INVASION!, BOOK TWO: THE SOLDIERS OF FEAR

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Now she was going to see it.

  Inside the Defiant, stasis generators made a trail of red lights up the main turbolift shaft, and Dax suspected the half-visible glimmer of their fields was all that kept its crumbling metal walls intact. It looked as though this part of the ship had suffered one of the hull breaches O’Brien had reported, or some even bigger explosion. The turbolift car was a collapsed cage of oxidized steel resin and ceramic planks. Dax eased herself into the open shaft above it, careful not to touch anything as she jetted upward.

  “Captain?” she called up into the echoing darkness.

  “On the bridge.” Sisko’s voice echoed oddly off the muffling silence of the stasis fields. Dax boosted herself to the top of the turbolift shaft and then angled her jets to push through the shattered lift doors. Heat lamps had been set up here to melt away the ice still engulfing the Defiant’s navigations and science stations. The powerful buzz of their filaments and the constant drip and sizzle of melting water filled the bridge with noise. Sisko stood alone in the midst of it, his face set in stony lines. She guessed that Bashir had headed immediately for the starship’s tiny medical bay.

  “It’s hard to believe it’s really five thousand years old,” Dax said, hearing the catch in her own voice. The familiar black panels and data stations of the bridge had suffered less damage than the rest of the ship. Except for the sparkle of condensation off their dead screens, they looked as if all they needed was an influx of power to take up their jobs again. She glanced toward the ice-sheathed science station and shivered. Only two days ago, she’d helped O’Brien install a new sensor array in that console. She could still see the red gleam of its readouts beneath the ice—brand-new sensors that were now far older than her own internal symbiont.

  Dax shook off the unreality of it and went to join Sisko at the command chair. Seeing the new sensor array had given her an idea. “Can you tell if there are any unfamiliar modifications on the bridge?” she asked the captain, knowing he had probably memorized the contours of his ship in a way she hadn’t. “If so, they may indicate how far in our future this Defiant was when it got thrown back in time.”

  Sisko swung in a slow arc, his jets hissing. “I don’t see anything unfamiliar. This could be the exact ship we left back at Deep Space Nine. If the Furies are going to invade, I’d guess it’s going to be soon.”

  Hayman grunted from the doorway. “That’s exactly the kind of information we needed you to give us, Captain. Now all we need to know is where and when they’ll come, so we can be prepared to meet them.”

  “And this—this ghost from the future.” Sisko reached out a hand as if to touch the Defiant’s dead helm, then dropped it again when it only stirred up the warning luminescence of a stasis field. “You think this can somehow help us find out—”

  The chirp of his comm badge interrupted him. “Bashir to Sisko.”

  The captain frowned and palmed his badge. “Sisko here. Have you identified the bodies, Doctor?”

  “Yes, sir.” There was a decidedly odd note in Bashir’s voice, Dax thought. Of course, it couldn’t be easy examining your own corpse, or those of your closest friends. “The one in the ship’s morgue sustained severe trauma before it hit stasis, but it’s still recognizable as yours. There wasn’t much left of the other, but based on preliminary genetic analysis of some bone fragments, I’ll hazard a guess that it used to be me.” Dax heard the sound of a slightly unsteady breath. “There’s something else down here, Captain. Something I think you and—and Jadzia ought to see.”

  She exchanged speculative looks with Sisko. For all his youth, there wasn’t much that could shatter Julian Bashir’s composure when it came to medical matters. “We’re on our way,” the captain told him. “Sisko out.”

  Diving back into the shattered darkness of the main turbolift, with the strong lights of the bridge now behind her, Dax could see what she’d missed on the way up—the pale, distant quiver of emergency lights from the Defiant’s tiny sickbay on the next deck down. She frowned and followed Sisko down the clammy service corridor toward it. “Is the ship’s original power still on down here?” she demanded incredulously.

  From the darkness behind her, she could hear Hayman snort. “Thanks to the size of the warp core on this overpowered attack ship of yours, yes. With all the other systems shut down except for life-support, the power drain was reduced to a trickle. Our engineers think the lights and equipment in here could have run for another thousand years.” She drifted to a gentle stop beside Dax and Sisko in the doorway of the tiny medical bay. “A tribute to Starfleet engineering. And to you too, apparently, Dr. Bashir.”

  The young physician looked up with a start from where he leaned over one of his two sickbay stasis units, as if he’d already forgotten that he’d summoned them here. The glow of thin green emergency lighting showed Dax the unaccustomed mixture of helplessness and self-reproach on his face.

  “Right now, I’m not sure that’s anything to be proud of,” he said, sounding almost angry. His gesture indicated the stasis unit below him, which Dax now saw had been remodeled into an odd mass of pumps and power generators topped with a glass box. A fierce shiver of apprehension climbed up the freckles on her spine and made her head ache. “Why haven’t you people done anything about this?”

  Admiral Hayman’s steady glance traveled from him to Dax, and then back again. “Because we were waiting for you.”

  That was all the confirmation Dax needed. She pushed past Sisko, and was startled to find herself dropped abruptly to the floor when the sickbay’s artificial gravity caught her. Just a little under one Earth standard, she guessed from the feel of it—she felt oddly light and off-balance as she joined Bashir on the other side of that carefully remodeled medical station.

  “Julian, is it . . . ?”

  His clear brown eyes met hers across the misted top of the box. “I’m afraid so,” he said softly, and moved his hand. Below where the warmth of his skin had penetrated the stasis-fogged glass, the mist had cleared a little. It was enough to show Dax what Bashir had already seen—the unmistakable gray-white mass of a naked Trill symbiont, immersed in brine that held a frozen glitter of bioelectric activity.

  She had to take a deep breath before she located her voice, but this time her symbiont’s long years of experience stood her in good stead. “Well,” she said slowly, gazing down at the part of herself that was now immeasurably older. “Now I know why I’m here.”

  YR1,DY6,2340

  Patient immobile + unresponsive. Limited contact + manipulation of subject due to fragile physical state and possible radiation damage, no invasive px/tx until vitals, Tokal-Benar’s stabilize. Fluid isoboramine values <47%, biospectral scan=cortical activity < prev. observed norm, ion concentration still unstable. (see lab/chem results, atta) No waste products yet; adjusted nutrient mix + 10% in hopes of improving uptake. Am beginning to fear I can’t really keep it alive after all.

  Staring down into the milky shadows of the suspension tank, Julian Bashir blinked away the image of those old medical records and trailed a hand across the invisible barrier separating the two realities. The stasis field pricked at his palm like a swarm of sleepy bees. “I guess I was wrong.”

  “Does that mean you don’t think it’s still alive?”

  Bashir jerked his head up, embarrassment at being overheard smothering under a flush of guilt as soon as the meaning of Hayman’s words sank in. He pulled his hand away from the forcefield, then ended up clenching it at his side when he could find nothing else to do with it. “No, I’m fairly certain it’s still living.” At least, that’s what the readouts frozen beneath the stasis field’s glow seemed to indicate. “It was alive when the field was activated five thousand years ago, at any rate. I can’t tell anything else about its condition without examining it in real time.” Although the thought of holding the orphaned symbiont in his hands made his throat hurt.

  Across the table from him, Hayman folded her arms and frowned down at the shimmerin
g box. The watery green of the emergency lights turned her eyes an emotionless bronze, and painted her hair with neon streaks where there should have been silver. “Assuming it’s in fairly stable condition, what equipment would you need to transfer this symbiont into a Trill host?”

  The question struck him like a blow to the stomach. “You can’t be serious!” But he knew she was, knew it the very moment she asked. “Admiral, you can’t just change Trill symbionts the way you would a pair of socks! There are enormous risks unless very specific compatibility requirements are met—”

  “What rejection?” Hayman freed one hand to wave at Dax, standing silently beside her. “It’s the same symbiont she has inside her right now!”

  It occurred to Bashir, not for the first time, that he didn’t like this woman very much. He couldn’t imagine what Curzon Dax had ever seen in her. “It’s a genetically identical symbiont that is five thousand years out of balance with Jadzia! For all we know, the physiological similarities between the two Daxes could make it even harder for Jadzia to adjust to the psychological differences.” Dax herself had withdrawn from the discussion almost from the beginning. She’d turned her attention instead toward the naked symbiont in its stasis-blurred coffin, and Bashir wondered which of her many personalities was responsible for the eerie blend of affection and grief he could read in her expression. He wished he could make Hayman understand the implications of toying with a creature that was truly legion. “These are lives we’re talking about, Admiral, not inconveniences. Any one of the three could die if we attempt what you’re suggesting.”

  Hayman glared at him with that chill superiority Bashir had learned to recognize as a line officer’s way of saying that doctors only earned their MDs because they hadn’t the stomach for regular Starfleet. “If we don’t find out who carved up the Defiant and pitched her back into prehistory,” she told him coldly, “millions of people could die.”

  He clenched his jaw, but said nothing. That’s the difference between us, he thought with sudden clarity. As regular military, Hayman had the luxury of viewing sentient lives in terms of numbers and abstractions—saving one million mattered more than saving one, and whoever ended the war with the most survivors won. As a doctor, he had only the patient, and even a million patients came down to a single patient, handled over and over again. No amount of arithmetic comparison could make him disregard that duty. And thank God for that.

  Hayman made a little noise of annoyance at his silence, and shifted her weight to a more threatening stance. “Do I have to make this an order, Dr. Bashir?”

  He lifted his chin defiantly. “As the senior medical officer present, sir, Starfleet regulations allow me to countermand any order you give that I feel is not in the best interests of my patient.” He flicked a stiff nod at the stasis chamber. “This is one of those orders.”

  Surprise and anger flashed scarlet across her cheeks. For one certain, anguished moment, Bashir saw himself slammed into a Starfleet brig for insubordination while Hayman did whatever she damn well pleased with the symbiont. It wasn’t how he wanted things to go, but it also wasn’t the first time that a clear vision of the consequences came several seconds behind his words. He opened his mouth to recant them—at least in part—just as the admiral turned to scowl at Sisko. “Captain, would you like to speak with your doctor?”

  The captain lifted his eyebrows in deceptively mild inquiry. “Why?” He moved a few steps away from the second examining bed, the one that held the delicate tumble of bones that Bashir had scrupulously not dealt with after identifying whose they were. “He seems to be doing just fine to me.”

  Hayman blew an exasperated breath, and her frustration froze into a cloud of vapor on the air. Like dragon’s breath. “Do I have to remind you people that you were brought here so Starfleet could help you avert your own deaths?”

  “Not if it means treating Jadzia or either of the Daxes as a sacrifice,” Bashir insisted.

  Dax stirred at the foot of the examining table. “May I say something?”

  Bashir kept his eyes locked on Hayman’s, refusing the admiral even that small retreat. “Please do.”

  “Julian, I appreciate your concern for my welfare, and for everything you must have gone through to keep the symbiont alive all this time . . .” Dax reached out to spread her cool hand over his, and Bashir realized with a start that he’d slipped his hand onto the stasis field again. “But I don’t think this is really your decision to make.”

  He felt his heart seize into a fist. “Jadzia—”

  “Dax.” She joggled his wrist gently as though trying to gain his attention. “I’m Dax, Julian. This—” She patted his hand on the top of the tank, and he looked where she wanted despite himself. ”This is Dax, too.” The pale gray blur was nestled in its bed of liquid like a just-formed infant in its mother’s womb. “I trust you enough to be certain you didn’t do this as some sort of academic exercise. Preserving the symbiont must have been something you knew for a fact that I wanted—that Dax wanted. And the only reason I can think of that I’d be willing to live in a tank like this for so many hundreds of years is the chance to warn us about what happened—to prevent it in any way I can.”

  Sisko came across the room, stopping behind Dax as though wanting to take her by the shoulders even though he didn’t reach out. “We don’t know that for certain, old man. And if we lose both you and the symbionts testing out a theory . . .” His voice trailed off, and Bashir found he wasn’t reassured to know that Sisko was just as afraid of failure as he was.

  “We’re only talking about a temporary exchange,” Dax persisted. “Julian has obviously managed to recreate a symbiont breeding pool well enough to sustain my current symbiont for the hour or two we’ll need. And even if we were transplanting a completely incompatible symbiont—” She truned to Bashir again, silently challenging him to say she was wrong. “—Jadzia wouldn’t start showing signs of rejection for at least six hours. That should give us plenty of time.”

  But being correct about the time frame didn’t mean she was correct about the procedure. “There’s still the psychological aspect,” he said softly. “We don’t know what the isolation has done to the symbiont’s mental stability.” His hand stiffened unwillingly on the top of the tank. “Or what that might do to yours.”

  Dax caught up his gaze with hers, the barest hint of a shared secret coloring her smile as she took his arms to hold him square in front of her, like a mother reassuring her child. “I know for a fact that even six months of exposure to mental instability can’t destroy a Trill with seven lifetimes of good foundation. Six hours with some other aspect of myself isn’t going to unhinge me.” She let her smile widen, and it did nothing to calm the churning in his stomach. “You’ll see.”

  “If you’re not willing to perform the procedure, Doctor, I’m sure there are other physicians aboard this starbase who will.”

  Anger flared in him as though Hayman had thrown gasoline across a spark. Dax’s hands tightened on his elbows, startling him into silence as she whirled to snap, “Judith, don’t! I won’t have him blackmailed into doing this.”

  The admiral’s eyes widened, more surprised than irritated by the outburst, but she crossed her arms without commenting. A more insecure gesture than before, Bashir noticed. He was secretly glad. He didn’t like being the only one unsure of himself at a time like this.

  “What if there were some other way?” he asked Dax. She opened her mouth to answer, and he pushed on quickly, “Symbionts can communicate with one another without sharing a host, can’t they? When they’re in the breeding pools back on Trill—when you’re in the breeding pools with them?”

  The thought had apparently never occurred to her. One elegant eyebrow lifted, and Dax’s focus shifted to somewhere invisible while she considered. “It doesn’t transfer all the symbiont’s knowledge the way a joining does,” she acknowledged after a moment. “But, yes, direct communication is possible.”

  A little pulse of hope push
ed at his heart. “And in a true joining, Jadzia wouldn’t retain any of the symbiont’s memories, anyway, once the symbiont was removed.”

  Dax nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true.”

  “So what harm is there in trying this first?”

  “Trying what first?” Hayman’s confidence must not have been too badly damaged, because the impatient edge to her voice returned easily enough. “What are you two talking about?”

  Bashir looked over Dax’s shoulder at the admiral, schooling the dislike from his voice in an effort to sound more professional. “When they aren’t inside a host, Trill symbionts use electrochemical signals to communicate with one another through the liquid they live in. Even a hosted symbiont can make contact with the others, if its host is first submerged in the fluid pool.” He glanced aside at the tank while his thoughts raced a dozen steps ahead. “If we can replicate the nutrient mixture that’s been supporting the symbiont, and fill a large enough receptacle, I think the Daxes should be able to . . .” He hesitated slightly, then fell back on the easiest word. “. . . talk to each other without having to remove Jadzia’s current symbiont.”

  Hayman chewed the inside of her lip. “We could question this unhosted symbiont that way? It could talk to us through Dax?”

  “Through Jadzia,” Bashir corrected automatically, then felt heat flash into his cheeks at Hayman’s reproving scowl. “Yes, we could.”

  “Julian’s right.” Dax saved him from the rest of the admiral’s disapproval. “I think this will work.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?” Hayman fixed Bashir with a suspicious glare, as if expecting him to lie to her. “What are our chances of losing the symbiont?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. He wished the truth weren’t so unhelpful. “I don’t know how fragile it is, how much radiation damage it may have sustained back then. It may not live beyond removal of the stasis field, and I don’t know what effect physically moving it from one tank to another might have.” He looked into Dax’s eyes so that she could see he was being absolutely honest, as a doctor and as her friend. “I do know it will be less traumatic than trying to accomplish a joining under these conditions.”