Kira waited, hoping for a response, but none came. “Of course, I didn’t really expect a coward like you to show your face,” she said, continuing her transmission. She paused for effect. “That is, I didn’t expect you to show my face, since you no longer have one of your own.” The barb felt juvenile to Kira, a taunt intended to dig at Ghemor’s ego and sense of self.
The captain inspected Yolja’s sensors. She saw a group of Bajoran assault vessels swarming around the two Ascendant ships closest to Bajor, while a broad span of the Militia awaited the rest of the invading fleet, the thousands of alien ships swiftly nearing. Meanwhile, Defiant raced toward the planet from outside the system, and Taran’atar’s ship gained on the Ascendants as they slowed on their approach to the planet.
As Kira tried to figure out another means of provoking a reply from Ghemor, a familiar but somehow foreign-sounding voice rustled up out of the comm. “You’ve discovered that I am here,” said Iliana Ghemor. “No doubt you are congratulating yourself for doing so, as if your possessing such knowledge would make a difference.” Kira heard her own tones and inflections, but they also sounded off to her, as though Ghemor for some reason chose to overpronounce her words. The captain tracked the signal, not surprised to find that it sourced from the lead ship of the Ascendant fleet.
Kira wanted to have a conversation with the woman who had once intended to take her place. She preferred a calm dialogue with Ghemor, in an attempt to reach her through sympathy and compassion, or short of that, by way of logic and reason. But Kira had not only followed the destructive trail of the Cardassian’s chosen path—a path strewn with rubble and bodies—she had also dealt with her directly, had looked into her eyes and seen her instability. More even than that, Kira also witnessed the long, tragic tale of Ghemor’s life, laid bare by the Prophets for Their own examination. The captain beheld the events that had taken the young Cardassian woman from a privileged existence and a promising future down into the depths of madness. Kira could imagine no reprieve from that abyss, no means of her reaching down into that pit and making any sort of meaningful connection.
Because of that, she tried instead to figure out how to incite Ghemor’s anger, and in that way keep her talking and preoccupied. “I’m not congratulating myself any more than if I’d run across a dead gutfish,” Kira said, referring to a Cardassian animal notorious for the foul odor it discharged when it died. “It doesn’t require much effort to locate the source of such a stench.” The words tasted mealy in Kira’s mouth.
To the captain’s surprise, Ghemor laughed—not a great chortle or cackle or bray, but a soft, measured chuckle that sounded perfectly sane. “You’re trying to bait me,” the Cardassian said. “For what possible purpose? To keep me busy while you attempt to mount some sort of grand defense for your people?” Again, Ghemor chuckled, but with an added tinge of derision. “I see the one starship headed for Bajor from outside the system, and the other two smaller vessels chasing the armada—one of them carrying you—but those won’t be enough to eliminate the Ascendants, or even to turn them away. And neither will the assault vessels headed up from the planet, or the weapons platforms in orbit. All that is left is the rending of Bajoran flesh and the gnashing of teeth.”
“I am here,” Kira said. “I am the cause of your misery. You do not need to punish innocent people for my crimes.”
An indicator amid Yolja’s communications controls flashed on, signifying the initiation of a visual component in Ghemor’s transmission. Kira activated the display mounted in the bulkhead to her left. Ghemor apparently wanted her to see something, but the captain didn’t know what to expect. What she saw surprised her.
Iliana Ghemor stared back at Kira, but not with the face the captain had expected. Rather than a duplicate of her own Bajoran features, she saw the ridges and scales, the ash-colored complexion and slick, dark hair that defined a Cardassian countenance. The overall effect resembled Kira, and she recognized that other version of herself. More even than observing Ghemor looking like her mirror image, it jolted the captain to essentially see herself in the guise of Bajor’s historical oppressors. Nearly seven years earlier, Kira had awoken to such a view, abducted by the Obsidian Order and surgically altered to resemble Iliana Ghemor in an attempt to unmask Ghemor’s father as a dissident within Central Command. Seeing herself as a Cardassian back then had been disturbing, but it troubled her nearly as much to discover that Iliana had reverted to her Cardassian self.
“Do I look like somebody who subscribes to the fable of Bajoran innocence?” Ghemor asked. “But of course I knew that you would be here, Captain. I counted upon it.”
“Then deal with me directly.”
“Oh, I will,” Ghemor said. “And you know that I will. I’ve already told you what I intend to do.”
“To become the Emissary?” Kira said. “To get your life back?” She recalled Ghemor’s plan to fulfill Trakor’s first prophecy in an alternate universe so that she could become a religious icon there. She believed that when she did, the Prophets would restore her existence, allow her to eliminate every other Kira in all the different realities, and make her whole.
“Don’t you see, Captain?” Ghemor asked, gesturing to her own face. “The Prophets have already given me my life back. I am no longer some bastardized iteration of Kira Nerys. I am Iliana Ghemor, proud and devoted daughter of Cardassia.”
“Then why are you here?” Kira asked. She knew the answer, but she wanted to keep Ghemor talking. “If your life has been made whole, you should go live it.”
“Oh, I am doing that, Captain,” Ghemor said. “And right now, I’m about to satisfy myself by making you a witness to what is about to unfold.”
“Come face me if you must,” Kira said, softening her voice to issue her plea, “but there’s no reason to do anything more than that.”
“But there is reason,” Ghemor said. “There is the suffering I endured for five thousand days. Five thousand. I am here to repay your actions.”
“Then do what you have to do with me,” Kira said.
“I am dealing with you,” Ghemor insisted. “I told you that when I finally met the Prophets, that They would see inside me, just as They did with your Emissary, and that They would then understand what I needed to do to get my life back. That is exactly what happened.”
The claim did not just sound patently absurd to the captain; it also angered her. Kira had encountered people who’d found tortuous ways of justifying their actions—including Bajorans who twisted the canonical writings in order to rationalize their own bad behavior. The Cardassians had taken such a position with respect to the Occupation, which they called the Years of Deliverance, asserting that they had come to Bajor not as oppressors, but essentially as social workers wanting to elevate the lives of the backward natives.
“The Prophets did not tell you to attack Bajor in order to make yourself whole,” Kira said, absolutely certain of her declaration.
“You are so misguided,” Ghemor said, almost as though she felt sorry for Kira. “Why else would the Prophets have given me an army to lead?”
An army, Kira echoed in her head, and then expanded on the thought. An army of religious zealots, with a history of attacking Bajorans. Kira didn’t believe that the Prophets had handed over the control of such an adversarial and seemingly formidable force to a vengeful madwoman, but why had They allowed it? The Ascendant fleet had come through the wormhole. In the past, the Prophets had closed the passage linking the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants to prevent the Jem’Hadar fleet from passing through it, and Kira felt sure that, through the power of the Orbs, They had fostered the destruction of the parasite queen, ending the infestation of Bajor. Why wouldn’t They have taken some sort of action to stop Ghemor and the Ascendants?
“You suddenly seem less talkative when your gods act differently from your expectations of Them,” Ghemor said. “But They are evidently just gods, and They are seeing fit to punish your people for their terrorist activities against Cardassi
a, and you for your transgressions against me.”
“That can’t be what’s happening,” Kira blurted, confident in the virtue of the Prophets. Except she could hear that the determination in her voice sounded more like desperation—or maybe even like denial. Am I trying to convince Ghemor of my trust in the Prophets, or am I trying to convince myself? So rarely had Kira faced personal doubts in her faith that the very concept felt foreign to her.
“You can protest that it can’t be happening,” Ghemor said, “but it already is: the Ascendants are here, I am leading them, and you will watch your world perish in flames—the result of a long series of events that started with you and your Shakaar resistance cell.”
“Iliana,” Kira began, her tone beseeching, “if I could change what happened to you, I would.”
“I don’t want your help or your pity, Captain,” Ghemor said. “All I want right now is for you to watch.” Ghemor, who looked so much like Kira despite her Cardassian features, leaned forward until her face filled the display. “I want you to watch—and suffer.”
The screen went dark, leaving Kira alone with her doubts as she sped toward Bajor, the Ascendant fleet, and Iliana Ghemor.
* * *
Seltiq sat alone in the cockpit of her blade-shaped vessel—a vessel that, in less exigent circumstances, she would have had to coat with a crimson finish to identify her new position. She would also need to take custody of the Eye of Fire at some point. Instead of planning such actions, though, she slowly leaned away from the communications panel and closed her large golden eyes. For just a moment, she allowed her mind to drift from the litany of Ascendant voices trilling forth from all across the armada.
So much had happened of late. The sheer quantity of dramatic incidents loomed over Seltiq like some terrible menace, the collective weight of recent events almost too much for her to bear. In addition to all of that, she had just learned that Votiq had perished. The news shocked her, despite the Grand Archquester’s advanced age of nearly four centuries. For more than five decades, ever since the death of his predecessor, Votiq had led the Ascendants on the Quest. His absence would leave a hole in the fabric of their existence.
But it won’t, Seltiq admitted to herself. By virtue of her status as the eldest knight among the surviving Archquesters, she immediately advanced to Votiq’s leadership position. She would miss him, owing to their long comradeship, but with his succession prescribed by the holy texts, the Ascendants would endure, and the Quest would continue without interruption.
It was not the fact of the Grand Archquester’s death that surprised Seltiq—not much younger than he, she understood well the rigors and pitfalls of advanced age—but the particular timing of his demise. It seemed cruel to think of Votiq spending so long pursuing his dream—pursuing the dream of every Ascendant—only for him to die on the verge of attaining that dream. According to Raiq, the Fire had implied that the Grand Archquester had burned beneath the gaze of the Unnameable when the armada had passed through the Fortress, meaning that, if the True had deemed him worthy, then he had actually achieved his lifelong goal. To herself, Seltiq questioned such a turn of events. Nothing in scripture even hinted at a separate Final Ascension for individual Archquesters, not even for the highest ranking among them.
I don’t have time to think about that right now, Seltiq told herself, her eyelids fluttering back open. The need for her to take action as the new leader of the Ascendants preempted her consideration of Votiq’s fate, but she also recognized the personal expedience in finding a reason to avoid doubting the veracity of the Fire. In Seltiq’s lifetime, she had never once deviated from orthodoxy, and on the threshold of the Fortress of the True, she did not intend to begin doing so.
Over the communications system, via audio only, the new Grand Archquester listened to one Ascendant after another as they expressed their evaluations of the current situation, as well as their concerns and their recommendations on how to proceed. Many believed as Raiq did, that the knights should attack the planet of heretics ahead using only their ships and the conventional weaponry they carried, preserving the subspace device for use in facilitating the Final Ascension. Others felt that the metaweapon should be unleashed on the newly found blasphemers, if only to expedite the battle and bring about the reentry of the Ascendants into the Fortress of the True as soon as possible.
Seltiq considered the divergence of opinions expressed to her—opinions she had sought after informing the armada about Votiq’s death, her assumption of his post, and the Fire’s identification of the false worshippers who called themselves Bajorans. The new Grand Archquester would have to choose one path or the other, or find an alternative. She would—
A light on the communications panel flashed on, indicating an incoming transmission from beyond the armada. Seltiq saw that it originated on the surface of the planet ahead. She had earlier listened to several such messages, though she hadn’t responded to them. Once Seltiq’s automatic interpreter had translated the content of those previous transmissions, she’d heard the apparent leader of the heretical population—who identified herself as Asarem Wadeen, First Minister of Bajor—initially attempt to commence a dialogue with the Ascendants, and later to blindly appeal for peace. The new Grand Archquester had been witness to many such pleas during her time on the Quest. As always, she found that the sad, desperate beseeching of the unholy sickened her.
Seltiq tapped a control, curious what new entreaty the heretic leader would make on behalf of her people. The new Grand Archquester expected once more to hear the imploring words of Asarem Wadeen, but instead, a masculine voice emerged from the communications panel, its tone pitched in a low register. The native language of the speaker, different from that of the Bajoran, flowed calmly, not in discrete words, but in a continuous hum, more like meditation than conversation. The message also possessed a strange, distinctly alien quality to it, quite different from either the musical speech of the Ascendants or the more prosaic tongue of most humanoid species Seltiq had encountered, including that of the Bajorans.
Despite the exotic flavor of the transmission, the automatic interpreter deciphered it at once, with no lag whatsoever. Seltiq grasped at once the reason for the immediacy of the translation: the linguistic computer didn’t have to decode the language because it already knew it. The new Grand Archquester checked the communications panel for the identity of the speaker’s species. What she saw jolted her: the message came from an Eav’oq.
Seltiq sat motionless, stunned by the revelation. She listened to the Eav’oq, who called himself Itu, as he sought to converse with the leader of the Ascendants. Finally, Seltiq worked a control to access the visual component of the message. She had never seen an image of an Eav’oq, but she had read accounts of them. Despite those literary descriptions, she did not feel prepared for the full extent of their alien nature. Itu had a long, tubular body, with a tangle of gangly pink limbs encircling his upper torso. One wide, gray eye covered his slender face.
For a few moments, Seltiq did nothing but stare at Itu on the display. When the Eav’oq did not receive a response from her or anybody in the armada, he tried to unilaterally negotiate for the lives of the Bajoran people. Itu spoke of eons past, referencing a tale out of antiquity that all knights knew well: the failed attempt of the Ascendants to exterminate the Eav’oq, an event that had led to a schism among the Orders, leading to the Great Civil War.
The words of the heretic enflamed Seltiq. Itu’s life and the very existence of his people seemed to mock the Ascendants, pointing up their failures even as the knights prepared to meet their gods. But something else troubled Seltiq even more: the armada had entered the Fortress of the True on one side of the galaxy and had exited on the other, far from where they had begun. How had Itu navigated the distance between his homeworld and Bajor? The Ascendants had seen nothing of the Eav’oq for millennia, allowing the unholy aliens ample opportunity to travel great distances. Still, the proximity of both Itu’s planet and Bajor to the Fortress
suggested another possibility—namely, that Itu himself had journeyed through the realm of the Unnameable.
The idea of a heretic traversing such holy territory repulsed Seltiq. It also raised uncomfortable questions in her mind: How could the Eav’oq even have discovered the Fortress? If they had, and if they’d entered it, then why had the True not immediately smote the profane aliens? Why had the Eav’oq been permitted to leave the Fortress?
The answers all at once seemed clear to Seltiq. The True had allowed Itu, and perhaps other Eav’oq, through the Fortress in order to point the way for the Ascendants. There could be no clearer sign that the Unnameable demanded one final sacrament—the destruction of Bajor—before the advent of the Final Ascension.
Seltiq jabbed at her control panel, ending the transmission. The image of the Eav’oq disappeared at once from her display. Then she worked communications and opened a channel.
The time had come for the new Grand Archquester to lead the Ascendants into battle.
* * *
Iliana Ghemor waited, but she would not wait long.
As she listened to the debate progressing among the Ascendants, she looked out into space through the dome atop Votiq’s vessel, which she had rendered transparent. The blue-and-white globe of Bajor dominated the view, with two of its moons hanging in space above it, one nearby, and one farther away, just above the planet’s horizon. Sunlight glinted off an orbital weapons platform, and pinpoints of movement marked the rise of assault vessels from the surface.
Ghemor wanted nothing more at that moment than to successfully launch the devastating power of Raiq’s subspace missile against Kira’s people. The Cardassian visualized the weapon soaring out of sight on its way toward the planet. She imagined the device detonating and tearing through subspace, undermining the fundamental structure of the space-time continuum. The resulting cataclysm would rip Bajor to tatters. The planet might survive the onslaught, individuals and even groups might find their ways to safety, but the civilization that had given rise to so many problems for the Cardassian Union, that had hosted the murder of her betrothed, that had birthed the bane of Iliana Ghemor’s existence—that civilization would never be the same.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance Page 8
