Demons of Air and Darkness Read online

  Right on cue, the Hirogen ship came into view.

  An errant cluster of waste material tumbled right toward it. It collided with the hunter’s small vessel with sufficient impact that even a monotanium hull couldn’t save it.

  Like all explosions in space, it was brief, but no less spectacular for all that. It blossomed evenly, then contracted into nothingness—aside from the green mass that had caused the explosion, which continued to tumble toward the hole.

  To Controller Marssi, it was the most beautiful sight she’d seen since the completed Apsac was first unveiled on Malon Prime.

  She still had no idea what that hole was or where it came from, and right now she didn’t care. All she knew was that if it hadn’t shown up when it did, she never would have ejected her payload, and the Hirogen ship would still be in one piece.

  “Looks like you beat the odds again, Controller,” Kron said with a smile, his words mirroring Marssi’s own thoughts.

  Laughing, Marssi said, “Did you ever doubt it?”

  “Yes, every second. But, like all the other times you’ve proved me wrong, I’m glad you’ve done so.”

  “Controller,” Gril said, his voice shaking, “I must protest this! We don’t know what’s on the other side of that hole! What if—”

  Marssi knew exactly what Gril was going to say, and so was happy to interrupt him. “Gril, what is the mission statement of this vessel?”

  “To—to dispose of the waste that accrues from our use of antimatter in a manner that will not be harmful to the Malon community as a whole,” he said as if reciting from a textbook— probably, Marssi thought, recalling Gril’s age, read recently.

  “Exactly,” she said, advancing slowly on the young man who, for his part, started to cower as she moved closer. “And we have done that, and also kept this star system from being contaminated. We’ve saved millions of lives today—most notably our own— eliminated one of the scourges of this sector, and we’ve done our job. Not to mention the fact that we’ve made an astonishing discovery that could very well spell even more profit for us down the road. So what, precisely, are you protesting, Gril?”

  Gril swallowed, and once again scratched his left nostril. “Well, when you put it that way, Controller, I guess—nothing.”

  “Good. Keep an eye on the waste, and tell the core laborers to keep on their toes.” Blinking a few times, she added, “And get someone to fix that damn arvat conduit—I don’t know what’s worse, the haze or the smell.”

  “Yes, Controller.” Gril returned to his console.

  Kron shook his head and chuckled. “Were we ever that young?”

  “I was,” Marssi said. “But not you. When you were born, you were already a cranky old man.” Placing an encouraging hand on her old friend’s shoulder, she said, “We need to get the warp drive fixed. As soon as the last of the waste has gone through that hole, I want to get back home and file a claim on this little discovery of ours.”

  “The drive’ll take at least a day or two to fix.”

  Marssi shrugged. “It’ll be at least that long before all the the tanks are emptied.”

  “Good point,” Kron said, and with a nod to Gril, sent the younger Malon down to engineering to surpervise the repairs.

  Marssi turned back to her console, and watched as the first bit of waste material approached the event horizon of the hole and then disappeared from sight. Even if she wanted to know what was on the other side, she’d have a difficult time getting a proper sensor reading now, with all the radiation in the way.

  Besides, she didn’t want to know. She didn’t care. She’d done her job. I can’t wait to tell Ella about this, she thought with a smile. Her ten-year-old daughter always loved to hear stories about her mother’s trips. Marssi predicted that this one—where she defeated one of the most brutal foes imaginable and also made an astounding new discovery—would quickly become Ella’s favorite.

  2

  THE GAMMA QUADRANT

  “THE COMMUNICATIONS ARRAY is now online, sir.”

  Commander Elias Vaughn didn’t smile at Nog’s report, but the lieutenant hadn’t really expected him to. In the month since Vaughn had been assigned as the first officer of Deep Space 9 and commanding officer of the U.S.S. Defiant, Nog had seldom seen the human smile while on duty.

  But when the young Ferengi turned to look at Vaughn in the Defiant’ s command chair, he did notice a slight curling of Vaughn’s lips under his gray-and-silver beard.

  Vaughn turned toward the bridge’s port side. “ Excellent work, gentlemen,” he said to Nog and the Andorian sitting at the console to Nog’s right.

  Ensign Thirishar ch’Thane didn’t smile, either, but Nog had learned to read the young science officer’s facial features well enough to see that he, too, was pleased with himself. Nog and Shar had spent the last week going over every square millimeter of the communications array, and they were quite proud of the work they’d done.

  Now, at last, everything appeared to be ready to go.

  “Address intership, please, Lieutenant,” Vaughn said to Nog.

  Nog couldn’t resist smiling as he complied. “Yes, sir. Intership open.”

  “Attention all hands, this is Commander Vaughn. Starfleet’s primary mission has always been one of exploration. Over seven years ago, Benjamin Sisko and Jadzia Dax discovered a stable wormhole in the Denorios Belt, one which opened the door to an entire quadrant of new worlds for us to seek out. Five years ago, Starfleet, Bajoran, and Cardassian personnel worked together to install a subspace array on the Gamma Quadrant side of the wormhole to provide communication between the quadrants. Unfortunately, that array did not survive the hostilities of the Dominion War—a war that, sadly, also closed the door that Benjamin Sisko opened.

  “But the war’s over now. And thanks to efforts by the crew of the Defiant and Deep Space 9, a new communications array has been successfully deployed and is now online. As of this moment . . . we’re back in the Gamma Quadrant.”

  Nog’s smile broadened, and he drummed his hands against the edge of his console in applause. At conn, Ensign Prynn Tenmei clapped, and Lieutenant Sam Bowers at tactical let out a celebratory whoop. Over the com system, Nog could hear other expressions of jubilation from all over the ship.

  Looks like we’re finally putting the war behind us, Nog thought with satisfaction. The repairs and upgrades to the station and the Defiant had been completed, and now the communications array was up and running—the prelude to the Defiant’ s upcoming mission of exploration to the Gamma Quadrant. Things were finally starting to get back to normal.

  Shar, meanwhile, had turned back to his console. “All systems are functional, and the silithium receptors are aligned. We’re ready to send our first message to DS9, Commander.”

  “Very well,” Vaughn said, standing and walking toward the viewscreen. “Open a channel and transmit the following: ‘Watson, I need you.’ ”

  Shar’s antennae lowered slightly. “Sir?”

  Vaughn’s lips curled again. “Old joke. A human one, so Colonel Kira won’t get it, either. Send the message please, Ensign.”

  Shar nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  After a moment, Colonel Kira Nerys’s sharp voice sounded crisply through the speakers. “Who the hell is Watson?”

  “Excellent,” Shar said, letting out a breath. Then he muttered some kind of supplication to the Andorian deity.

  I guess he wasn’t sure it was going to work, Nog thought with a smile. Nog, on the other hand, had known in his lobes that the array would function just fine.

  “Old joke,” Vaughn repeated. “Just a little test, Colonel. The new array seems to have passed it.”

  “Glad to hear it. Your timing is perfect. Get back over here right away, Commander. We have a meeting with Admiral Ross in half an hour.”

  Nog’s lobes pricked up at that, and he felt a phantom twinge in the biosynthetic that had replaced his left leg, lost in the war. Ross had been the commander of Starfleet’s forces agai
nst the Dominion. They’d already had one near-miss with renegade Jem’Hadar trying to start hostilities again.

  The war’s supposed to be behind us, dammit.

  “Starfleet’s declared a state of emergency,” Kira went on to say, “we’ve received a distress call from Europa Nova, and both the Tcha’voth and the Makluan have been recalled.”

  Nog frowned at that. Those two ships had been posted to Deep Space 9 by the Klingons and Romulans, respectively, to bolster the station’s defense, along with the Defiant.

  “I want you to go to yellow alert. We’re doing the same on the station.”

  “Acknowledged,” Vaughn said, calmly sitting back down in the command chair. “We’ll be back at the station in ten minutes. Defiant out.” He turned to tactical. “Signal yellow alert please, Lieutenant Bowers. All hands to general quarters.” Looking forward, he said, “Ensign Tenmei, set course for the wormhole, full impulse.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tenmei said, and Nog noticed, not for the first time, the change to the ensign’s voice that occurred every time she had to address Vaughn. It was subtle—a slight alteration in timbre that only a Ferengi would notice, but it happened only with the commander.

  Although it had become common knowledge among the crew that Prynn was Vaughn’s (apparently) estranged daughter—Uncle Quark had hardly been been able to contain the information once he’d found out—Nog wondered what the source of that estrangement was. Generally, Tenmei was friendly and outgoing off duty—Nog had even talked her into trying a tube grub in the mess hall yesterday. (Like most humans, she didn’t have the stomach for it and spat it back out.) On duty she was an exceptional pilot and a consummate professional, and apart from that slight shift in her voice that no one else seemed to notice, there was no obvious indication that she had any issues with Vaughn at all. And yet . . . Nog was certain there was something there, something that made him wonder if the Defiant bridge didn’t have a serious problem on the horizon.

  As the Defiant came about, Nog’s thoughts changed course as well and he turned to Shar. “I told you we could do it.”

  Shar was hunched over his console, making sure that the automatic settings on the array were running properly so that it would continue to function after the Defiant was out of range. “I never doubted it.”

  “Oh really? Who was the one who thought the alignment of the subspace antenna was wrong?”

  “That was me,” Shar admitted.

  “Who was the one who said that we’d need twice as many flux capacitors as we actually did need?”

  “That was me, too.”

  “Who was the one—”

  Shar finally looked up, brushing a lock of his coarse white hair off his face. “Nog, just because I was critical of some details doesn’t mean I doubted that we’d get the array online.”

  “Hah. You say that now.”

  “Yes, and I would’ve said it then if someone had asked.”

  The young Ferengi chuckled and relaxed for the first time in a week. While no words to the effect had been spoken, Nog knew that no one was entirely sure about whether or not he and Shar could get the job done. After all, from the time the station was turned over to Bajoran and Starfleet control by the Cardassians, over seven years earlier, the responsibilities of science officer and chief of operations had belonged, respectively, to Jadzia Dax—a Trill scientist with three centuries’ and eight lifetimes’ worth of experience—and Miles O’Brien—a Starfleet veteran of over twenty years. They’d now been replaced by a recent— albeit brilliant—graduate of Starfleet Academy and a junior-grade lieutenant who owed his rank to battlefield commissions rather than full Academy experience. Nobody had forgotten that, when Chief O’Brien first took over, Nog was a child being arrested by Odo for stealing from the assay office.

  From the conn position, Tenmei said, “Entering the wormhole.”

  Nog looked down and made sure that all the ship’s systems were within expected parameters for a trip through the wormhole. Most of the time, they were, but more than one such trip had been fraught with danger, from Kira and Dr. Bashir’s unexpected jaunt to a parallel universe to the aliens who resided in the wormhole causing an entire Jem’Hadar fleet to vanish. Nog didn’t want something like that to happen to them now because he was too busy ribbing Shar to notice an anomalous reading.

  However, everything seemed to be fine. Nog set the viewscreen on his console to show the wormhole as they passed through it.

  For a long time, Nog had thought of the wormhole solely as the thing that brought Uncle Quark all the new business. Then it was something they talked about in school occasionally. But he’d never really looked at it until Jake Sisko dragged him to the catwalk over the Promenade to watch the wormhole open and close one afternoon. It was then that he truly started to appreciate it. He hadn’t admitted it to Jake—nor to anyone else—at the time, but it was the most glorious sight he’d ever seen, and he wanted to know more about it. Nog often suspected that that moment, when he found his mind flooded with questions about the wormhole, was probably the first step on his journey to the Academy and Starfleet.

  Studying the wormhole in school didn’t prepare him for seeing it, and seeing it didn’t remotely prepare him for what it was like to go through it.

  His studies told him that the streams of white and silver light were verteron particles and silithium streams and various other bits of particulate matter, but that only mattered to Nog when duty required it of him. Times like this, he liked to just sit back and watch the dance of lights as the ship shot through seventy thousand light-years in a matter of minutes.

  As they emerged from the Alpha Quadrant mouth of the wormhole into Bajoran space, Shar spoke up, apparently not willing to let the subject die just yet. “It’s actually quite intriguing the way you keep doing things that don’t match the specifications. Especially since you’re always right.”

  Nog chuckled. “Well, not always. But when I’m wrong, I’ve gotten very good at making it seem like it was what I meant to do all along. I met Captain Montgomery Scott recently, and he said something great.” Shar didn’t seem impressed by the namedropping, so Nog added, “You’ve heard of him, right?”

  “Oh, sure, I know Scotty,” Shar said.

  Nog felt his jaw drop open. “You call him ‘Scotty’? I don’t think I’d ever have the lobes to do that.”

  “My zhavey introduced us, and he insisted I use the nickname.”

  Nog shook his head. He kept forgetting that the unassuming young Andorian had a parent on the Federation Council. “Anyway, he said, ‘The established norms are just guidelines, and your job as an engineer is to find a better way around them.’ ”

  “That certainly sounds like Scotty.”

  From behind him, Nog heard Vaughn’s rock-steady voice say, “Deep Space 9, this is the Defiant requesting permission to dock.”

  “Granted,” came the reply from Selzner in ops.

  Something caught Shar’s attention on his console. “Commander, we’re getting a message from the array. It’s relaying something on a Federation civilian frequency from the Kar-telos system, just a few lightyears into the Gamma Quadrant.”

  “Put it on screen, please.”

  “It’s audio only, sir,” Shar said quickly.

  Vaughn looked over at Shar and fixed him with an intense, calm gaze that was as scary as anything Nog had ever seen. “Then put it on speakers, Ensign ch’Thane.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is Captain Monaghan of the Mars freighter Halloran. I need some help here. I was doing the Jovian run, and now—well, I think I’m in the Gamma Quadrant. I haven’t the first clue as to how I got here. Someone please help me!”

  “You said it was a civilian frequency, Ensign?” Vaughn asked Shar.

  Shar nodded.

  “That explains it, then. Open a channel.”

  Manipulating his console, Shar said, “Channel open.”

  “Freighter Halloran, this is Commander Elias Vaughn, first officer
of Deep Space 9. You are, in fact, in the Gamma Quadrant.”

  “How the hell did I wind up here?”

  “That’s a very fair question, Captain. I wish I had an answer for that. What I can tell you is that we will dispatch a runabout to your position right away and lead you back to DS9 through the Bajoran wormhole. Is that acceptable?”

  Captain Monaghan started to sound panicky. Nog’s sensitive ears noticed the change in the timbre of her voice, even over the communications system. “I guess so. Isn’t this where the Dominion came from?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it is.”

  “Should I be worried about the Jem’Hadar?”

  “No,” Vaughn said with calm confidence that Nog—remembering the recent attack on the station— didn’t share. “You’re quite safe, I can assure you. Nonetheless, we’ll dispatch the runabout immediately.”

  “Thanks, Commander.” Nog noticed that the timbre of her voice had changed again. Vaughn’s words had obviously reassured her. “Halloran out.”

  Vaughn turned to Bowers. “Lieutenant, when we dock, prepare the Sungari for departure and take it to the Kar-telos system.”

  Bowers nodded.

  Shar was staring at his panel. “How is it possible that a ship in the Terran system suddenly found itself in the Gamma Quadrant?”

  “Let’s hope, Ensign, that it relates to why we’re at yellow alert right now.”

  Nog frowned. “Why would we hope that, Commander?”

  This time, Vaughn’s hard stare was turned on Nog. “Because, Lieutenant, I’ve been through more Starfleet states of emergency than I care to count. And the last thing you want to have to do during one is split your focus.”

  3

  DEEP SPACE 9

  ELIAS VAUGHNHATED MEETINGS.

  Oh, he understood the need for them. There were times when such things were vital, and it was good for groups of people who worked together to gather regularly and keep each other abreast of their duties, lives, or anything else of import.