The Long Mirage

by David R. George III

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  I dedicate this book to a great friend;

  he stood beside me

  as a best man at my wedding,

  he bats third,

  he plays shortstop,

  and his name is

  Mark Gemello.

  (There’s always room for Gemello!)

  Historian’s Note

  The primary story of this novel commences in late January 2386, immediately following the final events of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel Ascendance.

  We are all independent vessels

  sailing the seas of life to and fro

  oft meeting among the tides and swells,

  but each how full, we alone can know.

  —Akorem Laan

  The Book of Sighs, “Songs and Silence”

  Prologue

  Collateral Damage

  As the waitress approached the booth where the stranger sat, a curl of suspicion twisted in her gut. The man wore casual clothes—a dark striped cardigan atop a collared pullover shirt, tan slacks, and loafers—but he bore a serious manner. Mister Cardigan had smiled at her when she’d taken his order, but as she’d stepped back behind the counter, the good cheer had drained from his face. Something significant plainly occupied the man’s mind, and the waitress could only hope that the subject of his thoughts did not mean trouble for the diner. They’d already had enough excitement around there recently: a fight had broken out in the parking lot just the previous week, and a month before that, the place had been robbed at gunpoint.

  The waitress walked across the checkered linoleum floor, over patches of midafternoon sunlight slanting in through the front windows of the diner. Though past the traditional hours for lunch and still well before dinnertime, a number of customers—many of them regulars—sat scattered about the eatery. Mister Cardigan had chosen the booth farthest from the door, down by the other end of the counter, away from the main dining room and all the other customers. When the waitress arrived at his table, she reached up to the circular tray perched on her splayed fingers. She took hold of the tall, fluted soda-fountain glass and set it down before the man. Her hand came away slick with condensation.

  “Thank you, Joy,” Mister Cardigan said, glancing up and reading her name from the tag affixed to the strap of her bib apron. His lips curved upward at the ends, but his expression seemed like a façade erected for her benefit, rather than something genuine.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” Joy said. “I hope you enjoy it.” She waited a few seconds, trying to gauge the man’s true temperament, and thereby his intentions. She thought about the slip of paper beside the telephone in the tiny, windowless room that served as the manager’s office. She pictured the series of digits written there, the main number for the local sheriff’s office.

  The man must have thought Joy lingered for a response because he reacted to her scrutiny. He pulled the glass toward him and sipped from the straw sticking out of the frothy white head crowning the chocolaty drink. “Not bad,” Mister Cardigan said. “Not quite like they make them on Passyunk Avenue, but pretty good for out West.”

  Joy didn’t know how to reply to the man—she’d never heard of the street he’d mentioned—but then his eyes shifted and he looked past her. She followed his gaze and glanced back over her shoulder. Another man had entered the diner, and Mister Cardigan offered him a quick wave. Joy watched as the new customer lumbered along beside the counter and toward the booth. Thick-armed and barrel-chested, he had a long, frowning face and only a few wisps of hair on his dappled bald head. He acknowledged the waitress with a nod, then slid ponderously into the booth, directly across from the first man.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Joy said, and she reached across the table to where they kept the menus propped up between the sugar pourer and the salt and pepper shakers. Mister Cardigan stopped her with a touch to her forearm. It required a conscious effort for her not to flinch away from him.

  “Just bring him one of these,” Mister Cardigan said, tapping the side of his glass. The waitress looked to the second man for confirmation. He shrugged.

  Joy took a pad and pen from the wide front pocket of her apron and jotted the order down, then headed back behind the counter and retrieved another soda-fountain glass. As she poured a couple inches of milk into it, she looked over at the booth to see the second man open the bulky vest he wore and extract a large manila envelope from beneath it, which he then deposited on the table.

  “This is it?” Mister Cardigan asked, his tone mixing disappointment and disbelief. Though he spoke quietly, Joy could still hear him. He picked up the envelope and held it vertically on the table. The mustard-colored packet had a thickness to it, though it did not appear overfilled. “This doesn’t look big enough to hold all the cash, or small enough to contain just a check.” The second man shook his head, an action that set his shoulders wobbling back and forth.

  The waitress plopped a long-handled spoon into the glass, then walked to the other end of the counter to get a seltzer bottle. She aimed the siphon at the bowl of the spoon and filled the glass almost to the rim, giving the mixture a foamy top. By the time she moved back to the far end of the counter for the chocolate syrup, she saw that Mister Cardigan had pulled a sheaf of papers partially out of the envelope.

  “This won’t fly—not as repayment for your credit line,” he said as he examined the documents. “I mean . . . if you intend to use this as a form of security . . .” Mister Cardigan let his words trail off, as though considering the idea to which he had just given voice. The second man held up his arms, hands open and apart, as if to suggest that there could be no other reasonable interpretation of the envelope’s contents. It did not surprise the waitress to hear the two men talking about money or about what sounded like an ill-conceived debt. Such subjects arose a great deal—not just at the Deauville Diner, but all around town.

  Joy unscrewed the cap on the bottle of chocolate syrup and began pouring it into the glass. Though she watched what she did, she continued to listen, waiting for the two men to go on with their conversation. Finally, Mister Cardigan spoke again. “Maybe,” he allowed. “I can try to sell this as surety for your losses, but I don’t know how far I’m gonna get touting water rights in the desert.”

  Joy stirred the concoction she’d just made. The spoon clinked against the glass, drowning out the big man’s reaction. When the waitress finished, she plucked a straw from the dispenser on the counter and stuck it into the effervescent chocolate drink. As she placed the glass on a tray and started back out onto the floor, she heard Mister Cardigan sigh heavily.

  “Dealing with things like this makes me think again about getting outta here,” he said. Joy hoped that meant that he would soon leave the diner and never return, but as she set down the second glass, Mister Cardigan smiled at her again. The second man added a grateful nod, an action that, because he essentially had no neck, caused his entire body to dip forward. The sluggish movement made him seem far from formidable—even as strong as he looked, Joy figured that she could easily outrun him. She realized that she didn’t really fear either of the two men, but the dubious nature of their commerce still gave her pause.

  Carrying her empty tray back toward the counter, the waitress heard Mister Cardigan say, “What? Don’t gimme that look. I know I ca
n’t go anywhere, but this—” Joy visualized him holding up the large envelope with the bundle of papers protruding from it. “—isn’t gonna make my life any easier around here. I hope you have a backup plan.”

  Before the second man could respond, a customer at the other end of the counter motioned with his empty cup to the waitress. Joy quickly put down her tray and grabbed the coffeepot from the brewing station. She crossed the diner to fill the man’s mug, then seated a middle-aged couple who strolled in through the front door. She spoke with them for a few minutes until they eventually decided what they wanted to eat. She scribbled their choices—meatloaf for the husband, fried chicken for the wife—on the top sheet of her pad, then went back behind the counter to the pass-through, where she hung up the order for the cook to see. Several other plates had been completed, and so she delivered those meals to other customers.

  When Joy finally peered back across the diner toward Mister Cardigan, she saw that he and his colleague had risen from their booth. She quickly looked down and searched through the pocket of her apron to find their bill, but by the time she pulled it out, Mister Cardigan had already reached her. “I have your ticket, sir,” she said, holding the small piece of paper out to him.

  “Thank you, Joy,” the man said. In one smooth motion, he took the bill from her hand and replaced it with several dollars. Joy thought she heard the second man say something behind him, back at the booth, but she could not make out the words.

  “I’ll be right back with your change,” she told Mister Cardigan, but he generously told her to keep it for herself. He curled her fingers closed around the money, smiled, then stepped past her and over to the front door. When he opened it and walked outside, Joy smelled the parched desert air. Then the door closed and she looked back toward the second man.

  He wasn’t there.

  Joy whirled around, searching for him. The diner had only a single entrance accessible to customers, as well as a rear door for employees, but the second man could not have reached either without making his way past her. The waitress spun back toward the booth, which still sat empty.

  Joy did not see the technological arch that had appeared and stood beside the table because she had been specifically programmed not to see it. She could not observe the second man passing through the arch, nor the Cardassian architecture of the corridor he entered beyond it. For Joy, the Deauville Diner existed, and Las Vegas around it, but the holosuite in which her life unfolded did not. She had never heard of Quark’s Bar or of Deep Space 9.

  In the next millisecond, the software overseeing holoprogram Bashir 62 loaded a memory into Joy’s matrix, alleviating the disconnect of the second man’s inexplicable disappearance. The waitress suddenly recalled him passing her and leaving the diner through the front door. Nothing any longer seemed out of the ordinary.

  Still, as she headed back behind the counter to resume her work, the waitress hoped that neither Mister Cardigan nor his burly colleague would ever return to the diner. Though she had concluded that she needn’t fear either man, Joy hadn’t liked what she’d seen and heard. Though she did not know the details of their business, she had nevertheless perceived danger in its character.

  On that score, she would prove prophetic.

  One

  High-Risk Investment

  i

  * * *

  Captain Ro Laren strode into the hangar with a sense of purpose, eager to confirm or refute the alleged identity of the pilot who had just landed a vessel aboard Deep Space 9. Doctor Pascal Boudreaux, the starbase’s chief medical officer, walked beside her, with Crewmen Barry Herriot and Torvan Pim behind them on either flank. By the captain’s order, the two security officers kept their phasers holstered.

  With a gesture, Ro positioned Herriot and Torvan inside the door to the hangar, then continued on with Boudreaux toward the ship. Above, the stars winked out as the overhead hatch glided closed. A band of emitters around the opening shined electric blue, signaling the operation of the hangar’s force field that maintained the compartment’s internal atmosphere.

  Ro and the doctor came to a halt half a dozen meters from the ship. The whine of antigravs receded as the vessel powered down. The ship sported a lusterless, mottled hull that probably lent itself to camouflage in particular environments. Not quite the size of a runabout, it readily fit within the hangar’s designated landing zone. Its relatively compact size and simple configuration suggested that it might not function autonomously, but as an auxiliary craft attached to a larger vessel.

  Working as the beta-shift duty officer in the Hub that day, Ensign Allasar had reported no match for the ship in any of the relevant databases. Ro did not recognize its architecture, leaving her unable even to conjecture about its world of origin. Of course, it had just entered the Bajoran system through the wormhole, meaning that, theoretically, it could have come from any number of unknown planets in the vast, largely unexplored expanse of the Gamma Quadrant.

  “Don’t look familiar to me,” Boudreaux offered, echoing the captain’s thoughts, albeit in words flavored with his rich Creole patois. “I’m detecting a single set of life signs,” he said, consulting the tricorder he held out before him. “Definitely reads as Bajoran.” Ro had informed the doctor of the identity claimed by the ship’s lone passenger.

  “Make sure to run a blood sample,” the captain ordered. “With everything that’s happened recently, I want to be certain we’re dealing with the genuine article and not an Ascendant or Founder or some other shape-shifter.”

  “Understood.”

  As Ro reached for her combadge, the overhead hatch shot home with a reassuring clang. She waited a moment for the thick reverberation to quiet. The bright blue of the emitters around the hatch faded to black as the force-field generator automatically deactivated.

  Ro tapped her combadge, which chirped beneath her touch. Before she could open a channel to the vessel sitting in front of her, though, a panel in the ship’s hull withdrew inward. Ro heard the whisper of equalizing pressure. A moment later, the panel opened laterally, revealing a single individual standing just inside the ship.

  It was Kira Nerys.

  Despite several changes in the vedek’s appearance since last Ro had seen her, the captain knew her at once. After all, they had served together aboard the old Deep Space 9, day in and day out, for two years, until Kira had left Starfleet to join the Bajoran clergy. Standing in the entryway of the alien vessel, the vedek did not wear the traditional robes of her position, but a dark-green tunic with matching pants, an outfit that trod the middle ground between utilitarian shipboard wear and a uniform. Kira’s hair had grown down well past her shoulders, longer than the captain had ever seen it. The vedek also looked older to Ro, and thinner.

  But I’ve seen her carry herself with that bearing before, Ro thought. I’ve seen that expression on her face. Kira had always worn her determination like a second skin. Indeed, it had been with such resolve that, more than two years prior, the vedek had stolen a runabout and absconded with it into the wormhole. There, she had helped to defeat the rogue crew of a Romulan warbird, and to save Captain Sisko and Defiant, but she had been believed lost when the great subspace bridge had collapsed with her inside it.

  But obviously she wasn’t lost, Ro thought. Although she would wait for Doctor Boudreaux to draw a firm medical conclusion, the captain did not doubt that Kira Nerys had returned. As a Resistance fighter, as a Bajoran Militia member, and as a Starfleet officer, the vedek had defied death on numerous occasions, but Ro’s confidence about her identity came borne less by Kira’s resilience and more by the increasingly impressive series of recent events centered around the Prophets.

  As Ro and Boudreaux approached the ship, the vedek stepped down to the deck. The captain felt the urge to embrace her former commanding officer, suddenly returned after missing for so long, but before Ro could react in any way, Kira spoke, her manner matter-of-fact. “
Captain, Doctor,” the vedek greeted them. “I assume you want a sample of my DNA.” Without waiting for a response, she held her arm out, her hand open, palm facing upward. “You should also test my blood for morphogenic properties.” Having served aboard the old DS9 for nearly a decade, Kira clearly understood Starfleet’s security imperatives.

  “Thank you,” Ro said. She nodded to Boudreaux, who immediately extracted an instrument from the medkit hanging at his side. He collected a selection of epidermal cells from Kira’s outstretched hand, then fed the sample into his tricorder. He then swapped out the medical tool for a second device and raised it to the vedek’s upper arm, where he filled a phial with her blood. It required less than two minutes for Boudreaux to corroborate Kira’s identity.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the vedek said. Then, of Ro, she asked, “How long have I been gone?”

  “More than two years,” Ro said, wondering about the perception of time passing within the Celestial Temple. “The wormhole collapsed shortly after you entered it. You were presumed lost—” The captain stopped herself in midsentence. “The Vedek Assembly declared you missing and presumed to be in the care of the Prophets.” As desperate and unlikely as the official statement had always sounded to Ro, it all at once made perfect sense. “Was that the case? Have you been inside the wormhole all this time?”

  Kira glanced from Ro to the doctor and back again. “We need to speak in private, Captain.”

  Ro looked to Boudreaux, whose eyebrows rose, whether with amusement or indignation, the captain could not tell. She didn’t need to consider the request for long; she trusted Kira’s judgment. “Pascal, return to Sector General and report your findings to Commander Blackmer. When Vedek Kira and I are done here, I’ll bring her down for a full workup.”