Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance

by David R. George III

  “Of course,” Aland said, and then he peered over at Asarem. “An emergency shutdown will cause havoc everywhere. Do I have your authority, First Minister?”

  Asarem looked from Aland to Sisko. The former commanding officer of Deep Space 9 held her gaze. “Are you sure?” she asked him.

  “I am,” he said. He hesitated for perhaps the space of a heartbeat before uttering the words she needed to hear. “I am the Emissary.”

  * * *

  Kira paced the main cabin of Yolja liked a caged pugabeast. She had pressed the runabout to its maximum impulse speed, but it felt to her as though the vessel sat in its hangar aboard Deep Space 9, drawing no closer to Bajor and the alien fleet that threatened it. Forward and back she paced, around the freestanding console that stood just ahead of the transporter platform at the aft end of the compartment. Every few circuits, she leaned in over the main console and checked the sensors.

  I really thought I’d grown more patient with age, Kira thought. With age, and with greater responsibilities. Waiting had never been her forte, all the way back to the days of her youth, when she could do nothing quickly enough to rid her world of Cardassian occupying forces. But she truly believed that her time serving under Captain Sisko in a more structured environment, and then her two years in command of DS9, had taught her the value of facing down adversity with forbearance. At that moment, though, she thought she would get out and push Yolja if it would get her to Bajor even a second sooner.

  The captain had not yet decided whether to comply with Taran’atar’s instructions. As she stopped at the runabout’s main console, she saw that many of Bajor’s assault vessels had begun to withdraw from orbit, and Defiant remained just beyond the spread of the Ascendant fleet. She could also see from the way the alien ships gathered that they would shortly commence an attack on Bajor. The realization made her blood run cold. She felt helpless, still too far away to do anything to aid her people, although she saw that Taran’atar’s vessel had almost reached the rear edge of the Ascendant formation.

  Kira started away from the forward console when contra­puntal movement on the sensor display drew her eye. She leaned over the panel and watched for a moment as a ship at the leading edge of the invading fleet soared in the opposite direction. Kira sat down at the console and studied the readings. She expected to find the pilot of a Bajoran assault vessel attempting to penetrate the enemy ranks, but scans showed the ship as one of the Ascendants’ own.

  The captain followed the progress of the blade-shaped vessel as it sped along a straight path away from Bajor. Kira projected its linear course ahead. It did not surprise her to discover it on a direct path to Deep Space 9, and beyond it, to the Celestial Temple.

  Kira decided she would attempt to contact the ship’s pilot. She reached toward the communications panel, but just then, a series of tones indicated an incoming transmission. Kira tapped a control surface, half expecting to come face-to-face for the first time with an Ascendant, with the pilot to whom she had been about to send a message, but instead, the image of Taran’atar appeared on the monitor.

  “Taran’atar to Captain Kira,” he said.

  “I’m here,” Kira said.

  “And growing too close to the Ascendants,” he told her. “You must reverse your course.” The Jem’Hadar was no longer on the bridge of his ship, she saw, at least not that she could tell. His countenance filled almost the entire display, with nothing but a featureless background visible behind him. Because of the perspective and slight movement of the image, Kira suspected that he communicated with her via a personal access display device.

  “Why?” Kira asked, though she did not truly expect an answer. On the sensor readouts, she saw the fleeing Ascendant ship emerge from the rear of the fleet. It would shortly pass Taran’atar’s vessel, which raced in the opposite direction.

  “Because I am Taran’atar,” he said, his voice rising and his eyes widening. He drew what looked like an energy weapon from the belt of his black coverall. “I am dead. I go into battle to reclaim my life.”

  Kira heard the fiery words, and she suddenly understood what Taran’atar intended to do. Part of her wanted to stop him, to tell him that he did not need to sacrifice his own life for the sake of the Bajoran people. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, even though she realized that, despite his words, he would not actually reclaim his life.

  The captain operated her controls and brought Yolja to a stop. On the sensor panel, Taran’atar’s ship soared past the retreating Ascendant vessel. Kira made no mention of it, nor did Taran’atar. Instead, he continued his recitation.

  “This, I do gladly, for I am Jem’Hadar,” he said. “This, I do gladly . . . for my friend Kira Nerys.” The words startled the captain. It shocked her simply to hear Taran’atar alter the oath he had sworn all his life, more so because he invoked her name and called her his friend.

  “Victory is life,” Kira said. “I will remember you.”

  Taran’atar said nothing more, but he leveled his weapon at a target offscreen and squeezed the triggering pad. A beam of coherent blue light streaked from the weapon’s emitter. At once, a sickly shrieking noise blared out. It did not sound like a voice, or even like something natural, and yet it evoked the impression of pain.

  Not just pain, Kira thought. Agony. “What—” she started to ask, but Taran’atar began to scream. His image wavered, as though from a display or transmission malfunction. He dropped the padd he carried, and it landed screen side up. Kira watched from that perspective as he continued to fire his weapon. The air around him seemed to grow thin, not like colors dulling in bright sunshine, but as though the reality of the scene had somehow weakened.

  Taran’atar raised his empty hand in a defensive posture, in a way that made Kira think that some sort of creature would soon be upon him. He continued to fire his weapon, and to cry out, but the piercing screech grew in volume and nearly drowned out all other sounds. Taran’atar suddenly appeared to fade, and then the air thickened around him and brightened, until nothing more showed but a glowing field of white light.

  Kira lifted her hand in front of her face and tried to endure the brilliant glare by observing it through her fingers, the display unable to compensate for the intensity of what it showed. Ultimately, the captain had to look away. When she did, she saw the interior of the runabout’s main cabin thrown into bleak relief.

  And then the compartment quieted and the lighting returned to normal levels. Kira turned back to the main console to see that her transmission with Taran’atar had ended. She quickly consulted the sensor readouts.

  Taran’atar and his ship were gone.

  * * *

  With Seltiq’s order for the armada to attack Bajor ringing in her ears, Iliana Ghemor gazed out through the transparent canopy of her ship. In all directions, Ascendant vessels moved into position and assumed an attack posture. A glance at her sensors showed every ship’s shields at maximum power, and all their weapons energized. At long last, her revenge was at hand.

  Ghemor checked her scans once more and saw that the vessel Kira piloted no longer flew toward Bajor. Rather, it had stopped in space. Still close enough for her scans to show the Ascendants reducing the surface of her homeworld to ashes.

  Ghemor’s sensors also showed the other ship approaching the rear of the armada. It did not read as a Starfleet vessel, nor like any other she had ever seen. Ghemor worked her controls to scan it in greater detail, wanting to know about its offensive and defensive capabilities, but before she could, its signature blinked. The ship vanished for a moment before reappearing and seeming to rapidly expand in size, like concentric ripples in a body of water, but in three dimensions. An alert on her display identified the growing spheres as subspace waves.

  Alarmed about the deployment of some formidable weapon that could incapacitate or even destroy the armada, Ghemor set a course to flee, but too late. The waves propagated faster than they could have in normal space and swept through the Ascendant ships. None of
the vessels showed any ill effects as the subspace oscillations passed, but that was not what Ghemor feared.

  As rapidly as she could, she rearmed the subspace weapon, then launched it toward the surface of Bajor. She watched the missile streak away. Suddenly, the view before her quivered. Color drained from everything she saw—no, not the color, but the essence of everything. Reality all at once felt weak and insubstantial.

  Ghemor held her hand up before her face. She flexed her fingers, testing her own physicality. As she did so, the light in the cockpit increased in intensity, and the air appeared to gain some measure of . . . heft.

  Through the rising glow, a point of light flared into existence. Ghemor looked out through the transparent canopy of her ship once more and saw that the subspace waves had reached the missile even before it had entered the atmosphere. The metaweapon detonated, and Ghemor had just enough time to hope that the explosion would still destroy every living thing on Bajor.

  Then space tore asunder.

  * * *

  “Captain,” said Bowers at the tactical station, “sensors are detecting a . . . an eruption of subspace.”

  Vaughn stood up from the command chair, uncertain just what the lieutenant had reported. “An eruption?” he asked, making no effort to hide his confusion.

  “Aye, sir,” Bowers said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as though a region of subspace has come unmoored, penetrated into normal space-time, and is now gushing through the aperture.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ve isolated the area on scans,” Nog said. “It’s near the trailing edge of the Ascendant fleet, away from Bajor.”

  “Put it on-screen,” Vaughn ordered. “Maximum magnification.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ling. She worked her console, and the Ascendant ships displayed on the main viewer winked off, replaced by a region of seemingly empty space. Vaughn saw nothing.

  “Lieutenant Bowers?” he asked.

  “Charting a representation of the eruption,” Bowers said. The viewer changed again. In the center of the screen, bright blue spheres began emerging from a single point, expanding as they moved outward. “The lines denote subspace waves.”

  “Is it an Ascendant weapon?” Vaughn asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Bowers said. “There was a ship at that location, but it wasn’t an Ascendant vessel. It was Taran’atar’s ship.”

  “It was his ship?”

  “The eruption appears to have destroyed it,” Bowers said.

  Despite the news of Taran’atar’s sudden demise, Vaughn thought he saw a ray of hope. “Did Taran’atar launch a weapon?” he asked. “Are the subspace waves destroying the Ascendant ships?”

  “Negative,” Bowers said. “It appears to have been the violence of the eruption that blew apart Taran’atar’s vessel. The subspace waves are passing over the Ascendant ships without effect.”

  “Captain,” Nog called out, “Ghemor has launched the missile towed behind her ship. It’s headed for Bajor.”

  Vaughn supposed that many people—perhaps most people—would have felt a sense of dread at that moment. Taran’atar had reported that the Ascendants possessed a subspace weapon—a devastating destructive device—and the Defiant crew suspected the missile Ghemor towed behind her ship to be that weapon. They would apparently find out shortly, but the people of Bajor could pay a significant price for that knowledge.

  The possibility that the weapon could cause mass casualties saddened Vaughn, especially since the circumstances denied him and the Defiant crew the capacity to prevent such a calamity. Rather than dread, though, he felt a sense of futility. During his long tenure in Starfleet, most of which he had spent in Intelligence, Vaughn had helped avert numerous tragedies—events that, had they been allowed to reach fruition, would have resulted in untold death and destruction. But he had not always succeeded in his missions, which often left him with the enervating feeling that he could have—should have—done something differently. More even than his failures, though, the simple need for somebody like him—somebody to stand against tyranny and terrorism, against avarice and powermongering, against benighted self-interest and crippling ignorance—had spawned an abiding cynicism within him. Vaughn found it difficult to reconcile the evils of the universe with his natural desire merely to live a happy life.

  Except on our mission to the Gamma Quadrant. Vaughn’s command of Defiant on a three-month journey into unexplored space had proven the most fulfilling assignment of his career. But that had been more than a year prior, and while he’d enjoyed his posting to DS9, he had more often been charged with stopping various factions from achieving nefarious goals than he had been with discovering the marvels of the universe. And here I am again, facing down a madwoman attacking a planetary population with a terrible weapon.

  “Put it on-screen,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ling, and the scene on the main viewer shifted once more. The bright blue-green orb of Bajor appeared. A horde of Ascendant ships hung in space above it. One graphic identified Ghemor’s stationary vessel, while another tracked a shape moving toward the planet.

  A possibility suddenly rose in Vaughn’s mind. “Superimpose the subspace waves,” he ordered. Bowers complied at once, and the expanding concentric spheres appeared at the edge of the screen, moving toward Bajor. They traveled faster than the missile Ghemor had launched, and the outermost subspace wave quickly overtook it. When it did, the point of intersection exploded in a brilliant flash of white light.

  “What happened?” Vaughn asked, though he already knew: Taran’atar had done something in an attempt to save the people of Bajor.

  “The subspace waves have triggered the missile,” Bowers said. “Scans show that it was a subspace weapon, with a yield—” The tactical officer abruptly stopped talking, then looked up from his console with a grave expression on his face. “It was an isolytic subspace weapon.”

  Vaughn knew the destructive power of subspace weapons in general, but an isolytic version could literally tear apart huge tracts of the space-time continuum. As if to confirm his understanding, a great, dark gash appeared on the main viewscreen, a fissure somehow blacker than space itself. It tore like a streak of lightning above Bajor, originating at the point of the missile’s detonation and jagging back toward the nearest vessel: Ghemor’s ship. The hull cleaved in two before disintegrating in a coruscation of rusty gold, as though reduced to its component atoms. Vaughn thought—he hoped—that the destruction might seal the fracture that had opened in space.

  It didn’t.

  The rent in space-time multiplied, ripping the structure of reality apart in different directions. The ruptures zigzagged from one Ascendant ship to another, ripping them to pieces before causing them to crumble into nothingness. One of Bajor’s weapons platforms, and then another, split apart before degenerating into nothingness. Several assault vessels that had not cleared the area in time were minced to pieces. Some of the Ascendant ships began to move away from the advancing destruction, but Vaughn knew that power—and in particular warp power—attracted the subspace tears. The reason for the message that Kira had passed on from Taran’atar—that Yolja and Defiant should stay away from the Ascendant fleet, and that the Bajoran assault vessels should retreat—became abundantly clear.

  “Shut down the warp drive,” Vaughn said.

  “Sir?” Nog said, peering over at him from his engineering station.

  “We can’t outrun the fissures at sublight speed, and if we go to warp, we’ll only drag them along behind us until we slow. Shut down all noncritical systems, and prepare to eject and detonate the warp core.” If they timed it correctly, they could use the exploding core to seal the subspace breaches.

  “Yes, sir,” Nog said, and he set to work at his console.

  On the viewscreen, space continued to splinter, destroying one Ascendant ship after another as it did so. Vaughn feared that at any moment, one of the clefts in space-time would head toward Bajor. If any of the worl
d’s power supplies drew the subspace splits, the entire population—and even Bajor itself—would be at risk of destruction. As Vaughn and his crew looked on, though, the framework of broken space spread, but not in the direction of the planet.

  “Captain,” Bowers said, “several of the fissures are growing close to Endalla.”

  Endalla! Bajor’s largest natural satellite, the moon possessed a basic ecology, with a thin but breathable atmosphere, and liquid water on the surface. No advanced fauna had evolved there, but simple flora had. Over the previous few years, several thousand scientists had taken up periods of residence on the planetoid to perform local research.

  “Ensign Tenmei, set course for the nearest fissure, maximum impulse,” Vaughn said. “Lieutenant Nog, are we prepared to jettison the warp core?”

  “We will be shortly, Captain,” Nog said. “Shutdown protocols are proceeding.”

  “Ensign Tenmei, take us in close enough for us to fire the warp core directly into the breach, but no closer,” Vaughn said. He thought to tell Prynn that if any new fissures formed in the direction of Defiant, she should immediately withdraw, but such a strategy held no chance for success, since the subspace ruptures generated at faster-than-light speeds.

  “Yes, sir,” Prynn said.

  As Defiant once more came to life around the crew, Vaughn moved back to the command chair and sat down. “Show me Endalla,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ling.

  The chain-reaction destruction of the Ascendant fleet disappeared from the main viewer, and Endalla took its place. Occasional streaks of white showed above the mostly brown-and-green globe. “How long before the subspace fissures overtake the moon?” Vaughn asked.

  “It’s impossible to predict with accuracy,” Bowers said, “but probably between thirty and ninety seconds.”

  “And how long before we’re close enough to fire the warp core into a breach?” Vaughn asked.

  “At least five minutes, Captain,” Prynn said. Vaughn wondered if any of the crew could hear the dismay she tried to keep out of her voice.