STAR TREK: DS9 - Prophecy and Change

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  “Done.”

  “Thank you.” Thrax lifted the glass and threw back his kanar in one shot, then stood up. But before he left the table, he said, “And then, perhaps, you could practice the art of looking the other way. That freighter wasn’t the first with such precious cargo to pass through here. And it won’t be the last.”

  “He’s gone?” Nerys asked. They were back in her quarters, she once again on the couch, feet under the blanket and Odo was once again stalking about the room, with no clear direction for the anger that surged through him.

  “Yes,” Odo said, and he heard the slight snarl in it. He paused in his pacing, standing behind the couch and looked at Nerys, who had half-turned to look at him, a trace of a sad smile at the corners of her mouth. She was, he realized, watching him, waiting to see what his mood was. While he was rarely what he would call introspective, Odo knew what the look meant. He had to stop now, try to still the many voices clamoring for attention inside him and listen for his own. Settling into a state somewhere between fluid and solid, he let himself go in order to understand what he was feeling. Finally, minutes later, he said, “I’m angry.”

  Nerys asked calmly, “At whom?”

  “At those people. At Thrax. At my people for causing all of this.”

  “That’s a lot of anger.”

  Odo grunted, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. It was a lot of anger ... and something else, too.

  Almost the moment the thought entered his mind, Kira said, “But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

  The corner of his mouth quirked upward and he stepped to the couch, reached down and touched her shoulders. “Have you been taking counseling lessons?”

  Nerys smiled. “They make you do that when they put you in charge.”

  “Really?”

  Laughing, she said, “No. But it doesn’t take a counselor to understand this. All those kids floating out there in space, what else could that remind you of except you? Alone and afraid, not knowing why you were there or where you were going. You never talk about it, but you must remember it. Don’t you?”

  Almost against his will, he felt his gaze drawn to the cabin window that looked out into the depths of space. If he walked closer, he knew he would be able to see the sweeping arc of the station’s pylons, but from where he stood all Odo could see were the inky depths of space punctuated by tiny pinpricks of white light.

  Odo nodded, but did not speak.

  “The difference this time,” Nerys continued, “is that someone saved them. You saved them.”

  Odo touched her palm and felt the warmth of her skin. “We saved them.”

  “All right: We saved them. But who saved you? No one, really. And maybe you’re still angry about that. Maybe you’re even still a little afraid.”

  He considered her words and knew that while, yes, once that had been true, and maybe would be again, for now, for that one instant, it wasn’t. In that moment, he was neither angry nor afraid. Reaching down, he wrapped his arms around his lover and bent his head so that his mouth was next to her ear. “You found me,” he whispered. “You saved me.”

  Smiling softly, closing her eyes, Kira kissed his neck. “We found each other,” she said. “We saved each other.”

  Chiaroscuro

  Geoffrey Thorne

  Historian’s note: This story is set between the seventh-season episodes “Afterimage” and “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.”

  Geoffrey Thorne

  Geoffrey Thorne lives in Los Angeles with his supernaturally patient (and apparently prescient) wife. He likes to draw and he likes to write. For most of his life he has very much liked Star Trek.

  “Chiaroscuro” is his second official foray into the Star Trek universe, his first being his prize-winning story “The Soft Room,” from the sixth volume of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology, edited by Dean Wesley Smith.

  Chin on hands, hands on tabletop, Ezri Dax watched the ice dissolve. It was sort of beautiful; the tiny bubbles bleeding off the cubes dashing madly upward, only to be trapped again in the froth at the top of the glass.

  Years and parsecs away, near the middle of her bottomless memory, Torias Dax, suffering through an otherwise tedious lecture on the fluidity of space-time, had gotten an image similar to this one wedged in his mind. Personally she didn’t see the humor, but she remembered the smile it had brought to his lips as if it had been her own.

  “Either drink it or marry it,” said a voice behind her. “Anything else is a waste.”

  It was Quark. Again. The Ferengi bartender had been making excuses to hover around her table for the better part of an hour.

  She actually liked Quark. In spite of the obvious surfeit of qualities that made him a good Ferengi—greed, cynicism, and a mind that not only played the angles but recombined them in ways undreamt of by even the best grifters—there was something about him that generally lifted her spirits.

  Tonight, though, he wasn’t selling anything she wanted, not even the drink she had purchased an hour ago.

  When he realized she would not turn his way, Quark swiveled into the empty chair on the opposite side of the table. She thought he might dust off his patented grin—it had brightened the mood of more than a few gloomy sentients in its time, she knew—but, looking at her staring at the booze that way ... no. He seemed to reconsider, opting instead for a genial smirk.

  “One of those days, huh?” he said.

  Still she didn’t move, preferring to regard his features only as they were distorted by their trip through the glass of amber liquid.

  “Ezri?” he said.

  “Sorry,” she said, her voice drifting out of her like wisps of steam. “Just thinking.”

  “So I see,” he said, more gently than she might have expected. “Want to talk about it?”

  Absolutely not, she thought. I absolutely do not want to talk about anything with anyone right now. And, if I did, it wouldn’t be you, it wouldn’t be here and it wouldn’t be this.

  It was a message Quark wasn’t capable of receiving. Ferengi sympathy was as ephemeral as Ferengi altruism but, once awakened, damned hard to evade. Ezri knew from experience that the only way to make him go was to invite him in.

  “Will it cost me?” she said.

  “Well, normally, empathy is an extra,” he quipped, happy that she had finally engaged. “But for friends ...”

  He let the sentence dangle from the edge of what she remembered was his version of a smile.

  “Is that what we are?” she said softly, almost to herself.

  She remembered laughing with him and drinking too. She remembered thrilling adventures and games of chance. She remembered the banter, the meaningless little innuendoes tossed back and forth. She remembered more about him than he had learned yet about her.

  “Sure,” said Quark, still not quite getting a fix on her mood. “Sure, we’re friends. Why, I can’t count the times Jadzia and I—”

  He caught himself, but it was too late. Her eyes met his over the foam.

  I’m not Jadzia, she wanted to say. Jadzia is dead.

  Quark knew that, of course. All Jadzia’s friends knew. Some of them had seen her die. But they also knew that Jadzia had been joined to the Dax symbiont that held all of her memories. Now Ezri carried it and them as well. Jadzia had been Dax. Now Ezri was Dax. What none of them seemed to grasp, she believed, was that Ezri Dax and Jadzia Dax were not the same.

  It had been weeks since she’d agreed to rejoin the station crew. At the time it seemed like the right move, fulfilling a longing within her that had been growing ever since her impromptu joining. Now it seemed like a mistake. Whatever Ezri did, whatever she said, whatever fleeting expression might bend her features, would put one of her friends in mind of Jadzia.

  It was maddening and frustrating and very very sad. She was sick of it. She was sick of hurting them just by coming into a room. It had to stop. Whatever comfort she’d been able to provide as the receptacle of Jadzia’s memories was totally o
ffset by the fact that every day, she continued to not actually be Jadzia. She was like Jadzia’s ghost, haunting them. Their grief was still so fresh, none of them could see that Jadzia haunted Ezri as well.

  If there was ever justification for the rule against joined Trills reassociating with aspects of their past lives, this was it.

  So why am I still here?

  “I’m sorry,” said Quark. “Really, I didn’t mean—”

  Ezri dredged up a smile to put him at ease.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re right. I’m just having a bad day.”

  “Sounds like you could use a break,” he said.

  “Yes.” She pounced on the understatement as if it were manna. “I just need a break.” What she meant was, I just need to get away from this place and these people and Jadzia’s damned ghost.

  There was a chirp from her combadge. “Lieutenant Dax, please report to Captain Sisko,” said the disembodied voice of the station’s computer. “Immediately.”

  Ezri sighed. She stood up sharply, making a little show of checking to see if her uniform was presentable. As she started off, she apologized for making Quark worry.

  “Not a problem,” she heard him say as she departed. “That’s what friends do.”

  * * *

  He was in the wardroom as he almost always was these days, planning, debating, strategizing.

  Captain Sisko. Benjamin.

  Silhouetted there amongst the battle displays and starcharts, he looked nothing like the reedy ensign whom Curzon Dax had taken under his wing more than twenty years previous. Nor was he the puckish older brother Jadzia Dax had found waiting when she’d arrived on Deep Space 9. Current events, the war with the Dominion being chief among them, had recast her oldest friend into a shape that was both unfamiliar and a little unnerving.

  He was harder now than at any point in her memory, hammered by his need to win this war and tempered by his fear of the consequences should he fail. He had scant time for much else and almost none for the little Trill girl who shouldn’t even need his shoulder to cry on anyway.

  He acknowledged her arrival with a slight inclination of his head and then finished the order he was giving to a nearby ensign who, his task now set, dashed off to complete it.

  “Clear this room,” said Sisko in that deep baritone of which she’d always been fond. “Dax, you stay.”

  The people disappeared so quickly it seemed they’d all been beamed away by personal transporters. The holographic images vanished; the myriad tactical displays, one by one, went dark. Well, not all of them. A single sector of wardroom screen remained active, hovering in the space beyond Sisko’s massive shoulder like an unblinking and disembodied eye.

  “Ezri,” he said, gesturing for her to come nearer, “we have to talk.”

  A wave of panic went through her as she moved toward him.

  He knows! she thought, suddenly frantic. He’s seen the effect I’m having on the crew and he’s giving me my walking papers.

  “There’s a situation, Lieutenant,” said Sisko as she drew near.

  I knew it! she thought. Here it comes.

  “What do you know about Pandora?” he said.

  Or, she thought. He could just ask me something random, out of the blue.

  “Pandora,” she said slowly, feeling the word on her tongue. “Human myth, I think. Something about monsters in a jar?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched at that, and there was a sparkle of something behind his eyes, but it was gone too quickly for her to decipher.

  “Pandora,” he said, “is a research facility situated on an asteroid in the Ibarri system.” There was an odd cadence to his speech, as if he were sorting and approving the words individually before use.

  He’s holding something back, she thought.

  “What sort of research?” she said.

  “Archeological,” he said, still watching her closely. Ezri had the odd sensation that she was being scanned rather than spoken to. “With an emphasis on cryptography. Apparently, there are ancient ruins of a lost civilization on the surface.”

  He stopped, as if waiting for her to add something.

  “So ... the situation?” was the best she could do. Why was he acting so strangely, anyway?

  There was a beep from the companel behind him. Sisko stepped aside, allowing Ezri her first unobstructed view of the display screen.

  There were words there—priority communication—white on a black background—and the familiar Federation seal. There was a clock in the lower left corner beside the words, REESTABLISHING CONNECTION IN. ... The numbers on the clock were ticking down. When they hit zero the emblem vanished and was replaced by the unfamiliar and static-broken image of a woman in a captain’s uniform.

  “Sorry about the loss of signal, Captain,” said the woman. “We’re still having problems with our comm system.”

  She was Selenean, Ezri guessed. It was a species she knew of but had never actually seen. Her skin was a deep golden brown and burnished to the point of seeming metallic. Her hair, if hair it was, hung in a hundred finger-thick ropes from her head. Her eyes, slightly more round than most humanoids’, were like marbles of turquoise glass. While totally alien, even to Ezri’s sensibilities, she found the face beautiful.

  “I understand, Captain Medoxa,” said Sisko.” What’s your status?”

  “Unchanged, Captain,” said the golden woman. Then, seeing Ezri, “Is this Dax?”

  “It is,” said Sisko.

  An unreadable emotion flickered across the woman’s face. Ezri felt the bright light of Medoxa’s attention on her even through the comm chaff. To her mind, there was something invasive about it, like the woman was looking not so much at her as into her.

  “How much have you told her, Captain?” said Medoxa.

  “I was just beginning,” said Sisko. “Since you’re on the scene, perhaps you should provide details.”

  Scene of what? Details of what? What was going on? If this was some sort of officer transfer procedure it was one of which Ezri had never heard.

  “Three days ago, the researchers on Pandora found what they thought was a second Protean artifact,” said Medoxa. “They requested more sensitive analysis equipment from Starfleet and my ship the Anansi was sent to make the delivery.”

  The image of Medoxa broke up completely for a moment but returned.

  “Apologies,” she said. Then, continuing, “When we arrived to make delivery, Pandora’s satellite defense array fired on us. We sustained heavy damage, which we are still repairing.”

  “Have you been able to make contact with Pandora, Captain?” said Sisko.

  Medoxa shook her head. “All attempts at communication have been ignored,” she said. “Until now.”

  Ezri looked up at Sisko, the expression on her face saying, What’s going on?

  His hand on her shoulder said, Wait.

  “This,” said Medoxa, “is the transmission from Pandora we received sixty-two minutes ago.”

  The screen went black for a moment and was replaced by—Ezri couldn’t tell what. At first it seemed to be a field of darkness bisected neatly by a jagged swash of light. Within the swash she could sort of see a conical object rising out of what she was arbitrarily calling the floor.

  Suddenly, on the right side of the screen, a piece of the darkness moved, and she realized that someone had been standing there the whole time. That single tiny movement gave her the necessary anchor to resolve the image into something she could understand.

  It was a room, a very small room. There was a man standing to one side wearing what appeared to be some variant of a Starfleet uniform.

  All at once, the man began to speak.

  “It’s closed,” he said, and his voice had the sound of something left out in the cold for far too long, like the anatomy he used for speech was somehow unfamiliar. “It’s closed, and none of them knows how to open it.”

  He moved again, a sort of lurching shamble, which brought the left side
of his body into the light. He was holding something that looked disturbingly like a weapon.

  “Two hundred and fifty people.” The man was suddenly agitated, almost hysterical. “Two hundred and fifty and not one of them knows anything and I’m going to kill every single one of them unless someone opens the gate.”

  There was a long silence during which it seemed to Ezri that the man was struggling to maintain equilibrium. Then, “I know it’s you up there, Y’Lira Medoxa,” he said. “Watching. Listening. You know what I need. Bring it.” Then he was gone.

  Medoxa’s face returned. She looked worried. “That was Axael Krinn. Until this incident he was one of fifty cryptolinguists stationed at the Pandora facility.”

  “What happened to him?” said Ezri.

  “We’re still working on that, Lieutenant,” said Medoxa.

  “So Krinn hasn’t got access to the Codex, then?” said Sisko, cutting in.

  “My people haven’t detected any spikes,” said Medoxa. “So my guess is the gate is holding.”

  “Does he have any other way into the chamber?”

  Medoxa shook her golden head, making her hair shimmer and glint in the light. “No, Captain Sisko,” she said. “If it weren’t for the hostages we could just wait him out. We need Dax to—”

  The screen went black. The notation in the lower left read, CONNECTION BROKEN BY SENDER. Ezri was, to say the very least, nonplussed.

  “I’m sure you have some questions,” said Sisko.

  It wasn’t much, but the little he did make clear—Ancient ruins containing some sort of alien artifact—The Codex ... Impossibly old, immensely powerful, hidden behind an exotic and sophisticated security device ... had her head spinning.

  “Krinn can’t be allowed to get the Codex, Ezri,” Sisko had said. “Captain Medoxa thinks you can help defuse this situation, and I’m inclined to agree.”

  He knew more. He certainly knew more than he was saying but there was something, some—was it sadness?—preventing him from giving her much beyond the order to go.