Bloodletter (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  “I don’t know . . . ” Bashir sounded unconvinced. “It still strikes me as risky.”

  The real risk, Kira knew, was in Bashir’s emotional, impulsive nature. She played her final card. “There’s something else to consider, Doctor; something that I heard you talk about, before we ever left the station. We can’t do anything that would harm the wormhole’s inhabitants—not any more than we’ve already done. We don’t have the right to do that.”

  His lack of response over the comm link indicated that her words had hit their target.

  “All right.” Bashir’s voice finally came through the speaker. “If that’s what you think is best. But I still don’t like it.”

  She wanted to tell him that she didn’t like it, either, but stopped herself. Already she had spent far more time than she had intended, convincing him of the need for inaction on his part. Hören and an army of Redemptorists could have marched on her by now.

  “I’ll stay in touch with you,” she said. “As much as I can. But don’t worry—I’ve got everything under control.”

  She broke the link before he could make any reply. With that connection gone, and with it the human touch of his voice, the substation’s silence folded around her.

  He leaned back in his seat, looking at the shuttle’s comm panel. A blinking light told him that the link between him and Major Kira had been terminated—for the time being—on her command.

  “Great,” said Bashir disgustedly. He laced his fingers behind the back of his head and stretched out his cramped shoulder muscles. He still felt the effects of spending several hours in a tight space, hunched over as he had worked to get one of the shuttle’s engines back online. A fat lot of good he had accomplished by doing so; the shuttle now had the motive power to possibly get out of the wormhole and come to Kira’s rescue—a not inconsiderable goal in his mind, for several reasons—but he didn’t have the authority to fire the engine up and do it. His hands clenched tighter together in frustration.

  And the worst of it, the logical and emotionless part of his brain had to admit, was that Kira was almost certainly right. He had to admire anew her sangfroid in going through her list of reasons justifying his inaction; all the while some demented religious maniac might have been creeping up on her. The angry-at-the-universe attitude that she had always carried around herself like a shield, back at the station, had concealed a mind fitted with precision-cut steel gears. Yet, one that could also factor human elements into the equations; the business about not harming the wormhole’s inhabitants had been almost perfectly calculated to evoke the maximum desired reaction from him.

  She’s the one who should’ve been a doctor, thought Bashir. The control of patients—really a form of benign psychological manipulation—had been a topic at medical schools for centuries. Plus, Kira wouldn’t be one to shrink from using a scalpel, if necessary.

  Bashir slumped forward, hands in lap, then glanced over his shoulder at another section of the pilot area’s control panels. The readouts showed that the external sensors that had been installed in the cargo shuttle were still operating at peak capacity, soaking up every fluctuation in the wormhole’s complicated soup of electromagnetic radiation. There would be some interesting data, once he got it all back to DS9, where he and Chief Science Officer Dax could start breaking it down. The data would have been significant enough, if this had turned out to be a routine voyage through the wormhole. Now—with the convulsion triggered by the firing of the unbuffered shuttle engines, the manifestation of the wormhole’s inhabitants inside the shuttle, and the changes in the bands of radiation to allow the comm link to function—the accumulated information could be the basis for not just a groundbreaking but a definitive study of the wormhole’s fundamental nature. A ticket to the Federation’s highest scientific awards might just as well have been tucked inside the data collectors.

  There was a certain temptation, he had to admit, to blank out the rest of the universe and its problems, Kira’s included, and just concentrate on the input from the sensors, monitoring the data stream to make sure that it was coming in as pure and unhindered as possible. He had already been ordered to do as much by the mission’s commanding officer. No one could blame him for following those instructions to the letter. . . .

  No one but himself.

  “Even worse than that—” He nodded slowly. “I’ve started talking to myself.” The isolation of being stranded in the middle of this pocket universe was no doubt affecting his sanity. That was his clinical self-diagnosis. Now would be a good time for the floating committee of the wormhole’s inhabitants to make a reappearance. He could use someone to talk to. Whether it, or they, wore Kira’s face or not no longer mattered to him.

  “Hello?” He raised his voice as he swiveled the chair around toward the center of the pilot area. “Anybody home?”

  Silence. They were probably listening to him, and laughing. If they could laugh; that hadn’t been established yet. Bashir had to ruefully congratulate himself for providing the focus point for yet another investigation into the physiology of nonmaterial entities.

  He glanced once more at the panel showing the activities of the shuttle’s external sensors. That, he knew, was what he should be doing, giving over his entire attention to that scientific process.

  Instead, he remained seated, the point of his chin pressed against his doubled fists. His thoughts had already exited the wormhole, and now moved through their persistent calculations out beyond, in the Gamma Quadrant.

  She didn’t know what he was thinking. That was the problem.

  The layout of the substation was becoming more familiar to Kira, from her having already traversed it more than once. It was too late to kick herself for not having memorized the chart of the branching corridors and rooms before leaving DS9; there had been no reason to expect that she would ever need to be familiar with more than a few different sectors around the substation’s command center. Now, however, a functional map was slowly being ingrained at a subconscious level, a system of passageways and enclosed areas that she could almost recognize from the trace of her own sweat that had touched the bulkheads.

  Kira crouched down in a dark intersection of the shuttle’s main corridor. The problem with the map inside her head was that it didn’t show the most important element: where Hören was. For all of her confident talk to Bashir, the Redemptorist leader’s thought processes remained cloudy to her. She could reason out some things, based on her own past experiences with him and what she had learned from others’ encounters, but that still left out a crucial emotional component. It would be as much an over-simplification to characterize Hören Rygis as completely insane—no matter how demented-sounding his broadcast diatribes against her had become—as it would be to view him as coldly rational in his calculations. That he was obsessed with her—and with her death—there was no question; what form that obsession might take was still a mystery.

  In the corridor’s silence, Kira let her thoughts roll on as she gathered her breath. The big question was how Hören viewed his own death. Always, in his broadcasts to his fellow Redemptorists, there had been talk of the need for all of them to make the ultimate sacrifice that would bring about Bajor’s purification. The cross between political and religious fanaticism always produced that kind of obligation on its followers, with the assumption that it held equally true for the movement’s leaders. Historically, it didn’t always work out that way: the pasts of any number of planets were littered with accounts of holy men sending the faithful off to die in battle, while they stayed safe inside their temples. She was convinced that wasn’t the case with Hören; he’d already put himself on the line by smuggling himself aboard the substation.

  But if Hören was prepared for his own death, how glorious did he want it to be? After that one contact, the speaking aloud of her name over the internal comm system, he had as much as disappeared. He could be taking his time stalking her . . . or he could be preparing another surprise, on a far grander scale. It still w
orried her—putting it mildly, she thought—that the substation was constructed with high explosives throughout its framework. Both Bashir and Chief Engineer O’Brien had assured her that the explosives were as inert as clay without the fuse codes being read into them—but the Redemptorists had already proved themselves clever at rewiring the substation’s functions. Could they also have figured out some kind of a bypass, a way of igniting the explosives without the codes? If so, that would give Hören the ability to destroy himself as well as her, in a fiery cataclysm whose impact would be felt, symbolically at least, all the way back on Bajor.

  That thought nagged at her, as well as the simple suspicion that all Hören wanted to do was move soundlessly upon her from behind, unexpected, snare her, and draw a sharpened blade across her throat. All that talk of blood. . . .Deep inside herself, she felt that the words, the thundering way he had spoken them, had to be more than empty verbiage. There was a physical longing expressed in them, the desire for a consummation that couldn’t be satisfied through cleansing fire, but only by the yielding of one body to another. A yielding where her blood would flow over his wrists, gathering in a shining pool at their feet, until he let her go, and whatever was left of her fell, broken.

  Stop. Negative on that—her own voice inside her head short-circuited those images. That was a violation of all training and the survival instinct beneath; indulging one’s fears, letting them fester and grow along one’s spine, was a sure way of programming them to come true. Hören Rygis was as human as she, despite the voice of a wrathful god that he had summoned out of himself. He could be defeated, neutralized . . . killed, if necessary.

  Kira saw nothing moving down the length of the central corridor. She stepped out of the shadows and along the bulkhead to the next sector. Her quick strides left the silence unbroken.

  She had already decided that, whatever Hören’s plans might be, hers had to go on the offensive. He was obviously giving himself the luxury of time, the savoring of his prey’s trapped and cornered condition. That could come to an end all too quickly if Bashir, back aboard the cargo shuttle, found a way to persuade the wormhole’s inhabitants to reestablish its entrance zone. If that happened, Sisko would have an armed runabout from the DS9 station through the wormhole and out to the Gamma Quadrant in virtually no time . . . and that would be all it would take to push Hören over the edge. Whatever plans he had would go immediately to their climax; if he had a way of blowing up the substation, that would be when he’d push the button. If, on the other hand, Kira figured, all he wanted was to plunge a knife into her heart, he’d cut short this sadistic foreplay and move in on her before he could be stopped from the outside.

  Either way, she needed to locate Hören and render him inoperative—that had been the usual Resistance phrase for all violent actions, up to and including murder—before he could carry out his plans.

  A shape suddenly loomed in front of her. She quickly snapped back against the bulkhead, spine flattened against the metal. Holding her breath, she listened for the slightest noise, the least motion in the substation’s still air. A closed door was within reach behind her; she raised her hand toward its small control panel, ready to punch it, and dart through the opening, if necessary.

  She heard nothing. Carefully, she leaned forward, enough to see a few meters farther on. The silhouette of her head and one corner of her shoulder slid along the flooring’s grid. The faint luminescence from an overhead panel had cast her shadow ahead of her, that was the only enemy within striking distance. She relaxed—only a fraction, still maintaining her scanning alertness—and moved on.

  There was another reason behind her actions, that she could acknowledge only to herself. Inaction was something she could order Bashir into, but she would never be able to endure it for herself. Even if that had been the best strategy, to find a sector of the substation that she could barricade and defend, holding out until help came—she would have gone crazy, passively waiting for Hören’s attack. Anything would be better . . . to find him and fly straight at him, whatever weapon she’d been able to improvise raised in her hand . . . no matter what the outcome of that final, long delayed encounter might be.

  That was the emotion burning in her gut. The force of it was just barely controlled by her brain. She would have to act in a precise, logical method, not just wander aimlessly around the substation. Already, as she had made her way from the command center, she had been planning how she would use the rough map forming in her head to make a systematic sweep of the substation’s corridors and sectors, how she could move through every space one by one, driving the hunter turned prey before her.

  She had a dim memory, from when she had regained consciousness, of seeing something she might be able to use, in the dark hiding place she’d found herself in. A fusion welding rig, just barely compact enough to sling onto her shoulders and carry with her—it must have been equipment left behind by one of O’Brien’s work crews, or part of the substation’s own emergency gear. With that, she could seal off sectors as she cleared them, and bit by bit render a growing area of the substation out of bounds to Hören. Even if she could cut off just some of the routes through the substation that he must have mapped out for himself, that would still be a lessening of the advantage with which he’d started.

  Now, her brain was working the way it was supposed to. She could already visualize everything happening the way she wanted, the methodical process by which Hören would be caught in his own trap. The best result would be if she could take him alive, corner him and seal him into a section where he would be rendered harmless, unable to get back at her. Then she would be happy to sit down and wait for assistance to arrive. It would be a crushing blow to the Redemptorist movement on Bajor to have its leader brought back in such humiliation, captured by the very woman he had launched such a holy war to destroy. She could see it all . . . and there was enough malice in her heart to relish the prospect.

  That was still in the future, though. It was a satisfying enough vision to hang in front of her like a gauzy curtain, almost obscuring the length of the final branching corridor that led to the storage locker where she had hidden before. Kira put her head down and hurried toward the hatchway and the welding gear beyond it.

  The future obscured the present. Enough for her to forget, to let her senses grow dull for a second—

  And that was enough.

  She felt a change in air pressure before she heard anything. Then above, something was dropping toward her. She turned, raising her arm to defend herself, but it was already too late. She was knocked sprawling onto the corridor’s flooring.

  The human form’s knees pressed against her abdomen, pinning her flat. A hand grabbed the collar of her uniform, pulling her head forward. Dazed, she felt something thin and cold at her throat.

  “Kira . . . ”

  The voice spoke her name again. A whisper, almost loving in its softness. But this time she saw him. Hören Rygis lifted the knife blade under her throat, and smiled.

  CHAPTER 14

  HE NEEDED TO KNOW everything that had happened. That was why he called his remaining officers into his private office.

  The image of Kai Opaka was still uppermost in Commander Sisko’s mind. Not just from this last visit to her temple, but from the cumulative effect her contact had upon him. In some ways, he didn’t know what had changed him more, his brain-dazzling experiences when he had first entered the wormhole, or the slow, stilled—and on the surface, much less dramatic—working of the Kai’s influence upon him. One had been a thunderbolt, cracking open a stone to reveal its hidden interior; the other, carefully measured and patient drops of water, one by one, accomplishing the same revelations.

  “Let’s have an update,” he ordered as he swiveled his chair around to face the DS9 crew members. He almost shook his head, as though that would clear away anything obstructing his concentration on the job at hand. But he knew it was pointless; the touch of Kai Opaka was locked into a level deeper than his conscious bra
in. His soul, perhaps. He focused his gaze on the station’s security chief. “Any luck with our little band of Redemptorists?”

  “Some.” Odo gave a noncommittal shrug. “I used on them a certain psychological ploy that I’ve found valuable in the past. It yielded a few . . . interesting results.”

  “Anything we can use now?”

  “That’s always the question, Commander. I’ve certainly been able to dig out a great deal of background information on Hören Rygis. If we’re successful in bringing him back here to DS Nine, it’ll be a toss-up as to what sort of legal procedure we should initiate against him—a criminal trial or a clinical determination of his sanity.” Odo gazed up at the ceiling for a moment. “Of course, you’re probably aware of my own preference in such matters. I am of the school of thought that defenses based upon the perpetrator’s alleged mental condition are inevitably fraudulent. I would rather simply, as the old police phrase goes, ‘nail the bastard.’ ”

  “In this case, so would I, Constable. But we’re not at that point yet. If there’s something you’ve found out that we can use to get a handle on Hören Rygis, open him up—”

  “Given enough time, Commander, we could do all that; we could psychoanalyze him in absentia until we were familiar with every facet of his mind. We already know, from what was in the records of the Bajoran security forces and from what Major Kira herself told you, most of the root causes of Hören’s murderous obsession. The Redemptorists that I’ve been interrogating have filled me in on some of the past details of which we had been unaware—apparently there was some contact between Hören and Kira some years preceding the raid she led on the hostage situation. And there will undoubtedly be other things the Redemptorists will tell us, and perhaps soon; once the first cracks appear in their psychological defenses, the total disintegration of that armor follows shortly thereafter. At least, that’s been my experience.” Odo’s gaze sharpened as he addressed the figure on the other side of the desk. “What must be answered, Commander, is what good the information I can extract from these men will be, if we can neither act upon it ourselves, nor relay it to Kira so she can use it.”