As the Defiant hove into view on the screen, so did the battered alien vessel that was keeping station about two hundred meters off her port bow. Ezri forced down any outward show of apprehension as she noted the black rents in the other ship’s pitted hull, obviously the result of an unhappy encounter with a concentrated phaser or disruptor barrage. Most of the internal lights were dark, and only the exterior running lights allowed her to see the lines of the long, irregularly shaped hull.
Relinquishing the piloting chores to Nog, Ezri glanced up at Julian, who stood directly behind her flight chair, his expression anxious as he studied the alien ship. She took his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze as Nog put the Sagan on its final approach to the docking bay built into the Defiant’ s ventral hull.
Julian returned the squeeze, though his expression remained grim. Ezri could tell at once that he was already in “triage mode.”
“Bashir to Defiant. Please beam me directly to the medical bay.”
The clear tenor voice of junior engineer Jason Senkowski responded, “Acknowledged.”
Ezri released Julian’s hand so he could take a step back. Noting that Nog’s attention seemed occupied, she mouthed a silent “I love you” to Julian just before the shimmering transporter beam took him. A moment later, the Sagan floated upward into the narrow shuttlebay in the Defiant’ s belly and was maglocked into its parked position as the docking-bay door silently rolled closed beneath it.
Ezri’s stomach suddenly lurched up into her chest. For an absurd moment, she thought that the Dax symbiont was trying to escape from her body.
She became aware of Nog’s concerned stare. “Are you all right, Ezri?”
She opened her mouth to speak, and heard herself release an unflattering and uncharacteristic burp instead. I haven’t yarked on an instrument panel in over eighteen months. Why the hell should I be getting spacesick now?
She assayed a weak smile as she started shutting down systems and putting her console into “safe” mode. “I’m fine. Lunch must not have agreed with me.”
“I warned you,” Nog said with a grin. “You should have had the tube grubs.” The thought made Ezri feel as green as the skutfish that plied the floors of Trill’s purple oceans.
Nog had obviously noticed. “Maybe I’d better run some diagnostics on the Sagan’ s food replicators.”
Ezri’s stomach heaved again. “I’d rather not discuss food at the moment, Nog. Let’s just finish locking down this shuttle. And we have to get that alien document transferred to the bridge.”
Nodding, Nog thumbed a comm panel and called Lieutenant Bowers.
“Bridge. Bowers here.”
“Sam,” Nog said as he began scratching at his leg. “I’ve just started uploading a pretty big file to your station.”
“I see it,” Bowers said. “It’s coming through now. What is it?”
“Text. Alien text, and we’re going to need a translation and a cross-linguistic analysis of the thing.”
Now it was Ezri’s turn to stare at Nog. He hadn’t stopped scratching his leg.
His left leg, she realized with some surprise. The biosynthetic one.
“That’s one big document, all right,” Bowers said with a whistle. “There’s megaquads and megaquads here.” Ezri heard Bowers crack a joke featuring the phrase “billions and billions,” an expression which apparently had been mistakenly attributed to the Sagan’ s human namesake. She wished she felt like laughing, but decided instead that she’d settle for not feeling nauseated.
“Thanks, Sam. Nog out.” The engineer continued scratching his leg.
Ezri’s own distress melted away, at least somewhat, as she allowed herself to segue into her “concerned counselor” mode. Though she had spent three months on the command track, none of her nurturing instincts had dulled. Besides, focusing on something other than her own lurching insides seemed like a good idea just now.
“Phantom limb still bothering you?” she asked. She knew all too well that Nog didn’t appreciate any tiptoeing around the subject of his biosynthetic limb. It was usually best just to be up-front about such things, at least with Nog.
“No, not really,” he said, only now seeming aware of what he had been doing. “I usually don’t think much about it. I mean, it was a lot worse during the first few months after AR-558, but it still happens from time to time. The itching, I mean.”
Ezri furrowed her brow as the obvious solution came to mind. “I wonder…” She trailed off, lost in thought.
“Wonder what?”
“Nog, do you mind if I put my counselor hat back on for a moment?”
He bared his sharpened teeth good-naturedly. “Bearing in mind, of course, that free advice is seldom cheap.”
“No charge, I promise. But I wonder if your old psychosomatic symptoms might have begun flaring up again lately because of delayed stress.”
Nog looked skeptical. “From AR-558? Sure, that battle was hell, and it cost me a leg, but—”
“I don’t think this is only about AR-558,” she said, shaking her head. “At least not directly. I think it’s really about Taran’atar.”
Nog looked blank. “I don’t follow you.”
“Ever since Taran’atar came aboard DS9, you’ve been forced to share space with a Jem’Hadar soldier.”
“Oh. And it was Jem’Hadar who shot my leg off at AR-558.”
Ezri winced at that image. “Sounds like you’ve already done the math.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Nog said, his mouth a grim slash. “And I’ve concluded that the less I have to see of any Jem’Hadar soldier, the better I like it.”
Ezri was taken aback by Nog’s vehemence. “Why?”
The young Ferengi appeared to consider carefully just how much he wanted to reveal before replying. Ezri was about to try to change the subject to something less threatening when he said, “Right before we left for the Gamma Quadrant, I had a little run-in with Taran’atar that convinced me I’ve been right about him all along.”
Ezri’s counselor instincts went into overdrive once again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that all Jem’Hadar are cold-hearted killers, and nothing can change that. Not even a direct order from Odo.” Nog turned away, apparently concentrating intensely on an instrument panel.
They finished stowing the Sagan in silence. After Ezri advised Commander Vaughn that they were coming up to the bridge to make a preliminary report about the alien artifact, she and Nog disembarked into the narrow shuttlebay, entered the adjoining corridor, and made their way to the turbolift.
“Bridge,” Nog said, his voice hushed.
“Taran’atar isn’t responsible for what happened to you at AR-558,” Ezri said, trying to keep her tones even and nonjudgmental.
“No. But he won’t let me forget it, either. Just by being on the station. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad to come on this mission—no unnecessary reminders.”
Ouch, Ezri thought. I deserve that for trying to play counselor as well as first officer. Still, she hated to leave emotional loose ends hanging. Aloud, she said, “I don’t want to see you let an old resentment like this fester. It won’t do you any good in the long term.”
Just as the turbolift reached the bridge, Nog told the computer to halt it. She noticed that sweat had broken out on his hairless brow. “Ezri, I appreciate your help, but I’m fine. I can put up with having a Jem’Hadar on the station because I’m trained to follow orders. But nobody can order me to like it. Or to forgive the Jem’Hadar for taking my leg.”
Ezri nodded and told the computer to release the turbolift doors, which whooshed open a moment later. Stonily silent, Nog preceded her onto the bridge.
No, I can’t order you to forgive anyone, Nog. Only you can do that.
The twelve aliens Commander Vaughn had beamed to the medical bay had suffered injuries ranging from third-degree burns to fractures to blunt-force trauma to punctures. The two who were conscious spoke a few words that the universal t
ranslator evidently found as unintelligible as Bashir did. Their long, willowy forms, awkwardly arranged on the too-short biobeds, were equally alien, their black, chitinous exoskeletons reminding him of a cross between hardwood saplings and giant versions of the crustaceans his father sometimes caught on Invernia II. Their almost perfectly round heads bore black-whiskered faces that were oddly evocative of both praying mantises and sea lions.
And there was something very familiar—weirdly comforting, in fact—about their deep, dark eyes.
As Bashir, Ensign Krissten Richter, and a pair of corpsmen tended to the messy details of improvisational trauma surgery, all of them elbow-deep in alien gore, Bashir quietly entered the mental room in which he stored his childhood memories and took his first patient down from a high shelf at the back of a little-visited closet. The first surgical procedure he had ever performed had been sewing up the torn leg of Kukalaka, his favorite plush bear, at the age of five.
Seeing the eyes of his childhood companion writ large on these alien faces tempted him to dub his patients “Kukalakans.”
Nurse Juarez’s temporary absence had never been felt more accutely. But Edgardo was still on bed rest in his quarters, waiting for his leg to finish healing after an EVA mishap two days ago.
Three of the aliens had expired during the time it took the Sagan to return, and it had since taken nearly thirty minutes of extremely messy surgery before Bashir felt confident that no more of them were in imminent danger. Eight of the aliens were now curled up on biobeds or on the floor. Although they were all unconscious and weak, they appeared stable for the moment, and comfortable enough in the Defiant’ s class-M atmospheric mix.
Bashir wiped his gloved hands across the front of his amber- and umber-splattered surgical smock. Just as he was about to order Ensign Richter to transport the healthiest five of the lot back to the alien ship, the vital signs of the ninth creature took an abrupt turn for the worse.
The being lying on the biobed before Bashir would have stood nearly two and a half meters in height—were it capable of standing. Below its elongated, bulbous head were two upper limbs; farther down jutted three equally long lower extremities—none of which seemed sturdy enough to bear the being’s weight. But at the moment Bashir was far more concerned with the thick yellow ichor that had once again begun bubbling up through the brutal diagonal tear in the creature’s blue-black abdomen. The first round of protoplaser suturing on the wound had evidently not held.
Bashir placed the dermal regenerator on a higher setting and quickly stanched the worst of the bleeding. Satisfied that his makeshift suturing job would remain in place this time, Bashir slowly moved his tricorder across the creature’s belly to scan for evidence of internal bleeding. But it was damned difficult to interpret tricorder readings on creatures one had never before encountered, or even read about.
Bashir glanced up at Richter, who looked on with concern etched into her sharp features. One of the corpsmen, the youthful-looking Lieutenant John Candlewood, watched impassively for a moment before moving on to check the vital signs of some of the other unconscious aliens.
Krissten appeared to need a little encouragement. “You and the corpsmen did some fine work here, Krissten,” Bashir said.
Tears welled up in the young med-tech’s large, blue-green eyes. “Not fine enough for three of them.”
Bashir spoke in a tone he usually reserved for his most grievously ill patients. “Some patients are beyond saving, Krissten. Even the ones we know how to treat.”
Closing her eyes, she nodded slowly. No one ever gets used to death, he thought. And nobody ever should.
Bashir glanced down at the tricorder display. One of the creature’s large thoracic vascular channels was leaking fluid into its body cavity. A humanoid with an internal injury like that would probably have bled to death within a minute or two.
“I’m going to have to go in there again and patch up that blood vessel,” Bashir said. Assuming that it is a blood vessel, he thought as he picked up a laser exoscalpel from the instrument tray beside the biobed.
“Initiating sterile field,” Krissten said, her training evidently overcoming her emotional distress.
Bashir’s brow furrowed as the field’s faint blue glow arced across the alien’s wounded thorax. Four minutes later, Bashir had neatly cauterized the ruptured vessel without disturbing any of the surrounding—and still mysterious—organs and tissues. It appeared he had succeeded in stopping the creature’s internal bleeding.
So why was the alien’s breathing suddenly becoming so labored?
Krissten was clearly troubled by the same thing. “I don’t understand why he’s starting to have respiratory trouble now,” she said with a shake of her head. “If our atmosphere were poisonous to them, we would have known about it the moment they came aboard.”
The creature opened its eyes, gasped, and released a string of guttural sounds that could have been coughing or an attempt at speech. The only thing Bashir knew for certain was that the medical bay’s universal translator hadn’t placed them in the latter category.
The alien fixed both of its glistening, plum-sized black eyes on Bashir and reached weakly in his direction with one spindly arm. The creature’s three opposing digits trembled as they clenched and unclenched. Krissten took a cautious step backward. But Bashir saw no threat in the alien’s gesture; he took it instead as a plea for help. The creature’s quivering, willowy limb brought to mind the time he had spent with Ensign Melora Pazlar, whose thin Elaysian bones were probably just as frail because of her homeworld’s low gravity.
Of course. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?
The weak alien lowered its trembling arm and let out a painful-sounding wheeze. Bashir tapped his combadge. “Bashir to Nog.”
“Nog here, Doctor. What can I do for you?”
“Can you get me a reading on the artificial gravity levels aboard the alien ship?” Bashir smiled at the perplexed look on Krissten’s face.
Nog’s voice was infused with the enthusiasm of a busy engineer hard at work at his craft. “I can do better than that, Doctor. Shar and I are already aboard helping them pick up the pieces of their engine room. And the gravity here is one of the biggest nuisances we have to deal with.”
“How so?”
“Well, if you try to walk too fast, you end up falling on your butt in slow motion. I’d say the local gravity is set at about point-one-five of standard.”
Bashir recalled having seen the ancient 2-D images of Apollo astronauts “bunnyhopping” across the lunar surface in their bulky environmental suits, and sometimes toppling over, tortoise-like, after having taken a bad step. And there were the Russian cosmonauts who’d had to be carried from their capsules on stretchers after returning to Earth from months-long zero-gee orbital missions.
“Thank you, Nog. Bashir out.” He nodded to Candlewood, who had been following the exchange intently and immediately took the hint.
“Adjusting the local artificial-gravity environment to Earth-Lunar standard, sir,” Candlewood said as his fingers moved briskly over a wall console.
Bashir felt immediately lighter, and the wheezing alien at once began breathing more easily and deeply. The unconscious patients also seemed to have been invigorated by the change, as their respiratory muscles suddenly found themselves with considerably less work to do. Bashir imagined he saw a look of gratitude in the unfathomable oil-drop eyes of the creature who lay before him. He offered it a reassuring smile, though he was well aware that his countenance was probably as inscrutable to the alien as the alien’s was to him.
Bashir turned his gaze toward Krissten, who was gripping the edge of the surgical table with white knuckles. “Have you had any low-gee training, Ensign?” Bashir said.
“Not for years and years,” she said, still clutching the table like a rock-climber who had just watched a buddy plummet into an abyss. Krissten did not seem reassured by Candlewood’s deft, deliberate steps as he went off corpsman duty and exited
the medical bay. “Kol is a fan of zero-gee recreation. Not me.”
Bashir smiled, recalling a low-gee hoverball tournament he had once played against Krissten’s girlfriend, Deputy Etana Kol, who had won two out of three of those matches. He suppressed a sudden urge to show off his genetically enhanced reflexes.
“Just move carefully and slowly,” he said. “I’ll help you stow the surgical equipment.”
He reached for the exoscalpel that he had placed on the instrument tray and lifted it. He scowled when he noticed that it was still activated. Could have sliced my thumb off if I’d picked the damned thing up wrong. How could I have forgot to turn it off?
He moved his thumb toward the “off” toggle.
For a moment Bashir’s hand seemed to defy him, and he lost his grip on the instrument. It felt as though his hand had been slickened with tetralubisol. Damned gravity.
He bobbled the device, grabbing at the still-active exoscalpel as it fell—and succeeded only in batting it toward his patient. Krissten yelped as she, too, grabbed for the instrument, bumping Bashir and knocking him down in the process.
The alien on the biobed screamed as the exoscalpel sunk hilt-deep into its chest, precisely where a human’s heart would have been.
“Doctor, it was as much my fault as yours,” Krissten said after they had repaired the damage and had once again stabilized the patient. Luckily, the exoscalpel had not hit anything vital.
Bashir stood silently beside his again-unconscious patient, the crisis past, the surgical gowns already doffed and in the matter recycler. The healthiest five aliens were already back aboard their own ship. Bashir rubbed his hands together. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, they didn’t feel quite clean.
Finally he said, “Thank you, Ensign. But you weren’t the one who forgot to deactivate the exoscalpel.”
She wasn’t ready to let it go. “You’re not used to lunar gravity, Julian.”
“It shouldn’t have been a problem for me,” he said with an emphatic shake of the head.
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