Station Rage

by Diane Carey

  Together they laughed as a hundred wounds healed.

  All at once Fransu came up behind the woman, almost casually, without the slightest violence, wrapped his arms around her and put the blade of a short, sharp knife to her throat. He hugged her tighter and tighter, until her smile disappeared and the High Gul's smile did too.

  Fransu's expression was almost passive, shallow, heavy with grief and weighted by what he apparently saw as a lack of choice. His back was to a stone wall, his foe armored before him, and he was playing his last card.

  "Beam yourself over here, Excellency," he said, "and I will turn your woman over to the Federation. She can live an even longer life wherever she pleases, and become even older."

  The High Gul's expression bluntly changed. "Fransu, you are an insufficient person, do you know that? In all our years as husband and wife, in all the decades of a most spirited life together, I never made a single decision for her. The woman will choose for herself."

  "That's acceptable. She's no fool." Fransu raised the blade until it forced the old wife to tilt her head. "Well? Tell your husband what makes sense."

  The ancient woman wheezed against the blade, her nearly sightless eyes blinking rapidly as she tried to see the husband of her youth on the screen before her. She obviously wanted very much to see him, to believe the miracle that he hadn't changed at all in eighty long years, and that he still had a chance for the life that had been taken from them.

  "Husband," she croaked to him across the void of space, as if the knife at her throat didn't even exist. "You are the High Gul. No one has ever come up to that title since you lived. This hour, I have serenity. You are the one and only High Gul … and I am old enough."

  The High Gul's smile drifted away. He nodded. He shared another second of communion with his wife.

  Then he stepped forward, and his hand came down on the helm's phaser firing controls. The Defiant's weapons fired, blooming out toward Rugg'l.

  "No!" Sisko shouted, but it was too late.

  On the screen, the bridge of Rugg'l was disintegrating around Fransu and the old woman. Fransu defiantly raked his knife across the old woman's throat. The only color on her body appeared in the bleeding gash.

  Unblinking, the High Gul watched the slaughter of his wife with nothing less than pride. There might have been a thousand other emotions at play, but he kept them to himself. If he was shocked, there was no sign of it.

  Suddenly the main screen's picture blew to orange, then gray, then flickered off. Defiant's sensors automatically shifted back to a wide picture of space before them—

  Fransu's ship was smoking more and more, but it managed to return fire. The Defiant rocked again, sending Sisko and the High Gul stumbling. Clinging to the helm, Kira managed to keep her seat.

  Before Sisko could claw his way to his feet and react, two spears of highly concentrated phaser power lanced across the screen from one side to the other, the kind only a very big ship could generate, and converged on Fransu's ship.

  The Rugg'l folded in upon itself as if someone had doubled it over with a gut punch. Immediately another bolt of a slightly different shade of orange hit the ship and it was cleaved in two. Half the aft section and the remaining part of the tail went spinning off into space.

  With a numb fist Sisko hammered the comm panel. "Dax! Cease fire!"

  But he was too late. Fransu's ship hung sizzling, smoking and coughing blue and white sparks and noxious yellow-green gases. It would be hell in space over there.

  "Dax, Bashir, come in!"

  "We read you, Benjamin, but we didn't fire on Fransus ship."

  "Who did?"

  "They did."

  "Who's 'they'?"

  "Change your screen to aft wide angle."

  Kira glanced at Sisko, and when he nodded she found the right controls and shifted the screen.

  Before them on final approach were three massive Galaxy-class starships and one almost-as-massive Klingon battle cruiser. They were coming up in attack formation, beautiful and frightening in their gleaming strength.

  "You were right!" Kira said. "The whiteout! Starfleet didn't ignore a silent sector!"

  Sisko could only glance at her and breathe in and out. Relief washed through him to know not only that he could count on the simple logic of invasion tactics, but also that he could count on Starfleet to back him up. Even the Klingons weren't willing to let a whole sector go dark without investigating.

  "We're getting a hail," Kira said.

  He cleared his throat. "Put them on."

  "This is Captain Gamarra, Starship Exeter. Also the Starships Potemkin and Hood, and the Klingon Imperial Warship N'gat. Do you require assistance, Captain Sisko?"

  Completely balked, Sisko gaped like a slapped kid at the fleet of bright ships. "I don't think I do anymore. . . . Is anybody left alive on that Cardassian ship?"

  "Picking up a handful of life signs in the lower deck areas. And one on the bridge."

  "Beam a Security team to the inner areas and take charge, Captain Gamarra. The one on the bridge … beam the life sign to me."

  "Confirm that—you want him over there, with you?"

  "Yes, right here."

  "Right away. Exeter out."

  Without further complication, a funnel of transporter energy began to buzz almost immediately on the starboard side of Defiant's bridge. Sisko held his breath.

  The funnel sparkled, changed to bands, and formed itself into a humanoid body. But hope sank—of course, if wasn't the Gul's wife, despite fancy's flight.

  It was Fransu.

  He stood before them, saying nothing, but only gazed at the High Gul with a strange allure on his face. No contempt at all. Just the bewitchery of watching fate play out, twisting like a pennant in the wind, unpredictable.

  Sisko turned to the High Gul. "I'm sorry," he said with intimacy that surprised him. Not for his win. But for the other things. Both their wives.

  The High Gul didn't look like a soldier at all as he gazed back at Fransu. "I felt this was my duty."

  Sisko tipped his head in a gesture of the thinnest forgiveness. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand."

  The High Gul gazed at Fransu dispassionately, then at Fransu's hands, which were stained and glistening with the old wife's blood.

  "What my wife said," he began quietly, "it's part of being out here, in space. She always understood the gravity of being the wife of a soldier, a leader … she bore the danger of following. To the bitter end, she never expected to be put before my duty." He looked at Sisko. "You must have had a similar woman."

  Weighted by a graveside obligation to say something nice in response, Sisko felt his throat knot up and his lips go flat. He couldn't find words, or the strength to say them.

  Suddenly a bright ball of light erupted on the other side of Deep Space Nine, throwing the station momentarily into silhouette. An instant later, shock waves rocked the ship.

  Grabbing for the helm, he plunged for the sensor readouts. "What was that!"

  Kira beat him to the display. The color dropped out of her face.

  "Five thousand kilometers off the station," she rasped, "an Element One-ten fission explosion."

  Sisko blinked at the screen, at the quickly dissipating ball of glitter. "Odo …"

  He felt terrible, hollowed out, because he had forgotten all about the shapeshifter and that private torture going on over there.

  He stared at the screen. "He must've gotten off the station just in time."

  Tears welled in Kira's eyes. She did nothing to hold them back.

  "The last casualty of this battle," the High Gul said. "I do not apologize, but I am sorry for that. It's unfortunate. We are soldiers and you understand."

  Sisko kicked the navigation chair and sent it clattering. "I'm tired of being a soldier," he dashed off bitterly. "I'm tired of what it costs me."

  His lungs heaved in and out, strength fled from his limbs as the six-inch puncture wound in his body charged its true cost.
He slipped backward against the command chair without the will to catch himself and stay upright.

  It was the High Gul who came in quickly to catch him and keep him from falling too hard to the deck. To his right, Sisko saw Kira whirled around as if afraid the High Gul might be grabbing for Sisko's phaser.

  "No, Major—" he choked, holding up a staying hand as the High Gul lowered him to the steps between the command deck and the turbolift. "It's all right. I'll be all right. Take the prisoner below."

  Kira pushed stiffly away, her legs shuddering, and she never took her eyes off the High Gul. But, sensing something in the old Cardassian's sunken gaze, she spoke to Sisko. "Sir …"

  There weren't words, apparently, for her fears, or sense to them, but the High Gul seemed to understand.

  "My honor to serve with you, sentinel," he offered quietly.

  She stared and stared at him, her hands closed into fists; then abruptly she looked at Sisko.

  "You have your orders, Major," he said evenly. "Take Gul Fransu below."

  Again she looked at the High Gul as if clutched by foresight. She stepped away from the helm. Her voice was caught in her throat. "Yes, sir."

  She didn't push Fransu, and Fransu didn't resist as she led him to the turbolift.

  Sisko didn't look as the lift's doors gushed open, then shut, but he felt Kira's eyes scoping him and the High Gul.

  The soft whine seemed loud as the turbolift whispered away, heading toward the lower decks.

  Sisko settled his weak body against the step, aware of the High Gul's supportive grip.

  The old soldier wasn't looking at him as he crouched there, though. He was looking out at the three starships and the Klingon battle cruiser, his eyes full of appreciation for the scalding martial beauty and power he saw out there.

  After a moment he asked, "Are you ready for a holy war, Captain?"

  Still fuming and thinking about Odo, Sisko simmered, "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Let me ask you first … what will you do with me now?"

  "You've killed Federation people. It's not up to me. You're going to be remanded to Starfleet custody, and probably drown in a tangle of diplomatic yarn."

  "Trial? Prison?"

  "Probably."

  "So your Federation will incarcerate one of the founders of the Cardassian Empire. A historical figure. Almost a god, in the minds of many Cardassians. The trial will gain great publicity. Cardassians will rise in numbers and come for me, there's no doubt."

  "So?"

  "Wouldn't it be better if you let me go?"

  "Let you go?" Sisko grinned viciously over it.

  "I'll retire … I'll go to an agricultural community until my dying day."

  A few seconds plodded by, and then the High Gul laughed openly at Sisko's struggling expression.

  "I didn't think you'd believe that one," the old soldier said. "You know me as well as I know myself."

  "Well enough," Sisko accepted.

  The High Gul paced across the bridge, touching the helm, the battered consoles, ultimately picking up a piece of broken housing that had been blasted right off. He turned the burned shard over and over in his hands.

  "Can you imagine what a powerful narcotic it is to have millions ready to go to their deaths at a single word from you? I have had this. No matter the tons of soil I tried to till, I would be drawn into politics as the years passed, I would be successful, I would eventually raise an army, and still we would be at war."

  Softening through his anger and grief, Sisko shifted from one hip to the other.

  "I don't understand the galaxy anymore," the High Gul went on. "I saw in your friend Garak's face the beginning of doubt. Like him, everyone will expect me to have a magic elixir that will turn Cardassia back to invincibility. But I have no such stuff. Better, I think, that no one man have it."

  "Oh, I don't know," Sisko declared. "There are some men I'd follow … if I believed the same as they did."

  The High Gul smiled at him. "Thank you." He sighed. "I am an antique. I wanted to restore the Empire as it was intended to be by those of us who framed it. I had so many victories, I began to believe what people were saying about me. But people tire of deities … unless each miracle is bigger than the last. But it is too late for Cardassia to dominate anymore. I understand now why it was destined to stop expanding. You have done me a favor, Captain Sisko. I may have been the destruction of my own people, had I gone to war with the likes of you."

  He waved one hand at Sisko, the other at the main screen and the fleet of starships martialed across open space before them.

  "The galaxy has grown up in eighty years, but some things resurrect themselves. If I am incarcerated by the Federation, I am certainly out of commission … but word leaks out … Cardassia tears itself apart over me. They go to war with your Federation to get me back. Or to destroy me, depending upon which table you drink over." His eyes changed, narrowed, and he gazed at the screen as if into the future. "A holy war, on behalf of a not-god … In an effort to 'rescue' me, Cardassia will force the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, and all these to rise up and destroy it. I can't have that. . . ." He paused, thought of something, and asked, "What about Fransu?"

  "Fransu may talk," Sisko added. "But he's going to do it while rotting in a Federation penal colony. He won't get much of an audience."

  The High Gul nodded sadly.

  "Captain, I don't want it to be my legacy that I was the death of my own people. That idiot Fransu should have killed me all those years ago. Or let me live, but this was the worst thing he could do. I am more than flesh … I am legend."

  He turned to Sisko.

  "Better I stay that way." He held out his hand. It held a small device, to be used only in extremes. "Better the High Gul never awakens."

  "Recorders on visual," he said.

  "Recording," the computer's voice said.

  The High Gul took a step away from Sisko, then decided he was still too close and stepped even farther across the bridge. He tampered with the hand phaser for a few moments as if curious about the way the hardware worked, the funny markings in language different from any he had seen in his lifetime. Beam width … photon spill … emitter … beam intensity … trigger … Then he found the combination he wanted and adjusted the controls.

  In a flashing spectrum of bare energy, as Sisko raised a hand to protect his face from the glare, the High Gul of the Crescent fried himself out of existence, and back into legend.

  CHAPTER 23

  "I DON'T BELIEVE IT!"

  Ops was cool, dim, and there was even a fresh breeze coming through from the ventilators. On the main screen, the Starship Exeter and the Klingon warship hung in princely fashion, with the Exeter taking the wreck of Rugg'l in tow.

  Standing together, Sisko and Kira stared baldly at the subdued, ever-haunted proctor of their station. Before them, the shapeshifter was obviously exhausted, but no longer physically strained. The poison was gone and Odo was still alive, standing right here, uneasy under their stares.

  "How'd you get it out of him?" Kira asked as she glanced at Julian Bashir.

  "I didn't," the doctor said casually. "The chief did."

  He in turn gestured to Miles O'Brien.

  Weak and battered, Sisko pressed a hand to the Ops console and levered around to the engineer. "How, Chief?"

  "The same way we've used for centuries," O'Brien said with a quirky glint in his eyes. "A centrifuge. We put him in a big cargo drum, spun it with antigravs, and let the Element One-ten go to the outside, and filtered it out, then beamed it into space and let it blow its merry heart out."

  Kira shook her head. "I don't get it!"

  O'Brien tilted his grin at her. "You keep thinking of him as a solid. He's liquid. We just separated out the adulterant. Why didn't you just ask me to begin with?"

  Self-conscious, Odo lowered his gaze, plainly hoping that would be a signal for all of them to stop gaping at him. He'd survived, and that was that.

&
nbsp; Sisko glanced custodially at the people around him. Hovering nearby like the low notes on a French horn, Jadzia Dax stood nearby, gazing at them with an expression strangely similar to the High Gul's timeless wife's. Beside her, Julian Bashir eyed Sisko, certainly waiting for the right moment to order him to the infirmary for those twelve hours of recuperation.

  At his side, still stained and frayed from these last hours' events, Kira was feisty as Peter Pan, but now somehow subdued, maybe ashamed—Sisko couldn't tell and offered her the respect of not asking. By leaving the issue alone, he gave her tacit approval of her actions on Defiant. He knew she walked a line, and he wasn't going to push her off.

  That was how things were in this hard-bitten, untrusted, castaway garter of a station. Their electric Kira did a little command, a little security, weather-eyed Odo slopped over into defense or engineering, Sisko would do security or defense or anything else he wanted to, for an engineer O'Brien had broached more than his share of dangerous decisions, and nobody was really sure about Dax. They were an undefined collection, and that, in many ways, defined them.

  Around them the grey walls and aniline black shadows of Deep Space Nine were as comforting as a summer glade.

  Ultimately he looked again at Odo, unable to restrain his appreciation for the station's vigilant background man. "Well," he said, "that'll make quite a tall tale around the sector, I'll bet."

  "Absolutely not, Captain!" Odo said, tight as a strung bow. "The indignity of having an engineer as my doctor, of being separated like the ingredients of some foul cocktail … if you don't mind, I'd rather not have it talked about. Chief, thank you very much, and that's the end of this."

  "Come in! Come in! You can get autographs right here, only a modest fee—something to show your grandchildren! We have the entire episode recorded and we're re-creating it at zero nine hundred in the holosuites! Right this way … Odo! All these people want your autograph!

  "Quark!" Odo backed away as if approached by a snake.

  Some people would describe Quark that way, but Sisko had come to think of their local Ferengi moonshiner as less a swindler than just a guileful shortchange artist who hated his own honest streak.