Star Trek: Cayuga
21 - ‘Pressure, a Tale of the Dominion War’
By Jack Elmlinger
Stab.
Vasily Keitsev looked up worriedly from his plate of linguine.
Stab.
“Is there something on your mind, Captain?”
Jeanne Pozach looked across her mutilated food. “No,” she said, dropping her left hand onto the table. Keitsev’s eyebrows rose when it clanged against the glass tabletop. She pulled the sleeve of her uniform up to reveal an obsidian bracer. “They’ve been sending me subspace updates, every six hours with proposals for the spaceports, congratulations from the saplings…”
“The Anurans?”
“Yes, the Anurans.” She rested her chin on her hand and stared at the bracer. “I haven’t taken this thing off in two weeks.”
Keitsev looked at the bracer. “It looks heavy.”
“It is.”
The door chimes rang and the doors slid open with a whoosh to reveal Doctor Moru, Lieutenant Ntannu, and Lieutenant Commander Maguire. As the sight of the former Maquis operative, the chief engineer bristled.
“I was just going,” he said quickly, pushing himself away from the table. Maguire said nothing but she stood well clear out of his way to the door. “Captain, if you’d like, I can sift through the Anuran messages for you. I’ve got plenty of free time on my hands.”
“I’ll have them forwarded to you,” agreed the captain. Keitsev nodded at her and stepped outside where Crewman Leung was waiting for him.
Maguire stared at the door after it had closed behind him. “I thought,” she said,” that maybe, just maybe, that zh’Tali knocking the hell out of him would have made me feel better. You know, vicariously, I think that I was wrong.”
“Punishing him isn’t going to make him a better person,” Pozach reminded her as she began to clear away the dinner dishes to the replicator.
“Rabid dogs don’t get any better.”
Moru quieted her with a touch on her shoulder. “What did you want to talk to us about?,” he asked the Captain.
“We’re seven hours away from the Lamaari Parish.” Pozach deposited the plates in her replicator and watched them dissolve. “A few hours after we arrive, I’m supposed to be attending a ceremony where I will have to formally return a religious artifact called the Eye of Ejeria.” She turned towards her guests. “I’d like to know why.”
Ntannu frowned. “Wasn’t that explanation included in the mission report?”
Pozach sat down in an armchair and gestured towards the soda. “I’d like to hear it from you.”
Moru sat down carefully. “I’m not sure what we can tell you that you don’t already know, Captain.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“Fine, whatever.” Maguire plunked down onto the sofa next to the Bolian doctor. “It was the year 2374, near the end of the second year of the Dominion War…”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Amos Bradley hated the color yellow. It made him look sallow and ill. Supposedly, it was a cheery color but he associated it with an overly happy dog -- just irritating. His dislike had been a small but undeniable factor in choosing his career path and he had been relieved when he had finally settled onto the command track.
The Cayuga has been at Yellow Alert for nine days.
The Saber class starship had departed from Starbase One-Two-Nine, two months earlier, leaving the Fifteenth Fleet before it attacked the Dominion-held world of Rakalla III. They had met up with the USS Crazy House, and the USS Pommern across the Cardassian border. They had slinked and skulked around Cardassian space, slipping past star systems, and dodging enemy patrols.
Their subterfuge had gone well enough until the seventh week that the Pommern had been spotted by the Jem’hadar and destroyed while drawing attention from the other ships. The Crazy Horse had been destroyed, a week later, while trying to pass through a minefield. The Cayuga had survived and now it was ready to trade Yellow for Red.
Bradley stepped into the Situation Room, satisfied by the sight of his senior staff, seated and waiting for him. His First Officer, Arinda, looked up from her conversation with Hunter, her bald head catching the light slightly.
“This journey is almost over,” the Captain said, taking his seat. “What I need to know is, are we ready to do this?”
After glancing at the rest of the senior staff, Chief Engineer Stern said,” The Cayuga is in prime condition, sir. The Garibaldi and the Blazer are equipped with sensor decoy units which should make them appear as Lamaari patrol craft.”
“Sickbay is ready for mass casualties,” Doctor Moru commented without any inflections.
“My security teams are ready,” Lieutenant Ntannu reported,” but our operational strength is at a tenth of what it should be, due to the loss of the Pommern and the Crazy Horse’s security teams, along with members of the 121st aboard the Crazy Horse.”
Bradley frowned at this revelation. “But are your teams up to this?”
The Ktarian sucked in a breath and exhaled. “Yes, although, with a much smaller margin of error.”
“What I’d like to know,” Doctor Nabin interjected,” is exactly what we’re doing here?”
Bradley’s eyes slid over to Commander Arinda and the Deltan took that as her cue. “Four months ago, the Lamaari government signed a nonaggression treaty with the Dominion,” she said, standing up and triggering the monitor display,” and in exchange for protection from hostile neighboring species like the Kzinti, the Dominion can build shipyards and Jem’hadar breeding facilities throughout the Lamaar system. Starfleet Intelligence estimates that in the time that the production centers have been active, they will have built seventeen squadrons of attack ships, a dozen battleships, and bred enough Jem’hadar to crew all of them, four times over.”
“And we’re supposed to destroy all of these,” Nabin asked, aghast. “On our own?”
“No, that would be pointless, Doctor,” Arinda said coldly. “The system is defended by sixty vessels of the Lamaari Crusader Fleet and backed up by a squadron of Jem’hadar attack ships.” She manipulated the images on the display screen, producing an image of a massive emerald. “This is the Eye of Ejeria. According to Lamaari legend, this artifact is part of their creator-deity Ejeria, sacrificed to the Lamaari people in order to provide them with insight.”
Moru leaned forward in his seat. “I don’t think I like where this mission is going.”
“Our orders are to break into the building where the Eye is kept and to make off with it,” Bradley said. “Starfleet Intelligence believes that if we can prove that the Dominion are incapable of defending them. Then the Lamaari will declare that their treaty is void and demand the removal of all of their personnel and equipment.”
The silence that met Bradley’s pronouncement was broken by the clicking of Hunter’s mandibles and his translator saying,” And we must only humiliate the Jem’hadar.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Aimee Maguire turned the phaser rifle over and over in her hands. “I haven’t fired one of these since the firing range at the Academy.”
“With any luck, you won’t have to,” Stern said, passing her a tool kit. “Get in and get out.”
A bosun’s whistle pierced the Shuttle Bay, pulling Maguire’s attention over towards Commander Arinda. “Board the shuttles,” the Deltan ordered. The butterflies in Maguire’s stomach beat their wings harder as she stepped aboard the Blazer. She strapped into her seat and felt a small surge as the shuttlecraft lifted off from the deck. Soon they were in space.
“Beginning prerecorded chatter,” Ntannu said from the pilot’s seat. “Estimated flight time is five hours.”
“Do you think there’ll be any puddles?,” Crewman Musker asked while he was checking his phaser rifle.
“I doubt,” Crewman Fuller answered him,” if there was a Founder in the system, there would be a hell of a lot more ships than twelve attack ships guarding them.”
“Well, good, because I hate Changelings.”
“So, we’re supposed to pretend to be a pair of patrol ships?,” Maguire asked, fretting with her hair pins.
“Indeed, we are,” Fuller replied.
Maguire frowned while opening her toolbox. She began moving tools into the pouches strapped to her belt. “What happened to the ships that we’re supposed to be impersonating?”
“The Cayuga destroyed them both just before we launched.”
“Oh.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Doctor Moru put on another field coat and his breath began to crystallize before him.
“An-n-nother frostbite case,” Maharjarif said, her teeth chattering as she led Aaron Connelly towards a biobed. “I’m going to need the regenerator.”
Moru scowled and activated the monitor in his office. “Moru to Bradley.”
“I assume that you’re calling to complain about the cold, Doctor?” The Captain’s impatient tone did nothing relieve the Bolian or his mood.
“I’ve had eight people come into Sickbay with frostbite to their extremities. Ensign Sayvok might have lost a toe already.”
Bradley sighed, blowing out a cloud of condensed air before him. “Doctor, I’m just as cold as everyone else on this ship. In another few hours, we’ll be able to power back up.” Moru turned off the connection and returned to Maharjarif.
Silent and unseen, the Cayuga tumbled through space, bound inside the heart of a comet.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Commander Arinda glanced at the Lamaari capital city that passed below the shuttlecraft. The Lamaari had expected them to land near the defense citadel, a few kilometers away. What the Lamaari expected and what would be happening were two different things.
“Load micro-torpedoes,” she ordered.
Behind her, Crewman Beckley muttered,” I thought that Deltans were pacifists.”
Arinda stiffened at his remark. “No,” she told him,” we’re optimistically pragmatic. Fire.”
The shuttles flew over the citadel, leaving behind the roar of explosions and the screams of the surprised and the dying.
“We’ve disabled all of the interceptors on standby,” Ensign Nye reported from the Blazer. “Reliquary in forty-five seconds.”
“Prep up!,” the Deltan First Officer shouted over her shoulder. “Land in front of the entrance, aft towards the door.”
When the Garibaldi touched down, Harker and Dixon opened fire from the rear hatch. Their phaser rifle blasts cut down half a dozen Lamaari.
“They’re all missing an eye,” Harker said incredulously.
“That’s because they’re priests,” Beckley said as the Blazer set down beside the Garibaldi, effectively plugging up the opening. No one would be entering the shrine from the courtyard that surrounded it.
“Five minutes!,” Ntannu reminded Stern and Maguire as the engineers stepped over the Lamaari corpses in their way. “Musker and Fuller, stay with them!” A blast of purple energy forced him to seek cover.
“Jem’hadar!,” Nye yelled. Musker grunted as an energy blast struck him in his chest. He collapsed, already dead before he struck the ground.
Stern, Maguire, and Fuller ran towards the shrine. The building was shaped like a six-sided star and the Eye was mounted on a dais at its center. They sprinted towards it, a priest chattering in their language and warding them off with his hands until Fuller gunned him down.
Maguire stepped over the priest’s body and took the stairs, three steps at a time, her heart banging against her rib cage. “Stern, come on!” She stared up at the Eye that was suspended in a force field, thirty feet overhead, before she crouched down to begin working on the mechanism recessed into the floor.
“He killed the priest,” Stern growled as he stepped past her and pried an access panel open.
“And there are a lot of worse things than Fuller out there, waiting to do the same to us!”
“Get that thing on the ground,” the Chief Engineer replied to her. “I’ll take down its defensive fields.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“Did you hear that?”
Ntannu didn’t spare a glance at Dixon. Movement flickered in the corner of his eye and the Ktarian fired without any warning, blasting the Jem’hadar off of its feet.
“It’s a Lamaari priest,” Arinda shouted into the sudden silence, leading around the Garibaldi’s nose with a small surveillance device in her hands. “He’s telling the First -- no, the Vorta -- that weapons can’t be used inside the reliquary.”
“Ah, hell,” was Nye’s response to this information.
The Jem’hadars’ rifles clattered down to the ground and their owners disappeared inside their shrouds.
Nye died suddenly as his head was twisted around by a monster that vanished a moment later. Arinda fired across the space that it had occupied, forcing it back into visibility. She could see Stern, Fuller, and Maguire racing across the courtyard towards the shuttles, carrying the Eye between them.
A blow to the face knocked Ntannu off of his feet. He twisted to one side as he fell, avoiding the kick that he knew was coming for him. He rolled back onto his feet with a combat knife in his hand. A Jem’hadar soldier shimmered into sight, striking past his guards and cracking one of his ribs.
Dixon saw something blur towards Stern and Maguire. He ran over to intercept the Jem’hadar soldier, surprising it with a mighty smash from the butt of his phaser rifle. It fell to the ground, unconscious or dead, he couldn’t tell. He hurried after the engineers, firing wildly at a Jem’hadar rushing towards the wounded Beckley.
“Fall back!,” Commander Arinda shouted, firing her hand phaser upon a Jem’hadar as it moved around the shuttlecraft. “Dixon, Fuller, get the engineers into the air!” She backed inside the shuttle, laying down cover fire for Harker as he dragged Beckley towards the hatch, smoke trailing from the wound on his chest.
Stern hit the shuttle’s ramp and he didn’t stop running, throwing himself into the pilot’s seat. Maguire swung the Eye inside as Ntannu, beaten, bloody, and victorious, collapsed onto the ramp. As she reached for the injured Security Chief, a roaring Jem’hadar appeared out of nowhere, its fist pulled back to deliver a killing blow.
Maguire fired her phaser at it.
Fuller and Dixon pounded their way up the ramp, grabbing Ntannu and pulling him inside. The shuttle lifted off before any of them could find their seats. Maguire looked up from the floor, surprised to find blood that wasn’t her own on her clothes.
“That’s all there is to it?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Harker lifted the shuttle up through the sky and broke the sound barrier in under a second. “We’ll be out of the atmosphere in less than a minute.”
Arinda accepted this information with a nod as she examined Beckley. His right arm appeared to be shattered and the pink foam around his mouth suggested that he had a punctured lung. The shuttle stank from his melted uniform and his seared flesh. “Any sign of the Cayuga?”
“Not yet, Commander,” Harker said as the sky darkened into space,” but we are running a few seconds ahead of schedule.”
Arinda nodded and reached for the medical kit, freezing up as her hand touched a foreign object. She pulled it into view and it was a dark, metallic globe with evenly-spaced lavender lights.
“Oh, no,” she said dejectedly,” that’s not fair at all.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Once they had left the atmosphere of the planet, there was no medium through which the noise of the explosion could be transmitted but Stern saw it on the shuttlecraft’s sensors, all the same.
“We just lost the Blazer.”
Dixon brought up a sensor display from his place at the co-pilot’s station. “Three Lamaari corvettes are altering course after us and every Jem’hadar ship in the system is being sent to intercept us.”
“They won’t shoot us down,” Crewman Fuller said, holding Ntannu still as Maguire did her best to patch up the Ktarian’s wounds. “They still need that Eye back.”
“It’s a small comfort,” Stern cried. “Here they come!”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“The Garibaldi has broken orbit and there are three Lamaari ships after them.” Doctor Nabin’s voice was muffled through the thick scarf that he was wearing.
Captain Bradley pounded his armrest since they weren’t ready yet. “Engineering!,” he shouted. “Bring us back on-line!”
Behind the large engineering console, Zehna fought to work his panel through the cold frost. “Warp core and impulse engineers are warming up from cold standby,” the Bajoran reported over the intercom. “Life-support is re-engaged. Power to the navigational deflector, weapons and shields --”
“Hunter, get us out of this cage,” Bradley interrupted him.
The comet, known on Lamaar for its forty-six year orbit, shattered into pieces as red-orange phaser fire lanced out from its core. It sublimed underneath its assault and the Cayuga roared out from the debris.
“Take out those corvettes,” the captain snapped at his Bridge crew. The ship shuddered slightly as Hunter unleashed a salvo of torpedoes. Mercilessly, they punched through the eerie blue mist projected around the Lamaari hulls, tossing the ships around like toys.
“Forty-five seconds until the first Jem’hadar striker comes into range,” Doctor Nabin announced from Ops.
“Tell the Garibaldi that they’ve got half of that time!,” Bradley barked, watching the Jem’hadar ships appear on the scanners.
The Bridge lurched forward, nearly tossing Bradley out of his chair and into the helm console. “The shuttle’s aboard,” Nabin announced. “Structural damage to the Shuttle Bay.” The ship rocked again but this time, it came from weapons fire.
“Forward shields are at seventy percent!,” Hunter clicked, busy twisting the ship away.
Struggling to keep his place in his seat, the Captain yelled,” Hunter, stretch our legs!”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Despite whatever she might be feeling or thinking, Jeanne Pozach was leaning forward in her armchair. “Naturally, you escaped.” She shook her head. “What I don’t understand about this mission is how it became permissible to steal an alien religious artifact.”
“Take a longer view at it,” Maguire suggested to her. “Yeah, we did a bad thing, but because of that mission, the Lamaari shut down every Dominion production center and shipyard in their system. Stalling out even that little bit of their war machine helped us in the end.”
“Nearly twenty thousand Lamaari were killed by the Jem’hadar during the uprising.”
“None of us liked it, Jeanne,” Moru said reasonably. “If we could have talked the Lamaari into abandoning the Dominion, then we would have but that wasn’t an option.”
Pozach considered all of this. “I’d like you to join me on the surface.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The away team materialized into the reliquary’s courtyard. Lieutenant Ntannu quickly inventoried the forces surrounding them. There were snipers on the roofs of the nearby buildings, force fields around the shrine itself, and two or three hundred infantry soldiers arranged in a ring formation.
Captain Pozach approached the first row of soldiers, struggling to carry the crate that contained the Eye. their ranks parted aside for a cadre of one-eyed priests. She offered the crate to them and they reverently accepted it from her as one. She coughed and the priests turned their cycloptic gazes upon her.
“I’m sorry,” she began to say but the priests disappeared into the mass of soldiers. Pozach turned back to Maguire, Ntannu, and Moru who she found to be as unimpressed with her entreaty as the Lamaari had been.
The End…
21 - ‘Pressure, a Tale of the Dominion War’
By Jack Elmlinger
Stab.
Vasily Keitsev looked up worriedly from his plate of linguine.
Stab.
“Is there something on your mind, Captain?”
Jeanne Pozach looked across her mutilated food. “No,” she said, dropping her left hand onto the table. Keitsev’s eyebrows rose when it clanged against the glass tabletop. She pulled the sleeve of her uniform up to reveal an obsidian bracer. “They’ve been sending me subspace updates, every six hours with proposals for the spaceports, congratulations from the saplings…”
“The Anurans?”
“Yes, the Anurans.” She rested her chin on her hand and stared at the bracer. “I haven’t taken this thing off in two weeks.”
Keitsev looked at the bracer. “It looks heavy.”
“It is.”
The door chimes rang and the doors slid open with a whoosh to reveal Doctor Moru, Lieutenant Ntannu, and Lieutenant Commander Maguire. As the sight of the former Maquis operative, the chief engineer bristled.
“I was just going,” he said quickly, pushing himself away from the table. Maguire said nothing but she stood well clear out of his way to the door. “Captain, if you’d like, I can sift through the Anuran messages for you. I’ve got plenty of free time on my hands.”
“I’ll have them forwarded to you,” agreed the captain. Keitsev nodded at her and stepped outside where Crewman Leung was waiting for him.
Maguire stared at the door after it had closed behind him. “I thought,” she said,” that maybe, just maybe, that zh’Tali knocking the hell out of him would have made me feel better. You know, vicariously, I think that I was wrong.”
“Punishing him isn’t going to make him a better person,” Pozach reminded her as she began to clear away the dinner dishes to the replicator.
“Rabid dogs don’t get any better.”
Moru quieted her with a touch on her shoulder. “What did you want to talk to us about?,” he asked the Captain.
“We’re seven hours away from the Lamaari Parish.” Pozach deposited the plates in her replicator and watched them dissolve. “A few hours after we arrive, I’m supposed to be attending a ceremony where I will have to formally return a religious artifact called the Eye of Ejeria.” She turned towards her guests. “I’d like to know why.”
Ntannu frowned. “Wasn’t that explanation included in the mission report?”
Pozach sat down in an armchair and gestured towards the soda. “I’d like to hear it from you.”
Moru sat down carefully. “I’m not sure what we can tell you that you don’t already know, Captain.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“Fine, whatever.” Maguire plunked down onto the sofa next to the Bolian doctor. “It was the year 2374, near the end of the second year of the Dominion War…”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Amos Bradley hated the color yellow. It made him look sallow and ill. Supposedly, it was a cheery color but he associated it with an overly happy dog -- just irritating. His dislike had been a small but undeniable factor in choosing his career path and he had been relieved when he had finally settled onto the command track.
The Cayuga has been at Yellow Alert for nine days.
The Saber class starship had departed from Starbase One-Two-Nine, two months earlier, leaving the Fifteenth Fleet before it attacked the Dominion-held world of Rakalla III. They had met up with the USS Crazy House, and the USS Pommern across the Cardassian border. They had slinked and skulked around Cardassian space, slipping past star systems, and dodging enemy patrols.
Their subterfuge had gone well enough until the seventh week that the Pommern had been spotted by the Jem’hadar and destroyed while drawing attention from the other ships. The Crazy Horse had been destroyed, a week later, while trying to pass through a minefield. The Cayuga had survived and now it was ready to trade Yellow for Red.
Bradley stepped into the Situation Room, satisfied by the sight of his senior staff, seated and waiting for him. His First Officer, Arinda, looked up from her conversation with Hunter, her bald head catching the light slightly.
“This journey is almost over,” the Captain said, taking his seat. “What I need to know is, are we ready to do this?”
After glancing at the rest of the senior staff, Chief Engineer Stern said,” The Cayuga is in prime condition, sir. The Garibaldi and the Blazer are equipped with sensor decoy units which should make them appear as Lamaari patrol craft.”
“Sickbay is ready for mass casualties,” Doctor Moru commented without any inflections.
“My security teams are ready,” Lieutenant Ntannu reported,” but our operational strength is at a tenth of what it should be, due to the loss of the Pommern and the Crazy Horse’s security teams, along with members of the 121st aboard the Crazy Horse.”
Bradley frowned at this revelation. “But are your teams up to this?”
The Ktarian sucked in a breath and exhaled. “Yes, although, with a much smaller margin of error.”
“What I’d like to know,” Doctor Nabin interjected,” is exactly what we’re doing here?”
Bradley’s eyes slid over to Commander Arinda and the Deltan took that as her cue. “Four months ago, the Lamaari government signed a nonaggression treaty with the Dominion,” she said, standing up and triggering the monitor display,” and in exchange for protection from hostile neighboring species like the Kzinti, the Dominion can build shipyards and Jem’hadar breeding facilities throughout the Lamaar system. Starfleet Intelligence estimates that in the time that the production centers have been active, they will have built seventeen squadrons of attack ships, a dozen battleships, and bred enough Jem’hadar to crew all of them, four times over.”
“And we’re supposed to destroy all of these,” Nabin asked, aghast. “On our own?”
“No, that would be pointless, Doctor,” Arinda said coldly. “The system is defended by sixty vessels of the Lamaari Crusader Fleet and backed up by a squadron of Jem’hadar attack ships.” She manipulated the images on the display screen, producing an image of a massive emerald. “This is the Eye of Ejeria. According to Lamaari legend, this artifact is part of their creator-deity Ejeria, sacrificed to the Lamaari people in order to provide them with insight.”
Moru leaned forward in his seat. “I don’t think I like where this mission is going.”
“Our orders are to break into the building where the Eye is kept and to make off with it,” Bradley said. “Starfleet Intelligence believes that if we can prove that the Dominion are incapable of defending them. Then the Lamaari will declare that their treaty is void and demand the removal of all of their personnel and equipment.”
The silence that met Bradley’s pronouncement was broken by the clicking of Hunter’s mandibles and his translator saying,” And we must only humiliate the Jem’hadar.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Aimee Maguire turned the phaser rifle over and over in her hands. “I haven’t fired one of these since the firing range at the Academy.”
“With any luck, you won’t have to,” Stern said, passing her a tool kit. “Get in and get out.”
A bosun’s whistle pierced the Shuttle Bay, pulling Maguire’s attention over towards Commander Arinda. “Board the shuttles,” the Deltan ordered. The butterflies in Maguire’s stomach beat their wings harder as she stepped aboard the Blazer. She strapped into her seat and felt a small surge as the shuttlecraft lifted off from the deck. Soon they were in space.
“Beginning prerecorded chatter,” Ntannu said from the pilot’s seat. “Estimated flight time is five hours.”
“Do you think there’ll be any puddles?,” Crewman Musker asked while he was checking his phaser rifle.
“I doubt,” Crewman Fuller answered him,” if there was a Founder in the system, there would be a hell of a lot more ships than twelve attack ships guarding them.”
“Well, good, because I hate Changelings.”
“So, we’re supposed to pretend to be a pair of patrol ships?,” Maguire asked, fretting with her hair pins.
“Indeed, we are,” Fuller replied.
Maguire frowned while opening her toolbox. She began moving tools into the pouches strapped to her belt. “What happened to the ships that we’re supposed to be impersonating?”
“The Cayuga destroyed them both just before we launched.”
“Oh.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Doctor Moru put on another field coat and his breath began to crystallize before him.
“An-n-nother frostbite case,” Maharjarif said, her teeth chattering as she led Aaron Connelly towards a biobed. “I’m going to need the regenerator.”
Moru scowled and activated the monitor in his office. “Moru to Bradley.”
“I assume that you’re calling to complain about the cold, Doctor?” The Captain’s impatient tone did nothing relieve the Bolian or his mood.
“I’ve had eight people come into Sickbay with frostbite to their extremities. Ensign Sayvok might have lost a toe already.”
Bradley sighed, blowing out a cloud of condensed air before him. “Doctor, I’m just as cold as everyone else on this ship. In another few hours, we’ll be able to power back up.” Moru turned off the connection and returned to Maharjarif.
Silent and unseen, the Cayuga tumbled through space, bound inside the heart of a comet.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Commander Arinda glanced at the Lamaari capital city that passed below the shuttlecraft. The Lamaari had expected them to land near the defense citadel, a few kilometers away. What the Lamaari expected and what would be happening were two different things.
“Load micro-torpedoes,” she ordered.
Behind her, Crewman Beckley muttered,” I thought that Deltans were pacifists.”
Arinda stiffened at his remark. “No,” she told him,” we’re optimistically pragmatic. Fire.”
The shuttles flew over the citadel, leaving behind the roar of explosions and the screams of the surprised and the dying.
“We’ve disabled all of the interceptors on standby,” Ensign Nye reported from the Blazer. “Reliquary in forty-five seconds.”
“Prep up!,” the Deltan First Officer shouted over her shoulder. “Land in front of the entrance, aft towards the door.”
When the Garibaldi touched down, Harker and Dixon opened fire from the rear hatch. Their phaser rifle blasts cut down half a dozen Lamaari.
“They’re all missing an eye,” Harker said incredulously.
“That’s because they’re priests,” Beckley said as the Blazer set down beside the Garibaldi, effectively plugging up the opening. No one would be entering the shrine from the courtyard that surrounded it.
“Five minutes!,” Ntannu reminded Stern and Maguire as the engineers stepped over the Lamaari corpses in their way. “Musker and Fuller, stay with them!” A blast of purple energy forced him to seek cover.
“Jem’hadar!,” Nye yelled. Musker grunted as an energy blast struck him in his chest. He collapsed, already dead before he struck the ground.
Stern, Maguire, and Fuller ran towards the shrine. The building was shaped like a six-sided star and the Eye was mounted on a dais at its center. They sprinted towards it, a priest chattering in their language and warding them off with his hands until Fuller gunned him down.
Maguire stepped over the priest’s body and took the stairs, three steps at a time, her heart banging against her rib cage. “Stern, come on!” She stared up at the Eye that was suspended in a force field, thirty feet overhead, before she crouched down to begin working on the mechanism recessed into the floor.
“He killed the priest,” Stern growled as he stepped past her and pried an access panel open.
“And there are a lot of worse things than Fuller out there, waiting to do the same to us!”
“Get that thing on the ground,” the Chief Engineer replied to her. “I’ll take down its defensive fields.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“Did you hear that?”
Ntannu didn’t spare a glance at Dixon. Movement flickered in the corner of his eye and the Ktarian fired without any warning, blasting the Jem’hadar off of its feet.
“It’s a Lamaari priest,” Arinda shouted into the sudden silence, leading around the Garibaldi’s nose with a small surveillance device in her hands. “He’s telling the First -- no, the Vorta -- that weapons can’t be used inside the reliquary.”
“Ah, hell,” was Nye’s response to this information.
The Jem’hadars’ rifles clattered down to the ground and their owners disappeared inside their shrouds.
Nye died suddenly as his head was twisted around by a monster that vanished a moment later. Arinda fired across the space that it had occupied, forcing it back into visibility. She could see Stern, Fuller, and Maguire racing across the courtyard towards the shuttles, carrying the Eye between them.
A blow to the face knocked Ntannu off of his feet. He twisted to one side as he fell, avoiding the kick that he knew was coming for him. He rolled back onto his feet with a combat knife in his hand. A Jem’hadar soldier shimmered into sight, striking past his guards and cracking one of his ribs.
Dixon saw something blur towards Stern and Maguire. He ran over to intercept the Jem’hadar soldier, surprising it with a mighty smash from the butt of his phaser rifle. It fell to the ground, unconscious or dead, he couldn’t tell. He hurried after the engineers, firing wildly at a Jem’hadar rushing towards the wounded Beckley.
“Fall back!,” Commander Arinda shouted, firing her hand phaser upon a Jem’hadar as it moved around the shuttlecraft. “Dixon, Fuller, get the engineers into the air!” She backed inside the shuttle, laying down cover fire for Harker as he dragged Beckley towards the hatch, smoke trailing from the wound on his chest.
Stern hit the shuttle’s ramp and he didn’t stop running, throwing himself into the pilot’s seat. Maguire swung the Eye inside as Ntannu, beaten, bloody, and victorious, collapsed onto the ramp. As she reached for the injured Security Chief, a roaring Jem’hadar appeared out of nowhere, its fist pulled back to deliver a killing blow.
Maguire fired her phaser at it.
Fuller and Dixon pounded their way up the ramp, grabbing Ntannu and pulling him inside. The shuttle lifted off before any of them could find their seats. Maguire looked up from the floor, surprised to find blood that wasn’t her own on her clothes.
“That’s all there is to it?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Harker lifted the shuttle up through the sky and broke the sound barrier in under a second. “We’ll be out of the atmosphere in less than a minute.”
Arinda accepted this information with a nod as she examined Beckley. His right arm appeared to be shattered and the pink foam around his mouth suggested that he had a punctured lung. The shuttle stank from his melted uniform and his seared flesh. “Any sign of the Cayuga?”
“Not yet, Commander,” Harker said as the sky darkened into space,” but we are running a few seconds ahead of schedule.”
Arinda nodded and reached for the medical kit, freezing up as her hand touched a foreign object. She pulled it into view and it was a dark, metallic globe with evenly-spaced lavender lights.
“Oh, no,” she said dejectedly,” that’s not fair at all.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Once they had left the atmosphere of the planet, there was no medium through which the noise of the explosion could be transmitted but Stern saw it on the shuttlecraft’s sensors, all the same.
“We just lost the Blazer.”
Dixon brought up a sensor display from his place at the co-pilot’s station. “Three Lamaari corvettes are altering course after us and every Jem’hadar ship in the system is being sent to intercept us.”
“They won’t shoot us down,” Crewman Fuller said, holding Ntannu still as Maguire did her best to patch up the Ktarian’s wounds. “They still need that Eye back.”
“It’s a small comfort,” Stern cried. “Here they come!”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“The Garibaldi has broken orbit and there are three Lamaari ships after them.” Doctor Nabin’s voice was muffled through the thick scarf that he was wearing.
Captain Bradley pounded his armrest since they weren’t ready yet. “Engineering!,” he shouted. “Bring us back on-line!”
Behind the large engineering console, Zehna fought to work his panel through the cold frost. “Warp core and impulse engineers are warming up from cold standby,” the Bajoran reported over the intercom. “Life-support is re-engaged. Power to the navigational deflector, weapons and shields --”
“Hunter, get us out of this cage,” Bradley interrupted him.
The comet, known on Lamaar for its forty-six year orbit, shattered into pieces as red-orange phaser fire lanced out from its core. It sublimed underneath its assault and the Cayuga roared out from the debris.
“Take out those corvettes,” the captain snapped at his Bridge crew. The ship shuddered slightly as Hunter unleashed a salvo of torpedoes. Mercilessly, they punched through the eerie blue mist projected around the Lamaari hulls, tossing the ships around like toys.
“Forty-five seconds until the first Jem’hadar striker comes into range,” Doctor Nabin announced from Ops.
“Tell the Garibaldi that they’ve got half of that time!,” Bradley barked, watching the Jem’hadar ships appear on the scanners.
The Bridge lurched forward, nearly tossing Bradley out of his chair and into the helm console. “The shuttle’s aboard,” Nabin announced. “Structural damage to the Shuttle Bay.” The ship rocked again but this time, it came from weapons fire.
“Forward shields are at seventy percent!,” Hunter clicked, busy twisting the ship away.
Struggling to keep his place in his seat, the Captain yelled,” Hunter, stretch our legs!”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Despite whatever she might be feeling or thinking, Jeanne Pozach was leaning forward in her armchair. “Naturally, you escaped.” She shook her head. “What I don’t understand about this mission is how it became permissible to steal an alien religious artifact.”
“Take a longer view at it,” Maguire suggested to her. “Yeah, we did a bad thing, but because of that mission, the Lamaari shut down every Dominion production center and shipyard in their system. Stalling out even that little bit of their war machine helped us in the end.”
“Nearly twenty thousand Lamaari were killed by the Jem’hadar during the uprising.”
“None of us liked it, Jeanne,” Moru said reasonably. “If we could have talked the Lamaari into abandoning the Dominion, then we would have but that wasn’t an option.”
Pozach considered all of this. “I’d like you to join me on the surface.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The away team materialized into the reliquary’s courtyard. Lieutenant Ntannu quickly inventoried the forces surrounding them. There were snipers on the roofs of the nearby buildings, force fields around the shrine itself, and two or three hundred infantry soldiers arranged in a ring formation.
Captain Pozach approached the first row of soldiers, struggling to carry the crate that contained the Eye. their ranks parted aside for a cadre of one-eyed priests. She offered the crate to them and they reverently accepted it from her as one. She coughed and the priests turned their cycloptic gazes upon her.
“I’m sorry,” she began to say but the priests disappeared into the mass of soldiers. Pozach turned back to Maguire, Ntannu, and Moru who she found to be as unimpressed with her entreaty as the Lamaari had been.
The End…
