CHAPTER

13

 

BENJAMIN SISKO had a bad feeling, the same feeling he’d had just before the Ecocids revealed themselves as extortionists. By all rights, things were going better than they could expect. In a few minutes, they were due to rendezvous near a giant asteroid belt they had passed on their initial dash across the Gamma Quadrant. They had been able to skip their first rendezvous after the unscheduled stop with the Ferengi. Since then, the Ferengi vessel had remained out of scanner range, if it was behind them at all.

It was too early to say if the Marauder had broken off its pursuit, but there was at least a chance it had. Of course, the Ferengi knew the position of the wormhole as well as anyone, and they could be trying to do an end-around, to get there first. That prospect was real, yet it wasn’t the cause of Sisko’s apprehen-sion. Real, even likely, obstacles Sisko was used to handling. It was the unseen, the unreal, the unexpected that bothered him. By that token, the absence of the Marauder was troubling, because Sisko knew that the Ferengi never let go of money. The antimatter represented cold cash to them, including expenses uncollected. If the Marauder was able to fly at all, it should be right on their tail.

He pressed his communications panel. “Sisko to Dax. Do you see any sign of that Marauder?”

“No, Benjamin,” answered Dax. “She was on the move last I got a reading. I thought she had gone into warp, but there’s been no sign of her. The Phoenix has excellent scanners, but we’re out of range from where we left her. Maybe we hit her harder than we thought.”

“This may sound crazy,” said Sisko, “but I’d like to go back and see what happened to them.”

Odo had remained silent until that point, but he jumped up and filled Sisko’s viewscreen. “That’s very humanitarian of you, Commander, but we aren’t on a rescue mission. To say that Gimba deserved what he got is putting it mildly. Their ship didn’t look so badly damaged that they couldn’t make it to Eco or some other port of call.”

“That’s the point,” said Sisko. “If they’re not badly damaged, why aren’t they after us? Look, Constable, I don’t have to go all the way back, just far enough to get them in sensor range. Maybe they’re still where we left them. They might also be trying to go around us, trying to reach the wormhole first.”

“Odo,” said Dax, “the commander is right. Either they are too damaged to come after us, they have broken off, or they are planning an ambush. Whichev-er it is, we need to know.” She smiled. “Besides, it is the humanitarian thing to do.”

Odo bowed his head and said nothing more.

Sisko remarked, “You can keep going to the worm~ hole. Perhaps we don’t need to rendezvous sooner.”

The commander saw Dax glance at Odo; then he heard laughter coming from off the screen.

“The tanker is haunted, Commander!” called a voice from the floor. “There are bumps and thurfips in the night. I say it’s the ghosts of all those bodies in the hold—what do you think?”

The computer located the source of the voice and widened the angle to include the hog-tied Bajoran.

Sisko muttered, “I had almost forgotten about you, Rizo. Are you so desperate that you have to make up imaginary allies?”

“They may not be imaginary,” said Dax. “We feel there could be someone else aboard. The internal security on the tanker has been destroyed, and we’ll have to go out with tricorders to check the ship. We also need to check on the antimatter pods, so we would prefer to stop at the asteroid belt as planned. The computer says the pods are all right, but—”

“I understand,” said Sisko, “you need to eyeball them. I don’t blame you—we have gone to an awful lot of trouble to get them. I’m going to backtrack just enough to find out the status of the Marauder, while you continue on to the rendezvous. I don’t suppose there are any detention cells on that tanker?”

“No,” said Odo.

Rizo began to laugh. “Don’t you understand, Commander?” yelled the Bajoran. “That stuff is cursed! Everybody who handles that antimatter is going to die. We’re not going to make it back.” “Have you stunned him?” asked Sisko.

Odo sighed. “Yes, and cracked him on the head for good measure. That’s another reason for stopping— to find a secure area to put him.”

“Proceed,” ordered Sisko. “I’ll let you know as soon as I locate the Ferengi. Sisko out.”

 

After the screen switched back to the slightly blurred starscape of warp drive, Odo looked with disgust at his prisoner. He expected even captured criminals to act somewhat dignified, which didn’t include ranting about ghosts and haunted spaceships. Of course, the prisoner was the only one who knew if the tanker had any stowaways. Odo didn’t imagine there could be more than one, but one more terrorist made the odds even—two against two.

Having taken the craft once by force, the Bajorans wouldn’t be averse to trying it again. Plus, they would get desperate as they realized their only alternative was probably life in prison.

“Constable?” said Rizo, gazing up at him. “Is that really what they call you? That was a neat trick, coming aboard as a handbag. How do you do that?”

Odo cocked his head and looked annoyed. “I don’t wish to hold a conversation with you, especially about matters that are none of your business.”

“Oh, touchy,” cooed Rizo. “But look at me, Constable—I’m not shouting and screaming now. I’m merely trying to pass the time. What kind of species are you?”

The shapeshifter shrugged. “Does it matter? Have you ever seen any like me?”

“No,” admitted the Bajoran. “But you would be invaluable to us, if you decided to have a little excitement in your life.”

Odo gazed around the unfamiliar bridge of the tanker, and his eyes came to rest with distaste upon his prisoner. “I’ve got quite enough excitement in my life, thank you. Besides, your days are going to be considerably less exciting from now on.”

Rizo closed his eyes and struggled to find a comfortable position. “If you really find a room to put me in, are you going to take off these ropes?”

“Eventually,” said Odo, “I’m sure they will come off.”

“Maybe we can rig up something with forcefields,” Dax suggested, “and monitor him on one of the viewscreens.”

“Are you two really from Deep Space Nine?” asked Rizo, suddenly friendly. “I’ve only heard about the station—my life doesn’t lend itself to taking vaca-tions.”

“I’m the science officer,” said Dax, “and Odo is the chief of security. DS9 was built by Cardassians, so, in case you were wondering, it has plenty of detention cells.”

Rizo scowled. “I liked you better as Jade Dixon. Both of you are being wasted in Starfleet.”

“I’m not in Starfleet,” Odo added. “I work for Bajor.”

“So do I,” snapped Rizo.

Odo shook his head. “I don’t think so. The Bajor I work for is trying to build upon its hard-won freedom. It’s trying to stop fighting and make peace with itself, and its neighbors.” The Bajoran muttered, “Does that include Cardassians?” “I’m afraid so,” said Odo.

“Then the puppet government is weaker than I thought,” Rizo decided. “It’s a wonder anyone supports them. You know, we only stole the antimatter to keep that new starship for Bajor.”

“All you did was to delay its testing,” countered Dax. “If you want to stop fighting and live peacefully, now would be a good time to start.”

“Yeah,” scoffed Rizo, “as we run from a starship fifty times our size. Save me your platitudes, Lieutenant. You did what had to be done to recapture this tanker. You opened fire on the Ferengi and left hundreds of innocent people down there on that bug-infested planet.” “We can go back for them,” said Dax.

Rizo shook his head. “You won’t. Nobody will. Because nobody will ever know where they are—after this tanker blows up, and we all die.”

Dax flashed anger only briefly before she grit her teeth and announced. “Coming out of warp drive. Going into synchronous orbit with the largest asteroid, G-One, for lack of a better name.”

Odo asked worriedly, “You’re not going to orbit an asteroid in the middle of an asteroid belt, are you?”

“No,” said Dax. “We’re coasting along beside it, at a safe distance, orbiting whatever it’s orbiting. I imagine it’s taking a leisurely trip around that red giant in the corner of the screen. This position should be safe, and it has the advantage of shielding us from a casual scan.”

The Trill entered some final commands on her console, grabbed the phaser, and stood up. She checked the setting, took a few steps back, and leveled the weapon at Rizo.

“Go ahead, untie him,” she ordered.

“All right,” said Odo, bending down to undo his handiwork.

“Hey, friend,” said Rizo to the shapeshifter. “Don’t you ever carry a phaser?”

“Never.”

“How come?”

“For one thing,” answered Odo, “if you don’t carry a phaser, it’s impossible for a prisoner to take yours away from you.”

Odo finished untying the Bajoran and stepped back, unarmed but ready to react quickly.

Dax pointed to the turbolift with the phaser. “You go first.” Rizo grinned. “You want the ghosts to get me first?” “Move it,” ordered Dax. “How you act will determine the kind of holding cell we put you in. There may be some spare antimatter pods, and we could seal you up in one of those.”

Rizo laughed nervously. “She’s just joking, right, Constable?”

“I haven’t known Lieutenant Dax to joke,” answered Odo. “You had better follow instructions.”

Humming loudly and off-key, Rizo swaggered to-ward the turbolift doors, which flew open at his approach. “It’s just me—Rizo!” he announced. “Do your worst, ghosts. I know we’re not going to make it back to Bajor.”

Odo looked at Dax and shook his head in disgust. The more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea of sealing the terrorist inside an empty antimatter pod. But first, they had to make sure there weren’t any more of his playmates around.

The shapeshifter entered the turbolift immediately after Rizo. When Dax entered, he stationed himself between her and the Bajoran, knowing that Rizo might try something in the confines of the turbolift.

“Deck three,” said Dax. “We should check on the antimatter first.” “Are the forcefields still up?” asked Odo.

“I turned them off on deck three,” answered Dax. “So we can move around. This ship has only three levels, and the bottom one is nothing but cargo bays. That’s where they keep the antimatter.” “And the bodies,” Rizo whispered.

The turbolift came to a stop, and the door whooshed open. Odo stepped out, dragging Rizo by the arm, and pushed him a safe distance away from Dax and her phaser.

The Bajoran ignored the rough treatment and kept his attention focused on Dax. “Which one are we going to see first, Lieutenant, the antimatter or the bodies?”

“First we have to find some tricorders,” answered Dax. “You wouldn’t happen to know where some are, would you? I couldn’t find any on the bridge.”

The Bajoran laughed. “I knew where some were, but we handed them out to everyone. I think some were traded to the Ecocids for bilbok.”

While this conversation was going on, Odo stole a moment’s attention from Dax and Rizo to look around the anteroom of the cargo bay. It was like a miniature bridge, with its own viewscreens and work-stations, one for each of the three large doors that surrounded them. The doors were marked One, Two, and Three, and a thick-paned window on each did little to reveal their contents. He could see vague white shapes beyond door one, but cargo bays two and three looked dark and dismal.

It was very quiet in the hold of the deserted tanker, and Odo wondered if the earlier sound they heard was just an aural mirage. But, no, he thought. The Ferengi captain had also been suspicious, but he had been playing the same game and couldn’t complain. Rizo had at least entertained the thought of taking the Marauder, and he certainly had no scruples to prevent him from keeping another killer on board.

The shapeshifter turned to see Rizo take a threatening step toward Dax. “Keep your distance,” he warned.

“It’s all right,” answered Dax. “He was walking past me to show me where there might be a tricorder.”

“I’ll go,” offered Odo. “Where is it?”

“A bit touchy, aren’t we, Constable?” sneered Rizo. Nevertheless, he pointed. “In that panel under the console for bay one. There was some stuff in there before.”

Odo opened the panel but could find nothing in it except for wads of bloody bandages. A human might not have been able to search through the soiled bandages, caked with bodily fluids, but Odo had no such compulsions. His only disappointment was that there were no tricorders in evidence. “Anywhere else?” he asked.

Rizo shrugged. “What can I tell you, we’re pirates, and we sacked the ship. I’m sorry we didn’t treat it as nicely as you would, but we’re not used to many nice things.”

Dax frowned. “Rizo, if you can’t be of any use to us, I’m going to find a place to put you. Any ideas, Constable?”

“Yes,” replied the shapeshifter. “If cargo bay one holds the antimatter pods, and bay two holds the bodies, what’s in bay three?”

“That would be the smallest of the cargo bays,” answered Dax, moving behind its controls. She punched in some commands, gazed at the readouts, and frowned. “All the logs have been erased and disabled. We’ll never know who came in and out of these cargo bays, or what they were carrying.”

Rizo grinned. “Sorry, Lieutenant. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

“I think you knew exactly what you were doing,” muttered Dax. “There’s nothing left to do but fill them with atmosphere and go have a look. I’m filling bay three with atmosphere.”

She moved to the center console. “Filling bay two.” She glanced at the controls for the largest bay. “Bay one already has atmosphere. I hope you didn’t disable the automated docking systems, too.”

“No,” said Rizo, sounding hurt. “The idea is to get rid of the antimatter, remember? We’re simple people, and we trust each other. So we shut down a few security systems.”

Dax moved back to the controls for cargo bay three and pressed the button that opened the door. It slid open with a gasp of fresh atmosphere, and the lights blinked on, illuminating the auxilary cargo hold. Odo strolled a few meters into the chamber. It was empty now, except for assorted robotic arms, belts, and bumpers that guided antimatter pods toward a freight turbolift. Odo imagined that the turbolift took the pods straight out the docking module in the nose, or perhaps to the other cargo bays. An efficient setup, he observed—also a means of escape from the ship.

Nevertheless, they couldn’t drag Rizo around with them everywhere they went. It was simply too dangerous, considering the constant demands on their attention. Besides, outside the ship was nothing but cold space and asteroids.

Odo returned to the doorway. “I’m going to search for an intruder, or weapons. If this bay is clean, I suggest we put our prisoner here. Can we disable the controls?”

Dax shrugged. “Why not? Everything else has been disabled.”

Odo nodded and went back into the empty bay. The storage area struck him as small, but he reminded himself that this was the most auxiliary of the cargo bays on the Phoenix. The dull yellow walls bespoke a utilitarian existence for the room. The only features of interest were the robotic mechanisms that moved the storage pods in their inexorable journey to a matter/ antimatter reactor. Without pods to move, they looked like frozen monuments to tasks uncompleted. He wandered between two big arms and a viselike pincer, and he was reminded uncomfortably of the Ecocids. This was a machine an insect might appreciate.

With no sensors or weapons at his disposal, Odo perused every centimeter of the silent chamber. He crouched down and looked into dark crevices, and he opened storage and equipment panels. He was on the lookout for tricorders as well, but everything of value had been stripped by the scavengers, replaced by bandages and soiled clothes. He wondered if they had slept in here, too, but then he decided that they would have taken over the crew’s quarters on the second deck. That thought hiked Odo’s threshold of anger for a moment, but he quickly shook it off and returned to his search.

The emptiness of the cargo bay made his investigation easier, and he was soon convinced that cargo bay three was empty.

“Come in, Rizo!” he called. “And go to the far corner, where the scale is.”

The Bajoran did as he was told, shuffling into the empty room and taking a sullen position near a floor scale in a remote corner. Dax entered and went straight to the control panel, which duplicated the console outside the door, except for its lack of a chair and a viewscreen.

Rizo grinned and looked around the room. “So this is to be my grave? My tomb. You’ll leave me here to die, just like you left my comrades on Eco, just like you left the Ferengi vessel.”

“We won’t be able to hear him in here, will we?” asked Odo.

“Not likely,” said Dax with a smile. “They’ve disabled all the password protection, so I’m going to do what they did—destroy the circuitry.”

She reached into a panel and pulled out an isolinear chip, which she set on the floor. She proceeded to reset her phaser, take aim at the chip, and strike it with a pinpoint blue beam. After a second, the chip was a wisp of smoke. “We just ground them with our heels,” said Rizo. Odo backed slowly away from the terrorist, expecting him to make his move. But something within Rizo was beaten down—despite his bravado and crude energy, he seemed weary. He sat on the floor, testing the scale with his hand. A digital readout was a blur as it registered the changes in weight.

“Lieutenant,” said the Bajoran. “I wish you well, truly I do. This isn’t a fight you should be involved in. Bajor must be just for Bajorans. We don’t know the Federation very well, but we know how a conqueror can start off with promises and aid, only to turn into an occupying army. We let ourselves be conquered once—it can’t happen again.”

“I have sympathy for your feelings,” answered Dax. “And the suffering you can’t get over. There’s been nothing in my life to compare to it, and I’m eight times your age. But many of your people have put the horror behind them in order to get on with their lives. I might remind you that the Federation also fought the Cardassians.”

“It was the resistance!” insisted Rizo.

“Both,” admitted Dax. “Nevertheless, we have earned your trust. The Federation could keep a much greater presence on Bajor, but we don’t.” She motioned around the empty cargo bay. “And sometimes it gets us into trouble.”

The Bajoran shook his head. “I doubt if everyone in your Federation is as noble as you, Lieutenant.” He glanced at Odo. “There are too many alien Species on Bajor already.”

Odo scoffed, “We’re wasting time. We may have to search this entire ship.”

Dax lowered her head and nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right. Rizo, we’ll bring you food and water later.”

He waved at her. “Good-bye, Jadzia Dax. And Jade Dixon.”

Dax hurried out, quickly followed by Odo, and the door clanged shut behind them. While Dax stopped at the controls to make sure the makeshift cell was secure, Odo strode to the massive door marked One and gazed through the thick window. He could see the storage pods—hexagonal cylinders each about the height of a man but much widermstacked end to end in neat rows. Not only was this bay twice as large as bay three, but it had an intricate network of thick tubes crisscrossing its high ceiling. “What are all those tubes for?” he asked. “Under normal circumstances,” said Dax, “the storage pods wouldn’t leave the cargo bay during refueling. Using those shielded conduits, the antimatter would be moved directly from the full storage pods into the empty pods on the starship. But the Hannibal is a new ship without any storage pods of its own, so the pods themselves are going on board.”

She moved to the controls for bay one and announced, “I’m opening the door.”

Odo stepped back as the door drew open. He braced himself for a possible attack, although he thought it unlikely that their stowaway, if they had one, would be hiding among the antimatter. It wasn’t the kind of place a person would want to stay for hours on end. There was something distinctly foreboding about the large white canisters, emblazoned in red letters that issued severe warnings in several languages. They looked like rows of alien coffins.

He moved into the room in a crouch, glancing into the corners and low places. Bright overhead lighting dispelled most of the shadows and made his search easy. Like the other cargo bay, this was a big room, but it didn’t offer many hiding places. Three-fourths of the space was taken up by the storage pods and their support mechanism. The rest was simply vacant, and he figured there was room for ten more pods.

Dax stopped at the closest pod and bent over to study the readouts on its tiny screen. Odo recalled from his research that each storage pod was a self-contained unit with its own computer and monitoring systems. The internal systems had to be good, because only the stability of the magnetic field stood between safety and total annihilation.

Odo heard a gentle chirping noise and whirled around to face an offending pod. “What is it doing?” he asked.

Dax smiled as she moved from pod to pod, inspecting their readouts. “They’re quite remarkable, these pods. Each has its own diagnostic system set to start at a different time. The beeping means a pod has completed its diagnostic sweep. It will sleep for several hours and do it again.”

“Is the tanker equipped to eject these pods?” asked Odo.

Dax shook her head. “Not in the way a starship can. Of course, we can shoot them out the space dock, but they’re not plugged into an ejection system here, like they will be on the Hannibal.”

She chuckled. “I think Benjamin once referred to a Starfleet tanker as a giant gas can. He’s not far from wrong.”

Pressing flat against the wall, Odo maneuvered his way around the storage pods and made a complete excursion of the cargo bay. He peered into the freight turbolift, under the conduits and pipework, and between the gigantic robot arms, but he didn’t find anything amiss. Still, the somber storage pods made him uneasy, and he stood outside the door as Dax completed her inspection of each individual container.

She stepped out, and the door shut automatically behind her. “The pods appear in order,” she announced. “At least Rizo and his friend didn’t tamper with them.”

Dax drew her phaser and motioned toward the middle door. “I’m afraid this next one will be a chambers of horrors.”

“I don’t have a weak stomach,” said Odo, gazing through the window into the forbidding darkness of cargo bay two. “In fact, I don’t have a stomach at all.” “You’re lucky,” Dax remarked. She went to bay two’s console and punched in some commands. Not even the lights came on.

“This bay is badly damaged,” she said. “It now has an atmosphere, but I’m going to have to override the circuits to get the door open and the lights on. They didn’t want anybody just wandering in here.”

Odo watched the three cargo bay doors while Dax worked on the controls. The impatient part of him thought they should forgo this search in order to make it back to the Alpha Quadrant as quickly as possible, but the cautious part knew they had to be thorough. The middle of the wormhole was not the place for a sneak attack from within. Besides, Commander Sisko was off on an errand of mercy, or at least curiosity, and maybe this was a good time to take stock of their situation.

They had managed to wrest the tanker away from the criminals, and they had at least one prisoner to show for it. A couple of dozen prisoners would be more to his liking, but Odo was willing to settle for their success so far. Unfortunately, he had a feeling that this adventure was not finished yet.

The lights came on in cargo bay two, and the door whooshed open. Odo stepped inside to be greeted by a grisly sight, which brought home the full impact of what the terrorists had done. Twenty-one bodies of young Starfleet officers in their prime lay before him, mostly human, about evenly divided between male and female. Their bodies were bloodied and burned, but they had benefited from being stored in an airless cargo hold. He could detect no unpleasant odors or pools of blood, and their skin had started to mum-mify.

Neatly separated from the Starfleet bodies were the bodies of seven Bajoran terrorists, also bloodied, burned, and mummified. Except for their clothing, it would have been difficult to tell them apart from the larger group.

He heard Dax enter behind him, and he was glad he had a Trill with him instead of a human. Humans would have been uselessly emotional at this sight, although it was difficult for him to suppress his anger. He wanted to go next door and throttle Rizo.

Dax let out a heavy sigh. “Any sympathy I had for them just went away.”

“Good,” said Odo. He studied the rest of the cargo bay, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Like cargo bay one, bay two had a full complement of both magnetic conduits and robotic devices, to move the antimatter either alone or inside its pod. It wouldn’t take much, he thought, to eject the bodies into space, and he marveled that the terrorists had the consideration not to do so while in orbit around Eco.

“Look there!” said Dax, pointing to one of the thickest pipes snaking across the ceiling.

Odo saw nothing out of the ordinary, except for a wadded bit of yellow cloth hanging over the conduit. But the cloth evidently meant more to Dax, because she stood under it, staring at it. “Can you get it?” she asked.

“Certainly,” said Odo. He reached up, and his arm stretched double its normal length to snag the yellow cloth. To his surprise, there was considerably more of it stashed behind the pipe than he had thought, and he ended up pulling an entire spacesuit from its hiding place. A helmet tumbled on the floor after it.

“With that,” said Dax, “you could hide in here without atmosphere.” “We are not alone,” breathed Odo.

They heard a rumbling sound, and they whirled around to see the heavy door shutting behind them.

 

Commander Sisko rubbed his eyes and stared at the sight before him. He was at a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers, but the small shapes on the viewscreen were unmistakable. So was the ferocity of the battle, with phaser blasts streaking silently across the blackness. The scanners confirmed his eyesight— four small craft had the Ferengi Marauder surrounded and were blasting the hell out of it.

The Marauder tried to escape, but it was like a bear cornered by a pack of dogs. Wherever it turned, a smaller craft zoomed to cut it off, while the other three nipped at its heels with phaser fire. When the Marauder turned to stand and fight, the four sleek craft broke off and fell back. They were trying to surround it, thought Sisko, to keep pounding away from four different directions. But the Ferengi captain didn’t panic—he calmly picked one of the retreating ships and unleashed a torpedo at it. The smaller ship sputtered like a wet candle and went dark.

“Good for you!” Sisko found himself saying. He wished he hadn’t done so much to cripple the Ferengi ship. They were greedy and dishonest, but they didn’t deserve to be blasted out of the sky.

He racked his brain to think who the attackers could be. His first thought was that they were Ecocids, but he didn’t recall seeing any ships like that while orbiting the planet. Who had small one-or two-person fighters? In the Gamma Quadrant, it could be anybody. Coming from the Alpha Quadrant, it could only be a handful of races. Who hated the Ferengi, or had a score to settle? That could also be anybody.

The Marauder changed course and was on the move again, this time headed toward Sisko. Had he been spotted by the larger craft’s sensors? Would they think he was enemy or foe? As desperate as the Ferengi probably were at this point, they didn’t care. They saw another ship, and they were going to try to get some help.

Could he help the Marauder? The answer, sad to say, was no. He had no torpedoes left, and his phasers weren’t capable of stopping the sleek craft the way the Marauder’s torpedo had. An unarmed runabout and a badly damaged warship just weren’t going to defeat three fresh fighters, even if the fourth one was out of it.

Sisko’s only question was: When should he run? If the mystery fighters caught him in their sensors, would they come after him, too? He really didn’t want to find out.

The commander was about to reverse course and head back into warp drive when a distress signal blinked on his console. He thought about the delay it would cause if he listened to the Ferengi, but he couldn’t ignore their plea. He put the transmission on the screen.

He saw a smoke-filled bridge and a dead body draped over the navigator’s chair. The Ferengi captain rushed toward the screen, waving his arms frantically.

“You can’t help us! Go away!” he howled. “These are Cardassians—”

A direct hit rocked the Marauder, and the captain screamed and tumbled out of sight. The image broke up, and Sisko reached for the controls. Before he could go to warp, a tremendous explosion lit up the cockpit like a strobe light; and he was forced to cover his eyes. He opened them to see the Marauder streaking across the starscape like a giant Roman candle, until it exploded into chunks that glimmered and grew dark, like the entrails of fireworks.

He also saw that the three fighters were changing course and picking up speed.

Damn, he thought, they’ve seen me! Sisko punched the runabout into warp drive and began to pray.