The first that the Breen would have known that Atlantis had seen them would have been when their prey had started to manoeuvre not like she was trying to stay quiet and slowly rise out of the atmosphere, but had opted for rocketing straight up at the ships that were hovering above. In the vacuum of space, without gaseous resistance and without the pull of gravity to slow her, Atlantis could make an appreciable percentage of the speed of light on her impulse engines alone. But here, in the depths of Dormak VI, she was barely making a hundred kilometres an hour.

A journey of a few hours to the surface was cut to just over an hour now.

“Our pursuers are giving chase,” Gabrielle informed. Her sensors were, in this soup at least, the earliest warning they had. They were better at spotting the heat plumes surrounding Atlantis than the tactical sensors were since a subset of them were designed for spotting atmospheric anomalies after all.

“And those lying in ambush?” Tikva asked as she sat back down.

“Looks like they’re diving.” Gabrielle’s tone wasn’t confident about it. “But there’s a sheer layer above us making it hard to tell.”

“I’m getting really bad returns now,” Adelinde chimed in from Tactical. “We’ve been scanned,” she followed up immediately. “If their targeting sensor returns are as bad as mine, they know we’re here, but that’s about it.”

“Time till you can get a torpedo lock?” Mac asked.

“Few more minutes on the ones in front, a bit longer on those chasing us.”

The viewscreen, useless in the atmosphere, had been switched to a series of tactical displays. A sensor readout on the screen with a series of red dots around the periphery was the dominant one. A single red circle around the green dot of Atlantis was the nominal tactical range. It wasn’t at all the range of the ship’s weapons, just the range that Lin was confident she could get a target lock on and actually hit what she was shooting at versus firing wildly into the atmosphere and whatever might be out there.

“T’Val, you’re free to do whatever you need, understood?” Tikva asked her helmswoman.

“Aya ma’am,” came the response.

“This is about the point I would want to be launching decoys,” Blake said quietly from her seat. “Try and pull a few of those bogeys off of us.”

“Drop chaff, pull into the sun for a few seconds and then drop the nose and head for the deck?” Tikva asked with a knowing smile. She knew Blake had been the one to install an old air-breathing flight holoprogram and made it available to the crew. And then Tikva had tortured the crew from time to time by interfering in their scenarios, or joining in and showing people her own skill.

“If I was flying, sure. But submarines also sometimes had decoys they could launch.” Blake pursed her mouth to one side, then switched it from side to side briefly in recollection. “Basically went in the water, made a lot of noise, pretending to be the submarine itself. Make engine noises, sonar sounds and the such. Confuse launched torpedoes into chasing it and draw the attention of enemy submarines.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” Mac said. “Just wish we had thought of it an hour or so ago when we could have had some probes reconfigured to do that.”

“Yeah,” Blake said, disappointedly.

“But we aren’t fighting in an ocean.” Tikva’s words got Blake and Mac’s attention as she leaned back, exuding confidence. A trick never taught in the command course, but one that captains had to come into naturally. “We’re in an atmosphere. A hot, soupy, dilithium-chromate laden atmosphere.”

“Estimate target lock on our front three in two minutes,” Adelinde chimed in.

“What are you thinking?” Mac asked. “And please don’t giggle. It’s disturbing when you giggle.”

“She giggles?” Blake asked, attention shifting from Mac back to Tikva, smiling wickedly. “Do tell.”

“She was giggling the whole time she was telling me the plan for our little performance piece at Deneb,” Mac confirmed.

“We’re tracking the Breen via heat signatures. Likely they are doing the same at long range unless Breen sensors are so far better than ours as to be a total intelligence failure.” Tikva grinned, looking at Mac. “So let’s make some heat signatures.”

It took Mac a moment to hit on the idea himself. “We’ll be blinding ourselves as well.”

“So? We don’t necessarily want to fight the Breen, just confuse the daylights out of them and slip past them and into open space. Once we open the range, we can keep them at bay hopefully long enough for either some nearby Cardassian ships to jump on in, or go to warp ourselves and show them just how fast this ship is.”

Or, and hear me out on this one Other Tikvas, blow them to smithereens so the Breen learn the leave the Federation and her allies alone.

We’re not supposed to be starting wars out there.

Yar, turn the side a-broadside and run out the guns! They want a fight, let’s give it to them.

Not in this gaseous mess. Atlantis would walk all over them in space. Be smart, take the fight where our sensors, shields and weapons all have the advantage over a pack of raiders.

And where we could get the Harpies launched too.

Mac nodded once, then turned just enough to look up at Adelinde. “Photon torpedo spread fore and aft, detonation ten seconds after launch. Repeat every minute.”

“Every minute?” Blake asked.

“Letting the fireballs die down,” Tikva answered. “We’re going to have a wall of plasma ahead and behind us all the way to space.”

“What about the creatures that live in this mess?” Blake asked.

“No Dormakians on sensors,” Gabrielle answered without prompting. “The range is clear.”

Gabrielle’s pronouncement was all that was needed before Adelinde let the first volleys fly free, five torpedoes fore and aft, blossoming into curtains of plasma as matter and antimatter annihilated each other in an orgy of energetic conversion. The energy they were releasing into the atmosphere of Dormak was, on a local scale, catastrophic. But on a planetary scale, for a gas giant this large, barely noticeable. Cometary impacts would generate more upset in the planetwide storm systems and ecology than this creeping barrage of torpedoes.

Atlantis was blind to the threats around her, but in return the Breen were blind as to where, behind that curtain of advancing and retreating hurricanes of destruction, Atlantis really was. The two Breen forces couldn’t see each other either which seemed to have given pause in the ambushers above. They never plunged through the tumult to engage, opting either to move aside or climb ahead of Atlantis.

And as it would turn out, it was the latter as Atlantis finally burst through the clouds of Dormak VI and into free and open space. T’Val was forced to throw the ship through a series of rapid manoeuvres to avoid debris that was raining back down into the planet from above. Broken pieces of Breen raiders were plummeting, trailing atmosphere and plasma as gravity claimed them and they were chased by a few torpedoes from the waiting Cardassian warships that had taken station in orbit. With her ability to move out of the way limited by continued fire, T’Val threaded Atlantis right through the middle of the three-ship formation before swinging the ship around and with precision and evident skill set the ship into a simple and stable orbit.

“We’re being hailed,” Rrr announced from Ops. “Gul Fremek of the Sander would like to speak with you captain.”

“Too much to ask that the Ta’del isn’t present?” Tikva asked as she got to her feet.

“Not seeing it out there,” Rrr continued. “Looks like nothing but ships of the 7th Order out there.”

“Well, let’s get this over with then.” Tikva straightened her back, hands behind her as the viewscreen shifted from the stars ahead to the bridge of a Cardassian vessel.

There was no close-in of this ship’s captain, no imposing face occupying her whole viewscreen. This was far more like hailing another Starfleet vessel, with the bridge on display, the captain at the centre of the action. But Gul Fremek, a handsome enough Cardassian woman, wasn’t smiling. She was hard, eyes squinting in assessment before they eased after just a moment. There was concern, worry, then relief on her face in such short order as to give Tikva pause.

“Oh good,” Fremek finally said, relaxing some. “Captain Theodoras, you need to contact your commanders immediately. There’s been an incident in the Sol system.”

“What sort of incident?” Tikva asked. She could feel the interest, the concern, the need to know that was brewing in all of her bridge crew. And herself.

“There was an attack during the Frontier Day celebrations.” Fremek paused, either for dramatic effect or to sum up the courage to say the last piece. “By the Borg.”