Sisko reacted immediately. His gut tightened into a knot because of the depth of love he felt for his daughter, but owing to his training as a Starfleet officer and his years in command of Deep Space 9, he still moved. He dropped the saucepan—it clattered on the hardwood floor—and rushed to Kasidy. He took her hands in his and looked into her eyes. “Did you contact the transporter operator?” he asked. “Maybe Rebecca just didn’t get beamed out with you.”
“I did,” Kasidy said. “Rebecca’s not there.”
Holding on to one of his wife’s hands, Sisko raced outside with her. He realized that he didn’t have a communications device with him, and so he told Kasidy, “Have them beam us back to Adarak.”
She activated her combracelet, which twittered in response. “Kasidy Yates to Adarak Transporter Terminal.”
“This is Nendi Pol, Ms. Yates,” the Militia officer replied with an edge of concern. “Did you find—”
“No,” Kasidy interrupted. “I want you to beam my husband and me to Adarak right away.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sisko squeezed his wife’s hand just as the transporter effect took hold of them. They materialized on one of the platforms in the Adarak passenger terminal. He saw nobody inside the facility except Nendi, who jumped up from his chair and came out from behind his control console.
“Is Rebecca here?” Sisko asked, though he already knew the answer. He whirled around in the middle of the terminal, searching for his daughter. All four transporter platforms stood empty.
“No,” Nendi said. “The two of you—” He pointed at Kasidy. “—beamed out together.”
Sisko heard voices, and he turned toward the terminal entrance to see two men walking in from outside. He didn’t have to think about what to do. He knew that he had to secure the—
The accident scene. The phrase skittered through his mind like unwanted vermin across a basement floor.
Sisko threw his arms wide and strode toward the two men. “I’m afraid the terminal is temporarily closed,” he told them. “It shouldn’t be long.” One of the men started to protest, but the other appeared to recognize Sisko and grabbed his companion’s arm.
“It’s okay, Danol,” the second man said. “We’ll wait.” He redirected Danol and the two stepped back outside.
Sisko quickly paced back toward the control console and its operator. Kasidy went with him. “Close the entrance,” he told Nendi, hiking a thumb back over his shoulders in the direction of the front of the terminal.
The young man froze, awash in uncertainty. “I’m . . . I’m not in Starfleet,” he said, obviously trying to explain why he couldn’t simply follow Sisko’s orders.
“Neither am I,” Sisko said. “But I am the Emissary.” And the father of a little girl who went missing on your watch, he thought. He would also say it aloud if he needed to, but he didn’t want to spook the young man into inaction.
Nendi almost thought about it for a second too long, but then he returned to his console and worked the controls. The front doors glided closed, coming together with a latching sound. “I beamed Ms. Yates and Rebecca together,” he said. “To the same coordinates.” He regarded Kasidy. “When you contacted me afterward, I checked the real-time log and confirmed the transport.” He motioned toward his panel.
Sisko went around the console. Early in his Starfleet career, he had logged many hours crewing the Livingston’s transporters, and during his time as an engineer aboard Okinawa, he’d been charged with maintaining those systems. He reviewed the log to which Nendi referred. Just as the young man had said, the records verified the successful transport of both Kasidy and Rebecca.
Sisko reached up and tapped at the control surfaces. They buzzed in response, denying him access to the information he sought. He tried again, without success.
“Can I help, Emissary?” Nendi asked. “What are you looking for?”
“I want to see the point-to-point settings,” Sisko said. “Maybe Rebecca’s destination got established incorrectly.” He actually hoped that hadn’t been the case. Theoretically, if the end-point coordinates had somehow been set incorrectly or had been changed in error, Rebecca could have materialized a kilometer underground, inside solid rock, or a kilometer in the air, with nothing to stop her from plummeting to her death. Engineers designed transporter systems to prevent that from occurring, but Rebecca hadn’t beamed to her destination, so anything could have happened.
“Here, sir,” Nendi said, pointing to a display on the other side of the console. “I checked that too.” Sisko crossed behind him and studied the readout. It listed both the origin and destination coordinates for Kasidy and for Rebecca. The pairs of numbers matched precisely.
“Ben?” Kasidy asked. “What’s going on? Where’s Rebecca?” The questions came like pleas, revealing Kasidy’s fears. She asked where their daughter was in order to cling to the hope, ever more desperate, that Rebecca was actually anywhere instead of having been transported to her death, either by beaming to the wrong place or by never rematerializing at all, the pattern of her atoms lost to dissolution.
Sisko brought the side of his fist down on the panel. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said, trying to puzzle out what had happened. “The coordinates are right.” He gazed across the console at his wife, who seemed on the verge of breaking down. “You beamed out together. Why didn’t the two of you both . . .”
Sisko’s voice trailed off as a thought occurred to him. “Ben, what is it?” Kasidy asked, but he barely heard her. He touched the display currently showing the transporter coordinates and brought up a control menu. He began navigating through a series of selections and submenus, but he couldn’t find the right one.
“Pol,” Sisko said, “I need the carrier-wave transmission logs.”
“The transmission . . . ?” Nendi echoed. “But we have the origin and destination verified.”
“Get them!” Sisko ordered, ignoring the fact that he did not actually command the young man.
Nendi quickly raised his hands to the display in front of Sisko, triple-tapped to call up the topmost menu, then traversed down into the data. Twice, he chose incorrect paths and had to backtrack. Finally, he reached a list of frequencies, the digits marching to well right of the decimal place.
“That’s it,” Sisko said. Nendi withdrew his hands, and Sisko accessed a pop-up menu to sort the data in descending order by time. “Did you transport anybody in or out after Kasidy and Rebecca?”
“No,” Nendi said.
“That means that these are the entries for their transporter signals,” Sisko said, pointing to the top two lines. He touched the first and it expanded to a graphical representation of the symmetrical carrier wave. It looked normal.
“What is it you’re looking for?” Nendi asked, but Sisko paid no attention. Instead, he touched the second entry. When the graph of that carrier signal appeared, he immediately saw a problem. “What . . . what is that?” Nendi pointed to the place where the wave deviated from one frequency to another.
“It’s Rebecca’s carrier signal,” Sisko said. He looked up at his wife. “It was intercepted.”
“Intentionally?” Kasidy asked.
“I don’t know,” Sisko admitted. “It could have been a glitch in the system. Or maybe the effect of a solar flare or some other natural condition.”
“But what does that mean?” Kasidy asked.
“It means that Rebecca materialized somewhere else,” Sisko said.
“Somewhere else where?” Kasidy said, her voice rising. “Inside a tree? In the middle of a lake? Out in space?” She sounded frantic.
“No, no,” Sisko reassured her. “The system has safeguards to prevent that.” He didn’t know if he could be certain those technical protections had actually worked, but he needed to keep his wife calm. “Can you track this signal?” he asked Nendi.
“Yes, yes,” the young man said. He quickly worked the panel, and the display in front of him rapidly changed. Sisko watched as Nendi iso
lated the second part of Rebecca’s carrier wave and initiated a trace. A map of the Kendra Valley appeared, on which a green dot blinked at the point marked Adarak. A red line emerged from that point and drew a shallow arc across the screen. The image pulled back to a view of the Bajoran globe. The red line curved south from Kendra Province, past the equator, until it ended and another flashing green dot appeared. The display zoomed into a map of Tozhat Province, near the city of Johcat. A new set of destination coordinates appeared.
“That’s it,” Sisko said. He mapped the new materialization point for his daughter and confirmed that she had successfully transported to a location on the ground. “Rebecca just ended up beaming to another location, but she arrived there safely.” He moved out from behind the console and headed for an outbound transporter platform. “Beam me to her location,” he told Nendi. “I’m going to bring her back.”
Kasidy started after him. “We’ll both go.”
“No,” Sisko said, turning to stop his wife. “The Bajoran Militia needs to know about this. Contact Colonel Jalas.” Jalas Dren served as the top Militia officer in Kendra Province. “Tell him everything that’s happened.” He addressed Nendi. “Other than for me, keep this transporter shut down until it’s been checked out.” Sisko spoke as if he blamed what had occurred on a technological problem, but he did that only in an attempt to ease Kasidy’s concerns. He didn’t know if she fully believed that explanation, but she surely wanted to believe it. So did he, but he worried that something else had happened—something bad.
Sisko remembered that he had no comm device with him. He asked Kasidy for hers, then stepped up onto one of the outbound platforms. “Energize,” he told Nendi. As the transporter terminal receded around Sisko, he glanced at his wife, who looked as worried as he felt. Then his vision grew dark.
When his sight cleared, he saw that twilight in Kendra had been replaced by midday in Tozhat. Further, the blacks and grays and deep reds of the transporter terminal had been exchanged for the greens and browns of an undeveloped wilderness. It pleased Sisko that he had beamed onto solid ground, which meant that his daughter had as well, but any hope he had of finding her there quickly faded. He looked all around him, but did not see her.
“Rebecca!” Sisko called out. “Rebecca!” He waited, straining to hear any sound that could have been made by his daughter. He heard nothing like that. He wished he had a tricorder, but he knew that the Bajoran Militia would be out there soon enough with the proper equipment to scour the area.
In the direction Sisko faced, a veldt stretched far and wide into the distance. The grassy flatland featured only a few scattered trees and bushes between his location and the mountains that rose up along the horizon. He saw movement and faraway shapes out on the plain, but too distant for Rebecca to have walked there from the transport point in so short a time.
Sisko cupped his hands to his mouth and screamed out his daughter’s name, once, twice, a third time. Eventually, he pivoted to look in the opposite direction. Twenty or thirty meters away, a dense wood began. He could see little beyond the first few lines of trees. Again, he called out Rebecca’s name but received no response.
Sisko raised Kasidy’s combracelet to his mouth, ready to transport back to Adarak to ensure the Militia’s aid in the search, when a glint of sunlight caught his eye. He peered back at the woods, but whatever had shined had done so only briefly. Sisko moved around, trying to see it again, and at last he did: at the edge of the forest, a flash of light like a reflection on a mirror or a metal surface.
He lost sight of it as he ran through low-lying brush toward it, but he didn’t stop until he reached the tree line. He stepped past the first trunk and hunted around it, to no avail. He moved on to the next tree along the edge of the wood, and that’s when he spotted it: an antigrav stroller. It sat on the ground, tipped over and not functioning.
“Rebecca,” he said—not so that she could hear him if she was nearby, but involuntarily, under his breath. Sisko’s heart beat so hard it felt as though it might burst out of his chest. His pulse thundered in his ears. For a moment, he thought he might pass out, but he fought his way past the sensation.
Sisko hurried over to the stroller. He picked it up and examined it, then thumbed on the power button at the top of the U-shaped handle. It hummed into operation. The stroller hadn’t been broken; it had been deactivated.
Sisko closed his eyes and did something he hadn’t in a long time: he offered a personal prayer to the Prophets. Rebecca was too little to have reached the switch on the stroller. Somebody else must have done so.
Which meant that Rebecca had been abducted.
Gamma Quadrant, 2386
Sisko sat in the command chair on the bridge, resisting the impulse to rise and pace the deck. The ship’s chief medical officer had repaired his broken wrist—a distal radius fracture, Doctor Kosciuszko had called it—knitting his bone back together with one of his surgical instruments. The CMO had also prescribed an anti-inflammatory, and in the almost twenty-four hours since Sisko had been injured, the swelling had gone down.
The captain’s anxiety about his missing daughter and the rest of the abducted Robinson children, and his eagerness to find them and bring them back home, translated into extreme nervous energy. He wished he had a baseball with him so that he could hold it, focus his mind on the tactile sensation of it: the weight and shape of it that allowed it to fit confidently in his hand; the firmness that had just enough give in it to make batting a fair proposition; the elevated roughness of the 108 double stitches; the feel of setting his index and middle fingers across the seams to hurl a rising fastball, or hooking them in the horseshoe formation to drop a curve. If Sisko had a ball with him, he would toss it in the air above him and catch it when it came down, indulging in the satisfaction of both ritual and physical accomplishment.
No, Sisko thought. What I would do is wind up and heave the ball as far as I could. He knew well the energy he would expend making such a throw, how it would center him and calm his nerves, but he also appreciated the metaphorical aspect of such an act. In the midst of calamity, he would relish the ability to capture that distress, compress it, and send it hurtling away.
In the nearly full day that had passed since the ship had struck the pocket of energy, scans had revealed that Robinson presently perched on a small island of the normal space-time continuum, with the hull extending out into the inert region around it. The ship remained essentially stranded. Attempts to utilize the impulse engines at various speeds and in various configurations to move Robinson had all met with no success. Likewise, even employing the thrusters to push the ship, however slowly, out beyond that region of dead space had also failed. Relkdahz and his engineering staff believed that the warp drive, still undergoing repairs along with the hull, would provide the crew with their best chance to escape the area of destroyed space-time.
Meanwhile, Uteln and his tactical team had scanned nearby space and beyond for any sign of the alien attackers. Robinson’s sensors successfully reached across the inert zone surrounding the ship, but they showed vessels neither in the area nor at longer range. Uteln also reported no trace of any ion trails by which the crew might eventually track the alien craft, but theorized that such telltale signs of faster-than-light travel could be detectable once Robinson cleared the dead space.
Sisko rubbed at his eyes, though that did not help the ache behind them. He had barely slept, and when he had, the experience had hardly been restful. The same had been true for Kasidy. And probably for all the other parents on board, he thought. Sisko had always championed the idea of including crew family members on starships, particularly on those vessels conducting long-term missions of exploration. It always made sense to him to mitigate the hardships that service in Starfleet could impose on officers by allowing them to bring along those closest to them. He still believed that, despite what had happened—and despite that, once before, he had experienced the worst consequences of that policy.
P
rior to Kasidy and Rebecca taking up residence on Robinson, Sisko had discussed with his wife the positives and negatives, the benefits and dangers of such a choice. It had been a long road for them to travel from the idea to the reality, but they had come to the decision together. It had been a settled issue between them for some time—even when, after the assassination of the Federation president more than half a year earlier, Robinson had been ordered to the Helaspont Sector for a possible confrontation with Tzenkethi forces.
But this . . . this is different, Sisko thought. For almost all of the children—and only children—to be taken from the ship without warning or explanation . . . He could not find words to describe the enormity of the situation.
How would we go on? Sisko asked himself, thinking of his crew and their mission. He did not want to admit the possibility that they might not be able to recover or even find the children, but as the commanding officer of Robinson, he had no choice but to consider such an eventuality. With so many lost, and with so many grieving families left behind, Sisko would have little recourse but to turn the ship around and head back to the Federation. And what would that mean for Kasidy and me? Could our relationship survive so great a strain? Once, he would have thought so, and all that they had already withstood during their relationship of nearly a decade and a half demonstrated the strength of their bond. But this—
At the forward portion of the bridge, the turbolift doors beside his ready room opened with a whisper. Lieutenant Commander Althouse stepped out and crossed to her position, in the chair to Sisko’s left. “Captain,” she said. Dark circles beneath her eyes and drooping lids suggested not that she had slept badly, but that she had not gone to bed at all. “The counseling staff are overburdened right now.” The statement surprised Sisko, not for its content, but because Althouse typically came at a subject obliquely; she did not employ directness very often, so doing so at that moment doubtless spoke to the severity of the situation, as well as to her evident fatigue. “With so many parents of missing children distraught and seeking some form of counseling, the three of us cannot adequately address their needs.” Lieutenant Haroun al-Jarjani, from Alpha Centauri, and Ensign Aldora Vint, from Betazed, rounded out Althouse’s staff.
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