by David Mack
Nilat leaned in to study the results of the analysis. “Several round trips between the wreck and this other star system at the ass end of nowhere.” She turned to an adjacent terminal and tried to punch up some charts or other data about the remote star system, only to find her ship’s computer had none. “What do we know about that system? Anything?”
“Very little.” K’mjok called up a page of sparse facts from the Federation Galactic Catalog. “A red giant with one small, airless rockball of a planet.”
“How long to get there?”
K’mjok looked at Ang-Harod, who had been discreetly eavesdropping on their entire conversation. The Nalori woman checked her console. “At present speed, less than an hour.”
“Set course for the red giant,” Nilat said. “And throw in a Crazy Kahless.”
“On it.” Ang-Harod programmed the helm to execute the maneuver, which consisted of several rapid changes in speed and heading that, though they might seem erratic, had actually been devised to help expose the presence of starships that might be haunting one’s course. It was a precaution born of paranoia, Nilat knew. After all, her ship was cloaked. What could—
“We’ve got a tail,” Trunch reported from the weapons console. “Maybe more than one.” The Balduk transferred his panel’s data to the main viewscreen. “Three ships in a tight cluster. A fourth slightly ahead of them. All at the edge of sensor range, but definitely there.”
Nilat tensed; she felt annoyed and alarmed in equal measure. “Starfleet?”
K’mjok heaved an angry sigh. “Almost certainly.” He snapped at Trunch, “You said the Starfleet ships were moving away from us. What happened?”
“Don’t know.” He highlighted the lone ship traveling between the trio of Starfleet ships and the Silago-Ekon. “It looks like they have a friend. Maybe that’s what happened.”
On the viewscreen, numerous bits of data about the pursuit vessels updated: the Starfleet ships were increasing speed. It was almost certain that they knew the Crazy Kahless maneuver had exposed their presence, and now they were closing in for the kill.
A palpable wave of anxiety washed through the argosy’s command deck. Nilat felt it affect all of her senior people, and she knew it wouldn’t be long before word filtered down to the lower decks. This was going to be devastating to the crew’s morale unless she acted quickly.
“Go to maximum warp,” she said. “We need to reach that system before Starfleet does.”
K’mjok ground his teeth as he considered the situation. “Even if we beat them there, it will not be by much. A few minutes, at most. That might not be enough time to finish the job.”
“It will have to be,” Nilat said. “Prep a boarding party. We have to be ready to act as soon as we drop to impulse.” K’mjok started aft, then Nilat caught his arm. “Make sure you take the Husnock command codes. If the Nausicaans found what I think they did, you’ll need them.”
“Understood.” He scooped up the padd on his way off the command deck.
Facing the stretch of warp-distorted stars on the viewscreen, Nilat hoped her imminent showdown with Starfleet didn’t turn out to be the worst mistake of her life.
Gallows humor and nervous rumors—that was how the engineering crew of the Silago-Ekon coped with their fear as they learned their ship, despite being cloaked, was being chased at high warp by not one but three Starfleet vessels.
Proat had no time to ease the worries of his tool-pushers. They were all doing everything they could to wring just a few more tenths of a warp factor out of the argosy, even if it meant blowing half the EPS conduits along the keel. Nilat had bet their lives and freedom on a race against Starfleet, and now it was up to a bunch of half-trained youths to win the day.
Their chief engineer, however, had more pressing matters to attend.
The Denobulan had tasked all his people with more than enough busywork to keep their eyes and hands buried in the guts of the ship for the next hour. He took advantage of their distraction to slip back up to his quarters and lock the door. After a fast sweep to check for surveillance devices, he retrieved what he had told his shipmates was an urn holding the ashes of his father. Which it did, along with the ash of a few hundred cigars and an encrypted comm inside a resealable plastic shell.
He switched on the device, which had been made to sneak out ultralow-frequency bursts via the Silago-Ekon’s subspace transceiver. After a few fear-filled seconds, its indicator light changed from amber to blue, which meant his comrades were listening, though in accordance with protocol they would not respond.
“This is Proat. Condition urgent. Inbound with the prize. ETA forty-eight minutes. Coming in hot, pursued by three Starfleet vessels and a fourth ship of unknown origin. Recommend you prepare for hostile engagement, and proceed immediately to Phase Four.”
Fifteen
* * *
No matter how complex a system appeared, Gaila often found that in the end the difference between it being operational and inert so often came down to the push of a button. Thus it came to pass that he restored the automated flow of raw materials to his newly acquired munitions factory by swiping his hand across a touchscreen whose symbols he couldn’t read, but whose function N’chk assured him had been keyed to the systems they needed back online.
A flick of his wrist and the interface lit up, suddenly alive with a stream of new data. Excited but confused, he looked at his Kaferian tech guru for assurance. “Is that it?”
“Yes,” N’chk said, his chittering reply filtered through his vocoder. “This facility is now transmitting power to its legion of drone supply craft, as well as its ancillary sites.”
Rubbing his palms together in a pantomime of avarice, Gaila grinned. “Good, good! How long until the first new shipment arrives?”
“Two hours,” said Zinos. “After that, new loads should arrive every twelve hours or so. The system shut down with several loads already en route, so as long as the production facilities that fill the drones are automated and functional, we’ll be good to go almost indefinitely.”
Gaila clapped his hands once in approval. “Perfect!” He strode out of the control center and made his way down the corridor to the executive office he had appropriated. Zinos followed him, but N’chk stayed behind to monitor the facility’s complicated network of machines. On the move, Gaila asked Zinos, “How are the factory’s defenses?”
“Improving by the hour.” Zinos tried to hand Gaila a padd but he ignored it, so Zinos pretended he hadn’t been slighted, tucked the padd under his arm, and continued as if nothing awkward had happened. “Long neglect had put several systems into premature failure, but Vatzis and his boys are bringing them back online without much trouble.”
“Which systems? Shields? Weapons? Be specific, damn you.”
“Weapons, mostly. Nine defensive batteries in total—four topside, five below. Only three shield emitters were offline. One because of a corroded power supply, one had been struck by space debris, and the third overloaded during our systems test.”
The boss Ferengi grunted as he pondered the news. “All right. Prioritize shield repairs. This factory bristles with weapons. It won’t be a tragedy if a few are slow coming back into service. But we can’t have any holes in our shields when clients come calling. Understand?”
“Perfectly, Mister Gaila.”
“Good, get it done.” Double doors parted ahead of the duo as they approached Gaila’s new office. He entered the long suite, whose far wall was composed of transparent metal and therefore offered a stunning view of the cosmos beyond. Parked beside the desk of smoky obsidian was a cart that had been transferred off of the Tahmila. The cart was loaded with bottles of Gaila’s favorite liquors, and a cluster of single-serving cans of Slug-o-Cola rested on a tray of dry ice, along with a steel bowl of fresh tube grubs whose energetic wriggling had been stunted by the coldness leaching away their vitality from below. Gaila threw himself into his executive chair—another comfort he’d had brought over to replace
the office’s useless alien furniture.
Zinos played the part of a dutiful underling well. He cracked open a cola, then planted the beverage and the bowl of grubs on the desk in front of Gaila. Standing back, he did his best to reclaim an air of self-respect. “When might it be appropriate for us to discuss the setting of price points for our new inventory?”
“Good question.” Gaila pinched a struggling clutch of grubs from the bowl, tossed them into his mouth, and ground them into a savory paste with his fearsome teeth. “Your thoughts?”
“I feel unqualified to speculate, sir. I was hoping to learn from your business sense.”
At times Gaila wondered whether Zinos had learned any of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition other than the Thirty-third: It never hurts to suck up to the boss. “Without a field test, it’s hard to know how to price these things. I don’t want to sell a planet-buster for the same profit margin we could score on a normal torpedo. But charge too much—”
“And an angry customer might turn our merchandise against us.”
“Precisely. After our tech-heads finish bringing our defenses back online, have them inspect the production line. Let’s figure out how much bang we’re bottling in these things.”
“Understood.” Once more Zinos brandished the padd. “Of course, if you’re interested in seeing a live-fire exercise of Husnock munitions—” He stared at the padd and hesitated.
Never a patient man, Gaila snapped, “What are you saying?”
Zinos turned the padd so that Gaila could see its screen. “The factory’s ancillary nodes track the positions and activity of Husnock ships. And their sensors have picked up what looks like an Orion vessel approaching a derelict Husnock warship in a nearby star system.” Adjusting the display to show a wider area, he added, “And they’re being chased by four ships, of which three are definitely of Starfleet design.” A nervous smile. “So we might get a preview of what these weapons could do, and sooner than we expected.”
“Assuming the Orions survive the boarding of that derelict.” Gaila smirked. “I’d love to see their faces when they break in—only to discover we’ve already been there.”
Seconds after the Silago-Ekon dropped out of warp Nilat saw the dark behemoth looming ahead of them, a menacing shadow in front of the mammoth orb of the red giant. Even with the main viewscreen doing its best to compensate for the star’s brightness, light bled into the edges of the Husnock vessel’s silhouette, rendering its shape indistinct. Below it, also bathed in ruddy light, was the lifeless planet it apparently had been doomed to orbit ever since the extinction of its owners—a story Nilat had dismissed as a myth until a few years earlier, when a smuggled Starfleet Intelligence report revealed the blood-curdling tale to be the truth.
Nilat opened a channel from her command chair to the transporter bay. “Nilat to K’mjok. We’re here, thirty seconds to transport range. Is your team ready?”
“Ready to go,” K’mjok responded. “You sure transporters are safe?”
“We’re scanning for coordinates now,” she said, then shot a look at Trunch, whose thick, clumsy digits poked at his console with mounting frustration and no visible progress. “Stand by.”
The Balduk thumped the sides of his fists against his console. “Piece of junk!”
Nilat sighed. This is the last thing I need. “What now, Trunch?”
“Console frozen.” He stabbed at it with his index finger, then kicked its base. “Broken!”
Before she could talk him out of what threatened to be a highly theatrical meltdown, the overhead lights flickered, and static obscured the image on the main viewscreen. All around the command deck, other senior members of the crew recoiled from their duty stations.
Ang-Harod swiveled away from the helm. “Flight controls are locked.”
“All comms just went dead,” Ninivus said, plucking a transceiver from his huge finlike ear. “Nothing but cosmic scratch on all frequencies.”
Trunch checked a bank of auxiliary status displays. “Cloak is down. Weapons offline.”
Nilat felt her temper fraying. “What just happened?” She reopened the channel to the transporter bay. “K’mjok, get back to command. Something’s wrong.” After a few seconds without a reply, she added with rising anxiety, “K’mjok?”
“All comms are down,” Ninivus said. “Internal and external.”
“Talk to me, Nin. Did we get hit by a cyberstrike? What’s going on?”
The Tiburonian pressed his palms to his face in shock. “I have no idea.”
Moving to the engineering console, Trunch stared in horror at the ship’s master status display. “Airlocks opening on lower decks. Engineering crew blasted into space.”
There was no longer any doubt in Nilat’s mind the ship was under attack—but by whom? “Everyone, with me. We need to reach the weapons locker and arm up, right—”
The aft door opened, and a barrage of disruptor blasts screamed across the command deck. White-hot pulses ripped through Nilat’s gut, Trunch’s head, Ang-Harod’s chest. Ninivus sprinted toward the deck’s lone escape pod, but the fusillade blew out his knees before a mercy shot pierced his throat and severed his head from his body in a searing flash.
Nilat lay on the deck shivering, racked with agony from within. Her guts were numb at the center where the blast had first hit her, but its fiery torments were expanding, spreading through her vital organs and soft tissues, cooking her alive. She gasped for breath, sprawled on her back in a twisted pose. Trembling with adrenaline overload and terror, she turned her head—she refused to expire without looking her murderer in the eye.
Proat sauntered onto the command deck. He looked pleased with himself and with his bloody handiwork. In either fist he toted modified disruptor pistols. It took him only a moment to assess the situation. There was no one left to resist him. No one was conscious except Nilat. All the same, he took his time and made a slow circuit of the command deck.
He paused to fire an extra blast into Trunch’s chest. “I know you’re still with me, Commander.” He strolled from Trunch’s corpse to the smoking remains of Ang-Harod. “Since you’ve never made a secret of how fond you are of K’mjok, I thought you should know I beamed him and his team into space—and dematerialized them.”
The chief engineer pumped a shot into the dead Nalori’s skull. “I also want to say this isn’t personal, or even business.” He noted the separation between Ninivus’s head and torso, then tapped a series of commands into the communications panel before he turned to face the main viewscreen. “This is a matter of sworn duty.”
Nilat, who was sure she felt the flames of damnation creeping up her esophagus and down into her nether regions, strained to see what Proat was looking at. Then she saw it: on the main viewscreen, a ripple of distortion between the Silago-Ekon and the Husnock derelict resolved into the shape of a massive Breen warship.
Proat flipped her a taunting salute and smirked. “Long live the Confederacy.”
Then he aimed his weapon into her face and fired.
Sixteen
* * *
Tensions were high on the command deck of the Breen dreadnought Kulak, but so was confidence. Standing tall in front of its center seat, projecting calm, Thot Tren bared his fangs in a broad grin inside his snout-shaped mask—the same anonymous outer face worn by all but the youngest members of Breen society. Events were transpiring much as Tren had intended, with only one minor inconvenience—but even that wrinkle had been considered and prepared for.
Pictured on the main viewscreen was the Orion argosy Silago-Ekon, into whose crew he had months earlier insinuated one of his Spetzkar commandos. Tren’s superiors in the thotaru had criticized that move as a long shot, but now his gamble was paying off at last.
An alert on the communications panel. Signals officer Sevv muted it, then reported to Tren, “Incoming message from Spetzkar Proat. Audio only.”
“On speakers,” Tren said. He waited while Sevv rerouted the message.
�
�Repeat, this is Proat, on board the Silago-Ekon. Do you read me?”
“This is Thot Tren on the Kulak. Go ahead, Proat.” All around the dimly lit nerve center of the battleship, the other senior officers paused in their duties to hear Proat’s report.
Proat replied, “Mission accomplished. The Nausicaans recovered the Husnock codes, as expected, and then the Orions stole the codes and neutralized the Nausicaans. I’ve eliminated the Syndicate crew and destroyed their copy of the codes, meaning I now possess the only copy.”
“Good work, Proat. How soon can you deploy to the Husnock vessel?”
“I’m suiting up now. I’ll be ready to beam over in two minutes.”
Chot Vang, the first officer of the Kulak, interjected, “Be advised, Chot Braz and a Spetzkar team are already on board. They’ve defused a number of traps someone left behind.”
That news made Proat more curious than anxious. “Traps? Left by the Husnock?”
“Negative,” Vang said. “Most of them are of Ferengi design.”
“So, nothing to be concerned about—unlike our approaching visitors.”
Tren regarded the tactical screens that flanked the main viewscreen. “Leave them to me, Proat.” The left screen tracked the progress of the four rapidly approaching threat vessels, while the right cycled through ship profiles. All three Starfleet vessels had been identified by their energy signatures, but the fourth—a small Mancharan starhopper—was proving to be a mystery. “Deliver the Husnock codes to Chot Braz, then assist his unit in executing Phase Five.”
“Understood. Proat out.” The channel closed with a soft click.
Weapons Officer Bol looked up as the left tactical display updated with alarming new intel. “Thot Tren, the Starfleet vessels have increased speed. Revised ETA, eight minutes.”
“So I see. No doubt they accelerated as soon as their sensors detected us dropping our cloak.” Tren reflected on his past encounters with Starfleet, some of which predated the Dominion War. Before the war for the Alpha Quadrant, Tren would have said that Starfleet commanders had no stomachs for confrontation. Now he couldn’t be so certain. Starfleet’s veterans of the Dominion War could be unpredictable; many had been hardened by that conflict and tempered into dangerous blades. There was only one way for him to know which kind of officers he was facing today. “Vang, give our guests reason to reconsider their haste.”
