Twist of Faith

by S. D. Perry

  The temptation was to leap up and make a run for it, but Ezri sat tight. Seconds later, the guard was there, glaring, disruptor drawn. When he saw her, he pointed his weapon at her head. She expected him to be smiling for some reason, but then she understood that this wasn’t fun for him; it was his job. It was his job to stop her from leaving the cell, however possible. And it was her job to escape. Simple.

  Ezri jiggled the tool and the signal cut off. The forcefield emitters snapped back on. The guard was standing in the threshold, and as the forcefield closed around him, every muscle in his body—including his trigger finger—spasmed. His arm jerked and the shot singed the air just above Ezri’s head. The Jem’Hadar pitched forward, dropped onto the floor, and curled into a ball at Ezri’s feet as the forcefield emitters shorted out and the field collapsed for the last time.

  Ezri rose, walked quickly to the door, then prodded the Jem’Hadar with her foot. He didn’t move. She stripped him of his weapons and communicator, then crept down the corridor.

  After twenty meters of careful prowling she found an unmarked door. Opening it carefully, Ezri found a maintenance room that was obviously meant, among other things, to service the air-duct system. She opened a grate, climbed inside, and began to move as silently as she could, unable to suppress a wicked grin as she crept through the dark.

  “Do these Founders then not give you the white?” asked the First.

  Taran’atar’s mind felt clearer and he wondered if it was because the First had administered some kind of drug while he had been unconscious. “They created the white,” he said. “And, yes, they do. Your Khan merely stole the formula and re-created it. Badly, I might add.”

  “Badly?”

  “Your soldiers, First, are either very weak or badly trained. I killed ten of them myself. No single soldier should be able to kill ten Jem’Hadar.”

  The First frowned and it seemed for a moment that he was about to strike the prisoner, but then restrained himself. “Thirteen,” he said.

  Taran’atar did not understand him. “Thirteen?”

  “You killed thirteen. Your grenade landed in the midst of three soldiers. None of them had the sense to pick it up and throw it back.”

  Taran’atar felt a strange desire to make some sort of comment—either an expression of regret or a point of advice—but he refrained. It would not be well received and he knew that his life still hung by a thin thread. This soldier, this First, had come back to talk to him not because he felt Taran’atar had any valuable information to contribute, but because something they had discussed earlier had cut deep and was now festering. Though he was not a true Jem’Hadar, this First seemed to have some worthwhile qualities. He might grow up to be a respectable soldier someday.

  “Then how do you take the white?” the First said, continuing his earlier line of inquiry. “You have a shunt, but we found no evidence of a tube in your possessions. And you have been here many, many hours. Explain this.”

  “I am not like most Jem’Hadar. What you obtain from white my body can produce naturally.”

  The First’s turmoil was growing by the moment. He suddenly drew his disruptor and placed the weapon at Taran’atar’s temple. “I should kill you. You have no useful information and the time I spend speaking with you might be better used training the soldiers who still remain under my command.” He flicked a switch on the weapon and Taran’atar heard the charge build. The First watched his face. Then, slowly, he lowered the weapon and said, “But you have courage. I’ll grant you that. And some of the things you’ve said…” He walked back to where he had been standing and holstered his weapon.

  Turning, he pointed at the tube that pumped white into his throat. “You say you do not need this. Is that true?”

  “It is true.”

  “Is that how Jem’Hadar are meant to exist?”

  Taran’atar hesitated. Once again the First had surprised him, raising a question that stirred the Elder’s own growing uncertainty. “I don’t know,” he said, the words tearing at his throat like poison. “A Jem’Hadar lives only to serve the Founders and I have served them well and yet, and yet, as soon as they discovered my flaw they sent me here, to this blighted corner of the galaxy. I am a deviant. I am unfit to live among my kind and so I must die here among you weaklings and traitors. It is what I deserve.”

  The First listened dispassionately until Taran’atar finished his diatribe. Then, he reached up as if to touch the tube, though he could not seem to bring himself to do it. “Yes,” he said. “I see. You are correct about one thing: Your Founders and my Khan are very different. The Founders made you so that you hate the fact that you do not need the white, while my Khan…” Struggling mightily, the First managed to wrap his fingers around the tube and looked almost as if he would tear it from the shunt, but Taran’atar knew he would not, could not. Instead, panting heavily, he snarled, “…he made me well enough to make me willing to do anything for him, but not so well that I look upon this chain…” He let go of the tube. “…as a benediction.”

  Stepping close, putting his face in Taran’atar’s, the First hissed, “I am not a soldier. I am not a servant. I am a slave, but at least I know it. Why don’t you?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “We don’t have much time to talk, Joseph,” Kasidy Yates said to her father-in-law. The image on the viewscreen snapped and popped as the signal faded, then grew stronger. “They’re taking the subspace net down all across the province later this afternoon to put in some new equipment.”

  Joseph Sisko scowled. “Well, they can just wait until we’re finished,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get through all day.”

  “I understand,” Kasidy sighed. “It’s harder here than it was on the station. Sometimes, it’s easy to take for granted how efficient the Federation is.”

  “All right, all right,” Joseph grumbled. “I guess I just thought that all this ‘wife of the Emissary’ business would have given you some sort of…I don’t know…special status.”

  “It does,” Kasidy exclaimed. “More than I know what to do with. Do you have any idea how many people have come to my door over the past couple of days just asking if they can help out? And they’re all so earnest and polite, I can’t turn them away! I’ve had furniture movers, kitchen cleaners, garden weeders.”

  “Sounds all right to me,” Joseph said, something approximating a smile crossing his lips. “The kitchen-cleaning part, at any rate. Besides, you should take it easy.” The picture cleared up and Kasidy took a moment to study Joseph’s face and saw her fears confirmed: there were lines of weariness around his eyes and mouth that had grown more pronounced since Ben’s disappearance. It was the ravaged look of a parent who’d come to believe he’d lost his child, despite Kasidy’s conviction that her husband, Joseph’s son, would someday return.

  “Joseph, I’m in the middle of my second trimester—the best part of being pregnant according to my doctor—and I’ve never felt better. I want to do things. In fact,” she laughed, “I’m feeling pretty broody.”

  Joseph’s smile broadened and it took years off his face. “I remember that,” he said. “When my second wife got to that phase. There weren’t enough hours in the day to do everything she wanted. I was grateful to go to the restaurant every day where I didn’t have to work so hard.”

  “Well,” she said, smiling back, “things will be better when Jake returns. He’s good at handling the visitors. He has a gift for putting people at ease.”

  “Ah, he gets that from me. Never was one of his father’s strengths…” Then, Joseph’s expression went sober again. “Well, where is he? Not back on the station again, I hope. I’d much rather he stayed there with you on Bajor.”

  Kasidy stared at the monitor, confused. What could Joseph mean? Jake was on Earth. He’d left…how long ago? Two weeks. Could they be teasing her? But, no, that wasn’t like Joseph. He would never joke about something like that. She said, “What do you mean? He’s there with you, isn’t he?”r />
  Joseph’s smile slipped away and even with the poor connection, Kasidy could see the blood drain out of his face. “What? No…Of course not. What made you think he was here?”

  “He told me he was going there,” she said almost angrily. The surges of hormones came on that way sometimes; she occasionally found herself growing misty and weepy over strange things—a dew-covered spiderweb in the garden or a hand-thrown clay bowl that Ben had used to stir together a batch of mole sauce. Kasidy reined in her emotions and said, “Wait. Maybe we’re talking about the same thing and getting ourselves confused. Two weeks ago, Jake took a ship from DS9 straight to Earth.”

  Joseph’s lips moved for several seconds and Kasidy began to think that the signal was breaking down, but then she realized he was having trouble forming words. He clutched his chest and sat down, the camera automatically tracking. Good Lord, no, she thought. Please, not now. Not when I’m so far away. But then he seemed to take hold of himself and said, “I…I swear to you, Kasidy, Jake never called, never told me that he was coming here. Two weeks ago?”

  Kasidy nodded. “But if he didn’t go there, then where could he have gone? And why would he have lied?”

  “He wouldn’t have…Jake would never lie to you…Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless he was going to do something he knew we wouldn’t want him to do.”

  Kasidy felt herself grow light-headed and had to lean over so she wouldn’t faint. When she looked up again, she looked into the old man’s eyes and knew that whatever she said next would only make him look older and more fragile. “Joseph…where can he be?”

  Ezri stifled a sneeze, wiped her eyes against her sleeve, and desperately wished that she had an antihistamine. Why was it, she wondered, that in all the holonovels and two-dees of her youth, whenever the plucky young heroine had to clamber through ventilation shafts, she never seemed to get dirty? Ventilation shafts, she had discovered, were filthy places. And dark. And small. And things lived in them, the sorts of things that usually tried to get away from you, but sometimes grew confused and lost their way and came back to you.

  She guessed she’d been sitting still and trying not to make any noise for more than two hours. Enough was enough. Either they had discovered what she had done and were on her trail, or the other, more intriguing possibility had come to pass—the one she had devised once she’d figured out where the ketracel-white distillery was located. One way or another, it was time to get out of the air ducts.

  But there were problems.

  The first was that she no longer had any idea where she was. Ezri was fairly certain that the duct was sloping downhill and had been for quite a distance. She had, she realized, been unconsciously braking with knees and palms after every switchback. She must be quite a way below the holding cells by now.

  The other problem was that Ezri was afraid to push open a grate without first checking out what might be below, which meant shining the palm beacon she’d found into a dark room. The other option was simply dropping down into the darkness without checking first, an idea that held even less appeal than staying in the ducts. Sooner or later, she would have to do something, but, for now, crawling along in the dusty darkness was an acceptable alternative to making a decision.

  Wait.

  She backed up. Something had caught her eye in the dark. There. A flash. Red. Ezri reached out toward it and found a slightly open louvered grate. She poked at it and the louvers opened wider, creaking slightly, but there was no alarming noise from beneath her, so she assumed she was all right. For now. Lights, most of them very small. Control panels and lab equipment. There were no overhead lights, but the panels were casting enough glow that she could see the floor, not too far beneath her. The question was whether or not the room was safe. Nothing seemed to be moving, but Jem’Hadar could shroud themselves and stay very quiet if they so chose. But no, it seemed unlikely that a Jem’Hadar would be waiting shrouded in a dark laboratory.

  She pushed on the grate and was satisfied to discover it was on a hinge. No large piece of metal crashing to the floor, at least. Moving slowly, listening for anything, Ezri lowered herself through the opening and let herself dangle at arm’s length before releasing her grip.

  “You’re alone, Ezri,” she said, trying to settle herself. Her words echoed strangely and she amended her original estimate of the size of the room. Either it was bigger than she had thought or she had spent too much time in the air ducts.

  “Lights?” she called, but nothing happened. “Computer?” No response. Maybe that was for the best. No computer monitoring, at least, or it might be authorization-code–protected. Ezri had a vague idea about tapping into Locken’s main computer and trying to cause some trouble, but she knew that her chances of accomplishing that were fairly slim. Locken—or Section 31 or the Dominion before them—were probably ultra-paranoid about security. She had managed to perform her earlier piece of skullduggery only by tapping into Audrid’s extensive knowledge of humanoid biochemistry, Jadzia’s scientific acumen, and her own recent research into Starfleet’s Jem’Hadar database, when she’d been trying to gain some insight into Kitana’klan.

  She flicked on her lamp and played the beam over the control panels. The consoles and equipment looked like the sort of thing that she would see in a sickbay: sequence analyzers, tissue regenerators, even a small surgical bay. Ezri frowned. Why situate a medical facility so far away from the living quarters? It didn’t make sense.

  She continued to pan the light over the consoles, but not so slowly or methodically now. She had an idea what she was looking for now and, moments later, found it against the far wall.

  Stasis tubes. Two banks of four. Seven were active.

  Ezri felt the hairs on the nape of her neck stand up.

  What would Locken want with stasis tubes? It wasn’t a happy thought. It obviously wasn’t Federation technology and she didn’t like the idea of trying to figure out Dominion control systems. And it was possible that whoever was inside the tubes had a very good reason for being there—sick or injured beyond the abilities of the facility to heal. Or they might be Jem’Hadar. This was less likely, though. Why would Locken keep Jem’Hadar in stasis? Unless they were really bad Jem’Hadar. She brushed aside the thought. Anyone Locken would want kept out of the way would be her ally, even if only in the short run.

  “Logs,” she said. “There have to be log files.”

  The main workstation was a stand-alone, with dedicated memory and processing units. That spelled the end of any lingering plans for crashing the system, but Ezri let the idea pass unmourned. She was more interested in finding out what Locken had been doing in this room.

  There was no security on the system, not even a password. Locken had made no attempt to conceal his activities, which made sense to Ezri in retrospect. He was too arrogant to believe anyone would breach his security. There was one directory labeled STASIS, with seven files, named consecutively: SUBJECT

  1, SUBJECT 2, SUBJECT 3…No names, no identifying marks. They might have been petri dishes filled with mold.

  Another directory was labeled FAILURES, with many, many more files, some of them arranged into subdirectories. After a cursory review of both sets of files, Ezri concluded that the Failures had been the lucky ones: they were dead.

  Not all the test subjects had been humans. At least one of the Section 31 agents had been a Betazoid and another appeared to have been an Andorian, though it was difficult to say because of the poor quality of the recordings. The subject’s skin was blue, but he was hairless and didn’t have antennae, though there were small, dark patches on the skull where antennae might once have been.

  There were others: a pair of Romulans that must have come from the pirated starship; three small, furry beings that didn’t belong to any species Ezri knew; a Cardassian who screamed into the camera until he passed out or died. Each holoclip was preceded by several pages of notes and formulas, but Ezri could only guess at the connection be
tween them. Had Locken been testing a mutagen, a nerve gas, a spectrum of radiation, possibly all of the above? There was no way to know. She ran a search and found that there were over seven hundred individual clips, though there was no way to know how many subjects the number represented.

  There was a detached, clinical tone about the proceedings, but there was something even worse underneath it all, something that made Ezri want to shut everything off, crawl back into the snug, safe air vents. Beneath the clinical veneer, there lurked the horrifying spectacle of an emotionally arrested young boy taking a shivering pleasure in pulling the legs off bugs.

  She did not know why Locken had put these seven individuals into stasis and she wasn’t sure she wanted to dig deep enough into his “work” to find out now. Neither could she be sure that it was within the power of Federation science to restore them. Ezri wavered for a moment, wondering whether she should try to see if there was some way to cut power to the tubes and terminate the poor, damned monsters Locken had created.

  But, no, she decided. It wasn’t her call to make. When all this was over, she would bring back help. But dealing with Locken would have to come first.

  As quickly as she could, she climbed back into the air duct, eager to put herself as far from Locken’s chamber of horrors as she could.

  Security officer’s log. I’m leaving this record in case I don’t survive the assault on Locken’s stronghold.

  It’s still a few hours before dawn and we’re camped out approximately two kilometers east-southeast of Locken’s compound. We plan to leave as soon as the

  Ingavi have eaten and made whatever other preparations—physical or spiritual—they need to make. It occurs to me that I know almost nothing about Ingavi theology, whether they’re ancestor worshipers, monotheists, atheists, or something else entirely.

  I’m guessing there are about fifteen hundred Ingavi left, down from about five thousand when I was here last. That’s an unbelievably high mortality rate and it’s possible there are too few of them left for them to survive here on Sindorin, even if Locken and the Jem’Hadar left today. I don’t even know what else to say about that.