by S. D. Perry
“Well, yes,” Bashir said, trying to sound humble, but failing. “In fact, I was.”
Ezri braced herself against the bulkhead and pushed Bashir into the center of the corridor as hard as she could. He pirouetted in midflight, landed feet-first against the bulkhead, twisted, pushed off, then sailed after Taran’atar. “I hate you,” she called out. He waved in response, then signaled for her to follow. “No, really,” she said. “I do.”
The doors to the main bridge were sealed, suggesting that the bridge crew might have had time to erect a barricade before the ship was boarded. When Bashir began scanning the doors for a release frequency, Taran’atar laid his hand over the tricorder display, and then pointed at a pair of small hatches in the walls near the ceiling. “Automatic defenses,” he said softly, then quickly sketched out a rectangular area on the floor in front of the doorway. “Kill zone.” Bashir passed the information to Ezri, who nodded, drew her phaser, and pushed off to the opposite end of the corridor.
Bashir spoke briefly to Taran’atar, then followed Ezri. As soon as they were at a safe distance, Taran’atar shrouded and Bashir reactivated his tricorder, quickly found the proper frequency, and transmitted it to the doors, which opened without a sound. No illumination spilled out, not even emergency lights.
The hatches near the ceiling remained shut. Bashir and Dax waited.
Twenty seconds later, the Jem’Hadar shimmered back into existence before them. “I’ve deactivated the defense grid,” he said. “It didn’t require much effort. There was little power left in the system. The bridge controls are dead.”
Bashir nodded toward the bridge. “Is there anyone in there?”
Taran’atar nodded. “If we assume that this vessel was carrying a maximum of forty-five crew members and that between one-third and one-half of them were lost when the hull lost integrity, then everyone is in there.”
Bashir sighed, then set to work, slowly and methodically preparing himself as if for a minor surgical procedure. He activated the work light on his shoulder mount, then set his tricorder to automatic record and fastened it to the clip in the center of his chest harness. “Will you come?” he asked Ezri, who considered the question only for a second before nodding in assent. “Taran’atar?” he asked.
“I will stay out here and watch. I dislike being in a room with no escape route.”
“Ro can transport us out,” Ezri said.
“Yes,” Taran’atar said. “Assuming she is still there.” Then he turned, the air around him seemed to fold, and he disappeared.
Ezri winced, but resisted the urge to tap her combadge. Bashir saw her anxiety and activated his own. “Lieutenant?” he called.
“Ro here.”
“Just checking in. Anything out there?”
“Nothing that wasn’t half an hour ago. How about in there?”
“Yes,” Bashir said. “Something in the bridge. We’re going in to check it now.”
“I’ll resist the urge to say, ‘Be careful,’ because I hate it when people say that to me, but…”
Bashir smiled. “Understood. How’s the transporter lock?”
“Solid.”
“We’re going into the bridge now. If you don’t hear from us in twenty minutes, beam us all out. If you lose the lock, leave. Quickly.”
There was only a moment’s hesitation, but then Ro said, “Understood. Talk to you in twenty. Ro out.”
Bashir looked down at Ezri and asked, “Ready?”
“I think so,” she said. Then, incongruously, she laughed. “You know what’s strange?”
“No, what?”
She shook her head. “It’s just that I know whatever’s in there, at some time in one of my lives, I’m sure I’ve seen something worse. Curzon witnessed the aftermath of half a dozen battles. Tobin saw a woman get shot out an airlock by Romulans. Audrid watched as her husband was killed by some kind of alien parasite…. Yet, as much as these were all things that happened to me, it’s also like something that I’ve only read about or had described to me in a lecture….”
“‘For now we see through a glass, darkly,’” Bashir said softly.
Ezri hesitated, ran the phrase over her tongue, then said, “I suppose that’s it. Yes. What…?”
“It’s from the Judeo-Christian Bible,” Bashir said, then quoted:
We know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
He stared into the middle distance for a moment before shifting his gaze back to Ezri. “When I was a boy, perhaps a month after the gene resequencing, I found that passage in a book—not the Bible, but a collection of essays—and, in that egocentric way children have, decided it was about me.” Bashir shook his head and grinned bemusedly. “Odd,” he said. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”
Ezri stared at him for several seconds and then, because she could not kiss him through the e-suit, leaned forward and rubbed her cheek against his. “Every time I think I know everything about you, Julian Bashir,” she said, “you find some way to surprise me.”
Bashir laughed, surprised and delighted. “Well,” he said, “good.” Then, he sobered. “But we should go. Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Most of the Romulans had been killed quickly and cleanly, a disruptor to the back of the head at very close range. A few, the highest-ranking by what still remained of their uniforms, had died more slowly. Two of them—one obviously the ship’s captain and the other an otherwise nondescript woman who Bashir assumed was a member of the Tal Shiar—had been killed by degrees. Whoever had done this had partially melted the walls, then thrust the pair into the molten metal, totally immobilizing them. Bashir guessed that they had been forced to watch the others being killed, even as they themselves had died. The burns would have been fatal, Bashir judged, but not instantaneously.
Bashir could not help but remember the battlefields of the Dominion War, the smell of burned flesh, the sight of bodies pulverized into jelly by concussive sonic blasts. It had been horrible, but there had been something like a reason behind all the terror and death. Here, he judged, there had been no goal except, perhaps, simple sadism, an exercise in power, like a small child who pulls the legs off bugs because no one has told him it’s wrong. For the first time, he wanted to leave, to turn his back on the mission and disavow any kinship to the man he suspected was behind it all, though he knew he could not. He wanted, he realized, to be like a child again, and let others make the decisions. “…But when I became a man, I put away childish things,” he whispered, not even realizing he was speaking aloud.
He was shaken from his reverie when Ezri called, “Julian? Look here.” She was scanning the body of the captain, paying particular attention to the man’s forehead, which was coated in a crust of blood.
Inspecting the Romulan carefully, Bashir saw that the blood hadn’t flowed from a head wound as he had first surmised, but was a scab over a series of shallow cuts. At first, he made as if to scrape the blood away as he might if he were performing an autopsy, but then he felt the weight of death in the room and restrained himself, instead unhooking his tricorder and adjusting it for an epidural scan.
When the image materialized, he cursed, then thrust it at Ezri, who looked at it curiously.
“All right,” she said. “I see, but I don’t understand. The round figure is the sun?”
“Right.”
“And that’s a crescent moon superimposed on it?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “I don’t get it. What does it mean?”
Bashir smiled humorlessly. “I’m sorry. Humans can be rather self-centered sometimes. We assume everyone in the quadrant knows everything about us, even the things we don’t really want them to know. It’s an ancient symbol—almost four hundred years old—the sun and the moon together, suggesting totality, everything in the world. It symbolized the rule of Khan Noonien Singh.”
“Khan?” Ezri said. “But he’s dead. Isn’t he?”
Bashir nodded his head. “He is, but apparently his spirit isn’t entirely. Locken has appropriated his icon.”
“The humans will go mad,” Ezri said under her breath. Then, louder, as if remembering that Bashir was human, “Even those who aren’t against genetic engineering in principle won’t be able to tolerate the idea of a new Khan. It’ll send Earth into a frenzy.”
“Yes,” Bashir agreed. “And frenzied people make rash decisions. Maybe that’s what he wants.”
“All right,” she said, considering. “That fits.” She turned away from the victims and began to work the main control panels. “Now let’s see what else we can find out about what happened here.” She tried to activate the panel, but instead of the control panel lighting up, a prerecorded message began to play on the viewscreen.
There was only a single figure in the recording, a Terran male in his late thirties or early forties. He was neither particularly tall nor physically imposing, though the manner in which he carried himself suggested a feline grace. His hair was red, cut short, and receded into a widow’s peak. He wore a simple tunic and a long cloth overcoat, both black, both cut in a fashion like those worn by doctors in civilian hospitals. There was an emblem stitched into the upper left side of the coat front, the same symbol that had been carved into the Romulan’s forehead. His eyes, Bashir saw, were a strange color for a man with such a fair complexion, a dark brown, almost black, almost as if his pupils had swallowed his irises.
“My name is Locken,” he said, his voice low and reasonable, much more like the family doctor’s than a conqueror’s. “And you are trespassing. This is the sovereign territory of the New Federation. If you have not come to pay tribute, then leave or be destroyed. There will be no other warning.” He paused, still seeming quite reasonable, then added, almost incidentally, “Don’t imagine for a moment that you’re a match for me. You’re not.”
Ezri tapped a couple of other controls, but nothing happened. Then she reset her tricorder and performed a quick scan of the ship’s computer system. “That’s all there is,” she said. “The panel was keyed to play this message no matter what we did. Everything else has been deleted.” She looked up at the viewscreen and studied the image. “There was something very odd about his manner,” she said. “Something…inhuman.”
“He wasn’t addressing equals,” Bashir said. “He was talking to lesser beings. Something closer to animals…”
“Subjects,” Ezri added. “Or slaves.”
Bashir’s mouth tightened, but then he nodded in agreement. “Or slaves.”
“And did you see his eyes? Like two coals. Is that normal?”
Bashir shrugged. “It might be natural coloring. Could be a trait linked to his genetic enhancements. Could be colored contact lenses.”
Turning back to the control panel, Ezri asked, “So there’s nothing else we can do here?”
“Just one more thing, I think,” Bashir said, and tapped his combadge. “Taran’atar, proceed to engineering. Lieutenant Ro, two to beam out.”
“Acknowledged,” Ro answered.
The Romulan bridge shimmered and disappeared, replaced by the runabout’s cockpit. “Why’d you send Taran’atar to engineering?” Ezri asked.
Bashir ignored the question and spoke to Ro. “Lieutenant, please take us out to fifteen hundred kilometers and hold position.”
Ro turned around in her seat and looked at them. “What’s going on?”
“Before Taran’atar entered the bridge, I asked him to be ready to initiate a warp-core overload on my command.”
Dax and Ro exchanged looks. “Do we have authorization to do anything like that?” Ezri asked. “Shouldn’t we alert Starfleet and have them contact the Romulans?”
Bashir shook his head. “They’d never believe us. The Romulans would come out here and see that a human had orchestrated that massacre, maybe even find evidence that we’d been aboard and decide that Starfleet was somehow involved. Better to destroy it, and without using weapons that will leave Federation energy signatures.”
“You realize, don’t you,” Dax said, “that this is exactly the sort of thing Section 31 would do. Leave no evidence, clean up the trail so no one will know…? And those people, they had families, friends. Someone should tell them what happened.”
“The irony isn’t lost on me, Ezri,” Bashir snapped. “But I don’t think we can take the chance.”
Bashir’s combadge chirped. “Taran’atar to Bashir.”
“Bashir here. Go ahead.”
“Ready to beam back.”
Ro hit the transporter controls, and Taran’atar materialized behind them. “The task is completed. The overload should occur in six minutes.”
Ro wasted no time and gunned the thrusters. “Moving off to fifteen hundred kilometers,” she said, then spun the runabout around to face the direction of the Romulan ship, which had dwindled to invisibility. “Anyone want to say anything?”
No one did, and in the silence a few moments later, a brilliant white light erupted outside the viewport, throwing stark shadows into the runabout cockpit before winking out. The instant it was gone, Bashir ordered Ro to proceed on their original course, then turned and stalked into the aft compartment.
Dax realized then that Bashir hadn’t needed to stay and watch the explosion, but had forced himself to, making himself face the reality of his decision to employ the methods of his adversaries in order to defeat their purpose—knowing he’d have to live with that decision to the end of his days.
It wasn’t the first time he’d felt compelled to make such a choice. He’d done it before, entering the dying mind of Luther Sloan to extract the cure for Section 31’s genocidal changeling disease, to save Odo’s life. Part of Julian had died that day, and Ezri knew she’d just witnessed another part of him die now.
The thought made her ache inside. No, this wasn’t the first time he’d made such a choice. And she feared for him that it wouldn’t be the last.
Chapter Nine
It was hours later that Taran’atar, watching sensors, announced, “Something on long-range.”
“Jem’Hadar?” Ro asked.
“No. Engine signature is wrong. Something Federation, possibly Vulcan.”
“Probably a survey ship. The Federation hasn’t been able to get into this sector without a lot of trouble for the past couple of decades. The Romulans probably don’t like them being here, but they can hardly chase them out.”
Dax had come up next to Taran’atar to examine the readings herself. “So, nothing to worry about?”
“No, it’s something to worry about. We don’t want anyone knowing we’ve been here, least of all a bunch of Vulcans. If the Romulans ask them later, ‘Did you spot a Federation runabout in the area…?’”
“They’ll say, ‘Yes,’” Dax said.
“Right.” Ro signaled Bashir.
“Yes?” came the curt reply.
“We’ve got company, Doctor. I’m changing course. Heading for the Badlands now. The ride will probably get a little bumpy then. The plasma storms cause a lot of turbulence, sometimes long before you actually see one.”
“Will it damage the runabout?”
“Not if I’m doing my job right.”
“All right,” Bashir said. “Understood.” And then he signed off.
Ro, concerned about Bashir’s abrupt tone, looked at Dax, cocking her head toward the aft compartment. “Was it bad?”
“Bad enough,” Dax said, understanding that Ro was asking about the Romulan ship. She slipped into the seat next to Ro and started wor
king her panel. “I’m used to the idea of the Jem’Hadar being ruthless and efficient, but this was worse somehow. This was…sadism or something calculated to look very much like it.”
“Why do you say that?”
Dax considered the question, then said, “Everything was very…orchestrated for effect. It was almost like being in a holonovel—all very ominous, but also very structured. The only thing missing was the music.”
Ro grinned sardonically. “You’ll forgive me for saying this, but that sounds a little calculated, too. Situations like this, everyone writes a little narrative in their head as they go along, the story they’ll tell when they get back.”
“If they get back,” Dax said.
“No, not if,” Ro corrected. “Once you start thinking about dying, you don’t write the story in your head. As soon as you find you’re not writing the story anymore, it’s time to start worrying.”
“You forget,” Dax said. “I’ve already written a number of life stories. I know what it’s like to die.”
“Sorry, but I don’t think that’s true,” Ro said. “You know what it’s like for a life to end. That’s not the same thing as dying. If any of the previous hosts had died before Dax had been transplanted, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Dax turned to look at Ro. Coolly, she asked, “So what’s your point?”
“That you should never say ‘if,’” Ro said, “if you plan to live.”
She looked at Dax, but the Trill seemed preoccupied. “Something else on your mind?”
Dax hesitated. “We got a look at Locken—a recording he left—and what I saw didn’t jibe with the carnage.”
“Maybe he’s lost control of the Jem’Hadar.”
“Maybe…But, no, I don’t think so. He told them what to do. Might have even been there to stage-manage it. He wanted the scene set exactly, precisely right. He wanted it to have an impact and knew what to do to achieve it.”
“Doesn’t make it any less horrifying,” Ro said.
“No,” Dax replied. “More horrifying. I think that’s part of the reason Julian is so angry. I think he feels like it’s his fault, that he should have done something. Maybe made an effort to find Locken before something like this could have happened.”
