Earthdate: December 2373
Location: Just outside the Cardassian Badlands....Explosions by the hundreds filled space in every direction and shockwave after shockwave slammed into the tiny vessel Sphinx. Its shields sputtered and flared fitfully, while inside the lone pilot desperately tried to grab hold of the wildly flailing joystick, torn from her grasp during the murderous barrage.
"Where the hell is my backup!" yelled Jazz Phoenix into her voice pickup. She finally managed to snag the unwieldy stick, and jammed it as hard as she could to the left, at the same time cutting her port engine, hoping to evade the worst of the Jem'Hadar battle bugs' fire.
As the Sphinx gyrated around the worst of the explosions, a crackle of static suddenly filled her ears and the voice of her second-in-command, Lieutenant Lee Carter, could barely be discerned saying that the rest of the Banshees had been cut off from her position and couldn't help.
Phoenix cursed under her breath at the cruel gods of the galaxy and steeled herself for a very long and lonely fight. She had only herself to blame. She should have smelled trouble when Schmidt detected the lone Cardassian military freighter, apparently crippled and lightyears from any help. It had been the perfect target of opportunity-alone and defenseless-how could they pass it up?
They had peeled away from their task force to blow it up, but it had been a trap! From the sensor shadow above the magnetic pole of a nearby rogue planetoid, dozens of Jem'Hadar battle bugs had swarmed until they seemed to outnumber the very stars themselves. Phoenix had ordered a retreat, but it was too late-her team was surrounded and cut off from the task force.
She yanked her stick back the other way and re-ignited the port engine, reversing direction and temporarily confounding the attack ships that had been closing on her six. A deft zig followed by a well-timed zag placed a battle bug directly in her sights, and moments later it blossomed into a glowing cloud of radioactive debris after taking a double hit from her zip cannons. Swinging in a wide circumnavigation around the explosion, she got ready to come around for another attack run against her immediate pursuers.
Too late though, she realized that her opponents had anticipated her maneuver and were waiting for her as she came barreling around. It was a fatal mistake on her part, she knew-only a miracle would save her now. "Maaaaax!" she cried. Max's famous esper ability to be precisely where she was most needed had never failed her yet, and even as the echo of her plea for help died in her ears, she saw the Basilisk, Max's Banshee, fighting its way toward her through a horde of Jem'Hadar, with Carter, Schmidt and Beckett close behind.
But it was too late. Even as Phoenix watched Max blow the last of her opponents into oblivion and bellow forth her battle cry to warn off the enemy that were plaguing her commander, a Jem'Hadar attack craft loomed before the Sphinx's nose, and the last thing Phoenix saw was the blinding green flare of it disruptors.
"She can't have survived that day!" repeated Max stubbornly. "I saw her fighter get blown to subatomic spacedust by that Jem'Hadar attack ship, and so did you." This last was addressed to Carter, Jo and Sam, who had been right there that fateful day as well.
"But the distress signal..." said Jo. She knew only what her instruments told her.
"How should I know?" retorted Max hotly. Of the three survivors from those dark years, Max had been hit the hardest by Jazz's death. She and Jazz had been close friends, and Max had always blamed herself for not being at her boss' side when she'd been needed the most. It was a heavy burden on her heart, and this discovery was bringing unwelcome old memories and feelings back to the fore. "Did it ever occur to anyone that this might be another trap?"
"Max..." said Carter carefully. "That was more than ten years ago. You've got to let go."
"Yeah... Easy for you to say..." she muttered, then lapsed into sullen silence.
"So, who was this Phoenix person anyways?" asked Alex, feeling a little left out of the happenings.
"She was the wing commander of Banshee Squadron before Lee got the job. She was killed in this sector during the Dominion War. She and Max were friends."
"Oh."
Carter's voice came back over the comm-link. "Jo, have you been able to clarify the distress signal at all?"
"No, Commander. But I've got a definite fix on the point-of-origin. It's coming from the Lazon system."
The Lazon system?!? thought Carter. Could it be that Jazz really was still alive? Lazon II was an infamous Cardassian penal planet. If she'd been somehow captured instead of killed, she would have been taken to Lazon II. With renewed hope, she ordered, "Alter course for Lazon II." Their fighters' capacitors were recharged from the warp burst maneuver that had brought them to this remote location, so she pushed them up to warp 7, which would bring them to the vicinity of their destination in under five hours.
Five hours later, five Federation starfighters popped from subspace within the Lazon star system, former territory of the Cardassian Union, but now a no-man's-land lost during the chaos following the Dominion War, wedged between the seething turmoil of the Badlands and the devastation of the inner Empire wrought by the Founders during the last days of that conflict.
Jo quickly reacquired the distress signal once they had gone sublight, and guided them in towards the second planet of the system.
Utter devastation was the operating phrase for this place. The ruddy atmosphere was choked with a thick blanket of high-altitude particulate matter. The sun probably never shone here, and acid rain was most likely on the forecast for every day. Even from orbit, gargantuan strip mines hundreds of miles across scarred the acheronian surface, long abandoned, the precious metals they once yielded depleted. Sludge and toxic runoff from abandoned mega-factories congested sluggish rivers, clogging deltas and spewing into the small, shallow seas.
"Jo, send a message to Starbase 901. Apprise them of the situation, and ask them to send one of their starships to help pick up any survivors we find here."
"Right away," acknowledged Jo.
How can anyone survive in this hellish place? thought Carter dourly. She doubted conditions had been much better even back when Cardassia still administered the planet, but the environment now was nearly unlivable. But there were survivors-Jo's scans of the surface showed isolated pockets of humanoids scattered across the entire land area, concentrated around the sites of the former prison camps. That's where we'll find Jazz—if she's still here.