CHAPTER 20

JAKE FELT as if he were twelve years old again, running with his mother through the shaking corridors of the Saratoga, with no comprehension of the nightmare playing out around him. He felt that helpless, that useless, as Arla held an emergency medikit protoplaser to his neck and pushed him onto the Defiant's bridge, shouting out her warning: “Move away from the controls or he dies!”

At the ops console, Worf instantly jumped to his feet, but Jake could tell the Klingon's action was not in response to Arla's threat. Worf was preparing to attack.

“Don't even think about it!” Arla ordered. “The plaser's set on high, and that means his head comes off.”

“There is no need to harm him,” Worf said, his voice level and controlled. “We can all be safely on the Boreth within the next five minutes.”

“Nothing can change,” Arla said as she moved to the back of the command chair. “Nothing will change. All we're going to do is remain on this ship until the war comes to an end.”

Jake could see Worf's confusion at Arla's mention of ‘the war.’ “She must have been infected by Grigari nanomachines,” Jake said to Worf. “She's—”

The swift, increased pressure of Arla's arm against Jake's throat ruthlessly cut off the air to his lungs. He gasped for breath.

If Arla had had no weapon, he knew he would have had at least a chance of breaking the grip she had on him. Nog had shared with him several good Vulcan self-defense moves from his Academy lessons. Even if Arla had just been holding a knife to his throat, it would have been worth the risk to struggle to escape. But not against a protoplaser. All Arla had to do was touch the device's activation switch once, and the resulting force beam would shoot out faster than Jake could move to deflect it. Realistically, that left him with only one choice: remain passive.

“Commander Arla,” Worf said firmly, “you are a Starfleet officer who has been infected with an alien contagion. The contagion is affecting the performance of your duty. You must fight its influence and—”

“Be quiet!” Arla shouted. “I am Bajoran! And I will serve the True Prophets before I will be a slave to Starfleet!”

“Arla,” Worf tried again, this time making his appeal more personal, “what has happened is not the Prophets' doing. You—”

Arla jabbed the tip of the protoplaser deeper into Jake's neck. “I will kill him!”

Worf issued his own ultimatum. “Then you will have no protection against my attack. And I promise you I will rip your heart from your chest.”

But Arla did not give way. “Spoken like a true Starfleet officer, Commander. Now, cloak the ship.”

Jake caught Worf's questioning look, obviously trying to understand some reason for Arla's wanting the Defiant to cloak. But Jake could only stare back, mute. He had no idea what Arla wanted or why.

“That system is off-line,” Worf bluffed.

“I might not know starships as well as I know starbases,” Arla said, “but I know how to read status displays. The cloaking device works. You will activate it.”

“I am unqualified, and there are no cloaking specialists left aboard,” Worf said stonily.

“In five seconds, I will take off the boy's head, and then you can try to take the protoplaser from me. Five seconds . . . four . . . three . . .”

Jake braced himself for the assault. He had to give Worf a chance. Maybe the Klingon could—

But Worf gave in. He started for the cloaking console. “I will require approximately twenty seconds. We are not at battle stations.”

“Twenty seconds, then,” Arla said. “Nineteen . . . eighteen . . .”

When her countdown hit three seconds, the ship's cloaking device switched on.

“We are cloaked,” Worf said. “Release Jake.”

Arla shifted Jake to the side, and he realized it was so she could see Jadzia's console. The action caused her arm restraining Jake to relax by a fraction. His breathing steadied and Jake began to think more clearly again.

“Not for another eighty-two minutes,” she told Worf.

Jake stared at the time displays on the console. Eighty-two minutes was when all the pressure waves would achieve equilibrium. When everything would end.

“Now, move away from the console,” Arla ordered.

The Klingon did as he was told, until he was facing her from the front of the command chair.

Despite her control of the situation, Arla's anxiety was making itself felt to Jake. He could hear the shallow rapidity of her breathing, feel the sporadic tremors that struck her body. He quickly reassessed his situation. He might still not be able to do anything physical against her, but that didn't mean he was completely helpless. Especially if all Worf needed was about a second—more than enough time for Klingon reflexes to act.

Jake decided to give Worf what he needed: a diversion.

He twisted his head around to look at Arla. “You beamed Weyoun over to the station, didn't you, Arla?”

“I serve the True Prophets,” Arla said automatically. “They gave me the power to save the kai from his unjust punishment. Their will is my will.” The Bajoran commander's attention was still on Worf. Obviously, she did not consider Jake a threat.

“And that head wound you got—that was Weyoun, because—”

Arla's arm pressed harder on Jake's neck. “Kai Weyoun, Emissary to the True Prophets.”

“Right.” Jake coughed and rolled his eyes in warning at Worf, to let him continue without interruption.

Arla's arm lessened its pressure. Jake went on. “Kai Weyoun . . . he's served by the Grigari, so the Grigari also serve the True Prophets. I bet it was their nanites that worked on your head—made it look as if you'd been attacked when you hadn't. You've probably got millions, maybe billions of tiny machines inside you right now. Pushing around your individual brain cells. Changing you.”

Arla said nothing, and Worf held his position, so Jake pressed ahead, hoping Arla's silence meant there was some part of her unchanged that still remembered being part of Starfleet.

“So you can see why Worf thought you were like someone who'd been infected by an alien contagion. A natural mistake. I mean, because you have things in you that can change the way you think. Maybe even put thoughts in your head.”

Arla's thumb flicked on the protoplaser's adjustment setting, and the device hummed. Jake stiffened.

“I know what you're trying to do, Jake, and this is what I think of it!”

“Owww!” Jake cried as an electric jolt of pain shot through his cheek. He twisted away from her in a reflex motion and surprised himself by suddenly discovering he had slipped out of her armhold.

In the same instant, Worf let out a roar that shook the bridge and Jake dropped and flattened, making himself deadweight just as Nog had taught him.

Jake's practiced fall threw Arla off balance when she didn't let go of his jacket. And just as she stumbled sideways, Worf hurtled over the command chair, one forearm expertly deflecting her hand holding the protoplaser, his other slamming into her throat.

Now Jake felt Arla's grip release on his jacket and he immediately rolled to the side to stay out of Worf's way, then scrambled to his feet and ran to a weapons drawer under the closest console.

But the Defiant's computer didn't recognize him as an authorized crew member and the drawer would not open.

Only then did Jake look back at Worf and Arla wrestling on the deck. The Klingon's face was awash in bright blood, his left arm flopped uselessly, his one good hand still strained to hold both Arla's arms in check.

Then Jake saw the protoplaser's force-beam shoot out to a length of at least ten centimeters. Arla had obviously decreased its reach to inflict the warning cut on his cheek, but now Worf faced the glowing equivalent of a Romulan fusion blade.

Untrained to react instinctively to battle situations, without any real experience in the tactics of hand-to-hand combat, Jake did the only thing he could think to do: He asked himself how Nog would respond.

As if he were writing a scene in one of his stories, Jake visualized Nog's probable actions then carried them out, charging across the deck with an earsplitting roar of his own, and kicking Arla's shoulder where it touched the deck as hard as he could.

Arla cried out and Jake fought down the automatic urge to apologize for hurting her. The whole idea is to disable to win, he told himself. He spun around, prepared to strike again.

But Arla was on her side now, Worf right above her. And just as the Klingon brought his huge fist down on her face, she swung up with the plaser.

At one and the same moment in time, Jake heard the dull crunch of breaking bone and the sizzle of plased flesh.

Arla's body arched and went limp, the protoplaser rolled from her hand. The left side of her face appeared to have been crushed by the force of Worf's blow.

But Worf, too, fell to one side, moaning.

Jake ran to Worf, remembering to kick the protoplaser away from Arla.

Then he stopped and stared in shock at the gaping wound in Worf's chest. The plasing beam had sliced deep into one of Worf's hearts, and every beat sprayed more blood from the wound.

Worf looked up at Jake with clouded eyes. Tried to speak. But then slumped, head down, as if dead.

“No . . .” Jake protested, furious at his inability to help. A simple wound was something any medic could treat in seconds. But what could a writer do?

Jake slapped at his combadge. He called the agricultural technicians in sickbay, told them to get to the bridge with a full medikit at once.

They arrived within a minute, and by then Jake had used the bridge's emergency supplies to spray a coagulant into Worf's wound and hypo him with electrolytic stabilizers, metabolism blockers, and the three other drug ampules marked for emergency use in cases of bleeding, major: klingon.

The agricultural technicians helped Jake apply a self-constricting pressure bandage to Worf's chest, and with only a brief bout of squeamishness, Jake found he was capable of following the moving illustrations on the medikit's instruction padd to assist in setting up intravenous delivery of TRIOX FLUID REPLACEMENT: KLINGON in a vein in Worf's inner elbow. But the instruction padd ended with the warning to get the patient to medical facilities at once.

“The Boreth,” Jake said. “O'Brien's got to beam him over.” Then he remembered the cloak. As the technicians assembled an antigrav stretcher for Worf, Jake went to the cloaking console. But the console was unusable. Half the controls were in Romulan, and when Jake asked for translations to be displayed, the computer asked in turn for his command authorization codes. He couldn't shut it off.

Desperation impelled Jake to think back to everything O'Brien might have told him about the Defiant, about cloaks—which was nothing—about anything at all that might—

“Emergency transporter beacon!” Jake said. He turned to the technicians, told them to float Worf to the transporter room.

“Uh, what about her?” the bald technician asked. He looked over at Arla's still form.

Jake couldn't even look at the Bajoran, remembering the way Worf's fist had crushed her skull. “She's dead.”

The technician held up his medical tricorder. “Not according to this.”

“Oh, man,” Jake said, forcing himself to look again at Arla. He frowned—her injury didn't seem as bad as he had first thought. He looked back at Worf, on the stretcher. Make a command decision, he thought, remembering a lesson from his father. In the heat of the moment, when people are depending on you, don't waste time trying to think of the best decision, just make any reasonable decision and be open to correction.

“Stay here,” Jake instructed the technician. “Uh, stabilize her. And . . . tie her up or something, just in case.”

The technician knelt beside Arla. “Okay, but I don't think this one's going anyplace soon.”

Jake nodded without really listening. His mind was already one step beyond his next task. He gestured to the second technician to lift Worf with the antigravs and then hurried from the bridge to the transporter room.

“Can you even beam through a cloak?” the technician skeptically asked as he floated Worf's stretcher onto the transporter pad.

Jake bit his lip as he stared intently at the transporter control console, knowing just enough to bring up the printed menu of command options—the sort of information that was built into the system primarily for instruction and diagnostic purposes. “I don't know for sure,” he said. “But I do know that my dad always said that a cloaked ship couldn't risk making any transmissions. So if O'Brien's still trying to find us . . . and I can get this thing to put out an emergency transport beacon . . . yes!”

He had found the command line. And, he noted gratefully, it wasn't dimmed, which would have indicated he'd need to input a command code to access that function. But the emergency beacon was something that was used for disasters, when a ship's crew had to be evacuated. And in cases like that, the system had to be accessible to anyone—even civilian advisors like him.

“I don't know if this is going to work,” Jake cautioned, “but you should probably move off the pad.”

“Right,” the technician said, then jumped down, away from the stretcher. “What now?”

Jake looked at the console and the display that showed the emergency transport beacon was in operation. “I don't know,” he said truthfully. “I guess we just have to wait.”

That was when his combadge came alive with a call from the technician who had stayed behind on the bridge with Arla.

The technician was screaming.

The crowd in the storage chamber scattered before Dukat as the crazed Cardassian pushed through them.

Odo repeated the tactic that had worked before and changed his arms into heavy battering rams. But before the changeling could make contact with Dukat, a sphere of red energy pulsed around the Cardassian's robed form and Odo was thrown back as abruptly as if he had tried to breach the security field of a holding cell.

By the time Odo regained his feet, Quark was within Dukat's energy sphere, stubby legs kicking as the Cardassian held him up by the throat, his airway squeezed shut. The Ferengi's lavender-rimmed eyes goggled and bulged outward as his lungs ran out of air.

“Where is it?!” Dukat demanded.

A handful of others threw themselves against the glowing sphere and were repelled with the same crackling flares of red energy that had attacked Odo. Most gave up after two or three tries. But Rom kept mounting his charge over and over again with heartrending squeals of despair.

Odo quickly and gently blocked Rom, who was half-dazed by now, to discourage him from attempting yet another useless charge, then passed the distraught Ferengi over to the care of others. Only then did the changeling begin to circle Dukat's shimmering forcefield, searching for any sign of an opening.

Within the forcefield, Dukat loosened his grip on Quark's throat and lowered the frantically, flailing Ferengi to the deck, to give him a chance to answer the question.

“I don't know . . . what you're . . . talking about,” Quark wheezed as soon as he had sufficient breath to speak.

“Wrong answer,” Dukat said. His gray-scaled hand closed around Quark's neck and the hapless Ferengi was swung high again.

Odo didn't think Quark could last a minute more without air. But with the thought of that time limit came another. The changeling turned to Simons, silently mouthed his own question: How long?

Simons looked at his tricorder, held up one finger.

One minute, Odo thought. That's all it would take, and Quark would survive to disappear from Dukat's grip as everyone else in the room swept into the future again. Odo was sorry he wouldn't be present to see Dukat's face when that happened.

But another thought occurred to him. Although Quark had been in phase with the rest in the group for so many oscillations already, what if, because he was in Dukat's grip, he did not sweep ahead with all the others?

Just to ensure that the proper transfer took place, Odo decided that Dukat should release his grip on Quark.

“Dukat!” Odo shouted, his voice echoing against the bare metal bulkheads and deck. “Put him down!”

Dukat whirled to glare at the changeling.

“I know where it is,” Odo said.

Dukat suddenly grinned. “Tell me, or he dies.”

“Let him go, and I'll tell you.”

Dukat vigorously shook his head, and Quark. The Ferengi's eyes were closed now. Odo doubted Quark would survive much longer.

“Let me into your forcefield; let Quark out,” he quickly said. “Then, if I don't tell you, you can kill me instead.”

Odo stood steady as the section of the spherical forcefield directly in front of him flickered, then winked out.

He stepped forward, knowing there could only be seconds left. The forcefield reformed behind him.

“Now I can kill you both,” Dukat crowed as he reached for Odo. “Tell me where the Orb is, because it's not in Quark's bar!”

But before Odo could even think of a new bluff with which to respond, blue light flashed around him—

—and he was in the storage chamber, the gravity gradient perfectly level, with everyone else but one. Quark hadn't made the transfer.

Odo called out to Simons. “Get me O'Brien!”

The young ensign switched on the Klingon communicator and called for the Boreth.

But there was no response. Odo felt Rom's pleading eyes upon him.

“It could be the Chief can't reach us when we're in the wormhole environment,” Simons suggested.

“Odo,” Rom pleaded, “what are we going to do?”

“The only thing you and the others can do is wait to go back,” the changeling said gruffly. Then he started for the door.

As a changeling, Odo had other options.