by S. D. Perry
Ro was immediately all but tackled by Quark, and looking around, Kasidy realized that she didn’t want to stay; she wasn’t in the mood for light conversation or company, although she had to admit that seeing Taran’atar for the first time definitely captured her attention. It wasn’t every day that one saw a Jem’Hadar at a cocktail party.
Kira was talking to Ezri about something, but when she spotted Kas, she quickly extricated herself and hurried over, smiling a little anxiously.
“Kas, I’m so glad you decided to come.”
Kasidy smiled, looking into her concerned, searching gaze and seeing how much Kira still wanted their friendship. She was glad for it, but also knew it wasn’t ever going to be the same.
“Actually, I’m not staying,” Kasidy said. “I’m feeling a little tired…but I wanted you to know that I’ve decided to go ahead with my plans to move to Bajor.”
Relief flooded Kira’s face. “That’s wonderful. I just know it’s the right thing for you, Kas, after all you’ve done with the house, and…and how much you’ve wanted it.”
Kas patted the noticeable swell of her belly, thinking of Ben, thinking that there was just too much tying her to Bajor now. Wondering what her child’s life would be.
“You’re right,” she said, softly. “It’s what I want.”
Only moments after Kasidy left, Kira got a call from ops; a personal line from Bajor was waiting in her office. Vaughn was in the middle of telling a pretty funny anecdote about having to take the academy flight test with his very first hangover, but Kira didn’t like leaving people on hold; she quietly excused herself from the small audience and slipped out of the meeting hall, hurrying across the Promenade to a turbolift.
On another day, she might have been annoyed at having to leave in the middle of such a pleasant gathering, but she was just too happy. Commander Vaughn was going to make an exceptional first officer; he was emotionally balanced, bright, experienced—and his brush with the Prophets made him the perfect choice for a Bajoran station.
An Orb is home, Bajor is opening up to new ideas, I have a great staff and great friends…and the station is safe.
Kas’s plans to leave the sector had been the only thing that had still felt unresolved, and though Kira had hoped that the revelation of B’hala’s secret crypts would change her mind, she hadn’t been certain. Now, she felt a sense of completion, of things coming full circle—from her early-morning dream of a dying freighter and Benjamin to here and now, riding the lift to ops and knowing that she had a party of new and old friends to return to, she felt like she’d grown. She felt like for the first time in a while, there was nothing dark hiding in her life, waiting to surprise her.
She stepped into ops, nodding and smiling at the evening shift as she walked to her office. Not everything was perfect, of course—but happiness wasn’t about achieving perfection. For her, happiness was about hope and feeling loved, about being competent at her job and in touch with herself, with her faith.
Life was good, maybe as good as it got.
Chapter Twenty
Ro saw Kira leave, and found herself talking to Shar with one eye on the door, waiting for the colonel’s return. After about ten minutes, she decided it might actually be better if she could have a few minutes with Kira in private. Besides, Quark was starting to circle again, and he smelled like he’d taken a shower in lightly rancid fuel oil.
Ezri said that Kira had been called to her office, so Ro slipped out of the party and headed for a turbolift. When the doors opened into ops, she saw that Kira was sitting at her desk, alone.
As Ro walked closer, she realized that Kira was working, a stack of reports in front of her and one in hand. She didn’t want to interrupt the colonel, but Kira didn’t know that she’d already filed her investigation report, and Ro wanted to make sure that Kira was ready for any fallout.
When the office doors slid open, Ro knocked on the doorframe and Kira looked up, obviously preoccupied.
“Colonel, I’m sorry to bother you…”
“That’s all right, come in,” Kira said, setting the padd aside.
“I just wanted you to know that I sent my report on Istani’s murder to the Ministry of Justice,” Ro said, the doors closing behind her. “I included everything, but I kind of figure that with the killer dead, no one is going to want to look too hard at the Assembly’s involvement. Anyway, I thought you should know, they may have some questions before they close the file.”
“Thank you,” Kira said. “Listen…I meant to tell you before that you did an exemplary job with the evacuation. With the investigation, too. Really outstanding work.”
“I—thank you,” Ro said, flustered and pleased. Kira had never said anything as nice to her, and it felt amazingly good, touching off a flush of warm pride.
“I was too quick to judge you, Ro, and I hope you’ll accept my apology.”
Ro hadn’t planned on saying anything, but Kira’s praise had caught her off guard, surprising her into it.
“Colonel, I should apologize, too. Being too quick to judge runs both ways, and I haven’t made it easy for you.”
Kira smiled slightly, but seemed to be looking past Ro, her thoughts elsewhere. There was something different about her, something…
“Maybe there comes a point when we all need to start again,” she said, brushing her hair behind her ears.
“Colonel, your earring,” Ro said, immediately scanning the floor in front of Kira’s desk. The clasp must have broken; she’d never seen Kira without it.
“I took it off,” Kira said, still wearing that little smile, but Ro saw a profound sadness in her eyes. “It seems that Vedek Yevir got the last word, after all. I’ve been Attainted.”
Ro stared at her. “You mean…”
“I mean that I am no longer welcome within the Bajoran faith,” Kira said calmly. “I’m forbidden from entering any temple, nor can I study any of our prophecies, or wear my earring, or look into an Orb, or even pray with other Bajorans. Ever.”
Kira’s voice caught just a little on the last word, and she quickly swallowed it down, not sure why she’d told Ro, of all people, Yevir’s calm and self-righteous expression still clear in her mind, his voice repeating over and over again.
“When you chose to go against the word of a vedek, you turned away from Their light, Nerys. I had no choice but to make the recommendation, and the Assembly agreed…”
She saw the open compassion and pity on Ro’s face, saw that Ro was about to tell her how very sorry she was, and Kira suddenly realized that she couldn’t bear it. That the words would kill her.
“Ro, I have work to do.”
Ro nodded, seeming to understand, and that was awful, too. Without saying anything else, she turned and left the office. Kira picked up the report she’d been reading and found where she’d left off, concentrating, refusing to be beaten by one petty man, refusing to think of what he’d taken from her.
She still had her work; it would have to be enough.
Epilogue
It had been long enough; nothing was going to happen. It was time to go back.
Jake sat at the shuttle’s controls, his shoulders slumped, a few empty ration packets cluttering the console. The flight plan was up on the screen, all set to retrace his path back to the station, and he couldn’t help thinking that it looked a lot like failure. Nearly three full days, and all he had to show for it was a pinched nerve in his neck, from falling asleep in the pilot’s seat on the second night. He hadn’t brought a med kit, and all the Venture had on board was a few bandages and a half-empty tube of medicated foot lotion.
Jake massaged the sore muscles, scowling, focusing on the ache because he didn’t particularly want to keep thinking about his grandiose washout. He’d already decided that when he returned to the station, he would tell his friends what he’d done. He didn’t care anymore about being embarrassed. Dad was still gone and he’d let his own wild hope talk him into a big, stupid fantasy. He’d lied to people
he cared about, but he could fix it…and maybe by talking to Ezri and Nog, to Kas, he’d be better able to come to terms with how he was feeling about his father.
And not just the good stuff, either. Jake loved and missed him terribly, but there was also a little anger, and some hurt. Dad was off having this incredible, enlightening experience, because it was his destiny…but whatever he was to the Prophets, he was also Jake’s father, and that relationship mattered. Yes, Jake was old enough to be on his own, but did that mean he was just supposed to let his father go with a smile and a wave?
Maybe so, Jake thought, and for the first time since Dad had gone, the thought wasn’t a bitter one. Now that he was about to leave, about to let the prophecy go, he realized that his trip to the wormhole had brought him closer to an acceptance of the situation than all those weeks at B’hala. Maybe part of the reason he’d struggled so hard to avoid dealing with it was because he didn’t want to feel angry or hurt…and he didn’t want to accept that his father had willingly left him behind.
And that’s okay. I don’t have to be perfect…and neither does he.
He was disappointed that the prophecy hadn’t come true, no question, and he wasn’t looking forward to confessing his bizarre mission—but he was looking forward to going home. Maybe he would start another book, or look into the Pennington School again, after Kas had the baby. Maybe he could do a lot of things, and when Dad did return to linear space, he’d be proud that Jake had gotten on with his life.
Jake straightened in his chair, feeling okay, feeling hopeful and a little bit excited about all of the possibilities in front of him. Not great, but not so bad, either. Maybe he’d misunderstood the prophecy, or it had never been real, or it wasn’t even meant for him. Whatever it was, he suddenly felt like he hadn’t wasted the last three days, after all.
“Going home,” he said, tapping at the controls, telling the Venture to return him to the station. The shuttle had drifted some, but he’d be back at DS9 within the hour.
Jake hit the command key—and the shuttle spun around suddenly, the sensors reading a massive flush of energy surrounding him. They’d been out of whack for his entire trip, but he hadn’t seen anything like this.
“Onscreen bow,” he said, hearing the quaver of sudden hope in his voice, trying not to read too much into it—
—and what he saw on the screen made him laugh out loud, a pure sound of delight and wonder.
It’s true, it’s all true!
Swirling, dancing colors filled the screen, red and blue, white and purple, every color he’d ever seen in a kind of flowering mist. It was all around the Venture, streams of light flowing past the tiny ship in ribbons and waves. He could feel the power and the presence of consciousness, of an awareness, and his surprise was surpassed only by his joy; he might have been ready to let it all go, but it wasn’t necessary anymore, the Prophets had come and he would see his father again, he’d be able to bring him home—
—except the colors were moving faster now, and the sensors told him that the shuttle was going too fast, that it was starting to spin as it was carried deeper into the wormhole.
A second later the artificial gravity went, and Jake grabbed for the straps of his chair, not laughing anymore. The ship was going even faster, he was getting dizzy and an alarm started to flash and beep, then another, then a third. His stomach lurching, Jake stabbed at the controls—and there was no response.
“Stop! Stop it!” Jake shouted, an empty ration pack flying in front of his face, the colors in front of him getting brighter, becoming blinding. The Venture couldn’t take much more, it was going to tear apart, and his head was spinning along with the colors, they were blazing but things were getting darker, he was sick and he felt like he couldn’t breathe—
The shuttle started to shake violently and all of the alarms died at once when the power cut out.
Just before Jake lost consciousness, he saw his father’s unsmiling face in his mind’s eye, he saw his father reaching out to touch him, and he thought that he might be dreaming, after all.
ABYSS
David Weddle and Jeffrey Lang
To Alexis Quartararo, who showed me that to discover strange alien life-forms I needed to look no farther than the parking lot of the Woodley Market.
D.W.
For Jim McGuire
Who taught me something about the abyss
and
For Lane Carpenter
Who knew some things about how to get out of one.
J.L.
“For every Julian Bashir that can be created, there’s a Khan Singh waiting in the wings.”
—STARFLEET REAR ADMIRAL BENNETT
Chapter One
Something was almost ready to come out of warp. Something very big.
It was tripping all of Deep Space 9’s proximity alarms, lighting up the sensor board in ways Ensign Thirishar ch’Thane had never seen before. If the readings were accurate—and he was certain they were—a subspace displacement of almost unheard-of proportions was heading directly for the station and playing havoc with the long-range sensor arrays. Shar found himself struggling with his console, fighting back his mounting frustration as each klaxon he muted was quickly replaced by another.
The sudden pins-and-needles sensation in his antennae alerted him to the fact that Commander Vaughn was standing just behind him. Shar tried not to look flustered; the commander had a casual manner about him much of the time, but Vaughn was always an intimidating presence. Most Andorians cultivated a polite, soft-spoken demeanor, even—some might say especially—when they were about to slip daggers between each other’s ribs, but Shar was still adapting to Vaughn’s habit of shifting back and forth between easygoing civility and Starfleet formality.
“Cardassian control interfaces take some getting used to, don’t they?” he asked gently, sipping the noisome beverage Shar had learned was called “twig tea.”
“Yes, sir,” Shar admitted, thoroughly embarrassed. After six weeks as DS9’s science officer, he thought he’d finally mastered the idiosyncrasies of his own console. To have the station’s new first officer witness his sudden ineptitude was mortifying.
As if sensing his thoughts, Vaughn leaned over for a better view of the readings. “Relax, Ensign,” he said. “Given the circumstances, it’s no wonder the arrays are going haywire. Stay with it.”
Shar let out a breath and concentrated. As he moved his long fingers over the board again, the klaxons finally began to diminish. When the last of them was silenced, Vaughn patted him on the shoulder. “Good. Whenever operating alien technology, I find it’s usually helpful to keep in mind the psychology of the people who created it. In this case, extremely detail-oriented, exact, and thorough. Redundancies in the system are a given.”
“I’ll remember that, sir,” Shar said.
“Something coming in?”
Shar looked up to see Colonel Kira standing in the open doors of the station commander’s office, her voice echoing loudly in the otherwise quiet operations center.
Returning to his position at the central ops table, Vaughn set up an interface with Shar’s sensor board. “Certainly looks that way. Something quite large, coming in at low warp.”
“Nog?” Kira asked, coming down the stairs to join Vaughn.
“It had better be,” the commander said. “If it isn’t, we’re going to become a multi-gigaton smear of debris across the Denorios Belt.”
Kira ignored Vaughn’s commentary as she studied the tabletop display. “But no hail?” The question was directed at Shar.
“No, sir,” Shar replied, “but we anticipated this. Something this big coming out of warp, when you consider the disruption to subspace, it’s to be expected…” But Colonel Kira wasn’t listening anymore. She was watching the track of blips on the table.
“Does it look to you like he’s giving himself enough room to brake?” Kira asked Vaughn.
“It depends on how much momentum it had when Nog took it into warp,” Va
ughn said. “Let him do his job, Colonel. He seemed to know what he was doing. The kid is smart. And he has style to burn.”
“Style,” Kira repeated. “Nog?” She seemed to be having trouble forming an association between the two words.
“Sure,” Vaughn said. “His little scheme. His solution for…all this.” Vaughn waved his hand around the dimmer-than-usual operations center. Many of DS9’s nonessential systems had been shut off during the ongoing state of emergency. Ever since the colonel had been forced to jettison the station’s fusion core, DS9 had been running on a complex network of Starfleet emergency generators. The measure had bought them time, allowing the station to continue functioning, albeit at only a third of its normal power consumption. But after two weeks of running at full capacity, the system was showing the strain. In the last few days alone, entire sections of the station had been evacuated and powered down so as not to further overtax the generator network. In fact, with the exception of the scheduled aid convoys to Cardassia Prime and the three Allied ships patrolling space near the wormhole, DS9 was currently turning away all traffic.
The pulse of the station had slowed to a sluggish thud since Kira had ejected its great heart into space. The explosion, according to the Bajoran news feeds, had been visible across most of the planet’s nightside, appearing like a new star just as the westernmost cities were slipping into evening and those easternmost were turning off their lights for the night. Young children had run outdoors thinking it was fireworks for a holiday while their grandparents, recalling the arrival of the Cardassian occupation fleet, had fought to keep them inside.
Shar was both intrigued and somewhat perplexed by the behavior of some of his crewmates as conditions aboard the station deteriorated. The more the place began to feel like a frontier outpost, the happier some of the old hands seemed to be. Dr. Bashir was practically giddy about it sometimes. Shar had begun to form the opinion that these people were in serious need of some leave time, a lot of leave time. This is what happens, he told himself, when you associate with prophets, ghosts, and demons.