“No!” Dax shouted, and the Bajoran pulled his blow to a halt.
Fixed in place, the engineer turned her head to glare at Ezri, her antennae stiffening in surprise. “You,” she said. “You are a dead woman.” She didn’t say it as a threat; she said it more as a pronouncement, as something she already knew was a fact.
“I beg to differ, Rel,” Ezri returned.
“You know her?” asked Kira, emerging with phaser at the ready.
“I would like to think so.” Dax pushed Mace’s blade away.
“Oh. Wow.” Rain blinked. “She’s…blue.”
“Tiber has men sweeping the ship from bow to stern,” said sh’Zenne. “He has offered a personal bounty to any trooper who captures you.” She hesitated. “Is it true? Did you really kill the optio?”
“He did not give me a choice.”
After a moment, the Andorian nodded. “Good. Arrogant bastard. He had it coming.”
Dax took a chance. “Help us.”
“I am helping you right now by not screaming for security,” said Rel.
Ocett gave a derisive snort. “Huh. Typical Andorian. Good little dogs for the ubers, the lot of them.”
The engineer glared at Kira, the antennae on her head flattening against her skull in annoyance. “Tell your woman to keep her mouth shut, unless she wants me to knock the teeth out of it.”
“You’re worse than the humans,” Kira said. “At least they can’t help being conceited—they’ve bred it into themselves. But you? Your species willingly bent the knee to Noonien Singh, and for what? So you could live out your lives as second-class citizens, doing all the dirty jobs the ubers think are beneath them?”
“You know nothing about what they did to Andor,” said sh’Zenne, her voice as hard as ice. She looked at the Trill. “This is the company you are keeping, Dax?” Rel shook her head. “What is wrong with you? Have you gone mad?” She pointed at Ezri’s chest. “Has that thing inside you finally gone senile?”
A dry smile of amusement crossed Dax’s face. “It is…complicated.”
“In all the time I have known you, you have never raised your head,” said Rel. “Not like me, talking out of turn and getting slapped down for it.” The Andorian touched the copper torc around her throat, a mirror of the one worn by Ezri. “Why this, why now, for them?” She gave Kira, Rain, and the others a cursory nod. “Explain it to me.”
“We’re wasting our time with her,” Mace said, hefting the bat’leth. “Let me deal with the blue-skin and we’ll be on our way.”
“No.” Dax’s retort had steel in it. “You want the truth? I will give it to you.” She sighed. “I am with the resistance. Dax…the Dax symbiont has been there since the very beginning. I have been fighting the Khanate for nearly three hundred years.”
“I don’t understand,” Robinson said quietly.
Dukat spoke out of the side of his mouth. “She’s the host for a symbiotic intelligence. Ezri is the body. Dax is the memory.”
“Oh, right. I get it,” Rain replied, in a way that made it obvious she didn’t.
“But you are Bashir’s helot,” Rel went on. “His concubine.”
“I am a spy. But now that is done with. Now I am a dissident, the same as them.” She nodded at Kira and the others. “And we need your help. All of us.”
Sh’Zenne seemed suddenly tired, and Dax saw the hesitation in her eyes. “What can you do? Of course there have been times when I wanted to defy Bashir and the others…. I thought about disengaging the safeties and letting this ship rip itself to bits…. But I have family on Andor, and they would be made to suffer. Destroying one ship will make no difference, Ezri. The humans are too strong. We cannot win against them.”
“This is bigger than you know, Rel,” Dax told her. “Rain’s people have something that is going to tip the balance. Something that will show the galaxy what the Children of Khan really are.”
“We do,” said Robinson, her voice piping up. “We have the truth about Khan Noonien Singh. And we’re gonna tell everyone.”
Dax held out her hand. “Help us,” she repeated.
On some level, Hachi was marveling at the number of dents the fire extinguisher was collecting and the fact that the tall trooper just wouldn’t fall down. He was holding Shannon by a fistful of the pilot’s flight suit and choking the air from her lungs. Tomino blinked; it looked like she was turning white, but he could barely see straight. Hachi’s face was already a mess of bruises, his spectacles still clinging to his face, one lens a broken spider web of glass.
He blotted everything else out of his mind: Warren lying there on the deck with Rudy at his side, Shaun being pummeled to within an inch of his life across the room. Tomino put that all aside and channeled every ounce of his strength into a spinning blow that placed the blunt nozzle end of the extinguisher right into the base of the trooper’s skull.
Hachirota was rewarded with a dull cracking sound, and the tall man abruptly went slack, like a discarded puppet. He fell forward, crushing the coughing O’Donnel against a console. Tomino moved without thinking, ripping the strange pistol from the trooper’s holster.
The gun was bulky but lightweight, and it sat easily in his hand. He tried not to think about what he had just done—and then he did it again.
The trigger pull was slight, and there was no recoil. Just a shrill keening sound, a flash of amber, and the man trying to beat Shaun Christopher to death collapsed with a strangled cry.
Tomino stared at the pistol and felt sick. He tried to release his grip, but it refused to move. It was as if the thing had welded itself to him, as if his use of the weapon had made him part of it.
Slender fingers with raw, bloody knuckles came and pried his hand open. He looked up at Shannon and she nodded at him, her breath coming in gasps through a bruised throat. “Easy, Hachi. I got this.” She took the gun away from him, and he settled heavily to the deck plates, his eyes hazing.
“Sorry,” he said to the air.
Shaun took the gun from Shannon and rubbed his chest, probing gently for broken ribs. “What do we do now, Captain?” she asked him, taking the other trooper’s pistol for herself. He glanced at her. O’Donnel only ever used his rank when the situation was a bad one. He had to admit, this was the worst.
“Reggie?” he asked.
Rudy looked up at him and shook his head, the man’s big eyes shimmering. “Warren’s dead.”
Christopher took the grim news with a wooden nod. “Put him in medical. We’ll see to him later.”
“Later?” Laker was blinking furiously. “Is there even gonna be a later?”
“Rudy,” Shannon said firmly. “Do what the captain says. Hachi, help him.”
“Right,” said Tomino, moving like he had woken from a daze.
In a moment, it was just the two of them there in the room with the men who had tried to kill them. “We’re not leaving without Rain,” Shaun said, with finality. “We’ve lost too many people already. We get her back, and then we go.”
“Where?”
“I’ll figure that out when we get there.”
Sh’Zenne entered the Defiance’s main engineering chamber at a quick pace, her antennae erect and her dark eyes hooded. The first person she encountered was Glov, one of the Tellarite serviles. “You,” she barked. “Assemble the crew and get them out of there. I’m sealing off the compartment.”
Glov gave her a porcine blink. “What? Why? The systems are functioning within normal parameters—”
“Why do your kind have to argue about everything?” she snapped back at him. “An order is an order. Do it now!”
The Tellarite heard the tone in her voice, the sharp edge that told him this was one of those commands, a directive that he had better obey if he wanted to go another five minutes without a beating. He scrambled away, and Rel’s gaze swept the room. Every technician and operative down in the engine core was a nonhuman helot. Mostly hardworking Tellarites like Glov, along with a Vulcan, a Son’a, and a te
am of morose Ferengi; the Earthers didn’t stray down here too often, as if they thought the running of the warp core was beneath them. Sh’Zenne suspected that the truth was far more pragmatic—she had heard rumors that prolonged exposure to the churning energies of a matter/antimatter reaction was detrimental to their augmented genetic makeup. Whatever the reason, the engine room was belowdecks territory, and helot country.
All of which made her tense when she spotted the trooper in black duty armor standing with a weapon at the ready by the main systems console. Rel recognized the characteristic blond hair and arching cheekbones of an Ericsson bloodline.
“Subaltern!” said the trooper, approaching her. “What is going on here?” The woman gestured to Glov as he scuttled about the perimeter of the room.
“A lockdown,” said sh’Zenne, walking straight past her to the warp core monitor display. “The escapees from the detention decks are suspected to be heading toward this level. The princeps wants us to secure the engine core in case they try to sabotage the ship.” She started calling up control menus on the screen.
“I was not informed,” snapped the trooper, reaching up to tap her headset communicator rig. “Do nothing until I have confirmation.”
Rel turned and glared at the woman, her face turning a dark cerulean. “With respect, I am the chief engineer,” she retorted, “and this must be done now!”
“You are an alien,” came the trooper’s reply, slow and careful as if she were talking to a retarded child, “and I am a human. You are subordinate to me.” She looked away. “That is all that you need to know.”
“I suppose it is,” began the Andorian, as raggedly dressed figures dropped from the shadows of the maintenance catwalks in the ceiling.
To her credit, the Ericsson woman was quick. “Alert!” she snapped, bringing up her weapon. “Security breach in—”
The trooper’s words were cut off as sh’Zenne struck the human across the temple with the hyperspanner she had concealed down her sleeve. The blow knocked the communicator headset off her and sent the woman staggering.
“Who did you say was in charge?” spat the Andorian. In her darker, most secret moments, Rel had often wondered what it might be like to kill one of the humans. When the princeps called upon her to spar with him, she sometimes imagined the consequences of taking the fight to the furthest conclusion; but she had always stepped back, always halted. Bashir would have seen the thought in her eyes; but this one? This one lacked the skill and insight of the princeps.
Glov and the others hesitated at the doors to the corridor, unsure of what to do in the face of the subaltern’s act of open defiance. The Cardassian woman, Ocett, brandished a stolen pistol at them. “What are you waiting for?” she snarled. “Get out, before I put a stun bolt up your backsides!”
“Filthy…blueskin…” moaned the trooper. “You’re all…worthless.”
A sudden flash of anger, white-hot and murderous, lanced through her. Rel lashed out again, and this time the blow put the human out for good.
“You looked like you enjoyed that.” The Bajoran who carried the optio’s old bat’leth came closer.
She shot him a leaden look, but he was right. It had felt good; and suddenly, she wanted to do it again. Rel wanted to cause them pain, every human, every uber on the ship. Her fingers went to her collar. Although it was still around her neck, she felt as if she had just torn it away, ripped it apart along with a lifetime of servitude.
“Help me with this,” she told the Bajoran. She pointed at an identical console on the far side of the room. “You see that?” He nodded, cautiously eyeing the thrumming column of blue-white energy contained inside the warp core. “Get over there, and follow the sequence I set in motion. Do it now.”
He nodded and sprinted across the chamber. From behind her, sh’Zenne heard the Cardassian call out. “They’re all out. What now?”
“Seal the blast door,” she told her. “Green panel, by the injector matrix monitor.”
“I see it.” Ocett stabbed at the controls with her long-fingered hands. Alarm chimes, singing out at a different tone from the security alert already in progress, began a warble as the door dropped from the ceiling, cutting off main engineering from the rest of the vessel. The heavy duraplast gate was designed to deploy in the event of a plasma leak or energy surge; it would be enough to keep out any more of Tiber’s troopers until their sabotage was done.
Rel found it strangely easy to do; some small, curious part of her wondered how she would survive the crime she was enacting, but for the most part her mind concentrated wholly on the deed. It was as if she had been waiting her whole life for this moment.
“There,” said Dax, as the sound of the alert siren reached them. “Rel has done it.”
“Now what?” demanded Kira.
“Now we steal the key to our escape.” The Trill started off down the corridor at a run. “This way, quickly!”
Nerys came after her, with Dukat and Rain at their heels. The human girl lagged back, panting.
“Let me help you,” said the Cardassian, and Skrain took her arm.
She blinked at him. “Sorry. Sorry. Just…got no energy. I think it’s the wine and the cryo-sleep lag. My legs feel like lead and I want to puke.”
“You’re doing fine,” said Dukat. “I don’t think I would be as brave as you if the circumstances were reversed.” He smiled at her, showing flat, white teeth. “I can only imagine what you must be feeling.”
“Oh, it’s cool,” Rain said, her voice breathy, “aliens and spaceships, people shooting at me. Walk in the park.” She swallowed hard. “Ugh.”
“Quiet!” Kira threw the word over her shoulder. The four of them drew back into an alcove. A few meters ahead, the corridor branched to the right and ended in a security door. “That’s it?”
Dax nodded. “In there.”
“Cool,” repeated Rain, wondering just what it was they were risking their lives to find. “But how do we get past those two bruisers outside?”
A pair of armored troopers, each of them holding a fully charged phaser rifle, stood at parade-ground attention either side of the hatchway.
8
Dax had done well. As sh’Zenne ran through the protocols, she found dozens of places where security encryptions and data blocks were missing. Normally, what the Andorian was about to do would have required multiple authorizations from senior human crew members, but the Trill had been as good as her word. Rel felt a small tug of irritation; the sad, docile little helot was nothing of the kind. She had fooled all of them, sh’Zenne included, worming dozens of viral programs into the computers Rel worked with every day, with such subtlety and finesse that the engineer had never known it. In a way, she had to admire Ezri for her daring, but by the same token she cursed her own negligence for failing to see any signs of the interference.
Three hundred years of hiding in plain sight, though, Rel thought. With that much practice, is it any wonder we never suspected her?
“Ejection circuit bypass is complete,” called Ocett, her reedy voice carrying over the hard rhythmic growl of the warp core reaction. “Ready on this end.”
“Good.” Rel looked up, through the transparent observation window and into the area beyond, where the core bisected the room like a glowing rod of light. There was no sign of the Bajoran at the tertiary console where she had told him to stand.
Sh’Zenne started, throwing her gaze around, looking up at the overhead catwalks, down to the maintenance pits. The man was gone. She swore an epithet under her breath and stabbed at her panel, setting the programmed sequence running, and dashed out across the decking.
Activation lights were blinking fiercely, demanding her attention. The damned fool hadn’t done anything! Rel’s blue fingers danced over the surface of the console, tapping out the command string. The heel of her hand touched the panel, and she felt wetness. The Andorian turned her palm over and there was red liquid on it. It smelled of copper.
Small perturbations
in the air touched her antennae, motions generated by subtle pressures other than the deep subsonic rumble of the core. She ducked and pivoted in time to avoid the stabbing blow of a ship-issue short sword.
Another trooper! A man this time, a Dhasal clanner by the look of him. The human compensated for the miss and tried to cut her, but Rel slid away from his reach. Too late she realized that he was pushing her into a corner, cutting off her escape routes. Her boot skidded slightly on another wet patch, and the copper smell touched her nostrils again. A heaped shape protruded from behind the cover of one of the plasma conduits: the Bajoran man, dead from a slit throat, lying discarded with the careworn bat’leth on the deck by his corpse.
How had she missed the human? Of course there would be a second trooper! But Rel had been too caught up in her new and daring rebellion to think that far ahead. Masked by the pulsing beat of the warp core, any death cry the Bajoran might have made would never have reached her. She thought about calling out to Ocett, but sh’Zenne knew this would be over before the Cardassian could reach her.
No. There is only one way this can end now.
The trooper shook his head grimly. “I would have expected this from one of the others, but an Andorian?” He gestured with the still-wet blade. “Didn’t we train you people better than that?”
“Apparently not,” she said, and threw herself toward the console.
As they raced down the corridor past him, Bashir grabbed one of the men by his arm and dragged him closer. “Report!” he barked.
“Princeps!” gasped the trooper. “The…the internal sensors are still down, lord. Some sort of sabotage program in the mainframe. Adjutant Sisko is attempting to fix it as we speak.”
“Where are the dissidents?” he demanded. “Where…where is Dax?”
“Still at large. Squad Leader Tiber has locked off the bridge and the shuttlebay,” continued the man. “We’re sweeping down the ship, level by level.”
“Belay that,” Bashir growled. “Double the guard on the armory and main—”
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