“Can we increase the power of the shields momentarily?” Sisko asked. “Effectively send a surge through them that might incapacitate those ships.”
“I can try,” Uteln said. “I’m increasing the power to the defensive grid, but keeping the amount of power to the shields capped at the transmission nodes.” He worked his controls. “Power levels are building up at the nodes. I’ll need to release it before they overload.”
“Do it,” Sisko said.
Uteln waited, then tapped a control. On the viewscreen, the shields hugging the hull of Robinson flashed a darker blue as the increased power distributed across the grid. The auxiliary craft remained unaffected.
A hatch on the bottom portion of the spherical vessel withdrew and moved out of sight, revealing a dark opening. Sisko stood back up as he waited to see who or what would emerge. At first, nothing did.
“Ten vessels have landed on the hull,” Uteln announced.
At that moment, a long, narrow metal shape emerged from the craft visible on the main viewscreen. As it neared the hull, several arms folded down at its base, like the fingers of a technological hand. It pushed flush against Robinson. Sisko expected a cutting beam to start carving up the ship, or for the extended tool to begin rotating and physically cut through the outer plating.
But nothing like that happened. “What are they doing?” Rogeiro asked.
Suddenly, Sivadeki shot to her feet at the conn, her hands coming up to the sides of her head to cover her external auditory canals. She screamed and dropped to her knees. Sisko rushed forward to help her, but then a high-pitched screech pierced his ears. It felt as though long needles had been pounded into his brain. Black jots formed before his eyes. He staggered and tried to remain upright, reaching for the side of the conn with his uninjured hand. The main viewscreen winked off, and then the overhead lighting failed. Sisko held on for just long enough to glance behind him and see, in the reflected light of their consoles, the rest of the bridge crew crumbling. The emergency lighting came on with its ominous red tones.
Sisko fell forward and everything went black.
• • •
The rocking movement had a rhythm to it, almost like sound. It seemed a long way off, like a wave that starts in the middle of the ocean and becomes the barest swell by the time it reaches shore. It lapped beneath Sisko, swaying him gently one way, then the other. In some subjectively immeasurable amount of time, the sensation expanded, took on a fullness that became audible.
Aaa nnn . . . aaa nnn . . . caaa tnnn . . . caaa tnnn . . . Over and over, making no sense, until all of a sudden, it did.
“Captain.”
Sisko opened his eyes to see the blond-haired visage of Lieutenant Commander Diana Althouse, the ship’s counselor. The petite woman kneeled over him, her hands on his upper arms, apparently trying to shake him into consciousness. She wore a haggard expression that the captain thought spoke less to her sense of concern for him and more to whatever ordeal she had just endured.
Sisko’s thoughts swam. He blinked, searching for focus. He looked at Althouse, wondering just why she had come to his cabin. But then Sisko gazed past the counselor to the overhead, to the recognizable transparent dome. I’m on the bridge, he thought with surprise. He pushed himself up and saw other members of his crew blearily pulling themselves off the deck. “What . . . what happened?” he asked.
“The ship struck a pocket of energy and fell out of warp—” Althouse said, and all of it came back to the captain.
“We were attacked.” Sisko pushed himself up. A stab of pain flared in his wrist, which he saw had expanded to twice its normal size. As he climbed back to his feet, Sisko tottered and Althouse steadied him. “That sound . . .”
“It knocked the entire bridge crew out,” the counselor said.
Behind Althouse, Commander Plante tried to hoist herself up on the operations console, but then she lost her grip and staggered backward. Sisko stepped past the counselor, caught his second officer, and lowered her into her chair. Plante shook her head quickly from side to side, her long golden hair loosed from its knot and whipping around as she tried to clear the cobwebs from her mind. “I’m . . . I’m okay,” she said, and she began checking her control panel.
“Siva!” the captain heard Althouse say. When he turned, he saw that the counselor had moved to the side of the conn, where Lieutenant Commander Sivadeki lay motionless on the deck. A rust-colored stripe of blood had leaked from the Tyrellian’s earhole and pooled beneath her head. “She’s not coming to,” Althouse said. The counselor felt along the inside of Sivadeki’s elbow. “Her pulse is weak.” Without waiting for the captain’s order, Althouse followed ship protocol by reaching over and tapping the conn officer’s combadge. “Computer, emergency medical transport.” As the counselor rose and stepped back, the whine of the transporter filled the bridge and Sivadeki disappeared in a haze of coruscating white light, beamed directly to Robinson’s sickbay.
Sisko looked for his first officer and found him settling shakily back into his chair. The captain paced over to him. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Rogeiro said. He rubbed at his temple. “I’ve got a headache, but I’m all right.”
Sisko waited a moment to confirm his exec’s condition, then told him, “Sivadeki’s been injured. Get Lieutenant Stannis up here to take over. Meanwhile, fill in at the conn.”
“Aye, sir,” Rogeiro said. He stood and made his way over to Sivadeki’s station.
Sisko looked to Uteln, who had recovered enough to return to his console. “Tactical, report,” the captain said. “How long were we out?”
“Seven hours, thirty-one minutes,” Uteln said. He continued to study his instruments, then raised his head and looked over the captain, toward the main viewscreen. “The aliens are gone.” Sisko turned and followed the tactical officer’s gaze. The viewer showed the section of Robinson’s primary hull where an alien vessel had alit. The unusual craft no longer sat there, but in its stead, a clean, circular hole had been cut into the ship’s external plating, eliminating parts of the numerals 8 and 4 in its registry. As Sisko watched, a force field flickered blue across the cavity. “There are no more vessels on the hull, and internal sensors reveal no intruders aboard.” He tapped furiously at his controls. “External scans show no sign of any ships at all within range.”
“And the Robinson?” Sisko asked.
“The hull has been breached in all ten locations where the alien craft landed,” Uteln said. “Automatic force fields are in place.”
“Dispatch repair teams to those locations,” Sisko said.
“Aye, sir.”
“Commander Plante,” the captain said, “ship’s status.”
“The warp drive remains down,” Plante said. “Otherwise, all systems have been restored and are functioning within normal parameters. Casualty reports are coming in from all over the ship, mostly minor injuries. Sickbay lists four emergency transports . . . all for Tyrellian members of the crew. There are no indications of any fatalities, but . . . I’m receiving word of several people missing from their last known location.”
“Missing?” Sisko said. He strode over to stand beside Plante. “How many?” he asked as the operations officer worked her panel.
“Of the ship’s complement of one thousand, three hundred, forty-seven crew and civilian personnel,” Plante read from her display, “eighty-seven are unaccounted for.”
Sisko’s eyes widened as anger welled up within him. It did not require a sophisticated line of reasoning to identify what had happened: the alien boarding party had abducted almost ninety people from Robinson. The captain could only hope that they had been taken alive and were unharmed.
The faces of Kasidy and Rebecca flew across Sisko’s mind, but he pushed them away. He couldn’t think about the personal risk to his family. No matter who had been removed from the ship, the captain and his crew would do whatever they had to do to recover them.
“Where were they taken from?”
Sisko asked.
“From several different areas,” Plante said, consulting her displays. “But all on the residential decks.” Sisko watched as she scrolled through a list of names. She touched a heading, and an indicator appeared on each row. “Captain, only civilians are missing.”
Sisko could not prevent himself from feeling a pang of fear for his wife and daughter. He fought the urge to ask if they numbered among the missing. He could not show favoritism for his family; he had a responsibility to every individual aboard his ship.
Plante continued to parse through the data, searching for additional information. Eventually, her hands stopped moving across her console and she looked up at Sisko. “Captain,” she said, “all eighty-seven of the missing are children.”
• • •
Sisko stood in the center of the cabin he shared with his wife and daughter, his back to the open door that led to Rebecca’s room. She wasn’t in there. She wasn’t anywhere aboard Robinson.
“What are we going to do?” Kasidy asked. Sisko could see her obvious concern and seriousness of purpose, but also noted that she showed no signs of panic, for which he felt grateful. He had to make a conscious effort to tamp down his own fears, which otherwise would have threatened to overwhelm him.
When Kasidy had regained consciousness after the alien attack, she had raced to their daughter’s classroom to make sure that Rebecca had not been injured by the sound-based weapon that had incapacitated everybody aboard ship. To her horror, she discovered Rebecca missing, along with a number of other children. Kasidy allowed the appropriate ship’s personnel to contact the bridge to notify the command crew of the situation, and then she withdrew to their quarters to wait for word from her husband.
For his part, Sisko had learned on the bridge that Rebecca was among the missing children. He remained there for as long as it required him to discharge his immediate duties, which included determining the extent of what had happened aboard Robinson, ordering repairs to the warp drive, and setting his engineering, piloting, and scientific teams the task of finding a means of moving the ship beyond the region of destroyed space-time it currently occupied. Sisko also told Uteln to lead the tactical staff in finding a method of protecting the crew against another sonic attack—for the captain had every intention of tracking and engaging the aliens who had stolen most of the children aboard Robinson.
When Sisko had finally returned to his family’s quarters, he’d found his wife anxiously pacing in the living area. Her gaze settled on his swollen, discolored wrist, but only briefly, and she said nothing about it. Sisko noticed the door to Rebecca’s room standing open, but he resisted the impulse to go there, to peer in and explicitly confirm his daughter’s absence. Instead, he went to his wife, meaning to take her in his arms, to console her, to promise that he would not rest until they got Rebecca back. But once they embraced, Kasidy pushed away from him and continued her march across the cabin. She told him what she had experienced.
Kasidy had been thrown into a bulkhead when Robinson had suddenly lurched and its inertial dampers had faltered, though she had come away with just a bruise on her shoulder. She watched through a port as the strange energy webs had blossomed around the ship, felt the crew’s attempts to evade them, and witnessed the small vessels approaching. As best she could recall, she heard the high-pitched siren for only a moment before it had driven her to her knees and then into unconsciousness.
Sisko had explained all the details of those events from his perspective, from the pocket of energy the ship had struck to the alien force that had boarded the ship. Kasidy cared about none of it. She didn’t want to know what had already transpired; she only wanted to know what would come next.
“The first thing we’ve got to do is get the ship repaired and back into normal space,” Sisko told her.
Kasidy stopped a few steps from him. “I mean, what are we—” She pointed to Sisko and then to herself. “—going to do.”
The half statement, half question hit him like the blunt shock of a phaser set to heavy stun. Sisko had heard his wife utter the same words before, in the same tones, combining her hopes and fears, her determination and dread, stitched together with a thread of accusation. As Kasidy’s husband and Rebecca’s father, Sisko had brought them aboard Robinson, and as the commanding officer of the ship, he had allowed their daughter to be taken from them. Replace the Starfleet vessel with the planet Bajor, and his position as captain with that of Emissary, and they had been there before. Sisko knew that his wife, in that moment, did not blame him for what had transpired, any more than she had meant to do so six years earlier, but no matter how she thought about it—either then or now—he understood that she felt it.
“What we’re going to do is find our daughter,” Sisko said, “and bring her home safely.” He didn’t know the precise language he had used back when Rebecca had been taken as a toddler, but he realized it must have been close to what he’d just said. He didn’t really want that to be the case—he had no desire to mirror those baleful days back on Bajor on any level—but he could not deny the parallels of the two situations.
“It’s happening again,” Kasidy said quietly, as though reading his thoughts.
“No,” Sisko told her out of reflex, understanding what his wife needed to hear—what they both needed to hear. “The circumstances are similar, but no.”
Kasidy appeared to consider his claim. Sisko, remembering, saw the rest of their conversation play out in his head. She would say it out loud, ascribe their bad fortune to the choices he had made, the responsibilities he had accepted.
But that didn’t happen. Kasidy crossed the cabin to him, reached up, and put her hands on his upper arms. She looked deep into his eyes, searching for strength or truth or maybe something else. He didn’t know, but he stood tall and met her gaze, trying to bolster her, but also to find his own fortitude.
“Tell me it’s not the same,” Kasidy said. “Tell me that the Prophets haven’t spoken to you, that somebody seeking the Emissary or the Avatar hasn’t done this.”
“The Prophets haven’t spoken to me,” Sisko said honestly and earnestly. “And I don’t see how this could be about the Bajoran faith. We’re traveling deeper and deeper into the Gamma Quadrant, and Rebecca wasn’t the only child taken.” He decided not to say the other half of what he thought—namely, that he wished the abduction of the children from the ship did have to do with the Bajoran religion. Despite that the Prophets had essentially abandoned him after his return from the Celestial Temple, and later had sent a vision of Kira Nerys to release him from his service to Them, They had ultimately helped him to keep his family safe. It hadn’t always been easy, but he genuinely felt that the Prophets had guided him along the path that had allowed Kasidy and Rebecca to remain alive and healthy, and to bring them fully back into his life.
Kasidy dropped her hands from Sisko’s arms and wrapped her arms around his waist. She pulled in close to him, folding herself into his body. Sisko held her as best he could without setting his broken wrist tightly against her back. He wanted to protect her and make her feel safe. “What are we going to do?” she asked him again.
“I’m going to command this ship,” Sisko said, trying to project as much confidence to his wife as he could. “The crew is going to repair the warp drive, find a way out of here, and pursue those who took our children. We’re going to get all of them back, including Rebecca.”
“And what am I going to do?”
“You and the rest of the diplomatic corps and first-contact specialists are going to study our encounter with the aliens,” Sisko said. “You’re going to search for clues in how to deal with them once we locate them.”
Kasidy pulled away from Sisko and regarded him carefully. He suspected that she might think he sought only to keep her busy during this difficult time. “Do you think that will help?” she asked.
“I think it may be critical,” he told her. “I couldn’t even get them to respond to us—not when I tried to greet th
em, not when I told them who we were and what we wanted, not even when I threatened them and then fired on their ships. We need to find out what will work.”
Kasidy nodded. “Right,” she said, as though attempting to convince herself of the need for her efforts. “I’ll get right on it.”
“Good,” Sisko said. “I have to get back to the bridge.”
“Get down to sickbay first,” Kasidy said, holding a hand out to indicate his injured wrist.
“I will,” Sisko said. He leaned in and pressed his lips to his wife’s. “I love you, Kasidy.”
“I love you, Ben.”
“We’ll get her back,” he said, and then he headed for the door. On the way to sickbay, he vowed again to himself that he would not stop until he brought all of the missing children back to Robinson. Rebecca was taken from us once before, Sisko told himself, and we rescued her and brought her back home. He swore they would do so again.
But he couldn’t prevent himself from remembering how horrible it had been the first time their daughter had been abducted. Nor could he forget how, even after she had been recovered, the incident had almost destroyed their family. Most of all, he couldn’t stop thinking about how close they had come to losing Rebecca.
Bajor, 2380
Kasidy stopped in midstride after starting down the center aisle. On the display table to her right stood a large sculpture, perhaps a meter long and half as tall. It depicted a nude male figure diving into a river, the body captured in bronze, the water in some green-tinged crystalline material. Only the fingertips of the man touched the crest of one wave, the point of connection so minimal that Kasidy wondered if the artist had integrated a small antigrav into the work.
“Is this piece by Flanner Posh?” she asked, calling over to the owner of the gallery, who sat at a desk along a side wall of the shop. Rozahn Kather—whom everybody called Kit—looked up from the ledger she’d been perusing.
“That it is, dearie,” she said, her voice loud and friendly. She rose and made her way over to the sculpture and peered at it from the other side of the table. Since Kasidy had first come into Kit’s establishment almost four years prior, time had added a few more kilograms onto the older woman’s stout frame, and had etched deeper and longer lines into her face. “It’s a real departure for him.”
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