Bloodletter

CHAPTER 1

A CRY RANG through the engineering bay.

“Lousy piece of Cardassian crap!”

More words followed, in a vocabulary colorful enough to draw expressions of distaste from a Bajoran work crew nearby. Dressed in the drab gray of one of their planet’s more puritanical sects, they hadn’t yet become used to the rougher edges of station life.

Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien, still cursing, emerged from a thrust-device compartment’s access port. Blood threaded from the corner of his brow, gashed on one of the gantry chains running taut to the vessel’s exposed innards. It was only slightly redder than his sweating face.

“Is there some difficulty you have encountered?” O’Brien’s Cardassian counterpart inquired with mock solicitude. Behind him, curved panels of ship’s armor hung in the bay’s depths like brutalist stage scenery. “If you will recall, I warned you that working on our equipment was a matter best left to experts—”

“No difficulty; nothing that I can’t handle, that is.” He looked at the blood smeared on the rag he’d taken from his pocket. The wound was minor enough; a typical machine-shop accident that he could safely ignore for the time being. It was much harder to ignore the thin smile on the Cardassian engineer’s face. If lizards could grin—a major effort of self-control was required to keep from decking this one. “I just need the right tools.” He turned and headed toward the bay’s heavy equipment locker, ducking beneath the power cables looping overhead.

A satisfying expression of alarm showed in the Cardassian engineer’s eyes when O’Brien came back. “What . . . what do you think you’re doing . . . ”

It was his turn to smile. He pressed the joystick on the control box in his hands; behind him, the ponderous articulated device that had followed him out of the locker clumped forward, the steel deck clanging at each step. “I’ve been here long enough to be plenty familiar with the quality of Cardassian construction.” He deliberately steered the jacksledge so that the uplifted striking weight clipped one of the bay’s structural girders; the resulting shock wave came close to knocking the Cardassian off his feet. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that your stuff responds to an old Earthly engineering principle—If it doesn’t fit, use a bigger hammer.”

“You’ve gone mad—” The Cardassian scrambled out of the way as the device swung toward the drydocked vessel. “This . . . this is impossible. . . .”

Hammers didn’t come any bigger than the jacksledge. O’Brien and the rest of the DS9 tech crew had cobbled it together for smashing through whatever interior sections of the station had collapsed so badly that only brute force could clear a path. The striking weight was loaded with enough depleted fission material to punch a humanoid-sized hole between one deck and the next. Now, it followed O’Brien like a puppy on a leash as he clambered inside the open thrust-device compartment. The jacksledge’s servo-mechs allowed it to delicately pick its way into the space, the massive legs settling between the thrust chamber and the surrounding bulkhead.

The Cardassian engineer’s face appeared at the rim of the access port. He had recovered enough to begin blustering. “The use of this device is totally uncalled-for—” His voice echoed off the chamber’s wall towering above O’Brien’s head. “This is a complete violation of the operational protocols agreed to by the administration of this station . . . it cannot be done—”

“Bet me.” O’Brien thumbed the trigger button on the control box, and the striking weight swung through an arc close enough that he heard the rush through the air. The last he heard was the jacksledge hitting the bulkhead like the clapper of a monstrous bell. When the diaphragms inside his protective ear inserts opened up again, he could hear the ringing of the dented metal, and cutting through that, the ululating wail of the vessel’s security alarms going off.

He eyeballed the effect the hammer blow had made upon the bulkhead. If anything, the freight hauler wasn’t crap, but rather, overengineered for the research purposes to which it had been converted. It would take another dozen blows, at least, to bend the metal for enough clearance; then the buffer shields could finally be lowered into place.

The alarms didn’t shut off, but grew louder instead, shrieking from the violated core of the vessel. Before readying the jacksledge for another swing, O’Brien glanced out the access port and saw the Cardassian engineer running for the loading doors—whether from terror or to summon help, he couldn’t tell. The Bajorans looked up from the eyepieces of the assembly bench. They weren’t so puritanical, he noted, as to be able to resist smiling at the Cardassian’s discomfiture.

“Let’s get a few more in.” He patted the closest of the jacksledge’s legs. “Before anybody comes to stop us.”

After the DS9 security team had taken away the chief engineer—the head of security himself had snapped the hand restraints on—the Bajorans glanced around at each other. Events did not usually get so dramatic in the engineering bay.

“He seems a decent enough man.” One laid down the delicate tools and flexed his cramped fingers. “This O’Brien—he has not been ungracious toward us.”

A few of the others nodded in agreement. They had all expected the chief engineer to have greeted them with hostility, to have impeded their being made part of the station’s construction and retrofitting operations; O’Brien had been forced to take them on as part of an agreement hammered out between the station’s commander and the government authorities down on the surface of Bajor. But if O’Brien had not been exactly overjoyed by their arrival, he had at least been fair to them since.

Another of the crew pushed aside his magnifying optic. “I will admit that, when the great time comes, I may even miss him. A bit . . . ”

The sympathetic comments were more than the group’s leader could take. None but the other Bajorans knew that he was in charge of their spiritual and moral welfare, charged with shielding them from the temptations to be found among the heathens. He bore no mark that would have indicated his hidden rank to the Starfleet officers. It was just one more thing of which they were unenlightened.

“Perhaps,” he said coldly, “in your devotions you could strive to remember why we’re here; the purpose behind our coming to this place.” The leader cast a stern gaze around the assembly bench.

The others, suitably chastened, looked down at the glittering components of their labors.

“I only meant—” The first who had spoken, the youngest of the group, now made an attempt to defend himself. “Just that there’s surely no harm in being on good terms with the man. That’s all.”

“Ah . . . harm.” The leader nodded, making a show of mulling over the word. “As if our people hadn’t suffered enough of that, already. From just such creatures as this chief engineer of whom you seem so fond.” His own words lashed out, before the other could protest. “It doesn’t matter that he’s not a Cardassian. He, as well as all the rest of them, is still an outsider. They are not Bajoran.”

Silence wrapped itself around the group. None of them could raise his eyes to meet the harsh gaze of the leader.

“From now on—” He spoke softly, having vanquished all opposition. “Keep company only with your brethren, and you will be shielded from falling into error.”

No one spoke. One by one, they picked up their delicate tools and resumed their work.

He could hear them coming up the corridor outside his office—even with the door closed. For Benjamin Sisko, that was one of the unforeseen advantages of the Deep Space Nine station’s ramshackle state of construction. Aboard the Enterprise, or any of the other Starfleet vessels, acoustic isolation between one sector and another, between the public spaces and the private compartments, was total; you didn’t know who might be at your door until they announced their presence. Here, however, the ringing of footsteps on bare metal, the echoing of raised voices against the walls—all came clearly to him. Which gave him time, if only a few seconds, to put on his game face, the mask of calm authority that everyone expected from the station’s commander.

“ . . . sabotage . . . blatant sabotage. On my world, that is a capital offense. . . .” One voice had the grating tones of a Cardassian officer, the combination of overweening arrogance and innate hostility, without which all of them seemed unable to even order a drink in one of the station’s lounges. From the sound of it, this one seemed to have been pushed from mere annoyance to vibrating rage. “We shall see what kind of justice can be expected from your Federation superiors. . . .”

Another voice muttered something in reply, too low for Sisko to make out the words, though he recognized his chief engineer’s accent. He had a vague idea of what this was all about; the station’s head of security had been able to give him a rushed comm call, with an indication of the mess that was about to land on his desk.

The desk . . . that was the other advantage of a bit of warning. These days, any interruption seemed to come while he was chin-deep in the intricacies of Bajoran diplomacy. Spread before him were things not meant for the prying, advantage-seeking eyes of a Cardassian officer. As the voices and footsteps approached, Sisko blanked the computer screen.

“Enter.” He settled back in his chair, expression composed so as not to show that he’d just painfully nicked his shin on the drawer’s corner. Every damned thing the Cardassians had built seemed to have sharp edges sticking out of it, waiting to draw blood; that seemed the way they liked things to be.

Worse luck—there were two Cardassian officers. One he recognized as the chief engineer for the vessel currently being retrofitted in the drydock bay; the other—he suppressed a sigh of aggrieved annoyance—was Gul Tahgla, the vessel’s captain. Tahgla, in his brief time aboard DS9, had already proved himself to be an apt pupil in the arts of obstruction and connivance practiced by his crony and superior, Gul Dukat. Sisko sometimes wondered if Dukat had sharpened the metal edges before vacating the desk at which he now sat; he wouldn’t put it past him.

“For the love of—” Behind the Cardassians, Chief Engineer O’Brien whispered to Odo, loud enough for Sisko to hear, then grimaced as he held up the restraints binding his wrists. “Did you have to put ‘em on so tight? If you’re just trying to show these jokers you’re serious—”

The security chief glared back at him. “I do nothing for show.”

The Cardassian captain nodded stiffly toward Sisko. “I believe we have a small . . . problem, Commander.” A relishing smile lurked on his face as he spoke the word. “Or perhaps not so small. A certain matter of deliberate and unprovoked sabotage on the part of one of your senior crew members—”

“Bull.” O’Brien snorted in disgust. “I’ve been plenty provoked, thank you.”

Sisko listened to the Cardassian engineer’s account of what had happened in drydock. Now, he had to work to suppress his own smile; he would have liked to have been there when O’Brien had fired off the jacksledge, just to have seen the Cardassian scurry for the bay’s exit.

“I’m sure the commander will appreciate the ramifications of this incident.” Gul Tahgla’s voice grew more icily formal. “The agreement with the Federation, by which your technicians are given access to some of the most crucial areas of our ships, was accepted by our council under duress. In your guise of protectors of the hapless Bajorans, you have obtained control of the stable wormhole, access to which is permitted only to those who meet your conditions.” The formal tone was displaced by a sneer. “Odd, isn’t it, how such deep altruism just happens to give the Federation the keys to the entire Gamma Quadrant.”

“Please. There’s no call to—”

“Hear me out, Commander.” The Cardassian leaned threateningly over the desk. “It has been long suspected by our council that the Federation’s requirements for travel through the wormhole are a pretext by which spies could be given free run of our vessels, in the guise of workmen installing these ridiculous, nonfunctioning devices—”

“Believe me, if they were nonfunctioning, they wouldn’t be so expensive.” The Cardassian had hit a sore point with Sisko. A major portion of the station’s budget, the Federation resources devoted to keeping DS9 up and running, had gone into the on-site construction of the impulse energy buffers. Although no vessel, Federation or Cardassian or any other, would be allowed into the wormhole without the buffers in place, the reimbursement schedule that Starfleet had mandated covered only a fraction of their actual cost—at least until the next appropriations review.

In the meantime, DS9’s operations were being squeezed tight by the need to get craft such as the Cardassian research vessel ready for intrawormhole travel. It had been less than twenty-four hours ago that Major Kira had stormed into this office with the figures of the expected shortfall, rows of numbers on the screen of her data padd, as much as demanding that he immediately order a halt to any further retrofit work. Why should we go in the hole for the sake of Cardassians?—those had been her words. Kira had little experience with the subtleties of the Federation bureaucracy; he’d had a difficult time convincing her that running a deficit was the best way of persuading Starfleet to increase their budget.

As for doing things for the sake of Cardassians . . . he had his reasons for that, as well. And, for the time being, he was telling no one. “—and you’d better get it straight, nothing leaves that drydock till I say so! You can be a friggin’ admiral for all I care—”

The sound of his chief engineer’s shouting brought Sisko up from the deep workings of his thoughts. “Please, gentlemen.” He held up a hand for quiet, then gestured to Odo. “You can go ahead and take the restraints off. I hardly think they’re necessary.”

Tahgla’s expression soured even further. “Sabotage is treated so lightly by you?”

“I very much doubt that there was any criminal intent here; perhaps just a simple misunderstanding, that’s all. Mister O’Brien, if you could give us your interpretation?”

The engineer left off glaring at Odo and rubbing his chafed wrists. “It’s simple enough, Commander. We’ve gone back and forth with this bunch. We must’ve had twenty communiques, at least—I could call up the archive from the data bank and show you—concerning the dimensions of the impulse energy buffers that were going to be installed on their vessel.” Teeth-gritting frustration showed in O’Brien’s face. “It’s just a matter of how much clearance they’d have to leave us so we could fit the damn things in around their engines. We finally get it worked out—or so I thought—and then they show up in our drydock, and their engine compartments are almost a meter too narrow.” He shrugged. “So I fired up the jacksledge and went to make myself a little working room.”

“The dimensions of those chambers are exactly as you stipulated.” Tahgla jabbed a finger at O’Brien. “Our technicians are not given to the sort of errors you seem to expect from your own—”

Sisko angled the computer panel toward his chief engineer. “Let’s just take a look, shall we?”

An interlocking display of construction diagrams appeared, with the words SECURITY—ACCESS RESTRICTED blinking in red at the top of the screen. O’Brien lifted his hands from the keyboard and pointed to the specifications. “There—that’s what they’re supposed to be.”

His counterpart leaned past him, the sharp ridge of his finger tapping the Cardassian numerals. “And that’s what they are.” He glared as fiercely as Gul Tahgla, like an attack dog straining against its leash. “Just as you specified!”

Before Sisko could say anything, his security chief interrupted. “Excuse me; I don’t wish to parade my own expertise here—” Standing behind the quarreling engineers, Odo had craned his neck to see what was on the computer panel. “But I think I may be able to clear this up for everyone.” He glanced toward Sisko. “You see, Commander, I’ve lived among the Cardassians; so I’m a little more conscious of the stratifications in their society. The various sectors have different systems of mathematical notation—the numbers are the same, but the bases used for dividing and multiplying into units of measurement are not.” His fingertip drew a line across the numerals as he turned his level gaze toward the Cardassian engineer. “I believe that if you recalculate and use damur, the mercantile base, the results will come closer to what our chief engineer wanted.”

Sisko leaned back in his chair, watching the others assembled around his desk. He could see a smile tugging at the comers of O’Brien’s mouth as the Cardassian engineer squinted at the panel, a furious computation almost visible behind his scaly brow.

Though less emotion showed on the other Cardassian’s face, Sisko kept a closer eye on him. Gul Tahgla had watched Odo the whole time the security chief had been giving his short lecture, as though waiting for some particular word or phrase to come out of Odo’s mouth. Evidently, it hadn’t; Tahgla had kept his own silence, the suspicion that had narrowed his gaze finally dissipating.

“Well, yes . . . ” The Cardassian engineer straightened up, his voice stiff with sullen anger and embarrassment. He managed a nod toward Odo. “Your point is well taken. Perhaps . . . perhaps the confusion arose during your chief engineer’s initial communications with us. . . .”

A snort of disgust came from O’Brien.

Sisko went on observing. Especially Odo; the shapeshifter’s usual expressionless mask had betrayed no inner emotions. But he had picked up an unintended sign, anyway: a slight curling of Odo’s fingers, as though he were grasping, seizing hold of something. A clue, something that explained or revealed . . .

“It is not important to assign blame now.” Tahgla knew when he had been beaten. “Our own technicians will make the necessary adjustments, and then the installation of the impulse buffers can proceed as originally agreed upon.” The tone of insinuating politeness colored his words again. “I trust our scheduled departure date will still be met?”

“I’m sure Mister O’Brien will make every effort. In fact, that’s an order.”

“Glad to.” The words sooner the better didn’t need to be spoken. As O’Brien turned away, he leaned close to Odo’s ear. “And next time, not so damn tight!”

Odo stayed behind when all the rest had left. “I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of Tahgla’s chief engineer right now.” He gazed down the corridor before palming the office’s door closed. “A Cardassian gul doesn’t enjoy being caught out in an underling’s mistake.”

“Rather an interesting mistake, actually.” The diagram and specs were still on Sisko’s computer panel. “I remember learning at the Academy that the Cardassians had these differing math systems. But—” He smiled. “I don’t recall much more than that. Was there something else you wanted to tell me about them?”

“Just this, Commander.” Odo looked behind himself, a show of habitual, if needless, caution. “The Cardassian numerical bases have their origin in the various economic classes; the damur that’s used for scientific computations comes from the base devised by their ancient merchants and traders; the unit of linear measurement is based upon the size of a seed grain common on their home planet, I understand. The umur notation—” He pointed to the numbers on the screen. “That’s the numbering base that originated with the warrior caste.”

“Ah.” Sisko knew what Odo was about to tell him.

“Somewhere along the line, the Cardassians translated the specifications sent by O’Brien, but into umur rather than damur.” Odo’s hand clenched tight. “That’s not an unarmed research vessel sitting in drydock. It’s a Cardassian military ship in disguise.”

CHAPTER 2

HE WALKED right into the ambush. He should have known that she would be looking for him. Gunning for me, thought Sisko, ruefully. That’d be the right expression.

“I’ve been doing some more thinking.” Major Kira swung into stride next to him, almost as soon as he had entered the station’s main corridor. “About our previous conversation.”

She had come straight toward him, the crowd parting before her, as much due to her well-known temper as her rank. Plowing through them with a head-lowered determination, she was like an icebreaker navigating the frozen seas of some intemperate planet.

What he needed right now—after a long shift of studying classified Federation position papers and transcripts of the bickering provisional government down on the surface of Bajor—was dinner and a talk with his son Jake about the boy’s schoolwork. Followed by a hot bath and a spinal adjustment, and a seat along Wrigley Field’s first-base line, where he could contemplate the holosuite’s re-creation of a solid home run going in a perfect heart-lifting arc over the left-field wall. He didn’t need Major Kira bending his ear any further than it already had been.

Sisko kept on walking, not even looking around at her. “I don’t suppose it would make any difference,” he said, “if I told you the matter was closed.” He kept his voice low, to avoid being overheard too easily. Faces, familiar and unrecognized, permanent and transient, humanoid and otherwise, thronged the corridor.

“You know me better than that.” Kira made a joke of it—or nonjoke, similar to the thin nonsmile that marked her grudging tolerance of all fools that she hadn’t been empowered to toss out of the station’s airlock. At least, not yet. “I don’t give up very easily.”

“Indeed.” At the mouth to one of the corridor’s unused branches, a Gameran peddler had set up his quick-folding table, and was doing a brisk business in what appeared to be mildly stimulative transdermal patches. Though it would have been faster to take a turbolift from his office to his living quarters, he’d made it his habit to physically walk some sector of the station every shift, to see for himself what might be going on in this strange, small world he supposedly commanded. He made a mental note to have Odo move the patch peddler on, then just as quickly canceled it; for all he knew, the Gameran was part of the security chief’s network of snoops and petty informants.

“I feel it’s imperative to remind you that—”

“Major Kira.” He stopped and turned toward her. The soft bulk of a Buhlmeri cargo-tech bumped against his shoulder, muttered an apology, then went on. The standing population had increased markedly over the last several shifts; when he’d first been posted here, the station’s public areas had been sparsely occupied ruins. “I’ll be frank with you: I’m tired. I’ve been working hard the last few shifts, and I’m not in the mood to rehash a subject that I’ve made abundantly clear to you is no longer open for discussion. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“But that’s exactly my point.” Kira spoke through gritted teeth, her eyes flashing twin laser-points of anger. “And you’re only fooling yourself if you think it’s something recent. You’re swamped up to your eyeballs in diplomatic affairs, enough to fill every second of every watch, and you’re still trying to manage all the particulars of DS Nine’s operations—”

“You forget, Major, that’s my duty. My first duty.”

“Wrong. Your duty is to see that it gets done.” She made no attempt to keep her voice down; faces along the corridor turned their way. “It’s not going to do you or the station any good for you to keel over in your tracks from exhaustion. As long as the Federation expects you to oversee negotiations with the planetside government, you’re going to have to learn to delegate some of these things.”

Sisko felt a blood vessel at the corner of his brow begin to throb. Kira was far out of line. It would have been difficult enough for him to check his own temper, on receiving a warning like that from a superior officer, to hear it from his nominal second-in-command was aggravating beyond endurance.

“I’ve delegated quite enough, Major.” He started walking again, to burn off the adrenaline that had welled up inside him. “Especially to you.” He swung a narrowed glance at her. “Perhaps more than I would have, if your position here had been a matter of choice for me.”

She ignored the last comment, as she matched his stride. “Oh, you’ve certainly delegated.” Sarcasm seeped between her words. “Minutiae, the smallest things, those you think anyone else is capable of handling.” She grabbed his arm to halt him. “I’m talking about policy decisions, Commander. This station is Bajoran property—in actuality, not just as some technical legalism. The time is coming when all of DS Nine’s operations are to be turned over to my people. That’s by your own Federation’s edict. And your commission here includes preparing for that time. As the senior Bajoran officer aboard, I should be given the greatest possible authority to—”

“My commission, Major, is to suitably prepare for the transfer of DS Nine’s control. To Bajorans who are ready to assume the responsibilities for it.”

Kira’s lowered voice spoke of anger hotter than any shouting could express. “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

He glanced along the corridor. The other pedestrians had slowed down, trying as subtly as possible to stay within earshot. “Come with me.”

They were only steps away from Quark’s number-one lounge. Inside, Sisko signaled over the heads of the patrons stacked up at the bar. “Give us a private booth. And if you switch on any of your bugs, you’ll wind up eating them.”

The Ferengi displayed his sharp-toothed smile. “Commander, I would never . . . ” In fact, he probably wouldn’t; such discretion was part of the understanding by which Quark was allowed to keep his various enterprises running.

With the booth sealed shut, Sisko and Major Kira were encased in a soundproof bubble. He leaned across the narrow table. “Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear before. Or perhaps you think I’ve forgotten about some of the decisions you have been allowed to make—and their consequences.”

“If this is about that group of Redemptorists I let come aboard—”

He cut her off. “What else would it be about? Correction: it’s not just about whether you showed a lack of judgment in granting them entry to the station. It’s a question of the underlying sympathies that might have prompted that decision.”

The Redemptorists, a team of six microassembly specialists currently assigned to O’Brien’s drydock bay, had been brought up from Bajor enough shifts ago that the issues raised by the group’s presence should have begun to lose some of their sharp edges. Major Kira had been in charge of their security clearance—she still was, for any other Bajorans that might come aboard in the future; he hadn’t relieved her of the assignment—and she had personally signed their entry and residence chits. All of which Sisko had been able to verify for himself when Odo had first told him of the irregularities in the new workers’ backgrounds.

Odo’s worries were justified, given the reputation of the Redemptorists as one of the most intractable elements in the overheated stew of Bajoran politics. They were more of a religious movement, a fundamentalist group opposed to the conciliatory mainstream faith headed by Kai Opaka. Fanaticism had inevitably progressed, as it seemed to on any world, to violence; several Redemptorists had been involved in terrorist activities directed against other Bajorans who didn’t follow their particular annihilating creed. In the murderous infighting that characterized the Bajoran splinter groups—the ever-shifting coalitions and temporary alliances and eventual drawing of daggers—the Redemptorists were notable for the ruthlessness by which they dealt with long-standing enemies and onetime friends alike.

“Those men are not murderers, Commander. They’re all followers of the Redemptorists’ political defense wing. Their group even has members sitting in the Bajoran parliament—”

“I’m well aware of the fine shadings that afflict Bajoran politics. As you noted, I seem to spend a great deal of my time lately on precisely that. I’m also aware—perhaps more than you are, Major—of the difficulties that the Redemptorist movement has presented to the provisional government. In fact, your government has contacted me directly, to see if there’s anything that can be done from aboard the station to jam the pirate broadcasts by which the Redemptorists recruit other Bajorans to their cause.”

“That doesn’t alter the status of the ones I allowed on board. They’re legal—”

He and Kira had gone over this before. “ ’Legal’ seems to be a very flexible concept with you, Major. I don’t make quite the same distinction that you do between those who murder and those who condone murder. And what the Bajoran government needs to do—the elements it has to bring inside itself to stay alive—is not going to be the guideline for how this station is operated.”

“This Bajoran station, Commander.” Kira’s anger leapt another notch. “You keep forgetting that this is Bajoran property—”

“Currently administered by Starfleet—and that responsibility is mine.” He spread his hands flat on the table. “And it will be that way as long as the situation on Bajor’s surface remains the mess that it is right now.”

“But how is that ever going to change?” The words took on a desperate edge. “Those groups have to be brought into the center of things. They have tremendous energy and capabilities—”

“Oh yes, they’ve demonstrated that, all right.”

She pushed past his sarcasm. “If the Redemptorists and the others are left out on the fringe, unable to achieve any measure of legitimate power, what other choice are they going to have?”

“Besides violence?” Sisko shook his head before replying. “How about patience?”

“After what the Cardassians did to us, Commander, patience is not a word of which the Bajorans are very fond.”

“It may not be a word that’s to your liking, Major. But it’s one you’re going to learn the meaning of. There was a time not too long ago when I felt assured of your loyalty to this station; that it was of at least equal weight with your devotion to your people. But now, I’ve begun to wonder. This incident, combined with other things you’ve said and done, raises grave concerns in my mind as to whether an underlying sympathy with the aims of these terrorist groups—and your own impatience—has gained the upper hand in your thoughts. Until I’m convinced once more that the survival of DS Nine is your top priority, the question of your being given greater authority here is, as I said before, not open for discussion.” He stood up and reached for the door control, then stopped and looked back at Kira. “I’m disappointed, Major. I would have thought that you of all people, with your own experiences back on Bajor, would remember what damage these people can do.” He saw that the reference to the incidents in her past, before she had been posted as military to the station, was equivalent to a slap across her face. She glared back at him in silence.

The booth’s door slid open, revealing Quark right outside. “Refreshments?” He smiled and raised a tray with two synthales. “On the house.”

Sisko got past him without mishap, but Kira didn’t. Quark looked at the major’s back as she pushed her way out into the crowded corridor, then glanced down at the puddle and overturned mugs at his feet. “I guess not. . . .”

“When you say ‘liquid state,’ what do you mean? How much—a liter? Ten liters?” A malicious grin sliced across the Cardassian security officer’s face. “A pint?”

Odo looked away from him in annoyance. “I find your interest in my bodily functions to be distasteful. You can be confident that I have no interest in yours.”

He continued walking, his visual scan moving across the maze of pipes and exposed wiring that lined the station’s lower decks. These areas were little trafficked—at least by anyone who had a legitimate reason for being here—and were far down on the list for eventual upgrading and being brought back into service. The deep shadows—some sectors were almost completely unlit—and even deeper niches were consequently perfect for all those with illegitimate reasons. By his own calculations, he estimated that he had discovered and confiscated perhaps only 10 percent of the contraband moving on, through, and off DS9; the damage that the Cardassians had wrought upon the station’s exosystems had left it a smuggler’s paradise. Until the new security perimeters were phased in, all his vigilance was needed to keep the station from becoming an open thoroughfare for illicit goods.

By contrast, his counterpart from the Cardassian research vessel sitting in drydock—inside his head, he put quotation marks around the word research—kept his gaze locked on Odo. That annoyed him, as well. Of course, he knew that was the reason for the Cardassian’s constant presence: to keep an eye on him—the watcher watched.

“Isn’t it pretty close to that time for you?” Gri Rafod peered at him in amusement. “I’d hate for you to melt into a puddle just because you were giving me the grand tour.”

“I’m not giving you anything.” Odo clipped the words short. “You wished to accompany me on my rounds; you do so against my wishes. However, I am bound by the terms of the agreement worked out between your superiors and Commander Sisko. You persist in this fiction that you are preparing a report to the Cardassian council on recent improvements to the station’s security, fine. As you wish.” He stopped and turned his severest gaze on the other. “But you’re not fooling me.”

“How your harsh speech wounds me.” The Cardassian should have been an actor, he laid a hand dramatically upon his chest. “When I spoke to Gul Dukat, he told me that you were given to such groundless suspicions of others’ motives. I didn’t want to believe it, but . . . ” He shook his head. “I suppose it’s an inevitable result of the jobs you and I have been given. We see the worst sides of sentient creatures, don’t we?”

Odo kept silent. He had already lied to the Cardassian, a small but necessary violation of his own inner code. He wasn’t bound by any ludicrous agreement; if the maintenance of the station’s security required actions that weren’t officially approved of, the commander didn’t need to know of them—or could at least pretend not to know. Unfortunately, if he were to elude this Gri Rafod’s obnoxious surveillance—easy enough for a shapeshifter to do—it would play right into the hands of the Cardassian security officer’s superiors. The Cardassians were looking for any excuse to break the hard-negotiated pact by which all vessels, including their own, were brought into the DS9 drydock to have the impulse energy buffers mounted around their engines before being allowed access to the stable wormhole. The fact that the buffers enabled vessels to pass through the wormhole without harming its inhabitants seemed to bear no weight with the Cardassians. They cared little enough for the welfare of creatures that they could actually observe and touch, let alone the seemingly nonmaterial ones inside the wormhole.

If he were to slip away from the Cardassian security officer, then Gul Tahgla, the vessel’s captain, would immediately cry that the duplicitous Starfleet officers manning the station had unleashed their resident shapeshifter to spy out all the secrets and classified information that might be aboard the ship. The Cardassian council would howl that the installation of buffers was just a ruse to get their vessels into Starfleet’s prying hands. The proverbial hell would break loose, the pact between the Federation and the Cardassians would collapse, the Cardassians would press for whatever advantage they could derive from the resulting chaos.

Of course, none of that altered the fact that Odo had already decided to leave Gri Rafod hanging, and sneak undetected into the vessel sitting in drydock. He had determined his course of action even before the Cardassians’ unconscious error had revealed the vessel’s military nature.

“I hope you don’t feel that this time we’re sharing together is wasted.” Rafod smiled as he strolled beside Odo. “I assure you that I’m learning a great deal from you.”

More than you realize, thought Odo. If his own face had been capable of it, he would have smiled back. The Cardassian wouldn’t even realize how much he’d learned, until it was too late.

Their route led them to the active—officially so—sectors of the station. To the drydock itself. Odo detected Gri Rafod’s attention going up a notch, a tensing of the spine into full alertness. As they walked through a shower of sparks from a bank of welding torches, the dull gray shape of the Cardassian vessel loomed before them, its flanks crossed with scaffolding and the heavy cables of the overhead cranes.

Chief Engineer O’Brien stood before a shop computer panel, head lowered as he punched up progressively more detailed layers of schematics on the screen. “Some kind of problem, gents?”

“No, of course not. Merely routine.” Odo stood with hands clasped behind his back, gazing across the drydock’s bustling activity. Shouting voices and the clash of metal against metal assaulted his senses. While in the empty spaces belowdecks, he had tuned his hearing for maximum sensitivity, to pick up the slightest sound; now, he simply flowed an extra layer of molecules across the tympanum inside each ear, to block the loudest noises hammering through the air. “Busy, I take it?”

Gri Rafod wasn’t as fortunate; without filter plugs such as those O’Brien and his crew wore, the drydock’s noise level made it difficult for him to follow even a shouted conversation. Still, it was wise to remain cautious in front of him; Odo could see the Cardassian watching from the corner of his eye, as though an attempt to penetrate the vessel’s mysteries might happen at any moment.

“We’re about back up to speed.” O’Brien shrugged.

“Now that we got that little, uh, miscommunication sorted out.” The chief engineer had left the jacksledge sitting in the middle of the drydock, a squat and silent totem of power and a warning to the Cardassians against any further interference.

“Have you had a chance to work on anything else around the station? I know that there was a small plumbing problem the commander was concerned about—”

A sheet of meter-thick plate slipped and fell, its edge striking the drydock’s floor with an impact that Odo could feel through the soles of his boots. Beside him, Gri Rafod winced in pain.

The accident had distracted O’Brien’s attention; when he turned back after looking to see that no one had been injured, his expression was puzzled. “What plumbing problem?”

He’d been keeping his speech gruff, as though to indicate he was still annoyed at having been arrested and taken in hand restraints to Sisko’s office. Odo glanced quickly at Gri Rafod, to see if the Cardassian had picked up on this lapse.

Before Odo could say anything, O’Brien caught himself. “Oh, you mean the hydraulics system.” The security chief nodded. “That was no problem. You can tell the commander it’s all been taken care of. Ready to go.”

“Fine. I’ll tell him when I see him.” He turned to Rafod. “I’m afraid I’ll have to cut our little tour short. As you so considerately observed a while ago—it’s about that time for me.”

As they headed for the station’s Promenade and the security office, Gri Rafod shook his head, as though his auditory organs were still ringing. “It’s a pleasure to be out of that place.”

Odo said nothing, but gazed with satisfaction at him. The Cardassian didn’t suspect a thing.

She almost didn’t see him until she bumped right into him. Preoccupied with her thoughts, the deep brooding in which the commander had left her, Major Kira stepped into her quarters as the door slid open. She looked up and saw the station’s head medical officer standing there, holding a book in his hands.

“What are you doing in here?” The invasion of privacy would have offended her, even if she had been in a better mood.

Julian Bashir smiled as ingratiatingly as possible under the circumstances and placed the book back on the shelf. “Don’t you remember? You coded me one-time access, so I could give you the results of your medical tests.” He picked up his data padd from the corner of the desk set into the bulkhead and turned its small screen toward her. “I think you might recall that you wanted to keep it, um . . . private.”

“Right.” She rubbed her forehead. “Okay, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to tear your head off.” Kira sat down heavily on the corner of the bed. “So, what’s the verdict?”

It had taken some resolve on her part to ask a favor of Bashir. For some time now, she had found him, of all the DS9 crew members, to be the most personally irritating—completely at odds with her style of doing things, her notions of how to conduct oneself. She had long ago bolted herself into the direct approach, to put her foot down and pile right into any problem, any confrontation with another person. That was so she could endure, and even admire, Benjamin Sisko, even when she was 180 degrees opposed to him; she was never in doubt as to what the commander’s feelings were. But Bashir relied too much on charm—or at least what he must’ve thought was charm—and an easy, flattering manner, none of which she trusted. Stop trying to be friends with the universe, she wanted to tell him. And get on with your job.

“Nothing.” Bashir shrugged and tossed the data padd back onto the desk. “There’s nothing at all wrong with you. All the test results are within normal ranges. Perhaps a little elevated on some of the electrolytes, but nothing I’d worry about. You’re probably just tired.” His would-be ingratiating smile appeared again. “From overwork.”

She didn’t know if she was relieved or not. She’d asked him to run the tests and draw a blood sample after-hours, when the only medical unit staff on duty would all have been over in the emergency facilities. He’d assured her of confidentiality, that no one else-particularly Commander Sisko—would know that she’d been there; that was part of his duty as a physician. So now, if she didn’t need to be concerned about that, and the tests had all come out clear, then she only had to worry about what had prompted her request in the first place.

“It’s no secret how hard you push yourself.” Bashir gazed up at the ceiling as he musingly rubbed his chin. “Now, if I were your personal physician—if you’d put yourself under my care exclusively—I’d prescribe a long course of relaxation. A rest shift with no thoughts of duty or work . . . a fine dinner, a bottle of wine, pleasant company . . . ” He brightened. “Say, with me. How does that sound?”

Kira groaned inside herself. That was another reason she had taken a dislike to him. The same thing about which she had commiserated with Dax and every other humanoid female aboard the station. You couldn’t say hello to him without it leading to a come-on—a serious overestimation of his own appeal.

“It sounds like a bad idea.” She laid her head back against the pillow, not even caring what ideas might be zipping through Bashir’s head now. “As you said, I’m probably tired. Too tired.” He didn’t seem to get the message. Or did, but chose to ignore it. He went on scanning across the items on her shelves, the few books, the various little remembrance-enhancers of her past—there weren’t many of those, either. That was a result of her own war on whatever scraps of sentimentality might still be left inside her, and the fact that a childhood spent in refugee camps didn’t give one much to fondly look back on.

“Really, Kira, you can do better than this.” Bashir’s voice became mock-chiding as he examined the small, portable chip-player sitting between its minuscule speakers. He shook his head. “This is pathetic—barely adequate.”

“It works; that’s all I care about. And I got a good price on it from Quark—something about it having fallen off the back of an interstellar transport.” Her problem was getting into moral debt with Bashir—he’d done her a favor, having run her tests at a time when he knew that she knew he was already swamped with getting the station’s quarantine module up and running. So now, she supposed she had to have a semblance of conversation with him, when all she really wanted to do was boot him out of her quarters. “I suppose you think I should have something totally modern and up-to-date.”

“Oh no; by no means. You should have something classic.” He didn’t appear to be joking around. His face lit with enthusiasm. “Right now, I’m restoring a vintage Earthside music-playback system. Talk about old-fashioned: you wouldn’t believe the size of the media it uses. The discs are nearly the size of your hand.” He held up his own to demonstrate. “But the Theta decoding algorithms are just pure gold—the last great Sinclair-Moffett design breakthrough. They were supposedly up for some kind of Nobel prize before they died. . . .”

“I had no idea.” She gazed up at the ceiling, struggling to conceal her boredom.

“When I’ve got it up and running, it’s magic. The walls just fall away, and you’re in the Concertgebouw in old Amsterdam, or the pre-restoration Carnegie. Better than a holosuite—at least as long as you keep your eyes closed.” His voice dropped a few tones in pitch. “You should come by my quarters sometime and listen to it.”

Another come-on. The man was relentless. Now, she could put him out the door with no guilt feelings. She was about to tell him so when she heard another voice speaking. It took her a moment to realize that Bashir had pushed the start button on the chip-player.

She was off the bed and had shoved her way past him before he knew what was happening. She punched EJECT and pulled the chip out of the machine.

“What’s wrong?” Bashir stared at her in puzzlement.

“Nothing—” She grasped the chip firmly in her hand. “But you don’t want to hear this. It’s just some, uh, Bajoran folk music. Really monotonous.” That had been a screwup on her part, leaving the chip where anyone could come across it; she’d have to be more careful in the future.

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind. I have very . . . wide-ranging tastes.”

Yeah, I bet. “Some other time. Right now, I think I’m getting a headache.” The old lines were still the best ones.

After he had left—finally—and she was alone, Kira pulled the bed’s mattress away from the bulkhead, enough to reveal the small hiding place she had created. She pried up the corner of the wall panel, and was about to drop the recorded chip in with the others, when she stayed her hand. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing deep, and trying to control the pounding of her heart.

Maybe Bashir was right. Maybe she needed a rest, a long one, during which she could somehow find a way to stop thinking about the things that shouted inside her head. Stop thinking, and stop remembering . . .

Or perhaps it was Commander Sisko who was right. It was something different that caused her errors in judgment; she couldn’t even decide if it had been a mistake to approve letting the Redemptorists come aboard the station. Not fatigue, but something much more fundamental, the division that cleaved her soul. Between what she was trying to become, was pretending to be . . . and what she could never stop being.

She drew her hand back, still holding the chip. She got up and put it back in the machine, then hit the PLAY button. She turned down the volume so there wasn’t the slightest chance of anyone outside the door overhearing, then lay back down on the bed.

Eyes closed, she listened to the stern, compelling voice. It was the same as that on all the other chips in the hiding place, recordings of the illicit broadcasts of the Redemptorist leader on Bajor.

The man’s voice spoke of blood and fire, the need for the great cleansing of their planet, the driving away of all intruders from beyond the stars. In shame, mingled with a fierce, irrational pride, Major Kira Nerys clenched her teeth and listened. A single tear welled up and traced a line across her cheek.

CHAPTER 3

THE HIDING PLACE had been changed several times already; to prevent the station’s security chief from finding it and exposing the unauthorized guest it held—the most important person to the future of Bajor. He was aboard DS9, and only a select few knew of his presence. The youngest of the Redemptorist microassembly crew hurried through the darkened passageway, head ducked to avoid the pipes above. He kept the parcel in his arms clutched tight to his chest, mindful of the awesome responsibilities he bore.

“Unauthorized” was—as he had been instructed and as he had to keep telling himself—a relative term. At the end of the passage, he stealthily raised a little-used access hatch and began clambering down a set of metal rungs to the even darker level below. If he felt uncomfortable about breaking the regulations of the station’s administrators—these strangers who, from Chief Engineer O’Brien on up, had treated him and the rest of the devout with unexpected fairness—then he had to remind himself that their laws were as nothing compared to the dawning of Bajor’s glory and liberation. To remember that at all times was a test of his own faith.

He came to the last rung, his next step dangling into unlit space. This sector was one of the most heavily damaged aboard the station, the narrow passages and shafts torn apart by the fire set by the departing Cardassians. The station’s autonomic defenses had managed to extinguish the blaze, but only after the local power grid and sensors had been charred to a nonfunctioning state. The smell of blackened filaments lodged tight in his throat.

Drawing in as much of the stifling air as he could, he forced the hand clutching one of the rungs to let go. The drop into darkness was less than two meters, just enough for a spark of panic to flare inside his chest, the fear that he would go on falling forever.

He rolled off a mound of singed insulation material and got to his knees. The impact had jarred the parcel loose from his grasp, and he fumbled about for it with a growing desperation. At last he found it, right on top of the wire marking the rest of the way to the hiding place. He crawled forward, holding the parcel even closer to himself.

“Arten . . . how good to see you.” In the dim light, a smile rose on the face of the most important man on Bajor—or off the planet, since he had been smuggled aboard DS9. “I thought perhaps you had forgotten about me.”

Though the words were obviously said in jest, they still made Arten’s gut feel hollow. “Of course not—” His own words rushed out. “How . . . how could . . . ”

“Never mind.” Hören Rygis, the leader of the Redemptorist movement, unwrapped the parcel that had been set before him. “Of course, your services are greatly appreciated. By all the faithful.”

Still on his knees—the hiding place was too small for anyone to stand upright—Arten turned and made sure that the flexible panel had sealed shut behind him, preventing any light or sound from leaking out. Though Hören spoke in a low, even soothing, voice in this enclosed space, Arten couldn’t help hearing that other voice, the one from the broadcasts that went out to the Redemptorists scattered across the surface of Bajor. It must be a miracle, a sign of their cause’s righteousness, that the source of those hammering, apocalyptic sermons, with their calls to revolution and a burning purity, hadn’t yet been detected here in the bowels of the station.

Hören set aside the flasks of water and the food containers. At the bottom of the parcel were its most important contents. He held up the blank recording chips, turning them between his thumb and forefinger so they sparkled in the portable lantern’s glow.

“Through such simple things,” he mused aloud. “Thus is that day hastened, that all true Bajorans will rejoice to see. By virtue of the simple . . . ” He turned a sharp glance toward Arten. “You would do well to remember that.”

“Yes . . . ” He nodded, wondering just what Hören had meant. Some words of wisdom seemed to be no more than those that he already knew, homilies with which even the nonbelievers would have agreed. Others, he had realized bit by bit . . . the other words could mean things much deeper. And darker . . .

“In truth, however, you needn’t have worried about me.” Hören opened a flask and took a drink. “I had a visit last cycle from one of your companions.” He spoke casually, as though of a neighbor he had welcomed into a sunlit house.

Arten felt his spine stiffen. “Oh?” It was his appointed task to carry supplies to the hiding place, to bring the blank recording chips, and to carry away those with the fiery words locked inside. “Who was that?” He had wanted to ask why, but had held his tongue.

“Your group’s leader. Deyreth Elt. He brought me a few things.” Hören pointed to the items on a ledge that had been improvised on the space’s rounded wall. “Nothing much.”

“And was that . . . ” He couldn’t restrain his growing anxiety. “Was that the only reason he came to see you?”

“By no means.” Hören picked through an opened container, looking for a choice morsel. His long-fingered, almost delicate hands were at odds with the broad-shouldered bulk that seemed to push against the hiding place’s confines. Arten felt, as he had before in the man’s presence, that all the available space was somehow being absorbed, leaving only a thin margin in which to exist, bringing the harsh angles of that face right up against his own. Hören licked a dab of sauce from a fingertip. “Deyreth and I had a most intriguing conversation.” The angles sorted themselves into what might have been a kindly smile on another’s face. “About you, as a matter of fact.”

His heart stopped for a moment, then raced to catch up with the shallow breathing he tried to conceal. He couldn’t speak.

“Calm yourself. You have nothing to be afraid of.” Hören’s voice lowered even further from that on the recording chips. “Self-doubt is not a characteristic of those wearing the armor of faith.” The smile vanished. “Do you doubt yourself, Arten?”

“I . . . I don’t think so . . . ”

Hören sighed. “You’ll have to work on that. In the meantime, bear in mind that Deyreth is one of the oldest Redemptorists, one of the first to have accepted the revelation of struggle, back when we were a ragged band hunted by the Cardassian oppressors and Bajoran collaborators alike. Deyreth is worthy of your respect, a man of great devoutness, confirmed in the truth of his beliefs. Perhaps a little too confirmed—do you follow what I’m trying to tell you?”

A small light appeared, that didn’t come from the lantern. “Perhaps . . . ”

“It would be wrong to expect someone like Deyreth, as virtuous as he is, to adapt his ways to changing conditions, to the new opportunities that even I have been slow to recognize. The new rulers of this station, these representatives of the Federation—they’re different from the Cardassians, aren’t they? In many ways.”

Arten nodded. “That’s what I was trying to tell Deyreth and the others.”

“Ah. So, what Deyreth came here to report to me—the remarks you are said to have made, expressing some admiration for this Chief Engineer O’Brien who supervises your work—those things are all true? You did say them?”

He hesitated, his pulse lodged high in his throat.

“Come, come; you can speak openly with me.” Hören lowered his head, to bring his gaze level with Arten’s. “As I have tried to teach you: the simplest, the least among us, can be of the most value. You see things differently from Deyreth; that is to be expected. But you dared to speak to him the truth you perceived in your heart—that is commendable.”

A stone seemed to dissolve inside Arten’s chest. An influx of breath dizzied him. “It is true.” How much easier to say that, than to carry the weight of shame through these dark corridors! His words tumbled forth now. “The chief engineer—and the ones above him—they know what we are; they have no reason to treat us as well as they have. But they are different, they’re—”

Hören laid his hand on Arten’s forearm. “There is no need to explain. I understand.” He drew back, his gaze turning inward. “I understand . . . everything. . . .”

No need to say any more. Arten closed his eyes, feeling the knots of his spine loosen. Everything would be fine now. Now, they would all—Deyreth and the others—they would all see how different things were here.

In darkness, buried in the station’s hidden recesses, the voice of blood and fire spoke, in a slow whisper. “I understand . . . just what needs to be done. . . .”

“Well, this certainly looks comfortable.” Gri Rafod looked over the edge of the basin. His reflection wavered up from the depths of the polished brass. “That is, comfortable for some people.”

Odo found the Cardassian’s presence no less irk some, and the attempts at banter no more clever, than before. “It serves its purpose.” He didn’t look up, but continued sorting through the arrest reports on his data padd. He’d retreated to his private quarters, from the outer security office. With the door sealed, the glare and noise of the Promenade beyond were shut away. “It doesn’t need to do any more than that.”

“I suppose not.” Rafod stretched his legs out from the chair, looking bored and impatient. “Is it going to be much longer? Before it . . . happens?”

He glanced up. “My actions are bound by the agreement between your superiors and Commander Sisko.” He kept his voice level, to avoid giving Rafod the pleasure of knowing how irritated he’d become. “But my statements are not. You see fit to invade my privacy for no good reason—fine. I obey my orders. But I would like to point out to you that what ‘happens,’ as you put it, is simply a matter of my physiology. I must periodically revert to and remain in a liquid state; it’s as simple as that. It’s not a sideshow act for your amusement.”

“Yes, yes; of course. Whatever you say.” Gri Rafod looked around at the cluttered walls. “Though it’s rather a pity . . . ”

Odo sighed wearily. “What is?”

“That it’s not a sideshow act. I imagine it would be rather a good one. Perhaps you should talk to your friend Quark, see what he could set up for you.”

More loudly than he’d intended to, Odo dropped the data padd into his desk drawer and slammed it shut. The display device’s security codes were unbreakable, but on general principle he didn’t want the Cardassian handling it while he waited here.

He stood up and came round to the front of the desk. “If it will make you any happier—or perhaps more pleasant to be with—you should know that the time is at last here. Your unseemly interest in other creatures’ biological functions will be satisfied.” He stepped into the basin. “For a while, at least.”

Rafod ignored the dig. “Rather like getting into a bathtub, isn’t it?” He leaned forward to watch.

“I had thought that might be a novelty for you and your people. Now, my suspicions have been confirmed.”

“Very amusing.” The Cardassian smiled sourly. He nodded. “Yes, very much like an old-fashioned bathtub . . . though, of course, without any plumbing attached.”

Odo rested his hands on the basin’s edge. “I hope you’ve brought something with which to amuse yourself for the next couple of hours. As fascinating as our conversations have been, I will have neither the capability nor the inclination to indulge in them.”

“I anticipated that.” Rafod unfastened one of his uniform’s pockets and extracted a folded pouch and a small implement of hand-carved wood. “Speaking of Quark . . . he sold me all this, at what I’m sure was an extortionate price.”

The sharp scent of the pouch’s contents caught at Odo’s nostrils. “That’s tobacco.”

“Yes. Quark told me it’d come all the way from Earth. Seems to have rather a mild narcotic effect. Pleasant, but not soporific.”

“I would prefer that you not indulge while you are here in my quarters.”

Rafod busily fussed with the paraphernalia of lighter and tamping tool. “Yes, well, we’ll talk about that when you get back. To your proper form, that is.” He started filling the pipe with the shredded organic matter.

There was nothing Odo could do about it now. Or that he wanted to; if Rafod was preoccupied with this new toy, it would help to keep him from noticing anything going amiss, right beneath his scaly nose. “Then, if you’ll excuse me . . . ”

The Cardassian had managed to get the pipe lit. He leaned back in the chair, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It strikes me that you’re well advised to keep your doors so tightly locked here. With the number of enemies that a chief of security garners aboard a station such as this, or even just those bent on mischief and petty vandalism . . . ” Rafod suppressed a cough, then nodded. “If someone like that managed to get in here, while you were in your, ah, defenseless liquid state . . . ” He shook his head. “Someone could dump just anything into the receptacle there with you. Trash, old scrap metal . . . ” He smiled around the pipe. “Ashes, perhaps.”

Odo had been on the verge of letting himself sink into the basin, letting the individual atoms of his existence loosen from the constraints of solid matter. He stopped and drew himself erect.

“If someone were to do that, it would be very foolish of someone.” Odo leaned over the basin’s edge and through the tobacco fumes. “Let me tell you a little story, Gri Rafod. First, you have to understand that while I’m in my liquid state, I may be defenseless, but I’m not unconscious; in that sense, this periodic claim that my nature makes upon me is not exactly similar to the sleep that most other creatures require. I am awake, and aware of everything that happens around me.

“Now, here’s the story: once, someone did come in here, and he did just as you said; he tossed something into the basin while I was in my liquid state. And I was very, very annoyed by that.”

Rafod looked uneasy, as though realizing that he had pushed the shapeshifter too far.

“And when I came back from my little rest, I tracked that someone down. And do you know what I did to him?”

The Cardassian shook his head.

“Without his seeing, I turned myself into a morsel of food upon his plate, something so small that he would gulp it down without even chewing—the way I’ve seen you and your people eat. And then, once I was inside him, I stopped being quite so small, and I reached up through his throat, all the way into his head, and pushed his eyeballs out from the inside.” Odo wished he had mastered forming an unpleasant smile; it would have been perfect now. “It must have been quite an unsettling experience. I understand that even after having artificial optics grafted into his sockets, this someone remains under heavy sedation in a psychiatric ward on his home planet.”

Rafod took the pipe from his mouth. “You never did any such thing. It would be against the law.”

“You’re right,” said Odo. “I didn’t do that because I just now thought of it. But I would love to do it sometime.” He moved back to the center of the basin. “Do we understand each other now, Gri Rafod? Good. Enjoy yourself.”

After he had become liquid, with his level below the rim of the basin, he formed a light-sensitive patch and rudimentary lens at his surface. Just enough to watch the Cardassian security officer, without him noticing. Rafod scowled and muttered something to himself as he poked at the smoldering contents of his pipe, but he made no move away from his chair.

Good, thought Odo. The fool suspects nothing. He let the primitive eye dissolve and set himself to the tasks before him.

The temptation to remain a simple liquid was strong—the time when that change would become necessary was close at hand, and he could feel the ease it would bring to every particle of his being. But he could put it off a while longer, despite what he had told Rafod. There would be just enough time to do what was needed.

At the bottom of the basin, he emitted a discharge of ions sufficient to trigger the microelectronic switch the clever O’Brien had finished installing. The metallic membrane covering the basin’s floor contracted slightly, revealing the tiny slits around the edge. Even if Gri Rafod had closely examined the basin, he wouldn’t have been able to detect the openings.

Distilled water, colored with a slight gold tint to match that of Odo’s liquid state, seeped into the basin. He carefully adjusted his own specific gravity, so that the water floated above him as he let his matter slowly drain into the receptacle chamber hidden below his quarters. The exchange had been carefully timed, so that not even the slightest ripple showed at the surface of the basin.

When the last of his atoms had flowed through the drainage tube, Odo solidified a finger and reached up to press the switch at the top of the receptacle. The membrane expanded again, sealing the basin. O’Brien’s “hydraulic system” had worked perfectly.

In a corridor of the access level beneath the Promenade and the security office, Odo glanced around to make sure no one had spotted him. Having slipped away from Gri Rafod’s constant surveillance, he would just as soon continue about his business in secret. He gave himself the face and uniform of an engineering crew member, and hurried toward the drydock sector.

A few minutes later, Chief Engineer O’Brien stepped into a storage locker and found a reel of single-filament comm line out of place. He smiled, picked up the reel, and carried it out to where the Cardassian research vessel was being worked on.

Odo appreciated the personal touch, that O’Brien had kept all their confidential arrangements to himself.

The next thing he knew, O’Brien had dropped the reel onto the hard metal flooring. The impact jarred Odo’s thoughts from their tracks.

“Sorry,” whispered O’Brien as he bent down to scoop up the reel. “I guess my hands are still a little, uh, numb from those restraints. . . .”

Odo supposed that he and O’Brien were even now. Or at least, he hoped they were.

In the vessel’s engine compartment, after O’Brien and the rest of the work crew had left, a length of comm line slid, snakelike, off the reel and twined itself into the other wires and cables running along the bulkheads. Unnoticed beneath the bored gaze of the Cardassian guards, the line vanished into the heart of the ship and its secrets.

When Arten had retraced his way to the torn access shaft, he saw a glimmer of light, no bigger than the palm of his hand, playing against the fire-scorched metal. He looked over his shoulder, down the length of the narrow spaces through which he had just crawled, and saw the source of the glow. In the distance, the flexible panel that concealed the hiding place of Hören Rygis had caught one of its corners on a sharp-edged scrap peeled away from the bulkhead. Just enough to let the faint glow from the portable lantern leak out. Just enough to give away the hiding place to any nonbeliever who might come snooping through this sector.

He inched back toward the hiding place, even more carefully and quietly than before. After the revelation that Hören had come to see things his way, that the Starfleet officers aboard the DS9 station could be honorable and accommodating, it would be a shame to endanger that new level of understanding by his own carelessness. To have Hören discovered by the security chief before the time was right for him to step forward, or to have Hören himself find the gap in the hiding place’s camouflage . . . either would be tragic. As comforting as Hören had sounded when talking to him, Arten had still been aware that the flashing force of the great man’s wrath lay just beneath the surface. As he came within arm’s reach of the panel and the chink of telltale light, he thought of how much was at stake. Not just his own relationship with Hören and the others but the whole future of the Redemptorist movement. Perhaps this was the turning point, a change of heart in the man who represented the essence of their faith. If Hören could see a non-Bajoran as someone worthy of respect, perhaps even friendship . . . then, the day might not be far off when all the Redemptorists might step into that greater light, reconciled with the Bajorans who followed the teachings of the Kai Opaka. It could happen . . . and, in his own simple way, Arten might have helped bring it about.

He reached for the corner of the panel, to set it as it should have been left. As he did so, he heard the voice.

Hören’s voice—not the low, soothing one with which he had spoken to Arten. But the old one, the voice of fire and blood, the voice that lashed both apostates and the strangers who had come from beyond the stars. A voice of dire prophecy that could make a planet tremble, riven to its dark, molten core . . .

Arten realized what was happening. On the blank chips that he had brought, Hören had already begun recording another broadcast, which like the others before it, would be smuggled down to the surface of Bajor and scattered to the waiting ears of the faithful. Those who also believed in the sanctity of fire and blood.

He felt his heart tremble inside his chest. It would have been too much to expect all the change to happen in a matter of moments. There was still much left to be done. . . .

It dismayed him to hear that voice speak of the Bajorans whose deaths would be required to purify their sullied world. Heretics, collaborators, traitors . . . all those who by word or deed had offended the righteous.

The list seemed to get longer with each recording. Hören repeated one of the names, and then again, slowly, as though he were already savoring the satisfaction that he would receive from that particular assassination.

“ . . . she with the blood of the faithful upon her hands . . . Kira Nerys . . . she knows not, how soon justice will embrace her . . . and crush the life from her foul body . . . ”

Arten’s heart fell—into a darkness greater than that which surrounded him.

“Kira . . . ”

He set the corner of the panel into position, turned, and hurried away from the hiding place.

CHAPTER 4

THE PROOF WAS on the computer screen. Everything he had suspected, felt deep in his bones . . . every time Gul Tahgla or any of the other Cardassians had opened a mouth to speak, as though for creatures such as they, the simple ritual of greeting was only the prelude to another scheming lie. . . .

“Is there any point that requires elaboration, Commander?” On the other side of the desk, Security Chief Odo stood waiting.

“No—” Sisko shook his head. “It’s all pretty much as I thought it would be.” He sat forward in the chair, his chin propped against his fist. The bleak feeling that the ancients of Earth might have termed melancholia had overtaken him for a moment, as he had read through Odo’s report on the Cardassians’ so-called research vessel. They lie to us, he thought, and in turn we send a spy into their midst. It demonstrated how deception led to deception, turnabout and turn again, a snake with its own tail grasped in its jaws.

He found it even less cheering to ponder that the cycle of deception had only just started. His own lies—or, if he felt inclined to be charitable with himself, the concealing of the truth—would go on. He’d already decided as much. All that remained was to order his security chief to stay silent about what he’d discovered.

“This report”—Sisko reached out and tapped the computer screen—“is to be placed under total access restriction. For the time being, no one is to see it but me. Understood?”

“As you wish, Commander.”

“ ‘No one’ includes my first officer, Major Kira, on down—got it? And I’ll have a word with Chief Engineer O’Brien myself. I don’t want it even talked about that you entered the Cardassian vessel.”

Odo drew himself to his humanoid form’s full height. “You can rely upon my discretion, Commander.” His tone indicated that his professional pride had been nicked.

“Yes, of course; I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.” With a few taps on the keyboard, Sisko blanked the screen, sending the report to a local memory node rather than to the station’s main data banks. “I merely wished to stress the gravity of the situation.”

“I understand.” Odo seemed mollified—though, as always, it was hard to tell. “That’s why I took the initiative of ordering the disembarkation procedures for the Cardassian vessel to be put on indefinite hold. The exit crews have been so instructed.”

“What—” Sisko sat bolt upright. “That’s not within your authority!”

“But, Commander—” Odo had been taken aback by the other’s reaction. “I thought it the prudent thing to do, given the fact that the installation of the impulse buffers has been completed; the vessel has already been transferred from the engineering bay to one of the docking pylons. Its scheduled departure time was within the next hour—”

Sisko ignored the security chief’s explanation, as he quickly punched through a priority comm line to the pylon. “This is Commander Sisko. The hold order on the Cardassian vessel is hereby countermanded. Recommence all appropriate departure procedures. The vessel’s original schedule is to be complied with.”

No sooner had he gotten a confirmation of his order and had disconnected, than another call came through. Gul Tahgla’s face appeared on the viewscreen.

“Commander Sisko.” Tahgla’s image nodded to him. “Is there a problem? Your exit crew informs me—”

“It’s been taken care of,” replied Sisko. “I trust you’ll accept our apologies for any delay. Please bear in mind that yours is one of the first non-Federation ships to be cleared for travel through the wormhole. We’re still fine-tuning our procedures.”

“Nothing more than that?” The Cardassian gul’s eyes peered out from the screen. “I was concerned that there might be some second thoughts on your part. About letting us proceed on our mission. Perhaps you never anticipated that we would cooperate as fully as we did with your invasive technical requirements.”

“My only concern, Gul Tahgla, was for the safety of the wormhole’s inhabitants. We have an agreement with them, as well. Now that the impulse buffers are in place around your engines, you’re free to go.”

“Thank you. As I’ve mentioned before, I find your concern for these immaterial creatures to be . . . amusing.” He reached for the comm switch on the panel before him. “It might be some time before I return this way. Perhaps we can resume our conversation then. That is, if you’re still here.” The screen went blank.

“Are there any further instructions, Commander?” During the exchange with Tahgla, Odo had stayed discreetly out of range of the comm lens.

“No . . . ” Sisko shook his head. He knew that Odo was wondering, after the report he’d received about the true nature of the Cardassian research vessel, whether he had lost his mind; whether the nonstop pressure and mounting responsibilities of both running the station and overseeing the Federation’s diplomatic relations with Bajor had deranged his rational faculties. The time would come—and soon, he hoped—when he would be able to explain to Odo and the others the reasons for the decisions he’d made. The gamble he’d taken. But until then . . . “Proceed as I’ve indicated. Until further notice.”

When he was alone again in the office, he set the viewscreen to a remote scanner on the station’s exterior, opposite the currently engaged docking pylon. Gul Tahgla’s vessel was in the process of casting off, the arcs of the securing mandibles and the transfer umbilical cord slowly retracting from the ungainly Cardassian shape. The quick, bright flares of the maneuvering jets turned the vessel’s main thruster ports away from the station. The screen darkened against the engines’ sudden pulse. In only a few more minutes, the vessel had disappeared beyond the scanner’s highest magnification.

From the position of DS9 in the Bajoran system’s asteroid belt, there would be no visual check of the Cardassian vessel’s entry into the wormhole. Other, more sensitive tracking devices would record that moment. And as to what happened after that, on the other side . . .

Commander Sisko gazed at the blank screen, as though it could show him his own brooding thoughts.

“Any luck?”

Bashir looked over his shoulder at the voice that had come from behind him. Framed by dangling wires and the thicker cables of atmospheric life-support systems, Chief Engineer O’Brien stood in the quarantine module’s doorway.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure what O’Brien was asking about. Over synthales in Quark’s establishment on the Promenade—perhaps a few too many synthales—he had divulged some of his more personal plans to the engineer. Most of them—all, actually—had dealt with getting closer to some of the station’s female crew members. O’Brien had listened to the various schemes and machinations with the tolerant nostalgia of the happily married. Easy enough for him to take that attitude, Bashir had thought glumly. He goes back to his quarters with Keiko at the end of every shift.

“Pardon me—”

“I mean, with that diagnostic contraption you’ve been wrestling.” O’Brien pointed to the blood analysis unit perched precariously at the limits of Bashir’s outstretched fingertips; the device threatened to come crashing to the module’s floor at any moment. “Need a hand?”

“Well, yes, actually.” As with every other working and living space aboard DS9, the quarantine module was a hodgepodge of components finessed or bruteforced into working together. Or hopefully so; the QM was still a long way from going on line. As confusing as the interior layout was, its improvised nature was even more readily apparent from the outside, as it rested in one of O’Brien’s largest engineering bays. A heavy-ore transport that the Cardassians had abandoned now formed the linear spine of the QM; a turbolift would have been handy to get from one end to the other, though Bashir knew there was no chance of an equipment request like that being granted. Along the transport’s windowless sides, O’Brien had mounted every sealable living and working space that he could scrounge from DS9’s innards, linking them with a branching network of corridors; the ungainly result looked like a cubist grape cluster, rendered on a gigantic scale. Something sleeker would have better suited Bashir’s aesthetic preferences, but for the moment he was only concerned about not dropping the blood analyzer onto his head. “It should fit in here all right, but . . . ”

O’Brien stood on tiptoe and peered into the overhead niche in which the unit was wedged partway. “Looks like your clearance is just a smidgen too tight. Tell you what—down in the drydock bay, I’ve got a jacksledge that’ll clear this problem up in no time.” He smiled. “I’ve had a lot of success with it lately.”

“So I’ve heard.” The account of the chief engineer’s run-in with the Cardassians and its eventual outcome had already circulated around the station, adding considerably to the stock of anecdotes about O’Brien’s creative temper displays. “The difference here is, however, that this piece of equipment belongs to us. So I’m a little more concerned about keeping it in one piece.”

“Suit yourself.”

Between the two of them, they managed to get the unit in place, after O’Brien had stripped away some of the casing insulation that he judged to be superfluous. Bashir sat with his back against the module’s bulkhead and tried to regain his breath, as he watched O’Brien wrench down the retaining bolts.

“There, that should hold it.” O’Brien tossed the wrench in with the rest of the tools that had accumulated in one corner. “I’ll get the shop to dummy up a face panel so it doesn’t look quite so ragged.”

“I take it you have more time for this project now?” Bashir had been working single-handed on the quarantine module for the last several shifts. “The Cardassians must have finally left—”

“Sure enough. And I was never so glad to see the backs of anyone as I was that lot.” O’Brien shook his head. “Sneaky bastards, too.”

“What do you mean by that?” The comment, and the vehemence with which it had been spoken, took Bashir by surprise. The crew of the Cardassian research vessel had been unusually unobtrusive by their standards, confining themselves to either their shipboard quarters or the DS9 guest area that had been set aside for them. Generally, when Cardassians were aboard the station, a standing order went into effect, based upon the ancient Earth military slogan “Loose lips sink ships.” It hadn’t seemed to be necessary this time.

“Never mind.” O’Brien’s expression darkened. “You’ll probably find out about it soon enough.” He looked into the farther reaches of the QM, unlit except for the temporary work lanterns secured to the ceiling. “So, what’ve we got left to do here? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fiddling with this setup.”

The quarantine module had been the chief engineer’s main project before the arrival of the Cardassian research vessel. And a high-priority project, as well, given the limited resources with which they had to contend. O’Brien and his technicians were proving themselves masters at the art of improvisation, converting the station’s odds and ends into functioning medical equipment.

Pressure to complete the QM was mounting. Before DS9 could be considered an operational transit point, capable of handling the amount of anticipated traffic for the stable wormhole, the means of handling shipborne contagions would have to be in place. It was a problem as old as the art of navigation itself; in pursuit of a specialization in interstellar medicine, Bashir had studied the old practices of seaports on several ocean-dominated planets, Earth included. Plague carried ashore by the fleas on a rat climbing down a wharf line could decimate a population with no immunity to foreign diseases; a feverish sailor coughing up red-tinged phlegm in a waterfront tavern could infect the crews of every ship tied up in the harbor. Diagnostic procedures and treatment had improved since the days of towing a plague ship out to open water and setting it afire, but in an uncharted universe, the dangers were still close to infinite—even more so, now that the wormhole had opened up the entire Gamma Quadrant for exploration. That was the reason Bashir had pushed for this assignment; this was the edge of medicine, a place where careers and reputations were forged.

Now, he responded to O’Brien, “Most of the environment chambers still need to be sealed.” He kept a running checklist inside his head, on what still needed to be done. “I’ll have to be able to maintain hyperbaric atmosphere pressures with some gases that are fairly tricky to work with.” The QM was designed to treat nonoxygen breathers, as well as the range of humanoid life-forms. “There are the rest of the monitors, of course—I should be getting a cargo shipment from Procurement any time now.” Bashir started ticking off the items on his fingers. “Alarm systems, comm lines . . . ”

“Small stuff,” said O’Brien. “We’ll be able to knock all that out pretty quick. The hard part’s going to be getting the extrusion gantry working. Any time you go poking things out beyond the perimeter shields, you start running into problems.”

Bashir knew how much work the chief engineer had already put into the QM’s positioning abilities. The necessity for the module to be able to move outside the station had dictated its placement near one of the main cargo bays, so it could access the massive airlock doors opening onto empty space. In the event of a disease outbreak aboard a vessel approaching DS9, depending upon the nature of the infection, the stricken individuals could be brought aboard the station in hermetic-containment gurneys and placed directly into the QM; if the virus or other pathogenic agent was considered too dangerous, however, the QM with its medical team aboard could be extruded through the cargo bay doors on its segmented gantry arm. The only contact with the plague ship would be through the trailing umbilical cord providing an outward flow of life-support systems to the QM and the vessel to which it had attached itself. Until the crisis had passed, the sufferers had been treated, the infection banished . . .

Or not.

“I got the clearance from the ordnance master.” O’Brien’s voice lowered; he was aware that there were some details of a quarantine module’s construction that a chief medical officer wouldn’t want a casual passerby to hear of. “The explosive charges are being constructed in the station armory right now. Soon as they’re ready, I’ll set ‘em in place myself, and then we can get the last of the bulkhead panels finished up. You’ll have to go down and code the fuses.”

Bashir nodded. It was a secret shared between him and the chief engineer, and otherwise known only by the station’s highest officers; the final necessary element of the module’s construction. An image from a med school lecture came unbidden to his mind, of an ancient sailing ship set afire in open water. He could imagine how it would have looked, the flames leaping up through the rigging, the billowing black smoke clouds woven with sparks, the faces of the pale dead, the dying consumed by an even greater fever. . . .

Some diseases couldn’t be cured. They could only be stopped; the infection kept from spreading any further. A cleansing fire, and then the vacuum as cold and final as the first uncharted depths that man had sailed upon.

That was what the explosive charges were for; why they would be buried right in the fabric of the quarantine module. Better that, to annihilate the QM and the diseased ship, and the medics and crew together, than risk the spread of an untreatable contagion. The few would be sacrificed for the many. That was sound medical practice, a decision a doctor would have to make.

And that was why the coding for the fuses, the explosives’ trigger commands, would be known only to the station’s chief medical officer. Bashir felt his blood temperature drop a notch as he thought about it, as he had so many times already. A situation unique in Starfleet regulations, a destruct sequence that could not be initiated or countermanded by any other officer, including the station’s commander—in this and any other deep space posting, the quarantine module was the inviolable territory of medicine, with its fate and the lives of its crew solely in the hands of the doctor in charge. On DS9, that would be Bashir; he had already decided—as other chief medical officers before him had—that if the moment should come, he would be aboard the QM when the explosives were triggered. It was an unwritten regulation that ensured the destruct sequence would be undertaken only in the gravest of circumstances.

As Bashir stood in the center of the uncompleted module, it was as though he were finally seeing the reality of his ambitions gathering around him-everything that had brought him to DS9. This is what you wanted, he told himself; the edge of medicine, a place where reputations could be made . . . even if the cost was his own life.

“Ah, cheer up.” O’Brien had read his dark thoughts. He clapped Bashir on the shoulder. “How often does a man get a chance to blow himself up in such style? Kind of a shame, actually, that it hardly ever happens. Tell you what, though—I’ll see if I can get the charges doubled in strength, so if you have to, at least you’ll go out with a proper, fine show.”

Bashir laughed. “Thanks. I appreciate your concern.”

Though later, after O’Brien had left him alone once more in the module, he had to admire the chief engineer’s poker face. As he walked through the area, switching off the work lights, he realized that he couldn’t be sure whether O’Brien had been joking or not.

He crawled forward in darkness, as he had before, until he reached the hiding place. Arten turned the panel aside and entered the glow of the portable lantern. As dim as it was, he still had to squint and blink until his eyes had adjusted.

“How good of you to come once more.” The voice spoke from the blurred silhouette in front of him. Hören’s voice. “So much is made possible by the labor of the faithful.”

“I was told it was important.” He had brought nothing with him; the supplies he’d carried last time were sufficient for several days more. “I came as soon as I could get away.”

With his shoulders scraping the close metal struts, he watched as Hören rummaged through the objects spread along the wall. The Redemptorist leader’s muscled bulk turned awkwardly in the space, like a plowbeast caught in a pen too small for it. The longing in Arten’s breast grew sharper—the day when this man would stand upright in the open, an equal with other spokesmen for the Bajorans, couldn’t arrive too soon.

“Take this.” Hören set a pair of recording chips in Arten’s hand. “They must be smuggled down to Bajor as soon as possible. A message to all believers . . . our future . . . ”

His heart leapt. Perhaps these were the words, the treasure hidden in the black, square objects barely larger than his thumbnail, that would bring about the dawn. “Yes . . . of course. . . .” Arten hurriedly tucked them inside his jacket. “A freight shipment is scheduled to leave at the end of the shift. These will be at their destination tomorrow. . . .”

“Good.” Before Arten could back toward the hiding place’s exit, Hören leaned forward and clasped an arm around his shoulder. “You have done much already. For this you will be rewarded.”

The other’s face was so close to Arten’s that their breaths mingled. He felt his soul mirrored in the eyes, fierce yet also inexpressibly sad. “There . . . there’s no need. . . .”

“But you will have your reward,” said Hören. “In this world—and the next.” He gathered Arten toward him, as though to bestow a kiss of peace upon the younger member of the brethren’s forehead.

Arten saw then, at the limit of his vision, a flash of bright metal as the other drew his hand from inside his jacket. Suddenly, the air seemed to rush from Arten’s lungs, leaving him unable even to gasp, as a widening circle of pain radiated from his gut.

Hören let go of him, and he was unable to keep his balance, collapsing onto the hiding place’s floor. His hands scrabbled futilely at the dagger that had torn open his abdomen.

“That is the reward you have earned. . . .”

The voice came out of the darkness that had engulfed the close space.

“By the treachery of your heart . . . that would love your people’s enemies. . . .”

He could barely hear the last few words. In the widening pool of his blood, he curled around the metal that had become the gravitational center of a collapsing universe. He managed to raise his head and could just make out Hören gazing down at him, and beyond, the figure of Deyreth Elt emerging from the shadows, a look of triumph on his narrow, wizened face.

That was the last he saw. Except inside himself, where he fell toward a dawn whose light erased every world and pain.

CHAPTER 5

“PEOPLE, WE HAVE a small problem before us.” Sisko leaned forward, hands clasped atop his desk. In a semicircle before him sat his chiefs of security and engineering, his first officer, and his chief medical officer. “It’s also an opportunity for us.”

None of the others spoke. The low, somber tone of his voice indicated the gravity of the situation he was about to present to them.

“You will recall that some ten shifts ago, we were hosts once more to our old friends the Cardassians.” He spread his hands apart. “Whether we like it or not, that’s the nature of our job here. DS Nine’s function as a transit point, the doorway to the Gamma Quadrant, is just beginning; we’re going to be seeing a lot more traffic coming and going at our docking pylons. We need to prepare for that—”

“Commander.” In one of the center chairs, Major Kira stirred restlessly. “You’re not telling us anything we don’t know already. If this is just some sort of pep talk, there are a lot of other, more important things back at Ops I should be taking care of.”

Sisko turned his unsmiling gaze straight toward her. “I can assure you that I’m not wasting your time. As you will see.” He leaned back in his own chair. “The point I’m trying to make to you all is that, at the present time, under the orders we have received from the Starfleet high command, we are not at liberty to pick and choose among those seeking to travel through the wormhole. The Federation wishes to achieve a greater rapprochement with the Cardassian empire; allowing them access to the wormhole, and to the Gamma Quadrant beyond it, is seen as the primary means of accomplishing that. Of course, this is the age-old conflict between diplomatic intentions at headquarters and security concerns on the line. There are undoubtedly some things we would do differently here if we had a completely free hand.”

Chief Engineer O’Brien smiled wryly. “Like telling the Cardassians to take the long way around if they want to get to the Gamma Quadrant?”

“More or less. Frankly, I share the opinion of some of you, that if the Cardassians were never to set foot aboard this station again, it would be too soon. But that’s not the case—at least for now.”

Kira’s expression had become progressively more irritated. “Commander . . . please. As you’ve said before, there’s a lot we still have to get ready here. So, if you could just . . . ” She made a rolling, speed-it-up gesture.

Instilling patience in his second-in-command was going to be a long process, he knew; losing his own patience with her wouldn’t help. “I bring these points up for a reason, Major. I want it understood that I consider the present situation—the reason for our meeting now—to have been unavoidable. There should be no guilt feelings or pointing of fingers at other officers. Do I make myself clear?”

She had provoked him into speaking more forcefully than when he had begun; he could see in her eyes that she had started wondering just what the problem could be. Behind Kira’s back, Odo and O’Brien exchanged glances; they had the advantage of having been in on it from the early stages.

“Take a look at this.” From the desk drawer, Sisko extracted his data padd. “Our security chief managed to find a way aboard the Cardassian vessel before it left the station. Here’s his report on what he found.” Sisko watched as Kira scanned through the display, O’Brien and Dr. Bashir looking over her shoulders. “As you’ll recall, the vessel in question was represented to us as being for the purposes of scientific research—the Cardassians supposedly were initiating a sectorwide survey of the Gamma Quadrant, with an orientation toward joint commercial development with the Federation. That’s the main reason why their application for access to the wormhole was granted so quickly. When their vessel arrived here at the station, we certainly had no reason to doubt their stated intentions—”

“True enough,” said O’Brien, nodding. “We’ve seen the same sort of craft before—basically nothing more than converted long-haul freight carriers—in a lot of the other systems that the Cardassians have trading protocols with. They strip out all the light armament and substitute a bunch of different sensor arrays. If they’re going into a sector where hostilities could be expected, they’ll convoy with a cruiser or two and some advance scouts.” A shrug. “And that’s certainly what this one looked like from the outside.”

“We certainly had little way of knowing otherwise. The agreement between the Federation and the Cardassians stipulated that no search of the vessel would be permitted while it was being worked on here. Technically, we’re already in violation of that agreement—”

“What does that matter?” Kira struck the back of her hand across the data padd with mounting anger. “ ‘Research vessel’—they were lying to us from the beginning! It’s stuffed with weaponry—”

“I’ve read Odo’s report,” said Sisko dryly. “I’m aware of what he found inside the vessel.”

Odo leaned toward her. “If you’ll look at the last few screens, you’ll see the details of the shielding with which they had surrounded the arms. Even if we had done a scan of the vessel, we probably wouldn’t have been able to detect what they had aboard.”

“And now, they’re on the other side of the wormhole.” Kira shook her head in disgust. “Gul Tahgla and the rest are probably laughing themselves sick, over how they sneaked this right past us. Just before they head off to attack some defenseless system in the Gamma Quadrant—”

“There’s very little chance of that, actually.” Odo pointed to the data padd. “My analysis of the vessel’s armament—and I believe the commander concurs with me on this—is that it is essentially defensive in nature. The vessel lacks the speed and maneuverability with which to mount an offensive campaign; whereas its perimeter shields are several times more powerful than those of a regulation Cardassian cruiser.” He was enjoying the display of his expertise. “The other significant finding I made is the degree to which the vessel has been modified for long-term stasis under deep space conditions. The crew quarters, the life-support systems, food and atmosphere replication—everything has been set up so that the vessel can operate indefinitely without the need for planetfall.”

Kira scowled in puzzlement. “What’s the point of that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” O’Brien had looked up from the report. “Wherever they’re going, they’re planning on a long stay. And they’re prepared to fight off anybody who tries to move them.”

Bashir had stayed silent through the discussion, but now spoke up. “Do we have any idea of where that’s going to be?”

“That is the problem, people.” Sisko looked across their faces. “Now that the Cardassian vessel is on the other side of the wormhole, we’ve been able to trace its position with our remote monitoring devices—plus, unknown to them, and thanks to the efforts of our chief engineer and security officer, they’re carrying aboard a couple of miniaturized activity trackers. We not only know where they are, but also have a pretty good idea of what they’re up to. At this moment, the engines of Gul Tahgla’s vessel have been placed in standby mode; it’s no longer in motion—after having been traveling continuously since it exited into the Gamma Quadrant. It now has apparently rendezvoused with a group of other Cardassian vessels that had previously gone through the wormhole. Our sensors indicate that a large volume of equipment and supplies is being transferred to Gul Tahgla’s vessel, as well as additional crew members; there’s some pretty extensive structural work being done, too. They obviously wanted to do all their retrofitting at what they thought would be a distance sufficient to keep their activities from being detected by us. The probability is high that the vessel is in the process of being converted to operational efficiency as a self-sufficient outpost base. Once the Cardassians are done, though—and that shouldn’t be too much longer—by our best estimates of the vessel’s engine capacities, it would take them at least ten shifts to return to the vicinity of the wormhole.”

“Wait a minute.” Kira set the data padd down on the corner of the desk, and reached across to turn the computer screen toward her. She called up a navigation chart. “There’s nothing out there—that’s totally empty space.”

“Precisely. So we have to assume that the intentions of Gul Tahgla and his crew, once they’ve completed the modifications to the vessel, are to return to the zone surrounding the wormhole’s exit point. That’s the only thing of value in which the Cardassian empire could be interested.”

“But sovereignty over the wormhole has already been established—it belongs to Bajor—”

“Correction, Major. Sovereignty over this end of the wormhole has been established. As this is the first stable wormhole to have been discovered, there are points of interstellar law regarding it that have yet to be determined—and the Cardassians appear to be placing themselves in a compelling legal position. There’s an old Earth maxim that possession is nine points of the law—that’s undoubtedly what the Cardassians will argue, as well. DS Nine was moved to its current orbital position to validate Bajor’s claim on the wormhole and to fend off any attempt by the Cardassians to seize control of it. But the wormhole’s exit point in the Gamma Quadrant is light-years away from any inhabited system. There’s no intelligent species on the other side for whom a similar claim of sovereignty could be made.” Sisko swiveled his chair, turning back toward the others. “Now, the Cardassians have seized this opportunity, to gain back at least some of what they inadvertently let go when they abandoned Bajor and this station.”

“It is,” said Odo, “the sort of thing they might’ve been expected to do. As a species—and I state this from experience—they are addicted to legal maneuvers, exploitation of loopholes, and the like. For all their military swaggering, they are at their heart a race of lawyers.” He shrugged. “That may account for their persistent . . . public relations problems.”

Bashir nodded thoughtfully, as though having been presented with a particularly interesting diagnosis. “It’s rather like a rope with two ends, isn’t it? We’ve got hold of one end, and now the Cardassians are reaching for the other. If they get it . . . then, who really owns the rope?” He gazed up at the ceiling. “Or like one of those ancient, land-based transportation systems—what were they called?—a toll highway. We can control who goes into the wormhole, and under what conditions, but if the Cardassians’ claim to the sector around the wormhole’s other end were upheld, they’d control who’d be able to exit from the hole and travel on into the Gamma Quadrant.” He stroked his chin. “Very clever . . . ”

“Will you just shut up?” Kira glared fiercely at the doctor. “This isn’t a problem in one of your medical textbooks, that you’ll get an A for solving. The whole future of my people is jeopardized by this—”

“Exactly, Major. As you see, I have not been wasting your time.” Sisko could almost read the thoughts tumbling one after another behind her eyes. “Without effective control over the wormhole, Bajor would become once again a backwater of the universe, a depleted planet with nothing of value to sell. Essentially, it would be another charity case for the Federation. Membership in the Federation for Bajor would become a matter of low priority; the DS Nine station itself would be cut back to minimal functioning or even deactivated. It’s simple economics, actually.”

“If that’s how the Federation would feel about Bajor—if that’s how you feel, Commander—then we’d find a way of getting by without you.” Kira’s gaze narrowed. “We survived the Cardassians’ rape of our planet; we could survive the Federation’s neglect. And perhaps it would be better that way.”

“Perhaps.” He knew he had evoked the fanatical streak in her beliefs, the sympathy with the Bajoran extremists that lay buried just beneath the surface. It was so tightly interwoven with the anger that constantly simmered inside her, that to produce one was to face the other. “But perhaps it might not be necessary. I suggest that instead of giving way to these emotional displays, we might more profitably turn our attention to finding a way of circumventing the Cardassians’ plans.”

“What would you suggest?” Her glare didn’t soften. “If we had some sort of armed vessel of our own, maybe we could go out through the wormhole and knock them out of commission—”

“That would be an act of war, Major. An unprovoked act. The fact that we perceive the Cardassians’ actions as being contrary to our interests doesn’t give us the right to do that. No, I suggest that we beat them at their own game. Even if they knew that we were aware of their intentions, they’re still limited as to how quickly they can return to the sector around the wormhole’s exit. That provides us with our window of opportunity. If we can get a substation in position there, the Federation can legitimately press a claim for sovereignty over the sector—before the Cardassians can do anything about it. That’s why I asked our chief engineer to sit in on this meeting.” Sisko swiveled toward O’Brien. “Well? What do you think—is there anything we can put together, and fast, that we can get out through the wormhole to establish a presence with?”

The engineer shrugged. “We’ve got small craft, runabouts and the like, that we could send—”

“That won’t do. The Cardassians would be able to dislodge our claim, based on precedents in interstellar case law. A ship or smaller craft doesn’t indicate a serious intention to set up a permanent base.” Sisko shook his head. “No, we need something that we can represent, if even just on a temporary basis, as an actual substation. Later, if need be, we can get something larger out there.”

“I don’t know . . . ” O’Brien clenched his hand into a fist. “If we had more time . . . if we had the manpower and the materials . . . we could build you whatever you wanted. But if you’re talking about an enclosed, self-sustaining unit with living quarters, supply replicators, everything a substation would need . . . ” The fist squeezed harder. “To put together something like that from scratch . . . there’s just no way.” His gaze shifted away, as though catching sight of something beyond the commander’s office. “Unless . . . unless we used something we already had on hand. . . .”

“What would that be?”

“The quarantine module.” Excitement cleared the engineer’s previous expression. “It’s perfect! It’s already designed to operate outside the station. Longterm living quarters, all the facilities—it’s certainly big enough to qualify as a permanent base—”

“Wait a minute.” A look of alarm moved across Bashir’s face. “I’ve been waiting for that module to come on line for months! It’s already got a designated function.”

“Which will be of little use to anyone, Doctor, if the Cardassians gain control of the other end of the wormhole. If that happens, DS Nine won’t be the major transit point we’ve been anticipating; the Cardassians will be just as happy to shut down all movement through it, if they can’t have exclusive access.” Sisko held up his palm against any further protest. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but the circumstances force me to overrule you on this matter.” He turned back to O’Brien. “How soon can you get the quarantine module ready?”

“It’s already close to being finished. Now, we’ll have to detach it from the extension gantry, sever the umbilical connections, move the atmospheric and other life-support systems out of the cargo bay and into the module . . . let’s see . . . ” O’Brien nodded slowly. “We’ll have to rig towing mounts on both it and one of the larger utility craft, get some buffers in place . . . ” He shrugged. “Five or six shifts, and we’ll have it ready to go.”

“Make it four. Gul Tahgla isn’t going to wait around for us. Major Kira—” He turned back to her. “You’re so concerned about protecting Bajor’s economic interests in the wormhole—fine. This mission is yours. I can’t spare you more than anyone else aboard the station, but the presence of a Bajoran native on our impromptu substation will probably help legitimize our claim to sovereignty over this additional sector. Major—”

She looked up from the computer panel. He could see that she had called up some additional data on it, but she blanked the screen before he could tell what it had been. For a moment, her level gaze burned into his, then she nodded once. “I’ll have full operational command?”

“You’ll have to—it’ll be strictly a one-person operation. We’re already critically understaffed here. One of our freight shuttles will be rigged so you can use it as a pusher vehicle. You’ll take the retrofitted module out through the wormhole, transfer to it once it’s in position, and represent yourself to all approaching vessels—namely, the Cardassians—as having established authority over the sector. It shouldn’t be too long before we can rotate a skeleton crew out there to relieve you.”

“Very well.”

“Let’s get to work, people.” Sisko pushed back his chair to signal that the meeting was over.

Bashir remained seated after the other officers had left.

“Is there something on your mind, Doctor?”

“You could say that.” The chief medical officer spoke slowly, like someone taking a first cautious step into unknown territory. “I think you’ve overlooked a critical factor in your plans, Commander.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t have the authority to order that the quarantine module be used for anything other than medical purposes.”

Sisko waited a moment before replying. “You seem to forget, Doctor, that I’m the commander of this station.”

“I’m well aware of that.” Bashir’s voice rose in pitch and volume. “But the quarantine module, like all medical equipment aboard DS Nine, is completely under my authority. That’s by Starfleet regulation, Commander. Those rules were put into effect precisely to keep officers from diverting medical facilities and supplies from their intended use. The only person who can make decisions in that regard is the chief medical officer. I can order O’Brien to not even lay a finger on that module.”

“I see.” Sisko leaned back, studying the younger man before him. “Doctor Bashir—I would advise you not to press your authority on this. I’m faced with a crisis that threatens the continued operation of this station. If need be, I’ll have you thrown in the brig. You won’t be discharging much of your responsibilities as chief medical officer there.”

Beads of sweat had risen on Bashir’s forehead, and his hands trembled. “You could certainly do that, Commander. But then you’re going to have to consider how it’s going to look to the provisional government on Bajor, when word reaches them that you’ve stripped their DS Nine station of its first line of defense against epidemic diseases. And not just the station. Since all interstellar traffic to Bajor passes through here, without the quarantine module in place, the likelihood of spreading contagion on the planet’s surface is multiplied well beyond tolerable limits. That’s a lot to ask of them, just to help repair the damage caused by your decision to let the Cardassian vessel go through the wormhole.”

“And I suppose you’d be the one to tell the provisional government all this?”

“How could you prevent me?” The look in Bashir’s eyes was like that of a gambler at one of Quark’s dabo tables, who had suddenly realized how far over his head he’d gotten. Only by throwing everything in on one desperate play was there a chance of saving himself. “Throwing me in the brig—that would mean a court-martial before I could be removed from my post on the station. The Bajorans would naturally be interested in something like that—they’d likely send a team of observers to the trial. And when I’m in open court, I’ll say whatever I damn well feel like.”

“Ah.” Sisko pressed his fingertips together and studied Bashir through the cage they formed. “You realize, of course, that to go up against your commanding officer—and by extension, all of Starfleet—is undoubtedly the surest way of scuttling your career in this service? Even if the court-martial were to rule in your favor.”

Bashir’s neck and jaw muscles were tensed rigid. “And what would your career be like after that?” His voice could barely squeeze through as a whisper. “Or is that not really a matter of concern to you anymore?”

So it’s gotten out this far, thought Sisko. He knew what the doctor was referring to. That Bashir could speak of it—the resistance he’d put up against taking over the command of DS9, the request he’d made to Picard, and then retracted, for an Earthside transfer—only proved there were few secrets on the station. “My personal feelings don’t enter into this.” Sisko’s index fingers tapped against each other. “What would make you feel better about this mission for which the quarantine module is required? As chief medical officer, that is.”

Bashir took a deep breath before replying. “You spoke of it as a one-person operation. I’d like to change that. There’s more than enough room—the module’s set up for dozens of occupants—for me to go along with Major Kira.”

She’ll have something to say about that. He kept the comment to himself. “Why would you want to?”

“Commander Sisko, I’ve been pushing for access to the wormhole since it was discovered. Since you reported the existence of the creatures inside it. These are life-forms whose nature and habitat have no equal in the galaxy—they should be studied. They possess capabilities that we have no understanding of—they created a stable wormhole! The future of the universe’s exploration may rest with them. . . .”

“Of course. And since you’re the chief medical officer in this sector, you’d naturally be the one to go into the wormhole and read their temperature and take their pulse.”

“Well . . . ”

“And you would be the one to achieve galactic renown for your groundbreaking studies of the wormhole’s inhabitants. I’m sure the number of journal articles you’d get out of it would considerably advance your career.”

“Yes, but . . . ”

“Perhaps you could even go on the lecture circuit.” Sisko smiled. “Doctor Bashir, I think we understand each other very well.” He pulled open the bottom desk drawer and took something from it. “Here, catch.”

Bashir looked down in bewilderment at the spheroid of stitched leather his hands had reflexively trapped against his chest. “What’s this?”

“I thought you might be aware of my love for the ancient Earth sport of baseball—”

“Oh. Yes, of course; you have a library of the old players in the holosuites . . . ”

“That,” said Sisko, pointing, “is what hardball is played with. Perhaps you’d like to keep it as a little souvenir of our discussion today.” He leaned back, his smile growing wider. “I can tell when I’ve been outgunned. It’s a two-person mission now. You’ll be aboard the retrofitted quarantine module strictly as a scientific observer—you’re not to interfere with Major Kira’s operations in the slightest degree. I don’t think I need to warn you that if you do get in her way, she’s likely to make pretty short work of you. Understood?”

Bashir collapsed back in his chair, his entire body suffused with an attitude of relief. “Perfectly, Commander.” His upper uniform was soaked with sweat.

What Sisko didn’t tell him—and he wasn’t about to, either—was that he’d been prepared to grant the doctor’s request from the beginning. But now, Bashir had learned to fight for what he believed in; now, he was that much closer to being an officer as well as a doctor.

The commander decided Bashir had had enough for one shift. “I’ll run interference for you with Major Kira, and tell her about the change in plans. Maybe you’d better get hold of the chief engineer and let him know.”

There was no delay in finding Kira; she was waiting right outside. A drained-looking Bashir slipped past as she strode into the office.

“Commander—” She planted her hands flat on the desk and leaned forward, her eyes pieces of heated steel. “There’s something—”

“Let me guess. Something you found in the computer files that didn’t sit well with you. What would that be?”

“Just this.” She grabbed the edge of the panel and turned it so that they both could see the data she called up. “You removed the restricted access code on Odo’s report.” Her nail tapped the screen. “And there’s the date you logged the original file into your private memory node. And that date is before the Cardassian vessel left for the wormhole!” She blanked the screen and stood erect. “Commander, you knew beforehand what Gul Tahgla was up to. You deliberately let the Cardassians go—you even countermanded a hold order that Odo had already placed on their vessel—and thus jeopardized the success of DS Nine’s mission here.”

He sighed, eyes half-closed in weariness. Facing his first officer’s anger was like leaning into a storm wind. “This seems to be my shift for being an educator. Sit down, and I’ll give you a small but important lesson.”

“I’m only interested in an explanation—”

“Sit down, Major.” The thunder in his voice brought an even harder glare from Kira. But she sat. “You may not believe so, but DS Nine’s success is my top priority. To ensure that, I’ve had to do some things that are not in the Starfleet operational manuals. I’ve been aware of the flaw in our control over the wormhole since practically the first shift we moved the station to this sector—only a fool wouldn’t have been. And I’ve been in constant communication with the Federation authorities, urging them to allocate us the funds and material necessary for placing a substation at the wormhole’s other end, before anyone else could do the same. Since you’re not as experienced in dealing with the Federation bureaucracy as I am, it may come as a surprise to you that my request is tied up in committee meetings. I know that the only way to get the Federation to act is to manufacture a crisis that it can’t ignore. Gul Tahgla’s little ploy is exactly what I needed. The threat of the Cardassians gaining any control at all over the wormhole will be enough to force the Federation to provide the means of establishing a permanent substation at the other end.” He shrugged. “If I’d known of another way of getting action—other than allowing this situation to go right to the brink—I would have taken it. But there isn’t any other way.”

“You’ve thought this all through . . . haven’t you?” Kira’s anger had been replaced by a look of grudging admiration. “It’s something you’ve been planning for a while.”

“I knew we wouldn’t have to wait long. The Cardassians’ council has the virtue of being more ruthlessly organized than the Federation’s decisionmaking body. They seize opportunities quickly. That’s why it’s up to officers on the line, such as ourselves, to anticipate their moves.” Sisko leaned across the desk. “And now, I’ll tell you something else I’ve been planning. And that’s my putting you in charge of this operation. Even before you allowed that group of Redemptorists aboard a few months ago, I’ve had my concerns about this division in your loyalties—a division that seems more important to you than to anyone else. You seem to feel there’s some kind of conflict between performing your duties as a Starfleet officer and being a Bajoran patriot. I don’t see that conflict, Major; as far as I’m concerned, you best serve your people by ensuring the success of this station’s mission.”

Kira began to say something, then forced herself silent.

“Consider this operation as something of a test.” Sisko began sorting through the papers on his desk. “Your attitude toward it is, in some ways, as important to DS Nine’s future as actually getting the substation in place. Think about that.” He looked up from the papers. “Dismissed.”

Her hands squeezed the arms of the chair, words forming at her tongue, before she got up and strode for the door.

He watched her go. When the door had slid shut, he closed his eyes and laid his head back.

CHAPTER 6

ODO KNELT DOWN and turned the corpse onto its back. The body was relatively undamaged, despite having been found inside the massive gears that opened and closed the cargo bay doors. That alone indicated to him a murder that was the work of an amateur, or at least somebody unfamiliar with the operations of DS9. A professional—and he’d admit there were some aboard the station—would have known that sensors activated by the chemical traces of complex organic matter were built into the gear teeth, to prevent crushing accidents to the dock’s crew. The machinery could never provide a means of disguising a violent cause of death.

“I suppose we’ll need an autopsy.” Major Kira leaned over his shoulder. She had been called, as well, to the scene by the cargo bay’s foreman. “Maybe Bashir will have to be pulled off the substation mission to perform it.”

He detected a hopeful note in her voice. “I hardly think one is necessary.” Kira’s sour relations with the chief medical officer were no concern of his; he wasn’t about to help her out on that score. “This man’s death is obviously due to multiple stab wounds.” Odo placed his hand over the bloodied abdomen and let it flow inside; a second later, he extracted the probe. “From the size and shape of the blade, I’d say a personal weapon.” Taking a handkerchief from his uniform’s pocket, he re-formed his hand and wiped it clean. From the corner of his eye, he noted—with some satisfaction—a wince of distaste from Kira. That’ll teach her to butt in on police work. “Male Bajoran, early twenties . . . ” He spoke into his comm badge, the details being logged into his data base back at the Promenade security office.

“You recognize him?”

“Not by name.” He glanced up at Kira. “Or not yet. But I know he was one of that group of Redemptorists, the ones doing microassembly over in the engineering bay.” He caught another change of expression, a slight tautening of the corners of her mouth, that told him she had known that much, as well.

He completed the description, then called for a gurney to take the body to the medical unit’s morgue. Still kneeling, he made a quick search through the corpse’s pockets.

“Find anything?”

Odo stood up. Two small silver squares glittered on his palm. “Just these.” He held the recording chips closer to his eye. “The seal’s been broken on them. They’ve been used.”

“Oh.” Kira squinted at them. “Clues.”

“Yes,” he said patiently. “That’s what they’re called.”

After the body had been wheeled away, Kira followed him back to the Promenade. He wanted to ask her if she didn’t have anything more productive to do, but refrained. She was probably tensed up about the substation mission, he knew, anxious to get through the wormhole and out to the Gamma Quadrant. The last time he had encountered O’Brien in Quark’s bar, the chief engineer had complained of her incessant pushing to get the quarantine module ready for travel. O’Brien finally had threatened to have her barred from the engineering bay, so he and his crew could work in peace.

As Odo pushed his way through the nonstop crowds on the Promenade, with Kira in his wake, he pondered the difficulties with humanoid emotions. He hadn’t gone to great lengths to cultivate them inside himself, except for the ones useful in his job, such as suspicion and distrust; like the human appearance he bore on the exterior of his form, emotional traits would have been carefully acquired. The advantage to his essentially liquid-based nature, he’d often thought, was that few of the small things that troubled someone such as Kira had the same effect on him. He could let them sink without a trace, like stones dropped into an ocean.

“What’s that smell?” Kira scowled as she looked around the security office. “It’s like somebody had set fire to their old socks and then—” She used a Bajoran vulgarism that Odo knew meant to extinguish by urination.

The memory of Gri Rafod and the cheap tobacco that Quark had unloaded on him did manage to irritate Odo. “Trust me,” he told Kira, “there were aspects to our last batch of Cardassian visitors that were worse than you can imagine.” The smell had yet to completely fade.

He sat down at his desk and loaded first one chip, then the other, into a player. Neither produced sound. “These were never recorded on.” He studied the chip player’s small readout screen.

“How can you tell?”

“The type of recording device used with these first lays down an index of tracks. Even if the material is later erased, the index matrix remains. These chips don’t have anything like that.”

Kira leaned over the desk to look at them. “Not much good as clues, then, are they?”

“That, Major, is why I’m chief of security and you’re not.” Odo leaned back, holding up a chip between his thumb and forefinger. “Consider. A young Bajoran of known Redemptorist sympathies is found murdered, and in his possession are two recording chips, seals broken but not yet recorded upon.” The chip made a small noise when he dropped it onto the desktop. “Perhaps someone wanted him to believe they contained recordings.” He nodded slowly. “I’ll have to think about this.”

Kira made no move toward the office door. After a moment, Odo brought his gaze back round to her. “Is there something further I can do for you, Major?”

She shook her head, as though his voice had woken her. “No . . . nothing . . . ”

When she had left, and the door had slid shut behind her, Odo watched his forefinger push one of the chips around the surface of the desk. It wouldn’t have taken any great skill at detection to see that something else had been on Kira’s mind.

“What are you going to use for electromagnetic scanning?” Lieutenant Jadzia Dax, the station’s chief science officer, looked up at the blueprints on the engineering bay’s wall. The thin membrane, some ten meters square, was connected to the DS9 data bases and could call up any magnified schematic within seconds. “I don’t see any of the usual data routes—”

“We’ve taken over the perimeter sensors and reconfigured them.” Beside her, Dr. Bashir pointed to a section depicting the exterior of the quarantine module. “They were really needed only for docking maneuvers, but they have a pretty wide spectrum built into them—more than enough for what we need. Computer, give me the control layout.” The images blurred and shifted on the membrane, then drew solid. “You see?” He leaned closer than necessary to Dax, reaching around her shoulder to indicate the new set of prints. “There’s a lot of carrying capacity for the diagnostic and treatment equipment that we’re not going to be using now. We just shunt those aside and use the circuits for whatever we need. Clever, really.”

“Very.” She ignored his arm—it wasn’t actually touching her—and turned her self-possessed Trill smile toward him. “Your idea?”

“Well, no . . . ” Bashir followed her toward the QM. “O’Brien’s, as a matter of fact. But my approval was needed for it,” he hurriedly added. “All these retrofits first have to go by me. . . .”

The chief engineer stood inside the module, sparks raining around him as he prodded a welding torch inside an open ceiling panel. Beyond him, the metal-on-metal sounds of his crew’s labors boomed out of the QM’s farther recesses. Black power cables snaked around his feet.

“Haven’t used one of these since I was an apprentice.” Through the noise, O’Brien had heard their approach. He switched off the torch’s plasma flow, and the eerie ionic glow that had masked his face vanished. He pushed up his darkened goggles. “So, what’s the verdict?”

“Well, I’ve really only seen the plans,” said Dax. “But it seems like a lot to get done. Do you really think you can make your departure date?”

“This pup is going out the door as scheduled, even if I’m still riding on its back with a socket wrench.” O’Brien flicked on the torch again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . . ”

“Give me a call at Ops when you have the chance, Doctor.” Dax began picking her way out through the QM’s clutter. “I’ve got some ideas on ancillary stat probes you might find interesting.”

“How about right now?” Bashir moved to catch up with her, just before O’Brien brought his thickly gloved hand down from the ceiling panel and snagged him by the arm. “I’m not—”

“Not so fast.” O’Brien held onto him. “I need you here. We’ve got some decisions to make.” He signaled goodbye to Dax with the welding torch. “I’ll send him up to you when he’s finished his homework.”

Bashir followed the chief engineer to the front exterior of the quarantine module. “So, what exactly is it that’s so important?” His words sounded sulky even to himself.

“More important than your hormone level? Practically everything.” O’Brien stood beside the intricate mandibles of the towing link that had been grafted onto one end of the QM. A passage large enough for a humanoid to crawl through ran along the center of the four C-shaped locking arms. “Actually, this isn’t anything you have to make a decision on—I’ve already set it up, and I’m not changing it. You and Kira just need to know about it.” He pointed to a set of black ovoids around the central channel’s rim. “See those? I pulled some of the explosives from the interior walls and formed them into shaped thrust charges. That’s because there isn’t time to rig up fancy maneuvering jets with enough force to disengage the module from the cargo shuttle we’re rigging up as a pusher vessel. Once you and Kira get through the wormhole and into range of your target position, and she transfers over to the substation, one of you will have to calculate your firing angle and let ’er rip.” He picked up a cable with bare metal showing at its tip. “The trigger line’ll be wired right into the pusher’s control panel.”

The egg-shaped bomblets seemed less than impressive. Bashir shrugged. “So?”

“I forget—you’re a doctor, not a physicist. Well, this’ll give you a chance to brush up on your Newton. When these go off, there’s going to be a kick. You’d better have yourselves and everything else battened down before you punch the button.”

Bashir turned and began to walk away, then halted.

He looked over his shoulder. “Wait a minute. You said you took out some of the explosives. Where’s the rest?”

“Where do you think?” O’Brien went on checking the cable’s branching connections to the bomblets. “They’re still inside the QM, right where I put them soon as they were delivered from ordnance. If you think I’m going to rip them out, try to seal the walls back up in time to get this thing on its way, and then put the charges back in when we want to use this for its original purpose . . . ” He glanced over at Bashir, then shook his head. “Life’s too short.”

“Right—” Bashir looked at him in incredulity. “And I imagine it could get even shorter, what with riding all the way out to the Gamma Quadrant in a craft loaded with high explosives.”

“What are you worried about?” O’Brien looped the cable over one of the locking arms and out of the way. “You’re the only one who knows the fuse codes. Don’t tell them to anyone, and then the charges might as well be cementene bricks for all the damage they could do.” He clapped Bashir on the shoulder. “Come on. I need a break. And you look like you need a drink.”

As they headed for the engineering bay’s exit, they passed the microassembly work benches. A couple of the faces bent over the intricate work lifted and looked at Bashir and O’Brien, then turned back to the circuits beneath the lenses.

“Are those men working on the QM?” Bashir had seen that all the group were Bajorans.

“Of course. We’ve got everybody in the bay on this one.”

“But I heard they’re all Redemptorists . . . ”

“They can be whatever they want, as long as they get the job done.” O’Brien pushed him toward the door. “Let’s go.”

The voice—mocking, raging, compelling—filled the space. Even if the volume on the chip-player were turned all the way down, so that the words became hardly more than a whisper, they still dominated, hammering at one’s ear.

Blood and fire . . . the voice of Hören Rygis spoke of those things, and the death of nonbelievers. Blood was the thin, degenerate stuff that flowed in the veins of the faithless; fire was the coming day of cleansing, of scouring away the elements that had polluted Bajor’s holy soil. A fire that consumed life as its fuel and left the ashes of death behind, corpses facedown on the floors of the temples and council chambers.

“And beyond,” cried the voice of the Redemptorists’ leader. “The contagion has spread beyond the sky—it hovers above us, rising like the stench from a murderer’s hands. Orbiting in empty space, hiding aboard the strangers’ machinery of oppression—but even that is far enough to evade our wrath, our justice. She conspires with them, she sups at the table of the wicked, her goblet a martyr’s skull, the wine spilling down her chin the blood of innocents. It is a holy act, a sacrament, to rid Bajor of such evil. . . .”

In his office, with the only light that from the stars the voice would pull down from the heavens, Commander Sisko listened. He knew the words that would come next.

“The continued existence of such a person is a sickness.” The voice lowered to a mockery of reasoned discourse. “A sickness that infects the spiritual life of all Bajor. To suffer traitors, to endure the beating of their hearts, is to leave a poisoned thorn in our own flesh. It must be plucked out. . . .”

He had listened to the recording twice already. A transcription of the latest broadcast from the Redemptorists’ hidden radio transmitters—the security forces of the provisional government had sent it to him on a subspace linkup. He could reach out and switch the chip-player off, plunge the darkened office into a silence that would be as soothing as his wife’s touch upon his knotted shoulder muscles once had been—but an almost mesmeric fascination stayed his hand. Whatever else might have been said of Hören Rygis, he could be truthfully described as a spellbinder. In historical terms, less of a king and more of a Hitlerian type—the fires of which he spoke burned but did not illuminate.

. . . and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. Sisko’s brooding thoughts pushed the hammering voice away for a moment. The ancient poet had gotten that one right. Things hadn’t changed in all the centuries before or since.

A name brought his attention back—a name that the voice spoke, tongue curling as though the syllables were drops of acid upon it.

“Kira Nerys . . . ”

The first time he had listened to the chip, a chill had contracted Sisko’s spine. That didn’t change—it was as if the voice had already killed her and laid the body before him.

“When the blood is tainted, it must be let. That is how disease is cured. . . .”

He roused himself and reached for the player.

“Blood must flow—”

With a tap of his finger, the voice was stilled. For now.

She knew she was dreaming, but that didn’t help.

Worse than dreaming. Remembering.

The bed might as well have been on fire, for all the ease that Kira could find there. She writhed in fever, as though the flames she saw had burst from within her veins.

“I’m sorry . . . ” she whispered through cracked lips. If there had been anyone else in her quarters, they might have heard.

“Oh, it’s much too late for that.” The face of the dead, lit a flickering orange, turned toward her. “It was always too late.”

Her fists trembled against the sweat-soaked covers. “I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t know it would happen like this. . . .”

“You should have thought of that sooner.” The burning temple, its walls cracked by explosions, vomited black clouds up to the night sky. The dead’s shadow fell across her where she lay, both on the bed in the safety of DS9’s encircling steel, and on the barren ground where the impact of the blast had flung her. “But you didn’t.”

“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . ”

“Too late.” The ground was littered with corpses now. Some of them were disfigured by fire, others she could still recognize. All the dead fixed their unforgiving gaze upon her. “Better if you had been with us, inside. You should have been one of us. . . .”

The dream pounded on, its shrinking world battered by new, unseen blows. Kira felt the fabric of the pillow against her cheek, but still couldn’t escape. “I know,” she said aloud. “But I am one of you.”

“No—” The dead stepped back, shadows merging with night. “Not yet. But you will be.”

Her eyes opened, sudden as the turning of a metal key inside a lock. She saw her quarters around her, bulkheads and shelves and cabinets, the few simple things they held, pieces of her life aboard the DS9 station that were almost as familiar and real as the past—the past that claimed her in dreams and memory.

She drew in her breath, trying to make her heart slow. For a moment, it seemed as if the dream hadn’t completely faded away, that the sounds of it still gripped her. Muffled explosions, their impact eroded by falling distance . . .

Someone was knocking with a fist upon the door of her quarters. Nothing more than that; a sense of relief loosened her clenched muscles. The dreaming, and the past, was over, at least for another interval of present time.

“Are you all right, Major?” Commander Sisko stood on the other side of the door. He pointed to the tiny comm panel on the corridor’s wall. “I buzzed you, but there wasn’t any answer—”

“I’m fine.” She moved away, letting him follow her inside. One hand tried to brush her disordered hair into place as she sat down on the edge of the bed. “Nothing wrong—I was just asleep, that’s all.”

Sisko watched her with concern. “Must have been sleeping pretty heavily. Usually, you’re up like a shot.”

“Doctor Bashir told me I’ve been working too hard.” Kira shook her head, as though to clear away the last clinging fragments. She managed a faint smile. “Seems to be an occupational hazard around here.”

“I wonder . . . ” He turned the chair around from the desk and straddled it, arms folded across the top. “Sometimes people overwork for . . . different reasons. To escape things they don’t want to think about.” His gaze shifted inward for a moment. “Or remember.”

The commander’s words tensed Kira’s spine. “Perhaps so.” She couldn’t remove a cold edge from her voice. “But those are personal matters.”

“They become significantly less personal, Major, when they impact upon the performance of an officer’s duties.” Sisko’s attention focused hard upon her, the touch of his own past shoved aside. “Or say, upon that officer’s life. Or her death, to be more accurate.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sisko took a glittering silver square, a recording chip, from his uniform pocket and held it up. “Perhaps you are aware that there have been threats made against you.”

“Just like the overwork, Commander—it comes with the territory.” She kept a calm exterior, though her heart ticked faster again. “Not everybody on Bajor agrees with what we’re doing up here. You know that. Some of the more extreme elements would like to blow us out of the sky.” She shrugged. “But we don’t have to be universally popular to do our job.”

“These threats are different. They’re directed at you in particular.” The chip sparkled between Sisko’s thumb and forefinger. “I have to take them seriously. These are people who are capable of following up on their promises. And their leader speaks of you with a vehemence that certainly indicates your murder would be a top priority.”

Kira sighed. “If you’re speaking of the Redemptorists, Commander, then I’m aware of the same things you are.” She leaned back and pulled the mattress away from the bulkhead, enough that she could pry open her hiding place. She dropped the handful of chips onto the bed beside her. “You could listen to these, and you’d find that my name comes up at least a couple of times. I’ve been on the Redemptorist hit list since before I was posted to DS Nine.”

With a raised eyebrow, Sisko looked at the chips. “I take it these are all transcriptions of Hören Rygis’s broadcasts?”

“Of course. As the Bajoran military attaché aboard this station, I feel it’s my duty to stay current with planetside developments.”

“So why keep them hidden?”

She shrugged. “Technically, under the emergency regulations that are still in effect, it’s illegal for a Bajoran citizen to be in possession of material like this.”

“You could be exempted from that prohibition.”

“It’s just easier to do what I need to, and keep quiet about it. Why should I risk other people not understanding?”

Suspicion lingered in Sisko’s eyes. “So you’re aware of Hören Rygis’s long-standing animosity toward you . . . and you still approved that group of Redemptorists coming aboard.”

Her gaze met his head-on. “And I’d do it again, Commander. For the exact same reasons I gave you before. As long as they’re Bajorans, they’re my brothers.”

“Hm.” Sisko rubbed his thumb across the chip in his hand. “Perhaps your familial sentiments would be a little less tender if you heard Hören’s most recent tirade against you.”

“How do you know I haven’t?”

“Because this one was never broadcast. The provisional government’s security forces finally managed to track down the floating radio transmitter from which all the others picked up their signals. They raided it and confiscated everything, including this.” He held the chip higher. “The index date on it shows that it was recorded sometime within the last few shifts. And let’s just say that Hören speaks of you at greater length than he’s ever done before.”

“And was he—”

“Caught?” Sisko shook his head. “No, unfortunately. The Redemptorist underground is, to say the least, secretive. Wherever Hören Rygis is on the surface of Bajor, he continues to elude capture. And, I imagine, as soon as the Redemptorists rebuild their transmitting network, he’ll go on spewing his venom into the ears of his followers.” His voice lowered. “And continue urging them to kill you.”

“I don’t think I have much to worry about from a crew of Bajoran microassemblers—”

“Probably not. It’s the Redemptorists we don’t know about, the ones whose identities Odo doesn’t have logged into his data base, who concern me. What I’d like to know is why Hören wants you dead.”

“Commander—I wish I could say it was a long story.” Kira felt a weariness, from more than the rigors of her dreaming, weigh upon her bones. “But it’s not. Before my posting to DS Nine, I had a tour of duty in the provisional government’s security forces—it’s still a branch of what little military Bajor possesses. I thought I could do the most good there. When the Cardassians abandoned our planet, we were overjoyed, ecstatic, to see them go.” She pushed her hair back from her brow. “What we didn’t anticipate was the chaos that would follow their departure. If nothing else, the Cardassians provided order . . . things like the distribution of food, or the simple knowing from one day to the next what would happen. When that all fell apart, the resistance groups, the ones that had been fighting the Cardassians all along, started scrambling for power. That meant fighting each other.” She shook her head. “So much for brotherhood, right?”

Sisko’s expression didn’t change. “That’s why the Federation came here. We’ve seen it before.”

“Well, I hadn’t. I didn’t know. . . .” Kira took a deep breath. “The Redemptorists got squeezed out of the front organization that eventually formed the provisional government. Hören Rygis was already their leader then. They took over one of the temples by armed force, barricaded themselves inside with nearly a hundred non-Redemptorist hostages. There was a list of demands . . . I don’t even remember what most of them were. But Hören and his followers said they would throw one corpse out the temple gate every hour, until the demands were met. And they did—one of them was a twelve-year-old boy. That’s how Hören’s mind works.”

“And you were in charge of doing something about the situation.”

She nodded. “And I blew it. Or else I didn’t blow it; I don’t know anymore. I directed the whole operation; my security team stormed the gate, we got inside, we pulled out all but a half-dozen of the hostages still alive . . . ” She fell silent for a moment. “And the Redemptorists got what they really wanted. They became martyrs. They had enough explosives in there to turn the whole sky red.” The words were flat, dead things in her mouth.

“That wasn’t any fault of yours. You did what you had to.”

She could have closed her eyes and seen the flames, the dreams and memories without end. “Their bodies lay on the ground . . . some of them were still alive, at least for a little while. I recognized some of them. From the camps, when we had been only children, or later, when we had fought side by side . . . when all those things had seemed so much simpler . . . ” She closed her eyes, unable now to bear anyone’s watching gaze. “I stood there, and I felt my hands and my face withering from the heat . . . I stood there and looked down at them, and they saw me and knew who I was . . . they all must have, before they died . . . ” She pressed her fists against her legs to stop their trembling. “They were all my brothers. They died for what they believed in. Maybe I should have, too.”

Sisko touched her wrist, and she opened her eyes.

“You can be as hard on yourself as you want, Major. And I wish I could tell you it would help. But I know it doesn’t.”

Talking about these things had done no good, either, she felt hollowed, as if each word had taken a piece from inside. “Hören survived, of course; he wasn’t even in the temple when we broke in. Long gone . . . and already talking about the glorious deaths. . . .” Kira looked down at her whitened knuckles, as if they were small stones, no part of her. “So, of course, the Redemptorist movement became even larger than it was before. That’s what always happens, isn’t it? Martyrs. The only other thing you need is a target, someone to focus all that righteous hatred against. . . .”

“And is that all it is for Hören? Names on a list?”

“No—” Kira brought her gaze up to Sisko’s. “That’s not how . . . how his soul works. He couldn’t be as powerful as he is—his voice couldn’t be that powerful—if he didn’t really hate. As much as he loved those who died.”

Sisko’s face was set, grim. “He could find better ways of honoring them.”

It’s too late for that . . .

“What did you say, Major?”

She realized that she had spoken aloud, the words the dead had spoken to her.

“I . . . I don’t know. . . .”

Concern showed in the commander’s furrowed brow. “Perhaps the doctor is right. Perhaps you do need a rest.”

Kira shook her head. “That’d be the worst thing I could do. Then . . . then, all I’d do would be to remember.”

A distance fell between them, as if for a moment he saw something else—or someone—before him. He nodded. “Very well.” He pushed himself up from the chair. “The extra security measure I’ll be discussing with Odo won’t interfere with your preparations for the substation mission.” He started toward the door, then turned and scooped up the recording chips she had dropped on the bedcovers. “I don’t think you need these anymore.”

She could hear the chips scraping against each other, as though he were grinding them to dust inside his fist. “No—” She almost managed to smile gratefully. “No, I don’t.”

CHAPTER 7

SOME THINGS HAD CHANGED that didn’t matter—such as the location of the hiding place. Other things had changed for the better—he could tell that by the faces assembled around him. Hören nodded to himself in satisfaction. Much had been accomplished with one simple death. Another—at least, of one of his followers—wouldn’t be necessary.

“Are we all here?” He looked around the circle. This space was so much larger than the last hole into which he’d been crammed. That one had been hardly big enough for him to turn around in, let alone stand upright; the small of his back and his shoulder muscles still ached from their long confinement. Here, the bulkheads and ceiling were so far away that the glow from the portable lantern was quickly swallowed up. “I asked for everyone to come—”

Beside him, Deyreth Elt leaned forward. “As you instructed—they’re here.” Deyreth sat at Hören’s right hand, as though at a position of honor he’d newly earned. That, plus the use of the word “they” to indicate the others, indicated his self-appointed status.

Whatever Deyreth thought of himself was inconsequential to Hören. So many things were coming close to fulfillment—these lesser and expendable elements had begun to fade in his sight, like candle flames held against a blazing dawn. He strove to remind himself that they would have their uses for a while longer.

“My heart is gladdened by your presence.” Hören let his gaze rest upon each shadowed face in turn. “The communion of the faithful gives us all strength.” He sat back upon the cushion of a folded blanket. “How do your labors progress? And theirs?”

None of them spoke. The reforged somberness held them fast.

Deyreth broke the silence. “The quarantine module—or the substation, as they have begun calling it—is nearly ready for its voyage. The chief engineer O’Brien and his technicians have finished installing the life-support systems and the various sensors and other equipment for the use of the doctor. Indeed, most of the technical crews have been pulled out in order to complete the preparation of the cargo shuttle that will be used to take the substation through the wormhole.”

“And that leaves . . . what? Your work, I take it?”

A conspirator’s smile rose on Deyreth’s sharp-angled face. “Our true work. There were some, shall we say, unexpected problems with the circuitry on which we worked. Microcomponents that did not perform up to specification, or failed under test loads. Our team has had to go into the substation itself in order to rectify these matters. O’Brien and the others are already stretched too far, for any of them to spend much time supervising us. We’ve been able to accomplish a great deal—without being observed.”

“That’s true—” One of the other faces dared to speak. “They don’t know at all what we’re doing inside the substation. And we’ve installed bypass circuits on top of everything, so anytime O’Brien runs a diagnostic test, the results all check out the way they should. Nothing can be detected, unless he were to rip out all the interior panels—and there isn’t time for that.”

Hören let the man go rattling on, though these technical details were of little interest to him. All that mattered were the results, the creation of the next hiding place—the last one—which would bring him within striking distance of the one whose death would be a sweet justice.

He closed his eyes; the follower was speaking of something else, just as unimportant. Hören listened instead to the memory of his own voice, the words he’d recorded to be broadcast across the surface of Bajor to the faithful. The letting of blood . . . this is how disease is cured. The mere remembered sounds of the words were sweet. Even more pleasurable were the images they aroused within him, the ancient medical skill of venesection transformed into a holy rite.

There would be more than one doctor on the substation’s mission. But his would be the hand that bore the scalpel, the cure for the sickness that had infected his heart as well, that could be purged only with the release of another’s blood—her blood . . .

“Does that meet with your approval?”

Of course. . . .

Hören opened his eyes and saw Deyreth, and the others beyond, watching him. He nodded. “Your labors are pleasing to all the eyes of the faithful.” He smiled. “I know that you will have everything ready for me.”

The slow working of his plans, the coming of that great day . . . that had been the main reason for the change in hiding places. Away from the distant bowels of the station, and closer to, almost inside, the engineering bay. DS9’s overefficient security chief was prowling every centimeter of the dark, empty spaces; the principle that had enabled him to evade capture so far, to lodge himself inside the strangers’ nest, had been taken to its next logical step. If they knew how close he was to them—to her . . . but, of course, they didn’t. The shield of his faith protected him from the strangers’ eyes.

“Hören . . . I am concerned. . . .”

The few timid words sparked anger inside him. “Oh?” He glared at the one who had spoken. “What troubles you?” He peered more closely at the crouching figure. “Do you find doubts in your heart?”

“No—” The other quickly shook his head. “Of course not. I’m just . . . ”

“What?”

“I’m concerned about you, Hören.” He looked as if he were about to pray to be understood. “You’re so important—not just to us, but to all the believers—what would happen to our cause, to our faith, if something happened . . . if something happened to you? What would keep the Redemptorists together? It just seems . . . not foolish, I don’t mean that, but . . . risky. That you should undertake this task.”

“I see.” Anger was not called for now. “And what would you suggest? That you do it?”

“I don’t know—” The follower seemed mired in his own confusion. “But perhaps . . . if what is desired is Kira Nerys’s death . . . we can accomplish that now. So much more easily—and without endangering you. Even if we were to let them go on with their mission—there are hundreds of ways to make sure that she would never come back from it—”

“Ah.” Hören nodded. “Your worries for me . . . are very touching.” He let his voice soften, become tender as a parent’s to a beloved child. “And you are correct: I risk much—I risk everything—by going ahead with what we have planned together, what you have labored to bring about.” His gaze moved across the group of men. “But you mustn’t forget . . . that my death would mean nothing. To rid the soul of Bajor of this pollution, a small thing is asked of me. And a great thing would be given unto me. The honor of death, to die as our brothers have died . . . ” He smiled sadly. “Perhaps I am being selfish, to want that for myself. Would you deny it to me?”

“It’s just that . . . ” The other’s hands tightened into fists. “Is she worth your life?”

“Of course not. Kira Nerys is an insect compared to the least of us, even to that one whose sympathy for the strangers led him into error. But there’s more at stake than simply eliminating her pestilential existence. We have it within our power to transform her death—and mine, if need be—into the salvation of Bajor itself.” His voice faded to a whisper, which drew the others even closer to him. “The mysteries that our most ancient devotions seek to understand, the gifts that the Bajorans have been chosen to receive, of all the universe . . . the orbs . . . ” The whisper turned bitter. “The strangers come here and call the source of our faith a wormhole—and we mock our own beliefs when we use that word. That is how the infection spreads. And now, they would make of that sacred mystery a road for their boots to trample on as they carry their wares back and forth to market.” The bitterness twisted upon itself. “Shall we not let them make our temples into brothels then? Surely that would bring them money, as well. They might even let us have a few coins of it.”

Their heads were bent, even Deyreth’s, as though to receive the lash of his words upon their backs.

“Their mere presence here is an abomination.” He relented, voice soft again. “But give yourselves this comfort—soon that shall come to an end.”

He closed his eyes, knowing that his silence would tell them to leave him. So that he could be alone once more, in the darkness of his meditations.

Soon. Where even his voice, and the words that burned in it, would cease.

Silence at last. He turned off the player and leaned back in his chair, his thoughts deepening inside him.

It had taken some doing to find the right chip, the one that had been confiscated in the raid on the Redemptorist transmitter down on Bajor. Odo realized that not everyone had the same respect for physical clues that, out of necessity, he had developed—but he’d still had to bite his tongue when Commander Sisko had come back to the security office with a fistful of recording chips, the important one mixed in with them. The problem of searching through the chips had been compounded by Hören Rygis’s voice being on all of them, transcriptions of his ranting diatribes—something that Odo found personally offensive. Sentient creatures seemed to already show enough ingenuity at finding crimes to commit—why should they be exhorted to murder in addition?

He scooped up the other chips and sealed them into an evidence bag before extending his arm to drop them in the file cabinet on the other side of the office. Now that he’d found the one he’d been looking for, he wasn’t going to risk losing it again. It had been a violation of his own procedural rules to let the commander take away the chip in the first place, but he’d been able to tell that Sisko had had some compelling use for it. His own suspicions about what that might have been were confirmed when Sisko had come back with the handful, and had told him that they had been in Major Kira’s possession.

Unfortunately, the commander hadn’t seemed to feel any need for sharing what he’d learned from Kira. Inside himself, Odo felt a familiar irritation uncoiling. Like most humanoids, Benjamin Sisko had an obstinate respect for the privacy of others—and at the same time, he wanted his chief of security to snoop out every secret that might threaten the continued functioning of DS9. Odo would have appreciated a little help along that line.

Still, if cooperation wasn’t forthcoming from Sisko and the others, there were still inanimate objects to be questioned—they could be much more eloquent. He extracted the chip from the player and held it up to his eye to study it, then laid it back down. He had already taken it over to Dax’s lab to glean the information he needed from it. The chief science officer had run it through the subphoton microscope and downloaded the resulting images. Taking out his data padd, he called the file onto the screen.

At the highest magnification, the smooth surface of the recording chip looked as pitted as the surface of an airless moon. Odo scrolled the image to the manufacturer’s data inscribed in one corner.

Well, well. Without looking away, Odo punched the long stream of digits into the computer panel. How interesting. The chip had spoken, in its own way, with truths far more revealing than the voice of Hören Rygis.

On the larger desktop display was the batch number of the chip that had been found in the raid on the Redemptorist transmitter. He already knew what he’d find as he called up the file on the Bajoran microassembler whose murdered body had been dumped in the engineering bay. And the chip that had been found in the corpse’s pocket. . . .

The batch numbers were the same.

Odo leaned back, gazing with satisfaction at the two parallel strings of numbers. He’d previously scanned the corpse’s chip, but the one from the transmitter raid had been taken away by Commander Sisko before he’d had a chance to scan it. In the meantime, he’d searched through a massive data base of shipping invoices, and had found another puzzle piece: all the recording chips in that batch had been received and sold by one of the small gadget merchants doing business from an akhibara cubicle on the Promenade. Naturally, the merchant—an unusually obtuse Rhaessian—had had no record of his various customers; that would have been too much to ask for.

But even so . . . just those few scraps of information, the silent words from the recording chips, gave him a lot to think about, to piece together, to make sense of.

Inside Odo’s head was a world as intricate, and filled with both light and dark corners, as DS9 itself. His pleasure came from working his way through the corridors in both worlds, and finding out the secrets of every thing and person alike.

He set the revealing chip down precisely in the center of the desktop. Soon, he would have enough to make a report to the commander.

“You were warned, I take it?”

Doctor Bashir looked up from the display panel before him. The substation’s remote sensors were running through their last circuit checks. “Pardon me?” He glanced over his shoulder to the doorway of the cargo shuttle’s pilot area.

“Warned.” Kira stood there, arms folded across her breast, her habitual scowl in full force. “Now’s not a good time to play around with me, Doctor—we’ll be disengaging from the pylon in fifteen minutes. I know Commander Sisko spoke to you. About our . . . working relationship.”

He sighed. The length of time it would take to complete the mission—from going through the wormhole and out to the Gamma Quadrant, to bringing the cargo shuttle back to the station by himself—had originally seemed far too short for all he wanted to accomplish. Now, as it had become increasingly clear how much Kira resented his presence on the mission, he had begun to think it might be a long voyage indeed.

“Since you’re aware of my conversations with the commander, why do you bother to ask?” His own temper had started to fray a bit, from the shifts of nonstop work with O’Brien in getting the scientific equipment installed and running before the departure date. As little as an hour ago, Bashir had been inside the cargo shuttle’s cramped one-person augmented personnel module, awkwardly adjusting the last few sensors on the substation’s exterior. It had been a relief to stow the APM back in its holding bay and step out into the relatively less claustrophobic space of the shuttle’s pilot area—at least until Kira had started in on him. “And I don’t think that was quite the word Sisko used—advised would be more like it.”

“Whatever.” Kira stood right behind him. “If he didn’t warn you, then I will. This mission has great strategic importance, for both the station and Bajor. My job is to make sure that everything happens the way it’s supposed to. Your job, as far as I’m concerned, is to stay out of my way.” She glared at the lights on the display panel, as though they had somehow affronted her as well. “There’s still time for you to decide to do that the best way possible.”

“And that would be . . . ?” He already knew her answer.

“Don’t come along. Your assistance is not required.”

“Major Kira.” He swiveled the seat around and looked up at her. The time when he had thought there might be a chance of cordial relations between them had passed long ago. She had been ready enough to ask a favor of him when she’d needed it—apparently that had been no indication of her true feelings. “You might as well reconcile yourself to these arrangements. Technically, you may be in charge of this mission, but you should try to remember that, once you transfer to the substation, you’ll be on my territory. My agreeing to let the quarantine module be used as a substation is the only thing making this trip possible.” He had already faced down Commander Sisko about this; he found it comparatively easier to put the major in her place. “I could abort the entire mission right now, and there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it.”

She radiated a venomous silence toward him. For a moment, Bashir wondered if her hostility had crossed the line into active derangement. Kira had been missing for a couple of shifts, staying in her quarters—her absence from the engineering bay had enabled him and O’Brien to get a lot more work done—with rumors of a depressive episode floating around the crew on Ops. If that had been the case, she had bounced back from it with a vengeance.

“You’d be surprised, Doctor,” she spoke grimly, “at just what I could do about it.”

He turned away from her and leaned over the lights flashing on the panel. A very long voyage . . .

“Now—”

Hören Rygis stepped to the fore of the group of men. Beside him, Deyreth looked at the readout of the crudely patched together metal box in his hand. It was designed to indicate the status of the final preparations aboard the cargo shuttle.

“They’ve sealed the pressure locks.” Another red dot blinked on the box’s surface. “Perimeter checks under way. Let’s go.”

They were all dressed in the coveralls that were standard issue in the engineering bay. The work on the substation’s microcircuitry had continued right up to the last minute—a few well-devised component failures had seen to that. That had ensured that no one would question the microassembly team being on the staging area of the main docking pylon.

Hören felt an unshakable calm settle around his heart. It was at times like this he felt the sure machinery of fate. His followers had done their tasks well; the rest was up to him.

He started walking, shielded by the others. The distance across the pylon’s loading ramp had to be traversed, with none of the strangers noticing him. From the corner of his eye, he saw Deyreth surreptitiously press a switch on the box he held by his side.

With a mechanized hiss, the massive docking arms moved a fraction of a meter apart, loosening the connection between the substation and the cargo shuttle that had been modified for its transport.

“What the—” On the other side of the bay, the chief engineer looked in perplexity at the diagnostic cabinet. A bundled set of cables ran from it to a hatch in the machinery mounted on the cargo shuttle’s foresection. “We’re getting some flaky control feedback here.” The rest of the engineering crew looked over his shoulders at the cabinet’s gauge panels.

Their voices faded as Hören and the other Redemptorists used the distraction to slip around the substation’s distant side.

“Quick—” At Deyreth’s order, the largest of the men bent down, cupping his hands to give Hören a boost. Another switch on the box opened one of the substation’s curved exterior panels, enough for Hören to pry the gap wide enough for his shoulders to squeeze through. In a few seconds, he had scrambled inside, turning around to grab an improvised handle and pull the panel shut behind himself. The metal grew warm as a low-level fission charge around the panel’s edge welded it tight, sealing him in darkness.

He reached up to his ear to activate the tiny comm link there. This close, it was easy to pick up the transmission from Kira Nerys and the doctor in the shuttle connected to the substation.

“Anything wrong?”

That was Kira’s voice; he could imagine her up in the pilot area, impatient with the break in the departure procedure.

The chief engineer’s reply crackled with static. “ . . . looked for a moment like we were having some problem with the mounting arms . . . seems to have cleared up . . . ”

Within seconds, a fine vibration moved through the structural beams close around him. There wasn’t time to waste—he crawled quickly ahead, shoving aside a panel of lighter weight, then dropping from the ceiling to the substation’s interior.

Hören scrambled to his feet and reached up to the ceiling; the dislodged panel was just out of reach of his fingertips. He’d have to take care of it later; he nearly fell as the substation shifted position.

“What are you doing over there . . . ” In his ear, he could hear the exit crew’s voices. “Come on, clear the area . . . ” That must’ve been addressed to Deyreth and the rest of his group; it didn’t sound as if they had aroused any suspicions.

He hurried toward one of the substation’s farther sections, with a familiarity born of memorizing the plans Deyreth had provided him. He’d be able to brace himself inside a sickbed unit, secure against the cargo shuttle’s acceleration as it left the docking pylon.

Then it would just be a matter of waiting . . .

CHAPTER 8

“WE’RE DEAD.”

He spoke aloud, aware of the figure standing behind him in the doorway of the pilot area. Bashir leaned back from the shuttle’s instrument panel and looked over his shoulder. “Completely.”

“What are you talking about?” Kira had gone aft to do a visual scan of the connectors for the locking arms; the momentary glitch before they had left DS9 had continued to be a source of worry. If it had been up to Bashir, he would have delayed until it had been thoroughly checked out—but that had been Kira’s decision to make. Now, she slipped into the other seat. She quickly looked across the display. “What’s going on—”

“As I indicated, we’re dead. In the water, so to speak.” He pointed. “We’ve come to a complete halt.”

She muttered a few Bajoran swear words, as her hands moved across the controls. None of the instruments registered any change. She turned and glared at him. “If this is something you’ve pulled, just so we’d wind up spending more time here in the wormhole, I’ll—”

“Major Kira.” He tried to control his own temper. “If I’d known beforehand that you were susceptible to paranoid fantasies, I would’ve prescribed psychiatric treatment for you. I’m getting all the data I need, thank you.”

The latter was true; since the cargo shuttle, with the substation mounted before it, had entered the wormhole, the sensors had been operating at full capacity. The various pieces of equipment he and Dax had installed were running perfectly; he had checked the portable data banks and had found the information flow to be running at 110 percent of predicted levels. Commander Sisko himself had instructed Bashir to allow for the additional storage.

“They’re smart,” Sisko had told him. The commander had been giving him an additional briefing about the wormhole’s inhabitants. “They can figure out the purpose of anything that comes into their domain.” Sisko had, since his encounter with the creatures, developed a propensity for speaking of them as if they were material, even human. “They can figure out what you’re doing there. If they decide to, they can pour out information like a naiadene rainstorm.”

Perhaps that had already started happening. The wormhole’s interior had turned out to be a treasure chest of electromagnetic radiation, dense to either extreme of the sensors’ bandwidth, frequencies overlapping and intermingled. A full analysis would have to wait until he got the data banks back to DS9 and could begin going over them with Dax, but his first glance at some of the monitor screens showed indications of order, not just chaotic, random bursts and background noise. If that held up on further investigation, the hypothesis of the wormhole being an artifact produced by its inhabitants, and not just a naturally occurring phenomenon, would be substantiated. And if the underlying structure could be induced from the data . . . then the possibilities were wide open—for accomplishments far beyond the fields of multispecies medicine. Bashir almost had to control his hands from twitching, as though they might otherwise tear right into the secrets filling the banks.

Now, if only the wormhole’s inhabitants were to touch his mind, as they had the commander’s . . . then he was sure all the doors would open . . .

“I suppose it’s just a convenient accident, then?”

In the meantime, he looked at Kira beside him. “Major, perhaps you should lighten up a bit.” He’d had enough of her suspicions. “You’re well aware of the quality of materials with which O’Brien has had to make do. Probably nothing more than a loose connection somewhere. Here, watch—” He balled up his fist and, as he’d seen the chief engineer do often enough, slammed it into the least fragile-seeming panel in front of him.

Nothing happened, except for a throb of pain that traveled from his knuckles to his elbow. He wasn’t about to reveal that to Kira.

“Very impressive,” she said dryly. “Now, maybe we’d better try to fix things, and get on our way. If we were able to communicate with DS Nine from this far inside the wormhole, we could’ve asked O’Brien for some engineering advice. But since we can’t—” She stood up. “Come on. Let’s check out the engine compartment.”

“What do you need me for?” Bashir had already shifted his attention back to the sensor readouts.

“Not much, except to hold the flashlight. Now come on.” She strode past him.

As soon as they unsealed the access hatch, the burnt smell struck their nostrils. Not from a fire—the alarm systems would have kicked in if there had been one—but from overloaded circuitry and charred wire.

Bashir leaned over, peering into the opening. “This doesn’t look good.”

“Thanks for the diagnosis.” Kira had already started clambering down the metal rungs into the compartment. “It looks even worse down here.”

He breathed through a hand clamped over his mouth and nose as he stood beside her in the narrow space. “What do you think happened?” He watched as she opened a panel on the side of one of the massive cylinders and started the engines’ self-test mode.

“Well, it’s not the impulse units—they check out fine.” More numbers skittered across the readout. “Something to do with the bypass . . . no, it’s the buffers.” She ran her hand across the surface of the meter-thick shielding that had been placed around the engines, then looked at the sooty ash coating her palm. “They overloaded—something went wrong with the absorb-and-release algorithms.”

“What does that mean?”

Kira closed the diagnostic panel. “These buffers are built up from a programmable crystalline matrix. Like an intelligent capacitor—they take in the engines’ thrust impulses and modulate them to a sine wave. The propulsive effect is virtually the same, and it doesn’t disrupt the wormhole’s ionic field. So our little friends out there don’t suffer the effects, basically. But something went wrong here; it looks like the buffers were taking in 100 percent of the impulse power but passing on only 90 percent of it. With the additional mass of the substation we’re carrying, it’s not likely we would’ve noticed the drop in effective power. At least not until the whole system burned out.”

“So, we’re stuck here without engines?” Bashir looked across the compartment’s silent forms.

“No—” She shook her head. “We can pull out the buffer circuitry easily enough. That would just be putting things back in their original design. The problem is, what happens if we fire these things up—while we’re still inside the wormhole—and the buffers aren’t working?”

He had to admit it was a good question. Passage through the wormhole was predicated on the understanding that Commander Sisko had reached with the mysterious creatures that were its inhabitants. Creatures for whom the effects of an unbuffered impulse engine were potentially deadly . . .

“Let’s get back to the pilot area.” Kira started up the rungs to the access hatch above. “We’re really going to have to think about this one.”

While he waited, he was careful to touch none of the items in the sparsely furnished living quarters. It would have been easy enough for Odo to examine everything the Redemptorist possessed—there wasn’t much, clothes and a few sets of microassembly tools—and to do it undetected. He could have hidden himself as a thin, transparent membrane on the ceiling, and watched whatever the man did when he thought he was alone. But this was a time, Odo had calculated, when a more direct approach was called for.

The door slid open, and the Redemptorist named Deyreth Elt entered. Lost in thought, or just tired—he had let the door close behind him before he saw Odo sitting on the chair pulled over from the desk.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Deyreth’s reaction was immediately hostile. “What are you doing in here?”

“You needn’t be alarmed.” Odo kept his own voice level. “I apologize for this intrusion on your privacy. But I thought perhaps you would prefer that any discussions between us were done as discreetly as possible. You know who I am, don’t you?”

Deyreth nodded slowly. “The chief of security . . . ” He kept his back close to the door, as though he might attempt to flee at any moment.

“It’s been my observation,” said Odo, “that, for a group whose religious devotions are paramount in their lives, you and your fellow Redemptorists are remarkably well informed about the reality of DS Nine’s operations; the personnel in charge, and so forth. Almost as if you’d made it a point of study. At least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten whenever I’ve talked to the others.”

“Why have you been talking to them?” Deyreth’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Odo observed the change with satisfaction. It always helped to plant a seed that could grow large enough to split conspiracies apart. “It’s my job, isn’t it? To investigate . . . to talk to people. I would have hoped that you would welcome my attentions, in that it’s the murder of one of your own that’s being looked into.”

Deyreth’s expression grew even harder. “Arten was a fool.”

“Oh? Do fools deserve to die, then?”

“That . . . that’s not a concern of mine.” His face showed that he’d spoken too rashly. “But Arten fell among bad companions—nonbelievers—when he came to this place. It was a mistake to bring him with us; he was too young; he didn’t have the shield of a confirmed faith to protect him from his errors.”

“I see. And those errors were . . . ?”

“That is of no concern to you. Investigate his death, if you choose; I have no say about it. But these doctrinal matters are beyond your sphere of authority.”

“Very well.” Odo leaned forward. “Let’s talk of your compatriot’s death. I find it . . . interesting to hear you tell of these ‘bad companions’ Arten found here. Especially when my investigations among those who would fit that description—and I know all who are aboard the station—show that none of them had the slightest contact with him. He seemed to lead the same type of reclusive existence here as do you and the rest of the Redemptorists.”

A shrug. “I can’t answer for all of his comings and goings.”

Odo let his gaze wander around the quarters. “Do you like music? Of any kind?” He looked back to Deyreth.

The question seemed to puzzle him. “Such things are frivolities . . . ”

“I expected that reaction from you. That’s why I’m not surprised to see that there’s no chip-player in your quarters. There wasn’t one in Arten’s, either. Which, of course, made it intriguing that I found a couple of blank chips on his corpse. But then . . . there are other uses for them besides recording music.”

Deyreth remained silent, his spine visibly stiffening.

“What use would you have for them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. . . .”

“That statement might have been believable at one time.” Odo carefully watched the shift of expressions across the other’s face. “But not now—thanks to the services of a certain Ferengi barkeeper. Quark is probably the worst possible ‘companion’ on the station, but he doesn’t mind doing a few little services for me, now and then—it keeps him in my good graces for whatever malfeasances he may commit later on.”

A corner of Deyreth’s mouth curled in distaste. “What does that sort of creature have to do with me?”

“Quark is in the habit of surreptitiously video recording everything that happens inside his establishment, and most of what happens just outside on the Promenade; the entryway is studded with some cleverly concealed lenses. He is, as one might expect, alert to chances for blackmail.”

“I’ve never patronized such a place.”

“No. But quite a few shifts ago, not long after you and the rest of your microassembly team came up here from Bajor, you went into the booth of a Rhaessian gadget merchant just across the Promenade from Quark’s place—you show up quite identifiably on the video that he let me have. There you purchased two cartons of recording chips, paying for them with cash scrip issued by the Bajoran provisional government—the Rhaessian cheated you on the exchange rate. At high magnification, the details of the transaction are evident. The manufacturer’s batch number of the recording chips you bought is the same as of those that were found on the murdered Arten. Of course, that’s not really too significant—you might have given them to him for some obscure purpose that’s not really any of my business.”

Deyreth had stepped back, right against the door.

“What is significant,” continued Odo, “is that the same batch number is on the chips that were found during a raid on an illicit transmitting station on the surface of Bajor—”

In a split second, Deyreth had palmed the door’s control and darted out to the corridor beyond.

Odo had been readying himself, altering the muscle mass of his legs into a peak glycogen conversion rate. He was up from the chair like a coiled spring, and pinning Deyreth to the floor within a couple of strides.

“Go about your business,” he told the few startled faces in the corridor. With a knee against Deyreth’s spine, he jerked the other’s wrists back and snapped on a set of hand restraints. “Nothing to see here.” He pulled Deyreth upright and pushed him toward the nearest turbolift.

“Any luck?” She knelt down to see how the work was coming along.

Bashir lay on his back, his head and upper torso wedged into a narrow opening beneath the pilot area’s controls. “Wait a minute—” He wriggled out, his tools and light in his hands. “Not bad,” he said, leaning his shoulders against the panel. “But it’s going to take a while.”

He had surprised her by devising a plan for modifying the comm link—Kira had thought that medicine was his only practical field of knowledge. In this case, his leisure activity of restoring ancient audio equipment had proved to be of value: he had done a rough analysis of the electromagnetic spectra surrounding them in the wormhole, and had found a narrow band that seemed to reflect along the limits of the wormhole’s curved space. If he shorted out the transmitter’s signal on everything but those frequencies, they might be able to hail the Ops deck back on DS9. The drop-off in the signal’s strength would occur at a steep exponential rate, but it was still worth a shot.

“Take a break.” She almost regretted jumping down his throat the way she had before. “We’ve got to figure out some strategy here.”

Bashir followed her to the pilot seats. While he bandaged the knuckles he had scraped underneath the communicator panel, she ran through her analysis of their situation.

“It’s pretty obvious we were sabotaged.” Kira squeezed the seat’s arm in her fist. “O’Brien put in those impulse buffers himself, and when he checked them out they were functioning perfectly. If they hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have cleared this shuttle for the mission. So, somebody must’ve gotten to the buffers afterward.” She had her own suspicions about who it might have been, but she didn’t want to voice them now. The changes in the buffers’ circuitry could have been accomplished only by someone with advanced microassembly skills.

“Maybe that somebody doesn’t want us to get out to the Gamma Quadrant.” Bashir closed the lid on the first aid kit. “If Odo were here, he’d probably remind us of that old Earth maxim, Qui bono? Who benefits? The only ones I can think of would be the Cardassians.” He rubbed his thumb across the bandage on his index finger. “But Gul Tahgla and his crew had already left when the buffers were being installed around our engines . . . so, they must have someone else working for them, someone still aboard the station.”

His line of thought had diverged light-years away from hers; that was fine, as far as she was concerned. “Right now, it doesn’t matter who did it, or why. What we need to figure out is what to do about it. And fast—we’ve got to get the substation in place before the Cardassians can reach the wormhole’s exit sector and claim it for themselves.”

“I don’t know . . . ” Bashir shook his head. “It doesn’t do us much good that the engines are still operable. If we fire them up without the buffers, they’ll send a shock wave through the ionic field—we can’t be sure what the wormhole’s inhabitants will do to defend themselves. But when it happened before, with Commander Sisko out here, they collapsed the wormhole’s connection with the outside universe. Until they opened it back up, it was as if the wormhole didn’t exist anymore. We might not even be able to get out of here using those unbuffered engines.”

The same point had been worrying her. She had a vivid memory of the way the wormhole’s swirling entrance, a maelstrom of energies, had blinked out of existence, trapping Sisko inside. The same thing could happen to them now, with even less chance of a resurrection from a tomb sealed with the empty space between stars.

“And beyond that,” said Bashir, “there’s a certain moral question. Even if we could use the unbuffered engines to get out to the Gamma Quadrant, and if we weren’t bound by the understanding Sisko reached with the wormhole’s inhabitants—we’re still aware of the lethal effect the impulse energy has on them. Do we have the right to hurt them that way?”

“Spoken like a doctor.”

“It’s still the decision we’d have to make.”

She knew he was right. And there were practical concerns beyond the present one: if they did manage to get out and set the substation in the Gamma Quadrant, it wouldn’t accomplish much good if the wormhole’s inhabitants collapsed it out of existence. Bajor would wind up with sovereignty over nothing but an empty sector of space.

Her fingertips tried to rub away the ache that swelled behind her brow. If there were time to think, if the Cardassians weren’t on their way to claim the wormhole’s exit sector . . . if she and Bashir were still in touch with DS9, and they could consult with Sisko and the others about a plan of action . . .

There wasn’t time. Whatever she decided, even if it were the wrong thing, it would have to be soon.

“All right.” She drew in a deep breath, then leaned over and touched Bashir’s arm. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

“This is all very clever of you.” The Redemptorist had managed to regain his composure, enough to snarl at Odo as he was pushed toward the security office. “I imagine your heart is filled with pride over your accomplishment.”

“No more than usual.” Odo kept a tight grip on his suspect’s upper arm. The crowds on the Promenade parted for them, displaying only a mild curiosity; it was a familiar enough sight for them. “I can assure you that it’s merely a matter of routine.”

Deyreth twisted his neck to look back at him, “Be satisfied with what you can, heathen.” The Bajoran’s sharp-edged face held a look of maniacal triumph. “What happens to me is less than nothing. A dawn approaches that none of you can forestall—”

“Yes, of course; keep moving.” He found religious fanatics to be particularly annoying. There was no complexity to their minds, just a single glaring light that consumed everything else inside their skulls. No challenge to them; this one had already as much as confessed to the other’s murder. “Why don’t you wait until I can take down a statement from you?”

“Do you need one? Surely, in your cleverness, you have figured out everything you need to know.” Spittle flecked Deyreth’s lip. “I purchased the chips here, those that the vermin of the provisional government’s security forces found in their raid upon our transmitter—what does that mean? Tell me!”

“It means,” said Odo, “that your leader, Hören Rygis, is somewhere aboard the station. He’s been recording his broadcasts here and having them smuggled back down to Bajor.” He hustled Deyreth toward the security office. “That’s what you and I are going to talk about. And then you’re going to take me to him.”

Deyreth laughed, eyes wide with delight. “You’re too late! He’s gone, you cannot touch him!” The Bajoran contorted his body even further. “You can’t stop that which is ordained—”

For a moment, Odo had to turn his gaze away as he keyed the code upon the door. That inattention was enough; he heard the metal of the hand restraints strike the floor, followed by the delicate microassembly tools that Deyreth had stealthily managed to take from his pocket and use upon the hand restraints. His grip was torn loose from Deyreth’s arm as he was shoved against the wall.

“Stop!” Odo regained his balance, seeing Deyreth push through the crowd. No one laid a hand upon him. “Get out of my way—”

In his blind rush, Deyreth collided with the rail overlooking the deck below. The impact knocked the breath from him; dazed, he clung to the metal bar, his torso bent over the empty space.

Odo was still a couple of meters away, battering against the wall of humanoid and other bodies—there wasn’t time to assume another shape that would have gotten him past them any more quickly—when he saw Deyreth turn an agonized glance back toward him. Deyreth scrambled over the rail just as Odo reached out to grab him.

Gravity caught him first. Deyreth’s grasp of the rail slipped loose, and he toppled, centimeters away from Odo’s outstretched hand.

The crowd gathered at Odo’s back as he looked down at the body crumpled upon a grid below. Blood had already begun to seep through the small holes and dot the pipes and wiring underneath.

Odo turned and bulled his way through the gawkers. Someone else would have to gather up the Redemptorist’s body. Right now, he had to get to Ops and talk to Commander Sisko.

CHAPTER 9

SHE WALKED THROUGH the dark spaces. In silence; the bulkhead panels curved around her, like the flowing walls of the crypts beneath a Bajoran temple. The passage through what had been the quarantine module, and was now the substation that would secure her people’s claim to the stable wormhole, evoked memories in her. Of helping to carry the shrouded body of an uncle, the wounds of the beating he’d received from the Cardassian camp guards still seeping through the thin wrappings, carrying it and laying it down among the sacred bones of their ancestors. She’d hardly been more than ten years old then, and already she’d been pressed into the service of the rituals; there had been so few of her clan left.

Kira stopped for a moment, leaning a hand against a bulkhead to steady herself, and squeezing her eyes in an attempt to get rid of the painful remembrances. She could recall—she couldn’t stop herself—how light her uncle’s corpse had seemed; it hadn’t been until later that she had realized he had been starving himself, dividing his rations among her and the other children. When the time came, the guards had broken him like a dry stick.

Forget, she told herself. You’ve got work to do. Through sheer force of will, she put the memory, and all the others like it, back inside the chamber she carried inside her head, a chamber as large as Bajor itself, as small as the tear of a girl still weeping as she lay curled on a barracks’ dirty straw mat.

The interior of the substation brightened. Aboard the cargo shuttle, Bashir must have managed to switch on the auxiliary power. The central corridor ran ahead of her, branching on either side into the various sections and compartments. In the dim glow of the radiant panels—they wouldn’t come to full brightness until the substation’s own power source was activated—the substation looked less tomblike, and closer to a regulation Starfleet sickbay. Space was tighter, though, than on either DS9 or an Enterprise-class ship; the narrow corridors folded in upon themselves like a maze. When she had inspected the substation during its retrofitting in O’Brien’s engineering bay, she had memorized only the routes through it and the areas that she would require on the mission; the other sections she was content to leave sealed off.

“Major Kira—” Bashir’s voice crackled from a speaker over her head. “Are you at the control room yet?”

“I’m on my way.” The bad memories had snared her, just when there was no time to waste. Perhaps it had been the substation’s empty chambers on either side of her, surrounded by the wormhole’s darkness, that had triggered deepening thoughts. A wordless feeling had remained, chilling the skin across her arms and shoulders. She pushed it back, and headed for the substation’s nerve center.

He wondered why she had stopped. For a moment, as he had crouched silent behind a scrub room door, his hands almost within reach of her throat, he thought that she might have detected his presence. That might have been why she had closed her eyes, head bowed in concentration, her nostrils catching the scent of someone else aboard the substation . . .

She knows, Hören had thought. If that were so, then his careful plans would have to be changed. But the woman’s death would still be the final result.

If she had opened her eyes and turned to look toward him, her gaze taking in the miniature lens of the view panel by the door—he had short-circuited the diode that showed it had been activated, but he knew the motions of the phase-sensitive iris inside could still be seen—then that death would have had to be immediate. But she had moved away at last, striding quickly down the central corridor.

Kira stopped again, craning her neck to look at the ceiling above her. He rolled a fingertip across the screen’s controls, altering the lens angle. In the corridor’s ceiling, he could see now, was the gap he had dropped through when he’d sneaked inside the substation. Still visible at the corner of the opening was the thin metal plate he’d shoved aside.

“What’s keeping you?” The microphone inside the view panel was sensitive enough to pick up the voice of Kira’s confederate aboard the cargo shuttle.

“Just admiring the quality of the construction around here.” She shook her head, then continued on her way.

Hören let his tensed muscles relax. He was certain that she suspected nothing. Kira Nerys would proceed with her clever plans—he had expected no less of her, finding it within himself to admire her ingenuity as he had listened over the bug that had been placed in the shuttle’s pilot area. He could almost regret that her mind, and the determination that pressed it forward, could never serve a righteous cause.

He had his own plans, as well. Soon enough, they would intersect with hers, and she would be shown the errors of her soul. If, in that last moment, her eyes were to widen in sudden understanding . . . then death might encompass some small measure of salvation for her.

It wasn’t likely. He knew too well the depth of corruption in the nonbelievers. He switched off the screen and turned away, hurrying to make ready.

He listened to the report. And was not pleased.

“I regret the death of the Redemptorist Deyreth Elt.” Odo stood before him in Ops, hands clasped behind his back. “If only for the information that further questioning of him might have provided. As it is, my analysis of his statements awaits confirmation.”

Commander Sisko rested his chin upon a fist. He’d almost expected another voice to chime in from the seat beside his own, Major Kira expressing her view of the situation. If she sometimes had spoken too hastily, at least one had never had to wait long to know what she thought. Without her there, the silence seemed to stretch on toward infinity.

Unfortunately, the matter being discussed was Kira’s life, along with that of Doctor Bashir. The problem of the cargo shuttle having been detected at a standstill in the wormhole had been compounded by what his chief of security had just told him.

“You’re sure of this?” He knew the answer in advance—Odo was not given to low-probability speculations—but he wanted to give himself more time to think. “There’s no other interpretation of what he meant?”

“I don’t see one, Commander. If we had no corroborating evidence, I might have ascribed his words to just lunatic raving—this Deyreth Elt was seriously disturbed, in my estimation. Whether he was so before, or whether his growing political and religious fanaticism had further impaired his reason . . . it’d be hard to determine now, of course. I haven’t had time to thoroughly question the other Redemptorists, but a couple of them have indicated that Hören Rygis was aboard the station. I managed to locate what might have been one of his hiding places; the ventilation was naturally poor there, so the air sample I took might give us some sweat traces that we can DNA-type and match with Hören’s records from the Bajoran security forces. . . .”

“We don’t have time for all that, Constable.”

“Exactly.” Odo gave a quick, acknowledging nod. “That is why I feel it’s best if we operate on the assumption that Hören Rygis has stowed away somewhere aboard the substation. I’m confident that that is the meaning of what Deyreth Elt said before he died. We’ve tightened up security considerably on all vessels docking at or leaving DS Nine, so it’s virtually impossible Hören could have gotten off the station by those means. The cargo shuttle is simply too small for him to have concealed himself there for very long. That really leaves only the substation as a possibility.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.” Sisko turned toward Chief Engineer O’Brien. “How much access did this group of Redemptorists have to the substation?”

O’Brien slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but they pretty much had total access to it. They were our best team of microassemblers—there was no way we would’ve been able to get it ready in time without them.” His expression darkened, as though brooding over a personal affront. “The big question now is what else they might have done to it while they had the chance.”

“The explosives built into the structure naturally concern me—”

“Those would be the least of our worries, Commander. Those are all inert as old bricks; the fuse codes are set into them right at the molecular level. Doctor Bashir’s the only person who could set them off.” O’Brien scowled as his thoughts moved through their courses. “No, I’m more worried about what other little tricks these jokers might have wired in. And not just on the substation—the monitoring signal we got before we lost contact made it pretty clear that the impulse buffers on the shuttle had been tampered with, as well.”

“Very well.” Sisko looked behind him to the Ops crew. “Have a runabout prepared for immediate departure.” He turned back to the chief security and engineering officers. “If we can’t communicate with them from here, we’ll just have to go out there to get them. O’Brien, I want you to come along with me; maybe there’ll be something you can do to repair those impulse buffers so we can get the substation on its way again. I’m not ready yet to scrub this mission.”

“I’ll need some time to load up some equipment—”

“Do it.” Sisko pushed himself up from the seat. “Constable, I want you to sweat whatever else you can out of those other Redemptorists. The more we know about what we’re up against, the better.” He strode toward the doorway. “Let’s go, gentlemen.”

“You ready for this?”

She heard Bashir’s voice over the command center’s speaker. Kira pulled tighter the fastenings of the seat’s harness. “More than ready,” she called. Her voice echoed in the silence contained within the substation.

As she pressed her head back against the padding, she could imagine Bashir in the shuttle’s pilot area, making the final adjustments on the controls. The two had double-checked their calculations together, crunching the velocity and angle figures on the computer. The numbers had to be perfect: they were going to get only one shot at this.

“All right.” Bashir’s voice held an edge of tension. “Now, O’Brien warned me that the impact would be pretty sharp—”

“I bet.” She made a stab at lightening the mood. “Are you one of those doctors who always warns people about how much something’s going to hurt?”

A laugh came over the speaker. “No, I usually try to sneak up on people. Okay, here we go. Locking arms disengaged; separation sequence initiated. Brace yourself—”

She had felt a mechanical shiver run through the substation’s frame as the massive C-shaped arms had spread open and the atmospheric seals had snapped into place. That would have been warning enough; a second later, the sudden acceleration from the ring of explosives slammed her back into the seat. The impact knocked the air from her lungs; for a moment, the substation’s lights dimmed into spots of darkness swirling before her eyes. She fought to keep them from coalescing, pushing her into unconsciousness.

The pressure eased, and she was able to draw in enough breath to speak. “Bashir—how’re we doing?”

After a few more seconds, the doctor answered. “Looks good. The tracking instruments and my own visual check indicate that you’re right on target. You’re not breaking any speed records, but you don’t have that far to go. Shouldn’t be much longer before you’re out of the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant.”

Kira relaxed in the seat, feeling a subconsciously held tension drain out of her spine. The plan she had devised seemed to be working. The cargo shuttle’s maneuvering and docking jets didn’t require any energy from the impulse engines, so they could be safely used even with the buffers out of commission. Once the correct attitude had been determined, it was only a matter of “aiming” the shuttle like an old-fashioned gunpowder weapon, with the substation as its cannonball. The force of the bomblets built into the coupling’s disengage mechanism was enough to send the cargo shuttle and the substation in opposite directions, the shuttle farther back into the wormhole, the substation forward to its exit point. The wormhole was its own linear pocket universe, so the relative motions couldn’t go too far astray; the trick had been to make sure that the substation continued down the center of the wormhole without getting mired in the gravitational field around the edges and losing its precious momentum.

She unstrapped the harness, and let it retract into the sides of the seat. Another stricture seemed to have been loosened from her. For the first time in a great while, she felt that things were working out as they should. As she wanted them to. Even with these delays, the substation would reach the wormhole’s exit sector well before Gul Tahgla’s retrofitted vessel could return to it; the Federation’s claim would be established, and Bajor’s future protected. The other details, the source of the sabotage . . . that could all be cleaned up when she eventually made her way back to DS9.

“Julian—” It was the first time she had addressed him by his first name. “Will you be all right?”

“You needn’t worry about me . . . ” His voice faded for a moment, then came back as the transmitter compensated for the increasing distance. “All the sensors are up and running, and I’ve got gigaquads of data to start rummaging through.” She could imagine him smiling. “You were quite right when you suspected that I wanted to spend more time in here. Though I don’t know how much longer it’ll be—the station probably sent out a runabout as soon as our communications broke down.”

“Enjoy yourself while you can, then.”

“Maybe when we’re all back at the station, we can have a celebratory drink together at Quark’s—”

“Don’t push it.” She reached out and switched off the comm link.

It had been worth a shot. He told himself that, as he told himself after any rejection. Or striking out, as one of Commander Sisko’s ancient ballplayers might have termed it. The fact that the substation, with Kira aboard, was on its way to its destination reaffirmed that persistence had its eventual rewards. He’d have to try to remember that.

Bashir stood up and stretched, working out the kink that had settled between his shoulder blades. The sensors and their rapidly accumulating data would have to wait; after this much work, he felt more like a nap, after a perusal of whatever had been coded into the shuttle’s food replicator.

There wasn’t time for that. No sooner had Bashir checked the tracking monitor—it showed the substation just approaching the wormhole’s exit—than he was thrown from his feet by a sudden surge of power. He landed on his hands and knees, feeling the vibration coming up through the pilot area’s floor.

Below him, in the bowels of the cargo shuttle, the impulse engines had come to life.

“What the—” He grabbed a corner of the control panel to lift himself up; he barely managed to hold onto it as the cargo shuttle was shaken by an even stronger force, caught by a shock wave that dwarfed the bomblets’ explosion. The instrument readouts of the exterior sensors peaked, then were overloaded by the fury of electromagnetic radiation pouring into them. A blinding red light sliced through the visual ports.

It’s them—Bashir’s thoughts slammed against the confines of his skull. Out there . . . they felt the engines—

Impossible to stand; he crawled, fingers clawing at the seams of metal, as the keening of the shuttle’s alarms mounted. He reached desperately for the access panel that would take him down to the lower compartments, as the blow of an invisible hammer twisted a darkening cage around him.

“Julian!”

She had cried out his name, as she had seen the fabric of stars tear open. At the mouth of the wormhole, the open space of the Gamma Quadrant just beyond, as though her goal could be gathered by reaching out her arm . . .

The shock wave hit, a shuddering convulsion, the wormhole itself turned into a living thing. The substation had tumbled crazily, sending Kira shoulder-first into the corner of a bulkhead and the ceiling, then sliding across the command center’s operations panel. She clung to it with one hand, bringing her other fist down upon the comm buttons.

“Julian . . . what happened . . . ” No reply came over the speaker. As the tremors died, she scanned through the transmitter’s frequencies; all of them were dead.

One by one, the lights came back up on the panel, as the computer ran its autodiagnostics and reestablished its core functions. Kira felt blood trickling down from her temple, but ignored it as she called up a visual scan.

Behind the substation, the vast, churning image of the wormhole blotted out uncountable worlds. She had seen it before, from its terminus close to DS9: a thing of radiance and terrible beauty, a pouring forth of wonders, a thunder that was not sound but the trembling fibers of one’s being, atoms become suns. . . .

Now, the wormhole screamed.

She sensed rather than heard it, as though the spine inside her shivered at the same mute pitch. A living thing—its pain struck her once more.

No light—the wormhole drew darkness into itself, a writhing contraction of space itself.

Kira leaned over the viewscreen; a drop of blood spattered between her hand and the glass.

He’s in there. The thoughts inside her head had contracted to one alone. Inside . . . somewhere . . .

They both saw it. And then saw nothing.

That was what dismayed Commander Sisko and Chief Engineer O’Brien. For a moment, as they had come within the final approach to the wormhole, they had been enveloped in light. Different than ever before: a light that blinded in its fury, a rage that shouted the length of their optic nerves, that, even as they raised their arms to shield themselves, sank into the night of dead worlds.

“It’s gone.” O’Brien looked down at the instruments’ readouts. “The wormhole—it’s collapsed.” He turned toward the commander. “It’s gone—”

Sisko gazed at the silent, mocking stars. A hollow space had opened beneath his breastbone.

“God help them.” He shook his head slowly. “We can’t.”

He tore at the circuits, the deep throb of the engines rubbing his bones against each other, as though they might grind to pieces and fly apart. Wires thin as human hair tangled between his fingers, the sharp edges of the microcomponents bit into his palms; the compartment bucked around him again and he fell, squeezing his hands into fists, the guts of the controls stretching taut, then snapping. The ends stung across his face like quick hornets.

With a groan, the impulse engines halted. Bashir lay panting against the bulkhead. He opened his eyes when he realized that his own ragged breath was the only sound he heard.

Outside the cargo shuttle, the wormhole had stilled itself.

Silence.

And then she heard something.

In the empty spaces of the substation, the branching corridors, the sealed rooms; where nothing moved.

Nothing but her pulse, stepping from one beat to the next. Kira turned away from the control panel, and listened.

A voice . . .

She had heard it before, long ago. In another world, her life before this moment, this place light-years away from anyone else.

It spoke her name.

“Kira . . . ”

Then she knew.

She wasn’t alone.