by David Mack
She finished making her final changes to the roster as Dygan declared, “All probes are in position, Captain. We can begin gathering sensor data.”
“Proceed,” Picard said.
Garbled, intermittent spurts of information stuttered across the security console. Šmrhová applied a host of filters and signal boosters until the data on her screen resembled something useful. Even then, she was dismayed by its poor resolution and sharply limited range.
Picard threw an expectant look at her. “Lieutenant? Report.”
“We’re receiving data from the probes, but the planet’s weather patterns are causing serious interference, even on the SLF channel. Our ‘periscope’ also has numerous glitches and blind spots, and I suspect we might experience occasional blackouts.”
The captain’s expression betrayed no reaction. If her news disappointed him, he hid it well. “What is our effective range and angle of observation?”
“Range: sixty-five thousand kilometers from the edge of the atmosphere, and we have a near-total field of vision—excepting the blind spots I mentioned.” She relayed a relevant item of tactical information to the command terminal beside his chair. “There’s a Breen heavy cruiser in high orbit, executing what appears to be a search pattern around the low equatorial latitudes.”
Picard studied the intel about the Breen ship, then he glanced at the main viewscreen before looking back at Šmrhová. “The away team’s next check-in is less than two hours away. Can we use the probes to make contact with them?”
“No, sir. The probes’ comm systems are limited to the SLF channel. They can’t receive or transmit on the secure frequency we selected for the away team.”
“Merde.” He got up and smoothed the front of his jacket with a quick tug. “We need to get rid of that ship and make contact with the away team, Lieutenant. Keep working on it.”
Šmrhová nodded. “Aye, sir.”
“I’ll be in my ready room.” Picard crossed the bridge and exited to his private office. Šmrhová beckoned a relief officer to take her place at the security console as she moved to the center seat, keenly aware she had failed yet again to impress the captain.
Three years and counting.
• • •
“That’s the control facility down there,” La Forge whispered to his shipmates.
He lay prone to the right of Choudhury atop the factory’s cold metal roof, peering over the edge at the ugly gray outbuilding several dozen meters below. The structure looked as if it had been cobbled together from thousands of chunks of mismatched scrap, but La Forge was certain it was the factory’s control center. The away team had found it by scaling a ladder to the factory’s roof, following the spaghetti junctions of its information system, and tracking its dwindling relays here. Unassuming as the building might appear, its importance was revealed by the fact that every system in the entire facility was hard-wired into it. Through a doorway that slid open to let some soldiers exit, La Forge spied several individuals wearing Breen masks with nonmilitary clothing. Probably scientists or technicians, he figured.
Just beyond the outbuilding was a landing pad of more recent construction. A Breen cargo transport was parked there. Sickly green light spilled down its aft ramp from its main hold. La Forge increased the magnification of his cybernetic eyes as a squad of Breen troops guided a large antigrav frame inside the ship. Suspended like suits from the frame’s top lattice, arranged in ranks and files, were forty dormant androids from the factory. Deeper inside the ship’s hold, he saw the bottom edge of another such antigrav frame that had already been loaded and secured. He made a mental calculation of the interior volume of the ship’s hold, and concluded it could easily be hiding a third frame full of androids. That’s more than a hundred of those things, packed up and ready to go. And who knows how many the Breen have already shipped out?
Worf was stretched out on the rooftop to Choudhury’s left, his trained eyes studying the movements and positions of several dozen Breen personnel below. The troops were being split into teams of three or four. Some were sent inside the factory, some around its perimeter, and others into the adjacent mountain pass.
“They are on alert,” he said as softly as he was able. “Those are search deployments.” He crawled backward on his knees and elbows, and La Forge and Choudhury followed him. When they were far enough from the edge to avoid being observed by the Breen on the ground, they pushed themselves up to low crouching stances and fell back to regroup in a space beneath some pipes and between two enormous fan housings, where Velex and Soong were waiting. Worf shot a hard look at Choudhury. “They have been alerted to our presence.”
The security chief looked concerned. “Maybe a Breen ship spotted the Enterprise. The troops scrambling down here could be just a precaution.”
Her interpretation didn’t seem to convince Worf. Then his eyes narrowed, and La Forge recognized the look of his friend forming a plan. “We can turn this to our advantage.” He pointed at the pass. “Choudhury and I will head into the mountains and harass the Breen with guerrilla tactics. This will draw their forces to us—leaving the control center with few defenders.” He nodded at Velex. “You will escort Doctor Soong and Commander La Forge to the control center and neutralize any threats they encounter.” Velex accepted the mission with a curt nod.
Soong’s face was a mask of wide-eyed disbelief. “Are you kidding? That’s your plan? Doesn’t that seem just a tad simplistic against an enemy like the Breen?”
“Sometimes the simplest plan is best,” Worf said.
La Forge shrugged at Soong. “I’m with Worf. The more moving parts a plan has, the more ways it can go wrong. Just stay under cover unless Velex or I tell you otherwise. We’ll get you inside the control center. After that, the rest is up to you.”
The scientist let out a derisive huff. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”
Worf drew his blaster. “We will see soon enough. Move out.”
• • •
It never ceased to amaze Choudhury that someone as large and bulky as Worf could move with such agility and stealth. They were half sliding, half climbing down a cluster of vertical pipes on the factory’s exterior. There was no time to be slow or careful. The timing of the Breen patrols was as regular as clockwork, which meant Worf and Choudhury needed to take cover before the next trio of armed troops turned the corner thirty meters to her left.
She reached the ground first and sprinted a dozen meters toward a large, cube-shaped heat exchanger that was linked to the facility by a wide aboveground conduit. Worf jumped down from the wall a few seconds behind her and followed her across the perilous stretch of open ground. A perfectly timed somersault enabled her to roll to cover against the side of the heat exchanger, in a squat with her blaster in her hand. Worf breezed past her into the shadows barely a step ahead of the Breen patrol, which appeared precisely on time.
Huddled in the darkness, she and Worf slowed their breathing and became still. Choudhury imagined herself as a natural extension of the rocky ground, a part of the night, a soul at one with the wind. She purged her conscious thoughts and dwelled in the moment. At her back, Worf was the bedrock, unseen and unyielding. Crunching steps drew near, the gritty sound of boots on rocky soil. Then the Breen stepped into Worf and Choudhury’s field of view. Two of the Breen carried compact battle rifles; the third wore a sidearm and carried a neural truncheon, the trademark melee weapon of the Breen military. The two Starfleet officers tracked the Breen with only their eyes rather than risk moving their heads, then they relied upon their ears. Finally, the receding steps faded away, until only the wind remained.
Worf tapped her shoulder. They holstered their weapons and slipped away, up a narrow trail into the myriad hiding places of the mountain range, whose bizarre towers of rock made her think of granite blades. As they sidestepped between an enormous thrust of gray stone and the mountainside, the thunderous roar of fusion engines filled the valley and echoed off the rocky slopes. Choudhu
ry looked back and saw the Breen transport lifting off and heading for orbit.
She said nothing, and neither did Worf, but they both knew that letting the Breen ship escape with its cargo of more than a hundred Soong-type androids, even dormant ones without active positronic brains or functional programming, was a grave tactical error. But it was one they would have to address later, after the mission.
Can’t obsess over what’s done, she reminded herself. For all we know, they’ve made off with thousands of those things. We need to focus on where we are and what we’re doing. Our primary objective for now is to recover the stolen androids and destroy this factory.
Worf halted and directed her attention at the trail ahead. It forked, with its branches heading in opposite directions across the mountainside for a ways before doubling back at a higher altitude, where each intersected another path leading toward the peaks lining the pass. He indicated with a gesture that he would head right. She acknowledged with a confirmation that she was going left. Then they split up and stole away, each to a different vantage point from which to snipe the Breen and raise havoc as a distraction for Velex, La Forge, and Soong.
Several minutes later, she stopped at the corner of her trail’s switchback, surveyed the landscape below and above her position, and nestled herself deep into a crag in the rock wall, behind a large boulder. She drew her blaster, set it for maximum power, and waited.
After a short while, her transceiver vibrated gently against her throat. She tapped it twice and heard Worf’s voice, low and steady. “Worf to Choudhury. Confirm status.”
Because of the scattering field, there was no way to contact La Forge and Velex to ask if they remained ready. We’ll just have to hope they’re in position and good to go. She hoped this didn’t turn out to be another tactical error. “Ready.”
Worf’s voice was deathly calm. “Fire on my mark.”
Arm braced atop the boulder, Choudhury selected her first target and took a deep, calming breath to steady her aim. Then he gave the order, and her readiness became action.
“Fire.”
• • •
Hostile screeches of blaster fire echoed off the mountainside and re-echoed within the metal maze of the factory around La Forge. Now he understood why Worf and Choudhury had taken the risk of moving to higher vantage points before opening fire: the acoustics between the mountains and the industrial complex amplified and multiplied the sonic barrage of their weapons. Though there were only two of them harassing the Breen with fire from above, it sounded as if an entire platoon was waging an assault on the valley.
Velex, La Forge, and Soong stayed low to the ground, sheltered behind a long cluster of broad pipes. Their left shoulders were pressed against one of the factory’s towering walls of machinery, just inside the exit closest to the control center. La Forge lay in the middle of the group, monitoring the movements of the Breen patrol outside with his tricorder. Limited to a primitive echo-location mode that relied on ultrasonic pulses, it wasn’t as accurate or as detailed as a Starfleet device, but it was more than capable of tracking basic movements at short range. Of the nearly dozen personnel it detected in and around the control center, all but a handful of them scrambled into action when the shooting started.
“Look sharp,” he whispered to Velex. “They’re taking the bait.”
The Troyian adjusted his grip on his blaster. “Just tell me when.”
La Forge looked back at Soong. “I’ll cover Velex while he moves ahead to the control center. You stay here until I signal you to move up and join us.”
“Got it,” Soong said. “Good luck.”
When the last of the enemy troops had cleared the area, La Forge slapped Velex’s foot, cueing him to advance. The Troyian sprang to his feet and dashed around the corner, blaster in hand. La Forge tracked his progress with the tricorder. In a matter of seconds, Velex had reached the next point of limited cover, just a few meters shy of the entrance to the control center. La Forge put away his tricorder, crawled forward to the corner, and peeked around it. From across the empty stretch of gravel road, Velex beckoned him to move up.
His heart racing, La Forge got to his feet and sprinted away from the factory, toward Velex. He was halfway there when something unseen slammed into his face, and something else swept his legs out from under him. The engineer landed on his back, dazed and blinded with pain. He reached reflexively for his nose, which throbbed with deep pain and coated his hand with fresh blood. Blinking to clear the red haze from his vision, he saw Velex break cover and move toward him. Then several humanoid shapes shimmered into view between them.
Velex tried to aim his blaster, only to be cut down in a savage flurry of disruptor fire. His charred corpse crumpled in a twisted heap as the shapes between him and La Forge solidified. They were Breen soldiers—the snoutlike masks were unmistakable—but they wore a type of armor La Forge had never seen before. It was black and silver, with a scaly texture, and it featured what he surmised was a compact power cell on its back. The one detail he did recognize was the metallic gold stripe down the center of each soldier’s helmet, starting just above their long, narrow visors. That was the mark of the Spetzkar, the Breen military’s elite special forces.
The Spetzkar trooper who’d toppled La Forge pointed his rifle at the engineer’s face. A harsh crackle of machine noise issued from his mask’s vocoder and was instantly parsed into English by some unseen universal translator on his uniform: “Drop your weapon.”
La Forge tossed away his blaster and lay very still, his open hands raised in surrender. The Breen commando backed up but kept his weapon trained on him. Then two of his comrades seized La Forge by his arms and hauled him to his feet. They held him while the first commando searched La Forge, relieved him of his tools and other equipment, and tossed the contraband on the ground. Another trooper approached them, and this one’s helmet had thin red stripes on either side of its gold band. Probably a noncom, La Forge reasoned. Or maybe the commander.
Some untranslated conversation passed between Red Stripes and the other Spetzkar. Dangling in their iron grip, La Forge mustered his best poker face.
Please don’t let them find—
His silent plea was denied as two more Spetzkar ushered Soong out of the factory at riflepoint. Another round of machine noise was volleyed between Soong’s captors and Red Stripes, who barked some terse commands and pointed at the control center. His men let go of La Forge, then one of them poked him hard in the back with his weapon’s muzzle, prodding him toward the ramshackle outbuilding. Nodding and wiping blood from his face, La Forge started walking, and Soong fell in beside him as they neared the entrance.
He hoped Worf or Choudhury had seen what just happened to him, Soong, and Velex. Because if they hadn’t, their guerrilla campaign was about to take a sharp turn for the worse.
• • •
“They simply appeared,” Choudhury said, struggling to keep her voice down. “Until I saw them through the holoscope, I thought they were Jem’Hadar.” She ducked a centimeter lower behind a rock formation, paranoid there could be shrouded Breen commandos anywhere, even right next to her. Until that moment, she had never envied Worf’s keener olfactory senses and hearing. “Their markings were unmistakable, Worf. They were Spetzkar, a whole platoon of them.”
“Stay calm,” he counseled her. “Remember your blind-fighting instruction. Stay under cover as long as possible. Meet me at Soong’s ship.”
“Acknowledged.” She tapped her concealed transceiver once, closing the channel. After a long, calming breath, she studied the mountainside and mapped its moonlit terrain in her mind’s eye. Visualizing her path from one area of cover to the next, she plotted a route back to the pass, one that would let out close to the trail that led to Soong’s ship.
Before doubt could paralyze her, she willed herself into motion. On each leg of the hike up the mountainside, she was exposed and vulnerable for only a few seconds at a time. As long as no one’s looking in my direction
with UV or thermal imaging, I’ll be fine. She crawled on knees and elbows between two points of relative safety, eager to stay as far out of sight as possible. Along the way, she found herself questioning the wisdom of whoever decided this mission should have no reinforcements and no extraction plan.
Tucking herself under a low overhang of rock, she paused to assess the relative risk of the next hop in her trek up the mountainside. Sweat trickled down her forehead and pooled above her eyebrows, and strands of her black hair felt as if they’d been plastered to her forehead. A film of dust had formed on her teeth, filling her mouth with the unpleasant flavor of dry earth, and she struggled to muster enough spit to expel the taste.
She estimated it would take her another twenty minutes to reach the mountain pass, and another ten after that to reach Soong’s ship. A quick check of her chrono placed her ETA at the rendezvous right around the time of the away team’s next scheduled check-in with Enterprise. She hoped she and Worf both reached the rendezvous point alive—and that the Enterprise was still out there somewhere, waiting to bring them home.
• • •
The interior of the control center was just as much a hodgepodge of mismatched technology as its exterior, and that didn’t surprise La Forge in the least. What left him slackjawed in shock and horror was the sight of Soong’s first three prototype androids all but reduced to scrap atop portable worktables in the center of the room. The body of Lore lay in a discarded heap in the corner, and a small shape that he assumed was Lal’s body lay inside an open body bag atop another worktable, apparently awaiting its turn for a brute-force dissection.
B-4’s limp form lay on a worktable beside a bank of computers. An optronic cable linked his still-functioning positronic brain to the control center’s master systems board. La Forge wondered how long the poor android had until his neural net suffered a fatal collapse.