The screen flickered blue and then condensed into a familiar wide-screen scan of the Defianf’s bridge. It was the viewing angle Dax had gotten used to watching in post-mission analyses, the one recorded by the official logging sensor at the back of the deck. In this frozen still picture, she could see the outline of Sisko’s shoulders and head above the back of his chair, and the top of her own head beyond him, at the helm. The Defiant’s viewscreen showed darkness spattered with distant fires that looked a little too large and bright to be stars. The edges of the picture were frayed and spangled with blank blue patches, obscuring the figures at the weapons and engineering consoles. Dax thought she could just catch the flash of Kira’s earring through the static.
“The record’s even worse than it looks here,” Hayman said bluntly. “What you’re seeing is a computer reconstruction of the scattered bytes we managed to download from the sensor’s memory buffer. All we’ve got is the five-minute run it recorded just before the bridge lost power. Any record it dumped to the main computer before that was lost.”
Sisko nodded, acknowledging the warning buried in her dry words. “So we’re going to see the Defiant’s final battle.”
“That’s right.” Hayman tapped at her control panel again, and the conference room filled with the sound of Kira’s tense voice.
“Three alien vessels coming up fast on vector oh-nine-seven. We can’t outrun them.” The fires on the viewscreen blossomed into the unmistakable red-orange explosions of warp cores breaching under attack. Dax tried to count them, but there were too many, scattered over too wide a sector of space to keep track of. Her stomach roiled in fierce and utter disbelief. How could so many starships be destroyed this quickly? Had all of Starfleet rallied to fight this hopeless future battle?
“They’re also moving too fast to track with our quantum torpedoes.” The sound of her own voice coming from the image startled her. It sounded impossibly calm to Dax under the circumstances. She saw her future self glance up at the carnage on the viewscreen, but from the back there was no way to tell what she thought of it. “Our course change didn’t throw them off. They must be tracking our thermal output.”
“Drop cloak.” The toneless curtness of Sisko’s recorded voice told Dax just how grim the situation must be. “Divert all power to shields and phasers.”
The sensor image flickered blue and silent for a moment as a power surge ran through it, then returned to its normal tattered state. Now, however, there were three distinct patches of blue looming closer on the future Defiant’s viewscreen.
“What’s that?” Bashir asked Hayman, pointing.
The admiral grunted and froze the image while she answered him. “That’s the computer’s way of saying it couldn’t match a known image to the visual bytes it got there.”
“The three alien spaceships,” Dax guessed. “They’re not Klingon or Romulan then.”
“Or Cardassian or Jem’Hadar,” Bashir added quietly.
“As far as we can tell, they don’t match any known spacefaring ship design,” Hayman said. “That’s what worries us.”
Sisko leaned both elbows on the table, frowning at the stilled image intently. “You think we’re going be attacked by some unknown force from the Gamma Quadrant?”
“Or worse.” The admiral cleared her throat, as if her dramatic words had embarrassed her. “You may have heard rumors about the alien invaders that Captain Picard and the Enterprise drove off from Brundage Station. From the spectrum of the energy discharges you’re going to see when the alien ships fire their phasers at you, the computer thinks there’s more than a slight chance that this could be another invasion force.”
Dax repressed a shiver at this casual discussion of their catastrophic future. “You think the Defiant is going to be destroyed in a future battle with the Furies?”
“We know they think that this region of space once belonged to them,” Hayman said crisply. “We know they want it back. And we know we didn’t destroy their entire fleet in our last encounter, just the artificial wormhole they used to transport themselves to Furies Point. Given the Defiant’s posting near the Bajoran wormhole—” She broke off, waving a hand irritably at the screen. “I’m getting ahead of myself. Watch the rest of the visual log first, then I’ll answer your questions.” Her mouth jerked downward at one corner. “If I can.”
She touched the control panel again to resume the log playback. Almost immediately, the viewscreen flashed with a blast of unusually intense phaser fire.
“Damage to forward shield generators,” reported O’Brien’s tense voice. “Diverting power from rear shield generators to compensate.”
“Return fire!” Sisko’s computer-reconstructed figure blurred as he leapt from his captain’s chair and went to join Dax at the helm. “Starting evasive maneuvers, program delta!”
More flashes screamed across the viewscreen, obscuring the random jerks and wiggles that the stars made during warp-speed maneuvers. The phaser fire washed the Defiant’s bridge in such fierce white light that the crew turned into darkly burned silhouettes. An uneasy feeling grew in Dax that she was watching ghosts rather than real people, and she began to understand Starfleet’s reluctance to trust that this log was real.
“Evasive maneuvers aren’t working!” Kira sounded both fierce and frustrated. “They’re firing in all directions, not just at us.”
“Their present course vector will take them past us in twelve seconds, point-blank range,” Dax warned. “Eleven, ten, nine …”
“Forward shields failing!” shouted O’Brien. Behind his voice the ship echoed with the thunderous sound of vacuum breach. “We’ve lost sectors seventeen and twenty-one—”
“Six, five, four …”
“Spin the ship to get maximum coverage from rear shields,” Sisko ordered curtly. “Now!”
“Two, one …”
Another hull breach thundered through the ship, this one louder and closer than before. The sensor image washed blue and silent again with another power surge. Dax held her breath, expecting the black fade of ship destruction to follow it. To her amazement, however, the blue rippled and condensed back into the familiar unbreached contours of the bridge. Emergency lights glowed at each station, making the crew look shadowy and even more unreal.
“Damage reports,” Sisko ordered.
“Hull breaches in all sectors below fifteen,” O’Brien said grimly. “We’ve lost the port nacelle, too, Captain.”
“Alien ships are veering off at vector five-sixteen point nine.” Kira sounded suspicious and surprised in equal measures. Her silhouette turned at the weapons console, earring glittering. “Sensors report they’re still firing phasers in all directions. And for some reason, their shields appear to be failing.” A distant red starburst lit the viewscreen, followed by two more. “Captain, you’re not going to believe this, but it looks like they just blew up!”
Dax saw herself turn to look at Kira, and for the first time caught a dim glimpse of her own features. As far as she could tell, they looked identical to the ones she’d seen in the mirror that morning. Whatever this future was, it wasn’t far away.
“Maybe our phasers caused as much damage as theirs did,” she suggested hopefully. “Or more.”
“I don’t think so.” O’Brien’s voice was even grimmer now. “I’ve been trying to put our rear shields back on-line, but something’s not right. Something’s draining them from the outside.” His voice scaled upward in disbelief. “Our main core power’s being sucked out right through the shield generators!”
“A new kind of weapon?” Sisko demanded. “Something we can neutralize with our phasers?”
The chief engineer made a startled noise. “No, it’s not an energy beam at all. It looks more like—”
At that point, with a suddenness that made Dax’s stomach clench, the entire viewscreen went dead. She felt her shoulder and hand muscles tense in involuntary protest, and heard Bashir stir uncomfortably beside her. Sisko cursed beneath his breath.
>
“I know,” Admiral Hayman said dryly. “The main circuits picked the worst possible time to give out. That’s all the information we have.”
“No, it’s not.” Julian Bashir’s voice sounded bleak rather than satisfied, and Dax suspected he would rather not have had the additional information to give them. “I haven’t had a chance to read the majority of these medical logs, but I have found the ones that deal with the aftermath of the battle.”
Hayman’s startled look at him contained a great deal more respect than it had a few moments before, Dax noticed. “There were logs that talked about the battle? No one else noticed that.”
“That’s because no one else knows my personal abbreviations for the names of the crew,” Bashir said simply. “I scanned the records for the ones I thought might have been aboard on this trip. Of the six regular crew, Odo wasn’t mentioned anywhere. I’m guessing he stayed back on Deep Space Nine. My records for Kira and O’Brien indicate they were lost in some kind of shipboard battle, trying to ward off an invading force. Sisko seems to have been injured then and to have died afterward, but I’m not sure exactly when. And Dax—” He stopped to clear his throat and then resumed. “According to my records, Jadzia suffered so much radiation exposure in the final struggle that she had only a few hours to live. Rather than stay aboard, she took a lifepod and created a diversion for the aliens who were attacking us. That’s how the ship finally got away.”
“Got away?” Sisko demanded in disbelief. “You mean some of the crew survived the battle we just saw?”
Bashir grimaced. “How do you think those medical logs got written up? I not only survived the battle, Captain, I appear to have lived for a considerable time afterward. There are several years’ worth of logs here, if not more.”
“Several years?” It was Dax’s turn to sound incredulous. “You stayed on board the Defiant for several years after this battle, Julian? And no one came to rescue you?”
“No.”
“That can’t be true!” The Defiant’s captain vaulted from his chair, as if his churning restlessness couldn’t be contained in one place any longer. “Even a totally disabled starship can emit an automatic distress call,” he growled. “If no one from Starfleet was alive to respond to it, some other Federation ship should have. Was our entire civilization destroyed?”
“No,” Hayman said soberly. “The reason’s much simpler than that, and much worse. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
* * *
Cold mist ghosted out at them when the fusion-bay doors opened, making Dax shiver and stop on the threshold. Beside her, she could see Sisko eye the interior with a mixture of foreboding and awe. This immense dark space held a special place in human history, Dax knew. It was the first place where interstellar fusion engines had been fired, the necessary step that eventually led to this solar system’s entry into the federation of spacefaring races. She peered through the interior fog of subliming carbon dioxide and water droplets, but aside from a distant tangle of gantry lights, all she could see was the mist.
“Sorry about the condensate,” Admiral Hayman said briskly. “We never bothered to seal off the walls, since we usually keep this bay at zero P and T.” She palmed open a locker beside the ring doors and handed them belt jets, then launched herself into the mist-filled bay with the graceful arc of a diver. Sisko rolled into the hold with less grace but equal efficiency, followed by the slender sliver of movement that was Bashir. Dax took a deep breath and vaulted after them, feeling the familiar interior lurch of the symbiont in its pouch as their bodies adjusted to the lack of gravitational acceleration.
“This way.” The delayed echo of Hayman’s voice told Dax that the old fusion bay was widening as they moved farther into the mist, although she could no longer see its ice-carved sides. She fired her belt jets to follow the sound of the admiral’s graveled voice, feeling the exposed freckles on her face and neck prickle with cold in the zero-centigrade air. Three silent shadows loomed in the fog ahead of her, backlit by the approaching gantry lights. She jetted into an athletic arc calculated to bring her up beside them.
“So, Admiral, what have you—”
Her voice broke off abruptly, when she saw what filled the space in front of her. The heat of the work lights had driven back the mist, making a halo of clear space around the dark object that was their focus. At first, all she saw was a huge lump of cometary ice, black-crusted over glacial blue gleaming. Then her eye caught a skeletal feathering of old metal buried in that ice, and followed it around an oddly familiar curve until it met another, more definite sweep of metal. Beyond that lay a stubby wing, gashed through with ice-filled fractures. She took in a deep, icy breath as the realization hit her.
“That’s the Defiant!”
“Or what’s left of her.” Sisko’s voice rang grim echoes off the distant walls of the hold. Now that she had recognized the ship’s odd angle in the ice, Dax could see that he was right. The port nacelle was sheared off entirely, and a huge torpedo-impact crater had exploded into most of the starboard hull and decking. Phaser burns streaked the Defiant’s flanks, and odd unfamiliar gashes had sliced her to vacuum in several places.
She glanced across at Hayman. “Where was this found, Judith?”
“Right here in Earth’s Oort cloud,” the admiral said, without taking her eyes from the half-buried starship. “A mining expedition from the Pluto LaGrangian colonies, out prospecting for water-cored comets, found it two days ago after a trial phaser blast. They recognized the Starfleet markings and called us, but it was too fragile to free with phasers out there. We had to bring it in and let the cometary matrix melt around it.”
“But if it was that fragile—” Dax frowned, her scientist’s brain automatically calculating metal fatigue under deep-space conditions, while her emotions kept insisting that what she was seeing was impossible. “It must have been buried inside that comet for thousands of years!”
“Almost five millennia,” Hayman agreed. “According to thermal spectroscopy of the ice around it, and radiometric dating of the—er—the organic contents of the ship.”
“You mean, the bodies,” Bashir said, breaking his stark silence at last.
“Yes.” Hayman jetted toward the far side of the ice-sheathed ship, where a brighter arc of lights was trained on the Defiant’s main hatch. “There’s a slight discrepancy between the individual radiocarbon ages of the two survivors, apparently as a result of—”
“—differential survival times.” The doctor finished the sentence so decisively that Dax suspected he’d already known that from his medical logs. She glanced at him as they followed Hayman toward the ship, puzzled by the sudden urgency in his voice. “How much of a discrepancy in ages was there? More than a hundred years?”
“No, about half that.” The admiral glanced over her shoulder, the quizzical look back in her eyes. “Humans don’t generally live long enough to survive each other by more than a hundred years, Doctor.”
Dax heard the quick intake of Bashir’s breath that told her he was startled. “Both bodies you found were human?”
“Yes.” Hayman paused in front of the open hatch, blocking it with one long arm when Sisko would have jetted past her. “I’d better warn you that, aside from microsampling for radiocarbon dates, we’ve left the remains just as they were found in the medical bay. One was in stasis, but the other—wasn’t.”
“Understood.” Sisko pushed past her into the dim hatchway, the cold control of his voice telling Dax how much he hated seeing the wreckage of the first ship he’d ever commanded. She let Bashir enter next, sensing the doctor’s fierce impatience from the way his fingers had whitened around his tricorder. When she would have jetted after him, Hayman touched her shoulder and made her pause.
“I know your new host is a scientist, Dax. Does that mean you’ve already guessed what happened here?”
Dax gave the older woman a curious look. “It seems fairly self-evident, Admiral. In some future timeline, the Defiant is go
ing to be destroyed in a battle so enormous that it will get thrown back in time and halfway across the galaxy. That’s why no one could come to rescue Julian.”
Hayman nodded, her voice deepening a little. “I just want you to know before you go in—right now, Starfleet’s highest priority is to avoid entering that timeline. At all costs.” She gave Dax’s shoulder a final squeeze, then released her. “Remember that.”
“I will.” Although she managed to keep her tone as level as always, somewhere inside Dax a tendril of doubt curled from symbiont to host. Curzon’s stored memories told Jadzia that when he knew her, this silver-haired admiral had been one of Starfleet’s most pragmatic and imperturbable starship captains. Any future that could put that kind of intensity into Hayman’s voice wasn’t one Dax wanted to think about.
Now she was going to see it.
Inside the Defiant, stasis generators made a trail of red lights up the main turbolift shaft, and Dax suspected the half-visible glimmer of their fields was all that kept its crumbling metal walls intact. It looked as though this part of the ship had suffered one of the hull breaches O’Brien had reported, or some even bigger explosion. The turbolift car was a collapsed cage of oxidized steel resin and ceramic planks. Dax eased herself into the open shaft above it, careful not to touch anything as she jetted upward.
“Captain?” she called up into the echoing darkness.
“On the bridge.” Sisko’s voice echoed oddly off the muffling silence of the stasis fields. Dax boosted herself to the top of the turbolift shaft and then angled her jets to push through the shattered lift doors. Heat lamps had been set up here to melt away the ice still engulfing the Defiant’s navigations and science stations. The powerful buzz of their filaments and the constant drip and sizzle of melting water filled the bridge with noise. Sisko stood alone in the midst of it, his face set in stony lines. She guessed that Bashir had headed immediately for the starship’s tiny medical bay.
The Soldiers Of Fear Page 19
