by David Mack
Sarina limped across the catwalk with a golem’s focus. Her left leg was all but paralyzed, a dead weight she dragged while she advanced in small hops on her right. A mask of blood hid her face, and the crimson streaks in her hair had started to brown as they oxidized and dried.
Her eyes were locked on Bashir and full of determination. She clearly had suffered grievous wounds from their fall, but whatever drove her now paid pain no heed.
Seeing her used that way filled Bashir with rage. He yelled not at her, but at the evil he knew was pulling her strings. “Can’t you tell she’s in pain? She’s dying! Let her go!”
She stopped. Stared at him. When she spoke, her voice was drowned out by a haunting chorus that seemed to emanate from all around Bashir and which said the same words in perfect synchronicity with her. “You sentimental idiot. Did you ever really think you could win?” An evil smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I’ve known your greatest weakness since the beginning. You’re a romantic. A fool governed by your passions.”
Bashir looked down at the chip in his hand. Then he looked at Sarina. Even if she could ignore her pain, her body was broken and slow. If he could overcome his pain and put the chip into place on the console before she reached him—
“Even now you still think you can win,” she and her diabolical chorus said. Sarina limped forward once more, closing the distance to Bashir one halting hop-and-drag at a time. “You can’t defeat me, Doctor. You can’t even win a fight against this ravaged puppet, because you can’t bring yourself to hurt the woman you love. You’ll let the galaxy burn before you kill her.”
Twisting himself to face the console made the dagger dig into his spine and stole every ounce of strength he had. His breaths became quick and shallow, and his face pressed against the cold metal, which now was slick with a warm stain of his blood. Behind him the scrape-thump of Sarina’s wounded stride continued its slow cadence beneath the taunts of her infernal choir.
“You’re all just pawns to me, Doctor. But that’s not even the saddest part of this farce you insist on playing to the bitter end. The real tragedy isn’t that you’ve lost this game. It’s that you lost it decades before you ever decided to play.”
Stretching his left hand up to the console was pure agony. The knife in his back made his arm freeze half bent, with his palm perched on the console’s edge. He felt the blade shift between his vertebrae and knew that forcing himself to rise any further would sever his spinal cord. At best he would be paralyzed, but there was a chance he would die within seconds.
So be it.
“Stay down, Julian. Your fight is over. It ended twenty years ago when I set all this in motion.”
He tuned out the callous mockery. Dug deep into his soul and found all the best parts of himself: Federation citizen. Starfleet officer. Doctor of medicine.
It would only hurt for a moment.
He heard Sarina’s stuttered footfalls at his back. “I decided you would lose this war before you were born. Accept what you cannot change.”
Bashir forced himself to stand through the most hideous pain he had ever felt—a fierce bite of ice and flame that sent searing jolts up his spine and flooded his mind with white confusion—and then came a fleeting moment of clarity, perhaps his last.
He stretched out his hand and put the chip into the slot on the console.
Sarina tore the dagger from his back. It was like being a marionette with severed strings. Bashir’s legs buckled, and he dropped to the deck at her feet, shivering and broken. Looking up at her, he said, “I’d rather change . . . what I can’t accept.”
On the master console, the chrono showed the local time flip over to midnight.
The pale blue lights that shone on the auxiliary control center flickered, then stuttered into darkness. Viewscreens above the legion of consoles went black, then flooded with scrolls of data for a few seconds before switching off once more.
Faint white emergency lights snapped on high overhead, but barely any of their light reached the circular platform where Bashir lay bleeding and paralyzed. Sarina stood, her face blank, as the archive expunged itself of Uraei.
Then she and her chorus spoke as one for the last time.
“It is finished.”
In unison, all the viewscreens in the center displayed the same message:
FILE UPDATE COMPLETE
Sarina blinked as the blue lights snapped back on. Bashir gazed up at her, waiting for Control’s brainwashing to be undone—but when she looked back at him, he could see she was still its puppet. Then her blank gaze became one of despair, and a tear rolled from her eye.
She raised her dagger—
—and plunged it into her own belly. It went in low, just above the bladder. Blood coursed out, drenching her hands. She made a fast upward cut that almost reached her sternum before she twisted the blade and forced it to her left, through her upper intestine and stomach.
The blade remained stuck inside her as she dropped to her knees, then fell backward onto the catwalk a couple of meters from Bashir. Only then did the glassy stare of Control fade from her tear-stained blue eyes, revealing the woman Bashir knew and loved.
“Julian . . . I’m so sorry . . . I couldn’t stop it . . . ”
“Not your fault,” he said.
She reached toward him, and he stretched his hand toward her, but they were too far apart. The gap between their fingertips was less than a meter, but it was a gulf they could no longer bridge. Her tears fell faster as she began to tremble. “I’ve . . . always loved you. Thank you for . . . giving me . . . a real life.”
“Thank you . . . for being in mine.” All he wanted was to go to her, to hold her. To stroke her hair, kiss her forehead, tell her everything would be okay. He wanted to open a bag full of medical miracles and make her whole. But he couldn’t move, and neither could she. Standard comms wouldn’t work down here inside the archives, nor would transporters. There was no way they could call for help, and no way they could reach it soon enough for it to make any difference now. By the time anyone realizes we’re here and in trouble, it’ll be too late.
Consciousness started to slip away from Sarina, and Bashir knew there was only one thing left to say that mattered. “I love you,” he said.
Her last smile was sad and sweet, the expression of an innocent. Then her eyes fluttered closed, and with a last whisper of breath she was gone forever.
Bashir wanted to rage, to make someone suffer for taking her from him—but it was too late for that. Control was gone, expunged. It was as dead as she was.
He shut his eyes, felt his blood drain from his menagerie of wounds, and hoped his own demise would soon follow—because he was certain the only thing worse than having to lie helpless and watch Sarina die would be having to go on without her.
TEN DAYS LATER
Thirty-eight
It had been several years since Ozla had last walked the halls of Seeker’s home office on Trill. She had forgotten how exciting it felt to pass through the controlled chaos of the bullpen. Desk editors wrangled copy and art from reporters, while weathering tandem harangues from the managing editor and the art director. So many of the names and faces had changed while she was away, but the essential tenor of the place remained the same.
None of which allayed her concerns over having been called back to Trill. For most of the past two decades, her conferences with her editor-in-chief, Farik, had been conducted via real-time subspace whenever possible, and the rest of the time by encrypted messages. But after the Section 31 story broke wide, he had made it clear he wanted to conduct their next conversation in person, in his office. In her experience, such requests boded ill. When she was nominated for a Gavlin award for her exposé on the Orion Syndicate, he had told her by means of a postscript appended to a message criticizing her latest expense reports; even after she won the Gavlin, Farik had been content to
leave her a vid message.
Leaving behind the hubbub of the bullpen, Ozla neared Farik’s office. His assistant, a young Bolian man, smiled up at her. “Good morning, Ms. Graniv. And welcome home.”
“Thank you.” She elected not to mention that she had long since come to think of Earth as her home, especially after she’d bought a house in Chartres, France. “I have—”
“An appointment with Mister Farik,” the Bolian cut in. “He’ll be right with you, as soon as he finishes his conference call with the offworld bureau chiefs.” A theatrical gesture toward the trio of guest chairs alongside the office’s door. “Please, have a seat.”
She strolled toward a nearby vid wall instead. “I’ll stand, thanks.”
The floor-to-ceiling vid panel had been subdivided into ten smaller images that served as a border for one much larger image in the middle. It was a mishmash of news channels from throughout Federation space. Most of them had been muted, but headlines and other graphics told Ozla all she needed to know: the Section 31 story was everywhere.
She let her attention flit from one screen to another to absorb the big picture of the moment. On one screen, a replay of the previous day’s big story: President zh’Tarash ordering the arrest of two of her cabinet members as well as four members of the Federation Council. Just as momentous a news item played on another screen: several members of Starfleet’s admiralty were taken into custody by the Starfleet JAG office and now faced courts-martial.
Similar dramas played out on worlds throughout local space. Thousands of people were being charged with sedition, treason, conspiracy, murder, espionage, and countless other crimes as warranted. Most shocking of all, at least to Ozla, was that Section 31 had apparently proved unable to prevent the arrest of its senior directors once Control was disabled. Already, on planets throughout the Federation, people were starting to learn and revile such names as Vasily Zeitsev of Rigel, L’Haan of Vulcan, Caliq Azura of Betazed, and Kestellenar th’Teshinaal of Deneva. No one expressed the least amount of pity for Jhun Kulkarno of Zakdorn, who had taken his own life after being cornered by Federation Security in a starport on Izar.
Of those now in custody, the lucky ones were those who stood to face harsh justice before the Federation Council. The unlucky ones were being processed for extradition to the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, and the Dominion.
But the biggest story of all, the one that every report circled back to in some way, shape, or form, was Section 31’s coup of the Zife presidency and its assassination of Zife. That revelation had sent shockwaves through every echelon of the Federation’s government, and many of Starfleet’s most celebrated officers, including Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the famed starship commander, had been implicated in the cover-up.
Even such rival powers as the Romulans and the Tzenkethi had expressed dismay at the news. Rumors had begun to circulate that the scandals might disrupt the fragile accords that had been forged by Praetor Gell Kamemor of Romulus and former Federation president Nanietta Bacco—a diplomatic effort President zh’Tarash had labored to preserve.
What a mess, Ozla lamented.
Exposing the sins of Section 31 and the corruption it had spawned was going to force a hard reckoning for many citizens and leaders of the Federation. Though the great majority of them had never known of Section 31’s heinous crimes, much less consented to or conspired in them, there was no whitewashing the fact that almost all of them had, either directly or indirectly, benefitted from those evils. Ozla felt no regret for having brought that ugliness into the light, despite the pain and chaos it had caused to so many lives. She had devoted her life to being a servant of the truth—and the truth wasn’t always pretty.
Her bitter ruminations were cut short by the Bolian’s peppy demeanor. “Ms. Graniv? Mister Farik is ready to see you now.” Another hand flourish. “You can go right on in.”
“Thanks.” She breezed past the assistant into Farik’s large but cluttered corner office, his altar to journalistic integrity. Behind the balding, gray-bearded editor, the skyline and seascape of Kural had been reduced to a sketch of themselves by the patina of grime on his windows.
Farik sat reclined with his feet propped on his desk, his attention glued to the padd in his lap. He acknowledged Ozla with a distracted wave. “Grab a chair, if you can find one.”
Eschewing ceremony or manners, she pushed a stack of old data cards off one of his chairs and let herself collapse onto its raktajino-stained seat cushions. “I flew nearly a hundred light-years for this meeting, and you couldn’t clear a chair for me?”
“Deadlines,” he said, still reading the padd. “You know how it is.” He put the padd on his desk and rubbed his eyes, then looked up at Ozla. “Welcome back.”
“Why am I here?”
He leaned forward. “In case you hadn’t noticed, your latest story’s making quite a splash. Last time we looked, it’d been picked up by every news outlet we’ve ever heard of, and a few hundred we hadn’t.”
“Yeah, I know. It went viral.”
“Viral? No, Ozla, this is light-years past viral. I heard today it was signal-boosted through the Bajoran wormhole into the Gamma Quadrant, and Romulan long-distance relays are spreading it into the Delta Quadrant. Forget viral—this is going galactic.” He folded his hands and put on his most serious face. “You know what that means, right?”
“I’m getting a raise?”
A scowl. “As it happens, yes. That’s the good news. Ready for the bad?”
“I’m a reporter. I live for bad news.”
“Glad you said that, ’cause here it is: you’re being promoted.”
His words hit her like a slap made of ice water. “What? No!”
“Oz, I don’t have a choice. You were dead center of your own story.”
She had feared this would happen, but denial had let her hope it wouldn’t. “But I love being a reporter, Farik.”
“And you were great at it. But you’ve just become one of the most recognizable people in the galaxy. Like it or not, your days as an investigative reporter are done.”
“Why? I could get cosmetic surgery. Heck, I bet I could even get my DNA resequenced, set up a whole new identity, no one—”
“Forget it, Oz. The board already made its decision. Effective immediately, they want you to take over as the new Features editor.”
It took all her willpower not to leap across the desk and choke him. “Dammit, Farik! Features? Are you kidding me?”
“Could’ve been worse. At least you didn’t get Lifestyle.”
She stood and did her best to strike an imperial note. “Then I’ll quit!”
“And do what? Retire? You have a noncompete clause in your contract. Walk out that door and you’re legally barred from doing any news-related work, in any medium, for anyone anywhere, for the next five years. You really feel like cooling your heels for half a decade?”
She stared at him, feeling furious and stupid. “My deal had a noncompete clause?”
“You didn’t read it?”
“Let’s not play the blame game.” She slumped back into her seat. “So what does the Features editor do around here, anyway?”
He shoved his padd across the desk. She picked it up and surveyed its contents as he spoke. “First off, I need you to wrangle a gaggle of freelancers. I’ve got about a dozen standing by to write follow-ups to your bombshell. Go through their samples and dole out work based on which ones show promise. I need feature pieces by tomorrow on zh’Tarash’s indicted cabinet officers, the Starfleet angle, the Klingon and Romulan reactions, and legal analyses of the Section Thirty-one trials. Oh, and it should go without saying I need art on all those too.”
Ozla wondered if there were utensils in the break room sharp enough with which to cut her own wrists. She heaved a weary sigh. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Farik said. “I’ve go
t a tip that your pal Bashir is on the Starship Aventine, headed to Cardassia Prime and due to arrive in about ten hours. Find a local stringer who can get close enough to snag a quick interview with the man.”
She set the padd to standby. “I wouldn’t bother.”
“Why not?”
She answered as she stood to face her dreary new professional reality. “Because I have it on good authority that short of a miracle, Doctor Bashir has nothing to say.”
Thirty-nine
It was the furthest thing from a hero’s welcome. The Starfleet runabout Seine, one of several ancillary spacecraft attached to the Starship Aventine, sliced on a shallow trajectory through the dense cloud cover blanketing the Cardassian capital. It passed over the city’s center, then slowed into a long, wide turn toward the landing pad outside the castellan’s residential complex.
Watching the small starship descend, Garak felt more like a spectator to history than a head of state. The same troubling sense of his own powerlessness had haunted him two weeks earlier, when he had watched Julian and his friends depart in Archeus, pursued by enemies he had thought them ill-equipped to fight.
Then had come Graniv’s exposé, and with it the implosion of one of the most pernicious conspiracies Garak had ever encountered. The repercussions of her story had been felt on Cardassia Prime, and across the Union, as numerous people—some obscure, others of prominence—had been exposed as Section 31’s willing assets and collaborators. Hundreds of citizens and alien residents of Cardassian space had been arrested and now awaited what promised to be lengthy and complicated criminal proceedings.
The runabout’s maneuvering thrusters rumbled and shook the ground. Its exhaust kicked up dust that billowed over Garak, who squinted and bore the moment with the dignified reserve expected of his office.
When the cloud settled and dispersed, the Seine’s starboard hatch opened and a ramp extended from its threshold to the ground. The first person to disembark was Captain Ezri Dax, the precociously young commanding officer of the Aventine. Though she had risen to command at a tender age because of a combat-related promotion during the Borg Invasion five years earlier, she now wore her command with comfort, rather than the unease of a child floundering in her elders’ clothing. Dax had retained her petite build and youthful mien, but the wisdom of her ancient Trill symbiont shone clearly behind her eyes, giving her the aspect of one far older.
