by David Mack
A blinding beam of orange energy slashed across the main viewscreen, and as Dax’s eyes recovered from the flash, she saw a starship’s phaser blast rip into the Parham’s impulse engine, which erupted in a white-hot burst of ignited plasma.
Dax watched the small freighter spiral erratically into the atmosphere. Enraged, she sprang to her feet. “What was that?”
Everyone raced to update their consoles. Kedair answered first. “Not us, sir! That shot came from the Warspite!” The image on the main screen switched to show the Sovereign-class starship cruising into orbit from behind the Aventine.
An alert chimed on Mirren’s panel. “They’re charging up for another shot!”
“Helm! Put us between them and the Parham! Mirren, hail the Warspite!”
The Aventine’s engines whined and its hull groaned in protest as Tharp forced the ship through a sudden deceleration and turn into its sister ship’s line of fire. At the operations console, Mirren worked with speed born of terror before she looked back at Dax. “I have commander, Warspite, on channel one.”
“On-screen.” Dax strode forward to present the most formidable image possible.
Looking back at her from the main viewscreen was Captain Steven Unverzagt. The human commanding officer of the Warspite was an imposing figure: tall, broad-shouldered, and densely muscled. His face was defined by a strong, proud chin, a dark and well-kept beard, and a head of thick black hair worn slightly longer than was considered customary for Starfleet officers. His gray eyes and heavy brow combined to give him an intense stare that seemed engineered to shred lies and break down pretenses. He leaned forward on one elbow and eyed Dax with unfiltered irritation. “Captain, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Hold your fire, Captain.”
“I’ll do no such thing. Move your ship out of my firing solution.”
Dax glanced back at Kedair. “Lieutenant, shields to full, and lock phasers and torpedoes on the Warspite. If they fire on the freighter again, return fire.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Unverzagt simmered behind narrowed eyes. “You’re letting Bashir get away.”
“No, I’m stopping you from causing an interstellar incident. The Parham was inside Andor’s atmosphere when you fired on it. That means you attacked a civilian ship with deadly force while it was under Andorian jurisdiction. That’s a crime, Captain.” She threw another look back at Kedair. “Lieutenant?”
“Weapons locked on the Warspite, sir.”
Faced off against her burly, bearish peer, Dax exorcised any trace of anxiety from her face or her voice. “Final warning, Captain. Stand down or I will fire on your ship.”
Unverzagt’s resentment was plain to see. “You’ll regret this, Captain.”
The transmission ended without notice, but a moment later Mirren noted a change on her console. “The Warspite has powered down its weapons and lowered its shields.”
Bowers faced the viewscreen. “Looks like the damage is done, though.”
Dax’s heart sank as she watched the Parham plunge toward Andor’s surface in a flat spin, trailing smoke and shedding debris from its unshielded and overheated hull. If Bashir and the others were trapped inside the crippled freighter, they were as good as dead.
• • •
All that Bashir could see or smell was smoke. It tasted of burnt plastics and overheated metal, and it was blacker than night. Its heavy particulate dust was a sticky, insidious poison that adhered to his skin and infiltrated his nostrils, his ears, his pores.
It was all but impossible to imagine anything being loud enough to rise above the death wail of the Parham’s crippled engines and power core, but somehow Captain Harris’s violent cursing cut through the high-pitched shriek of rushing wind and shredding metal. The scrappy pilot remained strapped into his command chair at the helm, fighting and failing to make his hobbled ship obey even the simplest commands. Bashir and Shar alternated between being pinned to one bulkhead or another and being hurled about like rag dolls in a broken centrifuge.
A crack cut across the ship’s forward viewport, and half a second later hundreds of fissures branched off that first break and one another, spiderwebbing the transparasteel panel.
Harris craned his head back, over the top of his seat, and shouted something at Shar and Bashir. The words got lost in the banshee howl of the Parham’s uncontrolled descent. Bashir looked at Shar to see if he’d understood, only to see his own confused expression mirrored on the young Andorian’s soot-stained face. They both shook their heads at Harris, who rolled his eyes, drew a chestful of air, and bellowed, “Get in the goddamn escape pod! Now!”
Shar was next to the pod’s open hatchway, and he pulled himself through it just before another wild roll of the ship would have hurled him aft. He powered up the controls for the pod as Bashir fought his way across the narrow passageway. At the hatchway’s edge, Shar stopped him from entering and pointed at the hatch and ejection-system control panel. It showed nothing but a jumble of symbols and half-formed interface graphics, none of which were functional. Bashir pointed inside the pod at the guidance controls, which flickered to life. Shar leaned back, checked the panel, then turned back toward Bashir to flash a thumbs-up confirmation.
Bashir pulled himself forward, toward the cockpit. As he edged inside the cramped space, one of the secondary starboard consoles exploded, filling the cockpit with smoky bits of polymer shrapnel. Harris ducked behind his raised arm for cover, then saw Bashir as he lowered his hand. “What the hell are you doin’, Doc? Get in the pod!”
“The ejection controls are fried!”
“I know. Been meanin’ to get ’em fixed. Serves me right, I guess.”
A hard jolt rocked the ship to port, and then its nose plunged, and Bashir was pinned to the back of Harris’s chair. “What do you mean?”
Harris’s hands flew across his console, struggling to route every last bit of power to just two systems: the structural integrity field and the escape pod. His voice began to crack from the strain of besting the noise. “I can launch the pod from here. Get in and I’ll do the rest.”
Yelling over the roar of the blazing wreck left Bashir hoarse. “What about you?”
“I’m done for, Doc. I fired on a Starfleet ship. They’ll never let me fly again, and I ain’t goin’ to jail. This is it for me, so go! I’ll hold her steady.”
He grabbed Harris’s shoulder and made the man look at him. “You’re sure?”
There was no fear in Harris’s eyes. “Doc, this is the best thing I’ve ever done. . . . Go.”
Bashir left Harris and clawed his way over sparking consoles and imploding bulkhead panels to the escape pod. He motioned Shar deeper inside, then clambered in after him.
As soon as Bashir was fully inside the pod, the hatch rolled shut behind him. Deep thumps and vibrations in the hull signaled the release of the magnetic clamps, and half a second later he and Shar were pinned to the aft hatch as the pod rocketed away from the Parham, streaking through Andor’s mesosphere like a bullet shrouded in fire.
The inertial dampers kicked in a few seconds later, and the two old friends tumbled in free fall. Shar tapped a command into the guidance system, and the pod ceased its rolling. Once the view through the aft hatch’s viewport stabilized, they both looked back.
In the distance, trapped in the hazy realm between the vacuum of space and the cushion of atmosphere, the Parham was a dark projectile, tumbling and rolling, spewing smoke and casting off pieces of its hull. Then a great flash consumed the vessel from within, and its shattered remains spread across the sky like a flower of smoke.
Bashir pushed back against his sorrow; there was no time for it—not yet. All he could do was promise himself he would make sure the name of Emerson Harris was remembered with his own when people spoke of who helped save the Andorians from a premature oblivion.
Shar placed a consoling hand on Bashir’s shoulder. “My condolences, Julian. We were lucky you had such a brave friend.”
“Then we should count ourselves doubly fortunate. Most people don’t inspire such courage in strangers.” The chan pulled himself back toward the guidance controls and started programming landing coordinates.
Bashir watched over Shar’s shoulder. “We’re heading for the plains of Kathela?”
“No, but this pod is. I can’t take a chance on anyone tracking us to the Science Institute’s dark site. Even with the change in the government, secrecy is the only protection they have.” He finished his computations and locked in the pod’s descent profile. Then he turned to the communications panel, set up an encrypted channel, and sent out a simple message consisting only of what looked to Bashir like random numerals.
A moment later came the reply—another string of numerals, followed by symbols. Shar copied the new information and added it to his comm’s cipher code. Then he opened an audio channel. “Shar to Professor zh’Thiin. Do you read me, Professor?”
A crackle of static was followed by a woman’s voice. “Yes, Shar. Go ahead.”
“I’m with Doctor Bashir, and he has the cure. We’re in an escape pod on approach, and we need you to beam us down as soon as possible.”
“Acknowledged. Locking onto your signal now. Stand by to transport.”
Bashir shot a quizzical look at his friend. “Where, exactly, are we going?”
“Let me put it this way: If you like ice fishing, you’re in for a treat.”
Twenty-six
“I am forced to conclude, Admiral, that you have lost all control over the mission to Andor.”
On the face of it, the president pro tem’s assertion was hard for Akaar to refute. “This situation is complex and potentially explosive, Mister President. Given the delicate state of our political relationship with Andor, I would argue that Captain Dax’s actions were in the best—”
“They were insubordinate,” Ishan cut in, his anger verging on incandescent, “not to mention harmful to the interests of Federation security.”
Akaar smothered his temper as he faced his commander in chief via the secure subspace channel being transmitted from the high-warp transport designated as Starfleet One. “So far, sir, I see no actual harm. Handled correctly, we could turn these events to our advantage.”
The Bajoran waved off Akaar’s suggestion. “I don’t want to hear any more about your agenda for peace, Admiral. I want to hear how you plan to deal with Captain Dax.”
“At the moment, I see no reason to take a hand in the matter.”
“She threatened to fire on another Starfleet vessel!”
The accusation hung between them, unanswered, while Akaar wondered how the president pro tem had already acquired such detailed intelligence regarding the confrontation between the Aventine and the Warspite. Akaar had already transferred Commander Sarai out of Starfleet Command to a less sensitive posting on Luna, so if Ishan or one of his senior advisers had a source inside Starfleet’s headquarters, he had no idea who it might be. Then he considered the possibility that Ishan, who had already demonstrated a keen disregard for the protocols of the chain of command, might have bypassed him and made direct contact with Captain Unverzagt on the Warspite. Either way, his up-to-the-minute knowledge of events in the field boded ill.
“Under the circumstances, sir, I think Captain Dax acted within the law. If anyone is deserving of a closer review, I would suggest it’s Captain Unverzagt.”
Ishan’s seemingly omnipresent Tellarite adviser, Velk, leaned into the frame and whispered in his ear. The Bajoran gave his counselor a quick nod, then motioned him away. “Let’s move on for now, shall we? What are we doing to get Bashir off Andor?”
The question, to Akaar’s chagrin, was just what he’d expected. “Legally, we have no right to do so. If the Andorians capture him, we can ask them to extradite him.”
“The Andorians? Why would they arrest him? As far as they’re concerned, his only crime so far might be trespassing.” Ishan grumbled under his breath and shook his head in frustration. “No, Admiral. We can’t just sit back and wait for them to hand Bashir back to us. We need to go in there and get him before he turns over classified data that could do us real harm.”
Akaar feared the conversation’s next turn. “What are you suggesting, sir?”
“Don’t pretend we aren’t speaking the same language, Admiral. I want you to arrange a covert operation on the surface of Andor, to find Bashir and return him alive to the Warspite.”
“Such an operation would be a violation of Andorian sovereignty, sir.”
“Which is why it has to be covert. The Falchion will arrive at Andor in a few minutes. I want you to task them with keeping the Aventine neutralized while the Warspite completes its mission. Is that understood?”
The more Akaar heard, the more discomfited he became. “Sir, please clarify what you mean when you say you want the Falchion to ‘neutralize’ the Aventine.”
“Captain Dax has demonstrated a propensity for ignoring, subverting, and outright disobeying my orders. I have no doubt that if she is informed of our intention to recapture Bashir, she’ll take action to prevent it. So I’ll make this as clear as I can, Admiral: Captain Dax is not to be informed of this operation in any way, either generally or specifically. To that end, the Falchion’s mission will be to isolate the Aventine from the chain of command and prevent it from communicating with other ships or entities on the planet’s surface. If the Aventine tries to take action against this operation, or if it does anything that seems contrary to our interest in containing the Meta-Genome data, the Falchion is authorized to do anything necessary to stop her. Confirm for me that you understand my order and that you will carry it out.”
“I understand your orders, sir, but I also have a responsibility to warn you of their potential consequences. If a covert operation on Andor goes wrong, or inflicts any degree of collateral damage, it could serve to alienate the Andorians even further from the Federation—perhaps far enough to drive them into an alliance with the Typhon Pact.”
His warning seemed to amuse Ishan. “Then so be it. If Andor allies itself with our rivals, I’ll have no choice but to show them what a grievous mistake that is—and let them serve as an example to the rest of our member-worlds that they’re better off with us than against us.”
Akaar gave up any hope of reasoning with the man. It was clear that Ishan had made up his mind—or that someone had made it up for him—on everything from foreign policy to the minutiae of Starfleet’s command-and-control process, and contrary opinions were unwelcome. “Very well, sir. I’ll relay your orders to Captain Unverzagt. Unless, of course, someone in your office has already taken the liberty of relieving me of that necessity.”
A brief but venomous silence conveyed Ishan’s displeasure at Akaar’s dry jibe. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you as soon as you have Bashir back in custody. Good luck, Admiral.” Without waiting for acknowledgment or valediction, Ishan ended the transmission.
There was no question in Akaar’s mind of what he had to do. He had his orders, and he would see them carried out in good faith, just as he had sworn to do many decades ago. But whether the mission at hand ended in success or tragedy, he knew that it would set a terrible precedent. It was not merely that Ishan was overly belligerent and too quick to resort to force that troubled Akaar. It was that Ishan was reckless, vindictive, and petty. These were not admirable qualities in any leader; in the person of a Federation president, they could be disastrous.
One crisis at a time, Akaar reminded himself as he left his office to set in motion the president pro tem’s ill-considered plan. For now, I must deal with this and do all I can to prevent a calamity. And tomorrow, when this is done . . . then I will begin to deal with Ishan.
• • •
The drawing of blood for analysis was a simple procedure, one that required only two persons: a patient from whom blood was being taken, and a phlebotomist to perfo
rm the procedure. In fact, there was no reason why, given the conveniences of modern medical science, a trained medical professional could not draw a sample of his or her own blood, completely unassisted.
Consequently, it struck Bashir as a touch of overkill that nearly every member of Professor zh’Thiin’s staff at the Science Institute’s dark site was pressed in upon the two of them in a tight huddle, in the middle of the main laboratory. A host of Andorian faces representing all of the species’s ethnic variations—antennae in front or in back, skin tones in more than a dozen hues of blue, and countless subtleties of physiognomy and antenna shape—watched with wide eyes and bated breath as zh’Thiin used a hypospray to draw a primary sample of Bashir’s blood. No one spoke as she switched out the removable ampoule on the hypospray and drew a second backup sample. Then she passed the two clear cylinders filled with red human blood to one of the mesmerized witnesses. “Get these into the sequencer and isolate the retrovirus.”
The lanky researcher hurried across the lab, and the gathered knot of his peers parted ahead of him, their deference to his passage almost reverent. Half the group followed him to the molecular sequencer at the far end of the vast room, while the rest lingered around Bashir, Shar, and Professor zh’Thiin, who put away her hypo syringe.
Bashir massaged the tender spot on his forearm from which the serum samples had been extracted. “How long will it take you to isolate the retrovirus?”
“If it’s as unique as you said, we should be able to separate it from your blood and map its gene sequence in under an hour.”
Shar’s mood was less optimistic. “The real problem is what to do with it after that.”
“What do you mean?” Bashir rolled down his sleeve. He looked back and forth between Shar and zh’Thiin. “Are you saying you don’t have mass-production capabilities?”
“We do,” zh’Thiin said. “Several of them, all over the planet. What we don’t have right now is a secure way of getting the quantum pattern to them for industrial replication.”
