The cloaked figures on the first hovercraft scrambled for cover from the phaser fire, waving their arms to clear away the smoke churning out of the rear of the craft. Sensors indicated phasers had destroyed the engine and caused a minor water leak. But the authorities would arrive before the hovercraft sank.
Shar repeated the process, disabling both remaining hovercraft within minutes of each other. The fourth one, trying to avoid its companions’ fate, led them on a brief chase; the hovercraft was no match for a Starfleet shuttle.
Circling the area in the Sagan, Shar double-checked sensors to make certain that no other raider craft had entered the area. Save the official vessel coming from Perian, the seas were clear.
“What about the eggs?” Jeshoh asked finally.
“We’ll beam them out now,” Ezri said.
Shar’s scans revealed that only one vessel had successfully stripped eggs out of the mating grounds. Ezri beamed out the small storage crates and went with Keren to the rear of the shuttle to secure and properly store their cargo. Allowing viable eggs to be damaged now would be unconscionable.
Programming an elliptical trajectory around the mating grounds, Shar switched the navigating systems to auto and focused on keeping track of the criminals trapped on the hovercraft. Making a meaningful contribution to the final leg of their away mission satisfied him deeply. He hadn’t wanted to admit it to Lieutenant Dax, but he did feel like his research efforts had been for naught. While rescuing fertilized Yrythny eggs from unscrupulous raiders didn’t equate with making a scientific discovery that might have changed the planet’s destiny, he would savor his small victory.
From around a peninsula jutting into the bay, a Perian hovership churned into the mating ground. Shar dispatched a directional flare, pointing the authorities to where the disabled hovercraft bobbed in the water.
“Shuttlecraft Sagan to the Perian authorities. There are four unauthorized hovercraft in the area. Transmitting locations of craft to you now. We have secured the harvested eggs and will be returning them to House Perian.”
“Acknowledged, Sagan. We have received your transmission. See you back home.”
Shar tapped Perian’s coordinates into the navigation panel when Jeshoh touched his arm. “What can I do—” his voice trailed off at the sight of an Yrythny sidearm trained on his head. Jeshoh held the weapon flush against his chest, obscuring it from Dax and Keren’s view. From the rear of the shuttle, Shar heard the women rearranging equipment to accommodate the eggs. They talked quietly between themselves.
“These crates belong to an acquaintance of mine,” Jeshoh whispered. “We’re going to deliver them. I’ll provide you with coordinates. Once we clear Vanìmel’s gravity well, you will set course as I direct and go to warp. We’re running late, so please don’t pull any tricks to provoke me into shooting you or Lieutenant Dax.”
Locking out his adrenaline surge, Shar nodded. Where does Jeshoh fit into the puzzle? I’ve never sensed hostility from him. He’s Houseborn, what could he possibly want? Unless… He wanted one answer before surrendering to Jeshoh’s control. “Show me your hand.”
Jeshoh smiled, raised his left arm to the square, palm forward.
The blue starburst.
“It was you in Keren’s apartment that night,” Shar whispered. “That’s why she wasn’t concerned afterward. Why would you be there…unless…” Wide-eyed, Shar stared at Jeshoh, his antennae tense with understanding.
“I went there to protect her, as I always have,” he said wistfully. “We’ve chosen each other as consorts. Didn’t she tell you that we were raised together? She swam ashore at House Perian.”
“I assumed you met at the Assembly.” Shar recalled the many hours he’d worked side by side with Keren and Jeshoh over the past week, their easy familiarity, their gentle ribbing. All of it fit together now.
“We can work together and no one looks askance if we’re alone. But even that has become risky.” Jeshoh sighed. “Our last hope was your people.”
“My work’s not done yet,” Shar tried persuading him. “We still might have a chance. I can go back to Perian, work through the night—”
“We’re out of chances. Time to leave,” he said, resolutely.
Ezri called from the back, “Why are we gaining altitude? The ceremony starts in twenty minutes and I’m not sure how long these eggs can remain viable out of the water.”
Uncertain as to what action Jeshoh would take, Shar said nothing as he entered the coordinates the Vice Chair whispered to him.
“Is there a problem, Ensign?” Ezri said at last.
Jeshoh and Shar exchanged looks. Shar kept silent.
The locks on the crate lids clicked from the rear of the shuttle. Shar heard Keren’s light footsteps as she walked back to her seat. Ezri followed after. He sensed Keren pause and he willed her to take her seat. But she waited and Shar felt her studying him from behind.
“That worried, Ensign?” she said, her gruff voice laden with emotion.
Involuntarily, Shar raised a hand to his crown, realizing his antennae had become taut. She approached, her footfalls slow.
“Shar, what’s going on?”
Shar sensed Ezri’s irritation; heard her press past Keren, felt her step between him and Jeshoh. Her hands dropped to her sides. The lieutenant took a deep, steadying breath and she stood rigid.
Keren’s hand curled over the top of Jeshoh’s chair, her fingers trembling. “You have a weapon, Jeshoh.”
Jesoh said nothing.
“I’ve never known you to carry a weapon, and yet you have that sidearm pointed at Shar.”
“I’m defending something, Keren. I’m defending our right to have a life together.”
She became visibly pale, shaking as she tried to maintain her control, even as her words became choked with sobs. “You were at the meeting—you agreed with me that the radicals’ plan could destroy everything we’ve worked for. Please tell me you didn’t join them, Jeshoh!”
Jeshoh turned his sidearm on Ezri; her eyes darted between Shar and Jeshoh. “You,” he pointed at Ezri, “You take my seat.”
She complied.
“If you do this, Jeshoh, we could lose it all. Nothing has to change. We can continue our struggle honorably,” Keren pleaded.
“That’s where you’re wrong, my love. Without change, we have no future.”
“Where are you taking us?” Ezri asked.
The shuttle had cleared the atmosphere. Cold starry space awaited outside the viewport.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” was Jeshoh’s reply, and once again he turned his weapon on Shar. “Prepare to go to warp.”
As Vaughn anticipated, the Cheka warship maintained a direct intercept course with the Avaril, a fact that satisfied him; he enjoyed a predictable adversary. True to Bowers’s original estimate, the Cheka warship would intercept Avaril’s meeting tonight, five hours out from Vanìmel. “Meeting” is probably the wrong word, Vaughn thought. More like an “ambush.” The Defiant would level the playing field. He conceded there was a slim chance that the Yrythny leadership had masterminded Nog’s kidnapping, but his gut told him Chieftain J’Maah would be caught unawares when the Cheka finally showed up. Bowers continued to monitor communications from both the Avaril and the Cheka warship, hoping that additional information would be revealed.
Meanwhile, the crew of the Defiant worked; no one had any desire to leave much to chance.
For the full shift before the showdown, every crewmember perfected his or her roles. Vaughn had walked about, first observing Chief Chao’s transporter simulations, moving along to Prynn who studied the lay of the sector the Defiant would be flying through. Together, they visited the database for ideas to make evasive maneuvers more effective. On the bridge, Bowers analyzed every snippet of data the sensors revealed about the Cheka warship to devise their strategy. Lankford, one of their conn officers, upgraded the Defiant’ s navigational database with the starcharts purloined from the Cheka with, among
other things, web weapon locations. Vaughn admired the crew’s single-minded intensity.
Foremost among the single-minded was engineering. Nog’s team had been assigned the most critical tasks. Ensigns Permenter, Senkowski and Leishman had hid out in a lab, working with surprising focus considering their long hours over the past twelve days. Or maybe their dedication wasn’t surprising: they worked on behalf of their beloved chief.
Permenter had quickly taken to the idea of a noisemaker, once Vaughn had explained the twentieth and twenty-first-century tactic.
“So when an aircraft or a submarine was targeted with a missile, a noisemaker was released, tricking the missile into fixing on the noisemaker instead of the intended target?” she had reasoned.
“Exactly,” Vaughn had answered, pleased that she’d readily caught on to the idea.
“In this case, we want the Avaril’ s shuttle to be the noisemaker,” she had chewed her fingernails absently. “Trying to trick the Cheka into thinking that they’re seeing two Avarils. Mess with their sensors. Possibly project a false visual.”
“Again correct. Can you do it?”
She had nodded. “Yes…But you realize the real Avaril could still be attacked.”
“In a situation like this, I’ll take fifty-fifty odds over a hundred percent any day.”
“Good point, sir,” Permenter had agreed. “I’ll get right on it.”
Vaughn had smiled as he left engineering. Whether we rescue Nog—whether the Avaril survives—may come down to how good they are at their jobs. They’ll want to make him proud.
Vaughn continued surveying the ship, stem to stern; he wasn’t looking for anything specific, more like feeling his way around, renewing his acquaintance with an old friend. When the battle began, he needed to know who he was in the trenches with, to trust her without hesitation. Should the Cheka ship suddenly attack or if the Avaril proved to be a foe, Vaughn was prepared to go on the offensive. Defiant needed to be prepared for whatever she faced, for good or ill.
Quiet pervaded; all crewmembers soberly focused. If Vaughn was right, they had one chance at rescuing Nog. One chance. No one wanted to be the reason they lost another friend. Roness’s loss over the Vahni homeworld was still fresh in their hearts and minds.
Having finished his review of the lower decks, Vaughn circled by transporter bay 1 where Chao rechecked the system, and then on to the bridge. He replicated a cup of raktajino, took his place in the captain’s chair, and waited with the rest of them.
Because Shar had programmed the coordinates into the flight controls, Jeshoh rotated Ezri and Shar between piloting duties, anticipating that frazzled nerves might “accidentally” send them off course. Ezri had lost track of the number of hours they’d been flying, but she knew that dawn on Vanìmel was imminent.
When Ezri exchanged places with Shar, he immediately buried his attention in his padds. She couldn’t fathom what he’d be working on at a time like this—or how he could focus. If only I had access to weapons! I’m an excellent shot and could take Jeshoh down in nothing flat. At the outset, she’d agreed to travel and work unarmed. Personal phasers were locked up in one of the shuttle’s aft storage lockers. With little else to do, she eavesdropped on the interplay between the two Yrythny. Ezri wondered why she hadn’t pegged them as lovers. Maybe her sense about such things was backfiring on her. She kept her eyes on her console, listening as Jeshoh tried, once more, to lure Keren into a conversation.
“Sending the Wanderers away to colonies won’t solve our problem,” he argued. “We still can’t be together. Isn’t that why we joined the underground? To find a way we can be together?”
“Orchestrating terrorist attacks on aquaculture villages won’t solve our problems either,” she hissed. “Nor will trading eggs to the Cheka for weapons to use against the Houseborn. When the Cheka steal our offspring, you’re outraged. But now you sacrifice our young to our enemies?”
“We’ve sought to change our world since we were younglings. We vowed to do whatever was necessary, to make whatever sacrifice was required. This is the required sacrifice, Keren. These eggs aren’t ours. They belong to those who deny us our chance to have offspring. We owe them nothing.”
“This trade offers no hope for my people. Or for us,” Keren said.
Ezri listened as the argument volleyed back and forth, until Keren refused to respond to Jeshoh’s pleas. If only she’d anticipated this, she might have been able to work something into the treaty about the Houseborn-Wanderer taboos. Dangerous relationships were a Dax specialty, she thought wryly. Hadn’t she been willing to accept the consequence of reassociation to be with Lenara? The torrid, consuming kind of love—that kind of passion—prompted the most irrational behavior.
“Lieutenant,” Shar whispered. “I think I’ve got it.”
Dax turned and saw Shar’s antennae trembling with excitement. The boy will never be a poker player.“You’ve got what, Shar?”
“A preliminary genetic answer. But it will only help these two if Jeshoh can be convinced to forgo the trade.”
“Pass it over,” she ordered, taking the padd from Shar. Only a little of Jadzia’s scientific training had been in genetics, but she knew enough to interpret Shar’s data. He was absolutely correct: these findings were nothing short of astonishing.
Extrapolating the future path of genetic drift for both the Wanderers and the Houseborn, Shar’s models predicted that selective mutations in Wanderer DNA indicated that they, not the Houseborn, were the next step in Yrythny evolution. The creativity and cleverness that made them innovative artists and engineers coupled with their ability to adapt to the environment insured long-term survival.
On the other side, lacking the resilience of the Wanderers (and because of heavy interbreeding), Houseborn DNA would weaken over time, bringing on problems not unlike those now facing the Andorians. Over the generations, the Houseborn would become vulnerable to chromosomal maladies that would spell their end as a species.
The solution, ironically, was that intermating among Houseborn and Wanderers would create the genetic diversity the Yrythny species needed to survive. If present taboos and traditions continued—Wanderer sterilization, the Houseborn narrowing of the gene pool, Wanderer females not being allowed to reproduce—the Yrythny would spiral toward exinction. In fact, a reasonable conclusion was that the “Wanderer traits” were appearing precisely in order to assure the Yrythny’s survival as a species.
“This is incredible, Shar,” Ezri whispered.
Shar nodded his head, appearing very pleased.
A sensor went off on Ezri’s board. Sagan was rapidly approaching two much larger vessels. One seemed to be the Avaril. The other—
“The Cheka,” Keren moaned.
“You have to tell them,” Shar whispered to Ezri.
“Tell us what?” Jeshoh said.
“Shar’s research,” Ezri said, holding up the padd. “This is the answer you’ve been looking for.” Please let this be enough to put a stop to this insanity.
“Not offworld colonization, Lieutenant?” Jeshoh said, cynically, walking toward Ezri. “What about the magnificent compromise you negotiated with such skill among my fellow Assemblymen? Peace at last for Vanìmel! All the Wanderers have to do is leave.”
“It’s colonization, not exile!” Ezri insisted. “There are many cultures in my part of the galaxy where those unhappy with the status quo start over again somewhere else. Earth, Vulcan—” She stopped herself, knowing the names would be meaningless to Jeshoh. “The point is that colonization has often been the most viable solution to the kind of dilemma facing the Yrythny, and it’s always been a better option than genocide.”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Lieutenant?” Jeshoh asked. “If the former, then how is it that you now believe the answers we’ve been looking for are on that little device?”
Ezri sighed and shut her eyes. “Because even though colonization is a better option than genocide, this is a better option t
han colonization.” Keying the padd to display the text in Yrythny, Ezri passed the padd to Jeshoh.
He perused the results, paging through each section of Shar’s research until he reached the end. Tossing the padd on the deck, he laughed. “You expect me to believe this? Days of discussions and analyses come up empty. But in our darkest hour, you hand me research that purports to offer me the very thing Keren and I have been fighting for? It’s a hoax. It has to be.”
Ezri bit her lip. “The lateness of the research is partially my fault. I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been in helping Ensign ch’Thane pursue his study.”
“So you say now, Lieutenant,” Jeshoh said.
“Persuade him, Ezri,” Shar urged.
“I appreciate your efforts, Shar,” Jeshoh said with a sigh. “Your heart is well aligned, but the Cheka are going to get their eggs, the blockade will end, the underground will receive arms, and the fight between the Houseborn and the Wanderers will finally be a fair one. Proceed to the rendezvous point.” He walked back to his seat, still tightly gripping the sidearm.
As the senior officer, Ezri knew devising a plan fell to her. She considered Shar and Jeshoh, who embodied the extremes of reason and emotion, and puzzled over this impasse. In lieu of a phaser, she could pull out a few Klingon martial arts moves that had worked on a belligerent drunk. Startle Jeshoh. Throw him off his game. But that was Jadzia. Tobin had done that thing with the transporter to defeat a Romulan. Clever enough, but Jeshoh would be dead. She had no desire to kill anyone unless she had no other choice. Torias would do some daredevil flying to throw off his enemy, but then Shar or Keren might be hurt. And…Emony…
Stop it.
Her head hurt. She massaged her neck against the headrest, wishing away the voices in her mind. Clamoring for attention, the voices talked over one another; she couldn’t think straight through the noise.
“Ezri, you’re a counselor,” Shar whispered anxiously. “Talk him out of it.”
She stared at Shar.
Through many lives, Dax had averted crises with clever talk, brilliant (occasionally crazy) technological twists, raw nerve, un hesitating bravery and a few well-placed punches. Of these tools, none were Ezri’s, save maybe the bravery. Ezri alone had studied the workings of the mind and it was Ezri who needed to fix this. Not Curzon. Not Lela. Not Jadzia. Ezri.
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