As she walked along the corridor, Bacco realized that she no longer felt quite so tired.
• • •
The doors whisked open before Doctor Julian Bashir, revealing the base of the Observation Gallery. He stepped out of the turbolift with Lieutenant Commander Sarina Douglas by his side. Neither of them had visited that part of the starbase yet, though it had been completed and made accessible to the crew a few days earlier. Bashir had wanted to wait for the memorial Captain Ro had planned, and Sarina had agreed.
“I guess we’re not as early as we thought,” Bashir said quietly as he and Sarina moved away from the lift. They had decided to arrive well before the service so that they would have time to explore the new space in relative privacy. Other members of the crew had clearly entertained the same idea, though, since quite a few already milled about, all of them—like Bashir and Sarina—in their dress uniforms.
“I think everybody just wanted some time to see this place,” Sarina said. “Especially those who were on the station before.” She spoke softly, but her voice dropped out almost completely on her final word.
Before, Bashir thought. A single word that said so much. Before Typhon Pact starships launched an unprovoked attack on the first Deep Space Nine. Before the first station was destroyed. Before a thousand Federation lives had been extinguished in the blink of an eye.
Bashir and Sarina moved slowly across the expansive deck, which, though filled with members of the crew, otherwise appeared to contain little else. Looking around, the doctor saw that the turbolift they had exited stood in a circular bank of four in the center of the round space. The shafts ended there, climbing up to the Observation Gallery through the vertical spire atop the main sphere and rising no farther.
The doctor had heard that, during the design and construction of the starbase, somebody in the crew had suggested to the captain that the new Deep Space 9 should include a memorial to the old Deep Space 9 and the lives lost in its destruction. Ro agreed. After successfully pitching the idea to Starfleet Command, the captain worked with the starbase’s designers—among them, DS9’s top two engineers, Miles O’Brien and Nog—to develop a suitable location for it. Once that had been accomplished, Ro had commissioned a Bajoran artist, a woman named Acto Viri, to develop the memorial itself.
Bashir wondered how many other people knew that Kira Nerys had appreciated Acto’s art. Kira had been killed two years earlier in the collapse of the wormhole—although many Bajorans chose to consider her not dead, but missing. Years before that, when she commanded the station, she purchased one of Acto’s paintings, Bajor at Peace, and hung it in her office. Later, when she left Starfleet, she made a gift of the artwork to Ro Laren, though the painting had been lost with the station. Bashir felt certain that Ro had chosen the memorial artist as a means of honoring Kira.
The doctor strolled with Sarina among their crewmates, moving farther and farther from the turbolifts. When they neared the perimeter of the space, they both stopped abruptly. Transparent and angled outward, the exterior bulkheads offered dramatic views of the starbase. The Observation Gallery nestled below the upper intersection of the two vertical rings, and Bashir gazed out at one of those rings descending in an impressive arc off to his right. When he looked down, he saw the upper half of the station’s main section, the sphere, and through the transparent hull there, he beheld the brilliant green of the park.
“Wow,” Sarina said simply.
“I think that about covers it,” Bashir agreed.
They stood there for a few minutes taking in the spectacular vista, then began walking along the outer bulkhead. Partway around the circular compartment, they reached a ramp that rose to the deck above. Set a few meters in from the outer bulkhead and constructed of an extremely thin material that had been frosted white, it had no visible supports. As a result, the crew on the ramp looked as though they floated in midair.
Bashir and Sarina opted to bypass the ramp so that they could look out at the starbase from different points. The doctor noticed that when people spoke, they did so as he and Sarina had, in hushed tones. He thought that the stunning panorama could have inspired such reactions, but suspected that it had more to do with the nature of the place and the upcoming event.
Eventually, Bashir and Sarina arrived at a second ramp, set directly opposite the first. “Do you want to go up?” she asked.
“ ‘Want’ might be a bit strong,” Bashir said. Even two years after the fact, he found the loss of so many people all at once—so many friends and colleagues, in a catastrophe that need never have happened—difficult to accept. Such losses had been hard enough to deal with during wartime; in peace, it became nearly impossible. While Bashir wanted very much to honor his fallen comrades, he did not want to experience all of the deep emotions that would come with doing so.
“I know what you mean,” Sarina said. Still, they started slowly up the ramp together.
The next deck very much resembled the one below, but with some notable distinctions. Because the exterior bulkheads angled outward, the upper deck of the Observation Gallery enclosed slightly more space, but it seemed larger also because the overhead did not hang four or five meters above them, as on the lower deck, but a dozen or more. No turbolifts or other doors served the space; other than by transporter, it could be accessed only via the ramps. And as quiet as the lower deck had been, with people speaking in low voices, the silence on the upper deck went totally unchallenged.
As they had below, Bashir and Sarina approached the outer bulkhead. Once there, Sarina stopped and pointed down toward their feet. Bashir followed her gesture and saw that the half meter or so of the deck that abutted the exterior bulkhead had been layered with a black, marbled stone, and a low, raised rim set it apart. Names had been etched into the stone.
MICHELLE ROBINSON, read the name in front of Bashir, and in smaller letters directly below that, LIEUTENANT COMMANDER, SECURITY, DEEP SPACE 9.
ELEG RWATT, read the next entry. ENSIGN, ENGINEERING, U.S.S. ROBINSON. More than thirty of the starship’s crew had perished when it had defended the station.
AIDA SELZNER. LIEUTENANT J.G., COMMUNICATIONS, U.S.S. NILE. Bashir assumed that the DS9 comm officer had been assigned to the runabout during the evacuation.
JASON SENKOWSKI. LIEUTENANT, ENGINEERING, DEEP SPACE 9.
JANG SI NARAN. LIEUTENANT, SECURITY, DEEP SPACE 9.
Bashir’s vision began to blur. He looked up, away from the names, and took in a deep breath through his nose. It amazed him how fresh the wound felt, even after all the time that had passed.
Sarina took his hand and squeezed it, but he couldn’t look at her. Bashir knew that if they saw each other’s tears threatening, there would be no holding them back. He tightened his hand about hers, then resumed walking.
They continued around the deck. Bashir didn’t know about Sarina, but when he peered down at the names inscribed in the dark stone, he allowed his gaze to pass over them, picking out words here and there, but not really reading them. At that moment, together with Sarina and among so many of their crewmates, he couldn’t think of all his lost colleagues without breaking down. Occasionally, though, some names managed to penetrate his attempts to filter them out: JEANNETTE CHAO. HATRAM NABIR. CATHY LING. LUIS GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, who had been Kasidy Yates’s chief engineer aboard her freighter, Xhosa, which had been lost with everyone aboard. Bashir had known them all.
When they had made their way completely around, they turned toward the inner part of the deck. Because he had been looking down as he and Sarina walked along the names of the dead, and because so many of the crew filled the upper deck of the Observation Gallery, Bashir hadn’t noticed much else about the space. As they moved toward the center of the deck, though, he saw past all the members of the crew that a massive object stood there. Mounted atop a vertical black pole as though magically balanced, a huge, curved piece of metal looked to Bashir like a lower section that had been ripped from a great globe. Greenish-gray, with a slash of b
lack singed across its surface, its ragged edges conveyed with no words the original Deep Space 9’s violent end.
As Bashir and Sarina circled the artifact, they came across three plaques mounted around its base. The first displayed a silhouette of the original station, with a highlighted section indicating the precise location of the hull fragment. Below the image, the sign read:
SECTION OF BULKHEAD FROM
ORIGINAL DEEP SPACE 9
HABITAT RING
CORRIDOR K-17-R
The second sign gave the particulars of the first DS9’s construction as an ore-processing facility during the Occupation, its status as a command post by the Cardassian prefect, and its subsequent use by the Federation Starfleet. Though presented in the antiseptic language of museums, the description still managed to impart a sense of both the horrors and triumphs of which the original station had been a part. No matter the neutrality of the words employed, neither the abomination of the Occupation nor the exultation of Bajor’s liberation could be minimized.
The final plaque detailed the actual loss of the station. Though stated impartially, the roles in the disaster of the crews of three Typhon Pact starships—a Romulan war-bird, a Tzenkethi marauder, and a Breen warship—could not be denied. The account concluded by noting that Bajor and the Federation had opted to construct a new starbase, which would enter into service on the second anniversary of the first station’s loss.
Finishing their trip around the monument, Bashir and Sarina passed a small platform—about four meters by two, rising not even a meter above the deck—that had clearly been placed there for the event. They drifted about the space, not speaking or looking at each other, but holding hands very tightly. Around them, people continued to arrive in the Observation Gallery.
As the scheduled time of the memorial service neared, Bashir estimated that several hundred people had gathered. Ro had invited those members of the crew who had served on the old station at the time of its destruction, although not all 263 survivors remained in the Bajoran system, or even in Starfleet. The captain had also asked any civilians who had endured the loss of the station to attend, though after two years, only a small number—fewer than two hundred of the more than five thousand successfully evacuated—had opted to call the new Deep Space 9 home. Ro had also invited anybody else at the station who had ever been posted to the old DS9, or whose friends or family had been. Consequently, as Bashir gazed around at the people assembled, he saw exclusively faces he had known for years, including many of the current senior staff: Ro Laren and Cenn Desca, John Candlewood and Jefferson Blackmer, Zivan Slaine. He also spotted others he’d known on the old station, but who had moved on: Benjamin Sisko and Kasidy Yates from Robinson, and Ezri Dax, Samaritan Bowers, Simon Tarses, Mikaela Leishman, and a few others from Aventine. Miles O’Brien and Nog fit into both categories. Bashir also spied Quark lingering on the periphery of the gathering, as though still deciding whether he truly wanted to be there. Treir stood beside him, evidently having made the trip from Bajor for the service. Oddly, Odo stood not far from Quark.
A rustling sound drifted through the Observation Gallery as people began to move, turning toward the center of the deck and the fragment of hull that served as a cenotaph. Bashir and Sarina followed the leads of those around them and shifted to face in the same direction as everyone else. There, beside the memorialized wreckage, Captain Ro Laren rose up out of the crowd, mounting the portable platform. She waited just a moment as people stopped moving and the compartment quieted.
“Welcome to the Observation Gallery, and to the Memorial Deck, of our new starbase,” the captain said. She did not speak loudly, but her voice carried easily in the otherwise overwhelming silence. “Thank you for joining me here this evening. I know that this is not easy for any of us, but I am pleased to see so many of you who lived through our shared ordeal.”
Bashir recalled the first anniversary of the station’s destruction, when Ro had stood before the crew at Bajoran Space Central and said a few words in remembrance. That event had felt different from the one presently unfurling on the new station. A year earlier, the surviving DS9 crew members had not all been assigned to the same location; some had served on Bajor, while others had been posted to the various starships that patrolled the system. Of those who served planetside, many had attended a service held in Ashalla by the Vedek Assembly and presided over by First Minister Asarem and Kai Pralon. Ro’s words that day at BSC, though clearly heartfelt, had been brief. Though not the fault of the captain, that observance had lacked cohesiveness and a sense of moment.
“The Memorial Deck was, by the request of Starfleet, designed by a Bajoran artist named Acto Viri,” Ro continued. “I am grateful to Ms. Acto for her contribution to us and to those we remember. I invited Ms. Acto to join us for this service, but she politely demurred. From an artist’s perspective, she said, this memorial she created must speak for itself, which I certainly think it does. But Ms. Acto also told me that she declined to attend because she did not wish to intrude on the bond that all of us here share. I appreciate both her artistry and her grace.”
Bashir thought that in different circumstances, those present would have applauded. Acto Viri merited both recognition and gratitude. Not a single person clapped, though; as best Bashir could tell, nobody even moved.
“We come here tonight to honor our fallen comrades,” Ro went on. “They were men and women with whom we worked, with whom we lived, crewmates and neighbors, friends and family. In some very meaningful ways, those of us fortunate enough to continue on are now one family. We will forever be linked through our common experience, our mutual grief, and our continued existence.”
Ro paused, peering out across the people arrayed about her. At one point, her gaze intersected with Bashir’s. He felt a shock surge through him, as though his brief connection with the captain had in an instant taken him back to that dreadful day, that dreadful moment, when Deep Space 9 had ceased to be. Bashir froze, and he remained motionless even after the captain’s attention had moved past him. He had to force himself to resume breathing.
As Ro continued speaking, the doctor’s mind took him backward through two years of his life to the hours when he didn’t know if he even wanted to survive. During the evacuation of the station, he had been helping direct civilians to the nearest means of rescue. When the emergency bulkheads thundered closed, they sealed him in a section of one of the crossover bridges linking the Habitat Ring to the Docking Ring.
Just moments later, Deep Space 9 had exploded. The crossover segment broke off from the station, tumbling away into space. The emergency bulkheads held, sealing him in with twelve other people, all of them civilians, two of them children. As the lone member of DS9’s crew there, Bashir knew that he needed to take the lead, to keep all of the others calm. But even as he did so, he worried about Sarina’s safety. For a long time, he had no idea whether she had lived or died. His dread had been palpable, and if the woman he loved, the woman for whom he had waited his entire life, had perished aboard the station, he’d had no notion at all of what he would do.
As Bashir stood beside his beloved Sarina on the new starbase, he thought about all the people on the original Deep Space 9 who, like him, had lived through its demise, but whose loved ones had not. How did they get through it? he wondered. How would I have gotten through it?
It occurred to Bashir that in the wake of the destruction of DS9, he had nearly driven himself to a point where he would have found out firsthand: he had begun to doubt Sarina. He questioned her commitment to what he believed to be their common objective of bringing down Section 31, fearing that she actually worked for the nefarious covert organization. In the end, though, even with no ironclad evidence of Sarina’s intentions—How could there ever be, with Section 31 involved?—Bashir made the only choice he could: he chose to love her, and stand by her, and put his full trust in her. To do otherwise would have been almost as devastating to him as if he’d lost her in the station’s destruction
.
Bashir regarded Sarina. Even at a time and place that had already dredged up so much emotional pain within him, he realized that he felt happy. Bashir knew that he would listen to the words spoken that night, that he would grieve for the people he’d lost and all the others too, but he also knew that it would be all right because he would do so beside Sarina.
“There are no magic words that I can say that will ease the suffering we feel because of the people we’ve lost,” Ro said as Bashir peered back up at the captain. “But there is also no greater honor we can bestow upon our absent comrades than to move on in our lives—not only to move on, but to succeed. And as we do, we will carry our memories of them with us.”
Ro looked down and to the side, and a moment later, four of her senior staff—Cenn Desca, Jefferson Blackmer, John Candlewood, and Zivan Slaine—joined her on the platform. All five had been rescued from the station just seconds before it blew apart. “In honor of those we have lost, with the intention of always remembering them, always keeping them in our hearts and minds, we will speak their names aloud, for all of us to hear.”
Cenn Desca, the last executive officer of the original Deep Space 9 and the first of the new, stepped forward on the platform. He raised a padd and began to read from it. “Ferdinand Abejo. Açero Kyne. Jerot Afrane.” Cenn pronounced each name carefully, perfectly, his mouth moving over the syllables almost as though he had performed such a ritual a thousand times. “Massoud Ahzed. Rey Alfonzo. Alden Allard.” His voice neither rose nor fell, and yet it somehow managed to carry emotion within it.
For the first time since Ro had begun the service, Bashir heard something on the Memorial Deck other than the voice of the speaker. People cried. Sometimes it happened with the recitation of a particular name—Sherman Ravid broke into sobs when Lieutenant Commander Candlewood read out “Cathy Ling”—and at other times, the sounds of sorrow seemed to swell from everywhere, like waves breaking on the sand.
Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust Page 14