As the Serenity and the Ingenuity followed the Keldons back into the Underspace, Captain Lewis checked the time. If everything was going to plan, the Diligent and their Klingon allies should have just arrived in the Thomar Expanse. Soon, the first Cardassian array would fall, and then another and another as Captain Vox and General Golroth struck each of the arrays the Cardassians had inadvertently revealed to them through this feigned alliance he’d constructed. It was almost too easy…

“Mark our latest route through the Underspace, and the normal space coordinates of this array,” Captain Lewis ordered as they slipped through the aperture back into the turbulent corridors of the Underspace. “And forward them along to Polaris.” It was crazy to think how far they’d traveled in just a few hours. The latest target was nearly six thousand light years coreward of the Archanis Sector, where they’d started just a few hours earlier. Were they making the right choice? Or should they have been supporting the Cardassians in their mission to collapse the Underspace?

“Queueing the message into the network now,” confirmed Lieutenant Gadsen.

This would be the fourth target they’d passed along, and with each they came upon, Captain Lewis grew more and more skeptical that their plan would succeed. How many arrays like this did the Cardassians have? How many would Captain Vox and General Golroth need to destroy in order to stop the Cardassians from collapsing the Underspace? And would they be able to destroy enough of them before the Cardassians set their plan in motion?

For once, Captain Lewis almost wished that Dr. Lockwood or one of his lab rats had been on the bridge to answer his questions. Instead, all he had was the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity’s xenotechnologist, and while a shrewd scientist in her own right, she hardly had the competence in subspace physics to model the answers to his questions. Still, she had an important task before her. He glanced over at her. “How goes your progress, Commander?”

“It was easy enough to piggyback our carrier wave along the signaling frequencies of the beacons,” Commander Sena replied, referencing the way she’d hijacked the Cardassian probes to facilitate the Underspace-mediated communication channel that Lieutenant Gadsen had been using to communicate with the Polaris across thousands of light years in near real-time. “Even with their fabrication specs, they didn’t give us the keys to their command protocols, and those are proving difficult to bypass.”

“But you’ve embedded the Trojan horse in the probes we’re launching, and we can at least disable those, right?” Captain Lewis asked as he watched through the viewer as the USS Ingenuity ejected another one of the probes, built to Cardassian specs, from its rear launcher. As a failsafe, the Trojan horse they’d embedded would at least ensure that they could deactivate the ones they’d contributed to the Cardassian network.

“Of course,” Commander Sena nodded. “But that’ll only disable telemetry collection along the branches of the network that we’ve traveled. I have doubts it would be enough to undermine the entire network.” And that was the great conundrum in all of this. They had only local knowledge of the parts of the network they had traversed. The rest of the labyrinth was still beyond them. “The only way to assuredly stop them is to crack the command protocols of the system itself.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran stared ahead at the two Keldon class cruisers dead ahead and offered a suggestion: “What if we were to apprehend the Gul and compel him to hand them over?”

Captain Lewis looked at him doubtfully, but Commander Sena beat him to a response. “While I’d welcome an opportunity to go a round or two with a Cardassian Gul,” she said, her distaste for the Cardassians evident in light of the Omarion Nebula disaster. “It will be of no use.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran looked at her curiously. Although the JAG hearing officer had dropped the case against his Captain Lewis, the Betazoid had little doubt his Commanding Officer – and, for that matter, the former Tal’Shiar agent who’d just answered his question – would be able to excise the codes from an unwilling subject. He knew Captain Lewis had no qualms about doing what had to be done.

“Miss Sena is correct,” Captain Lewis explained. “That Gul is likely little more than a foot soldier, same as us.” The Executive Officer looked less than convinced. It was the reality of desperation, Captain Lewis knew, that sometimes you’d reach for strings that would lead nowhere. “I mean, if they captured you, would you be able to hand over Starfleet’s most secure command codes?”

“No, I suppose not…” Lieutenant Commander Eidran admitted.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Lieutenant Gadsen cut in. “But something’s wrong with the relay. I haven’t gotten an ACK back from Polaris yet. It’s like our message just fell into the abyss somewhere.”

“Let me have a look,” Commander Sena said as she pulled up the display that modeled the traversal of their comms payload. “Odd…” She’d figured maybe the payload lost its route somewhere along its path through the labyrinth, but that wasn’t what the display showed. Instead, it just terminated early. “It’s like part of the network is cut off.”

“Clarify,” Captain Lewis ordered as his spidey senses went off.

“I can’t be certain, but it got hung up somewhere around the branch node that leads to the Thomar Expanse,” Commander Sena replied, referencing the earliest turn in their journey when they’d first caught up with the Keldons. “It’s as though the rest of the chain back to the Archanis Sector is no longer allowing our side channel to traverse it.”

“Could Vox destroying the array have done that?” Captain Lewis asked.

“I doubt it,” Commander Sena shook her head. “We’re using the probes like we use subspace repeaters in a traditional comms model. It has nothing to do with the arrays at the termini.” As she keyed a few more instructions to explore the problem deeper, it dawned on her. “It’s almost as though we can’t relay any further than the probes that we laid on behalf of the Cardassians… as though the ones the Cardassians laid aren’t propagating messages for us anymore.”

“Have they caught onto us?” Captain Lewis began to ask.

But before Commander Sena could reply, Lieutenant Gadsen jumped in. “Sir, we’re being hailed by the lead ship,” he reported nervously, wary of the timing.

“On screen.”

A moment later, the Gul that they’d convinced to ally with them appeared on the main viewer. Even among a frequently disgruntled people, he looked particularly disgruntled.

“Captain Lewis, we need to talk. Your offer of assistance, we knew it was too good to be true. This whole time, you have sought to undermine us, all while pretending to be our allies. But what more should I expect from the Federation?”

There was a supreme distaste in the way the Cardassian spoke his words. Although Captain Lewis had no way of knowing, as a young boy, this Gul had watched his family perish in the rubble of Lakarian City. His father, like so many others, had been enlisted by the Federation into a resistance against the Dominion with promises that the Federation would come to their aid, but they had not come. Not in time, at least. And millions had died as a result.

“Whatever do you mean?” Captain Lewis asked, maintaining an air of outward calm even as inwardly his mind raced. The Cardassian relays were suddenly rejecting their messages, and now the Gul was accusing them of being duplicitous. Had they figured out what the Starfleet crew was up to?

“One of our arrays, the one in the Thomar Expanse, the one where we first rendezvoused, it has been destroyed.”

“Are you sure it isn’t just a malfunction?” Captain Lewis offered in a still-measured tone. “Such things are not unheard of when…” But Gul cut him off mid-sentence, uninterested in wasting more time with the traitor to their cause.

“At first, we thought so too – I mean, you made such a convincing case that you understood how the Underspace threatened both our people’s existences – but then we received this recording from the ships I’d dispatched there just in case you weren’t being entirely truthful with us.”

The screen suddenly shifted to a video of a battle, shot from the bridge of a Galor class cruiser as it traded shots with a Klingon assault wing. Captain Lewis recognized the composition immediately. It was General Golroth’s ship, the IKS Qul’val, and its accompanying flight of warbirds. The USS Diligent, thankfully, was nowhere to be seen though.

“The Klingons? What are they doing out there?” Captain Lewis feigned ignorance.

“Why don’t you tell me, Captain?”

“I don’t know…”

As they continued to watch, Captain Lewis fearing with each passing moment that Captain Vox’s ship would appear, the Klingons appeared to be winning. And thankfully, Captain Vox’s ship never showed itself. 

But then, about a minute into the recording, a dozen more Cardassian warships tore into the scene as they emerged from the aperture, outflanking and significantly outnumbering the Klingon force as they unloaded upon General Golroth’s flagship.

The battle was over moments later, every Klingon ship reduced to scrap.

“I am pleased to report, for the sake of the galaxy itself, that there were no survivors. But, you see, you’re not faultless here.”

“It must be a coincidence…” Captain Lewis began to say.

“No, it most certainly is not! You see, right before our quick reaction force emerged from the Underspace, they almost collided with something…”

The display cut to another video, this one a front mounted cam aboard one of the Galors that was tearing through the aperture towards the Thomar Expanse. And that’s when he saw it, the characteristic profile of an Alita class heavy escort tearing towards the Cardassian force. The warships bobbed and weaved, almost striking the corridors walls, to avoid colliding with the incoming Starfleet vessel.

“That would be the USS Diligent, which, according to Cardassian intelligence, is assigned to Polaris Squadron, same as you and your colleagues.”

Shit, Captain Lewis thought to himself. They’d been had.

“Shields up! Red aler…”

The captain didn’t even get the words out though as a pair of energy bursts leapt from the stern of both Cardassian ships. The last thing Captain Lewis saw, before the blasts hit, was a sadistic smile on the Gul’s face. He knew he’d won. It was too late. Starfleet couldn’t stop them now.

Lieutenant Tarasova had anticipated the captain’s orders, and she’d gotten the shields up before the blasts hit. It didn’t matter though. The bright flickers of light weren’t torpedoes or phasers. They were resonance pulses, shared with the Cardassian Union by the Turei, designed to interact with shield harmonics in such a way as to violently expel a ship from the Underspace.

And then, as the Serenity and the Ingenuity fell out of the Underspace, all hell broke loose.

The inertial dampeners couldn’t keep up with the rapid deceleration. Officers flew across the deck and slammed against bulkheads with impossible force.

The deflector couldn’t keep up with the velocity of incoming space particulates. They tore through the hull at superluminal velocities, breaches spreading across a half dozen decks.

Terminals exploded. 

Pylons collapsed.

Air vented from environmental systems.

Dozens of soldiers breathed their last breaths.

And then darkness overtook the ship.