by Olivia Woods
“Begin recording,” she said aloud. There was a chime of acknowledgment from the device, and she started to speak.
“Hello, Iliana. Welcome home. I’ve been asked to make this recording for myself-for you-to help my memory recover when I get back. I go in for surgery tomorrow. I’m going to miss Cardassia, but I know what I’m doing is right. The terrorism on Bajor has to be stopped. Father doesn’t want me to go. Mother…she looks unhappy all the time. I hope someday they understand. I want them to be proud of me.”
She paused, hating what she’d said so far, thinking she should just stop and start over. But she decided that this wouldn’t work if it seemed rehearsed or scripted. She needed to remain spontaneous, go with whatever came to her.
“You’re probably confused, maybe unsure who the real you is. I can relate to that. But I can’t know what you’ve been through, what you’re going through now. For me it hasn’t happened yet. What I can tell you-what I think is the most important thing for you to understand during this difficult time-is that there are people in your life who care deeply about you, maybe more than you can know, and you can trust them to help you find your way back.
“Welcome home, Iliana.” She smiled reassuringly. “Look for me in the mirror.”
The full-body cosmetic alteration Iliana had to endure was carried out in a secure medical facility deep in the bowels of Obsidian Order headquarters. It was long and grueling and painstaking, since it had to escape detection for a prolonged period of time, not just from Bajorans, but from herself. She could be allowed no doubt about her assumed identity. And because it was already well-documented that Bajorans and Cardassians were capable of interbreeding without medical assistance, Iliana’s ova were extracted in order to prevent conception during any sexual encounters she might have while on her assignment. Mindur Timot, who had supervised her transformation personally, assured her that her eggs would be cryogenically preserved until her return.
Following the initial surgeries, subtle manipulation of the genes controlling the growth of skin and hair would keep up appearances, while other treatments would maintain Bajoran norms in body temperature, respiration and heart rate, as well as blood and eye color. Prodigious quantities of DNA masking compound-used for decades by operatives who had to conceal their true nature from bioscanning devices-were injected in crystalline form at strategic locations throughout her lymphatic system. The crystals would dissolve slowly over time, maintaining the desired effect for up to five years.
At the end of it all, they wrapped her in a biomimetic sheath that she was told would not only help the alterations to stabilize, but also speed her recovery. “You’re a work of art,” Timot told her cheerfully during a visit to her bedside, the morning they peeled off the sheath. He seemed absurdly pleased with her appearance. The doctors who performed the actual procedures-and who had accompanied Timot on his visit-were similarly excited, as if she were a newly unveiled statue.
Entek stood in the back of the room, staring at her without expression.
“We’ve done everything we can for you,” Timot continued. “If at any time you’re subjected to more than a cursory medical scan, or if you should ever require major surgery, your true nature will be revealed. Short of that, no one will ever have reason to think you aren’t Bajoran.”
At first, she declined to look in a mirror. She wasn’t ready yet to see an alien’s eyes staring back at her. The smooth feel of her mutilated face beneath fingers that were far too pale had already been a great shock, compounded by the empty air she found where her neck ridges were supposed to be. She told the doctors as politely as she could that she needed some time alone. Timot and his staff hesitated, perplexed by her reluctance to look upon the fruits of their labors. Entek finally came to her rescue and herded them out of the recovery room, telling her as he left that she would not be required to return to duty until the following day. She offered him a small smile of gratitude as he closed the door, and even that simple act felt strange now in the absence of facial ridges.
Eventually she decided she could put it off no longer. She rose from the biobed and padded barefoot across the cold tiled floor until she stood before the thick curtain that was drawn over the recovery room’s wall of reflective glass. With one smooth motion, she pulled the drapery aside and met the stranger whose body she now wore, expecting to be horrified. Instead, she was fascinated. The woman whose frozen image Entek had first shown her weeks ago now stood before her, alive, mimicking her every movement, no matter how subtle. The bizarre copper hair that hung from her head was otherworldly.
She yanked at her patient’s tunic and let it fall, revealing her alien body. She had no doubt that the mirror was two-way, that she was being monitored, not just by unseen cameras, but by a team of psychologists, analysts, medics on standby, and probably Entek himself on the other side of the wall. She didn’t care. The sight of her new self transfixed her. Different colors, different contours, even different genitalia. She almost laughed.
Reborn again, she thought. Remade again. It seems I’m destined always to become someone else.
Nineteen days after Iliana left the recovery room, word came from Bajor: Kira had been captured and was being held at a detention facility in the planet’s southern hemisphere, a place known as Elemspur. The massive stone structure was a monastery that the military had converted into a prison facility during the early years of the annexation. An entire level of it had been outfitted for use in interrogations and biological research. One of the rooms on that level was set up with the equipment that had accompanied her on the voyage-machines that would facilitate the suppression and transfer of memories. Iliana was escorted into the room to find Entek overseeing diagnostics that were being carried out by a handful of medtechs. He nodded approvingly when one of the techs showed him the results displayed on a padd, then noticed Iliana standing nearby. He approached her and spoke quietly. “How do you feel?”
“A little nervous,” she admitted, “but resolute.”
“Good,” Entek said. He guided her toward a modified biobed near the room’s center, pointing out the different pieces of equipment they would be using and explaining the function of each one. He let her ask questions, and patiently answered them all. When she had run out of things to ask him, his lips curled into a smile, and this time it held no trace of condescension. “Are you ready?”
She nodded as she lay down on the biobed. “Let’s get it over with.”
Her mentor touched his comcuff. “This is Entek. Where is the subject?”
“On her way, sir,” came the reply. “She gave us some trouble, but we have it under control.”
“What sort of trouble?”
There was a pause before the voice answered. “She killed one of the guards, sir. And she broke Glinn Tarrik’s nose.”
Entek shook his head, looking as angry as Iliana had ever seen him, but he kept his voice low. “The subject was supposed to have been made too pliant to offer resistance.”
“Yes, sir. But these Bajorans, they can surprise you. And this one’s downright vicious. She’s sedated now.”
“She had better been given the proper dosage, Calas, or I’ll know who to blame. Entek out.” He looked down at Iliana and gave her an apologetic shrug.
“Not exactly an encouraging start,” she commented, strangely amused.
“Look on the bright side,” he quipped. “You’ll soon forget all about it.”
“Very funny.” She found their banter oddly comforting. Intellectually, she knew that was the point; Entek was trying to put her at her ease.
Iliana turned as the room’s wide double doors parted, admitting two guards who escorted an antigrav gurney on which lay a semiconscious Kira Nerys.
She was dripping wet and obviously naked underneath a simple sheet that covered her from her breastbone to her ankles. A glinn stormed into the room behind the gurney, the lower half of his face and the front of his uniform stained with blood. “Mister Entek, I demand the prisoner be returned to my cust
ody after the procedure.”
Entek didn’t even look up; he kept his eyes on Kira as his medtechs took possession of the gurney and glided it toward a pedestal next to Iliana’s biobed. “A word of advice, Glinn Tarrik,” he said. “Never presume to issue demands to a senior operative of the Obsidian Order.”
“That terrorist just killed one of my men!” Tarrik shouted.
“And she bloodied you most thoroughly from the look of it,” Entek said as his medtechs locked the gurney in place. “That tells me as much about the quality of the staff at this facility as it does about the prisoner. But if you’re very lucky, you won’t end up scrubbing plasma conduits when I’m through here. Now get out of my sight, and take your men with you. As of this moment, this Bajoran is the property of the Obsidian Order.”
Tarrik looked as if he had been slapped and was now contemplating violence. Instead, he gestured to his subordinates to withdraw. “This isn’t over,” he snarled impotently, and stormed out.
Entek sighed. “This is why I didn’t join the military.”
“I think you rather enjoyed that,” Iliana remarked.
“I always said you were perceptive.”
Iliana turned to look at Kira. The medtechs were attaching neuro-interface devices to her smooth forehead and other points along her cranium. It was eerie seeing her in the flesh, so close. Not a holo this time, not a reflection of her altered face. Here at last was the reality behind Ataan’s death, and so many others-a sower of chaos and bringer of misery. Hatemonger and terrorist. Monster.
“What are you going to do with her?” Iliana asked.
“After she’s terminated?” Entek shrugged. “Her body will likely be filed in the Order archives.”
Iliana took no satisfaction from that.
Kira’s head suddenly lolled toward her as if drawn to their conversation, but her eyes were glazed, unfocused.
Entek picked up a hypospray. “I need to give you a sedative now, a mild one,” he told Iliana. “You’ll start to feel very drowsy. You may even sleep a little. That’s perfectly normal. Don’t fight it.”
“All right.”
He hesitated. “Iliana…I’m going to miss you.”
“I know,” she said. “Now quit stalling, Corbin.”
Entek smiled at her one last time and pressed the hypo to her neck. The sting and hiss passed quickly.
Reality fades in and out. She never loses consciousness, but her perceptions are chaos. Colors swim. People and objects distort. Sounds slow to dull, incomprehensible groans, or blare painfully inside her skull. Moments of clarity come and go, and she clings to these as long as she can.
Gray hands gently affix metal objects to her forehead, her temples, the base of her skull. She hears orders being given, machines turning on, and suddenly someone else’s life flashes across the broken landscape of her conscious mind.
She plunges into darkness for a time and floats among shadows. She tries to recall where she is, what’s happening, but focusing is difficult. Then she remembers. The Cardassians captured her in the hills, brought her to Elemspur. She remembers being dragged from her cage and being shot with a hypo. They’re gonna interrogate me, she realizes. But she musn’t tell them anything. She won’t! They’ll have to kill her. She’ll die, but the cell will be safe. That’s all that matters. Shakaar…Furel…Lupaza, Latha, Gantt, Chavin, Bre’yel Mobara Roku klin ornak vaas i’m so sorry i love you all oh prophets FORGIVE ME-She hears a sound, muffled, as if through water. She follows it like a lifeline, hears others like it…and gradually the sounds resolve into voices. She fights to open her eyes, and sees Cardassians-soldiers, medical personnel, a civilian. One of the soldiers has a face she knows. What-
“-are you doing here, Dukat?” the civilian wants to know.
“This operation is finished, Entek.”
Laughter. “It has scarcely begun. And you are outside your jurisdiction. This is Obsidian Order business. You have no authority here.”
She tries to move, but her body won’t obey her. All she can do is watch through slitted eyes as Dukat swaggers across the room, stepping around freestanding control panels and all manner of complex-looking medical equipment. Interrogation room? “On the contrary,” drawls the gul. “I am still the prefect of this quaint little corner of the empire, and my authority here is absolute.”
The civilian is outraged. “You cannot interfere here, Dukat!”
Dukat shoots a look at the medical personnel. “Clear this room,” he tells them. “Now.”
The medics all glance at the civilian, then they lower their eyes and file out.
“Listen very carefully, Entek,” says Dukat, “because I will say this only once. Leave now. Return to Cardassia and tell Enabran Tain that everything went as planned. Refuse to follow those instructions, and I will inform Central Command and your lovely protegee here precisely who was responsible for the failure of the security grid that made Gul Pirak’s home vulnerable to the attack, killing him and so many other loyal soldiers of the Union…just so that one promising young woman would be turned to the Order.”
Entek doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. He stares at Dukat for what seems like an eternity before he finds his voice. “You’re bluffing.”
“Don’t be naive,” says Dukat.
“Even if I agreed to this, you cannot expect my superiors to believe my report without Kira’s body.”
My body. My death.
Dukat moves toward an instrument tray, picks up an empty hypo, and presses it against a bare shoulder belonging to someone-a woman-lying on a biobed next to her. He draws blood. Then he pops the vial and holds it out to Entek. “Make one.”
She forces her eyes to focus on the face of the woman on the biobed, sees herself. Mirror? But I didn’t feel the hypo…
Entek hesitates, holding Dukat’s stare, then finally he accepts the vial and departs. Dukat watches him go.
“Sir, this one’s awake,” one of Dukat’s men says, sounding very close.
“Sedate her,” says Dukat, looking directly at her for the first time. “She has a long journey ahead of her, and she’s going to need her rest.”
The kiss of a hypospray against her neck. The world fades again. She tries to keep her eyes open, to listen to what the Cardassians are saying, but her eyelids are too heavy. The last thing she sees is Dukat whispering into the ear of her reflection, and she wonders why she can’t hear him.
“This is a bad idea, sir.”
“You worry far too much, Rokai. You always did.”
“If someone should find out…”
“It’s your job to make sure no one ever does.”
“But what if-“
“Sshh! She’s waking up. Go. And remember what I told you.”
A forcefield opened. A forcefield closed. Footsteps echoed and receded with distance. She opened her eyes and sat up, quickly gathering that she was once again in a detention cell. As dark as the one she’d shared with Yeln and Alu, but some place smaller, cleaner. She saw ‘fresher facilities against one wall. She even lay on a bare cot, clothed in a thin, loose-fitting outfit-prison fatigues. The blue glow of the open doorframe testified to the active forcefield between her and the stark corridor outside.
“Good morning,” someone said. She turned sharply toward the voice, someone barely visible in the deep shadows. The dim blue shafts of light from the grated ceiling overhead revealed just enough to make him recognizable.
She lunged at Dukat, realizing too late that her equilibrium was way off, her movements sluggish and hard to control. She fell to her knees, right at his feet.
“An excellent beginning,” he said.
She stood up slowly, unsteadily. Drugged, she realized. Her teeth clenched. “What do you want from me?” she grated.
“What do you remember?”
No. No games. She spat in his face.
He sighed, slowly wiping off the spittle. Then he took a half step toward her and suddenly the fingers of his right hand were around
her throat. “What…do you…remember?”
She struggled in his grip, choking, her gaze locked on his pitiless ice blue eyes. “I…remember…every dead Bajoran…whose pagh cries out for…justice.”
Dukat’s mouth spread into a smile, then a toothy grin, before finally opening with laughter. He released her and she fell back against the cot. “Perfect,” he said, watching her massage her neck. “Simply perfect. Everything I could have hoped for, in fact. I must say I do appreciate your not pretending to be an innocent victim of circumstance. People waste far too much time denying their true natures, don’t you think…Nerys?”
Kira tried to shake off the fog she felt coiled around her brain. “Not much point to that, is there?” she said, her voice hoarse. “You obviously know who I am. And I’ve been in this forsaken place for seven days.” Seven? Or was it eight? Nine? Everything after they pulled me from the cell is such a haze…
Dukat’s mouth dropped open. “You still think you’re in Elemspur, don’t you?” There was a chuckle in his voice as he asked the question.
Kira didn’t allow her surprise to show. “You’ve taken me from one jail and thrown me into another,” she scoffed. “So what?”
“Oh, but this isn’t just any jail,” Dukat said. “You aren’t on Bajor anymore. You aren’t even on Terok Nor. This is the maximum security facility on Letau, the inner most moon of Cardassia Prime, and this room is its deepest cell. I was the administrator here for nine years, long before I became prefect of Bajor.”
“If that’s meant to impress me, you’ll need to try a lot harder, “Kira said. “Whatever you think this is going to get you, you can forget it. I’ll die before I tell you anything.”
“You still don’t understand why you’re here, do you? I’m not interested in extracting information from you, nor in seeing you die. Just the opposite. I plan to make sure you’ll live a long, long life.”
“What for?” she asked. “Don’t your people pride themselves on their swift, perverted justice system? Why keep me alive at all?” Her vision was doubling now. She kept blinking her eyes in a futile attempt to clear them.
