CHAPTER

14

 

LIEUTENANT DAX whipped out her phaser, adjusted the setting, and drilled the doorway that was shutting behind them. With pinpoint accuracy, she fried the seals and the sensors, then she swerved her fiery beam to the controls on the wall and reduced them to a shower of sparks. Odo was already running for the door, and he dove under it as it lurched to a stop.

Dax turned off her phaser and paused to assess the damage. Cargo bay two was even more disabled now, because the door wouldn’t even shut. Perhaps, she thought, it was fitting that the door be left open and the bodies visible to all.

She crawled out from under the partially closed door into the anteroom, expecting to find Odo holding the culprit by the scruff of the neck. Instead, she found him hunched over the controls for cargo bay one. “I think our visitor went back into bay one,” he said. “And unless I miss my guess, he’s activated the freight turbolift.”

Dax rushed to Odo’s side. “Is there any atmosphere in there?” She gazed at the screen. “Yes, there is. They can move between the cargo bays.” “Rizo!” barked the shapeshifter.

In tandem, they rushed to the console for cargo bay three. Dax bent over the controls and was relieved to see that nothing else had been disabled. She keyed the command to open the doors and drew her phaser again.

Odo tensed beside her and began a slow approach to the auxiliary cargo bay. Dax didn’t know if Rizo had joined with his confederate to fight or escape, but she was prepared for the worst. She set her phaser to heavy stun and waited to see what Odo encountered.

He was in a spidery crouch as he rounded the open door and gazed into the hold. Then he froze, and she started to rush to his side. Before she reached him she saw Odo relax and assume his usual stiff-backed posture, so Dax lowered her phaser and rounded the corner of the door.

Inside was Rizo with his arms wrapped around Petra, his nineteen-year-old daughter. He was trying to calm her, and Dax could only imagine from her wild eyes the kind of experience she had been through. Hiding in a spacesuit in a dark vacuum full of dead bodies, then dodging their determined pursuit, while trying to mount a final attack. The poor girl had a right to look exhausted and crazed.

“I told her it was no use,” said Rizo hoarsely, as he cradled his daughter. “We have reached the end. When the Federation is this determined to stomp us out, they will do it. You’re a different kind of foe to us, Lieutenant Dax, because you turn our own people against us. For all their ruthlessness, the Cardassians were never able to do that.”

Dax didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want an innocent to be tarred with the same brush as the guilty, but how many of those Starfleet officers had Petra killed? Her fate had long ago been corrupted and sealed.

“You can stay here until we arrive at Deep Space Nine, “said Dax. “I’m going up to the crew quarters to fix some food and drink for you, and I’ll beam it directly here. We don’t want to harm you, but this shipment of antimatter has to be returned to the Federation.”

“And us?” Petra asked meekly. “We only wanted to go someplace where there wasn’t any war.”

“I’ll help you find that place,” Dax promised. “But I can’t help you avoid your rightful punishment, whatever that will be.”

Dax nodded to Odo, who stood by the door and waited until she had left the cargo bay. When Odo came out, she rushed to the controls to shut the door and disable the freight turbolift.

“I think they’ll stay where they are,” she said. “The fight seems to have gone out of them.” “They’re murderers,” Odo reminded her. “I know.”

 

Commander Sisko cursed himself for his own stupidity, good-heartedness, or whatever foolishness had brought him back to search for the Ferengi Marauder. Her killers were on his tail, at a respectful distance, but nevertheless on his tail. The sleek fighters were faster than the runabout and could have caught him in a matter of minutes, but they seemed content to

follow him. That was more frightening than if they had just come after him, because then he would be forced to fight and get it over with. If he was going to be blown to bits, he wanted it to happen before they found the tanker.

If they really were Cardassians, he thought glumly, the hijacking was public knowledge on the other side of the wormhole. Sisko shivered, thinking this could be only the beginning of the task of defending their hard-won prize.

He estimated his rendezvous time at the asteroid belt to be less than half an hour, and he hadn’t decided what to do yet. If he kept going to the wormhole, they might follow him all the way through, and the tanker would be spared. At least temporarily. If the Cardassians were doing sensor sweeps, they might detect the tanker and go after it—no matter what he did. The Ferengi Marauder had probably been putting out a distress signal, and it had cost them their lives.

Sisko knew he couldn’t leave his comrades in the dark about this new threat. He would have to tell them, and they would have to obey his orders. But first, he would have to make certain of the Cardassians’ intentions.

He opened a standard hailing frequency and announced, “This is the runabout Mekong from the United Federation of Planets, hailing the ships that are following me. This is Commander Benjamin Sisko—please respond.”

A young Cardassian female appeared on the viewscreen. She was surrounded by an impressive array of instruments in her cocoonlike cockpit. Her brown hair was pulled back severely, and she had an arrogant gleam in her sunken eyes.

“Commander Sisko, we assumed that was you,” she remarked. “This is Gul Nerwat of the Yaro, an experimental vessel. Would you please stop so that we can come aboard and search your vessel?”

“What business do you have to search my vessel?” asked Sisko, getting huffy. “The Gamma Quadrant doesn’t belong to you.”

The Cardassian smiled, because she was in a position to do so. “We have learned that a rogue shipment of antimatter is endangering the Gamma Quadrant and the wormhole. We are pledged to find this shipment and safeguard it.”

“Like you safeguarded the Ferengi ship?” asked Sisko.

The Cardassian’s smile faded a little. “We don’t believe that is any of your concern. The Ferengi were, shall we say, belligerent. We know they were in league with you, but we don’t know where the tanker is. Can you tell us?”

“No,” Sisko lied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m on a routine mission from Deep Space Nine to open trade with a planet called Eco. You can check all of this out. In fact, I think you should go to Eco—maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“No, thank you,” answered the fighter pilot. “You have ten seconds to stop and let us board you. One—”

Cursing under his breath, Sisko flicked the viewscreen off. He opened up an audio channel that was little used, except for Starfleet emergencies. “Sisko to Dax,” he said. “Come in, Phoenix.”

“Dax here,” came the reply. “Benjamin, I’ve got something to reportw”

“Listen to mine first,” he ordered. “There are three Cardassian ships on my tail—one-man, experimental craft. They’ve already destroyed the Ferengi Marauder, losing Gimba and all hands, and they want the antimatter.”

He could hear Dax swallow. “What do you want to do?” “Proceed to the wormhole. I’ll hold them off.” “With what?” asked Dax. “You haven’t got any weapons to speak of, so you couldn’t delay them more than the time it takes to blow you up.”

The commander’s lips thinned. “I gave you an order.”

“Lure them into an ambush here,” answered Dax, “in the asteroid belt.”

Sisko shook his head with frustration. “You haven’t got enough weaponry to take out three ships either. Maybe one, if you got real lucky.”

Suddenly, his short-range scanners began to flash, and Sisko nearly jumped out of his seat. “I can’t believe it! They’x/e launched a torpedo after me!”

For the third time that day, Sisko took evasive action. He dropped the ship out of warp, hoping the torpedo wouldn’t be able to accomplish the same feat. The fighters were sophisticated but small, and they probably had simple torpedoes, he hoped, like the microtorpedoes on the runabout. Sure enough, his sensors tracked the torpedo as it whizzed by him. But the Cardassians had accomplished their objective— they had gotten him to slow down. He went to full impulse power and began more desperate maneuvers.

He checked his readouts and saw that the antimatter in his warp reactor was getting dangerously low. He didn’t have time to appreciate the ironywrunning out of antimatter while guarding a full tanker of the stuff. Besides, the Cardassians would probably obliterate him before he had a chance to run out of fuel. He glanced over his shoulder, although there was nothing to see but the back of the cockpit area. But he could feel them breathing down his neck.

The three fighters came out of warp at a considerable distance, but they instantly hit top impulse and spread out to surround him. When he zigzagged, one kept on his tail, another tried to cut him off, and the third tried to anticipate his next maneuver and beat him to it. There was none of that leisurely pace that had saved his life when the Marauder was chasing him. He took to mixing vertical and horizontal course changes, but the third fighter began to anticipate those moves and gain on him at an alarming rate.

The Cardassians tried to hail him, to say, he supposed, that his ten seconds were up. Sisko began to wonder if perhaps he should let them board the runabout as a delaying tactic to let the tanker escape. A second later, a phaser blast rocked the runabout and reminded him that he was not the one making the decisions. The Cardassians had stopped hailing him.

Commander Sisko made his sharpest turn yet and came around hard. They had attacked him, and that made up his mind what he had to do. He wanted to contact Dax and order her to escape, but he didn’t dare try another transmission with the Cardassians so close. Besides, there wasn’t any time. He picked the center fighter and fired up all of his phaser emitters; then he leaned forward and punched a fist in the air as the phasers raked the target. It blinked and swerved off course, although Sisko knew that its shields de-flected most of the damage.

The other two fighters swerved hard to meet him head-on, and he gripped his chair as their combined phaser fire pounded the runabout. The tiny ship bucked like an angry bull, and the lights in the cockpit ran through a spectrum of colors before the emergency reds came on. Behind him circuits were burning and raining sparks on the back of his neck, but Sisko remained at his post, staring at his instruments through acrid smoke.

He tried the helm and discovered that he had no control. This was it, thought Sisko—death in an unknown sector of the Gamma Quadrant. It might as well be the Gobi Desert.

Suddenly, a bulky vessel streaked out of warp drive, sending the two undamaged fighters scurrying. Sisko shook his head and tried not to blame Dax too much. Where old friendships were concerned, the Trill had always had more loyalty than sense. But she knew a sitting duck when she saw it—she picked out the crippled fighter and hit it with full phasers.

The small craft shuddered and fizzled like a wet firecracker. Then it went completely dark. Another fighter zoomed in and unleashed a phaser barrage upon the tanker.

Sisko punched his comm panel and opened hailing frequencies. “Gul Nerwat,” he warned, “do not fire on that tanker—unless you want to blow us all to kingdom come!”

The Cardassian’s face appeared on his viewscreen, and she scowled, “Our sister ship does not respond. Tell the tanker to drop her shields and prepare to be boarded. Or we will retreat to a safe distance and blow it up.”

Sisko heaved a sigh. He could stall for time, but what good would it do? The normal running lights flickered on in the cockpit, and he was thankful that some of the runabout’s systems were coming back on-line. However, a quick check of his instruments showed that both his shields and phasers were inoperative—the computer had assigned all available energy to the helm and life-support.

“Let me confer with the captain of the tanker,” he told the Cardassian. He didn’t want to reveal the fact that her crew were all dead and she was being piloted by two of his staff.

“Five minutes,” sneered the Cardassian. “Then we destroy you first, as an example.”

Taking out the battered runabout shouldn’t be too difficult, thought Sisko glumly. He went back to the emergency audio frequency. “Dax,” he said, “I told you to make a run for it.”

“You didn’t order me,” the Trill replied calmly. “Besides, we’re in this together.”

“We’re deep in it,” Sisko muttered. “The runabout has no weapons or shields left.”

“Then you’re out of it,” answered Dax. “They don’t want the runabout, anyway, so you should make a run for it.”

“But you can’t hold out,” Sisko answered. “If you don’t let them board you, they’ll back off to a safe distance and just keep pounding away.”

Odo’s voice cut in. “Pardon me, sir, but we’re sitting on more raw explosives than ten photon torpedoes combined. Isn’t. there anything we can do with it?”

The commander frowned mightily for several moments; then he snapped his fingers. “Depth charges!” “Pardon me, sir?” asked Odo.

Dax answered, “It’s an ancient Terran weapon used by seagoing vessels against submarine vessels.”

“To great effect,” added Sisko. “Dax, is there any way to eject a storage pod and set it to explode at a given distance?”

“Not at a given distance,” answered Dax, “but at a given time, yes. You simply program the pod to shut down its magnetic field at a given moment. The antimatter is released and hits the pod—and kaboom!”

“I can’t be any help,” Sisko murmured. “For this to work, they’ll have to be chasing you.”

“You should go now,” said Dax. “Somebody has to get back to DS9 to let them know what happened. Tell the Cardassians to give us a few minutes, then we’ll let them board us. I have to do some calculations and get set up. We can’t eject a pod at warp speed, but we should be able to do it at full impulse.”

Sisko said hoarsely, “I don’t want to leave you out here, old man.”

“You haven’t got much choice,” said Dax in her usual businesslike manner. “Besides, we’ve been through worse scrapes than this.” She paused. “Although I really can’t remember any.”

He shook his head, thankful that they were on audio only. “I don’t remember ever leaving you behind. I’m not going to do it.”

“Yes, you are,” answered Dax. “I hate to use clich6s, but I’ve led a long, full life, and you’ve got a son who needs you. Please get going, Benjamin.”

“Odo,” said the commander, “I want to beam you over.”

“I’m afraid not,” answered the shapeshifter. “With the state of the controls over here, I’m sure it will require both of us to eject a pod. Rest assured, Commander, I will not volunteer for any more rescue missions.”

“We’ll be right along,” Dax assured him.

Sisko gulped. “You’d better be. Out.”

He cut off communications and stared at the Cardassian ships on his viewscreen with an overwhelming mixture of hatred, grief, and frustration. A shred of hope was somewhere in that muck, but he feared giving it too much credence. Best to act as if Dax, Odo, and the Phoenix were gone. At least he would get back to DS9 and try to prevent the Cardassians from bringing the antimatter back.

He opened a channel to Gul Nerwat and reported, “The tanker needs five minutes to prepare for board-ing.”

“Why?” snarled the Cardassian.

“There are safety precautions to disable,” answered Sisko, hoping that sounded plausible. “My life-support systems are failing. Do you mind ifI try to get back to the wormhole?”

The Cardassian woman paused in thought, and she finally asked, “This isn’t a trick, is it?”

Sisko shrugged. “I have no shields and no weapons. Your own scanners probably tell you that. I couldn’t do anything to you even if I wanted to. Plus, if you destroy me, the tanker will fight to the end, and you’ll have to destroy it. You’ll go back to Cardassia having lost two ships from your squadron, with nothing to show for it.”

Sisko was quite content to talk all day and give Dax as much time as she needed, but the Cardassian captain was decisive. “Go,” she ordered. “Tell your people that Cardassians are merciful.”

No one would believe him if he said that, thought Sisko, but he smiled pleasantly. “You are indeed merciful. I bid you good-bye.”

“May we meet again,” answered the Cardassian woman with a smile that could only be called lascivious. “Under more pleasant circumstances.”

Sisko hid his repulsion. “Perhaps,” he answered. He cut off the transmission and slumped back in his chair.

It was all up to Dax now. With his fingers crossed, he put the battered runabout into low warp drive and headed for the wormhole.

 

When Dax entered cargo bay two, Rizo was just finishing a drumstick of fried chicken. Petra was asleep beside him on the barren cargo bay floor.

Rizo licked his lips appreciatively. “How did you know I liked this dish called ‘fried chicken’?”

“Lucky guess,” said Dax. “I notice it’s popular among humans, and Bajorans are a lot like humans.”

“I’m not sure if that’s an insult, or not,” muttered Rizo. He stood to his impressive height and wiped his hands on his shirt. “Have we gone through the wormhole? It didn’t feel like we went very far.”

“We haven’t,” answered Dax. “We’re surrounded by three Cardassian ships. They’ve already destroyed the Ferengi ship, killing Gimba and all aboard, and now they’re after us.”

Rizo’s face twisted into a frightening mask of hatred. “Cardassians,” he hissed. “You must destroy them.”

“We have a plan,” answered Dax, “but it will take three of us. Odo doesn’t want to trust you, but I don’t see that we have any choice. Will you give me your word, by whatever philosophies you hold dear, that you won’t turn on us?”

The Bajoran brushed back his hair and stared at her in amazement. “Do you think I want to be captured by Cardassians? What do you think they would do to me? Or you! They don’t want to destroy us—they want to take us alive. Let me die fighting them, and I will die happy.”

“You may be very happy,” muttered Dax. “If what we have planned doesn’t work, we’re out of options. Come.” She started to the doorway.

“One moment,” said the big Bajoran. He leaned down and stroked his daughter’s rough-cut hair off her forehead; then he kissed her.

“Daughter,” he said, “I don’t wish to wake you, but I have to go with Lieutenant Dax.”

The young woman sat up, confused and alarmed. “Where are they taking you?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “I’m going to help them. You stay here and sleep. Eat.”

“Yes,” agreed Dax. “We may need your help, too. For now, you should try to get some rest.”

“It will be over soon,” Rizo promised her.

Dax strode out the doorway, motioning Rizo after her. He was rubbing his eyes as he came out. “I’ve been no fit parent,” he admitted, “but we are no better than the mold which forms us. If we die killing Cardassians, it will be worth it.”

Dax shook her head and walked to the turbolift. “Remember, our mission is to recover the antimatter. Not kill Cardassians.”

“My mission is always to kill Cardassians,” answered the terrorist.

She explained the plan briefly to Rizo on the way up the turbolift. When they reached the bridge of the tanker, Odo gave them a dour expression and leaped to his feet, assuming a defensive posture. Rizo tightened his fists and glared at the security chief.

“At ease,” ordered Dax. “You’ll have to trust each other for the next few minutes, or you’ll die as comrades, no matter what. Odo, you will take over the conn. I’ve set the course, but you’ll have to relay to me the exact distance and speed of our pursuers. Rizo, I’ll need you below on the controls for cargo bay one. I’ll be inside the cargo bay, adjusting the program on the pod we’re going to eject.”

A beep sounded, and Odo glanced at the controls. “They’re hailing us,” he reported.

“Put down our shields,” answered Dax, “and tell them to start making their approach. When I give you the word, go to full impulse. Our shields have to be down, anyway, so we might as well do it now. Any questions?”

“Will you let Petra go?” asked Rizo.

Dax shook her head. “That’s a question for a tribunal, not me. If you don’t help us, she’ll be dead, or a Cardassian prisoner.”

Rizo nodded grimly. “Lead on.”

Dax could hear Odo speaking to the Cardassians as the turbolift doors shut between them. She tried to relax, but the idea of turning antimatter storage pods into deep-space depth charges was not a relaxing notion. Suicidal was more like it.

When they reached the cargo bay anteroom, Rizo rushed directly to his post like an eager Starfleet cadet. He smiled at her. ‘Tll help you kill Cardassians all day long. What do you want me to do?”

“Open the door and leave it open,” she answered. “When you hear me shout ‘now,’ eject the first pod in line through the docking nose. You’ll need to use the manual override, but I think you know how to do that already.”

“I do,” promised Rizo. “Count on me.”

He opened the door for her, and Dax entered the cavernous chamber. She was unable to suppress a horrible feeling of dread. The pods looked like what they suddenly were—enormous bombs. Conduits snaked across the ceiling like hungry vines, and robot arms dangled like the legs of giant spiders. Dax shook her head and tried to concentrate on her mission.

She was squeezing between pods on her way toward the freight turbolift when a noise sounded. She leaped back, startled, before she realized that it was just a nearby pod signaling the end of its diagnostic cycle. The Trill swallowed hard and scrambled toward the first pod in line.

She touched the panels to activate the pod’s internal programming. After studying the readouts on its small screen, she was satisfied that she knew how to turn off its internal magnetic field at a given microsecond. Of course, nobody ever did that when the pod was full of antimatter, so she had to disable several safety features, too.

Finally, she touched her comm badge. “Odo, I’m ready.”

“Good,” he answered, “because the two Cardassian ships are at five hundred kilometers and closing fast.” “Are their shields down?”

“Still up,” answered the security chief. “There is no point in firing at them. Shall I escape?”

“Do it,” she ordered. She called to Rizo, “Ready yourselfl”

“I’m always ready,” he shouted back, “to kill Cardassians!”

The ship pitched slightly as Odo plunged them into impulse drive. Dax brought up the subsystem that regulated the magnetic field inside the pod, and she saw that the timer read IND for indefinite. She readied her fingers to change the setting. The Trill had already done a batch of calculations, and she had a set of rough equivalents in her mind. One second for every two thousand kilometers. Adjust for speed and add four seconds for the ejection process. This wasn’t going to be very accurate, she knew, but an antimatter explosion didn’t require great accuracy to do damage.

However, an explosion that happened too soon would catch the tanker as well. An explosion that happened too late would miss its target. Her fingers tensed in readiness.

She jumped when her communicator beeped. “Odo to Dax. They are demanding we stop, or they will open fire.”

“Distance?” she asked.

“They fell back to eighteen thousand kilometers. Now seventeen. Bearing, sixty-three-mark-four. Full impulse. Now sixteen thousand.”

Awfully damned close, she thought, and the longer they waited the closer they would come. Knowing that one second’s mistake could cost them their lives, her fingers were a blur on the controls. Allowing for her own actions, she set the timer to shut off the pod in ten seconds. It was a nice round number.

“Now!” she screamed, leaping back.

The robotic arms lurched into action, lifting the pod as if it were a pillow and shoving it out the turbolift doors, which shut immediately behind the robot. She should run, thought Dax, somewhere! But she knew that there was no place to hide on a tanker full of antimatter.

She slapped her comm badge and announced. “Dax here. The pod is away!”

“Putting up shields!” barked Odo. Apparently not a second too soon, as the ship was jolted by a phaser blast.

“Was that it?” yelled Rizo from outside in the anteroom.

“No!” Dax shouted back. She was frozen while

mentally counting down the seconds. Four, three, two,

one ….

Matter met antimatter and ripped the fabric of

space open for a blistering moment. The light that

burned was whiter than the newest star, but it was

gone in seconds, leaving nothing in its wake.

Dax was knocked completely off her feet between

two huge pods. The ship pitched again, and she could

hear the groaning of the giant pods against their

restraints. She feared she Would be crushed! Suddenly

strong arms were lifting her and dragging her into a

clear area.

She looked up to see Rizo towering over her,

panting and grinning. “Did we kill ‘em?”

“I’ll check,” she breathed. She tapped her comm

badge. “Odo, what about our pursuers?”

“Gone,” answered Odo with satisfaction. “Not a

trace.”

Dax lay back on the cold floor and spread her arms

in blessed relief. “Go to warp drive,” she said. “I’ll be

right there. Out.”

When she started to get up, Rizo stuck a beefy palm in her chest and pushed her back down. i “Sorry,” he said, pulling a phaser from the back of

his belt. “You,re not going anywhere.”