Destiny_ Gods Of Night Part 1

Destiny_ G.o.ds of Night.

by David MacK.

2373.

PROLOGUE.

It was a lifeless husk-its back broken, its skin rent, its mammoth form half buried in the shifting sands of a mountainous dune-and it was even more beautiful than Jadzia Dax remembered.

Her second host, Tobin Dax, had watched the Earth starship Columbia NX-02 leave its s.p.a.cedock more than two hundred years earlier, on what no one then had realized would be its final mission; Tobin had directed the calibration of its starboard warp coils. A pang of sad nostalgia colored Jadzia's thoughts as she stood on the grounded vessel's bow and gazed at its shattered starboard nacelle, which had buckled at its midpoint and lay partially reclaimed by the dry waves of the desert.

Engineers from Defiant swarmed over the primary hull of the Columbia. They took tricorder readings in between shielding their faces from the scouring lash of a sand-laced sirocco. Behind them lay the delicate peaks of a desolate landscape, a vista of wheat-colored dunes shaped by an unceasing tide of anabatic winds, barren and lonely beneath a blanched sky.

Jadzia counted herself lucky that Captain Sisko had been willing to approve another planetary survey so soon after she had accidentally led them into peril on Gaia, where eight thousand lives had since been erased from history on a lover's capricious whim. Though the crew was eager to return to Deep s.p.a.ce 9 as quickly as possible, Dax's curiosity was always insatiable once aroused, and a flicker of a sensor reading had drawn her to this unnamed, uninhabited planet.

A sudden gust whipped her long, dark ponytail over her shoulder. She swatted it away from her face as she squinted into the blinding crimson flare of the rising suns. Adding to the brightness was a shimmer of light with a humanoid shape, a few meters away from her. The high-pitched drone of the transporter beam was drowned out by a wailing of wind in minor chords. As the sound and shine faded away, the silhouette of Benjamin Sisko strode toward her across the buckled hull plates.

"Quite a find, Old Man," he said, his mood subdued. Under normal circ.u.mstances he would have been elated by a discovery such as this, but the sting of recent events was too fresh and the threat of war too imminent for any of them to take much joy in it. He looked around and then asked, "How're things going?"

"Slowly," Dax said. "Our loadout was for recon, not salvage." She started walking and nodded for him to follow her. "We're seeing some unusual subatomic damage in the hull. Not sure what it means yet. All we know for sure is the Columbia's been here for about two hundred years." They reached the forward edge of the primary hull, where the force of impact had peeled back the metallic skin of the starship to reveal its duranium s.p.a.ceframe. There Defiant's engineers had installed a broad ramp on a shallow incline, because the ship's original personnel hatches were all choked with centuries of windblown sand.

As they descended into the ship, Sisko asked, "Have you been able to identify any of the crew?" Echoes of their footfalls were m.u.f.fled, trapped in the hollow beneath the ramp.

"We haven't found any bodies," Dax said, talking over the atonal cries of wind snaking through the Columbia's corridors. "No remains of any kind." Her footsteps sc.r.a.ped across grit-covered deck plates as she led him toward the ship's core.

A dusty haze in the air was penetrated at irregular angles by narrow beams of sunlight that found their way through the dark wreckage. As they moved farther from the spa.r.s.e light and deeper into the murky shadows of D Deck, Dax thought she saw brief flashes of bluish light, moving behind the bent bulkheads at the edges of her vision. When she turned her head to look for them, however, she found only darkness, and she dismissed the flickers as residual images fooling her retinas, as her eyes adapted to the darkness near the ship's core.

"Is it possible," Sisko asked, stepping over the curved obstacle of a collapsed bulkhead brace, "they abandoned ship and settled somewhere on the planet?"

"Maybe," Dax said. "But most of their gear is still on board." She pushed past a tangle of fallen cables and held it aside for Sisko as he followed her. "This desert goes on for nine hundred kilometers in every direction," she continued. "Between you and me, I don't think they'd have gotten very far with just the clothes on their backs."

"That's a good point, but I think it's moot," Sisko said as they rounded a curve into a length of corridor draped with cobwebs, and disturbed a thick brood of small but lethal-looking indigenous arthropods. The ten-legged creatures rapidly scurried into the cracks between the bulkheads and the deck. He and Dax continued walking. "I don't expect to find survivors from a two-hundred-year-old wreck, but I would like to know what an old Warp 5 Earth ship is doing in the Gamma Quadrant."

"That makes two of us," Dax said as they turned another corner toward a dead end, where Miles...o...b..ien hunched beneath a low-hanging tangle of wires and antiquated circuit boards-the remains of a control panel for the Columbia's main computer. "Chief," Dax called out, announcing their approach. "Any luck?"

"Not yet," said the stout engineer. His tightly cut, curly fair hair was matted with sweat and dust. The two officers stepped up behind him as he continued in his gruff Irish brogue, "It's a d.a.m.ned museum piece is what it is. Our tricorders can't talk to it, and I can't find an adapter in Defiant's databases that'll fit these inputs."

Sisko leaned in beside O'Brien, supporting himself with his right hand on the chief's left shoulder. Dax hovered behind O'Brien's right side. The captain stroked his wiry goatee once and said, "Are the memory banks intact?"

O'Brien started to chortle, then caught himself. "Well, they're here," he said. "Whether they work, who knows? I can't even power them up with the parts we have on hand."

Dax asked, "How long will it take to make an adapter?"

"Just for power?" O'Brien said. "Three hours, maybe four. I'd have to do some research to make it work with our EPS grid." He turned away from the Gordian knot of electronics to face Dax and Sisko. "Getting at its data's gonna be the real challenge. n.o.body's worked with a core like this in over a century."

"Give me a number, Chief," Sisko said. "How long?"

O'Brien shrugged. "A couple days, at least."

Sisko's jaw tightened, and the worry lines on his brown forehead grew deeper as he expressed his disapproval with a frown. "That's not the answer I was looking for," he said.

"Best I can do," O'Brien said.

With a heavy sigh and a slump of his shoulders, Sisko seemed to surrender to the inevitable. "Fine," he said. "Keep at it, Chief. Let us know if you make any progress."

"Aye, sir," O'Brien said, and he turned back to his work.

Dax and Sisko returned the way they'd come, and they were met at the intersection by Major Kira. The Bajoran woman had been in charge of the search teams looking for the crew's remains. Her rose-colored militia uniform was streaked with dark gray smears of dirt and grime, and a faint speckling of dust clung to her short, close-cropped red hair. "We finished our sweep," she said, her eyes darting nervously back down the corridor. "There's no sign of the crew, or anyone else."

"What about combat damage?" asked Sisko. "Maybe they were boarded and captured."

Kira shook her head quickly. "I don't think so. All the damage I saw fits with a crash-landing. There are no blast effects on the internal bulkheads, no marks from weapons fire. Whatever happened here, it wasn't a firefight." Nodding forward toward the route to the exit, she added, "Can we get out of here now?"

"What's wrong, Major?" asked Sisko, whose attention had sharpened in response to Kira's apparent agitation.

The Bajoran woman cast another fearful look down the corridor behind her and frowned as she turned back toward Sisko and Dax. "There's something in here," she said. "I can't explain it, but I can feel it." Glaring suspiciously at the overhead, she added, "There's a borhyas watching us."

Sisko protested, "A ghost?" As tolerant as he tried to be of Kira's religious convictions, he sometimes grew exasperated with her willingness to embrace superst.i.tion. "Are you really telling me you think this ship is haunted?"

"I don't know," Kira said, seemingly frustrated at having to justify her instincts to her friends. "But I heard things, and I felt the hairs on my neck stand up, and I keep seeing blinks of light in the dark-"

Dax cut in, "Blue flashes?"

"Yes!" Kira said, sounding excited by Dax's confirmation.

Sisko shook his head and resumed walking forward. "I've heard enough," he said. "Let's get back to Defiant."

Kira and Dax fell into step behind him, and they walked back into the compartment through which they had entered the Columbia. Sisko moved at a quickstep, and Dax had to work to keep pace with him as he headed for the ramp topside.

"Benjamin," Dax said, "I think we need to make a more detailed study of this ship. If I had a little more time, maybe the chief and I could find a way to use Defiant's tractor beams to lift the Columbia back to orbit and-" She was cut off by a chirping from Sisko's combadge, followed by Worf's voice.

"Defiant to Captain Sisko," Worf said over the comm.

Sisko answered without breaking stride. "Go ahead."

"Long-range sensors have detected two Jem'Hadar warships approaching this system," Worf said. "ETA nine minutes."

"Sound Yellow Alert and start beaming up the engineers," Sisko said as he climbed the ramp into the blaze of daylight. "Wait for my order to beam up the command team."

"Acknowledged," Worf replied. "Defiant out."

Back atop the crash-deformed hull, Sisko stopped and turned toward Dax. "Sorry, Old Man. The salvage has to wait."

Kira asked, "Should we plant demolitions?" Dax and Sisko reacted with confused expressions, prompting Kira to elaborate, "To prevent the Jem'Hadar from capturing the ship."

"I doubt they'll find much more than we did," Sisko said. "Columbia's over two hundred years old, Major-and technically, it's not even a Federation vessel." He lifted his arm to shade his eyes from the morning suns. "Besides, it's kept its secrets this long. I think we can leave it be."

Dax watched him walk away toward the apex of the primary hull. All around him, in groups of four or five, teams of engineers faded away in luminescent shimmers, transported back to the orbiting Defiant. The outline of Sisko's body dissolved in the suns' glare until the captain was just a stick figure in front of a sky of fire. Kira walked beside him on his right, as familiar and comfortable as someone who had always been there.

Sisko's voice emanated from Dax's combadge. "Command team, stand by to beam up."

The broken gray majesty of the Columbia lay beneath Dax's feet, an empty tomb harboring secrets untold. It pained her to abandon its mysteries before she'd had time to unravel them...but the Dominion was on the move, and war made its own demands.

2381.

1.

Captain Ezri Dax stood on the bow of the Columbia and made a silent wish that returning to the wreck wouldn't prove to be a mistake, at a time when Starfleet couldn't afford any.

Engineers and science specialists from her crew swarmed over the derelict Warp 5 vessel. Its husk was half interred by the tireless shifting of the desert, much as she had remembered it from her last visit, as Jadzia Dax, more than seven years earlier. The afternoon suns beat down with an almost palpable force, and shimmering waves of heat distortion rippled above the wreck's sand-scoured hull, which coruscated with reflected light. Dax's hands, normally cold like those of other joined Trill, were warm and slick with perspiration.

Lieutenant Gruhn Helkara, Dax's senior science officer on the Starship Aventine, ascended the ramp through the rent in the hull and approached her with a smile. It was an expression not often seen on the skinny Zakdorn's droop-ridged face.

"Good news, Captain," he said as soon as he was within polite conversational distance. "The converter's working. Leishman's powering up the Columbia's computer now. I thought you might want to come down and have a look."

"No thanks, Gruhn," Dax said. "I'd prefer to stay topside."

One of the advantages of being a captain was that Ezri no longer had to explain herself to her shipmates if she didn't want to. It spared her the potential embarra.s.sment of admitting that her walk-through of the Columbia earlier that day had left her profoundly creeped out. While touring D Deck, she'd been all but certain that she saw the same spectral blue flashes that had lurked along the edges of her vision seven years earlier.

To her silent chagrin, multiple sensor sweeps and tricorder checks had detected nothing out of the ordinary on the Columbia. Maybe it had been just her imagination or a trick of the light, but she'd felt the same galvanic tingle on her skin that Kira had described, and she'd been overcome by a desire to get out of the wreck's stygian corridors as quickly as possible.

She'd doubled the security detail on the planet but had said nothing about thinking the ship might be haunted. One of the drawbacks of being a captain was the constant need to maintain a semblance of rationality, and seeing ghosts didn't fit the bill-not one bit.

Helkara squinted at the scorched-white sky and palmed a sheen of sweat from his high forehead, up through his thatch of black hair. "By the G.o.ds," he said, breaking their long, awkward silence, "did it actually get hotter out here?"

"Yes," Dax said, "it did." She nodded toward the bulge of the ship's bridge module. "Walk with me." The duo strolled up the gentle slope of the Columbia's hull as she continued. "Where are you with the metallurgical a.n.a.lysis?"

"Almost done, sir. You were-" He caught himself. "Sorry. Jadzia Dax was right. We've detected molecular distortion in the s.p.a.ceframe consistent with intense subspatial stress."

Dax was anxious for details. "What was the cause?"

"Hard to be sure," Helkara said.

She frowned. "In other words, you don't know."

"Well, I'm not prepared to make that admission yet. I may not have enough data to form a hypothesis, but my tests have ruled out several obvious answers."

"Such as?"

"Extreme warp velocities," Helkara said as they detoured around a large creva.s.se where two adjacent hull plates had buckled violently inward. "Wormholes. Quantum slipstream vortices. Iconian gateways. Time travel. Oh, and the Q."

She sighed. "Doesn't leave us much to go on."

"No, it doesn't," he said. "But I love a challenge."

Dax could tell that he was struggling not to outpace her. His legs were longer than hers, and he tended to walk briskly. She quickened her step. "Keep at it, Gruhn," she said as they reached the top of the saucer. "Something moved this ship clear across the galaxy. I need to know what it was, and I need to know soon."

"Understood, Captain." Helkara continued aft, toward a gaggle of engineers who were a.s.sembling a bulky a.s.sortment of machinery that would conduct a more thorough a.n.a.lysis of the Columbia's bizarrely distressed subatomic structures.

Memories drifted through Ezri's thoughts like sand devils over the dunes. Jadzia had detailed the profound oddities that the Defiant's sensors had found in the Columbia's hull, and she had informed Starfleet of her theory that the readings might be a clue to a new kind of subspatial phenomenon. Admiral Howe at Starfleet Research and Development had a.s.sured her that her report would be investigated, but when the Dominion War erupted less than two months later, her call for the salvage of the Columbia had been sidelined-relegated to a virtual dustbin of defunct projects at Starfleet Command.

And it stayed there, forgotten for almost eight years, until Ezri Dax gave Starfleet a reason to remember it. The salvage of the Columbia had just become a priority for the same reason that it had been scuttled: there was a war on. Seven years ago the enemy had been the Dominion. This time it was the Borg.

Five weeks earlier the attacks had begun, bypa.s.sing all of the Federation's elaborate perimeter defenses and early warning networks. Without any sign of transwarp activity, wormholes, or gateways, Borg cubes had appeared in the heart of Federation s.p.a.ce and launched surprise attacks on several worlds. The Aventine had found itself in its first-ever battle, defending the Acamar system from eradication by the Borg. When the fighting was over, more than a third of the ship's crew-including its captain and first officer-had perished, leaving second officer Lieutenant Commander Ezri Dax in command.

One week and three Borg attacks later, Starfleet made Ezri captain of the Aventine. By then she'd remembered Jadzia's hypothesis about the Columbia, and she reminded Starfleet of her seven-year-old report that a Warp 5 ship had, in the roughly ten years after it had disappeared, somehow journeyed more than seventy-five thousand light-years-a distance that it would have taken the Columbia more than three hundred fifty years to traverse under its own power.

Ezri had a.s.sured Starfleet Command that solving the mystery of how the Columbia had crossed the galaxy without using any of the known propulsion methods could shed some light on how the Borg had begun doing the same thing. It had been a bit of an exaggeration on her part. She couldn't promise that her crew would be able to make a conclusive determination of how the Columbia had found its way to this remote, desolate resting place, or that there would be any link whatsoever to the latest series of Borg incursions of Federation s.p.a.ce. It had apparently taken the Columbia years to get here, while the Borg seemed to be making nearly instantaneous transits from their home territory in the Delta Quadrant. The connection was tenuous at best.

All Dax had was a hunch, and she was following it. If she was right, it would be a brilliant beginning for her first command. If she was wrong, this would probably be her last command.

Her moment of introspection was broken by a soft vibration and a melodious double tone from her combadge. "Aventine to Captain Dax," said her first officer, Commander Sam Bowers.

"Go ahead, Sam," she said.

He sounded tired. "We just got another priority message from Starfleet Command," he said. "I think you might want to take this one. It's Admiral Nechayev, and she wants a reply."

And the axe falls, Dax brooded. "All right, Sam, beam me up. I'll take it in my ready room."

"Aye, sir. Stand by for transport."

Dax turned back to face the bow of the Columbia and suppressed the dread she felt at hearing of Nechayev's message. It could be anything: a tactical briefing, new information from Starfleet Research and Development about the Columbia, updated specifications for the Aventine's experimental slipstream drive...but Dax knew better than to expect good news.

As she felt herself enfolded by the transporter beam, she feared that once again she would have to abandon the Columbia before making its secrets her own.

Commander Sam Bowers hadn't been aboard the Aventine long enough to know the names of more than a handful of its more than seven hundred fifty personnel, so he was grateful that Ezri had recruited a number of its senior officers from among her former crewmates on Deep s.p.a.ce 9. He had already accepted Dax's invitation to serve as her first officer when he'd learned that Dr. Simon Ta.r.s.es would be coming aboard with him, as the ship's new chief medical officer, and that Lieutenant Mikaela Leishman would be transferring from Defiant to become the Aventine's new chief engineer.

He tried not to dwell on the fact that their predecessors had all recently been killed in fierce battles with the Borg. Better to focus, he decided, on the remarkable opportunity this transfer represented.

The Aventine was one of seven new, experimental Vesta-cla.s.s starships. It had been designed as a multi-mission explorer, and its state-of-the-art weaponry made it one of the few ships in the fleet able to mount even a moderate defense against the Borg. Its sister ships were defending the Federation's core systems-Sol, Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar-while the Aventine made its jaunt through the Bajoran wormhole to this uninhabited world in the Gamma Quadrant, for what Bowers couldn't help but think of as a desperate long shot of a mission.

He turned a corner, expecting to find a turbolift, only to arrive at a dead end. It's not just the crew you don't know, he chided himself as he turned back and continued looking for the nearest turbolift junction. Three weeks aboard and you're still getting turned around on the lower decks. Snap out of it, man.

The sound of muted conversation led Bowers farther down the corridor. A pair of junior officers, a brown-bearded male Tellarite and an auburn-haired human woman, chatted in somber tones in front of a turbolift portal. The Tellarite glanced at Bowers and stopped talking. His companion peeked past him, saw the reason for his silence, and followed suit. Bowers halted behind the duo, who tried to appear casual and relaxed while also avoiding all eye contact with him.