Bloodletter (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  That thought—that there was someone else on the substation besides Kira, now drifting somewhere out in the Gamma Quadrant, someone with apparently a wealth of bad intentions—kept him working long after his eyes burned with the fatigue of squinting into the dimly lit space. Before he’d found the trigger and delay, he’d only wanted to ensure that the engines wouldn’t come on again unexpectedly; otherwise, he would have gone on fine-tuning the shuttle’s transmission and reception equipment, trying to establish a communication link with Kira. To warn her, if nothing else. From this close to the wormhole’s exit, there was a chance of a signal reaching the substation.

  He straightened his knotted back and rubbed the sweat away from his eyes. As far as he could tell, he’d gotten the controls for one of the engines back in working order—he wasn’t sure if there were enough cards in the repair kit to get the others back on line. The shuttle would be able to proceed on one engine, although at a reduced velocity. He’d have to run the autodiagnostics first, then go back in and patch up anything he hadn’t gotten close enough to spec. It was a simple matter of closing the hatch and pushing a few buttons. . . .

  “Well done, Doctor,” he said aloud. His voice boomed hollow in the space. An old med school joke surfaced unbidden in his mind: The operation was a success. Too bad the patient died. He realized he didn’t have the least idea of what he should do next.

  If he had managed to get the engine operational—a big if—then what? There had been some vague notion floating around inside his head, that he could come charging to her rescue. But if he fired up the engine, got as much thrust as he could from it, what would the chances be of getting the cargo shuttle all the way out of the wormhole in one piece? Or if he did, would the wormhole then collapse completely out of existence behind him? Without the wormhole’s shortcut, the Gamma Quadrant was sixty years’ travel from the edge of the Federation’s inhabited worlds, even at maximum warp speeds. He and Kira would have a long uninterrupted time to get to know each other.

  Another if. If she were still alive.

  Bashir closed the panel and punched in the code to initiate the autodiagnostic tests. Despite the darkness of his thoughts, he was pleasantly surprised when the small readout indicated that the impulse engine was functional within 70 percent of its rated load capacity.

  Eyes shut, he leaned his forehead against the panel. The temptation to get the shuttle moving was strengthened by the dread of staying frozen in this spot, inert, cut off from all the rest of the universe . . .

  “I should just do it,” he said aloud. “Just go—”

  Is that what you wish to do?

  He heard her voice behind him, and almost answered. Before he realized . . .

  Slowly, he looked over his shoulder. He saw Kira watching him from the shadows at the far end of the engine chamber.

  But not Kira. He saw that her eyes were empty, holding nothing but black space and scattered stars.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHEN SURROUNDED BY METAL, bound by the energy fields that keep an artificial world intact, a constant vibration settles into the fibers of one’s being, so small as to signal only the rubbing of one molecule against another. He had forgotten about that—it became buried in the subconscious for all aboard a Starfleet vessel or a station such as DS9, and was remembered only when one stepped onto the surface of a planet.

  The reverberations of DS9, from the metal-on-metal clashes that shook the drydock bay, to the motion of subatomic particles inside the computers’ circuitry, was the sound of a machine, essentially a dead thing. The silence of Bajor was of something living.

  Sisko stood in the central garden of the Kai’s temple. The high, enfolded walls shut out the distant street noises of the Bajoran capital. Here, the only sound was the ripple of water, the touch of a sheltered breeze on the courtyard’s small, shallow pool.

  “Your thoughts are much disturbed, Benjamin.”

  He turned and saw her. Kai Opaka’s attendants withdrew discreetly back into the temple’s cloistered halls, leaving them alone. The Kai’s calm, meditative appearance, Sisko knew, was like the surface of the pool they stood beside; hidden beneath, as had been revealed to him more than once, were quiet depths, chambers of secrets and truths.

  One of his eyebrows raised. “Are they really so obvious to you?”

  Kai Opaka smiled. “They would be obvious to anyone. Particularly”—the smile widened a bit—”if one stayed informed about developments here on Bajor, and on your station.”

  “I see.” He wished, not for the first time, that there were time. Not the stuff of hours and minutes racing by, the continuing round of crises writhing like a basketful of snakes, missions and lives hanging in the balance of his decisions—but the endless dimension contained within the temple’s walls. If he had that sort of time, he could spend it in the presence of the Kai, if only to absorb the slightest measure of her wisdom. . . .

  But he didn’t. “I regret,” he said, “that I can be here for but a brief moment. To consult with you.”

  She sat down, her robes settling over the tiled edge of the pool. Her plump hands folded across each other. “I understand, Benjamin. More than you think. You mistake the nature of my contemplations here if you believe I have no awareness of the outside world’s urgencies.”

  Sisko sat beside her. “Perhaps it’s not what I believe. But what I’d like to believe.” At the back of his thoughts, the digits of a clock’s readout sped faster and faster.

  “You must beware the temptations of mysticism. Though you are not as other men—the things that you have seen, that no one else has, changed and are still changing you—yet you are inextricably linked to the physical universe. There are others besides your son who depend upon you.” She touched his hand. “I depend upon you, Benjamin. I am not such a foolish old woman as not to be grateful for the protection you represent for our order.”

  Changed . . . he knew what she referred to. A body of secret knowledge shared between them. Some things that he knew, and others that were the Kai’s alone. The infinitely slow revelation of the wormhole’s mysteries . . .

  The clock’s numbers raced into a blur.

  He shook his head. “We’ll have to talk of these matters on another occasion. Right now, I’ve got the lives of two of my officers to worry about.”

  “Of course, Benjamin. Your esteemed doctor and our Major Kira. My thoughts dwell upon them also.”

  Someday, he would have to find out whether Kai Opaka received her surprising amount of information about the station’s affairs from leaks among the DS9 staff, or through some arcane ability of her own. “What do you know of them?”

  Kai Opaka didn’t waste time telling him things he already knew. “The doctor . . . his fate is unknown to me. Or perhaps unknowable would be the better word. I cannot see. The inhabitants of what you call the wormhole have suffered a grievous injury; how they will connect that trauma to another outsider—another human being—in their midst, is a question only they can answer. Much will depend upon the doctor’s wisdom; what he chooses to do or not do, to extricate himself from his plight. And much will depend upon your wisdom, Benjamin.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Their understanding of the universe beyond their little one, and their understanding of any entity other than their own, is derived from what they know of you. You are the one whose mind and soul they examined so minutely; you are the one who was judged by them. Or to put it more accurately, all of us were judged through you. Thus, you became an intercessor, pleading the universe’s case; that great responsibility was thrust upon one who was unprepared for it.”

  He nodded slowly. “I know . . . ”

  “What they found in your heart, Benjamin, they have placed in their store of knowledge.”

  The Kai’s words weighed heavy upon him. If he could have switched places with Bashir, he would have. Let the fire fall upon me. He had gone into the wormhole with rage and loss darkening his soul. They still did; to think of them
poisoning a formless world, whose inhabitants had never known pain because they had never known time itself . . . it was almost more than he could bear.

  He might as well have spoken aloud; the Kai’s hand rested gently upon his. “You must remember,” she said, “that you bore light in there, as well. As much as any that ever emerged from them. You just haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Perhaps I will, someday.” Sisko drew in his breath as he straightened his spine. “Very well. What about Kira?”

  Kai Opaka looked away from him. “I do see her.” The Kai spoke in hushed tones. “More than I wish. Kira is surrounded by darkness. There is one who has sealed her fate inside his fist, as though he could crush her like an insect—though an insect’s life would mean more to him.”

  “You speak of Hören Rygis . . . ”

  “Yes. The enmity he bears her, among others, is well known.”

  “Tell me about him. Anything might be of use to me.”

  Her expression grew sadder. “Benjamin. You are looking for answers where there are none. There is nothing to tell of him. Hören no longer exists. There is a thing that wears his form and speaks with his voice, and carries within the flames of hatred that he ignited. But the rest is ashes. It has been consumed, burned away by his anger. Just as your anger, your loss, your pain would have consumed you if you had let them.”

  He knew she spoke truth, as always. “Then tell me what I can do. To help Kira.”

  “You can do nothing.” An iron thread tightened in Kai Opaka’s throat. “You understand that already, and you do not understand it. You could do nothing before, when you lost someone—someone closer to you than Kira could ever be—and you can do nothing now. That is why some part of you is still at war with both the universe and your own heart, as though they were one and the same, and equally guilty.”

  He said nothing, letting her words fall through him like stones into the pool’s still water.

  “That remains the hardest thing for you to do, Benjamin. To do nothing.”

  “Of course.” He looked up at her, even managing a thin smile. “As you said, I’m linked to the world outside my skin. I can’t yet allow myself to be as wise as you.”

  “Ah. But you didn’t come here for wisdom. You came here hoping that I had some kind of magic, a wave of my hand that would bring your doctor and Kira back from their fates.” Kai Opaka shook her head. “But I don’t. Not the way you think.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Sisko stood up. “I should go back to the station and . . . do nothing.”

  “But you won’t.” Her smile chided him. “That is something we both know.”

  Without any signal from the Kai, her attendants had appeared to escort Sisko from the temple. “Until another time.” The clock inside his skull had resumed its relentless progress.

  “The same time, Benjamin. It’s always the same.”

  He nodded, then turned and left her presence.

  As close to her as her breath, her heartbeat; as if he walked behind like her shadow, turning when she did, stopping when she paused to listen to the silence held by the dark spaces. He watched her, feeling inside himself a glow of satisfaction, even of pleasure, that came from the power of observing without being observed in turn.

  Hören crouched beside a doorway, studying the display screen he held. A pair of wires mounted with fusion-weld tips ran into the corner of the security panel that he had pried open. His prey showed on the screen as a simple red dot, alternately moving or stopping in a scrolling chart of the substation’s maze. His followers had done well in adapting the corridors’ web of sensors and communication lines for this new purpose. The expanded visual aspect was something he generated inside himself: on his mind’s screen he could picture Kira’s face as she gazed anxiously around herself, her body coiled with apprehension as she took a step into a sector where anything could be waiting for her.

  He closed his eyes, savoring that vision. This moment had been so long in coming, from the first dark seed that had been planted in his soul, a seed of fire as he had watched the temple torn open by explosion and had known that his Redemptorist brethren, his children, were things of charred flesh and shattered bone, their corpses lying before the boots of traitors. The dead he had been able to forget—they had all known that sacrifices would be necessary to achieve the sanctification of Bajor—but not the face and name of their murderer. One whom he had saved before from fire and the crushing grip of the Cardassians—that memory was gall on his tongue.

  If he had been as wise then as he had become . . . if he could have foreseen the evil that would grow in Kira Nerys’s heart, as the desire for justice had grown inside his . . . he would have let her die, breath choked by the soil of the world she would betray. Better if he had. But instead, that seed, the image of her laughing and triumphant, had been nurtured inside him, carefully tended, flourishing where he had uprooted every soft and tender part of himself. Thus, he had transformed her crime into his righteousness; the burning of that fire, a red flower that would never extinguish itself in his memory, had made steel of his will, sharper than before. Every Redemptorist had been touched by that new metal, the movement made stronger, the weak cut away, blood purged to holiness.

  And now, the time had come for the final blossoming of that seed, the unfolding of intermingled fire and steel. If the price of taking her life was his own, he was more than prepared. All his labor, and the work of his followers, had gone to bring about this moment. When there would be no one but himself and Kira, no one to stand in the way of his uplifted blade, no one to shield her from the justice that now descended upon her. That had been the function of the various devices that the faithful, the small group of microassemblers aboard the strangers’ station, had so cleverly wired into the circuitry of the cargo shuttle. First, to cripple the vessel and leave it stranded in the midst of the wormhole, and then to separate Kira from her partner on the mission. All that had been done, to greater effect than he could have wished for.

  Hören opened his eyes, gathering his strength inside himself. So much more was about to be accomplished: not just Kira’s death, but the banishment of the strangers, the lying Federation and all its servants, from the skies of Bajor. The only reason that the DS9 station’s commander and the others stayed was to exploit the wealth they thought could be obtained from defiling the wormhole, the source of Bajor’s most precious mysteries. And there were certainly enough traitorous factions in the provisional government, who maintained their ruling coalition by debasing themselves for the scraps of wealth dealt out by their off-world masters. All that would change now, or already had been changed; he had felt the shock wave that had hit the substation, as the unbuffered engines aboard the cargo shuttle had inflicted their wound upon the wormhole’s inhabitants. The triggering device, with its corresponding delay circuit, that Deyreth Elt had built for him had done its job. A regretful necessity—but how else could the Federation’s hold on Bajor be broken? Perhaps someday, when the faithful prevailed in righteousness, and Bajor had returned to the purity of isolation, then the wormhole might open onto its chosen world again, bestowing the crystalline gift that indicated its sanctity. . . .

  He didn’t know if he would live to see that day. It was enough that he could help usher in its dawn.

  The red dot on the display screen moved. Hören watched it, quickly calculating that she was heading for the substation’s control center, from which she had fled before. He smiled to himself.

  It would be a pleasure to speak to Kira Nerys once more. Nearly as pleasant as what would come afterward.

  She stood before him. “Kira—” He reached out his hand, hesitating, as though he wanted to, yet was afraid to touch her.

  The image regarded him with its gaze filled with the bright points of stars. “Who are you?” Its voice was flat and hollow, with not even a pretense of human emotion. “You are not the same. You are not the one who is here . . . ” The voice drifted silent, as though the creature behind the image we
re searching for a word, a concept.

  “Before,” said Doctor Bashir. He knew he was addressing one—or more—of the wormhole’s inhabitants. This was how Sisko had reported their manifestation to him, the incorporeal entities taking on faces and bodies from the perceivers’ memory, like empty clothing dangling in a forgotten closet. “That was another human being. Another man.”

  “’Was’ . . . ” The stars showed in the Kira image’s mouth when it spoke. Without substance, the image hung suspended in front of Bashir, unable to cast a shadow among the others in the shuttle’s engine chamber. “That is the language of time. In that you are the same.”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly. More of his self-possession, and the scientist’s intent that had brought him here, had returned. He felt like a biological field researcher, carefully approaching a member of an undiscovered species, a rara avis perched on a tree limb, that might flutter away and be lost if startled by any sudden move. “The same . . . but different.”

  “How can that be?” The image’s voice altered slightly, into an almost hostile, demanding tone. “You change in time. You are not the same in one time as another. And yet you are also different at the same time. Explain.”

  It would be impossible, he knew. The wormhole’s inhabitants were of a different order of existence from himself; the pocket universe in which they dwelt was bound inside the larger one’s spatial dimensions, but transcended it in all considerations of past, present, and future. A metaphysician would be required then, to determine if in time, the universe that held all the galaxies was itself contained within the wormhole.