by David Mack
The Cardassian grimaced and clenched his jaw. Something inside his mouth clicked, and a flash of light erupted behind his eyes. He sagged in Data’s grip, with dark ochre blood running from his nostrils and ears, and the whites of his eyes turned mud brown as their capillaries burst.
Data dropped the dead man and regarded him with an emotion Lal took for a mélange of sorrow and disappointment. She moved to her father’s side and looked at the dead Cardassian. The air inside the room was thick with the sulfurous bite of fired projectiles and the ferric odor of spilled blood. “What happened to him, Father?”
“He appears to have activated some kind of suicide module rather than be interrogated.”
“But . . . why?” Orange lights flashed through the windows, illuminating the carnage.
Her father led her out of the room. “Because, Lal, he was working for someone—or something—whose wrath he feared more than death itself.”
• • •
Darkness dropped and an arm closed around Bashir’s neck. He had just started to wonder what was keeping Sarina when the power failed, and now he knew.
A backward toss of his head, and he heard the crunch of buckling cartilage and a broken nasal bone. He jabbed his elbows at the attacker behind him and was rewarded by the cracking of ribs and the other man’s pained grunts. The man’s viselike hold on Bashir’s throat slackened enough for Bashir to get his left hand under it, and he pivoted into an aikido throw that sent his opponent sprawling across the pitch-black bedroom. Then he ran.
Three steps into the suite’s main room someone clotheslined him in the dark, and he landed hard on his back, gasping for breath.
Enhanced reflexes don’t do me much good when I can’t see.
He waited for his second attacker to reach down and grab hold of him. Then Bashir pulled the man off balance and dragged him down to the floor. Even in the dark, Bashir could tell he was grappling with a Cardassian—he felt the ridges of the man’s clavicles and the protruding tear-dropped ridge over his sternum.
The Cardassian was stronger and within seconds was on the verge of pinning Bashir. Grunts from the bedroom suggested the first attacker was back on his feet. Fighting one of them at a time was hard enough for Bashir, who, despite his Starfleet training, had never excelled at hand-to-hand combat or close-quarters battle. He had trained to be a doctor, not a soldier.
That’s it, he realized. Think like a doctor.
In the span of a breath he called upon every arcane fact he had ever learned about Cardassian anatomy—and he recalled that their neck ridges were especially sensitive. That made them erogenous zones for Cardassians—as well as dangerous vulnerabilities.
Bashir freed his right hand and struck his foe’s left clavicle with his palm. The bone snapped with a sickening wet crack. The second Cardassian toppled aside unconscious, freeing Bashir, who scrambled back to his feet in time to meet his first assailant.
Flashing orange lights from a Cardassian police hovercar outside the window acted as a strobe, stuttering the first intruder’s approach. In one hand the stealth-suited Cardassian held a hypospray; in the other, a knife. Bashir thought he caught the ghost of a smirk through the mask.
“Surrender, Doctor, and this won’t have to hurt.”
“It already hurts.”
“It can always hurt more, I assure you.”
There was no time to scrounge a weapon, and the Cardassian blocked Bashir’s path to the door. The doctor pulled off his jacket and coiled it around his left forearm, hoping it might dull or delay the sting of his attacker’s blade, though he knew it would likely make little difference. Unarmed against a trained killer, Bashir didn’t expect to last long.
Cold steel slashed the air in front of his face. He retreated, then deflected a jab coming back the other way. The knife’s tip sliced through his jacket, leaving tatters and loose threads in its wake. A few seconds more, and I’ll be the one in tatters.
A golden glint on a steely edge was just enough warning for Bashir to dodge what would have been a fatal cut at his throat. He retaliated before the Cardassian could bring the blade back for another stroke, landed the side of his fist on the space between his foe’s neck and shoulder. The Cardassian staggered, then he lunged with the knife. Only the benefit of Bashir’s genetically enhanced reflexes enabled him to catch the Cardassian’s wrist and halt the blow.
Just as quickly, he regretted it.
Under the mask, the Cardassian snickered. “You can’t stop what’s coming.”
It was true, and Bashir knew it. The Cardassian was stronger than him, and now that Bashir had both hands occupied, he was trapped. This was all going to come down to a contest of strength, one that Bashir couldn’t hope to win.
Between them, the knifepoint crept closer to Bashir’s gut.
There was no sound of stress or strain in the Cardassian’s cruel, mocking tone. “You should’ve just let me take you, little man. Now you get to savor every moment as my knife pushes through your stomach.”
“That’s my spleen, actually.” The space between blade and flesh shrank by the second. Four centimeters. Three centimeters.
Sweat beaded on Bashir’s forehead and rolled in battalions down his back. His heartbeat thudded in his temples as he fought to control his breathing and focus his strength, all to postpone the inevitable. The muscles in his arms quaked from the effort of resistance, and his hands trembled, promising that when the knife finally bit into him, it would be messy and slow.
Two centimeters. One.
Bashir would have looked his attacker in the eye if not for the stealth mask concealing his face. He felt his arms shake. His fight was about to come to an end. He gathered a mouthful of blood and saliva and spent his last ounce of strength spitting it in his assassin’s face.
Then a pale hand reached out of the dark and clamped onto the base of the Cardassian’s neck, just above his shoulder. The Cardassian tensed and froze. Then all his forward pressure against the knife abated, and he crumpled to the floor, revealing Data standing behind him. The android let go of the intruder and stepped toward Bashir. “Doctor. Are you hurt?”
“I’ll live.” He saw Lal a few meters behind Data, but no one else, and at once he feared the worst. “Sarina and Ozla—have you seen them?”
“We had hoped they were with you.”
Bashir hurried toward the door. “Come on, we need to find them!”
The androids followed him as he ran from the suite and headed for the nearest stairwell. On the move, Lal asked, “How do you know they’re still alive?”
Was she oblivious of the implications of her question? Bashir didn’t have time to explain the virtue of hope, so he stuck to the facts. “They tried to take me alive, so they might have taken them, too.” His next thought he kept to himself.
At least I hope they did.
• • •
Nauseated and dizzy, Ozla stirred to find herself bobbing with a steady cadence. Something pushed against her abdomen, churning the remnants of her last meal and a surge of bile up her esophagus.
Where am I? What’s happening?
She could barely remember her own name, much less how she’d ended up in this predicament. Trying to piece together moments from recent memory felt like pushing through a woolen fog. Alone with her hazy thoughts, she felt disembodied. Lost.
Think, damn it! Why am I so groggy? I— Vertigo spun through her skull, and she came to a sudden realization. I’m upside down.
A second of focused thought clarified her understanding: she was draped over someone’s shoulder and being carried upstairs in the dark. Who the hell is this guy?
Her thoughts flooded back in a jumble, without order or logic.
Flashing amber light. My suitcase, half packed and open on my bed. Pain flaring white—something hit the back of my head. Garak telling us to travel light. The fleeting ti
ngle of a hypospray against my carotid artery. Falling to the floor, numb and paralyzed.
It’s the drugs, she realized. Had to be. She drifted in the grip of twilight sedation, struggled against the sensation that her present was nothing but an illusion, a waking dream, a cruel phantasmagoria that would dissolve at any moment.
Keen awareness returned rudely, in the form of a hot surge of emesis. Ozla spewed vomit down the stairs behind her and her captor, who halted his ascent at the sound of her violent retching. “Dammit, she’s awake,” he said in Cardassian. “Told you the dose was light.”
His comrade returned from the flight above and prepped a fresh hypospray as he approached Ozla. “Keep her still.” His accent, like his partner’s, suggested he was a native of Cardassia Prime, most likely from the capital city or its close exurban sprawl.
In the dim glow of battery-powered emergency lights on the landings between flights, all that Ozla could see of her two kidnappers was that they were tall, male, and dressed in head-to-toe tactical outfits with vision-enhancing goggles. Desperate to remain awake as long as possible, she played for time. “Did Section Thirty-one send you? Or the Orion Syndicate?”
“Quiet,” said the one with the hypospray. He put it to her neck and dosed her again.
As she drew a new breath, she felt the edges of her reality push inward, as if she were sinking into a deep pit within her own mind. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Her porter sounded almost apologetic. “It’s nothing personal.” The last thing she heard before sinking back into oblivion was his meek protest, “It’s just a job we do.”
• • •
Bashir knew there was only one thing keeping Data and Lal from sprinting up one flight of stairs after another and leaving him far behind: the suppressing fire the Cardassian abductors rained down from the landings ahead of them each time they started to close in.
Data and Lal made it halfway around the next landing’s switchback turn before ducking back to cover. Bullets ricocheted off the walls ahead as Bashir caught up to them. Data, listening intently, signaled him and Lal to wait. With their superior hearing, the androids could tell when the kidnappers were moving and when they were laying traps.
Bashir asked in a whisper, “Any luck calling for help?”
A frown from Data. “Not yet. They are jamming all frequencies.”
The markings on the wall indicated they were less than two flights of stairs from the roof. “Won’t their signal jammers prevent them from beaming out?”
“Yes. But I suspect they have pulse-shielded transports waiting on the roof.” A tilt of his head. “They’re moving.” Just like that, Data resumed running up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time, climbing with unflagging speed and his daughter right behind him.
By the time Bashir caught up to them, they had reached the roof. Steady cracks and pops filled the night as the Cardassians harassed the androids—and now Bashir—with alternating barrages to prevent pursuit. Beyond the roof’s edge, military police hovercars circled but didn’t approach or fire. Watching them hang back from the fray, Bashir felt his temper rise. “What the hell are they waiting for? Why don’t they do something?”
“There is nothing they can do, Doctor,” Data said. “If they enter the dampening field, their vehicles will crash, and charged plasma from their pulse weapons dissipates on contact with the edge of the dampening screen.”
A close ricochet tore paint off the wall above Bashir’s head, prompting him to duck a bit farther out of sight. “We can’t just sit here and do nothing!”
“Agreed. That is why I am triangulating the approximate position of their energy dampener, gauging the wind speed and direction, and performing a spectral analysis of the conduit piping over our heads.” He pointed at the labyrinth of metallic tubes running along the corner where the walls met the ceiling. “Lal, please hand me the section of pipe located between the pressure-release valve and the Y-joint.”
Lal looked up at the pipe her father had described, then leaped straight up and grabbed a different pipe. Dangling one-handed, she braced her feet against other pipes running lower on the wall, then took hold of the one her father had asked for—and tore it free as if were nothing more than a dry twig on a dead tree branch. Releasing the overhead pipe, she dropped and landed with effortless grace, then handed the liberated pipe section to Data.
He accepted it with quiet gratitude. “Thank you, Lal.” Working it with the ease of a sculptor molding clay, Data crushed and shaped one end of the pipe into a fearsome spiral point. Holding the pipe at its center, he tested its weight and balance. “Yes, I think this will suffice.” He looked at Bashir. “Doctor, are you armed?”
“Not as such, no.”
A nod, then Data lifted his tunic and opened a panel on his torso—an action Bashir found jarring because of how otherwise ordinary Data’s appearance presently was. To see such a stark reminder of his true nature seemed almost grotesque, an offense against a beautiful illusion. From a hidden compartment inside his abdomen, Data removed a compact type-1 phaser and handed it to Bashir. “I trust you will wait until the opportune moment to use this.”
“Naturally.”
Data turned once again toward his daughter and directed her attention to a panel on the wall beside the open doorway. “On the count of three, trigger the roof’s fire-suppression system. After that, remain here until I call for you.”
“Understood,” Lal said.
“One. Two. Three!”
Lal threw the switch, and automated firefighting systems outside blanketed the roof in a nontoxic but fire-smothering fog four meters deep. Into that chalky white soup Data launched his makeshift spear. It vanished into the chemical cloud. Half a second later came a bright metallic clang of impact, followed by a muffled boom and a short-lived crimson glow.
“The dampening field is down,” Data said. “Lal, summon help! Doctor, wait for your shot!” Before Bashir could ask Data what he meant to do, the android charged ahead and vanished into the roof’s dense blanket of white.
Disruptor blasts shot out of the cloud, wild flurries dispersed on seemingly random trajectories—exactly what Bashir would expect from someone blindly defending a fixed point. A handful of blasts caromed into the stairwell past him and Lal.
Outside a pair of police vehicles descended toward the roof, but a disruptor barrage pulverized one hovercar’s stabilizing thruster. From the doorway, Bashir watched in sympathetic horror as the vehicle spun out of control, nicked the rooftop’s edge, then plummeted toward the ground in a flat spin. Moments later he heard the crash, and a spire of flames climbed skyward. By then the second police vehicle had retreated out of range and the direct line of fire.
Their cowardice filled Bashir with contempt.
Way to protect and serve.
High-pitched shrieks of braking thrusters split the night and turned his eyes skyward. A pair of dropships descended like falling stones toward the rooftop. Just shy of impact they fired their antigravs and maneuvering thrusters to touch down with safe but bone-rattling force. Air displaced by their arrival banished the fire-suppressing haze—and revealed Data, out in the open and about to get lit up by one of the dropships’ automated antipersonnel plasma cannons.
That’s my cue. Bashir pivoted out of the door, aimed at the plasma cannon’s mounting assembly, and fired his phaser on full power. The orange beam cut through the weapon’s mounting with ease and triggered a secondary blast that left the weapon crippled and smoldering.
It was a great shot, one of the best he’d ever landed. But he had no time to celebrate, because as soon as the cannon was neutralized, the Cardassians holding Ozla and Sarina returned fire at him, as did half a dozen of their brothers-in-arms aboard the dropships.
The smart thing to do would have been to dive back toward the stairs and hit the deck as energy blasts raged through the doorway. Instead
Bashir charged onto the roof, firing back, trusting his reflexes and sheer dumb luck to get him to cover behind a ventilator housing a few meters from the door. In defiance of the laws of probability, he made it to shelter alive.
Through the wild crisscross of disruptor bolts and his phaser beams, he saw the kidnappers haul Sarina and Ozla toward the farther of the two dropships.
Huddled behind an elevator motor housing a few meters away, Data called to him, “Doctor! Throw me the phaser!”
Bashir tried to aim a shot to take down the abductors without hitting the women, but even his genetically enhanced coordination couldn’t compensate for the frenzy of battle and the destabilizing effect of adrenaline. There was no time to argue, no time to indulge stupid pride.
He lobbed the phaser to Data, who leaped and caught the weapon in midair, aimed as he fell toward the roof, and fired what Bashir would have sworn was an impossible shot, one that threaded minuscule gaps between clusters of rooftop pipes and machinery, to strike Ozla’s captor in the lower back, just above his hip, and drop him in a heap.
But the man carrying Sarina ducked inside the dropship, whose side hatch closed behind him. Its engines whined as it launched, and the second dropship did the same even as its handful of troops scrambled back aboard, abandoning Ozla and the fallen commando. The two vessels lurched upward, then ascended toward the clouds.
Bashir ran to Data and tore the phaser from his hand. He knew it would likely be a futile gesture, but he set the weapon to full power and fired at the second dropship. The beam crackled harmlessly against the ship’s shields—and then both vessels rippled like mirages and vanished from sight as they engaged their cloaking devices.
All he could do was let out a scream of inchoate rage. They had taken Sarina all but in front of him, and he had been powerless to stop them, helpless to save her. Fury and shame welled up within him and fought to take residence beside his grief.
