Bloodletter (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  “I don’t know . . . ” Bashir shook his head. “It doesn’t do us much good that the engines are still operable. If we fire them up without the buffers, they’ll send a shock wave through the ionic field—we can’t be sure what the wormhole’s inhabitants will do to defend themselves. But when it happened before, with Commander Sisko out here, they collapsed the wormhole’s connection with the outside universe. Until they opened it back up, it was as if the wormhole didn’t exist anymore. We might not even be able to get out of here using those unbuffered engines.”

  The same point had been worrying her. She had a vivid memory of the way the wormhole’s swirling entrance, a maelstrom of energies, had blinked out of existence, trapping Sisko inside. The same thing could happen to them now, with even less chance of a resurrection from a tomb sealed with the empty space between stars.

  “And beyond that,” said Bashir, “there’s a certain moral question. Even if we could use the unbuffered engines to get out to the Gamma Quadrant, and if we weren’t bound by the understanding Sisko reached with the wormhole’s inhabitants—we’re still aware of the lethal effect the impulse energy has on them. Do we have the right to hurt them that way?”

  “Spoken like a doctor.”

  “It’s still the decision we’d have to make.”

  She knew he was right. And there were practical concerns beyond the present one: if they did manage to get out and set the substation in the Gamma Quadrant, it wouldn’t accomplish much good if the wormhole’s inhabitants collapsed it out of existence. Bajor would wind up with sovereignty over nothing but an empty sector of space.

  Her fingertips tried to rub away the ache that swelled behind her brow. If there were time to think, if the Cardassians weren’t on their way to claim the wormhole’s exit sector . . . if she and Bashir were still in touch with DS9, and they could consult with Sisko and the others about a plan of action . . .

  There wasn’t time. Whatever she decided, even if it were the wrong thing, it would have to be soon.

  “All right.” She drew in a deep breath, then leaned over and touched Bashir’s arm. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  * * *

  “This is all very clever of you.” The Redemptorist had managed to regain his composure, enough to snarl at Odo as he was pushed toward the security office. “I imagine your heart is filled with pride over your accomplishment.”

  “No more than usual.” Odo kept a tight grip on his suspect’s upper arm. The crowds on the Promenade parted for them, displaying only a mild curiosity; it was a familiar enough sight for them. “I can assure you that it’s merely a matter of routine.”

  Deyreth twisted his neck to look back at him, “Be satisfied with what you can, heathen.” The Bajoran’s sharp-edged face held a look of maniacal triumph. “What happens to me is less than nothing. A dawn approaches that none of you can forestall—”

  “Yes, of course; keep moving.” He found religious fanatics to be particularly annoying. There was no complexity to their minds, just a single glaring light that consumed everything else inside their skulls. No challenge to them; this one had already as much as confessed to the other’s murder. “Why don’t you wait until I can take down a statement from you?”

  “Do you need one? Surely, in your cleverness, you have figured out everything you need to know.” Spittle flecked Deyreth’s lip. “I purchased the chips here, those that the vermin of the provisional government’s security forces found in their raid upon our transmitter—what does that mean? Tell me!”

  “It means,” said Odo, “that your leader, Hören Rygis, is somewhere aboard the station. He’s been recording his broadcasts here and having them smuggled back down to Bajor.” He hustled Deyreth toward the security office. “That’s what you and I are going to talk about. And then you’re going to take me to him.”

  Deyreth laughed, eyes wide with delight. “You’re too late! He’s gone, you cannot touch him!” The Bajoran contorted his body even further. “You can’t stop that which is ordained—”

  For a moment, Odo had to turn his gaze away as he keyed the code upon the door. That inattention was enough; he heard the metal of the hand restraints strike the floor, followed by the delicate microassembly tools that Deyreth had stealthily managed to take from his pocket and use upon the hand restraints. His grip was torn loose from Deyreth’s arm as he was shoved against the wall.

  “Stop!” Odo regained his balance, seeing Deyreth push through the crowd. No one laid a hand upon him. “Get out of my way—”

  In his blind rush, Deyreth collided with the rail overlooking the deck below. The impact knocked the breath from him; dazed, he clung to the metal bar, his torso bent over the empty space.

  Odo was still a couple of meters away, battering against the wall of humanoid and other bodies—there wasn’t time to assume another shape that would have gotten him past them any more quickly—when he saw Deyreth turn an agonized glance back toward him. Deyreth scrambled over the rail just as Odo reached out to grab him.

  Gravity caught him first. Deyreth’s grasp of the rail slipped loose, and he toppled, centimeters away from Odo’s outstretched hand.

  The crowd gathered at Odo’s back as he looked down at the body crumpled upon a grid below. Blood had already begun to seep through the small holes and dot the pipes and wiring underneath.

  Odo turned and bulled his way through the gawkers. Someone else would have to gather up the Redemptorist’s body. Right now, he had to get to Ops and talk to Commander Sisko.

  CHAPTER 9

  SHE WALKED THROUGH the dark spaces. In silence; the bulkhead panels curved around her, like the flowing walls of the crypts beneath a Bajoran temple. The passage through what had been the quarantine module, and was now the substation that would secure her people’s claim to the stable wormhole, evoked memories in her. Of helping to carry the shrouded body of an uncle, the wounds of the beating he’d received from the Cardassian camp guards still seeping through the thin wrappings, carrying it and laying it down among the sacred bones of their ancestors. She’d hardly been more than ten years old then, and already she’d been pressed into the service of the rituals; there had been so few of her clan left.

  Kira stopped for a moment, leaning a hand against a bulkhead to steady herself, and squeezing her eyes in an attempt to get rid of the painful remembrances. She could recall—she couldn’t stop herself—how light her uncle’s corpse had seemed; it hadn’t been until later that she had realized he had been starving himself, dividing his rations among her and the other children. When the time came, the guards had broken him like a dry stick.

  Forget, she told herself. You’ve got work to do. Through sheer force of will, she put the memory, and all the others like it, back inside the chamber she carried inside her head, a chamber as large as Bajor itself, as small as the tear of a girl still weeping as she lay curled on a barracks’ dirty straw mat.

  The interior of the substation brightened. Aboard the cargo shuttle, Bashir must have managed to switch on the auxiliary power. The central corridor ran ahead of her, branching on either side into the various sections and compartments. In the dim glow of the radiant panels—they wouldn’t come to full brightness until the substation’s own power source was activated—the substation looked less tomblike, and closer to a regulation Starfleet sickbay. Space was tighter, though, than on either DS9 or an Enterprise-class ship; the narrow corridors folded in upon themselves like a maze. When she had inspected the substation during its retrofitting in O’Brien’s engineering bay, she had memorized only the routes through it and the areas that she would require on the mission; the other sections she was content to leave sealed off.

  “Major Kira—” Bashir’s voice crackled from a speaker over her head. “Are you at the control room yet?”

  “I’m on my way.” The bad memories had snared her, just when there was no time to waste. Perhaps it had been the substation’s empty chambers on either side of her, surrounded by the wormhole’s darkness, that
had triggered deepening thoughts. A wordless feeling had remained, chilling the skin across her arms and shoulders. She pushed it back, and headed for the substation’s nerve center.

  He wondered why she had stopped. For a moment, as he had crouched silent behind a scrub room door, his hands almost within reach of her throat, he thought that she might have detected his presence. That might have been why she had closed her eyes, head bowed in concentration, her nostrils catching the scent of someone else aboard the substation . . .

  She knows, Hören had thought. If that were so, then his careful plans would have to be changed. But the woman’s death would still be the final result.

  If she had opened her eyes and turned to look toward him, her gaze taking in the miniature lens of the view panel by the door—he had short-circuited the diode that showed it had been activated, but he knew the motions of the phase-sensitive iris inside could still be seen—then that death would have had to be immediate. But she had moved away at last, striding quickly down the central corridor.

  Kira stopped again, craning her neck to look at the ceiling above her. He rolled a fingertip across the screen’s controls, altering the lens angle. In the corridor’s ceiling, he could see now, was the gap he had dropped through when he’d sneaked inside the substation. Still visible at the corner of the opening was the thin metal plate he’d shoved aside.

  “What’s keeping you?” The microphone inside the view panel was sensitive enough to pick up the voice of Kira’s confederate aboard the cargo shuttle.

  “Just admiring the quality of the construction around here.” She shook her head, then continued on her way.

  Hören let his tensed muscles relax. He was certain that she suspected nothing. Kira Nerys would proceed with her clever plans—he had expected no less of her, finding it within himself to admire her ingenuity as he had listened over the bug that had been placed in the shuttle’s pilot area. He could almost regret that her mind, and the determination that pressed it forward, could never serve a righteous cause.

  He had his own plans, as well. Soon enough, they would intersect with hers, and she would be shown the errors of her soul. If, in that last moment, her eyes were to widen in sudden understanding . . . then death might encompass some small measure of salvation for her.

  It wasn’t likely. He knew too well the depth of corruption in the nonbelievers. He switched off the screen and turned away, hurrying to make ready.

  He listened to the report. And was not pleased.

  “I regret the death of the Redemptorist Deyreth Elt.” Odo stood before him in Ops, hands clasped behind his back. “If only for the information that further questioning of him might have provided. As it is, my analysis of his statements awaits confirmation.”

  Commander Sisko rested his chin upon a fist. He’d almost expected another voice to chime in from the seat beside his own, Major Kira expressing her view of the situation. If she sometimes had spoken too hastily, at least one had never had to wait long to know what she thought. Without her there, the silence seemed to stretch on toward infinity.

  Unfortunately, the matter being discussed was Kira’s life, along with that of Doctor Bashir. The problem of the cargo shuttle having been detected at a standstill in the wormhole had been compounded by what his chief of security had just told him.

  “You’re sure of this?” He knew the answer in advance—Odo was not given to low-probability speculations—but he wanted to give himself more time to think. “There’s no other interpretation of what he meant?”

  “I don’t see one, Commander. If we had no corroborating evidence, I might have ascribed his words to just lunatic raving—this Deyreth Elt was seriously disturbed, in my estimation. Whether he was so before, or whether his growing political and religious fanaticism had further impaired his reason . . . it’d be hard to determine now, of course. I haven’t had time to thoroughly question the other Redemptorists, but a couple of them have indicated that Hören Rygis was aboard the station. I managed to locate what might have been one of his hiding places; the ventilation was naturally poor there, so the air sample I took might give us some sweat traces that we can DNA-type and match with Hören’s records from the Bajoran security forces. . . .”

  “We don’t have time for all that, Constable.”

  “Exactly.” Odo gave a quick, acknowledging nod. “That is why I feel it’s best if we operate on the assumption that Hören Rygis has stowed away somewhere aboard the substation. I’m confident that that is the meaning of what Deyreth Elt said before he died. We’ve tightened up security considerably on all vessels docking at or leaving DS Nine, so it’s virtually impossible Hören could have gotten off the station by those means. The cargo shuttle is simply too small for him to have concealed himself there for very long. That really leaves only the substation as a possibility.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.” Sisko turned toward Chief Engineer O’Brien. “How much access did this group of Redemptorists have to the substation?”

  O’Brien slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but they pretty much had total access to it. They were our best team of microassemblers—there was no way we would’ve been able to get it ready in time without them.” His expression darkened, as though brooding over a personal affront. “The big question now is what else they might have done to it while they had the chance.”

  “The explosives built into the structure naturally concern me—”

  “Those would be the least of our worries, Commander. Those are all inert as old bricks; the fuse codes are set into them right at the molecular level. Doctor Bashir’s the only person who could set them off.” O’Brien scowled as his thoughts moved through their courses. “No, I’m more worried about what other little tricks these jokers might have wired in. And not just on the substation—the monitoring signal we got before we lost contact made it pretty clear that the impulse buffers on the shuttle had been tampered with, as well.”

  “Very well.” Sisko looked behind him to the Ops crew. “Have a runabout prepared for immediate departure.” He turned back to the chief security and engineering officers. “If we can’t communicate with them from here, we’ll just have to go out there to get them. O’Brien, I want you to come along with me; maybe there’ll be something you can do to repair those impulse buffers so we can get the substation on its way again. I’m not ready yet to scrub this mission.”

  “I’ll need some time to load up some equipment—”

  “Do it.” Sisko pushed himself up from the seat. “Constable, I want you to sweat whatever else you can out of those other Redemptorists. The more we know about what we’re up against, the better.” He strode toward the doorway. “Let’s go, gentlemen.”

  “You ready for this?”

  She heard Bashir’s voice over the command center’s speaker. Kira pulled tighter the fastenings of the seat’s harness. “More than ready,” she called. Her voice echoed in the silence contained within the substation.

  As she pressed her head back against the padding, she could imagine Bashir in the shuttle’s pilot area, making the final adjustments on the controls. The two had double-checked their calculations together, crunching the velocity and angle figures on the computer. The numbers had to be perfect: they were going to get only one shot at this.

  “All right.” Bashir’s voice held an edge of tension. “Now, O’Brien warned me that the impact would be pretty sharp—”

  “I bet.” She made a stab at lightening the mood. “Are you one of those doctors who always warns people about how much something’s going to hurt?”

  A laugh came over the speaker. “No, I usually try to sneak up on people. Okay, here we go. Locking arms disengaged; separation sequence initiated. Brace yourself—”

  She had felt a mechanical shiver run through the substation’s frame as the massive C-shaped arms had spread open and the atmospheric seals had snapped into place. That would have been warning enough; a second later, the sudden acceleration from the ring of explosives slammed
her back into the seat. The impact knocked the air from her lungs; for a moment, the substation’s lights dimmed into spots of darkness swirling before her eyes. She fought to keep them from coalescing, pushing her into unconsciousness.

  The pressure eased, and she was able to draw in enough breath to speak. “Bashir—how’re we doing?”

  After a few more seconds, the doctor answered. “Looks good. The tracking instruments and my own visual check indicate that you’re right on target. You’re not breaking any speed records, but you don’t have that far to go. Shouldn’t be much longer before you’re out of the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant.”

  Kira relaxed in the seat, feeling a subconsciously held tension drain out of her spine. The plan she had devised seemed to be working. The cargo shuttle’s maneuvering and docking jets didn’t require any energy from the impulse engines, so they could be safely used even with the buffers out of commission. Once the correct attitude had been determined, it was only a matter of “aiming” the shuttle like an old-fashioned gunpowder weapon, with the substation as its cannonball. The force of the bomblets built into the coupling’s disengage mechanism was enough to send the cargo shuttle and the substation in opposite directions, the shuttle farther back into the wormhole, the substation forward to its exit point. The wormhole was its own linear pocket universe, so the relative motions couldn’t go too far astray; the trick had been to make sure that the substation continued down the center of the wormhole without getting mired in the gravitational field around the edges and losing its precious momentum.

  She unstrapped the harness, and let it retract into the sides of the seat. Another stricture seemed to have been loosened from her. For the first time in a great while, she felt that things were working out as they should. As she wanted them to. Even with these delays, the substation would reach the wormhole’s exit sector well before Gul Tahgla’s retrofitted vessel could return to it; the Federation’s claim would be established, and Bajor’s future protected. The other details, the source of the sabotage . . . that could all be cleaned up when she eventually made her way back to DS9.