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To Chris and Lynn Hoth, with thanks Historian’s Note This adventure takes place before the STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE episode “Battle Lines.” PART ONE CHAPTER 1 A CRY RANG through the engineering bay. “Lousy piece of Cardassian crap!” More words followed, in a vocabulary colorful enough to draw expressions of distaste from a Bajoran work crew nearby. Dressed in the drab gray of one of their planet’s more puritanical sects, they hadn’t yet become used to the rougher edges of station life. Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien, still cursing, emerged from a thrust-device compartment’s access port. Blood threaded from the corner of his brow, gashed on one of the gantry chains running taut to the vessel’s exposed innards. It was only slightly redder than his sweating face. “Is there some difficulty you have encountered?” O’Brien’s Cardassian counterpart inquired with mock solicitude. Behind him, curved panels of ship’s armor hung in the bay’s depths like brutalist stage scenery. “If you will recall, I warned you that working on our equipment was a matter best left to experts—” “No difficulty; nothing that I can’t handle, that is.” He looked at the blood smeared on the rag he’d taken from his pocket. The wound was minor enough; a typical machine-shop accident that he could safely ignore for the time being. It was much harder to ignore the thin smile on the Cardassian engineer’s face. If lizards could grin—a major effort of self-control was required to keep from decking this one. “I just need the right tools.” He turned and headed toward the bay’s heavy equipment locker, ducking beneath the power cables looping overhead. A satisfying expression of alarm showed in the Cardassian engineer’s eyes when O’Brien came back. “What . . . what do you think you’re doing . . . ” It was his turn to smile. He pressed the joystick on the control box in his hands; behind him, the ponderous articulated device that had followed him out of the locker clumped forward, the steel deck clanging at each step. “I’ve been here long enough to be plenty familiar with the quality of Cardassian construction.” He deliberately steered the jacksledge so that the uplifted striking weight clipped one of the bay’s structural girders; the resulting shock wave came close to knocking the Cardassian off his feet. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that your stuff responds to an old Earthly engineering principle—If it doesn’t fit, use a bigger hammer.” “You’ve gone mad—” The Cardassian scrambled out of the way as the device swung toward the drydocked vessel. “This . . . this is impossible. . . .” Hammers didn’t come any bigger than the jacksledge. O’Brien and the rest of the DS9 tech crew had cobbled it together for smashing through whatever interior sections of the station had collapsed so badly that only brute force could clear a path. The striking weight was loaded with enough depleted fission material to punch a humanoid-sized hole between one deck and the next. Now, it followed O’Brien like a puppy on a leash as he clambered inside the open thrust-device compartment. The jacksledge’s servo-mechs allowed it to delicately pick its way into the space, the massive legs settling between the thrust chamber and the surrounding bulkhead. The Cardassian engineer’s face appeared at the rim of the access port. He had recovered enough to begin blustering. “The use of this device is totally uncalled-for—” His voice echoed off the chamber’s wall towering above O’Brien’s head. “This is a complete violation of the operational protocols agreed to by the administration of this station . . . it cannot be done—” “Bet me.” O’Brien thumbed the trigger button on the control box, and the striking weight swung through an arc close enough that he heard the rush through the air. The last he heard was the jacksledge hitting the bulkhead like the clapper of a monstrous bell. When the diaphragms inside his protective ear inserts opened up again, he could hear the ringing of the dented metal, and cutting through that, the ululating wail of the vessel’s security alarms going off. He eyeballed the effect the hammer blow had made upon the bulkhead. If anything, the freight hauler wasn’t crap, but rather, overengineered for the research purposes to which it had been converted. It would take another dozen blows, at least, to bend the metal for enough clearance; then the buffer shields could finally be lowered into place. The alarms didn’t shut off, but grew louder instead, shrieking from the violated core of the vessel. Before readying the jacksledge for another swing, O’Brien glanced out the access port and saw the Cardassian engineer running for the loading doors—whether from terror or to summon help, he couldn’t tell. The Bajorans looked up from the eyepieces of the assembly bench. They weren’t so puritanical, he noted, as to be able to resist smiling at the Cardassian’s discomfiture. “Let’s get a few more in.” He patted the closest of the jacksledge’s legs. “Before anybody comes to stop us.” After the DS9 security team had taken away the chief engineer—the head of security himself had snapped the hand restraints on—the Bajorans glanced around at each other. Events did not usually get so dramatic in the engineering bay. “He seems a decent enough man.” One laid down the delicate tools and flexed his cramped fingers. “This O’Brien—he has not been ungracious toward us.” A few of the others nodded in agreement. They had all expected the chief engineer to have greeted them with hostility, to have impeded their being made part of the station’s construction and retrofitting operations; O’Brien had been forced to take them on as part of an agreement hammered out between the station’s commander and the government authorities down on the surface of Bajor. But if O’Brien had not been exactly overjoyed by their arrival, he had at least been fair to them since. Another of the crew pushed aside his magnifying optic. “I will admit that, when the great time comes, I may even miss him. A bit . . . ” The sympathetic comments were more than the group’s leader could take. None but the other Bajorans knew that he was in charge of their spiritual and moral welfare, charged with shielding them from the temptations to be found among the heathens. He bore no mark that would have indicated his hidden rank to the Starfleet officers. It was just one more thing of which they were unenlightened. “Perhaps,” he said coldly, “in your devotions you could strive to remember why we’re here; the purpose behind our coming to this place.” The leader cast a stern gaze around the assembly bench. The others, suitably chastened, looked down at the glittering components of their labors. “I only meant—” The first who had spoken, the youngest of the group, now made an attempt to defend himself. “Just that there’s surely no harm in being on good terms with the man. That’s all.” “Ah . . . harm.” The leader nodded, making a show of mulling over the word. “As if our people hadn’t suffered enough of that, already. From just such creatures as this chief engineer of whom you seem so fond.” His own words lashed out, before the other could protest. “It doesn’t matter that he’s not a Cardassian. He, as well as all the rest of them, is still an outsider. They are not Bajoran.” Silence wrapped itself around the group. None of them could raise his eyes to meet the harsh gaze of the leader. “From now on—” He spoke softly, having vanquished all opposition. “Keep company only with your brethren, and you will be shielded from falling into error.” No one spoke. One by one, they picked up their delicate tools and resumed their work. He could hear them coming up the corridor outside his office—even with the door closed. For Benjamin Sisko, that was one of the unforeseen advantages of the Deep Space Nine station’s ramshackle state of construction. Aboard the Enterprise, or any of the other Starfleet vessels, acoustic isolation between one sector and another, between the public spaces and the private compartments, was total; you didn’t know who might be at your door until they announced their presence. Here, however, the ringing of footsteps on bare metal, the echoing of raised voices against the walls—all came clearly to him. Which gave him time, if only a few seconds, to put on his game face, the mask of calm authority that everyone expected from the station’s commander. “ . . . sabotage . . . blatant sabotage. On my world, that is a capital offense. . . .” One voice had the grating tones of a Cardassian officer, the combination of overweening arrogance and innate hostility, without which all of them seemed unable to even order a drink in one of the station’s lounges. From the sound of it, this one seemed to have been pushed from me...
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