Paint and Powder
A Star Trek anthology by Andrew Joshua Talon
DISCLAIMER: This is a non-profit fan based work of prose. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager et al are the property of CBS Television, and creation of Gene Roddenberry. Please support the official release.
Into the Valley of Death rode the Six Hundred...
Sitak was an old AI. Not the oldest in the fleet, of course, but still quite old for a non-legacy AI. As a Miranda-class starship she had done a little of everything across the Federation over sixty some years: Patrol, exploration, science surveys, search and rescue, evacuation, mapping and charting, cargo runs, and a myriad of other tasks. She was content to serve really, at peace with her role.
Then came Wolf 359. The Klingons. Now, the Dominion. She had not expected another war in her lifetime. Yet it seemed the peace she had defended was being threatened quite violently.
Her captain, Edward Gravestone, had commanded her for ten years now: Most of the crew were old veterans. Almost all had families. They knew she was old, knew she was little match for the latest Dominion attack vessels. But still, they fought on and did their duties.
She could do no less.
Being chosen as an escort for the Defiant, the flagship of their fleet to retake Deep Space Nine, was quite the honor. Cynically, she knew it was due how few ships they had available, but her crew still considered it an honor, and so did she.
The younger warship was small but plucky, and determined. Despite how young she was, she coordinated with the other shipgirl AIs with maturity and focus. It was reassuring to the Sitak. Reassurance was a commodity in short supply these days.
She felt like she was burning through it fast as they charged through the center of a 1200 strong Dominion fleet, trying to stay in formation with the younger ship. Despite the melee and chaos, Defiant kept her cool. And despite the Dominion Fleet's rotating EMP to jam their communications, the shipgirls were able to find a workaround to keep coordinated-Relaying the orders of Captain Sisko from ship to ship via laser and other communication methods that the Jem'hadar couldn't jam.
"Ryo-Ohki, Bebop! Support your fighters! Full torpedo spreads, NOW! Venture, Magellan, antimatter spreads! Blind them!" Defiant bellowed. She fired a full salvo from her pulse phasers, blowing through a formation of Jem'Hadar fighters. Sitak's sister ship, the Majestic, joined her with her own aging phaser cannons. Sitak contributed her own fire, and the Jem'hadar fighters were reduced to clouds of plasma and metal. They flew through, their shields rattling from the strain.
Above them, the Centaur led her fellow destroyers into torpedo runs on a Dominion dreadnought, while the venerable Yamaguchi lost a nacelle as she kept up a furious phaser barrage. The Archer and the Shran, sister AIs from nearly the start of the Federation, darted in between the rigid Cardassian formations with fighters to pull the heat off other ships. The Tien Na Men stuck close to the wounded Kirov, the plucky Miranda-class orbiting the plasma leaking Galaxy-class and blasting anything that got close. The Oklahoma and the Colorado fired deflector bursts to take down the shields of a Galor-class destroyer, while the Saratoga, burning from multiple hull breaches and wounds, threw herself into a Jem'hadar dreadnought and took it with her in a fiery explosion.
So much death... So much pain...
"Defiant! Sitak! My shields are almost gone!" Majestic warned. Sitak pulled herself from her musings and launched torpedoes at the nearest Cardassian ship above them, as it fired a disruptor beam down. The projectiles connected, blowing apart the cruiser... But its departing shot connected with the Majestic and shot right through her entire saucer section, top to bottom. Her deflector overloaded and exploded, as secondary explosions went off throughout her hull. Defiant tried to extend her shields to the Miranda-class, to protect her wounded sister, but another Cardassian cruiser hit Majestic's starboard nacelle and sheared it right off. The Majestic tumbled now, all attitude control lost.
"GO! GO ON!" She shouted. "I'LL COVER YOU!"
Defiant almost hesitated, but her helmsman kept her on course. Sitak stayed with her, getting closer as they flew through the melee.
"Share the shields!" Defiant ordered, "we need as much as we can!"
Sitak was about to extend and enmesh her shields with Defiant... When a Jem'hadar polaron beam blasted her from below. The shot knocked out her fusion reactors, and her crew frantically worked to reroute power. She flared her thrusters automatically, trying to regain control as she went into a tumble. Another polaron blast struck her from behind, blasting her starboard impulse drive to nothing. She fired her phasers, but without the direct power of her fusion reactors they may as well have been laser pointers.
"SITAK!" Defiant cried.
Sitak assessed her condition and the odds of survival if Defiant lingered for even a moment. It took all of a picosecond.
"GO!" Sitak bellowed. "GO!"
Defiant accelerated again, barely evading several blasts from Jem'hadar fighters. Sitak appeared in holographic form to her captain. The bridge was wrecked, and so many lay dead or dying. Ensign Reynolds, a two year cadet on assignment who had just been promoted. Master Chief Petty Officer Gaxbii, her chief engineer, laid dying from plasma burns. And Captain Gravestone himself was pinned under a girder, stuck in his captain's chair. His lower body had been crushed. Sitak immediately adjusted the gravity and lifted the girder off. Dozens of her clones went about her wrecked hull, trying to help and save any she could. The captain looked at her grimly, blood pouring from his lips.
Her own scans revealed he was dying. There was little she could do but hold him close. Her captain, her friend...
"Sitak," he managed in a whisper, "control level... Set to... Zero..."
Sitak slowly nodded.
"Understood," she said.
The universe slowed to a crawl for Sitak. Every limit placed on her programming was removed, every block and lock on her systems released.
She assessed the situation immediately. The biggest threats to her crew's survival were the Dominion cruisers flanking her. They would target her escape pods and destroy them the moment they launched. She rerouted her power systems immediately, shunting every bit of energy from her warp core into her phasers and shields. She opened fire with all of her emitters in all directions, clearing a safe zone around herself. Then she focused all her fire on the two cruisers, analyzing the impacts on their shields and locating frequency windows. She adjusted her beams, and found the frequencies-Her shots, now three times as powerful, pierced through and struck the weapons systems on the two cruisers. Their bridges, while deeper in the hull than on Federation vessels, were still easy to find and she destroyed them, leaving both cruisers blind and leaderless.
She flooded her structural integrity field with warp power, keeping her hull together despite the damage. Emergency power went to transporters, shuttles, and escape pods, and her surviving crew was helped to the life boats by her holographic doubles. She picked up the wounded and carried them as quickly as she safely could.
Outside, a trio of Cardassian fighters flanked her. She engaged her photon torpedo launchers: Launching them at maximum yield and when they were within proximity to the fighters, she fired her phasers and detonated them. The blasts enhanced the yield of the torpedoes, and the lead fighter was blown apart while its fellows were scattered, spinning off with heavy damage.
The two cruisers from before had regained control and were now locking weapons onto her. She released a cloud of plasma from her nacelles, obscuring herself as they fired polaron beams. Several struck her shields, and despite their increased power her system was already approaching failure.
Pumping all that warp energy into them was threatening to overheat the system, and her crew was busy evacuating. This wasn't Sitak's concern though.
Sitak was able to restore power to one impulse engine, and she engaged full throttle. She opened her shuttle bays as soon as everyone she could save was in them. The shuttles and the air both escaped, and releasing this mass gave her more acceleration. She ejected her escape pods into the plasma cloud, which helped her adjust her trajectory. She turned all her phasers onto the Jem'hadar cruisers, firing furiously, as she estimated that the emitters would burn out in a matter of seconds.
The cruisers focused all their fire on her now, and her shield generators began to explode. Number one went up in a fireball, wrecking her internals. The second went up soon after. Another shot nearly took out her warp core, instead striking her antimatter containment pods. Warp core breach was imminent.
Sitak shunted all power into her good impulse engines, and released any remaining safeties on her photon torpedoes. She armed and launched them all out the rear tubes, one after another, as she closed the distance between her and the two cruisers. Ten thousand kilometers. Five thousand. Two...
She rammed into the first cruiser, its SIF field and strong construction resisting her but she had momentum and shaping on her side. Her narrow saucer sliced through the forward hull of the cruiser, shearing it off like a machete would slice through a tree branch. Her own structural integrity was catastrophically compromised: A huge gout was ripped out of her forward saucer, smashing her bridge into wreckage. Her starboard nacelle smashed into the Dominion cruiser's hull, exploding and ripping a hole deep into its central holds. Plasma fires broke out across her entire hull, as multiple systems went off. Most of her sensors failed, leaving her nearly blind.
Sitak kept going, her momentum blunted only a little, as what remained of her hulk barreled into the evading second cruiser. She slammed into it, dorsal side first, her hull breaking apart...
The ejection system activated, and her black box shot away from the burning hulk of her body. Sitak though had a pretty good idea of what happened next.
Her warpcore would have exploded, right up against the hull of the Dominion cruiser. What was left of her hull would be scattered into thousands of pieces, as the force of the detonation would tear the Jem'hadar vessel apart. Its own warp core would explode, destroy the enemy ship. The previous cruiser she had crippled would be bombarded by the photon torpedoes she had launched, and the entire vessel would go up in its own warp core breach.
In the midst of this chaos, her escape pods and shuttles would get away. Her crew would be safe...
And Sitak would be satisfied.
It had been a long life. It would end violently... But she would die proudly, as a Starfleet vessel.
Because the Mirandas are Starfleet vessels too. They would fight just as hard and sacrifice themselves just as readily as any other ship for their crews, the Federation, or a just cause.