Strange New Worlds IX

by Dean Wesley Smith

  He was pulled away from the thought by the sensation of a sudden change in course combined with rapid acceleration. He made his way forward to the cockpit and found Pressman cursing under his breath.

  “They spot us?” Bashir asked as he slid behind the other console. Pressman chewed his bottom lip and adjusted course and speed before he answered.

  “Yes…I don’t know. One of the warships just broke orbit and is heading this way. He must have picked up our gravitic displacement somehow. We may have to cut and run.”

  “Wait,” Danar said as he leaned between the two command consoles. “You said time was of the essence to secure this facility, correct?”

  “Well, of course it is,” Pressman snapped. “But it won’t do the mission any good if we get killed or captured.”

  “We won’t,” Danar said. He pointed to a screen on Pressman’s console. “There, see? They are still running on noncombat status. They saw something to make them take a closer look, but not enough to make them wary. We play this right and we can keep going. Change heading; get under them, then behind them, quickly.”

  “What?” Pressman said. Bashir looked a bit uncomfortable at the notion as well. He knew too well what a Jem’Hadar ship could do.

  “Those ships use ion propulsion, right?” Danar snapped. “If you can swing in under and behind it and stay close, then we’ll be hidden in the particle wash. It’s a blind spot on the sensors, see?”

  Pressman sputtered. He was accelerating toward the warship but his hands hesitated over the console’s controls.

  “That’s, that’s insane,” he said. “That shower of charged particles, we’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

  Danar was already reaching over Pressman, to manipulate the helm console. “Not if we randomly fluctuate the particle shrouding. We’ll look like normal ion distortion.”

  He looked to Bashir and the doctor nodded and began to reconfigure the console in front of him. He wished Miles was here to do this but he was fairly certain he could manage. Pressman was still trying to catch up.

  “But that would require changing the cloaking domain at an impossible rate. You can’t…”

  “Watch.”

  Danar pulled him up and took his seat at helm, already executing the maneuver that would bring the scout to within 125 meters of the warship’s drive exhaust. Bashir began to alter the cloak’s characteristics to absorb and redirect charged particles. His hands blurred and darted over the console like hummingbirds.

  The main viewscreen was awash in white light from the Jem’Hadar drive. Julian noticed that the sensors were providing nothing but streams of meaningless data. They were flying blind on the tail of a dragon. Danar responded by sheer instinct, his moves anticipating every minor course correction of the warship. Soon the planet appeared in view once again, as the warship returned to its standard orbit. Danar broke from trailing the warship just as it was settling into orbit. He positioned the ship in a fixed orbit over the planet’s northern magnetic pole.

  “An old smuggler’s trick,” he said. “The electromagnetic interference will hide us from their sensors. I used it once on a Federation starship and it fooled them. It will fool the Jem’Hadar.”

  Pressman activated the antimatter bomb with a voice-authorized security code. The bomb was a meter-long cylinder of dull silver metal. He handed the control padd to Bashir.

  “It’s keyed to your and Danar’s DNA. Either of you can set it for a timed detonation or for immediate explosion. There is enough antimatter in there to destroy the entire planet.”

  “What’s here that is so important you’re willing to vaporize the whole planet to keep the Dominion from getting their hands on it?” Danar asked. Pressman regarded him coolly for an instant, then returned his gaze to Bashir.

  “If the asset can be recovered or secured, then do it. If not, it has to be destroyed.”

  Bashir nodded, but it was obvious to Danar that this didn’t sit well with him either.

  “Up and at ’em, gentlemen,” Farr barked to the Angosian squad. They were carrying compression phaser rifles—state of the art. “I want communicator checks in five and pre-transport weapon inspections. Let’s move, gentlemen!”

  The team began to shuffle toward the small transporter pad. Danar took Bashir aside near the rear bulkhead.

  “My people are about to die out here. I’d like to know what we are dying to protect. I think we deserve that, don’t you?”

  Bashir nodded. He glanced toward the transporter. Pressman was busying himself with the controls.

  “About a century ago, a Federation starship visited this world. They discovered a device, a life-form; they weren’t entirely sure what it was, but it was capable of acting as a portal through time.”

  “A time machine?” Danar said somewhat incredulously.

  “Yes, Starfleet has knowledge of several time-travel techniques they have encountered over the years, actually. But this one has always been unique, as it seems to be self-aware.”

  “A living time machine.”

  “It calls itself ‘the Guardian.’ Once the Federation Council learned of its existence and that it appeared to be billions of years old, they quarantined the system and made it a classified research outpost. I knew nothing about any of this until Pressman paid me a visit on Deep Space Nine a few days ago.”

  “So you mean to tell me that the Federation has had access to time travel for over a century and they never used it to alter outcomes in their favor?”

  Bashir nodded gravely. “That’s right. We could have destroyed the Klingons and Romulans before they became a threat, but the Federation is predicated on freedom and life, not control and death.”

  “Your Federation,” Danar said, looking over Bashir’s shoulder at Pressman. The doctor nodded.

  “Exactly. I agreed to come along because as dangerous as it would be for the Dominion to get control of the Guardian, it would be just as disastrous for Section Thirty-one to have it.”

  “So what do you plan to do? Blow it and the planet up?”

  “If I have to, yes. But I’m hoping you and I can find a better way out of this.”

  The surface of the planet was a graveyard, littered with the ruins of long dead civilizations. There was a silent, shimmering blur and Bashir, Danar, and their team appeared. Farr made a curt gesture with her arm and the Angosian soldiers fanned out quickly and quietly. Bashir thumbed the power control on his tricorder and swept it in the direction of a pile of broken columns and rubble.

  “The ruins date back tens of thousands of years,” he said.

  “I thought your ‘Guardian’ was much older than that?”

  “Starfleet’s scientists theorized that this may not be its world of origin. Or perhaps the Guardian brought itself to this world for some reason.”

  He frowned at the tricorder’s small screen. And then quickly shut it off.

  “We have company. Some kind of craft, it’s twelve hundred meters due west of our present location and heading our way.”

  Danar tapped his headset communicator on.

  “Farr, we have possible hostiles closing. Everyone get out of sight. No one is to engage without my signal. Get ready.”

  In seconds, Danar’s team became like smoke. They drifted silently into the rubble, becoming nothing more substantial than desert sand gently blowing. Minutes passed then there was a low, powerful hum that caused Bashir’s molars to ache—the gravity suspensor on a large vehicle. A moment later a heavily armored transport, about thirty-five meters long and vaguely reminiscent of a beetle in configuration, came into view. It crept slowly along, its antigravity field kicking up red-brown dust around its undercarriage.

  Around it, like satellites to a planet, was a unit of Jem’Hadar infantry keeping pace with the transport. Danar was impressed. The reports Pressman had provided gave dry facts and figures about what the reptilian humanoids were capable of, but now, actually seeing them scan the terrain for any threat, seeing how they carried themselv
es with such arrogance and certainty, Danar knew. He knew they were the ultimate soldiers, bred for discipline and death. And he couldn’t help but smile.

  The Jem’Hadar expedition slowed and then stopped. The foot soldier on point carried a gun-like sensor device that he fanned slowly back and forth. He frowned and made adjustments to the device, then waved it again.

  Bashir glanced at Danar, and the subhadar nodded curtly. It was a search pattern. Somehow they had detected either the stealth transporter’s beam or Bashir’s tricorder scan, which had been modified to appear as planetary background radiation. While the large transport rumbled and began to settle onto the ground, the Jem’Hadar began to spread out to search faster and to become less of a target for an ambush.

  Bashir could almost feel Danar’s perception dissecting the pattern of dispersal, the range to targets, the timing of each movement. Searching for any weakness, any opening. If they stayed where they were, one of the teams would be discovered eventually and then it would all be over. They would be pinned down and picked off, one by one. The vise was closing.

  Danar moved, faster than even Bashir thought he was capable. He was subvocalizing commands into the headset, which was designed to allow for nearly silent communication if needed. He leapt over a five-foot piece of crumbling column from a running broad jump, sighted and fired on two Jem’Hadar while in midair, killing them. He turned in flight and landed facing another two of the Dominion’s warriors. The phaser rifle hissed again and again. He killed a third Jem’Hadar and wounded the fourth. The wounded one returned fire as both he and Danar dived for cover behind the crumbling memorials to the people who had once called this dead world home. All around them was the rasping discharge of particle beams as the Angosians fell upon the Jem’Hadar.

  Bashir lay prone behind an overturned column. He noticed the transport was powering itself up and would be moving again in seconds. He belly-crawled across the impromptu battleground toward the massive craft. As he slid along the dust, he remembered doing this at the academy and hating it as much then as he did now. He keyed his hand phaser to maximum discharge and then programmed in an overload. As the transport began to rumble to life, he tossed the whining phaser under the slowly rising craft. The suspensors weren’t at full power yet and the antigravity field wasn’t strong enough to keep the makeshift grenade from sliding under the edge of the transport. There was a massive blast of white light and blistering heat as the transport bucked and twisted. Dust and debris scattered everywhere. The transport dropped back to the ground with a groan. Thick black smoke gushed from numerous gashes in the heavy armor. Bashir figured the crew had been well enough protected that there was little likelihood of any deaths, but the craft was grounded and would be offering no assistance or escape for the Jem’Hadar. He rolled onto his back and snapped on his tricorder and quickly began to run a communication-jamming protocol that would hopefully keep the Jem’Hadar from reporting their situation.

  Danar’s left arm hung uselessly at his side, an ugly phaser burn blackening his shoulder. He moved from cover point to cover point, not staying in one place more than a few seconds, just long enough to snap off shots at the two Jem’Hadar who were trying to pin him down in a crossfire. They were succeeding too. In a few moments they would have him and that would be the end of that. He knew he should be scared but that was not part of his programming. He knew he should be angry, but that too interfered with optimum operating efficiency, so it too had been chemically edited out of his choices. Strangely, his last thoughts were of what was going through the minds of the other biological robots playing out this game—the Jem’Hadar. Were they even allowed to feel at all? Suddenly he felt great pity for the perfect killing machines about to end his life. At least he still had enough of himself left to miss the parts he had lost—they had never known anything but killing and death.

  There was a flash of light and one of Danar’s attackers fell from a shot from behind. Danar reacted with no thought, no conscious awareness. He rolled to the left and came up running toward his other opponent. The phaser rifle blast caught the Jem’Hadar as he jumped to new cover. He fell and lay unmoving on the ground.

  Suddenly it was quiet. Black smoke and desert sand swirled all around the battlefield. Bashir, his face covered in dust, found Danar resting on a large boulder, staring down at the dead Jem’Hadar. He waved a small medical probe around Danar’s shoulder and then began to riffle through his medical bag.

  “How many did we lose?” Bashir asked.

  “Hogor, Preis, and the two of us are alive. Everyone else is dead.”

  Bashir paused in his preparations. “Farr?”

  Danar nodded. “It was a good fight. It was how she would have wanted to go out. She was born to this life…and she was good at it. A good friend too.”

  “I’m sorry, Roga.”

  Danar said nothing.

  “You didn’t mention it?” Bashir said.

  “Mention what?”

  “That you counted yourself among the dead from my treatment.”

  Danar narrowed his eyes but continued to stare at the dead body silently.

  “That was the closest thing to suicide I’ve ever seen. You knew you were most likely going to die and you did it anyway. And please spare me the excuse of it being the only chance we had. I know it was, but you threw yourself into it with an absolute disregard for surviving it. You have a death wish, Danar.”

  “The Jem’Hadar have a saying, Doctor,” Danar said softly. “They say they enter battle already dead. A wise sentiment for any soldier.”

  “You are not a Jem’Hadar.”

  “Aren’t I?” Danar snapped. “Aren’t you? We are just like them; programmed and conditioned to be exactly what someone else wanted us to be, to suit their purposes, not ours.”

  Bashir said nothing. He pressed a hypospray into Danar’s arm just below the burn.

  “When we won our right to return to Angosian society after the war,” Danar said, “I was suddenly some kind of leader for the veterans. That’s how I became one of the governing council. I never wanted any of that. I just wanted my old life back. I got married to a woman I had cared for in the days before the war and I found some peace in her for a time. But one night after an especially horrible nightmare of the war, I woke up and found myself strangling her on our bed. The next day, I began taking the treatments. So I traded one set of programming for another. And the man I once was just fell further and further away from me until now I think he was a ghost, an orphan. He’s lost to me and without him, I don’t want to live.”

  Bashir wiped the dirt off his face and sighed.

  “You are not a machine. You are a man, a man that has been changed by his experiences. You can’t undo those experiences, and you can’t forget them. You have to live with them, make peace with them and realize that the man you were isn’t dead, he has merely grown, changed.”

  “But if you could undo it, Doctor,” Danar said with eyes full of pain and anger. “If you could, would you? Would you become that awkward, unintelligent boy again? Knowing you’d never be a surgeon, never join Starfleet? Would you be happy with just being Julian Bashir?”

  Bashir looked away and did not reply.

  Danar arranged for Pressman to beam up the bodies of the dead. He protested, calling it an unnecessary security risk that might give away the scout’s position. Danar explained what he would do to the former admiral if he didn’t comply and the bodies were soon aboard.

  Bashir, Danar, and the two remaining Angosian commandos crossed the four kilometers to the site of the Guardian quickly and quietly. Several times they passed low-flying Jem’Hadar ships moving in search patterns. Bashir carried the antimater bomb slung over his back.

  Shortly after the dim red dusk that approximated nightfall on the unnamed planet, they reached a ridge overlooking the research outpost. Through powered field glasses, Danar examined the layout of the facility’s defenses.

  “That’s odd,” he said. “There are a few tr
oops down there, but not the number I’d expect for guarding a top secret Federation time machine.”

  “Could it be a trap?” Bashir asked.

  “Possibly, but as Pressman said they seem to have been here for a few weeks and there are no indications that a larger force was camped out here.”

  “What do you propose?”

  Danar turned away from the ridge and addressed his remaining two men.

  “I want you to move out in opposite directions about half a kilometer. Then make some noise; draw out their forces as best you can and then regroup near the secondary extraction point we discussed. Get yourselves back up to the ship and tell Pressman we are in. Don’t engage the Jem’Hadar, just get them up and moving. We’ll give you twenty minutes before we head down there. Good luck.”

  Hogor and Preis nodded and then briefly embraced Danar. In moments they were gone. No sound, no trace, save memory, marked their passing.

  Time lapsed in an odd combination of manic speed and anxious boredom.

  “There, they did it,” Danar said. “They are moving off. Looks like we should be able to avoid the remaining ones. The Guardian is inside that large building, correct?”

  “Yes,” Bashir said, quickly scanning through his own glasses. “They built it around the Guardian, since there seemed to be no way to move it. It seems to register as having no mass, but it can’t be budged.”

  “Let’s go ask it about that,” Danar said, rising to his feet.

  The interior of the building was well lit. Excavation pits with ladders leading down into them were everywhere. The place had a hollow silence that made it feel like a tomb. Danar and Bashir moved cautiously toward the massive ring-like structure that resided at the center of the building. It was about three and a half meters high and almost eight meters long. It had the appearance of being made out of stone that glowed with an inner light. A strange low moaning like a sorrowful wind seemed to surround the Guardian.