"WE TRAVELLED UNDER cloak, since we had to get all the way through Cardassian space without being detected by the Klingons. We were halfway home, and I was just starting to breathe easy."
Ben Sisko relaxed in his command chair for the first time since the Defiant left Cardassia Prime.
"But you've got to. If you say it, he'll believe it."
Beside the helm, Chief O'Brien cajoled Jadzia Dax, but she wasn't buying into the latest plot.
"Trust me," O'Brien went on. "The next time you see him, just sniff the air and say, 'Is that lilac?'"
Dax offered her elegant smile, but said, "I have my own ways of torturing Worf. Find somebody else."
O'Brien turned his eyes to Sisko, but the captain quickly said, "Don't look at me."
Resigned, O'Brien sighed and retreated to the upper deck.
Sisko was almost instantly sorry he hadn't wanted to play. Certainly he wanted something to do on this long voyage. Cardassia Prime wasn't exactly next door. He wanted to put his hands on the helm and drive, but that was Dax's job.
He wanted to fuss with the engineering, but O'Brien was constantly doing that. He even thought about health and well-being, but Dr. Bashir was right over there, gazing with that boyish wonderment at the beauty of space on the forward screen.
Oh, well … what was a captain to actually do? If the ship was in good shape, the crew was trained and doing their jobs without prompt, the mission was going smoothly, there just wasn't much to occupy command staff. He almost started wishing some little thing would go—
The red alert klaxon whined to life automatically and the bridge lights changed to accommodate their eyes, and a thousand unseen changes instantly came into play. The ship was going into "just in case" mode.
In case of what, this time?
O'Brien's voice rang out, "I'm picking up a massive surge of chronoton radiation around—"
Suddenly the bridge seemed to twist in upon itself. For a second, Sisko saw multiple images of everything around him. Then the second was over, and everything seemed normal. Or perhaps not.
"What happened?" Sisko croaked.
As if feeling the need to respond to his useless request with a useless vocalization, Dax said, "I don't know, but we've dropped out of warp."
Sisko was about to drawl, "No kidding," when O'Brien twisted toward him and said, "Sensors are coming back on line."
"Something's very wrong, Benjamin," Dax said. "According to the navigational computer, we're over two hundred light years from our last position—"
"We're decloaking!" O'Brien interrupted.
Dax frowned at her console. "Someone's activated the transporter!"
"Deactivate it and get us back under cloak," Sisko said quickly.
She worked, but didn't appear satisfied.
O'Brien's voice had a rough croak. "I'm picking up a ship—dead ahead."
Sisko turned halfway around and looked up at the dark screen. "Can you identify it?"
He peered at the flickering, struggling viewscreen. No picture yet.
Dax pressed and plucked at her controls. "Not yet, but it's close … very close."
Sisko clenched a fist and said, "Chief, I need that screen!"
"I think I've got it," O'Brien murmured—not really a response.
The snowy static crackled and fritzed, then blinked twice and suddenly cleared.
Quite clear. Damned clear. Damned clear—
So close Sisko could nearly reach out and run his hand along the etched hullplates, a pure white gullwinged angel passed before them like an untarnished shipwright's model. Sisko recognized the configuration as each section passed—Starfleet line-drawing shapes of the dishlike primary hull, the cigar-shaped engineering hull with its gold deflector disk, the two sizzling white antimatter nacelles lancing out in back. Yes, this was Starfleet configuration, but a form that had been corrupted over the years by more and more technology and less and less esthetics.
But still …
"That's—" Dax began, but didn't finish.
Sisko parted his dry lips. "The Enterprise!"