Station Rage

by Diane Carey

  Driving backward into the point of contact, he threw all his weight into that elbow and felt his attacker's balance skid out from under them both. The Cardassian's own phaser dashed out to one side, though he managed to keep a grip on it. Together they struck the side of the pulse drive monitor unit with a deafening crack, and the Cardassian's phaser went off.

  The surge of raw phaser power whined so close to Sisko's ear that it raised the hairs on the backs of his hands and neck. With both hands clutching the Cardassian's arm around his neck, he looked in time to see the phaser beams slice a glaring orange burn crack across the control panels on the other side of the complex.

  "Stop it!" Sisko ground out, his lower lip pressed into the Cardassian's rock-hard arm. "Stop it! The deflector grid! You're heading for it! Idiot, you're—"

  The phaser kept screaming at his ear. The Cardassian's hand clenched hard on the weapon, firing the wobbly orange flame as if drawing his name on the engineering panels, going like a child's scrawl toward the deflector grid.

  From behind the Cardassian bear-hugged him and kept firing, either didn't understand or didn't care, or was caught up in the fever of the wrestling match.

  "Stop firing! Stop—firing!"

  He dug his heels into the ground and dropped his weight out from under, trying desperately to pull the mighty Cardassian off balance only a few inches. But this was like wrestling with an iron statue. The Cardassian roared an unintelligible curse and wouldn't give. In front of Sisko's aching eyes, the phaser and the fist clutching it shuddered and buzzed, draining violently all over the engineering deck housings—those critical housings where the important stuff lay.

  Sisko raised one foot, searching for a wall or something to brace against—too late. The phaser beam went like scalpel through the deflector grid housing, and in a pathetic instant the shields were down. That was it. They were down.

  A tough ship … without shields. Fransu's weapons would cut into bare unprotected hull plating.

  "You blundering ass!" Furious, Sisko tucked his chin under the Cardassian's arm, found a hole in the Cardassian's armor, peeled back his swollen cheeks, and sank his teeth in where it counted.

  The Cardassian gasped, dropped back, and tried to pull his arm up.

  Sisko brought his knees up, dropped out of the stranglehold, and rolled away. His hands scratched the deck, the corners, the housings for a crowbar, a mallet, a piece of the ship, anything he could use as a bludgeon to make this end somehow in his favor. But there was nothing.

  He had as he turned only swollen hands and numb legs, equilibrium shot to hell and judgment not far behind it. He cranked his head around to the Cardassian—something about seeing death coming, about facing it head-on and not being shot in the back.

  Pressing both hands to the side of a repair console, he pushed all the way to his feet.

  His back muscles withered with anticipation of the Cardassian's phaser slicing the same scrawl in his spine as it had in the deflector grid.

  He rose to his full height at the same second the Cardassian stumbled up and was swinging around to him. The soldier's face was twisted, growling, and the weapon was coming around, too.

  The deck lit up—more electrical buzzing, more hot streaks. Sisko squinted, knowing it was coming. He didn't have anything to throw.

  The Cardassian's expression changed, but only for the briefest instant before changing quite suddenly again—eyes grew wide within their bony goggles, mouth fell open as if to gulp a protest, when abruptly his body tucked forward to accept a blow and dissolved into a puff, then fizzled out of life.

  Sisko stared at the empty space before him, wondering during that last instant if he had in fact died and come back as supernatural and now his very thoughts could destroy.

  He spun around, caught himself, chest heaving and legs fighting for balance, and struggled to focus his vision on the figure there. With a gurgling wheeze he snarled, "Garak!"

  Garak loosened his grip on his weapon—he didn't want to fire it accidentally at the man he had just saved.

  "Captain Sisko," he said. "You look as if you've been through a shredding. I heard you were dead."

  "Where'd you," Sisko heaved, "hear that?"

  "Oh … tailor's privilege, Captain." There was an attempt at smugness, but it was shallow. Garak attempted a dispassionate grin and failed.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Throwing in with you. My hopes have crumbled." There was a veil of sadness that Garak couldn't hide. "Only grim alternatives now."

  "I hope there are alternatives left. Do you know anything about Federation technology?"

  A flicker of the smugness came back. "Captain … don't you know by now? I'm a very good tailor."

  "Then stay here and man engineering."

  He stepped to Garak and glowered, feeling his stiff face groove with permeating disgust. Then he tipped one shoulder toward the deflector grid station and lingered only one more bitter instant.

  "We'll talk later," he said.

  "Our shields just collapsed! Can't you get through to your men in engineering? What are they floundering around with? They've got to bring our shields back up!

  "Clus, Koto, this is the bridge—give priority to bringing the deflectors back on-line. We have no deflectors. Clus? Koto, do you read? Clus?"

  Putting her shoulder down and digging her feet into the carpet as if pushing the ship herself, Kira drew a shuddering breath. "I don't know how long we can do this. We're dead without shields, there's no doubt about that."

  The High Gul abandoned the comm unit and told her, "Break away from him and go to the sun."

  She twisted around. "Say again?"

  "The sun," he said with a casual motion outward into the solar system. "Go to the sun. Go close."

  "You want to play tag right next to the sun?"

  "No, around it."

  "Why?"

  "We need something in our favor. Fransu will have photons, we will have the sun."

  "If we leave, he might take the opportunity to cut up the station."

  "No, he knows I'm on board here. He will follow me."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because he is Fransu, sentinel."

  Irresolute, Kira shook her head and faced front again, where all their troubles lay. "All right … he's Fransu."

  She sheared off on her course, wheeled Defiant around on a rim, and belted all the speed she could get out of the struggling impulse drive. She could almost feel it sucking, tapping fuel as best it could. A little better now—maybe the Gul's men had figured it out and put the PDT back in balance.

  But still no shields.

  They could go to the sun, all right, and about all they could do was hide behind it. One shot of full phasers from a ship the size of Fransu's would buckle the hull somewhere or slice off an engine, and that would be it.

  "They are following, High Gul," Elto reported. "Firing again—"

  His voice was cut off by a blistering hit that sent sparks from the ceiling and smoke pouring out the port subsystems. But it was a grazing hit—Kira still had helm integrity under her hands. She squeezed speed out of the ship and the ship dug in.

  The sun was in front of them, blinding bright in spite of the main screen's compensators that saved their eyes. Bajor's unforgiving apricot sun, now a strategic point in a space battle. Not the destiny of most suns, certainly.

  Kira aimed for it. It stayed the same size for damning minutes, then began to appear steadily larger.

  "He is pursuing," Elto reported. His voice squawked with tension. "Gaining!"

  "Go around the sun, sentinel," the High Gul said, "as far as you can go, but stay on a horizontal plane."

  "What'll that do for us?" Kira asked, to avoid another automatic aye-aye.

  "I know how Fransu thinks. He was never very good at this. He's too cautious to be good at it. Rather than chase me and risk my turning on him, he'll wait on this side. We'll come up underneath him, hit him hard, then disappear around again.
It will completely unnerve him."

  "And you're enjoying it."

  "Yes, I'm enjoying it."

  "Playing sun tag isn't my idea of strategy," Kira said. "Without shields, we can't get too close or we'll fry. He's got shields and he can—"

  "It doesn't matter what he has," the High Gul insisted. "We will prevail if we outthink him."

  Kira bit her lip. "Doesn't always work …"

  She adjusted her vector to avoid slamming into the sun—although the abandon of it was insanely enticing for a second or two—and brought the ship around just as the temperature warning klaxon came on.

  "Proximity alert … veer off immediately … proximity alert … veer off immediately"

  "Yes, shut up," she muttered, and switched it off.

  She was sweating. Her clothing began to chafe around her wrists and neck. Her hair slowly began to matte. She could feel it becoming heavier, strand by strand, as the heat increased. Without shields, the ship couldn't fend off the sun's beating.

  They looped around the sun at the axis horizontal to themselves, pretending that up was really up in space, and down was down.

  Kira watched her displays cautiously. "We're opposite to DS9 … now."

  "Loop under the sun and meet him. Come up firing."

  Understanding the picture, Kira appreciated the High Gul's restraint in explaining every detail and ordering every move. She knew what to do and the order was to just do it. He was also taking the still-ripe risk that she was truly willing to work with him. This would be the time for her to turn on him. She felt his eyes on her, knew he was betting his life on her.

  It was a kind of field-of-honor trust, and though it failed to unnerve her, it did keep her from thinking about anything but the task at hand, distracted her from imagining ways to betray him.

  The bridge was getting hotter. Sweat drained down the sides of her face. Beneath her clothing she felt it puddle on her chest, under her knees, and on the bottoms of her feet. Every movement now had an annoying squish.

  On the screen the sun grew closer, then scooped upward to the top of the screen, then all but its bright light vanished and they were underneath it.

  She piloted as sharply as she could manage, but without shields she could only cut so close.

  Fransu's ship was right where the High Gul said it would be, hesitating, wondering if it should come around. Something about that bothered Kira, but she ignored her inner voice and came up firing as instructed.

  Phaser streams incised the deflector grid underneath Fransu's vessel, and without even looking at the sensor displays she could see the crackling of energy cutting through the grid. There had obviously been some previous damage done by DS9's phasers, and now she was cashing in on it.

  Fransu's ship shuddered off to port, trying to gain range, but Kira kept Defiant at full speed, never mind the dangerous reality of being overtaken by the sun's powerful gravity.

  "It worked!" Elto called, panting with excitement.

  "Worked," Kira breathed to herself.

  "Loop around the sun again," the High Gul said.

  Without responding to him Kira piloted a tight path around the brilliant field of heat and light, keeping Defiant's stronger topside hull to the sun. The engines moaned with effort so taxing that the sound thrummed up through the deck under them.

  "All stop," the High Gul said when they were on the other side again. "Come about and hold position."

  She maneuvered the ship as instructed, facing the sun, ready to leap or plunge in any direction.

  "Holding position," she said. "The next move is Fransu's."

  They began the most awful, nerve-wrecking thing in battle—they waited. Ten seconds … twenty … forty … a minute …

  "Where is he?" Kira asked the main screen, the sun sizzling upon it, hurting her eyes in spite of the screen's compensators.

  The High Gul coughed on a thread of smoke coming up from one of the port side panels. "I told you he wouldn't follow. Elto, can you pick up his location on the other side of the sun? We can go and hit him again."

  "My readings are confused," Elto choked on the electrical smoke. "I see several images of his ship … but none is complete."

  "Those are sensor ghosts," Kira said, turning to look at him. "Switch to tactical sensors and look for propulsion residue instead of a ship."

  "Thank you."

  She shifted around again, nauseated by her decision to help them.

  Bajor, Bajor, Bajor, the galaxy was bigger than Bajor. There were millions of innocent families in the Cardassian culture, too, whom she'd never considered before coming to her position on Deep Space Nine and widening her field of vision. And others who would be affected by a Cardassian civil war—she scoured her mind for the impact of what she was doing, and plaguing doubts ate at her.

  "When we've made him tense," the High Gul said, "we'll again loop around beneath the sun and pound his unprotected underside. Fransu will never expect that. He'll be protecting his bow and beams, expecting a flank action. Sentinel, if you would prepare us for—"

  "I see him!" Elto stumbled to the lower deck and took the navigation station and weapons, giving Kira the chance to concentrate on the helm. "He's coming out of the sun's corona! Here he comes!"

  CHAPTER 20

  "FIRE! FIRE!"

  "Firing." Kira heard her own voice as if in a distant crowd. She lunged into the phaser mechanism and blasted freely, but Fransu's ship barreled down upon them from inside the bright disk of the sun.

  "Our phasers are only skimming their shields," Elto reported, gripping the edge of the console in front of him. "At this angle, we need photon torpedoes."

  As if in bitter mockery, Fransu's ship opened fire with its own photons, and the Defiant boomed like a cannon going off in a cave as she was hit by Rugg'l's strafing run. Fire broke out in three places around the bridge, sparks fanned from deck to ceiling, and smoke boiled along the starboard side.

  "Fire again!" the High Gul blazed.

  Kira abandoned her controls and swung around to him and fought for stable tone.

  "We've got to get out of here. You've got to accept the fact that we can't fight him without deflector shields. You can't outthink a photon torpedo! Let me veer off!"

  With her fierce expression she dared him to respond, to cough up some poetry that would shield the ship.

  Stiff in the command seat, the High Gul's voice was ragged. He looked from the screen to her, then to the screen again, at the far-distant silver scratch of Fransu's ship swinging about to come back at them.

  "Very well, veer off. Any course."

  As she swung back to the helm, Kira felt a sudden stinging pain run up her left arm—the port side lateral sensor array subsystems station had just blown up. The carpet beside her was burning!

  She managed to stay in her seat and field the hot sparks that scorched her face and left hand, winced, and wiped the sparks off on her leg. She turned the ship up on its blunt nose like a clumsy dancer and struck off with full impulse speed straight Z-minus around the bottom of the sun—the course the High Gul had fancied would surprise Fransu. Now it was just an escape route.

  The Cardassian legend gripped both arms of the command chair. "Why did we not see him coming? These modern sensors should've been able to pick up anything moving toward us!"

  "I tried to tell you!" Kira shouted over the crackle of shredded electrical systems. "It's eighty years later. He can get a lot closer to the sun than you think! That's how he came around without being seen! The reason we don't play this game is that our shields have gotten better than our sensors!"

  "I see no particular wisdom in what's happening here," the High Gul said. "A battle is a battle—time-tried methods should operate in any age. And Fransu is a known element. . . ."

  She cranked around, still keeping both hands on the controls. "Well, maybe the raw technology's improved in eighty years! And maybe he's got eighty years more experience than the last time you saw him! And maybe, just maybe, he doesn'
t think of you as a hero-god anymore!"

  Pure gut fury blew into the High Gul's face as he stared at her.

  Uh-oh … trouble. She'd hit a sour chord with that one.

  He rose from the command seat and glowered down at her, his arms arched out at his sides, hands slightly raised as if he were about to backhand her. But she didn't care. A crack across the face wouldn't change anything.

  She stiffened her jaw, ready to take it.

  But abruptly the turbolift door swept open and raw orange phaser fire creased the bridge. Not just outside on the bare naked hull, but right here, inside, ten feet way, where no one could possibly get away from it.

  Phasers blared like stampeding macaques across the bridge of the fighting ship. There wasn't even time for Kira to plunge out of her seat once the turbolift opened and the lightning started. She could only duck forward over the helm and cover her head—a silly instinct that could do nothing against the attack of hot phasers. But it was one of those things that made a person feel better just before dying.

  None of the phaser energy hit her, though—a mind-boggling surprise during moments in which she prepared to be vaporized. When the sounds fell off, she was still sitting at the helm, digging her fingernails into her hair, peeking up from the crook of one elbow.

  "Sir?" Slowly she let go of her hair.

  Before her was a ghost of Ben Sisko, drenched in blood, plastered head to foot with dust, hunch-shouldered, gruff, armed and dangerous.

  Such a death mask … Sisko was furious. Ghastly and sunken with purple bruises, his eyes were ringed in white and boiled with anger. Sweat cut shining trails through a blood-flecked gray plaster of dust on his face and neck, and his soaked uniform was torn in front and across one shoulder, revealing a slate-blue bandage over half his chest and secured to the bare corded muscles of his shoulders and upper arm.