“Sir,” Bowers said. “Request permission to lead the team to engineering.”
Kira stopped and looked at him. “You know I can’t grant that request, Sam. Not this time.” She nodded toward the command chair. “You keep her warm until I get back.”
Bowers frowned, clearly unhappy with her decision. “May I respectfully remind the captain that Starfleet regulations call for the ship’s commanding officer to remain on board, not to lead away missions.”
Kira smiled at him. She knew what he was trying to do, and appreciated it, so she kept her tone light as she strode out of the bridge. “Sorry, Mr. Bowers, I guess I haven’t gotten to that part in the manual yet.”
As the Besinian ship materialized around her, Kira swept her drawn phaser around the dim corridor into which Transporter Chief Chao had deposited Team One. Kira trusted her people to cover her back, but as team leader, she was their first line of defense against anything in front, and she was determined that none of the killers on this ship would take any more lives.
Fortunately, sensor reads of their beam-in point had proven true: the corridor outside the engine room was quiet. It wasn’t until Kira looked at the deck that she saw why.
At her feet lay a dead man.
He was an Arkenite: the distinctive swept-back skull, domed forehead, and large, elegantly shaped ears were unmistakable.
Tarses bent to one knee, held his tricorder over the corpse for a few seconds, and delivered his verdict. “Shot by a phaser during the last thirty minutes,” he told Kira, pointing out the dark bloodless burn on the back of the head, which was visible even in the ship’s dim purple emergency lighting: the telltale sign of an energy weapon fired at point-blank range.
“Sir, another one,” DeJesus said, crouching next to a prone Ktarian male. Both bodies, Kira noted, wore drab paramilitary clothing. Tarses moved to scan the second corpse, and reported the same findings.
What the hell—?Kira thought. She’d seen enough brutality in her life to recognize executions when she saw them. But if Tarses was right, both of these men had been killed while the Defiantwas chasing down this ship. Which meant…what?
She tapped her combadge. “Kira to Defiant.”
“Bowers here, Captain. Is everything all right?”
“We’re in, Lieutenant. But we’ve come across a couple of bodies, very recently killed by weapons fire. Tell Team Two they can beam to their target site, but to proceed with caution.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Kira out.” She gestured with her phaser toward an elliptical door at one end of the corridor. “According to Chao, that should be engineering. Stay alert. I don’t want any mistakes.”
The door, not unexpectedly, refused to open. Nog unsealed an access panel and went to work on the locking mechanism, DeJesus covering him while he applied the skills developed during his misspent youth together with what he’d learned under the tutelage of of Chief O’Brien over the last few years. Kira and Tarses watched and waited on the other side of the doorframe, backs against the corridor wall, phasers at the ready.
After a few moments, Nog looked up at Kira and nodded once. Kira nodded back, and her chief engineer touched a final contact on the exposed circuitry before hitting the deck. The thick engine-room door slid open, but there was only silence beyond. No voices, no weapons fire. DeJesus quickly peered inside and then withdrew her head. Finding nothing, she swung her entire body around and entered the room, her phaser pointing the way.
After several seconds, Kira heard DeJesus call out “Clear!” and the rest of Team One crossed the threshold, spreading out as they did so. Kira saw at once why they had encountered no resistance. Four more dead bodies littered the deck: two Tellarite females, a male human, and a male Romulan, all fallen where they’d been shot, as Tarses quickly confirmed, by phaser fire. The last two had been shot in the back; the others bore chest wounds, and still held hand weapons of their own, as if they were preparing to fight back against whoever had felled their shipmates. Like those out in the corridor, they were dressed in paramilitary garb of no discernible affiliation: mercenaries. Judging from the absence of phaser burns anywhere else in the room, Kira concluded they’d never had a chance to return fire. Whoever did this had gotten the drop on all of them.
The warp core stood silent and dark.
“Any life signs?” Kira asked Tarses.
“Just us,” the doctor answered, his small eyes and straight, slightly upswept eyebrows enhancing the scowl he wore as he reported his findings. “Wait. I’m picking up something in that direction,” he amended, pointing to starboard. “It’s Bajoran.”
“Maybe it’s the one who killed the crew?” Nog said. “A survivor taken from the village, getting their revenge?”
Kira was reluctant to draw any conclusions yet, though she had to admit Nog’s guess seemed not an unlikely possibility.
“Dr. Tarses and I will check it out,” she decided. “Ensign DeJesus, you’ll stay to assist Lieutenant Nog while he assesses the ship’s engines. Contact me if there’s anything new to report. Which way, Doctor?”
Tarses indicated a short corridor leading out of main engineering and into an adjacent subsection, dimly lit like the rest of the ship in that odd purple lighting. The doctor’s tricorder, Kira realized, was leading them toward an airlock. Tarses peered through a small triangular window in the inner hatch.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered.
Kira didn’t stop to ask him what he saw. She made several attempts to open the inner portal using the keypad in the wall next to it before she finally stepped back and fired her phaser at the mechanism. Applying her full strength on a stubborn manual lever below the keypad allowed her to crank the hatch ajar, enough that Tarses could fit fingers into the edge and pull it open the rest of the way.
The Bajoran was a young woman who could not have been older than twenty-five, huddled in a corner with her knees up, her face buried behind them. It was immediately apparent that she wasn’t the killer of the ship’s crew. She’d been sealed in the airlock from the corridor, and from the looks of her, she’d been tortured: clothing torn, burns on her exposed skin, hair matted with blood from a head injury. Her earlobe was torn where her earring had been partly ripped free, the bloody ornament hanging by one intact clasp. Her entire body was trembling. She had no other reaction as the door of her prison opened.
“We’re here to help you,” Tarses said as he approached. She flinched at the sound of his voice, so he lowered it to a whisper as he slowly raised his tricorder to scan her. “I’m a doctor. My name is Simon. Can you tell me your name?”
The woman made a slurring noise and pushed her way to her feet, back against the outer portal. She swung her arms as if to warn Tarses away.
Drugged?Kira wondered. Or simply traumatized?Maybe it was both.
“It’s okay,” Tarses said. “We’re going to take you out of here.”
Tarses’s quiet assurances only spurred the woman to resist even more; she seemed to be trying to push her way through the airlock, making desperate, guttural noises and intermittently clawing at the air in the doctor’s direction.
Kira came into the airlock and approached the young woman. “Easy, easy,” she said softly. “You’re safe. We’re not going to let anything else happen to you, I promise. My name’s Nerys. Kira Nerys.”
The woman’s reaction was immediate: she began screaming. She covered her head with her arms and turned away, beating her fists against the outer portal, desperate for escape.
Tarses took advantage of the opportunity she presented in turning her back to them and moved in, hypospray in hand. He pressed it to the side of her neck, and she let out one more piercing scream before dropping into unconsciousness.