“I know,” Gerda said. “We also have to avoid being knocked out of the sky.” She paused, then said, “Brace yourself.”

Saganrolled to port, dipped, then rolled to starboard before righting itself again. Ezri held on to her console with her left hand and kept herself seated. She studied the sensor display, her eyes on the readings of the fragment as they neared it once more. “Targeting,” she said as she worked the phaser controls. She waited. Finally, the indicator blinked green, but almost immediately it reverted to red. The shuttle began to shake as it shot through the upper atmosphere. The targeting indicator changed from red to green and back, two more times.

“I can’t get a lock,” she said, which meant that she would have to target the fragment manually. She could do that, but she could not risk missing and sending a volley of deadly phaser fire into the planet below. “We’re going to have to come up from underneath.”

“We can’t do that,” Gerda said. “We’d be flying head-on into the debris field.”

Ezri understood Gerda’s warning—it was one thing to fly amid the lunar fragments traveling in their direction, and another to fly into them going in the opposite direction—but she had no time to explain why they had to do this. “Do it,” Ezri said. To her credit, Gerda hesitated for only a fraction of a second, but in that instant, Ezri knew that the ensign wanted her to take the shot now and get the shuttle out of there. But she could not—would not—take that chance. They had not worked this long, this hard, to save the Vahni, just to end up killing some of them themselves with errant phaser fire.

Around them, the shuttle grew louder as it raced downward. The huge mass of the planet filled the forward windows, green and brown land visible through white clouds. The flashes of the burning lunar fragments continued to wink on and off in front of them like guttering candles. The vibrations in the cabin increased as Saganbroached the middle atmosphere.

And then they were turning, pulling up and around in an arc. The planet slipped out of sight— too slow,Ezri thought, but she knew that such a maneuver at greater speeds would have torn the shuttle apart. At last, the stars filled the windows, Saganheading back away from the planet. Ezri reacquired the fragment on the scanners and tried another phaser lock, which again failed. She enabled manual firing and concentrated as the shuttle and the fragment rushed headlong at each other. She fired, the phaser blast barely audible in the noisy cabin.

The fragment did not disappear from the sensors. The distance between Saganand the rock mass diminished rapidly. One more shot,she thought, maybe two,but her hands were already working her panel. Another phaser strike surged from the shuttle.

Ahead of them, the fragment exploded in an intense blaze of yellow-red light.

“Yes,” Ezri hissed through clenched teeth, knowing that, while they might have saved the people below, she and Gerda were still in danger. On her sensor readout, she saw two more fragments approaching the shuttle fast. “Come about,” she ordered, looking up in time to see a mass of burning rock charge past Sagan.“There’s another one,” she shouted, following it with the sensors. With no time to establish a phaser lock, she fired a spread directly in front of the shuttle. Ahead, another fragment flashed as it disintegrated.

She checked the sensors again, and saw a huge swarm ahead, too dense to travel through, too wide to escape, too many to destroy. “Land,” she yelled. “We’ve got to land.” If they could even get low enough, below an altitude of about fifty kilometers, the fragments would never reach them, burning up in the atmosphere above them. She thought about transporting to safety, but she could not allow the shuttle to crash and possibly kill any of the Vahni.

Gerda brought Saganaround in a tight arc, the starfield slewing away. Ezri waited to see the horizon of the planet, wanting to know that they were no longer headed upward. Sensors showed that another fragment had just missed them, and she knew this was going to be close. Maybe if she could rig the warp drive to overload and vaporize the shuttle, then they could transport—

A mass of rock slammed into the rear of the shuttle. Power destabilized for a second as the shields went down. The interior went dark, and then emergency lighting flashed on, bathing the cabin in a dull red glow. The noise inside the shuttle increased dramatically, deafeningly, and Ezri realized that the noise-suppression plating must have been breached.

“We’ve lost attitude control,” Roness yelled.

Another fragment crashed into Sagan.The sickening sound of rending metal filled the cabin. The shuttle moaned like a wounded animal, and then it began to tumble. Ezri flew out of her chair, just able to bring her left arm up as she struck the ceiling. Now,she thought with maddening clarity, the shuttle will head back down to the planet.She was thrown into the side bulkhead, and then backward. She had just enough time to be amazed that she did not feel any pain.

And then darkness took her.

Ezri awoke slowly. At first, she became aware of sounds around her, soft, syrupy rhythms she could neither place nor understand. Her first coherent thoughts were of Trill, and of the Caves of Mak’ala. For a time, she drifted in her mind through the interconnecting pools, communicating with the other symbionts, and waiting an almost painfully long time to move out into the world, and then from there to the rest of the universe. And then, finally, she was Lela Dax, and more than the sum of the two of them. Lela, and then Tobin, and then all the rest, through to Ezri. Ezri Dax, aboard Destiny,Deep Space 9, and Defiant.

Aboard Sagan.

Ezri opened her eyes and did not know where she was. She peered at the ceiling and recognized Defiant.She tried to lift her head, but found herself too weak.

“Doctor,” a woman’s voice said, “she’s awake.”

Ezri heard footsteps, and then a face entered her field of vision, a woman with blue-green eyes, and reddish blond hair braided and pulled back against her head. Ezri knew this woman, she was sure. She remembered having a drink with her in Quark’s the night before the mission…yes, when the woman and Sergeant Etana had been saying goodbye…the woman’s first extended mission, her first extended time away from Etana. “Krissten,” she said.

“Yes,” the nurse said.

“Ezri,” came another voice, and it took Ezri only a second to recognize Julian’s mellifluous tones. His dark, handsome face appeared above her, beside the nurse’s. “How are you feeling?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but only an unintelligible sound emerged.

“That’s all right,” Julian told her, reaching up and running a hand tenderly across her forehead. “You’ve been thrown around quite a bit. The good news is that you’re going to be all right.” He smiled at her, a smile that she had already taken into her heart.

“The shuttle,” she finally managed to say. “We were on board the shuttle.”

“Yes,” Julian said, and his face changed slightly, she saw, the smile maybe no longer as wide.

“What—” she started, and again she tried to raise her head. Julian put a hand on her shoulder and restrained her, gently pushing her back down. “What happened? The Vahni?”

“You saved the Vahni,” Julian said.

The fog seemed to begin lifting from around Ezri, and she became more aware of her surroundings. She turned her head to the right and saw a biobed and medical displays. “How did I get here?” she asked.

“Later, Ezri,” Julian told her, and he looked up at the nurse. She nodded and moved away.

“What happened?” Ezri asked, raising her voice.

“Your shuttle lost power,” Julian told her. “As it started to fall back toward the planet, we were able to grab it with a tractor beam and transport you off.”