“Checking,” Uteln said, consulting the readouts on the tactical console. “The Tzenkethi vessel struck the forward portion of the saucer section, carving out a roughly wedge-shaped gap through the forward parts of decks eight, nine, ten, and eleven. Emergency force fields are ineffective because of the extent of the damage, but emergency bulkheads are sealed and maintaining the integrity of our internal environment. Casualty lists are still coming in, but we have dozens of injured, some critically, and—” He looked at the list that had so far been assembled, and noted the tally at the bottom. “—at least twenty-seven missing.” The top of his bald head went cold, a typical Deltan reaction to tragedy.
For his part, Commander Rogeiro looked ashen, the color drained from his swarthy complexion. He started to say something, but his words came out in a low, breathy voice that Uteln couldn’t understand. The first officer stopped, cleared his throat, and began again. “What about the Defiant?” he asked.
“Scanning,” Uteln said, operating his sensor panel. “I’m detecting the Defiant, but not the Romulan warbird.” He studied the readings of the Starfleet vessel. “The Defiant’s shields are functioning at low levels, but the ship is operational.” He checked for radiation and residual energy in that area, identifying numbers that, in the current situation, could only be considered good news. “It appears that the warbird has been destroyed.”
Rogeiro let out a long breath, apparently in relief. “Are there signs of any other Typhon Pact ships?” he asked.
Uteln broadened the reach of the sensors to include a larger region about Deep Space 9—or about the location that DS9 used to inhabit. “No, sir, I’m seeing no other Typhon Pact ships,” he reported. “There’s considerable wreckage throughout the area, but there are also a number of smaller vessels, both civilian and Starfleet, unharmed.”
Then Uteln spied a sudden fluctuation in the numbers. “Sir,” he said, “there’s a ship closing on the area at high impulse speed.” The idea that the Robinson crew and its badly damaged starship would soon find itself in battle once more brought with it feelings of dread and resignation. Uteln worked to identify the approaching vessel, scanning for its transponder beacon. To his relief, he immediately read an ID signal. “Commander, it’s the U.S.S. Canterbury.”
“All right,” Rogeiro said. “Raise the Defiant, then I’ll talk to the Canterbury.”
“Aye, sir.” Uteln toggled open a standard ship-to-ship comm channel, then nodded to the first officer.
Rogeiro turned around and faced the main viewscreen. “Robinson to Defiant,” he said. “This is Commander Anxo Rogeiro, in temporary command.”
On the viewer, an image of the Defiant bridge replaced the field of stars. A tall, slender man gazed up from the command chair. Uteln noted that he wore the two solid and one hollow pips of a lieutenant commander, and he wondered if DS9’s captain had perished on the station.
“Commander,” the man said. “I’m Lieutenant Commander Wheeler Stinson.”
“What is your status, Commander?” Rogeiro asked.
“We’ve taken some damage, but we’re still spaceworthy,” said Stinson. “We’re just beginning rescue efforts. Emergency bulkheads were closed on Deep Space Nine prior to its destruction, so there may be survivors in some of the larger pieces of the wreckage. Captain Ro is coordinating operations from the runabout she’s aboard, the Rio Grande.” Stinson turned to a console at the side of his command chair. “I have Captain Ro on another channel,” he said, working his controls. “I’m patching her in.”
On the viewer, Uteln watched as the picture of Stinson aboard Defiant shifted to the left half of the screen, while a Bajoran woman, presumably Captain Ro, appeared on the right side. She held her right arm closely against her side, as though she’d recently hurt it. To Uteln, she appeared exhausted, and yet also determined.
“Commander Rogeiro,” she said, but then she paused. She cast her gaze aside for a moment, but then looked back up. “How is the Robinson and its crew?”
“Both are badly damaged,” Rogeiro said. “Before we destroyed the Tzenkethi vessel, they took a sizable slice out of our primary hull, and we’ve sustained casualties.”
Ro nodded. “Are you still functional?” she asked. “I know the Canterbury’s on its way, but we’re going to need all the help we can get in our recovery efforts.”
Rogeiro peered back up over his shoulder. “Uteln?”
The security chief verified the current status of the ship with a glance down at the tactical console. “I’m not sure how we’d fare against another marauder,” he said, “but all of our breaches have been sealed, and the engines and transporters are working.”
Rogeiro turned back toward the viewscreen again. “We’re prepared to assist,” he told Ro. “Should we coordinate with you or the Defiant?”
“With me,” Ro said. “Commander Stinson has another task to take care of right now.”
“Understood,” Rogeiro said.
With the urgency required of the rescue operation, Uteln wondered what else could possibly warrant the attention of the Defiant crew. On the main screen, he once again saw Captain Ro hesitate and then look away. When she peered back, she finally voiced the question that he thought had been troubling her. “Where is Captain Sisko?”
“The captain is in sickbay. He’s been . . .” Rogeiro paused as he seemed to search for the appropriate word to use. “He’s been injured,” he said at last. “But he should make a complete recovery.”
Though Ro’s expression didn’t change, Uteln still perceived relief in her. “We’re working on a grid for our search,” she said. “In the meantime, we’ll send you coordinates at which to rendezvous. Meet us there, and we’ll provide the search pattern.”
“Yes, Captain,” Rogeiro said.
The tactical console chirped, and Uteln studied the panel to see that the Rio Grande crew had transmitted the coordinates.
“Ro out,” said the captain, and the runabout cockpit disappeared from the viewscreen, which filled again with Lieutenant Commander Stinson on the Defiant bridge.
“Rogeiro out,” said the first officer.
Uteln followed the implied order and terminated the comm signal. When Rogeiro looked up at him again, the security chief said, “Coordinates received, sir. I’m routing them to the conn.”
“Sivadeki,” Rogeiro said, “when you’re ready, take us to the coordinates.” He moved to the command chair and sat down, then contacted Doctor Kosciuszko in sickbay.
Uteln returned his attention to the tactical console, where he examined the damage assessments being submitted by the crew from all over the ship. He could already see that Robinson would require considerable downtime to effect repairs. But nobody’s going to be able to repair all the people we lost, he thought cheerlessly. Then he thought about Captain Sisko. In the two and a half years in which Uteln had served aboard Robinson, he’d never seen his commanding officer react to anything the way he’d reacted to the destruction of the Antares-class cargo ship. From the names Sisko had said afterward, Uteln understood that the captain believed that his wife and daughter had been aboard that vessel.
But he should make a complete recovery, Commander Rogeiro had said. Uteln didn’t agree. In fact, he wondered if Captain Sisko would ever set foot on the bridge of Robinson again.
Tomalak—for so long a commander in the Romulan Imperial Fleet, and after that, a proconsul for two different praetors—stood on the bridge of the Breen privateer Ren Fejin, racing for home. A home whose walls have grown weak, he thought angrily. A home whose leader would gladly allow mortal enemies to walk through those walls, even to topple them, rather than charge the Empire with spending the necessary capital to reinforce them.
The deck underfoot rattled considerably, but Tomalak had become accustomed to the rough ride. He longed for his voyage to conclude, but not because of the uncomfortable vibrations that the freighter’s engines sent coursing through the ship. Rather, he simply craved success in his first mission as an
agent of the Tal Shiar. Tomalak wanted to prove his worth as he embarked on the next stage of his professional career, but more than that, he wished to deliver to the Empire the tools it required to ensure its military superiority over the Federation and its Khitomer Accords allies.
He walked over to the middle of the confined bridge, to where the navigational console projected a holographic sphere. An image of the Breen vessel—a brace of opposing and asymmetric arcs joined together by a connector that looked misaligned—sat in the center of the display. Ahead of the ship, a bright green line—the same color as the horizontal light across the front of the ridiculous Breen helmets—showed Ren Fejin’s calculated course. None of the pinpoints that represented the stars correlated to any Romulan sun. As long as his journey had been—from the Empire, to Deep Space 9, to the Gamma Quadrant, to the Dominion, and finally back to the Alpha Quadrant—it would yet require days and days before he would see the familiar lights of home appear on the display. Before he returned to Romulus, though, he would have to visit the Breen Confederacy.
And thanks to the ineffectiveness of the Breen and the Tzenkethi, and the incompetence of T’Jul, he thought, it’s going to take me even longer to get home. With the loss of Eletrix, Tomalak no longer had a ready means of traveling from the Confederacy back to the Empire.
Turning in place, he peered around the bridge. One Breen oversaw ship operations, while a second piloted the vessel. A third, Trok—the engineer who required Dominion technology in order to develop and implement quantum slipstream drive on Typhon Pact starships—stood in a corner. Perhaps observing, Tomalak thought of the Breen engineer, but more than likely simply cowering. Since Trok’s rescue from the clutches of the Jem’Hadar, he had kept to himself, showing signs of emotional trauma through his agitation and reticence. Tomalak surmised that the engineer understood just how close he had come to death; of the thirteen Breen who’d boarded Ren Fejin for their mission, only four—along with a Romulan specialist, Joralis Kinn—had survived the near debacle in the Gamma Quadrant.
Taking two steps over to the communications panel, Tomalak felt the inclination to dispatch a coded message back to the Empire, back to Tal Shiar Chairwoman Sela. The idea of sharing word of what had happened, and of laying the responsibility for the failure at the feet of T’Jul and the others, seemed necessary, but he also understood the foolhardiness of transmitting even encrypted communications through Federation space. In the current state of affairs, at least until Kinn reinstated the cloak on Ren Fejin, it would take great effort to avoid not just Starfleet patrols, but also civilian vessels. Thanks to the recent agreement to open some of the borders of the Typhon Pact and the Federation to commercial traffic, a Breen cargo ship would not by itself draw attention, but with the fiasco at the mouth of the wormhole, the situation had changed. Sending any kind of message to the Empire, to Sela, would foolishly risk Ren Fejin’s detection.
And I did not rise for so many years through the Imperial Fleet, he thought, I did not have starships named after me, I did not have praetors seek out my counsel, because I took foolish actions. For too long, Romulus had been beset, if not by fools, then at least by leaders who overreached their abilities. Hiren, Shinzon, Pardek, Braeg, Rehaek, Tal’Aura, Donatra, Kamemor—they had all played at Romulan politics and power, and they had all lost. Well, Gell Kamemor had not yet lost, but she would. In Sela, Tomalak had finally allied with the keenest mind and the most fervent patriot he could.
The harsh notes of what sounded like an alarm rang out in the enclosed space of the bridge. The two Breen at the operations and piloting consoles looked at each other and spoke in their garbled electronic argot. Tomalak stepped closer to them, and his translator deciphered the final few words after the alarm ceased: “—ship in pursuit.”
Tomalak spun quickly and moved back to the holographic navigational display. At the edge of the spherical projection, directly aft of the representation of Ren Fejin, he saw the form of the Starfleet vessel that had engaged Eletrix as soon as the warbird had reentered the Alpha Quadrant. Tomalak observed for just a moment, and in that brief interval, the starship visibly gained on the Breen privateer.
Tomalak hastened to the communications panel, reached up, and pressed the button that initiated an open link. “Bridge to engineering,” he said. “Kinn, what’s the status of the cloaking device?” Because the agreement that unlocked Typhon Pact and Federation borders to commercial craft explicitly prohibited vessels with cloaks, Joralis Kinn, a specialist in such technology, had traveled to the Gamma Quadrant with the crew of Ren Fejin, carrying with him the component pieces from which he could construct a functioning cloak. He had assembled the device, and the Breen had employed it in their mission to the Dominion, but to avoid raising Starfleet suspicions upon their return through the wormhole, he had dismantled it prior to their reentry into the Alpha Quadrant.
“The status is that I’m in the middle of rebuilding it,” Kinn replied, the comm channel lending a hollow ring to his words.
“In the middle?” Tomalak said. “Kinn, we’ve got a Federation starship coming up fast behind us. We need to hide this scow, and we need to do it soon.”
“How soon?” Kinn asked.
Tomalak peered over at the two Breen running the ship, both of whom stared back at him—or seemed to—through their snouted masks. “How long before they reach us?” he asked them, pointing over at the navigational display. One of them consulted his panel, then gave an answer enumerated in Breen units of time, which Tomalak quickly estimated for Kinn in Romulan terms.
“That’s not enough time,” said the specialist.
“It better be,” Tomalak told him, “or we’re going to be spending time—probably a long time—in a Federation prison.” Tomalak would never allow himself to endure such a fate, of course, but he clearly needed to motivate Kinn.
“Maybe if I had more assistance,” said the specialist, though his tone did not sound especially confident to Tomalak. At present, only one person, the fourth surviving Breen, aided Kinn.
Tomalak looked across the small bridge. “You,” he said, pointing over at Trok. “You’re an engineer. Get down below and help Kinn.”
Trok froze.
Tomalak took a stride toward him. “Go!” he bellowed. “If you don’t recall, the Jem’Hadar took down this ship’s shields, and we certainly can’t outrace or outgun a Federation starship. The only thing we can do is hide, so you better go help Kinn make that happen.”
Trok nodded, hesitantly at first, but then more strongly, as though coming to understand the exigency of the situation. He quickly crossed the bridge and exited. Tomalak could only hope that his engineering expertise would function as an asset to Kinn.
Returning to the communications panel, he said, “Trok is on his way. As soon as you can cloak the ship, do it. Then let me know so I can change our course and avoid detection.”
“Very well,” Kinn replied calmly.
Tomalak closed the channel, then cursed the specialist aloud for his equanimity. The two Breen looked his way, but he ignored them. Instead, he headed back over to the holographic display, where he saw that the Starfleet vessel had already grown noticeably closer.
Tomalak watched the representations of the two ships for a while. As he did so, time seemed to speed up. The gap between the two ships continued to shrink.
When a tone indicated an incoming transmission to the bridge, Tomalak deluded himself for an instant into hoping that it originated with Kinn down in engineering. It didn’t. When he moved over to the communications panel and accepted the message with a touch to a control, he immediately heard a male voice speaking in Federation Standard. Even if his translator hadn’t interpreted the words for him, and even if his long experience with Starfleet hadn’t brought him a significant understanding of the foreign tongue, he could have deduced the speaker’s intent from the circumstances.
“This is Lieutenant Commander Wheeler Stinson of the Federation vessel Defiant,” the man said. “You are o
rdered to stop your vessel at once and surrender. You will be taken into custody on suspicion of abetting treaty violations and acts of aggression against the Federation. Please respond at once.”
Tomalak reached up and opened a communications link. “Bridge to engineering,” he said. “Kinn, how long until we can cloak?”
“You just sent Trok down here a short while ago,” Kinn said. Though his tone stayed level, his words seemed to suggest that his composure had begun to crack. “We still need some time.”
Unfortunately, Tomalak thought, in addition to shields, effective weapons, powerful engines, and a functioning cloaking device, time is something we lack. But he said nothing more to Joralis Kinn. Instead, he punched at the control to close the channel to engineering.
Tomalak wondered what he could tell the Starfleet officers who would take him into custody, and those who would follow, undoubtedly with questions. He could claim that the crew of Ren Fejin knew nothing of the Romulan warbird that, while cloaked, had followed the Breen cargo ship through the wormhole. He could assert that he’d been duped, or perhaps captured and held against his will. He could, in fact, maintain any number of falsehoods in an attempt to save himself. He understood, though, that even the smallest amount of scrutiny would expose his lies.
The signal that denoted an incoming transmission rose once more on the bridge. Again, he worked the communications console to receive the message. “This is Lieutenant Commander Stinson of the U.S.S. Defiant. You are ordered to bring your vessel to an immediate halt. If you do not, I will be forced to open fire. Without shields, I cannot be sure that your vessel will survive such an assault.”
To Tomalak, the ultimatum fell short of the strongest form it could have taken. Had the roles he and Stinson played been reversed, Tomalak would have avowed with certainty that Ren Fejin and its crew would be destroyed if Defiant sent phasers or quantum torpedoes in their direction. Regardless, he knew that the long path he’d traveled from Romulus had finally come to an end—at least for the present.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek, the Next Generation) Page 4
