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 He might be out of date, but smart then was smart now and he was smart enough to know that she knew how to fight with this ship.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.
Driving backward into the point of contact, he threw all his weight into that elbow and felt his attacker's balance skid out from under them both. The Cardassian's own phaser dashed out to one side, though he managed to keep a grip on it. Together they struck the side of the pulse drive monitor unit with a deafening crack, and the Cardassian's phaser went off.
The surge of raw phaser power whined so close to Sisko's ear that it raised the hairs on the backs of his hands and neck. With both hands clutching the Cardassian's arm around his neck, he looked in time to see the phaser beams slice a glaring orange burn crack across the control panels on the other side of the complex.
"Stop it!" Sisko ground out, his lower lip pressed into the Cardassian's rock-hard arm. "Stop it! The deflector grid! You're heading for it! Idiot, you're—"
The phaser kept screaming at his ear. The Cardassian's hand clenched hard on the weapon, firing the wobbly orange flame as if drawing his name on the engineering panels, going like a child's scrawl toward the deflector grid.
From behind the Cardassian bear-hugged him and kept firing, either didn't understand or didn't care, or was caught up in the fever of the wrestling match.
"Stop firing! Stop—firing!"
He dug his heels into the ground and dropped his weight out from under, trying desperately to pull the mighty Cardassian off balance only a few inches. But this was like wrestling with an iron statue. The Cardassian roared an unintelligible curse and wouldn't give. In front of Sisko's aching eyes, the phaser and the fist clutching it shuddered and buzzed, draining violently all over the engineering deck housings—those critical housings where the important stuff lay.
Sisko raised one foot, searching for a wall or something to brace against—too late. The phaser beam went like scalpel through the deflector grid housing, and in a pathetic instant the shields were down. That was it. They were down.
A tough ship … without shields. Fransu's weapons would cut into bare unprotected hull plating.
"You blundering ass!" Furious, Sisko tucked his chin under the Cardassian's arm, found a hole in the Cardassian's armor, peeled back his swollen cheeks, and sank his teeth in where it counted.
The Cardassian gasped, dropped back, and tried to pull his arm up.
Sisko brought his knees up, dropped out of the stranglehold, and rolled away. His hands scratched the deck, the corners, the housings for a crowbar, a mallet, a piece of the ship, anything he could use as a bludgeon to make this end somehow in his favor. But there was nothing.
He had as he turned only swollen hands and numb legs, equilibrium shot to hell and judgment not far behind it. He cranked his head around to the Cardassian—something about seeing death coming, about facing it head-on and not being shot in the back.
Pressing both hands to the side of a repair console, he pushed all the way to his feet.
His back muscles withered with anticipation of the Cardassian's phaser slicing the same scrawl in his spine as it had in the deflector grid.
He rose to his full height at the same second the Cardassian stumbled up and was swinging around to him. The soldier's face was twisted, growling, and the weapon was coming around, too.
The deck lit up—more electrical buzzing, more hot streaks. Sisko squinted, knowing it was coming. He didn't have anything to throw.
The Cardassian's expression changed, but only for the briefest instant before changing quite suddenly again—eyes grew wide within their bony goggles, mouth fell open as if to gulp a protest, when abruptly his body tucked forward to accept a blow and dissolved into a puff, then fizzled out of life.
Sisko stared at the empty space before him, wondering during that last instant if he had in fact died and come back as supernatural and now his very thoughts could destroy.
He spun around, caught himself, chest heaving and legs fighting for balance, and struggled to focus his vision on the figure there. With a gurgling wheeze he snarled, "Garak!"
Garak loosened his grip on his weapon—he didn't want to fire it accidentally at the man he had just saved.
"Captain Sisko," he said. "You look as if you've been through a shredding. I heard you were dead."
"Where'd you," Sisko heaved, "hear that?"
"Oh … tailor's privilege, Captain." There was an attempt at smugness, but it was shallow. Garak attempted a dispassionate grin and failed.
"What are you doing here?"
"Throwing in with you. My hopes have crumbled." There was a veil of sadness that Garak couldn't hide. "Only grim alternatives now."
"I hope there are alternatives left. Do you know anything about Federation technology?"
A flicker of the smugness came back. "Captain … don't you know by now? I'm a very good tailor."
"Then stay here and man engineering."
He stepped to Garak and glowered, feeling his stiff face groove with permeating disgust. Then he tipped one shoulder toward the deflector grid station and lingered only one more bitter instant.
"We'll talk later," he said.
"Our shields just collapsed! Can't you get through to your men in engineering? What are they floundering around with? They've got to bring our shields back up!
"Clus, Koto, this is the bridge—give priority to bringing the deflectors back on-line. We have no deflectors. Clus? Koto, do you read? Clus?"
Putting her shoulder down and digging her feet into the carpet as if pushing the ship herself, Kira drew a shuddering breath. "I don't know how long we can do this. We're dead without shields, there's no doubt about that."
The High Gul abandoned the comm unit and told her, "Break away from him and go to the sun."
She twisted around. "Say again?"
"The sun," he said with a casual motion outward into the solar system. "Go to the sun. Go close."
"You want to play tag right next to the sun?"
"No, around it."
"Why?"
"We need something in our favor. Fransu will have photons, we will have the sun."
"If we leave, he might take the opportunity to cut up the station."
"No, he knows I'm on board here. He will follow me."
"How do you know?"
"Because he is Fransu, sentinel."
Irresolute, Kira shook her head and faced front again, where all their troubles lay. "All right … he's Fransu."
She sheared off on her course, wheeled Defiant around on a rim, and belted all the speed she could get out of the struggling impulse drive. She could almost feel it sucking, tapping fuel as best it could. A little better now—maybe the Gul's men had figured it out and put the PDT back in balance.
But still no shields.
They could go to the sun, all right, and about all they could do was hide behind it. One shot of full phasers from a ship the size of Fransu's would buckle the hull somewhere or slice off an engine, and that would be it.
"They are following, High Gul," Elto reported. "Firing again—"
His voice was cut off by a blistering hit that sent sparks from the ceiling and smoke pouring out the port subsystems. But it was a grazing hit—Kira still had helm integrity under her hands. She squeezed speed out of the ship and the ship dug in.
The sun was in front of them, blinding bright in spite of the main screen's compensators that saved their eyes. Bajor's unforgiving apricot sun, now a strategic point in a space battle. Not the destiny of most suns, certainly.
Kira aimed for it. It stayed the same size for damning minutes, then began to appear steadily larger.
"He is pursuing," Elto reported. His voice squawked with tension. "Gaining!"
"Go around the sun, sentinel," the High Gul said, "as far as you can go, but stay on a horizontal plane."
"What'll that do for us?" Kira asked, to avoid another automatic aye-aye.
"I know how Fransu thinks. He was never very good at this. He's too cautious to be good at it. Rather than chase me and risk my turning on him, he'll wait on this side. We'll come up underneath him, hit him hard, then disappear around again. It will completely unnerve him."
"And you're enjoying it."
"Yes, I'm enjoying it."
"Playing sun tag isn't my idea of strategy," Kira said. "Without shields, we can't get too close or we'll fry. He's got shields and he can—"
"It doesn't matter what he has," the High Gul insisted. "We will prevail if we outthink him."
Kira bit her lip. "Doesn't always work …"
She adjusted her vector to avoid slamming into the sun—although the abandon of it was insanely enticing for a second or two—and brought the ship around just as the temperature warning klaxon came on.
"Proximity alert … veer off immediately … proximity alert … veer off immediately"
"Yes, shut up," she muttered, and switched it off.
She was sweating. Her clothing began to chafe around her wrists and neck. Her hair slowly began to matte. She could feel it becoming heavier, strand by strand, as the heat increased. Without shields, the ship couldn't fend off the sun's beating.
They looped around the sun at the axis horizontal to themselves, pretending that up was really up in space, and down was down.
Kira watched her displays cautiously. "We're opposite to DS9 … now."
"Loop under the sun and meet him. Come up firing."
Understanding the picture, Kira appreciated the High Gul's restraint in explaining every detail and ordering every move. She knew what to do and the order was to just do it. He was also taking the still-ripe risk that she was truly willing to work with him. This would be the time for her to turn on him. She felt his eyes on her, knew he was betting his life on her.
It was a kind of field-of-honor trust, and though it failed to unnerve her, it did keep her from thinking about anything but the task at hand, distracted her from imagining ways to betray him.
The bridge was getting hotter. Sweat drained down the sides of her face. Beneath her clothing she felt it puddle on her chest, under her knees, and on the bottoms of her feet. Every movement now had an annoying squish.
On the screen the sun grew closer, then scooped upward to the top of the screen, then all but its bright light vanished and they were underneath it.
She piloted as sharply as she could manage, but without shields she could only cut so close.
Fransu's ship was right where the High Gul said it would be, hesitating, wondering if it should come around. Something about that bothered Kira, but she ignored her inner voice and came up firing as instructed.
Phaser streams incised the deflector grid underneath Fransu's vessel, and without even looking at the sensor displays she could see the crackling of energy cutting through the grid. There had obviously been some previous damage done by DS9's phasers, and now she was cashing in on it.
Fransu's ship shuddered off to port, trying to gain range, but Kira kept Defiant at full speed, never mind the dangerous reality of being overtaken by the sun's powerful gravity.
"It worked!" Elto called, panting with excitement.
"Worked," Kira breathed to herself.
"Loop around the sun again," the High Gul said.
Without responding to him Kira piloted a tight path around the brilliant field of heat and light, keeping Defiant's stronger topside hull to the sun. The engines moaned with effort so taxing that the sound thrummed up through the deck under them.
"All stop," the High Gul said when they were on the other side again. "Come about and hold position."
She maneuvered the ship as instructed, facing the sun, ready to leap or plunge in any direction.
"Holding position," she said. "The next move is Fransu's."
They began the most awful, nerve-wrecking thing in battle—they waited. Ten seconds … twenty … forty … a minute …
"Where is he?" Kira asked the main screen, the sun sizzling upon it, hurting her eyes in spite of the screen's compensators.
The High Gul coughed on a thread of smoke coming up from one of the port side panels. "I told you he wouldn't follow. Elto, can you pick up his location on the other side of the sun? We can go and hit him again."
"My readings are confused," Elto choked on the electrical smoke. "I see several images of his ship … but none is complete."
"Those are sensor ghosts," Kira said, turning to look at him. "Switch to tactical sensors and look for propulsion residue instead of a ship."
"Thank you."
She shifted around again, nauseated by her decision to help them.
Bajor, Bajor, Bajor, the galaxy was bigger than Bajor. There were millions of innocent families in the Cardassian culture, too, whom she'd never considered before coming to her position on Deep Space Nine and widening her field of vision. And others who would be affected by a Cardassian civil war—she scoured her mind for the impact of what she was doing, and plaguing doubts ate at her.
"When we've made him tense," the High Gul said, "we'll again loop around beneath the sun and pound his unprotected underside. Fransu will never expect that. He'll be protecting his bow and beams, expecting a flank action. Sentinel, if you would prepare us for—"
"I see him!" Elto stumbled to the lower deck and took the navigation station and weapons, giving Kira the chance to concentrate on the helm. "He's coming out of the sun's corona! Here he comes!"