Earlier, Douglas had escorted Enkar’s attorney in to see her after he’d arrived from Bajor—representation evidently arranged by Asarem Wadeen’s office. Douglas respected the first minister, but her staunch defense of her chief of staff in the face of such overwhelming evidence bewildered the security officer. Such support seemed both unwarranted and politically dangerous.
The attorney—an older man with graying hair and a long face—had met with Enkar all morning. Later that afternoon, lawyer and client would stand before a Federation judge who had also arrived that day from Bajor. Douglas hoped that the arraignment would result in a change to Enkar’s imprisonment, relocating her to a facility on Bajor or elsewhere in the Federation. After she had shot and killed President Bacco, her presence on Deep Space 9 felt like an open wound.
Douglas peered back down at the padd on which she worked, reading again through the names and assignments of the security staff. She had just discovered that she had accidentally detailed Crewman Ravid to consecutive shifts on the second day of the residential arrivals when a shrill whistle filled the air. The alarm differed from the starbase-wide red alert klaxon, signaling an emergency situation within the stockade complex. Through the open doorway of the office—none of the compartments within the stockade contained doors—she heard running footsteps: security personnel emerging from the other offices. Two officers—Cardok and Ansarg—had been charged that shift with keeping Enkar under constant surveillance. The stockade contained no other prisoners.
Douglas glanced at the viewscreen. Enkar Sirsy lay on the deck in the middle of her cell. Douglas tossed her padd onto the desk—it slid across it and clattered onto the deck—and bolted through the doorway.
She arrived outside Enkar’s cell just behind Cardok and Ansarg. They all observed the accused assassin through the force field. Flat on her back on the deck, Enkar convulsed. Spittle ran from her mouth and down the side of her face.
“Phasers,” Douglas told Cardok and Ansarg. “Stand back and give me cover.” The security officers acknowledged their orders, drew their weapons, and fell back to the opposite side of the corridor. Douglas lay a fingertip flat on the panel set into the bulkhead beside the opening to the cell. After her fingerprint was scanned and recognized, she keyed in her security code. Finally, she lowered the force field, which automatically locked down the entire stockade complex.
Douglas pulled her own phaser, never more pleased that her weapon would fire only with her hand around the grip. She rushed inside the cell, alert for any sign of deception, any move to harm her or take her hostage. She saw none. Enkar’s body continued to shake, seemingly out of control. Douglas dropped to her knees and looked into the prisoner’s eyes; they appeared glassy and unfocused.
She immediately reached for her combadge, but then something else caught her attention. She bent low and examined a patch of skin near the nape of Enkar’s neck. It glowed a bright red. Douglas realized that she could smell the grisly scent of burning flesh. She slammed her fingers onto her combadge, which chirruped in response.
“Douglas to Sector General,” she said. “Emergency medical transport from the stockade.”
“Sector General, Bashir,” came Julian’s immediate reply. “I’m initiating security protocols.” Standard procedure in such a situation required that the transporter shield around the cell in the stockade be lowered, and then another erected around the emergency medical transporter compartment once beaming had been completed. Force fields would also be raised. “Emergency transport on your order.”
“Two to beam in from my location,” Douglas said. “Energize.”
Blue-white motes of light danced in her eyes as the transporter effect enveloped her and Enkar.
• • •
As Nurse Krissten Richter administered the benzodiazepine he’d prescribed for Enkar, Bashir leaned in over the operating table. He studied the readings that projected above his patient’s unconscious form, the seizures that had racked her body only seconds earlier easing. “I’m seeing trace amounts of diburnium and tricobalt,” he told Richter and Nurse Juarez, who also stood by to assist. The doctor knew that even such small quantities of those transuranic elements were likely responsible for Enkar’s condition.
Bashir edged up toward his patient’s head. He focused on the ruddy patch of flesh that Sarina had pointed out, where a small section had charred black. The readings jumped dramatically and, for a Bajoran body, inexplicably. “Something’s been implanted under her skin,” he said. “Computer, visual scan of patient’s neck, left posterior.”
Within the run of medical data projecting above Enkar’s body, a window opened displaying an image of the left rear part of her neck. As the scan pushed into her body, Bashir saw the normal structure interrupted by cauterized tissue. Below that, a foreign object appeared, a small square of material that did not belong.
Bashir turned to Juarez. “Laser scalpel,” the doctor said.
• • •
Ro sat behind her desk, examining the image displayed on the large viewscreen hanging on the bulkhead across from her. She saw a magnified view of the object Doctor Bashir had surgically removed from Enkar Sirsy’s neck. It looked like nothing more than a nondescript square of synthetic resin, but for one corner, which had been singed into a jagged edge.
“It has several purposes, both medical and technological,” explained Lieutenant Commander John Candlewood, a computer specialist and the starbase’s primary science officer. He sat with Doctor Bashir in the chairs in front of Ro’s desk. Commander Blackmer and Lieutenant Commander Douglas stood off to the side. “For one thing,” Candlewood said, “it produces a scrambling field to deflect sensors.”
“It has its own cloaking device?” Ro said.
“Essentially, yes,” said the science officer. “At least in terms of sensor scans. But it can also be used to prevent transport of the subject into which it’s implanted.”
“Which is why we couldn’t beam Enkar out of the theater’s control booth into the stockade,” Blackmer noted.
“But you did transport her to the stockade,” Ro said.
“After we removed her from the control booth,” Blackmer said.
“The device is sophisticated enough to be programmable,” Candlewood said. “I’ve managed to dump the instruction set. The device can be configured to disallow transport from a specific location.”
“Can you tell if it was set up to prevent transport from the control booth?” Ro asked.
“Yes, because it contains a record of executed instructions,” Candlewood said. “Once Enkar had been transported into the control booth, that triggered the transporter inhibitor for as long as she remained there.”
“Meaning she had no easy avenue of escape,” Ro said.
“If she even knew what was happening,” Bashir said. “If she was even conscious.”
“What?” Ro asked.
“In addition to preventing itself from being scanned and creating a transporter block,” Candlewood explained, “the device can emit electromagnetic waves capable of inducing unconsciousness.”
“Are you telling me . . . has Enkar been telling the truth?” Ro asked. “She really doesn’t remember what happened?” The captain’s mind swam with the implications. Had Enkar Sirsy been an unwilling dupe? According to Doctor Bashir, she remained unconscious in Sector General, her recovery from being poisoned likely but uncertain. Even if she survived, though, it seemed improbable that the first minister’s chief of staff would or could provide any assistance with the investigation. If she had acted intentionally, she’d already demonstrated that she would not confess her crimes; if she had not acted of her own volition, then she hadn’t even been aware of her role in the assassination.
“According to the device’s memory, it emitted the electromagnetic waves twenty minutes prior to the start of the dedication,” Candlewood said, “and stopped only just before Lieutenant Commander Blackmer entered the control booth.”
“Meaning that she wa
s probably unconscious at the time President Bacco was killed,” Bashir said.
“But then how can she have committed the crime?” Ro asked. “And how could the emission of the waves have been timed to stop so perfectly, when the length of the speeches through the ceremony would have been an unknown beforehand?” Even as Ro asked the question, though, she realized the answer.
“Somebody was with her,” Blackmer said. “Somebody transported into the control booth with her, used her hands to fire the weapon in order to implicate her, shut down the waves keeping her unconscious, then transported out before I got there.”
“We reexamined the readings of the power drains used to feed the portable transporter we found,” Douglas said, stepping forward and setting a padd on Ro’s desk. “We knew it provided more than enough power to beam Enkar into the control booth. Calculations show it was enough to perform three transports: two people into the booth, and one out.”
“We wouldn’t have known about any of this if the device hadn’t malfunctioned,” Candlewood said. “Some of the instruction set and memory were damaged, so I can’t tell whether it was supposed to remain hidden but leaked, or whether a self-destruct process went awry.”
Ro felt sick to her stomach. She had locked down Deep Space 9—had kept it locked down even in the face of opposition from the visiting heads of state—specifically to ensure that anybody involved in the assassination could not leave the starbase. All of a sudden, it seemed as though whoever had killed President Bacco was probably gone. Unless—
“Do we have any indication at all who might have done this?” Ro asked.
Candlewood and Bashir exchanged a knowing glance, as did Blackmer and Douglas. When the doctor looked back over at Ro, he said, “We do have some evidence. There is a microscopic quantity of cellular material—other than Enkar Sirsy’s—on the device, an amount you’d expect from somebody handling it.”
“Enough cellular material to identify the person who handled it?” Ro asked.
“Not the individual, no, but I can tell you the species,” Bashir said. “It’s Tzenkethi.”
Epilogue
Adrift in Shadows
Captain Ro Laren peered down from the bluff that perched above Deep Space 9’s extensive park. Her first officer, Cenn Desca, stood beside her. Above, stars shined down through the transparent bulkhead. Below, much of the crew had congregated across the green expanse, just as they had ten days earlier, when Ro had decided to celebrate the opening of the park and the impending dedication of the starbase.
They had never completed the dedication ceremony, and because of the assassination, DS9’s transition to full operational status had occurred without any additional fanfare. In one more day, the influx of ten thousand civilian residents would begin. That meant Ro had only one last opportunity to readily assemble and address a large segment of her crew. Later, the presence of so many people aboard, as well as the arrival and departure of numerous ships, the processing of cargo, the maintenance and repair of Starfleet vessels, along with the implementation of other starbase functions, would render such gatherings problematic.
“Tomorrow, the real work of this starbase begins,” Ro said, the words picked up by her communicator and transmitted through the park’s audio system to those below. “Tomorrow, we will begin welcoming thousands of new residents, we will open our cargo hatches to freighters, we will open our repair bays to Starfleet vessels, we will open facilities like this park for the rest and recreation of crews throughout Starfleet and the rest of the sector. Tomorrow, Deep Space Nine will become busy, and it will never stop being busy.
“And yet this crew has already been through so much,” Ro continued. “For those few of you who served on the original station, it has been two years of dealing with and overcoming disaster, while at the same time working toward the day we could all stand on a new Deep Space Nine. For all of us, we have experienced another disaster, one that will stay with us for some time to come. President Bacco’s assassination marks a low point in Federation history. It is an event that wounds us collectively as a people, but it also impacts us on a personal, emotional level.”
Ro did not address the possible involvement of the Tzenkethi in the assassination. She had communicated that information to Starfleet Command, and for the moment, at least, it had been designated as classified. Ro could only hope that it would not lead to confrontation and war with the Tzenkethi Coalition and their allies in the Typhon Pact.
“Over the course of the past five days, I have had to deal with my own grief,” Ro went on. “It is a process, and I’m sure it will continue for the foreseeable future. But even as I deal with these difficult emotions, I keep asking myself questions: How do I move on from here? How do I go forward when I’m in so much pain? How do we go forward?”
Ro glanced at Cenn, acknowledging the words she would say that had originated with him. “I think there’s only one answer, and that is simply to keep moving, to keep living. It might not always be easy, but that’s what makes it even more vital never to stop, never to stay in place and allow the past to capture us in its unchanging reality. We don’t need to ignore what’s happened—nor could we—but the only thing we can change, the only thing we can shape, is our future.
“Yesterday was hard,” Ro said, “but we can strive to make today better, and to improve tomorrow still more. In that spirit, in recognition of the past, in support of the present, and in hope for the future, I am dedicating this space—our beautiful, green, open space—as Nanietta Bacco Park.”
The applause began at once—not a boisterous ovation, but steady clapping that seemed to convey the crew’s approval. She turned to Cenn, who had brought his own hands together, and he nodded to her. The moment felt . . . if not good, then at least right.
Ro turned and headed down the slope toward the trees that hid the bulkhead surrounding the park. She and Cenn had made it halfway there when a collective gasp rose behind them. Ro turned toward the noise and immediately saw movement overhead, through the transparent bulkhead.
In a great whirling gyre of blue and white light, the Bajoran wormhole had spun open.
Ro’s jaw dropped as she gazed upon the magnificent display. She marveled at the timing of the event. Never before had the wormhole seemed so vital to her, so important. Its reappearance felt as though it represented the hope for the future of which she’d just spoken.
Ro’s combadge twittered. “Slaine to Captain Ro,” said the tactical officer. She had volunteered to miss the gathering in the park and crew her station in the Hub.
Ro tapped her combadge. “This is Ro. Go ahead.”
“Captain, the wormhole has just opened,” Slaine said.
“I can see that, Zivan,” Ro said with a smile. “It looks beautiful.”
“Captain,” Slaine said, a note of urgency creeping into her voice, “there’s something emerging from it.”
Ro’s smile evaporated. “A ship?”
“No, sir. It appears too small.”
“Is there any danger to the starbase?” Ro asked, dreading the tactical officer’s response.
“No, it doesn’t seem so,” Slaine said, at least allaying the captain’s immediate concerns.
“Raise the shields,” Ro said. “Call the entire senior staff to the Hub. I’m on my way there.”
She and Cenn ran for the exit, and beyond it, the turbolift.
• • •
Ro stepped with Cenn out of the turbolift and into the Hub. She didn’t head for her command chair but instead took the steps down into the Well, to the situation table. “What have we got?” she asked, peering over at Dalin Slaine. Ro saw that Blackmer had already arrived in the Hub, as had Chief O’Brien.
“Captain, I’m having trouble making sense of these scans,” Slaine said. “I’m getting unusual energy readings, and . . . there seems to be a life-form aboard.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t a ship,” Ro said. “Let’s see it.”
Slaine worked her console, a
nd a three-dimensional image appeared above the sit table. Shaped like an hourglass, it glowed a strange green color. Ro recognized it at once as an Orb of the Prophets.
“Captain,” O’Brien spoke up. “I know this. Once before, when Captain Sisko first found the wormhole, he was in a runabout with the station’s science officer, Jadzia Dax. The wormhole aliens used one of those—” He pointed to the holographic display above the sit table. “—to send her back to the station.”
Ro knew immediately who the Orb carried—the only person it could be: Kira Nerys. She bounded up the steps and toward the doors that led to the Hub’s transporter room. “Chief, Jeff, you’re with me,” she said.
The captain entered the small, four-pad transporter room at a jog. O’Brien and Blackmer followed behind her. “Jeff, draw your phaser, just in case,” Ro said. “Chief, give me a level-one containment field and bring it aboard.”
“Aye, sir,” O’Brien said, moving to the freestanding control console. He quickly operated the panel, and a burst of blue around the perimeter of the transporter platform signaled the initiation of the containment field. “Lowering shields and locking on.”
Bright white streaks formed in the air above one of the pads. Pinpoints of light joined the beams, until it all materialized into an object. Ro took a step forward, gazing at the Orb floating before her. “What—” she started to say, but then the compartment filled with a flash of white light. When it faded an instant later, green swirls circled a figure who had suddenly appeared in place of the Orb.
As the green light faded, Ro glanced over her shoulder at O’Brien. He looked back at her quizzically and shrugged. Ro turned back to the platform. “Who are you?” she asked.
Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust Page 33