by Неизвестный
"This is Major Kira Nerys," she spoke aloud. She waited a moment for the computer to match up her voice patterns with the ID files in its data banks. There was no telling what would happen next, but it was worth a shot.
"Access granted." The low-level sizzle from the barrier emitters at either side of the corridor died away. "Proceed."
Of course, she thought. As Commander Sisko had told her, her being relieved from duty had all been handled informally. As a consequence, no change in her administrative status had been logged into the station's computer. Inside DS9, she
could come and go as she wished, just as before.
She stood in front of the holosuite, her hand a few centimeters away from touching its control panel. McHogue's mocking words were as loud now as if he were there with her, speaking them into her ear.
You speak from ignorance . . . what you know is nothing . . .
The acolyte had found out. Something had brought her there, to that small enclosed space in the heart of Moagitty, a chamber whose walls could fall away, to reveal—
What? There had been no answer to that question then, when Kira had bent down to look into the acolyte's face to try and decipher the few cryptic words that had been spoken. Something about the Kai Opaka; the acolyte had seen her.
The acolyte had seen nothing; a trick, a fraud, another of McHogue's endless displays of illusion. Lies that killed, darkness that extinguished light. Kira knew that, could believe nothing else . . . yet the acolyte had believed otherwise That was what Kira had seen in the acolyte's face: the sureness of complete devotion, the grace and peace that might have been bestowed by the Kai's hand being laid upon the upturned brow.
She couldn't figure it out. The acolyte was trained, as were all the servants of their faith, to tell the difference between the true and the false; thus they served all who carried even the smallest fragments of the Bajoran religion in their hearts. If such a one could be fooled by McHogue, then his lies were indistinguishable from the truth. And that would mean the truth could be found inside the liar's holosuites . . .
"There's only one way to find out." Kira spoke aloud this time, to be comforted by the sound of her own voice in the empty corridor's silence. It didn't help much; her heart was still beating faster as she laid her fingertips against the holosuite's control panel.
The door slid open and she stepped inside. A noise as soft as her breath signaled the door's closing, sealing her into the holosuite's limitless world.
She half-expected to find McHogue waiting there, to welcome her into his domain. Instead, silence deeper and more profound than that of the corridor beyond folded around her; she listened intently, but heard nothing more than her own exhalation and the movement of blood within her veins.
The darkness yielded as she stepped forward; she could feel the soles of her boots treading upon dirt and loose gravel. That was an illusion, she knew as well; the holosuite's low-level tractor beams fed their tactile sensations to her nerve endings. But more than that; any time she had been in a holosuite before, she had found the artificial world more entertaining than convincing. She'd always had to short-circuit the last measure of disbelief inside herself, a process that had never seemed worthwhile to her; the whole experience, as far as she had been concerned, was for those who found it easy to let go of the reality outside the chamber. Now that wasn't a problem for her; the problem was in forcing herself to remember that there was another, presumably larger reality outside this world in which she had found herself. She knew that was the effects of the cortical-induction technology; she had read the reports that Dax and Bashir had uploaded from their research lab. An uncanny feeling plagued her now, that McHogue's hand had somehow reached into her skull and was manipulating each cell and fiber.
Looking upward, Kira saw a field of stars, familiar ones; she could trace the constellations visible from Bajor's northern hemisphere. He took those out of my head, she thought, and put them up there. It was a personal touch that chilled her more than the night air surrounding her.
Another light flicked before her; she could smell the wood fire's smoke, hear the crackle of the small branches that had been placed upon it. The confines of memory closed around her; she knew where she was. She looked behind herself and saw strands of barbed wire, laced with deadlier electrified lines; the glow of the fire made the points of metal look like sparks permanently etched into the blackness. This was home.
Another home, a smaller world, the first one that she had ever known. Something else that McHogue and the CI module had reached in and taken out of her head—the refugee camp in which she had grown up. There were no memories before this.
A group of Bajorans, emaciated limbs visible through their rags, huddled near the fire. Their faces were hollow-eyed, with no thoughts perceptible behind, just the bare consciousness of misery. A child with bones sharp enough to poke through the parchment skin crouched next to her mother, as much to give comfort as to receive it. Words that someone else had spoken now passed again through Kira's head—
. . . starved little rat . . .
—and were gone. None of the people seemed to be aware of her presence, standing at the limit of the fire's glow. She felt like a ghost, come back to spy upon the living, the ones who would never die inside her. The hungering girl-child would always be there, locked inside a place she could see at any time, but never touch.
A sound of something whistling through air, and striking flesh with bone beneath, came from the distance. The only reaction from those around the fire was a squeezing shut of their eyes and an instinctive hunching of the shoulders, as though the blow had landed upon their backs. The sound came again, accompanied this time by a cry of pain.
Kira watched as the child looked up at her mother, then silently drew away, into the wavering shadows cast by the fire. The child looked at her elders for a moment longer, then stepped silently toward the dark shapes of the camp's barracks. Kira followed, her boots making no impact on the ground.
She knew what the child would find. What she herself had found, in a night that had begun so long ago and still hadn't ended. A group of Cardassian guards had a gray-haired Bajoran elder spread-eagled against the side of one of the wooden buildings, the knots of the leather strips cutting off the circulation to the man's feet and hands. His back had been flayed raw, the metal-tipped lash set to maximum penetration. A Cardassian officer watched with a bored expression; all the questions had been asked, the gasped and screamed answers noted. Less than a meter away, another Bajoran knelt, greedily wolfing the ration scraps that had been his reward for betraying the escape plot. A smile passed among the guards as they saw their officer leisurely extract the hand weapon from his uniform's holster and level it toward the informant's head. The man looked up and gaped, his mouth falling open to reveal the dry crumbs upon his tongue.
The child, hiding around the barracks' corner, saw everything. Kira knew the lesson that was being written on her heart.
You want to do everything yourself . . . you can't trust anyone . . .
The officer pressed the weapon's trigger stud.
Go it alone. That's the best way . . .
A line of flame leapt to the informant's brow, as simply as if the officer had laid his finger there. At the centers of the watching child's eyes were two sparks of the same fiery color.
Kira's hand moved to her side; she found not the regulation phaser, but the armament that had become her favorite during the battles of the resistance, a heavy-duty assemblage of metal and power with a barrel that extended almost to her knee. Somehow it seemed light as the air itself as she raised it and locked her arm straight.
They saw her then, the ghost become living and visible. The Cardassians turned away from their victims, the one crumpled upon the ground and the other still bleeding where he stood fastened to the wall.
A greater fire leapt, as though her heart had broken open and poured out its contents, a rushing wave that slammed against the Cardassians' amazed faces. The w
eapon's force caught both guards together, lifting them from the red-mottled ground and casting them broken upon the dark field beyond. With exquisite, pleasurable slowness, she turned the flame toward the officer, illuminating him, a new and purified thing that yielded its own puny weapon from a suddenly outflung hand.
Kira gathered her breath into herself, a heated joy that filled her lungs. She closed her eyes, knowing that the child had seen as well, the child had already seen this in her sullen dreams. She had seen this.
The air turned into fire. She could feel the weight of the armament in her hand, as though it were an extension of her arm, a burning vein running straight from it to a point between her breasts. She knew the watching child was gone, no longer separate from her; the child saw everything from behind her eyes. She opened them and saw the refugee camp spiralling below her, the ragged buildings pushed away by the fiery column at their center.
Another voice spoke inside her head. Whatever you want . . . I can give it to you . .
She didn't care where the power came from. In this world, there were no lies or truths. A murderous rage swept through her body, granting its own incendiary grace.
In the night sky of memory and dream, Kira rose higher; she could gaze upon all the Cardassian occupation forces, their disbelieving faces turned toward the new sun that had bloomed in the darkness. There was no weapon in her hand now, but she no longer needed one; a sweep of her arm sent a angel's holy fire toward the horizon, a rain of death at her intoxicated command. The surface of this world would be scoured clean . . .
"Kira!"
Who had spoken her name? She turned in air, face contorted with anger. Her burning hand struck toward a visage that she could barely discern.
Something grabbed her around the shoulders. Darkness enveloped her and she fell, striking an angle of hard metal a second later.
She opened her eyes and saw Commander Sisko standing hove her, the bare and empty walls of the holosuite chamber behind him.
Against her shoulder, she turned her face, feeling a child's sobbing well up and burst inside her. The tears were a child's tears, not of shame, but of incalculable loss.
CHAPTER 13
"You were lucky the commander found you in there." She looked over the diagnostic results on her data padd. Some of the brain-scan numbers were a little out of line, but returning to normal.
"Tell me about it." Lying on the examination table, Major Kira gazed up at the infirmary's ceiling. "Or better yet, don't."
"I'm not joking." Dax set the data padd aside. "It could have been much worse. From what we've been able to tell, the strength of the CI-modified holosuite's effect has actually increased—and on an exponential basis. Even an exposure of limited duration, a few hours or so, could have the same impact that we saw in the subjects who had spent a cumulative total of several weeks under its influence."
"How long was I in there?"
"Believe it or not, seven point five minutes, from the time the door closed to when Sisko hit the shutoff control."
Kira rubbed the corner of her brow. "It seemed like hours. Especially . . . toward the end . . ."
"That's the time-dilation effect. There had been some indications of it before, but never to this degree. That's why we had O'Brien wire an alarm into the unit; as soon as it went off at Ops, the commander was on his way there." Dax began putting back the rest of the instruments she had used. Properly speaking, it should have been Bashir's job to run a post-stress check on Kira, but he had collapsed, near exhaustion from the hours he had already spent in the research lab. She would check her results with him when he had gotten at least a couple more hours' sleep. "It might be of some value if you told me exactly what you experienced while you were in the holosuite." Dax glanced over her shoulder at the major. "Is it anything you would feel free to talk about?"
"Nice of you to ask." Kira had sat up, leaning forward with her hands against the edge of the table. "Sure, why not? I can't see how I can embarrass myself any more than I already have."
She listened to the major's description, categorizing the hallucinated perceptions and actions as classic revenge fantasies, with delusions of grandeur. Though there was an interesting philosophical question posed, one that Dax would have to think about later, when there was more time. Just whose delusions had they been? Kira's, McHogue's . . . or those of a starving child in a Bajoran refugee camp that no longer even existed?
"Lock me up and medicate me," said Kira, throwing her head back to gaze at the ceiling again. "I'll go quietly."
Dax smiled. "I don't think that will be necessary. Just don't do it again."
"That'd be against medical advice, I suppose."
"It's against my advice, at least. And—as you might imagine—against Commander Sisko's specific orders. He asked me to tell you that."
Kira groaned softly. "Just my luck that he was at Ops when I tripped the alarm. I seem to have this memory flash of him looking like he was going to pull my head off with his bare hands."
She had long experience with knowing how intimidating Benjamin could look when he was angry. The fact that Major Kira could even talk about it indicated how much ego strength she carried around with her.
"I'm sure it was directed more toward McHogue than it was toward you. If there were anything that he wanted to do with his bare hands, it would be to dismantle that holosuite until it was particularly small pieces of scrap. Then he'd commence doing the same to McHogue."
"Maybe I could help him." Kira refastened the collar of her uniform, where the tip of one of the instruments had read out her vital signs. "Maybe I could do anything at all around here."
"'They also serve, who stand and wait . . .'"
"What?" Kira stared at her.
Dax closed the instrument cabinet. "Just something I've heard Benjamin say; a quote, some Earth source that he didn't identify to me. Though actually, if you study the ethnography of enough cultures across the galaxy, a similar sentiment or variation thereof is quite frequently encountered."
"I suppose you're right; I can remember hearing something pretty similar from Kai Opaka." Kira stood up from the examining table. "Well, right now I'm not going to put up any argument about it. I'm beat; what sounds good to me is going back to my quarters and collapsing for a shift or two. That session in the holosuite—seven minutes or whatever it was—really took it out of me."
"That's the depletion of the brain's catecholamines; very similar to the aftereffects of certain chemical use. There's no sign of permanent damage, but it will take a little while for the neurotransmitters to reach their proper levels again." Dax hit the control panel beside the door, opening it for Kira. "However, you are correct about the proper course of treatment: sleep, and plenty of it. I don't think we need Dr. Bashir to write you a prescription for that."
After Kira had left, Dax tapped her comm badge and was connected to Sisko's office at Ops.
"Well? How is she?" The commander's voice was level and controlled, but Dax could detect the tone of concern in it.
"She's fine, Benjamin; or as well as can be expected. The time spent in the altered holosuite didn't have as much of an impact as her being relieved of full duty has had."
"Is that a psychological assessment of her condition? I didn't think you'd take it upon yourself to run any tests along those lines—"
"I didn't need to," replied Dax. "And it's not a psychological assessment; it's a personal observation. I don't have to have known Kira for as long as I've known you to have insight into her character. Her actions of late have been irresponsible and erratic; most of that is a direct result of the informal administrative action you took against her. Her personality structure is almost entirely based upon the status she had here as a liaison to the Bajoran government and a Starfleet officer. General Aur and the Severalty Front took the first part of that away from her—and then you removed the rest. Frankly, Benjamin, whatever has happened is as much your responsibility as hers."
There was sile
nce for a few seconds; she could picture her old friend alone in his office, his face heavy with brooding.
"I'm aware of that," came Sisko's voice. "It's just something that I'm afraid I haven't been able to turn a great deal of my attention to. What do you advise?"
"Restore Kira to full duty. As soon as possible."
"There's a problem. I relieved her of duty for good reason. The security of this station and its ability to carry out its mission has to be my overriding concern. As long as there's any doubt about Kira's loyalty to those ends, then I have to take the appropriate measures."
Dax had already anticipated that response from him—and was ready for it. "Think about it, Benjamin. It's been established conclusively that the Cardassians are involved in the current situation on Bajor—Gul Dukat practically boasts about his hand-in-glove relationship with the new government's Minister of Trade. And at the same time, this experience that Kira just had in the altered holosuite proves that she would be psychologically incapable of any dealings with the Cardassians. The kind of rage that she has built up inside her would be impossible to overcome. That she's been able to channel that anger into constructive modes of behavior is largely a tribute to her strength of character—and something that we're fortunate to have working in our behalf."
"Your point is well taken, Dax." Sisko's voice turned thoughtful. "Very well taken, actually. All right, I'll take the responsibility for this one. Immediate notification will be made to Major Kira that she's been restored to full duty."
"I'd like to make a further suggestion, Benjamin."
"What's that?"
"Delay notification for at least two shifts. She needs the rest."
That advice was accepted as well. After Benjamin had broken the comm link, Dax closed her eyes, trying to let her own fatigue seep out of her body. Rest was something she could have used, too. In addition to the research she had been doing with Bashir, the prying apart of the altered holosuites' secrets, there was the burden of the other, the bits and pieces of data that she had kept to herself so far. Those secrets weighed far more heavily upon her.