by Diane Carey
* * *
This was what the last two years of war had been building up to, what inevitably came if neither side of a conflict fell soon enough. This would be the one decisive upheaval, sink or swim, and neither side was thinking about tomorrow. There would be no holding back any more. Tomorrow, there would be nothing left with which to try again. The decision would be made today—here—and right now.
The Defiant led the way, as the strongest tight-maneuver vessel left in the Federation fleet. At their sides, Klingon and Romulan fighter wings pressed forward boldly. Backing them up were the remaining starships, support tenders, and any other vessel that could still hit and take some. The Allied Fleet was depleted by a third.
That figure did not change Sisko’s now-or-never commitment or dull his determination.
“Hold your fire until proximity distance,” he ordered. “We won’t get any second chances.”
“All systems ready, sir,” O’Brien reported.
Sisko understood what that meant. All systems were up to their top ability for the moment, even if that only meant thirty percent. He had to be ready to lose things much earlier than in the first-wave assault.
That meant adjusting his thinking process and his orders to compensate and improvise.
On the planet below, countless thousands of civilians were absorbing the brutality of the Vorta and Jem’Hadar extermination teams. An act of desperation on the part of the Dominion, yes, but there was also the taste of bitter vengeance in such wholesale slaughter. On the planet, a horror was playing out.
In space, the second horror now erupted.
The enemy ships did not come out to meet them, but forced the Allied Fleet to spread itself thin and circle as much of the planet as possible—and it was a very big planet indeed. Even seven hundred ships couldn’t cover so much area effectively, and within moments the sheer firepower of engaged vessels lit up space as if the Cardassian homeworld had become a nova suddenly torched in the night.
Defiant roared in slashing. Nothing was held back. No one was in the mood for restraint The bridge exploded into an unrecognizable wreck and no one cared. Sisko barked orders and authorizations, letting them free from anything that might make them hold back. The everbalanced triangle of life, risk, and cause, generally rocking on its tip, finally turned and slammed down upon its base. Die if we must, but make it cost. Our lives for something bigger, much better, and everlasting—possession of our own quadrant for everyone who comes after us. That is the code of the military branch of any civilization, and today it was the banner of the Defiant.
Shrapnel spun across the bridge from port to starboard as a Breen hacker got its teeth into them on a blunt pass. Sisko took a dozen slivers in the arm, brushed them off in a patch of blood, and dodged from position to position, doing things faster than he could order them done. There weren’t enough people left standing on the bridge to follow his orders anyway. All he needed was himself, Nog at the helm, Ezri, Worf, and O’Brien. The rest would have to be let go.
Every time a Breen or Jem’Hadar vessel veered into range, Sisko snapped, “Fire!” He didn’t even wait for the targeting computers. Worf gave up trying to aim by sensor and simply blanketed wedges of phaser fire into space, hitting something almost every time, even if once or twice they grazed another Starfleet ship or an ally. They were getting their share of friendly fire—that was unavoidable. It seemed that everyone accepted the chance of getting killed by a neighbor. With phaser and disruptor fire crisscrossing intervening space, there was no way to avoid getting struck by somebody’s something.
There was no sense or order, no coordination to the attack. In fact, that was an advantage. With all the wild-hearted Starfleet, Klingon, and Romulan captains bringing to bear their decidedly individual talents and experiences against the programmed uniformity of the Jem’Hadar and Breen, the Allied forces were almost impossible to predict and willing to be crazy.
“Worf, portside! Open fire! Ezri, compensate for the lateral shift! O’Brien, don’t move!”
He kept the orders running for each consecutive surge, keeping off the bow of this enemy ship, hugging the tail of that one, shooting, dodging, twisting, ducking. His arms and shoulders quivered with energy as his body charged to the task. He felt none of the wounds he knew had been inflicted upon him. Not a bruise ached, not a scratch burned. They were there, but he couldn’t feel them. That made him feel immortal, invincible. The fact that he could force by sheer will the acrid chemical smoke through his lungs as it poured from the ship’s damaged bridge conduits made him even more powerful.
* * *
“Captain!”
“Coming, Odo.”
Sisko made his way to the other side of the bridge, where Odo hovered over a flickering monitor.
“I may have found something interesting,” the constable said. “So far, Mr. Worf has managed to score direct hits on eleven Breen ships, but only three of those suffered significant damage.”
At tactical, Worf shot them an insulted glower. “It’s difficult to penetrate their shields. They appear to use stochastic field emitters.”
Odo peered past Sisko’s shoulder to the Klingon. “I’m not questioning your abilities, Commander.”
“What are you getting at, Constable?” Sisko prodded.
“All three ships that suffered damage were struck in the aft impulse manifold.”
Halleluja….
Sisko peered into the screen, making sure there hadn’t been some missed detail that could explain better. There wasn’t.
“Constable, you may have found a chink in their armor. Helm, find us a Breen ship. Mr. Worf, target—”
“I’ll target their aft impulse manifold.” Worf seemed both insulted and victorious. Not a bad combination for a Klingon.
Defiant veered hard over and whined in pursuit of the nearest Breen, locking onto its prey in seconds.
“Pull in tight, Ensign,” Sisko directed. “Three more degrees port … that’s better … z-minus two … fire!”
The weapons howled. Streaks of energy lanced through the Cardassian ionosphere like slicing the top off a cake, and drilled the back of the Breen ship. A few seconds—and FFFFWOOSH—obliterated.
Odo looked at Sisko, who looked at Worf, who was already looking at Ezri, who didn’t have a clue what all this meant.
Well, maybe she had a clue, but she hadn’t quite distilled it out of her memories yet.
“Dax,” Sisko began, “send a priority-one message to all ships. Let ’em know what we found!”
Now she got it.
CHAPTER
8
There it was—the cargo door. Dominion Headquarters’ rare weak spot.
“No guards,” Kira observed. Damar, she hated to admit, had called this one pretty well. “Our own private little Achilles’ hell.”
“Heel,” Garak corrected.
“No, I think I got it right the first time.”
Ekoor squatted near her. “Where are the guards?”
“Like the commander said,” Garak explained, “they’re probably off killing Cardassians.”
“Then this may be easier than we thought,” Damar said from the other end of the assault team.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Kira warned.
“We have a problem,” Garak pointed out.
“Only one?”
“But I’m afraid it’s a rather large one. That door is made of neutronium.”
Kira felt her shoulders sag. “Then the explosives we brought aren’t going to make a dent in it.”
Garak’s wide eyes rolled. “Now you see the problem.”
“What do we do?” Ekoor asked.
“I don’t know,” Damar said, “but I’m done hiding in basements.”
Garak rewarded him with a laugh.
“I fail to see what’s so funny, Garak,” Damar shot back.
“Isn’t it obvious? Here we are, willing to storm the castle and sacrifice our lives in a noble effort to slay the Dominion beast in
its lair … and we can’t even get inside the gate!”
“We could knock on the front door,” Kira suggested, “and ask the Jem’Hadar to let us in—”
“Or send the female shapeshifter out to us,” Damar grumbled.
“Whichever’s more convenient.”
They looked at each other, and spontaneously laughed. It was kind of funny, right in the middle of this big ugliness.
“Well,” Garak reminded, “we do have to think of something….”
Kira nodded, but knew she couldn’t honestly blame Damar for the murderous gleam in his eyes. She’d spent all her childhood sneaking around, hiding, lurking, becoming an expert at strike-and-fly assault missions, guerrilla tactics, and resistance thinking—and she was the first to admit that a person could become absolutely excellent at it, but could never learn to love it. Damar had spent his life as a Cardassian military officer. This running and hiding was new to him and somehow degrading.
“We can’t stay here much longer,” she told them. Now that they knew their explosives wouldn’t scratch this door, they had to come up with another plan.
“What if I were to give myself up as a prisoner?” Damar offered.
“They’d kill you on sight,” Kira canceled.
“And us along with you,” Garak concurred.
She started to turn away, to find a route away from the Headquarters, or another less daunting portcullis to break through, when the cargo door abruptly slid open with a terrific screech. She ducked back into the shadows beside Garak. Damar and the others pressed into an opposite hiding place.
Together they watched as three Cardassian soldiers emerged from the Headquarters. In handcuffs!
“I know those Cardassians,” Damar whispered. “They’re part of Weyoun’s security force!”
What a strange sight—Jem’Hadar pushing Cardassians in irons!
Kira pressed closer to the wall and squinted. Yes, here came two Jem’Hadar, pushing the Cardassians out at gunpoint. Their rifles had bayonets fixed. Why?
The question answered itself after the Cardassians made a few steps into the alley. The Jem’Hadar offered no pause for thought or confession, nor did they even allow their prisoners to turn and face death head-on. They simply moved forward and drove their bayonets into two of the Cardassians, then shared the third, spearing the helpless natives through the spines.
Damar leaped to his feet, enraged. “No!”
“Damar!” Kira tried to grab for him, but he was gone, rushing into the alley, blanketing the Jem’Hadar with wildfire. The two Jem’Hadar went down hard.
Damar rushed past them and stormed the open cargo door. But the door was starting to close! And their presence here had been compromised.
“Charge!” Kira shouted, and raced after him.
Garak, Ekoor, and the other Cardassian conspirators vaulted from their hideout and clambered after her. Nothing left to hide. She was relieved to hear their boot-steps hammering behind her, that they hadn’t had a change of heart at the sight of the coldhearted slaughter exacted on their own people by the Jem’Hadar.
Kira and Garak, leading the group behind Damar, opened fire, blowing aside the shocked Jem’Hadar who appeared here and there in their path. The Jem’Hadar were built for space and clumsy on land, a factor which very swiftly washed in the resistance’s favor.
They broke inside the cargo door, into a brightly lit loading dock, with Damar boldly leading the way. He was driven to blind fury, and this was enheartening for all who followed him. They would get in! They would turn the tables here somehow!
They would blast their way past the half dozen Jem’Hadars who appeared in front of them!
“Hah!” Damar shouted insanely, and opened fire.
The Jem’Hadar were instantly attracted by his shout and opened fire themselves, all aiming at the single target who had drawn their shots. In an amazing flurry, Damar took combined bolts to the chest. Driven backward, he slammed into a wall, his face plastered with shock and rage.
The resistance fighters spread behind boxes of cargo, clearly stunned. Kira covered Garak as he bent at Damar’s side, his face crumpled and fearful.
“He’s dead,” Garak murmured.
She barely heard him. The news showed clearly in his astonished face.
Something happened to her—she recognized it. All Damar’s rage, insult, devotion, and pride transferred itself, like a soul changing bodies. He’d gotten them inside and now it was up to her. She was suddenly charged with the drive to take back Cardassia as if it were her own. How was that for a story to tell!
She spun on the hiding resistance fighters. “Get up! Remember Damar’s orders! We stop for no one!”
Shuddering with emotion, Garak rose to his feet, daring the fire from the Jem’Hadar, and turned to his fellow Cardassians.
“For Cardassia!”
Ekoor burst from hiding. “For Cardassia!”
Following the supercharged Ekoor, Kira and the others easily outmaneuvered the Jem’Hadar guards—and Damar had been right, there weren’t as many as there should have been—freely blowing them to piles of flesh and plastic tubing all the way through the Headquarters.
None of this building was familiar, and Kira found it disconcerting to race through unfamiliar corridors with such directioned purpose—evidently Ekoor did know his way, for he led them at full tilt without so much as a pause at a corner or a hesitation to remember the right way.
Alarms began to ring. Security alert. They were aware of the breach now. She knew the sound of that. So much for subtlety.
She kept firing, trying not to hit Ekoor, who continued to roar through the corridors, blind with fury. He was firing wildly, hitting every Jem’Hadar he spied. At that imprudent rate his weapon would be drained any second now and he’d be helpless.
“Get the explosives, Garak! Ekoor!” she called. “Come forward here, get ready—”
“We’re ready,” Garak called. In both hands he held not his weapon, which he had handed to Ekoor, but the grenades.
“This door!” Ekoor shouted. “This one! Hurry!”
Ekoor fired foolishly at the door, causing a dangerous backwash of energy from the shielded panel.
“Stop!” Kira shouted. “Garak, the grenades!”
“Coming!”
“Take cover!”
They spread out. Two seconds, and a concussion blast nearly took their heads off.
Kira shook away the blur and dove through the smoking wreckage where a moment ago there had been a door. She opened fire even before she had a target, and felt the hot buzz of shots whizzing by her. In a cloud she saw one Jem’Hadar fall. Another, though, got his weapon up and fired, killing one of Ekoor’s Cardassian recruits. Following the trajectory she thought she’d seen, Kira fired again. The second Jem’Hadar crashed to the floor.
She plowed into the briefing room and leveled her weapon joyously at the flaky face of the female shapeshifter who had so often compromised Odo. Ah!
“Contact the Jem’Hadar fleet!” Kira ordered. “Order it to cease fire!”
Garak stepped forward, again holding his weapon and aiming now at Weyoun’s astonished glare. “And order the Jem’Hadar troops on Cardassia to lay down their arms immediately.”
“He’ll do no such thing,” the female shapeshifter said. At her words, the Vorta dutifully regained control over his expression.
Kira moved to a position allowing her to cover both Weyoun and the shapeshifter in one shot. “Garak, check the monitors. What’s going on in space?”
Garak was as comfortable with the Cardassian mechanics as he had become with the workings on Starfleet ships. Instantly he had the readouts displayed on three monitors.
“I’m not reading any Breen ships in close proximity to the planet,” he said. “There’s a trail of Breen exhaust leading out of the solar system. Looks like the Allies have them in retreat.”
“Cowards,” the female shapeshifter commented bitterly. “First the Cardassians, now the Breen. Th
is proves what I’ve said all along—solids are not to be trusted.”
“The Jem’Hadar haven’t abandoned us,” Weyoun claimed. “They’ll fight to the death.”
“There aren’t enough of them on the planet,” Kira told him. “We’re here, aren’t we?”
Weyoun glared coldly at her. “Tell me … where is my old friend Damar?”
“Damar’s dead,” Garak announced before Kira could stop him from speaking up and tipping any hand they had in their favor.
“A pity,” Weyoun said.
Garak’s bitterness got the better of him. “He died helping to free Cardassia.”
The Vorta tilted his head. “What’s left of it.”
Garak’s anger boiled over. He raised his weapon to Weyoun and fired at point-blank range. This time Kira had no inclination to stop him at all.
As her loyal follower collapsed to the floor, the shapeshifter regarded him unemotionally. “I wish you hadn’t done that. That was Weyoun’s last clone.”
Garak sneered, “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Kira stepped forward. “The war’s over. You’ve lost.”
“Have I?” the shapeshifter challenged. “I think you’ll find the Jem’Hadar don’t agree with that assessment. They’ll continue to fight to the last man.”
“What will that accomplish?”
“Isn’t it obvious? To make sure your ‘victory’ costs you as many ships and as many lives as possible. When the next Dominion fleet comes through the wormhole, there’ll be no one—not the Federation, not the Klingons, not the Romulans—who’ll be strong enough to stop us.”
Kira pressed down a shudder at the prospect. “That’s an empty threat.”
Clearly weakened by her sickness, the shapeshifter sank into her chair. She seemed too tired to argue. She leaned back in her chair, her demolished face strangely content.
“Is it? … We’ll see,” she uttered. “In the mean time, more of your ships will be destroyed, and your casualty lists will continue to grow. By the time it’s over, you will have lost so many ships, so many lives … that your victory will taste as bitter as defeat.”
* * *
“We’ll launch a three-pronged attack,” Admiral Ross explained. “The Romulans and our new Cardassian allies will engage the Jem’Hadar forces. The Klingons will target the Breen, and the Federation will take on the orbital weapons platforms. Any questions?”