by K. W. Jeter
Sisko ignored the security chief’s explanation, as he quickly punched through a priority comm line to the pylon. “This is Commander Sisko. The hold order on the Cardassian vessel is hereby countermanded. Recommence all appropriate departure procedures. The vessel’s original schedule is to be complied with.”
No sooner had he gotten a confirmation of his order and had disconnected, than another call came through. Gul Tahgla’s face appeared on the viewscreen.
“Commander Sisko.” Tahgla’s image nodded to him. “Is there a problem? Your exit crew informs me—”
“It’s been taken care of,” replied Sisko. “I trust you’ll accept our apologies for any delay. Please bear in mind that yours is one of the first non-Federation ships to be cleared for travel through the wormhole. We’re still fine-tuning our procedures.”
“Nothing more than that?” The Cardassian gul’s eyes peered out from the screen. “I was concerned that there might be some second thoughts on your part. About letting us proceed on our mission. Perhaps you never anticipated that we would cooperate as fully as we did with your invasive technical requirements.”
“My only concern, Gul Tahgla, was for the safety of the wormhole’s inhabitants. We have an agreement with them, as well. Now that the impulse buffers are in place around your engines, you’re free to go.”
“Thank you. As I’ve mentioned before, I find your concern for these immaterial creatures to be . . . amusing.” He reached for the comm switch on the panel before him. “It might be some time before I return this way. Perhaps we can resume our conversation then. That is, if you’re still here.” The screen went blank.
“Are there any further instructions, Commander?” During the exchange with Tahgla, Odo had stayed discreetly out of range of the comm lens.
“No . . . ” Sisko shook his head. He knew that Odo was wondering, after the report he’d received about the true nature of the Cardassian research vessel, whether he had lost his mind; whether the nonstop pressure and mounting responsibilities of both running the station and overseeing the Federation’s diplomatic relations with Bajor had deranged his rational faculties. The time would come—and soon, he hoped—when he would be able to explain to Odo and the others the reasons for the decisions he’d made. The gamble he’d taken. But until then . . . “Proceed as I’ve indicated. Until further notice.”
When he was alone again in the office, he set the viewscreen to a remote scanner on the station’s exterior, opposite the currently engaged docking pylon. Gul Tahgla’s vessel was in the process of casting off, the arcs of the securing mandibles and the transfer umbilical cord slowly retracting from the ungainly Cardassian shape. The quick, bright flares of the maneuvering jets turned the vessel’s main thruster ports away from the station. The screen darkened against the engines’ sudden pulse. In only a few more minutes, the vessel had disappeared beyond the scanner’s highest magnification.
From the position of DS9 in the Bajoran system’s asteroid belt, there would be no visual check of the Cardassian vessel’s entry into the wormhole. Other, more sensitive tracking devices would record that moment. And as to what happened after that, on the other side . . .
Commander Sisko gazed at the blank screen, as though it could show him his own brooding thoughts.
“Any luck?”
Bashir looked over his shoulder at the voice that had come from behind him. Framed by dangling wires and the thicker cables of atmospheric life-support systems, Chief Engineer O’Brien stood in the quarantine module’s doorway.
For a moment, he wasn’t sure what O’Brien was asking about. Over synthales in Quark’s establishment on the Promenade—perhaps a few too many synthales—he had divulged some of his more personal plans to the engineer. Most of them—all, actually—had dealt with getting closer to some of the station’s female crew members. O’Brien had listened to the various schemes and machinations with the tolerant nostalgia of the happily married. Easy enough for him to take that attitude, Bashir had thought glumly. He goes back to his quarters with Keiko at the end of every shift.
“Pardon me—”
“I mean, with that diagnostic contraption you’ve been wrestling.” O’Brien pointed to the blood analysis unit perched precariously at the limits of Bashir’s outstretched fingertips; the device threatened to come crashing to the module’s floor at any moment. “Need a hand?”
“Well, yes, actually.” As with every other working and living space aboard DS9, the quarantine module was a hodgepodge of components finessed or bruteforced into working together. Or hopefully so; the QM was still a long way from going on line. As confusing as the interior layout was, its improvised nature was even more readily apparent from the outside, as it rested in one of O’Brien’s largest engineering bays. A heavy-ore transport that the Cardassians had abandoned now formed the linear spine of the QM; a turbolift would have been handy to get from one end to the other, though Bashir knew there was no chance of an equipment request like that being granted. Along the transport’s windowless sides, O’Brien had mounted every sealable living and working space that he could scrounge from DS9’s innards, linking them with a branching network of corridors; the ungainly result looked like a cubist grape cluster, rendered on a gigantic scale. Something sleeker would have better suited Bashir’s aesthetic preferences, but for the moment he was only concerned about not dropping the blood analyzer onto his head. “It should fit in here all right, but . . . ”
O’Brien stood on tiptoe and peered into the overhead niche in which the unit was wedged partway. “Looks like your clearance is just a smidgen too tight. Tell you what—down in the drydock bay, I’ve got a jacksledge that’ll clear this problem up in no time.” He smiled. “I’ve had a lot of success with it lately.”
“So I’ve heard.” The account of the chief engineer’s run-in with the Cardassians and its eventual outcome had already circulated around the station, adding considerably to the stock of anecdotes about O’Brien’s creative temper displays. “The difference here is, however, that this piece of equipment belongs to us. So I’m a little more concerned about keeping it in one piece.”
“Suit yourself.”
Between the two of them, they managed to get the unit in place, after O’Brien had stripped away some of the casing insulation that he judged to be superfluous. Bashir sat with his back against the module’s bulkhead and tried to regain his breath, as he watched O’Brien wrench down the retaining bolts.
“There, that should hold it.” O’Brien tossed the wrench in with the rest of the tools that had accumulated in one corner. “I’ll get the shop to dummy up a face panel so it doesn’t look quite so ragged.”
“I take it you have more time for this project now?” Bashir had been working single-handed on the quarantine module for the last several shifts. “The Cardassians must have finally left—”
“Sure enough. And I was never so glad to see the backs of anyone as I was that lot.” O’Brien shook his head. “Sneaky bastards, too.”
“What do you mean by that?” The comment, and the vehemence with which it had been spoken, took Bashir by surprise. The crew of the Cardassian research vessel had been unusually unobtrusive by their standards, confining themselves to either their shipboard quarters or the DS9 guest area that had been set aside for them. Generally, when Cardassians were aboard the station, a standing order went into effect, based upon the ancient Earth military slogan “Loose lips sink ships.” It hadn’t seemed to be necessary this time.
“Never mind.” O’Brien’s expression darkened. “You’ll probably find out about it soon enough.” He looked into the farther reaches of the QM, unlit except for the temporary work lanterns secured to the ceiling. “So, what’ve we got left to do here? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fiddling with this setup.”
The quarantine module had been the chief engineer’s main project before the arrival of the Cardassian research vessel. And a high-priority project, as well, given the limited resources with which they had
to contend. O’Brien and his technicians were proving themselves masters at the art of improvisation, converting the station’s odds and ends into functioning medical equipment.
Pressure to complete the QM was mounting. Before DS9 could be considered an operational transit point, capable of handling the amount of anticipated traffic for the stable wormhole, the means of handling shipborne contagions would have to be in place. It was a problem as old as the art of navigation itself; in pursuit of a specialization in interstellar medicine, Bashir had studied the old practices of seaports on several ocean-dominated planets, Earth included. Plague carried ashore by the fleas on a rat climbing down a wharf line could decimate a population with no immunity to foreign diseases; a feverish sailor coughing up red-tinged phlegm in a waterfront tavern could infect the crews of every ship tied up in the harbor. Diagnostic procedures and treatment had improved since the days of towing a plague ship out to open water and setting it afire, but in an uncharted universe, the dangers were still close to infinite—even more so, now that the wormhole had opened up the entire Gamma Quadrant for exploration. That was the reason Bashir had pushed for this assignment; this was the edge of medicine, a place where careers and reputations were forged.
Now, he responded to O’Brien, “Most of the environment chambers still need to be sealed.” He kept a running checklist inside his head, on what still needed to be done. “I’ll have to be able to maintain hyperbaric atmosphere pressures with some gases that are fairly tricky to work with.” The QM was designed to treat nonoxygen breathers, as well as the range of humanoid life-forms. “There are the rest of the monitors, of course—I should be getting a cargo shipment from Procurement any time now.” Bashir started ticking off the items on his fingers. “Alarm systems, comm lines . . . ”
“Small stuff,” said O’Brien. “We’ll be able to knock all that out pretty quick. The hard part’s going to be getting the extrusion gantry working. Any time you go poking things out beyond the perimeter shields, you start running into problems.”
Bashir knew how much work the chief engineer had already put into the QM’s positioning abilities. The necessity for the module to be able to move outside the station had dictated its placement near one of the main cargo bays, so it could access the massive airlock doors opening onto empty space. In the event of a disease outbreak aboard a vessel approaching DS9, depending upon the nature of the infection, the stricken individuals could be brought aboard the station in hermetic-containment gurneys and placed directly into the QM; if the virus or other pathogenic agent was considered too dangerous, however, the QM with its medical team aboard could be extruded through the cargo bay doors on its segmented gantry arm. The only contact with the plague ship would be through the trailing umbilical cord providing an outward flow of life-support systems to the QM and the vessel to which it had attached itself. Until the crisis had passed, the sufferers had been treated, the infection banished . . .
Or not.
“I got the clearance from the ordnance master.” O’Brien’s voice lowered; he was aware that there were some details of a quarantine module’s construction that a chief medical officer wouldn’t want a casual passerby to hear of. “The explosive charges are being constructed in the station armory right now. Soon as they’re ready, I’ll set ‘em in place myself, and then we can get the last of the bulkhead panels finished up. You’ll have to go down and code the fuses.”
Bashir nodded. It was a secret shared between him and the chief engineer, and otherwise known only by the station’s highest officers; the final necessary element of the module’s construction. An image from a med school lecture came unbidden to his mind, of an ancient sailing ship set afire in open water. He could imagine how it would have looked, the flames leaping up through the rigging, the billowing black smoke clouds woven with sparks, the faces of the pale dead, the dying consumed by an even greater fever. . . .
Some diseases couldn’t be cured. They could only be stopped; the infection kept from spreading any further. A cleansing fire, and then the vacuum as cold and final as the first uncharted depths that man had sailed upon.
That was what the explosive charges were for; why they would be buried right in the fabric of the quarantine module. Better that, to annihilate the QM and the diseased ship, and the medics and crew together, than risk the spread of an untreatable contagion. The few would be sacrificed for the many. That was sound medical practice, a decision a doctor would have to make.
And that was why the coding for the fuses, the explosives’ trigger commands, would be known only to the station’s chief medical officer. Bashir felt his blood temperature drop a notch as he thought about it, as he had so many times already. A situation unique in Starfleet regulations, a destruct sequence that could not be initiated or countermanded by any other officer, including the station’s commander—in this and any other deep space posting, the quarantine module was the inviolable territory of medicine, with its fate and the lives of its crew solely in the hands of the doctor in charge. On DS9, that would be Bashir; he had already decided—as other chief medical officers before him had—that if the moment should come, he would be aboard the QM when the explosives were triggered. It was an unwritten regulation that ensured the destruct sequence would be undertaken only in the gravest of circumstances.
As Bashir stood in the center of the uncompleted module, it was as though he were finally seeing the reality of his ambitions gathering around him-everything that had brought him to DS9. This is what you wanted, he told himself; the edge of medicine, a place where reputations could be made . . . even if the cost was his own life.
“Ah, cheer up.” O’Brien had read his dark thoughts. He clapped Bashir on the shoulder. “How often does a man get a chance to blow himself up in such style? Kind of a shame, actually, that it hardly ever happens. Tell you what, though—I’ll see if I can get the charges doubled in strength, so if you have to, at least you’ll go out with a proper, fine show.”
Bashir laughed. “Thanks. I appreciate your concern.”
Though later, after O’Brien had left him alone once more in the module, he had to admire the chief engineer’s poker face. As he walked through the area, switching off the work lights, he realized that he couldn’t be sure whether O’Brien had been joking or not.
He crawled forward in darkness, as he had before, until he reached the hiding place. Arten turned the panel aside and entered the glow of the portable lantern. As dim as it was, he still had to squint and blink until his eyes had adjusted.
“How good of you to come once more.” The voice spoke from the blurred silhouette in front of him. Hören’s voice. “So much is made possible by the labor of the faithful.”
“I was told it was important.” He had brought nothing with him; the supplies he’d carried last time were sufficient for several days more. “I came as soon as I could get away.”
With his shoulders scraping the close metal struts, he watched as Hören rummaged through the objects spread along the wall. The Redemptorist leader’s muscled bulk turned awkwardly in the space, like a plowbeast caught in a pen too small for it. The longing in Arten’s breast grew sharper—the day when this man would stand upright in the open, an equal with other spokesmen for the Bajorans, couldn’t arrive too soon.
“Take this.” Hören set a pair of recording chips in Arten’s hand. “They must be smuggled down to Bajor as soon as possible. A message to all believers . . . our future . . . ”
His heart leapt. Perhaps these were the words, the treasure hidden in the black, square objects barely larger than his thumbnail, that would bring about the dawn. “Yes . . . of course. . . .” Arten hurriedly tucked them inside his jacket. “A freight shipment is scheduled to leave at the end of the shift. These will be at their destination tomorrow. . . .”
“Good.” Before Arten could back toward the hiding place’s exit, Hören leaned forward and clasped an arm around his shoulder. “You have done much already. For this you will be rewarded.”
The other’s face was so close to Arten’s that their breaths mingled. He felt his soul mirrored in the eyes, fierce yet also inexpressibly sad. “There . . . there’s no need. . . .”
“But you will have your reward,” said Hören. “In this world—and the next.” He gathered Arten toward him, as though to bestow a kiss of peace upon the younger member of the brethren’s forehead.
Arten saw then, at the limit of his vision, a flash of bright metal as the other drew his hand from inside his jacket. Suddenly, the air seemed to rush from Arten’s lungs, leaving him unable even to gasp, as a widening circle of pain radiated from his gut.
Hören let go of him, and he was unable to keep his balance, collapsing onto the hiding place’s floor. His hands scrabbled futilely at the dagger that had torn open his abdomen.
“That is the reward you have earned. . . .”
The voice came out of the darkness that had engulfed the close space.
“By the treachery of your heart . . . that would love your people’s enemies. . . .”
He could barely hear the last few words. In the widening pool of his blood, he curled around the metal that had become the gravitational center of a collapsing universe. He managed to raise his head and could just make out Hören gazing down at him, and beyond, the figure of Deyreth Elt emerging from the shadows, a look of triumph on his narrow, wizened face.
That was the last he saw. Except inside himself, where he fell toward a dawn whose light erased every world and pain.
CHAPTER 5
“PEOPLE, WE HAVE a small problem before us.” Sisko leaned forward, hands clasped atop his desk. In a semicircle before him sat his chiefs of security and engineering, his first officer, and his chief medical officer. “It’s also an opportunity for us.”