Bloodletter (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  “Words—your kind is so fond of them. You name things and believe you know them.” A smile played on the image’s face. “Yes, if it pleases you to call them such.”

  “All right. What is it you would show me, then?” He felt like a character in an old Earth story, talking to the ghosts who had visited him. “I’m ready.”

  More than ghostlike; a phantom of suffering. Suddenly, the image of Kira threw its head back, the cords of its neck tautening, mouth grimacing in pain. The image grew translucent; for a moment, the stars filled its outline, twined with bones of glass. Then it was gone.

  He was alone in the cargo shuttle. More so than ever before; he realized that even when the image had chosen not to show itself to him, the wormhole’s inhabitants had always been there with him, watching. Their presence had filled the shuttle like oxygen. He could breathe, but the stuff inside his lungs was something colder and thinner, a bitter metallic taste formed on his tongue.

  “Where are you?” Bashir called aloud, then slid down from the seat. He stood in the middle of the pilot area, looking slowly around the empty space.

  Something else had stopped that had almost become as much a part of him as his pulse. He looked toward the panel that held the instruments for the external sensors. All the readouts had pegged down to zero, the same blank red numeral showing on all the gauges. He stepped toward the panel and laid his hand on it. The equipment was still working, a faint electronic hum seeped through the skin of his palm. The data storage units continued to operate, absorbing the flat output of the wormhole’s dead universe.

  Appalled, Bashir stepped back from the readouts. He spun to face the pilot area’s center. “Where are you?” A cry now, as much of anger as fright.

  We are not here. Not now. A soundless voice spoke at his ear. This is the place where we are not. Because of what you would do to us. We can look into this other time, and touch you in it, but we cannot be here.

  He went to the front of the area, and leaned over the control panel, to gaze out the observation ports. The swirling play, the visible bands of the wormhole’s electromagnetic radiation, had vanished. Darkness without stars surrounded the shuttle.

  “This . . . ” He touched the cold inner surface of the port. “This is what the engines would do?”

  Without that which you call the buffers . . . yes. The wounding it causes, the hurt to us . . . the death. You would kill us with the engines. And when we die, the wormhole becomes a dead thing, as well. Its flesh is our flesh; we are the same as it. It would not happen at once, but slowly in your time. Whenever the engines come upon us, a little more death. Until there is no more.

  There was something else they weren’t telling him; he sensed it, out beyond the fragile skin of the shuttle, beyond the limits of the wormhole itself.

  “What about the rest? Out there?” He pointed to where the stars had once been, cold light swarming at the point where this small universe opened onto the larger one. “What happens there?”

  We know not. The voice seemed to come from a place almost as distant. That is not our concern.

  An idea had already formed inside him; all he needed to do was speak it aloud. Even though he was afraid to.

  “Leave me here, then.” Bashir looked over his shoulder, half hoping to see the Kira image standing behind him. “In this time, in this place.”

  This is the time of the dead.

  “I know. But I can do you no more harm here. Your kind exists in another time, apart from this. I can activate the engine without causing any more suffering, any more death, to you. We’re all beyond that, here, in this time. There would be no more wounding, yet I could go to the aid of the other one of my kind. That’s all that matters to me now.”

  The voice was silent for a long moment. Then it came again. You do this at peril to yourself. We cannot tell you what lies beyond this place, this time, our flesh. We are not out there, where you wish to go. You will cease to exist for us, as the other one did. You will have no way of speaking to us again.

  He nodded slowly. “But there’s no other way.”

  You will be lost.

  “I’ll have to take that chance. But like everything else out there—it won’t be your concern anymore.” He shrugged. “Maybe you won’t even remember me.”

  Too late. Now, you exist in memory, as well.

  “All right.” Bashir pushed himself away from the panel and stood in the center of the pilot area. “Let’s do it.”

  It is done already. The voice was barely perceptible. Goodbye . . .

  He was truly alone. The instrument gauges stared at him like empty eye sockets. He walked past them, heading for the hatchway that led down to the engine compartment.

  A few minutes later—if time could have been measured in this universe—he came back up and settled himself in the pilot area’s chair. He reached out and pressed the main thrust control. Below him, he felt the surge of power emitted by the unbuffered engine.

  Gathering speed, the cargo shuttle moved toward the wormhole’s exit.

  “I’ve brought someone with me this time.” He pulled another chair toward the table in the center of the cell. “I think you know our Chief Engineer O’Brien.”

  Odo watched as the Redemptorists, sitting in a row on the other side of the table, nodded toward their former boss. They all looked puzzled as to why he had come.

  “The chief engineer and I have been having an interesting conversation.” Odo unfolded the papers that Quark had given him and spread them out on the table. “Much the same as you and I have had. Only concerning things that I wasn’t quite aware of before.”

  The Redemptorists shifted in their chairs, appearing nervous and uncomfortable. He had observed this condition in interrogation subjects before, especially after they had—had time to reflect upon various psychological ploys he might have used upon them. This bunch now radiated an uneasy fear when confronted by him, undoubtedly worrying—if only subconsciously—about what he might turn to next.

  “It seems certain devices were purchased by your late comrade Deyreth Elt.” Odo looked down at the sheets of paper. “Devices that the chief engineer informs me are called parasitic echo relays.” He looked up at his audience. “Ring any bells with you?”

  The Redemptorists glanced from the corners of their eyes at one another, but remained silent.

  “These devices have some striking properties. It was an education, hearing about them. It seems that these echo relays can be placed in parallel with circuits that might have a coded signal sent along them—the input circuits, let us say, for a chain of high explosives that requires a fuse code in order to be triggered.” Odo looked at O’Brien sitting next to him. He sensed the hot-tempered human’s impatience with what must have seemed like a roundabout mode of questioning. The engineer would have been much more likely to have reached across the table and banged a couple of heads together to get them talking. Even if he hadn’t gotten any answers that way, he would have felt better. “These echo relays don’t require the code signal; they can pick it up from the circuits they’ve been placed on, and hold it for a variable length of time before allowing it to pass on to the next stage of the circuit. Now, does that sound familiar?”

  They were trembling, right at the verge of cracking; Odo saw one of the Redemptorists open his mouth, as though he were about to speak. Sweat dotted all their brows. The softening up he had done before was about to pay off. To confront them now, with a spiel of information that they had thought was known only to themselves, was the final step in the process.

  “Come on,” growled O’Brien. “There’s people’s lives at stake—”

  The Redemptorists didn’t even seem to hear the chief engineer. They were still staring at Odo, like small animals hypnotized by a venomous reptile.

  “You know you want to tell me.” He pitched his voice low, almost soothing. “Think how good it will make you feel. Why not now?”

  “It’s so they won’t all go off at once—” The one in t
he center of the row broke his silence, his words blurting out, propelled by the pressure inside him. “And that way—”

  “That’s right,” another one quickly added. “So the force isn’t cumulative, it’s dispersed—”

  They all began talking at once, their voices tumbling over each other.

  Odo turned toward O’Brien. “Are you getting all this?”

  She swiveled her chair toward him. “There have been some highly unusual developments in that sector, Commander.”

  Sisko stood behind Dax on the Ops deck, looking at the panel display she had called him to see. “Exactly what’s going on?”

  Dax ran a fingertip across the glowing numerals. “I’ve been keeping a monitoring scan on the sector where the entrance to the wormhole was before it collapsed out of existence. Look at this.” The numbers she pointed to were rows of zeros. “There’s been a near-total drop in the background electromagnetic activity. Virtually nothing is happening in that sector. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  He felt his brow creasing in puzzlement. “What do you think it means?”

  “Hard to tell, Commander.” She studied the readouts. “It’s as if that sector has shifted in time somehow—to a point approaching the theoretical end of the universe itself. This flattening out of the EM distribution is a kind of death on a cosmological scale. It’s what we would anticipate seeing—if there were anyone still around to see it—when the universe begins collapsing in upon itself. It’s just that here it’s confined to this one relatively small area.”

  “Something must be going on in there. Inside the wormhole.”

  Dax nodded. “That sector of space and the wormhole must somehow still be connected—just as if the wormhole left a gap in the outside universe’s fabric when it disappeared. And now we’re seeing some kind of resonance effect between them.”

  “It’s Bashir.” One of Sisko’s fists struck the panel. “He must have done something. He must have figured out some way of dealing with the wormhole’s inhabitants.”

  “Perhaps. But then, the wormhole’s entrance hasn’t reappeared.”

  “Commander—” A voice called from the Ops doorway. He looked up and saw Odo and O’Brien striding toward him.

  “What is it, gentlemen?”

  “My interrogation of the Redemptorists has yielded some results at last.” Odo appeared pleased with himself. “We’ve come up with some information that may be of considerable value.”

  “It’s just as we thought,” said O’Brien. “They’ve wired some additional surprises into the substation.”

  Sisko led them back to his office. He leaned forward across his desk, chin braced against his fists, and listened to the chief engineer’s explanation.

  “—and that’s what they’ve cooked up.” O’Brien had finished the technical details. “These parasitic echo relays turn the autodestruct function of the original quarantine module into something almost completely different. The original destruct sequence was set for all the explosives to go off simultaneously, as soon as the fuse codes were transmitted to them. That way, the QM would have been completely destroyed; there wouldn’t have been any pieces bigger than your hand floating around afterward. Now, with these echo delays wired into the circuits aboard the substation, they will go off one after another, with several seconds between charges. The cumulative effect won’t be present; all the substation’s atmospheric seals will be blown out, but the structural framework and most of the exterior shielding will still be intact.”

  “Apparently, the plan was something devised by Deyreth Elt and Hören Rygis.” Odo turned his gaze toward the commander. “They anticipated that once we discovered Hören was aboard the substation—particularly if we also found out that he had been successful in murdering Major Kira—we would initiate the autodestruct sequence as the quickest means of eradicating him, so that he couldn’t be brought to trial on Bajor. He couldn’t eliminate the explosives and their circuitry on the substation, but with the echo relays they could be sufficiently altered so that he would stand a reasonable chance of survival. With one of the portable emergency life-support systems aboard, he could hold out for some time. Long enough for the Bajoran provisional government to become aware of the situation and press for him to be brought back to the planet’s surface. Any trial would become a show for gathering even more support for the Redemptorist cause. Hören would come out of it an even bigger hero than before.”

  “Indeed.” Sisko leaned back. “Now that we have this information, gentlemen, what do we do with it?”

  “If we could get this information to Major Kira, she could use it against Hören.” Odo’s voice remained dispassionately logical. “We know that the other end of the wormhole is still in existence; it’s also reasonable to assume that the cargo shuttle is still close to the wormhole’s exit. Though the internal curvature of the wormhole normally renders impossible any transmissions to or from vessels that have traveled significant distances inside, the cargo shuttle might be within effective comm range. If so, there’s a chance that Kira is in contact with Doctor Bashir. He could transmit to her the fuse codes for the explosives. As soon as she had acquired a portable life-support system for herself, she could initiate the autodestruct sequence and blow Hören into space. An entirely appropriate conclusion to him, I would maintain.”

  “The problem is in getting the information to her.” Sisko rubbed his chin. “I think we need to have another little discussion with Gul Tahgla. . . .”

  He used the augmented personnel module to transfer from the cargo shuttle to the substation. The APM, stowed in its own bay just off the shuttle’s freight hold, was almost a complete small spacecraft in its own right, nearly two meters across at its widest point and close to four meters from the base of its propulsion unit to the signal lights and sensors mounted above the multiwindowed head. The six utility arms positioned around the APM’s elongated trapezoidal form were equipped with a variety of tools, from heavy-duty grappling pincers to fusion weld cutters. Bashir didn’t know what it would take to get inside the substation, but he wanted to be prepared for any eventuality.

  The safety of the cargo shuttle dwindled behind as he steered the APM toward the substation’s docking port, where it had once been connected to the vessel taking it through the wormhole. In all directions lay the field of stars, the coldness of their scattered light prickling Bashir’s skin. The memory of the Kira image’s eyes haunted him; that, and the dead pocket universe, the wormhole wounded by the unbuffered engines, from which he had finally piloted the shuttle.

  Around the docking port were the black scorch marks from the bomblets that had originally cannoned the substation out here to the Gamma Quadrant. Inside the APM, Bashir rotated a control on the small panel before him, playing an exterior work light across the massive C-shaped arms splayed out from the port. Reaching behind him in the APM’s cramped space, he found the glovelike hand-piece that operated the smaller grappling arm. The APM turned on its axis as the arm extended and seized hold of the port’s emergency release bolts.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when the bolts gave way, the grappling arm slowly twisting them to their unlocked position. The explosive force of the bomblets hadn’t damaged the entry system. He had been worried about the possible need to cut his way in with the fusion torch, and compromise the substation’s atmospheric seals.

  Backing the APM off a few meters, he watched the hexagonal door of the port swing open. Within minutes, he had guided the APM inside; using one of the grappling arms, he struck the red manual-activate switch protruding from the side of the airlock. Through the APM’s sensors, he could hear the hissing sound grow louder as oxygen flooded the chamber. As soon as the pressure-match light came on on the panel, he unsealed the APM—a vertical slit appeared between two of the segmented windows, widening as the metal edges retracted from each other, down to the APM’s base. Bashir quickly stepped out and hurried to the doorway leading to the interior of the substation.

&nbs
p; In the central corridor, with the door sliding shut behind him, caution suddenly held him back. There was no telling where Horen might be—the Redemptorist would undoubtedly have been able to tell that someone new had come aboard. Bashir resisted the impulse to call out Kira’s name, and instead, tried to make as little noise as possible as he headed for the command center.

  He found he needn’t have worried.

  When the command center’s door slid back, he spotted the two corpses lying on the deck. Or what had been corpses; slow centuries had reduced them to skeletons, the soft tissues reduced to a thin, wrinkled leather.

  The larger one he assumed had been Hören; the other, he was able to recognize as Kira from the few faded scraps of her uniform, the white fingers of her ribs visible through the gaps. The skull’s eye sockets held nothing as they gazed up at the ceiling.

  He knelt down and touched what had been her head. The small bones crumbled to dust with the slightest pressure.

  Cold, deeper than that between the stars, seemed to radiate from inside him. He quickly stepped to the control panels; the instrument lights came up, slowly and dimly, beneath his fingertips. “DS Nine—this is the substation mission calling Deep Space Nine. Do you read me?” He could hear his own voice tautening, as dread seized hold of his throat and breath. “Is there anyone there? Anyone . . . ”

  Silence answered him. Silence that he knew now was the wordless speech of the dead, an emptiness large enough to swallow galaxies, small enough to be held inside jaws of whitening bone. He stepped back from the panel and turned toward the dead, who still had remnants of faces.

  “They have been here a long time. Just like this. Waiting for you.”

  Somehow, the unexpected voice failed to startle him. He looked over his shoulder and saw a woman standing behind him. She was dressed in the enfolding robes of a Bajoran priestess.

  “There is no blame to be ascribed to you.” The woman’s expression was one of gentle forgiveness. “As I told your commander, Benjamin Sisko, there are limits to human effort. One must learn to accept what one can and cannot do.”