by K. W. Jeter
Sisko turned away from the computer panel. "Your concerns are well founded, Constable. That's why I'll be going alone on this mission. If anything happens to me, the full complement of the station's officers will be needed here to handle the situation as it develops further."
"I agree with Odo," said Bashir. "It's far too dangerous; even if you get past the spatial disturbances, the atmospheric storms above Bajor will make any kind of landing almost impossible. What would be the point of throwing away the life of the station's commanding officer? If anyone is to go down there, it should be me—I'm the one with firsthand knowledge of Dax's research into the CI technology's effects."
"Perhaps so, Doctor." Sisko kept his voice level as he replied. "But you don't have any experience at piloting a runabout under hazardous conditions. I do. The disturbances that have been hitting the station generally have a leading edge that can be punched through with maximum thrust, then a zone of gravitational rarefaction that requires a three-point visual scan to reestablish the instrument bearings—that's a little trickier than what I believe you're capable of handling at this point. As for when I reach Bajor . . ." He shrugged. "Every hurricane has an eye, where the air is relatively still. It's just a matter of threading the needle."
"I think," said Odo, "that even you will find this mission to be more difficult than you've made it sound."
Sisko managed a thin smile. "It must be a good thing then, that nothing that's happened lately has drawn upon my store of good luck."
To his own ear, nothing sounded in his voice but a calm confidence; he had long ago mastered the commanding officer's necessary skill of betraying no hesitation or doubt. To that end, he would forgo even returning to his quarters for a moment and seeing Jake before setting out on the mission. It was impossible to remove his son entirely from his thoughts; he would have to admit no other possibility—lying to himself, if need be—than that he would see Jake again, upon his own coming back from Bajor and whatever he found there.
He pushed back his chair and stood up. "We can continue this discussion when I return with Dax. Right now, I believe I have a runabout waiting for me."
Only two things were alive in this world. Herself and McHogue . . . and she couldn't be sure about him. Perhaps he had already transcended that state, and become something vast and impersonal as the galaxies that wheeled in the night sky. The points of stars glittered in the blackness at the center of his eyes.
"Yes, of course," said the smiling figure before Dax. "You're absolutely right to have such doubts." McHogue's image turned slightly away from her, an upraised hand gesturing toward the bare horizon. "It is rather an intimidating landscape, I admit . . . but not without a certain, shall we say, bleak attractiveness of its own. And one in which the seemingly animate—such as ourselves, my dear Jadzia—stand out all the more prominently."
That in a world of his making, he could step among her unvoiced thoughts, and pick each one up and examine it like a shell upon an empty beach, didn't frighten her. She had expected as much.
"It's not a matter of doubt," said Dax aloud. "In the absence of confirmable data, I'm more than willing to take an agnostic position on the nature of your existence."
What had laid a chill hand upon her heart, tightened the breath in her throat, was the visual content of this world; what McHogue had chosen to present as such to his visitor. Surely it would have been within his powers, if he had wanted, to unroll an infinite tapestry of the green, unending summer that had once flourished inside the station's holosuites, the world that Benjamin had told her about.
"Oh, certainly," came McHogue's comment. "But that would have been so boring, wouldn't it? We've seen all that. Time for something new . . . and stark."
She would have closed her eyes, if she had thought it would do any good; if it would have blotted out what had already been burned into the optical processors of her mind.
A world of corpses.
Bones whitening beneath a glaring sun, a fiery scalpel that cut away the last of the deracinated flesh upon the fingerlike spread of ribs and rounded skull. The walls of the city of Moagitty had been breached—it looked like centuries ago, judging from the crumbling edges and rusted metal girders—and strewn across a baked-hard soil. No green shoot could break through the planet's armor; the withered branches of the trees were skeletal hands clawing at the sky. No wind stirred; with the life of Bajor at an end, the breath of its air had been stilled.
The city of Moagitty, in that other universe she had left so far behind, had been built upon the level plains close to the capital city, so that its corridors and chambers could expand to accommodate all the patrons that would flock to it from across the galaxies. Or that had come here; that time might have been centuries ago, to judge from the silence that had enfolded the planet. Since then, the low places had been raised high, as though the bones of the rocks beneath the dead soil had broken through, sharp-edged as knives. She could see down the barren slopes, to the valleys of skulls, the empty gaze of each once-sentient species mounded upon its neighbor.
"A tribute to the pertinacity of the inveterate gambler, wouldn't you say?" McHogue's smile displayed the pleasure he took in his own macabre humor. "They came and wagered away all the money in their pockets, then they pawned the clothes in the manner so traditional in these places—but I did all my predecessors one better. I let these poor losers pawn the flesh off their bones."
Dax turned away from the view that stretched beneath the cliffs edge. "I find it difficult to believe that any of these met such a fate at your Dabo tables."
"Right you are! How very perceptive—I really should have expected no less of you. But then again, you've devoted so much time and effort to the study of my little . . . eccentricities. Rather a self-taught McHogue-ologist, aren't you? I'm flattered; I'm not joking when I say that."
She felt revulsion growing in her throat. "It wasn't anything," she said with a cold fury, "that I did for pleasure."
"Oh yes, of course." McHogue nodded in a show of sympathy. "I understand—rather more than you do, as a matter of fact. You set out upon the journey that eventually brought you to these stony shores, all with the intent of somehow finding a way to defeat me. Well? Did you?" The mocking smile returned. "What've you got in your pockets?"
"Nothing. . ." Dax slowly shook her head. "I have nothing. . . ."
"And now you're wondering if you should have come here at all. What a shame. Well, I won't hold that against you. As you can imagine, I'm feeling pretty good about myself lately. You might not think so, but things have really worked out well. Just the way I planned, as a matter of fact."
She peered more closely at his image. "The way you planned . . . or the way the Cardassians did?"
"The Cardassians?" McHogue gave a snort of disgust. "Those clowns. Gul Dukat and that whole flock of lizards . . . I played them all like a cheap harmonica. Though perhaps they got what they wanted; I wouldn't begrudge it to them, just because I had a different agenda. Access to the stable wormhole—that was the limit of the Cardassians' ambitions. That's because they have small minds, like all mortal creatures. Even your other half, Dax, the symbiont you left behind in the world between this and the one from which you started. A few centuries of experience is not really very much. Not nearly enough, not to begin thinking big with."
There was no need, Dax knew, for her to speak.
"How big? That's a very good question." McHogue turned toward the still landscape that lay on all sides of Moagitty's shattered walls. "Let's just say that at a certain point, the idea of limitations ceases to have any validity." He glanced over his shoulder at her. "And it's not all selfishness on my part, either, you know. I've always been a magnanimous individual. It's been my curse, I suppose; I was born to be the host of the universe. Everybody welcome. We never close." He shook his head in self-amusement. "Even here. We're not really alone, despite the way things look to you now. The dead are not dead . . . not in the way you would ordinarily believe."
&
nbsp; She couldn't stop the words in her mouth. "I wouldn't have expected such mysticism from you."
"It's hardly mysticism, Jadzia. Though there is a certain poetry to the matter. For these—" He gestured toward the tangled skeletal remains. "—the storms of mortality have passed. All those well-known ills that flesh is heir to . . . that's all over for them. Just as well, really. Now they've found safe harbor . . . in me." The star-points at the center of McHogue's eyes shifted, brightening to needle glints. "In my world, Dax. In my mind."
The fields of bones might have spoken for her. "I can see what that world is like."
"No, you can't. Even as far as you've come, Jadzia, from one world and through another, you're still just standing at the doorway of this world. These others, those whose remains you think you see—they're the lucky ones. They're inside, where it's safe and warm, and the sharp breezes no longer cut their skin. All who came to me through the altered holosuites and the CI modules—they're all here." McHogue smiled and tapped the side of his head with a fingertip. "All still alive, forever, in their own way. My way, that is. Even poor old Wyoss—I know that you still feel sorry for him, tormented child that he was. Poor little murderer. You see, I freed him from all that pain. I understand him, Jadzia, him and all the others so desperate to be free of the terrors of existences, their lives and deaths all muddled together. Wyoss is part of me now. They all are."
She said nothing.
"Ah, here it comes." McHogue nodded in recognition. "The stuff of melodrama, the standard line addressed to big thinkers, by those who can't quite ramp up to their scale. You're mad, McHogue. Crazy as a bedbug. I'm well aware that's what you're thinking. But then, that's what you believed before you came here, isn't it? The usual tawdry therapeutic line: you're so wise, so sane, and you thought you could inject that sanity like some sort of mental vaccine into the madness I've created. What were you going to do, Jadzia, put me on the couch and have me talk about my unhappy childhood? What you still don't realize is that your notions of what is sane and what isn't no longer apply here. You yourself found out that all the CI modules were linked together on their own subspace frequency; now you know where the network led. Right here,Jadzia; to me. And as every little fantasy was created and made real—as I made them real—then bit by bit, this world, this universe, became real."
Now she found her voice. "That's what defines insanity—for you, at least. You've convinced yourself that your fantasy has form, a substance, a physical existence."
"Oh? And you in your wisdom think it doesn't? Then prove it, Jadzia." McHogue's smile turned feral, his eyes narrowing to slits. "I know all about the plans you made—I can see it inside your head—and all about your escape route. It's really quite clever of you. All you have to do is take a single step backward, in that world you left behind you, and you'll be beyond the CI module's effect." He shrugged, in an elaborate show of disdain. "Then do so. Leave. You might as well—there's nothing you can accomplish here, anyway."
A knot of fear seized inside her gut, blanking out the rational control she had maintained. Instinctively, she stepped back, as the lord of this world had commanded—
And in that other place, in the research lab aboard Deep Space Nine—
There was no one.
"You see?" McHogue reached out and grabbed her wrist, squeezing it tight. "I told you so. The unreal has become the real."
CHAPTER 17
In her dreaming, she turned from the lifeless, blackened ground drifting below her. Kira turned, and saw a streak of fire cut the night sky in two. From so far away . . . a spark brighter than the stars.
She wondered what it was. It was already gone, the dream wrapping itself tighter around her. She opened her hand as she slept; somewhere, she could almost feel her fingers brushing across the bed. But here, in her dreaming, there were only ashes trickling from the hollow of her palm. . . .
He wiped the blood from his brow.
Leaning forward, Sisko could see a blot of red that fallen upon the controls of the Ganges. He drew in a deep breath, the ache across his shoulder muscles beginning to ease.
At the midpoint between DS9 and Bajor, the shock wave of the spatial disturbances had hit again, the edge pulsing through the runabout's coordinates like an invisible tsunami; he had traced its approach on the craft's instruments and had braced himself as best he could. He still hadn't been prepared for the whipcrack blow, the gravitational inversion that had seemed to cycle from zero mass to a small sun's densest core in less than a second. Where the station's structural members had groaned a basso from the storm's force, the lighter frame of the Ganges had screeched in treble, as though the pulse engines were about to be torn from its heart.
While he had been struggling to regain control, a corner of the pilot seat's restraining harness had broken loose; the plastoid housing of the astrogation monitor above the forward viewport was now dented and cracked, the impression roughly corresponding to his bloodied temple. He'd had to claw a hold onto the instrument panel with his one free hand, knowing that the density trough between the shock waves would tumble him helplessly into the rear sections of the runabout if his grasp were to be torn free. The flow from his torn skin—he'd had no way of determining if the bone beneath had been fractured—had spun in a red mist before his dizzied eyes, then had spattered against the front of his uniform as he had punched in additional thrust. Only when the Ganges had broken through to less turbulent space did Sisko have a moment to press a forearm against his brow, trying to stanch the bleeding with his sleeve.
I shouldn't have bragged to Bashir, about how good I am at this. It had been the sort of remark that was listened to by the universe's deities, if Sisko had believed in such, who then promptly set about one's comeuppance.
There had been enough time, a few minutes between the pulses of the spatial disturbances, for him to fumble open the first-aid kit with one hand, while keeping the other on the runabout's controls. A sterile bandage pressed onto his brow had kept the trickle of blood from getting into his eyes.
The first impact had been the worst. After that, his combat piloting skills had risen from whatever chamber of memory in which they had been buried, and instincts faster than his thought processes had taken over the craft's operations. The instruments arrayed before him only served to confirm what his sharpened senses could feel coming: the prickle of a low-level ionic discharge across his arms signaling the approach of another shock wave, a hollowness in his gut foretelling the depth of the gravitational trough behind the pulse. His hands had darted from thrust advance to navigational vectors with a sureness born of long experience.
At the edge of Bajor's atmosphere, the Ganges was beyond communication range with DS9; the spatial disturbances he had managed to put behind him now effectively overwhelmed the small craft's subspace gear. There was no one with whom to consult, not a voice whose opinion he could ask, when Sisko looked below and saw the dark clouds part, as though in welcome. It didn't matter; he knew, at this point, he wouldn't have taken any words of help. All that he needed, prophecies and blessings, had been given to him a long time before.
I should have expected this as well. . . .
This close, to Bajor and the city of Moagitty, and to McHogue himself . . . the path had been smoothed for him. The storm clouds had parted, rolling back like the curtain before an old-fashioned theatrical performance.
Before he had exited from the station's launchpad, he had loaded into the runabout's onboard computer the building plans that Odo had brought back from the meeting with Gul Dukat. The entire physical layout of Moagitty could be scrolled onto the screen before him. But Sisko saw now that there was no need for the information.
As he let the Ganges descend through the stilled air, he could see below, brilliant in the rain-washed daylight, the broken walls and towers of the city McHogue had built. Its great central chamber was exposed to sight, the crenellated roof torn and scattered by the hurricane winds.
He's expecting me, thought Sisko
. All had been made ready for his arrival. There was even space enough to land, within the white ruins.
Looking up, through the viewport's top edge, Sisko saw the clouds coming together again, sealing the rift that had been opened for him. As though he had been locked into this world, beyond even the vision of the sun.
His hand reached out to the control panel, finding and activating the braking thrusters. Even as he guided the runabout's slow descent, he sensed the watching gaze being raised toward him . . .
The gaze of one who smiled.
A shadow fell across them.
"You see?" McHogue's delight was evident as he turned his face toward the sky. "I think it's admirable," he said fiercely, "that your old friend would come all this way for your sake. Especially when I know how terrified he is, deep inside."
Jadzia looked at the dark-clothed figure with contempt and loathing. "I very much doubt that Benjamin Sisko has any fear of you."
"Ah, well . . ." McHogue shrugged. "You've been acquainted with him so much longer than I have. Or at least that other part of you has, that part you didn't bring along with you when you came to pay me a visit here. But you forget that I've had some experience of our mutual friend that's a little different from yours. A little more . . . internal. There's nothing like walking around with somebody inside their deepest nightmares, to give you that sense of really getting to know him."
"But that's all you would know of him. Or anyone."
"Touché, Jadzia. That's a point well taken; I'd be the first to admit that my view of my fellow sentient creatures might be a bit on the jaundiced side. Though I'm glad to see that the argumentative tendency is still active in you." McHogue's expression turned glum as he gazed across the landscape of bones, like intricate snow sloping down from the peak on which he stood with Dax. "My one substantial regret about this glorious enterprise upon which I have embarked is that it's all been too easy. People just fold and toss in their hands, without putting up a fight. It all makes me rather nostalgic for those pleasant, innocent days when I was defrauding people in partnership with that rascal Quark. There were times when I had a knife put to my throat over a gold-pressed latinum chip no bigger than your fingernail. That was fun. Oh, well . . ." He slowly shook his head. "Can't be helped. I suppose it's what comes with selling a product that everybody wants. Immortality inside me, an expanded form of existence, the satiation of every perverted desire—you know, if I had it to do all over again, I might have made the deal slightly less attractive to the customers. So my salesmanship skills wouldn't have gotten so rusty."