by David Mack
“Didn’t say Vulcan food is good,” the Chalnoth protested as Braz pointed one of his men at the hairy brute. “Said their food makes them taste good. Big difference.”
The Gorn hissed, then rasped, “Vulcans. No flavor.”
Braz directed another of his commandos at the Gorn.
“You have no palate,” the Chalnoth said. “Vulcan is gamy. Soak it in bloodwine.”
The sinewy reptilian stopped and sniffed the air. “Someone here.”
The Chalnoth worked his two pairs of protruding tusks, as if he might taste a scent. “No one here. Just us.” Invisible to their eyes, two Spetzkar slipped behind them, moving with the silence of a rolling fog. Then Braz gave the kill order, and his commandos each struck with a short sword whose cutting edge had been honed to a monofilament that could slice duranium.
The Gorn and the Chalnoth both stared, befuddled, as their rifles split in half just behind the focusing assembly, and the fronts of their weapons clattered to the deck at their feet. Then their heads tumbled off their shoulders, struck the deck with dull thuds, and rolled into the dark.
Spetzkar scouts advanced to the next junction, then gave the all-clear sign. Braz directed his men forward and up to the next level of the station. Unseen and unheard, they moved like vengeful spirits, agents of death creeping from shadow to shadow. Undetectable. Unstoppable.
Within a few minutes, word of six more confirmed kills in other areas of the station had reached Braz. Now he and all his men were converging upon the factory’s control center and executive office. Two hostiles, a Brikar and a Kaferian, occupied the control center, whose access catwalks had all been retracted, isolating it from easy approach.
Braz opened a secure channel to the Kulak. “Chot Braz to Thot Tren.”
“Go ahead.”
“Two hostiles have isolated the control center. Should we frag it?”
“Negative. Offer them safe passage if they surrender and give us the Ferengi.”
The last thing Braz would have expected from Thot Tren was a show of mercy. But orders had to be obeyed. Braz kneeled, activated his vocoder, and called out to the pair in the control center. “Attention. This is Chot Braz of the Breen Spetzkar. Surrender your position and turn over your Ferengi boss, and you can both walk out of here alive and free.”
He was answered by a barrage of disruptor fire that streaked by above his head. Glad I kept my stealth circuits engaged. Braz scuttled to cover and poked his head out to see a squad on another catwalk being forced into retreat by an automated sentry gun. It must be able to target based on subsonic profiles or microchanges in air density. He raised his sonic disruptor rifle—a weapon chosen specifically for its safety of use in proximity to highly explosive ordnance—and targeted the autocannon. With a single shot he reduced the robotic sentry weapon to a sparking heap of junk. Similar conflagrations on other sides of the control center announced the destruction of other sentry weapons.
Braz opened a channel to his commandos. “We need the control center intact. Joat, lob a couple canisters of sketricine in there.”
The commando asked over the transceiver channel, “I know sketricine kills Kaferians, but will it even affect a Brikar?”
“We’re about to find out,” Braz said. “Fire when ready.”
He waited and watched as the nerve-gas canister erupted inside the control center, filling it with lethal, dark green vapors. After more than a minute without a sound from inside the cloud, Braz decided it was time to finish the op. “Braz to Kulak. Can someone over there hack the station’s controls and extend all the catwalk bridges to the control center?”
“Stand by,” Vang replied. “Restoring the bridges now.”
As promised, the divorced ends of the catwalks leading to the control center extended from each side and met in the middle with a metallic clang.
“All squads, converge on the control center.”
He led his team across the catwalk bridge into the control center. Their battle suits protected them from the lingering gas, and a tweak to his visor’s settings enabled Braz to see through the haze. The fragile body of the Kaferian lay crushed under the prodigious mass of the Brikar. He used his suit’s built-in scanners to check them for life signs. “Dead. Someone tell Militia Command to update the specs on sketricine to include ‘lethal to Brikar.’ ” He looked around the center, and then peered into the office beyond. “Any sign of the Ferengi?”
His men all gestured no.
“Braz to Kulak. The factory is secure, but we’ve lost the Ferengi.”
“We haven’t,” Tren said. “We tracked his ship fleeing the station about fifteen seconds ago. It just jumped to warp on a course for Ferenginar.”
“Good riddance to him,” Braz said.
“Agreed. Unfortunately, we have new pests heading our way—the Starfleet variety. Get your people to work loading the armada with heavy ordnance. I’ll have Chot Taan send over an engineering team to assist, and we’ll get whatever help we can from the Sulica and the Tarcza.”
Motioning his commandos out of the control center and back to the lower decks, Braz asked Tren, “How much time do we have?”
“Less than we’d like, old friend, so move with a purpose. Because as soon as those Starfleet ships arrive, I’m going to blast them all into dust.”
Boiling over with rage, Gaila pounded his fists on the helm of the Tahmila. “What in the name of the Infernal Auditor happened back there?” He glared at Zinos, his only surviving employee. “I asked N’chk a dozen times, ‘Are we secure?’ And a dozen times he said we were.” He gestured wildly at his rustbucket of a ship. “Did the meaning of ‘secure’ change, but no one told me? We had the advantage! How did we end up on the losing side of this?”
His last henchman had little to offer besides a befuddled grimace. “They found a way in.”
“Oh, really. That’s what went wrong? I never would’ve guessed! Amaze me with more of your expert analysis, Mister Zinos.” Gaila locked the ship’s heading into the autopilot, then he got out of his chair to confront his bewildered Argelian hireling. “We had eyes on all their ships. Weapons locked on anything that moved. And all our networks were in lockdown.” Nose to chin with the slender humanoid, Gaila asked through clenched teeth, “What happened?”
Only then did Gaila see that Zinos’s hand was resting on the grip of his holstered disruptor pistol. The Argelian was one of the fastest draws Gaila had ever seen, and a crack shot at any range. Now, with no one else on the ship to back up Gaila’s bluster, the Ferengi realized he might, possibly, have pushed Mister Zinos just a wee bit too far for his own good.
When Zinos spoke, he sounded calm despite the dangerous glimmer in his eyes. “I checked the security myself. N’chk didn’t lie, it was solid. So if it was compromised, there might have been some flaw in the system that we didn’t know about. Something that was already in place when we took possession of the factory.”
It was a sensible argument. Gaila chewed on that for a moment. “Maybe. Or the Breen might have found something on one of those ships they stole. Some workaround on a computer.”
“Perhaps. But if the Breen had the ability to bypass our security, why negotiate in the first place? Why not approach under cloak and attack without warning?”
Damn him, that made sense. “Yes, yes, all right. So let’s go back to your idea: there was a flaw in the station’s security from the moment we came aboard. How did the Breen know about it? They couldn’t have been here before. If they had been, they’d have left a garrison.”
Zinos scratched at the lonely tuft of facial hair between his chin and lower lip. “Whoever made the flaw must have told the Breen.” As he finished his statement, he looked at Gaila, as if to imply that the answer should be obvious.
And after a few seconds of contemplation it was.
“The Pakleds!” He stomped in a circle while shaking with fury, and the next dozen words out of his mouth were alien vulgarities of the most heinous kind. When he finally
forced himself back into some semblance of composure, he growled like a wild animal and felt his lobes tingling with the heat of his anger. “I’ll kill those doughy simpletons!”
“We both will,” Zinos said. “But we’ll need to find them first.”
Gaila’s mind raced, fueled now by hatred and a thirst for revenge. “If they’d given their intel to the Breen before now, the Breen wouldn’t have haggled with us, they’d have just taken the station. Which means the Pakleds must’ve been waiting somewhere just outside our sensor range—waiting to give that information to someone they knew would be able to force us off the station.” He pointed at Zinos. “They had to have been within comm range. Or maybe just beyond it, with a subspace signal buoy to mask their position.” He moved to the helm, disengaged the autopilot, and changed the ship’s heading. “Start scanning for that subspace radio booster. If we find it, we might be able to use it to find them.”
“Or,” Zinos said, “we could just put ourselves into a sensor blind spot anywhere between here and their way home.” He waited for Gaila’s inquiring stare, then continued. “You don’t think the Pakleds would’ve given that intel to the Breen for free, do you? They were out here to get paid, just like the rest of us. If they gave the Breen the keys to that station, they must have gotten something of value from the Breen. And if they did—”
“Then they’ll be looking to get somewhere civilized,” Gaila said, following Zinos’s logic. “After all, what’s the point of scoring a fortune if you don’t enjoy it? And since Pakleds aren’t exactly known for their work ethic, it’s a good bet they’re already looking for a safe port of call that’ll take their money.” He snapped his fingers. “Pull up a star chart on the navcomp.”
They hunched together over the navcomp console. Zinos summoned a chart of the surrounding sector and updated it with their position, as well as that of the munitions factory. “If we assume standard comm range, augmented by a subspace buoy—” He superimposed some circles to indicate an area with a radius of a few light-years. “If we assume they wouldn’t have run deeper into unexplored space, we can probably rule out about half of this.”
“A safe guess, knowing Pakleds.” Gaila studied the chart. “Wherever they are, if they plan on getting back to known space, they’ll have to pass through the Kineris Sector.” He tapped the screen, indicating a binary system smack in the middle of the sector grid. “That’s where we set up our listening post. Unless that oaf Cherbegrod wants to go a hundred light-years out of his way for no reason, he’ll have to take his ship within sensor range of this system to get home.”
Zinos nodded. “Yes, I think that works.”
“Of course it does. I just said so.” He cracked his knuckles. “Set our new course, Zinos. Those bumbling sacks of stupidity just cost me the deal of a lifetime, and I mean to make them pay for it in blood and latinum, even if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
Twenty-four
* * *
“It would seem,” Keru said, his eyes locked on his tactical readouts, “that the Breen have dealt with whatever was keeping them from raiding the munitions factory.”
“Confirmed,” Tuvok said. “Simultaneous loading operations are under way for nearly all of the Breen-controlled Husnock ships.”
It wasn’t news to Vale. She watched in horror from the center seat of the Titan’s bridge as, on the main viewscreen, a swarm of drones ferried loads of heavy ordnance from the space station to the two hundred forty-five remaining Husnock vessels in the Breen’s ghost armada. “Mister Tuvok, how long until the Breen finish loading their hijacked fleet with munitions?”
The Vulcan checked his console, then frowned. “Difficult to say. It is unclear how many pieces of ordnance the various Husnock ships are designed to carry.”
In the seat beside Vale’s, Sarai rolled her eyes. “Best guess, Mister Tuvok. Gauge how long it took them to arm the smallest Husnock ship, and extrapolate from there.”
“Assuming that the relative sizes of the vessels correlates with their ordnance capacity and loading times”—he shot a cryptic look at Sarai—“the Husnock fleet might be fully armed in as little as another three minutes, or as long as another quarter hour.”
“Either way it’s not much time,” Riker said. “They’ve already loaded enough weapons of mass destruction to lay waste to half the worlds in the Federation. We need a plan right now.”
Vale clung to hope as she swiveled her chair toward Pazlar, who was working furiously at the science department console. “Commander Pazlar. Any luck yet?”
“I’m close, Captain, I can feel it.” The platinum-haired Elaysian worked with almost feral intensity. “I’ve ruled out several frequencies already. I just need a few more minutes.”
Before Vale could offer words of encouragement, Sarai said, “It might be too late.”
On the main viewscreen, eleven Husnock vessels veered away from the munitions station to join the Breen battleship Tarcza in establishing a defensive formation that circled the factory on different orbital planes, while the remaining Husnock ships finished loading fresh ordnance delivered by the station’s drones. “Looks like the Breen have planted their flag on the munitions plant,” Vale said. “Which leaves only one question: How long until they—”
“The rest of the fleet is deploying,” Tuvok interrupted.
The image on the viewscreen chilled Vale’s blood. More than two hundred Husnock ships, led by the Breen heavy cruiser Sulica and the dreadnought Kulak, were accelerating away from the station and racing straight toward the Titan and its escort ships.
“Tactical,” Vale said, “tell me they’re not—”
“They are,” Keru said, confirming Tuvok’s dire news. “At warp nine.”
“Sound battle stations, raise shields, charge all weapons.” Vale didn’t know if her ship would be able to survive another head-to-head fight with one Husnock vessel, never mind an entire armada. All her hopes resided on Pazlar disrupting the Breen’s control of their stolen fleet, which would leave the Sulica and the Kulak facing three Starfleet vessels.
That was a fight her ship and crew might survive. If they were lucky.
Watching the unstoppable force bear down on the Titan, Vale muttered to Sarai, “Damn. Talk about a David and Goliath scenario.”
Her first officer regarded her with disbelief. “David and Goliath? Sir, this is more like three ants taking a stand against a herd of elephants. We should retreat, while we still can.”
“They’d just overtake us, Number One. And we need to give Pazlar more time.”
Sarai whispered back, “She’s not even close. Captain, I urge you: retreat.”
On the screen the ships loomed larger by the second. From behind, Vale Tuvok declared, “Captain, the armada will reach us in thirty seconds.”
After so many years of seeing her shipmates accomplish miracles, Vale wanted to think it could happen again—but one look at the frustration on Pazlar’s face proved what Sarai had said. There were no miracles in the works. No deus ex machina waiting in the wings, no rabbit about to spring from some technomage’s top hat.
“Twenty-five seconds,” Tuvok warned.
Vale couldn’t just sit and wait for the hammer to fall. “Helm, hard about! Escape and evasion tactics, maximum warp. Mister Keru, relay my order to the Wasp and the Canterbury!”
Her officers acted with speed and precision, and within seconds the Titan was in full retreat, its warp engines keening in minor chords through the ship’s spaceframe. Then came the erratic thunder of torpedo detonations harrying their escape.
“The Breen and their armada are gaining,” Keru said.
“All shield power aft,” Vale said. “Fire quantum torpedoes at will from the aft launcher, random dispersal patterns. See if we can force them to break off pursuit.”
“Firing,” Tuvok said. “Torpedoes are impacting on Husnock shields without effect.”
Lavena called back from the helm, “Captain! The Wasp is veering into a nearby star sy
stem. Canterbury is matching their heading. Should we follow?”
Vale looked to Sarai, who checked her chair’s console. The first officer looked up. “The system has a dense debris ring between the third and fourth planet. It might provide cover for evasive maneuvers.”
“Helm,” Vale said, “take us in. Stay close to the Wasp and—”
A hellacious barrage rocked the Titan, overloading the inertial dampers and throwing the bridge crew like rag dolls from their posts. Vale landed on her belly, shaken but unhurt. Pushing herself to her feet, she said in a clear voice, “Damage report!”
“Aft shields buckling,” Keru said. “Another hit like that and we’re wide open.”
Torvig pivoted away from an engineering panel scintillating with red warning lights. “Multiple overloads in the EPS relays and weapons arrays. Primary sensors offline.”
Vale clawed her way back into her command chair. “Helm, resume evasive maneuvers. Tactical, see if the Canterbury can cover our—” An explosive flash on the viewscreen cut her off and yanked her heart into her throat. When the blinding glare abated, chunks of the Canterbury’s hull drifted into the Titan’s flight path. Vale felt her ship judder as it knocked aside its sister ship’s debris with its navigational deflector field. “Tuvok, status of the Wasp!”
“They’ve come about on an attack heading,” the Vulcan said.
Sarai was aghast. “They could escape with slipstream. What the hell are they thinking?”
“They’re trying to help us escape,” Vale realized, thinking aloud.
Keru shared Sarai’s horror. “But there are too many Husnock ships, they’ll never—”
His prediction came true in a heartbreaking flash of sickly green light as a crushing fusillade of Husnock ordnance converged on the Wasp and obliterated every last trace of it.
“The Kulak and its fleet are coming about,” Keru said, almost shouting. “Right for us.”
Blasts hammered the Titan. Lights stuttered into darkness, and bridge consoles followed them. Sparks erupted from an EPS conduit in the overhead, and then a pall of smoke filled the bridge. Keru fought to extract damage reports from his console. “Hull breaches, decks three and four. Starboard nacelle venting plasma. Phasers are offline.”
