Bloodletter (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  “Julian—” It was the first time she had addressed him by his first name. “Will you be all right?”

  “You needn’t worry about me . . . ” His voice faded for a moment, then came back as the transmitter compensated for the increasing distance. “All the sensors are up and running, and I’ve got gigaquads of data to start rummaging through.” She could imagine him smiling. “You were quite right when you suspected that I wanted to spend more time in here. Though I don’t know how much longer it’ll be—the station probably sent out a runabout as soon as our communications broke down.”

  “Enjoy yourself while you can, then.”

  “Maybe when we’re all back at the station, we can have a celebratory drink together at Quark’s—”

  “Don’t push it.” She reached out and switched off the comm link.

  It had been worth a shot. He told himself that, as he told himself after any rejection. Or striking out, as one of Commander Sisko’s ancient ballplayers might have termed it. The fact that the substation, with Kira aboard, was on its way to its destination reaffirmed that persistence had its eventual rewards. He’d have to try to remember that.

  Bashir stood up and stretched, working out the kink that had settled between his shoulder blades. The sensors and their rapidly accumulating data would have to wait; after this much work, he felt more like a nap, after a perusal of whatever had been coded into the shuttle’s food replicator.

  There wasn’t time for that. No sooner had Bashir checked the tracking monitor—it showed the substation just approaching the wormhole’s exit—than he was thrown from his feet by a sudden surge of power. He landed on his hands and knees, feeling the vibration coming up through the pilot area’s floor.

  Below him, in the bowels of the cargo shuttle, the impulse engines had come to life.

  “What the—” He grabbed a corner of the control panel to lift himself up; he barely managed to hold onto it as the cargo shuttle was shaken by an even stronger force, caught by a shock wave that dwarfed the bomblets’ explosion. The instrument readouts of the exterior sensors peaked, then were overloaded by the fury of electromagnetic radiation pouring into them. A blinding red light sliced through the visual ports.

  It’s them—Bashir’s thoughts slammed against the confines of his skull. Out there . . . they felt the engines—

  Impossible to stand; he crawled, fingers clawing at the seams of metal, as the keening of the shuttle’s alarms mounted. He reached desperately for the access panel that would take him down to the lower compartments, as the blow of an invisible hammer twisted a darkening cage around him.

  “Julian!”

  She had cried out his name, as she had seen the fabric of stars tear open. At the mouth of the wormhole, the open space of the Gamma Quadrant just beyond, as though her goal could be gathered by reaching out her arm . . .

  The shock wave hit, a shuddering convulsion, the wormhole itself turned into a living thing. The substation had tumbled crazily, sending Kira shoulder-first into the corner of a bulkhead and the ceiling, then sliding across the command center’s operations panel. She clung to it with one hand, bringing her other fist down upon the comm buttons.

  “Julian . . . what happened . . . ” No reply came over the speaker. As the tremors died, she scanned through the transmitter’s frequencies; all of them were dead.

  One by one, the lights came back up on the panel, as the computer ran its autodiagnostics and reestablished its core functions. Kira felt blood trickling down from her temple, but ignored it as she called up a visual scan.

  Behind the substation, the vast, churning image of the wormhole blotted out uncountable worlds. She had seen it before, from its terminus close to DS9: a thing of radiance and terrible beauty, a pouring forth of wonders, a thunder that was not sound but the trembling fibers of one’s being, atoms become suns. . . .

  Now, the wormhole screamed.

  She sensed rather than heard it, as though the spine inside her shivered at the same mute pitch. A living thing—its pain struck her once more.

  No light—the wormhole drew darkness into itself, a writhing contraction of space itself.

  Kira leaned over the viewscreen; a drop of blood spattered between her hand and the glass.

  He’s in there. The thoughts inside her head had contracted to one alone. Inside . . . somewhere . . .

  They both saw it. And then saw nothing.

  That was what dismayed Commander Sisko and Chief Engineer O’Brien. For a moment, as they had come within the final approach to the wormhole, they had been enveloped in light. Different than ever before: a light that blinded in its fury, a rage that shouted the length of their optic nerves, that, even as they raised their arms to shield themselves, sank into the night of dead worlds.

  “It’s gone.” O’Brien looked down at the instruments’ readouts. “The wormhole—it’s collapsed.” He turned toward the commander. “It’s gone—”

  Sisko gazed at the silent, mocking stars. A hollow space had opened beneath his breastbone.

  “God help them.” He shook his head slowly. “We can’t.”

  He tore at the circuits, the deep throb of the engines rubbing his bones against each other, as though they might grind to pieces and fly apart. Wires thin as human hair tangled between his fingers, the sharp edges of the microcomponents bit into his palms; the compartment bucked around him again and he fell, squeezing his hands into fists, the guts of the controls stretching taut, then snapping. The ends stung across his face like quick hornets.

  With a groan, the impulse engines halted. Bashir lay panting against the bulkhead. He opened his eyes when he realized that his own ragged breath was the only sound he heard.

  Outside the cargo shuttle, the wormhole had stilled itself.

  Silence.

  And then she heard something.

  In the empty spaces of the substation, the branching corridors, the sealed rooms; where nothing moved.

  Nothing but her pulse, stepping from one beat to the next. Kira turned away from the control panel, and listened.

  A voice . . .

  She had heard it before, long ago. In another world, her life before this moment, this place light-years away from anyone else.

  It spoke her name.

  “Kira . . . ”

  Then she knew.

  She wasn’t alone.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 10

  IT DIDN’T MATTER if she were dreaming or not. All that mattered was the firepower in her hands.

  More than Kira had ever known before—if she closed her eyes, the weapon’s weight drew her to the center of Bajor, as though her world’s heart had been given to her to bear. The metal sweated in her palms, a living thing with its own desires. Her desires—the killing machine she held had read the fire in her soul, the part of her that had consumed the rest, that wanted revenge and the bestowing of pain equal to her own. Now, the fire was locked inside the weapon, ready to be released with the slightest motion of her finger.

  “Sure you can handle that thing?” The assault team’s oldest member, a grizzled veteran of anti-Cardassian campaigns, watched her. He sat with his back to the wall of the drainage ditch, his face and gear smeared so that he looked as though he were made of the same mud and wet stone. Kira knew that the man had been going on raids against occupation facilities while she had been a hollow-ribbed child in the refugee camps—but it hadn’t been that long ago. “We could maybe equip you with something a little more . . . suited to you.” He turned his head, drawing in the scent of the predawn air and whatever it could tell him.

  “I can handle it.” She knew she was being tested. There was no room in the assault team for weaklings. She had already packed the shoulder cannon and a brace of its shells enough kilometers to leave her legs trembling from exhaustion. A patch of skin on the small of her back had been worn raw by the weapon’s metal stock. It was antique military tech, heavy and loud, and coated in the same dirty grease as everything else the Bajoran resistan
ce carried; worse, it was completely outclassed by the Cardassian guards’ armaments. Well-aimed, though, it could do an impressive—and soul-satisfying—amount of damage. The one time she’d fired it—the resistance didn’t have enough shells to waste any on target practice—the power transfer link for one of the largest strip-mining complexes on the planet had been reduced to glowing scrap. “I’ve done it this far.” Kira shifted the cannon’s bulk, making sure that its delicate electronic sights were shielded from the drizzling mist.

  “Here they come.” The team’s scout ducked his head back below the wall’s top ridge. “Six of ’em.”

  Kira saw the older man, the team’s de facto leader, stiffen. “We were told five,” he said.

  “You go up and count them, then.” The scout handed over his binoculars. The sniper fire from the Cardassians’ perimeter pickets had taken out the team’s fourth member, and had made them all jumpy.

  She watched as the leader, standing with his head hunched low, adjusted the binocs’ tracking range. A faint green light shaded the rims of his eye sockets. After a few seconds, he dropped back down and crouched between Kira and the scout.

  “All right—the five I recognize. I’ve been on operations with all of them before. The sixth one I don’t know, but he appears to be unarmed.”

  “Bajoran?” Kira looked up to the ridge. “A prisoner, maybe?” The Cardassians had a wide range of techniques for pressuring the weak-willed into becoming collaborators. Some didn’t need to be convinced.

  The leader shook his head. “I don’t think so. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  When the larger group came within a few meters distance, the scout signaled to them with a flashlight shuttered to a single radiant point. A minute later, they had all scrambled into the ditch.

  “Who’s this?” Kira’s leader nodded toward the sixth man.

  “Political officer.” The point man for the larger group propped his rifle against the stones. “Sent out from headquarters.”

  “That’s all we need.” He looked in disgust at the black-clad figure.

  “Perhaps it is.” The political officer spoke in a low voice, a surface calm darkened by a brooding judgment. His unsmiling gaze measured his critic. “There have been reports . . . of dissension among those who seek to overthrow the oppressor. A failure of unity in our purpose. Such things are wounds, brother, by which Bajor itself is bled. That dawn is coming when the oppressor’s vanities will be trampled in the dust; we must purge our own hearts and make of them vessels of light, to be worthy of that which shall be granted to us.”

  Talk and fine words . . . Kira crouched with the shoulder cannon, listening and mocking inside herself the overly dramatic words. They seemed so pointless to her. Hearing them made her feel like a child again, listening in on the elders’ endless debates and theological discussions in the camps’ barracks, tired old men splitting infinitely finer hairs and formulating political agendas that would never come to pass. That, as much as her hatred of the Cardassians, had finally pushed her into picking up the gun and joining the resistance. It had been a good thing for her that she’d been starved skinny and breastless; she had barely been able to crawl beneath the last camp’s barbed wire, the metal thorns tearing the thin fabric of her shirt and leaving a set of bleeding stripes down her back, stripes that she’d worn as a badge of honor until they healed and faded.

  Words . . . and at the same time, this man’s voice. The part of her that mocked fell into silence inside herself. And listened. The way that his companions listened, a leaning forward, as though every sense must gather in what he said.

  Her team’s leader was the only one who didn’t partake of this communion. His gaze flicked across the other men and then, eyes narrowing, came back to the political officer. “You can save your little inquisition for later. Right now, the rest of us have work to do. If you’re not toting weight, the best you can do is stay out of our way.”

  “As you wish.” The political officer, broader across the chest and a head taller than the team’s leader, nodded once. “Let the righteousness of your faith be the shield that protects you in your endeavors.”

  The team’s leader grumbled something under his breath as he turned away. “All right, let’s move out.”

  Kira lifted the shoulder cannon. . . .

  And then, for a moment that stretched to the night’s horizon, her hands were empty. She squeezed her eyes shut in confusion, wondering if she were dreaming now or at the edge of waking. She didn’t seem to be standing in a muddy ditch with the familiar stars of Bajor overhead; she crouched in a narrow metal chamber, its low ceiling pressing against her back. And she herself was different: not a skinny teenager, hair beginning to grow out after being shaved for lice in the camp from which she’d fled; and not in the dirt-colored field gear of the resistance, but in a uniform with an emblem that she could almost recognize. . . .

  The dreaming or the waking, whichever it was, faded away. She clambered out of the ditch, the shoulder cannon’s harness tugging her back into the ground, and hurried to catch up with the others.

  Then, things didn’t go well.

  I remember that, she murmured to herself. She pressed her hands against the metal walls binding her, as though they were the weight of memories pressing the breath from her lungs. I remember . . . but you’re dead. . . .

  The metallurgical installation went up in a fireball that resembled a new sun, straining against the hot leash rooted in the blackened towers. It had serviced the largest of the Cardassian construction yards based on Bajor—the alloys and massive framing girders going from its forges into the starships and heavy cargo freighters hauling away the rest of the planet’s wealth. The plant’s tailings and chemical wastes seeped into the groundwater, and into the lungs of the Bajorans unlucky enough to work there, a forced assignment that was little more than a five-year-long death sentence. To see a cancer like that erased from Bajoran soil . . . Kira had felt the flames leap up in her heart as well, as she had taken her eye away from the cannon’s sight. Two of the shells she had gotten off, as she had knelt beneath her comrades’ covering fire, had torn open the plant’s central power source, the overload surge igniting the rest of the facility.

  That part had gone all right—the dead had the comfort of knowing they had succeeded in their task.

  It had been a suicide mission all along; Kira had known that and accepted it without a second thought. What surprised her was how quickly it changed, from the near-sexual glow of triumph inside herself, to the sudden adrenaline rush of fear that blocked out all except the animal desire to survive.

  “They’re behind us—”

  She didn’t know which one of the assault team had spoken; she turned her head and saw the dark shapes ranged along the crest of the hill, and knew that they were a unit of the Cardassian defense forces that had managed to circle them undetected. The hot barrel of the cannon burned her hands as she scrambled to swing it around. She didn’t make it.

  The first impact lifted her off her feet and into a tumbling flight surrounded by shattered rock. If it had been a direct hit, she would have been torn to bleeding pieces as quickly as her comrades at one side.

  More luck: she landed in a bank of soil that crumbled beneath her, her half-conscious form sliding into a ravine a few meters deep, the water at its base tangled with exposed tree roots. The wet dirt covered her face and torso, shutting off her breath. Her hands pawed feebly at her mouth and nose, but were too weak to clear them.

  Just before she passed out from lack of oxygen, she felt another’s hand grasp her by the arm. The figure—she saw only a silhouette outlined by stars—pulled, drawing her up onto her feet, legs trembling beneath her.

  “Kira—” The political officer kept her from collapsing with an arm clasped around her shoulders. She didn’t wonder then how he knew her name; later, she realized it had been part of his duties. “Can you walk?”

  She nodded, coughing to clear the mud from her throat. His voi
ce, even though no more than a whisper, seemed to impart its strength, evoking her own. The sound of heavy military machinery drew her gaze. Adrenaline sped her pulse as she spotted the Cardassian defense forces prowling the ridge above.

  The political officer drew her back into the shadows. “They’re sweeping the area.” He turned his face toward hers. “We’ll have a better chance if we split up. At least one of us should make it, then.” He pointed along the ravine’s course. “Head north. There’s a resistance encampment in the Tohrmah hills.”

  Crouching low to avoid being seen, Kira moved off. Behind her, she heard only a few softly spoken words, telling her to remember that her faith was a shield. When she was several meters away, she glanced back and saw the man’s silhouette as he watched for his chance; then he broke out of the ditch’s shelter. In a second, he had vanished into the darkness. She turned and continued on her own silent way, expecting fire to roll over her back at any moment.

  She never saw him again. But she knew of him, and realized who the political officer had been—the name linked to the powerful voice—when, only a few years later, she first heard the broadcasts of the man who had become the leader of the Redemptorist wing of the resistance.

  That voice had spoken her name once, in a crevice soaked with rain and blood. And then later, when both she and the man had become different from what they once had been. And yet the same. The voice spoke her name differently then, in a thunder of wrath and vengeance.