Star Trek Deep Space 9 16 Invasion! 3 Time's Enemy

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 530.08KB 154 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

L.A. Graf - DS9 - Invasion! 3 - Time's Enemy Star Trek Deep Space 9 INVASION! Time's Enemy

L.A. Graf

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you

should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed." Neither the author nor

the publisher has received payment for the sale of this "stripped book."

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or

dead, is entirely coincidental.

An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon amp; Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York,

NY 10020

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon amp; Schuster Inc., under exclusive license

from Paramount Pictures.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN 0-671-54150-1

First Pocket Books printing August 1996

10 987654321

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon amp; Schuster Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Before

Out here where sunlight was a faraway glimmer in the blackness of space, ice lasted a long time. Dark

masses of it littered a wide orbital ring, all that remained of the spinning nebula that had birthed this

planet-rich system. The cold outer dark sheltered each fragment in safety, unless some chance grazing of

neighbors ejected one of them into the unyielding pull of solar gravity. Then the mass of dirty ice would

begin its long journey toward the distant sun, past the captured ninth planet, past the four gas giants, past

the ring of rocky fragments that memorialized a planet never born. By that point it would have begun to

glow, brushed into brilliance by the gathering heat of the sun's nuclear furnace. When it passed the cold

red desert planet and approached the cloud-feathered planet that harbored life, it would be brighter than

any star. Its flare would pierce that planet's blue sky, stirring brief wonder from the primitive tribes who

hunted and gathered and scratched at the earth with sticks to grow their food. In a few days, the comet's

borrowed light would fade, and the tumbling ice would start its long journey back to the outer dark.

One fragment had escaped that fate, although it shouldn't have. It carried a burden of steel and empty

space, buried just deep enough in its icy heart to send it spinning back into the cloud of fellow comets

after its near-collision with another. For centuries afterward, it danced an erratic path through the

ice-littered darkness before it settled into a stable orbit in the shadow of the tiny ninth planet. More

centuries passed while dim fires glowed on the night side of the bluish globe that harbored life. The fires

slowly brightened and spread, leaping across its vast oceans. They brightened faster after that, merging to

form huge networks of light that outlined every coast and lake and river. Then the fires leaped into the

ocean of space. Out to the planet's single moon at first, then later to its cold, red neighbor, then to the

moons of the gas giants, and finally out beyond all of them to the stars. In all those long centuries, nothing

disturbed the comet and its anomalous burden. No one saw the tiny, wavering light that lived inside.

Until a fierce blast ofphaserfire ripped the icy shroud open, and exposed what lay within.

CHAPTER 1

"It looks like they're preparing for an invasion," Jadzia Dax said.

Sisko grunted, gazing out at the expanse of dark-crusted cometary ice that formed the natural hull of

Starbase One. Above the curving ice horizon, the blackness of Earth's Oort cloud should have glittered

with bright stars and the barely brighter glow of the distant sun. Instead, what it glittered with were the

docking lights of a dozen short-range attack shipsolder and more angular versions of the Defiant as well

as the looming bulk of two Galaxy-class starships, the Mukaikubo and the Breedlove . One glance had

told Sisko that such a gathering of force couldn't have been the random result of ship refittings and shore

leaves. Star-fleet was preparing for a major encounter with someone. He just wished he knew who.

"I thought we came here to deal with a nowmilitary emergency." In the sweep of transparent aluminum

windows, Sisko could see Julian Bashir's dark reflection glance up from the chair he'd sprawled in after a

glance at the view. Beyond the doctor, the huge conference room was as empty as it had been ten

minutes ago when they'd first been escorted into it. "Otherwise, wouldn't Admiral Hayman have asked us

to come in the Defiant instead of a high-speed courier?"

Sisko snorted. "Admirals never ask anything, Doctor.

And they never tell you any more than you need to know to carry out their orders efficiently."

"Especially this admiral," Dax added, an unexpected note of humor creeping into her voice. Sisko raised

an eyebrow at her, then heard a gravelly snort and the simultaneous hiss of the conference-room door

opening. He swung around to see a rangy, long-boned figure in ordinary Star-fleet coveralls crossing the

room toward them. Dax surprised her by promptly stepping forward, hands outstretched in welcome.

"How have you been, Judith?"

"Promoted." The silver-haired woman's angular face lit with something approaching a sparkle. "It almost

makes up for getting this old." She clasped Dax's hands warmly for a moment, then turned her attention

to Sisko. "So this is the Benjamin Sisko Curzon told me so much about. It's a pleasure to finally meet

you, Captain."

Sisko slanted a wary glance at his Science Officer. "Um likewise, I'm sure. Dax?"

The Trill cleared her throat. "Benjamin, allow me to introduce you to Rear Admiral Judith Hayman. She

and I well, she and Curzon, actuallygot to know each other on Vulcan during the Klingon peace

negotiations several years ago. Judith, this is Captain Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space Nine , and our

station's chief medical officer, Dr. Julian Bashir."

"Admiral." Bashir nodded crisply.

"Our orders said this was a Priority One Emergency," Sisko said. "I assume that means whatever you

brought us here to do is urgent."

Hayman's strong face lost its smile. "Possibly," she said. "Although perhaps not urgent in the way we

usually think of it."

Sisko scowled. "Forgive my bluntness, Admiral, but I've been dragged from my command station without

explanation, ordered not to use my own ship under any circumstances, brought to the oldest and least

useful starbase in the Federation" He made a gesture of reined-in impatience at the bleak cometary

landscape outside the windows. "and you're telling me you're not sure how urgent this problem is?"

"No one is sure, Captain. That's part of the reason we brought you here." The admiral's voice chilled into

something between grimness and exasperation. "What we are sure of is that we could be facing potential

disaster." She reached into the front pocket of her coveralls and tossed two ordinary-looking data chips

onto the conference table. "The first thing I need you and your medical officer to do is review these data

records."

"Data records," Sisko repeated, trying for the noncommittal tone he'd perfected over years of trying to

deal with the equally high-handed and inexplicable behavior of Kai Winn.

"Admiral, forgive us, but we assumed this actually was an emergency." Julian Bashir broke in with such

polite bafflement that Sisko guessed he must be emulating Garak's unctous demeanor. "If so, we could

have reviewed your data records ten hours ago. All you had to do was send them to Deep Space Nine

through subspace channels."

"Too dangerous, even using our most secure codes." The bleak certainty in Hayman's voice made Sisko

blink in surprise. "And if you were listening, young man, you'd have noticed that I said this was the first

thing I needed you to do. Now, would you please sit down, Captain?"

Sisko took the place she indicated at one of the conference table's inset data stations, then waited while

she settled Bashir at the station on the opposite side. He noticed she made no attempt to seat Dax,

although there were other empty stations available.

"This review procedure is not a standard one," Hayman said, without further preliminaries. "As a control

on the validity of some data we've recently received, we're going to ask you to examine ship's logs and

medical records without knowing their origin. We'd like your analysis of them. Computer, start

data-review programs Sisko-One and Bashir-One."

Sisko's monitor flashed to life, not with pictures but with a thick ribbon of multilayered symbols and

abbreviated words, slowly scrolling from left to right. He stared at it for a long, blank moment before a

whisper of memory turned it familiar instead of alien. One of the things Starfleet Acade-my asked cadets

to do was determine the last three days of a starship's voyage when its main computer memory had

failed. The solution was to reconstruct computer records from each of the ship's individual system

buffersrecords that looked exactly like these.

"These are multiple logs of buffer output from individual ship systems, written in standard Starfleet

machine code," he said. Dax made an interested noise and came to stand behind him. "It looks like

someone downloaded the last commands given to life-support, shields, helm, and phaser-bank control.

There's another system here, too, but I can't identify it."

"Photon-torpedo control?" Dax suggested, leaning over his shoulder to scrutinize it.

"I don't think so. It might be a sensor buffer." Sisko scanned the lines of code intently while they scrolled

by. He could recognize more of the symbols now, although most of the abbreviations on the fifth line still

baffled him. "There's no sign of navigations, eitherthe command buffers in those systems may have been

destroyed by whatever took out the ship's main computer." Sisko grunted as four of the five logs

recorded wild fluctuations and then degenerated into solid black lines. "And there goes everything else.

Whatever hit this ship crippled it beyond repair."

Dax nodded. "It looks like some kind of EM pulse took out all of the ship's circuitseverything lost power

except for life-support, and that had to switch to auxiliary circuits." She glanced up at the admiral. "Is that

all the record we have, Admiral? Just those few minutes?"

"It's all the record we trust ," Hayman said enigmatically. "There are some visual bridge logs that I'll show

you in a minute, but those could have been tampered with. We're fairly sure the buffer outputs weren't."

She glanced up at Bashir, whose usual restless energy had focused down to a silent intensity of

concentration on his own data screen. "The medical logs we found were much more extensive. You have

time to review the buffer outputs again, if you'd like."

"Please," Sisko and Dax said in unison.

"Computer, repeat data program Sisko-One."

Machine code crawled across the screen again, and this time Sisko stopped trying to identify the

individual symbols in it. He vaguely remembered one of his Academy professors saying that

reconstructing a starship's movements from the individual buffer outputs of its systems was a lot like

reading a symphony score. The trick was not to analyze each line individually, but to get a sense of how

all of them were functioning in tandem.

"This ship was in a battle," he said at last. "But I think it was trying to escape, not fight. The phaser banks

all show discharge immediately after power fluctuations are recorded for the shields."

"Defensive action," Dax agreed, and pointed at the screen. "And look at how much power they had to

divert from life-support to keep the shields going. Whatever was after them was big."

"They're trying some evasive actions now" Sisko broke off, seeing something he'd missed the first time in

that mysterious fifth line of code. Something that froze his stomach. It was the same Romulan symbol that

appeared on his command board every time the cloaking device was engaged on the Defiant .

"This was a cloaked Starfleet vessel!" He swung around to fix the admiral with a fierce look. "My

understanding was that only the Defiant had been sanctioned to carry a Romulan cloaking device!"

Hayman met his stare without a ripple showing in her calm competence. "I can assure you that Starfleet

isn't running any unauthorized cloaking devices. Watch the log again, Captain Sisko."

He swung back to his monitor. "Computer, rerun data program Sisko-One at one-quarter speed," he

said. The five concurrent logs crawled across the screen in slow motion, and this time Sisko focused on

the coordinated interactions between the helm and the phaser banks. If he had any hope of identifying the

class and generation of this starship, it would be from the tactical maneuvers it could perform.

"Time the helm changes versus the phaser bursts," Dax suggested from behind him in an unusually quiet

voice. Sisko wondered if she was beginning to harbor the same ominous suspicion he was.

"I know." For the past hundred years, the speed of helm shift versus the speed of phaser refocus had

been the basic determining factor of battle tactics. Sisko's gaze flickered from top line to third, counting

off milliseconds by the ticks along the edge of the data record. The phaser refocus rates he found were

startlingly fast, but far more chilling was the almost instantaneous response of this starship's helm in its

tactical runs. There was only one ship he knew of that had the kind of overpowered warp engines

needed to bring it so dangerously close to the edge of survivable maneuvers. And there was only one

commander who had used his spare time to perfect the art of skimming along the edge of that envelope,

the way the logs told him this ship's commander had done.

This time when Sisko swung around to confront Judith Hayman, his concern had condensed into cold,

sure knowledge. "Where did you find these records, Admiral?"

She shook her head. "Your analysis first, Captain. I need your unbiased opinion before I answer any

questions or show you the visual logs. Otherwise, we'll never know for sure if this data can be trusted."

Sisko blew out a breath, trying to find words for conclusions he wasn't even sure he believed. "This shipit

wasn't just cloaked like the Defiant . It actually was the Defiant ." He heard Dax's indrawn breath. "And

when it was destroyed in battle, the man commanding it was me."

"Captain Sisko would let me."

It occurred to Kira that if she had a strip of latinum for every time someone had said that to her in the last

forty-eight hours, she could probably buy this station and every slavering Ferengi troll on board. Not that

the prospect of owning a dozen wrinkled, bat-eared larcenists filled her with any particular glee. But at

least Ferengi were predictable, and they didn't act all affronted every time you refused to jump at their

comm calls or told them their problems were trivial. After all, they were Ferengiany aspect of their lives

not directly related to money was trivial, and they did everything in their power to keep things that way.

Humans, on the other hand, thought the galaxy revolved around their wants and worries, and tended to

get their fragile little egos bruised when you implied that they might be wrong. With that in mind, Kira had

spent the better part of her first day in commanda good two or three hours, at leastplacating,

compromising, making every sympathetic noise Dax had ever taught her, in the theory that a little stroking

(no matter how insincere) was all the crew needed to carry them through the captain's absence.

Somewhere around lunchtime, though, she'd elbowed that damned leather sphere off Sisko's desk for the

fourth damned time, and the fifth trivial work-schedule dispute let himself into the office while she was

under the desk patting about for it, and the sixth subspace call from Bajoror Starfleet, or some other

damned placestarted chirping for immediate attention, and it became suddenly, vitally important that she

conduct the EV inspection of weapons sail two herself. She fled Ops with the ball still lost in the wilds of

Sisko's office furniture, hopeful that shuffling the whining crewman off to Personnel and playing ten

minutes of yes-man with a Bajoran minister would buy her enough time to get safely suited up and out

into vacuum. O'Brien, bless his soul, only stammered a little with surprise when she plucked the repair

order from his hands on her way to the turbolift.

Next time, she'd just have to leave the station without the environmental suit. It would make everything so

much easier.

"Well?" Quark hadn't quite progressed to petulance yet, but there was something about having a Ferengi

voice whining right in your ear that made even an overlarge radiation hardsuit seem small and strangling.

"I'm telling you, this is exactly the sort of thing Sisko would endorse with all his heart."

Kira couldn't help blowing a disgusted snort, although it blasted an irritating film of steam across the

inside of her suit's faceplate. She locked the magnetic soles of her boots onto the skin of the sail while she

waited for the hardsuit's atmosphere adjusters to clear out the excess humidity. "Quark, Captain Sisko

won't even let you in Ops." Which was why he'd wasted no time weaseling onto a comm channel Kira

couldn't escape, no doubt. "/ don't know why he lets you stay on the station at all."

She could just make out his squat Ferengi silhouette scuttling back and forth in the observation port

above his bar. "Because the captain has a fine sense of the market, for a hu-man. But not so fine a sense

of how to extract profit from opportunity." Kira flexed her feet, breaking contact with the station and

letting the momentum of that slight movement swing her around to the front of the sail's arc, out of

Quark's line of sight. / really am out here to do work , she told herself as she passed a diagnostic scanner

slowly down the length of one seam. The fact that she enjoyed a certain cruel satisfaction every time

Quark grumbled with frustration and ran down the corridor to the next unobstructed window was really

just a perk.

"I'm still picking up some residual leakage," she reported to O'Brien. The rad counter on the far right of

her helmet display barely hovered at the bottom of its range, and she scowled around a renewed twist of

annoyance. "Not enough to warrant lugging out this twice-damned hardsuit, but. . ."

"Sorry, MajorStarfleet regulations." His blunt Irish brogue managed to sound honestly sympathetic for all

that Kira suspected he never much considered resenting Star-fleet protocol. "Anytime you send

personnel to inspect a first-stage radiation hazard, you've got to send them in ISHA-approved protective

gear."

"And in my case, that means a hardsuit built to fit a guy like Sisko."

"Well, they are sort of one-size-fits-all."

Kira stopped herself just before she snorted again and fogged her faceplate. "One size fits all humans

over two meters tall."

"Yes, ma'am," O'Brien admitted. "Something like that."

"Major, I really don't think you're giving my proposal the attention that courtesy requires."

Kira pulled herself hand-over-hand down the outside of the sail, dreaming wistfully of pushing off toward

the wormhole and letting it whisk her far away from even the slightest whiff of Ferengi. "O'Brien, isn't

there some way you can cut Quark out of this channel?"

"Not without cutting you off from the station, too, ma'am. Sorry."

She wondered whether she should tell him how much that concept appealed to her.

"It's just that Captain Sisko doesn't appreciate the spiritual importance of recreation the way"

" No , Quark!"

The squeak of pained indignation in her ear couldn't have been more poignant if someone had gone

fishing for the barkeep's nonexistent heart with a spoon. "Major, you have my word that everyone will

stay to my back three Dabo rooms."

"That's what you promised the last time you organized a gambling tournament." She planted her feet again

with a clang that she felt through her suit but couldn't hear, and pushed open the access door to the inner

sail with as much violence as the microgravity would allow. "Instead, the Bajoran Trade Commission

wrote up a four-page complaint about increased shoplifting on the Promenade, and Morn filed

sexual-harassment charges against no less than six of your players."

The ragged puffing of another sprint along the Promenade balcony was followed by distinctive slap of

Quark plastering himself to yet another window. "But this year" Kira could just imagine the sweet-sour

smell of his snaggle-toothed grin. "I've hired an Elasian cohort to serve as exclusive door guards."

" No !" Kira watched her radiation gauge soar to an almost alarming level, and punched one fist against

the interior lighting panel to brighten the room. "Now, which word of that didn't you understand?"

"Most likely the declarative negative. It's a recurrent problem with the Ferengi, I'm afraid." Even if Kira

hadn't recognized the security officer's gruff sarcasm, the growl of naked animosity in Quark's muttering

would have told her it was Odo who had walked in on the Ferengi's noxious attempts at charm.

"Apparently the Ferengi don't have a word in their language for 'no.'"

Quark sniffed with what Kira suspected was supposed to be indignation, somehow managing to sound

both obsequious and offended at the same time. "That's not true," the Ferengi countered. "We have

several, depending on how much negotiation it will take to change your mind."

"Tell me you're taking the whole tournament to the Gamma Quadrant," Kira suggested.

"And never coming back," the constable added.

"then I might consider giving you permission to use the station as a jumping-off point. Until then . . ." The

diagnostic scanner flashed brilliant white, warning that enough first-stage radiation soaked the weapons

sail to light most small cities for a year. Kira barely took the time to fold up the scanner before stepping

backward out the door. "Chief, did you see that reading?"

"I saw it." O'Brien sounded more frustrated than upset. Kira suspected he was wishing he were here now

instead of her. "I could have sworn we checked all the power units in those phaser batteries on our last

external inspection. One of them must have gone bad."

"Should that be throwing off so much first-stage radiation?"

"Not usually," he admitted. "But whatever's gone wrong in there, Major, it's not something you should be

tracking down with a handheld scanner and a trouble light. Now that we know where the problem is, I

can have my boys start working on it."

"Leaving you more time to consider my proposal," Quark said brightly.

'Wo, Quark."

She'd never heard a Ferengi hiss like that before. "Fine." Out on the surface of the habitat ring again, Kira

saw Quark make a short, frustrated gesture with his arms in the distant window, then pointedly return his

hands to his sides with the same finality a Bajoran would have used when dusting herself of someone

else's dirt. "Fine! I took you to be a generous, understanding woman with a clear sense of your duties to

the people on this station." He angled a petulant glare up at the slim figure towering behind him.

"Obviously, I was wrong. So if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to salvaging the economy on my own." He

lifted his chin with an indignant sniff, and stalked out of sight beyond the window's frame as though he

hadn't been the one trespassing on her comm channel in the first place.

"I don't know how Sisko ever gets any work done around here," she complainedmostly to herselfas she

pulled the access door closed behind her.

"By staying in his office, I suspect."

Kira glanced over toward the window as though she could have seen any real expression on Odo's

wax-smooth fea-tures even if he weren't so far away. She didn't always know how to take the

constable's remarks when he wasn't being overtly sarcastic. Did he state the blatantly obvious because he

meant some kind of veiled criticism, or just because it was the truth? With Odo, sometimes an answer

was just an answerrefreshing after the labyrinthine politics of the Federation and Bajor, but not always

any easier to take.

"What can I do for you, Odo?" She turned to push off for the airlock, ready to shed this cumbersome,

too-hot carapace and take a private meal in her quarters before falling into bed. "Please tell me Sisko

called and said he'd be home for a late dinner."

"Unfortunately, no." And he sounded truly apologetic, as though Kira's lighter teasing were just as

heartfelt as anything he ever said. "Although you wouldn't be the only one glad for his return." A data

inset sprang to life at the bottom of her suit display, scrolling information past her chin as she walked.

Kira glanced a frown toward the window, then chided herself for the uselessness of the gesture and

looked away.

"So what's this?" she asked.

"Read it."

Security reports, dating back to seven days ago, all with Odo's blunt, clear signature in the corner. The

first three entries looked like a hundred others that had come across Sisko's desk while Kira sat therethe

late-night break-in of a store catering to tourists who wanted to backpack their way around Bajor, a

discrepancy between goods received and the bill of lading for a shipment of computer components on

their way to Andor, the theft of

Kira paused, cocking her head inside the big helmet as she glanced down at the fourth item on Odo's list,

then blinked back up through the other three. "Robberies." She looked ahead, at the station laid out

before her, at the wormhole, at the stars. "All of these are robberies of some kind, and all within the last

week. A crime syndicate, trying to set up shop on Deep Space Nine ?" In so many ways, it was the ideal

location The wormhole made for a perfect escape route, and there were no extradition treaties with the

Gamma Quadrant.

Odo grunted in his version of grim amusement. "There really isn't room here for any more organized

crime than what Quark already controls. Besides . . ." He must have touched something on his own padd

to brightly highlight the item currently on Kira's display. ". . . there isn't much of a black market for

household power matrices, much less for portable thermal storage containers." A few flashes of data

brought up another report from farther down on the list. "Unfortunately, tactical plasma warheads still

bring a healthy profit, no matter where you plan to sell them."

Kira didn't immediately recognize the style of paperwork in front of her, but what it said was clear

enough. "Six liters of weapons-grade liquid plasma, missing from a shipment to the starship yards at

Okana." A little thrill of almost-panic whispered through her. "That's on Bajor."

"Which is only three hours by shuttle from Deep Space Nine ." With only Odo's gravelly voice for

company, Kira suddenly felt very vulnerable out here in the open. She made herself start walking again,

heading straight for the airlock's neon fluorescent striping. "Anyone with this list of materials," the

constable went on, "could spend a few hours in a Federation library and easily construct an explosive

device powerful enough to destroy this entire station."

Not to mention vaporize a small starship, or depopulate any province on Bajor. Kira spat an angry curse,

and keyed open the airlock on runabout pad F with awkward gloved fingers. "Any guess as to their

intended target?" How could the Federation make this kind of information just available to any psychotic

who asked? Didn't they realize that Bajor wasn't some population of doe-eyed pacifists, but, rather, a roil

of scarred soldiers and ex-resistance operatives who had perfected filching the innards for bombs years

before the Federation wandered onto the scene?

"That would depend on several factors," Odo said. "We don't even know who 'they' are yet."

"No . . ." Kira drummed one foot impatiently inside its ill-fitting boot, watching the atmosphere readings

bloom inside the airlock even as she heard the hiss and rumble of air pressure gathering around her. "But

I'll bet we can guess."

She could almost read Odo's thoughts in his grim silence. The constable knew as well as Kira that the

paramilitary cells who'd begun shaking their fists in the northern provinces these last few months were

little more than old resistance fighters with a new bone to chew. "Oppression is oppression!" was their

crythey claimed little difference between the Cardassians' iron bootheels and the Federation's paternal

"control by example" from their lofty space-station pedestal. As far as Kira was concerned, all you had

to do was look at their respective medical facilities to appreciate how unrelated their motives toward

Bajor were. Still, zealots had a habit of ignoring opinions not directly in support of their cause of the

week, and this latest batch seemed just as unyielding as any other; they might not have posted any official

threats yet, but Kira knew these sorts of people almost as well as she knew herself. It was really just a

matter of time.

"I thought that was supposed to be the difference between democracy and dictatorship," she said aloud,

stepping sideways to squeeze through the airlock door as it rolled aside. "You don't have to blow up

things just to have your voice heard."

Odo looked up from the other side of the bay, stroking one hand thoughtfully across the nose of an

as-yet-unnamed runabout. "The humans say old habits die hard."

Which meant that humans and Bajorans had something in common, although perhaps not the best

attributes of either.

A chirp from inside the hardsuit's helmet saved her from having to contemplate the question further. "Ops

to Major Kira."

She popped the seals on the helmet anyway, dragging it off her head and tucking it under one arm rather

than get trapped inside this suit for any longer than she had to be. "Go ahead, Chief."

"We've just picked up a neutrino flux from the wormhole, Major. It looks like someone's coming

through."

Kira glanced a startled look at Odo. "Are there are any ships due back from the Gamma Quadrant?"

Odo shook his head in silent answer even as the human's voice replied, "No, sir. Nobody's due in or out

for at least another three days."

She curled one hand over the rim of the helmet to muffle the comm pickup there as she commented softly

to Odo, "I suppose it's too much to ask that our bomb builders chose just this moment to relocate their

materials."

He scowled down at her in fatherly disapproval for such a naive suggestion, taking her comment just as

seriously as he seemed to take everything. Kira decided it wasn't worth trying to explain her admittedly

weary sense of humor right now, and instead withdrew her hand from the helmet and set it on the floor so

she could crack the chest on the suit and squirm herself free.

"Chief, I'm still down in Runabout Pad F getting out of this damned suit. Put the station's defense systems

on standby, then transfer an outside view to the runabout's viewscreen." Stepping free of the bulky

trousers, she motioned Odo to follow as she let herself into the small ship's hatch. "I want to see what's

going on."

"Aye-aye, Major."

The inside of this runabout was as identical to every other such craft as a Starfleet shipyard could build it.

Oh, the floor plates were too bright and unscuffed, and milky sheets of protective sheeting still draped the

four seats and all the stations, but the number of steps from the hatch to the helm were exactly the same,

the shadows that fell across her eyes as they walked through the cabin came in exactly the sequence she

expected, and the clearance between panel and seat when she slipped into the pilot's chair was so

familiar that she barely even noticed the crinkle of sheeting under her hands. She certainly didn't feel any

need to pull her eyes away from the newly awakened viewscreen and what it had to show.

Light swirled against the cold backdrop, a spiral blossom of energy and quantum probability far too

lovely to deserve its inelegant human namewormhole. From the moment she'd first seen the gateway twist

into being, Kira accepted that this was something more wonderful and significant than merely what the

Federation's mathematics justified. That science could touch the tip of this iceberg didn't bother

herunderstanding the parts of a thing granted you no special insight into its nature, just as a meticulous

description of all the biological systems making up a Bajoran gave you no true idea of the person living

inside that shell. Four years of watching spaceships come and go through the wormhole's flaming mouth

had done nothing to dim her convictions the phenomenon's very existence proved there was more to life

than simply what met the eye.

This time, the wormhole's gift was little more than a twinkle of reflected light, tumbling, spinning, flashing

in and out just at the portal's edge, too small to really be seen. When the petals of radiant energy finally

folded back in on the singularity and retreated into invisibility, only the tiny glitter of movement remained,

drifting lazily, darkly toward Bajor.

"It isn't powered." Odo leaned over the console to peer at the viewscreen, his colorless eyes intent on the

tumbling mite. "It's either lost its engine, or it never had one."

Kira nodded with a thoughtful frown, and tapped at her comm badge to reconnect with O'Brien in Ops.

"Any idea what that is, Chief?"

He was quiet for a moment, no doubt conferring with his equipment. Kira drummed her fingers on the

sheeting covering the panel and willed herself not to hurry him, even when Odo speared her with an

intensely irritated glare for the noise she made.

"Iron . .." O'Brien said at last, his voice distracted and thoughtful. "Nickel. . . traces of duranium and

methane ice . . ." He gave a little grunt of surprise that sounded ever so slightly disappointed. "My guess

is a cometary nucleus. Maybe an asteroid fragment."

Nothing interesting, in other words. Kira sat back with a satisfied nod and pulled her hands away from

the panel. Just as well. She didn't think she could stand much more "interest" around the station just now.

"Major?" O'Brien caught her while only half standing, mere moments before she would have thanked him

for his time and gone back to her runabout inventory. "Major, the computer's listing that fragment's

course as being right through Bajor's main ore-shipping lanes. We might want to take care of it before it

passes out of phaser range."

With the wormhole's location, just about anything that came through under free momentum had to cross a

Bajoran shipping lane eventually. "Anything in the fragment that'll react badly to our weapons?"

"No, sir. The minerals are pretty evenly distributed, through and through. It should vaporize nicely."

She straightened the covering on her chair with a flick of her hand, and suppressed a grin when Odo

echoed her gesture on the draping he'd disturbed on the console. "Then go ahead, Chief. Minimum burst,

thoughI don't want"

Movement shimmered across the still-active viewscreen, and she felt a momentary sting of anger at the

thought that O'Brien had opened fire without waiting for her command. Then her brain registered that

there'd been no streak of phaser light even as she ducked around the pilot's chair to relocate the newly

arrived fragment. The single hard spark of light was gone, replaced by a glittering cloud that drifted away

from itself like puff-flower seeds when shattered by a single quick breath. What once was one was now

many, and dissipating rapidly.

Kira didn't even get a chance to question O'Brien before his voice volunteered, "So much for weapons

practice. It broke up."

"Broke up?" Odo parroted. He frowned a question at Kira that she wasn't sure how to answer while

O'Brien confirmed, "Broke up. We've got about ten dozen pieces floating out there right now, none of

them bigger than three meters across." Easily small enough to be handled by the screens on any sublight

shipping vessel Bajor put out.

The constable didn't look particularly enheartened as he watched the last of the cloud evaporate. "It's

deep space on the other side of the wormhole," Kira explained, personally just as glad not to have one

more thing to worry about. "The methane ice probably sublimated in the solar wind from Bajor's sun, and

it didn't have enough left to hold it together." She reached between the seats to clap him on the shoulder.

"It happens all the time."

Odo's face thinned the way it sometimes did when he let his attention get absorbed in something outside

himself. "Then why is the wormhole doing that?"

She followed his gaze to where a faint, amber corona misted the void right where the mouth of the

wormhole cast its brilliant whirlpool when it appeared. The rippling haze looked like gold dust, floated on

a celestial pool.

Pushing aside a corner of the material cloaking the panel, she woke up the science station and made a

brief query back to the Ops computer and its adjacent sensor array. Even if the runabout's sensors were

on-line, they couldn't have told her anything from inside the docking pad. What the Ops sensors told her

was as elegantly unromantic as all of science's purported truths. "Minor fluctuations in the sub-space

membrane." She flashed Odo what was meant to be a reassuring smile as she shut down the panel again.

"Probably didn't like the taste of that asteroid fragment. It'll settle down in an hour or two, you'll see."

Odo only grunted, his eyes darkened with suspicion even as he let Kira turn him away from the

viewscreen and lead him out of the runabout. "Constable," she sighed, "we've got Sisko gone for who

knows how many days while the Bajoran Resistance builds a bomb right under our noses, and you're

worried about an asteroid fragment that destroyed itself when it entered the star system." She shook her

head and switched off the bay's lights. "All of our problems should be so simple."

CHAPTER 2

The advantage of having several lifetimes of experience to draw on, Jadzia Dax often thought, was that

there wasn't much left in the universe that could surprise you. The disadvantage was that you no longer

remembered how to cope with surprise. In particular, she'd forgotten the sensation of facing a reality so

improbable that logic insisted it could not exist while all your senses told you it did.

Like finding out that the mechanical death throes you had just seen were those of your very own starship.

"Thank you, Captain Sisko," Admiral Hayman said. "That confirms what we suspected."

"But how can it?" Dax straightened to frown at the older woman. "Admiral, if these records are real and

not computer constructsthen they must have somehow come from our future!"

"Or from an alternate reality," Sisko pointed out. He swung the chair of his data station around with the

kind of controlled force he usually reserved for the command chair of the Defiant . "Just where in space

were these transmissions picked up, Admiral?"

Hayman's mouth quirked, an expression Jadzia found unreadable but which Curzon's memories

interpreted as rueful. "They weren'tat least not as transmissions. What you're seeing there, Captain, are"

"actual records."

It took Dax a moment to realize that those unexpected words had been spoken by Julian Bashir. The

elegant human accent was unmistakably his, but the grim tone was not.

"What are you talking about, Doctor?" Sisko demanded.

"These are actual records, taken directly from the Defiant ." From here, all Dax could see of him was the

intent curve of his head and neck as he leaned over his data station. "Medical logs in my own style, made

for my own personal use. There's no reason to transmit medical data in this form."

The unfamiliar numbness of surprise was fading at last, and Dax found it replaced by an equally strong

curiosity. She skirted the table to join him. "What kind of medical data is it, Julian?"

He threw her a startled upward glance, almost as if he'd forgotten she was there, then scrambled out of

his chair to face her. "Confidential patient records," he said, blocking her view of the screen. "I don't think

you should see them."

The Dax symbiont might have accepted that explanation, but Jadzia knew the young human doctor too

well. The troubled expression on his face wasn't put there by professional ethics. "Are they my records?"

she asked, then patted his arm when he winced. "I expected you to find them, Julian. If this was our

Defiant , then we were probably all on it when it wasI mean, when it will be destroyed."

"What I don't understand," Sisko said with crisp impatience, "is how we can have actual records

preserved from an event that hasn't happened yet."

Admiral Hayman snorted. "No one understands that, Captain Siskowhich is why Starfleet Command

thought this might be an elaborate forgery." Her piercing gaze slid to Bashir. "Doctor, are you convinced

that the man who wrote those medical logs was a future you? They're not pastiches put together from bits

and pieces of your old records, in order to fool us?"

Bashir shook his head, vehemently. "What these medical logs say that I didno past records of mine could

have been altered enough to mimic that. They have to have been written by a future me." He gave Dax

another distressed look. "Although it's a future I hope to hell never comes true."

"That's a wish the entire Federation is going to share, now that we know these records are genuine."

Hayman thumped herself into the head chair at the conference table, and touched the control panel in

front of it. One of the windows on the opposite wall obediently blanked into a viewscreen. "Let me show

you why."

The screen flickered blue and then condensed into a familiar wide-screen scan of the Defiant 's bridge. It

was the viewing angle Dax had gotten used to watching in postmis-sion analyses, the one recorded by the

official logging sensor at the back of the deck. In this frozen still picture, she could see the outline of

Sisko's shoulders and head above the back of his chair, and the top of her own head beyond him, at the

helm. The Defiant's viewscreen showed darkness spattered with distant fires that looked a little too large

and bright to be stars. The edges of the picture were frayed and spangled with blank blue patches,

obscuring the figures at the weapons and engineering consoles. Dax thought she could just catch the flash

of Kira's earring through the static.

"The record's even worse than it looks here," Hayman said bluntly. "What you're seeing is a computer

reconstruction of the scattered bytes we managed to download from the sensor's memory buffer. All

we've got is the five-minute run it recorded just before the bridge lost power. Any record it dumped to

the main computer before that was lost."

Sisko nodded, acknowledging the warning buried in her dry words. "So we're going to see the Defiant's

final battle."

"That's right." Hayman tapped at her control panel again, and the conference room filled with the sound

of Kira's tense voice.

"Three alien vessels coming up fast on vector oh-nine-seven. We can't outrun them." The fires on the

viewscreen blossomed into the unmistakable red-orange explosions of warp cores breaching under

attack. Dax tried to count them, but there were too many, scattered over too wide a sector of space to

keep track of. Her stomach roiled in fierce and utter disbelief. How could so many starships be

destroyed this quickly? Had all of Starfleet rallied to fight this hopeless future battle?

"They're also moving too fast to track with our quantum torpedoes." The sound of her own voice coming

from the image startled her. It sounded impossibly calm to Dax under the circumstances. She saw her

future self glance up at the carnage on the viewscreen, but from the back there was no way to tell what

she thought of it. "Our course change didn't throw them off. They must be tracking our thermal output."

"Drop cloak." The toneless curtness of Sisko's recorded voice told Dax just how grim the situation must

be. "Divert all power to shields and phasers."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

L.A.Graf-DS9-Invasion!3-Time'sEnemyStarTrekDeepSpace9INVASION!Time'sEnemyL.A.GrafThesaleofthisbookwithoutitscoverisunauthorized.Ifyoupurchasedthisbookwithoutacover,youshouldbeawarethatitwasreportedtothepublisheras"unsoldanddestroyed."Neithertheauthornorthepublisherhasreceivedpaymentforthesaleofthis"...

展开>> 收起<<

Star Trek Deep Space 9 16 Invasion! 3 Time's Enemy.pdf

共154页,预览31页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Star Trek Deep Space 9 16 Invasion! 3 Time's Enemy

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: