Station Rage

by Diane Carey

  "I mean right now."

  "Now? Captain, your heart nearly stopped. You need a good twelve hours of recuperation time."

  "Pump me full of whatever it takes."

  "You already are full of anesthetics, antibiotics, and cordrazine. That's why you're talking to us and not screaming in agony."

  Odo looked at Bashir. The doctor was overstepping. His young bronze face was tight with concern at this field-treatment business. He didn't like it. He wanted a nice clean infirmary around him, with support staff and sterile fields.

  Understandable. The situation was intolerable to Odo, the lack of control, of order, the unpredictability. He grimaced with anticipation of disaster as he brought his physical matter back to his side and reintegrated it into a humanoid hand, but no bright light came to signal the end.

  Before him, Sisko struggled to roll onto his elbow. The effort drained him as if he'd been climbing a cliff. "There are bullies on my playground, Doctor. Neither deserves to win. The High Gul is like the soldier left on an island who doesn't realize his war is long over with. If I don't stop him, he's going to keep fighting until it breaks all our backs. You shore me up and get me out there."

  Irritated, sopped in blood to the elbows and speckled with it up to his neck, Bashir didn't argue. Staidly he prepared the right hypo.

  As he waited, Sisko looked at Odo with concern that embarrassed the shapeshifter, then fingered his comm badge. Sweat poured down the sides of his dust-plastered face as he forced his legs under him. His complexion was ashy as a Cardassian's. "Sisko to Ops. Come in, Dax."

  "Benjamin? You're alive? Kira said—"

  "Mostly. "

  "Fransu knows what he's doing. He's concentrating his firepower on our shield grid and he's broken it in several places. Overall shield power is down to one-third, structural integrity is ruptured in sixteen outer areas, and the lower core is uninhabitable. There are fires in at least ten sections. Weapons power is still up, but I don't know for how long. O'Brien's giving them priority. The docking ring is—"

  "How are the transporters? Is Defiant still in range?"

  "Impulse engines are just warming up. It's taking a while because of the complete maintenance shutdown. They're coming up around the station to meet Gul Fransu's ship."

  "Have they moved out of the station's shield perimeter yet? And are their shields up?"

  "No to both. In thirty seconds they'll be out of our shields and they'll have no choice but to put up their own."

  "I want you to beam me over there, quick."

  "Specifically—?"

  "The bridge is transport-shielded. Send me to the engineering deck." He looked at Odo again. "You coming?"

  "I want to," Odo offered automatically, and even the offer caused a reserve of strength to surge through him. He sat up straighter. "But I can't. If I could only relax completely for just ten minutes, I could hold this form again long enough to help you. But that's not possible. I'm coming to the end of it. I have to get off the station."

  Sisko gritted his teeth and grimaced with pure effort as Bashir hoisted him to his feet. Then the doctor gave him the last hypo, the one that would mask his pain, clot his blood, sustain his strength, keep his heart hammering, and hold him upright for a few critical minutes longer.

  "Don't use the transporter," the captain said, struggling for every thought. "We don't know what that would to you. The dissolution of particles might—"

  He stopped. He didn't say it.

  "Ignite me," Odo droned. "I understand. I'll find O'Brien. He'll get me into a runabout."

  "Benjamin, you have ten seconds."

  "Odo, I'm sorry," Sisko grated with clear sympathy "I'm ready, Dax."

  "Are you armed?"

  "A phaser, two fists, and a lot of teeth." Sisko stepped out of the clutter of bodies, and as Odo gazed up at him and wondered what he was thinking, he said, "Energize."

  "Fransu! Fransu … Fransu … so it's you."

  On the main screen, the picture of Gul Fransu was incongruously clear, considering the sector whiteout and the bombardment that had rattled down through the station to the Defiant until a few minutes ago.

  The High Gul stared and stared at the man he obviously knew.

  Kira Nerys paused and watched them. What did they look like to each other? To Fransu, the High Gul must look not so different from the last time they'd seen each other, eighty-some years ago. But Fransu was an old soldier now, hammered and wizened, only an echo of what his youth must have looked like.

  The High Gul glanced at her in an accusing way, then dropped the fact that she hadn't told him the identity of their attackers. As she returned his glare with her own, he seemed to accept that it hadn't been her job to tell him. The opposite, rather.

  He looked again at the Cardassian man on the screen.

  "Fransu …" he murmured again. "I had hoped it would not be you."

  On the screen, Fransu glanced to his side at one of his crewmen, then rubbed a sweaty hand across the front of his silver-gray uniform.

  "Excellency," he began. "Central Command is thrilled that you are alive."

  "Oh, yes," the High Gul drawled. "Yes … I certainly would be, to see an anchor of the past resurrected."

  Kira held her breath. What was the relationship here? Had Sisko been wrong about these two?

  "Fransu," the High Gul began, dwelling for some unspoken reason on the name, "patch me into the Central Command. I wish to speak to them."

  "Excellency … I cannot do that. The sector is blanked out."

  "Unblanket it."

  "I can't do that without collecting the string of drones manually."

  "I see. Fransu … I want you to cease firing on the outpost of Terok Nor."

  "Very well."

  Kira squinted. Too easy. Way, way too damned easy.

  "Where are my Elites, Fransu?" the High Gul asked. His voice had a terrible one-dimensionality about it. "Where are my loyal two thousand?"

  "During the conquest of Tal Demica, in the later years when it was almost won, I sent the revive signal. They arose, but you did not. You were gone. Someone had moved you. The two thousand went on to fight as ordered, to conquer Tal Demica as planned. Your name is revered through the Empire."

  Before Kira, the High Gul smiled a deep sentimental smile, but also one of warm amusement. He strode to the other side of the deck, pulling his hand along the helm as if drawing a line, gazing first at the deck, then back up at Fransu.

  "I would like, when this is over, to go back to Tal Demica and see what really transpired and what has developed there as a result."

  Fransu paused, struggled for control over his expression, glanced to his side again. "If you will beam aboard," he said evenhandedly, "I will take you there."

  "Thank you, Fransu. Thank you most deeply. Now I know without a doubt what to do. I'm glad we had this moment of deception between us. I've enjoyed this," he said to the face on the large screen. "Unfortunately, all things end."

  "Deception?" Fransu returned, but he knew.

  The High Gul nodded. "Didn't you learn anything from me in those early days? I don't think you allowed my two thousand to survive their hibernation. You've not only become a coward, but a butcher as well."

  "Why do you say these things, sir?"

  "Because you're preparing to release the outpost only in order to engage this ship in battle."

  Fransu sighed, glanced to his right again, then asked, "How do you deduce this?"

  "Because you've brought only one ship. Central Command has no idea you've come here, have they? Otherwise there would be either celebrations and a welcoming fleet, or a fleet of blatant attack, depending upon how things have really played out. But there is only you. You were ambitious enough to betray me, but too cowardly to kill me. You try to act in secret, to protect yourself from your past actions, but you've learned nothing in these years. The truth always leaks out, Fransu. There is no perfect silence. Whatever you do here will find its way back home. Cardassia has
nothing to gain from the destruction of these people."

  "No," Fransu finally admitted. "But I do. I should have killed you when I had the chance, but in those days I could not raise my hand so high. Fortunately, my awe for you has faded with my youth."

  "How do you intend to explain the slaughter of this outpost?"

  "There will be nothing but a smoldering wreck. I learned long ago not to explain wreckage."

  "I'm glad you learned something," the High Gul said. "Now, my bold student, let me ask you this and watch the shade of the decades fall from your eyes … do you remember what you're up against?"

  CHAPTER 19

  WITH THE HELM under her hands and the ship murmuring softly against her thighs, Kira Nerys faced forward but still felt the High Gul's eyes upon her, scoping the back of her head, her shoulders, and she felt his tempered smile.

  "We're coming out of the station's shield sphere," she reported. Her throat was raw. "I'm putting up our own shields. They're almost fully charged. Do you have a heading for me? Something tells me you're not the frontal attack type."

  "What are the strengths of this ship?"

  When he asked that, ignoring her comment, instinctively Kira stopped underestimating him. He might be out of date, but smart then was smart now and he was smart enough to know that she knew how to fight with this ship.

  "Heavy weaponry," she said, "heavy shielding, tight maneuverability. It's a one-of-a-kind ship, so Fransu won't know its abilities."

  "Weaknesses?"

  "Our weaknesses are simply lack of crew. If something goes down, there's no way for the five of us to get it back on-line. Second, our photon torpedoes are out of the equation. We don't keep them active and loaded—they're too dangerous. It takes crew to load them. We'll have to do without ours, but Fransu won't have to do without his."

  "And as I recall, photon torpedoes are quite formidable at close range."

  "Right."

  "Things have not changed so much. Weapons are weapons, ships are ships, Fransu is Fransu. While we pass him, I want you to open fire. Let him have a taste of this vessel in his teeth."

  Kira hunched her shoulders and pressed her cold fingers to the helm. "Coming about."

  Squat and tankish, tilting as efficiently as a dish spun across a galley floor, the Defiant turned up on one fistlike nacelle, swung on an invisible lead line around Rugg'l, and jumped into a sudden burst of speed.

  Like a prowling hound the Cardassian ship hung against the ageless black shroud above Deep Space Nine. A beautiful sight in its way, and a strange drugged feeling, this reawakened challenge. It raced in Kira's veins. Again she was fighting the Cardassians, this time at a Cardassian's side. There was always a cost to peace, and if she paid Bajor's today she would be gratified. Deals were made every day, but few for the sleepful nights of a whole civilization, possibly a whole sector. Bajor's peace had been allowed lately, but unfinished. If the High Gul wasn't lying, and she didn't think he was, then she might have purchased a few generations' nights of peace, whose mornings were unafraid.

  Seconds were suddenly swallowed and she shook herself out of her thoughts and put her hands on the firing controls, but Fransu beat her to it. The Cardassian ship opened up on them at close range, pounding blue bolts across the open sky between the two ships, incising Defiant's shields across the critical midpoint.

  The bridge became sharply hot—a sure sign of power loss somewhere on board. The ship was in survival mode and sacrificing comfort for compensation.

  "Equipment failure in something called PDT crossfeeds," Elto reported from the upper bridge.

  "That's the primary slush deuterium tank—impulse fuel temperature. We can't go without that."

  The High Gul calmly searched for the comm unit. "Bridge to Clus and Koto. If you can hear me, please go to the auxiliary control area and compensate for temperature control in the impulse fuel tanks."

  "They're turning," Kira said as she watched the other ship on the forward screen and the small displays around her that measured what was happening out there.

  As Rugg'l began its swing to meet them, Kira opened fire. Heavy energy bolts racked the bridge, so powerful that their noise came up through the ship as an earsplitting whine—pew-pew-pew-pew.

  The bolts rapid-fired into space and caught Rugg'l under the chin, knocking the big ship upward against its own artificial gravity.

  The High Gul inched forward in the command seat and cracked, "Wonderful!"

  "Not bad, not bad, not bad," Kira murmured, gritted her teeth and came about again. When the beam of Rugg'l presented itself, she fired again.

  The Cardassian ship heeled downward on one side now as its shields absorbed the pummeling with almost visible effort.

  "This is a wonderful ship we have!" the High Gul uttered genuinely.

  Kira nodded, but her mind was on something else. "We can hang out here forever and pound on each other until one of us breaks down, and it'll be us because he has a crew and we don't."

  "And he knows by now that we have no photon torpedoes, or we would have used them at this range."

  She peered over a shoulder. "How do you figure he knows that much about Federation technology?"

  "I must assume he does, or we could all die of my shortsightedness. After all, he has not been asleep for eighty years."

  Kira made a ragged grumble in her throat and faced the bow again. One battle at a time.

  "Shoot again," the High Gul said. "We can cut and cut him until he faints."

  Without confirming—she couldn't bring herself to aye-aye this guy—Kira leaned into the controls, brought Defiant up on an edge, rolled around Rugg'l's stern, and opened fire again. Pew-pew-pew—

  But this time Gul Fransu was ready. He had readjusted his shields to deflect the heavy bolts away from their critical sections, and that bought them precious seconds. They returned fire, anticipating Kira's piloting and sledgehammering Defiant continually until Kira managed to pull the ship completely around and veer off.

  "They've got our number," she choked. "Guidance is shuddering, fusion reactor pellet injectors are backflushing … I'm losing plane-to-thrust balance—I've got overthrust! What are your men down there doing anyway!"

  Defiance.

  Its own kind of red alert. A brew of possessiveness and insult, and the effect of having damned near died. A rush of invincibility, enough to sustain the critical minutes.

  Might have been the drug. Didn't matter. Any rage was good rage.

  The sizzling of a transporter beam was the last sound that should've gaggled through the engineering deck of this taut-muscled ship of the right name, but here it was, ringing in the ears of Benjamin Sisko. He watched the battleship's innards coalesce around him as if the room were doing the beaming and he was just standing here while the universe changed around him.

  It was an illusionary by-product of beaming. In his rational mind he knew exactly what was going on, but down inside he'd never quite gotten used to it. Lights flashing where there was no fixture, energy crackling where there was no source.

  He pressed his shoulder tight against the corner of the chief engineer's office doorway. Dax had put him into a sheltered area. Outside on the main deck, two Cardassian soldiers hustled about trying to run a ship meant to be run by a crew of couple dozen. They were probably rushing to put as many systems on automatic as they could, but there was a limit to that. Some things just couldn't be replaced by computer programs and autopilots. Some things just required the leaps of logic that only living beings with common sense and flashpaper innovation could make.

  He struggled through blurring vision to see the readouts. What was the ship's condition? Had they taken any hits yet?

  Yes, there was one … another …

  The two ships were engaging, perhaps just testing each other, but there were shots being exchanged. Were Defiant’s shields up yet? Yes—he could see the bright lime-green lights confirming shield integrity. They'd gotten the deflector grid on-line. They had a few minutes,
time to maneuver.

  How much was Kira cooperating on the bridge?

  Threats wouldn't hold much ballast for Kira. Something more compelling had moved her.

  He seethed to get these people off his ship. Was that sensible? Who would run the ship if all the Cardassians were gone? The Defiant would be a doomed creature tied to a stake.

  Back and forth the arguments wrangled in his aching head. He found no answers and battled to make a plan without them. Yes, he would take engineering. He never again wanted to be helpless on a possessed ship. His pulse drummed in his ears—he had no idea how long Bashir's concoction would keep him on his feet. Stimulant this strong would kick back on him before very long. All the clocks were ticking.

  Before he was ready one of the Cardassians heard the scrape of Sisko's boot on the doorframe and turned to face it, saw him, reacted with shock, clawed at his side for his hand weapon and brought it around. For an instant Sisko was shocked too, almost too long an instant. His depleted body and mind jolted at the sight of the Cardassian's hollow face and that weapon swinging around and up, but his own weapon was already in his hand. He gave over to instinct and opened fire. One hard squeeze.

  His phaser was set for wide field and found its target without relying on him for good aim. Narrow ray, and he would've missed.

  The Cardassian raised his arms to protect his face, made a choked yell, broke into torn pieces of flesh and squiggled to bits of floating ash, leaving only the stench of burned living matter to puff back toward Sisko.

  What the hell? Sisko thought. He checked his phaser, which was set on heavy stun. Apparently the long dehydration had made the Cardassian's body unstable.

  Where was the other Cardassian? He'd slipped out of Sisko's view—when? He couldn't see. . . .

  Of course—the engineering deck was only half lit. It wasn't just his eyes after all. The lights were down fifty percent. Dock standard. He'd forgotten about that. No one had bothered to turn them up. Or more likely the Gul's men didn't know about dock standard. That was why everything seemed blurry, diminished, colorless.

  A movement at his side—a hard force struck his phaser arm, numbing him to the shoulder, driving the weapon from his hand. He heard it skid away, scraping pitifully across the open deck. Pain blinded him for a crucial instant. He raised his elbow sharply, taking the one chance he had, and amazingly made contact.