The Mist (14 page)

"And very few Klingons," Sotugh said.

"Fewer than a thousand," Sisko said. He looked at Sotugh and grinned. "And you know, they all have different facial features than you do."

"Bah," Sotugh said. "They left the Empire centuries ago. They are Klingon only by birth."

"Convinced now?" the Trill asked the Quilli.

The Quilli frowned, and its bristles moved forward. The frown was one of those expressions that made dangerous tiny creatures appear harmless and cute. Sisko was not fooled. "It is the first thing that has broken me out of the story's magic naturally broken me out, not interrupted it," it said, looking at the others. Then it stood again, and bowed slightly to Sisko. "But in each story, the teller is allowed one impossible thing. I will give you this one. Do not have any more."

Cap put a fist to his mouth and turned away, hiding a grin. Sotugh rolled his eyes.

Sisko nodded solemnly. "I'll do my best," he said.

"Obviously," I said to Jackson, "Captain Victor and Councillor Näna want to start a war between normal space and Mist space. We do not have time to discuss why. You and I need to call a truce between our forces. My people are running out of time."

Behind Jackson, the medical team helped the injured woman up. She was between them. They put their arms around her, and half carried her out of the brig. The remaining prisoners did not try to get away.

Jackson watched this, as I did, and then turned to me. "If you can return my belt," he said, "I can order a cease-fire."

I instructed the guard to do as Jackson asked, then release the others. I tapped my comm link. "Dax," I said. "Patch me through to Sotugh."

"Aye, Captain," she said.

One of the guards had left. The other still stood before the door. Jackson's people crowded near the barrier.

Then I heard Sotugh's voice over the comm link. "Go ahead, Sisko," he said.

"Cease hostilities," I said. "We have no fight with those on the station."

"Is this a trick, Sisko?" Sotugh said.

"If I had known you were doing this on the strength of one man's word," Sotugh said, "I would never have stopped the fighting."

Sisko had learned to take these interruptions as part of his story. He had taken, enjoyed, and swallowed a quick bite of jambalaya while Sotugh talked.

"Have you never taken a man on his honor before?" Sisko asked.

Sotugh scowled. "Human honor is a difficult concept, often debated among the Houses of the Empire."

"But it does exist," Sisko said.

"Sometimes," Sotugh conceded.

"This is not a trick," I said to Sotugh. "We have a much larger enemy and very little time to fight him. Meet me in Ops. We have a battle plan to discuss."

The guard had given Jackson his belt. He was using it to order a cease-fire.

There was a momentary pause, and then Sotugh said, "Bah, they have stopped fighting. There is no honor in killing men who do not fight. I will meet you."

I turned back to Jackson, who nodded to me. The worry lines on his face had eased slightly, and I realized he was a much younger man than I had initially thought. Young or not, he was clearly in control of his people.

"We need to figure out just what Captain Victor is up to," I said, "and then we need to stop him. But first, we are running out of time for my station. We must shift it back to real space. Do you know how we can do that?"

"With all of my ships destroyed," he said, "I don't think we can. Your station is going to be stuck in this space."

"Unacceptable," I said. "That is exactly what Captain Victor wants to happen, and we're not going to give it to him."

Fourteen

"BRAVO!" THE QUILLI said, clapping its tiny paws together.

"The story's not over, warthog," Sotugh said.

"It doesn't matter. I like tales of heroism and derring-do."

The Trill raised an eyebrow. "I take it that you have forgotten your disapproval."

"We may quibble about details," the Quilli said, "but quite frankly if the story's good, the details can be changed."

"You are going to sell this!" the Trill said.

"I never said that," the Quilli said, looking at Sisko, paws out as if it were shrugging its tiny shoulders. "I'm merely trying to help the captain here with his tale."

The Trill shook his head. "Don't trust a Quilli. Make sure it pays you something before it leaves. Believe me, it'll make a profit off you otherwise."

Sotugh's scowl grew. "The warthog seems to be fairly unpredictable. We will wait until Sisko is done before we will discover if this story meets the warthog's ideas of 'derring-do.' "

"You don't think it will?" Sisko asked him.

Sotugh shook his head. "The warthog is a little tiny creature covered with poisoned darts. Who knows what will please it?"

"It would please it to continue with the story," the Quilli said.

Cap actually laughed.

Sisko only smiled, and complied.

Jackson and I beamed into Ops to discover that the smoke had cleared, the fires were out, and my crew was hard at work repairing the station. Chief O'Brien was on his back near some fried paneling, his hands covered with soot as he worked.

Major Kira had not bothered to clean the dirt off her face or fix the sleeve of her uniform; she was sitting at her station, seeing what parts of Deep Space Nine were still on-line. From one of the comm links, I heard Security Chief Odo's voice growling about looters, but I could not tell to whom he was talking.

It did not matter. At this moment, we had to take care of the station.

As Jackson and I stepped off the transporter pad, Kira saw us. She raised a phaser so quickly that I did not see her hand move.

"Captain!" she said. "Stand aside. That's one of the men we were fighting."

"I know, Major," I said. "You can put your weapon down. Jackson and I have discovered a common cause."

Kira put down her phaser, but she narrowed her eyes in her "this had better be good" look.

I ignored it. "Major, I need a status report."

She sighed, knowing that I would not answer her unasked question immediately. She glanced at O'Brien. Except for a brief moment to observe the verbal altercation, he did not look away from his work.

"We'll have shields up in five minutes," she said. "Weapons are going to take another ten."

"She did a good job sabotaging the place," O'Brien muttered. He did not sound pleased.

"As she was ordered to do," I said. "Just put it back together as soon as you can. But the weapons are now our first priority."

"Captain, the shields"

"I understand, Major," I said. "But the situation has changed. We need those weapons and we need them now."

"Yes, sir," Kira said.

O'Brien rolled away from the panel he was working on. Without bothering to close it, he moved to another, pulled it open, and started to work there.

At that moment Captain Higginbotham beamed onto the transporter pad. Higginbotham is a tall man who looks no different than he did when we were at the Academy together except for the silver threading his dark wiry curls.

He wrinkled his nose at the stench of fried circuitry. "Remind me when I need a good saboteur to hire Major Kira," he said as he stepped off the pad.

"The situation has changed, Paul," I said.

"I gathered that when I saw the ships," he said. He nodded at Jackson, who did not nod back.

Then the turbolift clanged into place. The unusual sound made O'Brien lift his head from his work. Sotugh, his uniform covered with two phaser burns, stepped off.

"Four," Sotugh said. "Four phaser burns, Sisko. We were having a glorious pitched battle on the Promenade until you cut it off."

"Excuse me," Sisko said, not willing to quibble over details, although he was convinced he had only seen two phaser burns, "four phaser burns. No matter how you looked, we can agree on what you said."

"I said, 'Your explanation had better be a good one,' " Sotugh said.

"And I did not answer you immediately."

"No, you did not."

"Instead I turned to Major Kira."

"Are the sensors working?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," she said. "I didn't see any point in sabotaging those."

I moved over to a nearby panel and keyed in the main screen showing the scene outside. The Cardassians were still holding their positions near the wormhole but now there were at least a dozen Galor-class warships.

"A Klingon fleet of six will be here in less than thirty minutes," I said. "Three Federation starships will also be here by that point."

"It will be a glorious battle," Sotugh said.

"Yes," I said. "But it will be a fight staged by Captain Victor and the Mist. And I, for one, don't like fighting other people's battles."

"Staged?" Sotugh said.

I switched the screen to show the fleet of Mist ships now surrounding Captain Victor's ship half a light-year away. There were at least thirty, maybe more.

"Grey Squadron," Jackson said, staring at the screen with a look of shock. "I've never seen or heard of more than two in one place before."

"Grey Squadron?" Higginbotham asked.

Jackson half swallowed, then nodded without taking his gaze from the main screen. His eyes were touched with a hint of fear. "The Grey Squadron is made up of the only fully armed Mist ships. They've functioned as a sort of police force for centuries, keeping the peace among the hundreds of systems."

"Hundreds of systems?" Higginbotham asked, glancing sharply at me.

"Armed with what?" Sotugh demanded.

Jackson only shrugged. "No one really knows."

"Oh," I said, "Captain Victor knows. And our problem is that we must capture one of those ships within thirty minutes or we're not returning to normal space."

"What?" Major Kira said.

"Explain yourself," Sotugh demanded.

"Yes," Higginbotham said. "It seems there is a lot we haven't heard."

"I was beginning to think that I was the one who had been tricked," Sotugh said. "By you."

Sisko nodded. "I can understand that. You certainly were not set up to trust the Federation at that point in our histories. It is to your credit that you helped us and did not abandon everything at that point."

"I still think you are too gullible," Sotugh said, obviously pleased at Sisko's compliment.

"I think events were transpiring too fast to proceed on anything other than gut instinct," Sisko said.

"If I had done that, Sisko," Sotugh said, "I would have taken over your station myself."

Sisko shrugged and sipped his Jibetian ale. "That only proves my point, Sotugh. Events were transpiring too fast for us to do much more than stay ahead of them."

It took me a few short minutes to brief Captains Sotugh and Higginbotham, Major Kira, and Chief O'Brien.

"It seems that our focus," Higginbotham said, after I finished, "is to get a device under our control to shift us back to normal space. We shift the station first to get it out of here, and to forestall any problems in our space. Then we shift our ships back momentarily to buy more time."

"A good idea," Sotugh said.

"I think it's critical," I said, "that we don't let the station fall into Captain Victor's hands."

"And from the looks of those Cardassian ships," Major Kira said, "the station needs to be in normal space to stop a war."

I glanced at the screen. There were now more than a dozen Cardassian privateer ships near the wormhole and the number seemed to be growing by the minute. I turned to Jackson. "Do you have any other ships close by with the ability to shift?"

"Every starship has the shift device hooked to its warp drive," Jackson said. "But the closest ship would take an hour to get here, if it could get through the Grey Squadron."

"That's too long," I said.

"What about the debris?" Chief O'Brien asked Jackson.

"I don't understand," Jackson said, staring at the chief before glancing at me.

"Your ships," O'Brien said. "Is there any chance that one of the shift devices might have survived whatever blew them apart?"

Jackson glanced at the main screen, but none of the debris was visible. His entire face sagged. I knew that he saw not just debris, but the bodies of his crewmates. "One of them might have," he said after a moment. "They are well protected."

"Jackson, work with the chief to see what you can find." I turned to Captain Higginbotham and Sotugh. "If we end up fighting the Mist ships, we need to remember that they can beam through our shields."

"And more than likely shoot through, also," Higginbotham said.

"Five against thirty," Sotugh said. "I would welcome such odds if we had shields. Without shields, there is only stupidity in such a death."

"So we need to find a way to shield against their weapons," I said.

"You know," Higginbotham said, stroking his chin and staring out the screen at the Grey Squadron, "if they have such an advantage, how come they aren't pouring in here to destroy us?"

"The way that Victor has set things up so far," I said, "has been to allow Jackson to do the fighting for him. I suspect he believes we are still fighting. It doesn't matter to him, as long as we remain here past our time limit. Then we will be trapped in the Mist's space."

"At which point they come in, call us invaders, and destroy us," Higginbotham said.

"I would imagine that is Captain Victor's plan."

"A coward's plan," Sotugh said.

"Captain," Chief O'Brien said. "We've found one shift device intact."

"Excellent, Chief. Beam over to the Defiant and get it hooked up."

"Captain," Jackson said, and three of us turned to him. He grinned for the first time since I met him, an infectious look. No wonder he was an effective leader.

"Captain Sisko," he corrected. "With our device hooked up, your ship will not be able to transfer your space. It will only be able to transfer other objects."

I glanced at Higginbotham and Sotugh.

"In fact," Jackson went on," anything that has been in Mist space too long will stop the shift."

Higginbotham gave me a concerned look. Sotugh shook his head, as if this obstacle was yet another personal affront.