He strained to see through the cloudy atmosphere. As the smoke swirled, he caught a glimpse of one of the crew in profile at the rear of the bridge. Distinctive dark markings spilled from a temple down the side of a fair face and neck, making the Trill unmistakable. “Dax,” he called, “reroute flight control.”

He watched her operate an aft console, and then she yelled, “I’ve got it.”

Vaughn started toward the lieutenant, but stopped when he saw movement at the center of the bridge. On the floor beside the command chair, Bashir leaned over Prynn’s unmoving body. The doctor held a tricorder in one hand and an instrument Vaughn did not recognize in the other.

Vaughn looked at the inert face of his daughter. Her porcelain features, normally tense and expressive despite their delicacy, were now slack, even peaceful, contradicting the awful mass of injuries her body had sustained. For a moment, he saw Prynn’s mother, her own mien passive—at peace somehow, despite her obvious understanding of what was soon to come—in that instant he last saw her. He felt the familiar rage and anguish building within him, the enormous guilt not far behind, and he wondered how this could have happened again.

You have a mission,he told himself, and allowed the simple statement—his old mantra—to carry him away from his private darkness. He raced past Nog and Bowers, both intent on their consoles.

When he arrived beside Dax, her fingers were sprinting back and forth across the display—“Resequencing the reactors,” she said, raising her voice amid the tumult—and after a few seconds, the vibrations of the impulse drive steadied. Several alarms quieted too, lessening the commotion considerably; now only a couple of staccato tones persisted in their warnings. Vaughn could have ordered them silenced, but they were a source of information, and in any dangerous situation, he sought information. “Taking evasive action,” Dax continued. Better than the sound of the stabilized engines and fewer alarms was no sound at all: the absence of Jarada weaponry landing on Defiantas the lieutenant maneuvered the ship.

“How far from the planet?” Vaughn wanted to know. Dax told him. They were still too close to go to warp safely.

“Two more Jarada heavies emerging from the far side of the second moon,” Bowers called from his station. Those were in addition to the pair of battleships Vaughn knew were already pursuing Defiant.

“If we can stay at full impulse,” Dax reported, checking her readouts, “they won’t be able to catch us. We only have to worry about the ones already firing on us.”

If only we could stand our ground and defend ourselves,Vaughn thought. This was not a fair fight, though, and would not be even if Defiant’s weapons could be brought back online. Not because the bantam starship could not best a top-of-the-line Jarada vessel—or even bear up against several of them—but because this was a battle Defiant’s crew could not join. The Jarada were a strange and reclusive species, punctilious in the extreme, and often very difficult to deal with; they had once terminated contact with the Federation for two decades after a UFP representative had mispronounced a single one of their words during an introduction ceremony. But while temperamental in many regards, the Jarada were also in some ways predictable: they employed well-defined rules of engagement, and it was that fact about them that constrained Vaughn’s actions right now.

“Sir,” Nog yelled, a second after another alarm began bleating. “The impulse engines are losing power.” Vaughn looked to Dax, wanting the information to prove false, but the alarm and her expression told him otherwise. And he had known better anyway: in his experience, only good news ever turned out to be suspect.

As if to underscore his thought, the tone of the impulse drive changed once more, flattening and slowing, and then Defiantrattled again beneath the force of a disruptor bolt slamming into the ship. Sparks flew from a port-side console, but despite the failure of the aft shields, the hull armor again withstood the attack. Bowers confirmed this a moment later, but the continued existence of Defianthad already told Vaughn what he needed to know. Effective as the ablative armor was at dissipating the effects of the Jarada weaponry, though, it would not hold up indefinitely; each attack thinned the hull plating, Vaughn knew, its layers vaporizing at the point of impact and dispersing the destructive energy out into space.

He stepped up to the tactical station, beside Bowers. Vaughn had actually anticipated the possibility of something like this turn of events during the past couple of days, but there had been no apparent solution other than for the crew to speed their way through it. And as bad as the situation now was, it would deteriorate even further if Vaughn gave in to temptation and defended Defiantby means other than retreat.

Less than three days ago, the Jarada had grudgingly helped the Federation save the lives of a half-million people in the evacuation of the human civilization from Europa Nova. During an extended incident in which previously unknown Iconian gateways—essentially, open doorways linking noncontiguous and often distant locations—had suddenly become operational, masses of lethally irradiated material had spilled out of an orbital gateway and threatened the population of the planet. A convoy led by the Bajoran Militia had managed to evacuate almost all of the Europani to safety, but five hundred thousand had been forced to flee through a second gateway, this one on the surface of their world and linking to Torona IV, one of the home planets of the Jarada.

“Status,” Vaughn said to Bowers.

“Aft shields are gone. Aft armor down to sixty-seven percent.” That measure would not need to diminish to zero, Vaughn knew, before the hull ruptured beneath a disruptor hit. And when that happened, explosive decompression would be just the beginning of a chain of rapid and catastrophic failures that would leave only debris and a bright energy signature where Defianthad been.

“What happened to those evasive maneuvers?” Vaughn called back to Dax, though the answer was clear: as quickly and as well as the lieutenant had taken to the demands of command, she was a good pilot, but not the career pilot that Prynn was.

That Prynn had been.

An unsettling mixture of pride and sorrow rose within Vaughn, quickly threatening to overwhelm him. Pressure built behind his eyes, and it struck him that, for the first time in years, it would be an easy thing to allow himself to break down, to give in to his pain and abdicate his responsibilities. But that was not really an option. He willed himself—as he had so many times before—to disconnect from his emotions. You have a mission,he told himself again. If he survived this encounter with the Jarada, there would be time later to mourn.

Dax announced an automated evasion sequence, and the impulse drive whined as it struggled to support the new instructions. Vaughn felt a shift in the pit of his stomach, the gravity generators and inertial dampers adjusting as Defiantsheared from its course. Tremors rumbled through the ship’s superstructure, but at least for the moment, no weapons landed.

Vaughn peered at the main viewer. In his mind, he saw what was not visible on the screen: the near pair of Jarada ships dancing in lethal patterns about Defiant,the far pair charging toward the scene. He searched his vast experience for similar predicaments and recalled several, but none in which his actions had been so tightly restricted.

Vaughn had secured safe harbor on Torona IV for the evacuees by providing technical data about the gateways to the Jarada. In the few days since, Europa Nova had been completely evacuated, and Vaughn and his crew had then led a convoy to the Torona system. There, they had overseen the relocation of the half-million Europani to Bajor, where the rest of their population awaited eventual return to their world once it had been decontaminated. The last group of transports had broken orbit less than an hour ago, and in that time, the Jarada had apparently discovered that the gateways had been shut down, possibly for good, and certainly for the foreseeable future. Considering their xenophobic nature, the Jarada might have welcomed this, but instead, with the technical information they had been given now valueless to them, they had chosen to believe themselves duped by Vaughn.