“Drop the lift to the bottom of the shaft,” Selten said. “Then lower the force field and open the doors.”
“Yes, sir,” Block said as he sent his fingers skittering across his control panel.
Selten didn’t believe he had enough information to draw a firm conclusion about the intelligence of the shape-shifting life-form—he reasoned that it could be acting on innate reflexes—but the security chief perceived a measure of knowledge in the creature, which he could only assume it had gleaned from its brief contact with Odo. Though the specimen had been faced with few choices, the path it had taken from its compartment nevertheless appeared to follow the most direct route to the upper level of Newton Outpost and, presumably, to freedom.
Selten opened a channel once more to his staff. “All security personnel, withdraw to the nearest safety compartment.” Then, to Block, he said, “Lower the force field at the top of the turboshaft and open the doors there.” As he spoke, the security chief operated the transporter again, using the life signs and combadge signals to beam everybody in and around Compartment L to the outpost’s infirmary, a secure area always supervised by one of the numerous medical doctors on the staff. “Pressurize the hangar, then lower all force fields and open all doors between there and the turbolift.”
“Yes, sir.”
On the display, the lift doors on the lower level opened to reveal an empty shaft. The great silver mass heaved into the vertical conduit and arced upward. Its way no longer impeded, its shape smoothed and narrowed as it sped into the turboshaft, making it look like a mammoth silver snake. “Raise the force fields and close the security doors behind it as it clears them,” Selten said. While the creature had demonstrated that such measures would not stop it should it reverse its course, they would at least slow it down, which would provide additional time, if necessary, to evacuate the outpost.
The security chief accessed other monitors, starting with the one observing the turbolift on the upper level. The doors stood open on the vacant shaft. Time elapsed—ten seconds, twenty, thirty, a full minute—and then the creature shot out of the turboshaft and whisked down the adjoining corridor. It sped through two open checkpoints, its path clear, then raced past the security office. Selten and Block both stood up at their stations to peer through the one-way port that looked out into the corridor. The creature’s shining silver surface reflected the overhead lighting.
Something like an insistent whisper reached Selten’s ears, and he realized that, even through the door to the security office, he could hear the sound of the air as the great mass roared past. The size and the speed of the specimen impressed, but as the security chief looked on, something about its lithe motion implied a mind driving its movement. Selten could not explain it, other than to attribute it to intuition, or to infer that his own telepathic abilities touched however dimly upon the creature’s awareness. The security chief concentrated for a moment, and he briefly felt something, a sense of yearning, there and then gone.
Before the serpentine entity had fully passed, Selten returned to his console, and Ensign Block followed suit. The security chief accessed the monitors in the hangar. He saw that the door to the airlock had withdrawn into the bulkhead, implying that atmosphere had been introduced into the large area. On the deck, markings designated a landing zone, and the outpost’s two runabouts—Neva and Loire—sat off to the side.
The creature bolted through the open airlock. It sliced past the runabouts, its form stretched into an extended silver cylinder. It curved up and toward the interlocking hatches that formed the flat roof of the hangar.
“As soon as its entire mass has cleared the airlock, seal the doors,” Selten told Block.
“Yes, sir.”
The creature smashed into the center of the hangar’s roof. At the point of impact, its body compressed and spread, but not in a circle. It flowed along the line where the two hatches came together. Selten didn’t know with certainty that the entity could compromise the roof the way it had the Corridor Four security door, but he did not intend to find out. He focused on the entrance to the airlock and waited as the trailing body of the creature continued passing through it and into the hangar.
“The outer hatch is showing signs of strain,” Block said.
The security chief tried to gauge how long he could safely delay before risking serious damage to the outpost, but then he saw the tail end of the creature enter the hangar. “Now,” he said at once. “Close the airlock, then open the hatches.”
The ensign operated his controls, and Selten saw the airlock doors glide closed. Immediately afterward, the hatches parted and the roof to the hangar opened. Beyond, against a backdrop of stars, light glinted off numerous small objects teeming in nearby space. Located inside a shepherd moon tucked into the rings circling the gas giant of Larrisint IV, Newton Outpost provided nothing but spectacular views.
As the hatch continued to open, the walls of the crater situated directly above the outpost came into view. The creature rocketed out of the hangar, whether of its own efforts or as the result of the atmosphere blasting out into space, Selten couldn’t tell. He waited until the entire mass of the specimen had left the outpost, then ordered Block to secure the hatches. The ensign complied at once. The security chief raised the outpost’s shields, although he had little confidence that they could long withstand an assault by the creature, which had already proven its ability against force fields.
As the roof of the hangar closed, Selten accessed the external sensors. The specimen still did not read as a living organism, but the security chief tracked its movement. It continued in its tubular shape, twisting among the dust and rocks of Larrisint IV’s rings. For three full minutes, it moved away, but then it abruptly changed its path and plunged back toward the shepherd moon at tremendous speed.
Selten quickly worked the outpost’s weapons controls. The shepherd moon had been fitted with two phaser banks and a quantum torpedo launcher. The security staff maintained the systems, regularly testing them to ensure their performance, but in the three years Selten had served at Newton Outpost, they had never been fired in defense of the facility.
The security chief targeted both the phasers and the quantum torpedoes. He tracked the path of the creature, but as it neared the shepherd moon, it altered its trajectory. Selten waited to fire, and the deviation increased. The creature had initially been headed for the center of the crater that masked the entrance to the outpost, and then for a spot on the surface, and finally for a point in nearby space.
Mindful of a feint, Selten kept the weapons locked on the silver mass. As it swooped in, it suddenly altered its form. It changed from its long, cylindrical configuration into a complex structure, with what looked like fins and sails, antennae and tails, demonstrating that it possessed far more than the rudimentary shape-shifting abilities it had to that point shown. It remained entirely silver, but nevertheless appeared organic, like some great spaceborne entity. Selten had never seen anything even remotely resembling it. Its appendages rippled, almost as though the creature swam through the void.
The shape-shifter soared past Newton Outpost. Its course changed slightly, and the security chief quickly calculated that the creature had used the mass of the shepherd moon to make the adjustment. Its path bent past the outpost and headed on a course that would take it on a close approach to Larrisint IV.
It’s using gravity either for propulsion or for navigation, or perhaps for both, Selten thought. The action could have been the byproduct of mere instinct, but it also could have been the design of an intelligent mind. Selten calculated its flight path and saw that it would bend around the gas giant and slingshot outward, taking the creature out of the Larrisint system.
As the security chief tracked the shape-shifter, wanting to ensure that it did not return to the shepherd moon, he opened an outpost-wide comm link. “This is Lieutenant Commander Selten,” he said. “Secure from general quarters. The specimen held in Compartment L has escaped confinement and fl
ed the outpost.”
He then checked in with the infirmary. Doctor Leslie Braeden reported two dead and six injured among the scientists and technicians present when the creature broke from captivity. She could not determine the condition of Odo, whose physical essence remained in an unformed gelatinous state. Since being transported to the infirmary after being attacked, the Changeling had shown no signs of life.
Once his staff had reassembled, Selten briefed them on everything that had transpired. The security team followed the progress of the creature, first as it fell toward Larrisint IV, and then as its redirected course took it into interstellar space. Selten prepared a report, then contacted Starfleet Operations.
“Would you classify the creature as a belligerent?” asked Admiral Elizabeth Kadin over a secure subspace channel.
“I cannot make such a determination with any certainty,” said the Newton Outpost security chief, “but it clearly could pose a hazard to Federation vessels.”
“Understood,” Kadin said. “Is there anything more?”
“Just one thing,” Selten said. “When the creature passed close to me, I sensed what I can only describe at its driving force.” The security chief paused, allowing the fleeting impressions he’d received to coalesce into a coherent thought. “Whatever that thing is, it wants something,” he finally said. “It wants something, and it wants it badly.”
I
Descent
December 2377
Captain Kira Nerys stood in Ops and gazed up at the main viewscreen, which hung down from the overhead. She had served for nearly a decade aboard Deep Space 9—for seven years as exec and Bajoran liaison, and then two more as its commanding officer—but she had never grown completely accustomed to its Cardassian architecture. Her discomfort on the erstwhile Terok Nor did not stem from any residual anger or ill will she held for the once and longtime oppressors of her people, for she had fought hard to leave behind the bitterness and hatred so readily fostered within her during the Occupation, and which had then been vigorously renewed during the Dominion War. Far more basic than that, she simply judged the design sense of the Cardassians as awkward and inconvenient. Who installs a viewscreen in a control center so that everybody has to look up to see it? Even after her extended tenure aboard DS9, Kira still occasionally stumbled over one of the raised thresholds in the station’s doorways. The fact that she sometimes tripped when entering or exiting her own quarters bespoke a style of construction far short of ergonomic.
On the main screen, the resplendent blue-and-white whirlpool of the Celestial Temple spun into view. Just moments before, Kira’s first officer, Commander Elias Vaughn, had reported the loss of contact with Starfleet’s comm relay in the Gamma Quadrant. The automated, self-contained device kept station in space just outside the Idran system. The relay facilitated subspace communications through the wormhole, but it had abruptly gone silent, not even responding to a simple ping to confirm its continued existence.
Kira had ordered Vaughn to take DS9’s chief of operations, Lieutenant Nog, on a runabout to diagnose and repair the problem. Before the first officer had even made it to the lift, the station’s alpha-shift tactical officer, Lieutenant Samaritan Bowers, announced the opening of the wormhole. Knowing that the day’s schedule included no ships arriving from the Gamma Quadrant, Kira asked to see the vessel on the viewscreen.
The captain peered up and saw a small form—its bow section dark, its aft light—emerge from the center of the Celestial Temple. She could distinguish no details about the ship apart from its compact size and shading. When the terminus of the wormhole swept back in on itself and vanished, Kira could just make out the white portion of the vessel against the black backdrop of space.
From the other side of Ops, near the turbolift, Vaughn asked, “Can you identify that ship?” To Kira, it appeared to be towing another structure.
“Negative,” replied Bowers. “There’s nothing in the ship registry that matches the configuration. It’s relatively small, though. It probably has enough room for only a limited number of passengers.”
“Assuming that they’re the size of typical humanoids,” Vaughn said, glancing over at Bowers.
“Yes, sir,” Bowers agreed. He appeared abashed at having to be corrected.
Kira looked to the communications station. “Open a channel,” she said.
“Channel open,” said Lieutenant Ezri Dax. Only recently returned from Tellar, where she’d undergone Starfleet’s Advanced Tactical Training, Dax currently split her on-duty time between alpha shift, when she crewed communications, and beta shift, when she took over for Bowers.
“This is Captain Kira Nerys of Deep Space Nine, to unknown vessel.” The station’s commanding officer delivered the words in a formal tone. “Please identify yourself.”
Kira waited, but she received no immediate reply to her hail. Vaughn walked back around the raised perimeter of Ops to stand next to her. As one silent moment drew into the next, Kira exchanged a look with her exec, and she could see reflected in his expression her own concern: that the unexpected appearance from the Gamma Quadrant of an unrecognized ship bore directly on the failure of the communications relay.
“No response, Captain,” Dax said.
“What’s their course?” Vaughn asked.
“Not for the station,” Bowers said, examining the data on his console. “It looks as though they’re heading for Bajor.”
Kira’s concern grew. Standard operating procedure required all vessels arriving through the wormhole to stop at Deep Space 9. The deviation could have been an oversight, or perhaps even just ignorance, but in either case, Kira should have received an answer to her message.
“This is Captain Kira,” she said again. “Identify yourself and state your business in this system or face the consequences.” The bellicosity of Kira’s language made her uncomfortable. She had uttered such phrases uncounted times before, but doing so had grown more and more difficult of late.
“Captain, the wormhole is opening up again,” Bowers said, surprise evident in his voice. Kira watched the viewscreen as the Celestial Temple swirled back into existence. Another shape, resembling the first but wholly dark, flew from within the vortex of blue and white light. “The second ship has a configuration similar to the first,” Bowers said, checking his readouts. “It is following the same course.” The wormhole once again withdrew into itself and disappeared.
“Is it in pursuit of the first ship?” Vaughn asked.
“Possibly,” Bowers said. “I’ll scan for weapons—” The lieutenant clipped his sentence short as the Celestial Temple rotated open a third time. The level of Kira’s concern increased even before she saw two more ships exit the wormhole, and then five more after that. When scores of ships—a veritable squadron—then materialized, she reached out to Vaughn’s arm and urged him forward, a physical manifestation of the order that rose in her mind.
“Get to the Defiant,” she told him. As he raced toward the lift, she looked over at Bowers. “Red alert,” she said. “We’re under attack.” She didn’t know if by we she meant the crew and residents of Deep Space 9 or the people of Bajor, but she could not mistake the threat that had so quickly arisen.
The call to battle stations blared through Ops as alert lighting bathed the crew in red tones. “Bowers, go with Commander Vaughn,” Kira ordered, assigning the tactical officer Defiant would need. Dax had just completed advanced training, but Bowers had both seniority and more experience in the position.
Kira quickly descended the steps to the situation table that sat in the middle of the control center. As Bowers followed Vaughn to the lift, Dax shifted over to tactical, and Lieutenant John Candlewood, the station’s newly promoted chief science officer, took over at communications. “Dax, raise the shields,” Kira said. “Candlewood, continue our hails.”
“Aye, Captain,” Candlewood said.
“Energizing phaser arrays and loading quantum torpedoes,” Kira said, working controls on the sit table
. Starfleet had first made significant upgrades to DS9’s weapons and defenses six years prior, in anticipation of hostilities with the Dominion. Since then, the improved systems had performed well, successfully protecting the station from major damage, and possibly even from destruction, on several occasions. They had also been upgraded a second time, not even two years earlier.
As gauges on the sit table showed power coursing into the phaser arrays, and quantum torpedoes loading into launch tubes, Kira glanced back up at the main viewscreen. A second flood of ships had appeared in the center of the wormhole. “Course?” she asked.
“Unchanged,” Dax said. “I’m reading two hundred thirty vessels in total, and they’re all following the path of the first, which remains headed to Bajor. They have defensive shields that are inhibiting our sensors. Visual scans reveal what appear to be emitters on their hulls, which could be weapons, and the structure that the first ship is towing looks like a torpedo of some kind. Several other ships are also hauling various pieces of equipment.”
“Anything, Lieutenant?” the captain asked, peering up at Candlewood.
“Negative,” the science officer said. “Still no response, although it appears that our hails are being received.”
“Understood,” Kira said, and she thought that she understood too well. Is it going to be this again? she asked herself. Another battle? More injuries, more deaths? Such incidents had always been a part of her adult life—and even before that, as regular occurrences in her childhood. Only the scale had changed. Where as a girl she had first taken up arms against individual Cardassians, and then larger and larger groups of them, she had graduated to firing on well-crewed ships and populated cities. Her justification for doing so did not mitigate the tremendous fatigue she had begun to feel.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance Page 2
