Cathedral

by Michael A. Martin, Andy Mangels

  “We took at least seven direct hits,” Bowers added.

  A single compression disruptor would be no match for one of the Defiant’ s pulse phaser cannons, and would pose no serious threat to her shields. But having to face more than a dozen Nyazen tubes simultaneously was quite another matter.

  Vaughn acknowledged his science officer with a nod, then turned back to Bowers. “Damage report.”

  “There’s been some buckling in the ablative armor,” Bowers said. “And a minor hull breach on deck three, aft starboard. Force fields are holding. Nog and Celeste are already on damage-control detail.”

  “All weapons operational,” Shar said, his antennae flattening forward in apparent belligerence.

  “We still have warp and impulse power, Captain,” Tenmei said, glancing at Vaughn significantly as if to say, Now would be a good time to use a whole lot of both.

  Not yet, Vaughn told himself. I haven’t got what I came here for yet.

  “We’re being hailed,” Bowers said.

  The Nyazen captain’s indistinct oblong face suddenly reappeared on the bridge viewer. “Withdraw/begone,” he said, the venom behind his words belied only slightly by the translator’s crystal-chime voice. “Warning offered/given but once/this single instance.”

  “We don’t want to fight you,” Vaughn said. “But we’re prepared to defend ourselves.”

  Tenmei cast a brief Oh, really? glance over her shoulder at him. Then, for the Nyazen’s benefit, she put on the face she always used just before Bowers trounced her on poker night.

  But Vaughn ignored his daughter’s quiet impertinence. “All we want is temporary access to the…cathedral.” He rose and spread his hands before him. “Our need is urgent.”

  The turbolift door opened, and Vaughn saw Ezri enter the bridge. Though she still looked somewhat shaky, she was clearly no longer anywhere near death’s door.

  “Less than microscopic is concern of mine/ours for your need/desire,” the Nyazen sang. “You harbor/succor our enemy/blood-hated ones. None such may approach/loom upon cathedral/anathema.”

  “The Nyazen are claiming ownership of the object,” Ezri said, now standing almost directly behind the captain’s chair. She didn’t appear to be addressing anyone in particular. “And they don’t want any D’Naali near it.”

  Great, Vaughn thought. He wants to destroy us just because we’ve still got Sacagawea aboard.

  Vaughn tried to project calmness and reason as he regarded the bulbous alien on the screen. “There must be some way we can reach an agreement. Perhaps something we can trade—”

  The Nyazen abruptly vanished, the communication apparently terminated at the other end.

  “Their weapons are powering up again, Captain,” Bowers said, anxiety evident beneath an enforced poker-night calm. Vaughn saw that he and Tenmei were both looking to him expectantly, each clearly ready to follow him through the gates of hell if need be.

  “Sir?” Tenmei said as the moment stretched.

  “Withdraw,” Vaughn said. He chafed with frustration, but could see no alternative that would protect the lives of his crew, his D’Naali guest—and the Nyazen, with whom he had no quarrel other than their refusal to allow him access to the artifact. Perhaps later, and from a safer distance, the aliens could be persuaded to let him approach the object.

  If not, he would have to bypass them somehow. And sort out the ethical proprieties later.

  A gloom descended across the bridge. No one spoke for a seeming eternity as Tenmei quickly brought the Defiant about and put ten million kilometers between her and the Nyazen fleet.

  “No sign of pursuit,” Bowers said. “All thirteen of the Nyazen ships are maintaining their positions around the artifact.”

  “Keep station here,” Vaughn instructed Tenmei. “Full stop.”

  “Full stop.”

  “A blockade,” Ezri said. “They won’t chase us, but they won’t let us approach either.”

  “A blockade can’t stop what it can’t see,” Vaughn said, then tapped his combadge. “Vaughn to Nog. How long until the cloak is back on-line?”

  Nog’s response sounded harried. “One of the mains is blown, and a whole bunch of EPS relays are down. We’re looking at a few days, at least.”

  Vaughn turned that information over in his head. At the rate Bashir was declining, he surely didn’t have a few days. “Then we’ll have to find a short-term, work-around solution. Nog, I’m hereby putting you and Shar in charge of getting us close enough to the artifact to beam an away team over—without letting the Nyazen blow us out of the sky first. Use anybody you need, and bring me a plan in four hours.”

  Nog’s response took a beat longer than Vaughn expected. “We’ll get right on it. Nog out.”

  Vaughn saw that Shar was already on his way to the turbolift, leaving Ezri standing beside the empty science station. She stared at the console, touching its smooth surface tentatively, looking as though she’d never seen its like before. Now that she was suddenly shorn of the memories of Dax’s previous hosts, Vaughn supposed that probably wasn’t terribly far from the truth.

  She’s not the same woman I chose as my first officer, Vaughn thought, a lump of sorrow forming in his throat. He knew how badly Ezri Dax had wanted to expand her expertise beyond Ezri Tigan’s counseling duties. He recalled how delighted she had been after he had sponsored her transition to a career track in command. Vaughn knew that if her current condition proved permanent, he would have to get a new exec. That would destroy her.

  He was determined not to let it come to that. And he’d be damned if he’d take anything more away from her than she’d already lost, unless and until the safety of his ship and crew demanded it. He decided that what she really needed in the meantime was to keep busy and feel useful.

  “Lieutenant D—” He stopped, cursing himself for his lapse. He began again in a quiet, almost apologetic tone. “Ezri, please give me an image of the alien artifact.”

  Ezri, having heard his false start, visibly stifled a wince as she began working the console.

  The viewer before Vaughn began showing a recording of the artifact as it endlessly repeated its leisurely tumble across the adjacent dimensions. But this time it had an audio accompaniment. A series of weird, grinding, shrill-sweet musical tones stacked themselves into unearthly chords, gliding, jagged, stepwise melodies, and fading, colliding overtone-reverberations.

  The music wasn’t exactly Vaughn’s cup of twig tea. But he decided that it wasn’t entirely unpleasant either.

  He glanced at Ezri, offering her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “The music of the spheres, Lieutenant?”

  “Sorry, Captain. This was something we noticed when we were surveying the Oort cloud in the Sagan. It comes from the subspace vibrations of the icy bodies nearest to the artifact. We translated those vibrations into sounds. I must have accidentally keyed the recording we made. I’ll turn it off.”

  Vaughn raised a restraining hand. “No. Let it play.”

  With a sigh, he settled back into the command chair, idly watching the artifact as it slowly turned and morphed before his eyes. Though he couldn’t say why, he had become more certain than ever before that the only hope of reversing whatever had been done to Ezri, Bashir, and Nog lay inside that object. Concealed. Mysterious. Perhaps even ultimately unknowable and ineffable, like the thoughts of a god. And the thing hovered tantalizingly beyond his reach, thanks to the vigilance of thirteen Nyazen blockade ships.

  He wondered if the eerie celestial music was helping to inspire him to crack the artifact’s mysteries—or if it merely sought to mock his helplessness.

  Ezri left the bridge quietly, relieved to be away from its suddenly familiar-yet-alien environment. Surrounded by the cool competence of the bridge crew, she had felt as callow and awkward as though it were her first day out of the Academy.

  At least I didn’t fall to pieces right in front of Commander Vaughn, she thought, grateful for that small mercy. But it had been a near
thing. She didn’t want to know what would happen the next time someone inadvertently addressed her as “Lieutenant Dax.” She wondered if she should ask everyone to start calling her Ezri. But that wouldn’t take her rank into account, nor the dignity of her job as the Defiant’ s first officer. Lieutenant Tigan, then.

  No. It was Lieutenant Dax. And I’m not Dax anymore. I ought to be busted back to ensign.

  Ensign Ezri Tigan, late of the U.S.S. Destiny. An assistant ship’s counselor still three months short of completing her psych training, and haunted by fading, ghostly dream memories. No, not memories, she corrected herself. Memories of memories. Ezri Tigan, suddenly dispossessed of the eight variegated lifetimes of accumulated expertise into which she had finally and thoroughly integrated her very sense of self, after more than a year of painstaking, determined effort.

  At least Joran’s memories will be gone, she told herself. And Verad’s, too. Those two killers will never bother me again.

  But she was also keenly aware that balanced against this slim benefit was the loss of Jadzia’s drive and curiosity; the worldly wisdom of Lela, Audrid, and Curzon; the humor and scientific acumen of Tobin and Torias; Emony’s exuberance and competitiveness; and her own sense of wholeness, which had lately become bound up in the lives of all the hosts that had preceded her, and the reassuring, cumulative gestalt they had formed within the core of her being.

  As Quark might say, this was a lousy deal all around.

  Ezri thought, not for the first time, that it was only a matter of time before Commander Vaughn realized that she was no longer fit to do the job he had assigned her. She would never again be fit for it. Not without Dax. The Defiant’ s captain needed a rock-solid executive officer and second-in-command, not a struggling counselor. She knew on some visceral level, deeper than even the Dax symbiont had ever touched, that she was no longer worthy of the red uniform of command.

  Over the past two days, she had repeatedly asked herself why Vaughn hadn’t already removed her from active duty. Perhaps it was because he now considered her so ineffectual that formally relieving her simply wouldn’t have served any useful purpose.

  Her counseling training spoke up then: You could simply ask him, Ezri. But suppose Vaughn hadn’t relieved her because he honestly still believed in her abilities. Would he continue to do so if she were to air her innermost doubts before him?

  Ezri struggled to keep her face free of this internal argument as she passed several of her colleagues in the corridors. Crewman Rahim nodded to her as they passed. Lieutenant McCallum, crossing from another direction, didn’t seem to pick up on her distress either, apparently intent on some urgent task elsewhere.

  But Kaitlin Merimark stopped as Ezri brushed past and looked askance at the Trill. Kaitlin, who had seen her in the medical bay when she had been near death, obviously wanted to offer some words of comfort. But she just as obviously had no idea what to say.

  Say anything, Ezri thought, anything except “Lieutenant Dax.”

  Ezri felt a surge of gratitude for Kaitlin’s steadfast friendship. But she also knew she couldn’t deal with comfort just now, any more than Kaitlin seemed to know how to give it.

  She realized that she had arrived at her destination, the biochem lab. “It’s my turn to watch over the slug,” Ezri told Kaitlin, immediately aware of how flippant she sounded. She stepped quickly into the lab, sealing the door behind her before Kaitlin could respond.

  After she’d dismissed M’Nok from his watch duty, she stood alone in the lab, appreciative of the solitude. In here, she would probably have no chance encounters with anyone, at least for the next few hours.

  But she also knew she wasn’t entirely alone. Dax was here as well, floating in some solitary universe of his own, thinking his unfathomable thoughts. Thoughts that had commingled so freely with her own for the past eighteen months. She approached the table on which the symbiont’s artificial environment container sat and stared through the transparent viewport at the symbiont’s dark, ridged surface. She placed a hand on the window. The creature didn’t seem to notice her presence.

  Ezri recalled her early trepidation about becoming joined. She had always regarded these sightless, silent life-forms as sinister parasites. And she truly never had wanted to be joined, a fact that she could scarcely believe now that her soul, in Dax’s absence, felt as hollow as the Caves of Mak’ala back on Trill. Regardless, after her joining had become an irrevocable fact last year, she had worked like hell to make her symbiosis with Dax a successful one.

  Now she could only wonder whether her old, prejoining persona was as lost to her as was Dax. Was there no way back even to the life she had lived before her encounter with the symbiont?

  She realized then that not everybody in her life would regard her metamorphosis as a tragedy. Dr. Renhol from the Symbiosis Commission would no doubt be relieved to be freed from having to deal with her any further, shepherding the integration of her many personalities. And Mom would be positively thrilled. Yanas Tigan had never wanted to see her daughter, or either of her sons, joined in symbiosis in the first place. It’s so much easier to browbeat your children, Ezri thought, when they aren’t also your elders. Her brother Janel would get his sister back, albeit not quite in mint condition. And Norvo, the younger of her two brothers, would probably relate to her better now that she was no longer joined. Once his prison term is finished, she reminded herself.

  And then there was Julian. Had she lost him as well? She knew that he had been in love with Jadzia Dax before he had begun sharing his life with Ezri Dax; Dax had been the common denominator in both of those relationships. Now, given Julian’s cathedral-induced decline, was their current relationship a moot point?

  There would be no way to know, she told herself—unless Vaughn could find a way to defeat the Nyazen blockade and search the interior of the alien artifact. Assuming, of course, that there were answers to be had there.

  She quietly instructed the computer to play back the peculiar sounds Nog had recorded just before the first encounter with the artifact. The empty lab was immediately filled with the strains of the quasimusical cacophany. No longer filtered through Dax’s sensibilities, it sounded different to her now than it had when she’d first heard it aboard the Sagan. It was almost agreeable. She thought of the syn lara compositions of Joran Belar, the twenty-third-century psychotic murderer who had briefly hosted the Dax symbiont, until Verjyl Gard had tracked him down and killed him. Ezri wondered if Joran’s music in any way resembled these emergent, intertwining chords, melodies, and countermelodies.

  Without the reassuring presence of the symbiont in her belly, she simply couldn’t tell. All she knew was that it sounded alien, as ungraspable as the true shape of the interdimensional artifact itself.

  Watching the leathery-skinned Dax symbiont as it floated in its purple nutrient bath, Ezri wondered if the creature was as distressed as she was over their current circumstances. Or was it relieved finally to be free of her, hoping perhaps for a more appropriate host-match once the Defiant returned it to Trill?

  Feeling helpless and utterly alone, she wept as the bizarre nonmusic swelled and crashed all around her.

  Nog set the celestial music at an agreeably bone-jarring volume. To his somewhat surprised satisfaction, Shar made no objection as the darkened lab came alive with sound.

  In Nog’s experience, the single place aboard the Defiant most conducive to thinking was the stellar cartography lab. Particularly when it was doing what it did best—displaying the universe in all its infinite scope and grandeur. The room was dark save for their softly glowing padds, the fixed, jeweled pinpoints of distant stars, the dimly reflective iceballs of the local Oort cloud, the haze of the distant galactic plane, which gleamed like latinum wherever it wasn’t obscured by dark interstellar dust clouds—and the artifact.

  In the middle distance, the alien construct continued its eternal tumble as the vibrational strains of several nearby icy bodies provided an eerie accompaniment. It’s
guarding its secrets, Nog thought as he watched holographic simulacra of the thirteen Nyazen ships that blockaded the object. Gently tapping his new left leg, Nog wondered if he and Shar could really do anything about that.

  And just how badly he really wanted to do anything about that.

  Nog was seated at a table large enough to accommodate both himself and Shar while they ate their hastily replicated dinners. Or rather, as they worked while simultaneously picking at their dinners. The table, chairs, and food trays were the only things mooring either of them to the solid world of decks and bulkheads and artificial gravity. Everywhere else around them, the Gamma Quadrant blazed and beckoned.

  A padd cast an amber glow across Shar’s pale blue features, turning them an almost Orion green as he stared intently at rows of figures. Nog noted that he appeared uninterested in his meal, something called paella that Shar had agreed to try on Bowers’s recommendation. Nog saw that some of the dish’s ingredients looked enough like the tube grubs on his own plate to be almost appealing.

  Shar set the padd aside, his eyes now riveted on the alien artifact that floated above them.

  “It’s clearly a holy object to both the D’Naali and the Nyazen,” Shar said in a tone that struck Nog as nearly reverent. It reminded him of the times during his childhood when his father had told him stories about the Divine Treasury.

  “And the text you recovered has to be some sort of scripture,” Shar continued.

  “Scripture?”

  “Sacred writings. A body of legend which may be based upon certain objectively true information. Or myth-driven ethical pronouncements, like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.”

  Nog scowled at that, then instructed the computer to turn the music down by a few decibels. “Translating the alien text is no longer our top priority. Let the computers handle that. We still have to find a way around the Nyazen blockade. And the captain wants our report in less than two hours. Let’s meet with Senkowski and Leishman’s teams one more time and go completely through it all again. There must have been something we missed on the first two tries.”