Jadzia Dax was momentarily confused with both the captain of Deep Space Nine and the captain of the Defiant on the bridge at the same time. Benjamin had immediately turned over responsibility for the ship's launch to Worf while he demanded a detailed briefing from Dax on recent Klingon activity around the wormhole. At the same time, Worf was barking orders at her in her capacity as helmsman and weapons officer!

Meanwhile, the two Klingon ships fired three more disruptor blasts. Two deflected off the shields of the target ship, the last partially penetrated and drew blood from the starboard engine pod.

"Aye, Commander -- I'm sorry, Captain? -- engine spin-up, seven-six-five-four. Yes, sir, five ships in the last two weeks; can't say for sure they were Klingon, but they were cloaked and they were in and out of the wormhole. Release docking clamps, chief. Aye, Commander, reverse one quarter...

Captain Sisko stood and walked away from Dax, reluctant to interrupt her while she performed the whip-turn and got the Defiant cruising to attack speed headed toward the wormhole, where the battle raged. Now one of the birds-of-prey fired a torpedo of some sort, briefly illuminating the smaller ship's shield structure to the naked eye.

A fourth blip appeared for a moment in the glare, but Dax quickly classified it as most likely a sensor echo. Something seemed strange, however. Could it be another cloaked ship? Well, we'll soon see, she thought; it has to decloak to shoot anything.

"On screen," said Worf; he didn't say, but Dax knew he meant the combat. They watched as two Klingon birds-of-prey harried a smaller vessel of unknown design, a ship that scarcely would have attracted the station's attention except for two points of interest: it was squawking a Federation distress call, and it was being cut to ribbons in their own backyard.

Worf inhaled, but before he could ask, Dax responded, "Four minutes, Commander." Another disruptor blast rocked the presumed Federation ship, skewing it from its path and sending it careening into the teeth of the second bird-of-prey. "Captain," said Dax, "their shields are holding remarkably well. We should be there in plenty of time." "Let's hope so, Old Man."

The lieutenant commander watched her oldest human friend pace back and forth. His face was impassive, but the Trill could read it like a tricorder, so long had she known him. There were rumors of high-level, political contact between Gowron and the Federation Council, but nobody had given the word to the high muckety-mucks of Starfleet, let alone a mere captain commanding a space station in the quadrant boondocks. The Klingon-Federation alliance was off; no, it was on again; no, definitely off -- absolutely, definitely, positively -- well, maybe not, but they weren't exactly sure.

The captain, Dax understood, fretted that yet another incident between the Defiant and Klingon warships might have diplomatic repercussions far beyond the problems of a Federation pleasure yacht or ore-hauler that had stupidly poked a stick into a Klingon anthill. But how could Benjamin Sisko possibly stand still for a Federation ship being mauled within eyeball range of a heavily armed Federation fortress?

O'Brien spoke up. "No response to the hail from the Klingons, Captain. I mean, Commander." Dax smiled.

"They heard us?" asked Worf, touching all bases.

"Yes, sir. They're just giving us the cold shoulder."

Now Worf rose from his command chair. "Captain, I insist you either give me full command of this mission and let me lock phasers or take command yourself."

"I'll take the conn, Mr. Worf," said Benjamin decisively. He strode to the command chair as the Klingon vacated to the XO's position. "Full power to the phaser array, Old Man. Lock on both targets simultaneously but don't fire yet. Mr. O'Brien, try one more time... tell them to stop immediately or we'll blow them out of the sky."

"Can I quote you on that, sir?" asked O'Brien, but he was already sending the message.

"Two more shots, Benjamin," said Dax. "Their shields are still at sixty-five percent."

Sisko stood, staring at the forward viewer. "That should hold until we can hose them down and separate them."

Suddenly, Dax saw an energy surge; her suspicions were confirmed. "Captain, there's a third Klingon ship!" The new ship, a small, lightly armed patrol vessel, decloaked practically at the side of the Federation vessel. "Their shields are powering up, but they don't have any disruptors."

"I've had as much of this as I'm going to take. Fire on the birds-of-prey. Let's bloody their noses and see if that catches their attention!"

Abruptly, Worf leaped from his chair and raced to Dax's console. "Commander, did you say the small ship has no disruptors?"

"Yes, sir. Firing now, Captain." She tapped the touch-plate, still incongruously called a "trigger" even centuries after the last mechanical lever dropped a hammer on a firing pin. The twin bolts appeared instantaneously -- actually at just a hair under lightspeed, but close enough to infinity across such a short distance -- cutting through the weaker side-shielding of both birds, crippling the disruptor alignment module of one ship and slightly damaging the aft environmental controls of the other. Call it one hit and one near miss.

"Readying photon torpedoes," announced Chief O'Brien, in case the captain decided to finish them off.

"Just shields?" demanded the Klingon in Dax's ear, urgently.

"Huh? Oh, yes Worf, just shields. Why, is there something I should--"

"They're modulating their shields!" shouted Worf. "Captain, we must reverse course and put as much distance as possible between us and the Federation ship!"

"Why must we do that, Mr. Worf? That ship needs our help."

"That ship is already dead, sir!"

Hesitating only the briefest of moments, Sisko made an instant decision to listen to his second in command. "Full stop, reverse full impulse. Get us out of here, Old Man." His voice seemed a bit sulky to Dax; Benjamin was not happy about withdrawing when he seemed to have the upper hand.

The small, unarmed Klingon ship began to modulate its shields, extending them. Suddenly, every sensor on Dax's console shot off the scale, and she actually felt a hard, electrical shock pass through her body.

Both ships now drifted naked, the two shield systems gone. "Hold tight," said Commander Worf.

"Benjamin, the Klingons are beaming something--"

She never finished the sentence. The forward viewer flared white, giving the Defiant crew an instant of spectacular rainbows as the viewscreen filters tried to damp the electromagnetic energy by separating it into component bandwidths. The computer finally gave it up as a lost cause, and immediately substituted an instrument readout in place of the visual.

A moment later, Dax restored visual contact. The Federation ship was a dark, twisted hulk of metal, shredded beyond recognition as a starship except for the telltale warp signature residue and other forms of radiation associated with hyperluminous travel. The smaller Klingon patrol boat was nowhere to be seen, not even with a sensor sweep.

"Faith," whispered O'Brien, eyes as wide as Dax's must have been.

"Dax," shouted an unexpected voice from the turbolift, "scan for life signs!"

When did Bashir come up to the bridge? she wondered.

"The two birds-of-prey -- where are they?" said Sisko. The words broke the spell that had held the others motionless.

Dax quickly remodulated the scanners, swept the entire system. She had totally lost track of them when all the instruments maxed out. "Captain, they're heading back toward the wormhole at full impulse. We can't catch them before they're in the Gamma Quadrant."

Sisko stared, silent a long moment. "Better let them go, Dax. We have no idea what reception committee might be waiting for us on the other side, and I think we'd better discuss this one with the flags before going anywhere."

He sat at his command chair, looking heavy and tired. He hates this part, thought his friend. "Take us to the -- the remains of the ship, Dax. We'd better make an inspection, file a complete report. Bashir, Dax, pull some EVA suits and meet me in Transporter One. Doctor, bring your forensics case. Let's at least try to figure out who they were."

Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax laid in the rendezvous course and engaged, then she rose from her console and shuffled toward the turbolift, feeling quite heavy herself.

Doctor Julian Bashir sealed up his pressure suit, feeling the perfect fool, and stepped forward onto the transporter pad. Listening to his own breath rasping in and out his helmet stimulated his adrenal gland; his heart raced, and his breathing grew ragged. By the time PO1 Swenson pulled the transporter slides forward, energizing the away team, Bashir's hands were shaking and his knees felt weak, as if he couldn't support himself.

He didn't need to. There was, of course, no gravity on the exploded wreck of a hull: no lights, no air, no gravity -- no life that Bashir could see. Materializing, he could not stop his feet from twitching as his stomach lurched, and he launched himself gracelessly across the belly of what once had been the main deck. The others, even the captain, had similar problems.

The comm channel squawked loudly in Bashir's ear. "Good idea to tether us together, Benjamin," said lovely Jadzia Dax. The doctor quite agreed and said so.

The away team comprised Captain Sisko, Lieutenant Commanders Worf and Dax, and Lieutenant Bashir, but it looked like a single, four-bodied, sixteen-limbed organism connected by thin, vascular cables. "Everyone freeze," ordered Sisko, straining against the pull of three other bodies with their own momentum, their own velocity.

Singly, the captain reeled them in slowly; one tug was all that was necessary, Bashir noted -- he'd "known" it, of course, but studying zero-G in books at the Academy was different from actually experiencing it in a ghoulish hulk of a once-was starship! Even the two training exercises he'd received were inadequate.

As the captain pulled Bashir closer in turn, the doctor tried to shake off the fantasy that he was a fly in a web being drawn in by a hungry spider. "Everybody loosen your tether reel," said Sisko. "Just move slowly and don't exit the ship without my authorization."

Suddenly, Bashir blinked. He'd just seen movement, something about the walls. Staring at a particular bulkhead, Bashir suddenly realized what he had seen: "Captain, the hull is contracting!"

Sisko winced inside his nearly transparent helmet. "Good eye, doctor. O'Brien, is this ship stable?"

"Um..." The chief activated his tricorder, which flashed silently in the vacuum, and he spun slowly in place. "No sir; it's not stable. It could go at any second. Maybe we'd better get out of here."

"Set up a forceshield to reinforce the hull," ordered the captain."

"That'll give us a whole half an hour," muttered O'Brien.

"Then monitor it carefully, Chief. I don't like surprises."

While O'Brien set up the minishields, Bashir bounced gently to the center of the black cavern, trailing his gossamer tether; looking out -- there was no up or down -- he saw stars through gaping holes in the skin of the ship, holes with jagged edges pushed outward presumably by a terrible explosion. Ground-zero was not yet determined; that was Worf's job. Bashir unslung his medical tricorder, set the scan depth, and kicked the deckplates to begin a slow pirouette, searching for lifesigns the ship's scanners might have missed -- though how anyone could still be alive on this frozen, airless hulk is beyond me, he mentally added. As expected, the only lifesigns he detected were those of the away team.

Bashir began to grow dizzy; he was still breathing too rapidly, hyperventilating, and the short, shallow breaths were scrubbing his blood of carbon dioxide. Starting to panic, he tried to stop his rotation, but he had drifted out of contact with the deck. He closed his eyes, but that was worse. Forcing himself to inhale slowly, taking long, deep breaths and holding them, the doctor finally calmed himself. His stomach continued to roll and lurch, however... he really didn't like zero-G!

"We're alone!" he reported.

"Ouch! Doctor, there is no reason to shout. I can hear you perfectly well over the comm link."

"Sorry, sir," said Bashir, chagrined. "No further life signs."

Dax spoke up; Bashir heard tension in her voice, too, and this made him feel better, though he didn't know why. "Julian, try scanning for organic molecules."

"Right, Jadzia." The task required recalibrating the tricorder to a more sensitive scale, which of course required closer proximity to what he was scanning. "Captain," he said, cutting off his words too crisply, "request permission to -- to untether. I cannot conduct a full DNA scan while tied up like a dog on a leash."

Sisko was a long moment answering. "If you think it's necessary, Doctor. I don't like it. Report every few minutes, so I know you haven't drifted through a hole and into empty space."

Julian reached down, hesitating a moment; he gently rubbed his fingertips together, then quickly disconnected before he could change his mind. Holding on to the base of a chair, bolted to a bulkhead (or had it once been a deck?), he stared around at a dozen rips and gaps easily large enough to "fall" through. Even if I did, the Defiant would still catch me, he told himself; his stomach and knees refused to believe him.

The hull lurched again. "Sorry, Captain," grumbled Chief O'Brien. "This jury-rigged fairy box isn't going to hold much longer."

Pushing away the fear with thoughts of duty, Bashir began a laborious scan across each flat surface for organic molecules. He struck rich ore right away: nearly every deck, overhead, and bulkhead was coated with a fine spray of DNA, the gigantic, easily detected coding molecule found in varying forms in every species of animal or plant in the quadrant. "Good Lord," he whispered, forgetting he was hot-miked.

"Find something?" asked Sisko.

"There was somebody -- there were several some-bodies here all right, um, I count six; but they were ... vaporized is the only way I can put it. They were blown apart by a bomb, I would guess, so powerful that all organic entities aboard this ship were taken apart, molecule by molecule, and dis--" Bashir swallowed, feeling nauseated at the thought, "and distributed in a fairly even coating approximately a hundred and fifty angstroms thick throughout the ship."

The guttural voice of Commander Worf cut through the soft conversation like the blare of a trumpet in the middle of a string quartet. "Captain, I was afraid of this. The Klingons have perfected a weapon they were only testing when I was last on the homeworld."

"A new weapon, Mr. Worf?"

"To be more accurate, sir, a new weapon-delivery system. I do not know how familiar you are with Klingon battle tactics."

"I'm reasonably familiar, Worf; I had a good instructor." Bashir could hear the smile in Sisko's voice; he recalled that Curzon Dax, Jadzia's former host and a mentor to the young Benjamin Sisko, had befriended many old Klingon warriors.

"Then you know about the legendary battle of Fom Kerdeth."

"I think I recall," said the captain. "Perhaps you should enlighten us anyway."

"At Fom Kerdeth, Bardak Linron the traitor fought the forces of Kahless to a standstill. Many dead were recorded during those six days, and many songs have been sung. But Kahless finally lost the battle when Bardak sent his best general, Renarg, to negotiate terms for separating the combatants. Renarg entered the tent of Kahless's high command with an arrogant list of demands, but his terms were a ruse, for he had strapped high explosives all around his body, concealed beneath his armor and clothing. He detonated the munitions, sacrificing himself to kill Kahless's entire general staff. It is only by a miracle that the Emperor himself survived; he had stepped out to... to relieve himself from the night's drinking."

Bashir waited; evidently Worf wanted some prodding, which Dax supplied. "A charming story. How does it relate, Worf?"

"We have long theorized that any ship, of any size, can be destroyed by transporting a bomb directly to the engineering deck next to the antimatter containment field, or to the bridge if you want to preserve the ship as a trophy. The idea is to detonate a bomb aboard your own ship, transporting it just as the explosion initiates, so there is no time for the target to transport it into space or back aboard your own ship."

"You can't transport a bomb or anything else through shields, Worf," said Sisko.

"That has always been the difficult point," agreed the Klingon. "The High Council spent years secretly funding Project Renarg, trying to develop a method for momentarily interrupting a target ship's shield. Two years ago, I took the initiative to quickly read through a classified abstract of the current theory: the researchers believe that if you pilot a ship without a shield up to the target, then activate the shield set to a frequency whose wave crests and troughs are the exact mirror image of the target's shield, it will cancel out both shields."

"Only for a moment!" exclaimed Dax. "Only until the target realizes what has happened and remodulates its shields. A second or two, no more."

"A second or two is all you would need, Commander." No one spoke for a moment, then Worf continued. "I have found the center of the explosion, and it is not at a location where it could have occurred by accident or in the heat of battle. There is no evidence of concealment; the explosive device seems to have materialized exactly where it exploded."

"Project Renarg," mused Bashir.

"Yes, doctor. I believe the project has been successful.

The Klingons now have the capacity to destroy any ship in the Federation fleet."