STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  “To what end?” Skon asked. “Even if we could, as you say, blow ourselves free from the engineering section, the Romulans would still have the warp engines, as well as enough fire power on their own ship to destroy the habitat section.”

  “Not if we blow up the engines first!”

  Skon was silent for several seconds, forcing Tobin to reflect on what he had just said. What am I thinking about? What’s come over me? When did the solution to all my problems become blowing up something?

  Skon took the padd from Tobin and began to work the controls, probably, the Trill decided, to shut down the schematics on the display to conserve the padd’s charge. When that didn’t happen, he leaned forward to see what Skon was working on and saw a surprisingly realistic slow-motion wireframe animation of the Heisenberg, breaking apart into sections. Then one of the sections—engineering—exploded in a flash. In the first three cycles, the habitat also exploded, but each time Skon pushed the simulation so that the two sections were farther and farther apart. Finally, the habitat survived—at which point he began to try to figure all the possible responses of the Romulan ship.

  Five minutes later, Skon shut off the simulation and looked up at Tobin. His right eyebrow arched up. “It is an intriguing concept, Tobin Dax. How do you plan to destroy the warp core?”

  Tobin tried to recall everything he had learned about the Heisenberg’s warp engines since coming aboard. “Well,” he began, “the intermix chamber is a fussy piece of machinery. Even if the whole system is on standby, we could probably touch off a core breach if we disrupt the coolant system. An explosion like that would blind the sensors on the Romulan ship. Maybe even disable it if it’s close enough to dispatch a boarding party. But, wait—oh, damn! The cooling system isn’t accessible through the ship’s computer nodes so that they won’t go off-line if the system crashes. We don’t stand a chance of disabling the control systems with the Romulans in there.” Skon folded his padd and slipped it into his sash, then flicked on his small flashlight. His underlit features were grim and, Tobin thought, distressingly demonic, though his soft tone belied his expression. “Tobin,” he said, “I do not believe you have considered all the possibilities.”

  “This,” Tobin said, sometime after they’d made their way to the project lab, “is an extraordinarily bad idea.”

  “You may be correct, but it was, after all, your idea.”

  “It wasn’t my idea to use the prototype.”

  “Not as such,” Skon replied. “But it was your idea to try to set off a chain reaction in the warp core by blocking the coolant flow. As you pointed out, we cannot shut off the coolant system from inside engineering, so we must do the next best thing by placing something inside the coolant tank. I believe that lab table will have enough mass. We may be fortunate and the change in pressure will burst the tank. The Terran systems are, as you said, ‘fussy.’ ”

  “But even if that works and they don’t notice the drain on the system and the whole power grid doesn’t blow out,” Tobin inhaled deeply, feeling himself to be on the verge of hyperventilation, “... I don’t want to do this!”

  “Do you lack confidence in your own work?” Skon asked. “Have you not seen the test results? It should be extremely safe. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but safe.”

  “Couldn’t we just ... oh, I don’t know ...” Tobin paused, waiting for panic to produce an inspiration.

  Nothing came. Either he wasn’t panicked enough or his sense of personal danger was beginning to burn out from overuse. “All right,” Tobin sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it.” He weakly waved Skon toward the ventilation shaft they had used to enter the laboratory. “Be careful. No sense in both of us getting killed.”

  Skon pushed off and floated toward the open vent, Tobin’s sarcasm apparently lost on him. “Give me ten minutes to reach engineering and get into position.”

  “Fine, fine,” Tobin said wearily. “It’ll take me at least that long to power up the equipment and move the lab table into position.”

  “Of course,” Skon said as he disappeared into the vent. “Do not forget that the table still has as much mass as it had when the gravity was functioning.”

  “Yes, yes,” Tobin said, running his hands over the familiar controls. Lights glowed under the shielded chamber. The computers began to crunch gigaquads of data and check redundant systems. “Mass,” he repeated. “No problem.” The main console hummed to life. Tobin smiled a small, satisfied smile. Maybe ... maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. It was a machine, one that he understood inside and out, that he had helped design and construct. He trusted it—the theory behind it, anyway—in some ways more than he trusted himself. Perhaps that would be enough.

  Less trustworthy were the two bombs and the makeshift retrieval device he and Skon had cobbled together. Not that he didn’t trust Skon’s workmanship on the retrieval device, but there hadn’t been time for anything other than the most rudimentary testing. The bombs—well, a bomb was a bomb. Rigging together power cells to explode was no test of any capable engineer’s abilities. The trick, really, was keeping them from going off prematurely.

  The lab table, unfortunately, turned out to be a bigger problem than he had anticipated. Though Tobin was now getting used to pushing himself around in zero-g, he had no idea how to manipulate large, bulky objects. He was just about to give the table a tremendous shove toward the prototype when it occurred to him that he would then have to race around to the other side of the table and stop it before it smashed through the bulkhead. Dislodging the table and moving it carefully into place took much more time than he had allotted. Even as Tobin settled the table into place, his chronometer began to chime. Skon was in place, waiting for Tobin’s signal.

  He walked back to the control panel and checked the displays. Everything looked optimum, which was surprising, considering how badly the Heisenberg had been damaged. On the other hand, that was how they had designed it; the power supply could not be interrupted.

  Tobin initiated the charge cycle and the generators hummed to life. Four large scanning units rose from their cradles on the perimeter of the chamber and locked into place with an intimidating ka-chunk. He rechecked the coordinates, slapped the COMMIT switch, and slid his hand to the row of control levers.

  The telltale blinked green and Tobin listened carefully to the hum of the pattern buffers. When the tone hit the correct pitch, he gently shoved the row of levers slowly downward. The table began to glow faintly on the stage, then shimmered and shone with a silvery phosphorescence. By the time he had pushed the row of levers halfway down, Tobin could see through the table and its outline began to waiver. Then, checking all the scanners to make sure he was on target, he quickly reviewed all the readings and, finding there was no degradation in the signal, pushed the levers to the bottom of the row. The hum rose to a shrill crescendo, then quickly died away. The table was gone.

  Or, more precisely—assuming the prototype matter transporter had performed as intended—the table was now reassembled in the warp engine coolant tank. With any luck, it had already become wedged in an intake valve, severely curtailing the flow of coolant to the intermix chamber. The temperature change would set off an alert to engineering stations on the bridge and the chief engineer’s bug board. Since no one was manning either of those stations, failure to correct the problem within five minutes would set off the shipwide alarm. Skon had figured that would give them about eighteen minutes before the core went critical. Of course, the Romulans would know something was wrong and would probably begin tearing apart the engine room to find the source of the problem. They might even figure out that it had something to do with the coolant system, but not soon enough to do anything about it.

  The transporter scanners dropped back into standby position and the generators began the recharge cycle in preparation for the next transport. It all seemed so noisy that Tobin began to worry about someone coming to investigate. Worrying about that unlikely possibility made it easier to not think about the oth
er, more real terrors he was about to face.

  Tobin tried to program in the next set of coordinates, but his hands shook so badly that he kept fumbling the settings. “You don’t want to get this wrong,” he said aloud, willing himself to be calm. After the third failed attempt, Tobin turned away from the console and patted his pockets in search of the deck of cards. Running through sleights sometimes had a soothing effect on him. Sometimes.

  He slid the deck out of its box and restacked the cards to run Dead Man’s Hand. Just as he finished, the warp core Klaxon sounded—much sooner than he had expected—and Tobin started back to the controls, banging his shin against the console. Knowing that Skon was waiting for him to act gave Tobin the focus he needed, so he ignored the pain, slid the cards into his pocket, and entered the settings correctly on the first try. Figuring out how long to give himself before the recall timer kicked in was difficult, but he finally settled on ten minutes. If he couldn’t set up the bombs in that time, it wouldn’t really matter.

  After clipping the retrieval device—a thirty-centimeter tube containing an easily detectable isotope—to his belt, Tobin guided the two explosives into the transporter chamber. The first humanoid ever to be transported is going to be carrying two very large bombs with him, Tobin mused, shaking his head. This really isn’t what we had in mind. He stepped into the transport chamber, inhaled once deeply and let the breath out slowly. The pattern buffers began to cycle and the sensors ka-chunked up out of their racks. For some reason, the noise made Tobin think about the amusement park rides his brothers had dared him to go on when he was a boy—the kind that would whir, clang, and groan before they began to subject him to sudden, sadistic changes in vector. Just before the rides would begin, everyone—everyone—would say the same thing. Tobin found himself saying it aloud as the hum of the generator reached its highest pitch. “Well ... here we go.”

  Skon floated cross-legged by the grill overlooking the engineering section, his eyes half-closed in meditation, fingertips lightly touching the floor. He felt the Heisenberg shudder through his fingers. A Klaxon sounded—loud, shrill, and insistent. These humans, Skon thought. Studies had shown that a low-pitched, less strident sound was a more effective alarm, but, no, they insisted on this. His ears rang, but no more than he had anticipated.

  The Romulans responded in an orderly fashion: Two were attempting to determine if their investigations had tripped the alarm, while the other pair darted around engineering looking for other signs of trouble. Unable to discover the cause of the Klaxon, the leader sent one of his men out of engineering on some errand while directing the others to continue their examination of the warp core. The leader himself moved out of sight to the other side of the core. In the scenarios Skon had been running through during his meditations, this outcome had been predicted seventy-three percent of the time.

  Skon fingerwalked down the side of the vent to a grill he knew he could open without being seen. There was no need for greater stealth since the Klaxon effectively concealed any and all noise he could conceivably make. Slipping through the open grill, he pushed off the wall at an angle and floated toward the ceiling. Skon did not have a great deal of experience with zero-g, but these were simple calculations of force, drag, and inertia. Assuming his calculations were correct—and, naturally, they were—he would come to a stop approximately eight meters above the two guards. It was an easy matter then to push off from the ceiling and drop down silently behind the pair.

  One thing troubled him as he fell. He’d had an excellent view of the engine room from the ceiling. The Romulan commander, it seemed, had disappeared.

  One crisis at a time.

  Skon had noted earlier a soft spot in the Romulans’ armored EVA suits—where the helmet met the torso. No doubt it was meant to improve their mobility, but it was also a vulnerability Skon could exploit. He reached out with both hands as he descended, applying a nerve pinch to each man that rendered both of them instantly unconscious. He disarmed the pair, propelled them into the airlock, and then shoved the thruster packs in after them. Skon had no desire to cause any unnecessary loss of life, and if all went according to plan, he would be able to return in time to open the exterior hatch so that the Romulans could escape before the core went critical. Disabling the airlock controls so that the inner hatch could only be opened from Skon’s side was only the work of a minute.

  All was going well. The third soldier was still off on his errand. There was only the matter of the Romulan commander, the wild card in Skon’s calculations, to contend with. Wild card, Skon thought. When did that word enter my vocabulary? He would have to query Tobin about the word’s etymology if they ever saw each other again. In any case, if Skon could free his companions from the cargo hold and send them through to the habitat section within the next ten minutes, it was unlikely that the commander would be able to regain control of the situation.

  Pushing off toward the short passage that led to the cargo hold, Skon looked right and left, then straight up, remembering his own attack on the guards. Nothing. Skon decided the most logical scenario was that the commander had followed the guard out of engineering, which meant that the odds of Tobin being found had to be recalculated. But, no, he thought, focusing on the task at hand. Free the prisoners first. Improve the odds as much as possible.

  Skon released the lock, and the storage room door slid open, revealing the Romulan commander with a disrupter leveled only centimeters from Skon’s chest.

  There’s something wrong with the transporter, Tobin decided. Why is this taking so long? He kept waiting to be there, to be there, but the silvery curtain lingered, shimmering, tingling, and finally burning. Tobin wanted to lift his arm and check his chronometer, but found he couldn’t move. His eyes were dry and he desperately wanted to blink, but he couldn’t do that either. The pattern buffers, he thought. My molecular structure is too much for them. The transporter doesn’t have enough memory to store the pattern of a sentient being—No, two sentient beings! He began to wonder how long the transport beam could hold his pattern before it started to degrade. Six seconds? Seven? And what happens if it tries to reassemble me without the portions that have degraded and been lost? Tobin tried to imagine how the computer would decide which pieces would be left out. A kidney? Part of my brain? The symbiont?

  And then someone shoved icicles into Tobin’s eyes. Silver icicles. Flaming silver icicles. There came a shattering sense of dislocation, of his vital parts being turned inside out. He tried to scream, but his lungs were flapping like shredded balloons in a hot wind, his heart a dried up, shriveled husk. He heard a small voice in the back of his head say, Stop being so dramatic.

  Lela! Tobin thought, Save me!

  I’m dead. Save yourself.

  And then he was floating in the center of the junction that separated the habitat from engineering. His ears were ringing. Tobin wanted to look at his chronometer, wanted to know how much time had passed, but he couldn’t lift his arms. Everything felt simultaneously leaden and tingly, but then he realized that this could be accounted for by the fact that he was gripping the handles to the two makeshift bombs so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. Tobin released both and lifted his hands to his face. Encouraging sign—all fingers present and accounted for. And his ears still worked; they continued to be assaulted by the warp core alarm.

  Tobin retrieved the bombs and went to work. The job was simple: Open the access panels, tap into the power feed, set the timers, and seal the panels up again. The converted power cells were so generic in appearance that few of the ship’s crew, let alone Romulan invaders, would recognize them for what they’d become. Slamming shut the second hatch, Tobin began to feel some sense of relief. He checked his chronometer, saw that he still had a couple minutes before the transporter retrieved him, and decided that the best thing to do would be to find someplace to hide.

  He never heard the hatch open behind him, never knew anyone was there until he felt the hand on his shoulder.

  Wi
thout knowing exactly how it happened, Tobin’s face was pressed into a bulkhead, the cold muzzle of a disrupter jammed into his cheek. He flailed, tried to fend off the attacker, but couldn’t twist or turn, couldn’t stop the hand that was patting him down, looking for weapons, identification, gold and precious gems, who knew what? All Tobin knew for sure was that he was a small and helpless Trill in a large and perilous universe.

  Then the guard let him go.

  When he turned around—slowly, so as not to provoke reprisal—Tobin saw several familiar items drifting lazily in midair: tools, his rebreather, the hardcopy of 99 Tricks. The Romulan was holding the only two articles that held any interest for him: the retrieval device and Tobin’s deck of cards. How much time had passed since he had last looked at his chronometer? If the transporter retrieved the Romulan, there could be all sorts of complications, not the least of which would be that Tobin would be left in the junction with two bombs primed to explode any moment. Panic welled up and Tobin did the only thing he could think of: He pushed off the wall and took a swipe at the retrieval device.