A trap. Nothing but a trap. Artfully planned, with one end in view; to get them away from the freighter. By now, Starfleet and the Garaka had to have found it. And the QIb laH'e' was stuck, here... with only one way out, and that blocked by the three enemy ships.
Oh, they could flee at warp speed... and, as before, it would gain them nothing. The transwarp nexus was in clear space, their warp signature would stand out like a neon sign - no way to hide it, even if they did not blunder straight into an approaching Starfleet task force.
And no suggestions from the Captain, and that hurt morale worst of all. He had stormed, raging, off the bridge, once they had emerged from the gateway and seen -
Tayaira looked up at the screen. It made perfect sense in Starfleet terms, she thought. Machines, objects, were cheap, too cheap to be reckoned in the Federation's post-industrial economy. So destroying the transwarp gates was a perfectly logical step to take. She could see, in one corner of the viewer, the regular gleam as one broken section rotated, slowly, the light of the nearest star glinting off it as it turned.
Within hours, she thought, she herself would be wreckage revolving lifelessly in space. Or, perhaps, consigned to some Federation prison camp, to emerge in a few decades as some "rehabilitated" shadow of her former self. No other alternative, no way out. She knew it. So did everyone on the ship. The sense of defeat was overwhelming, palpable.
She resumed her pacing, stopped at her tactical console. It mocks me, she thought. Status displays still showed for the gateway network, registering all the gates at zero power. Well, of course they are, if they are destroyed, she thought.
It took another circuit of the bridge before she stopped, again, at the console, and frowned.
The twelve gates all registered the same. But eleven of them were different, surely? They were destroyed, their control circuits inoperable... how could they transmit a status code, even? All right, perhaps the control circuits remained sufficiently intact, even though the gates themselves were destroyed... but for all of them? Not one of the control computers was sufficiently badly damaged that it did not register?
She shook her head. Federation deception, perhaps? Had they rigged the gateways to register as intact, even after their destruction? It seemed likely -
Tayaira caught her breath. Or the Feds might have tried some other sort of deception -
She strode to the main science console. "Scan," she ordered.
The science officer was some junior whose name she didn't know. He stared up at her with sullen eyes. "What's the use?" he said.
"I gave you an order!" Tayaira snarled. "I want scans of that debris!"
For a moment, she thought he would still disobey; something in her face, though, must have convinced him that she would kill him if he did. He turned to the console, slow and resentful. "Setting up scan. What are we looking for?"
"If I knew that, I wouldn't need you. Commence full sensor sweep. Slow and careful."
"Working." She watched over his shoulder, reading the displays. "Fragments. Metals, high durability alloys... ceramic fragments, too, looks like ablative armour from a warship hull...."
Tayaira's eyes narrowed. "Where are the high-density exotics?"
"Sir?"
"From the warp coils of the gateways! There should be hundreds of tonnes of exotic alloys out there!"
The science officer adjusted something on the console. "There are," he said. "I'm reading... twelve large concentrations. It's heavy material, it can't have drifted far from the sites of the destroyed gateways...."
Tayaira swore sulphurously. "Destroyed, hell!" She stabbed her finger down on the displays. "Everything here is consistent with destroyed ships -"
"Yes," said the science officer, "they fought off our backup here, destroyed them... blew the gates, and came after us. We know that."
"They faked us out once. Why couldn't they do it again? Scan for holo-emitter signatures!"
"You think -"
"The gates register as functional on the command network. Our eyes tell us they're gone. One of the two has to be wrong. Why not our eyes?"
The science officer's eyes came alive with sudden hope. "On it," he said.
"Keep at it. I'm going to get the captain," said Tayaira grimly.
She raced off the bridge, down the corridors, into the labyrinth that was the Kar'fi carrier. She passed a number of Klingons, some of them apparently wandering, aimless, under the influence of drink or worse... that was a bad sign. But there was no time now to discipline them. She reached the captain's quarters, hammered on the door.
There was nothing but an incoherent sound from the other side. Tayaira swore again, opened the emergency panel by the side of the door, and cranked the manual override. A few furious turns of the wheel, and the door was open wide enough for her to edge through.
Klur was sitting on his bed, his face lit only by the flame from his souvenir trinket. He turned towards her and spoke, blearily, "'s you."
Drunk, again. Tayaira looked about. There was a bottle, somewhere - round red pills, she had seen him use it before -
"All gone," Klur mumbled. "Did everything they said to, an' it didn' work. Did that T'Jeg his favour -" he hissed the word. "Talakh, Kysang, they had to die clean. No questions. Bad for me too, he said, if there were questions. An' the others, they made sense. Step it up, the war, I mean. Proper victories, real victories, do enough damage to the Feds, Feds 'll run. Made sense. Only, didn' work. We ran, instead. That's wrong. Doesn' that seem wrong to you?"
A bottle of round red pills. Tayaira's hand closed over it gratefully. She shook out two of them, held them out to Klur. "Take these, sir."
"Don' wanna," Klur slurred.
"Sir. Take them."
Klur struck out, a petulant, childish gesture, knocking the pills out of Tayaira's hand. She took a deep breath. Then she slapped Klur across the face, as hard as she could.
The captain subsided onto the bed, his face a mask of astonishment and affront.
"Sir." Tayaira put as much command as she could into her voice. "I serve the captain, but I speak for the crew, and your crew needs you now." She shook another two pills out of the bottle. "Take them."
Staring at her as if hypnotized, Klur reached up, took the pills from her hand, and swallowed them. Tayaira kept her eyes on him, watched him wince as the alcohol antagonist began to work, as his eyes and his expression began to clear.
"Waste of good bloodwine," Klur said in a rasping voice.
"The Feds faked the destruction of the gateways," Tayaira said.
"What?"
"The only real wreckage is from the relief force. I have science, now, trying to pinpoint the holo-emitters -"
Klur sprang up. "Are you sure about this?"
"I -" Tayaira swallowed hard. "I believe so, sir."
"If you're wrong," Klur said, "I will kill you three times over before I die."
"If I'm wrong, sir," said Tayaira, "I'll welcome that."
Klur strode to the door, reactivated the mechanism, and was through it at a run. Tayaira followed.
On the bridge, the science officer was alternately whooping with laughter and working feverishly at his console. "I have them, sir!" he shouted as Klur charged towards him. "I have them! She was right!"
"Show me," Klur demanded.
"Emitter signatures - here, here, here -" the science officer pointed. "Every gateway has them! I've been working it out, we can channel a tetryon pulse through the main deflector and burn them out with a single energy spike -"
"Do it," Klur said.
He stalked to his command chair. Tayaira watched as the science officer's hands flew over his console, programming the sequences. "Ready, sir!" he shouted. "Energizing now!"
A deep muttering grumble came from power sources in the bowels of the QIb laH'e', and the screen cleared. Like magic, Tayaira thought. The drifting debris faded from sight, the gateways reappeared, intact, pristine.
"It's like coming back to life," she whispered, inaudible in all the joyful shouting on the bridge.
"We're not home yet," said Klur. "Bring the ship to alert status! And power up the homeward gateway!"
Tayaira turned to her console, to enter the commands, and stopped. The status display still showed the power levels for all twelve gates. Eleven were powered down, cold, inert.
One was at maximum power already. Ready for transit.
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