Bloodletter (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  There might have been an occasion when Bashir would have been interested in puzzling these matters out; the doctor in him could already see the implications of a temporal continuum where the onset, progress, diagnosis, and cure of a disease were simultaneous; where death itself was equivalent to birth, both of them gems on the same necklace.

  But not now. Not when Kira’s and his own life might still be at stake.

  “The one to whom you showed yourself before—the one named Benjamin Sisko—he and I are both men, but we’re not the same man. “Bashir struggled to find means of communicating with the entities that shuffled in and out of the image before him. “We’re both the same kind of creature, but not the same individual.”

  The Kira image frowned. “Your kind speaks in riddles, just as . . . before. You change from point to point in this time; yet you claim to be the same creature. How can you know that?”

  “Well . . . ” He started feeling desperate. “That’s the function of memory. Part of us is a record of the changes we go through in time.” That sounded right to him; he decided to go with it. “It could be maintained that all we are—all that creatures such as myself are—is the sum of those changes.”

  “Then you might change, in time, into the one called Sisko.”

  “I don’t think that’s very likely.”

  A pensive expression formed on the image’s face. “We do not change. We are . . . eternal. That is your word.”

  He saw an opening. “But the universe outside us—the small one, that my kind calls the wormhole—that’s part of your kind, isn’t it?”

  “Yes . . . ” Kira’s image nodded. “Our kind and the wormhole—we are the same . . . ” Its eyelids closed for a moment, hiding the empty space of stars behind. “The same flesh. That is what you would say.”

  “Maybe ‘substance’ would be better. But it doesn’t matter.” Bashir resisted the urge to step closer, to touch the image’s hand, to feel whatever energy it was composed of. “The wormhole changed, though, didn’t it? Because of what happened—”

  The stars changed to blazing suns, bright in the engine compartment’s dim space; he winced at their sudden fury.

  “Yes!” The image’s other voice thundered from it. “The hurt—the wounding! As before, when one of your kind came among us. That one, the one named Sisko—he made a promise to us. He made time a thing to be bound, to be held in his hands; he said never. Never would the wounding happen, never would your kind come amongst us and hurt us—”

  The image of Kira seemed to swell with rage, as though absorbing the physical dimensions of the compartment. Bashir found himself looking up into its black gaze. His hands, in a reflexive panic, clawed for the rungs at his back.

  “Never is a thing of time—so he told us!” The image’s voice mounted. “So you told us! Your kind! But it is not so—it is a lie. There is no such thing as never—you come here and hurt us again. And always—”

  His courage wavered for a moment, long enough for him to turn without thinking and scramble up the ladder. He pulled himself out of the access hatch and collapsed onto the deck above.

  She was already there, waiting. For a moment, he thought it actually was Kira, kneeling down beside him. Until he rolled, exhausted, onto his shoulder and could see the blackness and the starry points inside the image’s eye sockets.

  Its first voice spoke, gentler if only because it betrayed no emotion. “There is no need to speak in your defense. We know the nature of your kind; we have listened to, and gone deep inside, one who is both different and the same as you. What decision we make depends not on your words.”

  The momentary panic had drained away from Bashir; he could faintly see his line of attack again, the way he had been trying to shape this strange discussion’s course. “‘Decision’ . . . ” He hoisted himself into a sitting posture against the bulkhead. “Don’t you see? That word alone implies an operation in time. Your kind will decide, and that will make things different now from what they were.”

  The Kira image nodded, almost sadly. “Yes . . . our kind has already been changed by this time you have brought us. We are not as we were. To exist as your kind does . . . we do not know yet if this is a good thing. We look inside you and see that you are something called a doctor, as the other one is a commander. Know then, Doctor Bashir, that time and change and all the other aspects of your peculiar existence may be only a disease. And one for which you possess no cure.”

  “That may be.” Another thought came to his mind, unbidden.

  The image peered more closely at him, as though seeing through the bone shell of his brow. “That is true, Doctor. As you speak inside yourself: The cure for time is death. We know that.”

  “It’s not a cure that my kind accepts.”

  “Pity.” The Kira image regarded him with no change in expression. “See how much more suffering and pain you cause by not doing so.”

  Anger, born of the entity’s incomprehension and his own failure, flared inside Bashir. “There is another one of my kind, whose semblance you have taken on—”

  “Yes. That one’s exterior appearance was uppermost in your thoughts.”

  “She’s in danger. I need to speak with her.”

  Lines appeared on the image’s brow, as though the entity beyond it were puzzled. “That one is in no danger from us. That one no longer exists here.”

  “Nevertheless . . . ” He made an effort to contain his frayed temper. “She exists elsewhere.”

  The image shrugged. “Speak with her, then.”

  “I can’t. The electromagnetic radiation . . . certain aspects of your nature make it impossible for me.”

  Eyes closed, the image was silent, as though in deliberation or conference. Then its gaze settled upon him again. “That has been changed, as your kind would say.” It pointed down the passageway to the shuttle’s pilot area. “Go to that material object that enables you to speak with nonexistent ones. You will find it functions as you wish.”

  As Bashir got to his feet, he saw the kneeling image begin to fade, bands of darkness rising through the visible form. Kira’s face, with its eyes of stars, looked up at him.

  “We will speak again, Doctor. It is—also as you would say—simply a matter of time.”

  He thought he saw its face evolve to a trace of a smile, before it was gone. When he was alone once more, he turned and hurried to the pilot area.

  CHAPTER 13

  SHE HEARD HIS VOICE, even as she inched forward in the corridor’s shadows.

  “Kira . . . come on, answer . . . ”

  Static crackled through the words, the background noise of a barely maintained comm connection. The source of the transmission was in some sense not far away at all, and in another, a universe away. It didn’t matter; the touch of that voice at her ear was as welcome as a rope tossed to one who was drowning.

  “Kira . . . ” An anxious edge filtered into Bashir’s voice, detectable even through the haze of electronics. “Are you there . . . ”

  The initial impulse that Kira felt was to push herself away from the bulkhead and sprint the last twenty or so meters to the substation’s command center. She fought that urge back; she had made her way as stealthily as possible through the substation; she was now completing the circuit that she had begun when another—and closer—voice had spoken her name. The voice of Hören Rygis had come from the substation’s internal comm system, one of the concealed overhead speakers being activated by a remote circuit whose other end could have been anywhere aboard. It had been an unreasoning animal response to have fled the command center, as though the voice had been an armed Hören suddenly revealed standing behind her. In actuality, she might have been running straight toward him; the hiding place she had found in one of the storage lockers could have been separated from the blade of his weapon by no more than a few centimeters of reinforced metal.

  Stupid, she had told herself. She hadn’t survived a childhood in the refugee camps, and then her years in the Bajoran
resistance, by giving in to panic like that. Her own instincts, and the military training she’d been given on top of them, were sharper; the only explanation she could give herself was that here in the Gamma Quadrant was the farthest she’d ever been from the soil on which shed been born. Bajor was no longer even a pinprick of light in the field of stars ranged in DS9’s observation ports. A thread had been broken for her, through which she had received some unknowable strength . . .

  Come on, Major—” Bashir’s voice broke into her wordless thoughts. “I know you’re there . . . you have to be there. . . .”

  She had to reach the command center and respond to Bashir’s transmission before he gave up and broke the link. At the same time, she knew that the stowaway Hören had detected her presence in this area before, and would logically assume that she would return to it at some point. Being at the farthest extension of one of the substation’s sectors, the command center formed a perfect cul-de-sac, a trap with no exit. To step into it, no matter how urgent the reason, might be the same as stepping into the center of Hören’s lethal plans.

  Carefully, she crouched and peered around the next corner of the passageway. For what must have been the thousandth time since she had first heard her name spoken aloud, she reached down to the belt at her uniform’s waist, for the personal armament that would be holstered there . . . and found nothing. The weapon had been left behind at her DS9 quarters, part of a decision she had fully concurred with at the time. The substation was supposed to represent a permanent settlement, not a military expedition; it would be easier to maintain that position in a court of interstellar law if the substation was effectively unarmed, down to the lowest possible level. The only hostilities that might have been expected would have come from the Cardassian vessel under Gul Tahgla’s command, and he would be smart enough to realize that any warlike action would automatically invalidate any claim he might make on the sector surrounding the wormhole’s exit.

  There were times when, paradoxically, defenselessness was the best strategy; unfortunately, the present situation—or what it had become for Kira—wasn’t one of them. She would have given a great deal to have a fully charged phaser filling her hand right now.

  The command center’s doorway was open. She couldn’t remember if her fist had hit the retract lock switch on the inside control panel, or if she had heard the door slide back into position after she had bolted through it. Light spilled down the corridor from the center’s overhead panels. Keeping her back close to the bulkhead, she could see most of the interior, the control stations curving around the sides, the two empty operations seats . . .

  And no sign of another living being.

  Minutes had passed since she had last heard Bashir’s voice over the command center’s speaker. She prayed that he was still on the comm link, waiting for a reply or fine-tuning the cargo shuttle’s transmitter.

  You’ve come this far, she told herself. You might as well go for it. She shoved herself away from the metal beside her and ran for the doorway.

  Within seconds, she had dived inside, twisted, and rolled onto her feet, coming up with hands readied in an elementary defense posture. A quick visual scan showed that the center was empty; she slapped the doorway’s control panel and let her tensed spine relax only a fraction as the metal slid into place. She felt no safer than before, but a small measure of power had been reestablished.

  “Bashir—” She leaned over the command center’s transmitter, one fingertip jabbing the respond switch. “This is Kira—”

  “Great . . . I was just about to give up on this,” Bashir’s voice answered her. “Are you all right?”

  “For the moment.” Kira looked over her shoulder, keeping an eye on the doorway.

  “I was afraid you might’ve gotten banged up, when everything went crazy.”

  “Negative on that; I came through fine.” She assumed, since Bashir had gotten the transmitter working, that he was in working condition, as well. “Now, listen; I need—”

  “There’s something important I have to tell you, Kira.” His words broke through hers. “You’re not alone out there. Someone else is aboard the substation with you—”

  “I’m well aware of that. He’s already revealed his presence to me. It’s Hören Rygis.”

  “The Redemptorist,” Bashir said, nodding. “I guessed as much.”

  “He’s been making broadcasts for months about how I should be killed. I don’t imagine he came along now just to talk politics with me.”

  Bashir nodded again. Kira was simply confirming what he’d already surmised. “Then he had some way of firing off the cargo shuttle’s engines. It was his bunch that installed the devices I found. . . .”

  “Good guess.” She found that it was easier to turn her back to the comm panel, her hand behind her on its switches, and keep watch on the closed doorway. “What’s your current situation? Are you in communication with DS Nine?”

  “No—and there’s no way I can be, either. At least, not for the time being. When the shuttle engines activated without their buffers, the wormhole went through some major changes. The convulsion you felt was the least of it. The wormhole’s inhabitants collapsed the other end by the station. It was a purely defensive reaction, to keep out anything else that might harm them. Unfortunately, it means that as far as DS Nine’s concerned, the wormhole doesn’t even really exist. Whether I’m stuck inside it or not.”

  “You’ve had contact with the wormhole’s inhabitants?”

  “With mixed results.” Bashir sounded annoyed with himself. “They allowed me to get in touch with you. That’s about it for now.”

  Kira nodded as she processed the new data. “You’ll have to keep working with them. Somehow, you’ve got to persuade them to open up the wormhole again. The comm equipment has either been damaged or tampered with, so I can’t get in touch with DS Nine. And even if I could, without the wormhole, there’s no way for Sisko to send any assistance out here to me—”

  “There is another way. To get assistance to you, I mean.” Bashir’s voice grew excited. “I did manage to get one of the cargo shuttle’s engines operational; the diagnostics all check out on it. I could activate it and rendezvous with your position pretty quickly. We wouldn’t even have to do anything about Hören; you could be waiting by one of the hatches, we could get you transferred onto the shuttle in no time, and he could rot aboard the substation for all we care.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Kira took her gaze away from the door and stared at the comm panel. “The engines firing without their buffers is how things got screwed up in the first place. That was all part of Hören’s plan. If you activate them again, there’s no telling what the wormhole’s inhabitants will do.”

  “Maybe that’s a chance we’ll have to take. If I gave it all the thrust it’s capable of bearing, I might be able to get the shuttle to the wormhole’s exit and get it outside before the inhabitants could do anything. Or they might expel the shuttle, like an immune system rejecting a foreign object—”

  “Right, or they could crush it like an egg and spit out the pieces. Or dissolve it—and you—into sub-atomic particles. There’s no way of knowing what they’re capable of.” She shook her head in exasperation, leaning her weight on the panel. “And what if you did manage to get out? They’ve already shut down one end of the wormhole; why wouldn’t they shut down this one as well? Then we’d be stuck out here in the Gamma Quadrant—without the wormhole, that’s a sixty-year voyage at maximum warp velocity—with nobody else in this sector except for a shipful of pissed-off Cardassians. Hören Rygis wouldn’t have to kill me; he could just watch us die of old age.”

  She didn’t speak of what else the disappearance of the wormhole would mean: the complete triumph of the Redemptorists’ plans for Bajor—to render the planet valueless to the Federation and isolate it from all the other developed worlds. If her death was necessary to keep that from happening, she was ready.

  Bashir wouldn’t be deterred, though. �
�Then what would you have me do instead? Your life’s in danger from that maniac. Do you expect me to sit here and do nothing?”

  “That’s exactly what I expect you to do. More than that—I’m ordering you to do nothing. I’m still the commanding officer for this mission; its success matters more than either of us. As far as I’m concerned, my arrival at this sector at least gives the Federation a chance of making a claim of sovereignty over it—”

  “That claim’s going to be pretty shaky if you’re dead.”

  “A court of law would have to determine that. Look, I know you’re right, Doctor; if the Cardassians reach this sector and find nothing but a murdered Starfleet officer and a homicidal lunatic running around the substation, then they’re going to be in a strong position. The Cardassians could blow away the substation, assert their own claim, and justify it all with a legal defense of necessity. Maybe it would stand up, maybe it wouldn’t. But it’s not going to happen that way.” Kira leaned closer to the comm panel. “I can handle Hören; he’s a known quantity to me. I understand how his mind works. He’s already lost the element of surprise; if he was planning on sneaking up on me, there’s no way he can do that now. This isn’t your area of expertise—but I spent years fighting on different kinds of terrain. This substation is just one more. And I’ve got the advantage; the defense always does. Especially if I just have to hold out until we do come up with a way of getting some assistance to me.”

  It was all a lot of big talk, she knew, designed to convince Bashir; she wouldn’t have bought it herself. She didn’t know what other surprises—booby traps—Hören and his followers might have wired into the substation. Or what weapons he might be carrying—if she were going to arm herself, she would have to cobble together something from the medical equipment aboard. If she had the time, and the means of getting to it before Hören intercepted her. It wasn’t a matter of defensive strategy at all; it was more like walking naked through a forest of knives.