Proud Helios

by Melissa Scott

  * * *

  Sisko smiled, his own relief an almost painful lightness in his chest. "We'll try to do better next time, Chief." He turned back to the main console. "Möhrlein, get us out of here."

  "Sir," the smuggler acknowledged. "Returning to the station."

  "Whatever your top speed is," Sisko said. "Use it."

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Möhrlein nod, but his own attention was fixed on the scene unrolling in the main viewscreen. Helios had turned fully, presenting its least damaged flank to the oncoming Cardassians; even as Sisko watched, the lead Cardassian ship fired, and he saw the phaser bolts blaze against the stars before dissipating in a blue flash of Cherenkov radiation.

  "They've got their shields back," Tama said, unnecessarily.

  Sisko touched his controls, throwing a tactical grid and projected-course lines across the onscreen images. "They're running for the wormhole," he said, as much to himself as to the others. Gul Dukat had seen it, too: in the screen, the Cardassian ships fanned out, trying to drive the bigger ship away from the approach to the wormhole—and back toward the station. "Möhrlein, how long to get to DS9?"

  "Forty minutes," the smuggler answered, and Sisko could hear the strain in his voice. "And I'm at maximum now."

  "Let me see what I can do," O'Brien said. Sisko glanced at him, and somehow the engineer achieved a grin. "Hell, sir, I've been practicing on stranger equipment all day."

  "Do it, Chief," Sisko ordered.

  Bashir relinquished his place at the technical console, and O'Brien stooped over the controls, his hands working even before he sat down.

  "The Cardassians are firing again," Möhrlein said.

  Sisko saw the lights flare in the viewer, saw the answering blue flash as the bolts struck Helios's shields. The big ship seemed to ignore them, plunging on as though nothing had happened—but the shields had to be feeling the strain, Sisko thought. Not even Helios could take that kind of punishment for very long—and why didn't Kolovzon return fire? Had his phasers been out of service all along, and all his threats nothing but a bluff? Light flared suddenly on the screen, bright enough to make him blink: Helios had finally returned fire. The lead Cardassian ship seemed to stagger briefly, yawing away from the bolts before returning to its original course.

  "Their shields are holding," Tama reported. "But they're at forty percent over the starboard quarter."

  Helios swept on, ignoring its enemy's vulnerability, fired at the second ship without effect, and kept going. Why? Sisko demanded silently. Why not finish them off— The tactical grid held the answer, and he swore under his breath. Helios was driving for the wormhole, but the Cardassians were pushing her inexorably off the direct course.

  "I've got it," O'Brien said, from the technician's station.

  "I can bypass the transformer, that'll double our power output. It'll be a rough ride, but we'll be back at DS9 in twenty minutes—or maybe less."

  "If it doesn't blow the entire system," Möhrlein protested. "And my internal compensators, not to mention destabilize every control surface I've got."

  "You mean you can't handle it?" O'Brien asked, and Möhrlein's lips thinned.

  "Anything you can rig, I can fly—engineer."

  "Do it," Sisko said.

  "Strap in," Möhrlein said. He looked at Sisko then, mouth curving into a gambler's smile. "Like the man said, it's going to be rough."

  Sisko reached for his own safety webbing, the heavy, archaic grey synthistel, and drew it tight across his body. Behind him, he heard the rustling as the others did the same, and then O'Brien said, "The bypass is ready, sir."

  "Ready here," Möhrlein said, and sounded grim.

  Sisko glanced for a final time at the tactical grids, at the warships sliding smoothly across the stars, and nodded. "Do it, Chief."

  The lurch of acceleration flung him back in his couch, tugged painfully at heart and guts before the gravitics reasserted control. He risked a glance sideways, and saw Möhrlein's teeth bared in a grin that was more like the snarl of a corpse. O'Brien braced himself against his console, pushing himself away from the panel with one strong arm while he adjusted the controls with his free hand. At his side, Tama pushed himself back into his chair, tightening his safety web with shaking hands. Blood showed at the corner of his mouth where his head had hit the console. Bashir started to go to him, loosening his own webbing, but the smuggler waved him back as Carabas lurched again.

  It was a ride Sisko would never forget. The ship lurched and seemed to skid as the gravitic compensators tried and failed fully to match the increased acceleration, and the ship's controls alternately held and slewed wildly. It was like being on a roller coaster, Sisko thought, clinging to the sides of his console, but a roller coaster that moved in three dimensions, not two. He heard Kira whoop wordlessly—she seemed almost to be enjoying the mad ride—and Odo snarled something in answer.

  "And will we be able to dock under these conditions?"

  Sisko looked at Möhrlein, who shrugged, his hands never moving from his controls. "If we get there in one piece, they can tractor us in. If the deflectors are down."

  Sisko looked at the tactical display, at the ships now locked in roiling battle, and at DS9 still out of the worst of the danger zone. If everything held, he thought, if it all held together, they would survive—if.

  "Come on," Möhrlein muttered, under his breath, hands white-knuckled on his console, "Come on, don't fall apart on me now."

  Sisko reached for the communications console, his grasp uncertain in the shifting gravity, but on the second try opened the channel to DS9. "Carabas to Deep Space Nine. Come in, Dax."

  "Benjamin!" Dax's voice was sharp with alarm. "Commander, your course is very erratic—"

  "I know," Sisko answered, and was shaken with the desire to laugh aloud. Erratic was hardly strong enough a word for what he was feeling. "We're coming up on the station. Can you take us aboard?"

  There was a brief pause before Dax answered. "We're at red alert, Commander. Can you give me a definite approach vector? And velocity?"

  "No. You'll have to bring us in by tractor," Sisko said.

  "Very well," Dax said, and her voice sounded momentarily less certain than her words. "Stand by."

  "Standing by," Sisko answered, and relaxed, letting the uncertain gravity pull him back against the couch's padding. He had done everything he could; the rest was up to Dax.

  * * *

  Dax frowned at the readouts streaming across her screen, looked up a final time at the display filling the main viewer. Carabas's course was a red line—a broad red line, compensating for the unstable progress—aimed at the station; beyond it, a tangle of gold lines tipped by wedges marked the ongoing pursuit. She spared that only the slightest glance—Helios was slowly gaining on her pursuers, struggling toward the wormhole—and turned her attention to Carabas. The little ship was coming in at too high a velocity, and under imperfect control: hard to catch effectively in the clumsy tractor, even harder to catch safely, so that the shock of mismatched velocities didn't override the already stressed compensators and turn her passengers to jelly. And yet, if they slowed down, the shields would have to be lowered for an even longer period—and that was an unacceptable risk to the station.

  She scowled at the uncompromising numbers, her mind racing. Keep the same velocity, but somehow make sure that the shock of the tractor's "catch" didn't override Carabas's compensators…All right, she thought, if Carabas's relative velocity has to remain the same, can I make the tractor relatively "quicker," closer to Carabas's apparent speed—make it somehow elastic, so that it gives with the ship's pull, countering its velocity that way? There was something she had read before, years before, in another lifetime, another host…Her frown cleared, and she keyed in the name, the references, praying that the station's library computer would have the article she had so suddenly remembered. She held her breath as the screen went blank, and then cleared. The equations lay before her, the solution in black
and white. She suppressed the desire to shout her elation, and turned to the communications screen.

  "Dax to Carabas."

  "Sisko here."

  "We can take you aboard by tractor," Dax said, and this time didn't bother to hide her smile.

  In the screen, Sisko frowned. "What about the deflectors? The station's safety—"

  "Is my first priority, Benjamin," Dax cut in. "The screens will be down for the minimum possible time, well within acceptable limits. We're going to use Ballanca's equations."

  Sisko frowned. "I don't think I'm familiar with that, Dax."

  "Bloody hell," O'Brien whispered, behind him, and Sisko felt a sudden twinge of uncertainty.

  "It's a way of making the tractor beam behave as though it were elastic," Dax said. "In effect, it will 'stretch' a little as it takes you in tow, damping out the shock of matching velocities."

  "I hope you've worked this out right, Dax," Sisko said. There was no other choice, and he knew it, but it wasn't a particularly pleasant prospect.

  "So do I," Dax answered, with a little smile. "My calculations show you'll reach the optimum point for pickup in two minutes. Please confirm."

  Sisko looked at Möhrlein, who nodded.

  "I confirm that, Dax," Sisko said.

  "Then stand by for pickup in two minutes," Dax said. "Deep Space Nine out."

  Sisko took a deep breath. "All right, people, check your safety webbing now. This is likely to be very rough."

  He heard the murmur of acknowledgment, and then the rustle of movement, barely audible over the moan of the engines, as the others obeyed his order. He dragged his own webbing tight again, grateful for its firm embrace, and a set of numbers flared in his screen: Möhrlein had set a countdown running. He made himself take slow, deep breaths as the numbers clicked down, and, as the last second ticked away, lifted his voice to carry to the full compartment. "All right, people, hang on—"

  His last word was snatched away in the sudden impact as the tractor beam struck the ship. Carabas's engines whined, and the ship yawed against the beam, threatening to tumble out of control as the tractor momentarily overrode the control surfaces. Möhrlein, white-faced, white-knuckled, struggled to bring the ship back into its proper alignment, and Sisko lunged forward and sideways against the safety netting, adding his input to the system. Carabas lurched again, the gravity surged and dropped sickeningly, and then, quite suddenly, the ship steadied.

  "Carabas," Dax's deceptively placid voice said from the main screen, "we have you in tow. Stand by to come aboard."

  It took less than three minutes to bring the ship the rest of the way into the docking port, but Sisko did not relax until the airlock had closed over the ship. He wrestled himself free of the safety netting, calling, "Dax, raise the deflectors. I'm on my way to Ops."

  "What about shutdown?" O'Brien protested, and Sisko shook his head.

  "Leave it—let Möhrlein handle it, it's his ship. We're needed in Ops, all of you."

  The hatch was already open, and he charged through, his officers close on his heels. They made it to Ops in record time—ever afterward, Sisko wished they had recorded their progress—and he burst from the turbolift to see his crew staring openmouthed at the viewscreen. In its darkness, Helios hung at bay, slewed round at last to face the pursuing Cardassians, the solar face, now stained with the scoring of a direct, shield-piercing phaser blast, glaring down at them.

  "Benjamin—" Dax exclaimed, and stopped, biting off her instinctive cry of relief and welcome, replacing it with the practical response of a Starfleet officer. "They're right at the wormhole, sir, but they're losing power."

  "Helios?" Sisko asked, and the Trill nodded.

  "Our sensors report they've lost aft shields, and forward deflectors are down by thirty percent."

  Light flared in the screen, brilliant, blinding, a light Sisko had seen only in training, the killing glare of a full phaser barrage, every battery on Helios firing in a single massed pattern. Sisko lifted his hand to his eyes, and the screen went momentarily white as the visible-light sensors struggled to compensate. The brilliance faded slightly, and Sisko, blinking through the clouds that blurred his vision, saw the first of the Cardassians swinging out of control, away from its proper course. Its hull was dark, only the emergency lights flickering across its hull.

  "We're picking up a distress signal from Vindicator," a technician said.

  Sisko grinned. "She's swinging across the cruiser's course—oh, that was nice shooting." He remembered then who he was praising, and was silent, but the unregenerate starship commander in him cheered at the Cardassians' defeat.

  And then the wormhole opened, blue disk roiling out into space, the shaft of light at its center beckoning Helios onward. The ship swung again, accelerating into that brilliance. The remaining Cardassians fired again, but the cruiser's fire fell short, blocked by the need to avoid the damaged frigate. The second frigate scored one, perhaps two hits, and then Helios had vanished, absorbed into the light, and the wormhole had started to close, spiraling back in to cover and conceal its course.

  "The Cardassians have lost their sensor suite," Dax reported. "They're not going to be able to pursue."

  Obviously Kolovzon's intention, with that last barrage, Sisko thought. A clever move, maybe even brilliant. He said, "Could Helios have survived the passage through the wormhole?"

  Dax shook her head, and turned away from her console. "They'd taken a lot of damage, Benjamin. And they weren't in good shape to start. The stresses—they were starting to break up as they went into the wormhole, but there's no way to tell for certain."

  Sisko nodded slowly. "Stand down from red alert."

  "Sir," Kira said, and Sisko rejoiced inwardly to hear her familiar voice. "Sir, the Cardassian cruiser is hailing us."

  "Put it on the main viewer," Sisko said.

  Gul Dukat's face glared down at him, technicians scuttling back and forth in the background, and Sisko hid another grin. Clearly, Helios had done her fair share of damage.

  "Commander Sisko," Dukat said. "I warn you, my government will consider your behavior an act of direct aggression—"

  "Hold it, Dukat," Sisko said. "You were warned that I had staff being held prisoner on that ship, and that I would do whatever was necessary to get my people off in one piece." He allowed his real anger to show for the first time. "And you did nothing whatever to protect them, or this station—and yet you were still unable to carry out your government's orders."

  "Your interference," Dukat began, and Sisko's temper finally broke.

  "We did not interfere with anything, Dukat. The only interference here has been yours—your egregious violation of Bajoran sovereignty, not to mention your callous disregard for the safety of the people aboard this space station. I suggest that you and your fleet depart Federation space immediately—or as soon as you're able to get under way—before your presence causes further diplomatic repercussions." In the screen, Dukat's mouth opened and closed twice without sound, like a fish feeding, but Sisko swept on without waiting for an answer. "Now, Dukat. Sisko out."

  He gestured for Kira to cut the connection, and the picture vanished, to be replaced with the image of the three ships hanging against the starscape and the invisible wormhole. The lead frigate—Vindicator—was still drifting, distress lights now flaring along her sides.

  "The cruiser is changing course," Dax reported, after a moment. "She's heading for the border, Commander. And the other frigate is taking Vindicator in tow."

  Sisko nodded. "Good. After all that, I'd've hated to have to offer assistance."

  Dax smiled back at him, and he heard a chuckle, quickly suppressed, from Kira. Sisko squelched his own feeling of triumph—it was too soon, there was still too much to do, to indulge himself yet—and turned to Dax. "What's our general status, Lieutenant?"

  Dax bent over her console. "Running diagnostics now, sir. Everything seems to be in order—" She broke off abruptly, fingers stabbing at her controls. "Sir,
docking port five is open, and Carabas is no longer in the bay."

  "Find it," Sisko ordered.

  "Scanning now," Dax answered. A moment later, she looked up again, unsuccessfully struggling to hide a smile. "Commander, I have the ship on sensors. It's heading out of the Bajor system at top impulse power."

  Sisko heard a soft noise behind him, and turned to see Odo glaring at the screen. "Constable?"

  "They were under arrest, Commander," Odo said, through clenched teeth. "Sir, I must put myself on report for carelessness. I should have stayed behind, made sure they did not escape."

  Sisko shook his head. "There were other things going on, Odo. You had other concerns."

  "Nevertheless," Odo began, and Sisko held up his hand.

  "Don't worry about it, Constable. Considering all the help they gave us, getting Kira and O'Brien back, it would have been a little awkward to see them go to jail—I would have felt obliged to act as a character witness, which might have been embarrassing."

  Odo gave him an odd look, disapproval and agreement mingled. "Indeed it might."

  Sisko grinned, and looked around the operations center as though he were seeing it for the first time. The station was safe, his people, his family and crew, all safely restored to their proper places. He took a deep breath, savoring his victory, and then his eye fell on a datapadd abandoned on the operations table. He picked it up, scanned it idly, and then more carefully as its import sank in. It was a list of minor systems failures and necessary repairs that had been reported since the crisis began. Over a dozen items, Sisko thought, and it was almost certainly still growing.

  "O'Brien," he said, "I think you'd better get onto these." He held out the datapadd, and O'Brien took it, a look of resignation settling onto his round features.

  "Aye, sir."

  "But do it tomorrow," Sisko said, and headed up the stairs to his office. "It's good to be home."

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