STAR TREK: DS9 - Prophecy and Change

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  Ezri found the whole business, particularly its effect on Sisko, to be more than a little unsettling.

  “Medoxa will tell you anything else you need to know,” he said as he hustled her off, “when you get there.”

  Why me? she thought as her runabout tore the distance between Deep Space 9 and the Anansi into unobservable shreds.

  There were plenty of counselors with more experience as crisis negotiators. There had to be contingency plans for retaking the Pandora facility should something like this happen. Why should Ezri be the fulcrum on which this situation shifted?

  True, she did have Curzon and Lela Dax’s memories. Both of them had been gifted speakers. Maybe that’s why her name had come up.

  Well, she thought, I said I wanted a break.

  * * *

  Her runabout rendezvoused with the Anansi where it sat, licking its wounds, in the bosom of a phenomenon called the Fassig Drift. Two comets had intersected here once, millennia ago, and obliterated each other. The Drift was what remained.

  The Anansi itself, while clearly a Starfleet vessel, was of one of the newer designs made specifically for use in the Dominion War. Smaller, with a blunted nose and more hard corners than the normal Starfleet issue, the Anansi’s designers had clearly sacrificed all aesthetic value in favor of martial function. Even the double warp nacelles, characteristic of all Starfleet vessels, seemed to Ezri like the paws of some great feral beast waiting to pounce.

  Captain Medoxa was waiting when Ezri’s runabout docked. Flanking her were two of her officers—a tall, dangerous-looking Andorian and a smaller, apparently human, female with dark, close-cropped hair and an expression that leaned toward wily.

  “Welcome to the Anansi, Lieutenant Dax,” said Medoxa.

  The first thing that struck Ezri as she stepped out of the shuttle’s confines was how dark the Anansi was.

  The shuttlebay was one massive shadow broken only occasionally by bright patches of light. She caught the spark of some exposed circuitry in her periphery and thought, Battle damage. Pandora’s defense array caused this.

  As she followed Medoxa and the others out of the bay, the ship lurched violently around them. No one lost their footing, but it was a near thing.

  “What was that?” said Ezri.

  “We’re under way, Lieutenant,” said Medoxa. Then, to the female officer, “Casey, get down to E section and find out how Bors is doing with the warp drive.”

  “Aye, Skipper,” said Casey and vanished down an adjacent corridor.

  “All right, Lieutenant,” said Medoxa, moving forward again herself. “Let’s get you up to speed. What exactly did Sisko tell you was happening here?”

  “Not much,” said Ezri, her voice full of displeasure. “And less than I think he knew.”

  “Yes, well,” said Medoxa. “Don’t be too hard on him, Lieutenant. I just dumped all this in his lap. Most of what you’re about to learn is classified.”

  “So,” said Ezri. “This isn’t about negotiating to save the hostages?”

  “In a word, Lieutenant, no,” said Medoxa as she led Ezri and the silent Andorian through the Anansi’s maze of tight utilitarian corridors. “Axael Krinn is not just a researcher at Pandora. He is—he was—their chief cryptolinguist.”

  “You said they’d found something recently,” said Ezri. “Some kind of artifact.”

  “A Protean object,” said Medoxa. “The second of two.”

  “This ‘Codex’ being the first,” said Ezri. Medoxa nodded. “You seem to think that contact with this second object has something to do with Krinn’s behavior.”

  “There are many theories,” said Medoxa. “That is one.”

  “Why?” said Ezri. “What is it about these objects that leads you to even entertain something like that?”

  “What do you know about the Proteans, Lieutenant?” said Medoxa.

  “Nothing,” said Ezri.

  “Shavras,” said Medoxa, meaning, Ezri guessed, the big Andorian.

  “Protean,” he began in a voice like autumn leaves scraping together, “is the Starfleet designation for an extinct civilization believed to have held sway over most of this galaxy about a billion years before anyone in the Federation learned to harness fire.”

  Ezri whistled and said, “What happened to them?”

  “We have no idea,” said Shavras, following his captain around yet another tight corner. “But eight years ago a starship stumbled upon some ruins of theirs in an asteroid belt encircling the Ibarri red dwarf.”

  “The ruins themselves offer amazing insights into the Protean civilization,” said Medoxa, taking over again. “Starfleet could have studied them for decades and not cracked all their secrets. But there was something else there.”

  “The Codex,” said Ezri.

  “The Codex,” said Medoxa somberly. “Yes.”

  “What is it, exactly?” said Ezri. “Captain Sisko wasn’t very specific.”

  Medoxa fell silent briefly, causing Ezri to think the information must be classified. Then, “Our best guess, based upon available data,” said Medoxa, “is that it’s a model.”

  “A model? Of what?”

  “Of everything, Lieutenant,” said Medoxa. “The Codex is a model of what we call ‘reality’ as seen from the outside. As best we can tell, based on the observations made by the team that discovered it, we think it’s plugged into the fundamental structure of space-time in ways we don’t and perhaps can’t understand.”

  “And now Krinn wants it?” said Ezri.

  Medoxa nodded.

  “Excuse me, Captain.” An end was still loose in Ezri’s mind. “If this thing’s just a model, why’s it so dangerous?”

  “May I continue, Lieutenant?”

  “Of course,” said Ezri. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Axael Krinn was part of the away team, that first discovered the Codex hidden in a chamber beneath the ruins,” said Medoxa. “But, unlike the ruins on the rest of the asteroid, the Codex chamber was pristine, and the Codex itself was active.”

  “Active?”

  Medoxa stopped and turned to Ezri. “It killed two of the team as soon as they came near it,” she said. “It maimed two more, including Axael Krinn.”

  Yes, thought Ezri. That’s fairly active.

  “Only the team leader got out relatively unscathed,” said Medoxa.

  “Lucky one of them did,” said Ezri.

  “On the contrary,” said Medoxa. “She considered herself to be the least fortunate of the five.”

  “You said she made it out relatively unscathed.”

  “Physically, yes.”

  Ezri pushed past Shavras to get nearer to Medoxa.

  “I’m a counselor, Captain,” she said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. The winding trip through the Anansi’s guts was taking its toll. “I’ve dealt with a lot of injured minds, especially since the war started. I’ve also seen the casualties that come through Deep Space 9 from the front.”

  “What’s your point, Lieutenant?” asked Medoxa.

  “Only that I have a pretty good understanding of the resilience of the average humanoid mind,” said Ezri, herself a little surprised by the intensity of her emotion. “It’s rare these days, even during wartime, to come across a psychological trauma that can’t be treated by current methods—assuming the patient wants to get better.”

  Where was all this coming from? It was as if learning of these events had stirred up some deep reservoir of anger in her over which she had little control.

  “A valid opinion,” said Medoxa, apparently unfazed. “But one not shared by this particular officer.”

  “Well,” said Ezri. “Who was this self-obsessed ingrate?”

  “Her name was Jadzia Dax.”

  When the world stopped spinning, Ezri realized she was still standing in the same close little corridor with the same unfamiliar officers looking impassively her way.

  “That’s not possible,” she said eventually.

  “It�
��s not only possible,” said Medoxa. “It’s true.”

  “No,” said Ezri. “You don’t understand. If Jadzia had been there, if she even knew about it, I’d remember.”

  Again that thing flashed behind Medoxa’s eyes that Ezri was unable to place. Then, as if she had not interrupted her story, Medoxa continued.

  “Jadzia Dax managed to drag out the two other surviving members of her team before succumbing to the Codex effect herself,” she said. “She and they were beamed up to their ship and treated while Starfleet determined what to do next.”

  “Skipper,” said a familiar voice over the Anansi’s comm system. “Bors says we’ll have warp drive again in under an hour.”

  “Thank you, Casey,” said Medoxa.

  “And internal comms are back up.”

  “I gathered that, Ensign,” said Medoxa. “Let me know when we are approaching the Ibarri system.”

  “Aye, Skipper.”

  Medoxa seemed confused, as if she’d forgotten for a moment what she was about. “Where was I?” she said.

  “You were about to tell Dax here about the gate,” said Shavras.

  “Yes,” said Medoxa, firming up. “The gate.”

  “Look, Captain,” said Ezri. “No disrespect but, really, this is all a crock. I don’t remember any of this. There’s no way that it could have—”

  Medoxa held up a hand for quiet. “The reason that you have no memory of this,” she said evenly, “is that Jadzia had those memories erased.”

  Ezri could feel something hammering behind her eyes and realized dimly that it was her own pulse. It was only with effort that she was able to find her voice again.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, trying to put words to the feelings ringing in her mind. “Jadzia was a Trill, a host. She was Dax’s host. She would never—”

  “Lieutenant.” Medoxa looked as if she would reach out to the younger woman in some comforting way.

  “No!” said Ezri, angry tears welling in her eyes. “She would never let anyone take her memory.”

  Ezri’s mind was in retreat. She couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, couldn’t feel anything but deep soul-numbing horror at the act of mutilation Medoxa described.

  Yet it had happened before, hadn’t it? For reasons they considered sound, the Trill Symbiosis Commission had itself forcibly repressed all knowledge of Joran, Dax’s only unstable host, who had remained forgotten for close to a century before the memories began to surface in Jadzia just a few years ago.

  Now Medoxa was telling her that years before, with Joran’s memory still suppressed, Jadzia herself, without even consulting the Commission, had willingly allowed memories of her own to be stripped away. It was inconceivable.

  “Jadzia saw the Codex kill two of her friends and nearly kill two more,” said Medoxa. Her tone was soft, but the words had iron in them. “She would have done anything to prevent it from happening again.”

  “I can’t ...” Ezri cast about blindly for a nonexistent exit. “I can’t listen to this.”

  “Lieutenant Dax!” said Medoxa sharply. “Compose yourself.”

  With difficulty Ezri did manage to come to something like attention. Medoxa moved close to her then and spoke in a tone too low for Shavras to hear.

  “We need to be on the same page here, Dax,” she said and pressed something into her hand. Ezri looked down at it through watery eyes. It was an isolinear datachip.

  “What’s this?” asked Ezri.

  The Anansi, as stripped down to the bare essentials as it was, still had a holodeck. It was small, about three meters cubed, but for her purposes it would do.

  “It’s a message,” Captain Medoxa had said. “From Jadzia to you.” The opportunity to speak with her predecessor face to face, even holographically, was startling enough to put the brakes on Ezri’s skepticism. She agreed to take a look.

  “Computer,” she said. “Run program, Dax Infinitum.”

  “This program is Read Only,” said the computer. “You will not be able to interact.”

  Suddenly Jadzia Dax was standing before her, but it was a Jadzia that Ezri found herself hard-pressed to recognize.

  The image was younger than Ezri had expected, by almost a decade. Eight years ago, Ezri thought. That means it had to have been during the first year after Jadzia was joined. Two years before she was assigned to Deep Space 9. Though she possessed Jadzia’s memories, the self-image that went along with them was that of a mature Jadzia, complete in herself. This one was scattered, agitated, seemingly ready to jump at the slightest provocation.

  “I guess introductions are unnecessary,” said Jadzia. “If you’re seeing this it means that some time has passed and that, so far, we did the right thing.” Jadzia forced herself to smile, briefly. Maybe it was something like bravery but all Ezri saw was rue. “Starfleet agreed with me, finally. That thing down there is too dangerous for anyone to get near it. They let me design the security system to make sure no one gets in there until we have some way of protecting ourselves from—” Her voice broke and she was overcome by some powerful feeling. When she recovered, she went on.

  “There are engineers down there right now putting in the hardware. I made sure that none of them would be telepaths. I think—I think that’s what happened to Etoli and Sovak and to the rest of us, too. It does something to your mind—” Again she broke off.

  Ezri watched in horrified fascination Jadzia’s struggle to keep herself together.

  It was painful for her to see Jadzia this way; broken into pieces by the trauma she’d undergone. She longed to reach out, to give Jadzia some kind of solace, but this was all ancient history. Jadzia was dead. Even the memory of this was gone.

  “They’re setting up a permanent dig there,” Jadzia went on. “That’s the plan anyway. They want to translate the glyphs that are all over everything. So, someday, maybe, in a century or two, we’ll be able to understand what it is, how it does what it—how to make it stop. Maybe.”

  Jadzia’s eyes grew cold then, as if all of the emotions had drained out of her body. “Until then,” she said. “That thing stays locked up behind my gate. It’s the best way. Only Dax can open the gate, and only Dax can live long enough to know when it’s time—if it ever is.”

  Jadzia’s demeanor changed again suddenly. Ezri thought she looked almost ashamed.

  “I’m letting them wipe the memory of this out of me,” she said. “The only way to make sure the gate stays shut is to hide the key. I’m the key. And that means, so are you.”

  There it was, right from Jadzia’s own mouth. What was the Codex that a single contact with it could so shatter Jadzia that she would go against thousands of years of Trill tradition this way?

  “Right now you think I’m taking the easy way out,” said Jadzia. “Or that I’m being selfish or something. Please, believe me, I don’t deserve to forget this. I don’t deserve to go away and live my life without some—punishment.”

  Jadzia broke off again and seemed to be fighting a losing battle to maintain self-control. She was shivering slightly, and there were tears obvious in her eyes—eyes which refused to focus on anything for longer than a few moments. Ezri had seen enough soldiers in recent weeks to recognize battle trauma when she saw it.

  With obvious difficulty, the image of Jadzia did manage to continue.

  “You’re wondering how I could do this to you—to us. I’m wondering it myself. Memory is sacred. I know that. If there were any other way ...” she said. “But there isn’t. There just isn’t. That thing down there is too dangerous to be let out. It’s just the most—”

  Jadzia made a good show of pulling her spiraling emotions back in.

  “I can’t tell you the secret of opening the gate,” she said softly. “But I can tell you what it is. It’s a holographic maze. There are no safety protocols. If you can’t beat the maze, it’ll kill you. Another precaution against anyone but Dax being able to open it.”

  Ezri was stunned. A lethal maze designed by this wom
an who was obviously teetering on the brink of total mental collapse? What had her superiors been thinking? Or maybe this confession was the only time Jadzia had allowed herself to break down, to show the chaos she was fighting inside.

  “If you’re Dax, you can do it,” Jadzia said. “And here’s an added bonus: Complete the program, and you’ll get your memories back. Posthypnotic trigger. Then you’ll understand why all this was necessary, and hopefully, that knowledge will do some good when the gate comes down. But don’t open the gate unless you’re sure—absolutely sure—that the time is right. If it’s not and that thing gets out ... everyone loses. And I mean everyone.” The hologram vanished, and Ezri was alone.

  She found Medoxa waiting when she exited the holodeck, her face still the unreadable golden mask it had been before. She was alone, having dismissed her subordinates while Ezri was inside.

  The expression on Ezri’s own features made it clear to Medoxa that, whatever the contents of Jadzia’s message, it had done the trick.

  “Are we on the same page now, Lieutenant?” said Medoxa.

  Ezri nodded slowly. “You need me to somehow help prevent Krinn from opening Jadzia’s gate.”

  “No, Lieutenant,” said Medoxa as she turned, heading for the nearby turbolift. “I need you to open it for him.”

  “This is insane,” said Ezri as they went over it for the fourth time.

  Medoxa had taken Ezri to the armory to meet with the ship’s tactical officer, a human named Gabrielli, and had laid out the so-called plan on the way.

  “You said that before,” said Medoxa. Her attention was on Gabrielli as he triple-checked the modifications he’d made to Ezri’s combadge.

  “It’s a good plan, Lieutenant Dax,” said Gabrielli as he placed the altered chip back into the badge and resealed it. He handed it to her and stood by as she reattached it to her uniform.

  “And it’s the only one we have,” said Medoxa. Then, to Gabrielli, “Is the weapon ready?”

  The weapon was a modified hand phaser, reduced to the size of Ezri’s little finger. Provided she wasn’t searched or observed too closely, she might get a clear shot at Krinn.