On the Destiny.
As a Starfleet officer.
Just before she’d been posted to DS9.
Yanas was confronting her again, as though she hadn’t heard Bokar’s cruel words about her late son. Mom never was a great one for listening, Ezri thought. Eavesdropping, perhaps, but not listening.
“So what are you planning to do?” Yanas said, clearly still attuned to Ezri’s thoughts. The older woman’s tone was harsh, obviously calculated to demoralize. To reassert control. “Will you go back to chasing those Starfleet daydreams again? You need to learn to accept life as it comes, Ezri.”
True enough, Ezri thought, recalling Nog’s dire warning about how little time remained before the “untethering” became permanent. The only question is, Which life?
“Listen to your mother, Miss Tigan,” Bokar said, his lips inclined in a contemptuous smirk.
And in that instant, Ezri made a decision. A command decision, she thought with some satisfaction. Advancing quickly on Bokar, she treated him to a pair of quick rabbit punches to the face, followed by a hard abdominal jab. The gangster’s unconscious form thumped hard against the stone floor. She was gratified to note that he was no longer smirking.
“Problem solved, Mother. At least for now. This time it’s your turn to clean up the long-term mess.”
Ezri noticed then that a Starfleet combadge was attached to the left side of her jumpsuit. Had it been there all along, waiting for her to sever her ties to all her might-have-been lives?
She tapped the combadge. “Defiant, if you can hear me, beam me back. Now.”
Her stomach lurched. Whatever changes were going on within her mind and body seemed to be accelerating. Nausea rose within her, and she felt her knees turning to water. Abruptly, another realization came.
It’s the symbiont. I feel weak because my body needs the symbiont again.
It came to her then that she must have succeeded in “realigning her worldline.” That was the good news. The bad news was that without Dax she would probably be dead within a few short hours.
Yanas’s face was a mask of incredulity. Defiance wasn’t something she encountered very often, whether from employees or from offspring.
“You can’t just leave, Ezri. Why would you return to the life you had before? You never wanted to be joined in the first place.”
“I’m just following your own advice, Mother. Accepting life as it comes.” Or as it came.
“But I need you here!”
“Hire a damned bookkeeper,” Ezri said, her consciousness beginning to ebb. She felt as though she were falling over a precipice into one of the open pergium shafts. A voice from her combadge spoke, perhaps in acknowledgment of her signal. But she couldn’t be sure.
Ezri saw another shape appear, as if out of nowhere, at her mother’s side. Janel smiled in Ezri’s direction. “I’ll take over from here, Zee.”
“I still hate your hair,” Ezri heard Yanas say a moment before darkness closed in around her.
The colorful tunic Moogie had given him for his Attainment Ceremony was already thoroughly soaked with sweat. Nog had already forgotten how he’d gotten here. Wherever here was. He only knew that his pursuers had killed a lot of people. Kellin, Larkin, Vargas. Countless others. They all lay in the dust, some blown apart, others sliced to gory slivers. All Nog could think of was running, and staying ahead of their killers.
Uncle Quark’s voice sprang into his mind unbidden: Maybe you’ll grow up to be a real Ferengi after all. Not like your father.
Clutching his phaser tightly, he ignored the daggers of pain that lanced his side and kept moving as quickly as the absurd terrain permitted. Thanks to the semidarkness and the profusion of tall, irregularly shaped rock formations that seemed to cover every square meter of this Chin’toka hellhole, he couldn’t see them coming. But his sensitive hearing counted dozens of pounding footfalls, all coming toward him. Unvarying in their rhythm, their approach as inexorable as death itself.
He knew he was getting winded. He was also grimly aware that his pursuers never got tired. Sooner or later the Jem’Hadar would catch up with him, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He would have to stop, stand his ground, and fight them. Fight the most relentless, implacable, nightmarish foes he’d ever imagined.
The still-green memory of how they’d shot him during the battle for control of the Dominion’s AR-558 communications array—forcing Dr. Bashir to amputate his leg—sent a jolt of terror through his lobes and down his spine. He paused beside a large outcropping, the dusty air making him cough and wheeze as he struggled to catch his breath.
Sudden confusion struck him as he looked down at his two perfectly good, utterly normal legs. When did the Jem’Hadar shoot me in the leg? The recollection had the quality of a fading dream. He clearly remembered a time six years ago, when Captain Sisko and his Uncle Quark had briefly fallen into Jem’Hadar hands. Nog and his now-missing best friend Jake Sisko had done their best to mount a rescue. Luckily, Uncle Quark’s dignity had been the only thing seriously wounded that day.
Still, Nog couldn’t shake a strange mental image, half memory and half premonition, of wearing a Starfleet uniform. Of serving aboard starships. Of having fought alongside some of the bravest people he’d ever known, in this desolate place. Chin’toka, he somehow knew.
Before he could consider the matter further, an enormous humanoid shape flung itself toward him from behind one of the larger rocks. Without thinking, Nog leveled his phaser and fired with the ease of long practice.
Repulsed by the phaser’s blunt impact, the Jem’Hadar fell backward against the unyielding bedrock, so much dead weight. Nog wanted to look away, but discovered he couldn’t. He squinted in the shadows at the supine corpse’s pebble-textured face.
Nog recognized it. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that he’d seen this particular Jem’Hadar’s face before, many times. He remembered that he hadn’t enjoyed the experience. It made no sense, but this sensation of quasi-memory felt more profoundly real than even his evanescent, dreamlike recollections of Starfleet.
He considered the reassuring heft of the phaser in his hand. Starfleet issue, he decided, not at all certain how he knew that fact either. Perhaps he had been in Starfleet. Maybe that was why using this thing had come so naturally to him. And perhaps it also explained why he recognized this strange place, where some shadow-Nog had lost a leg in some all but forgotten Dominion War battle.
Maybe I’ve been hurt. Lost my memory.
Misaligned.
In.
The.
World.
Lines.
Sacagawea’s translator-mediated voice, like a glebbening rainstorm made of latinum slips, came back to him. And he remembered. He was in the cathedral now. Or the anathema.
He had beamed inside the alien artifact.
He tried to reassure himself that everything he was experiencing in here was probably not objectively real. It had to be the artifact acting on his mind. Or his own mind trying to come to terms with an infinite number of alternate Nogs across an infinite number of parallel worlds.
So why do I think I’m in the Chin’toka System, of all places?
The footfalls were much closer now. His pursuers would be on top of him soon. Nog started to throw himself into motion once again, responding to Ferengi instincts honed by untold aeons of evolution.
He stopped. Maybe running wasn’t the way to fix Sacagawea’s worldlines, he thought. He heard his uncle’s voice again, pleading with him to flee, the way any sensible Ferengi would. They’re going to take your leg again. Unless you run. On your two good legs.
The Jem’Hadar footfalls continued growing louder as a new thought chilled him: Was losing his leg the only way to remained “tethered,” to borrow Sacagawea’s word, to the correct universe? Or perhaps it was the price of restoring Ezri, Dax, and Dr. Bashir to their normal condition. He was an engineer. He knew that nature was, in its own way, an excellent model of the Ferengi way o
f life. It always balanced the books, and it never gave anything away without eventually demanding payment. Usually with interest.
He looked down at his left leg again, and thought of his absent friends.
Then he smiled. So be it.
The sound of his own pulse nearly drowning out the rising din of the approaching Jem’Hadar, Nog planted his feet in the dust and raised his phaser toward his still-concealed pursuers.
“Sorry, Uncle,” he said out loud, his voice sounding flat in the stale, stagnant air. “It looks like my running days are over. In more ways than one.”
Another Jem’Hadar appeared from behind the same outcropping that had produced the first. A second and a third followed hard on his heels. Nog fired and fired again. Three times. Five times. Still more Jem’Hadar filed into view from behind the rocks, moving closer, contemptuous of the death Nog dispensed. Corpses fell in twisted heaps, and still more Jem’Hadar leaped over them, approaching faster than Nog could kill them. The press of hostile flesh was now only a few meters away, and every soldier in the line wore the same face.
The face of the first Jem’Hadar to fall.
Taran’atar’s face.
Nog continued firing. But they kept coming, surrounding him, every countenance overflowing with the brute savagery he’d always known lay just beneath Taran’atar’s veneer of civility.
The phaser in his hand suddenly stopped firing. Out of power. Great.
To Nog’s astonishment, the columns of Jem’Hadar abruptly halted their advance. Except for the cacophonous strains of distant music, utter silence engulfed the world.
A lone, black-clad Jem’Hadar soldier stepped forward, continuing his deliberate approach until he stood within arm’s reach. The creature towered forbiddingly over Nog, who felt his guts turn to parboiled gree worms. He concentrated on the barely audible music in an effort to master his fear. He wished fervently that Captain Sisko had agreed to sponsor his application to Starfleet Academy more than four years ago. If that had happened, then he’d know how to handle himself now.
Confused, overlapping memories assailed him. Sisko had sponsored him. He’d made it into the Academy. He’d served in a cadet unit called Omega Squadron, under the grandson of a famous Starfleet commodore. By graduation he’d already visited and seen more strange places than he could count, from Cardassia Prime to Talos IV. Perhaps more than any other Ferengi that had ever lived.
Then Nog recognized the ethereal sounds that were drifting across the dismal landscape: He’d first heard them aboard the Sagan, just before the artifact had first appeared. Its entwining, random-numerical melodies reminded him of the physical unreality of this place and helped him to suppress his overpowering urge to flee. And its steady pulse reminded him that the clock was still ticking inevitably toward the interdimensional “untethering” that Sacagawea had described—and which he had already previewed aboard the Defiant on more than one occasion.
Somehow, Nog managed to hold his ground. When he spoke, his voice shook. “All right, Taran’atar. Get on with it.”
Then, to Nog’s immense surprise, an unexpected equanimity descended upon him. Right after they’d discovered the artifact, Ezri had tried to tell him that he needed to clear the air between himself and Taran’atar. He wondered if that’s what he was about to do, consciously or not. Maybe it explained why the artifact had recreated AR-558’s killing ground.
Taran’atar took a step back, raised his bloodied kar’takin, and swung the blade into Nog’s left leg, just below the knee. Whether real or imaginary, the pain utterly convinced Nog. He collapsed to the dust, screaming.
As though disconnected from his own body, Nog watched as Taran’atar reached down and picked up the severed leg as though it were some hard-won battle trophy. The Jem’Hadar smiled enigmatically as he tucked the limb behind his back, along with his gore-spattered blade. Then he tossed a small metallic object into the dust beside Nog.
Nog saw that it was a Starfleet combadge. He picked it up. He felt light-headed, unable to speak, conscious of little besides his own blood, which was rapidly soaking the desiccated ground. With trembling fingers, he activated the little device’s homing beacon, uncertain as to whether it could reach the Defiant. Or if it was working, or if it was even real.
The world turned sideways, the way it had the time he’d unwisely tried to match Vic Fontaine’s drummer drink for drink. “I’ll be seeing you,” he thought he heard Taran’atar say in an incongruously clear tenor voice, “in all the old familiar places.”
And just before consciousness fled him, Nog realized that he could probably deal with that.
All at once, Dax became aware that something in its environment had changed. The blind and deaf creature was well acquainted with the curious tingling sensation of being disassembled and reconstituted by a transporter beam—even harrowing, rather rough beamings such as the one it had just experienced. But this current feeling of sudden change was subtly different.
Dax still enjoyed the same euphoric freedom of gentle, aqueous suspension it had been experiencing for the past day or so, ever since its abrupt removal from Ezri Tigan’s body. What was different and perplexing was where the symbiont now found itself floating. It made no sense, but there could be no denying the water’s distinctive salinity and mineral factors. Even the limited sensorium of a symbiont could never mistake this particular place for any other.
Mak’ala. Somehow, I have been brought home, all the way from the hinterlands of the Gamma Quadrant.
With that recognition came an ominous tingle of dread. Dax had never enjoyed spending extended periods here. The symbiont had always taken great care to prearrange as brief a recuperation interval here as possible while between hosts. Floating in the complex network of caves for too long had always brought on a curious, and admittedly irrational, feeling of vulnerability.
After returning to the pools briefly following the death of Lela, the first Dax host, the symbiont had dreamed of predators—eyeless creatures who trolled the caves until their hyperolfactory abilities guided them unerringly to some unsuspecting symbiont. Then these inescapable horrors of unhinged jaws and serrated teeth would pounce. Scores of lifetimes would end, suddenly and ignominiously, in some brute’s foul gullet—
Stop it, Dax told itself. Such things did not exist. The humanoid Trills who tended the pools had seen to that long ago.
Yet the apprehension lingered.
Dax wished there had been an opportunity to arrange a new joining before being disassociated from Ezri Tigan. But the separation had come without any warning. How long would the Symbiosis Commission take to assign a new host? Not long, Dax trusted. The Commission knew that Dax’s lifetimes of experience were too valuable to the Federation to be allowed to languish for long.
Dax wished Ezri well. It had no desire to see her come to harm because of the sudden collapse of their joining. And it appreciated all the painstaking, after-the-fact preparation Ezri had done to accommodate their ad hoc symbiosis, once it had become a necessary and unalterable fait accompli. But the encounter with the alien artifact had caused that symbiosis to fail, or had at least catalyzed its failure. That aborted joining was now part of Dax’s lengthy past, and was likely to remain so. And although it shamed Dax to admit it, being free of Ezri’s sometimes disorderly thought processes was a real relief. The portion of Dax that recalled Audrid’s love of peaceful walks in the woods exulted in this newfound freedom.
Dax reached out into its liquid environment with its limited physical senses, probing around itself with insubstantial electrolyte filaments. It perceived immediately that other symbionts were in the pool, which was as expected. Willing itself forward, Dax probed to the pool’s boundaries, sensed the limits of its rocky walls in every direction. It was a finite, though by no means cramped, space. But Dax knew that this would be the extent of its universe until its next joining. The wider, less confining worlds beyond were far more inviting.
The symbiont sensed that a narrow passage lay in
its path, seeming to beckon. The notion of entering such a restrictive space raised the wise apprehension of Audrid and Lela. But the inquisitive natures of Tobin and Jadzia immediately overruled this initial cautious impulse. Dax undulated forward, eager to encounter whatever lay ahead.
Entering the constricted passage, the symbiont began picking up speed, reacquainting itself with Emony’s love of kinesthetic motion. The narrow channel soon widened again, and Dax found itself delighting in the freedom of yet another large underground pool, this one seeming to stretch into infinity. Reaching out with its limited sensorium, Dax detected other shapes floating in the distance.
But they weren’t symbionts. Tobin’s fear rose as the shapes approached, but the battle-tempered courage of Curzon and Jadzia deftly parried it.
The shapes grew larger and more complex. While they weren’t limbless symbionts, neither were they razor-toothed predators. Feeling relieved, Dax quickly ascertained that they had arms and legs, heads and torsos. They were humanoids, all of them as naked as symbionts. There were nine of them, all swimming about him, and all apparently emotionally agitated, judging from their movements. The rhythmic flailing of their limbs set up chaotic, overlapping waves throughout the pool, vibrations that reminded Dax of the celestial music produced by the Oort cloud bodies near the alien artifact. Dax probed at the faces of each of the humanoids with gentle, bioelectrical fingers.
Moving from one face to the next, Dax recognized each and every one of the humanoids. Though it knew this was impossible, Dax also knew that their identities were unmistakable.
“You’ve known about what’s coming for the past century,” Audrid said, somehow speaking directly into the symbiont’s mind. She was obviously completely unmindful of the absurdity—no, the utter impossibility —of her presence here.
“It’s more like the past century and a quarter,” Torias said, floating beside her.
“But it still hasn’t done anything about it.” This came from Lela.
“All those years,” Torias said. “All those lifetimes. And you spent most of them assing around the galaxy.”
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