The Soldiers of Fear (22 page)

Behind her the door whooshed open and Deanna came in. She immediately took Worf 's hand and held it. Then she looked up at Beverly, who shook her head.

"Anything," Deanna said. "Try anything."

Beverly glanced at the overhead readings. Worf 's hearts and lungs seemed to be clear now and his blood had cycled a few times, cleaning out the poisons. But there was no brain activity. The only chance he had was to be shocked back.

She quickly prepared an extra-sized dose of Klaxtal, the strongest stimulant she knew of that would work on Klingons.

She glanced at Deanna, who was staring down at Worf 's smudged face. "Stand back," Beverly said. "This might cause some sharp muscle contractions."

Deanna stood back, but didn't release Worf 's hand.

Beverly injected the Klaxtal and then moved out of the way. She had seen Klingons break human doctors' limbs while under the influence of this drug.

But Worf didn't move.

Deanna glanced at her. Beverly was about to step in to try again when Worf 's powerful body jerked upward, his legs kicking, his arms flailing. Deanna let go and the two of them watched as Worf 's body twitched and bucked, then lay still.

Very still.

It hadn't worked. Beverly stepped back up beside Worf. "Worf, damn you," she said. "Come back to"

Suddenly the monitor over Worf blinked, and the next instant he took a huge, shuddering breath.

"He's back," Deanna said, moving up beside him and touching his head.

But the question was whether or not he was completely back.

Beverly glanced at the reading. There was brain function, but she couldn't tell if there was damage.

"Worf," she said. "Worf. You need to speak to me."

He still didn't open his eyes.

"Deanna," she said.

Deanna nodded, then bent over him, her hair hiding his face. "Worf," she said. "Please"

His right hand went to her throat. "I will not talk!" he said.

"Worf," Beverly said. "It's Deanna!"

He let go and she staggered backward, smiling. "Deanna?" he said. "I am on the Enterprise? "

"Yes," Beverly said. She glanced at the scan beside the bed. His conscious brain functions gave a better reading. He would be all right.

"The Furies?"

"Are defeated," Deanna said, her voice rasping.

"And Commander Riker?"

"Is fine," Deanna said. "But he insisted on going to the bridge before coming here, even though both his hands are burnt."

Beverly glanced at her. She hadn't heard that Riker lived.

Deanna smiled, never taking her eyes from Worf "The captain should be ordering him here any minute."

But something in Deanna's eyes said that wasn't the whole story. Beverly caught the look, but Worf appeared too tired to care. "My head feels as if it has been trampled by a herd of Klingon wildebeests," he said.

Beverly smiled at him, and took her place beside him. "Your head is hard, and that probably saved your life," she said. "But I do need to check the rest of your injuries. And I need to tell the captain that you're all right."

"I will," Deanna said. "He'll be very pleased to hear it."

Several hours later, Picard sank into a chair in Ten-Forward. Commander Will Riker already had a seat at the table. He was staring out the window, at the stars streaking past. His hands were wrapped in light bandages, and his eyes had deep shadows. It looked as if he had lost weight in the last day, and maybe, just maybe, he had.

Guinan came over, a carafe filled with purple liquid in her right hand, two snifters in her left.

"Tea for me, Guinan," Picard said.

She grinned. "I've been saving this Nestafarian brandy for a special occasion. I think defeating the Furies counts, don't you?"

"I don't feel like celebrating," Riker said, his gaze still on the stars.

"I don't think special occasions are always celebrations," Guinan said. She put the brandy down between them, poured a centimeter of purple liquid into the bottom of each glass, and pushed them toward her customers. "Sometimes special occasions are the quiet moments when healing can begin."

She got up, and left them. Picard watched her go. He relied on her wisdom and her strength. She was letting him know that she approved of his action, of the path he had chosen to defeat his fears, and the Furies, all at the same time.

But he didn't approve. He didn't feel as if he'd done enough. He wasn't certain the wormhole was closed forever. And he had lost what promised to be one of Starfleet's top new officers.

Riker held out his bandaged hands. Picard had never seen anything quite like that before.

"Dr. Crusher doesn't trust me not to tear off the new skin," Riker said. "So she bandaged me."

"You're off duty, Number One. You can rest, you know."

Riker nodded. He glanced at the stars. "But I have some practicing to do," he said softly, almost to himself. "Flying old atmospheric jets in a holodeck program. I have a rematch scheduled. Someday."

Picard finally understood. Redbay. They were both thinking of the lieutenant, alone on the other side of the wormhole.

With the Furies.

A sacrifice either one of them would have gladly made in his stead. A sacrifice Riker was supposed to make, but circumstances prevented.

In some ways, it was just as hard on this end, knowing that they would never know how or if Redbay survived. They only knew that he had done his job.

Now they had to go on. When they had signed up for Starfleet, they knew the risks.

One of those risks was the loss of their own lives.

The other, harder risk, was losing friends.

Picard picked up his snifter, twirled the brandy, and inhaled. It had a spicy, dark scent. "Tell me about Lieutenant Redbay, Will," Picard said.

Riker stared at Picard for a moment, then took a brandy snifter in one bandaged hand.

"Not the lieutenant I can read about in the records," Picard said. "I want to know the man."

Riker nodded, taking a sip. "Lieutenant Redbay?" He glanced out at the stars for a moment, then went on. "Lieutenant Sam Redbay was my friend."

He lifted his brandy snifter in a silent toast.

Picard joined him.

The Invasion Continues In Invasion!

Time's Enemy by L.A. Graf

"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 1. 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 ships older 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. Starfleet was preparing for a major encounter with someone. He just wished he knew who.

"I thought we came here to deal with a nonmilitary 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 an uninterested 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 Starfleet coveralls crossing the room toward them. Dax surprised him 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, actually got 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 reminded his superior officer almost as soon as she released his hand. "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 explained, in such polite bafflement that Sisko guessed he must be emulating Garak's unctuous 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?"

He 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 Academy 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 buffers records 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, either the 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 circuits everything 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."