August 2382
7
“I do not have to kill you to change the shape of your life.”
The words terrorized, even though they came delivered without inflection, without nuance, cold syllables electronically pronounced and secondarily translated into Federation Standard so that Sarina Douglas could understand her Breen inquisitor. A chill seized Sarina, clad only in her undergarments, even as a hot spotlight blinded her to her surroundings. Metal restraints bound her limbs to the hard chair in which she sat, her feet feeling frozen atop the unyielding concrete surface beneath them.
Sarina had traveled to the Breen Confederacy, to the world of Salavat, to try to find where the Typhon Pact had begun constructing a starship equipped with quantum slipstream drive. Starfleet Intelligence had assigned her to locate and destroy the concealed shipyard, as well as to eradicate the purloined schematics and any backup copies of them—and the man assigned to interrogate her already knew that. He sought other information.
He wanted to know where Sarina had acquired her Breen armor and mask, which had been stripped from her body and lay in a heap on the floor in front of her. He wanted to know how Starfleet had learned about the secret operation headquartered beneath the barren surface of Salavat, and how she had penetrated the territory of the Confederacy to reach the icy planet. But mostly he wanted to know about her collaborator.
“Tell me about your partner,” the inquisitor demanded. The harsh, computerized speech burst from his snout-faced mask like the discharge of an energy weapon. “The one named Bashir.”
Julian, Sarina thought, with no small degree of anxiety.
Seven years before, Jack, Lauren, and Patrick—the genetically enhanced but socially maladjusted humans institutionalized along with Sarina—had essentially abducted her from the psychiatric facility and made their way to Deep Space 9. They hoped that Doctor Bashir could treat her, that he could free her from the prison of her own altered mind. Her senses too slow to keep up with her brain, the variance between the two had left her mute and unfocused. Doctor Bashir—Julian—thought he could modify her condition; he thought he could fix her. But she’d been afraid that any changes to her body might hurt her.
“It won’t hurt,” Julian assured her, leaning over her in the bare room on Salavat, his handsome face in shadows as his head momentarily blocked the light shining into her eyes. “I promise.”
“And I can promise that it will hurt,” said the inquisitor, unseen, from somewhere behind Sarina. “I promise the only thing to make it stop hurting will be death.”
Fear washed over her like a wave, forcing her down beneath its relentless onslaught, threatening to drown her. Death did not frighten her, but absence did. If she lost her life, she would no longer have a chance to finish what she’d started with Julian. Once, he had saved her, and once, he had loved her. On their mission to the Breen Confederacy, he had divulged the continuing emotions he felt for her, and she had walked into his arms.
“I love you,” he told her, his face just centimeters from hers, but still backlit and impossible to discern in the bleak torture chamber. Sarina could feel his warm breath on her lips. She wanted to lean forward and kiss him, but her head had been restrained too. Her eyes sought his in the darkness as she labored to make out his features, to gain strength from his visage.
“Is that what will save you?” asked the inquisitor, the buzzing, mechanical tones of his transmitted voice no longer menacing, but merely curious. “Or is that what will defeat you?”
Sarina heard the sharp rap of the Breen’s footsteps as he walked out from behind her. In her peripheral vision, she saw him, saw the layered armor that wrapped his body, saw the canine-like helmet hiding not only his face, but the identity of his very species. He reached for something, but the silhouette of Julian’s face filled most of her gaze and she could not see.
And then the shadows quivered. Sarina realized that her inquisitor had taken hold of the standard supporting the spotlight. The room seemed to waver as the Breen carried it forward. As he brought it abreast of her, and then past her so that it shined from just over her shoulder, Julian’s face became visible, the light sweeping across his features like the surface of a moon emerging from an eclipse.
Except that it wasn’t Julian.
The mature woman peered at Sarina with brilliant, dispassionate eyes. The pointed tips of her ears peeked through her shoulder-length black hair. “I told you I would return,” said L’Haan. “You will escape your captivity.”
Sarina struggled against her restraints, to no avail.
“You broke from the confinement of your own mind,” L’Haan said. “You found your voice and your life. And you finally found a necessary outlet for your intellect.”
Four years earlier, Starfleet Intelligence had recruited Sarina into its ranks, making the compelling case that not only did her enhanced assets make her particularly suited to field operations, but that such work would fulfill her capabilities—that it would fulfill her.
And for most of the intervening years, it had. But then one day not long before, L’Haan had appeared on behalf of Section 31. The Vulcan operative presented a different argument than Starfleet Intelligence had, contending that while SI did make good use of her abilities, it also placed limits on her by virtue of its licit nature. The extralegal Section 31, L’Haan insisted, would provide her a broader canvas on which to draw the story of her life.
“You set your mind free once, from the prison of your genetic engineering,” said L’Haan, her face bathed in the indifferent light the inquisitor still held in his hand. “Then you set yourself free by enlisting in Starfleet Intelligence, and then again by joining Section 31. Surely this situation—” L’Haan gestured toward the steel bands binding her arms to those of the chair in which she sat. “—can be no match for you.”
Awareness dawned on Sarina. She stared deep into L’Haan’s eyes, and the covert agent took two steps backward. Sarina slowly rose to her feet, the restraints around her limbs falling to the concrete floor with a clatter.
She remembered the inquisitor, and she turned to face him. He stood behind the straight-backed wooden chair. He carried the tall stand supporting the spotlight in his left hand, illuminating that side of his body while leaving the other side in darkness. In his right hand, he held a neural truncheon, a favored Breen tool for controlling and incapacitating prisoners.
“You’re no match for me,” Sarina said.
“No?” said the inquisitor, his skepticism evident even in the single electronic word. He dropped the spotlight to the floor, where it teetered on its stand for a few seconds, causing light and shadow to dance about the featureless walls. Then he reached up and pulled off his mask.
Julian stared back at her.
Sarina could only gape as he lifted the truncheon and brandished it in her direction. He skirted the chair and thrust the weapon into her midsection. Her brain screamed in agony as the device overloaded her synapses, triggering terrible waves of pain. She doubled over, her arms wrapping around her body. She cried out—
And awoke. Sitting upright, her arms enfolding her abdomen, she felt the clammy sensation of perspiration cooling on her skin. Her heart raced, and her breathing came in heavy rasps.
For a moment, Sarina had no idea where she was. “Lights up one-quarter,” she said around mouthfuls of air. She half-expected the darkness to remain, and to find herself still a prisoner of the Breen—or a ward of Starfleet Medical. But a quick tone answered her, and her surroundings brightened to reveal Julian’s quarters aboard Deep Space 9. Her locale did little to ease her discomfort.
Seemingly constructed of hard edges, awkward angles, an inordinate amount of grillwork, and a host of shadowy corners, the old Cardassian station struck Sarina as a sinister version of the institutions in which she had spent most of her life. Certainly it embodied the worst aspects of those facilities. Though she knew it recycled, the atmosphere seemed stagnant, absent of any scent. Metal surfaces abounded,
along with computer interfaces. The place felt confining, even claustrophobic.
Although most of the substance of her dream, and even its general outlines, had begun to fade as soon as she woke, her unease remained. As her pulse rate slowed and her respiration returned to normal, Sarina wanted nothing more than to walk in the open air, to feel grass beneath her feet and the soothing rays of some star on her face. Short of that, she thought she’d settle for a warm embrace.
Sarina looked to her side, confirming what she already knew: Julian did not lie beside her. She moved her hand across the surface of the bed, to the place he would eventually occupy when he completed his shift in the infirmary. She briefly considered climbing out of bed, dressing, and paying him an impromptu visit, but she decided against it. She still had so many things to think about, so many choices to make.
It had been two weeks since Captain Dax and the Aventine crew had recovered her and Julian from open space in Breen territory. In the end, they succeeded in finding and destroying a prototype Breen vessel equipped with slipstream drive, while also eliminating the stolen plans that allowed the construction of the experimental starship in the first place. They also managed to do so without igniting an interstellar war—although on that count, Sarina and Bashir and Dax came close to the brink.
It had taken some time for Aventine to make its way from the Confederacy to DS9. While en route, Sarina and Julian spent time in sickbay, the ship’s medical staff tending to the wounds the pair had suffered during the carrying out of their mission. The two also underwent complete physicals—an ordeal Sarina would have preferred to skip—and then, mercifully, they had a few days to do little but rest.
As soon as they had been rescued by the Aventine crew, even before they had exited the transporter room to which they’d been beamed, Julian had looked ahead. During their time together in Breen space, they had rekindled the brief but intense romance they’d shared after he’d successfully treated her catatonia years earlier. Still in each other’s arms on the transporter pad, considerately left alone there by the operators on duty, Julian rushed to talk with her.
“Now that this is over,” he’d said, referring to their mission, “what’s next? For us, I mean?” He wanted to know if she intended to continue serving with Starfleet Intelligence, and if so, whether or not she wanted him to join her there. His words spilled from him quickly, almost desperately. He doubtless would have asked more questions had they not been interrupted by the entrance of the ship’s chief medical officer and a nurse.
The intrusion, though, had given Sarina a few moments to think. On the way to Aventine’s sickbay, walking side by side, she took Julian’s hand in hers and squeezed it tightly. “In answer to your question,” she told him, “I go where you go.” He smiled, as widely and naturally as she’d ever seen.
A pang of guilt had risen within Sarina when she’d seen that smile. Julian didn’t know about her involvement with Section 31, or their ongoing plans with respect to him. Nor did she think he suspected what she did: that they would not wait indefinitely for him, and that at some point, they would discontinue their classification of him as a promising prospective agent, and instead catalog him as an enemy combatant. From what she knew of his past dealings with 31, he surely would have understood the danger of being labeled by the organization as an adversary.
Sarina stood up from the bed, her rumpled nightshirt falling to her knees. She paced across the small room to the oval port in the outer bulkhead, which she’d rendered opaque prior to retiring for the night. “Computer,” she said, “set the window to transparent.” As with the lights, a brief note answered her, and then the environmental system complied with her command. The stars became visible, though not B’hava’el—Bajor’s sun. Deep Space 9’s slow rotation would carry it past within the hour—it did so for a few minutes within every hour—and she couldn’t imagine being able to fall asleep again before it reappeared. She had such important questions to answer for herself that it surprised her that she’d been able to slumber in the first place.
After the completion of the Breen operation and their time in Aventine’s sickbay, Sarina and Julian had done little beyond compiling their individual reports of events, which they had then submitted to Starfleet Command and Starfleet Intelligence. Still recovering and decompressing from their ordeal, they remained off duty upon their arrival at DS9, at least until that night, when Julian agreed to take a late shift for Doctor Boudreaux, whose husband had apparently suffered a bad fall at an archeological dig on Bajor. Spending the evening alone had finally allowed Sarina the freedom to seriously consider what she would do next. Unfortunately, she hadn’t decided on a course of action by the time fatigue had overcome her.
Tomorrow, she knew, Commander Erdona of Starfleet Intelligence would arrive at Deep Space 9. Among other duties, he would personally debrief Sarina and Julian on the details of their mission. He also might attempt to recruit Julian into SI, and he almost assuredly would inform Sarina of her next assignment. That meant that she had little time left to her before she needed to reach some significant decisions.
Sighing in frustration, Sarina peered out at the stars. Reflected in the port, she suddenly saw movement behind her. She whirled around, upset that somebody could so easily enter the room without her hearing. But when she turned, she found herself still alone.
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Now you’re getting paranoid,” she told herself. Except that she truly had more than enough good reasons to maintain a suspicious nature. Just the previous night, when she’d woken from a dream, she’d decided to rise and spend some time by herself. She left Julian in bed and slipped into the living area of his quarters, where she ordered up a hot cup of herbal tea. When she turned from the replicator, L’Haan regarded her from a chair across the room.
Clad wholly in black, the Section 31 operative had noted that an acoustic-dampening field protected their conversation from being overheard, and that a mild sedative introduced into Julian’s dinner would ensure that he slept soundly through the meeting. L’Haan commended Sarina on the success of her primary mission—to thwart the attempt of the Typhon Pact to develop quantum slipstream drive—as well as of her secondary mission—to begin the final push to enlist Doctor Bashir as an asset. To accomplish that, L’Haan wanted Sarina to continue her romantic relationship with Julian, to make it as intense and intimate as possible. “Make him love you,” she’d said, “and then we will have him.”
“A sound plan,” Sarina said aloud in Julian’s empty bedroom. She turned back to the port. B’hava’el had just come into view, she saw, a yellowish speck of light just slightly larger and brighter than the other stars she could see from her vantage. It occurred to her to make a wish upon it—she half-recalled an ancient tradition of doing so—but simply wishing would not help her make the choices she needed to make.
Feeling a touch of self-pity, Sarina said, “Maybe it would have been better if I’d never returned from the Breen mission.” But she knew that her death wouldn’t have solved anything. And then she remembered the words of her inquisitor on Salavat, and a chill raced down her spine.
“I do not have to kill you to change the shape of your life.”
Doctor Julian Bashir sat at the long, narrow conference table in the wardroom, battling the urge to fold his arms together before him and lay his head down. The long hours of his debriefing—of his two debriefings—had exhausted him, both mentally and emotionally. Fortunately, an end at last seemed in sight.
Bashir glanced to his side at Sarina, who appeared more anxious than fatigued. Then he peered across the short width of the table at Commander Aldo Erdona, who sat with a collection of padds amassed before him. The tall, dark-haired man had arrived at Deep Space 9 that day from Starfleet Intelligence. Although he claimed that he’d already read through the after-action reports that Sarina and Bashir had submitted to SI, the rigorousness of his questioning raised doubts about that in the doctor’s mind.
Erdona had i
nitially interviewed the two of them separately—first Sarina and then Bashir. After taking a break, presumably to collate the information he’d gathered, the commander asked to speak with them together. Bashir assumed that Erdona intended only to clarify some minor inconsistencies that might have arisen—the result of mere differences in perspective and memory—but he instead wanted to hear a shared account of their time in Breen space.
Listening to Sarina describe what had happened to her on Salavat after they’d separated during the mission had been more than difficult for Bashir; it had been wrenching. In the time since their recovery by the crew of Aventine, she had told him about her capture and detention. But Sarina spoke to him only in general terms about her experience, a truth he came to realize as she recounted for Erdona her brutal interrogation by an inquisitor from the Breen Intelligence Directorate.
Bashir wondered again, as he had numerous times throughout the previous two weeks, if he had failed the woman he loved beyond any chance of redemption. During the mission, Sarina made the tactical decision that they should split up. He protested, to no avail, but he also knew that he could have said and done more to ensure that they stay together. Instead, Sarina ended up alone, surrounded by Breen military forces, and delivered into the hands of a torturer. Although she managed to escape her captivity and the mission subsequently succeeded, how much had she suffered? As he sat beside her in the wardroom, Bashir asked himself whether his love could possibly overcome the terrible agonies that she’d endured at least in part because of his actions.
Across the table, he saw Erdona continuing to speak, but Bashir’s own thoughts superseded the commander’s words. The doctor absently reached up and passed his hand over his close-cropped beard. He could not help but dwell on the two questions to which he so desperately needed answers: Could Sarina possibly forgive him for failing to keep her safe? And even if she could, would he ever be able to forgive himself?
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night Page 9
