Proud Helios

by Melissa Scott

  "—get away with it."

  A woman's voice answered, not one that Kira recognized, but she knew it could be no one but Diaadul. "Be quiet, Chief. I won't tell you again."

  There was no answer, but Kira had heard enough. She checked the eavesdrop function to be certain it was only a one-way transmission, and leaned back against the wall, reached for her communicator.

  "Kira to Sisko."

  The response was reassuringly prompt. "Sisko here."

  "I'm at the new control room. Diaadul is in there with Chief O'Brien, definitely holding him prisoner." Kira glanced back along the corridor in spite of herself. "Where's the security team?"

  "On its way," Sisko answered. "Odo reports he's five minutes from your location. Wait for their arrival."

  Kira made a face, but knew she couldn't handle this one on her own. "Very well," she began, and broke off as voices sounded again from inside the compartment. "Stand by, Commander."

  "Two for pickup confirmed," Diaadul's voice said, from the speaker. "Commence beta phase now."

  "Damn!" Kira bit off the rest of her words, knowing there was no time left, and reached for the command override box she had been issued when she joined Odo's security team. She slipped it over the control surfaces, and triggered the key sequence. "No time, Commander. I'm going in."

  "Major—" Sisko's voice stopped abruptly, but Kira had no time to wonder why. The telltales on top of the override box went green at last, and she kicked the door release. The heavy hatch rolled back, groaning softly, and she ducked through the opening, phaser ready.

  "Hold it right there!"

  She caught a quick glimpse of Diaadul in the center of the room, already whirling like a dancer, and O'Brien leaning, arms outstretched and palms flat against the wall, and then Diaadul fired, and O'Brien crumpled to the ground. Kira cried out, wordlessly, unable to believe what she had seen, and in the same instant knew she'd made a fatal mistake. She flung herself down and sideways even as Diaadul fired, but the bolt creased her side, flinging her painfully against the bulkhead. She tried to breathe, her vision fading, realized that she was only stunned, and then even that ceased to matter and she collapsed bonelessly to the floor.

  * * *

  Diaadul waited, her phaser still leveled, until she was sure the Bajoran was truly unconscious, then crossed to the wall controls to close and relock the door. Kira had dropped her own weapon; the Trehanna kicked it carefully out of reach, then picked it up, setting it on the nearest console. Then she tucked her own phaser back beneath her tunic and reached for the package of sensor pickups that she carried in her pocket. She hadn't expected Kira to find her so quickly, but, on balance, it might not be a bad thing to have two hostages. O'Brien was needed for several reasons, could not be threatened too convincingly—Jarriel's repairs were proceeding all too slowly, and another engineer might well make a difference—but Kira was perfectly expendable. At least to us, Diaadul added, and smiled slightly. She won't be expendable to Sisko, and that, at least, will buy us time.

  She set the first pickup on O'Brien's collar, working the tiny clips into the fabric to keep it secure, and then returned to Kira's slumped body. She ran her hands over the other woman's uniform, found and removed the communicator and Kira's spare phaser, a tiny holdout model, and attached the second pickup to the Bajoran's jacket. Then she stepped back, reaching for her communicator.

  "Diaadul to Helios. There are three packages for pickup now."

  There was no answer, but she hadn't expected one: once the plan had entered its beta phase, there would be no time to spare for a response. Everything now depended on Helios, on Kolovzon's legendary timing… She glanced in spite of herself at the locked door, and hoped it would be enough. If Kira had found her, then the rest of the security team, the Starfleet security officers and the dough-faced, shape-changing constable, could not be far behind. And then an alarm whooped from the intercom's speakers, a sound that even she recognized as Starfleet's red alert. She grinned then, no longer bothering to hide her smile, and leaned back against the console, waiting for the final phase to begin.

  * * *

  In Ops, Sisko leaned forward as though he could drag an answer out of the communications console. "Major—" He broke off as indicators flicked out, informing him that Kira had broken contact. "Damn the woman! Doesn't she have the faintest idea of discipline?"

  He saw the nearest Bajoran look away, eyes hooding, and mastered his temper with an effort. "Odo! Make all speed to support Major Kira, she's gone in alone."

  "What?" The constable's displeasure was evident in his tone, but he made no other protest. "We're on our way, Commander."

  Sisko grimaced, but there was nothing more he could do. They'd bungled this one, all of them, himself in particular—he should have listened to Odo, put Diaadul under arrest the moment anything had seemed odd about her—

  A tone sounded, from the main navigation systems, and Dax said, "Commander, I'm picking up a disturbance, it might be a wave emission, moving toward us from the general direction of the Denorios Belt."

  "Put it on the main screen," Sisko ordered, automatically, and Dax touched keys to obey. The image in the screen shifted, became a different patch of starscape, empty except for the faint, star-scatter haze of the Belt in the background.

  "We're not picking up anything else," Dax said, doubtfully. "Just through the filter—"

  And then the screen shimmered, wavering as though it were about to melt, to dissolve, and a ship appeared. Massive, slab-sided, it wheeled on its long axis until it faced the station, the image of a solar face blazoned across the protruding bridge.

  "Sound red alert," Sisko said, and felt the calm of absolute disaster surround him. "Dax, stand by the shields, ready at full power."

  "Red alert, sir," a Bajoran acknowledged, and in the same instant the familiar alarm sounded, whooping through the station. Sisko closed his mind to the image of the station's civilian population, running frantically toward their disaster stations, then looked back at the screen.

  "Get me a good fix on that ship."

  "Got it, sir," another of the Bajorans answered. "Sensors are locked on."

  "Stand by phasers," Sisko said.

  "Standing by," someone answered, and an engineering technician, Swannig, Sisko thought, lifted his head from his screen.

  "Sir, we're not getting anything from the new conduit. All the controls are dead, and I'm not able to activate them from here."

  "How much power do we have for the phasers?" Sisko demanded. In the screen, Helios grew larger, swinging again to reveal a flank scored and pitted as though by heavy fire. "Dax, put their course on the main viewer."

  He didn't hear her acknowledgment, but a moment later, a secondary screen appeared, with Deep Space Nine at the center and Helios's projected course laid out as a green parabola. If the pirate continued on her present heading, she would sweep around the station, and swing back out into the asteroid belt, using the station's disproportionately high artificial gravitational field to create a minor slingshot effect. It was a clever tactic, Sisko admitted sourly, and one that gave the ship a clear field of fire for as much as four interminable minutes. . . .

  "Sir, phasers are at seventy-five percent of the Cardassian rating," Swannig reported.

  "Commander," Dax said. "Preliminary readings suggest that won't be enough to penetrate Helios's shield."

  "Can we route power from deflectors to the phasers?" Sisko asked.

  Swannig bent over his console. "Not without dropping shields below the recommended limits."

  "Sir, Helios is approaching phaser range now," one of the Bajorans reported, his voice high and strained.

  "Raise our shields, Dax," Sisko said, grimly, and braced himself against the nearest console.

  "Raising shields—" Dax broke off abruptly, her eyes widening in horrified disbelief. "Sir, the shields don't answer. We have no deflectors."

  "Get them up," Sisko said, through clenched teeth. "Come on, Dax." In the
screen, Helios loomed ever larger, the wedge-shaped icon in the secondary screen already beginning its turn to circle the station. She was well within phaser range, but still holding fire, and Sisko's hands tightened on the edge of the console. Any minute now, he thought, any minute he'd see the flare of white light that meant Helios was firing, that meant DS9 would be destroyed—"Shields?" he snapped again, and saw Dax shake her head.

  "The system's not responding, sir."

  Out of the corner of his eye, Sisko saw Swannig and a Bajoran technician fling themselves to the floorplates, ripping frantically at the plates that gave access to the weapons console's inner workings. In the main viewer the stars swung crazily behind Helios, the green wedge accelerating perceptibly along its track. Sisko caught a glimpse of more damage, metal ripped like paper along one side of the pirate's hull, a weapon turret peeled back and hanging as if by a thread of metal, and then Helios was past, accelerating away from the station at near warp speed. The image shimmered again, like heat—like an illusion, Sisko thought, bitterly—and vanished.

  "Tracking the wave emissions," Dax said, and almost at once shook her head. "I've lost her. I'm sorry, Benjamin."

  Sisko sighed, shook his own head. "Keep scanning, you may pick up something." He stared for a moment at the empty screen, unable to understand what had happened. Hellos had us dead to rights, he thought. Why the hell didn't she fire?

  "Try the shields now, Lieutenant," Swannig said, and Dax bent over her console.

  "Shields are responding normally," she reported, a moment later. "I don't know what went wrong."

  "Well, find out," Sisko snapped. "We may not be so lucky next time."

  He stood in the center of Ops, hands still resting on the edge of the operations table. The whole thing had been over in minutes, hardly time to respond—but plenty of time to attack, he thought, bitterly. If we'd had power. He stared at the main viewer, half expecting to see the pirate reappear, returning to finish what it had started, but the screen stayed blank, the same seemingly empty starfield filling its surface. He took a deep breath, and touched his communicator. "Dr. Bashir. Any casualties?"

  There was a little pause before the young man answered, sounding out of breath. A baby was wailing in the background, sounding more outraged than hurt. "Nothing serious, Commander. Some bruises when the turbolifts shut down, and a sprained ankle from falling off a ladder. All under control."

  Let's be grateful for small favors, Sisko thought. "Carry on, Doctor," he said, and broke the connection.

  "Commander," Swannig said. "I've located the problem."

  "Well?" Sisko turned to face him, saw the younger man push himself up off the floorplates, and rub his clean hands reflexively down the front of his uniform.

  "Something tripped the emergency cutouts," Swannig said. "It's there to prevent increased demand from overloading the system—the Cardassians had troubles with time lag, you could ask for more than the conduits could carry if you weren't sensitive to it, and then you'd risk blowing the entire system. It's supposed to have an instant reset feature, but that seems to have been disabled, I don't know how. I've reset it manually, and disabled the cutout. It shouldn't happen again."

  Sisko nodded, still chilled by the narrow escape. If Helios had fired, DS9 would have been completely defenseless, and even a single shot from that over-weaponed monster would have been enough to do serious damage to the station. So why didn't they attack? "All right, Ensign," he said aloud. "Dax, stand down from red alert, but keep us on yellow alert for now." A thought struck him, frighteningly plausible, and he made an effort to keep his face expressionless. "And raise Odo for me."

  "Yes, Commander," Dax said, and a moment later Odo's voice crackled through the nearest speaker.

  "What's going on, Commander?"

  Sisko grinned in spite of himself at the constable's familiar attitude, and heard a choking sound as someone suppressed a giggle. "The station was in imminent danger of attack, Constable. I'm sorry if that disrupted your plans."

  There was a little silence, and when Odo spoke again, his voice lacked some of its usual asperity. "I take it that the emergency is over?"

  "For now," Sisko answered. "Where are you, Odo, and what's your status?"

  "I'm in the secondary control room," Odo answered. "Neither Chief O'Brien nor Major Kira—nor, for that matter, Lady Diaadul—are anywhere to be found." There was a little pause, and then the constable added, thoughtfully, "We did find their communicators, however."

  "O'Brien's and Kira's?" Sisko asked, though he thought he knew the answer.

  "Yes."

  Missing people, abandoned communicators, and an abortive attack on the station: it was a suggestive, and unpleasant, combination. Sisko sighed, and said, without much hope, "Take your people and keep searching the area. Report the minute you find anything."

  He distinctly heard Odo's sigh, but the constable said only, "Very well, Commander. Odo out."

  "Dax," Sisko said, and the Trill looked up expectantly. "Pull the recordings of the attack, and put them through to my office. Then I want to talk to you and—" He stopped abruptly. He had almost said Major Kira, and that was a painful reminder of how much he'd already come to depend on the Bajoran. "I want to go over them in my office," he finished, and turned away before anyone could read the concern on his face.

  Dax was as efficient as ever. The first reports were already flashing onto his screen as he took his place behind the desk. Dax herself appeared in the doorway a moment later, her lovely face set into a grim mask.

  "Bad news, Benjamin," she said, and took her place opposite him. "I've run the sensor records of Helios's approach through the broad-band system, and…"

  Her voice trailed off, and Sisko said it for her. "You spotted a transporter beam."

  "I think you should see for yourself," Dax said, and nodded.

  Sisko leaned forward as the new images filled his screen. Helios hung at the center of the image, frozen against the stars, the marks of battle starkly visible on her sides.

  "I'm beginning the tape two minutes into the attack run," Dax said. "She's just starting her turn around the station."

  Sisko nodded, staring at the ship as it jerked into motion, shifting frame by frame across a starfield that was beginning to streak as the station's cameras could no longer cope with the relative motion. He saw the ship tilt slowly, exposing more damage, the torn turret he had noticed before, and dark lines of carbon scoring across the unpainted surface of the hull.

  "And this is the enhanced view," Dax said.

  In the screen, angles sharpened, as though a light had been turned up. A haze of color, like a faint, rainbowed halo, appeared around the ship's stern, highlighting emissions from the hidden engines; more halos appeared, surrounding the weapon turrets and picking out the sealed mouths of photon-torpedo launchers. The ship lurched forward again, and a haze appeared beneath its belly, a glowing golden light almost invisible against the bright hull. In the next frame, the light had already become a beam, stabbing halfway to the station; in the next and the one following, the beam reached past the edge of the screen, clearly extending toward the station. There was more, but Sisko leaned back, looking instead at Dax.

  "Preliminary analysis suggests that that—" She gestured to the beam, now pulling back into the ship. "—is consistent with a transporter in operation."

  "Which means we can assume that Kira and O'Brien are prisoners on board that monster," Sisko said. "And presumably the shields didn't work because someone on Helios lowered them."

  "Or someone on the station," Dax said. "I don't think we can eliminate that possibility."

  It was, in fact, the more likely option, and Sisko grimaced at the thought. "No one on board this station has any reason to support Helios—they're all equally at risk. Except those smugglers, and Diaadul herself."

  Dax was already busy with a datapadd. "The smugglers were under restraint before the attack began, and remain so."

  "Which leaves Diaadul,"
Sisko said. "Could she have lowered the shields from O'Brien's new monitoring station?"

  Dax tilted her head to one side. "I don't know, Benjamin. I don't think so, but I don't know what her technical skills are like."

  Sisko stared for a moment at the screen, no longer seeing the pirate ship's jerky progress. Instead, a new and frightening possibility opened up in front of him, one in which someone on board the station was a spy for Helios—worse than that, a saboteur—and he was left without either the chief engineer he needed to repair the damage, or the full security complement he needed to prevent it. He heard a tap at the door and looked up sharply, to see Swannig standing in the doorway.

  "I'm sorry to interrupt, sir, but we've found the problem."

  "Yes?" Sisko said, and beckoned the technician in.

  "With the shields, sir. We were virused."

  Dax gave a little exclamation of impatience. "I should've guessed—should've considered the possibility. Especially with someone playing around with our accounting systems."

  Swannig glanced at her. "It was the same kind of program, Lieutenant, the same hand, I'd say. That's how we found it so quickly, ran a scan from the program you'd found."

  Dax shook her head, her lips compressed in self-disgust, and Sisko said, "Go on."

  "It wasn't really a virus, sir," Swannig said, "more of a Trojan horse. It masquerades as a standard subrepair routine—somebody's gotten a good copy of Starfleet programming—until it gets the trigger signal, which is the general shutdown of nonessential systems that goes out automatically with red alert. At that point, it disables the reset and substitutes its own data for the data usually sent by the override sensors, with the result that, the minute you call for shields, the whole system shuts down."

  "Clever," Sisko said, sourly.