“You’re going home right after this,” Radovan told her. “We both are.”
Excitement welled within Radovan. All of his designs, all of his careful machinations—all of his life—had led to that moment. He had suffered through loss after loss—his father, his brother, his mother. He had endured hardships, never fitting in with anybody, never belonging anywhere. And yet, for all of that, he had come out the other side, searching for something—anything!—and finding the Ohalavaru. He’d listened to Rejias Norvan, followed him, and witnessed his failed plan on Endalla. Radovan had used that disastrous event to reinterpret The Book of Ohalu. He would do what Rejias could not: empower the Ohalavaru and reveal the truth to all.
“This will all be over soon,” he told the girl. He tapped the surface of the padd, bringing up a timing control that he set for one minute. His finger hovered over the START button. He had coded it so that, once initiated, the countdown could not be stopped.
Radovan hesitated. He wanted to complete his work, wanted to achieve what he had set out to achieve, but the irrevocable nature of what lay ahead gave him pause. This is the beginning of a new age for Bajor, he thought, but do I want it also to be an ending?
Radovan considered the question, but he didn’t have to consider long. His childhood had been torment, his adulthood a slow but relentless descent into an abyss of loneliness, depression, and sorrow. He’d had enough.
Radovan touched his fingertip to the padd, and the timer began to count down.
• • •
Rebecca Jae Sisko was tired and hurt. She couldn’t put her arms down and they felt weird. The big rock behind her was hard and pointy in her back. She missed Mommy and Daddy. She missed her house and her room and her bed. She just wanted to see her parents. She just wanted to sleep.
I just want to go home.
The man said that they both would be going home soon, but she knew better. He took her from Mommy and he wasn’t going to give her back. He was a bad man.
Rebecca watched him hunch over the big silver tube—over the bomb. She was only three and a half, but she knew what she saw. Something like it blew up the month before on one of Bajor’s moons. It hurt a lot of people and almost hurt Daddy. She wasn’t supposed to know that. Her parents didn’t think she knew. But she heard things. She heard things, and sometimes she somehow knew things.
The man pushed a button on the padd attached to the silver tube. When he stood up, Rebecca saw Bajoran numbers on the screen. They were changing quickly.
The man watched the screen—and then suddenly he didn’t. He ran away from the tube, from Rebecca. He ran up the hill, moving alongside the knocked-over tree. He was running away.
“Mommy,” Rebecca said, even though she knew her mother wasn’t there and couldn’t hear her. She never felt more lost in her life. She watched the man run away and knew that he was even more lost than she was. She didn’t hate him, even though she thought Mommy and Daddy probably would if they were there. But Rebecca felt sorry for him. He was sad and she wasn’t, but in a lot of other ways, she was a lot like him. She was uncomfortable around most people, feeling different from them—even from Mommy and Daddy—and carrying around a loneliness—a hollowness.
The tube in front of her made a buzzing noise—or maybe it was the padd on it. Rebecca looked and saw the number 10 written in Bajoran on the screen. She could count to ten in Bajoran and Federation Standard.
The numbers counted backward. The tube—the bomb—clicked and hummed. Rebecca figured it was preparing to explode.
Maybe it won’t, she thought. Maybe I’m just being a scaredy-cat.
Rebecca thought that maybe she didn’t understand what was going on. Maybe everything with the bad man would turn out to be something else. Maybe it would be nothing at all.
But then the hum coming from the tube got louder. Then it issued a loud whine. Rebecca looked at the screen and watched as the numbers changed from 3 to 2 to 1, and finally to 0.
Then the bomb exploded.
Gamma Quadrant, 2386
The doors opened and Sisko leaped through them, his phaser raised. A wall of noise met the captain inside the Glant actualization chamber. To his surprise, the broad space looked just like the one he had entered during the first rescue mission. It marked the first time he had observed two creations of the Glant that even remotely resembled each other.
But unlike in the other actualization chamber Sisko had stormed, all of the equipment before him appeared powered up and operating. Indicator lights flashed on control panels, and information spelled out in alien glyphs marched from right to left across displays. Sisko wanted desperately to find his daughter, but five Glant stationed at various consoles looked over at him. Five Robinson security officers took up a position on either side of the captain, all of them with their weapons aimed at the Glant. He knew that Kasidy and the others stood behind them.
“Shut off the equipment and move away,” Sisko ordered, raising his voice to be heard over the cacophony of the Glant equipment. He could only hope that he had not arrived too late. It had taken precious time for his away team to battle their way through a legion of Glant defenders. The second away team, composed solely of Robinson security officers, helped to shorten the confrontation by attacking from another direction. But according to Voranesk, the process of transferring the minds of the children into newly created Glant had already begun.
“You cannot explore here,” one of the alien scientists said, speaking loudly. It had an oblong head and a pyramidal body that looked like a cross section of sedimentary layers mounted atop a wide, rolling track. Extending from each triangular side of its body, a pair of articulated metal arms ended in a hand with at least ten digits. “You cannot stop actualization.”
“Watch me,” Sisko said, and he pointed his phaser at a shelving unit on the wall to the left of the Glant. The captain squeezed the trigger pad, and a beam of bright blue energy shot out and diffused across the piece of furniture, vaporizing it into nothingness. “You four move into the far corner,” Sisko said, pointing in that direction, and they quickly heeded his words. To the first Glant he’d addressed, he said, “Now shut down the equipment.”
The Glant’s wide track spun beneath it, turning it toward the nearest control panel. As it started toward the console, Sisko peered around. Just as in the other actualization chamber, he saw a number of transparent compartments holding the Robinson children. When he didn’t see Rebecca, he risked a look at the far wall, to the horizontal slabs housed inside the large, intricate machines.
Suddenly, the chamber quieted. Lights stopped flashing, instead burning constantly or staying dark. The characters scrolling across screens settled down to become static displays. Sisko thought that the Glant had done as he’d instructed, deactivating the equipment, but when he looked back over at him, he saw that the scientist had not even reached a control panel.
“Oh, no,” Sisko said. Kasidy called after him as he ran forward. His eyes moved from side to side as he searched for his daughter. He saw her in the second of the five machines that lined the back wall. She lay on her back, motionless, secured to the slab by straps around her arms and legs. A trio of thick tubes ended in dish-shaped instruments that had been affixed to the sides and top of her head. Her eyes were closed, as if she were sleeping or unconscious.
Sleeping, Sisko repeated to himself. Or unconscious. His mind would not allow for any other possibilities.
He holstered his phaser as he reached his daughter. “Rebecca,” he said, his mouth dry, his voice barely above a whisper. “Rebecca.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm, which felt warm beneath his touch. He felt a cautious relief, but as he examined her body, he did not see her chest rising and falling.
But then movement caught his attention. He looked right, to the second bay inside the machine, where the slab there was gliding out. Atop it lay an entity Sisko had trouble comprehending. Its main body seemed a tangle of metal coils interspersed with solid objects—cubes an
d spheres, cylinders and cones. When it rose up, Sisko could see that it had appendages of some sort, though he could not quite distinguish what kind or how many. The entity had a long neck—another helix of metal. Three discs covered parts of its flat, rectangular head, all of them attached to the surrounding machine by bulky conduits. It opened a quartet of eyes.
Sisko’s blood ran cold. He recognized the look in the alien eyes of the entity.
“Daddy,” it said.
Bajor, 2380
In less time than the blink of an eye, Rebecca felt many things. A heavy weight pushed her body back into the hardness of the boulder. Fire burned her skin. A tangy ammonia smell reached her nose, and the stink of cooking meat. Tiny, jagged pieces of hot metal punctured her arms and legs, her belly, her chest, her face.
More than anything, Rebecca felt physical pain, like nothing else she had ever experienced. Even as young as she was, she knew she could not live. She was scared. For an instant, she thought of Mommy and Daddy, at how upset they would be when they learned what had happened to her, and at how sad they would be to miss her.
And then Rebecca’s pain and fear and sadness changed. Even as the blast began to destroy her body, she got angry—angrier than she had ever been in her short life. Angry at the man who took her from Mommy, angry at spending so much time away from her home, angry at the bomb that exploded, angry that she would never be able to return to her life with her parents, who she loved more than anything.
The world almost stopped as Rebecca’s intense anger sparked a hidden part of her. The explosion slowed to a crawl. The burst of flames expanded toward her in tiny steps. Fragments of the bomb’s shell floated toward her as though suspended in midair.
Rebecca opened her mouth and screamed: “NOOOOO!”
A pale yellow flash of light surged from her in every direction, like the shockwave of an explosion centered within her.
• • •
“Major, there’s been an explosion!”
Tey looked over to the left side of the room, to where Lieutenant Tapren crewed one of the consoles in the Mission Operations Center. From where she stood with Orisin in the center of the room, Tey could see a dot flashing red on the lieutenant’s display. She and the major rushed over.
Standing on either side of Tapren, Tey and Orisin peered down at the console. The screen showed a tactical display of the northeastern outskirts of Johcat. Tey saw markings defining such topographical features as the border of the city, the edge of the Deserak Wilderness, and the thoroughfare that ran all the way to the town of Revent. In the region marked Talveran Forest, the red dot flared, and concentric circles emanated from it.
“It’s . . .” Tapren began, but her voice trailed off.
“What?” Orisin asked. “What is it?”
Tapren tapped at her controls. Labeled columns of digits scrolled up in a dialogue window on the side of the display. “I’m not sure, sir,” the lieutenant said. “It reads like the energy of a high-yield quantum torpedo, but . . . the shockwave isn’t consistent with that. It resembles something else—like the leading edge of a nuclear detonation, or of a temporal wave, or a warp-field rupture. The power of the explosion is sizable for such a contained area, but the force it’s generating—”
Tapren stopped speaking as the blinking red dot vanished from her screen. All of the numerical values on her display dropped either to zero or to some negligible amount. Tey had no idea how to interpret what she’d just seen.
“What happened?” Orisin asked.
The lieutenant worked her controls. She refreshed the display, but it still showed normal readings. “This . . . this shouldn’t be possible,” Tapren said. “There’s no discernible trace of an explosion or its effects.” She paused, then ventured that it must have been a fault in the sensor system.
“A fault registering within our search area? That’s suspect,” Tey said. “Can you pinpoint the location?”
“I’ve got it,” the lieutenant said.
Tey began running for the door as she heard the major tell Tapren to transfer the coordinates to the nearest transporter room.
• • •
Tey materialized in the middle of the Talveran Forest alongside Major Orisin and four Militia officers—Lieutenant Strine, Sergeants Elvem and Garvish, and Corporal Tenev. They had beamed to a location a hundred meters from the source of the possible explosion. They had all come armed with phasers, though Tey kept hers mounted on her hip for the moment. She opened a tricorder and scanned their surroundings.
“We’re inside the spread of a sensor mask,” Tey said. “I’m getting indeterminate readings, but there appears to be a life sign ahead.” She pointed the direction.
Orisin moved quickly, and Tey trailed immediately behind him. She heard the others following. As they moved, Tey counted off the distance to their target. At fifty meters, Orisin slowed, as did Tey and the others.
“I don’t see anything,” the major said as he tried to look past the trees and through the underbrush.
Tey checked her tricorder. “There’s a roughly circular depression ahead, like a crater,” she told Orisin. She wondered if there had been an explosion after all, though her scans showed no indications of increased radiation or any other type of fallout or damage. “The edge is twenty meters away. The life sign is twenty meters beyond that, below the surrounding ground level.”
Orisin turned to Tey and the others. “We’re going to advance on the rim of the depression. Try to minimize noise, but we need to get there. Agent Tey, you’re with me. Strine and Tenev, take a position ten meters that way.” Orisin pointed to his left, and the two women started at once in that direction. “Elvem and Garvish, ten meters that way.” The major pointed right, and the man and woman set off through the trees and undergrowth.
Orisin made eye contact with Tey. She drew her phaser and nodded once. Together, they moved toward the location of the explosion.
• • •
“I’ll be right back,” Radovan told the girl. He climbed back up the embankment to where he’d left the floating cylinder. Taking more care and moving slowly, he descended backward into the gully, pulling his device after him. When he reached the bottom, he turned toward the Avatar.
The girl stood as he’d left her, with her back to the boulder, her arms raised to either side, held up by the chains that bound her to the pitons. She should have been complaining, whining to him about her discomfort, about how she didn’t want to be there, about how she wanted her mother. But she didn’t. She only watched him mutely.
Radovan maneuvered his device into place above another large rock, a meter or so in front of the girl. He powered down the antigrav and the cylinder settled down onto the relatively flat surface of the stone. He activated the padd attached to the device by a couple of fiber-optic leads.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he told the girl. “We’re almost done here, and then all this will be finished. You won’t have to spend any more time with me.”
The girl looked at him without saying anything, and then down at the device. When she peered back up at him, she seemed to take his measure. “I want to go home,” she said.
“You’re going home right after this,” Radovan told her. “We both are.”
Excitement welled within Radovan. All of his designs, all of his careful machinations—all of his life—had led to that moment. He had suffered through loss after loss—his father, his brother, his mother. He had endured hardships, never fitting in with anybody, never belonging anywhere. And yet, for all of that, he had come out the other side, searching for something—anything!—and finding the Ohalavaru. He’d listened to Rejias Norvan, followed him, and witnessed his failed plan on Endalla. Radovan had used that disastrous event to reinterpret The Book of Ohalu. He would do what Rejias could not: empower the Ohalavaru and reveal the truth to all.
“This will all be over soon,” he told the girl.
“Bajoran Militia!” a man’s voice called out from somewhere
above, near the rim of the gully. “Freeze!”
No! They’d found him. Just seconds away from fulfilling his destiny.
Radovan shifted to one side, attempting to interpose his body between where the voice had originated and the bomb. He stopped moving then, trying to appear as though he had complied with the shouted orders. But he tapped at the controls on the padd, bringing up a timing control that he set for ten seconds.
Radovan reached for the START button.
• • •
When Tey arrived at the edge of the depression with Orisin, she peered down into it. At its bottom, near the center, a man stood with his back to them. He appeared to be doing something on the flat surface of a large rock.
“Bajoran Militia!” Orisin called to the man. “Freeze!”
The man took a quick step to one side, then stopped moving. He kept his back to her and the major. Tey could see, just past him, a small, outstretched arm bound to a boulder.
Rebecca!
Tey aimed her phaser and fired.
Gamma Quadrant, 2386
Rebecca felt many things. Gravity pulled at her in a way that it hadn’t before, making the hardness of the metal surface on which she sat feel even more solid. Suddenly more sensitive than usual, her body registered the gentle passage of air in the room. Likewise, an abundance of scents—including the sour tang of human perspiration—filled her nose.
More than anything, Rebecca felt joy, born out of a mixture of love and profound relief. Her father, impressive and strong in his captain’s uniform, stood in front of her, clearly come to rescue her and the others from their captivity of the strange robots who had seized them from Robinson. Because she’d been unconscious much of the time, she couldn’t tell how long she and the others had been away, but she was filled with fear and confusion and despair.
“Daddy,” Rebecca said.
But her father did not reach for her, did not come to her and wrap her in a paternal embrace promising that, however bad circumstances had been, everything would be all right. Instead, he stood there staring at her, his features rigid. Did I do something wrong?
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