"No," Worf said, before the chief engineer could reply. "Not unless they already know where we are. A cloaked vessel cannot be detected by gravitational signature alone."
"Especially in a system as orbitally complicated as this one," Thornton added. "The gravity well's way too bumpy to resolve individual events unless you already know roughly where you're looking."
"Good." Sisko leaned back in his command console, as pleased with the coordinated response of his bridge team as with the information they'd given him. He thumbed the communicator controls. "Ensign Farabaugh, how soon do you have us scheduled to intercept an incoming comet?"
"In a little over ten minutes, sir. I was just about to alert you." The junior science officer sounded as tired as O'Brien looked, his voice scratchy but confident. "Sorry for the short notice, but we had to redo half our calculations after that Cardassian battleship banged its way through the debris field."
"Understood. Are we still scheduled to nudge that comet off course on the opposite side of the planet from the Klingons?"
"Aye, sir." Farabaugh hesitated, and Sisko heard the murmur of a second voice in the computer room. "But to get to our intercept point, we're going to have to pass pretty close to the Klingon ship on at least one orbit."
"How close?"
"About one hundred kilometers."
Sisko winced. "My old piloting instructor at the Academy used to call that kissing distance." He looked over at O'Brien again. "You're sure the Klingons won't be able to pick us up?"
"Not unless they have their scanners focused directly on our position when we pulse the impulse engines," O'Brien assured him. "Otherwise, we'll be running on gravitational forces and momentum. We should slip by like a Ferengi going through a customs check."
"Then let's do it." Sisko sat back in his command chair, listening to the distant whisper of cometary dust vaporizing off the shields. It occurred to him that the sound couldn't actually be coming from the ice itself as it smoked and vanished into empty space. It must be the internal echo of the shield compensators, constantly readjusting to keep the voltage gap steady and the external forces balanced across the ship's hull.
"Course plotted and laid in for minimum impulse thrust," Worf announced, his deep voice anomalously loud in the thrumming silence. Sisko wasn't sure if that was the result of his tactical officer's tension or his own. "Ten seconds to engine pulse."
"Mark." O'Brien sounded much calmer, but, then, he was the only one who really knew how well their waste-heat output blended with the ambient infrared. "Five, four, three, two... pulse detected."
Sisko could have told him that. Despite the parsimonious engine firing, designed to put the cloaked Defiant into the correct orbit with minimal expenditure of energy, his years as her commander had attuned him to the little warship's slightest movements. He felt the shiver of redirected momentum, subtle as the shifting weight of a baby asleep in its mother's arms. "New heading?"
"Orbital plane forty-three degrees to spin axis, rotation thirty degrees from planetary prime," Worf said with satisfaction. "We are on the correct heading for comet intercept at the lip of the gravity well."
Sisko glanced over at Thornton, whose gaze never seemed to waver from his sensor output. "What about our Klingon intercept?"
"Still one hundred kilometers, assuming the Klingons maintain their orbit. Estimated time of closest passage two-point-five minutes."
"Commander Worf, please lay in potential course changes to prepare for possible Klingon detection. Straight attack, evasive attack, evasive retreat."
"Aye, sir."
Sisko swung his chair back toward O'Brien. "How's the magnetic signature of our shields holding out?"
"Still matched to planetary polarity, plus or minus ten percent. I'm slowly modulating as we cross the magnetosphere."
"Good." Sisko brushed his gaze across the view-screen, eying the familiar face of Armageddon with its halo of cometary debris only long enough to be sure that nothing had changed. He tapped his communications control panel. "Farabaugh, any changes in comet trajectories caused by our new orbit?"
"No, sir. We're traveling far enough inside the gravity well to be out of range."
"Good," Sisko said again, but he was frowning as he lifted his hand. That unexceptional answer had left him with nothing left to do, no occupation to soak up his surging tension for the final minute of countdown. He contented himself with drumming his fingers softly on the arm of his command chair and running through all the possible battle-plans, should the Klingons somehow detect their presence. It wasn't that he didn't trust his chief engineer's camouflage or his chief tactical officer's piloting skills. But to a Starfleet officer who'd had ingrained a thousand kilometers as the minimum undetectability limit throughout most of his career, the idea of sliding invisibly past a Klingon bird-of-prey at one hundred klicks or less fell just short of requiring divine intervention.
"Klingons off the aft side," said Thornton. His voice was so quiet and emotionless that it took Sisko a moment to realize the announcement meant they'd slipped past. "No sign of ship activity detected from passive scanning."
The Defiant's bridge murmured with the exhaled breath of her five vastly relieved officers. No, make that four, Sisko thought wryly. Odo looked just as relieved as the rest of them, but the Changeling didn't have the lungs needed to produce a thankful sigh.
"Estimated time of encounter with comet?" he asked briskly. After a tense encounter like that, a good commander knew how to focus his crew's attention on the next challenge. Otherwise, relief had a way of turning to distraction.
"I am not sure," Worf said unexpectedly. "I have the orbital course, but I do not have the exact coordinates of the comet copied to my piloting console."
Sisko frowned. "Thornton?"
The dark-haired engineering tech shook his head. "Sorry, sir. I can get sensor readings on all the comets, but I'm not sure which one Farabaugh's aiming us at."
A frustrated breath trickled out between Sisko's teeth. Trying to deflect a comet without getting caught by the Klingons was like trying to leave Quark's bar without leaving a tip... it seemed easy to do at first, until you kept getting tangled in one layer of obstacles after another. Unfortunately, in this case you couldn't flip a coin to a Ferengi barman and have the obstacles magically vanish. "Odo, open an on-line channel to Farabaugh so he can hear us down in that science lab. O'Brien, I want you and Osgood to start working on transferring the comet impact model up to a spare station on the bridge. And someone find out where that damned comet is!"
The words had no sooner left his mouth than the Defiant shuddered under a scraping impact. A moment later, a massive, smoking, black hulk of cometary ice floated into the main screen's view. One whole side was sheared freshly white from its contact with the Defiant's angled shields.
"I hope," said Sisko ominously, "that was the comet we were supposed to be deflecting. Because if not..."
"Comet deflection one hundred percent successful, sir!" The excitement in Farabaugh's voice echoed brightly across the open communications channel. "With the momentum added from sublimation, its new trajectory will take it out of the debris field entirely."
"Well, there you go." O'Brien looked up from his shield modulator controls with a mischievous smile. "All we need is to do that another hundred-thousand times, and Armageddon will be safe."
Even Sisko felt his lips stretch into a smile at that image. "By then, most of the Klingons should have died of old age," he agreed. "Allowing us to leave the system just in time to collect our pensions." The stifled spurt of laughter that trickled out of his communicator panel told him Odo had added a permanent channel between the bridge and the science lab. He didn't bother reaching for his panel controls. "When's our next deflection scheduled for, Ensign?"
"Not for another forty-five minutes, sir." There was a pause while two young voices conferred in a murmur at the other end of the channel.
"With your permission, sir, Osgood and I would like to grab some
breakfast before then."
"Breakfast?" O'Brien said blankly. "Don't you mean lunch?"
Worf rumbled disagreement from his piloting station. "According to the ship's chronometer, it is currently fifteen-twenty hours. Any meal served now would be classified as supper."
Sisko felt his own stomach growl uncomfortably. "I don't care what you call it, anyone who wants some can get it. Just be sure to be back on station by sixteen-hundred." He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. "We have an appointment with a comet, and it won't wait for us if we're late."
By the time they met up with their fourth comet, Sisko's bridge crew had subversive interception down to a fine art.
"Critical point coming up at coordinates two-sixty and four-forty-three mark twenty-nine." Farabaugh looked up from the makeshift tracking console O'Brien had rigged from one of the life-support stations at the back of the Defiant's bridge. They'd spent the slow hours between comet deadlines moving both junior science officers back onto the bridge, streamlining their data transfer procedures, and perfecting their deflection maneuvers. Osgood had settled in at the main computer access panel, where she could concentrate on the constant adjustments they needed to make in their cometary impact model, while the Defiant jockeyed back and forth through the cloud of cometary debris. Thornton and Odo had adjusted the main view screen's detection parameters, autoprogramming it to focus on their cometary targets both before and after impact.
So far, their peripatetic path and jarring encounters with comets hadn't drawn any unwelcome attention from the Klingons, although with Kor's ship settled in a stable equatorial orbit, Sisko feared it was only a matter of time until one of their intercept points fell recklessly close to their enemies. In the meantime, the constant short-range passes they had to endure on their unpowered gravitational orbits made the muscles between Sisko's shoulders harden with accumulated tension. Worf claimed the additional challenge of evading detection while deflecting comets made them better warriors, and even O'Brien admitted that the adrenaline rush of those close passes kept him awake and gave him new motivation as the hours dragged on. Personally, Sisko thought he could have limped along on the old motivation -- saving Armageddon and all its inhabitants from mass destruction -- for quite a while yet.
"Time to gravity-well intercept?" he asked, knowing the routine now by heart.
"Twelve minutes and counting." Osgood swung around at her computer station, blue eyes somber in her fine-boned face. "Captain, this comet fragment masses three kilotons, four times as big as the others we've intercepted. We're going to have to give it a much stronger nudge with the shields to deflect it."
"It's also heading straight-line into the gravity well," Farabaugh warned. "There's no curve-back capture loop at all. We're not going to get a second chance to bump it if we miss."
"Understood." Worf punched the new data into his navigational computer, then transferred the resulting course changes onto the orbital model of Armageddon Thornton had inserted in a corner of the main viewscreen. The new loops added additional frills to the fading lacework of their past orbits. Sisko narrowed his eyes, watching the golden target spot that beaded their path on the third orbit.
"Mr. Farabaugh, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like we're deflecting this comet on the same side of the planet the Klingons are orbiting."
"We are, sir," the young man admitted. "Due to this comet's straight trajectory, it was the only intercept point we could find. But at least we'll be in the terminus when we do it. The dusk might help disguise the comet's change in direction."
"Let's hope so." Sisko glanced across at Worf. "What will our closest pass to the Klingons be this time?"
"One-hundred-and-twenty-five kilometers," the tactical officer replied.
"Piece of cake," said O'Brien.
Sisko grunted. "Begin preparation for course change --"
The blinding shock of a phaser blast across the viewscreen sliced across his words like a bat'leth. Sisko cursed and leaped to lean over Odo's shoulder, scanning the Defiant's shield and systems outputs for damage. All the indicators were baffiingly normal. "What the hell did Kor just shoot at?" he demanded.
"As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing." Odo swept an impatient hand across his displays. "It looks like the shot went wide of us by several hundred kilometers. There's no evidence of impact with any comet fragments, either."
"Don't tell me they're just shooting in the dark, hoping to hit us?" O'Brien demanded incredulously.
Worf let out a scornful snort. "The odds against that are far too high to justify the waste of power. I would have expected better from a Dahar Master. Unless he was very, very drunk."
"The odds will get a lot better at a hundred-and-twenty-five kilometers distance," Sisko said grimly. More phaser fire shattered across the screen. "And Kor only needs one hit to extrapolate our location and zero in." He stood and began pacing, even though he knew the motion couldn't ease the frustrated ache of inactivity between his shoulders. He needed to be out doing something, going somewhere -- not trapped in this clandestine, cloaked orbit, unable to move a muscle for fear of Klingon detection. "All right, gentlemen, time for a quick command conference. Do we try for deflection and risk getting shot at by Kor?"
Odo gave him a somber look. "What other options do we have? That comet isn't going to wait for us to find a safer orbit."
"We could allow the impact to occur." Worf's scowl looked as if it had embedded itself permanently in his massive forehead, but his voice remained carefully neutral. "That would allow us to remain at maximum distance from the Klingon ship."
O'Brien threw the Klingon an astounded look. "But it would break the deal the hostage-takers offered us -- who knows what they would do to the Victoria Adams crew then? Not to mention that Julian and Dax and Major Kira will be left at the mercy of that comet!"
Worf's face darkened. "True. But if we chase this comet to our death, many others will fall on Armageddon after it. Should we sacrifice our ability to deflect them all just to deflect this one?"
Odo cleared his throat, a humanoid habit he'd learned in his years among solids. "You're assuming the first one we deflect will be our last? Why? Is Kor so invincible in battle?"
"The last time I saw Dahar Master Kor," said Worf succinctly, "he was a drunken, reckless, nonsense-spouting old fool. But he was at one time one of the mightiest warriors of the Empire. I would not underrate him, even now."
A last flicker of phaser fire stabbed across the nightside of Armageddon, then the Klingon ship slid around the planet 's curvature, still firing randomly into space. Farabaugh glanced over his shoulder. "Captain, if we're going to deflect that comet, we've got to move soon. Otherwise, we won't be able to maneuver into an intercept orbit at all."
Sisko rubbed a hand across his slim beard, giving in to the frustrated longing for action that had been building in him since they'd first arrived. "Commander Worf, lay in course change for comet intercept. Chief, get our warp engines on-line and our shields back as close to battle-ready as you can without losing all magnetic polarization. Odo, punch a high-security contact through to the away team. We need to let them know what's going on."
"Aye, sir," said O'Brien and Worf in unison. Odo merely punched the order into his screen, moving so rapidly that Sisko suspected he'd been practicing the sequence in advance. "I've got Major Kira now, sir."
"Major," Sisko said without preliminaries. "Any luck locating Dr. Bashir?"
"No, sir." Sisko could hear the heavy rattle of rain on leaves all around her, with a background thrum from some nocturnal creature chirping despite the downpour. "We followed the trail of whoever took him as far as we could, but we never even caught sight of them. If they really are using the native pachyderms for transport, they can probably cover nine times the distance we can in a day."
"Understood." Sisko drummed his fingers on the arms of his console, wrestling with the decision he had to make. "Major, I want you to return to the main Klingon camp," he said at
last. "If the hostage-takers decide to contact you or to release any of the survivors, that's where they'll expect you to be."
He heard the breath Kira drew in, even through the sound of distant thunder. "You're expecting a comet to fall?" she guessed. "But the hostage-takers --"
"-- can't keep Kor from finding us sooner or later, so long as we keep bouncing comets away right under his nose," Sisko finished.
For a moment, all he heard in response was rain and chirping. "What about the survivors from the Victoria Adams?" Kira asked at last. "And Dr. Bashir?"
Sisko grimaced. "We'll have to gamble that the comets won't hit near them. Once the battle's over -- with luck -- we'll be able to resume the search for them. And to resume warding off Armageddon."
"Sylshessa." He could hear the wry smile in Kira's voice. "I suspect Kor's not going to give you enough time to drop your shields and transport us now. So I guess I'll see you after you've won."
Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02 Page 13
