Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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“Ensign ch’Thane,” Vaughn said, stepping away from the engineering console. “Apprise the medical bay.” If any casualties were being treated, the medical staff would need to know about the interruption of power.

“Sir,” Nog said. “If we’re at warp and the fracture in the nacelle widens, we could go up in a fireball.”

“And if we stay here and allow four Jarada battleships to attack us in tandem, we willgo up in a fireball.” Vaughn made sure his tone left no doubt that his orders would stand. He had planned enough operations in his career, developed enough strategies, solved enough problems, that hesitation had long ago been banished from his decision-making process. “Time until the trailing ships are in weapons range?” Vaughn asked.

“Three minutes, twenty seconds,” Dax said.

“That’s how much time we’ve got to get far enough away from Torona IV to go to warp. Can we do it?”

“Depending on how much power we draw,” Nog began, “how much power there is…” His voice trailed off.

“You don’t know?”

“I’d have to run an analysis, and that’d take a couple of minutes.”

“No time,” Vaughn agreed. “Lieutenant,” he said to Dax, “shortest route, now.” Then, touching the fingers of his right hand to Nog’s shoulder, he said, “Go.”

Nog responded by working his console, his hands moving with expert precision across the controls. His demeanor seemed to change slightly, Vaughn noticed, almost as though the engineer found relief in having something specific to do. In the short time Vaughn had been aboard Deep Space 9—not much more than a month—he had been impressed by Nog, and even seen the station’s recently promoted operations officer grow in confidence. There was still something innocent and even wide-eyed about him, perhaps a healthy fear of the unknown and of death, but there was, Vaughn thought, a great deal of potential in the young man. And Nog’s engineering skills only slightly overshadowed his remarkable ability to improvise.

As Nog discharged his orders, Defianttransformed. The atonal groan of the port impulse engine disappeared, leaving the smoother, softer hum of the pair that remained online. The shuddering of the deck also smoothed out.

“Port engine is offline,” Nog said. “Deuterium conduits are clear. I’m rerouting power.”

“Sensors and shields last,” Bowers said.

The insistent, blaring alarms cut off abruptly. Even with the sound of the impulse drive, the bridge suddenly seemed almost quiet to Vaughn. He looked around in time to see most of the stations go dark: environmental control, transporter operations, communications. When the sciences console lost power, Ensign ch’Thane rotated his chair around to face the rest of the bridge. His antennae no longer bent downward, Vaughn saw, but seemed tense, as did the expression on his face. He’s trying to control his fear,Vaughn thought, and then, recalling the Andorian response to danger, corrected himself: Not fear; anger.Something flickered off to the right, and Vaughn looked to see that the main viewer had gone blank.

“Power levels are coming up,” Nog reported as he continued to redirect the ship’s systems to funnel into the impulse engines.

The lights went next, plunging the bridge into momentary darkness before the emergency lighting came on. The few wisps of smoke still hovering about looked to Vaughn like phantoms haunting the scene. He found the pall menacing, and it occurred to him that he had spent a great deal of his career—a great deal of his life—bathed in the gloomy twilight of impending danger.

And then the emergency lighting went out. A claustrophobic blackness surrounded Vaughn. Only the engineering and tactical stations, and Dax’s rerouted flight-control display, remained operational, their lonely glow like beacons in the night. The bulkheads felt closer now, and Vaughn was acutely aware of the smallness of Defiantabout him, and of his own insignificance in the vastness of space.

The resonant drone of the impulse engines grew louder again, but remained steady this time. “We’re approaching ninety percent of full impulse,” Dax said, her face barely visible in the reflected light of her console.

“The near ships are closing in again,” Bowers said, his words coming quickly and loudly.

“They don’t—” Vaughn started, but then a thunderous jolt pounded Defiant,and another. Vaughn reached for the back of Nog’s chair, but missed, and he went sprawling backward onto the deck. No alarms sounded, but something hissed loudly in the darkness. Vaughn rolled to his feet and looked toward tactical, where Bowers’s shadowy figure hovered over his station.

“Starboard shields are down,” Bowers called out. “Aft armor down to—” The tactical officer stopped speaking as his own console went dark. Vaughn could no longer see even a dim outline of the man. “Aft armor down to twenty-three percent,” Bowers continued, obviously reporting the last reading he had seen.

“Sensors and shields rerouted,” Nog reported, finding the last bits of power for the impulse engines.

“They weren’t prepared for that burst of impulse power,” Dax said. “We may have time before they can swing around for another pass.” Another pass, another disruptor strike like the last one, Vaughn knew, and Defiant’s armor might not hold.

“Time,” Vaughn said. The hissing stopped, but again the sound of the impulse drive wavered.

“Estimating ninety seconds before the third and fourth ships get here,” Dax said. “Eighty seconds before we can go to warp. If the impulse engines hold up.”

Good,Vaughn thought. They had made up time. He hoped it would be enough. Moving through the darkened bridge from memory, he found the center seat and settled into it.

“One minute until we can go to warp.” Dax said. “With sensors offline, I can’t tell where the Jarada ships are.” Vaughn thought he heard the confidence present in the lieutenant’s voice up to this point begin to drain away.

Another blast rocked the ship, though not as violently as the previous strikes. Had it, Vaughn realized, Defiantwould likely not still be here. He stopped himself from asking Bowers for a status update; with the tactical station down, there was no way to know how much more the aft armor had degraded. But Vaughn did not need that data to know that Defiantwould not survive another assault.

“Fifty seconds,” Dax said. Then: “We’re not going to make it.”

Vaughn turned in his chair toward Dax. She was staring intently at her console, her face shining orange in its light. He could not make out the spots on the side of her face, but he could see her inexperience in her expression.

So young,he thought, and then about Shar and Nog, and even about Bowers and Bashir: They’re all so young.Still, Dax’s eyes never left her display. She was good, this one, and strong; command had been the right choice for her. Vaughn had no idea how good a counselor she might have become had she continued in that profession, but he was confident that, given the chance, she would make a fine commander, and sooner rather than later. And so he chose to trust her instincts now.

“Evasive maneuvers, Lieutenant,” he said, “but give me no more than another seven seconds on our course.”

Dax’s hands moved in swift response to the order even before her acknowledgment passed her lips. She anticipated me,Vaughn realized, and wondered just how far a career in command might take her.

Vaughn faced forward in his chair, staring through the darkness toward the main viewer, which he could not see, and which was offline anyway. His right hand was a knot of pain, but it paled beside the ache in his heart. Just ahead of him, the indistinct shape of the conn rose from the deck, a mute marker of his daughter’s violent death. He looked down to the side of the captain’s chair, to where Prynn had been thrown by the explosion that had taken her away from him for good. In his mind’s eye, he saw her lying there, the spark of life gone from her visage. He remembered that spark, that flash in her eyes, from the moment they had succeeded in evacuating the last of the Europani from their poisoned world, when she had smiled at him for the first time in years. And he remembered it from her childhood, and even before, from the time she had been an infant. Her dark, almond eyes had always seemed amazingly vivid to him, as though they contained the passion of her will. They were Ruriko’s eyes.

“Forty seconds,” Dax said. “Back on a linear course.”

A chill gripped Vaughn as he sat in the darkness. The air on the bridge was still oppressively warm—the environmental systems had not been offline that long yet—but he envisioned the absolute cold of space bleeding away the kernel of heat generated on Defiantto sustain the crew. The image recalled the dreadful tableau Vaughn and an Enterpriseaway team had found not long ago aboard Kamal,a derelict Cardassian freighter adrift in the Badlands. Bodies everywhere, Bajorans and Cardassians frozen in death.

That had been a part of the incident that had driven Vaughn to Deep Space 9, away from the career he had worked—the life he had lived—for the past eighty years. Decisions of life and death, killing some so that others might live, battling alongside evil in order to conquer even greater evils. He had seen and experienced as much of that—more, much more, he amended—than he had ever wanted to. And so he had made the decision to live a life not laced with sorrow and regret, and to seek not ugliness and horror to be vanquished, but beauty and wonder to be explored. Yet here he was again, faced with risking Defiant’s crew of forty to save a hundred thousand.

“Thirty seconds.”

Vaughn braced himself, waiting for the final salvo that would boil away and penetrate the only protection Defianthad astern. Seconds ticked away in agonizing slowness.

When Dax reached ten,Vaughn told Nog to bring all systems back online. One step at a time, the ship limped back to life: lights rescued the bridge from darkness, consoles blinked back on, alarms cried out once more.

“At zero,” Vaughn said, raising his voice to be heard above the alerts, “shut down the impulse drive.”

“Aye, sir,” Nog said.

Dax counted out the last five seconds with an expectant tone, and Vaughn thought he heard the return of her determination with each word. After “One,” Dax said, “We’re clear for warp.”

At once, the thrum of the impulse engines faded, the tone deepening as the volume decreased. Vaughn said nothing, instead counting out another three seconds to himself.

“Sir?” It was Bowers, an edge clearly audible in his voice. He had expected the order to go to warp as soon as they were able, Vaughn surmised. But with all those civilian lives dependent upon what they did here, Vaughn could not afford to act without a margin of error.

Ignoring Bowers, he told Dax, “Go to maximum warp for ten seconds, then throttle down to warp three-point-seven and take evasive action.” The lieutenant did not bother to acknowledge the orders as she set about implementing them. Vaughn imagined he could feel Defiantleap to warp.

“Monitor the fracture,” Vaughn said to Nog.

“Aye, sir.”

“The Jarada have gone to warp,” Bowers said. “All four ships. They’re in pursuit.”

“Engage cloak,” Vaughn said.

Bowers’s fingers played across the control surfaces of the tactical station, but he hesitated before completing the command. “Sir, the Jarada will be able to read us cloaking.” The lieutenant’s hand hovered a few centimeters above his console.

“Do it,” Vaughn ordered. Bowers complied, immediately bringing his hand down on a blinking touchpad. The bridge lighting dimmed in the telltale way that signaled the ship’s stealth mode to the crew.

Come on,Vaughn thought, exhorting the Jarada to keep up their pursuit. He expected them to read Defiantcloaking, just as he expected that they had already read the microfracture in the warp nacelle. It never paid, Vaughn knew, to underestimate the enemy.

“Warp three-point-seven,” Dax said. “Starting evasive maneuvers.”

“Status of the fracture?” Vaughn asked.

“Stressed,” Nog said. “But stable.”

Vaughn ticked off another ten seconds in his head, then told Dax to bring the ship out of warp. “Take us to station-keeping.”

“Dropping out of warp,” Dax responded. Then, a few seconds later, she added, “Engines answering full stop.”

“The Jarada are approaching the area,” Bowers said.

“Of course they are,” Vaughn offered. They had read Defiant’s course and velocity once it had gone to warp, seen where it had cloaked, and if they had detected the fracture on the nacelle, they would have calculated just how far the Starfleet ship could possibly travel before having to drop back to sublight speed. Now, if they utilized all of that information to determine a starting point and locus for a search—

“They’re passing our position,” Bowers said, and Vaughn could hear the smile on the tactical officer’s face even without looking.

“No celebrations yet, Lieutenant,” Vaughn said, though he tried to inject a sense of lightness into his tone. “Keep your eyes on them.”

Seconds passed, then minutes, Bowers intermittently describing the movements of the four battleships. The Jarada vessels stopped not far beyond the most distant point to which Defiantcould have traveled at maximum warp, given the damaged nacelle. Then they retreated, split up, regrouped.

“They’re moving again,” Bowers said finally. “Heading off on different vectors at warp one…describing helical trajectories—” Bowers suddenly looked up from his console. “They’ve set up a search grid.” He did not need to add what they all already knew: the Jarada were looking for Defiantfar from its current location.

“Excellent,” Vaughn said. After they hunted fruitlessly for a while, he thought, the Jarada would guess that Defianthad taken evasive action and modified its speed after it had cloaked. Vaughn thought they would likely change their search strategy, call in reinforcements to assist. But space was big and Defiantsmall—and essentially invisible—and they already had an advantage over their pursuers; Vaughn had chosen the odd velocity—warp three-point-seven, not warp one or three or five—to hide their position that much more. This game of hide-and-seek was one Vaughn knew he would win.

“Lieutenant Nog,” he said, “I believe you have a fractured warp nacelle to repair.”

“Aye, sir,” Nog said, bounding out of his chair and heading for the starboard exit. “Right away.”

“Lieutenant,” Vaughn called as the door opened before the engineer. “Everyone,” he continued, still having to raise his voice above the alarms. He gazed around to include all of the bridge crew.

“Well done.” Nog smiled widely, his small, sharp teeth showing prominently. He nodded, then turned and left.

Vaughn sat back in the captain’s chair. Exhaustion washed over him like a warm wave, trying to coax him into the deeper water of sleep—or perhaps unconsciousness. But there was much yet to do. There were still Jarada ships to avoid, and light-years to travel before Defiantarrived safely back at Deep Space 9. He would have to check to see if any other of the crew had been injured. His own left arm had been burned in the fire at the conn, his right hand even more so, and he would have to have Dr. Bashir patch him up.

And he would have to say goodbye to Prynn.

But not right now.

“Normal lighting,” Vaughn said. “And get rid of those alarms.” Around him, the bridge brightened and quieted, Bowers making the necessary adjustments. Vaughn looked up and said, “Ensign Roness, Ensign Senkowski, report to the bridge.” Relief at the conn and engineering stations for Dax and Nog.

After the acknowledgments came back, Vaughn rested his elbow on the arm of the chair and let his head fall into his uninjured hand. He wanted very much not to think about anything, not to feel anything.

Vaughn closed his eyes. For now—for right now—he was content to pretend that he was at peace, in a life that continued to know no such thing.

2

Kira Nerys slid her thumb down the cracked, ruby-colored spine of the oversized book. She felt the raised hubs and the textured surface of the aged tome, both smoothed from wear, and smelled the faint, musky scent of its binding. Flecks of gold passed beneath her touch, remnants of inlaid letters long ago eroded away by the attentions of many readers through many years.

“When the Prophets Cried,”she said aloud, pronouncing the title in a voice not quite soft enough to be a whisper. Her hand descended to the base of the book, and she let her fingertips hang the edge of the glass shelf. She stood like that for a few moments, her arm outstretched, alone in her office.

The old volume beckoned to Kira, like the open invitation of a longtime and trusted friend. Often throughout her life she had turned to the venerable work for spiritual and emotional guidance. Penned hundreds of years ago by Synta Kayanil, a vedek revered even in her own time for her insight, the collection of religious exegeses, historical recountals, and prophetic writings had provided Kira with a solid foundation on which to build and rebuild her faith—both in her gods and in herself. One of the few possessions she esteemed, and the only one she retained from her early childhood, the book had occupied a significant place in her life for almost as long as she could remember.

But now When the Prophets Criedhad been denied her. With the Attainder imposed upon her by the Vedek Assembly, Kira was forbidden to study any of the Bajoran canon. Of course, she mused, she could simply pull the book from the shelf and read it anyway, and nobody would ever know.

Nobody but Kira herself.

She leaned in toward the book, her hand still dangling by two fingers from the shelf, the glass pleasantly cool to her touch. She breathed in deeply. Commingled with the musk of the cover was the slightly acid odor of the pages within. Kira had never really liked that smell, exactly, but it had always afforded her a sense of familiarity, even a sense of being…well, home, though the concept of homewas necessarily a broad one for her. Before the end of the Occupation, less than eight years ago, she had lived her entire life either on the run or in a refugee camp, and so home had been wherever she had rested her head at night. To a great extent, she thought, that continued to be the case. Even having spent the years since the liberation of Bajor residing on DS9, she did not now think of the station as the only place she belonged. All of the Bajoran system—Bajor and the other planets, their moons, the wormhole, even the Denorios Belt, and yes, Deep Space 9 too—the entire system formed her home.

Kira stood away from the shelf and let her hand drop to her side. To her right, just within the limits of her hearing, voices and the workaday sounds of ops drifted through her closed office doors. She looked in that direction and, through the glass, saw personnel arriving for the start of the day shift, relieving the crew that had worked through the night. Kira had come to her office early today, ahead of the morning shift change, a consequence, she supposed, of the events surrounding the Iconian gateways and her days spent thirty thousand years in the past. Her experiences back in time—whether real or imagined—during a formative and long-forgotten era in Bajoran history had brought her to a deeper appreciation of her people, and to a greater sense of her own responsibilities in the present day. Her abiding trust in the Prophets, and in her own ability to walk the path They had laid out for her, had been reinforced in a way she had not known she had needed. She had returned to DS9 with a strengthened resolve to help her people through these turbulent times—despite the Attainder.

Because of her faith and her belief in the precepts of her religion, Kira would never challenge the edict set down by the Vedek Assembly. Ironically, a transgression of that very nature—acting in contravention of the wishes of Vedek Yevir Linjarin—had led to the Attainder in the first place. Allowing that the ancient Ohalu text unearthed at the B’hala archeological site might not be apocryphal, and convinced that the people had the right to decide the issue for themselves, Kira had posted a complete translation of the book to the Bajoran communications network. She had taken the extreme and irrevocable action, clearly opposed to Yevir’s intention of keeping even the existence of the old work hidden, because she had believed it the right thing to do for her people. But the only reasons to violate the Attainder would be for her own benefit, insufficient cause in her mind to defy the vedeks.

Kira walked over to the replicator set into the wall to the side of her desk. “Raktajino,”she said. “Extra hot, with two measures of kava.”The machinery hummed to life and, amid the striated shimmer of materialization, deposited a mug of the scalding Klingon beverage onto the replicator pad. Kira curled her fingers around the handle of the mug and brought it up to her lips. Wisps of steam carried the stout aroma of the black liquid wafting up to her nose. She sipped, and the hot, sweet raktajinofelt strong and vitalizing as it flowed down her throat.

A smile crossed her face as she was reminded of Etana Kol, a sergeant in the station’s security detail. Kol often remarked that the colonel’s internal organs must be composed of rodinium in order for her to be able to drink such hot beverages, and Kira usually responded by claiming to have a taste for warp plasma or phaser fire or the like. The banter had become an ongoing ritual for the two women whenever they shared a meal at the Replimat after attending temple services.

Temple services.

For more than a month now, Kira had not prayed—had not been permitted to pray—among her fellow Bajorans. Even with her determination to face this time with dignity and fortitude, she could not deny that she missed visiting the temple and being surrounded by people who believed what she believed, who knew what she knew. And there were other things she missed as a result of the Attainder: experiencing the effects of an Orb encounter, speaking about matters of faith with vedeks and prylars…even simply wearing her earring.

Kira absently lifted a hand to her right ear as she crossed to her desk. She set the raktajinobeside the desktop computer interface and sat down, brushing the tips of her fingers along her lobe as she did so. It still seemed strange to her, that sensation of a bare ear; she felt exposed somehow, almost as though she had left her quarters without fully dressing.

Recognizing the tenor of her thoughts, Kira pulled her hand away and let it fall onto the desk with a rap. She did not wish to think about those things that were missing from her life. Instead, she wanted to concentrate on all that she did have, and on the direction her life was headed—on the direction she would take it.

Dismissing thoughts of the Attainder with a shake of her head and a short, backward wave of her hand, Kira activated the computer interface and retrieved her agenda for the day. By design, she had no appointments scheduled during the morning—she had pushed the daily staff meeting back a few hours—but the afternoon would be full. After convening with her senior staff, she had the weekly meeting open to all station personnel, which typically lasted an hour or so, and after that, who knew how long it would take to listen to Quark itemize whatever requests or grievances the Promenade Merchants’Association had this month.

And speaking of Quark, she anxiously awaited the opportunity to talk with Ro about her foray with him to Farius Prime. Kira had already read the lieutenant’s preliminary report on their disruption of the negotiations for the gateways between the Orion Syndicate and the Petraw—whoever they turned out to be—but she still had numerous questions about Ro’s time undercover as Quark’s escort. That,she thought, grinning, ought to make quite a story.

Kira picked up the mug and sipped again at the raktajino.Her final appointment for the day, she saw, would also be the most important: a subspace conference with the Starfleet Corps of Engineers that would provide her with an update on their efforts to decontaminate Europa Nova. While First Minister Shakaar and Minister Asarem and the rest of the Bajoran government had immediately responded to the Europani crisis by offering their planet as a temporary harbor, the sudden influx of two and a half million people—with another halfmillion on the way—taxed Bajor’s resources. The sooner the refugees could be returned to their world, the better for everybody.

Kira keyed in her access code with her free hand and found that she had several messages waiting for her, as was often the case when she started her shift. She scanned down the list and saw that most appeared to be routine, but two caught her eye: one from Lieutenant Ro, and one, very surprisingly, from Taran’atar. Kira supposed that she was becoming accustomed to the Jem’Hadar’s presence on the station, and her confidence in him had grown well beyond the simple fact of his assignment to DS9 by Odo. He had certainly proven himself as a soldier under her command. But she could also see that, for all his strength and military abilities, he still felt awkward and unsure here, often seeming to grope for understanding in this setting—and on this mission—that was clearly so alien to him.

The readout indicated that Taran’atar’s message was audio only. Kira put down the mug of raktajino,now half empty, and touched the interface controls, which warbled in response. “Colonel Kira,”Taran’atar began. His usually resonant voice still sounded thin to her, as it had when she had visited him in the infirmary upon her return to the station. She recalled the image of him lying on the diagnostic pallet, looking as though he had been battered for hours, the greengray skin of his face unnaturally colored blue and purple and black.

Difficult as it was to credit, Dr. Tarses claimed that those hideous bruises were indications of the superior capacity of Jem’Hadar to heal. When Taran’atar had been recovered by Lieutenant Bowers and Ensign Roness after he had returned from the Delta Quadrant through one of the gateways, his face had been a mass of open wounds. Bowers had transported him aboard Rio Grandeand had managed to stem the bleeding, and by the time they had gotten back to DS9, the damage had already begun to mend.

Unfortunately, Taran’atar’s facial wounds had been the very least of his injuries. One of his arms had suffered multiple fractures, and two of his ribs had been splintered. A bladed weapon not only had penetrated one of his biceps, but had traveled within, chewing up muscle tissue and then sawing its way back out. Another, more jagged blade had been plunged into his chest, leaving a gaping hole and slicing through one of his hearts. Two other of his organs had been damaged as well. It had been worse even than when the Jem’Hadar hatched by that genetically engineered renegade—Locken—had tortured Taran’atar; they had hurt him, but in trying to extract information from their prisoner, their attentions had been designed to keep him alive. The Hirogen in the Delta Quadrant had clearly had no such constraints; he had wanted to hunt down and destroy Taran’atar. When Kira had visited the infirmary and learned the extent of his injuries, she had wondered—and she wondered again now—what the combat between the two warriors must have been like; after all, as badly wounded as he was, Taran’atar had wonthe battle.

Kira listened to the rest of the message. Like all of Taran’atar’s communications, it was succinct: he wanted to be liberated from the infirmary. Liberated,Kira thought, unable to suppress a smile, as though he were a prisoner.When she had first seen him after their ordeals, he had expressed his satisfaction that they had both reclaimed their lives. Now, she supposed, he wished to reclaim his life once more, this time from the clutches of Dr. Tarses.

Kira sympathized. She had never been much of a patient herself, had never wanted to lie about for long, even to expedite her own convalescence. She would see to it that Simon released Taran’atar as soon as medically appropriate—which, knowing the rapid recuperative powers of Jem’Hadar, would be soon, anyway.

She called up Ro’s message, a text memorandum requesting the authority to regulate the pedestrian traffic on the Promenade. Ro had listed several justifications for the request, but Kira thought that she should have foreseen this herself. As busy a place as Deep Space 9 had always been, it had never been as close to capacity as right now. Almost five months after the war with the Dominion, businesses were finally returning to normal, and the trade routes were once again being plied—although not yet through the wormhole. The station also continued to function as a staging area for relief efforts to Cardassia, and now played a similar role in the evacuation of Europa Nova. And while a substantial majority of the refugees had been taken to Bajor, several thousand remained on DS9, along with the crews of scores of ships waiting to begin resettlement of the Europani once their world had been returned to habitability.

Kira turned in her chair and gazed out the large, oval window behind her desk. She could see at least a dozen ships, no two alike, a couple of them Bajoran, but most from out of the system. With so many crews aboard the station, Ro had already posted more security officers than usual along the Promenade, a move Kira supported.

She’s been doing a good job,Kira thought as she turned back to her desk. She had not been that sure of Ro at first, but the new security chief had performed her duties seriously and well. And despite a rocky beginning, the two seemed to have developed a professional relationship of mutual respect.

Another aspect of the congestion on the Promenade, according to Ro, concerned the Bajoran temple and the Orb of Memory. As word of the Orb’s rediscovery spread, many Bajorans were apparently undertaking a pilgrimage to the station to experience it for themselves. The Orb would eventually be moved to Bajor, once a suitable location for it had been selected and prepared by the Vedek Assembly, but in recent days the number of passenger transports arriving fully loaded from Bajor had increased dramatically.