by K. W. Jeter
A distance fell between them, as if for a moment he saw something else—or someone—before him. He nodded. “Very well.” He pushed himself up from the chair. “The extra security measure I’ll be discussing with Odo won’t interfere with your preparations for the substation mission.” He started toward the door, then turned and scooped up the recording chips she had dropped on the bedcovers. “I don’t think you need these anymore.”
She could hear the chips scraping against each other, as though he were grinding them to dust inside his fist. “No—” She almost managed to smile gratefully. “No, I don’t.”
CHAPTER 7
SOME THINGS HAD CHANGED that didn’t matter—such as the location of the hiding place. Other things had changed for the better—he could tell that by the faces assembled around him. Hören nodded to himself in satisfaction. Much had been accomplished with one simple death. Another—at least, of one of his followers—wouldn’t be necessary.
“Are we all here?” He looked around the circle. This space was so much larger than the last hole into which he’d been crammed. That one had been hardly big enough for him to turn around in, let alone stand upright; the small of his back and his shoulder muscles still ached from their long confinement. Here, the bulkheads and ceiling were so far away that the glow from the portable lantern was quickly swallowed up. “I asked for everyone to come—”
Beside him, Deyreth Elt leaned forward. “As you instructed—they’re here.” Deyreth sat at Hören’s right hand, as though at a position of honor he’d newly earned. That, plus the use of the word “they” to indicate the others, indicated his self-appointed status.
Whatever Deyreth thought of himself was inconsequential to Hören. So many things were coming close to fulfillment—these lesser and expendable elements had begun to fade in his sight, like candle flames held against a blazing dawn. He strove to remind himself that they would have their uses for a while longer.
“My heart is gladdened by your presence.” Hören let his gaze rest upon each shadowed face in turn. “The communion of the faithful gives us all strength.” He sat back upon the cushion of a folded blanket. “How do your labors progress? And theirs?”
None of them spoke. The reforged somberness held them fast.
Deyreth broke the silence. “The quarantine module—or the substation, as they have begun calling it—is nearly ready for its voyage. The chief engineer O’Brien and his technicians have finished installing the life-support systems and the various sensors and other equipment for the use of the doctor. Indeed, most of the technical crews have been pulled out in order to complete the preparation of the cargo shuttle that will be used to take the substation through the wormhole.”
“And that leaves . . . what? Your work, I take it?”
A conspirator’s smile rose on Deyreth’s sharp-angled face. “Our true work. There were some, shall we say, unexpected problems with the circuitry on which we worked. Microcomponents that did not perform up to specification, or failed under test loads. Our team has had to go into the substation itself in order to rectify these matters. O’Brien and the others are already stretched too far, for any of them to spend much time supervising us. We’ve been able to accomplish a great deal—without being observed.”
“That’s true—” One of the other faces dared to speak. “They don’t know at all what we’re doing inside the substation. And we’ve installed bypass circuits on top of everything, so anytime O’Brien runs a diagnostic test, the results all check out the way they should. Nothing can be detected, unless he were to rip out all the interior panels—and there isn’t time for that.”
Hören let the man go rattling on, though these technical details were of little interest to him. All that mattered were the results, the creation of the next hiding place—the last one—which would bring him within striking distance of the one whose death would be a sweet justice.
He closed his eyes; the follower was speaking of something else, just as unimportant. Hören listened instead to the memory of his own voice, the words he’d recorded to be broadcast across the surface of Bajor to the faithful. The letting of blood . . . this is how disease is cured. The mere remembered sounds of the words were sweet. Even more pleasurable were the images they aroused within him, the ancient medical skill of venesection transformed into a holy rite.
There would be more than one doctor on the substation’s mission. But his would be the hand that bore the scalpel, the cure for the sickness that had infected his heart as well, that could be purged only with the release of another’s blood—her blood . . .
“Does that meet with your approval?”
Of course. . . .
Hören opened his eyes and saw Deyreth, and the others beyond, watching him. He nodded. “Your labors are pleasing to all the eyes of the faithful.” He smiled. “I know that you will have everything ready for me.”
The slow working of his plans, the coming of that great day . . . that had been the main reason for the change in hiding places. Away from the distant bowels of the station, and closer to, almost inside, the engineering bay. DS9’s overefficient security chief was prowling every centimeter of the dark, empty spaces; the principle that had enabled him to evade capture so far, to lodge himself inside the strangers’ nest, had been taken to its next logical step. If they knew how close he was to them—to her . . . but, of course, they didn’t. The shield of his faith protected him from the strangers’ eyes.
“Hören . . . I am concerned. . . .”
The few timid words sparked anger inside him. “Oh?” He glared at the one who had spoken. “What troubles you?” He peered more closely at the crouching figure. “Do you find doubts in your heart?”
“No—” The other quickly shook his head. “Of course not. I’m just . . . ”
“What?”
“I’m concerned about you, Hören.” He looked as if he were about to pray to be understood. “You’re so important—not just to us, but to all the believers—what would happen to our cause, to our faith, if something happened . . . if something happened to you? What would keep the Redemptorists together? It just seems . . . not foolish, I don’t mean that, but . . . risky. That you should undertake this task.”
“I see.” Anger was not called for now. “And what would you suggest? That you do it?”
“I don’t know—” The follower seemed mired in his own confusion. “But perhaps . . . if what is desired is Kira Nerys’s death . . . we can accomplish that now. So much more easily—and without endangering you. Even if we were to let them go on with their mission—there are hundreds of ways to make sure that she would never come back from it—”
“Ah.” Hören nodded. “Your worries for me . . . are very touching.” He let his voice soften, become tender as a parent’s to a beloved child. “And you are correct: I risk much—I risk everything—by going ahead with what we have planned together, what you have labored to bring about.” His gaze moved across the group of men. “But you mustn’t forget . . . that my death would mean nothing. To rid the soul of Bajor of this pollution, a small thing is asked of me. And a great thing would be given unto me. The honor of death, to die as our brothers have died . . . ” He smiled sadly. “Perhaps I am being selfish, to want that for myself. Would you deny it to me?”
“It’s just that . . . ” The other’s hands tightened into fists. “Is she worth your life?”
“Of course not. Kira Nerys is an insect compared to the least of us, even to that one whose sympathy for the strangers led him into error. But there’s more at stake than simply eliminating her pestilential existence. We have it within our power to transform her death—and mine, if need be—into the salvation of Bajor itself.” His voice faded to a whisper, which drew the others even closer to him. “The mysteries that our most ancient devotions seek to understand, the gifts that the Bajorans have been chosen to receive, of all the universe . . . the orbs . . . ” The whisper turned bitter. “The strangers come here and call the source of our faith a wormhole—and we mock o
ur own beliefs when we use that word. That is how the infection spreads. And now, they would make of that sacred mystery a road for their boots to trample on as they carry their wares back and forth to market.” The bitterness twisted upon itself. “Shall we not let them make our temples into brothels then? Surely that would bring them money, as well. They might even let us have a few coins of it.”
Their heads were bent, even Deyreth’s, as though to receive the lash of his words upon their backs.
“Their mere presence here is an abomination.” He relented, voice soft again. “But give yourselves this comfort—soon that shall come to an end.”
He closed his eyes, knowing that his silence would tell them to leave him. So that he could be alone once more, in the darkness of his meditations.
Soon. Where even his voice, and the words that burned in it, would cease.
Silence at last. He turned off the player and leaned back in his chair, his thoughts deepening inside him.
It had taken some doing to find the right chip, the one that had been confiscated in the raid on the Redemptorist transmitter down on Bajor. Odo realized that not everyone had the same respect for physical clues that, out of necessity, he had developed—but he’d still had to bite his tongue when Commander Sisko had come back to the security office with a fistful of recording chips, the important one mixed in with them. The problem of searching through the chips had been compounded by Hören Rygis’s voice being on all of them, transcriptions of his ranting diatribes—something that Odo found personally offensive. Sentient creatures seemed to already show enough ingenuity at finding crimes to commit—why should they be exhorted to murder in addition?
He scooped up the other chips and sealed them into an evidence bag before extending his arm to drop them in the file cabinet on the other side of the office. Now that he’d found the one he’d been looking for, he wasn’t going to risk losing it again. It had been a violation of his own procedural rules to let the commander take away the chip in the first place, but he’d been able to tell that Sisko had had some compelling use for it. His own suspicions about what that might have been were confirmed when Sisko had come back with the handful, and had told him that they had been in Major Kira’s possession.
Unfortunately, the commander hadn’t seemed to feel any need for sharing what he’d learned from Kira. Inside himself, Odo felt a familiar irritation uncoiling. Like most humanoids, Benjamin Sisko had an obstinate respect for the privacy of others—and at the same time, he wanted his chief of security to snoop out every secret that might threaten the continued functioning of DS9. Odo would have appreciated a little help along that line.
Still, if cooperation wasn’t forthcoming from Sisko and the others, there were still inanimate objects to be questioned—they could be much more eloquent. He extracted the chip from the player and held it up to his eye to study it, then laid it back down. He had already taken it over to Dax’s lab to glean the information he needed from it. The chief science officer had run it through the subphoton microscope and downloaded the resulting images. Taking out his data padd, he called the file onto the screen.
At the highest magnification, the smooth surface of the recording chip looked as pitted as the surface of an airless moon. Odo scrolled the image to the manufacturer’s data inscribed in one corner.
Well, well. Without looking away, Odo punched the long stream of digits into the computer panel. How interesting. The chip had spoken, in its own way, with truths far more revealing than the voice of Hören Rygis.
On the larger desktop display was the batch number of the chip that had been found in the raid on the Redemptorist transmitter. He already knew what he’d find as he called up the file on the Bajoran microassembler whose murdered body had been dumped in the engineering bay. And the chip that had been found in the corpse’s pocket. . . .
The batch numbers were the same.
Odo leaned back, gazing with satisfaction at the two parallel strings of numbers. He’d previously scanned the corpse’s chip, but the one from the transmitter raid had been taken away by Commander Sisko before he’d had a chance to scan it. In the meantime, he’d searched through a massive data base of shipping invoices, and had found another puzzle piece: all the recording chips in that batch had been received and sold by one of the small gadget merchants doing business from an akhibara cubicle on the Promenade. Naturally, the merchant—an unusually obtuse Rhaessian—had had no record of his various customers; that would have been too much to ask for.
But even so . . . just those few scraps of information, the silent words from the recording chips, gave him a lot to think about, to piece together, to make sense of.
Inside Odo’s head was a world as intricate, and filled with both light and dark corners, as DS9 itself. His pleasure came from working his way through the corridors in both worlds, and finding out the secrets of every thing and person alike.
He set the revealing chip down precisely in the center of the desktop. Soon, he would have enough to make a report to the commander.
“You were warned, I take it?”
Doctor Bashir looked up from the display panel before him. The substation’s remote sensors were running through their last circuit checks. “Pardon me?” He glanced over his shoulder to the doorway of the cargo shuttle’s pilot area.
“Warned.” Kira stood there, arms folded across her breast, her habitual scowl in full force. “Now’s not a good time to play around with me, Doctor—we’ll be disengaging from the pylon in fifteen minutes. I know Commander Sisko spoke to you. About our . . . working relationship.”
He sighed. The length of time it would take to complete the mission—from going through the wormhole and out to the Gamma Quadrant, to bringing the cargo shuttle back to the station by himself—had originally seemed far too short for all he wanted to accomplish. Now, as it had become increasingly clear how much Kira resented his presence on the mission, he had begun to think it might be a long voyage indeed.
“Since you’re aware of my conversations with the commander, why do you bother to ask?” His own temper had started to fray a bit, from the shifts of nonstop work with O’Brien in getting the scientific equipment installed and running before the departure date. As little as an hour ago, Bashir had been inside the cargo shuttle’s cramped one-person augmented personnel module, awkwardly adjusting the last few sensors on the substation’s exterior. It had been a relief to stow the APM back in its holding bay and step out into the relatively less claustrophobic space of the shuttle’s pilot area—at least until Kira had started in on him. “And I don’t think that was quite the word Sisko used—advised would be more like it.”
“Whatever.” Kira stood right behind him. “If he didn’t warn you, then I will. This mission has great strategic importance, for both the station and Bajor. My job is to make sure that everything happens the way it’s supposed to. Your job, as far as I’m concerned, is to stay out of my way.” She glared at the lights on the display panel, as though they had somehow affronted her as well. “There’s still time for you to decide to do that the best way possible.”
“And that would be . . . ?” He already knew her answer.
“Don’t come along. Your assistance is not required.”
“Major Kira.” He swiveled the seat around and looked up at her. The time when he had thought there might be a chance of cordial relations between them had passed long ago. She had been ready enough to ask a favor of him when she’d needed it—apparently that had been no indication of her true feelings. “You might as well reconcile yourself to these arrangements. Technically, you may be in charge of this mission, but you should try to remember that, once you transfer to the substation, you’ll be on my territory. My agreeing to let the quarantine module be used as a substation is the only thing making this trip possible.” He had already faced down Commander Sisko about this; he found it comparatively easier to put the major in her place. “I could abort the entire mission right now, and there wouldn’t be a thing you cou
ld do about it.”
She radiated a venomous silence toward him. For a moment, Bashir wondered if her hostility had crossed the line into active derangement. Kira had been missing for a couple of shifts, staying in her quarters—her absence from the engineering bay had enabled him and O’Brien to get a lot more work done—with rumors of a depressive episode floating around the crew on Ops. If that had been the case, she had bounced back from it with a vengeance.
“You’d be surprised, Doctor,” she spoke grimly, “at just what I could do about it.”
He turned away from her and leaned over the lights flashing on the panel. A very long voyage . . .
“Now—”
Hören Rygis stepped to the fore of the group of men. Beside him, Deyreth looked at the readout of the crudely patched together metal box in his hand. It was designed to indicate the status of the final preparations aboard the cargo shuttle.
“They’ve sealed the pressure locks.” Another red dot blinked on the box’s surface. “Perimeter checks under way. Let’s go.”
They were all dressed in the coveralls that were standard issue in the engineering bay. The work on the substation’s microcircuitry had continued right up to the last minute—a few well-devised component failures had seen to that. That had ensured that no one would question the microassembly team being on the staging area of the main docking pylon.
Hören felt an unshakable calm settle around his heart. It was at times like this he felt the sure machinery of fate. His followers had done their tasks well; the rest was up to him.
He started walking, shielded by the others. The distance across the pylon’s loading ramp had to be traversed, with none of the strangers noticing him. From the corner of his eye, he saw Deyreth surreptitiously press a switch on the box he held by his side.
With a mechanized hiss, the massive docking arms moved a fraction of a meter apart, loosening the connection between the substation and the cargo shuttle that had been modified for its transport.