by Olivia Woods
On the other side of the room, an open doorway led down another corridor.
“What are we doing here?” he whispered, suddenly apprehensive without understanding why.
“Sulan?” someone called.
Vaughn looked up to see a black-haired Bajoran woman, perhaps a few years older than Kira, carrying a box of what looked like medical supplies as she walked out of a side room.
She stared at Vaughn for a lingering moment before focusing her attention on Opaka. “I heard we had visitors.”
Opaka answered the woman with quiet but firm calmness. “Vaas, I need you to begin packing up the reliquary.”
“I suspected you might,” the other woman said with a grim nod as she finger-combed her lustrous black hair away from her eyes. “I’ll get a team together and get started right away. Do you want me to contact Mylea?”
“No, I’ll take care of that myself. Hurry along now.” As Vaas set her box down on the floor and headed outside, Opaka turned to face Vaughn. “There’s a secure communications unit in Jaro’s office, at the end of this hallway. You can join me there when you’re…finished.” Then she moved quickly down the corridor without another word.
“Wait, finished with what?” Vaughn demanded as he started to follow.
That was when he heard Prynn’s voice. It halted him in his tracks.
She was singing softly, a melancholy tune that he didn’t recognize. He followed the sound, which was coming from one of several small curtained rooms that ran along both sides of the wide corridor.
Opaka had already moved on and disappeared into the office. He stood alone in the hallway.
The singing continued, and it tugged at him. Trying not to make any noise, he found the room from which the song was emanating—the only one of the private rooms that was currently occupied, it seemed—and peered through a narrow gap in the curtains that demarcated it. Prynn was sitting in a wooden chair beside a computer screen that displayed what he assumed to be the main portal of this world’s public comnet.
Her chair faced the side of a bed, and lying there next to her was a dying man.
Prynn was holding one of his bony, translucent hands in her own, his thin arm looking impossibly fragile. The hospital gown he wore did little to hide the fact that he was emaciated, his narrow chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly with his slow, labored breathing. His white hair was unkempt, his beard neglected, and his milky eyes stared sightlessly at the ancient ceiling.
Prynn looked up, halting in midsong, startled to see Vaughn watching her from the corridor.
“Prynn,” rasped the dying man, his voice pitifully weak. “What’s wrong?”
The young woman opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated when Vaughn held up an index finger in front of his lips.
“Prynn…?” the old man said.
“You have a visitor, Dad,” Prynn told him, her eyes still on Vaughn, who shook his head reproachfully.
“Who?”
“I’m not really sure. I just know he comes from far away. I think he’s a friend.” Prynn released her father’s hand and stood up. “I’ll let the two of you talk. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“You should get some sleep,” her father said.
“Later, I promise,” she said, gently kissing his forehead before moving toward the doorway. She said nothing to Vaughn as she walked past him.
Vaughn sighed and stepped through the curtain. At first he simply stood there, more than a meter from the foot of the bed, his revulsion toward the invalid’s utter decrepitude making him reluctant to approach.
“Hello…?” the blind man said. “Are you there…?”
“Yes, I’m here,” Vaughn said quietly as he moved to take Prynn’s vacated chair.
The man in the bed didn’t answer right away. Was it because Vaughn spoke with a stranger’s voice…or because he didn’t?
“Who are you?”
Vaughn considered evading the question, but only for a moment. “My name is Elias,” he said. “Just like yours.”
Silence again. “I think I understand,” said the other man. “I’ve heard stories…” His voice faded. His lips were parched; his tongue gray and dry.
“Do you need water?” Vaughn looked around and found a sipping bulb on a nearby table. He touched it to his counterpart’s lips and allowed him to drink, hoping he wouldn’t choke.
“Thank you,” the other Elias breathed after he had finished swallowing. His voice sounded clearer now, but was still feeble.
Vaughn set the bulb back down.
“Why did you come here?” Elias asked.
Again, Vaughn didn’t answer immediately. “Someone sent me. But it hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to.”
“What in life ever does?”
Vaughn bowed his head, his eyes clenched shut against the torrent of confused thoughts and conflicting emotions rising up inside him. “What happened to you?” he whispered.
“I got old,” his frail alternate told him, as if nothing else needed to be said.
“But why are you on Bajor, in Vekobet?”
Elias turned his head toward Vaughn as if he could actually see him. But the rheumy eyes were still blank. “Where else should I be? I was one of the last generation of Imperial Terrans. When I was a young man, I watched our civilization transform and weaken, until it was too vulnerable to defend itself from the wolves that came scratching at our door. Overnight, I went from being a prince and an officer in Starfleet to being a slave. Eventually I wound up on Bajor, sold to the Jaro clan.”
“Jaro? You’re the doctor’s servant?”
“I’m his friend,” Elias said, and weak though he was, his anger as he corrected Vaughn was unmistakable. “Essa has protected my family from the beginning, taking us with him wherever he went. He’s great man, with great vision, and I’ve tried my best to help him in his labors.”
Tears formed in the old man’s eyes. “But now, I fear I’ve become a burden to him. And to my daughter.” His voice faded until Vaughn could barely hear him say, “To everyone.”
“You never expected to live this long,” Vaughn realized.
Elias shook his head, his tears finally brimming over and streaming onto his sunken cheeks. “I can tell that surprises you. Maybe where you come from it’s normal for our kind to live to a ripe old age. But here, Terrans almost never make it past seventy. Most of us die from sickness or violence long before we ever get a chance to become…old. Essa thinks I’ve hung on this long because I’m so damned stubborn.”
Vaughn smiled in spite of himself. “Is that what you think?”
“Once, maybe. Now…I’m not sure what I’m waiting for. You, perhaps.”
“Me?”
“You think it’s an accident that we’re here together now?” Elias asked.
Vaughn blinked. “I told you, someone sent me.”
“But it hasn’t gone the way you thought it would. And now…here you are.”
Vaughn considered what his counterpart seemed to be telling him, and it troubled him greatly. He’d tried to convince himself that his fool’s errand to the alternate universe was a mistake, but an entirely different possibility was taking root in his mind instead. As much as he tried not to think about it, he kept coming back to the same unpleasant but impossible-to-ignore question.
Had Sisko lied to him?
Was this the real reason he’d sent Vaughn here, to meet this ruined husk of a man who shared his name? And if that was true, then why?
Vaughn studied Elias’s pale, craggy, withered face, the thin neck that didn’t seem strong enough to support the weight of his head. So much he saw was familiar, but so much was not. There wasn’t even—
There’s no scar, he realized.
Vaughn automatically reached beneath the neck of his Bajoran topcoat, felt inside the high collar of his uniform until he touched the raised line of flesh that had been a part of him since his youth. The scar ran all the way up his neck to just behind his left ear. It was
a very old injury, one he seldom thought about anymore.
“How much do you remember about Berengaria?” he asked quietly.
A strange look passed across his counterpart’s face. “Why would you need me to tell you about that?”
“I…I’m guessing it must have been very different from the one I knew.”
“What I remember most is that it was a wonderful place to be a boy,” Elias told him. “Wasn’t it that way for you?”
Vaughn closed his eyes. “For a while, yes.”
“Then maybe our birth worlds aren’t so different after all.”
“Maybe,” Vaughn said, opening his eyes again. “I want to ask you…When you lived there, had you ever been to the Vale of Mists?”
“No,” Elias said. “The creatures there, they don’t tolerate intrusion. Why?”
Vaughn tried not to sound disappointed. “It’s not important,” he decided. “I just hoped you might be able to help me remember something that happened to me there a long time ago.”
There was a rumble outside. Vaughn’s chair vibrated beneath him. The water bulb rattled on the table.
“I hear thunder,” Elias said.
Vaughn stood up, listening. “It isn’t thunder,” he said. He moved to the curtain, saw Opaka and Prynn heading toward him from Jaro’s office. Prynn went immediately to check on her father, while the older woman spoke quickly to Vaughn.
“My friends in Singha can make offworld transport available to a small number of us. We can head there as soon as we relocate our artifacts to the Mylean enclave.”
The building vibrated again. “You may not have enough time,” he told her. “Does this place have a basement?”
Opaka shook her head.
“Then keep everyone away from the windows,” Vaughn told her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Vaughn ran out of the infirmary. The rumbling sounded much louder outside, and it seemed to be coming from all directions. He searched for something he thought he’d seen when Opaka had first led him through the alley, and quickly found it: an alcove with a narrow metal ladder that led straight up the side of the infirmary. He grabbed hold of a rung and started to climb.
The roof was a short square wall surrounding a fusionstone dome. Judging from the access panels along the dome’s base and the low vibration he felt through the stone, Vaughn guessed it housed a dedicated power supply for the infirmary, as well as the facility’s climate-control equipment. He kept low as he drew his phaser and crept around the dome’s perimeter.
Once he’d reached the north wall, his view opened up. From here Vaughn could see over the rooftop of the refectory, as well as those of the other nearby buildings. From this vantage point, he had a fairly decent overview of the entire camp.
All around Vekobet, touching down on clouds of dust set swirling by their thrusters, were Klingon ships.
They’ve come for Kira and me, he realized. But how would they have known—?
His combadge chirped. “Kira to Vaughn.”
“Vaughn here. I see them, Captain.”
“Assessment?”
“An invasion force of six Chutok-class assault ships completely surrounding the labor camp. I see soldiers disembarking. If they’re like the Chutoks of our universe, we can expect a minimum combined troop strength in excess of nine hundred, backed by ship-based armaments. I don’t think there’s any question why they’re here. We’ve screwed these people but good, Captain.”
“Anything else?”
“Use of infantry suggests that the Klingons want to keep collateral damage to a minimum, or that they’re planning to take prisoners, or both. The camp’s ‘workforce’ is already moving into defensive positions. They look pretty good, but at three-to-one odds, the most they’ll do is slow the Klingons down a bit.”
“Recommendations?”
“We should attempt to keep the Klingons’ attention on us so we can cover our hosts’ escape.”
“Agreed. Meet me back in the refectory as soon as you can. That’s where we’ll make our stand.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Vaughn out.”
Vaughn hurried down the ladder and back into the infirmary, even as the first sounds of disruptor fire rang out in the distance. Opaka had retrieved a cache of weapons from somewhere and was handing them out to the half-dozen patients in the main room, all of whom were quickly getting dressed and preparing to head out the door.
“Wait,” Vaughn said to them, blocking their exit. They halted but were clearly impatient to get outside, before they even knew what awaited them. “Your camp is surrounded. You’re outnumbered and outgunned. What do you intend to do?”
“We intend to fight,” one of the Bajorans declared, and the others voiced sentiments of agreement.
“Then you’re all going to die,” Vaughn told them. “This isn’t a fight you can win.”
More disruptor fire rang out. Anger seeped into the first Bajoran’s face and he tried to push Vaughn out of his way, but he stopped short of doing so when Vaughn suddenly drew his phaser and raised it to the man’s face.
“You have to listen to me, all of you,” Vaughn said.
Opaka was looking at him in shock. The other patients raised their weapons and aimed them straight at Vaughn.
“Who the kosst do you think you are?” the first Bajoran asked.
“Just tell me one thing,” Vaughn said quickly. He nodded toward Opaka. “What do you owe the leaders of this enclave?”
The patients looked at Opaka, then one of them turned back to Vaughn. “Everything.”
Vaughn lowered his weapon. “Then you need to help them get out of Vekobet,” he said. Opaka tried to protest, but Vaughn pushed ahead. “This place is about to be overrun by overwhelming Alliance forces. None of you stands a chance against them. But you can save Opaka. You can save the Shards of the Prophets.”
The assembled Bajorans began grumbling loudly, prompting Vaughn to raise his voice. “The six of you can escort Opaka through the escape tunnel, take whatever artifacts you can carry, and help her to reach another enclave. But your only chance is to do it now. Before the Klingons discover the reliquary and overrun it.”
“Commander, my people are under attack,” Opaka said angrily. “I have no intention of—”
“Listen to me,” Vaughn said to her. “Bajor needs you alive. It needs the hope that those Shards represent. You have to get away, now, before the Klingons get past your soldiers.”
“I will not abandon my followers!”
“It’s we who will not abandon you, Mistress,” the first Bajoran said, and Opaka stared at him as he gestured at Vaughn. “This man is right. We cannot afford to lose you, especially now, after what happened to Ashalla. Our people need the guidance of the enclaves. And this enclave must survive, even if Vekobet does not.”
“My captain and I will try to keep the Klingons busy while you get away,” Vaughn said. “We’ll send Winn and Jaro after you. If you have explosives, you’ll need to use them to seal up the tunnel behind you. If you can, try to force the parts of the building directly over the tunnel to collapse, so that the Klingons never find your escape route.”
“Wait,” Opaka said. “Elias and Prynn—”
“I’ll see to them as well.” Vaughn looked at the first Bajoran. “Take three of your men and Opaka out of here, now. The rest of you, follow me.” He started back toward Elias’s room.
“Commander,” Opaka called after him.
He turned to look at her.
“Thank you,” she said.
Vaughn nodded and marched on to Elias’s room, followed by the two remaining armed Bajorans. Prynn looked up expectantly and Vaughn said, “You two need to be evacuated immediately. Opaka will be waiting for you in the reliquary.”
“My father can’t walk,” Prynn said.
“We’ll carry him,” said one of the two armed Bajorans as the pair moved to either side of Elias’s bed.
“No,” the old man said, waving off the hands t
hat reached for him.
“Dad, please, there’s no time for this,” Prynn said.
“I said no,” Elias said with as much force as his feeble voice could muster. “I can’t do this, Prynn…I would only slow you down…and I wouldn’t survive the journey anyway.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Prynn,” Elias rasped. “Don’t be foolish. You have to leave me and go with Sulan. Now.”
“No!” Prynn cried. “I’m not going to—”
“Elias…tell her,” the dying man said.
Vaughn looked down at his counterpart. The disruptor fire outside was getting louder, more insistent. He knew they didn’t have much time.
“He’s right, Prynn,” he said. “He can’t do this.”
“Shut up!” Prynn shouted. “I’m not leaving my father here to be slaughtered.”
“Prynn, look at me!” her father said. “I’m dying…and I’ve had enough. I love you with all my heart…but it’s over. You need to let me go.”
“I can’t! Dad, please, get up!”
“Elias,” the old man said. “She’ll never be safe while I’m alive.”
Vaughn’s eyes narrowed. There was no misunderstanding what the other Elias was asking of him.
Vaughn drew his phaser and turned to the others. “Get her out of here.”
“What? No!” Prynn screamed as the two armed Bajorans moved in quickly to pull her out of the room. “Don’t do this! Dad, please—”
Vaughn gripped Elias’s arm and leaned in close to his withered face. “I’ll make it quick,” he whispered.
“Thank you,” the dying man said. He clutched Vaughn’s forearm with unexpected force, his blind eyes jerking wildly back and forth as if he could catch one last glimpse of something, anything—
“Dad!”
Vaughn aimed the phaser and gently squeezed the firing stud. He saw the weapon’s flash through his closed eyelids.
When Vaughn opened his eyes he saw that all light and life had vanished from those of his counterpart.
Prynn broke away from the others and threw herself at Vaughn. “Damn you!” she screamed, pounding her fists against his face. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
