"MAJOR KIRA! Safety-grid crash!" an ensign shouted. "Where?"
"Reactor failure … danger imminent … Evacuate to docking ring. Automatic shutdown in six minutes … repeat … six minutes to fail-safe …"
"Say it again! I didn't hear you! Can you turn the volume down on the klaxons?"
"Yes—the crash is almost systemwide. It's a major reactor shutdown. Ordinarily the station's separate areas would self-seal, but with the malfunctions we've had all morning, the sealing panels are failing. There's a flush of radiation into occupied areas. Anybody who's not evacuated in five minutes thirty seconds is dead."
"Where's Captain Sisko?"
"Infirmary, I think."
"Have you got the comm links cleared yet?"
"Some, but not to the infirmary."
"Six minutes—damn! What areas are in danger?" Kira Nerys peered over Dax's shoulder at the panels whose readouts were frantically flashing schematics of the station, with certain sections blocked out in bright emergency orange.
Even though she knew Kira could see the monitors, Dax heavily said, "Look."
Before them lay a 2-D architectural diagnostic of the station, simple blue lines in the shape of a giant spindle on a black background. At the heart of the spindle, a jellylike marigold-orange plume boiled from one of the reactor areas, moving like a swarm of killer bees as Dax narrated its path.
"Radiation is flushing upward through the lower core. It'll contaminate sections four, five, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve of the inner lower core, several connecting tunnels, airlocks, cargo aisles, several labs. Shortly after that it'll overtake the infirmary, main engineering, and from there it'll encroach very quickly on the Promenade … and finally Ops. Just a matter of minutes."
"Dammit! Here? Where's the safest place?"
"Docking ring. We still have working seals there."
"All right, that's where we'll go."
Kira was embarrassed when her voice came out as almost a groan, frantic to hold all strings on all kites and not lose any. The whooping klaxons were driving her crazy, ticking down the seconds they had left. She swung around to the other people on post in the area.
"Anderson! Go down to sections four and five and evacuate everybody to the docking ring. Mason, you do the same in sections nine, ten, eleven and twelve. Get somebody to help you. Utang, you go. Never mind your station, just get those people out! Then go down to engineering and see if Chief O'Brien needs extra hands. You and the officers will be beamed out just before fail-safe. After that, it'll take a starship's phasers to get back in here."
Take a step, swing around, take another step, swing around again. On the screens, the creeping mange moved ever through the station, toward her. The station pulsed with the menace of changing allegiance, and she found the idea noxious. Handing over DS9—when had she become so possessive? Starfleet would come and eventually they'd get the station back, but to lapse even for an hour to the malefic power she had fought all her life was a bone-grating thing. The station was no shining prize, only a giant set jaw turning in space, a restive plaza acting as a side door to the wormhole, but it was all Bajor had to prove that somebody besides Bajorans would stand ground here or even cared to.
But DS9 had once been Cardassian, had been built by Cardassians, functioned under a constant veil of having once lived another persona, had survived a change of allegiance, and sometimes Kira felt that the station, like a captured ship under a foreign flag, was only biding time until it changed back.
She pressed her hands to the sides of her head and scrappily demanded clearer thinking. Didn't get it, exactly, but some things took time.
"This is all we need," she roiled. "To abandon Ops! Don't we have any option? Isn't this place double-sandbagged or something? Anything?"
"After a certain point, the computer gives us no choice but to leave," Dax calmly instructed. "The computer is going to do everything it can do to keep contamination from flooding the whole station. It'll force us to abandon these areas as it's programmed to do. As long as it reads 'radiation,' it won't allow traverseways to remain open. It seals them."
"With what? Forcefield?"
"No, energy can fail. The heavy portcullises roll into place. And that's it. We have to beam everyone off ASAP. After that, we won't be able to beam off through the radiation."
Kira stifled a groan. Her chest hurt. "How many people are left on the station?"
"We have a report that all but fifty-one people have evacuated to Bajor. Most of the remaining personnel are Starfleet Security personnel and our department heads, along with a few others who are still getting off."
"Get'em off! What's taking so long?"
"I don't know. Kira … did you authorize launch of one of the runabouts into the wormhole?"
"Me? No."
"Well, look at this. We've got one heading in there right now. There it is."
Pointing at a moving blip on the small screen, Dax fought with her controls for a few seconds; then one of the larger screens popped on, just in time to show a clear picture of the runabout approaching the mouth of the wormhole and the wormhole flashing into its visible mode, a swirling toy of lights and energy. The runabout plunged in without even pausing to adjust approach vector.
"Patch me through to that!" Kira demanded.
"Go ahead."
"Attention, runabout, this is Major Kira. What's your authorization to enter the wormhole?"
They waited. No response.
"Attention, runabout! Identify yourselves!"
"It's no use," Dax told her. "There's nothing coming back over the frequency."
"Is it damped out like the internal communications?"
"No, just no response. It's as if there's no one aboard at all."
"Could it be the saboteurs making an escape before the station is contaminated?"
"Of course it could be."
Rankled and flooded with suspicions, Kira knotted her fists. "Keep a monitor on the mouth of the wormhole. If they decide to come back, I want to know it. Explain to me what happened to the reactor."
Dax played her controls as if enticing information out of the mechanics, but shook her head. "I'm not receiving specific data. Some kind of rupture. I can only presume it was sabotage, not a breakdown, given circumstances."
"That doesn't make me feel any better. Six reactors on the station, only two of them operating, and one of those two ruptures. If it's not sabotage, we're going to go down in a record book somewhere. How did they tap into the technical connections necessary to rupture a reactor? And what disturbs me is that these people might be able to get to the other one and rupture it too. Then, on top of contamination, we're also out of power."
"By then it won't matter," Dax began.
She began to say something else, but stopped as Ben Sisko appeared, packed into the small opening of one of the access conduits, crawled out, unfolded his large frame, and hurried to them, shaking one foot that seemed to have fallen asleep as he crawled through the guts of the station.
Kira swung around. "Sir—"
"I heard it." He shook out his limp and surveyed Dax's readouts. "Whether we have power or not won't make any difference, Major, if we have to abandon DS9 because of reactor contamination. Status?"
"Three minutes thirty seconds to fail-safe …"
"Intrastation communications are still ragged," Dax said, "but there are alarms going off everywhere. The computer is about to shut down any traverseways on the station, thinking it can stop the radiation from spreading, but it can't. There are too many malfunctions in smaller grids. If we don't get out of the inner core and get our people out, we're all dead. And, Benjamin, four of our Security men were attacked in the lower core, probably by the infiltrators on their way to or from their sabotage of the reactor." She paused and looked up at him. "Our men are all dead."
His skin wine-dark in the shadows, eyes harsh, Sisko's face turned stony, cheekbones, lips, jaw cut on edges.
"Four more," he said through his teeth. "And infiltrators now have possession of their four phasers. Dax, issue Security Alert One to our personnel here and on the planet. We've got to stop supplying weapons to our enemies."
"I'll do my best to get the message through, Benjamin."
"Sir, somebody launched a runabout without authorization," Kira said, "and it went into the wormhole. It could be the saboteurs trying to escape into the Gamma Quadrant."
"Could be, but it isn't. I launched that runabout myself."
"You did?"
"Yes, I did."
"But why?"
"So it'll be there in case I need it. Or in case I need to use its impulse engines to blow up the wormhole by remote. I have to protect the wormhole as much as I have to protect the station. I have an obligation to the civilizations in the Gamma Quadrant not to let hostile powers go through there, and I have an obligation to us not to let the same come through from there. One can never be too prepared. I'm sure you agree."
"Well, I—"
"Three minutes to fail-safe … repeat, three minutes to fail-safe … all personnel evacuate specified areas …"
"Benjamin," Dax said, "we can beam out to the docking ring in the last four seconds, but after that even the transporter safety features will shut out these contaminated areas."
On the monitor, the marigold cloud spread toward main engineering. Closer, closer—it was almost there.
Kira watched Sisko, as curious as she was anticipatory of what he would do about this poison thundering down upon them. This wasn't a time for shilly-shallying or faintheartedness. She didn't think she was falling prey to either of those, but her hands were cold and her mind already spinning with ways to keep the fight going without having Ops as a command center.
Her hand was poised over the transporter's automatic-evacuation panel. One tap, and the machine would grab any life-forms left in the endangered areas and deposit them in the docking ring.
But Sisko wasn't making any orders of that nature yet. He gazed at Dax's monitor as if he had the time.
They watched as the marigold cloud pressed toward main engineering and the labs down there.
Finally he glanced at Kira. "I've got two and a half more minutes. I'm going to use them. Just to be prepared, adjust the emergency evacuation transporter to put us in the docking ring instead of on the planet. Our Cardassian guests'll have to contaminate the whole station before I give it up, and they've got to breathe too."
"I've done that," Dax said.
"Sir, we don't know what kind of protective gear they've got," Kira pointed out.
"Maybe not, but I'm willing to—"
"Attention, aliens."
Sisko straightened and looked into the air as if to find explanation written on the ceiling. "Uh-oh … here it comes."
Dax leaned forward, her flawless expression crimped. "They've tapped into the general broadcast system."
"See if you can home in on it. Use the biosensors once you get close."
"This is the High Gul of the Order of the Crescent. I am speaking to Benjamin Sisko, commander of the intruders. You are in possession of Cardassian property. You will surrender it immediately. I have immobilized your command areas. Surrender or I will do likewise to the habitation areas."
Narrowing her eyes and feeling as if she were waiting for a punch line, Kira waited a second to see if the voice would speak again.
When it didn't, she said, "Order of the Crescent … that's old-fashioned. It's from before either the Central Command or the Obsidian Order. Over seventy years! Maybe longer—I'm not sure. I heard some of the older Cardassians mentioning it."
Sisko nodded. "It could be an elaborate hoax."
Kira pressed her hand to her short hair as if to hold in her thoughts, then held the same hand out to him. "But the Order of the Crescent? How can that be? Who are these people? A history cult or something?"
Occult with contemplation, Sisko folded his arms as if he had all day and turned to face her. "I'll tell you who they are, Major. They're those corpses we found in the docking pylon, that's who they are."
"Corpses? You mean those dead Cardassians?"
"They weren't dead," he said, his low voice sequestered, bodeful. "They were in some kind of hibernation. Breaking into the chamber may have awakened them."
Smoldering, and suddenly angry that all her instincts had failed, Kira abandoned any composure and let her jaw fall. Her cheeks and hands turned cold. "What?"
He nodded slowly. "Those bodies are the people we're fighting. They didn't infiltrate the station at all, Major. They were already here."
"But that's—that's—"
"Spooky. Yes, it is. That's what we're dealing with, Major. A brigade of the dead." He crossed behind her suddenly to the other side of Ops and tapped the monitors and readouts.
"Fifty seconds to fail-safe … Evacuate immediately … repeat, evacuate immediately."
Watching them both, Dax held her poise as she said, "Transporter is activated and standing by. Benjamin—radiation is going into engineering. Shall I transport them out?"
Suddenly Sisko's expression changed. He crossed Ops again to another station and checked and rechecked the panels. All the readouts would say the same things—that they were about to die.
Dax turned and snapped. "Benjamin!"
"Stand by!"
The marigold plume began to flood main engineering on the monitors. Miles O'Brien's post. Had he gotten out? It was a pale, bitter assumption, a faint hope, that he had, and a gripping horror that they couldn't call and ask.
Kira felt her pulse hammer in her wrists and temples. What was wrong with Sisko? Was this some kind of breakdown? Had he snapped? Was this the time for the second-in-command to countermand?
As she watched him rush from console to console, searching for something he wouldn't explain, she thought of O'Brien … death by radiation poisoning. The tongue bleeds, the skin burns off in red flakes, blood vessels swell, pop open, eyeballs blister and swell.
Have I got my phaser? I'll shoot us all first.
"It's encroaching on the infirmary now," Dax said, her throat tight. "Benjamin, whatever you're doing—"
"I told you to stand by."
Holding silent, Kira felt her skin wither. While O'Brien could be anywhere on the station, working his engineering skills here or there, Julian Bashir wouldn't be anywhere but that little black area now turning orange with poison.
And Julian would stand his post until told otherwise. He would have faith in them, up here.
The transporter enact—it was right there. It was under her hand.
Dax's voice was very low, fierce. "Benjamin … the infirmary."
The infirmary was contaminated now. If Julian was in there, then he was dying a hideous death, slow and burning, and mercy would be to choke to unconsciousness before his skin was burned off his body. What was Sisko waiting for? A desperate shriek from a dying physician to get everyone else off?
"Sir," Kira attempted, "we have to get out of Ops and evacuate the whole central core! Our officers are standing by at their posts. They'll be killed by that cloud if we don't beam out! They're being killed now!"
"I said for both of you to stand by."
Sisko's tone was that of almost cheerful defiance. He hovered over a set of readouts that had held his attention since the cloud flooded engineering.
Kira watching him, drenched in shock, and finally spun to Dax and flagged her arms desperately. What's he doing?
Pushing back from her console, Dax stood up and with fluid motion abandoned her control center. "We don't have any choice. We certainly can't swallow that much radiation, and we can't defend the station if we're dead."
"Thirty seconds to fail-safe … Implement emergency evacuation immediately …"
Feeling her legs tingle with sudden resolution, Kira stared at him, held her breath, and tried again. "Sir, it'll be all right. I've been pushed back before."
The carpeted deck was uncomforting beneath her as she came to stand beside Dax, so the automatic transporter sensors wouldn't have any trouble finding her. Didn't make any sense, but she didn't care. Machines could break and she didn't want to be in the middle of one when it did.
"Fifteen seconds to fail-safe …"
Dax again placed her hand over the transporter trigger. "Ready, Benjamin."
Energize. Energize. Energize. Well? Energize!
Kira stepped away from Dax, toward Sisko. "Sir?"
He had pressed forward over the command center, his large hands spread like the feet of a giant hawk, his neck knotted and his eyes canted to one side.
"Ten seconds …"
Kira clenched her teeth.
Behind her, Dax abridged, "Benjamin?"
They both moved toward him.
"Five seconds to fail-safe …"
Kira drew a long breath. "Sir!"
Pushing to his full height, Sisko set his jaw and waited. There was nothing left to do. The decision had been made and there was barely time to unmake it. They were either cannily calling a bluff or they were trapped here, to await contamination and a slow and gory death by radiation poisoning.
Four, three, two …
And he had made his decision for all the Starfleet personnel still left on the station—they were trapped with him if he was wrong.
Holding her breath for the last tick, Kira was swatted with the full impact of command authority, of Sisko's having made that decision and of his having the absolute right to make it for all of them. She had made decisions like that all her life, but only for herself.
"One … Fail-safe."
Ops fell silent, but for the soft whirrs of the computer systems working, and the occasional croak of a compromised system trying to get itself back online.
On the screen, the orange mange flooded the inner core of the station all the way to the top—to Ops. The picture looked like a spindle, but now with bright tangerine wool around it.
Quietly Dax said, "It's here."
Using only her eyes, Kira looked around. She listened.
She waited for her skin to start tingling. Like a sunburn—that's how it would begin. Then her tongue would swell.
"Fail-safe plus five … six … seven …"
No swelling. No sunburn.
"Fail-safe plus ten seconds."
No tingle. How long would it take?
She put her hand on the phaser at her hip. She closed her eyes. If she could save her eyes for a few seconds longer as her skin began to peel and her blood to boil, she would be able to aim, to shoot.
"Fail-safe plus twenty seconds."
"Captain?" a voice popped through the same hole Sisko had come in through. "Captain Sisko? Are you still here? Hello?"
Kira opened her eyes and looked.
Bashir's benign gaze preceded him as he crawled in and strode toward them, looking from one to the other, brows up like a child's.
"What's going on?" he asked. "Why wasn't I beamed out? My infirmary alarms went off. The computer said the whole place was awash with radiation, but the transporter never came on. I asked Chief O'Brien on my way here, but he didn't understand either. So what is it? Am I needed on the planet or not?"
"Julian!" Kira uttered, her throat raw with relief. Her pulse hammered in her throat, echoing in her ears. He wasn't lying on the infirmary deck with his skin flaking off!
He looked at her, then grinned in a completely confused and self-conscious way. "Have I done something?"
"Captain! Captain Sisko! Captain Sisko!" Another voice. This one not nearly so lyrical.
A gremlin appeared in the hatch, popped out, and screeched to them, eyes ringed with white as he clutched two large twine-tied bundles, one under each arm. "Where's the radiation? What's going on? What happened? The alarms started ringing and there was this terrible voice drumming about fail-safes and contaminations and I kept waiting to get beamed off! I thought you had things in hand up here! I wrapped up as much latinum as I could carry and I've been waiting to get off. And while I'm on the subject, do you know that two-thirds of my patrons evacuated without even paying their bills? They ran right out the door! I mean, they didn't even pay! Do you know what kind of sight that is? It's like watching money grow legs and walk right out! I have their names and I want them run down!"
"Calm down, Quark," Sisko said. "Dax?"
Tilting her reedy body just enough to peek at the panel as if watching an errant child, Dax allowed the computer systems time to read themselves out and put the diagnostic conclusions up.
"Atmospheric sensors read stable," she said. "The computer is blocking off the main accessways, but there's no actual contamination happening." She turned to look at Sisko without taking her hands from her panel. "Nothing at all."
"Fail-safe … code red, code red … all personnel in contaminated areas are now overwhelmed … fail-safe … do not enter contaminated areas without protective gear … fail-safe."
"See?" Quark pointed at the speakers. "That's what I mean!"
Bashir blinked at the booming computer voice. "I think it's trying to tell us we're all dead."
Quark rounded on him. "I feel dead!"
The doctor didn't respond to the Ferengi's remark, but pulled his medical tricorder out of his shoulder pack and fiddled with it. "This doesn't make sense … according to the tie-in with the station computer system, we actually read out as dead. This is amazing!" He turned the tricorder and picked at the controls. "Something must be interfering with its sensing mechanism. Is that possible?"
Low in his throat, Sisko chuckled, "Smart bastard."
Rattled, Kira swung to him and burst out, "A fake! They almost got us to abandon Ops! They could've walked right in here and taken over if not for you!"
Lips pursed, Sisko sighed in obvious relief. "He made the computer believe the station was being contaminated and hoped we'd act as we were trained to act. But I sensed a red herring. After all, if he wants to destroy the station, there are easier ways to do it. He wants possession of it, intact. And if it's flooded with radiation, he wouldn't be able to use it for a month."
"That's incredible!" Kira rapsed. "How did you know?"
"I didn't, Major, believe me. I could've easily been killing us all. I guess you could say I made a bet that he wants the station more than he wants us all dead. There's just something about him—"
Suddenly the alert klaxons very unceremoniously fell silent. The blunt quiet was both soothing and unnerving.
Shaking her head with relief, Dax slid back into her seat as if she had never come out of it. "All ventilation systems read functional and clear now. The computer is giving up its effort. It thinks we're all out of the inner core. That or dead …" Then she paused, tapped, and her ivory face crimped again. "Benjamin, the outer short-range sensor grid alert just popped on."
"Why?" He leaned forward.
Kira snapped around to Dax and looked at the readouts that showed them what the sensors were finding in deep space around the station. "Another fake?"
"No fake," Dax said. "I'm reading a Cardassian Galor-class warship … fully armed and coming in at high warp, full shields."
The short-lived touch of victory in Sisko's eyes fell away.
"It's begun."