“Evasive maneuvers, Lieutenant,” he said, “but give me no more than another seven seconds on our course.”
Dax’s hands moved in swift response to the order even before her acknowledgment passed her lips. She anticipated me,Vaughn realized, and wondered just how far a career in command might take her.
Vaughn faced forward in his chair, staring through the darkness toward the main viewer, which he could not see, and which was offline anyway. His right hand was a knot of pain, but it paled beside the ache in his heart. Just ahead of him, the indistinct shape of the conn rose from the deck, a mute marker of his daughter’s violent death. He looked down to the side of the captain’s chair, to where Prynn had been thrown by the explosion that had taken her away from him for good. In his mind’s eye, he saw her lying there, the spark of life gone from her visage. He remembered that spark, that flash in her eyes, from the moment they had succeeded in evacuating the last of the Europani from their poisoned world, when she had smiled at him for the first time in years. And he remembered it from her childhood, and even before, from the time she had been an infant. Her dark, almond eyes had always seemed amazingly vivid to him, as though they contained the passion of her will. They were Ruriko’s eyes.
“Forty seconds,” Dax said. “Back on a linear course.”
A chill gripped Vaughn as he sat in the darkness. The air on the bridge was still oppressively warm—the environmental systems had not been offline that long yet—but he envisioned the absolute cold of space bleeding away the kernel of heat generated on Defiantto sustain the crew. The image recalled the dreadful tableau Vaughn and an Enterpriseaway team had found not long ago aboard Kamal,a derelict Cardassian freighter adrift in the Badlands. Bodies everywhere, Bajorans and Cardassians frozen in death.
That had been a part of the incident that had driven Vaughn to Deep Space 9, away from the career he had worked—the life he had lived—for the past eighty years. Decisions of life and death, killing some so that others might live, battling alongside evil in order to conquer even greater evils. He had seen and experienced as much of that—more, much more, he amended—than he had ever wanted to. And so he had made the decision to live a life not laced with sorrow and regret, and to seek not ugliness and horror to be vanquished, but beauty and wonder to be explored. Yet here he was again, faced with risking Defiant’s crew of forty to save a hundred thousand.
“Thirty seconds.”
Vaughn braced himself, waiting for the final salvo that would boil away and penetrate the only protection Defianthad astern. Seconds ticked away in agonizing slowness.
When Dax reached ten,Vaughn told Nog to bring all systems back online. One step at a time, the ship limped back to life: lights rescued the bridge from darkness, consoles blinked back on, alarms cried out once more.
“At zero,” Vaughn said, raising his voice to be heard above the alerts, “shut down the impulse drive.”
“Aye, sir,” Nog said.
Dax counted out the last five seconds with an expectant tone, and Vaughn thought he heard the return of her determination with each word. After “One,” Dax said, “We’re clear for warp.”
At once, the thrum of the impulse engines faded, the tone deepening as the volume decreased. Vaughn said nothing, instead counting out another three seconds to himself.
“Sir?” It was Bowers, an edge clearly audible in his voice. He had expected the order to go to warp as soon as they were able, Vaughn surmised. But with all those civilian lives dependent upon what they did here, Vaughn could not afford to act without a margin of error.
Ignoring Bowers, he told Dax, “Go to maximum warp for ten seconds, then throttle down to warp three-point-seven and take evasive action.” The lieutenant did not bother to acknowledge the orders as she set about implementing them. Vaughn imagined he could feel Defiantleap to warp.
“Monitor the fracture,” Vaughn said to Nog.
“Aye, sir.”
“The Jarada have gone to warp,” Bowers said. “All four ships. They’re in pursuit.”
“Engage cloak,” Vaughn said.
Bowers’s fingers played across the control surfaces of the tactical station, but he hesitated before completing the command. “Sir, the Jarada will be able to read us cloaking.” The lieutenant’s hand hovered a few centimeters above his console.
“Do it,” Vaughn ordered. Bowers complied, immediately bringing his hand down on a blinking touchpad. The bridge lighting dimmed in the telltale way that signaled the ship’s stealth mode to the crew.
Come on,Vaughn thought, exhorting the Jarada to keep up their pursuit. He expected them to read Defiantcloaking, just as he expected that they had already read the microfracture in the warp nacelle. It never paid, Vaughn knew, to underestimate the enemy.
“Warp three-point-seven,” Dax said. “Starting evasive maneuvers.”
“Status of the fracture?” Vaughn asked.
“Stressed,” Nog said. “But stable.”
Vaughn ticked off another ten seconds in his head, then told Dax to bring the ship out of warp. “Take us to station-keeping.”
“Dropping out of warp,” Dax responded. Then, a few seconds later, she added, “Engines answering full stop.”
“The Jarada are approaching the area,” Bowers said.
“Of course they are,” Vaughn offered. They had read Defiant’s course and velocity once it had gone to warp, seen where it had cloaked, and if they had detected the fracture on the nacelle, they would have calculated just how far the Starfleet ship could possibly travel before having to drop back to sublight speed. Now, if they utilized all of that information to determine a starting point and locus for a search—
“They’re passing our position,” Bowers said, and Vaughn could hear the smile on the tactical officer’s face even without looking.
“No celebrations yet, Lieutenant,” Vaughn said, though he tried to inject a sense of lightness into his tone. “Keep your eyes on them.”
Seconds passed, then minutes, Bowers intermittently describing the movements of the four battleships. The Jarada vessels stopped not far beyond the most distant point to which Defiantcould have traveled at maximum warp, given the damaged nacelle. Then they retreated, split up, regrouped.
“They’re moving again,” Bowers said finally. “Heading off on different vectors at warp one…describing helical trajectories—” Bowers suddenly looked up from his console. “They’ve set up a search grid.” He did not need to add what they all already knew: the Jarada were looking for Defiantfar from its current location.
“Excellent,” Vaughn said. After they hunted fruitlessly for a while, he thought, the Jarada would guess that Defianthad taken evasive action and modified its speed after it had cloaked. Vaughn thought they would likely change their search strategy, call in reinforcements to assist. But space was big and Defiantsmall—and essentially invisible—and they already had an advantage over their pursuers; Vaughn had chosen the odd velocity—warp three-point-seven, not warp one or three or five—to hide their position that much more. This game of hide-and-seek was one Vaughn knew he would win.
“Lieutenant Nog,” he said, “I believe you have a fractured warp nacelle to repair.”
“Aye, sir,” Nog said, bounding out of his chair and heading for the starboard exit. “Right away.”
“Lieutenant,” Vaughn called as the door opened before the engineer. “Everyone,” he continued, still having to raise his voice above the alarms. He gazed around to include all of the bridge crew.
“Well done.” Nog smiled widely, his small, sharp teeth showing prominently. He nodded, then turned and left.