Chapter Text
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The streaking star-scape vanished, the rays of light collapsing into single stars to reveal the battered transport Ull’roall being hounded by the strange, beetle-shaped attack ship.
“Fire phasers, hold on torpedoes until the transport is safely out of the detonation envelope,” Trujillo ordered. “Helm, pursuit course. Get on their tail and do your best to stay there.”
As the Jem’Hadar ship flashed past on the main viewer, Trujillo spared a glance toward Chester. “You said they preferred slashing, strafing attacks.”
Chester nodded, very glad the transport was still there. “They’re fast and maneuverable, and they make the most of it–especially when they’re working together.”
Reykjavík held position behind the Jem’Hadar vessel, peppering the smaller ship’s aft shields with orange bursts of stuttering twin-streamed phaser fire. The enemy’s shields held firm against the onslaught, and in response the attack ship launched a brilliant white projectile from an aft-facing launcher that slammed home against Reykjavík’s forward shields with staggering force.
The deck lurched and personnel were thrown forward against their restraints. A chorus of grunts and muttered curses resulted and even Trujillo looked impressed.
Chester glanced up at J’etris, who said, “The modifications to the shields are fully effective.”
Glal blanched. “That was effective? Felt like we got hit with an asteroid!”
J’etris grinned. “Yes, but we’re still here.”
“Forward shields holding at seventy-nine percent, Captain,” Jarrod advised, silently alarmed at the amount of shield degradation from a single impact.
The attack ship pulled relative-upward and vanished from the viewscreen in a maneuver Reykjavík couldn’t hope to follow.
Naifeh struggled at the helm to maintain an approximate trailing position as the ships looped over. “I’m losing her, sir!”
“Reinforcing aft and dorsal shields,” said J’etris. “They’ll come down on top of us and target the nacelles. The center of their ventral hull is a weak point if we can punch through their shields.” She was already targeting torpedoes to do just that, and as soon as the Jem’Hadar ship dropped down to begin its run, she fired.
“Do it,” Trujillo confirmed the order, pulling her swing-arm console up and into her lap from the side of her chair.
Reykjavík loosed a salvo of six torpedoes from her three forward-facing launchers, which arced hard over, cutting into the attack ship’s enviable turn radius. The vessel suddenly juked hard to port, then back to starboard before flipping over and diving relative to the course of the incoming ordnance.
“Mãe de deus!” DeSilva exclaimed without meaning to do so.
Only the last of the six torpedoes managed a proximity detonation, exploding just close enough to impact the smaller craft’s ventral shields as it pulled away.
“That was… impressive,” Trujillo allowed grudgingly. She referenced her laptop console before ordering, “Helm, hard about to zero-two-zero-mark-three-five-zero. J’etris, that should give you an aft torpedo angle on them.”
“Continuing phaser fire with all facing banks as they transit around our target perimeter, sir,” Jarrod called out. “Multiple hits, but no shield penetration as yet.”
“And this is after they’ve taken all those hits from Greyhound,” Glal noted dourly.
“And they’re more maneuverable,” said Chester. “We’re not going to make a lot of progress until we deal with that.” She called up a map of the sector on her console, looking for better terrain that might restrict the Jem’Hadar’s movements. The results were not promising.
J’etris let out a growl of frustration as the attack ship eluded her next spread of torpedoes.
Reykjavík’s phasers gamely blazed away at the darting attack ship, which continually rolled back and forth to absorb the impacts on different quarters and thereby prevented any specific shield grid from being whittled down to the point of collapse.
Naifeh, used to having an advantage in maneuverability due to Reykjavík’s overpowered impulse engines, struggled to keep pace with the Jem’Hadar and keep the starship’s most potent weapons systems aligned with the smaller ship.
Another improbable maneuver brought the attack ship relative nose-down towards Reykjavík’s dorsal perspective, and the attacker sent three seething, bluish poleron beams crashing against the starship’s shields.
Reykjavík bucked wildly, thrown momentarily off course and sent into a lateral spin as Naifeh fought to regain control.
Jarrod was thrown back against his support frame, grunting as the whip-sawing jolt snapped his head back and threatened whiplash should he survive this encounter.
Trujillo looked from Glal to Chester, her expression pinched. “This isn’t working. Ideas, people.”
Glal looked flummoxed, which in Trujillo’s opinion was a bad omen.
“Mines?” J’etris offered. “If we start kicking mines out aft of us, they’ll have to start altering their trajectory to avoid them.”
Chester nodded. “We’ll have to control how they come to us. The easiest way I can see to do that is to play possum, which should draw them in close for an efficient kill. But we’d better be pretty sure of getting them when we do it, because they won’t fall for it twice.”
“Their shields aren’t nearly depleted enough yet,” DeSilva called back from her post at Ops.
“And that’s not changing soon,” grumbled J’etris.
Chester glanced at the chart on her console again. “There’s a nearby system we might be able to use, but it would require we leave the transport.” She glanced at Trujillo. “I don’t think that’s an option, sir.”
“It’s not,” Trujillo confirmed. “With their firepower, they could have finished off that transport long before we arrived. They’re using it as bait. If we run, hoping they’ll follow, they’ll destroy the transport before pursuing us.” She turned to J’etris. “Start laying mines behind us at random intervals. Gravitic sensitivity with thruster capabilities. Program them to detonate only in the vicinity of the attack ship.”
“Yes sir,” said Jetris. She got to work.
Another strafing run, this time from their port-quarter, slammed into the shields with a jackhammer blow. The engineering station on the upper bridge level exploded, flaying the occupant of that seat with plexipolymer shrapnel that caused the woman at that post to gasp and then slump against her safety restraints. Additional, albeit less lethal detritus rained down throughout the rest of the bridge.
“Port shields down to twenty-eight percent; moderate hull buckling port side, primary hull,” DeSilva called out over a cacophony of alarms.
A fusillade from Reykjavík as the Jem’Hadar raced past her bow resulted in a prolonged phaser barrage and two photon hits out of a volley of six, thanks to Jarrod and J’etris’ expert coordination.
Glal freed himself from his restraints long enough to move to the side of the stricken petty officer at the Engineering station, checking for a pulse. He closed his eyes for a moment and looked to Trujillo, shaking his head before retreating to his post.
Chester and J’etris shared a look, J’etris openly concerned. There had already been far too many deaths, and no way of knowing the impact on the timeline. They had to end this, and quickly.
Trujillo absorbed the death of her crewmember, adding it to the tally of those aboard the destroyed freighter, the damaged transport, and the doomed crew of Greyhound, none of whom would have died in the ‘original’ iteration of this timeline. She clung to the illusory control she wielded over this situation, damning herself for failing when it really counted. So many battles behind her, so much experience, and yet none of it was helping in this most desperate of circumstances.
“Voli-Vox!” Glal blurted suddenly.
Trujillo looked askance at her XO, wondering if in the heat of the moment he’d slid off the proverbial rails. “The Tellarite game?”
He nodded vigorously. “Exactly!”
“I don’t see how lassoing a kivinch from a chariot has anythi–” Trujillo stopped mid-sentence, her eyes widening. “Of course…”
She dropped her eyes to her laptop interface, typing madly at the controls. “Commander Chester, please take control of our primary tractor beam emitter from your station. The next time that beetle comes in range, we’re going to lower our shields and snare her. The tractor beam itself should prematurely detonate or throw off anything they send back towards us long enough for us to bracket their ship with torpedo spreads.”
“Should?” Garrett gawped from the Science station.
“They just hit one of our mines, sir,” DeSilva alerted. “They’re adjusting the trajectory of their attack run.”
“What kind of forces can our inertial dampeners compensate for?” Chester asked, transferring control. “This won’t do anyone any good if we get ourselves turned into paste.”
“Engineering,” Trujillo called, “all auxiliary power to inertial dampeners. We’re about to try something reckless and I don’t want us turned into Salsa Roja.”
“On it, Captain,” Kura-Ka answered with all the resignation of a man marching to the gallows.
“And make sure everyone is strapped in,” said Chester, her eyes on her display, fingers hovering over the controls. “All right. One Nantucket sleigh ride, coming right up.”
The attack ship circled around, dipping in for another pass. Chester waited. The moment before it came within range she called, “Lower shields!” to Jarrod and pounced.
The tractor beam flashed out, catching the Jem’Hadar in the forward ventral plating, where the ‘thorax’ of the beetle it mimicked would have been. It bucked, pitching up hard and to starboard, and this time, they followed.
The jolt threw Chester hard against the restraint harness, and she was suddenly very glad of the archaic safety measure. Without it, she would have gone flying. As it was, keeping hold of them was a hell of a job as they tried everything in the book to shake Reykjavík off. Chester grinned, wide and predatory. Let them try. It was beyond time to squash this bug.
Trujillo grunted at the jolt and the disconcerting sense of acceleration bleeding through the dampeners. “Fish on!” She called over her shoulder to the tactical officers flanking her. “Kill their engines!”
“With pleasure, sir,” said J’etris.
A flight of torpedoes raced ahead towards the wildly slaloming attack ship, gripped tightly in the cruiser’s tractor beam. Its engine nacelles were free from the beam’s grasp and vulnerable to the multiple impacts of the missiles in concert with Jarrod’s raking phaser fire.
“That’s it!” Trujillo crowed uncharacteristically. “Pour it on!”
A Jem’Hadar torpedo launched back towards them corkscrewed madly away, its targeting sensors scrambled by the tractor’s energies. An accompanying poleron blast, however, found its mark and lanced into the unshielded rim of Reykjavík’s saucer, blasting through several compartments to explode deep in the saucer’s interior.
Reykjavík shuddered, alarms wailed, and the bridge lighting flickered as the console now reconfigured for engineering functions became a riot of flashing red indicators.
An unmanned station next to Garrett’s science board crackled and sparked and the young officer drew her hands back just in time to avoid severe burns from arcing streamers of electrical current sizzling across her own console’s surface.
The chaos on the bridge was so distracting that Trujillo nearly missed the sight of the Jem’Hadar ship’s starboard nacelle exploding just as Reykjavík’s tractor emitter burned out.
“We’ve lost the tractor beam!” Chester announced. She looked up at the viewer and the Jem’Hadar limpingly trying to right itself, trailing atmosphere and plasma. There was vicious satisfaction in her voice as she added, “But it looks like they’re hurting a lot more.”
“Raise shields, all weapons continuous fire. Let’s finish this!” Trujillo growled, leaning as far forward as her restraints would allow with her fist clenched.
More torpedoes slammed home into the primary superstructure of the attack ship as rippling phaser fire scored back and forth across its hull. The ship slowly moved to come about just as its port nacelle was blasted free from its pylon to spin away on a random trajectory.
“Their shields are failing!” DeSilva blurted, heedless of bridge decorum now.
Naifeh piloted Reykjavík in a makeshift orbit, circling the Jem’Hadar vessel while keeping the cruiser bows-on to the attack ship as the starship worked to exhaust its torpedo stores and phaser energy.
“By the Great Hoof, what does it take to kill one of these things?” Glal exclaimed, dumbfounded at the smaller vessel’s resilience.
“A hell of a lot,” said Chester, “but we’re getting there.”
A final, blinding explosion heralded the end of the Jem’Hadar ship, the blast’s wavefront crashing against Reykjavík’s flagging shields and causing the deck beneath Trujillo’s feet to shudder yet again.
The captain sagged briefly in her chair, exhausted by the fight which had lasted mere minutes. She gave herself until the count of ten to tap her reserves, then straightened and released her safety restraints before standing.
“What’s our situation?”
DeSilva turned in her seat to address her captain. “Damage report, sir. Explosive decompression in several sections on Decks four, five, and six. Pressure doors and forcefields are in place and holding. Fire suppression systems have been activated and damage control teams are responding. Sickbay reports injuries and fatalities, but no firm numbers as yet.”
Chester ducked her head, using the excuse of unfastening her harness to hide her unhappiness at that; out of the corner of her eye she caught J’etris casting a look of transparent relief at Garrett, and hoped no one else was going to read too much into that.
Trujillo nodded wordlessly at this and took a moment to take measure of the bridge. She turned back towards the viewscreen, addressing Naifeh at the helm. “Get us back to the transport, best possible impulse speed.” She then looked to Glal and Chester, “Make preparations to render aid to the passengers and crew of Ull’roall.” Trujillo turned to Jarrod and J’etris as they unfastened their leg and waist harnesses. “Make sure every bit of that ship is either completely destroyed or beamed into our shuttlebay for return to Bedivere. When we’re done here, as far as history will be concerned, this never happened. We’ll simply have hunted down a particularly well-armed brigand, whomever Command wants to pin this on.”
Chester nodded her agreement and relief. There was going to be a lot more work, but at least the immediate nightmare was now a spreading cloud of wreckage. It was a potent reminder not to take their present technologies too much for granted.
Trujillo yearned for the seclusion of her ready room so that she could find her emotional equilibrium in private. She had been found wanting in this scenario, and only the sage counsel of their temporally displaced counterparts and her executive officer had secured victory. It had been a humbling experience for her, a reminder that no matter how good you were, there was always someone out there who was better.
She resumed her place in the captain’s chair, accessed her laptop interface, and began taking stock of her ship’s condition.
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