“Aye, sir,” Merimark said, and worked her console.
Ezri moved over to where Nog sat at the engineering station. “What’s the ship’s status?” she asked.
“Whatever hit us carried a massive amount of energy,” Nog said, glancing up. “It overloaded the shields and created a feedback surge that knocked just about everything else offline. The backups and secondary backups tried to engage, but they also overloaded.”
“Then how do we have any systems at all?” Ezri asked.
“Most of them shut down automatically before they suffered any damage,” Nog said. “The majority of the damage was done to the EPS power couplings and some of the ODN manifolds.”
“So you were able to bypass the downed junctions,” Ezri concluded.
“Yes,” Nog said. “We’re actually not in bad shape.” Nog looked back up. “It shouldn’t take more than a day or so to replace the failed junctions.”
“Good,” Ezri told him. “Start putting together a repair plan.”
“Yes, sir,” Nog said.
The starboard door opened with a whisper, and Commander Vaughn entered the bridge. He looked hurt. Blood had caked in an irregular patch above his left eye, two dried, red trails snaking from it down the side of his face. His uniform, covered in a brown-gray layer of dirt, had been torn open in a dozen places, his bruised and bloodied flesh showing through them. “Report, Lieutenant,” he said, stepping up to Ezri. She told him what they knew and gave him the ship’s status. Vaughn confirmed that Bowers and Roness had been with him and were now in the medical bay, neither one of them hurt badly, though Bowers might be out of commission for a couple of hours.
“Lieutenant,” Shar said from his station, addressing Ezri, then adding, “Captain,” when he saw Vaughn. “I’ve charted the debris field. I’ve identified any fragments of the moon that will strike the planet, and that are large enough and traveling at such an angle that they’ll produce an impact yield greater than ten megatons.”
Ten megatons,Ezri thought, and wondered exactly what that meant, and then knew almost immediately—probably from Jadzia’s experiences, she guessed—that such a strike would be capable of wiping out a small city. Any fragments significantly larger than that would threaten the entire planet.
“How many, Ensign?” Vaughn asked.
Shar hesitated for just an instant, as though not wanting to deliver bad news, Ezri thought, and then he did just that: “Two hundred thirty-one. And they’ll begin hitting the planet in less than six hours.”
Ezri raced into the two-tiered shuttlebay where Chaffeeand Saganwere berthed. Both of the shuttles had already been powered up, and a low whine buzzed through the bay, like the sound of bees in a hive. The small compartment, barely larger than the craft it housed, felt cold to Ezri, though she suspected that the sight of open space below the shuttles, just beyond the force field, spurred her imagination. Lieutenant Candlewood stood beside Chaffeeon the lower tier, she saw.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “Tenmei and Roness are already on board the shuttles and ready to go.”
“All right,” Ezri said, pleased that Gerda had been in and out of the medical bay as quickly as she had. “Let’s go then. I’ll take the Sagan.”
“Aye, sir,” Candlewood responded, and he immediately boarded Chaffee.
Ezri sprinted to the bulkhead and began climbing the yellow rungs built into it. With so many lives at risk, she was eager to board Sagan.The Vahni interplanetary ships carried no weapons, leaving Defiantand its two shuttles as the only line of defense.
Ezri reached the second tier and hurried aboard Sagan.She quickly closed the hatch and took a seat in the cockpit beside Gerda. The plan was simple: Defiant, Chaffee,and Saganwould attempt to destroy the lunar fragments threatening the planet. Defiant,with its superior weaponry, would focus on the half-dozen largest bodies, which measured hundreds—and, in two cases, thousands—of meters across. If any of those bodies struck the planet, Ezri knew, it would have not just consequences local to the point of impact, but global implications, maybe even to the point of generating a nuclear winter. The exacting process of destroying the massive fragments would take some time, so that they would not end up just broken apart; fracturing the biggest lunar pieces would only increase the amount of work that had to be done, without significantly decreasing the danger to the Vahni. In the meantime, Chaffeeand Saganwould demolish the smaller, but still potentially lethal, fragments.
“Let’s go,” Ezri said, working her controls, configuring them for the weapons and sensors they would need. Within moments, Chaffeeand then Saganhad dropped from Defiantand into space. The debris field spread before them. The number of objects seemed vast, the task ahead impossible. Lunar fragments stretched from one side of their visibility to the other, from the top to the bottom, and reached away from them for kilometers.
Ezri sensed movement beside her, and she turned to find Gerda looking at her, the realization of the enormousness and difficulty of their job clearly showing on her face. “We can do this,” Ezri told her with a certainty she did not feel. But she had learned from Commander Vaughn that confidence served as an important tool of command—of leadership. “We’re lucky there aren’t even more large fragments than there are.” Whatever destructive force had torn apart the moon, at least it had reduced it mostly to rubble that would not threaten the planet.
“Aye, sir,” Gerda said, and Ezri could see the young woman collect herself, a sense of resolve settling on her features. It was a noteworthy moment for such a junior officer. Gerda operated her console, and Sagansprang toward the debris field. The shuttles would begin in the middle of the pack, destroying the most dangerous fragments first, those with the steepest angle of entry, then work their way outward along spiral courses.
Ahead of Sagan,a cluster of nine fragments rolled end over end toward the planet below. Ezri checked her instruments and saw that only two of them were large enough to threaten the Vahni; the others would either burn up as they encountered the planet’s atmosphere, or be deflected back out into space. And there, Ezri knew, lay the primary danger of this mission. They did not have enough time or power to destroy every fragment headed toward the planet, only those that posed a threat; that meant that they would need to maneuver through the debris field to specific targets, and while the smaller fragments might not have been a danger to the planet, they absolutely would be to the shuttles.
Ezri watched the readouts for optimal weapons proximity, even as she keyed in a phaser lock on one of the tumbling rocks. When Saganflew into range, she hit a touchpad, unleashing the shuttle’s fire. Saganjarred slightly as the phasers sprang into action, the drone of their activation seeping into the cabin. Streams of phased energy raced into the eternal night of space. The phaser lock was true: the largest fragment in the cluster vanished in a burst of light and energy. In her mind, Dax supplied the explosive sound that would never be borne in space.
“Only two hundred twenty-four to go,” she said to Roness, subtracting one from the number of fragments the shuttles had been charged with handling. Then she worked to retarget the phaser lock.
Ezri slumped back in her chair, exhausted. Her arms, extended over her console as she had worked the targeting locks and the phasers, felt leaden. For nearly six hours, the crews aboard Defiant, Chaffee,and Saganhad battled the debris field, winnowing the number of potentially deadly lunar fragments down one by one. Now, finally, only one remained, and it had already been reduced by Defiant’s phasers from seven hundred meters across to two hundred meters.