Original Sin

by David R. George III

  The dreams about the events on Endalla hadn’t started immediately after Radovan’s return to Bajor, at least not that he could remember upon waking. But soon enough, they filled his nights. Initially, the images that played across his slumbering mind echoed the actual events on the moon, but as the days passed, they morphed into something different—something darker. He imagined ghastly scenes with more violence and death than he had witnessed on Endalla. His nightmares showed him more: charred, bleeding bodies in the form of Ohalavaru corpses and a dying Benjamin Sisko.

  Why? Radovan asked himself, not for the first time. It didn’t make sense to him. He had come back to Bajor feeling no worse than when he had gone to Endalla. In fact, he hadn’t found his time on the moon very satisfying, and so leaving early had been a boon. He didn’t care about Rejias or the others who’d died, and Radovan held no particular animus for the Emissary, even considering his mother’s opinion of Benjamin Sisko.

  But my dreams didn’t just include hundreds of Ohalavaru dead, Radovan thought. And not just a dying Emissary. There had been another presence in his recent nightmares: Rebecca Sisko.

  The Avatar.

  Radovan swung his legs from the sofa and pushed himself up to a sitting position. The toddler occupied a special place in the prophecies of Ohalu. In the meetings he had attended, Radovan had heard many discussions about Rebecca Sisko’s significance to the Ohalavaru. Most believed that the mere fact of her birth proved Ohalu’s foresight and demonstrated his understanding of the Prophets. A small minority also thought that a day would come when Rebecca Sisko would play a larger role in Bajoran life.

  Radovan didn’t know how to interpret her death in his dreams—as a sign of loss, or as a necessary step on the road ahead. He had never fully understood the Prophecies, either from the Bajoran canon or from the Ohalu texts. At times, they seemed to make sense of the universe, to offer up context for the mysteries of existence and a clear way forward into the future. At others, they sounded like so much propaganda, bald invention intended to calm and control a perpetually troubled people. Radovan read the Prophecies with a vague sense of confusion and disappointment. He had been asking questions all his life, and yet he had never received any satisfactory answers—not from the mainstream religion and not from the Ohalavaru.

  Except—

  Something clicked inside Radovan. He stood up in the murky shadows, his hand moving to his temple as his thoughts swirled. He realized that his frenzied reimagining of events marked a metamorphosis from simple nightmare into something far heavier: a mystical vision—an Orb shadow, or perhaps even a pagh’tem’far.

  Or a prophecy, Radovan dared to think. All at once, he realized that the Prophets, whether gods or aliens, had gifted him with future sight—and a mission. He suddenly interpreted his dreams as the prospect of Bajor facing destruction. The idea didn’t entirely distress him, but his frenzied psyche provided him with a view forward. Though blurry at the edges, he saw the start of a path that he could walk—that he was destined to walk.

  At long last, Radovan perceived a purpose to his life. Answers seemed tantalizingly close, just over the horizon. He only had to get there. He knew that he would need to take action, that it would be difficult for him, even to the point of having to break the law. He might even have to risk his own life, but he made the decision to do whatever he had to do.

  Even, he thought, if it means that he would have to hurt the Emissary.

  Or worse.

  Chapters

  Reaction

  Gamma Quadrant, 2386

  The Galaxy-class starship jolted hard, as though it had slammed into something while soaring through the Gamma Quadrant. A tremendous roar filled the Robinson bridge as the impact hurled Captain Benjamin Sisko from the command chair. The deck canted beneath him and he flew over the operations console. Pain flared in his knee as it struck the back of Commander Gwendolyn Plante’s head. He landed in front of the main viewscreen, trying to cushion his fall with his outstretched hands. Agony sliced through Sisko’s right wrist as it gave way. He heard the snap of a bone not through his ears, but inside his body. Instantly nauseated, Sisko ignored both the feeling and his injury.

  “Status report,” he called out. The captain had to raise his voice to be heard above the shrill quaver of the automated shipwide alert that blared on and off in time with visual signals flashing red. The ruddy tint of emergency lighting suffused the bridge.

  “We’ve dropped out of warp,” said a voice from right beside Sisko. The captain saw that Anxo Rogeiro had been hurled from the first officer’s chair to the front of the bridge. The commander made his declaration from where he sprawled on the deck, without the benefit of consulting a control panel or a padd. Sisko immediately realized how his exec made such a determination: despite the call of the red alert, the resonant background hum of the faster-than-light drive would have been audible, and the low-level vibrations it produced would have translated through the structure of the ship, if it had still been operating. The captain could neither hear nor feel the effects of the warp engines.

  “Confirmed,” called Lieutenant Commander Sivadeki from her position at the conn. During whatever had happened to the ship, she had somehow kept herself anchored to her station. “The warp engines are off-line. We’re tumbling.”

  “Impulse power,” Sisko ordered, raising his voice to be heard above the din. “Bring the ship under control.” He pushed himself up from the deck, sending a thunderbolt of pain slicing through his broken wrist. He saw that the area around his injury had already begun to swell. “Plante,” he yelled, intending to direct her to quiet the red-alert klaxon, but she must have anticipated him because the sound ceased. He saw her working the ops console even as she climbed back into her chair. Sisko must have knocked her from her position when his knee hit her head.

  “Power levels are fluctuating,” Plante said. “The main generators are down. The backups are active but unstable.”

  “What happened?” As Sisko raced through the gap between the conn and ops panels, back toward the command chair, Lieutenant Commander Uteln reported from the tactical station on the raised aft section of the bridge.

  “We struck a . . . a pocket of energy,” he said. “It did not breach the hull, but it collapsed our warp field and overwhelmed the shields.”

  “A ‘pocket of energy’?” asked Rogeiro, who had followed the captain back to the center of the bridge. “A natural phenomenon? Or a weapon?”

  Uteln’s hands danced expertly across his panel. “Impossible to tell,” he said. “But navigational deflectors didn’t stop it and sensors didn’t detect it until too late.”

  “Maybe a mine,” Rogeiro suggested.

  “Tune the sensors to scan for other pockets,” Sisko told Uteln. The captain bent his arm and held his broken wrist against his chest to steady it. The pain had eased to a dull throb. “Conduct a full sweep of local space.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Captain, the impulse engines are not responding,” said Sivadeki from the conn. “The Robinson is continuing to tumble.”

  “Thrusters,” Sisko said. “Bring us to a full stop.” The captain turned and looked at the main viewer, across which the span of stars reeled, reflecting the ship’s uncontrolled pitch through space.

  “Engaging thrusters,” Sivadeki said. The stars immediately began to slow and stabilize.

  But then the viewscreen went blank. The emergency lighting failed, as did the visual red-alert signals, leaving the bridge illuminated only by the glow of control panels. A moment later, they too failed, plunging Sisko and his command crew into absolute darkness. An eerie silence descended.

  Sisko remained where he stood, confident that the Robinson officers at their stations knew their duties. He tapped his combadge, which warbled in response. “Sisko to engineering.”

  “Relkdahz here, Captain,” came the disembodied voice of the ship’s chief engineer. His words, interpreted from the alternately slurping and squealing sounds of hi
s native language by a portable translator, sounded reedy and robotic. “We experienced an energy surge all over the ship. It knocked us out of warp, overloaded relays, and damaged the main engines. It also caused feedback in our systems and shut down the primary generators. The backups engaged, but a residual charge from the surge sent them into quiescent mode.”

  “What can we do?” Ahead of Sisko, a beam of light winked on at ops, where Plante had retrieved a handheld beacon from its storage location at her console. The rest of the bridge became faintly visible in flat shades of black and gray and white.

  “We’ve initiated a full restart of the main generators,” Relkdahz said. His voice sounded unusually loud in the otherwise silent bridge. Another beacon flared on behind Sisko, at the tactical station, and then Sivadeki activated a third at the conn. “It’ll take thirteen minutes to restore main power, but we’re cycling the emergency generators; they’ll be back in less than two minutes. The state of the impulse engines is unclear.”

  “Acknowledged,” Sisko said. “Warp drive?”

  “We won’t know with certainty until we can get in there and fully assess the damage,” Relkdahz said.

  “What’s your best estimate?” the captain asked.

  For a moment, the chief engineer did not answer. Sisko thought that the combadge signal might have failed. The captain waited for a moment, the leaden ache in his wrist pulsating in time with the beat of his heart.

  Then Relkdahz said, “I’d guess at least a day . . . maybe two.”

  “Keep me informed. Sisko out.”

  In the dim light thrown by the handheld beacons, the captain returned to the command chair. Rogeiro sat down beside him, shaking his head. “Days, not hours,” the first officer said. “If we did hit a mine, we could be in for some company.” His words carried the gentle accent of his Portuguese heritage.

  “You think it could be a trap,” Sisko said.

  “Probably not meant for us,” Rogeiro said.

  “No,” Sisko agreed. The Robinson crew had departed Deep Space 9 and entered the Bajoran wormhole three months earlier. They set course away from the Dominion and into space unexplored during any of Starfleet’s previous forays into the Gamma Quadrant—the three-month journey of Defiant a decade prior, Robinson’s six-month mission three years ago, and the aborted joint effort of Enterprise and the Romulan vessel Eletrix. “We have neither friends nor foes this far from the Federation.”

  “Until the warp drive is repaired, I should lead a team of shuttlecraft to patrol the area,” Rogeiro suggested.

  In general, the idea appealed to the captain. Where Robinson had been rendered blind and unable to protect itself, the auxiliary vessels possessed fully functioning systems. In addition to providing reconnaissance of nearby space, the shuttles could also defend the starship if needed. But the plan lacked one essential.

  “Our sensors couldn’t detect the energy pocket until too late,” Sisko told Rogeiro. “Whether it was a mine or something that occurred naturally, there could be more of them. Until we can tune the shuttlecraft sensors accordingly, I don’t want to send anyone out there.”

  “Sir, the ship isn’t under control, and we’re not sure when we’re going to get the impulse engines back,” Rogeiro said. “If there are more pockets of energy, the Robinson could hit another one. I think it’s worth the risk to send at least one shuttlecraft out to seize the ship with a tractor beam and bring it to a stop.”

  “You’re right,” Sisko said at once, understanding the danger to Robinson. “Get down to the shuttlebay—”

  In front of Sisko, the conn and ops stations glimmered back to life. Sivadeki and Plante wasted no time in working their controls. All around the bridge, other panels flashed on, and the rest of the bridge crew returned to their tasks. Finally, the emergency lighting came back on, imbuing the scene with its crimson tones.

  At the front of the bridge, the main viewscreen remained blank. Sisko ordered Plante to activate it, and a moment later, a moving starfield reappeared there. “Do we have impulse drive?” Rogeiro asked.

  “It’s just come back online,” Sivadeki said.

  “Bring us to a full stop,” Sisko said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The soft drone of the impulse engines rose to permeate the bridge, the almost imperceptible tremors of their operation like the ship’s heartbeat. It felt to Sisko as though the wounded Robinson had been revived. The array of stars began to slow their slantwise march across the viewscreen, until at last they settled into a motionless image.

  “Engines answering all stop,” said Sivadeki.

  Sisko stood back up. “Sensors, full sweep,” he said. “Find out if that pocket of energy is still intact after we collided with it. I also want to know if there are any others out there.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Uteln.

  “Lieutenant sh’Vrane,” Sisko said, addressing the ship’s lead science officer, “study the sensor readings we already have from just before the collision. See if you can determine whether the energy pocket was of natural or artificial origin, and if it was manufactured, try to figure out its purpose.” From the sciences station on the aft perimeter of the bridge, the Andorian acknowledged her orders.

  Rogeiro stepped up beside Sisko. “Commander Sivadeki,” the first officer said, “are there any solar systems in the area?” Sisko thought he asked the question as though he already knew the answer—which he undoubtedly did, since Robinson had been cruising through a relatively barren region of space.

  “Negative, Commander,” Sivadeki said. “The nearest are between five and ten light-years away and unlikely to contain life-sustaining planets. The system we were headed for has a main-sequence star, spectral class K, absolute magnitude of plus five. It’s eleven-point-two light-years distant.”

  “What are you thinking?” Sisko asked his exec. “If there are civilizations orbiting any of those stars, we’re too far out for the energy pocket to be some kind of defense or early-warning system.”

  “Right,” Rogeiro said. “That wouldn’t make any sense. It’s—”

  “Captain,” Uteln interrupted, “we have multiple sensor contacts dropping out of warp. I read six incoming vessels—no, eight—twelve.” He operated his controls, clearly trying to identify the scope of the approaching threat. “There are two dozen ships. No known configuration. They’re about four times the size of a runabout.” Uteln continued to work the tactical station, coaxing information from the sensors. “Scans show they have defensive shields and . . . they also have emitters on their bows and concentrated energy behind them.”

  “Weapons,” Rogeiro concluded.

  “Shields up,” Sisko said. “Ready main phasers and arm quantum torpedoes.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Uteln.

  “Bring us about, full impulse,” Sisko said. With the warp drive out, Robinson could not outrun the incoming ships, but it could at least make itself into a moving target. “Prepare for evasive maneuvers.”

  “Setting course, full impulse,” said Sivadeki.

  As Robinson settled onto a new path, Rogeiro spoke to Commander Plante, who served the ship not only as its operations manager, but also as its second officer. “Put the ships on-screen.”

  The image on the main viewer shifted and a swarm of vessels appeared. Other than by virtue of their proximity to one another, the ships did not look like a coordinated squadron. They traveled along differing nonlinear trajectories and in no discernible formation. Sisko saw no two vessels that matched in color. He focused on one with a greenish gray hull that had no axial symmetry, looking more like a fusion of differing, many-angled shapes. When he studied a second ship, he saw that, even apart from its orange exterior, it in no way resembled the first; it comprised three spheres joined by cylindrical projections.

  “Those ships look different from one another,” Rogeiro said, giving voice to Sisko’s thoughts. “There’s no uniformity of design.”

  “Hailing frequencies,” Sisko said. With Uteln preparing
the ship’s weapons and defenses, Plante took over communications. She tapped at the ops panel.

  “Channels open, Captain,” she said.

  “This is Captain Benjamin Sisko of the U.S.S. Robinson,” he intoned. “We are representatives of the United Federation of Planets on a peaceful mission of exploration.” He waited for a response, and when he got none, he tried again. “This is Captain Sisko from the United Federation of Planets. We come in peace.”

  “Nothing, sir,” Plante said. “I can’t tell if they’re receiving us.”

  On the viewer, a jumbled batch of vessels peeled off from the others and dove toward Robinson. “Here they come,” announced Uteln.

  “Target the lead ships,” Sisko said without hesitation. He loathed the idea of first contact with an unknown species coming at the potentially lethal end of a phaser, but he would do what he needed to in order to protect his crew. “Phasers only. Prepare to fire on my order.”

  Sisko and Rogeiro retreated to their chairs as tense seconds passed. As the phalanx of alien vessels approached Robinson, the captain dreaded the onset of battle. From a philosophical standpoint, they had embarked on their mission to encounter unknown civilizations, to learn about them and from them, and to establish friendly, mutually beneficial relationships; they had not set out into the Gamma Quadrant with the aim of making new adversaries. On the practical side of the ledger, Sisko had no way of knowing the strength of the alien weaponry. He hoped that the advancing vessels, all far smaller than Robinson, would pose no real threat to his crew, though he feared that the aggregate power of so many ships could prove overwhelming.

  “Captain, two more sets of ships are breaking off from the main group,” Uteln said. “They’re moving to outflank us . . . but . . .” Sisko heard the chirps and twitters emitted by the tactical console as Uteln worked his controls. “Sir, none of the vessels are aiming their weapons at the Robinson.”