After having the same breakfast—except the jumja syrup—Radovan examined the items he’d replicated and brought with him. He hadn’t settled on a course of action until that morning, until his dreams had showed him the way forward, but he saw at that moment confirmation that he had been guided on his path—by prophecies in The Book of Ohalu, by Rejias Norvan, by the events on Endalla, by the nightmares that had haunted his sleep. He knew what he had to do, and he saw that he had brought everything he would need, from the chemicals to the technology, from the parts to the tools.
Knowing he would never see another sunrise, Radovan Tavus set to work.
• • •
Tey hovered over the transportation coordinator, watching one of his displays as it tracked the target of his scans across the landscape. She had arrived at the Bajoran Planetary Operations Center in Jalanda only a few minutes prior, after receiving a message early that morning from Lieutenant Tapren. Major Orisin wanted Tey to know that sensor scans outside the perimeter of Johcat had just detected an empty travel pod meandering across the surface. The major wanted her to meet him at the BPOC as soon as she could get there.
It had taken Tey less than thirty minutes after speaking with Tapren to reach her destination. Most of that time had been taken up with walking from her home to a local transporter terminal, and then from a Jalanda terminal to the Planetary Operations Center. She managed to arrive before Orisin.
“Can you superimpose the course that the travel pod has taken?” Tey asked Torken Noth, who crewed the panel. His console stood at the end of a row of similar stations, just one of many such rows in a warehouse-sized room called the Surface Transportation Hub. Civilians oversaw the movement and coordination of travel pods, underground slidewalks, intercity maglevs, and the like. They even monitored the status of major pedestrian thoroughfares.
“I can show you from the point where sensors picked it up, but that wasn’t even an hour ago,” Torken said. “Before that, we had no record of it because its transponder was disabled. We’ve been scanning for it half the night.”
“I know,” Tey said. “Show me anyway.”
Torken manipulated his controls. Tey studied the display, which showed an overhead satellite view of the region northeast of Johcat. A sliver of the outermost section of the city cut across the bottom left of the screen, the only blemish on a chart of vast, undeveloped lands. At the top left, a verdant swath showed a small section of the Talveran Forest, while the Deserak Wilderness filled the rest of the display. The travel pod moved inside the enormous nature preserve, and as Tey watched, a glowing red line appeared behind it—a line that zigzagged in a seemingly random fashion, traveling north and south, east and west, sometimes crisscrossing, sometimes doubling back.
Tey heard footsteps behind her and recognized the gait of Major Orisin. She turned to face him. He greeted her as he arrived.
“Good morning, Agent Tey,” he said. “Thank you for getting here so quickly. What have we got?” They stood on either side of Torken and examined his display. Tey pointed to the end of the red line.
“This is the point at which orbital sensors finally located the travel pod, and this is the path it’s taken since then,” she said. “They found it less than an hour ago. Its transponder is disabled and there’s nobody aboard. It has to be the travel pod we’re looking for.” Tey mentioned no details that would identify the case upon which they worked or any of the principals involved, as the abduction of Rebecca Sisko had yet to be made public.
“We need to get a team out there to stop and examine the pod,” Orisin said.
“I’ll beam aboard and shut it down,” Tey said. “I can do a preliminary check on its navigational system, but I’m sure it’s been wiped. We won’t find any physical evidence aboard either.”
“Probably not, but we need to be sure,” Orisin said. “Even masterminds can make mistakes.” The major looked to the transportation coordinator. “Mister . . . ?”
“Torken, sir. Torken Noth.”
“Mister Torken, transfer data on the travel pod to Transporter Room Three,” Orisin said. Tey hadn’t had authorization to beam directly into the Planetary Operations Center—an oversight in her hasty return to service for the Bajoran government—but it would be no problem for her to beam out.
“Yes, sir.”
Orisin headed out of the Surface Transportation Hub, and Tey fell in beside him. Once they’d exited into the corridor, the major said, “After I learned about the travel pod, I heard from the forensics team. They found almost no DNA anywhere in the flat—except under the bed. Samples matched both Rebecca’s DNA and Radovan’s.” The news did not surprise Tey. “Before I came here, I stopped in Adarak to notify the parents.”
Orisin led Tey to a large transporter room. The major checked with the operator on duty, who confirmed that they’d received the sensor data from Torken. While Tey beamed aboard the travel pod, Orisin would make arrangements at the provincial Militia headquarters in Renassa for the vehicle to be relocated there using a large-scale cargo transporter. There, computer analysts could fully inspect the travel pod’s navigational system and a forensics team could search it for physical evidence.
Tey mounted the transporter platform. The operator worked his console. White streaks clouded Tey’s vision as a familiar whine rose and then diminished. Her view of the transporter room faded, replaced by the shifting sight of rolling hills ripe with vegetation. She found beaming from a stationary position to a moving perspective a bit disconcerting, so she closed her eyes for a moment to maintain her equilibrium.
When Tey opened her eyes, the sensation of being off-balance had passed. She sat down and reviewed the travel pod’s console. She located its piloting controls and stopped it, then shut the drive down. After accessing the navigational system, she searched through its program and logs. As she’d expected, it had been coded to continuously erase its positioning data, so its course could not be traced backward. Similarly, its logs erased themselves every five minutes.
Tey had one other idea. She called up the travel pod’s life-of-service gauges. To her surprise, they hadn’t been modified or erased. She could compare the values against the numbers prior to when Radovan had taken out the vehicle. After the pod’s previous use, its lifetime hours in service and distance traveled would have been automatically downloaded to the Surface Transportation Hub. Tey could thereby determine how long the vehicle had been in use and how far it had journeyed from the moment Radovan had used it to move Rebecca Sisko. It wouldn’t be much to go on, but it would allow her to calculate the limits of where the travel pod could have gone. There would still be a tremendous amount of ground to cover, but it would at least narrow the search area.
After recording the travel pod’s amassed time and distance in her wrist comm, she tapped the device to open a channel. “Tey to Major Orisin.”
• • •
After working for the entire morning and into the afternoon, Radovan finished his creation. He regarded it with satisfaction, with awe, and with a sense of poetry. With satisfaction, because he had labored earnestly and meticulously to complete it. With awe, because even without knowing the role he would play in the life of the Avatar, and thus in the future of Bajor, he had still somehow moved forward unerringly along the path to his destination. And finally with a sense of poetry, because of how the end would mirror the beginning. The Ohalavaru had read and contemplated, talked and debated, until Rejias Norvan had made a choice and taken action. In Radovan’s case, spurred by the events on Endalla, he had made his own choices, he had taken—and would take—action, and then the Ohalavaru would talk and debate, read and contemplate.
But not just the Ohalavaru, Radovan thought. All of Bajor would see what he had done, would come to understand the door that he had opened for all their people. They would bless his name for the age of Awareness and Understanding he delivered through his sacrifice.
Now all that I need is a stage, Radovan thought. He could do it there, in the cl
earing, but he wanted something more . . . memorable. He crossed the open ground and headed deeper into the wood, using a large blade to clear the underbrush. He felt confident that he would find what he needed.
Before too long, he did.
Radovan stopped at a point where the ground fell away. He peered down into a rocky gully, split by a running stream. Moss-covered boulders sat at the center of the hollow, and several trees had toppled down at points around the edge. Roughly round in shape, the depression looked almost like a naturally formed amphitheater.
Radovan smiled as a feeling of bliss washed over him. He plainly saw in the setting before him a parallel with the environment of his latest dream. In the images that had infused his sleeping mind, he had stalked toward the Avatar among the charred, dead bodies inside the crater that Rejias’s bombs had carved out of the surface of Endalla.
Back at the clearing, Radovan gathered up the device he had made. It lay on the ground, a silver cylinder not quite a meter in length, which he’d sealed at both ends. He had fashioned the housing from the metal container carrying his transporter inhibitor. He’d utilized the chemicals and fiber-optic cables and other components he’d brought with him to rig the mechanism, and he’d attached a padd to control it all. Finally, he’d cut the metal from his mother’s trunk into little pieces to use as shrapnel.
Radovan separated the antigrav from the remnants of the trunk and attached it to the bomb. He also packed some pitons and lengths of chain into a carryall, which he slung across his shoulder. Then he went to the girl’s tent.
Inside, she watched him as he unlocked the manacle at the end of her chain and attached it to his wrist. “It’s time,” he told her. “Get up.” When she stood, Radovan saw that she had taken her shoes off. He crawled farther into the tent and put them back on her feet. “Come on,” he told her, and he led her outside.
“Where are we going?” the girl asked.
Radovan looked down at her. “Don’t you know?” he said. “Both of us . . . we’re finally going home.”
Gamma Quadrant, 2386
The time had come.
Sisko and his away team had discovered the hybrid nature of the Glant, had learned about how they kindled their artificially crafted physical bodies with organic minds culled from naturally evolved species. The captain had been unable to convince the aliens to return the children stolen from Robinson, had failed to negotiate any sort of settlement or exchange that would have brought the children back home. The Glant had just announced that the “actualization”—the irrevocable process by which they transferred existing consciousnesses into their newly constructed creations—had begun.
Sisko stabbed at his combadge, which chirped in response. “Captain to Styx,” he said. “Alpha one go.” Before departing Robinson, Sisko had chosen the simple code as a shorthand means of ordering the commencement of the crew’s secondary plan for dealing with the Glant. If the away team could not reclaim the children by peaceful means, the captain had decided, they would take them back by force.
Sisko received no reply over his combadge from Ensign Weil, but he immediately heard the high-pitched sound of the transporter. White motes appeared before the captain’s eyes, and the five Glant in front of him began to fade from view. As he dematerialized, the captain hoped he had not waited too long to act.
The transporter deposited Sisko in a long corridor, its walls, ceiling, and floor comprising alternating wavy strips of orange and blue. He glanced around to verify that Kasidy, Doctor Kosciuszko, Counselor Althouse, and Lieutenant Rogers had been beamed with him to their new location. They had.
An instant later, the high-pitched hum of the transporter rose again. Sisko saw bright specks and streaks appear at his hand, courtesy of the transport enhancer he wore around his wrist. A phaser appeared, and he wrapped his fingers about the pistol’s grip. He quickly checked to ensure that every member of the away team had one. In the case of Lieutenant Rogers, a phaser had materialized in one hand and a tricorder in the other.
“Report,” Sisko said.
“Like before, Captain,” Rogers said, working the tricorder. “Indeterminate life signs inside and outside the chamber where the children are being held, but a great deal of movement, coming toward us from around the next corner. The other away team has beamed in on the other side of them.” Per the plan, the security officers remaining aboard Styx had been transported as near as they could be to the location of the children, but in a corridor different from where Sisko and the others had been beamed.
“Time until the Glant arrive?” Sisko asked.
“Just seconds,” Rogers said.
“Positions,” Sisko called out, sidestepping to take cover against one wall. Kasidy crouched behind him, her phaser already raised. Sisko knew that his wife hadn’t had much experience using weapons in the field, but as a member of Robinson’s civilian support staff, she had received training, and Starfleet required her to maintain her proficiency.
On the other side of the corridor, Kosciuszko, Althouse, and Rogers likewise took up positions against the opposite wall. Sisko could hear the chaotic sounds of the Glant’s approach up ahead. “Here they come,” Rogers said.
From around the next corner, a horde of Glant appeared. Sisko didn’t wait. “Fire,” he said, and the shriek of phasers filled the air.
• • •
Rogeiro sat in the command chair on the Robinson bridge, eager for word from the captain. When Uteln announced an incoming transmission, Plante glanced back at the first officer from the operations console, her concern evident. A veil of anxiety shrouded the bridge—the entire ship, really. While the crew had breathed a collective sigh of relief when sixty of the missing children had been rescued from the Glant, tensions remained high because of the twenty-seven still held captive.
“Put it through,” Rogeiro said.
“Weil to Robinson,” came the voice of the officer piloting Styx. “Alpha one go.”
Rogeiro had hoped never to hear the coded message. It meant that diplomacy had failed. It meant that the Robinson crew would have to go into battle. It meant that more lives would be put at risk.
“Acknowledged. Robinson out,” the first officer said, and then, “Rogeiro to all shuttlecraft.” He repeated the coded phrase that initiated the next stage of the mission. Powered up in standby mode and fully crewed, a dozen of the small vessels sat in the ship’s shuttlebay, poised to launch.
Rogeiro waited. “Shuttles away,” Uteln said a few moments later. The first officer rose to his feet and moved to the center of the bridge, his gaze fixed on the main viewscreen. The strange world of the Glant floated in space dead ahead. Almost at once, the first trio of shuttlecraft appeared on-screen, sweeping into view as they raced to provide cover for Captain Sisko and the away team.
As they neared the region of inert space surrounding the Dyson section, Uteln said, “Glant vessels are moving to intercept.” The image on the main screen shifted to a magnified view. The Glant world filled the screen, and from it, a score or more of ships grew larger as they sped toward space and the approaching Robinson shuttles.
“Shields up full,” Rogeiro said. “Phasers and quantum torpedoes at the ready.”
Uteln translated the first officer’s orders into action as he worked the tactical console. “Shields up, weapons online.”
“Commander Sivadeki, take us in,” Rogeiro said. At the conn, Sivadeki acknowledged her order as she operated her controls. The impulse engines steeped the bridge in their low pulse. “Battle stations.”
As alert lighting bathed the bridge in its blood-red glow and emergency tones blared, Robinson surged forward, on its way to engage the Glant.
• • •
Weil hauled the runabout sharply to starboard. Styx banked hard, the view through the forward ports rolling through nearly ninety degrees. The blue laser fired by the pursuing Glant vessel pierced the air just below the runabout.
“Hold on,” Weil said as she pitched Styx upward on its later
al axis—at the moment, perpendicular to the surface below. Already strained by the runabout’s abrupt movements, the inertial dampers struggled to adjust. For an instant, Weil felt a strong accelerative force pushing her toward the deck as the ship wheeled up and over. “We’ll be coming up behind them.”
“I see them,” Grandal said from a console on the port side of the cockpit, where he had configured a weapons panel. The captain had ordered the security officer to stay aboard Styx with Weil and Spingeld, just in case negotiations with the Glant failed.
When Sisko had contacted the runabout and issued his coded message, Weil had relayed it at once to Robinson. Crewwoman Spingeld immediately beamed the captain and his away team as close as she could to where the children were being held. The transporter operator had then sent phasers and a tricorder to them, before beaming the other security officers to a second location near the children.
After setting the captain’s plan in motion, Weil had watched and waited for the Glant to respond, expecting them either to attempt to commandeer Styx and its crew, or to attack the runabout outright. Before long, sensors showed a pair of their vessels approaching the position of the runabout. Weil lifted off and fled, but soon found Styx pursued by ten ships closing in from all directions.
Weil had commenced evasive maneuvers, and Grandal had unleashed Styx’s weapons. The runabout’s superior firepower destroyed two of the attackers, but the ongoing barrage of Glant lasers took its toll. Styx’s defensive shields dropped to less than twenty percent.
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