Original Sin

by David R. George III

  The girl simply looked up at him. She did not cower or in any way show fear. That made no sense, and it only enraged Radovan more. He felt his fingernails digging into the palm of his closed hand, still pulled back and ready to strike. He wanted very badly to hit the girl, to confirm his strength, to show his control of the Avatar, to take the next step in doing what Rejias Norvan could not: prove the truth of The Book of Ohalu and the Ohalavaru beliefs.

  Radovan spun away from the bed and rushed back across the room. He sped through the hall to the dining table. He grabbed the medkit, opened it, pulled out the hypospray, then selected the appropriate ampoule for his purposes. He ran back into the bedroom and—

  The girl was gone.

  Radovan felt his eyes widen in surprise—and in fear. If she somehow got free—

  Radovan’s arm shot out, his hand clutching at the doorjamb. He wrenched himself back into motion, reversing course and dashing back into the living area of his flat. The front door remained closed and locked.

  Of course it is, Radovan thought. The girl could not have gotten past him. And even if she had, she could not possibly reach the locks on her own, nor could she have manipulated them in order to free herself. Radovan’s decision to confine her to his bedroom had come from an abundance of caution.

  He headed back down the hall, taking a moment to peek into the guest ’fresher. When he didn’t see the girl, Radovan continued on into the bedroom. He slid open one side of the closet doors there, then the other. He glanced on the other side of the bed, then checked in the en-suite refresher. Finally, he dropped to his stomach and pulled up the comforter that hung down from the bed all the way to the floor.

  The girl gazed back at him. For a moment, neither of them moved, but then Radovan scrambled forward. The girl shrieked and tried to crawl away, but his hand found her forearm and clamped on. He yanked her from under the bed. As she attempted to prize his fingers from around her wrist, Radovan swung his other arm around and brought the hypospray up to the side of her neck. The girl froze when she heard the medical device’s hiss, then frantically tried to free herself, flailing her arms and legs. Her efforts lasted only a few seconds before her body went limp.

  Radovan stood up with the girl in his arms. He hadn’t wanted to leave his flat, nor had he intended to vacate the city. He always recognized that he might have to do so, but never had he envisioned the time coming so quickly. But then he also hadn’t counted upon Winser Ellevet to inadvertently interfere with his plans.

  It’s time to go, Radovan thought. After his confrontation with Winser, he’d spent the rest of the day preparing for his departure. For their departure.

  Radovan carried the Avatar out of his bedroom, more certain than ever that he was on his way to fulfill his fate.

  Gamma Quadrant, 2386

  The bright white sparks of materialization dissolved from before Sisko’s eyes, leaving him standing amid a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors. Because of the veritable rainbow of multiform hues shining on him from every direction, it took the captain a moment to discern the overall profile of the wide, rectangular corridor into which he had beamed. The variegated surfaces—walls, ceiling, floor—lent the surroundings a carnival-like atmosphere, but paradoxically, the cool, dry air smelled of antiseptic.

  Sisko glanced to either side to ensure that both security officers Rogers and Grandal had successfully transported with him from Styx. Like the captain, they had their phasers drawn, set to heavy stun. Also like Sisko, they wore in their ears special comm units, designed by Lieutenant sh’Vrane to block the effects of the sound-based weapons used against the Robinson crew during the boarding of the ship.

  Seeing no beings in the corridor in either direction, the captain looked to Rogers, who, in addition to his phaser, also carried a tricorder. “Life signs in the building are erratic and uncertain, but . . . I am detecting the group of twenty-nine children,” the lieutenant said. “Down another corridor to the left, about fifty meters ahead, and then inside a large chamber.”

  Sisko had ordered separate three-member away teams to the trio of locations housing the Robinson children. He’d left a pilot, transporter operator, and physician aboard each of the runabouts, with orders to vacate the Dyson section—and to return later—if the vessels came under attack. Lieutenant Stannis aboard Acheron and Ensign Weil aboard Styx would await signals as the away teams sought to free the children and bring them to points where they could be beamed to the runabouts and then taken back to Robinson. The captain hoped to rescue all of the children at once, but short of that, the away teams needed to conduct reconnaissance efforts to determine how best to accomplish their goal.

  Gesturing with his phaser, Sisko motioned ahead. He started forward down the corridor with Rogers and Grandal flanking him. They had proceeded ten or so meters before the lieutenant spoke up again.

  “Sensors show movement ahead,” Rogers said. “Still indeterminate life signs, but they’re coming in this direction, toward the second juncture.” The lieutenant pointed along the left-hand wall. Sisko could make out a series of intersecting corridors. The captain flattened himself against the near wall and leveled his phaser at the second junction, as did Grandal beside him. Rogers took up a similar position against the opposite wall.

  From a distance, a confused racket emerged, a disordered agglomeration of noises that grew louder even as the din failed to cohere. Sisko tried to imagine troops advancing to intercept the away team, but he did not hear the cadence of soldiers marching in unison, nor even the intentional breaking of stride to avoid mechanical resonance. It sounded like chaos.

  Suddenly, a frenetic throng spilled from the mouth of the second passage up ahead. Sisko could not immediately absorb what he saw. Ten or twelve figures rushed toward the away team, but the captain had trouble registering them as living beings. The captain saw flesh, but also metal casings, and though some appendages looked like arms and legs, and some projections like heads, he also spied wheels and drums, lights and readouts.

  But then Sisko spotted one of the approaching horde aiming a device at the away team, a pistol-like armament with a parabolic emitter. The captain heard a high-pitched whine for just an instant before the specialized comm units in his ears canceled out the potentially debilitating sound. Another squall rang out, but originating with the away team and accompanied by first one and then another reddish-yellow beam as Rogers and Grandal discharged their weapons. Sisko squeezed the firing pad on his own phaser and a third beam streaked into the advancing force.

  An attacker that walked on three legs and had multiple arms extending from a barrel-shaped body dropped to the floor. Sisko could not determine whether to categorize it as a living being or as a machine. A network of electrical arcs flashed across a many-legged creature that immediately stopped crawling.

  The away team continued to fire their phasers, and as more of the peculiar assemblage toppled, Sisko made out more details. Every entity differed considerably from those beside it. The captain noted significant variations in shape, color, composition, and size, and widely diverse numbers and types of appendages and other body parts. Appearances ranged from robotic to animalistic, from the surreal to the sublime. No two individuals hailed from the same species—if any of them evolved as a natural life-form in the first place, rather than being artificially constructed.

  More of the entities faltered and collapsed. A large dark-green being that resembled an upright squid fell forward, and another that looked more or less like a red quantum torpedo casing perched atop spider legs crumpled to the floor. But the others kept coming. They’d cut the distance to the away team to twenty meters.

  Sisko faced a difficult decision, but he made it at once. “Set phasers to kill,” he called out to Rogers and Grandal.

  The beams ceased for a moment as the three men adjusted their weapons. When they fired again, intermittent bolts of blue infused the red-yellow streaks. More of the attackers fell, but two continued on. A large humpbacked beast galloped for
ward on six powerful legs, while a gray wingèd creature took to the air. The lethal phaser beams sliced through the corridor and into the approaching pair, to no effect.

  Sisko had no choice, and no time to issue his order. He removed his finger from the trigger pad and reset his weapon, then fired twice in rapid succession. The first brilliant blue-white beam seared out and caught the massive charging animal between its front legs. The luminous glow spread across the creature, consuming it in a haze of vaporization. When the radiance dissipated, it left nothing behind, the molecular integrity of the beast catastrophically destroyed.

  The flying entity soared across the remaining distance to the away team. The captain heard it scream as it bore down on its prey. Sisko’s second shot struck it at point-blank range. It disappeared in a miasma of deadly phased energy.

  The shrill cries of the away team’s phasers ended, echoing down the corridor before leaving Sisko and the security officers in an unnatural silence. For a moment, nobody moved. Sisko listened and looked, straining to hear any sound that would signal approaching reinforcements, to see any movement off in the distance.

  Rogers consulted his tricorder. “Scans show no other forces headed in this direction,” the lieutenant said. “Our path to the children is clear.”

  “Let’s move,” Sisko said without hesitation.

  As the three Robinson officers picked their way through the scene of their downed attackers, Grandal blurted, “What are these?”

  Sisko had the same question. Some of the entities looked like organic beings, some like machines, while still others evoked a combination of the two. But not like the Borg, the captain thought. Before the Collective had been vanquished, they had seized various life-forms, augmented them with technology, and forcibly connected them to their hive consciousness. In the case of the individuals massed on the corridor floor, they did not appear enhanced, but whole—whether born or constructed. But there’s no commonality, Sisko thought. He considered the Xindi and the Breen and the multiple species that formed their civilizations. The Federation itself comprised numerous races. Still, the captain thought, what’s going on here is more than some sort of societal affiliation.

  “I don’t know,” Sisko told Grandal, but then he remembered an unusual detail about the aliens. “All of their ships were different from one another too. Maybe . . .” Maybe what? he asked himself. He didn’t know, and at the moment, he didn’t care.

  Sisko and the two security officers reached the far end of the fallen entities and rushed toward the second intersection. The captain made it there first and quickly peeked around the corner. As Rogers had indicated, the corridor stood empty. Several sets of large doors, all of them different colors, lined the walls at wide intervals.

  “It’s the first one on the right,” Rogers said.

  Sisko didn’t wait. He ran over to the doors, which came to a peak where they met at the top, reaching almost to the ceiling six or so meters overhead. A dark green, they appeared metal, lined along their edges with large rivets. Rogers scanned them with his tricorder.

  “The children are definitely in there, spread out,” the lieutenant said. “The doors are composed of a steel alloy that should be susceptible to phasers.”

  Sisko took a step back and raised his weapon, but then he noticed a hand-size surface protruding from the wall. Shaped like back-to-back crescents, it matched the color of the doors. The captain stepped forward and pushed it. The doors silently swung inward.

  Sisko rushed forward with Rogers and Grandal, all brandishing their phasers. They entered a large chamber, perhaps twice the size of Robinson’s main engineering compartment. Massive amounts of technological equipment jammed the space, none of which Sisko recognized. Consoles and panels proliferated, featuring incomprehensible readouts, along with oddly shaped dials and what must have been other controls. The air felt heavy and smelled of ozone, the atmosphere laden with a pulsating thrum and the feel of electrical potential.

  As the doors swung shut behind the away team, five beings positioned amid the various apparatus turned toward them, obviously startled. None of the entities looked like any they had so far seen, nor did they resemble one another—not in form or hue, not in basic biology or mechanics. Sisko aimed his phaser, as did Rogers and Grandal, but then he saw a pair of legs at the far end of the chamber, atop a flat surface set inside a large, complex piece of machinery. The shins were smaller than those of an adult, their flesh colored blue. The captain moved to his right so that he could see more. He recognized Beschelcorea th’Vrent, the teenage thei of Veraldorash ch’Vrent, one of Robinson’s nursing staff. The boy appeared strapped down and unconscious.

  “There,” Sisko said, pointing. “I see one of the children.”

  “They’re all around, Captain,” Rogers said, and he gestured to several other points about the chamber. Like th’Vrent, four other children lay insensible and tethered inside various equipment, as did an equal number of the alien beings. The other children were caged in a handful of transparent compartments. When they saw Sisko and the security officers, a few of the older children began waving and shouting, though the captain could not hear them. He wondered how they could breathe in the enclosed space, but saw tubes and conduits attached to their containment cells.

  Sisko did not see his daughter.

  The captain moved toward the nearest being, who looked more humanoid than any other entity the away team had so far encountered. More humanoid, Sisko thought, but not fully humanoid. The being had two pair of arms—one set larger, one smaller—and what looked like a ring of eyes around a squarish head. It stood on a wide single leg that ended not in a foot, but in a horizontal cylinder.

  Sisko pointed his phaser at the being. It lifted all of its arms in an obvious gesture of supplication. “Free the children,” Sisko ordered Rogers and Grandal. The security officers started forward, but the other beings—one of which looked as though it had been carved out of stone—moved to block their path.

  Sisko stepped closer to the first being and shoved the emitter of his phaser against its body. “I am Captain Benjamin Sisko of the United Federation of Planets,” he said, unsure if his words would be understood. “We were on a mission of peaceful exploration, but your people attacked our ship and abducted our children.”

  The being appeared confused. Sisko assumed it lacked the technology to translate his words, but then it exhaled through two wavering tabs on either side of its head. Its voice sounded like somebody moaning. Sisko could not discern individual words or even distinguishable phonemes, but the special comm units he wore in his ears contained a universal translator.

  “I am Zonir of the Glant,” the being said. “You cannot explore here. This is not [untranslatable].” The translator emitted a low tone for the parts of speech it could not adequately interpret. It bestowed a neutral tone upon the voice, casting it as neither female nor male.

  “We are not exploring here,” Sisko said. “We have come to take back our children.”

  “You are exploring here,” Zonir said. “I can see you.”

  Sisko looked to Rogers and Grandal, and then to the other beings. There seemed to be a disconnect in communication. The captain tried again. “We are here to bring our children back to our ship.”

  “What do you want for your ship?” Zonir asked. “We do not have what you seek.”

  “We want our children,” Sisko said again, raising his voice and pointing with his empty hand toward Corea th’Vrent.

  Zonir gestured with two of its arms toward the Andorian child. “That is not what you think it is,” it said. “It is an [untranslatable]. It is not for you.”

  Sisko shook his head. He and Zonir had spoken only a few sentences to each other, but both seemed confused. Some of Zonir’s words—and probably some of his own, the captain thought—didn’t translate, but Sisko suspected a deeper dissonance, down on a conceptual level.

  “Captain,” Rogers said, “sensors are showing movement and sporadic life signs headin
g in this direction.”

  Sisko had no time to negotiate. He pushed his phaser harder into Zonir’s body. “Free the children now.”

  “What are you talking about?” Zonir said. “We don’t have what you want.”

  Sisko swung his arm to one side and fired past Zonir. The blue phaser beam engulfed a table and reduced it to atoms. The captain returned his weapon to Zonir’s chest. “Move,” Sisko ordered. “You and the others, move to the corner of the chamber.” He motioned to the point farthest from the doors.

  Zonir didn’t say anything and didn’t move, and the captain thought he might have to use force. But then Zonir spoke to his colleagues, telling them to do as Sisko demanded. They complied. Sisko kept his phaser trained on the motley group—one of them looked to the captain like a gray-striped monkey with five tails. “Do not speak another word,” Sisko told them when they reached the corner.

  Then he turned to Rogers and Grandal. “Get the children out of the cages.” As the security officers acknowledged their orders, the captain went to Corea th’Vrent. The boy lay supine on a slab inside the bay of a large machine. He had been strapped down, and three thick conduits led to dish-shaped appliances that had been attached to his head, though his antennae remained free. A dim glow bathed his entire body.

  Sisko reached into the machine, intending to free Corea from his restraints, but as the captain’s hand entered the bay, it began to feel numb. He jerked his arm back, realizing that the boy had been placed in a stasis field. Sisko searched instead for a way to release the slab and pull it from the machine. As he did so, he heard the security officers speaking to the children, telling them to back away. A phaser blast rang out, and the captain glanced over to see Grandal helping pull one group of children through the broken door of their cage.

  Sisko felt all around the front base of the slab, without success. He was about to demand that Zonir help him when his fingers found a latch. He pressed it, then pulled the slab toward him. It glided easily from within the machine. He quickly unshackled Corea, then tried to puzzle out the three appliances on his head. Sisko didn’t know if he could safely remove them, but he also knew they had little time to complete their rescue.