by Неизвестный
Dax stepped forward, into the range of the CI module's field. The research lab disappeared from around her; she felt the skin of her arms grow chilled as a night wind brushed across her.
For a moment there was silence, and then a greater silence, heart-aching, inside her; she knew that the symbiont had already been torn from what had been their shared consciousness. Somewhere immeasurably far from her, part of her self had become an observer at her mind's perimeter.
She gazed around at the empty, darkness-shrouded shapes that filled the world into which she had entered. McHogue's world. Then she began walking, toward the bright doorway of the horizon.
The first impact hit as he entered Ops. A silent shuddering rolled through the station's frame, strong enough to jar him back against the open doorway. As the tremor subsided and he regained his balance, Bashir could see the Ops crew scrambling to their emergency positions; the deck's readouts erupted with a surge of data and sector alarms.
"Where's Dax?" Commander Sisko, leaning over the central control panel, turned quickly toward him. "We're going to need her up here—immediately."
"I don't know; the last time I saw her was in the research lab." Through the soles of his boots, Bashir could feel another low-level pulse moving through the station. "I came straight here from my quarters when the general alert went out. What's going on?"
Sisko nodded toward the perimeter-scan readouts. "We've got some spatial field disturbances coming our way; major ones. Their point of emanation seems to be Bajor. Severity seems to be increasing as well; I've already sent O'Brien on an all-levels sweep, to secure as many stress points as possible before the next one hits."
The readout was only roughly decipherable to Bashir. He looked back to the commander. "Is this something we'll be able to ride out?"
"Hard to tell. Dax has much more experience with interpreting these phenomena. She can tell us if the acceleration curve is close to its peak or whether it has further to go yet—"
"Commander, we've been able to get no response from Dax." Odo came up beside them. "There's been no answer to the direct comm request we've sent to her."
"That first jolt may have caused some damage inside the lab; you'd better get down there, Constable." Sisko looked toward Bashir. "You, too, Doctor; she might be injured. Get her patched up and back here to Ops, as soon as possible." He turned away, clasping his hands behind his back as he studied the spread of readouts on the overhead panels.
If she's alive—Bashir couldn't stop himself from thinking the worst, as the turbolift swept him and the security chief toward the lab.
Odo glanced from the corner of his eye at Bashir. "I'm confident we have nothing to worry about, Doctor. It's been my observation over the years that Trills are remarkably resilient, especially to sudden blows or falls. They do, after all, have two functioning neurosystems within their bodies."
Another rumbling surge hit the station, knocking Bashir against the side of the turbolift. The lights of the small space flickered and dimmed; beyond them, he could hear the structure of DS9 creak and groan, the frame members straining against their connectors, like an ancient sailing ship heeling beneath a storm-force gale. That was a bad one, he thought, feeling then a trace of embarrassment at how simple and stupid the words had sounded inside his own head. Of course it had been bad; for the mass of DS9 to have registered any shock at all was an indication of the storm fury radiating out of Bajor. A storm without wind, without any atmosphere at all in the vacuum surrounding the station; it was as if the fabric of space itself, the network of invisible connections between atoms and stars, was being crumpled like a rag into a fist. This little bubble of light and sentience floating in the Bajoran asteroid belt could be snuffed out between one tightening fold and the next.
The turbolift's interior brightened; with a hissing noise, it resumed its course, a twisting path through DS9 that had always reminded him of med-school diagrams of peristaltic motion. That didn't seem amusing now; if the turbolift's advance sensors had detected sufficient torsion damage to the transit shaft, it might have shut itself down, trapping them midway until a rescue crew reached them. If one ever did.
"Thanks—" He let Odo pull him by the forearm, steadying him again on his feet. "Maybe I should worry more about us than her."
When they reached the lab, they found it empty. Or apparently so—Bashir thought he could sense Dax's presence, or some intangible remainder of it. He and Odo stood next to the bench, looking around the area.
"She should be here," said Bashir. His level of concern had gone up another notch. "Where else could she—"
"Watch out!" Odo's voice was a sharp command, simultaneous with his hand grabbing and pulling him back away from the bench.
He saw it then, below eye level; he had almost set his hand on it as he'd stepped forward, searching for Dax. The disassembled CI module, its black casing set to one side, had been powered up; he could tell that much from the luminous sparks moving through its microcircuits. At the same time, he caught the scent of charred wiring insulation and burnt-out components. Even as he looked at the module's exposed innards, another piece of it failed, bursting into a white-centered flare, then darkening just as quickly to a twisted black lump the size of his thumbnail.
"Careful," admonished Odo, as Bashir reached to touch the module. He could feel its heat against his fingertips; he drew his hand back and picked up one of the probe tools that had been left scattered on the bench.
A cautious insertion of the tool's point unleashed a fury of sparks; he shielded his eyes and leaned away, to keep his brows from being singed. When he dropped his protective forearm, he could see that the module was dead, its circuits reduced to black cobwebs, already crumbling to ash.
"What happened to it?" Odo regarded the object's remains with his usual deep distrust.
"Hard to tell . . ." He poked a few more times into the blistered circuits. "I think even O'Brien would have a hard time running a post-mortem analysis on it now. My guess would be that a self-destruct program was triggered somehow; damage this thorough is pretty hard to explain any other way. It'd have to be deliberate."
"Perhaps our friend McHogue decided that he didn't want people prying into his secrets anymore." Odo looked away from the device, toward the unlit recesses of the lab. Another low-level vibration passed through the station, strong enough to rattle a case of glass chemical vials mounted on the wall; Bashir steadied himself against the edge of the bench. "We don't have time to concern ourselves about it now. We still need to find Dax."
A quick search through the rest of the lab yielded no sign of her; Odo returned to the bench area and contacted the Ops deck. "We're not having much success down here; has any other indication of Dax's whereabouts been found?"
Sisko's voice answered him. "Negative, Constable. We've been attempting to run a trace on her comm badge, but we're not getting anything." A barely controlled frustration ran beneath the words. "If something had happened and her badge had been destroyed, the comm desk would have picked up a interrupt signal. Otherwise, the only possible explanation is that Dax has somehow managed to exit or been taken from the station. But there hasn't even been a runabout leaving the docking pads in the last two shifts—"
"Transporter activity?"
"None, Constable. It's as if she's disappeared right out of our midst. . . ."
Bashir tuned out the others' voices, leaving them behind himself as he peered at the computer panel's screen. He was fully aware of Dax's thoroughness; if her mysterious absence was somehow related to her work on cracking the CI module's secrets—and the charred state of the device indicated as much to him—then she would have left a record on the file directory they had shared between them.
He found the most recent additions, date-stamped only a couple of hours ago. Leaning closer to the screen, he quickly scanned across the words into which Dax's voice had been transcribed. He could almost hear her calm, dispassionate tone, the careful dissection of event and evidence
. . . .
Another voice spoke, the echo of what he had heard spoken by Commander Sisko less than a minute ago.
As if she's disappeared . . .
Bashir slowly shook his head, already beginning to realize the truth of what had happened to her. Of what she had set out to do.
"Commander—" He straightened his arms against the bench's edge, pushing himself back from the computer panel. "Are we presently capable of getting any signals to and from Bajor?"
"We've managed to establish a comm link. It's weak and erratic, but we can get through. Why do you ask?"
He rubbed his forehead, as though the ball of his thumb could erase from his eyes the words—Dax's words—that had shown on the computer screen. "I suggest, Commander, that you redirect the tracer you have out for Dax and her comm badge. If you use as narrow a beam as possible and increase the range, there's a good chance you'll find her. Down there, on Bajor. In the city of Moagitty, to be precise."
There was no need to wait however many minutes it would take for Sisko to get back to him, to confirm what the narrowed and pinpointed tracer had found. He reached out and switched off the computer panel.
"What's all this about?" He heard Odo speak from behind him.
"We'd better get back to Ops—I'll explain there." Bashir shook his head. His gaze moved from the blank computer screen to the burnt-out remains of the CI module. "He came out here and got her," he murmured. "Just like that . . . McHogue did . . ."
"What are you talking about?"
He didn't turn around. He knew, from deep inside hirnself, what had happened, though he couldn't be sure how it had. How that other world had become even more real than the coolly rational Dax could ever have anticipated. Real enough to step into, as her research notes had indicated was her plan . . .
And too real to step back from.
CHAPTER 16
A delayed memorandum had been routed to him; Sisko found the notifier tag on the screen of his computer when he stepped back in from Ops deck. It was from Dax; she had marked it both urgent and confidential.
The memo's tag continued to flash red on the computer panel. "Proceed with memorandum delivery." He leaned back in his chair, awaiting the answer to one more mystery.
No visual display accompanied the message. Dax's voice came from the computer's speaker module. Sisko frowned, hearing an odd note of tension running beneath the science officer's words.
"Benjamin—I'm routing this information to you personally, as you can best determine what use should be made of it. Given the speculative nature of what I'm about to tell you, I'm naturally hesitant to place it in the computer's research files for Dr. Bashir and the others. I may be in error concerning these matters—and I certainly hope I am—so until proof is at hand, one way or the other, I'll leave it to your decision as to whether anyone else should be brought in on this."
The recorded voice fell silent, as though Dax had taken a moment to collect and order her thoughts. Sisko swivelled his chair, bringing himself closer to the computer panel, the blank screen within reach of his fingertips.
"To state it very briefly," continued Dax's memo, "the situation regarding McHogue and his plans may be much worse than we had previously thought. It may, in fact, be worse than we can imagine. Up until this time, the research that Dr. Bashir and I have done on the nature of the CI technology has supported the conclusion that its negative effects are essentially limited, despite McHogue's rather grandiose claims. That is, the damage caused by the altered holosuites is upon their unfortunate users, manifested in severe psychological deterioration and consequent externalizing of violent and self-destructive impulses. Most of the effort that Dr. Bashir and I have expended has been directed toward determining possible preventative and therapeutic methodologies that could be used to reverse the harm that would be brought by McHogue's continuing deployment of the CI modules; naturally, other officers such as yourself and Security Chief Odo have sought means of containing the outwardly manifested criminal and political damage stemming from the inner, personal devastation. All of this is, of course, well known to you.
"However, Benjamin, I'm afraid that our responses to McHogue's operations have been misdirected. Some of McHogue's statements that were interpreted by us as symptomatic of megalomania, perhaps as a result of a psychopathological condition due to his own exposure to the effects of the CI modules, may in fact have a basis in reality."
Dax's words, released from the computer's data banks, prodded Sisko's memory. He had given a full report on his conversations with McHogue to the other officers, for whatever use it might have been in their investigations. The diagnosis of megalomania had largely been one of his own making; how much of that, he wondered now, had been cold, rational analysis on his part, and how much a deep visceral loathing of the entity that had sat smiling across from him, speaking of mad things?
The memorandum continued. "Concurrent to my joint research effort with Dr. Bashir, I gathered and analyzed on my own certain data that I felt it best to keep confidential at that time." On the surface, Dax's voice might have been describing an accumulation of dry, inconsequential statistics. "Even before the present atmospheric storms on Bajor and the ongoing spatial disturbances in our sector, there were indications of a deeper underlying phenomenon taking place. Dating from the time at which it may be assumed that McHogue first placed the CI modules into operation, there is a growing body of evidence—navigational instrument deviations, subspace sensor readings, and the like—that a fundamental cosmological shift is taking place, with the city of Moagitty functioning as its epicenter. I didn't want to believe this, Benjamin, but the data allow for no other conclusion. Moagitty has become a black hole, but one unlike any we've ever encountered before. It is not an object of such colossal mass that light cannot escape its gravitational pull; instead, it appears to be creating a warpage of dimensional relationships beneath the universe in which we exist. An analogy, Benjamin: it's as if the cosmos that we normally perceive were reduced to a map spread out and fastened upon a table. Now that table—the subspace dimensions that maintain our universe—is being destroyed. Somehow, the operations of McHogue's CI modules are drawing subspace in upon itself and collapsing it, just as a gravitational black hole does with light radiation. That is what is causing the planetary storms and the spatial disturbances; the tension between the imploding table and the map above it is reaching catastrophic proportions. At the moment, that disturbance is limited to the sector surrounding DS9; however, the sensor readings that I've been following already indicate a widening of the destructive phenomena. There's no reason to believe that the subspatial collapse will not spread beneath all possible space. This would be a cataclysm beyond our imaginings, Benjamin; an eclipsing of the galaxies themselves."
The words ceased for a moment, as if that which could be neither imagined or spoken had claimed her voice. In the silent office, Sisko heard his own shallow breath mingling with a whisper that could not be heard but only felt, the motion of the stars wheeling in their ancient courses. A hand had been laid upon both his heart and the nearest star, halting each between one fragment of time and the next. If there was to be a next one . . .
"I'm unsure as to the causal relationship between the operation of the CI modules and the subspatial collapse." The murmur of Dax's voice had resumed. "Further investigation would be required to establish the exact mechanism involved. Suffice it to say—that amount of time isn't available to us now. The consequences of McHogue's operations upon the surface of Bajor have reached a critical point. That's why I'm forwarding this memorandum to you, Benjamin. I don't think it will be long before you'll be aware of what I've set out to do. I just wanted you to know—and to understand—that I had my reasons."
Again, silence; a few seconds ticked by, before Sisko turned his head and saw the words end of memorandum set in place on the screen before him.
He tapped his comm badge. "Commander Sisko to Dr. Bashir. Any sign of Dax?"
"Negative, si
r. I'm afraid that—" Bashir broke off his reply. "Odo and I are heading toward Ops. There's a lot we need to talk about."
"Very well," snapped Sisko. "Make it quick."
Another series of bone-jarring impacts rattled through the station before Bashir and Odo arrived. The office door slid shut behind them.
"All right, then—" Sisko leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips against each other, as though the cage they formed would be enough to contain the worry and anger that had grown so large inside him. "I want to hear exactly what you found, and I want to hear it now." There hadn't been time to waste before; that it might already be too late for him to do anything was the chief goad to his self-lacerating fury.
On the opposite side of the desk, Dr. Bashir slumped down into one of the other seats, without being prompted to; he looked drawn with fatigue and an even more visible anxiety. Behind him, the station's security chief remained standing.
"It seems that Dax, as is her usual practice, left detailed notes about what she had discovered, and what she was planning on doing—"
"I'll tell him," interrupted Bashir. He pushed himself upright in the chair, making the effort to bring his emotions under control. "I was Dax's research partner on this investigation, so I think I have a slightly better idea of what's happened to her."
Odo raised an eyebrow, then nodded. "As you please, Doctor." He took a step backward and folded his arms across his chest.
"Dax figured out a way—or so she apparently believed—of entering the hallucinatory environment created by an activated CI module, and then going beyond that to an alternate reality that's hidden behind the sensory perceptions that are evoked in the subject neurosystem—" Bashir looked up at the office's ceiling, drawing in a breath between rigidly clamped teeth before returning his gaze to the commander. "This is all somewhat difficult to explain. . . ."