Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance

by David R. George III

  Sensor sweeps around Bajor by the crew of Bellerophon had confirmed that the explosion of Defiant’s warp core had sealed the fractures in space. Endalla read as geologically stable, but it had been transformed from a living, breathing world into a dead, airless rock. Not a single individual who’d been on the moon survived, nor were any of their bodies recovered.

  A thorough search of the historical record provided little additional information about the Ascendants. The only recorded encounter with them had been by the crew of Enterprise a century earlier, at Pillagra, although they had been believed responsible at that time for the destruction of two other Bajoran colonies, Gelladorn and Velat Nol. Itu gave an account of his people’s historic experiences with the Ascendants, which had driven the Eav’oq into hiding for millennia. After the attack on Bajor, Itu and his diplomatic team returned to their own world, and later sent a message requesting that they be left alone while they processed the meaning and implications of what had taken place.

  Kira shook her head, as though physically trying to clear her thoughts, and her canoe rocked from side to side. Back on Deep Space 9, the measures she usually employed to find peace of mind hadn’t worked. The captain considered paying a visit to Phillipa Matthias or one of the station’s other counselors, or even simply talking with some of her friends, but she didn’t quite know what to say about how she felt—not that she was particularly inclined to have those sorts of conversations anyway. She also thought about speaking with one of the vedeks on DS9, but she feared they would pronounce her assertions of contact with the Prophets as orb shadows or even delusions; Bajorans believed fully in their gods, and that They communicated with Their people by way of various types of visions, but not that They spoke directly with anyone other than the Emissary.

  Five weeks after the invasion, when Mjolnir and Bellerophon had departed, and life aboard the station had returned to normal, Kira put in for a two-week leave on Bajor. She decided to hike alone along the foothills of the Glyrshar Mountains, to Densori’s Landing, where she would take to the water, traversing the Elestan down to the Graldom Forest. She hoped that the solitude and the physical activity would allow her to take her mind off her troubles and find a way to renew herself.

  After a while, the escarpment fell away and Kira paddled back out into the sunlight. The swollen orange orb of B’hava’el had descended low in the sky, and so the captain scouted for a good location to go ashore. When she spotted a small riverside clearing, she headed for it. She pulled her canoe up onto the bank and secured it, then collected her rucksack and carryall, and she traipsed inland.

  Inside the wood, Kira’s feet pushed into a soft bed of fallen needles. She smelled the strong scent of pine. The muffled twitter of birds reached her from above, accompanied by the sawlike hum of lopa bugs. At one point, she startled a hyurin, the fist-size rodent scampering away from her.

  When Kira judged that she had walked far enough from the river that its burble would not keep her awake through the night, she found a patch of level ground and dropped her gear. She slipped off her flotation vest—thin and comfortable when dry, it expanded to a buoyant form when immersed in water. As she unpacked and pitched her tent, she could not help thinking of her days on the run in the Resistance. Except that tents and sleeping rolls would have been considered luxuries. She’d had similar thoughts often on her trip, and not for the first time, she wondered why she had chosen to take her leave in a way that approximated her life during the Occupation.

  Don’t be so melodramatic, Kira chastised herself. Nobody chased her through the forest, nobody pointed a weapon in her direction. She would not drift off to sleep that night alert for the sound of approaching footsteps, fearful that she would wake to find herself in Cardassian custody—if she even woke up at all. Her life had changed significantly since those days, and in all ways for the better.

  Then why do I feel so unsettled? Kira had taken leave because she’d felt troubled, and she’d thought that time away from the burdens of command would necessarily fix that. But it’s not being the captain of Deep Space Nine that’s upsetting me. Each day that had passed with no real change in her mind-set had brought her closer to that admission. The night before, as she strived to relax enough to sleep, she replayed the decisions she’d made and the actions she’d taken once it had become clear that the Bajoran system faced an alien invasion. Starfleet Command had not found fault with her leadership, but she searched for the mistakes she was sure she’d made. Fortunately, the physical demands of her dawn-to-dusk hike that day caused her to drift off despite her agitation.

  Kira finished setting up her tent, then laid out her bedroll inside it. Although she didn’t really need a fire—she’d brought a portable cooking pad with her—she made several trips back to the river to find stones. She formed them into a circle by her tent. She hunted down some dead wood and kindling, then used a flint to ignite a flame.

  By the time Kira had prepared and eaten her evening meal, night had fallen on Graldom Forest. The daytime heat gave way to crisp air, but she warmed herself by the fire. The capering flames dredged up more memories. She pictured her mother and father, her two brothers, Reon and Pohl, bathed in the flickering light of a small stove in the Singha refugee camp. She recalled Furel and Lupaza, Reyla and Mobara, comrades in the Resistance, sitting around a campfire in one of the many caves in which they’d hidden.

  They’re all gone now, Kira thought. All of my family, and almost all of my friends from that time. Her recollections didn’t sadden her any more than they ever did; she had long ago accepted such losses, for to do otherwise would have been to dishonor their memories and to relegate herself to a sort of walking death.

  The darkness deepened around Kira, out beyond the meager glow of the fire. Dull aches suffused her legs from all of the hiking she’d done that week, while she felt deeper pain in her shoulders after her first day on the river. She realized that she wanted nothing more at that moment than to sleep—preferably without dreaming—but as she moved to extinguish the fire, she realized that she hadn’t checked the padd she’d brought with her.

  Kira reluctantly pulled her carryall from inside the tent, not really wanting to find if she’d been sent a message, but knowing that she should. She shuffled through the contents of the tube-shaped bag until she found her padd. She activated it and saw at once that she’d received a message from Vedek Yevir Linjarin.

  There had been a time when an attempt by Yevir to contact her would have elicited a strong reaction from Kira—somewhere on the spectrum between frustration and anger. The vedek had not that long ago served as a lieutenant in the Bajoran Militia. Posted to DS9, he had a chance encounter with the Emissary, which altered the trajectory of his life. Walking among the people on the Promenade, Benjamin Sisko approached Yevir, touched his shoulder, and counseled him that he didn’t belong there, that he should go home. In that moment, Yevir understood that he had to that point wasted his dull, inconsequential life, and he felt called to religious service. Within hours, he resigned from the Militia and returned to Bajor. The next day, he became a novice and began his religious studies.

  Kira had heard the story several times. Yevir apparently reveled in telling it, and though it easily could have been a tale told—even though true—as a political calculation, the captain believed the profundity of the incident’s impact on him. It actually inspired Kira, and reminded her of her good fortune that she knew the Emissary not just on a professional basis, but as a friend.

  Yevir’s personal story resonated with many others, among the laity and beyond, which helped explain his meteoric rise through the ranks of the Bajoran clergy. He advanced from novice to prylar to ranjen to vedek in just two years, an astonishingly rapid progression. Many believed that he would someday become kai, though he had not submitted his name for consideration by the Vedek Assembly when they had chosen a new spiritual leader the previous year.

  Yevir characterized his beliefs as conservative, which differed from how Kira fe
lt about her own faith. Never had the vedek’s traditionalism been more on display than after the discovery of the Ohalu texts, which proclaimed the Prophets not as gods, but as powerful and benevolent aliens. Opinion divided sharply among the vedeks about how to handle the controversial material, with Yevir strongly advocating for keeping what he considered heretical documents from ever being made public. When Kira uploaded translations of the texts in their entirety to the Bajoran comnet, Yevir spearheaded efforts to have Kira attainted—efforts that succeeded, at least for a time, in excommunicating her from the Bajoran faith.

  But while the vedek identified as conservative, Kira had discovered that she could not always use that as a predictor of either his interpretation of religious tenets or on what side of an issue he would fall. To his credit, he did not appear to react to issues based upon the accepted views of orthodoxy; rather, he seemed to study matters on a case-by-case basis, and with an open mind. His overtures to the Oralian Way, an ancient Cardassian religious group, marked one example of Yevir acting contrary to popular traditional thought.

  Kira played the message. “Captain Kira, I hope you are well, and that you are finding peace on your travels.” Yevir spoke calmly, almost languidly, but his sharp-eyed visage betrayed the exactitude with which he chose his words. He and Kira had spoken several times over the last month, including just before the captain had taken her leave. Always perceptive, he plainly had discerned the disquiet within her.

  “I am loath to contact you during this time away from your duty,” Yevir continued, “but I am concerned that Raiq has reached a critical juncture.” The Ascendant, after much public debate on Bajor and even in the wider Federation, currently resided at the Shikina Monastery in the Bajoran capital of Ashalla, though her legal status remained unresolved. “She still has many questions, but she is also distrustful of virtually everybody.” Yevir paused, signaling his intention to emphasize what he would say next. “Everybody, that is, except you.”

  Kira could not be entirely sure why Raiq had come to trust her. It might simply have been because the captain had been the first person the Ascendant had encountered after the isolytic subspace weapon had wiped out the rest of her people. Or perhaps Raiq had been influenced by Kira’s unwillingness to fire on her unprotected vessel. But the captain also wondered if it had anything to do with what she had said to the Ascendant aboard Yolja, or in the hours and days afterward, aboard DS9.

  Six weeks earlier, in the Gamma Quadrant, Kira had beamed the Ascendant onto her runabout, into a containment field erected around the transporter platform. The gleaming alien crumpled to her knees and fell back against the rear bulkhead, her body quaking. “I am Kira Nerys,” the captain told the gleaming alien. “I am the commanding officer of the space station on the other side of the wormhole.”

  At that, the Ascendant raised her head. “ ‘Wormhole’?” she said. Kira’s universal translator rendered the word in Federation Standard, but the captain heard the unexpectedly musical quality of the uninterpreted speech.

  The Ascendant’s paroxysms of grief abated as she stared at Kira. The captain saw no tears on her face, nor anything that approximated them, but she remained convinced that the alien had been crying—or whatever the equivalent might be for her species. “Yes, a wormhole,” Kira said, thinking that perhaps the word failed to translate in whatever device the Ascendant used for communication. “A subspace bridge physically linking two points distant from each other in normal space.”

  “Then it is not the Fortress of the True,” the Ascendant said, looking away from Kira. “Or maybe . . . maybe it is. There’s nothing in the scriptures that would contradict that.” She seemed to be speaking more to herself than to the captain, apparently debating some sort of religious idea. “Or maybe,” she went on, peering back up at Kira, “the Fortress is a myth. Maybe all of it is a myth.” Despite that she had uttered it, the suggestion clearly angered her.

  “I don’t know,” Kira said. “I don’t know what it is you’re talking about, and I don’t know why your people came here to destroy my people.” In truth, the historical record spoke of the Ascendants who attacked Pillagra a century prior objecting to the Bajorans falsely worshipping the True, but she wanted to hear about the reason behind the invasion directly from the alien.

  “We were told that you are heretics,” the Ascendant said.

  “But our religion is not your religion. We do not worship your gods.”

  “There is but one set of real gods. Either you worship them or you do not.”

  Kira didn’t know whether or not to reveal details about the Bajoran culture, but since the Ascendants already felt justified in attacking Bajor, she did not see how the truth could make things worse. “We worship the Prophets, not the True.”

  “On the Quest, we have learned that just because a race of aliens calls the gods something different from what we do does not mean that they are not our gods.”

  “And that was reason enough to want to destroy us?”

  “Blasphemers must be vanquished, either because they worship false gods, or because they dare to worship the True,” the Ascendant said. “So it is written, so it must be done.”

  “Unless it’s all a myth,” Kira ventured, echoing the doubts already expressed by the Ascendant, who seemed to deflate at the words. The captain thought of the Ohalavaru and their belief that the Prophets were not divine. “You did not personally participate in the attack. You stopped the launch of the subspace weapon, and then just before the attack began, you fled.”

  The Ascendant dropped her head. “I believed that we needed the weapon to help us join with the True in the Fortress.” The vision of somebody detonating an explosive device of any kind, let alone an isolytic subspace weapon, within the Celestial Temple chilled Kira. “It might be that my acting against the Fire doomed my people.”

  The words resonated in Kira’s mind: the Fire. She recalled the Prophets dubbing Iliana Ghemor with that title before sending her away. At the time, Kira had believed that They had removed Ghemor as a threat to Bajor, but that had obviously not been the case. The captain’s mind reeled as she wrestled with the meaning of it all. She knew better than to think that she could know the minds of the Prophets, but for just a moment, the answers seemed almost in her reach.

  “Why did you flee?” Kira asked.

  The Ascendant shook her head, a gesture that appeared to carry the same meaning as it did for many other humanoid species. “I ran from the situation because . . . I think because I was trying to outrun my own heterodoxy.”

  “Your faith did not align with that of the other Ascendants?”

  “For all of my life, it did . . . until now.” The expression of sadness on her face transcended species.

  “Is that why you lowered your shields?” Kira asked. “So that I would fire on you . . . so that you would die?”

  “My doubts do not deserve to live.”

  The articulation of the Ascendant’s guilt struck a chord in Kira. It seemed a terrible—and unnecessary—burden. “We all have doubts,” she said. “That does not make us unworthy of our faith.” She hesitated, searching for the right words. “Sometimes, answering our doubts can strengthen our beliefs.”

  “You have doubted?”

  “I am an imperfect adherent,” Kira said, admitting something difficult even to think about. The Prophets had called her Their Hand, and yet confronted with an existential threat to all of Bajor, she had accomplished almost nothing. She had been little more than a bystander as the Emissary, First Minister Asarem, Minister of Defense Aland, Captain Vaughn, and even the Eav’oq diplomat, Itu, had handled the situation. “I am imperfect, but I strive for better understanding.”

  Again, the Ascendant shook her head. “I no longer know what to believe.”

  Kira felt the Ascendant’s pain. The loss of friends and family brought terrible anguish, but life could eventually go on. If you lose the core of who you are, though, you could lose all hope.

  The captain
had stepped up to the containment field surrounding the transporter pad and lowered herself to her knees. She faced the Ascendant at eye level. “Maybe if we talk . . . if we work together . . . maybe I can help you figure it out.”

  In front of her campfire, Kira blinked. She realized that, lost in recollection, she hadn’t heard anything of Yevir’s message after his mention of Raiq. She operated the padd to replay it.

  “Captain Kira, I hope you are well, and that you are finding peace on your travels. I am loath to contact you during this time away from your duty, but I am concerned that Raiq has reached a critical juncture. She still has many questions, but she is also distrustful of virtually everybody . . . everybody, that is, except you.

  “In recent days, Raiq stopped speaking,” Yevir went on. “A doctor confirmed that there was nothing physically wrong with her. She continued to read the Bajoran canon, and also to record, from memory, Ascendant scripture. We cannot tell with certainty, but she might be attempting, or planning to attempt, a comparative analysis.”

  Kira understood why such an appraisal threatened Yevir: while he kept an open mind about most issues, he did not appreciate what he considered attacks on Bajoran religious doctrine. The captain did not worry about people who did not believe as she did, or even about those who judged her faith as misguided. After the invasion of the Bajoran system, though, it made sense to fear that more Ascendants might one day arrive and feel justified in launching another attack—although Kira believed Raiq’s claim that the fleet had comprised every living member of her people.

  “Today, Raiq finally responded to my efforts to communicate with her,” Yevir said. “As I mentioned, she has many questions. I endeavored to answer them for her, but she quickly became frustrated, and it was clear that we had difficulty making ourselves understood by one another. Vedek Kyli volunteered to speak with Raiq, but their conversation did not last long and produced the same results. Afterward, Raiq suggested that, if she was going to talk with anybody, it should be with you. I know that you are away, but if you can find any time at all to contact her, I think that it would help her. I also think it might aid all of us here at the monastery in establishing a level of trust with our guest.” The message ended and the screen went dark.