Twist of Faith

by S. D. Perry

  Taran’atar mulled it over. “This,” he said at length, “is all very paradoxical.”

  Kira shrugged. “At best,” she said, “it’s paradoxical. On its bad days, it’s just complete nonsense.”

  The Jem’Hadar grunted his assent.

  “If nothing else,” she concluded, “have faith in Odo. I know I do.”

  He looked up at her then and the glaze of confusion in his eyes seemed to lift and he nodded. “Then perhaps that,” he said, “will be our common ground.”

  The corpse of Empok Nor was growing cool; and though several of DS9’s emergency generators had been transferred over to keep the chill out of a few sections, Vaughn found something sad about it, but he seemed to be the only one who did. Perhaps it was a function of having seen so much death over the years. Old people, he reflected, think about death more. Well, nothing profound there. They also think about being cold more, he decided, and zipped his coat up to the neck and flipped up the collar.

  It was one of the old-issue Starfleet field coats, probably one of the best garments the quartermaster’s office had ever issued, and Vaughn, like most officers who had been cadets eighty years ago, had held on to his. They were sturdy, had deep pockets, and the heating cells were well placed.

  Vaughn was standing at the docking port in one of the station’s lower pylons, watching the stars through the airlock viewport. He appreciated that about Cardassian station design, being able to actually see the ship approaching the dock rather than relying on a monitor or a holotank. He was thinking about the term “mothball.” Many, many years ago, he had looked the word up in one of the older editions of the Oxford Dictionary of Terran Languages and had been surprised to find that it had something to do with a substance that was stored with clothing to kill insect larvae. The definition still made him shake his head and smile in wonderment; what a wonderfully flexible language Late English had been.

  “Mothballed,” he said aloud, letting the word roll over his tongue. How long would it be before someone somewhere decided it was time to mothball him? He glanced out the viewport at the huge docking ring above him and decided, Well, a little longer, anyway.

  Someone was coming up behind him. It was in itself unusual enough that Vaughn hadn’t heard the approach. There were only two or three possibilities for who it might be. One of the three would have killed him by now. The second…well, he knew it couldn’t be her, because he always knew exactly where she was.

  “Dr. Bashir,” Vaughn said without turning. “What can I do for you?”

  Bashir stopped walking, obviously puzzled. Vaughn heard him take a deep breath, then release it slowly. He’s angry, Vaughn decided, but trying to keep it under control. Almost doing it, too.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” Bashir said, obviously struggling to remain polite. “And I’d like some straight answers, please.” Then he added, “For once.”

  Vaughn turned around to look at him, then leaned back against the airlock portal. “Of course, Doctor.”

  Bashir closed the distance between them, then stopped, set his feet as if he was expecting Vaughn to throw a punch at him. “You knew what was going to happen.”

  Vaughn cocked his head to one side. “That’s not a question.”

  Bashir sighed and began to turn around to leave.

  Vaughn held up his hands. “All right, all right. Sorry. Evasion is a difficult habit to give up. The answer is, no, I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. I had suspicions. I know how Thirty-One works, Doctor, and there’s always more than one meaning to anything they say.” He pulled his combadge off the front of his uniform and held it up for Bashir to see. Then he curled his fingers around it, shook his fist in the air, and opened his palm. The combadge was gone. “And always remember,” he added, “whatever it is they let you see, no matter how interesting it might be, they’re only letting you see it so you won’t pay attention to something else.” He held out his other hand and showed Bashir a combadge. Bashir shrugged and then Vaughn pointed at the front of the doctor’s uniform. His own combadge was gone.

  Bashir held out his hand and Vaughn dropped the combadge into it. “Section 31 needed Locken out of the way. And while they most likely could have mustered a force capable of reducing him, his Jem’Hadar, and the hatchery to ashes, they would have lost what they were really after all along.”

  “His data,” Bashir guessed.

  “Yes,” said Vaughn. “But the only way to accomplish both goals, get rid of Locken and obtain his data, was to put someone on the inside, something Section 31 couldn’t do. Cole needed you to do it for him. Once you took care of this for him, their job would be simpler. They got what they wanted, and they covered their tracks. Section 31’s first principle is to protect the secret of their existence. Any other motivation they might espouse is secondary and serves only to reinforce the first principle. It may have been different once, but not anymore. It’s their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.”

  Bashir studied Vaughn carefully. “Are you telling me, then, that you aren’t one of them? Another Starfleet officer on a short leash—”

  Vaughn’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “I’m not on anybody’s leash, Doctor. And I’ve never worked for Thirty-One.”

  Bashir saw the truth then, and the revelation left him breathless. “You’ve been fighting them, too.”

  “Longer than you’ve been alive,” Vaughn said. He turned to look out the viewport again. “I think, Doctor, that you’ve always been and always will be a bit of a romantic. Your latest romantic fantasy is this idea that you’re the solitary opponent to this gigantic conspiracy. It feeds your ego.”

  Bashir began to protest, but Vaughn waved him to silence. “There’s nothing wrong with having an ego, Doctor,” he said. “It’s a necessity if you’re going to survive this. The truth is that there are only a few of us. The other much sadder truth is that the only ones among us who have survived opposing Thirty-One are the ones who are patient, and who can think even more moves ahead than they do.”

  “A lot of good any of that did the Ingavi,” Bashir muttered.

  In response, Vaughn tapped a command code into the companel on the wall. He pointed up to Empok Nor’s docking ring, where an odd-looking, blocky starship suddenly decloaked.

  “What the hell is that?” Bashir asked.

  “That, Doctor, is a mobile environment simulator—a holoship, for want of a better word. The only one of its kind, in fact. It was custom-built in secret and illegally equipped with a cloaking device. It’s a relic from a failed Section 31 operation in the Briar Patch last year. Thirty-One was never implicated, unfortunately. The blame went instead to a single rogue admiral, now dead, who was working with the Son’a. But those of us who have made it our business to oppose Thirty-One knew perfectly well who and what was pulling his strings.

  “After the operation failed, the holoship was officially confiscated by Starfleet Command and destroyed.” A small smile made its way into Vaughn’s beard. “At least, that’s what the paperwork says.”

  “Are you telling me you stole it out from under the noses of Starfleet Command and Section 31? But why?”

  Vaughn shrugged. “For a rainy day. The idea of using one of Section 31’s own instruments against them appealed to me. This one was designed specifically to relocate a small colony—in secret.”

  The last piece clicked into place for Bashir, and he started laughing. “You got the Ingavi off Sindorin!”

  Vaughn nodded. “Most of them. As many as we could find in the time we had. And I didn’t do it personally. But as I said…you aren’t alone.”

  “Ezri mentioned that we picked up a sensor ghost while leaving the planet.”

  “Nothing is perfect, Doctor,” Vaughn said. “Not even one of my plans. You’ll learn that as we work together.”

  Bashir suddenly smiled, a roguish, almost boyish grin. He looked like he might climb through the airlock without an e-suit to get to the ship. “But—Ro! You have to t
ell her! She was devastated!”

  “She’s already up there,” Vaughn explained. “Trying to make it clear to the Ingavi what happened. With only mixed results, I’m afraid. They’re pretty shocked by this whole affair, though she seems to be getting a lot of help from one in particular.”

  “Is it Kel?” Bashir asked. “He made it?”

  “I didn’t catch the name. All I can tell you is that whoever he is, he seemed very pleased with himself.”

  “It’s Kel!” Bashir shouted. “I have to tell Ezri! I have to explain it to Kira! Otherwise, she’ll start making plans—”

  “The colonel knows,” Vaughn said. “We couldn’t have done this without her looking the other way at the proper time. And as for Lieutenant Dax—I think you should wait.”

  “Wait? Wait for what?”

  “Wait until you’ve gone over there and started doing some medical assessments on our guests. Then, you help me explain that they’re to be resettled on Ingav—which, incidentally, is a Federation protectorate these days. And then…” He clapped Bashir on the shoulder. “Then you come back to DS9 with me and I’ll make you a cup of good twig tea, and together, together, we’ll begin to make plans.”

  DEMONS OF AIR AND DARKNESS

  Keith R. A. DeCandido

  For David Henderson,

  the world’s most professional fan.

  Historian’s Note

  This novel takes place about two weeks after the events of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel Section 31: Abyss, and also after the events of the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Pathfinder.”

  The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.

  —NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

  Chapter One

  The Delta Quadrant

  “Shields one and two are now down, shield three is buckling, and warp drive is down!”

  Controller Marssi of the Malon supertanker Apsac snarled at Kron’s report.

  For years, she had heard stories of this ship and its strange alien crew. Some had called it the “ship of death.” At least two other Malon export vessels had encountered it, and neither had come out of the experience intact.

  Now it was attacking the Apsac. They’d already been forced to drop out of warp, dangerously close to a star system. Marssi had no idea what had prompted the attack, nor did she care. She just wanted it to stop.

  “Return fire,” she snapped, moving from her small circular console in the center of the bridge to Kron’s larger one against the starboard bulkhead.

  “We have been,” Kron said. “Our weapons have had no effect.”

  Marssi rubbed her nostrils. The smell of burning conduits was starting to fill the bridge. “I take it they aren’t answering our hails?”

  “Of course not. They don’t want to talk, they want to destroy us, same as they do everyone else.” Kron turned back to his console. “Shield three is now down. Our weapons banks are almost exhausted and we still haven’t even put a dent in their hull. They’re coming in for another pass.” As he spoke, more weapons fire impacted on the Apsac’s hull.

  Kron spit in anger. His saliva was tinged with green. He motioned as if to wipe hair off his face, which under other circumstances would have made Marssi smile. Kron had been making that gesture during times of stress in all the decades they’d served together, but the old man’s gold-brown hair had long since thinned past the possibility of ever actually impeding his vision.

  “Shield four just went down and shield five is at critical levels,” he said. “They’re on a parabolic course—they’ll be back in weapons range in two minutes.”

  Marssi cursed. She had designed the Apsac herself, supervising its entire construction personally. The vessel was groundbreaking—it had seven separate shields in addition to the reinforced tanks. If that redundancy wasn’t enough, the shields were strengthened by an enhancer of her own design. (In truth, designed by someone to whom she’d paid a considerable sum, but as far as she was concerned that made it hers.) Her ship had the lowest incidence of thetaradiation poisoning of any export vessel on Malon Prime and she’d set several records for hauling. Perhaps best of all, her core laborers had a survival rate of sixty percent—twice that of most other export vessels—and she was able to pay them well above the already-lucrative going rate.

  Her profit margin was huge—the cost of constructing the ship and designing the shield enhancer had been recouped by her second run. With this latest trip, she would clear enough to finally buy that house in the mountains that she and Stvoran had had their sights on all these years.

  And now, Marssi thought, these be-damned aliens are going to ruin it.

  From the big console behind her, Gril said, “Controller, look at this.” Gril was a new hire—this was his first run. He’s certainly getting more than he signed on for, Marssi thought bitterly. We all are.

  The controller walked over to the young man. “What is it?”

  “We’re getting an analysis of their hull—it’s made of monotanium! Can you imagine that? No wonder our weapons have had no effect. If we could make our ships out of that—”

  Rolling his eyes, Kron said, “Do you know how much it’d cost to mass-produce enough monotanium to build a tanker, Gril?”

  “I know, I know, but think of it! We’d never have another tank rupture.”

  “We’ve never had one in the first place, you idiot,” Kron muttered.

  Defensively, Gril said, “You know what I mean.”

  Marssi looked more closely at the readouts as they scrolled across Gril’s black screen in clear green letters. In addition to the powerful hull, the small, squat ship had a very efficient dicyclic warp signature, decades ahead of anything the Malons had developed for faster-than-light travel.

  “You’re right, Gril,” she said. “Those aliens do know how to build a ship.”

  An alarm sounded. Marssi heard the staccato rhythm of Kron’s boots on the bulkhead as he ran to one of the other consoles. She turned to see that he seemed a bit blurry—a green haze was starting to descend upon the bridge. One of those burning conduits must be leaking arvat. That’s just what we need.

  Kron pushed a few buttons and then pounded the console with his fist. “Dammit! The warp core containment field is showing signs of collapse and the impulse drive is down.” He turned to look at Marssi, his yellow eyes smoldering with anger, his golden skin tinged with sweat. “We can’t even move now. And they’ll be in range in one minute.”

  Wonderful, Marssi thought. If the tanks don’t rupture and the shields don’t go down, we could still die from a containment breach.

  “Who are these people, anyhow?” Gril asked as he nervously scratched his left nostril. “What do they want with us?”

  “The Hirogen are hunters,” Marssi said grimly, walking back to her center console and running a check to see if she could get the propulsion systems back online. “No one knows where they come from, but they’ve shown up in every part of known space. Supposedly, they’ll hunt anything and everything. This particular ship has been reported in this sector at least twice.”

  “From what I hear,” Kron said with a nasty look at Gril as he moved back across the bridge to his own console, “there’s only one way to survive an encounter with them: don’t be their prey.”

  “But—but we are their prey.”

  “Smart boy,” Kron said with a grim smile, then glanced at a readout. “That’s interesting, they’ve slowed down. They’re still closing, but it’ll be another minute or two before they’re in range.” He snorted. “They probably realize that we can’t fight back, so they’re going to take their time with us now.”

  Gril shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why hunt us?”

  “It’s what they do,” Kron snapped.

  “Yeah, but whatever they do to us will kill them, too, if the tanks rupture or the core breaches. What’s the good of being a hunter if you don’t live to enjoy the fruits of the hunt?”

  Marssi turned to Gril. “That’s a good point. Maybe
he just doesn’t know.” She looked at Kron. “Open a channel to them.”

  Kron snorted. “They haven’t answered a single hail yet.”

  “They don’t have to answer, they just have to listen. Open the channel.”

  Scowling, Kron pushed three buttons in sequence. “Fine, it’s open.”

  Marssi took a deep breath—then regretted it, as the burning-conduit smell had gotten worse. “Attention Hirogen ship. If you continue with your present course of action, this ship will be destroyed and our cargo will be exposed to space. We are currently carrying over half a trillion isotons of antimatter waste. We have heard stories of how Hirogen hunters can weather anything, but I doubt that even you could survive being exposed to those levels of theta radiation. Over half our shields are down and a warp core containment breach is imminent. There’s a danger of physical damage to the tankers as well. Any one of these can lead to this entire star system being irradiated and will result in the instant death of you, us, and anyone else in the immediate vicinity. Please, break off your attack—for your own sake, if not for ours.”

  Kron’s eyes went wide. “They’re replying.”

  “You sound surprised,” Marssi said dryly.

  “That’s because I am,” Kron said, shooting her a look. “On screen.”

  A face appeared on the console in front of Marssi. The creature fit the descriptions from the stories she’d heard of the Hirogen: a face of rough, mottled skin, with the rest of the body covered in metallic, faceted body armor. The helmet had four ridges that began close together at the forehead and spread out and around to the back of the head. This one also had a streak of white paint on either side of each middle ridge. As he spoke, he reached up to his forehead with a gloved hand. Red paint dripped from the index finger, and the Hirogen applied it to the section of the helmet under the leftmost ridge.