Section 31 - Disavowed

by David Mack

  New sensor data appeared on the situation table as its display refreshed. Trom and Crin studied the icons representing their two pursuers. The first officer traced one gloved finger along the path of the hijacked scout ship. “They’re heading straight toward us.” He looked up at Trom. “Almost as if they have some means of seeing through the cloaking device.”

  Trom nodded. “They very well might. Such advantages tend to be short-lived.” He reached out and tapped the icon representing the wormhole ship. “If the scout’s following our trail, then the wormhole ship is probably shadowing the scout. Which means we can use the scout to lead our prey into a trap—and rid ourselves of two pests at once.”

  Crin reduced the volume on his vocoder. “That might not be wise, sir. What if the scout and the wormhole ship unite against us?”

  “Unlikely.” Trom’s thoughts were a whirlwind of possibilities. “The wormhole ship is following the scout at long range. If they were in league together, they’d move as a pair—or else split up to cut us off. No, our hunters have become the hunted and might not even know it.” He stalked away from the situation table and returned to the listing center seat. “Helm, bring us about. Set an intercept course for the scout ship pursuing us. Rem, charge all weapons and tell Solt we’re going to need all systems operational within the hour. It’s time for a showdown.”

  Sixteen

  Sarina’s voice was soft and her breath was warm in Bashir’s ear. “What happened over there?”

  He looked up from the sensor display and cast a furtive glance around the command deck to make sure the Section 31 agents weren’t paying particular attention to their conversation. “Nothing. Just a short holding action.”

  “That’s not how Kitsom saw it.” She turned a wary look toward the crew-cut agent. “He got pretty bent out of shape about the delay. And he blamed you.”

  Bashir shrugged off the news. “He was right. Cole wanted a two-minute countdown. I set it for six, so the station’s crew could reach the escape pods.”

  “Risky move.” Her anxious eyes flitted toward Cole. “How’d he take it?”

  “About as well as one would expect.”

  “So? Was it worth the risk?”

  “Most of the station’s crew survived. Their casualties were minimal and limited to armed combatants, and we accomplished all our mission objectives. So, yes—I think it was worth it.”

  She wore a skeptical frown. “I’d bet Cole and the others disagree.”

  He disarmed her warning with a smile. “And it’s my pleasure to disappoint them.”

  Before Sarina could chide him any further, a fast-moving anomaly sent up chirps of alarm from the sensor console. Bashir turned to analyze the readings, with Sarina looking over his shoulder. More dire alerts sounded from the tactical console. Bashir raised his voice over the sudden din of feedback tones. “Neutrino surge! Dead ahead, moving on an intercept course, closing at warp nine point eight!”

  Webb’s eyes widened as he read the report on the tactical panel. “It’s the Tajny! She’s coming right at us!”

  Cole snapped out orders. “Shields up! Evasive pattern romeo four! Charge weapons!”

  Kitsom pointed at the viewscreen. “They’re uncloaking!”

  The Breen battle cruiser rippled into view, a ghost taking shape in the darkness. Then its main disruptor banks fired, and the image on the viewscreen flared. Half a second later, the bridge was filled with the ear-splitting boom of overpowering energy blasts pummeling the Królik’s shields. Something above Bashir’s head let out a fearsome bang. He and Sarina dodged clear of a shower of white-hot phosphors that rained down from a ruptured plasma conduit.

  “Forward shields collapsing,” Webb shouted over the clamor of the attack.

  Despite Cole’s level tone, Bashir heard the stress in the man’s voice as he issued new orders. “Transfer shield power to the aft and dorsal generators. Helm, come about, hard starboard! Get me a clean shot at their warp coil!”

  Adrenaline put a tremor in Webb’s report: “They’re behind us!”

  Another brutal impact rocked the Królik. The force of it sent Bashir tumbling forward. He slammed against a secondary duty console, then lost his footing as another thunderous blast sent him and the rest of the crew flying toward starboard. For a moment he was airborne, and then he landed on top of an auxiliary console, which cracked beneath him.

  The lights went out. Bashir blinked, and a hazy, out-of-focus view of the command deck returned. He realized it wasn’t the lights that had gone out—it had been him, stunned into a semiconscious state for who knew how many seconds.

  Sarina pulled him off the shattered console and helped him onto his feet. “Get up! We have to abandon—”

  “Be advised,” rasped a mechanical voice over the ship’s internal comm network, “this is Thot Trom, commanding the Breen expeditionary force aboard the cruiser Tajny. Surrender without condition or delay, or you will be destroyed. You have twenty seconds to reply.”

  On the viewscreen, the fearsome bulk of the Tajny orbited the smaller Królik like a massive carrion bird making a slow circle above its mortally wounded prey. Cole maintained his poker face while watching the cruiser. Around him, Sakonna, Kitsom, and Webb dusted themselves off but betrayed no sign of fear.

  Quite the opposite, Bashir realized. Before the attack, they all acted as if they were under hideous stress. Now their ship is crippled and they’re about to be taken prisoner, and none of them shows a hint of concern. What are they up to?

  A burst of blue light swirled into existence behind the Królik. Bashir recognized its telltale event horizon, a cerulean storm of churning dust and high-energy particles: it was a wormhole. But its limited scope and near-perfect symmetry betrayed its origin: it was artificial, the product of a jaunt ship. The vessel that had created the instant tunnel through space hurtled out of it and cruised into an attack posture against the Tajny.

  Cole shot a look at Webb. “On speakers. I want to hear what they say to each other.”

  The agent patched in an intercept of the ship-to-ship communications between the jaunt ship and the Tajny. “Attention, unidentified Breen vessel. This is Captain sh’Pherron, commanding the free starship ShiKahr. Power down your weapons and drop your shields.”

  Kitsom reclined his chair, crossed his arms, and grinned at Webb. “Bet you a hundred credits the Breen don’t even respond before they open fire.”

  “No bet,” Webb said.

  Sarina wrangled a sensor report from the stuttering hash of her console. “The Tajny is coming about to face the ShiKahr. Wait, I’m detecting a power buildup—”

  The Tajny unleashed a massive pulse of energy at the ShiKahr. The brilliant white sphere slammed into the jaunt ship. A crackling cocoon of wild, sapphire-hued lightning enveloped the vessel from its needle-shaped primary hull to its ring-shaped secondary fuselage. The creeping tendrils of blue energy snaked inside the ship, whose running lights dimmed and went dark.

  Bashir recognized the weapon that had crippled the ShiKahr. He had been aboard the first Defiant when it was laid low by the Breen’s dreaded energy-dampening cannon. Although ships in his universe had since been hardened to repel that attack, the jaunt ships apparently had not.

  As the same mechanized voice that had given its ultimatum to the agents on the Królik addressed the jaunt ship’s crew over an open channel, Bashir realized that he and the rest of Cole’s team had all just been played for fools.

  “Crew of the ShiKahr. This is Thot Trom, commanding the Breen expeditionary force on the cruiser Tajny. Surrender and prepare to be boarded.”

  * * *

  In every direction sh’Pherron turned, she found bad news. “Riaow?”

  The Caitian tapped at her console, whose surface danced with wild blue fingers of electricity. “Weapons and shields off-line! Tactical grid’s fried!”

  Zareth swiveled his glenget—a kneeling chair custom-made to suit his peculiar Chelon physiology with its inflexible back carapace—
and faced the captain. “Helm’s frozen!”

  Turak stepped back from the master systems display, which had become a flickering mosaic of chaotic pixels. “All computer systems are off-line.”

  “Which means we can’t initiate command lockouts or a manual override.” Desperate for good news, sh’Pherron tried to open an internal comm channel to main engineering, but the interface beside her command chair transformed into a garbled mess and went dark. “Uzaveh’s fire! What hit us?” She tapped the subdural communicator behind her ear and was relieved to hear the dulcet tone of the transceiver standing by to transmit. “Everyone, switch to personal communicators. Until we get the computer back, all comms need to be direct, from person to person. Riaow, tell security to repel boarders. Turak, let Mott know we need primary power and the main computer restored, as soon as possible. Zareth, contact the deck officers for casualty and damage reports, see if they—”

  “Captain,” Turak cut in. “Boarders reported in main engineering and auxiliary control.”

  “Have all personnel in those sections repel boarders by any means necessary, and—” Her train of thought was derailed by a singsong wash of noise and a flurry of light in the center of the bridge. “Hit the deck!” She turned her chair and raced to duck behind it.

  A fury of white light was followed by a tooth-rattling detonation. By the time sh’Pherron realized what had happened, she was lying flat on her back, half blind, half deaf, and stunned.

  Standing above her and the rest of her dazed bridge crew were a dozen Breen soldiers armed with disruptor rifles, stun batons, and flash grenades. The neon green glow of their visors cut through the smoky gloom of their attack’s aftermath. Acting on instinct, sh’Pherron tried to draw her phaser, only to have one of the Breen step on her wrist and pin it to the deck.

  The hulking masked intruder loomed over her. A harsh scratch of mechanical noise spat from a speaker in the snout of his mask. A secondary speaker mounted beneath the snout translated the sounds for her. “I am Thot Trom. Do you command this ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Order your crew to stand down and surrender.”

  Trom waited several seconds for sh’Pherron to react, but she made no move to comply. Staring at the monstrous contours of his helmet, she felt her antennae twitch with revulsion.

  Trom increased the pressure on sh’Pherron’s wrist, which cracked loudly beneath his weight. She dropped her weapon. “Give the order, Captain. Tell your crew to stand down.”

  “No.”

  The Breen aimed his rifle and snapped off one shot. Its crimson blast struck Zareth, who let out a roar of pain as he vanished in a fast-spreading blaze of red fire that left nothing behind but a handful of dust and the echoes of his death cry. Then Trom leveled his weapon at Turak. “Tell your crew to stand down and surrender this ship, or I will execute your bridge officers, one by one. After they are gone, I will have my men execute the rest of your crew the same way. And I will make you witness every one of their deaths.”

  Handing over the ship went against all of sh’Pherron’s training. Worse, it offended her on a personal level; losing her ship so decidedly, and so swiftly, was a smirch upon her virtue as an Andorian. But her pride was not worth sacrificing the hundreds of lives under her command. She slowly raised her empty hand and touched the transceiver behind her ear.

  “Captain sh’Pherron to all ShiKahr personnel. Attention, all decks. This is the captain. Stand down. This is a direct order. Lay down your weapons and surrender.” She glared up at the masked villain whose boot pressed on her wrist and whose rifle remained trained on her first officer. “Thot Trom is now in command of this vessel. That is all. Sh’Pherron out.” Another light tap on her subcutaneous transceiver closed the channel. She looked up at Trom, her eyes and her heart full of hate. “The ship is yours.”

  “I know it is. Thank you, Captain.” He removed his boot from her wrist, kicked away her weapon, and barked orders in his machine-noise voice. There was no translation this time, but none was required; the actions that followed were self-explanatory.

  The Breen soldiers hoisted sh’Pherron and her stunned officers from the deck, herded them into a turbolift, and marched them belowdecks, to the brig.

  * * *

  Time was short and Thot Trom was impatient as he entered the ShiKahr’s transporter room. “Energize,” he said as soon as he’d stepped through the doorway. One of his technicians, Chot Kine, initiated the transport sequence.

  Trom faced the transporter platform. Half a dozen heavily armed Spetzkar troopers stood between him and the low dais. Six figures materialized on the energizer pads. As the prismatic whorl of light resolved into solid forms, Trom saw that his newest prisoners were wearing Breen military uniforms—but their faces were distinctly those of Federation-aligned species: four human males, a human female, and a Vulcan female.

  As the annular confinement beam deactivated, freeing them from their in-transport paralysis, the Spetzkar troopers raised their weapons. To the prisoners’ credit, none of them made even the slightest attempt to reach for his or her own disruptor pistol, which were plucked from their belt holsters by two of the Spetzkar.

  “Which of you is in command?”

  As Trom expected, the eldest human male, a trim figure with close-cut dark hair and green eyes, stepped to the front of the group. “I am.”

  “Name?”

  “Cole.”

  “How did you come to possess a Breen military vessel?”

  The human shrugged. “I never thought to ask.”

  “How did you learn of our mission?”

  “What mission?”

  Behind his helmet, Trom smiled at the human’s insouciance. “Feigned ignorance? Is that all you have to offer? You disappoint me.” He turned toward Thar Khol, the chief of the security detachment. “Take them to the nearest empty cargo bay. Have Doctor Nev meet us there with an interrogation kit.” As his men seized the prisoners and forced them toward the door, Trom permitted himself a rare moment of gloating. “You want to play? Then let the games begin.”

  Seventeen

  Bashir saw little of the jaunt ship during his forced march from the transporter room to the cargo bay—nothing but corridors either deserted or littered with the bodies of those slain by the Breen. The few details he noticed suggested the ShiKahr was a clean and orderly vessel, a bit tight on interior space but no less accommodating than many of Starfleet’s smaller ships.

  The small cargo bay to which he and the rest of the Section 31 team had been led was also nearly immaculate, and it exhibited an efficient use of space. If he had one criticism of the storage bay, it was that it felt uncomfortably cold, but he attributed that to the fact that he and the others had been compelled by their captors to remove their stolen Breen uniforms, which had left all of them barefoot and attired in only their undergarments.

  He also blamed his crushing headache on the Breen, because they were the ones who had strung up him and the others by their bound ankles and dangled them upside down with their fingertips just shy of scraping the deck. As if hanging inverted hadn’t been enough of an indignity, the Spetzkar guarding them until their commander’s arrival insisted on circling the group and jabbing them with stun batons at random intervals.

  Muffled grunts and stifled shouts of pain answered every crackling thrust of the batons. Bashir dreaded his next turn on the receiving end of the Breen’s sadism. Just when he thought he might be spared another jolt, a stab of white heat in his ribs made his mind go blank.

  Consciousness returned with a shudder. He had no idea how long he had been out. At first he thought it might have been only a few seconds. Then he assessed the size of the puddle of drool that had spilled from his mouth and gathered beneath his head, and he realized he must have been hanging stunned and limp for at least a minute, if not longer.

  He turned his head toward Sarina, who hung like a rag doll beside him, and he mumbled under his breath, “If this is the Breen’s idea of a suspended se
ntence, I can’t say I approve.”

  His rewards for the bad joke were a wince from Sarina and a gut-punch from a Breen that left him gasping like a landed fish. The quip had been an admittedly lame attempt to bolster his broken morale, but more than once he had found comfort in gallows humor during times such as this.

  The cargo bay’s broad oval door dilated and vanished inside the bulkhead. A trio of Breen entered. Bashir recognized the insignia of the one walking in front of the others—it was the commander, Thot Trom. He surmised the others were two of Trom’s senior officers.

  Analyzing their gaits and body language from an upside-down vantage made it more difficult for Bashir to guess the species of the individuals beneath the Breen uniforms. Even so, he was fairly certain the commander was a Silgov, a humanoid species whose members could mingle easily among the peoples of the Federation. The other two were harder to gauge. The lightness of one’s step led Bashir to think he might be an Amoniri, a low-density species whose need for cold had made refrigeration units standard issue on Breen uniforms; the other one was likely a Fenrisal, a lupine-featured race for whom the Breen masks had acquired snouts.

  The Spetzkar officers approached the prisoners and spread out into a single rank before them. Trom looked at one of the Breen who had been guarding the group. Harsh noise spat from Trom’s vocoder like sonic confetti ejected from a blender. Despite Bashir’s experience with the Breen language, the device’s near-perfect scrambling of vocabulary and syntax left him no chance of decoding the conversation transpiring right in front of his face.

  After a brief exchange with his men, Trom activated his vocoder’s translator circuit. “Who is ready to answer my questions?” His request was met by silence. “Your stoicism is laudable but futile. Most of you are unknown to us.” He looked at Bashir. “But not all of you.”

  One of the other Spetzkar handed Trom the Breen version of a padd. He took a short look at it, then proceeded as if from memory. “Doctor Julian Subatoi Bashir. Human, genetically enhanced. Former chief medical officer, Starbase Deep Space Nine. Dishonorably discharged from Starfleet after a court-martial in absentia. I’ll spare you a recounting of the formal charges.”