Sarina stole a quick look at Bashir’s wound and asked, “Can you walk?”
“Not without help,” he said. He started opening a pouch on his suit to retrieve his medkit. “It’ll take me ten minutes to fix it.”
She thrust her hands into his armpits and lifted him to his feet. “We don’t have ten minutes right now.” She reached inside the cab and pressed a button that opened the train’s doors. “We need to get off this train and into the city’s transportation system. If it’s like most cities’ transit networks, it probably has old tunnels that are no longer in use.”
He let Sarina help him out of the train and down to the tracks. Once they were on foot, it was easy to see that her prediction had been correct: there were many levels of tunnels and several lines running parallel to one another. A few had obviously fallen out of use and been allowed to sink into darkness and disrepair. Within a few minutes of abandoning the train, they had retreated deep into a long-forgotten corner of the Breen city.
Limping along with his arm draped over Sarina’s shoulders for support, Bashir asked, “What if they find traces of my DNA on the train?”
“They won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
Somewhere above and behind them, a powerful explosion quaked the bedrock and rained dust on their heads.
Sarina smiled. “Let’s just say I took a few precautions.”
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”
For Marco and Margaret:
thanks for everything.
Historian’s Note
This story takes place in mid-2382, more than a year after the events depicted in the Star Trek Destiny trilogy and roughly three years after the events of the film Star Trek Nemesis.
In war there are no winners.
—Neville Chamberlain, speech, 1938
APRIL 2382
1
“Intruder alert! Lock down all decks! This is not a drill!”
The warning repeated and echoed through the corridors of the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards’ command facility. Red lights flashed on bulkhead panels, and pressure doors started to roll closed, partitioning the space station.
Ensign Fyyl tried to block out the cacophony of deep, buzzing alarms as he sprinted toward his post, phaser in hand. Was it an attack? Fyyl had no idea what was happening. The skinny young Bolian was less than a year out of Starfleet Academy and until that moment had counted himself lucky to have been posted to the security detail on a platform orbiting Mars, one of the safest assignments in the Federation. Now it seemed as if he was in the thick of the action—the last place he’d ever wanted to be.
He stumbled to a halt in front of a companel. With trembling fingers he punched in his security code, confirmed his section was secure, and requested new orders. A multilevel schematic appeared on the display. In real time, sections of the station switched from yellow to green as deck officers and patrolling security personnel such as Fyyl checked in. Then a number of sections turned red, and the chief of security directed all his teams to converge on the intruder.
