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By Root 160 0

of the elevator shaft. He took a deep breath, taking in the sight of the shaft dwindling into infinity. It had stood for thousands of years, and by his actions it wouldn’t stand even another day. He felt his eyes go moist, and his breathing became choked. He wanted to look down, down to Kharzh’ulla, to the places he had known so well as a youth, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. He had always looked up. When his mother died, he looked up. When he declared himself for engineering at the university, he looked up. When he left Kharzh’ulla, his career in disgrace, he looked up.

As the transporter beam took him, he looked up.

“I’m fine,” said Tev, his arms crossed, his brows knotted.

Lense frowned. “That’s my determination to make, not yours.” She picked up her medscanner off the worktable. “Now, lie down on the biobed.”

Tev sat resolutely on the biobed. “Doctor, it was the merest case of zero-gee discomfort.” He looked to Gomez standing near the sickbay doors. “Commander Gomez will attest to that.”

Gomez held up her hands in a don’t-look-at-me gesture.

“Discomfort?” repeated Lense. “The med sensors in your suit showed your heart rate up, your blood pressure up, and you were hyperventilating.” She paused, taking in Tev’s defiant expression. “I can have you medically relieved from this mission, Tev.”

Tev flared his nostrils and narrowed his eyes. He flopped backward onto the biobed in exasperation. “Very well, Doctor. Run your tests.”

Lense smiled sardonically and shook her head.

“Well,” said Gomez, “if the patient’s in good hands, I’ll be in the transporter room meeting First Minister Grevesh and Minister Eevraith.”

Lense nodded, then turned back to running her medscanner above Tev’s body. The last thing Gomez heard as the sickbay doors closed behind her was a snort of derision from Tev.

Slumped in his antigrav chair, Grevesh looked frail. Gomez thought he hadn’t looked particularly strong on the surface, but under the da Vinci’s higher gravity, he seemed to wilt. “First Minister, are you all right?”

Grevesh blinked his eyes a few times, as if to clear them, and Eevraith knelt down on the transporter platform beside him. “First Minister?” Eevraith said.

Grevesh pushed Eevraith away, and he inhaled loudly and deeply. “I feel heavy,” he said, his voice weak. He smiled when his eyes focused on Gomez.

Gomez nodded and smiled. “You feel that way because, in essence, you are heavier. But as your body becomes accustomed to the higher gravity aboard ship that feeling will pass.” She stepped up onto the transporter platform and knelt at Grevesh’s knee. “Welcome aboard the da Vinci.”

Grevesh patted Gomez’s hand. “Thank you, my dear.”

Eevraith and Gomez rose, and Grevesh’s chair floated off the transporter platform and out into the corridor. Two security guards led the way as they walked to the turbolift.

“How much preparation has your team done, Commander?” asked Eevraith.

“We’ve placed the detonation charges, and now we’re moving on to the next phase—detaching the Ring segment westward of the damaged elevator.”

“How?”

“The Ring consists of segments a few hundred kilometers long. What we’re doing is simply ‘breaking’ the Ring at one of the joints with explosive charges, then using focused phaser bursts if needed.”

“Clever,” Eevraith said. “How long until you ‘break’ the Ring?”

Gomez shrugged. “Within an hour, once our engineering team reports back.”

The turbolift doors parted, and Grevesh, Eevraith, and Gomez entered the cabin. The doors slid shut, and Grevesh looked up at Gomez standing on his left. “What of the people living in the Ring?” The Ring was inhabited along much of its length. The section above the damaged elevator had a large population due to its proximity to the elevator that serviced Prelv. The Ring segment east of the elevator’s terminus had been abandoned after the Jem’Hadar attack, but to the west twelve thousand Kharzh’ullans called the Ring home.

“Fortunately,” she said, “we’ve moved only a thousand Kharzh’ullans.”

“The rest of that Ring segment won’t be affected?” Eevraith said.