Sacraments of Fire

by David R. George III

  That terrible incident in Ro’s childhood had stayed with her for years—stayed with her still. Her experiences aboard Wellington and Enterprise, then with the Maquis and in the Bajoran Militia, and finally aboard Deep Space 9, had taught her the value of teamwork and friendship. She came to understand the necessity of trusting people, and she eventually learned how to accept, and even to request, the assistance of others. Despite that, doing so still felt to Ro like an improper act—as though surrendering to her own weakness. She always fought the emotion, recognizing its uselessness. She usually succeeded in overcoming it, but the anxiety always returned.

  “I don’t understand,” Altek Dans said. “You need my help?” He stood just inside the entryway to his cell, peering quizzically at the captain through the force field.

  “I do,” Ro said. “I want to release you.”

  “Of course you do,” Altek said. He shook his head. “And all you need is my help in answering your questions.”

  “No,” the captain said.

  “No?” Altek asked, his voice dripping with disbelief. “Because that’s all I’ve heard for three days now: ‘Answer our questions and we’ll let you go.’ ” He glared past Ro, and she didn’t need to follow his gaze to know that he intended his look as an indictment of Lieutenant Commander Blackmer. The security chief stood behind the captain, across the corridor, his phaser drawn.

  “You needn’t be upset with Commander Blackmer,” the captain said. “He was acting on my orders. He also believes what you’ve told him.”

  Once more, Altek’s eyes darted to one side, looking past Ro at the security chief. “That comes as a surprise, but I’m pleased to hear it,” he said. “And what about you? Do you also believe me?”

  “I trust my security chief,” Ro said. “He’s very good at his job, and so, yes, I believe you.”

  Altek waited for a moment, then said, “You believe me, and yet I’m still in this cell.”

  “That’s right,” Ro said. “That’s because there are people with greater authority than me who aren’t persuaded of your innocence in the assassination, or that you haven’t come here to commit some other criminal act. Those people don’t disbelieve you, but they want you held until we can verify who you are and why you’ve come here.”

  “I keep hearing that, but I’ve told Mister Blackmer everything I possibly can, and maybe even more than I should have,” Altek said. “So if you’re here just to repeat his demands of me, don’t bother.” With an air of general disgust, he waved his hand dismissively toward Ro. His fingers must have come precariously close to the force field, because it emitted a quick warning hum. Altek turned and moved away from the entry.

  “Doctor Altek,” Ro said. The stranger did not respond, but kept his back to her. She called after him again, then addressed her security chief. “Jeff, I’m going in.”

  “Captain,” Blackmer said, crossing the wide corridor and joining her at the entrance to the cell. “Captain,” he said again, dropping his voice to a whisper. “We agreed that as long as we’re detaining Altek, nobody but security personnel will be allowed to enter his cell. It’s for your own safety, and that of the entire starbase.”

  “Yes, I agreed with that,” Ro said, also speaking softly so that Altek would not hear her. “But I want to talk to that man in there, and I need to establish a rapport with him. I can’t effectively do that with a force field between us.”

  “Captain, letting you in is a violation of the strict protocols we put in place after what happened to President Bacco.”

  “I understand your concerns,” Ro said. She looked back over at Altek, who stood on the other side of the cell, still facing away from her, his hands on his hips. “You told me that you believed him, Jeff. If he didn’t have anything to do with the assassination, and if he hasn’t come here for some hostile purpose, then I won’t be in any danger just by entering his cell.”

  “But, Captain . . .”

  Blackmer’s words faded, but the haunted look in his eyes did not. But, Captain, Ro felt sure he had started to say, what if I’m wrong? Both from knowing Blackmer, and from having served in his position for more than two years, she understood that he blamed himself for the president’s murder. How could he not? she asked herself. Ro knew that he had spent time in the last few days with Lieutenant Knezo, one of DS9’s counselors, but the captain wondered if she should also have another conversation with him about his role in what had happened.

  At the moment, though, she needed to concentrate on dealing with Altek Dans. “Jeff, when this force field is deactivated, the entire stockade will lock down. On top of that, the cell is under constant surveillance by your security staff, and you’re standing out here with a phaser in your hand.”

  Blackmer nodded slowly, as though it pained him to lose the argument about protective procedures. “Of course, Captain,” he said. He reached up to the panel beside the entry and quickly ran through the process of lowering the force field.

  “Thanks, Jeff,” Ro said. “For now, leave it down.” She did not wait for him to acknowledge—or object to—her order, but paced into the cell. “Doctor Altek,” she said, “I’m not here to ask you any more questions, or to tell you again what we require of you.”

  Over his shoulder, Altek said, “No, you’re just here to get my help, is that right?”

  “Yes, it is,” Ro said. “I told you that I want to release you from custody, but that there are people in higher positions than me who are reluctant to do that. So I’m here to get your help.”

  Altek finally turned back around. “What is it you think I can do for you?”

  Ro inhaled deeply, trying to fashion just what she should tell Altek, and anxious about how he might react. “Our laws about detaining individuals suspected of wrongdoing are very clear,” she began. “Because we have no real indication of you committing any crime, I’m supposed to give you your freedom by this afternoon.”

  Altek said nothing, but the captain saw that she definitely had his attention.

  “As is often the case,” she went on, “there are different ways to interpret the law. In this case, there are provisions that, when construed from one perspective, would allow me to keep you in custody for a longer time.” Ro shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with a concept that would have sounded completely natural if uttered by some smooth-tongued Cardassian leader during the Occupation. It reminded her of the discussion she’d had with her first officer that morning, when Cenn had observed that, of all people, Bajorans should be slow to detain people without due process—and perhaps least of all one of their own.

  “I’m not going to do that,” Ro said, unsure until just that moment if she would permit Altek to walk out of his cell once they’d finished speaking. “As of right now, you’re free to go.” She motioned toward the open entryway.

  Altek looked in that direction, but he made no move to leave. “And what sort of help must I provide to you in exchange for my freedom?”

  “You don’t have to do or say anything,” Ro told him. “I’m asking if you will.”

  “All right,” Altek said. “Ask.”

  “Because I might have to stand a court-martial for disobeying a direct order to keep you detained, I’d like to ask you not to leave this base for at least a few days.” Ro didn’t think that Akaar would bring charges against her, primarily because she had a sworn duty—as did all Starfleet personnel—not to obey an illegal or immoral order. Then again, the admiral’s continuing disdain for her had begun all those years ago, when she’d served aboard Wellington and had defied a superior. “I’d also like to have one of my officers escort you around at all times once you leave this cell. I’ll assign you quarters and you can have privacy there, but when you move around the base, I’d like somebody to accompany you.”

  Altek regarded Ro without saying anything, then sat down in the cell’s only chair. “You’re in charge
of this ‘base,’ as you call it?”

  “I am,” Ro said.

  “Then can’t you simply order your people to follow me?”

  “I could, or I could just have you expelled,” Ro said, “but I’m not interested in creating an adversarial relationship with you.”

  Altek glanced around the cell in which he’d been held for nearly three full days, his message clear: they already had an adversarial relationship. He did not address that point directly, but said, “Even if I wanted to leave, I don’t have any idea where I am or how to get back home. I imagine that I’d need your help with that.”

  “I think you would need my help because—” Ro stopped, hesitant to reveal more than she should about Altek’s situation. If he had emerged from the wormhole out of Bajor’s past, as Blackmer believed, the Temporal Prime Directive prohibited her from saying or doing anything that could potentially alter the timeline. Since Altek’s arrival on DS9, though, Ro had studied the incident when Akorem Laan had come forward in time more than two centuries. He had ultimately reentered the wormhole with Captain Sisko, who reported that the Prophets had returned the Bajoran poet to his own time, with no memory of his journey into the future. Ro reasoned that if Altek likewise went back, he also would retain no knowledge of whatever he experienced on Deep Space 9. “You would need assistance to get home because we believe you’re a lot farther away than you think, and in a very different way.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” Altek said, and again he looked around at his cell. “Although it certainly feels like I’m farther from home than I’ve ever been.”

  Ro crossed the compartment and sat down on the edge of the sleeping platform. She hesitated as she tried to find the right words. According to Blackmer’s interrogation reports, Altek claimed to be a doctor, and he’d spoken of working at a hospital. That alone told the captain that, whenever he had come from, he had experience and familiarity with some level of technology. He had been disoriented when they’d first brought him aboard the starbase, which could have been the result of being exposed to twenty-fourth-century advancements, but also might have been caused by his transit aboard an Orb of the Prophets and then being beamed to the stockade. Altek certainly hadn’t displayed any extreme reactions to what he’d so far seen, although that included only the transporter room and his cell.

  “Doctor Altek, during Commander Blackmer’s questioning, he asked you what year it was,” Ro finally said.

  “He did, and I told him: the seventeenth Year of the Petalune.”

  Ro shrugged. “I don’t know when that is,” she said. “I’ve never heard of the Petalune.”

  “How . . . how can that be?” Altek asked. “A petalune is a flower, and also the name of a constellation, just like the names of all the years in a cycle.”

  “None of that is familiar to me.”

  “Where . . . where are you from?” Altek seemed to be grasping for answers.

  “I was born in Lyncar, a small village in Hedrikspool Province,” Ro said.

  “I’ve never heard of either of those places,” Altek said. “Are they on one of the island continents? Or on one of the archipelagos?”

  “No,” Ro said. “Hedrikspool is on the main landmass, near the equator, on the western coast.”

  Altek rubbed a hand across his face, clearly frustrated and trying to make sense of what Ro was telling him. “But where you’re describing . . . that’s not far from Joradell.”

  “The city where you practiced medicine,” Ro said.

  “Yes,” Altek said, “and you told me when I first got here that you don’t know it.”

  “No.”

  “But you know something,” Altek said. “What is it you’re trying to tell me?”

  “There’s no easy way to say this, Doctor Altek.” It won’t be easy either for him or for me, Ro thought. Telling him risked inviting a visit by the Department of Temporal Investigations. Not to mention providing Admiral Akaar with another reason to bring court-martial proceedings against me. “We believe that you have been displaced in time.”

  “ ‘Displaced in time,’ ” Altek repeated, as though searching for meaning within the words. “Time travel?” Just the fact that he employed the term suggested that he at least understood the concept.

  “Yes, we think you’ve traveled into what for you would be the future.” It suddenly occurred to Ro that, considering the apparent nonlinear existence of the wormhole aliens, Altek might actually have traveled backward in time, rather than forward. She discounted the idea at once, based solely on the way he had behaved while on DS9.

  “Travel into the future,” Altek said. “That sounds fantastical.”

  “I’m sure it must.”

  Altek stood up. He appeared driven more by emotion than the will to take some sort of action. “How far into the future?”

  “Right now, we have no way of knowing,” Ro admitted. “Based on some of the things you’ve said, it seems likely that you’ve traveled centuries, perhaps even millennia.”

  Altek’s legs gave out, and he fell back down into the chair. “Millennia,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper. “Everybody I know—Greta, Veralla, the Cawlders . . . Anora—gone.” He sat quietly for a few moments, clearly attempting to process what he’d been told. At last, he looked up and said, “I need you to show me—to prove it to me.”

  “I can do that,” the captain said. “But before I do, there are some other things I need to tell you about.” Things I need to prepare you for, she thought: Space travel. Alien life. The Prophets and the Celestial Temple. She thought it unlikely that any of those things had been a reality for him in his own time. He had dismissed beaming from the transporter room to his cell as a drug-induced experience, and Blackmer and O’Brien as eugenically altered Aleira.

  “Tell me what you have to, and then maybe you can answer my questions,” Altek said. “I have a lot of them.” Ro saw an expression of desperation on his face. “My first question is: can you send me back home?”

  Ro thought about what had happened with Akorem Laan, how he had been escorted back into the wormhole by Captain Sisko and apparently returned to his own time by the Prophets. She wanted to tell Altek that he could expect the same experience, that yes, he could readily go back to where and when he had come from—but she couldn’t. Too many uncertainties surrounded the situation, and she didn’t want to promise him something that might not be possible. Instead, she told him the only thing she could: the truth.

  “I don’t know.”

  14

  “Captain, long-range sensors are detecting energy discharges.” Lieutenant Commander Uteln crewed the tactical console on the raised aft section of the Robinson bridge. The Deltan spoke with an obvious sense of urgency.

  Seated in the command chair, Captain Sisko despaired of what the report could mean. The ship had just arrived at the Federation border. Per Admiral Akaar’s orders, the president pro tem wanted the Robinson crew to respond to the possibility of Tzenkethi involvement in the assassination of President Bacco by making a show of force where the Coalition would observe it. That meant a patrol route clinging to the Federation border closest to Tzenkethi space.

  Beside Sisko, sitting in the first officer’s position, Commander Anxo Rogeiro asked, “Is it weapons fire?” His thoughts echoed Sisko’s own concerns.

  “It’s impossible to tell at this range,” Uteln said. Sisko heard the taps of the tactical officer’s fingertips on his panel. “It could be something like a mining operation, or even something naturally occurring.”

  “Where is it located?” Rogeiro asked.

  “Determining now,” Uteln said. “It’s on the other side of the border.”

  Sisko exchanged a look with his first officer. “In Tzenkethi space?” Rogeiro asked.

  “Negative,” Uteln said. “The discharges are in an unaligned region.”


  “To us, it’s unaligned,” Sisko noted. “But who knows if the Tzenkethi have arbitrarily decided to annex another volume of space without informing anybody.” The Coalition had a long history of belligerence toward the Federation, as well as a propensity for suddenly declaring unclaimed, unexplored territory as their own.

  “Commander Plante, are there any other Starfleet vessels in the region?” Rogeiro asked. At the operations console, Gwendolyn Plante worked her controls. Newly promoted to the rank of commander and the position of second officer, she had first served under the captain aboard U.S.S New York during the Borg Invasion.

  “There are a number of smaller patrol vessels assigned along this portion of the border,” Plante said as she studied her display. “The Endurance and the Mjolnir are due within the next three days, but we’re the first heavy to arrive.”

  “Which patrol vessel is closest to the energy discharges?” Sisko asked.

  “Tying the long-range sensors into the assignments database,” Plante said, her hands moving expertly across the ops controls. “It looks like it should be the Argus. It’s a Vigilant-class scout.”

  “Hail them,” Sisko ordered.

  Several chirps rose from the tactical console. “Channel open, sir,” said Uteln.

  Sisko stood up and stepped to the center of the bridge. “Robinson to Argus,” he said. “This is Captain Benjamin Sisko. We’ve arrived at the Federation border and have detected energy surges near your position. Please provide a status.” He waited, and when he got no response, he said, “Robinson to Argus. Please reply.” Again, he heard nothing but silence.

  “There’s no response, sir,” Uteln said. “I can’t tell whether or not they’re receiving our transmission, and I can’t pick up the ship on sensors. There could be interference from the energy discharges.”

  “Keep trying to raise them,” Sisko told Uteln, and then he looked to his first officer. “What do you think?” he asked, though the captain knew that Rogeiro would share whatever opinion he’d formed. When Sisko glanced to where the ship’s counselor sat on the other side of the command chair from the first officer, he saw Lieutenant Commander Diana Althouse regarding him. Studying me, Sisko thought. He genuinely appreciated Althouse’s professional acumen, but he thought that, sometimes, she read his emotional state too well—at least, too well for his comfort.