Ro looked at Lenaris. The general was facing Akaar squarely, refusing to be intimidated by the admiral’s superior height. “I’m giving the station’s chief of security a little latitude, Admiral,” he said evenly. “Unless you intend to challenge my authority as acting commander of Deep Space 9?”
Akaar said nothing, but Ro could imagine his teeth clenching. He might really believe she was untrustworthy, insubordinate, and criminally reckless, but he was still wise enough not to make the situation worse with a power grab over her.
Finally Akaar turned to the ops crew, who stood frozen at their stations. “Well? You heard the general. Clear the room.”
As the officers and crew exited in the turbolifts, Akaar turned back to Lenaris, who clearly intended to remain behind. “I am staying as well,” the admiral said, his tone making it clear that nothing, not even if Bajor announced it was joining the Dominion, would change that.
“Suit yourselves,” Ro muttered. She finally found a clear line of sight that afforded her a decent degree of cover: the column next to the operations station. She slapped her combadge again. “Taran’atar, I’m in position. Can you verify the target?”
A moment of silence, then, “Negative. Security sensors still do not register the presence of a life-form beneath the array.”
“I’m running the risk of blowing a hole in ops big enough to send the station spinning out of the system! I need verification!”
“I have none to give. You will have to trust your instincts,”Taran’atar said. “Or make a leap of faith.”
Ro shook her head, muttering, “You and I are gonna have to have a long talk when all this is over.” She quickly adjusted the setting on her phaser. “Gentlemen, if I were you,” she said to Lenaris and Akaar, who were still in the pit, “I’d find some place else to stand.”
As the admiral and the general took positions roughly equidistant from Ro along the uppermost level of ops, Ro raised her arm, pointed her phaser directly at the central ceiling plates and fired. Something flared—maybe a circuit bank or a power conduit—and Ro held her breath, waiting for the pull of escaping air that signaled a hull breach. But nothing was blown out into space. Instead, metal plating and subspace tranceiver components showered ops. Crashes and sparking equipment resounded through the chamber, some of the debris bouncing off the ceiling pylons and spinning in new directions. Akaar, the biggest humanoid in the room, had to dive and roll to one side to avoid being hit by shrapnel.
Silence fell. Smoke wafted from the opening Ro had made, and she strained to see through it. Gradually it thinned. Blackened machinery and the intact outer hull of the station was all she saw.
No…
She searched the transceiver compartment and the overhanging pylons with her eyes. There was nothing, no sign that a humanoid had ever been up there. “Do you see anything?” she called to Lenaris, standing by the transporter stage. The general shook his head.
“Lieutenant,”Taran’atar said through her combadge. “What happened?”
Ro couldn’t speak. She stood openmouthed, staring at the ceiling, unable to believe how completely wrong she’d been. Again…
“Akaar to security,” the admiral growled, picking himself up off the deck. “Send a team to ops immediately.”
Still staring at the damage she’d done, Ro let her phaser drop to the deck. There was a crash—
Something smashed into the situation table, shattering the surface and leaving a large depression. The impact made Ro flinch, and for a moment she thought one of the pylons had given way. But there was nothing there. It was as if the table had simply caved in on itself.
Or something invisible had struck it…
Ro retrieved her phaser and advanced toward the pit, stopping short when she was halfway down the steps, unwilling to believe her eyes.
Something flickered atop the shattered situation table. Then whatever mechanism had been in operation finally gave out, and Ro found herself staring at the unmoving form of a humanoid, covered completely in a loose-fitting red environmental suit.
Ro trained her phaser on the figure as she looked up at Akaar. “Well, this just got a little more complicated, didn’t it, Admiral?” she asked.
Lenaris looked at Akaar, who was staring intently at the figure splayed over the situation table as he made his way toward the pit.
“What is it?” Lenaris asked. “Is it Gard?”
“Oh, it’s him,” Ro confirmed, looking at the unconscious face through the suit’s visor. “But what’s really interesting is his choice in attire.” She gestured with her weapon at the red garment. “This, General, is an isolation suit. It provides the wearer limited life support and generates a very localized cloaking field, small enough to hide a man. The problem here is that Gard could only obtain such a suit from the manufacturer.”
“Who?” Lenaris asked.
Akaar bent over to study Gard’s prostrate form more closely. “The Federation.”
9
This will work,Vaughn told himself. It has to.
He stood in the center of the medical bay, watching Bashir and his assistants begin the slow, complex task of disengaging sections of Borg technology from Ruriko’s body. Nog had solved the problem of separating her from the regeneration alcove by connecting it to a second, portable energy supply. After that, it was simply a matter of beaming Ruriko, alcove and all, directly to Defiant’s medical bay. Nog continued to monitor his makeshift generator, which provided Ruriko with uninterrupted life support while Bashir and his med-techs, Richter and Juarez, went to work. Ruriko had yet to open her eyes.
Bowers stood by with phaser in hand, prepared to take action if the circumstances warranted it. Sam had remained unhappy about beaming Ruriko on board, and with good reason. Vaughn was taking a huge gamble.
From the moment Vaughn recognized Ruriko’s transponder signal, he dreaded making the choice he’d faced inside the wreckage of the Valkyrie.Until he’d actually set eyes on her, he’d manged to convince himself he had the luxury of time. But really, he never doubted for an instant that Ruriko was alive; special ops transponders were wetwired into the nervous systems of their operatives. They self-destructed immediately upon brain death. For Ruriko’s to be working seven years after she’d been lost could only mean one thing: she’d survived.
That Ruriko had succeeded in neutralizing Veruda’s A.I. before it interfaced with the Borg had never been in question, nor what the outcome would be. She and Vaughn had both understood the necessity of his order to take the Valkyrieand pursue the Borg ship, just as they’d both known that the mission would cost Ruriko her life.
But she beat the odds. She made it off the Borg ship and back onto the Valkyrie. What neither of them had counted on was the Borg’s apparent success in assimilating Valkyrie,and all hands aboard her.
This is my fault,he thought as he stared at her face. I consigned her to this, as surely as if I’d stabbed her with the assimilation tubules myself. She’s endured seven years of hell because I was never able to put her before duty.
Strange, how easily the old emotions resurfaced, even after seven years. He thought his reconnection to Prynn following his encounter with the Inamuri would finally unshackle him from the past. I should have realized. I should have known that something like this was coming. The signs were there, the coincidences too numerous….