Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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“What the hell are you talking about?” Sisko demanded, moving toward him ominously. He wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got there, but he made the move anyway.

“How long have you had that cough?” Thamnos demanded. He jerked his chin toward Zetha. “She’s the carrier, don’t you see? She’s immune, but she’s been incubating the disease for months. Once it’s triggered, you’ll all get it. That cough tells me you already have!”

It wasn’t a collapse, exactly, Uhura insisted. She’d gotten up from her desk while she was talking to Crusher, and simply misjudged her footing. The fact that she was walking across a level floor that suddenly seemed to undulate and buckle beneath her was beside the point. She was fine, really.

“The hell you are,” Crusher said, pressing the hypo against the side of her neck. Seeing the older woman literally fall off her feet, Crusher had used a priority override and beamed directly into Uhura’s office, then ordered a backup team to escort the admiral home. “You’re this close to exhaustion. You’re to stay in bed and away from that desk for at least eight hours if I have to strap you down in order to enforce it.”

Annoyed at all the fuss, Uhura was sitting very straight with her arms folded, wearing The Look, by the time Crusher had sent the backup team on its way and returned to the bedroom. But The Look, she discovered, only worked on the male of the species. Damn!she thought. Either I’m losing my touch, or it’s whatever tranquilizer Crusher’s shot me with, but this evening is not going the way I’d planned!

“Doctor’s orders?” she managed, resting on her dignity amid the pillows of her queen-size bed.

“Bed rest. Watch a movie, listen to some music, read a good book,” Crusher said. “Anything but work.”

“May I answer some mail?” Uhura asked sweetly. If The Look didn’t work, maybe her best smile would.

“Only if it’s not work-related,” Crusher scolded, halfway out the door. “Want a cup of hot milk before I go?”

“Get the hell out of here!” Uhura snapped. If the smile wasn’t going to work, either, she’d save it for another occasion. “Go home to your son; I don’t need you here.”

“Good night to you, too,” Crusher said, and was gone.

As soon as the outer door slid shut and locked behind her, Uhura activated the beside console. Riffling through the usual office memos and notes from friends and family members she didn’t have the energy to answer, she found a message from Curzon. She unscrambled it.

“Called in on emergency diplomatic mission, effective immediately. Hush-hush, rush-rush, top secret. So I won’t tell you I’m aboardOkinawa. Will comm you when I get back. Thanks for the memories, Curzon.”

Ordinarily, if Curzon was off on a top secret mission, he kept it secret. By its very presence, his message bothered her. Following her refit, Okinawahad been scheduled to go on maneuvers in the Mutara sector awaiting a new assignment. Where had she been diverted on such short notice, and why would Curzon specifically want Uhura to know?

Memo to self,she thought sleepily as she turned off the bedside lamp and the combination of the sound of foghorns on the bay and whatever it was Crusher had given her took effect: AscertainOkinawa’ s official destination, then extrapolate.Tranquilizers or no, a familiar tingling at the back of her neck said it had something to do with Catalyst.

Chapter 17

Zetha backed away from the others until she reached the far wall, one hand covering her mouth, her eyes wide with terror. Thamnos was still smirking.

“Do we have a deal?” he demanded. “The vaccine and your lives in exchange for my freedom? I’d say you’ve got the better end of the bargain.”

Again a look passed between Sisko and Tuvok which was too quick for Thamnos to notice. The human let the Vulcan know he was about to create a diversion.

Sisko appeared to crumble while they watched. He clenched his fists against his temples and seemed to stagger. When he straightened up, tears welled in his eyes.

“I don’t want to die!” he cried with all the passion of a Shakespearean actor. “I’ve seen what this disease does to people!” He turned on Zetha. “If this—this Tal Shiar plant has infected us all, the only thing that matters is the vaccine! Tuvok, let him go.”

“But, Dr. Jacobs—” Tuvok interjected, playing along.

“I said let him go, dammit!” Sisko snapped. “Dr. Thamnos, we’ll agree to your terms. We need that vaccine.”

As if reluctantly, Tuvok released his hold. Thamnos was swaggering and smirking at the same time.

“Now, there’s a sensible man. Maybe once we get out of here, we can be business partners. We can sell hiloponto both sides. I’ll still want full credit for the research, of course, but—”

He never finished his sentence. The knife that severed his windpipe prevented it.

Admiral Tal got up from the command chair to pace the warbird’s bridge restlessly. Few realized how much of a warbird commander’s life was spent just sitting. Sometimes, especially times such as this, a person needed to stretch.

This place had been hard won, and over a long and storied lifetime. That incident when he was a subcommander had almost ended his career if not his life; the climb back up had been arduous, to put it mildly. Tal had gotten as far as commander without tarnishing his honor or his morals—no mean feat in the service of an Empire not always committed to either—only to find himself subordinate to that butcher Volskiar at Narendra III.

He still had nightmares about that, though it was sixteen years past. It made him wary of all orders from above, and intent on scrutinizing their origin and their purpose. As he’d tried to tell Jarok, the headstrong fool, the important thing—well, the next most important thing after honor and morality, was moderation.

The next most important thing after that was to stay offworld, and out of politics, as much as possible. Such caution had won him an admiralcy, but at the cost of rarely seeing sky above him. He had no doubt he would die someday within the confines of a ship, in the service of a world where it was not safe for the moderate to live.

Tal would fight when he believed the cause was just. But, after Narendra III, he would not fight unless he knew precisely what he was fighting for.

The admiral did a circuit of the bridge stations, communicating by a glance here, a nod or touch on the shoulder there, that he knew he could count on his crew to give him their best, for they never got less from him. As for his crew, their respect for him bordered on adulation.

Tal saw that all was in order, then settled back in the command chair.

“Well?” he demanded of Koval. “We’re almost there. What happens next?”

“There” was a world Tal had finally managed to correlate between their course and existing starcharts as Renaga, designated unallied and “to be observed.” It was the only thing in the vicinity even the Tal Shiar could possibly be interested in. Tal knew other ships passed this way occasionally in spite of the treaty; he suspected Federation ships did as well. Was that the point of this Tal Shiar effort, to provoke accusations of treaty violation and stir up trouble for no particular reason? Did the Empire not have enough else on its mind? Whatever happened, he and his crew would take the brunt of it, and Tal was not amused.

Koval had had ample opportunity to observe the admiral on their journey here as well as earlier. He knew Tal’s history, and knew from his own investigation that the admiral was politically beyond reproach. He had been seen more than once in the company of Alidar Jarok, who was under surveillance for reasons owing to a possible shift in orthodoxy, yet the content of their conversations, beyond talk of women, had never been substantiated.

Koval knew as well that Tal was no ordinary commander. Intelligent, patrician, fit and energetic despite his years, not quick to anger but, once there, implacable, this one would not be bullied. He had also reached an age where he was beyond fear.

Koval was forced to consider him a peer. Very well; it would be a challenge. Had he known how much Tal despised his soft-bellied self, he would have found the challenge all the more exciting.

In answer to Tal’s question, he said: “We wait.”

“For what?” Tal asked incisively.

He got no answer.

On Okinawa’s bridge, Captain Leyton had just asked his helmsman for an ETA at Renaga.

“Approximately 2.5 hours, sir,” the helm reported not a little nervously. “Barring interception by a Romulan patrol.”

“They won’t intercept us, Ensign,” Leyton said confidently. “Ambassador Dax assures me they want us to get there.”

This earned him puzzled looks from some of the bridge crew. Leyton was not about to resolve their puzzlement; he wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing on this mission himself. Beside him, Curzon Dax was as opaque as stone.

Unbeknownst to Uhura, Dax had been following as much of Albatross’s progress as he could by way of his special diplomatic access to intelligence matters. When the C-in-C informed him there was reason to believe a Romulan warbird was heading toward Renaga, reason or reasons unknown, but in the first overt violation of the Zone in a very, very long time, Curzon’s logical conclusion was that it had something to do with Albatross.

Curzon knew that Tuvok had reported there were Romulans on Renaga sending transmissions back to the homeworld. Once he was given access to the decoded transmissions, he could extrapolate from their very existence and the excitement they had generated at Starfleet Command that the Romulans were interested in something other than crop yields and weather reports on this backward little world. Curzon knew, as perhaps not everyone on Okinawadid, that by the time they arrived at Renaga, they would find themselves nose to nose with a decloaking Romulan warbird.

Back on Earth, Admiral Uhura was having words with the C-in-C.

“Never mind how I found out Okinawawas en route to Renaga. I want you to tell me why. Sir.”

She didn’t expect anything but the usual obfuscative need-to-know speech. She was floored when the C-in-C told her there was reason to believe a Romulan warbird was also moving toward Renaga. Had someone else fielded that while she was out of commission last night? If so, why hadn’t she been informed?

“Has Captain Leyton been briefed on the presence of my away team?” she wanted to know, grateful it was Okinawa,with Curzon on board, that was on its way. But on its way to do what? “I don’t want them getting caught in the crossfire.”

Assured that Captain Leyton and Ambassador Dax knew as much as anybody did about the situation, Uhura signed off, not a little perturbed. If there was a warbird about, it was essential to have a starship there for balance, but she’d rather Albatrosshad been well away before that. Albatrosshad not responded to her hails for over an hour now. It could mean nothing. It could mean a great deal. There was nothing to do but wait.

“There is a story about a river,” the woman who had thrown the knife said, her voice echoing off the walls of the cave. She stood in the long narrow passage that led perhaps a thousand meters downward from the entrance to the cave, her hands limp at her sides. Her eyes were glazed and she wore a fixed and eerie smile. Selar, surreptitiously running her medscanner, noted the presence of strong hallucinogens in her bloodstream.

“The river fed all the farms in the valley where it ran, and the people in the valley were content,” the woman said dreamily. “But a greedy man bought the land high in the mountains where the river rose as a small spring between the rocks. And the man dammed up the river and diverted it so that only his farm benefited from it.”

“It’s an interesting story, ma’am,” Sisko said cautiously. He’d made note that, having thrown the one knife in her possession, really more of a meat cleaver, with remarkable accuracy, she was otherwise unarmed. “How does it end?”

“One would think,” the woman said, “the way such stories usually go, that the other farmers would rise up against the greedy man and destroy the dam, or kill him so they could have their water again, but no. Instead, it was the river itself, meaning his own greed, that rose up in time of flood and drowned him.”

“A parable,” Sisko said, still humoring her. “Who are you?”

“I am the river, of course,” she replied, her manic smile widening. “I am also Boralesh, widow of the man Cinchona, who was killed by greed. A vision led me here. When he rose from my bed tonight, I took the dreaming drugs, and they led me here.

“No one man can control the river. No one man can claim the riches of our world for strangers. We do not want you here. You must leave.”

“That’s our intention, ma’am,” Sisko said. “But the vaccine your husband spoke about—”

“You mean the potions he was always concocting in my kitchen?” Boralesh’s voice was laced with sarcasm. “None of them ever improved upon what the gods have already given us. Hiloponis our mothersoil, our life’s blood. It cannot be made better. And it will not be taken away from us.”

“But you wouldn’t mind if we took one of—Cinchona, did you say?—one of the potions with us?”

The woman shrugged. “These things are nothing to me.” Something seemed to penetrate her drug-induced fog, and she frowned. “The children…I must not leave them alone for long….”

With that she drifted out of the cave, and they let her go.

“We should follow her,” Sisko said after she had gone. His anxiety was not feigned now. “If Thamnos was right, if we’re all infected, we do need to get ahold of whatever it was he was working on, however crude.”

“I submit we have more urgent things to deal with now, Lieutenant,” Tuvok said tautly, preparing to take the case full of datachips with them, indicating the dead Thamnos crumpled against one wall. “Speed is of the essence. If we are discovered here…”

“Agreed,” Sisko said. He was already disengaging the Romulan transmitter, and selecting which Rigelian artifacts he would take with him. The more evidence they had of the connection between Thamnos and the Romulans, the better. “But it might not hurt to see what Boralesh has in her kitchen.”

“I doubt it is anything more than what we have found here,” Selar suggested, gathering several jars of hiloponjust in case. “And if the vaccine is indicative of its ‘creator,’ it may be as ineffectual as the raw materials it is derived from. Further, something Zetha and I were working on just before we came here…”

It wasn’t as if the others had forgotten Zetha, but in the wake of Thamnos’s bizarre revelations, the suddenness of his death, and the eerie apparition that was Boralesh, their focus had been elsewhere. At the mention of her name, Zetha whimpered quietly. All eyes turned to her, and those eyes held questions.

She had sunk to the floor in the half-dark, and huddled there as if she didn’t know what else to do. She looked up at Tuvok, tears streaming down her face.

“When you asked if I was Tal Shiar, I told you no. It was the truth. They took me off the streets, threatened to kill Godmother if I didn’t go with them. I was trained, but I never took the oath. All ghilikhave to take the oath before they’re sent on their mission. I had made up my mind I would not take the oath, but I could find no means to escape. If Cretak hadn’t taken me away from them, they would have had to kill me.”

Tuvok was solemn. “Is this, now, the entire truth?”

“Yes!”

“You might have told us this from the beginning.”

“Would you have trusted me if I had? I wanted—I needed you to trust me. The only way I could think of was to tell you only part of the truth.”

Concerned with getting back to the ship before the sun rose, Tuvok said: “We will speak further on this later.”

“No,” Zetha whimpered. “There can be no ‘later.’ I have killed all of you. Leave me here! Seal up the cave when you go. Leave me with this…murderer, this eater of souls! I will not be the cause of any more death!”

“There is no evidence that you have caused any deaths,” Selar began.

“Thamnos said I was!” Zetha cried. “ ‘Sample 173’ he said, and Sisko believes him. How can it not be true? The datachips…they gave me the injections, said they were nutritional supplements…I never had enough to eat when I was little….”

“Hey, I never meant that!” Sisko said. Her accusation struck him so hard, he winced. He wasn’t sure what he believed anymore. He went to her, crouched down and took her hand as if he were talking to Jake. “It was a diversion, to distract Thamnos, like what you and Tuvok did with Jarquin. You didn’t really think—? My God, little girl, how awful it must be not to be able to trust anyone!”

In the meantime, Tuvok had gone up to the entrance of the cave, estimating the time until sunrise, then returned. He and Sisko had walked in under cover of night, but there was no time for that now.

“You and Selar beam out first,” Sisko instructed him. “Zetha and I will follow.”

Carrying the Romulan transmitter as well as the datachips, Tuvok signaled the transporter on Albatrossto beam them in. As the transporter beam engulfed the two Vulcans, Sisko took Zetha’s hands and gently pulled her to her feet. He wrapped his arms around her and she clung to him like a child. Her bones felt as fragile as a bird’s.

Hell,he thought, if I’ve caught the disease, it’s too late to worry about it anyway. And Selar seemed awfully confident none of us had. Guess I’ll know more once we get out of here.Not knowing what else to do or say, he rocked Zetha in his arms until the transporter grabbed them both.

“I was beginning to worry,” Uhura said a short time later as Sisko settled in at the controls and answered her hail. It was a little disconcerting seeing her as just a face on a viewscreen after so long using the fully dimensional holos, but the away team was in a bit of a hurry right now.

“All present and accounted for, Admiral,” Sisko responded as Tuvok locked into the seat beside him. He barely noticed Selar touching the hypo to his arm to draw blood. “We have a lot to tell you.”

“Hold that thought for now,” Uhura said crisply. “There’s a warbird in the vicinity, and Okinawa’s on her way. Curzon Dax is aboard. Okinawawill be looking for you. Rendezvous soonest.”

Sisko didn’t know whether to be elated or alarmed. Having Okinawacome to them meant he’d be reunited with Jennifer and Jake that much sooner, but he was disturbed at their being inside the Zone and potentially in harm’s way.

“Acknowledged,” he said, keeping rein on his thoughts. “Tell Okinawawe’re on our way.

“Easier said than done,” he said to Tuvok as soon as Uhura had signed off. His cough forgotten, the possibility that he might be infected with Catalyst forgotten, his main concern now was how to get the clumsy bird off the ground. “Recommendations, Mr. Tuvok? Tiptoe out the way we came in, or push the afterburners, go up like a rocket, and risk frightening the neighbors and, maybe, signaling our position to a warbird?”

Tuvok had been scanning for any energy displacement that might have been a warbird under cloak. So far, so good.

“I submit we cannot reveal our position to a warbird that is not yet here.”

“Agreed,” Sisko concurred, powering her up full. “Maybe the natives will think it’s just thunder…”

With a shudder and a roar, Albatrosstook wing.

Selar had gathered serum samples from everyone, Zetha last. The girl lay on her bunk, no longer weeping, but curled up into herself in stony silence.

“I will need your assistance with the next phase of the experiment,” Selar began.

“All those people—!” Zetha whispered hoarsely. “Everywhere I went, I carried it with me. Cretak, the crew of the ship that brought me, Admiral Uhura, Dr. Crusher and her son. Other ‘seeds’ may have started the outbreaks on Tenjin and Quirinus, but I must have brought it again to the domes we visited, the survivors in Sawar, Citizen Jarquin, the Sliwoni when I went into town to steal the adaptor…we wondered how it spread so quickly there…”

“You have not infected anyone,” Selar said. “Of that I am certain.”

Zetha sat up, rubbing the tears off her face with the heels of her hands. “How can you be sure? Thamnos said—”

“As with everything else, Thamnos was incorrect. Admiral Uhura is quite well. She and Lieutenant Sisko were in communication minutes ago. No one else on Earth has been infected.”

This seemed to give Zetha hope. “Then maybe the disease was still…incubating? Perhaps it’s only active now. But still, you and Tuvok and Sisko, even that madwoman on Renaga…”

“Lieutenant Sisko shows no signs of the illness. His cough, I believe, is psychosomatic,” Selar said.

“Psycho—What does that mean?”

“It means, and you did not hear me say this,” Selar said, in a rare moment of confidentiality, “that Lieutenant Sisko is uneasy with the responsibilities of command. The emotional stress is taking a physical toll.”

Zetha remembered how her gums used to bleed in the final weeks in the barracks. She understood about stress. For a moment she almost pitied Sisko. Then she remembered about Catalyst.

“So I didn’t infect him? Does that mean—?”

“Will you assist me in continuing my experiment?” Selar asked again.

Puzzled, emotionally spent, Zetha could think of nothing else to do. She followed Selar to the lab.

Many in the village on the hilltop were awakened by the rushing sound of Albatross’s thrusters, and some ventured to their windows in time to see the fiery orange trail soaring upward, but none dared venture outside to investigate. Some prayed, others simply went back to bed. In the morning, some would venture into the woods from which the demonic sight had originated, see the scorch marks in the grass, and pray again. The only one who might have offered some explanation, however incredible, was Boralesh, who slept through it all.

Speculation might have entertained the villagers for days if they had not soon had newer marvels to concern themselves with. For that morning Boralesh informed her neighbors that she had dreamed her husband had been murdered by a demon, and this was of far more interest than some unexplained fireball in the sky. Perhaps the two were somehow connected?

When Thamnos failed to reappear that same evening—the villagers were accustomed to his seemingly aimless peregrinations, but he always returned for supper—some would whisper behind their hands that perhaps he had deserted the woman who had forced him into marriage. Others would speculate that it was not a demon that had killed him. The buzz would last for several weeks, then dissipate. It was all in the stars and the gods’ hands, anyway, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

“Well?” Admiral Tal demanded yet again, wishing Koval would get out of the habit of standing just between his peripheral vision and the forward screen every time he was on the bridge. “We’re here. Now what?”

Koval did not look at him so much as address him over his shoulder. “I beam down. You wait.”

“Alone?” Tal demanded, though not with any great passion. If a Tal Shiar operative chose to beam into a possibly hostile environment without a security team, who was he to stop him?

“Yes, alone,” Koval said. “Where I’m going, no one will even see me. I will instruct your transporter crew. You will stay in constant contact with me and await my orders.”

The sight of the knife in Thamnos’s throat almost made Koval wish he’d brought guards. But there was nothing living in the cave, and Koval was confident he could beam out before anyone might come shuffling in from outside.

He had already silenced the other two transmitters and their operators, ordering the warbird’s transport officer to beam him from site to site. He’d planned to silence Thamnos next, but someone had beaten him to it.

The fact that the murder weapon was a native kitchen knife might almost have led him to the obvious conclusion that Thamnos had been killed by a Renagan, for whatever reasons Renagans killed each other. Jealous husband, embittered wife, cheated business partner—what did he care? But when he realized that the Rigelian’s transmitter and the datachips were gone, Koval arrived at a different conclusion entirely.

A Renagan killer might have opened the case looking for valuables and, not finding anything but datachips, meaningless to an illiterate, dumped them on the floor, smashed the transmitter as being equally useless, trashed the place, and gone away. The fact that the only things missing could directly link Thamnos, the seeds, and the Empire was disquieting. Whoever had done this knew exactly what they were looking for. Using a native knife to kill the Rigelian was just a sardonic twist.

Seething, Koval searched the cave once more to make certain he’d overlooked nothing. Knocking carelessly against a table, he overturned several jars of hilopon.

“And we never even figured out how the accursed stuff works!” he muttered in disgust, rubbing the fine powder between his fingers before wiping them fastidiously on a handkerchief, which he wrapped around the haft of the knife and, not without tugging, pulled it free. He touched the dead man’s neck. Not that he expected to find a pulse, but he wanted to determine how long ago he had been killed.

The corpse was still warm, the limbs limp as a rag doll’s, not yet stiffened with rigor mortis. Thamnos had been dead for less than an hour. Whoever did this could not have gone far.

With a humorless smile, Koval wrapped the knife in the handkerchief, which he concealed in his tunic before signaling the warbird.

“Scan the planet for any sign of transport,” he ordered Tal. “A ship, a shuttle, a transporter signal. At once!”

“Acknowledged,” Admiral Tal replied, nodding to his science officer to run the scan. Tal himself was watching something else on the forward screen with the intensity of a predator watching a mouse. The schematic showed him a smallish, lumpy shape that did not match the configurations of the military vessels of any enemy he knew. A civilian ship, then, streaking away from the surface of a pre-industrial world as fast as its engines could take it, which wasn’t all that fast.

She cannot see us,Tal thought, checking the cloak anyway, yet she somehow knows we’re here. I wonder if she’s what Koval brought us all this way to find.

Admiral Tal allowed himself the luxury of a yawn. With the indolence of a predator who’s already eaten a full meal, he let the mouse go.

“Admiral?” Sciences had completed her scan. “There is no sign of any alien vessel on the planet.”

They had all seen the small awkward ship streaking away from the planet just moments before Koval gave his order for a sensor scan. But if Tal said they hadn’t, then they were prepared to swear on their mothers’ graves that they hadn’t.

“Admiral?” Helm was more nervous than usual. None of them liked it when Tal Shiar was aboard, and no one needed to tell them Koval was Tal Shiar. They knew. “Colonel Koval is signaling to beam aboard.”

“Yes, yes, by all means, beam his lordship aboard!” Tal said dryly. “And quickly now! He needs to know we found nothing on the planet.”

Whatever smiles or titters the bridge crew might have indulged in were well gone before Koval strode onto the bridge.

“We’re leaving orbit,” he announced.

“Are we now?” Tal’s expression was just this close to a sneer. How many scars did he bear in service to an Empire that had spawned… this.But Koval was oblivious to the admiral’s disdain. Whatever he’d found on Renaga had locked him into killer mode; before Tal could give the order, Koval took over.

“Helm, come about. Set scan to widest possible range and scan for any and all vessels in the area. The rest of you, to battle stations!”

“Energy distortion,” Tuvok reported evenly. “Port side aft.”

“I’m told no matter how often they redesign the cloak, there’s always some leakage,” Sisko mused, hoping he didn’t sound as anxious as he felt. “Damn! Just a few minutes more and we’d have been able to put the planet between us and hide out. She’s seen us, and she’s in pursuit.”

The icy silence between the Federation and the Empire had begun before he was born. He’d never seen a Romulan warbird before, and would have been perfectly content to live a long and fruitful life without ever having the privilege. He raised Albatross’s ancient shields and opened the intraship.

“Sisko to Selar and Zetha. Assume battle stations. We’ve got company, and we may have to do some fancy maneuvering between now and when Okinawa—uh-oh!”

Tuvok correctly interpreted that as “Romulan vessel powering weapons and decloaking.” At Sisko’s nod he opened a channel and, in the most imperious Romulan he could muster, announced: “Imperial warbird, this is a civilian vessel. Documentation is in order. We are prepared to be boarded and searched if you desire.”

The hell we are,Sisko thought, trying to push the engines to give him a little bit more, but they were already giving him everything they had.

“Imperial warbird…” Had to give Tuvok credit for trying. “…why are you powering weapons? I repeat, we are a civilian vessel. We are prepared—”

The answer was a phaser blast that, had Sisko not flung the clumsy bird into evasive, would have blown them into smithereens. Instead it swatted the ship off course, drained the shields down to forty percent, and set off an alarm somewhere that Sisko hadn’t even known the ship had.

“A little better aim and we’re finished,” he told Tuvok unnecessarily, readying to throw her into a new evasive pattern before the next blast. “C’mon, Okinawa,where are you?”

It was a peculiar artifact of Romulan ships that they were rather poorly designed acoustically. Depending upon the class of ship, they all made some sort of sound. Some hummed, some whined, some expressed themselves in a kind of low waspish buzz, but they all gave voice. One would think a species so acute of hearing would have remedied this long ago. Or perhaps the ships were designed that way deliberately, to keep the crew always on edge, always combat ready.

As if the background noise weren’t annoying enough, seasoned veterans swore they could feel the weapons fire vibrate through the soles of their boots before they heard it. New recruits usually scoffed at them, until they felt it for themselves.