He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
- William Faulkner, Speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize
The predatory outlines of a Defiant class starship loomed on the small viewscreen on the Rocinanté's control console. "Section 31!" hissed Max Vasser. "Looks like we didn't outsmart them after all. They're coming up fast from dead astern."
Another energy bolt blossomed in the rear viewscreen. "Hang on!" shouted Max.
West yanked the controls hard over causing the Rocinanté to swerve crazily. Behind the two pilot seats, Gromit rolled from the left wall of the cockpit to the right side. Outside, the phaser blasts from the pursuing ship passed to starboard, but just barely. "Here's where things get interesting," muttered West.
"What's happening?" yelled the image of Claude Vasser on the Rocinanté's little comm screen. His face showed worry and concern for his daughter and his old partner West.
"We're under attack by a Section 31 ship, dad!" yelled Max. She had to shout to be heard over the constant battle noises -- the creaks and groans of stressed metals, the clamorous thrumming of shockwaves slamming against the hull outside, the frightened squealing of West's tribble. "They must have been monitoring your grave on Serenity just on the off chance that someone would eventually show up who knew something about the Omega device, and they've been on our tail ever since."
Claude could be seen manipulating controls out of the viewscreen's field of view. After a few moments, he looked up at West and said, "I'm heading in your direction. Hold them off until I get there."
"Easy for you to say," replied West, but he barely spared the older man on the monitor a glance so occupied was he with keeping the Rocinanté from being hit by phaser fire from the warship behind them.
"Why don't you fire the rear weapons, West?" shouted Max. Another near hit rattled the cockpit forcing her to hang onto the console before her. In the back, Gromit rolled from the right side of the cockpit to the left.
"Rear weapons?" barked West between grated teeth. He laughed humorlessly. "Sweetheart, this ain't a shiny Starfleet ship, it's a beat-up old cargo hauler. We've barely got any front weapons!"
Max thought furiously. There must be something they could do to fight back. Some way to strike back at the Section 31 ship -- some way to slow them down just a little. "What about those little decoy drones?" she asked suddenly.
"What about them?" asked West.
"We could lob a couple behind us and overload their warp drives. Two miniature antimatter reactors exploding in your face ought to do a little damage!"
West's face lightened. "Great idea! Glad I thought of it. Here-- you fly, I'll lob." He punched a contact and the flight controls disappeared from the console before him and reappeared on Max's side.
"Wha--? I don't know how to fly this bucket!" exclaimed Max.
But West was already out of his chair and heading aft. Over his shoulder he called, "Piece o' cake for an ace starfighter pilot like you," and then he was out the hatch.
Max cursed under her breath and placed her hands on the steering controls. After a few false starts that made the poor Rocinanté rock and scream in protest and made Gromit roll across to the other side of the cockpit, she got the hang of it, and the ride got smoother. She marveled at the responsiveness and power of this 'beat-up old cargo hauler', as West called it. There was clearly a lot more to it than met the eye. Now if only she could keep away from those phaser blasts.
A particularly close blast splashed across the Rocinanté's shields and almost knocked Max from her seat. "Hurry up, West!" she shouted down the corridor behind the cockpit.
West's voice returned through the intercom. "I'm set. Fire both tubes!"
Max's palm slapped the decoy firing control and she felt the ka-thunk ka-thunk of the small booby-trapped probes being ejected from the dorsal tubes. West burst back into the cockpit and fell into his seat and quickly focused the rear-view monitor on the two torpedo-shaped objects.
At the last moment, the Section 31 ship noticed the tiny obstacles in its way and tried to swerve aside, but it was too late. The probes' miniature warp cores overloaded and caught the vessel between two searing explosions of warp plasma and gamma rays. For a few seconds, the blinding light washed out everything else, neither ship nor the green force lines of the quantum wormhole could be seen, and West and Max dared to hope that they had succeeded in destroying their enemy, but then the stubby prow of the Defiant class emerged from the fireball followed by the rest of the ship and they knew they were still in big trouble.
"Damn!" shouted West. "Is there no stopping these guys?"
To punctuate West's statement and demonstrate just how futile their attempt had been, a barrage of phaser fire spattered over the Rocinanté's shields. They flared bright green and sputtered fitfully as they tried to absorb the onslaught, but in the end the attack was too much. In a last angry flash, the shields collapsed, letting the last few phaser shots through to the hull.
West and Max somehow managed to retain their seat through the violent shaking, but a wide assortment of new bruises would tomorrow attest to the fact that they were banged against console edges and arm rests repeatedly. Circuits overloaded and relays fused, filling the cockpit with showers of sparks making them duck their heads, and acrid smoke constricted their throats and stung their eyes before the automatic filtration system could compensate. The lights flickered and shorted out, plunging them into darkness until the dim red emergency lights came on long moments later.
"Remind me to upgrade the shield generators after we get out of this mess," muttered West after he had recovered from the shock of that last hit.
"If we get out," was Max's grim muttered reply.
The comm screen on the control console flickered to life again. West expected it to be the captain of the Section 31 ship calling to demand their immediate surrender, but was surprised to see the craggy face of Claude Vasser again. In all the excitement, he had almost forgotten about the other man.
"Here's the plan," said the older Vasser without preamble. "I beam the Ancients' Omega power device over to my ship before it occurs to them to do the same thing. I lead Section 31 away while you two make your escape. Got it?"
"No we don't 'got it'!" yelled Max. "They'll come after you!"
"That's the idea, Maxine. Section 31 doesn't give a damn about you two. All they want is Omega and to get revenge on me for defecting and ruining their plans."
"But you'll be killed!" pleaded Max. "There must be another way! You have to come with us, dad!"
At her side, West said in a calm voice, "He's right, sweetheart. It's the only way. Any other option and we all get killed." He started punching controls on his board. To the comm screen, he said, "I'm sending you the coordinates for the device, Claude."
"No! I won't let you do this! How can be so cold? He was your partner for God's sake!" Max grappled with West's arm to keep him from finishing transmitting the data to her father. "I didn't find my father alive after twenty years just so he can throw his life away!"
A terrible explosion from somewhere on the aft section of the Rocinanté jerked the deck out from under Max's feet and she staggered to her knees. West used the opportunity to stab in the final number sequence and hit the 'transmit' key. Half a second later, the Ancients' Omega device was enveloped in a cascade of transporter sparkles and faded from view.
The viewscreen image of Claude Vasser smiled sadly at his daughter. "Don't worry about me, Maxine. Listen to West; he understands. Your old man still has a few tricks left up his sleeve. You haven't seen the last of me." He paused and regarded his anguished daughter with clear affection. "You've grown up into a fine woman, Maxine. I'm proud of you. Tell your mother I love her... and... I love you too." He touched an off-camera control and the comm screen went dark.
West banked the Rocinanté in a tight loop that tossed Max back into her copilot seat and made Gromit roll and thump against the opposite wall again. Outside, the Section 31 ship whooshed past the small evading cargo runner and headed straight for Claude Vasser's ship just as he predicted.
"We can't just leave him," said Max to West in a last desperate attempt to change his mind. In her heart she knew what they were doing was the only reasonable course of action -- even jettisoning Omega out into space and making a run for it wouldn't have worked; Section 31 wouldn't be satisfied until they had both the Omega device and exacted their revenge on her father -- but she still found it near impossible to accept her father's sacrifice.
West looked up from his controls at Max's distraught face. He felt a sudden pang of empathy for her. She tried to act so brash and uncompromising all the time, but he could see the carefully concealed vulnerability behind her mask.
"Trust your father, Max," he said emphatically. "If he says you haven't seen the last of him you can bet your life on it."
"That I could do," muttered Max disconsolately as she turned back to face forward. "But we're betting his life here, and that's a game I don't like..."
But there was nothing she could do. Under West's guidance, the Rocinanté fled back the way it came while the black Section 31 ship dove deeper into the quantum realm in pursuit of Omega and her father. She couldn't imaging any other outcome than the death of her father -- after all, what could a Raven class do against a souped-up Defiant class? She hoped and silently prayed that her father did indeed have one helluvan ace up his sleeve.
At her side, despite his optimistic words, West was thinking along the same dismal lines.
Their thoughts were interrupted by a tremendous flash of light. The whole inside of the quantum extrusion was suddenly filled with white brilliance too intense for their eyes to tolerate, and then the whole cockpit was turned upside down and rolled over and over again in a never-ending cartwheel. Walls, ceiling and floor became a blur, indistinguishable from each other in the frenetic gyration, and West, Max, and Gromit were brutally thrown around the small room in tangles of arms, legs, and fur. From somewhere in the midst of the maelstrom, Max thought she heard West shout something about an Omega explosion, but she was too busy trying to keep from getting her brains smashed in to pay too much attention.
Outside, the forcelines delineating the quantum vacuum units fluctuated wildly, shrinking and inflating repeatedly almost too quickly for the eye to follow as the energy from the destabilized Omega molecule poured into the constricted continuum, flooding it with the very fires of Creation.
The forcelines squeezed together, then puckered as though the fabric of spacetime was folding up and turning itself inside out, then vanished from the universe. One tiny spaceship was expelled from the pocket of quantum foam back into normal Euclidean space at that exact instant. It tumbled slowly end over end in lazy, zero-gee somersault, its running lights extinguished, its engines cold, its windows dark. Only the emergency beacon in the nose possessed life, flashing its simple message with metronomic regularity.
Several hours later, the Search & Rescue vessel which had been dispatched from Serenity pulled alongside, attached a tractor beam, and towed the derelict craft back to safe harbor.
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