A Major Collision

by Seven

(crossover)


Disclaimer:  Earth: Final Conflict and its characters are copyrighted by Tribune Entertainment Company.  All rights reserved.



Note from Author:      All right. It's weird. It's peculiar. It's not particularly well-written. It conflicts with everything in both universes. But I just had to write this story, however huge and gaping the flaws.



**********



In space, a flat, rounded warship was hovering. The engine modifications were complete, and the warship went into warp.

Captain Benjamin Sisko played with his baseball on the bridge, nervously. Normally he would have left the baseball on DS9, but he needed a sense of normality. How was he going to accomplish this mission?

"We are about to reach the coordinate, Captain," Worf rumbled.

"Engines steady, sir," O'Brian called. "We can do this."

Sisko stood up and straightened his shirt. The baseball rolled from his lap to the floor. "Dax, go to warp."

Ezri Dax's slim fingers danced on the board. "Warp drive engaged... hold on! This is gonna be bumpy...."

The Defiant seemed to stretch, then glide through a thousand domains of subspace...

----

Captain Lili Marquette's shuttle glided on conventional drives through the asteroid belt. Agent Sandoval was reading in the passenger seat, while Lili deftly avoided asteroids.

The mothership had picked up some odd energy fluxes from the belt, and had sent Sandoval and Lili to investigate. It was more than a little odd, but then, Lili thought, Zo'or had been acting peculiar lately. More peculiar than usual.

The shuttle suddenly slammed into something. At first Lili thought that it was a rock, then saw that the surface was smooth. Metallic. And it was grinding into the virtual glass and didn't seem to be able to get away.

"Get us away from that!" Sandoval yelled above the shrieking alarm controls.

"I can't!" Lili yelled back. The virtual glass began to flicker, and the air inside began to thin in spurts. A huge chunk of the metal hull of the other vessel sheared away.

----

"We have seen no indication that your precious humans will advance in any way," Zo'or said smugly, looking into his opponent's face. "How have they advanced since the arrival of the Taelons?"

"What we have done is interfere with their natural progression," Da'an argued. "And therefore-"

A fizzling noise from Zo'or's command panel interrupted them. Major Liam Kincaid seemed to break out of a trance as he transferred the fizzling into a more accessable control area and cleaned it up. "... Marquette... another vessel... Jaridian... require assistance..."

Zo'or jerked out of his chair. "The Jaridians," he said in a low voice.

"Hold it," Liam said. "We don't know for sure."

"Liam is right," Da'an said. "We must make sure."

Zo'or looked down for a moment, then waved a datastream into view and altered the mothership's course, from lunar orbit to conventional drive. After a moment, the two shuttles came into view. Da'an and Zo'or looked nervously at them. Their front sections were melded, the tip of the alien shuttle jammed into the virtual shield.

"That is not of Jaridian design," Da'an said, sounded relieved.

"Both are leaking air," Liam reported. "The virtual glass is breaking down, and the alien shuttle appears to have stress fractures."

"Pull them into the shuttlebay," Zo'or said.

----

Lili and Sandoval were already out of the shuttle when Da'an, Zo'or, and Liam arrived. They looked rumpled but all right. However, the alien shuttle, with cracks and folds along its side, was still unopened.

"Why has the shuttle not been opened?" Zo'or asked the Volunteer present.

"We can't get it open, sir. It only opens via a code, and we don't know what it is," the young woman replied.

Liam held his hand up. "I think I know a way," he said. Walking over to the shuttle, he pulled off the code panel and grasped a large lever inside, and pulled hard on it. There was a groaning noise, and the door slid open.

Wild coughing and hacking came from inside. Liam went into the smoke-filled cabin and grasped its seemingly humanoid occupant by the shoulders, or what he could see of them. He helped it walk out, still coughing and spluttering.

The young woman appeared to be human, with blue eyes filled with tears and short dark brown hair. A thick band of freckles made its way along her neck down into the blue collar of an odd black and gray jumpsuit. Da'an bent down and touched her shoulder. "Do not be afraid," he said quietly. "We will not harm you."

The girl took a glance back at the shuttle and groaned. "Benjamin's... gonna kill me," she wheezed, ending her statement with more coughing.

"Benjamin?" Zo'or asked suspiciously.

"Yeah, Benjamin Sisko, captain of the USS... uh oh..." She stared about in horror.

"Captain of the USS Uh-Oh?" Sandoval asked. Lili gave him a little kick in the shin.

"Oh, boy, I shouldn't have said that," she gasped. "Look, my name is Ezri. Ezri Dax, and you have to let me go right now, okay? With my shuttle? Okay, you can keep the shuttle, but you have to blow it up."

"Pardon me," Liam said.