Twist of Faith

by S. D. Perry

  Kira didn’t like the tone in Hiran’s voice. “Is he all right?”

  “I really think you should see him, ma’am.” Hiran’s tone was more urgent. Kira also knew him well enough to know that he was unlikely to say anything else.

  She accompanied him back in the rowboat to the marina. As Hiran stroked the oars, Kira asked, “What happened here?”

  “Lerrit’s last stand, you could say, ma’am,” Hiran said, almost bitterly. “General Torrna pretty much beat them on the land. See, on his way back from Fort Tendro, he came across General Takmor’s regiment—but Takmor’d been killed.”

  Damn, Kira thought. She was one of the good ones. “I’d heard that she was the one who reclaimed Sempa Province.”

  “Actually, that was General Torrna, ma’am. The general, see—well, he just plowed on in and led them to victory. They were ready to call it quits, but he rallied ’em, and they took Sempa back. Meantime, Admiral Inna came back here when she found out that the Lerrit Navy was gonna throw their whole armada at us.”

  Kira looked at the smoky, ruined port. “Looks like they did.”

  “Oh, the admiral, she threw back pretty good, too. Cost her her life, mind, but—”

  “Inna’s dead?”

  Hiran nodded. “Just what we needed after everything else.”

  “What everything else? Hiran, I’ve been laid up at Tendro, and obviously I haven’t been getting all the news.”

  “Oh, ma’am, I’m sorry,” Hiran said in a sedate tone. “I guess you didn’t hear that Prefect Natlar was killed, too. See, same time the Lerrit Navy did their last stand here, the Lerrit Army did likewise in the capital. Didn’t work, of course—thanks to the blockade, they were underfed, understaffed, and under-armed. We beat ’em back mighty good, truth be told, but—” He sighed. “Not without a cost, if you know what I mean.”

  Kira shook her head. “So we won?”

  “Yes, ma’am, if you can call this a victory.”

  They arrived at the marina. Kira disembarked from the rowboat, and couldn’t help contrasting this with the last time she set foot on the dock. Then, the sun was shining, a stiff breeze was blowing, carrying the smell of fish and seawater, with the Korvale Ocean a sparkling green in contrast to the dull-but-solid brown of the dock’s wood. Now, the sun was obscured by billowing smoke, and the wind carried only the smell of that smoke, occasionally broken by the stench of blood and death.

  Then she saw the bodies.

  They were arranged in a row just past the marina in a ditch that hadn’t been there before. Many wore Perikian uniforms; many more wore Lerrit uniforms. A few—though even a few were too many—wore civilian clothing.

  Nerys walked into the other chamber, Furel right behind her. Kira Taban’s body was laid out on the pallet. She had seen far too many dead bodies not to know one now.

  Her father was dead.

  “He died calling your name.”

  It took an effort for Kira to pry her horrified eyes away from the array of corpses and continue her journey to the office where she and Torrna had spent so much time together.

  The small wooden structure had held up remarkably well during the attack—only a few scorch marks differentiated it from Kira’s memory of the building. Several familiar faces greeted her hastily; others ignored her completely. One person, a merchant who had set up a shop specializing in merchandise from Endtree, muttered, “Thank the Prophets she’s here. Maybe she can talk some sense into him.”

  Nobody sat at the sergeant’s desk.

  She entered Torrna’s tiny office. The general sat behind his rickety wooden desk, which was piled top to bottom with enough refuse and detritus to be a serious fire hazard, given the conditions outside. The small bar that sat under the window was full of empty, overturned, and broken bottles. Kira was therefore not surprised that the smoky stench that had filled her nostrils since Tunhal’s ship came around the bend was now being overpowered by several different types of alcoholic beverage. At least three more bottles were visible on the desk, not to mention the large glass that Torrna Antosso clutched in his right hand.

  The smoke obscured the view of the mainland, as it obscured everything right now.

  The general looked like a zombie. His eyes stared unblinking, straight ahead. If not for the smell of alcohol—not to mention Torrna’s atheism—Kira would have thought he was in the midst of a pagh’tem’far vision.

  “They’re dead,” Torrna said without preamble, his voice barely more than a monotone. “Dead dead dead dead.”

  “I know, Hiran told me about the prefect and Admiral Inna. But—”

  Torrna made a sweeping gesture, knocking over one of the empty bottles. “No! Not them. I mean, they’re dead, too, but tha’s not who I mean.”

  “Who’s—”

  “Lyyra! She’s dead!”

  Kira found herself unable to reply at first. She had been prepared to console Torrna on the deaths of Natlar and Inna even as she herself struggled with the fact that the serene prefect and the no-nonsense admiral were gone.

  “What about the kids, are they—”

  “They’re dead, too. All of ’em, dead dead dead dead dead. An’ they didn’ know.”

  Frowning, Kira prompted, “Didn’t know what?”

  “Th’ I was alive! B’fore I could get home I found Takmor’s regimen’.”

  “I heard.”

  “By time I got home, they were dead—an’ I never got to tell ’em I was alive!”

  “They probably found out from the dispatches,” Kira said, not sure if, in the chaos of the end of the war, anyone would have the wherewithal to contact Lyyra about so trivial a matter as the fact that her reported-dead husband was still alive. Especially if she and the kids were close enough to the fighting to be killed. Hell, knowing Lyyra, she was right in the midst of it. She was always a healer at heart.

  “Doesn’ matter. Nothin’ matters. They want me to take over now’t war’s over. Ain’t gonna do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gonna drink m’self to death. If that doesn’ work, I’m gonna cut m’ throat. Don’t wanna live in this world without ’er.”

  …Odo “putting on” the tuxedo for the last time before descending into the Great Link…

  “Listen to me, Antosso, you can’t just give up.”

  “Why not?” He pounded his fist on the desk, rattling the bottles and knocking several papers off. “Haven’ I done enough?”

  …Bareil, his brain barely functioning, slowly fading away on the infirmary biobed…

  “No, you haven’t! You’ve spent all this time fighting, you can’t give up now! Perikia needs you! They couldn’t have fought this war without you, and they certainly wouldn’t have won it without you.”

  “Doesn’ matter. Without Lyyra—”…Captain Sisko—the Emissary—traveling to the fire caves, never to be seen again…

  “There are still hundreds of people out there who fought and died for Perikia—including Lyyra. Without Natlar, without Takmor, without Inna—they’re going to need your strength. They need the man who beat back the Lerrit Army. They need the man who trudged through the swamp and the mountains to get home. They need you.”

  …her father lying dead in the caves of Dakhur Hills…

  Torrna shook his head. “Can’t do it. Jus’ can’t.”

  Snarling, Kira got up and went to the other side of the desk. She grabbed Torrna by the shirt, and tried to haul him to his feet. Unfortunately, while they were the same height, he was quite a bit larger—and, in his drunken state, so much dead weight.

  …Opaka lying dead after a shuttle crash on some moon in the Gamma Quadrant…

  “Get up!”

  “Wha’ for?”

  “I said get up!”…Furel and Lupaza, only on the station to protect her, being blown into space by an embittered, vengeance-seeking Cardassian…

  Torrna stumbled to his feet. Then he fell back into the chair. Kira yanked on his arm, which seemed to be enough to ge
t him to clamber out of the chair again.

  She led him outside. She propped him up on one of the wooden railings that separated the small office building area from the main marina and pointed. “You see that?”

  “I don’t see anythin’ but—”

  Losing all patience, Kira screamed. “The bodies! Look at the bodies! Those people died fighting for Perikia! So did Natlar, so did Inna—and so did Lyyra. You have no right to give up now—because if you do, Lerrit has won. There’s no one else who can unite these people the way you can now—you’re a hero! Without you, they’ll fall apart, and either Prince Avtra or the Bajora will be able to come right in and take over.”

  Torrna stared straight ahead for several minutes. Then he turned back to Kira.

  When she first entered his office, Torrna’s eyes were glazed over. Now, they were filled with sadness.

  In as small a voice as he’d used when they were traveling through the mountains, Torrna said, “I’m sorry.”

  Kira remembered that the ground-based gateways tended to do one of two things: jump randomly from vista to vista every couple of seconds, or, like the one at Costa Rocosa, stay fixed on one location. This one, however, was different: it jumped back and forth between only two destinations.

  The first was ops on Deep Space 9.

  The other was the comforting light that Kira Nerys knew in her heart belonged to the Prophets.

  As she stared at the pathetic, drunken figure of Torrna Antosso standing in the midst of the wreckage of Natlar Port, Kira at once realized that she made the right and the wrong choice in stepping through the gateway when she did.

  This, she thought, is me. And whether or not Torrna decides to drink himself into oblivion or takes charge of the Perikian government—doesn’t matter.

  Kira walked away, then. Away from Torrna Antosso, away from Natlar Port, away from the Korvale Ocean, away from the Perikian Peninsula.

  Or, more accurately, under it.

  She’d been in these caves before. The last time was when the Circle had kidnapped and tortured her thirty thousand years from now. She had no idea why she came down here, and yet she was never more sure of anything in her life.

  Despite the fact that the Denorios Belt’s tachyon eddies prevented any gateways from being constructed within ten light-years of Bajor, Kira was not surprised by the fact that an active gateway was present in the caves. She didn’t know where it would lead her, but she felt supremely confident as she stepped through it, ready to face what lay beyond…

  Chapter Ten

  Kira Nerys stared at the galaxy.

  She had to look up to see it in its entirety, its bright face filling half the sky. She’d seen images of the galaxy before, simulations and holos taken from deep-space probes launched centuries ago by any number of worlds. But nothing prepared her for the sight before her now.

  The galaxy stared back down at her, a still and silent maelstrom that seemed to scrutinize her as she stood beneath it, and she knew that it was no simulation. She was as far from home as she’d ever been, and might ever be, and under the unblinking eye of the immense double spiral, Kira Nerys felt very, very small.

  She was only partly aware of her surroundings: the smooth circular floor beneath her feet, the central console with its brown-and-blue color scheme and alien markings that registered dimly as matching the known designs of the Iconians.

  And no walls. Only sky. She stood in a room without shadows, lit by a hundred billion suns.

  Must be a forcefield, but—

  “Ah, there you are.”

  She felt the voice more than heard it, as if it came from within her. Kira wanted to turn around to respond, but found herself transfixed by the starscape.

  A finger seemed to appear from nowhere and point at a spot in the lower left quadrant of the vista spread out before Kira. The voice said, “It’s here.”

  Kira finally tore her gaze away from the view and followed the finger back up the hand and arm it was connected to, and finally to the body. The figure was huge, though definitely bipedal and apparently humanoid, standing at well over two and a half meters tall, dwarfing even the immense Hirogen hunter that she and Taran’atar had faced in the Delta Quadrant. He—the voice sounded male, at least—wore a maroon cloak with a hood that obscured his features.

  “Wh—what?”

  “The world you come from is here. I believe you refer to it as Bajor.”

  “Who are you?”

  The figure hesitated. “You might say I’m an emissary of the people who built this outpost, but that might have unfortunate connotations for you. Suffice it to say that I am the custodian of this place.”

  “You’re an Iconian?”

  There was a movement inside the cloak that Kira supposed could have been a nod. “You’ll be pleased to know that I was able to cure you of that unfortunate energy.”

  Energy? It took Kira a moment to realize that he was referring to the theta-radiation poisoning. She had been on that arid desert of a planet in the Delta Quadrant, theta radiation eating away at her, when the gateway beckoned. Her tricorder had told her that the radiation levels were fatal….

  Of course, the rational part of her brain said as she looked down and saw that she no longer wore the ancient clothing of Bajor’s past (did I ever?) but was instead in her sand-soiled Militia uniform.

  It was some kind of dream, she thought, that’s all. Or maybe a pagh’tem’far. That would certainly explain—

  She cut the thought short as she felt a mild stiffness in her left arm. Looking down, she saw the badly healed wound she’d received the day they drove the Lerrit Army out of the capital city. “How did—how did this get here?” She pointed to the wound.

  The hood tilted a little to one side. “Presumably you received it at an earlier date.”

  “You’re a big help,” she muttered.

  “I assume that you wish to take the gift that has been given to you and then go home?”

  Kira almost asked the figure what he meant by that. But duty took over. Like Torrna Antosso, she had a role to play, a duty to perform, and a planet to defend—regardless of what obstacles had been placed in her path.

  “Actually, I need to return to Europa Nova. I made a promise that I would do everything I could—”

  Before she could finish the sentence, the custodian drifted—walk was too clumsy a word to describe how he moved—over to the center console.

  “Ah, I see. One of our hezlat gateways is in orbit of that planet,” he said after touching one of the triangular controls.

  “Hezlat?” Kira asked as she approached. Two small holographic displays hovered on either side of the blue globe atop the console, each showing a star system. The sizes and magnitudes of the two stars matched those of Europa Nova’s star and the star where they’d found the tanker in the Delta Quadrant.

  “Many different types of gateways were constructed over time,” the custodian said, “some large and inelegant, some small and functional, others that could be held in the palm of one’s hand. The hezlats were among the first, and also among the largest. Let’s see, this one is stable—it links System X27?L with System J55?Q.”

  The custodian seemed to be just staring at the display, so Kira helped him along. “Someone decided to dump theta radiation into that—that hezlat of yours. We had to evacuate everyone from the planet on the other side before the radiation levels became fatal.”

  “Yes…I see that now. But there is something blocking part of the gateway.”

  Thank the Prophets, the Euphrates is still there. “Yes, that’s one of our vessels. That’s how we travel, by ship—and I used mine to block the radiation from coming through and—”

  “I understand, Colonel. I observe your ships traversing the galaxy all the time from here. It is not a pastime shared by all my people.”

  “There are more of you, then?”

  “Yes. Some of them are dealing with this crisis now. I have faith in the Sentries.”

  Kira had
no idea what that meant, but she didn’t want to get off topic. “What about Europa Nova?”

  “Hm?”

  “System—” She peered at the console screen, but couldn’t read it. “X2-whatever,” she said. Finally, she pointed at the holographic display. “That one!”

  “Oh, yes. I am searching now. Ah, there we are. System O22?T has a star that will suffice for the purpose.”

  A third star-system image appeared in the holographic display. From the brightness and magnitude, it had an O-type star.

  “I can reprogram this particuar hezlat gateway to transport the matter that is emitting the energy on both sides into the star in System O22?T. The star there will render the energy inert.” He turned to Kira. “I will also remove the object blocking the gateway. Would you like it in System O22?T, System X27?L, or System J55?Q?”

  “Uh, the second one,” Kira said. “Is the place where you’re sending the waste uninhabited?”

  “Of course,” the custodian said as if the answer were self-evident. Kira had no such assurances, though. After all, according to most of the legends, the Iconians were conquerors.

  The custodian made some adjustments on the panel. “I assume by the state you arrived in that your species is vulnerable to this type of energy.”

  Assuming that he meant theta radiation, Kira said, “Yes, very vulnerable.”

  “In that case, you must be careful. The gateway can remove the matter, but some of the energy will remain around that planet you were concerned with. You say it was evacuated?”

  Kira nodded.

  “Repopulating it will be a challenge.”

  “Like I said—I made a promise.”

  Again, the custodian made a gesture that might have been interpreted as a nod, then said, “It is time for you to leave.” The Iconian touched a series of triangular panels. A blue light shot out from the globe and then a gateway opened near the edge of the floor. Through it, Kira could see the bustle of ops, with Dax giving orders to Sergeant Gan.

  She looked at her host. “We thought there was a natural phenomenon preventing your gateways from functioning in the space around my planet,” Kira said. “That isn’t completely true, is it?”