Chapter Text
USS Bluefin
Sector 21509
Alliance Occupied Cardassian Territory
“Code One-Alpha-Zero!” Commander Inga Strauss announced from where she examined the Ops board over Lt. Commander T’Ser’s shoulder. “Ship in distress.”
Captain Joseph B. Akinola sat forward in his command chair, suddenly imbued with a sense of urgency after days of relative quietude on patrol in occupied Cardassian space. “Specifics,” he ordered.
T’Ser answered promptly. “It’s from the starship Gibraltar, sir. Records show she’s currently tasked to escort duty, one of four ships sitting watchdog on a convoy of freighters bearing relief supplies to Cardassian colonies in Sector 21508.”
Strauss resumed her seat to initiate a level-four diagnostic on all ship’s defensive systems. “Stats on Gibraltar?” she inquired of T’Ser.
The Vulcan quirked a dubious eyebrow as the starship’s information scrolled across her display. “Constitution-class, ma’am, reactivated and refit during the war. Moderate armament, maximum speed rated at Warp 8.2.”
“Can you say ‘sitting duck?’ muttered Senior Chief Solly Brin, a burly red-skinned Orion, from his seat at an auxiliary station aft.
“What’s her situation?” Akinola pressed.
T’Ser delved into the encoded substrate of the distress call, decipherable only to those in possession of the proper Starfleet encryption matrices. “It appears she was sent to investigate a suspicious distress call from a Kriosian freighter in the E’Mdifarr Belt some point-seven lightyears off the convoy’s course.” She paused, gleaning additional information from the brief text message. T'Ser turned to fix a serious look on the captain. “They’ve been ambushed, sir. At present, they’re fighting four ships that look to be cargo haulers modified for combat, and a number of smaller fighters and corsairs.”
“Set an intercept course for those coordinates at maximum warp and engage,” Akinola ordered, watching the starfield on the main viewer shift as the Albacore-class Border Cutter came about and engaged her faster-than-light engines. “Then send an encrypted burst message… let them know we’re on our way.”
“Aye, sir,” T’Ser acknowledged as she carried out the order. She glanced back at Akinola. “Sir, what about their fellow convoy escort ships? Wouldn’t they be able to respond more quickly?”
Akinola nodded somberly. "They could, Commander, but they won’t. Gibraltar is likely buying time for the convoy to get away. That’s their job.”
“Bait, sir?”
“Precisely, Mister T’Ser.”
*****
USS Gibraltar
E’Mdifarr Asteroid Belt, E’Mdifarr system
Sector 21508
Alliance Occupied Cardassian Territory
“Shields down to fifty-three percent!” shouted Master Chief Tark from the Tactical station over the crash of another barrage against Gibraltar’s shields.
“Helm, tighter turns,” Captain Donald Sandhurst urged from the command chair as he watched the starship slalom between enormous chunks of asteroid debris that loomed large in the viewer.
They had come to the asteroid belt in response to a distress call from a freighter claiming to be under attack by insurgent vessels. Though suspicious that an emergency should occur so close to the path of the convoy, the crew had at first sensed nothing out of the ordinary as the handful of armed shuttles attacking the freighter scattered upon their arrival.
But as soon as Commander Ramirez’s away team had beamed over to assist, all hell had broken loose. The damaged freighter had been a ruse. In fact, the ship had been retrofit to carry capital weapons and shield generators, making the humble looking cargo hauler into a formidable warship.
The supposedly routed fighters had returned with a vengeance, accompanied by three more of the faux-freighters, a force clearly capable of inflicting great damage on the unsuspecting convoy. So, the Gibraltar had fled deeper into the asteroid field to draw the pirate vessels into a pursuit. As long as they were busy chasing the starship, the convoy was safe.
“Communications?” Sandhurst asked.
“Still being jammed,” answered Lt. Commander Pell Ojana, the ship’s Bajoran second officer and diplomatic specialist.
As he looked over to his young science officer, Sandhurst inquired, “Status of the IFEW?”
The tall, ebony skinned Zulu, Ensign Kuenre Shanthi, clung to his console as Ensign Brett Lightner’s wild maneuvering at the helm pushed the inertial dampeners to their limits. Shanthi finally found his voice and answered, “The Ionization Field Effect Weapon is primed and ready for deployment, Captain.”
“Good, let’s just make sure all our new friends are in close proximity when we set it off.”
From Ops, Lieutenant(j.g.) Olivia Juneau piped up, “Two of the freighters are lagging behind, sir. We’ll have to either slow down or double back to maneuver them in range of the device.”
“Mister Lightner, hook us around smartly. A one-hundred eighty degree turn beneath that big monster bearing 173-mark-008,” Sandhurst commanded.
Lightner beamed like a kid in a candy store as he responded in the affirmative and threw the old workhorse into a tight turn, utilizing the gravitational field of the asteroid to sling-shot the starship back in the opposite direction of their pursuers.
As Tark lay down a fusillade of photon torpedo and phaser fire, Juneau opened the aft shuttlebay doors to expose the large cylindrical device in its launch cradle that now monopolized most of the bay’s space.
*****
Kriosian-flagged freighter SS Draskaar
E’Mdifarr Asteroid Belt, E’Mdifarr system
Sector 21508
Alliance Occupied Cardassian Territory
Gibraltar’s away team sat in sullen silence, held at gunpoint by members of the freighter’s crew. Two humans and a Zaranite kept watch over the Starfleeters as the freighter shuddered under fire from the starship as well as the stress of high-g maneuvers within the asteroid field.
“This could have gone better,” Commander Liana Ramirez announced definitively but quietly. The first officer's small frame was nearly dwarfed by the enormous Bolian lieutenant seated next to her on the deck of the cargo bay.
They had been surrounded and captured almost instantaneously upon beaming onboard the supposedly stricken cargo ship. Their captors, whoever they were, had done an admirable job of feigning damage through the creative use of localized subspace fields and thoron emissions.
On the other side of Ramirez sat the Gibraltar’s El-Aurian chief security/tactical officer. He wasn’t a big man, but he was whipcord lean and much stronger than he appeared. He took the opportunity to lean in towards the XO with an ironic smirk gracing his deceptively youthful features. “Excuse me, sir, but would this be a bad time to reflect on how your security chief voted for transporting a recon drone over prior to beaming in?”
Ramirez scratched idly at her temple with her middle finger. "Cork it, Pava,” she offered in a subdued voice.
“I'm merely attempting to offer real-time feedback on potentially hazardous courses of action implemented by the XO, sir.”
Ramirez rolled her eyes as the ship’s chief medical officer, Lieutenant(j.g.) Issara Taiee struggled to suppress a grin despite the seriousness of their situation.
“We can’t just sit here, Commander,” rumbled the large Bolian engineer, Ashok.
“For the time being, Lieutenant, we don't have much choice in the matter,” Ramirez sighed.
“Enough talking!” barked one of their jailers, emphasizing his point by waving the barrel of his Klingon disruptor rifle at the group.
She and the others obligingly fell silent, all of them still contemplating some kind of escape strategy.
The ship rocked again, the sensation accompanied by the screech and hollow thump of a hull breach somewhere nearby. Their ears all popped simultaneously as the compartment experienced a brief yet telling change in atmospheric pressure.
A moment later, an Andorian in smudged coveralls walked briskly into the compartment, escorted by two more armed humans. He regarded the captured Starfleet personnel coolly and asked, “Which one of you is the engineer?”
Ashok began to rise and was startled when Lar’ragos jumped to his feet. “That’d be me.”
The Andorian looked at Lar’ragos skeptically, then gestured to Ashok. “Then why is he getting up?”
“Him?” Lar’ragos looked to the Bolian. “Look at him, the big bruiser’s the security officer. He’s just trying to protect me. Man can’t tell the difference between a spanner and a plasma-torch.”
Ashok reluctantly resumed his seat, and Ramirez patted his arm in silent encouragement.
Lar’ragos offered the XO a discrete wink as he turned back toward the Andorian, whom he presumed to be the freighter’s engineer. “Can I have my equipment?”
The Andorian looked to one of the guards and dispatched the man to collect the engineering kit Ashok had brought over. He held on to the briefcase-sized kit himself and gestured for Lar’ragos to follow, flanked by the two armed men.
They moved down a narrow, dimly lit corridor, and the four arrived at a dilapidated looking turbolift car. As they entered the turbocar, the Andorian stepped to the side to allow Lar’ragos and his escorts room. The Andorian thought idly that it was strange for the Starfleet engineer to be wearing a disturbing little smile.
“What’s so damn funny?” the Andorian asked hotly as the doors slid closed.
Lar’ragos said nothing, but his eyes narrowed and the smile grew wider.
*****
USS Bluefin
En route to Sector 21508, Warp 9.2
Alliance Occupied Cardassian Territory
With over an hour before their rendezvous with the besieged Gibraltar, Akinola had moved to his ready room in an attempt to gauge the likelihood that Bluefin would find survivors upon their arrival.
He was no longer a young man, and though still quite physically fit, more than a bit of grey had found its way into his tightly curled hair. He was of Terran African descent, tall and well built. Akinola cut an imposing figure, due as much to his height as his bearing. Originally an enlisted man in Starfleet, Akinola had eventually risen to the rank of Senior Chief before pursuing his officer's commission. His entire career had been spent among the 'Border Dogs,' Starfleet's overworked and unappreciated red-headed stepchild, the Border Service.
If Starfleet could be considered the Federation’s navy, the Border Service was akin to the Coast Guard. They patrolled the borders and internal space-lanes, safeguarding commercial traffic, tending comms relays and navigation buoys, and generally keep the peace, freeing Starfleet to engage in its mandates of exploration and humanitarian assistance.
Akinola took a seat at his desk and called up the general specs of the old Connie. He reflected that Starfleet had done an admirable job in restoring the ship, taking so much time in fact that she’d slipped from her drydock moorings only after the end of the Dominion War.
Her senior officers’ records indicated that her captain, Sandhurst, had been an engineer of some renown who had somehow been talked into accepting a captaincy. That was the thing about long wars, Akinola mused, they created many opportunities for upward mobility through the ranks. He scanned the bullet points of the Gibraltar’s recent history and noted that though Sandhurst had occupied the center seat for less than a year, his ship was already gaining a reputation for finding itself in the eye of the storm. Sandhurst had cut his teeth on the fiasco at the Cardassian colony of Lakesh in the Crolsa system, and had then followed months of routine escort missions by joining up with Jean-Luc Picard’s ill-fated mission of mercy into the Briar Patch.
Despite their widely divergent career paths, Akinola felt a growing sense of kinship for the man who, like him, commanded what many saw as an outdated vessel fated to carry out the kinds of mundane missions that nonetheless kept the Federation functioning.
He switched off his terminal and Akinola vowed that if at all possible, he would deliver Sandhurst and his crew safely from this most recent trouble. ‘We old bucket captains have to stick together, after all.’
*****
Kriosian-flagged freighter SS Draskaar
E’Mdifarr Asteroid Belt, E’Mdifarr system
Sector 21508
Alliance Occupied Cardassian Territory
The doors parted to reveal a scene of absolute carnage. Lar’ragos limped out of the turbocar, holding a rifle in each hand. His face was cut, bruised, and bleeding, but the smile remained. He spat wetly to dislodge the severed Andorian antennae that had been clutched in his teeth.
He emerged from the shadows behind the three guards that remained watching over the away team members. Lar’ragos would rather have incapacitated their captors, but the weapons he held had no stun setting and he dare not give them the opportunity to alert the rest of the ship. He was also in no shape for another physical confrontation, the savage brawl in the confines of turbolift having left him with significant injuries.
Lar'ragos triggered both rifles simultaneously and sent streams of pulsed plasma into the backs of two of the men, turning both into smoking piles of charred flesh and fragmented bone.
The third guard spun around as he raised his own weapon. Ramirez took the opportunity to sweep the man's legs with her own, which sent him crashing to the deck where he was quickly incapacitated by Ramirez, Ashok, and Petty Officer Dunleavy of the security detail.
As she rose to her feet, Ramirez caught one of the rifles out of the air as Lar’ragos threw it to her. She looked over the El-Aurian and took note of his injuries as she shook her head in a mixture of disbelief and resignation. “Do I want to know, Pava?”
“Almost certainly not, sir,” he replied gravely, stumbling and sinking to one knee as Taiee moved to assist him.
Ramirez hefted the rifle and motioned for the others to get to their feet. “First order of business is locating the bridge on this heap.”
*****