He became aware of Tiber speaking into his headset, and he turned on the squad leader. “Who are you talking to?” he demanded.
“Adjutant Sisko,” said the senior trooper. “With your permission, Princeps, I thought he might be able to track the teleporter’s energy signature…”
Bashir drew himself up, forcing down the thunder of self-recriminations echoing in his mind. “No need.” He bit out the words. “There’s only one place she could have gone.” Slamming his sword back into its scabbard, he pushed past Tiber and stalked away, his hands in tight, white-knuckled fists.
“What the hell is going on over there?” Shannon used the optical scopes to range along the hull of the Defiance, peering toward the reflective viewports of the warship, which was separated from the Botany Bay by only a few hundred meters. She could see most of the lower hull of the vessel, including the train of frozen gas that streamed out from the circular vent along the midline.
Shaun was at her shoulder. He had seen the panel blow off and tumble away into space; then both of them watched the glowing mechanism follow it out from the hull and drift off. At first, Christopher had thought the thing might have been some kind of weapon deployment, but then the bodies drifted out afterward, and they quickly understood that they were watching an accident unfold.
“Or maybe sabotage,” offered Hachirota. Rudy stood by his side, silent and morose.
Shannon shot Shaun a look. “Dax?”
“She said she had a plan,” the captain noted, but his tone belied his belief. O’Donnel knew him well enough to know that Shaun Christopher wasn’t the kind of man who waited on others to get things done. It was one of the reasons Wilson Evergreen had picked him to captain the Botany Bay. He turned to Laker. “That drive sled they bolted to our hull…Any ideas on how it works?”
Rudy blanched. “I don’t know. The power train looks relatively simple, but the engines…Ah, I feel like a caveman looking at a V8. I don’t even know where to start.”
“You’re a nuclear physicist, Rudy,” Shannon said sharply, “one of the smartest guys around. Help me figure it out.”
But Laker shook his head. “I don’t feel so smart anymore.”
“Forget that!” Tomino cried, gripping a heavy spanner in his hand like a club. “We got company!”
The perturbation of the air oscillated around the cabin and Shannon turned from the scope to see a sparkling golden cloud emerge from thin air. The teleport! But this time the field effect was different, the cycle longer and more labored. O’Donnel wondered how safe the technology was. What error could a malfunction in matter displacement cause? What would a software glitch do to living tissue? The very idea made her stomach turn over.
“Rain!” Rudy called out the girl’s name as the transport field melted away. She had a weird-looking device in her hand and her expression…Shannon saw the new distance in Robinson’s gaze, and she wondered what kind of horrors Rain must have seen aboard the Defiance.
Dax was with her, along with another female. Like the speckle-patterned woman, she seemed human enough, except for a striated ridge on her nose. The new arrival caught O’Donnel staring at her and growled. “Seen enough?”
“Who’s this?” demanded Shaun.
“Kira Nerys,” Rain explained. “She’s, uh, with us.”
The woman glared at Dax. “This is your escape route? An ancient derelict crewed by time-lost humans.”
“I grow weary of your attitude,” Dax retorted, and Shannon heard a marked change in her words. “They need your help, Kira. Show them how to operate the impulse motor and the warp drives. Otherwise, we give up and wait for Bashir’s men to repair my sabotage. The choice is yours.”
Kira’s lip curled and she surveyed the crew. “Which of you is the engineer here?”
“That’s me,” said O’Donnel.
Kira beckoned her forward. “Come on, then. For all our sakes, I hope you’re a quick study.”
“You brought us a popcorn maker?” Tomino asked Robinson, as the captain watched Kira and Shannon head downship.
“It’s called a cloaking device,” Rain replied.
“A what now?”
“It will make this vessel invisible to sensors,” said Dax.
“Stealth technology,” Christopher noted, examining the sphere. “Like electronic countermeasures?”
“Far more sophisticated,” continued the Trill. “I would be happy to give you a complete description of the unit and its functions, but right now I need to power it up.” She glanced at Tomino. “Your fusion reactors are still operable, yes?”
“Yeah, more or less.”
“Then show me where they are.”
Hachi gave Shaun a questioning look and he nodded. “Go ahead. Give her what she needs. Rudy? Help them.”
“Gotcha, boss.”
In a moment, Shaun was alone in the compartment with Rain, and he saw the twitch of emotion in her shoulders. “I, uh,” she began, trying to find the words to articulate something she didn’t want to voice.
Christopher went to her and put a supportive hand on her shoulder. “Rain, don’t worry. You’re back with us now. It’s okay.” He didn’t know what had happened to her on the Defiance, but he knew Rain Robinson, and he knew her moods. The girl was like the younger sister he had never had, and his jaw set hard at the thought that Bashir might have hurt her in some way.
“It’s not okay, Shaun,” she told him. “It is so very, very far from being okay. If that ship is an example of what the rest of the galaxy is like, then we should have never woken up. It’s a war. It’s all built on lies and slavery. It’s Khan’s twisted dream come true.” She shook her head. “He won, Shaun. After everything that happened, he won.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I thought that, but just now I realized something. Khan hasn’t won, not while one of us is still breathing. He only wins if he silences us, and I’m not going to let that happen.”
“He made the whole world like him,” she said in a small, tight voice. “Killers.” Rain was staring down at her hands, her eyes misting. “I don’t want to be that.”
“We’ll make him pay.” Shaun nodded to himself. “Lies can’t survive in the light, Rain. And we’re going to bring it.”
9
Jacob Sisko found his commander on the mid-decks, amid the chaos of the howling alert sirens and damage control teams.
“My lord!” he called. “We are attempting to stabilize the Defiance’s systems, but the viral weapon program continues to move from subroutine to subroutine. It is affecting environmental control, gravity management, atmospheric processing…”
“I want it eradicated.” Bashir gave the order with a flat, distracted tone.
The tall youth nodded. “I have deployed a counterprogram to sweep the mainframe layer by layer, but it will take time. We are discovering several dormant packets of sabotage protocols embedded in the primary computer core. The code resembles an Iconian machine language…I believe the viral program is based on the data-phage that destroyed the battlecruiser Yamato seven years ago.”
“Varley’s ship…” Bashir’s lips thinned. “Dax served as a helot aboard that vessel.”
Sisko nodded again. “Perhaps she retained some element of the alien code and weaponized it.”
“Damn her!” Bashir struck out in blind fury and smashed a wall panel with his fist. Jacob saw a haze of conflicting emotion on his commander’s face. He could only begin to guess what questions were torturing the princeps at this moment.
For an instant, Jacob thought of his father aboard Station D9, utterly unaware of what was taking place aboard Defiance. If the elder Sisko had been here now, what would he have said to his son? He would tell me to distance myself from Bashir as quickly as possible. He would tell me to let the man make every mistake he could, to help him do so, even, so that when he falls he falls hard. The Khanate does not forgive failure easily, and Julian Bashir has failed his Khan. Jacob’s eyes narrowed. Yes. He would tell me to throw m
y princeps to the wolves; but I am not my father.
“She’s out there,” said Bashir, his voice hollow. “On the sleeper ship. It’s the only place she could have gone.”
“Sir,” Jacob went on, “we have no motive power and our sensors have been blinded. However, weapons have limited functionality. There are photonic torpedoes loaded in the forward tubes. Blind-fired, I believe their seeker heads could still find and target the derelict.”
“That would destroy it!”
Sisko frowned. “Lord, you…we unwittingly gave them the means to flee the Ajir system! They must be stopped!” Or else, he added silently, your failure will be total and complete.
Bashir seemed to sense what remained unspoken. “Dax…Dax must not escape. I must have her alive, do you understand?” There was a flicker of manic fury in his tone. “I have to look her in the eye! I have to be the one…”
“Sir, the Botany Bay is already moving off. It may only be a matter of minutes before they go to warp speed.” He leaned closer. “Lord, please. Give the order.”
But the princeps shook his head. “The teleporters,” he snapped, pushing past Jacob toward a transporter chamber farther down the corridor. “Are they still functioning?”
“They are,” Sisko replied, keeping up with him, “but only the matter displacement systems. Dax’s program has crippled our scanners, including the transport lock. We cannot target her biosigns and retrieve her.”
Bashir strode into the transporter room, to the command console, pushing the technician on duty out of the way. “That is not my intention.” He ran through the activation cycle, turning the power to operating levels. With two swift steps, the princeps crossed the room and mounted the pads, throwing the crewman a hard nod. “You will send me over to the Botany Bay.”
“Sir?” The technician was incredulous.
Jacob gaped in surprise. He has taken leave of his senses! “Princeps, did you not hear my report? The targeting sensors are down!”
“Then aim them manually.”
He shook his head. “Without scanner lock, you could materialize inside a bulkhead or—”
“Or as close to the ship as you can place me,” Bashir broke in. The commander stiffened, running through a series of swift kata exercises, drawing the air from his lungs, setting his body into a suitable, ready state. “The sleeper ship’s dorsal conning tower has an airlock hatch on the port side. Transport me to that point. Do it now, Jacob. That is a direct order from your princeps.”
Sisko swallowed hard and nodded to the technician to step away from the console. An order was an order, even if it was a nearly suicidal one, and Jacob could not allow a junior officer to take the responsibility of obeying it. He laid his slender fingers on the control sliders. “As you command, lord.”
Sisko’s hands traced over the panel; there was a silent flicker of red energy, and Julian Bashir vanished.
The alien woman’s hands flashed across the console that Bashir’s people had retrofitted to the Botany Bay’s engineering station, and O’Donnel did her best to keep up with her, but Laker was right. This technology, the kind of blue-sky knowledge that in her day had been science fiction, was at the very edge of Shannon’s ability to understand.
In my day, she thought bleakly. My day seems like it was only a few months ago, not hundreds of years. This damned voyage, it’s taken everything from me. My world, my family, the man I loved… Hank Janeway’s face rose up in her thoughts, and she pressed down a hard jag of pain.
“Hey,” snapped the woman, giving her a severe glare. “I said, watch the power regulator feed! If the discharge is too fast from your reactors, it will blow the servo conduits!”
“Okay.” Shannon bristled but said nothing more. She felt like a first-day student thrown in on the end-of-term test, struggling to grasp the basics of something that was barely within her experience, without even a second to process it all.
But the woman, Kira—she’d tersely told O’Donnel she was something called a Bajoran—wasn’t done with her. “Kosst, I need you to focus! If you foul this up, we’ll be stranded here for your uber friends, and I’m not going to let that happen!”
All the stress and irritation, all the anger and fear, flared hard in a surge of resentment. “Those people over there on that ship, they’re not our friends. They’re nothing like us!”
The Bajoran’s face split in a sneer. “You’re human. That’s close enough.” A sour tone sounded from the console and Kira grimaced, moving swiftly to where Shannon was working a control panel. She shoved her away. “No, wrong!” she snapped, changing the settings herself. “Maybe that’s true.” Kira threw the comment at her, as an afterthought. “Maybe you’re not like them. They’re just arrogant. You people are idiots.”
The last of O’Donnel’s tolerance snapped. “To hell with you! Let’s put you on ice for three-and-a-half centuries, rip away everything that meant a damn, and then see how well you do!”
Kira rounded on her, eyes flashing, and Shannon saw the mirror of her own anger. “I have lost everything I care about,” snarled the woman. “They did take it from me! He’s dead and it’s because of your kind!”
He? The word echoed in O’Donnel’s thoughts. A hard knot of understanding pressed into her, a sudden sense of empathy for the woman.
The Bajoran blinked back tears. “Why couldn’t you have killed Khan Noonien Singh back then? None of this would have happened!”
“We tried,” O’Donnel offered. “Believe me, the whole bloody world tried.” Shannon’s moment of fury melted away. “I am sorry,” she told Kira. “And I know what you must be feeling. We all do.” She gestured at the walls. “Everyone on board this ship lost people we loved to Khan. And now we’ve lost more than that. We’ve lost our world, our entire past.”
The hard set to the Bajoran’s jaw softened slightly, and she nodded. “Yes. Of course. I’m…sorry too.”
“Forget it,” said O’Donnel. “Let’s just get this done.”
His faith in Jacob’s skills was not in error. As the teleporter deposited him in place, Bashir had a momentary glimpse of a stark wall of gray hull metal curving away from him, before the punishing impact of deep space struck away what little air remained in his body. A crippling chill crawled across every exposed inch of his flesh and he lashed out, his hand snaring an antenna rod protruding from Botany Bay’s fuselage.
In the black silence, Bashir’s blood thundered in his ears and he felt the rimes of frost flash-forming on his body, as the wisps of air molecules caught in the transporter’s aura instantly turned to ice. The soft tissues in his eyes prickled and stabbed like needles. His empty lungs were black, razor-sharp stones cutting him inside.
The killing cold coiled around him and began to squeeze the life from the princeps. He had little time; with dogged, agonizing motions, he moved over the hull toward the red ring of the airlock hatch, one handhold after another.
This would have been death for a normal humanoid, for a being of limited nature like the Basic girl Robinson or the Defiance’s helots. Unprotected and exposed to the icy kiss of the void, their flesh would swiftly blacken and die, their organs cease to function; but three hundred years of augmentation made an Earth-born like Julian a very different breed. Enhanced stamina, increased physiological prowess. He was a better, stronger design of man.
Bashir resisted the pull of the dark and grasped the airlock handle with ice-flecked fingers, turning the mechanism to release the bolts holding it shut. A puff of displaced air fluttered past him, and the hatch rolled open. With an effort, Julian grabbed the frame of the airlock and pushed himself inside, one hand reaching out to slam the control pad that would initiate an emergency repressurization sequence.
Sound returned with the high shriek of air. Bashir reached up to touch his face and found blood frozen in lines from his nostrils and the corners of his eyes. He shook the ruby red fragments away, his body shaking with the cold.
Inside him, a very different kind of chill had t
aken hold.
Over Christopher’s shoulder, Rain watched the power curve displays flex and bend in ways that the DY-102’s designers had never considered. “Is that bad?”
“Beats me,” Shaun replied, chewing his lip. “The remote systems control stuff that blue-skinned woman set up in here might as well be labeled in Sanskrit for all I can tell.” He shook his head. “Shannon’s either going to love this or else she’ll throw a fit. And then the ship’ll blow up.”
The color drained from Robinson’s face. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
The captain glanced at her. “I hope so. I can’t tell.” He frowned. “One way or another, we’ll find out soon enough.”
Rain studied the laser ranging display. “Defiance hasn’t come after us yet. If anything, it looks like they’re drifting.”
“Dax really did a number on them. Bashir’s not going to take it well.”
“Hopefully, we will not stay around long enough to find out.” Dax came through the open hatch onto B Deck, with Hachirota trailing behind.
“Is it done?” Shaun asked.
Tomino gave him a sheepish look in return. “I guess so. She plugged the popcorn maker into the main bus and, well, it didn’t make any popcorn, so I suppose that means it’s working.”
Dax peered at one of the temporary control panels, tapping at keys. “I have slaved the cloak controls to his console. As long as the field dispersal remains constant, we should be able to maintain invisibility.”
“We’re going to turn see-through?” Rain couldn’t keep the incredulous tone from her words.
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