Sacraments of Fire

by David R. George III

  “What about this ship?” Kira asked. In the end, nobody had known precisely what had taken place aboard Even Odds prior to its destruction. While Jake had mentioned something about an other-dimensional deck on the ship, Starfleet’s experts had ultimately concluded that unexplained subspace waves had triggered an isolytic subspace weapon. It might help Kira determine a course of action if she could discover what had caused the destruction in the Bajoran system.

  “The Even Odds is . . . an interesting vessel,” Dez said, in a way that implied he understated the case. “I’ve had it for more than a decade, but it’s at least two centuries old.”

  “Two centuries?” Kira said. Few ships, even those privately held, remained in service for such a long period. “Who constructed it?”

  “Who didn’t?” Dez replied with a chuckle. “The Even Odds has undergone at least a dozen major refits. Since I’ve had the ship, we’ve added a sizable section along the starboard stern, including a large cargo bay, a new transporter, and several corridors.”

  In her brief time aboard, Kira had noticed the disparate architecture in the sections through which she’d walked. None of it resembled that of any ships she’d traveled on, in either the Alpha or Gamma Quadrant. She said as much.

  “You might recognize two parts of the Even,” Dez told her. “The section I added we salvaged from a crashed Cardassian vessel. Another was taken from a Jem’Hadar attack ship.”

  “So does that make you allies of the Dominion, or adversaries?” Kira asked.

  “Neither, I hope,” Dez said. “We do our best to go about our business unnoticed. Sometimes it’s not possible, but we do what we can to avoid drawing attention to ourselves.”

  “What about armaments?” Kira asked, hoping that she would not betray the reasons for her curiosity. “When you do draw attention, how do you protect yourselves?”

  “With the strongest shields we can find,” Dez said. “Our armaments are minimal. We stay alive mostly by avoiding trouble, and when we can’t, we take a beating and run like hell.”

  “Some might call that craven.”

  “Better a craven survivor than a courageous corpse,” Dez said. “We do try to keep somebody aboard to function as our security. These days, Taran’atar holds that position for us.” He again glanced over at the Jem’Hadar, who hadn’t moved during the course of the conversation, or even given any indication that he was listening to them.

  “I wondered about that,” Kira said. When she had given Taran’atar the choice of remaining on Deep Space 9 or leaving aboard an old Bajoran scoutship, he had elected to depart the station. Kira believed that he would immediately return to the Dominion to face punishment for what he perceived as his failures during his time in the Alpha Quadrant, but if he had, he obviously hadn’t stayed. “How long has he been aboard, and how did you coax him to become a member of your crew?”

  Before Dez could respond, Taran’atar walked over to stand beside the table. “I am a member of this crew not because I have been coaxed,” he said, “but because it is how I fulfill my function.”

  Kira understood that he referred to his preprogrammed nature as a soldier. It underscored the difficulties Odo faced in attempting to offer genetically engineered species like the Jem’Hadar and the Vorta more opportunities and different ways of life. In many respects, it reminded Kira of a saying Captain Sisko had once used: you can’t free a fish from water.

  Then again, she thought, the Alonis managed the feat. The aquatic species utilized formfitting, water-filled environmental suits and antigrav chairs to travel beyond their homeworld and interact with other species. Not quite the same thing as the challenges the Jem’Hadar confronted in moving past their embedded militarism, but perhaps nonetheless a hopeful example.

  “I understand your decision,” Kira told Taran’atar, “but how did you arrive on the Even Odds in the first place?”

  When Taran’atar did not immediately answer, Dez looked up at him. “Why don’t you tell Captain Kira the story of how you joined us?”

  And he did.

  THE SHRILL PEAL of the engines saturated the main cabin of the old Bajoran scoutship, the threat of an overload racing toward inevitability. The faster-than-light drive, designed for a maximum velocity of warp five, pushed the small vessel through space just past warp eight. Taran’atar didn’t know whether the ship’s structural integrity or its engines would fail first, only that given enough time, each of them would. If he survived the disintegration of the hull and the explosive decompression that followed, he might remain conscious for a few seconds before cardio-respiratory collapse led to asphyxia. He considered putting on an environmental suit—he found four of them stowed for emergency evacuations—but he saw little point. He thought it more likely that the warp drive would explode before the ship broke apart, which would reduce him to atoms no matter how he protected himself.

  Taran’atar sat down at the main console as the decommissioned Bajoran vessel navigated through the Gamma Quadrant, no longer on course for the Dominion. An unfamiliar pattern of stars showed through the forward port, but the Jem’Hadar did not see it. Instead, before he started back to work, he took a moment to think about what he had earlier heard over the scoutship’s communications system: an audio signal that had originated several parsecs away.

  It had required multiple attempts to tune and filter the message before it had resolved into words that Taran’atar could fully distinguish. Distorted by his digital manipulation and limited by both the weakness of the signal and the Bajoran vessel’s outmoded equipment, it sounded reedy and thin. “This is the independent courier Even Odds, calling anyone within range of this transmission. Our ship is under attack. Repeat, we are under attack. Please, if anyone is receiving this, we request immediate assistance.” The message repeated, obviously broadcast on an automated loop.

  Taran’atar had listened to the distress call, iteration after iteration, but he’d otherwise taken no action. He maintained his course for the Dominion, and as he moved farther and farther from the source of the message, the signal began to break up. Eventually, it faded completely into the static and hiss of background radiation.

  At first, Taran’atar had done nothing but deactivate the comm system. He continued on a straight-line trajectory toward Dominion space, traveling at warp five in relative silence, the white noise of the scoutship’s engines a steady thrum in the main cabin. Alone, with no one issuing him orders or offering him options, he contemplated the distress call.

  Less than ten minutes later, Taran’atar had made a decision. He took control of the vessel’s helm and brought the ship about. He consulted the comm system for directional data, then set out to locate the source of the signal.

  As Taran’atar had headed toward the ship under attack, the signal it transmitted grew stronger, at a rate faster than he’d expected. The Jem’Hadar checked the readings and determined that, even as the Bajoran scoutship drew nearer to the source of the distress call, Even Odds traveled at high speed in roughly the opposite direction, narrowing the distance between the two as its crew undoubtedly attempted to outrun its attackers. Even so, traveling at warp five, it would take days for Taran’atar to reach the assaulted vessel.

  The Jem’Hadar had then made another decision. A choice of tactics rather than of personal direction, it came far more easily to him than the first had. He clambered belowdecks, into the engine compartment, where he worked to modify the scoutship’s drive system. In little more than an hour, he increased the introduction of deuterium into the dilithium chamber, expanded the electromagnetic fields surrounding the crystals, and he uncapped the flow of warp plasma through the injectors, at the same time bypassing all of the emergency shutdown regulators. The engines would run hot and fast, but only for so long. If they held, and if the hull remained intact, they would get him to his goal in a matter of hours rather than days. Taran’atar estimated a fifty percent chance that he wou
ld reach Even Odds before the scoutship blew itself apart for one reason or the other. That probability satisfied him.

  As the engines shrieked around him in the main cabin, Taran’atar understood that, in juxtaposition with the rest of his life, his decision to respond to the distress call made no sense. The existence of every Jem’Hadar came complete not with mere strictures, but with well-defined physiological imperatives. Taran’atar swore an oath to safeguard the Founders, but more than that, his mind and body drove him to protect those who created him. He believed his life forfeit at the beginning of every such battle, and that he could reclaim it only as a function of his effectiveness in defending the security of his gods.

  Except that I have no gods.

  The thought caused a profound ache within Taran’atar, as though some part of his being had been hollowed out. He suffered solitude in a way that he never had, his purpose in serving something greater than himself relegated to a memory seemingly so remote that it might never have been at all. If he cut power to the scoutship’s engines and allowed the vessel to drift, he would not have felt more aimless than he did at that moment.

  Taran’atar did not entirely comprehend what had happened to him, otherwise he would have sought in some way to reverse everything that had brought him to that point. Many details had contributed to his newfound atheism. Certainly the declaration by the Founder leader—that the Changelings were not gods, that they revered their own creator, a massive shape-­shifting prime mover who had given them life—had stoked the fire of his doubts, but that had also been but one flame in what had ultimately grown into an inferno.

  The initial spark of uncertainty had accompanied his aberration. Unlike his fellow Jem’Hadar, Taran’atar had never been dependent on ketracel-white. Though he had hidden that fact for most of his existence, poisonous questions had risen in the back of his mind. How could the Founders have created him—or any Jem’Hadar—with such a flaw? Shouldn’t such an error have been impossible for gods to make? Taran’atar could’ve blamed the Vorta who had run the hatchery where he’d incubated, but shouldn’t the Founders have known about his deviation? Shouldn’t they have done something about it?

  Eventually, Odo had discovered his condition, and he’d subsequently ordered Taran’atar to Deep Space 9, not as a soldier, but as an observer. The Jem’Hadar could have understood the assignment as a punishment, but the Founder insisted that he intended something different from that. Taran’atar followed his instructions, but he never truly grasped his mission. Regardless, he tried to succeed, tried to watch and learn, but his failures compounded one atop another. His last had been allowing the co-opting of his allegiance, his will not strong enough to prevent the redirection of his fidelity away from the Founders, first to the Intendant, and then to Iliana Ghemor.

  Once Taran’atar had finally broken free of the mind ­control that had tied him to Ghemor, Captain Kira had given him a choice—something he had neither asked for nor wanted. He could stay on Deep Space 9 or not. He therefore decided to return to the Dominion to face judgment for his long string of lapses. He anticipated a swift execution that would, at least in his final moments, bring him back to the life of a Jem’Hadar soldier. He deserved to die, and so his death would allow him to serve his gods one final time.

  Except that I have no gods, he thought again. With that truth, he could no longer trust the Founders to properly administer justice. On his journey from Deep Space 9, he had begun to fear that, once he reached the Dominion, Odo would send him back to the space station. Taran’atar could accept the legitimacy of a death sentence, but not the pointlessness of another exile.

  I am Jem’Hadar, he told himself, seeking meaning from the words. Being Jem’Hadar had always signified obeisance and obedience to the Founders, and living a soldier’s existence. He could no longer bring himself to practice the former, but he could still attempt the latter. That was why he had elected to turn the scoutship away from the Dominion and in pursuit of the distress call’s source. The equation became simple: somebody required protection, and so he would provide it.

  That meant Taran’atar would need arms. He turned his attention to the main console, where he searched for anything that resembled a weapons panel. Kira had told him that the vessel had been disarmed, but he hoped that he could reverse that.

  After a few moments, he identified charging, targeting, and firing controls for a single phaser bank. None of them responded to his commands. Using sensors, he found a phaser emitter mounted at the bow of the ship, but the supporting infrastructure—batteries for the charge, conduits, energy-transfer nodes—had all been physically removed. If he had a place to set the ship down, he could replicate the necessary tools and proper components and install them himself, but that would require many days of effort.

  Instead, Taran’atar ran through a list of the scoutship’s systems: communications, navigational deflectors, defensive shields, warp engines, impulse drive, environmental controls, computer. He considered all of them subpar and of little use to him, but even with their limitations, he saw a means of creating a weapon. Over the next hour, he developed a program to channel all of the scoutship’s power, from all systems but the transporter, through the main deflector array. The result would produce a single pulse of energy that he could direct outward from the bow of the ship. The blast would destroy the deflector and render the vessel impossible to safely navigate, and with the shields drained of power, the ship would become defenseless, but the plan would at least provide him with some offensive capability.

  Afterward, Taran’atar brought up a schematic of the ship’s interior. He found a panel at the aft end of the main cabin that concealed a small weapons locker. When he opened it, he saw slots for four handheld arms, all of them empty. A utility drawer once used to store scanners likewise contained nothing.

  Taran’atar absently reached to the side of his hip, to where he normally carried his rens’takin, a short-bladed combat knife. The sheath hung from his belt, unfilled. Prior to his return to Deep Space 9 with Commander Vaughn aboard Defiant, he had surrendered all of his arms.

  Moving to the scoutship’s lone replicator, Taran’atar attempted to produce an energy weapon for himself. Design limitations precluded him from doing so, but he did fashion a new blade. He sheathed it on his belt, where it hung with a satisfying weight.

  Seated back at the main console, Taran’atar considered what other preparations he might make for the coming battle. He thought again about donning an environmental suit, but doing so would impede his ability to shroud. That would undermine a significant tactical advantage he would have in hand-to-hand combat, should such a situation arise—and Taran’atar hoped that such a situation would. He doubted whether his single deflector-directed energy discharge would alone succeed in fending off the Even Odds’ attackers, and he had no intention of staying aboard the scoutship once it had become incapacitated.

  Taran’atar reached forward to the main console and reactivated the ship’s comm system. “—one within range of this transmission. Our ship is under attack. Repeat, we are under attack. Please, if anyone is receiving this, we request immediate assistance.” After a brief pause, the message began again. “This is the independent courier Even Odds, calling anyone within range of this transmission.” Taran’atar checked the signal strength and saw that the assaulted vessel no longer moved toward the scoutship. That suggested that the pursuit of Even Odds had ended. Taran’atar waited to see if another message would replace the first, informing anybody receiving the message that the crew of Even Odds had survived the encounter with their attackers.

  Instead, the distress call ended in midsentence. No other message replaced it. Unsure whether Even Odds had been destroyed, Taran’atar made yet another decision: he continued on, still prepared for battle.

  THE TWO VESSELS hung beside each other in space, motionless. As Taran’atar approached them in the Bajoran scoutship, he examined a magnified view of th
e scene on a screen beside the main console. The larger vessel appeared somewhat boxy, nearly as wide as it was long, and about half as tall. Ports along its visible flank suggested that it contained four decks stacked atop each other. Taran’atar did not recognize the overall design, but portions of the vessel seemed as though they had been appended after its initial construction. The piecemeal architecture included components readily identifiable as Paradan, Trelian, and Cardassian, as well as elements of unfamiliar origin.

  As Taran’atar studied the larger ship, he saw one unifying detail across many of its surfaces: numerous parts of the hull had been blackened by weapons fire. The vessel looked wounded. There could be little doubt as to its attacker.

  Although he had never before observed one in person, Taran’atar could easily classify the smaller ship. Colored a flat black and barely visible in the void, illuminated only by the running lights of its prey, the blade-shaped, single-passenger vessel had been a design long known to the Founders. Attacks on the Dominion by the Ascendants had been on the rise over the previous decade, bringing Jem’Hadar forces into conflict with them on a number of occasions.

  Taran’atar scanned both ships. The Ascendant vessel showed only the mildest hints of damage, its shields still almost wholly intact. Taran’atar read no life-forms aboard.

  As he expected, the defensive shields on the larger vessel—presumably Even Odds—had been compromised. Power levels fluctuated throughout the ship. He read the existence of some unusual equipment, some of which he recognized, some of which he didn’t. Sensors detected only two life signs, neither of which the Bajoran scoutship’s database could identify, but which Taran’atar could. One was an Ascendant, the other, a Jeflinic, a humanoid species with gray skin and light eyes. He did not think a physical battle between the two would last long. Assuming that Even Odds carried a complement larger than one, it seemed reasonable to assume that the Ascendant had already killed everybody else aboard; even if they had attempted to flee in an evacuation vehicle, the Ascendants, once they decided on a target, rarely allowed anybody to escape.