by K. W. Jeter
But there was no time for that. Not now. The wormhole’s inhabitants were right; his kind did exist in another way, one where the illusions of eternity slowly faded, to reveal the cruel steel gears of the universe.
The image regarded him with a frown. “Your nature makes you suffer. You exist in pain.”
“That is what’s sometimes called the human condition.” Bashir almost felt like laughing, a humorless noise collecting inside his throat. His immediate diagnosis would have indicated the cumulative effects of fatigue. “That’s why I keep thinking about activating the engine—even without the impulse buffers, and with the effects it would have on your kind—and heading out there. To see if I could do anything to help her.”
A shake of the image’s head. “That cannot be allowed. You have already brought pain and wounding to our kind. There are those among us who would cause your existence to cease, in order to defend us.”
“Still . . . you can’t expect me to just forget about a friend. And what’s going to happen to her.”
“You see that one in memory—but it is not enough. Perhaps if you could see that one in that other place—that place that is not here. Then your suffering would cease.”
He raised his head. “What’re you talking about? Can you do that?”
The expression on the image’s face remained placid. “It is close enough. What we can perceive can be shown to you.”
Bashir swung his legs out of the hatchway and scrambled to his feet. “Then show me. Now—”
The Kira image stepped toward him, bringing its face close to his. If there had been any substance behind the surface phenomenon, it could have brought its lips to his for a kiss. Instead, he found himself gazing into the blackness of its eyes and the stars swimming there.
“Look. If that is what you wish.”
He saw a brighter spot of light, and knew it was the substation drifting just outside the mouth of the wormhole. It grew larger, the stars disappearing behind it. Then it vanished, as he felt himself falling toward it.
Another dark space, its walls curving around him. He could almost sense them pressing against his shoulders, and at the same time he knew he was still aboard the cargo shuttle, gazing into the empty eyes before him.
He saw her then—Kira, the real one. Running before him, into the corridor’s distance. His hand reached out involuntarily, as though he could stop her. She looked over her shoulder, but her gaze went through him, toward another point. He called her name, but she didn’t hear; she ran without stopping.
Then he saw the other, the silhouette of a man, looming up before him, blocking out everything else. The man took a few steps forward, and Bashir saw the broad shoulders, the heavy arms dangling at his sides. In one of the man’s fists, a star glittered, a bright flare of light. But not a star. The man continued on his relentless path, and in the corridor’s shadows, the object in his hand resolved into a sharp-bladed knife.
“What is wrong?”
Bashir had stepped backward, away from the image before him. His own hand came up, shielding his eyes from the vision it had presented him.
“Did you not see this one?” A puzzled tone came into the image’s voice. “Does this one not exist out there, in time?”
He couldn’t answer. His fists trembled as he turned away, his gaze falling to the open hatchway and the engines in the dark space below.
CHAPTER 15
HE BROUGHT OUT the good stuff. From a locked cabinet by the welding equipment lockers; the deactivated jacksledge, hunkered down on its pile-driver feet, seemed to stand guard as he pulled out the bottle of Powers.
“All the way from Earth itself.” O’Brien broke the seal with his thumbnail and poured two fingers of Irish whisky into each of the glasses he’d set out on the workbench. “I’ve been saving it for special occasions.” He shrugged, shaking his head wearily. “Though we certainly don’t have much to celebrate. Your health.”
Sisko matched the toast and knocked back a mouthful. It tasted like a rain-drenched peat bog on his tongue and felt like fire sliding down his throat. “Thanks.” He could understand why the chief engineer was fond of the stuff, though he also knew it wasn’t going to do any good for either of them; they would get just about as inebriated by upending the bottle and pouring its contents out on the engineering bay’s deck.
It was the sentiment that mattered, however. Far better to have been invited here, amid the smells of raw metal and spent fuel—the bay always reminded him of one of the programmed modules in the holosuites, a re-creation of a nineteenth-century blacksmith’s shop, complete with eye-stinging black smoke and iron heated to a glowing red—than to be sitting in a booth in Quark’s lounge, an untouched synthale in front of him. If nonaction was the prescription he’d have to take whether he liked it or not—Kai Opaka’s words still weighed heavy in Sisko’s memory—it was best practiced in congenial, if cruder, surroundings.
“You can’t beat yourself up over these things, Commander.” O’Brien had drained his glass; he refilled it and topped up Sisko’s. “There’s a limit to what you can do.”
He managed a smile. “It seems to be my curse to be surrounded by people wiser than I am.”
“I don’t know about that. To be frank, I’m still puzzled about what happened up there in Ops.” O’Brien leaned over his arms folded on the bench. “When you had Gul Tahgla on the screen—why didn’t you give him an unencoded message to relay to Kira on the substation? Hell, he already knew we were in trouble with it.”
“Perhaps he did.” Sisko rolled a drop of the whisky around on his tongue. “And perhaps Gul Tahgla didn’t. The problem is, we can’t be sure. Tahgla might’ve just been fishing for confirmation of his suspicions—a confirmation that we would have handed over to him on a plate if we had given him an unencoded message. And, as long as there’s any doubt in his mind, he’s going to proceed that much more cautiously. When the Cardassians’ vessel gets within range of the substation, he’s going to stop and sniff around it, looking for any sign of a trap, anything that we could possibly spring on him.” He took another swallow. “That’s Gul Tahgla’s problem—and it’s one he shares with most Cardassian officers. They’re so constitutionally devious that they can’t imagine anyone else not being the same way. They can all waste shift upon shift, first creating suspicions inside their own heads, then chasing them down. Endlessly; even when they get proof that nothing underhanded is going on, they still won’t believe it.” The alcohol hadn’t cheered him up any, but had loosened his tongue; that was more of a lecture than he had intended to give.
“Hm.” The chief engineer had made significant progress on the bottle’s contents. The potential loss of Major Kira and Doctor Bashir had set him off. “Is that a good enough reason not to do it, though?” His tone was almost belligerent as he hunched over his glass. “Because you were the one who decided to contact Gul Tahgla in the first place. You said that helping our officers was more important than any reservations we might have about dealing with the Darcass . . . Cardassians.”
“True. Up to a point.” Sisko tapped a finger against his own glass. “And that point is reached when we do anything that might negatively affect Kira’s successful completion of her mission. She still might have a chance—and I owe her that much. When I gave her the mission, I indicated my trust that she’d be able to carry it out. I can’t second-guess her now. Because of circumstances that we were unable to predict, Kira is operating on her own, cut off from any communication with us.” He raised his hands, palms outward. “Fine—that’s what we’ll have to accept. But until we have hard evidence that she is in fact dead, we also have to assume that she’s continuing on the mission. If we could have gotten potentially useful information to her, we would have; but to do so at the cost of jeopardizing the mission itself would be cutting the ground out from beneath her feet.” Sisko shook his head. “I can’t treat a subordinate officer that way.”
“Not even if she might wind up dying? Because you didn’t?”<
br />
It took a few seconds before he could reply, seconds in which a hollow space seemed to open inside him. “Kira assumed a certain responsibility when she accepted the mission. And I assumed it when I gave it to her.” The words, though true, echoed bleakly through the emptiness. “That’s the nature of our job here. This is not a settled territory, where someone might reasonably expect a degree of safety. Things can go wrong very quickly. And then we have to deal with them, as best we can. That’s all.”
O’Brien contemplated the dregs in his glass. “I guess that’s why I’m glad you’re the commander here, and I’m not.”
“I wish I were glad about it.” He pushed his chair back. “Take it easy on that stuff, will you? You’re still on duty until this crisis is over.”
Deliberately, the chief engineer picked up the bottle—it was still more than half-full—held it out at arm’s length, and let it drop. It shattered on the deck, the brown liquid spattering across his boots.
“I wasn’t thirsty, anyway.” O’Brien kicked away a wet shard of glass. “At least, not right now.”
She leaned her back against the metal. As soon as she had gotten through the doorway, she had hit its control panel with her fist. The door had slid shut, cutting off the passageway. Panting for breath, Kira pressed her palms behind her, as though she could keep the door locked that way.
Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. The farther from the central corridor, the more the substation was set in darkness. By the faint bluish glow from an instrument panel, she saw the outlines of a row of pedestaled biobeds, most with surgical support frames hanging above. The frames were larger than the ones in the sickbays set aside for oxygen-breathing organisms, the clamshell forms capable of extending sealed atmospheric chambers around the beds. When the substation was still being designed for use as a quarantine module, the area would have been employed for the benefit of some of DS9’s more exotic visitors.
Its original function didn’t matter now. Kira pushed herself away from the door and ran to the rows of medical equipment drawers. She yanked them open, each gleaming metal tray clattering to the end of its track. All of them were empty.
“Damn—” She flung the last one closed in frustration. She had hoped to find something that could be used as a weapon. Even a simple manual scalpel would be better than her bare hands. Obviously, Bashir’s progress in fitting out the QM had been interrupted by it being commandeered for its new mission. There were probably crates full of implements that she could have used—surgical instruments were fundamentally variations on cutting edges, no matter how advanced the technology for making the incisions might be—and all of them were sitting in a storage locker back on DS9.
In her flight through the substation’s maze, she had come across a few cartons of simple bandages and other soft materials. Wonderful, she had thought grimly. Maybe I could wad them up and shove them down Hören’s throat—if I could just get him to say “Ah.”
She clambered onto one of the biobeds and looked up at the overhead surgical frame. The curved lens of its focused-beam spotlight glinted a transparent green. She stood on her toes and struck the lens with her fist. A shard of glass—a big one with an end wrapped in a bandage for a handle—could draw blood as well as sharpened steel. She ground her teeth together as the thick lens shivered with each blow, but didn’t break.
“Kira—”
The voice didn’t startle her, she had been expecting it at any moment. She quickly crouched down on the bed’s padded surface, scanning across the area’s darkness, ready to spring from it and run again.
Silence.
Carefully, she stepped down from the bed’s pedestal. Nothing moved in the darkened space. The voice had come from an overhead speaker—Hören could be at any point in the substation.
She called out. “Where are you?”
“I’m everywhere, Kira.” The whisper was overamplified, but still recognizable as Hören’s. “That’s why you can’t escape me. You never could. Because I’m in your heart, as well.”
“That’s a lovely thought.” Looking over her shoulder, she calculated the distance to the doorway. The impulse to dash for it, into the corridor beyond, was almost overpowering. “Sometime, you’ll have to show me the rest of your poetry.”
“Yes . . . ” Hören’s voice betrayed no anger. “We should talk, Kira. I admit I made an error in judgment. I underestimated how well you could resist your own guilty conscience. If we sat down and talked . . . perhaps that part of you that still acknowledges righteousness would accept that which comes with it. That is, justice.”
She heard something beyond the voice coming from the speaker above her. From another direction, and closer.
“You mean my death.” Kira kept her head motionless, looking out the corner of her eye.
“Such a harsh word. Don’t torment yourself with it.”
“Right, I forgot; that’s your job.” How had he traced her to this area of the substation? She had thought she had lost him all the way back at the storage lockers. And he couldn’t be talking through the entire comm system—there was another overhead speaker in the passageway beyond, and she would have heard the voice filtering through the door, if that had been the case.
It was a question that would have to wait for her to figure out the answer. She heard the other sound again, the slight disturbance in the still air. Behind her, somewhere down the row of beds.
“A regrettable necessity, Kira.” The voice oozed smooth from the speaker. “A movement such as the Redemptorists is fueled by the passions of its followers. Anger against a traitor is an effective spark for those emotions. I serve my followers by evoking it in them.”
“How noble of you.” She realized what the sound was. Someone’s breath, one bed closer to her now. “I wonder . . . if there’s something else that fuels your anger.”
“Oh? And what would that be?”
Slowly, Kira reached behind her, bracing her hands against the edge of the bed. “Guilt.” She listened to the area’s silence. “Not mine, but yours.”
The other sound, the careful inhalation and release, halted for a moment. “What do you mean by that?” The voice from the speaker above tightened a fraction.
“You survived, Hören. And they didn’t.” She flexed her knees slightly, rising a centimeter onto her toes. “The ones back at the temple, all those years ago. They died . . . your faithful brethren. I remember standing there, looking down at some of them . . . with the flames at my back. . . .” She raised her voice, so it echoed from the corners of the space. “It wasn’t pretty. Some of them lived just long enough to maybe wonder . . . where you were, Hören. And why you didn’t die with them.”
The breathing sound grew louder; she could picture the nostrils flaring, the cords tightening in the neck. She knew it came from only a few beds down the row.
“Really quite a common reaction, Hören.” Kira felt her palms sweating in anticipation. “Survivor’s guilt. Because in your heart, you don’t believe that I’m the traitor. You’re the one who betrayed them—”
A cry rang from both above and behind her. She sprang to one side, pushing the corner of the bed so that it rotated on the axis of the pedestal. The other end caught Hören across his abdomen, toppling him forward. Kira ducked beneath the arc of his knife; for a moment she saw plainly the contact microphone taped to his throat, which had picked up and magnified his almost inaudible whispering. A wire ran from the black dot of the microphone to a short-range transmitter clipped to his belt. She rammed the butt of her palm into the side of his head, but his momentum carried him on top of her.
The knife swung again, closer, and she felt a streak of fire along one arm. She thrust herself upright, her hands against Hören’s waist and shoulders, and heard him land heavy against the angle of the bulkhead and the floor.
Blood streamed down to her elbow; she was unable to draw her left hand into a fist. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Hören on his knees, pushing himself upright wit
h one hand, his other arm dangling as though broken. Rage contorted his face.
She made it to the doorway before he could launch himself toward her. A quick stab at the control panel and she had stumbled out to the passageway, the door sliding shut behind. The narrow space tilted dizzily around her. Hören’s footsteps pounded closer, only slightly muffled by the door.
Reaching up with her good hand, she grabbed the edge of the metal surrounding the luminescent panel above her. It came free as she drew her legs up, her weight breaking the seal. A thin strip peeled loose, a few meters long, flexing in her grip. She jabbed the broken end into the doorway’s sliding track, just as Hören struck the control on the other side. The door ground to a halt as the metal strip, its other end still fastened to the ceiling, bowed to the snapping point. Through a gap of a few centimeters, she could hear Hören cursing incoherently.
Kira turned and staggered into a run. She clutched her wounded arm tight against her breast, the blood soaking into her uniform.
He heard her even before she spoke. Before she responded to the signal transmitted from within the wormhole—her ragged breathing spoke of exhaustion close to collapse.
“Kira—are you all right?” Bashir pressed his hand flat upon the comm panel’s switches. He had been trying to hail the substation for over an hour. “What’s wrong?”
“Under . . . under control.” Her voice broke into a crude simulation of a laugh. “I can’t believe it. I thought this was supposed to be some kind of a hospital unit, and I can’t even find a damn first aid kit . . . ”
The comment worried him even more. “What happened?”
“Let’s just say . . . I made contact with Hören. It wasn’t fun.”
“How badly are you hurt?”
“Like I said . . . under control.” The sound of her breathing steadied. “Surface wound from a knife; lots of blood, no major tissue damage. I was able to pull an insulation sheet loose from one of the control panel modules and bind it up with that. I seem to be getting function back in my hand—anyway, that’s the least of my worries right now.”