He liked sparring with the alien; she did not think like a human, and that made her difficult to predict. The sparring kept Bashir sharp, even if it did make him seem eccentric to the other officers in Quadrant Command. Defiance had more alien crew in senior roles than any other ship in the fleet. Some men told Bashir he would regret his generosity toward the nonhumans, but he ignored them. His jaw hardened and he pressed the attack. He felt a closer kinship to the blue-skin than those Basics on the sleeper ship. Julian thought of Christopher’s arrogance, his outright lies, and hit out hard in anger.
Rel went down and lost the Vulcan weapon, a moment of panic in her eyes. Bashir saw it and reeled himself back before he did sh’Zenne some real damage. “How is it that a human vessel can vanish completely from our records? Were those files lost in the war?”
The Andorian shook her head and swallowed hard. “No, Princeps, as far as I can determine. It is simply…not there. Quadrant Command’s database has no information on any manned extrasolar space launches from Earth in the year 2010, no mention of any starships called Botany Bay…” She got back to her feet.
“That is because it is a phantom,” said a new voice.
Bashir turned to see O’Brien striding across the room, his regulation short sword sheathed at his waist. Like the princeps, the optio was dressed in a light sparring tunic and trousers. “If it is a mirage,” snapped Julian, “then it is a very convincing one.”
“Aye, lord, it is.” O’Brien approached and sh’Zenne backed away, sensing that her presence was no longer required. Miles drew his sword and saluted his commander.
The princeps had been sparring for a few hours, and he would have been well within his remit to reject the casual challenge; but to do so would be seen as weakness, and he was not one to display that, not even for an instant. Julian mirrored the gesture before dropping into a ready stance. “Must I hear you speak of secret conspiracies again?” he asked. “That thread of conversation is drawing thin.”
O’Brien attacked, hitting hard and fast. “You must, lord,” he snapped, between sweeping slashes of his blade. “I would be worthless to you if I did not voice my suspicions.”
Bashir blocked each blow easily. “You suspect everything.”
“That is what makes me such a good tactical officer. ‘All war is deception,’ lord.”
“Sun Tzu,” said Bashir, recognizing the quote. Their swords met and the horns of the blade-guards locked for a long second. “You still think the sleeper ship is some sort of intricate honey-trap?”
“Why not?” O’Brien put his weight behind the weapon, trying to turn it free. “It is not—ugh—beyond possibility. The Bajorans doctor a rabble of non-Terrans to appear as Basics, leave this derelict for you to find. Your interest in the past and in…in unusual thinking is well known, sir. It is the perfect lure for you.”
“Ha!” Bashir abruptly reversed his grip, robbing his opponent of his balance, and slammed into the optio with his pommel, punching him away. “Anyone who believes that proves only how little they know me!”
O’Brien shook off the strike and steadied himself. “If you say so, Princeps.” He moved back toward him, raking the sword through the air. “Then at least, will you hear my advice and place the Basics under isolation? Leave the dormant ones as they are and hold those awake in the cells.”
“They have done nothing wrong,” Bashir countered. “They pose no threat to us.”
All at once the optio dropped his guard and stepped back off the mat, abruptly ending the bout as if his commander’s recalcitrance had tired him out. “Sir,” he said with a sigh, “what do you think will happen here? These Basics, if they truly are our commonplace ancestors lost for centuries, they have no place in the Khanate. Do you think they will be granted citizen status because of some distant kinship to us, if they really are Earth-born? They are fragile little things, weak as any helot, inferior to us in every way. What can they ever be except a…a curiosity?”
“And we should cull them because of that, is that what you believe?”
O’Brien looked at his commander from hooded eyes. “Ultimately, what I believe matters nothing. You are princeps, and at this moment, their fate is in your hands.” He sheathed his blade. “Unless, of course, you abrogated responsibility of the Botany Bay and turned charge of it over to Lord-Commander Sisko. Then the ship and its contents would be a millstone for his neck and not yours.”
Julian thought about Jacob’s words to him after the briefing and said nothing. O’Brien wasn’t a fool; he saw that if Bashir had made up his mind to preserve Christopher and the other sleepers, then distancing himself from any potential blowback over their discovery was his only alternative. A cold thought crystallized in Bashir’s mind. How many of my crew think the same way as Miles does? Am I diminishing myself in their eyes by doing this? He recalled Tiber’s unguarded comments and his lips thinned.
Without warning, with his still-bared blade, the princeps struck out at the optio and O’Brien was caught off guard. Before the tactical officer could react, Julian had taken the short sword’s keen edge right to the other man’s throat. “A bout is only over when I say it is,” he hissed, “just as my orders remain inviolate until I see fit to countermand them. Clear?”
O’Brien barely moved, a thin thread of blood forming where the blade rested against the flesh of his neck. “Clear, lord,” he replied huskily.
Dax halted at the entrance to the security tier and waited for the last of the sensor inspections to come to a conclusion. Finally, the lights in the scanner tunnel went blue, and she stepped through into the brig’s anteroom to find herself confronted by an imposing female trooper. Lean and tall, she had olive skin and a dark plait of hair coiled over her shoulder. Ezri didn’t know the woman’s name, but she recognized the Terran’s bloodline archetype immediately; she was of Tiejun extraction. They were usually aggressive and taken to argumentative behavior.
Dax bowed slightly; not as deeply as she would to a line officer, but enough to show her obeisance to a pure-strain human. “I am here to conduct an interview with the prisoner, Kira Nerys.” She offered the trooper a datapad bearing the authorization of the princeps.
“Why?” demanded the woman. “Tiber has already ‘inter-viewed’ her.”
Ezri hid her distaste at the thought of what Squad Leader Tiber’s tender mercies would have entailed for the Bajoran freedom fighter. “This is a noninvasive interrogation. I am here to confirm points of data from engineer sh’Zenne’s study of their vessel.”
The trooper grimaced and tossed the pad back to her, stalking away toward one of the force field–barricaded cells without waiting to see if Dax was following. Ezri glanced through the haze of yellow-orange energy shrouding the doorways that she passed, spotting Cardassians and Bajorans beyond them in various states of disarray. By turns they looked pitiable, angry, or broken.
“In here,” said the Tiejun woman. She pressed her palm to a control pad, and the field over one cell guttered out. “Use your communicator when you want to leave.”
Dax bowed again and entered Kira’s cell; she was barely inside when the barrier sprang into place once again. The trooper walked away, throwing her an arch look as she returned to her post.
Inside the compartment, the atmosphere was heavy with sweat and desperation. The air had a flattened sensation to it, where a noise-deadening security sphere enclosed the cell. The soundproofing was adjustable, so that interrogators could conduct their work toward grisly extremes if required, without ever alerting the other prisoners; similarly, the sphere could be turned down to allow other inmates to hear the screams of pain, if it was thought that could soften the resolve of others. The Khanate’s security staff often found it to be a very strong motivator.
Kira Nerys sat on a spartan bunk molded to the far wall, her back pressed into the corner of the cell, hands flat against a plastifoam mattress. There were contusions on her face and neck, bruising around the skin visible on her wrists. The Bajoran’s eye
s were hard, though, not those of a dispirited woman but someone tempered and annealed by the attacks upon her. Hardened, like sharpened steel, Dax imagined.
“I’ll give you nothing, slave,” said the Bajoran, her voice hollow and weary. “Don’t waste your time.”
The Trill produced a hand computer from her pocket and scanned the room. The device chimed softly and she nodded to herself. “We are not being monitored. I took care of it.”
The words had barely left Ezri’s mouth when Kira exploded into motion and rocketed off the bed, punching the helot hard in the sternum. Dax stumbled, breath gusting out of her lungs, and she fell against the wall.
“Nerys…” She coughed out the name and looked up, seeing Kira standing over her, her fists in tight balls, her whole body vibrating with barely caged fury.
“You stupid lapdog bitch!” growled the prisoner. “We trusted you! You were supposed to protect us!” She seemed to become aware of herself, and the tension in her faded a little. The Bajoran sank back onto the bed.
Dax dragged herself off the floor, tasting the tang of blood in her mouth. “I did the best I could…”
“Your best?” Kira’s voice was a razor. “Your best got a dozen of my men murdered, my ship captured—”
“Do not blame me for your failure!” Ezri snapped back at her fiercely. “O’Brien found you, despite all my attempts to divert the Defiance away from this system! He picked up your ship because you spent too long waiting at Ajir! Why did you divert from the plan? You should have been long gone.”
“I…” Kira’s face creased with emotion, and she shot a glance out at the force field, to the cell across the corridor where her lover was being held. “Skrain. I waited for Skrain…”
“And that is how O’Brien tracked you. The ion trail pooled and the energy return tripped Defiance’s sensors.” Dax shook her head. “You should have gone on without him.”
The other woman’s shoulders drooped. “I thought it was worth the risk.”
Ezri mirrored her actions. “You were wrong.” She reached out and placed a hand on the Bajoran’s arm.
It was evening in Africa, and the Great Palace was lit by a stream of orange-purple light reflected off the clouds from the setting sun. There was a cool breeze in the air, and Bashir tasted the scent of an oncoming rainstorm. He stood with his hands on the carved stone of the balustrade, looking out over the wide expanse of the savannah.
Khan joined him, adopting a similar stance. “Julian. I confess, I did not expect to see you here again so soon.”
“Forgive me, lord, but this is one of the few places where…I can find a moment to hear myself think.”
Noonien Singh chuckled softly. “The demands upon a leader are sometimes his greatest test, my brother. The key is to know what truly requires your attention and turn the full force of your will to it in the most opportune moment.”
For a moment, the princeps was distracted, barely even registering the counsel’s ready advice. He nodded absently.
The Khan sensed it immediately. “Bashir!” he snapped, and Julian was jerked out of his reverie by the hard edge in the voice. “Are you so overwhelmed that you ignore even me?”
The princeps colored and shook his head. “No, my Khan. I am sorry. It is just…in recent days, events are causing me to consider things that I have previously left alone.”
“What sort of things?” demanded the hologram.
“Questions of loyalty. And the matter of the ship we discovered in Ajir’s halo zone.”
“The ship,” repeated Khan, pausing as the counsel tapped into the Defiance’s database for more background.
Bashir nodded. “A relic from the past. A craft called the Botany Bay.”
And then the program did something that Julian had never seen happen before, not in all his time as an officer of the Khanate. Noonien Singh’s image froze in place, every gesture and tiny realistic motion of him suddenly suspended, turning him into a perfectly carved statue.
The princeps was confused, and hesitantly reached out a hand to touch the counsel, then thought better of it. Some sort of system malfunction? It hardly seemed possible. The moment the name of the old derelict had left his lips, something had been triggered deep in the heart of the holographic matrix.
In another heartbeat the moment passed and the counsel jerked back to life, but now the Khan’s expression had altered, turning hard and serious. “Julian, listen to me carefully. Until direct orders arrive from my grandson himself, you are to isolate that vessel and everyone on board it. The Botany Bay is to be contained at all costs. Do you understand me?”
Bashir gave a slow nod. “I understand, my lord.” Bashir had never heard of a counsel giving a ranking princeps an order before, although there were always rumors about the holo-programs and the length of their reach. He recalled the elder Sisko once hinting darkly of a ship whose command crew had been killed and whose counsel had activated automatically and assumed the role of captaincy for itself.
“Do it now,” said Khan, and before Julian could say any more, the palace balcony melted away, reshaping itself back into the bare walls of the holo-chamber.
Immediately, Bashir’s communicator headset chimed and he tapped it with a finger. “This is the princeps.”
“Adjutant, lord,” Jacob’s voice was tight and urgent in his earpiece. “An encrypted subspace transmission was just sent directly from the counsel chamber to Quadrant Command on Earth…. Is there a problem? Something we should be aware of?”
Julian felt unsteady, giddy, as if the world had suddenly started to move around him, out of his control. “No,” he said distantly.
“Very well, sir.” He heard the doubts in his aide’s tone. “In the meantime, engineering corps informs the command deck that we are ready to move to warp velocities on your order. The prize crew is standing by to board the derelict and take it under power. Shall we proceed?”
“Not yet.” Bashir’s answer seemed to be coming from a different person. He felt disconnected, his thoughts turning again to Shaun Christopher and his people. To the woman, Robinson. The counsel’s abrupt reaction absorbed him. It seemed almost…unreal. He had to know why the hologram had reacted that way. What did the sudden response to the name Botany Bay mean?
All at once, Bashir wanted nothing less than to grasp the secrets of the sleepers, and to know more about Rain Robinson in particular.
Dax’s eyes flicked to the hand computer; the sensor returns still read in the null end of the spectrum. “What did you tell Squad Leader Tiber?”
“Not much. A few choice suggestions about the kind of farm animals his mother might have had sexual intercourse with.” She chuckled stiffly, over a jolt of pain from her broken ribs. “These ubers get very irate when you make fun of their breeding. It’s easy to push their buttons if you know how.”
Ubers. It was actually a term from an old Terran language, Dax recalled, a name that had somehow slipped into pejorative use by all those who stood against the Khan and his arrogant kindred. Just to say the word aloud in the halls of this ship would see Bashir turn the dominae key on her for a disciplinary reprimand. “You should be careful, Nerys. Tiber hates nonhumans with a passion. He would rip you open just to amuse himself, if the chance was offered to him.”
“It won’t be, though. At least, not yet,” the Bajoran replied. “I’m Kira Nerys, remember? Enemy of the Khan, dissident and terrorist. My death’s going to be nice and public. I’ll bet they’re already planning it. Up against the ruins of the bantaca spire in Ashalla, a firing squad or a beheading, maybe.” She sniffed. “Perhaps it will do some good. All my blood on the stones, color-corrected and broadcast wideband across every planet of the Khanate. Perhaps it will make some people think.”
“Nerys, I will do my best to find a way to get you out of here, Dukat and the others as well—”
Kira kept speaking as if she hadn’t heard Dax. “But that’s not likely, is it? All those worlds out there, they cling to Khan’s hems like a
bused children. All of them, beaten and downtrodden so many times that they’ve come to think of it as a gesture of love, like some kind of honor.” She spat the word. “Nothing but apathy and slave-state minds. Too scared to resist. Too weak.”
Dax sighed. “Servitude is all they know. Most of them have never lived in true freedom.”
“You have.” Kira prodded Ezri in the chest, where her symbiont lay. “Dax has. You know how it feels. And you know the humans have no right to take that from us.”
“No,” said the Trill. “No, they do not. But they do not care about what is right. They care about their destiny. They believe in it, to the exclusion of all else. ‘One day, a Khan will rule the galaxy.’” She quoted the human axiom with rote diction.
“Not while I’m still breathing,” grated Kira. “We could break their grip if only we had the numbers!” She shook her head. “Khan Noonien Singh’s greatest crime was convincing billions that they were inferior. If we could rally those people, make them see…” The woman ran out of energy and her voice trailed off. “I hate that man with every fire of my pagh. Khan was dead before I was born and still I hate him. There’s nowhere in the quadrant that bastard’s shadow doesn’t fall. But it’s too late now. Too late for me.” She sniffed, attempting to recover some of her poise. “When’s my execution, then? I’m surprised we’re not down there now. Or is Sisko going to keep me for himself?”
Dax shook her head. “Kira, we still haven’t left the Ajir system.”
“What? Why are we still here?”
In low and urgent tones, Ezri began to explain about the derelict, and of what the Botany Bay might represent.
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