Tiber’s gruff, urgent tones interrupted him, crackling over the ship’s internal communications net. “All details, alert! Engine room does not answer security! Get a team down there, now!”
“Too late,” spat the commander, shoving the trooper away. “Too late!”
Dax walked slowly around the corner with her hands raised. Immediately, the two troopers guarding the hatch brought up their guns and took aim. Targeting lasers danced on her chest, wavering over her heart. “I am unarmed,” she began.
“Stay where you are,” said the senior of the two. “Take another step and I will burn you down.”
“You do not want to do that,” Ezri told them. “I have activated the Defiance’s corbomite self-destruct mechanism. It will atomize this vessel in under six minutes, unless you do exactly what I say.”
The other trooper brought his gun to his shoulder and sighted through the scope, the laser dot moving to a point on her forehead. “Impossible.”
“You are bluffing,” added the first. “The ship has no such system.”
“Are you really willing to take that risk?” She closed the distance between them, resisting the urge to shoot a look back to the alcove, where Kira and the others were concealed.
“Yes,” said the senior trooper. “Kill her.”
Rel fell against the panel and struck the three keypads in the correct order, the consequences of the choice she had made suddenly slamming into her thoughts. She barely had an instant to articulate them before burning, white-hot pain turned her nerves into an inferno.
The blade of the short sword entered her back where her hexaribs connected to her spine, breaking hard bone and piercing the lower lobe of her left lung. Her mouth filled with a foamy cyan fluid that spilled from her lips, trickling across the console to mingle with the blood of the dead Bajoran. Sh’Zenne fell forward off the blade of the sword and spun away, her legs turning to water. She hit the deck and landed at the trooper’s feet as he raised the blade for the killing blow. The throbbing light from the matter/antimatter pillar cast dull illumination over the Dhasal man. Rel thought she heard Ocett calling out, but then the wind came.
It shrieked and tore at everything around them, every small loose item in the engine chamber suddenly taking to the air and racing across the space. With hissing flashes of spent power, the warp core dropped through the deck, trailing sparking cables behind it. The trooper pivoted, shock frozen on his face, as the full understanding of what the Andorian had done came to him.
Hull plating on the ventral fuselage of the Defiance exploded away on emergency ejection charges, allowing the entirety of the warp core mechanism to detach and follow it out into the void. Normally, the expulsion of the core was a last-ditch option employed if a critical, unstoppable overload was in progress, but Dax had laid a path for sh’Zenne to exploit. With a few commands, she had disengaged the safety interlocks—including the emergency force field that should have sealed the ejection port closed after the core vented. The ship’s systems were thrown for a loop as the main power was abruptly torn away, and lights and functions across every deck of the Defiance dimmed as one.
But for Rel sh’Zenne there was only the storm; the razor-storm. She remembered it with punishing clarity, the blinding fines of sleet that fell from the ice hurricanes off the Tavda Mountains, near the settlement where she had been born. Here in this human ship, it returned again and tore at her blue flesh, screaming and howling. She watched as the trooper tumbled backward and away, into the pull of the storm, over the lip of the gantry and gone. Rel felt the wind take her as well, pulling her off the deck, her numbed legs twisting beneath her. Her skull slammed against a stanchion and Rel felt her right antenna snap, lighting pinwheels of new, lancing pain.
The storm carried her into the empty cradle where the core had stood and she plunged downward, dragged into the black and bitter cold of space, dreaming of Andor.
Power ebbed and automatic mechanisms scrambled to switch Defiance over to backup generators and battery stores. The illumination panels in the corridor’s ceiling blinked and went out, plunging Dax and the troopers into darkness. The Trill threw herself away from the probing red threads of the targeting beams, down to the floor in a tuck and roll, clearing the way for an open field of fire. Distracted by Dax, the troopers were exposed to beam fire from Skrain Dukat’s stolen pistol.
Bright spears of energy flashed over Ezri’s head, and the short, brutal engagement became a series of strobe-effect afterimages on her retinas. Each phaser bolt threw millisecond-fast flashes of light about the passageway, casting jumping shadows in hard, stark outlines. She heard a muffled scream and the wet tearing of cut flesh; the concussive energy transfer as a beam struck a living target; the clatter of a falling body.
It was all over in heartbeats, and like a rising curtain, the warship’s power train reset itself and brought the illuminators in the corridor back to operational power. The first thing Dax saw was Kira Nerys pulling a knife from the body of the senior trooper’s slumped corpse, the blade inserted in the thin gap between the plates of duraplast mesh. His companion lay next to him, an ugly, smoking crater in the center of his armor’s chest plate.
“Oh god.” Rain had kept back, as Dax had told her to, hiding in the lee of the alcove while Ezri and the resistance fighters took on the human troopers. But now she stood, her hand at her mouth, over the Cardassian. Dukat was against the floor, a streak of blood arrowing down at him where he had slid across the wall. The pale gray skin of his face was blackened where the nimbus of a high-power phaser bolt had slammed into him.
Kira dropped the knife and flew to Dukat’s side. “Skrain! Skrain!”
He coughed and shuddered, trembling with agony. “Nerys. It’s…still dark.” Dax realized that the beam blast must have blinded him.
“Skrain…” Tears streamed from Kira’s eyes, cutting tracks through the patina of dirt on her cheeks.
Dax found Rain looking at her, the question she couldn’t utter in Robinson’s expression. Ezri shook her head, ever so slightly.
The Trill watched the strong, vital woman she had seen in the holding cell disintegrate by degrees. Kira Nerys, warrior and freedom fighter, the most wanted terrorist of the Bajor Sector, fell to pieces in front of her, holding the Cardassian to her chest. Dukat coughed again and touched at her face, tracing the lines of her tears.
“Nerys, my love,” he said huskily. “You mustn’t…Don’t dwell. Don’t wait for me again.” He shook his head. “You should go.”
“No.” The single word contained an ocean of heartache.
“Yes,” he replied. “Yes. Take the…human girl. Go with Dax. You know what must…be done.” Dukat’s head bobbed, as if he were agreeing with something. His lips parted to say more, but only a faint gasp emerged.
The moment turned brittle and long, but it ended with Kira drawing a hand across her face, wiping away the last of her tears. She stood stiffly, letting the Cardassian’s hand drop to the deck from where she had held it.
“This way,” said Dax, opening the hatch and moving through it. “We don’t have much time.”
Rain followed Kira, unable to meet the churn of emotion tumbling in the Bajoran’s eyes.
The compartment beyond the hatch was a hexagonal chamber surrounding a single piece of equipment. Set on a narrow dais, a spherical module made from a translucent white material pulsed quietly. A power nexus at either pole blinked with systems displays, and rods of monitor gear surrounded it in a cage of technology. The device had a slightly out-of-place look to it, as if it had its origins in the science of a different culture.
“Help me deactivate the interlocks,” Dax ordered, keeping her voice level, giving Kira something to focus on. The Bajoran set to work without saying anything.
“What is that thing?” asked Robinson.
Dax didn’t look up from the console. “We call it a cloaking device.”
Squad Leader Tiber snapped into a salute as the princeps approached him. Bashir�
��s expression was stormy; Tiber couldn’t recall a time when he had seen such naked fury on his commander’s face. He bowed his head automatically. “My lord, a number of the escapees have been terminated, but—”
“Spare me,” Bashir snarled. “I want answers, now!” He stabbed a finger at the heavy drop-hatch across the entrance to the engine room.
“The chamber has been vented to space,” Tiber reported. “The warp core was ejected.”
“Dax!” He spat out the helot’s name.
Tiber shook his head. “Uh, no, sir. It appears that Subaltern sh’Zenne was responsible. She locked off the compartment. Two of my troopers were in there with her, but they were lost—”
“Where is Dax?” Bashir demanded.
“Not there, lord. Scanners show others were inside in the compartment at the time of decompression, a Bajoran male and a Cardassian female—”
“You are pathetic!” Bashir exploded with fury, and Tiber recoiled as if he had been struck. “What kind of soldier are you, man? These inferiors are running rings around us! You are supposed to be their better!”
“The helot has seeded the ship’s systems with a viral program!” Tiber tried to defend himself. “Her access to the Defiance’s controls allowed her to lay traps!”
Bashir prodded Tiber in the chest. “Is that an accusation, Squad Leader? Are you blaming me for your lack of vigilance?”
The senior trooper balanced on the edge of voicing the culpability he knew should be laid at his commander’s feet. Not a single officer aboard the ship would disagree with him if he did, but still he could not bring himself to openly defy a sworn princeps of the Khanate.
No. That would be beyond a squad leader’s remit. Instead, Tiber bowed his head and shook it. When Picard arrived aboard the Illustrious, there would be more than enough blame to be apportioned, and Bashir would have to answer for his indulgence toward the aliens.
“If Dax is not here, then where is she?”
“Transporter rooms, airlocks, and shuttlebays are all secure. She has not left this vessel,” Tiber replied, keeping his voice flat.
Then the squad leader saw a flash of understanding in the eyes of the princeps. “Make sure you keep this area secure!” Bashir shouted, breaking into a run. “She may have sympathizers among the other helot crew!”
Tiber took a step after him. “Lord, where are you going?”
The princeps had his sword and gun drawn, and he ran on without giving him the grace of an answer. Tiber grimaced and went after his commander.
“Done,” said Kira quietly.
A series of metallic claws around the upper and lower regulator modules sighed open, and the energy moving through the cloaking device stuttered and died. Warning lights immediately began to blink on the console dais.
Ezri gave Rain a nod. “It is inert now. Twist the mountings, it will detach.”
Gingerly, the human woman cupped the spherical device between her palms and pulled. There was a snap of static discharge, and then Robinson had the unit clutched to her chest. “It’s light,” she said, surprise in her tone.
Dax nodded distractedly. “Most of the wave-functionality of the unit occurs in subspace. It’s little more than a glorified antenna array.”
Kira was looking at the gun in her hand. “They’ll know we’ve done this. Bashir’s men will be here in seconds.” She glanced up. “I can destroy the module with a single shot.”
“If I had wanted to destroy it, I would have done that the moment we entered the room,” Dax replied. “We are taking it.” A humorless smirk tugged briefly at the corner of her lip. Just like Noonien Singh did, when he stole one for Earthfleet from the Romulan commander he seduced and murdered. She beckoned the two women closer. “Come here. You need to be within the field radius if this is going to work.” Ezri reached inside her tunic, feeling for a concealed skin-pocket. The surgical alteration had been done shortly before she was joined with the Dax symbiont, and the pouch of synthetic flesh was virtually undetectable except by the most invasive of medical examinations. She bit back a jolt of pain as her fingers probed for the seam and found it; within, her fingers closed around a small disk concealed there.
“What are you doing?” asked Rain, horrified.
Dax said nothing. The skin ripped slightly as she removed the object, and she gasped. Inert fluids coated the surface, and Ezri wiped them away with her thumb. “Closer,” she said. “I need you to be close to me.” The device sensed the warmth of her fingers and opened itself along its length, revealing a blinking activation stud.
“Beacon?” asked Kira in a dull voice.
Dax shook her head. “A prototype emergency transporter device, microminiaturized. A single-use unit. The power output is so extreme that it burns itself out after one pulse.”
Rain blinked. “That thing’s a teleporter? It’s no bigger than a quarter!”
“The design was copied by a Vulcan agent from the Khanate’s own testing laboratories. I have already preprogrammed the destination coordinates.”
Nerys advanced on her. “A transporter? You had a transporter on you all along, and you waited until now to tell us?” She raised the gun. “We could have beamed out straight from the security tier!” Kira shot a pained look at the door and the bodies that lay on the other side of it.
“No,” Dax said sadly. “We were too deep inside the ship. And the unit’s field effect isn’t designed for more than one or two signatures…Frankly, I am not even sure if it will manage all three of us.”
“Then you stay!” Kira leveled the gun at Dax’s head. “Stay here and perish, just like you let Skrain die!”
“She didn’t kill him,” said Rain.
“Shut up!” snarled the Bajoran. “Don’t be fooled by her! Ezri, the youthful, quiet little woman…She’s a sham, a mask for that callous old worm in her chest!” Kira blinked back fresh tears. “She never intended to get Ocett or Mace or the others out! Beneath all that, she’s heartless! Dax doesn’t care about any one of us…Just her damned mission!”
“Yes,” said Ezri. “That is true. That is what I am, a liar and a fake. I have never tried to be anything else, Nerys. Because I know that my mission is more important than my life, your life…Skrain’s life.”
Kira gripped the gun tightly. “Don’t say his name again!”
And then the Trill’s face shifted, and the saddened aspect that she wore fell away; she let them see the real Dax, just for a brief moment. When she spoke again, every word was hard-edged and cold. “Do you want to stay here and join him? Do you want to waste his sacrifice, or do you want to come with me and make his killers pay tenfold for it?”
The Bajoran’s gun dropped away. “Fire’s sake, you are a hateful one. I thought I knew enmity, but you’re steeped in it.”
“That is what my mission requires of me.” Dax twisted the microdevice, and it emitted a pulsing whine. “Get ready.”
The three of them sharing looks of conflicting emotion, Rain and Kira and Ezri clustered together. Yellow-gold radiosity flared out from the transporter, and it expanded to envelop them in a haze of glittering color.
As the interior of the Defiance melted away around them, Dax was dimly aware of a figure bursting through the hatchway. She caught an accusing stare, but then the face was gone, lost in the fog of transit.
“Ezri!” Bashir bellowed her name and reached out to snatch at her, but the matter transport cycle was too far advanced, and all he took was a handful of empty air. His heart turned stony in his chest; he had looked her in the eye just as she dematerialized. And there…There he had seen it. The truth. The punishing reality.
It was like a knife blade being pushed with even, gentle pressure through the plates of his armor and into the meat and bone of his chest. The knowledge, cutting his heart, opening him. The princeps staggered to a halt, his hand curling into a fist.
“They stole the cloaking module,” Tiber said angrily. “First they disable the ship, then they take away our defenses.” He snor
ted. “I did not think a Trill capable of such base cunning.”
“Then you are as much a fool as I am!” Bashir shouted, stunning the squad leader into silence.
He leaned forward against the empty support frame, his hands tensing on the metal bars. They bent beneath the pressure of his powerful grip as the tension in him grew worse. Julian wanted to rip the thing to pieces and smash everything he could see. A directionless rage welled up inside him.
Her eyes.
Ezri’s gaze, that momentary spark of contact between them. It was enough to shatter his self-control. He could hardly stand to form the thought in his mind, and yet he could not deny it.
All this time he had been with her, worked with her, lay with her, and looked into her eyes over and over again, supremely confident that he knew the color of her loyalty, with ironclad certainty. She could not lie to him; no one could. It was Julian Bashir’s un-yielding sight, his ability to turn the light of his will upon those around him and never be wrong. No one can hide a lie from me, he told himself. No one!
No one but her, it would seem.
Nothing in Julian’s life had prepared him for this moment. He stared down at his clean, hard-worked hands, as if they belonged to someone else. How was it possible, for a woman he had shared his bed with, a woman who—in his own way—he had actually cared for, to be able to deceive him?
More than anything, he wanted to believe that he had been mistaken somehow, that perhaps there was some other explanation for this chain of events. It is some kind of duplicate of her, perhaps Sisko’s shape-shifter taking on her form or some other kind of subterfuge… Bashir’s thoughts groped at any avenue of explanation, desperate to find a way to put aside what he knew was the certainty of the matter.
Her eyes.
As the transporter spirited her away, she had been unguarded and open in a way that he had never seen before, not in all the time she had served him.
“She lied to me,” he whispered so quietly that Tiber could not hear his words. “She has lied to me from the very start.” The depths of Bashir’s failure rose up around him, the blood rushing in his ears. When Picard arrived, when the Khan learned the full measure of his error, Julian would not even be granted the honor of a soldier’s death. He would be lucky if the commander of the Illustrious did not vent him to space like the corpse of a fallen helot.
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