Colonel Kira Nerys turned in her chair and saw herself enter the cramped bridge of the Defiant. It was the replicant of herself from the mirror universe, still in her rust-red uniform that was almost exactly the same as her own, except for one or two minor things that were almost impossible to note. Her eyes were steely and cold. Kira let the seat return to the console and focused on her readings. The sphere they had been forced to attack was now little more than a flaming wreck on the surface of Jeraddo. However, she had the awful suspicion that the cube would be only minutes away. She heard Sisko's voice behind her, talking to the replicant, but it was irrelevant for the time being. She had to concentrate.
"I'm sorry, but this is a combat situation," Sisko was saying tersely. "You'll have to leave the bridge. Now. Return to your quarters."
When Kira didn't hear the usual pneumatic noise of the doors opening, she looked over her shoulder. The replicant was still standing there, one hand on the phaser at her hip. "But captain, we can help," she asked imploringly. "The Defiant is powerful, but you've never fought the Borg here, in our own reality."
Sisko seemed ready to say 'no', but he shook his head and gestured towards the back. "Alright, fine. The mission ops table is free."
"Thank-you, captain," the Kira-replicant said, relief in her voice. But was it a little too much relief? Kira watched her duplicate walk to the mission ops table and seat herself at it, where she called up a screen of information and started reading.
Chief O'Brien gazed into the spherical warp core reaction chamber as if he could see his future in the harsh white glare. He had felt the deck shake a few minutes ago, but nothing had happened since, so he assumed that it had been a sortie with one of the Borg vessels. Captain Sisko had obviously steered them clear of it, on the account that he was still fully biological, and the Defiant was still throbbing with its overpowered gusto. "Woodward," he called to one of his assistants. "Check the EM ratios and make sure they're balanced. The last thing we need is for…"
A set of double-doors opened behind him, and he turned to see the powerful figure of Worf striding into the Engineering chamber. He looked a little beaten and bruised, but nonetheless okay. "Something I can do for you, commander?" Miles O'Brien asked, his Irish accent tinging the question.
Worf looked momentarily confused, then his expression cleared to its usual mix of seriousness and dour Klingon purpose. "Yes, Chief. The captain wanted me to look the phaser banks over one more time. We had to retune them for combat, and I am concerned that it may be causing wear on the mechanism."
O'Brien, being the chief engineer of both Starfleet's only cloakable warship and Cardassian space station, couldn't see how retuning the phasers would damage them, and he proceeded to tell Worf so. But the Klingon lieutenant was adamant. "It is a matter of safety," he insisted in a deep voice. "If we lose phasers whilst we are engaging the Borg, we would be captured and assimilated for certain. I only wish a few minutes to inspect the phaser banks, then I will return to the bridge." When O'Brien opened his mouth to protest, Worf cut him off. "We may only have minutes before the cube finds us, Chief. And I realise that your engineers are busy."
"Oh, alright," O'Brien gave in. He had known Worf for ten years, and trusted him to look over the ship's weapons array. "You can get through the security check by yourself, yes?" When the Klingon nodded, he waved a hand impatiently. "Well, get going, or the cube will find us." He said that last bit in a deep voice that mocked Worf's own bass timbre. The only response he got was a cutting glance before the lieutenant turned his back and left. O'Brien shrugged and got back to work.
Alone in the guest quarters, the parallel-universe Jadzia Dax tried to hold back the guilt behind a dam of control as she worked the control panel. It was a basic library access terminal that was available for guests to download and read non-classified information about the Defiant. In her own reality, starship designers never would have spared such a thought for temporary passengers. It would have been considered a waste of materials and computer usage. But Dax was a lot more computer-savvy than she let on around most people. She didn't like to flaunt it, but many hailed her as one of the Alliance's most accomplished hackers; she had cut her teeth on Borg security programs, and from there, she had found others to be a fair bit simpler. And she was already intimately-familiar with the computer firewalls of the Defiant. Sure, there were one or two differences here and there, but it was essentially the same system. The best way to do this was to focus entirely on the job. Forget about Benjamin. Forget that she was betraying him and his crew, his ship…
Forget about it all. There's a way to get this done. Let's do it, the age-old symbiont inside her commanded. The Dax symbiont was just as compassionate and hard-headed as the more humanoid Jadzia, but was endowed with several lifetimes of experience, and it knew that this was the only way for things to be done.
She proceeded to tunnel through the firewall using a combination of mathematic brute force and some clever tricks with access codes that she'd learned a long time ago. It took her only five or six minutes to get behind the security screens and into the core processing functions lists. The helm and navigation systems…that was her target. They were currently active and being manipulated from the bridge, but that just meant that the Dax-replicant had to be careful in the way she did things. Presumably, there was somebody sitting at the console, and that meant that any changes in the software were instantly obvious if she inadvertently let it be seen. She called up the Defiant's astrogation library, found the appropriate star chart, and compared it with the recent passive scans. Perfect, she realised, relieved. This was going to be easy. One or two quick adjustments to the helm's course, a set-up sensor loop that would feed the screens false data, and an override protection switch. The Dax-replicant drew a sharp breath as she started to back out through the firewall, delicately, so as not to leave tracks. She had just betrayed Captain Sisko! Perhaps she could stop her hacks from coming into effect? Or confess and turn herself in?
No, that would get them nowhere.
She cleared the temporary memory bank, sent the signal, and shut the terminal down. If this all worked the way it should, she would have time to regret it later.
