As the group rounded a bend in the tunnel, the smell the children had noticed became suddenly apparent to Sisko. Soon it overwhelmed them, triggering their gag reflexes.
Covering his mouth and nose with his hand, Sisko took a look around at their surroundings. The tunnel had opened into a wide chamber with large, rectangular crevices carved directly into the walls on either side.
Sisko approached one of the openings and quickly realized where the smell was coming from.
“This is a tomb,” he said, his voice muffled by his hand.
Kira stepped up and, heedless of the smell, laid a hand reverently on the threshold. She bowed her head and Sisko heard her whisper, but he couldn’t make out the words. He turned away to give her some privacy. As Sisko moved further down the passageway, he noticed Jek staring at a picture painted crudely on one of the walls.
“Hey, look at this,” said the boy.
Sisko drew near, trying to get a better look.
Something that looked like an old-fashioned sailing ship was floating among the stars. There was a streak of purple, which Sisko assumed represented the Denorios Belt, and beside it, a mouth of blue flame. The Celestial Temple.
Next to the first drawing was another, the figure of a man standing in a white circle.
“Is that you, Emissary?” asked Loral.
“I don’t think so,” Sisko answered, but found it difficult to tear his eyes from the image.
The catacombs were different beyond the tomb. No more hand carved tunnels—they’d come upon natural caves, untouched by Bajoran artisans. Stalactites dripped overhead, some forming columns with the stalagmites below.
“It’s beautiful,” Loral said. The child stared in wonder as she passed a patch of purple crystal formations on the wall of the cavern. Something was glistening farther down the wall.
Sisko stopped suddenly.
“Major,” he said, pointing at the wall, “do you see that?”
Kira looked. After a moment, she turned back sharply toward Sisko, understanding. “Water.”
Sisko nodded. “There’s water seeping through the wall.”
“So what?” Jek asked.
“These caverns were carved by flowing water,” Sisko explained, “and most rivers have underground sources.”
“There’s a river just outside the city,” noted Loral.
“And if this is any indication,” Sisko said, feeling himself grinning from ear to ear, “then the way out of here may be very close by. All we have to do is follow the water.”
Colonel Day threw down his pickax. He looked at the Militia personnel and civilian volunteers gathered around him. “No more,” he said. “This is no longer a rescue operation. As of this moment, it’s strictly recovery. I’m calling in the heavy equipment.”
The workers gave a hearty cheer.
There had been three cave-ins since the body of Vedek Tanin had been discovered the previous night. The number of injured workers had risen to five.
“Let’s get out of here,” Day said. He took a lumbering step over some debris and then stopped. Kai Opaka stood in his way.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“It’s over, Eminence,” Day said. “The work is too dangerous, and it’s been long enough. There’s no hope that anyone could be alive down there.”
“No hope?” Opaka echoed. “And what of the Prophets?”
“What of our lives?” Day asked. He knew he stood little chance of winning a spiritual debate with the kai, and he wasn’t fool enough to try. But if he could keep the emphasis on more immediate concerns—
Opaka faced the crowd. She drew them in close, gesturing for them to gather around her. “I know that the work you do here is dangerous,” she said. “I know that you’ve seen your friends and coworkers injured. Perhaps you’ve even been injured yourselves.
“I want you to know why you risk your lives,” said Opaka. “Somewhere under these stones, there is a man named Benjamin Sisko. He is the Starfleet commander of Deep Space 9 ... and he is the Emissary of the Prophets.”
A murmur ran through the crowd. Day shook his head in disbelief that Opaka was still peddling that delusion of hers. He’d heard the rumors, of course; they’d been spreading since yesterday. If she thought their people would accept an offworlder as the Emissary so soon after the Cardassians had been forced out, Day’s task here would be easier than he thought. Opaka’s “good news” would be rejected, Sisko would be left to die, and the Federation would likely abandon Bajor as a lost cause. Then Day’s purposes, and those of the group to whom he belonged, the Circle, would be achieved.
In the park across the street, reporters from the comnet had set up imagers to record the proceedings. Even better, Day thought. Now the whole planet will know what a demented old relic she really is. Day saw that the other two aliens, Sisko’s son and the Starfleet medic, were also present.
“We have faced many challenges together,” said the kai. “We defeated the Cardassians and survived their brutality. But we must not become like them. We must become like ourselves. We must remember who we truly are, and not what our oppressors tried to make us into.
“A greater challenge is upon us now. To face the future. Our people are weary, angry, divided. We must set aside our differences and recognize that we have not merely survived, but thrived. Because even during the darkest hours of the Occupation, we were united. The only way we can move forward is to do so as one, as the people we know ourselves to be.
“On this day, I call upon the people of Bajor to join together. To gather the strength of the pagh within each of us and to embrace the future toward which the Prophets, through the Emissary, are guiding us.”
Day looked at the faces in the crowd. Tears filled the eyes of many. Too many. Some wept openly. Others nodded with renewed purpose. Day cursed beneath his breath. Opaka was turning the tide.
“My friend Vedek Tanin Prem died yesterday beneath these stones,” she continued. “Before he died, he told me that he believed the path of the Prophets was not always clear, and that he feared for our people’s ability to face a new test of our faith—one that would require us to let go of our preconceptions and recognize the Emissary for who he truly is.
“Now, Children of the Prophets, that test is upon us. We have come through the night of the Occupation and now stand at the dawn of Ha’mara. The Temple gates have opened.”
The kai reached down and picked up Day’s abandoned pickax. Then she straightened, meeting his eyes for a long and disconcerting moment before turning back to the crowd. “Vedek Tanin spoke true when he said that the path of the Prophets is seldom clear, and it is seldom easy. But I am willing to walk that path, as Tanin did. I will not turn aside now, after living through so much. And I will not turn my back on the Emissary.”
Opaka swung the pickax against a massive stone. The blow was not heavy, but it rang out across the rubble.
Soon the sound of metal on stone intensified as the others picked up their tools and went back to work. Within minutes, the ringing of pick and hammer had drowned out all other sound.
Deep under the city, Sisko had lost all sense of time. The tunnel had been climbing steadily for what seemed like hours. From all indications, Sisko felt they were headed in the right direction, but there was no way to be sure. He kept putting one weary foot in front of another, hoping that the next time he rounded a bend in the tunnel he would see daylight.
Sisko thought he felt a burst of warm air. He stopped moving, and Kira and the others closed in on him, his joy quickly spreading through the rest of the group.
“Is it an exit?” Loral asked.
“I think so,” Sisko said. He took a step forward and felt the floor give under his weight.
Strange, he thought. He gently began to retract his foot when an excited Jek raced past him.
“Stop!” Sisko cried, but it was too late.
The floor gave out beneath the group with a crack that rang out like thunder. Sisko tried to jump bac
k but he wasn’t quick enough. He felt the handlight slip from his grasp as he fell into shadow.
* * *
A few meters back, Kira felt the tunnel rumble as the floor collapsed beneath her. She heard the others cry out as they fell, and suddenly Kira was suspended in complete darkness. She groped for a handhold, her fingernails digging into the unforgiving stone of the floor’s jagged edge.
She couldn’t hold on. That truth exploded in her mind as she felt herself beginning to slip into the chasm below. She tried to pull herself up, but that only sent more fragments of stone falling into the void.
What did it matter, she thought. Even if she could pull herself back up, where would she go? The light was gone, the floor untrustworthy. If she did somehow climb out of the opening, she would have to walk the Paths of the Lost alone. There was a good chance that she would never find her way out, that she would wander the catacombs until she died of starvation, or slipped into madness.
It seemed she had run out of options. She felt her fingers giving out. She would fall, probably to her death, and she would never see the light of day again. If she did live, her only chance for survival would be to follow Benjamin Sisko—to walk with him wherever he led.
Sisko thought he was dead the moment he hit the underground lake. It sent blades of ice through his veins, freezing him into complacency as he sank through the black water.
Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just act.
His survival mantra was all that kept him alive. He kicked his legs and began to pull himself through the water. In the darkness he couldn’t tell which way was up, so he could only hope that he was headed in the right direction.
As Sisko breached the surface of the lake, he saw the handlight lying on a stone fragment that jutted out of the water. It was focused on the lake, reflecting off the water and filling the chamber with a pale blue light.
Sisko’s eyes widened in amazement as he took in the size of the cavern. The remains of the chamber’s ceiling stretched like fingers into the darkness. There was a muddy shore about twenty meters away, where Jek and Loral were sitting calmly, smiling at him.
“Isn’t this incredible?” asked the boy. “Have you seen the fish?”
Sisko wasn’t sure that he wanted to see any kind of animal that lived in this environment. He kicked through the water in the direction of the beach, wishing more than anything for a warm bed and a bowl of hot gumbo.
As Sisko neared the beach he heard Major Kira splash into the water behind him.
“Kira!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”
He was about to turn back for her when her head bobbed up about five meters away from him. She shook her head in disbelief.
Satisfied that she was all right, Sisko trudged onto the muddy shore. He was freezing, but that didn’t bother him right now. He looked at himself—the knees ripped out of his pants and his uniform covered in mud.
Sisko laughed, and the sound boomed through the gigantic chamber.
“What the hell are you laughing at?” Kira asked as she too arrived on the bank. She looked as ridiculous as Sisko felt, and seeing her made him laugh even harder. Kira’s brow furrowed—her jaw was clenched in anger.
“What’s so damn funny?” she snapped.
“We are,” Sisko said. “Just look at us.”
Jek scooped a handful of mud into his hands and fashioned it into a ball. He took careful aim at Kira and threw.
Kira’s jaw dropped as the mud splattered across the front of her uniform.
“You little ingrate!” she yelled, though Sisko could detect no real anger in her voice. The major knelt down and dug her hands into the mud beneath the water. She produced a projectile of her own and threw it toward the beach. It landed squarely in Sisko’s face.
He stopped laughing. Sisko reached up with both index fingers and wiped the mud off his eyelids. “Major,” he said, “this means war.”
The battle that raged in the cavern under Ashalla might never have made it into a Starfleet combat training simulation, but as it became clear that he was facing three-to-one odds, Sisko began to think he was fighting for his life—or, at minimum, his dignity.
Sisko laughed as he hurled another mudball at his first officer. Kira retaliated by scooping her hand through the water and splashing the commander.
“You’re going to regret that,” Sisko said. He lunged into the water after Kira.
As he lumbered toward her, the lake floor dropped away suddenly. Sisko tried to pull himself back to where there was even footing, but it was impossible—the sudden current under the surface of the lake was sucking him down. He tried to call out for help, but water filled his throat. The cold sent needles of pain through his body. Sisko reached toward the surface—but saw only darkness as the water closed in over his head.
Then, a small, strong hand closed over Sisko’s wrist.
Kira pulled with all her strength. She felt her feet slipping, but refused to let go.
“Come on, dammit!”
She cursed into the shadows as she felt one of her boots slip in the muck. She heard Loral and Jek splashing up behind her, felt their hands wrapped around her waist. Together, they pulled with everything they had.
Finally, Sisko emerged from the black water. Coughing and sputtering, the group collapsed on the dark shore of the lake.
“We’re never going to get out of here,” Kira said.
“We have to try,” Sisko insisted. “No matter how difficult the road is, we have to keep going. Even if I knew I would fail, at least I’d die knowing that I never gave up.”
“I thought everything would be different after we beat the Cardassians,” Kira said. “I thought I could finally stop fighting.”
“You can stop fighting me,” said Sisko.
“I’m trying,” Kira panted. “I’m trying.” Dimly, she was aware that Loral and Jek had gotten up and started wandering down the shore.
“I have a confession to make, Major,” Sisko said. “I didn’t tell the complete truth about my experience in the wormhole.”
Water dripping into her eyes, Kira squinted in his direction, waiting.
“I said that the Prophets showed me I should never give up, but I never explained how.” He paused, still breathing heavily. “They showed me my wife. They showed me her death over and over again. I asked them why. I begged them to take me away from there.”
“What happened?”
“They said that I brought them to Wolf 359. I had never left the Saratoga. Two years later, and I hadn’t lived a day.”
“That’s understandable ...”
“No, it’s not.” Sisko sat up, turned toward her. His face glistened with beads of water. “I owe it to Jennifer to keep living,” he said. “It’s the debt that all survivors owe the dead. You owe it to your family, and to every Bajoran who died during the Occupation—to live. And to move forward boldly, to make the most out of life.”
“And you think I can do that by aligning myself with the Federation?”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the Federation,” Sisko said. “It has to do with you, with Kira Nerys. You can choose to live in the present or to live in the past. The same choice I had.”
Sisko sighed, and went on, “There’s been enough death because of the Occupation. Now is the time to bring hope back into the world.”
Kira stared at him, and finally dared to speak the thought that had come to her mind. “It seems to me that that’s what you’re here for,” she said, “if you truly are the Emissary.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sisko answered. “For now, though, I’ll settle for just being a friend to Bajor, and to you.”
In the distance they could hear Loral and Jek shouting in excitement. “A stairway! Emissary, we found the way out!”
Kira and Sisko stared at each other for a long moment, as understanding finally passed between them. Kira stood up, walked over to where Sisko sat, and reached out. “Well?” she said. “Take my hand.”
Sisko smiled and let Kira pull him to his feet. They limped together across the muddy shore.
When they neared the stair, which seemed to wend its way up a considerable distance, Kira could see a glimmer of daylight at the top. Sisko turned as if to take one last look at the Paths of the Lost. They had survived, Kira knew, only because they had relied on each other. She wondered if Sisko believed, as she now did, that the Prophets had a hand in all this. But for some reason, she didn’t ask. Maybe she no longer needed to know.
They walked up the long stairs in silence. At the top they pushed together through a thin layer of earth on a wooded slope at the edge of Ashalla. It was dusk beyond the Paths of the Lost, about thirty hours after the collapse of the Taluno Library. The light hurt the wanderers’ eyes after being so long underground, but they didn’t care.
Ashalla glittered with light. In every window Jake could see, a candle was burning. Lanterns lit the sight of the Taluno Library, where rows of candlebearers had gathered near the workers who were still digging carefully through the ruins.
And then, they started singing.
To Jake, it was much like the song of the people who had gathered at the monastery the previous morning, and it reminded him a lot of the African choral singing his father had introduced him to a few years ago.
Clutching the padd that Bashir had given him—which now contained pages and pages of thoughts and feelings he’d spent half the day wrestling with, Jake found himself repenting his earlier anger toward the people of Bajor. No matter what happened to his father, these people didn’t deserve his hate.
Then, as he stood looking on with Dr. Bashir, Jake thought he heard his father’s voice.
He turned away from the workers and looked down the street. His jaw dropped.
“Dad!” Jake screamed. He ran toward his father.
Everyone who was watching the progress on Taluno Library turned around at Jake’s shout. They saw four muddy people walking arm in arm down toward the crowd.
Jake flung himself into his father’s arms.
“You’re alive!” he said. He hugged his father as tight as his arms would allow. Sisko hugged him back so hard that Jake’s feet were lifted off the ground.
STAR TREK: DS9 - Prophecy and Change Page 6