He didn't specifically remember returning to his own little bloodstained corner, and hoped fervently he hadn't lost consciousness before tending the last of the patients. It all seemed so unfair. If he was going to break a leg during a planetary mission, why the hell couldn't he have done it when no one else needed his services? Or, at the very least, have done it so that he didn't hemorrhage a liter of blood in the process?
He wrestled his thoughts back to the moment, and concentrated instead on the small, neat movements of the painted xirri near his feet.
The little native doctor -- a male, Bashir had finally determined when he'd been able to catch a glimpse of hemipenile bulges while they made their rounds -- had found a piece of what looked like broken chert, and now used it to nick carefully, gently at the fabric of Bashir's trouser leg. He'd already extended the doctor's original cut clear to the groin, and was almost finished in the other direction, slicing patiently down toward the ankle and the terminal hem. I've had nurses who weren't so thoughtful. He certainly couldn't argue with the xirri's diagnosis -- even with the fracture reduced, his knee had swollen dramatically. Another few centimeters, and the clothing would have compromised his circulation.
"Thank you."
The xirri blinked huge eyes at him, with no expression Bashir could readily discern. Then it bent again to its work, tongue flicking rhythmically.
Small, unglazed dishes filled with a foul-smelling mash littered the cave floor around them, the contents burning with an almost invisible flame. Bashir patted around him in the thin, watery light, wondering what trick of nature made all the illumination seem to pool in his lap and run no further. By the time his hand thumped against the open Medkit, his thoughts had already staggered so far in search of that explanation that he couldn't quite remember what he'd been looking for.
A cool, gray-green hand slipped past his own, pulling his attention toward the instruments laid out in their tray. The scalpels. Of course -- he'd wanted something a bit better suited to cutting. But when he tried to lever himself away from the wall to lean forward toward his ankle, a great spasm of pain ripped up his leg and knocked him back again. God, this was so embarrassing. He was supposed to know enough to foresee what kind of movements would send him crawling out of his skin. Opening his eyes, he found the xirri watching him with its tongue coiled curiously just outside its tiny mouth. It turned the piece of chert over and over in nimble fingers, then scooted slightly closer to taste the laser scalpel with its tongue.
It tugged at the scalpel very gently. The piece of chert ended up in Bashir's lap almost as an afterthought.
"Here..." He tightened his grip just enough to make the native pause and look up at him. "You activate it like this." He turned the instrument until the power switch faced the xirri doctor, then turned the scalpel carefully away from them both and depressed the switch with his thumb. A thin, glowing blade of light hissed inffbeing from the end. "Use it like a normal knife, but for God's sake be careful -- it'll cut through bone and fingers just as easily as it will my pants!"
Deactivating the scalpel with almost ritualistic care, the xirri held it at a respectful arm's length as it repositioned itself beside Bashir's leg.
"It's a shame they can't talk."
Bashir's thoughts seemed to be ringing, his head full of broken glass as he looked meticulously left and right in search of the voice he only half-remembered. He found George just inside the touch of the tiny lights, his head resting back against the same wall that supported Bashir, his hands neatly folded atop his knees. "The Federation may be lenient when it comes to determining sentience, but I have a feeling K'Taran's elders are going to want some more quantifiable evidence than kindness and a good bedside manner."
For some reason, it didn't even seem odd to be sitting in the blood-smelling dark debating sentience ethics with a Starfleet demigod while he felt beside him for the tricorder he couldn't remember last using. "So you believe they're sentient?" he asked George. But quietly, as though their discussion might embarrass the xirri.
George turned a wry look toward Bashir across the darkness. "Don't you?"
He finally found the tricorder close against his left hip. He wondered if he'd snugged it there for safekeeping, or simply dropped it the last time he'd slipped away from consciousness. Not that it mattered. The device had reverted to whatever dementia had addled its brain hours ago. A frightfully low blood pressure played hide-and-seek behind a skirl of signal so strong it almost washed his screen to white. By the time the xirri tapped the tricorder's casing to gain his attention, Bashir could barely tell he was a Human through the confusion of contradictory readings. Dropping the useless tricorder into his lap, he forced a wan smile when the xirri politely offered the butt end of the deactivated scalpel.
"Thank you again." His fingers felt cold when he reached for the instrument, and his thoughts ricocheted briefly off the idea that all his heat had collected into a burning coil by his knee. But whatever rationality he'd seen in that thought evaporated as he watched the xirri pick up the empty water bottle and toddle off toward the Cavern's water supply.
Even the exertion necessary to follow the xirri's movement with his eyes proved too much to sustain. Leaning his head back against the wall again, he listened to the shiver of his bones as the planet rumbled with distant damage.
"When I was young," George offered, his voice warm and soothing, "I served under a man who had a very flexible view of the Prime Directive." He laughed softly. "He didn't have much patience for politics and rhetoric. If he knew that innocent lives were being threatened, he'd move heaven and earth to save them, and the Prime Directive be damned."
Behind the darkness of his closed eyes, Bashir half-remembered, half-dreamed an image of Starfleet as it must have been on the frontier. "He sounds like a great man."
"He was. The best." George was quiet again, and when he finally spoke, his deep voice smiled. "He would have had a field day with Armageddon."
Bashir would have gladly given it to him. The planet, the comets, the killing, impenetrable foliage, the spiraling, threatening slash of fiery rain. Ice as hard as boulders, boulders the size of houses, shattering the mantle and spewing megatons of ash and rock and gas back into an atmosphere growing wintery cold for lack of sun. Feverish dozing offered a nightmarish flash of Kira and Dax swept up in a vortex of fire. He jerked himself awake, leaping away from that image, and his hand seized convulsively on the tri-corder still open in his lap.
It chirped politely, scrolling out a neat queue of test results. Bashir stared at the device for nearly thirty seconds, trying to remember why seeing the tricorder hum through its paces surprised him. It certainly wasn't the dismal readings and predictions it produced -- his white-cell count was no higher than he'd already suspected, and it wasn't like he'd expected any better from his serum O2. Cupping the tricorder between both hands, he lifted it and passed it across his torso. "Why am I not getting interference?" he asked aloud.
"What?"
"My tricorder..." He tipped it to face George as the older man scooted closer. "It hasn't worked since I left the Vrag main encampment. But now..." As though the tricorder heard him, a long scrawl of pointless code sketched itself through the middle of the readings, swelling like an amplified virus until it had taken over the small device's brain.
Cool water splashed across his exposed leg, startling him. Bashir looked up, catching the painted xirri's indifferent gaze, and the tricorder hissed with renewed interference.
George's thoughtful, "I wonder what's happened now," barely penetrated the pulselike hammer of Bashir's thoughts.
It had been the xirri patients the tricorder first refused to scan. And when he'd first been carried into this cavern, before any xirri had come close to him down here -- hadn't the tricorder produced perfectly coherent scans in those first few minutes? He made himself really look at the bands of distortion while the xirri neatly irrigated his leg precisely as he'd done himself a few hours before. What did this look like? W
hat could this be that assumption simply hadn't let him see?
Medical school. A long, painfully boring lecture on reducing tricorder interference patterns that might crop up during extravehicular triage missions. Oh, God, he'd barely listened because he'd been so worried about an upcoming xenosurgery rotation, and this had struck him as something better left to the engineers, But now his memory -- which misplaced so little, even when it was only half-overheard behind a bout of narcissistic fretting seven years ago -- exploded the answer across the front of his brain like a supernova.
"Radio waves..."
High frequency radio waves, intersecting the tricorder's fragile sensory circuits.
George dutifully held the small device while Bashir popped open the casing over the brains of his tricorder. "A doctor and an engineer," the older officer commented playfully after watching Bashir work for several minutes. "You're a man of many talents."
"You have no idea." By the time he mated the interference signal through the tricorder's translator and back, the result through the tricorder's speaker was no more than squeaky, scratchy nonsense. The xirri recoiled slightly, as if from fingernails on a blackboard.
Bashir reached out to catch its hand before it could scurry away. "I know this is just a matter of sampling" he said, keeping his eyes and smile on the xirri in the hopes it might realize he was speaking to it. It licked once, twice at its huge corneas, but didn't move away. "Once enough language goes into the translator, something I can understand comes out. So I hope it works the same way for you. Is there something I cando to keep you talking? To make you feed enough data --"
"-- wish
The voice seemed almost too small to be real. No emotion, no inflection, just words spelled out as mechanically as type on a bare computer screen. But words! Bashir's heart raced against his breastbone. George hissed a little sound of surprise.
"-- Noises
George couldn't hold himself silent any longer. "Hello?"
The voice snapped silent. The tricorder blinked, but said nothing.
"Can you hear us?" Bashir fought the urge to say the words too loudly, but found it a hard impulse to ignore. "Can you understand what I'm saying?"
The xirri licked its eyes again, rapidly, in nervous stutters. "Can you
Bashir exchanged a triumphant glance with George, smiling so wide it hurt his cheeks. "Yes."
"These
"Yes. I..."" For the briefest instant, he thought of explaining the differences between sound waves and electromagnetism, and instead said only, "I can't hear your words with my ears without the help of these things."
The xirri nodded as though that only made sense. "Before this, I was only aware of
No more than the Klingons – or Bashir -- would have expected to discover xirri radio language in their silences. "You led us to these caves," Bashir said, gesturing around them. "Do you understand what's happening outside?"
"We have not
"Then why didn't you? When the first comets fell, there were xirri outside who were injured." He thought about the smoke-poisoned female, and the child this very xirri had carried all the way from the blast crater. "Why didn't you all come to the caves then?"
"Many
He remembered K'Taran's voice saying, We knew the xirri would be needing help. So we came. But it was George who finally said, very gently, "The xirri have been good friends to the Klingons."
The painted xirri cocked its head, reminding Bashir of nothing so much as a serious child considering the weightiness of its reply. "The sky has welcomed them with
Bat'leths met and locked with a clash of steel that thundered through the cold, dry air of the Klingon ship. "You fight well," said the stocky warrior scowling across that expanse of blood-splattered metal at Sisko. The thick tendons of his neck had made Sisko's slashing cut a minor annoyance rather than a telling blow, but it had still wiped the smug arrogance from his face. "For a Human."
"Thanks." Blood dripped down Sisko's face and seeped its salt taste between his gritted teeth, but it didn't impair his vision. The spiraling cheek-plate he'd thought was ornamental had stopped a wicked thrust of the pronged bat'leth point just short of his eye. His shoulder muscles burned with exhaustion and trembled with the effort of holding off his attacker, but his grin was still exultant. Five minutes into the Sul'batlh was longer than he'd ever expected to last.
Much of the credit for his survival had to go to the space in which they fought. He'd known that Jfolokh-class Klingon ships were small, but he'd never seen the inside of one before. It was a single cramped and cluttered deck, inhabited by a minimal crew of five in addition to its captain. As a result, Sisko and his opponent -- a middle-aged Klingon engineer even more beer-bellied than Kor himself -- had ducked and chopped their way through the various ship's stations in a chaos of swinging bat'leths and ducking Klingon ensigns.
With the steely clash of their weapons silenced, Sisko could hear the disrupted sounds of Odo's hand-to-hand battle with the young Klingon tactical officer and Worf's more titanic clash with Kor. The Dahar Master had refused to pursue his challenger, forcing Worf to come forward and attack him or risk forfeiting the Suv'batlh for cowardice. Despite Kor's stolid stance, however, there was nothing indolent or inebriated about his flying bat'leth. The constant, shattering crash of his blade against Worf's at times blended into continuous metallic thunder .
"Captain!" The young Klingon manning the sensor desk swung around, dark braids flying in alarm. "The Starfleet vessel is moving away at full impulse speed!"
Kor grunted, dropping to one knee to avoid a desperation roundhouse swing by Worf, then lunged up from below with the point of his blade. Worf flung himself backward, tripping over the empty chair of the weapon's console. He brought his bat'leth up just in time to avoid a wicked downward stab at his supine body, deflecting Kor's blade just enough to skate off his ribcage. Another bloody slash was added to the magenta lacework he already wore.
"Ignore the ship." Kor took a step back, catching his breath and incidentally giving Worf a chance to scramble back to his feet. "If we win, they leave no matter where they are. If we lose, they go wherever they like. Watch them for signs of attack, that is all."
They'd played this same scenario out several times now, the gasping old Dahar Master and the less accomplished but far more fit Starfleet officer. Each break in their furious fencing grew longer and each interval of blade-work shorter, giving Sisko a shred of hope that Worf might yet win, if he could just wear Kor down. Odo, on the other hand, was already teetering on the verge of failure. His long-armed and lithe young opponent had settled on a strategy of lunging and striking, oblivious to Odo's apparently ineffectual attempts to block him. Odo had reformed the rents in his mock-armor so many times that it had lost all its detail now, blurring into a generic solid surface, randomly swirled with black and red. The constant platinum flashes of protoplasmic matter beneath it, revealed every time a blow sliced through him, seemed to egg his Klingon opponent on to wilder and wilder swings. Sisko doubted the constable could hold his shape much longer.
Not that he was in much better condition, with
his straining lungs and the dry rasp in his throat that came from trying to breathe the Klingons" harsher atmosphere. With a painful squeal of gouged metal, Sisko's bat'leth slipped across the engineer's blood-wet blade and slid violently off to one side. He cursed and swung toward the Klingon's knees, praying that his opponent's defensive instincts would yank him back rather than aiming his descending blade at Sisko's undefended torso.
He was half-successful -- his opponent did jerk away, but not fast enough to keep the flat of his blade from unintentionally slamming into Sisko's solar plexus. All the breath from his lungs exploded out, making his vision darken abruptly. Choking, Sisko tried to stagger backward, away from wherever his opponent now was. Fortunately, the small Klingon ship chose that moment to stagger, too, its hull thundering with a barely shielded explosion.
"What was that?" Kor bellowed, giving the sprawled and even bloodier Worf another respite to climb to his feet. Seeing that his own opponent had swung around to scowl at his readouts with single-minded engineering focus, Sisko clung, gasping, to the back of an empty console. The black edges faded from his vision just in time to let him see the violent spray of glittering white fragments that erupted across the sensor's field of view. It looked like a firework made of ice.
Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02 Page 20
