by K. W. Jeter
The egg-shaped bomblets seemed less than impressive. Bashir shrugged. “So?”
“I forget—you’re a doctor, not a physicist. Well, this’ll give you a chance to brush up on your Newton. When these go off, there’s going to be a kick. You’d better have yourselves and everything else battened down before you punch the button.”
Bashir turned and began to walk away, then halted.
He looked over his shoulder. “Wait a minute. You said you took out some of the explosives. Where’s the rest?”
“Where do you think?” O’Brien went on checking the cable’s branching connections to the bomblets. “They’re still inside the QM, right where I put them soon as they were delivered from ordnance. If you think I’m going to rip them out, try to seal the walls back up in time to get this thing on its way, and then put the charges back in when we want to use this for its original purpose . . . ” He glanced over at Bashir, then shook his head. “Life’s too short.”
“Right—” Bashir looked at him in incredulity. “And I imagine it could get even shorter, what with riding all the way out to the Gamma Quadrant in a craft loaded with high explosives.”
“What are you worried about?” O’Brien looped the cable over one of the locking arms and out of the way. “You’re the only one who knows the fuse codes. Don’t tell them to anyone, and then the charges might as well be cementene bricks for all the damage they could do.” He clapped Bashir on the shoulder. “Come on. I need a break. And you look like you need a drink.”
As they headed for the engineering bay’s exit, they passed the microassembly work benches. A couple of the faces bent over the intricate work lifted and looked at Bashir and O’Brien, then turned back to the circuits beneath the lenses.
“Are those men working on the QM?” Bashir had seen that all the group were Bajorans.
“Of course. We’ve got everybody in the bay on this one.”
“But I heard they’re all Redemptorists . . . ”
“They can be whatever they want, as long as they get the job done.” O’Brien pushed him toward the door. “Let’s go.”
The voice—mocking, raging, compelling—filled the space. Even if the volume on the chip-player were turned all the way down, so that the words became hardly more than a whisper, they still dominated, hammering at one’s ear.
Blood and fire . . . the voice of Hören Rygis spoke of those things, and the death of nonbelievers. Blood was the thin, degenerate stuff that flowed in the veins of the faithless; fire was the coming day of cleansing, of scouring away the elements that had polluted Bajor’s holy soil. A fire that consumed life as its fuel and left the ashes of death behind, corpses facedown on the floors of the temples and council chambers.
“And beyond,” cried the voice of the Redemptorists’ leader. “The contagion has spread beyond the sky—it hovers above us, rising like the stench from a murderer’s hands. Orbiting in empty space, hiding aboard the strangers’ machinery of oppression—but even that is far enough to evade our wrath, our justice. She conspires with them, she sups at the table of the wicked, her goblet a martyr’s skull, the wine spilling down her chin the blood of innocents. It is a holy act, a sacrament, to rid Bajor of such evil. . . .”
In his office, with the only light that from the stars the voice would pull down from the heavens, Commander Sisko listened. He knew the words that would come next.
“The continued existence of such a person is a sickness.” The voice lowered to a mockery of reasoned discourse. “A sickness that infects the spiritual life of all Bajor. To suffer traitors, to endure the beating of their hearts, is to leave a poisoned thorn in our own flesh. It must be plucked out. . . .”
He had listened to the recording twice already. A transcription of the latest broadcast from the Redemptorists’ hidden radio transmitters—the security forces of the provisional government had sent it to him on a subspace linkup. He could reach out and switch the chip-player off, plunge the darkened office into a silence that would be as soothing as his wife’s touch upon his knotted shoulder muscles once had been—but an almost mesmeric fascination stayed his hand. Whatever else might have been said of Hören Rygis, he could be truthfully described as a spellbinder. In historical terms, less of a king and more of a Hitlerian type—the fires of which he spoke burned but did not illuminate.
. . . and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. Sisko’s brooding thoughts pushed the hammering voice away for a moment. The ancient poet had gotten that one right. Things hadn’t changed in all the centuries before or since.
A name brought his attention back—a name that the voice spoke, tongue curling as though the syllables were drops of acid upon it.
“Kira Nerys . . . ”
The first time he had listened to the chip, a chill had contracted Sisko’s spine. That didn’t change—it was as if the voice had already killed her and laid the body before him.
“When the blood is tainted, it must be let. That is how disease is cured. . . .”
He roused himself and reached for the player.
“Blood must flow—”
With a tap of his finger, the voice was stilled. For now.
She knew she was dreaming, but that didn’t help.
Worse than dreaming. Remembering.
The bed might as well have been on fire, for all the ease that Kira could find there. She writhed in fever, as though the flames she saw had burst from within her veins.
“I’m sorry . . . ” she whispered through cracked lips. If there had been anyone else in her quarters, they might have heard.
“Oh, it’s much too late for that.” The face of the dead, lit a flickering orange, turned toward her. “It was always too late.”
Her fists trembled against the sweat-soaked covers. “I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t know it would happen like this. . . .”
“You should have thought of that sooner.” The burning temple, its walls cracked by explosions, vomited black clouds up to the night sky. The dead’s shadow fell across her where she lay, both on the bed in the safety of DS9’s encircling steel, and on the barren ground where the impact of the blast had flung her. “But you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . ”
“Too late.” The ground was littered with corpses now. Some of them were disfigured by fire, others she could still recognize. All the dead fixed their unforgiving gaze upon her. “Better if you had been with us, inside. You should have been one of us. . . .”
The dream pounded on, its shrinking world battered by new, unseen blows. Kira felt the fabric of the pillow against her cheek, but still couldn’t escape. “I know,” she said aloud. “But I am one of you.”
“No—” The dead stepped back, shadows merging with night. “Not yet. But you will be.”
Her eyes opened, sudden as the turning of a metal key inside a lock. She saw her quarters around her, bulkheads and shelves and cabinets, the few simple things they held, pieces of her life aboard the DS9 station that were almost as familiar and real as the past—the past that claimed her in dreams and memory.
She drew in her breath, trying to make her heart slow. For a moment, it seemed as if the dream hadn’t completely faded away, that the sounds of it still gripped her. Muffled explosions, their impact eroded by falling distance . . .
Someone was knocking with a fist upon the door of her quarters. Nothing more than that; a sense of relief loosened her clenched muscles. The dreaming, and the past, was over, at least for another interval of present time.
“Are you all right, Major?” Commander Sisko stood on the other side of the door. He pointed to the tiny comm panel on the corridor’s wall. “I buzzed you, but there wasn’t any answer—”
“I’m fine.” She moved away, letting him follow her inside. One hand tried to brush her disordered hair into place as she sat down on the edge of the bed. “Nothing wrong—I was just asleep, that’s all.”
Sisko watched her with concern. “Must have been sleeping pretty h
eavily. Usually, you’re up like a shot.”
“Doctor Bashir told me I’ve been working too hard.” Kira shook her head, as though to clear away the last clinging fragments. She managed a faint smile. “Seems to be an occupational hazard around here.”
“I wonder . . . ” He turned the chair around from the desk and straddled it, arms folded across the top. “Sometimes people overwork for . . . different reasons. To escape things they don’t want to think about.” His gaze shifted inward for a moment. “Or remember.”
The commander’s words tensed Kira’s spine. “Perhaps so.” She couldn’t remove a cold edge from her voice. “But those are personal matters.”
“They become significantly less personal, Major, when they impact upon the performance of an officer’s duties.” Sisko’s attention focused hard upon her, the touch of his own past shoved aside. “Or say, upon that officer’s life. Or her death, to be more accurate.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sisko took a glittering silver square, a recording chip, from his uniform pocket and held it up. “Perhaps you are aware that there have been threats made against you.”
“Just like the overwork, Commander—it comes with the territory.” She kept a calm exterior, though her heart ticked faster again. “Not everybody on Bajor agrees with what we’re doing up here. You know that. Some of the more extreme elements would like to blow us out of the sky.” She shrugged. “But we don’t have to be universally popular to do our job.”
“These threats are different. They’re directed at you in particular.” The chip sparkled between Sisko’s thumb and forefinger. “I have to take them seriously. These are people who are capable of following up on their promises. And their leader speaks of you with a vehemence that certainly indicates your murder would be a top priority.”
Kira sighed. “If you’re speaking of the Redemptorists, Commander, then I’m aware of the same things you are.” She leaned back and pulled the mattress away from the bulkhead, enough that she could pry open her hiding place. She dropped the handful of chips onto the bed beside her. “You could listen to these, and you’d find that my name comes up at least a couple of times. I’ve been on the Redemptorist hit list since before I was posted to DS Nine.”
With a raised eyebrow, Sisko looked at the chips. “I take it these are all transcriptions of Hören Rygis’s broadcasts?”
“Of course. As the Bajoran military attaché aboard this station, I feel it’s my duty to stay current with planetside developments.”
“So why keep them hidden?”
She shrugged. “Technically, under the emergency regulations that are still in effect, it’s illegal for a Bajoran citizen to be in possession of material like this.”
“You could be exempted from that prohibition.”
“It’s just easier to do what I need to, and keep quiet about it. Why should I risk other people not understanding?”
Suspicion lingered in Sisko’s eyes. “So you’re aware of Hören Rygis’s long-standing animosity toward you . . . and you still approved that group of Redemptorists coming aboard.”
Her gaze met his head-on. “And I’d do it again, Commander. For the exact same reasons I gave you before. As long as they’re Bajorans, they’re my brothers.”
“Hm.” Sisko rubbed his thumb across the chip in his hand. “Perhaps your familial sentiments would be a little less tender if you heard Hören’s most recent tirade against you.”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
“Because this one was never broadcast. The provisional government’s security forces finally managed to track down the floating radio transmitter from which all the others picked up their signals. They raided it and confiscated everything, including this.” He held the chip higher. “The index date on it shows that it was recorded sometime within the last few shifts. And let’s just say that Hören speaks of you at greater length than he’s ever done before.”
“And was he—”
“Caught?” Sisko shook his head. “No, unfortunately. The Redemptorist underground is, to say the least, secretive. Wherever Hören Rygis is on the surface of Bajor, he continues to elude capture. And, I imagine, as soon as the Redemptorists rebuild their transmitting network, he’ll go on spewing his venom into the ears of his followers.” His voice lowered. “And continue urging them to kill you.”
“I don’t think I have much to worry about from a crew of Bajoran microassemblers—”
“Probably not. It’s the Redemptorists we don’t know about, the ones whose identities Odo doesn’t have logged into his data base, who concern me. What I’d like to know is why Hören wants you dead.”
“Commander—I wish I could say it was a long story.” Kira felt a weariness, from more than the rigors of her dreaming, weigh upon her bones. “But it’s not. Before my posting to DS Nine, I had a tour of duty in the provisional government’s security forces—it’s still a branch of what little military Bajor possesses. I thought I could do the most good there. When the Cardassians abandoned our planet, we were overjoyed, ecstatic, to see them go.” She pushed her hair back from her brow. “What we didn’t anticipate was the chaos that would follow their departure. If nothing else, the Cardassians provided order . . . things like the distribution of food, or the simple knowing from one day to the next what would happen. When that all fell apart, the resistance groups, the ones that had been fighting the Cardassians all along, started scrambling for power. That meant fighting each other.” She shook her head. “So much for brotherhood, right?”
Sisko’s expression didn’t change. “That’s why the Federation came here. We’ve seen it before.”
“Well, I hadn’t. I didn’t know. . . .” Kira took a deep breath. “The Redemptorists got squeezed out of the front organization that eventually formed the provisional government. Hören Rygis was already their leader then. They took over one of the temples by armed force, barricaded themselves inside with nearly a hundred non-Redemptorist hostages. There was a list of demands . . . I don’t even remember what most of them were. But Hören and his followers said they would throw one corpse out the temple gate every hour, until the demands were met. And they did—one of them was a twelve-year-old boy. That’s how Hören’s mind works.”
“And you were in charge of doing something about the situation.”
She nodded. “And I blew it. Or else I didn’t blow it; I don’t know anymore. I directed the whole operation; my security team stormed the gate, we got inside, we pulled out all but a half-dozen of the hostages still alive . . . ” She fell silent for a moment. “And the Redemptorists got what they really wanted. They became martyrs. They had enough explosives in there to turn the whole sky red.” The words were flat, dead things in her mouth.
“That wasn’t any fault of yours. You did what you had to.”
She could have closed her eyes and seen the flames, the dreams and memories without end. “Their bodies lay on the ground . . . some of them were still alive, at least for a little while. I recognized some of them. From the camps, when we had been only children, or later, when we had fought side by side . . . when all those things had seemed so much simpler . . . ” She closed her eyes, unable now to bear anyone’s watching gaze. “I stood there, and I felt my hands and my face withering from the heat . . . I stood there and looked down at them, and they saw me and knew who I was . . . they all must have, before they died . . . ” She pressed her fists against her legs to stop their trembling. “They were all my brothers. They died for what they believed in. Maybe I should have, too.”
Sisko touched her wrist, and she opened her eyes.
“You can be as hard on yourself as you want, Major. And I wish I could tell you it would help. But I know it doesn’t.”
Talking about these things had done no good, either, she felt hollowed, as if each word had taken a piece from inside. “Hören survived, of course; he wasn’t even in the temple when we broke in. Long gone . . . and already talking about the glorious deaths. .
. .” Kira looked down at her whitened knuckles, as if they were small stones, no part of her. “So, of course, the Redemptorist movement became even larger than it was before. That’s what always happens, isn’t it? Martyrs. The only other thing you need is a target, someone to focus all that righteous hatred against. . . .”
“And is that all it is for Hören? Names on a list?”
“No—” Kira brought her gaze up to Sisko’s. “That’s not how . . . how his soul works. He couldn’t be as powerful as he is—his voice couldn’t be that powerful—if he didn’t really hate. As much as he loved those who died.”
Sisko’s face was set, grim. “He could find better ways of honoring them.”
It’s too late for that . . .
“What did you say, Major?”
She realized that she had spoken aloud, the words the dead had spoken to her.
“I . . . I don’t know. . . .”
Concern showed in the commander’s furrowed brow. “Perhaps the doctor is right. Perhaps you do need a rest.”
Kira shook her head. “That’d be the worst thing I could do. Then . . . then, all I’d do would be to remember.”