Takedown

by John Jackson Miller

  A tone sounded from the tactical station. Šmrhová announced, “Aventine has entered the system. Eighty thousand kilometers from the array and closing.”

  “Red Alert,” Picard said, calmly. “Just in time.” Aventine was four times Enterprise’s distance from the facility. He spoke to be heard over the alert clarion. “Lieutenant Faur, full impulse to the Adelphous Array, now.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Silence the alarm,” Worf ordered. The Klingon leaned in and asked, “You are not going to confront him?”

  Picard shook his head. He’d shared some of his suspicions with Worf, but not yet all. “The wrecking crew is coming. We’re going to chain ourselves to the building.”

  Ahead, the Adelphous station nearly filled the screen with its dark, unlit mass. It was time. “Shields up,” Picard ordered. “Orbit at our minimal turning radius. Hug the array.” He looked to Worf and smiled gently. “They have the speed—but we have the shorter route.”

  Such a strategy wasn’t possible at the Corvus Beacon, where Aventine had arrived first. Nor at the No’Var Outpost, where the asteroid field—not to mention the Klingons’ disruptor cannons—made it difficult to maintain an inner track.

  Picard was also banking on Riker not wanting to shoot at Enterprise.

  That proved a bad bet. “Photon torpedoes,” Dygan snapped. “Coming in fore and aft.”

  “Shields to maximum!”

  The viewscreen went white. Enterprise shook madly as it sailed through a miasma of destructive power. His mind told him the torpedo wasn’t aimed directly at them. His bridge crew gripped their armrests, struggling to stay at their stations.

  “He’s just trying to shake us loose,” Picard said.

  “Aventine’s shields are up. Still diving straight toward us and the station,” Dygan said.

  “Hold steady.”

  Another barrage—and then, after the universe stopped shaking, another call from Dygan. “He has broken off. Now circling the station at four hundred kilometers away, firing phasers.”

  “Circle at one hundred kilometers away,” Picard said. “Keep our shields between Aventine and the array.”

  Enterprise quaked again. “We are taking damage without fighting back,” Worf said, a little unease in his voice.

  “The array can’t fight back. We can take the damage better than it can.”

  The stalking continued for a few minutes before a hail came in. Picard ordered it put on-screen. The holographic Riker appeared, again before the black backdrop. “I see you came back for more.”

  “You invited us.” Picard spoke in even tones. “You do realize this array is not operating?”

  “A deactivated phaser is still a phaser,” Riker said.

  Picard found that puzzling. “The array is not a weapon, Admiral.”

  “It depends on your point of view.”

  “And what is your point of view?”

  Riker looked a little pained. “You figure it out. I’m busy.”

  Picard needed to keep him talking. He wasn’t ready to play his trump yet. “This will not end like the other times, you know.”

  Riker grinned. “Captain, are you going to fire on a superior officer?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “You outgun me, but I can outrun you,” Riker said. “Do you ever get the feeling we’re developing a new training program for Starfleet Academy?”

  “I hope to be alongside you giving the lecture,” Picard said.

  Riker smiled wanly. “I’m guessing that probably is not going to happen.” He looked off to the side. “Not now.”

  “It could, if you stop your engines. We could talk—”

  “I know we could. But I already know what will happen instead. If you don’t fire, your shields will reach their limit, and I will destroy the station. If you do fire, I will execute an evasive maneuver you’re not expecting that will put me on a clear vector. And I will destroy the station.”

  “You didn’t destroy the Klingon outpost.”

  “This location is different. Don’t bother asking how.” Riker shook his head. “Now, it’s time to—”

  “I spoke with Deanna,” Picard said.

  Riker paused. For a moment, the captain felt a break in the phaser fire striking Enterprise’s shields. Then it resumed.

  “Deanna is concerned about you and the way you left,” the captain continued. “I know about the Far Embassy, Will. I know.”

  All emotion left the face of the figure on-screen. “I have work to finish.” Then he vanished, the comlink cut. The viewscreen reverted to the scene from outside, as Enterprise lurched around, keeping between Aventine and the array.

  To Picard’s left, Hegol Den touched his arm to get his attention. “I think you got through, Captain. If a holographic character can show emotion, that is.”

  “This one does.” Picard looked over to La Forge, who had been scanning Aventine without pause since it had arrived. “Intensify your life-sign scan of Aventine, Commander.”

  “No change in the number of occupants, Captain.”

  “See if you can scan deck by deck,” Picard said. “I am particularly interested in the number of people in or near holodeck one . . .”

  Thirty

  AVENTINE

  Ezri Dax thought captains should know every square centimeter of their ships. Yet Riordan had found crawl spaces she never would have considered entering. She hadn’t minded, though: Riker had demonstrated that he had knowledge of what was going on in most of the Jefferies tubes. Riordan had found accessways so ill-suited for use that they’d stumped even the admiral’s surveillance capabilities.

  Still, she had somehow assumed that their destination would have been a larger opening. It had certainly been a hope, after shimmying through hundreds of meters of darkness, stopping only to deal with a turn left, right, up, or down. Instead, the area where Riordan had abandoned his diagnostic equipment was large enough for him and him alone. She’d been forced to remain on her stomach, lodged in a meter-wide shaft like a Trill mudcrawler in a burrow.

  As low-tech as the signaling system Riordan was now working on, her own link to the bridge was even more primitive. The boatswain’s whistles they’d found in storage B had been distributed to more than sixty different crewmembers, stationed at intervals all along the route between her and the bridge. The surveillance equipment aboard ship would certainly hear the alert sounds, which was why another sixty individuals scattered all around the ship had the instruments as well. Riker might hear all the tooting and tweeting, but only one line of signalers actually led anywhere.

  From behind her in the crawlspace, three short, shrill chirps told her Enterprise was in view of Aventine’s underside. Four would have meant another Starfleet ship, five a “friendly.”

  Finding the whistle around her neck, she blew a couple of fast notes. Acknowledged. Stand by.

  Curled up in his cubbyhole, Riordan made adjustments to a small equipment case by the light of the SIMs beacon strapped around Dax’s head. The padd was connected to a port in the floor. “I’ve taken the audio input from my combadge and connected it to a transducer,” Riordan said. He paused long enough to look back at her. “Don’t worry about the details. It involves some steps I don’t expect you to understand.”

  Dax groaned, feeling the confines of the shaft pinching at her. “You’re a real charmer. You do realize there are ranks above ensign, don’t you? You could try for one—by being a little less . . . you.” She gave an acidic smile. “Just a little.”

  Riordan ignored her. “Okay, here we go,” he said, unspooling a coil of wire connected to the combadge. “I wasn’t able to get the transmission rate in real-time, so you’ve got to keep it very short. Will Enterprise figure it out?”

  “We’ll find out,” she said, pulling the combadge close to her mouth. “Worf . . .”

  ENTERPRISE

  Another phaser barrage struck Enterprise’s shields. With the protective energy barrier down to fifty percent—an
d the bridge officers straining to keep the ship in the right position amid the din—Picard found the observation from his chief engineer bizarre: “There’s something odd with Aventine’s ventral registry lights.”

  “We noticed that before. Some of them are intermittent.”

  “They still are. But they’re oscillating in a non-random pattern.” La Forge’s fingers flew across the controls. “This might be something.”

  Or nothing, Picard thought. But anything different was good. “Mr. Faur, keep us oriented with a ventral view of Aventine.”

  La Forge sounded tentative. “I’m running the oscillations through a decryption algorithm,” he said, studying the data on his console. A minute later, he looked back at the captain, triumphant. “It’s speech!”

  Speech? “Let’s hear it.”

  Over the sound of phaser fire, a woman’s voice reverberated throughout the bridge.

  “Worf . . .”

  The Klingon’s eyes widened. “It is Dax!”

  “Detapa . . . Council . . . tactic.”

  “Detapa Council? That’s a Cardassian body,” Dygan said.

  “Torpedo . . . to . . . aft.”

  Picard looked to La Forge. “Is that all?”

  “It’s still coming in,” the engineer said. “It took a minute to receive just that much.”

  “It appears to be a message to you,” Picard said to his first officer. “What does it mean?”

  Worf appeared lost in thought. In the meantime, the voice continued. “Phasers . . . twice . . . ten . . . second . . . gap . . . to . . . acknowledge. One . . . minute . . . then . . . torpedo.”

  The message began to repeat. La Forge turned down the audio. “I think that’s the whole thing.”

  Dygan looked at Worf. “The Detapa Council—and Jadzia Dax. You were there?” Picard only knew a little of the matter: Sisko’s team had acted to protect the Cardassians from the Klingons. It would have been a difficult episode for Worf. Dygan put the pieces together. “You even saved Gul Dukat.”

  Worf glared at the Cardassian. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  As another barrage reduced Enterprise’s shields further, Picard put up his hand. “This tactic Dax is signaling to you about. Is there a chance that Riker could know about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Worf thought for a moment. “It was a sensitive matter politically. Did the report reach the Enterprise?”

  “No,” Picard said. “What do we need to do?”

  “Captain Dax wants us to fire on them. And I know why.”

  AVENTINE

  Just as Dax began reciting her prepared message for the fifth time, the world went topsy-turvy around her. The fact that she couldn’t see much of the world didn’t make it any better.

  “Something hit us!” Riordan said, as Aventine continued to reverberate. He put his hands on the low overhead to balance himself.

  Dax struggled to recover her bearings. She’d lost her whistle in the impact, which had knocked her around in the shaft like an ice cube in a glass. “That wasn’t a hit on us,” she said, clutching onto the edge of the opening. “That was—”

  Another noisy quake shook the ship. This time, she was more prepared for it. “That was two phaser shots to our shields. That’s the signal!”

  “I thought we had spotters with tricorders at the viewports.”

  “We’re in a firefight. I needed something I could count on—and that didn’t require the couriers to send the word about.” She’d recognized what the shots were—and Leishman and her team waiting at the tractor beam certainly would have, too. “Two shots. Worf understood.”

  “That, or we’ve finally made them mad.”

  ENTERPRISE

  “Ready photon torpedo,” Picard said. Enterprise hadn’t used the most destructive part of its arsenal on Aventine before now; only phasers, with the intention of reducing the vessel’s shields. Where phasers were precise, torpedoes were a blunt instrument capable of damage far beyond what was intended, in certain circumstances. He looked to Worf. “Number One?”

  “Aye, Captain.” The Klingon was back at the tactical station, preparing the weapon. They had been keeping a countdown since firing the second phaser. “The torpedo is targeted for a location just outside the shielding area—and just inside the aft tractor beam arc.”

  “Ten seconds,” La Forge said.

  “Detonation under your control, Number One.” Picard looked at the viewscreen, which showed Aventine continuing to rain harassing fire down on them. “Fire!”

  Enterprise launched the weapon. It appeared on the viewscreen a moment later: a shining star, closing in on the vessel far above. “Readings on Aventine, Mr. La Forge.”

  “Nothing . . . nothing . . .” The engineer paused. “Tractor beam active. It has the torpedo!”

  “Detonate!”

  Thirty-one

  AVENTINE

  Aventine lurched violently, shaking Dax completely out of the shaft and sending her tumbling into Riordan. The young engineer’s jaw hit the side of the bulkhead as she collided with him.

  A moment passed in the darkness as Dax cast about for her light-giving headgear, lost in the fall. “Ensign, are you all right?”

  Riordan struggled to right himself. “That . . . hurt.”

  “Sorry.” Bowers would have liked the chance to pop the guy, she knew. But there were more important issues at the moment. “Did it work?”

  Riordan fumbled for his padd. Its lights were all dark. “Power’s out,” Riordan said.

  Finding her SIMs beacon, Dax felt a momentary weight off her shoulders. And then she didn’t feel any weight at all. “Gravity’s out!”

  Lifting in the narrow space and jostling Riordan in the process, Dax fought to swim back toward the darkened opening. Systems were down—but for how long?

  ENTERPRISE

  “Power consumption is zero on Aventine,” La Forge said. “That’s knocked them for a loop.”

  Picard believed it. He had never seen anything like it. Milliseconds after Aventine took hold of the photon torpedo, the weapon exploded—and suddenly the matter it was trying to grapple was moving at relativistic speeds, being both propelled and consumed in a reaction with antimatter. The tractor beam, normally visible in the electromagnetic spectrum as a cool white, blazed red—a sudden attack of heartburn.

  He would ask La Forge about the particulars later. What was important now was that Aventine’s major systems appeared to be down. She was heading outward from the Adelphous Array, its circular path widening. It was no longer firing, its shields were down—and the registry marking lights, which had either been intermittent or used for Dax’s unorthodox messaging, were extinguished.

  “Systems should start to reboot in a few minutes,” La Forge said. “Life signs are unchanged. Location of readings is changing, though. Some motion toward holodeck one—but it’s slow.”

  “Then we’ll go there ourselves,” Picard said, standing. He already suspected what had happened to Riker—and he knew the clock was running. “Mr. La Forge, you and I will beam to Aventine.”

  “Ready, sir.”

  Picard had run his theory past the engineer on the way to Adelphous. It was a long shot—but if it was true, then he and La Forge were ideally suited to deal with the situation.

  Worf was conflicted. “Captain, I wish to object again. We should send across a security team first.”

  “Number One, if my theory is right, they have security aplenty over there. What they need is experience of a sort only we can provide. And if I’m wrong, I’ll need you here to protect the array.” Standing next to La Forge, he clicked his badge. “Picard to transporter room. Two to beam directly to Aventine holodeck one. Energize.”

  AVENTINE

  Picard had materialized in some strange places before, including some that had been considered a breach of etiquette. It wasn’t always possible for the transporter team aboard Enterprise to know when it was beaming individuals into an awkward situation planetside. He had mate
rialized in the middle of a Bolian domestic argument once—and then there was that time that the pleasure-world of Risa turned a beam-in zone into a changing area for the baths without telling everyone.

  But beaming into a Starfleet admiral’s bedroom was a first. Shining his light around the room, Picard saw all the accoutrements of a well-appointed boudoir. Gravity felt normal here. His artificial eyes seeing even more, La Forge clicked his badge. “Enterprise, are you sure we have the right place?”

  “On target. Holodeck one, portside aft corner.”

  Picard wasn’t surprised. “Titan told us he had developed a program with his rooms.” He touched the bed. “There must be some power to the holodeck, or this furniture wouldn’t be here. The lights are simply off.” He waved his hand before a bedside lamp. It lit up, casting a warm glow across the room.

  “Something’s in there,” La Forge said, pointing toward the entrance to the bathroom. He moved his hand to his phaser.

  “It won’t be necessary,” Picard said in low tones. Besides, it would be awkward enough to catch an admiral in the shower without being armed to boot. He edged toward the open door.

  Inside, they saw the admiral was indeed in the shower—except he was in full uniform, and the shower and the rest of the bathroom, in fact, were missing. Riker stood motionless before a black background. Across the room from him, a small spotlight in the wall was unlit.

  La Forge examined the unmoving admiral. “Holographic matter. This is who we’ve been talking to, I suspect.”

  “Holo-Riker.” Picard examined the spotlight in the wall. There was a small input beneath it. “The admiral’s studio.”

  Holo-Riker broke his statuesque pose. “This is an invasion of privacy,” he said. “I protest.”

  “Relax, old man,” the captain said. “You’re not who we’re here to see.”

  The artificial admiral shot Picard an offended look before resuming his frozen pose.

  Picard led La Forge back into the bedroom. His badge chirped. He tapped it. “Picard here.”

  “Aventine is continuing on the heading it was on when the torpedo detonated,” Worf reported. “Shields remain down. I have put security teams with gravity boots in main engineering and on the bridge.”