Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust

by David R. George III

  And I trust him completely too, Keev thought. She had known him and worked with him for years, and his leadership had rarely steered the gild wrong. And he’s always been reticent. His reserved nature, which often gave the appearance of secretiveness, did not mark a change in his behavior, but kept consistent with the character she had always known him to have.

  The strange tools, though, marked only one peculiarity in their fortification of the cave. The columns and support beams and joists all appeared to be composed of ordinary materials—wood, she thought—but she could not tell with certainty, which seemed odd. When binding the different components together, they sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, seemed to be made of something else entirely, though Keev could not exactly say what—something like soft glass, filled with liquid and light.

  And sometimes while she worked in the cave, she would see movement in her peripheral vision. She would turn and think she saw the reinforcing structure rendered translucent, with blue and white streamers wavering within—but only for the span of a heartbeat. She wondered if anybody else experienced the phenomenon. Keev hadn’t mentioned her—What? Hallucinations? Visions?—to anybody, but she thought she might tell Altek.

  She turned away from the support framework, then looked quickly back. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, even for a brief time. It seemed that Keev could not force her perceptions.

  She shrugged off her concerns. Except they’re not really concerns, are they? she asked herself. I don’t really feel uneasy. No, Keev felt captivated by her peculiar, transient observations.

  She stepped over to the nearest column and rested her hand against it. The surface looked like wood, and it felt hard and rough. Keev began to drop her hand and turn away, and in that moment, she saw as though through a glass, darkly, and where her fingertip touched the surface of the column, circles of light spread outward from it, like ripples in a pond.

  But when she looked back, the column was just a column.

  Keev moved to her makeshift sledge, the smooth side of the bark against the ground. She picked up the rope affixed to its two front corners, set her feet, and pulled backward. The stone came forward a short way. Keev reset her feet and pulled again. Once more, the sledge moved, but the bark must have rubbed against something abrasive on the ground because it suddenly stopped. Not expecting that, Keev lost her grip on the rope, overbalanced, and tumbled backward. She cried out, more in surprise than in pain, though she felt a twinge as her head snapped toward the ground.

  “Anora!” Altek called from farther down the cave. She saw him from her inverted position. He dropped his own bark-and-rope sledge and raced forward, the beam of his beacon jumping as he did so. When he reached her, he kneeled down and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Keev said. “I only wounded my pride.” As she sat up, she felt an ache in the side of her neck. “Oh,” she said, reaching up to rub her injury.

  “You don’t sound all right,” Altek said. “Let me see.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Keev said, still rubbing. “I just twisted my neck when I fell.”

  “Let me see,” Altek repeated. Keev pulled her hand away, and he raised his beacon to shine it in the slope between her head and her shoulder. He reached with his other hand and tugged the loose fabric of her blouse away from her neck. “It looks like it’s starting to swell,” he said, leaning in. She could feel the heat of his breath on her flesh. “You’ll probably have a knot there and a pretty good bruise for a few days.”

  “Serves me right for daydreaming while I work,” Keev said.

  Altek seemed to take too much time examining her shoulder, and she worried for a moment that he might have seen something more serious there than a simple bump. But then he leaned forward and touched his lips to her flesh. They felt soft and hot against her, a gentle intensity. She closed her eyes and visualized him kissing her like that, seeing him kneeling beside her on the floor of the cave, his mouth nestled in the crook of her neck.

  Altek pulled back suddenly. Keev turned her head and looked at him. “I . . . I’m sorry,” he said. “I just . . . I . . .” He looked as though he believed she would rebuke him for his transgression.

  Instead, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

  Seventeen

  Ro awoke well before Deep Space 9’s simulated dawn—except that she hadn’t slept, not really. Maybe an hour or two in total, dozing on and off, but mostly she succeeded only in wringing her bedclothes into knots—which also amounted to a fair description of how her stomach felt: in knots. However long I slept, Ro thought, I sure as hell didn’t rest.

  The weight of the previous day’s events hadn’t lessened, and she didn’t see how it could anytime soon. She’d had direct contact with only a handful of DS9’s twenty-five hundred crew members after the assassination, and with almost none of the few hundred civilians aboard, but those she had interacted with had all displayed signs of confusion and anger and grief. And I’m sure I showed those same emotions, because that’s how I felt too, Ro thought. That’s still how I feel.

  Even Quark had been affected. Although he usually behaved as though events held meaning for him only insofar as they impacted his business, Ro knew better. Quark’s brusque exterior and the time and energy he spent pursuing the acquisition of wealth hid a softer, kinder man. It certainly satisfied him—in some way that Ro couldn’t quite understand—to project the image of himself as an avaricious Ferengi businessman, but he did other things that virtually nobody knew about—things that not only didn’t profit him, but that actually cost him latinum. Quark hadn’t even told her about the contributions he’d made to help a number of children orphaned by the destruction of Deep Space 9—not just on Bajor, but on several other worlds as well; Ro had found out incidentally, when she’d contacted the families of those lost. She had never mentioned it to Quark, but neither had she forgotten it.

  After the assassination, and after Ro’s announcement to the entire starbase, Quark had stopped by her quarters. He came by very late, though not long after she entered her cabin, and she suspected that he’d been calling on her every few minutes throughout the night until she finally arrived. When she opened the door, he peered up at her with an expression of such concern that she almost broke down right then.

  Ro had invited Quark inside—just for a few minutes, she’d said—and they’d sat together on the sofa in her living area. He asked about her, about how she felt regarding what had happened, about how she intended to make it through the next few days and beyond. She had no more answers for him than she did for herself, and she eventually told him that she preferred not to talk about any of it. Quark put his arms around her and held her, occasionally stroking her hair.

  Ro had actually fallen asleep beside him, briefly, and when she’d woken up, she’d thought that she’d be able to get something close to a night’s rest. Quark offered to stay with her, but she declined. He made no argument, other than to remind her that she could contact him at any time if she needed anything at all.

  At the door, just before he’d left, Quark had looked up at her with a tight jaw and tears in his eyes. “I liked her,” he said. “I mean, she was a good leader. She kept the Federation out of a war with the Typhon Pact, and she got the right people in the right places to stop the Borg from overrunning the entire quadrant.” He paused, and Ro thought that he would say no more, but then he added, “The Forty-fourth Rule of Acquisition declares that you should never confuse wisdom with luck. In the case of President Bacco’s leadership, I don’t think it was luck.” Quark then bid her good night with a kiss on the cheek.

  When the door to her quarters had closed after him, Ro had started for her bedroom. On the way, she noticed a plush green bag on the console table in the entryway. She picked it up and loosened its drawstring to find several packets of jumja tea and two sleeves of milaberry biscuits—both Ro’s favorite, and the latter being what she considered c
omfort food. She had no idea how Quark had placed them there without her knowing, but his thoughtfulness touched her.

  Ro hadn’t enjoyed any of the tea or biscuits, though, because she’d feared doing so might have prevented her from sleeping. I should’ve drunk all the tea and eaten all the biscuits, for all the sleep I got. She knew that she should probably stay in bed at least another hour, to rest as much as she could before what would plainly be another brutal day.

  But she couldn’t. Ro extracted her feet from among the twisted bedcovers, rose, and padded into the refresher. She stood over the washbasin and stared at herself in the mirror, not pleased with the appearance of the face that stared back at her—with its red-rimmed eyes and dark circles—but not surprised by it.

  Ro removed the blue shorts and half shirt in which she slept—Or tried to sleep—and adjusted the controls of her shower. Feeling as though she needed more than to simply get clean, she substituted hot water for sonic waves. She stepped beneath the hard spray and let it beat down on her. After just a few seconds, she increased the temperature of the water.

  At that point in time, three-quarters of a day after the assassination, Ro realized that much of the quadrant had probably learned of the tragic events. Only a few hours after Captain Sisko had first spoken with Admiral Akaar, the commander in chief had contacted Robinson, ordering Ro, through Sisko, to end DS9’s communications blackout. Akaar had then opened a secure channel directly to the starbase.

  According to the admiral, the Federation Council had appointed Ishan Anjar as president pro tem. The Council then publicly announced the news of President Bacco’s death and the selection of her interim replacement. Finally, they began preparations for an impending special election to choose her permanent successor.

  Ishan, Ro knew, had taken over from Krim Aldos as Bajor’s representative on the Federation Council less than a year earlier. An interesting choice, she thought, considering that the evidence pointed to a Bajoran as the president’s assassin. She supposed that the move might have been intended as a signal to the first minister and the people of Bajor that the Federation—or at least its government—did not hold an entire world responsible for the actions of one individual. Or maybe it’s just the force of Ishan’s will. Ro remembered hearing a rumor—completely unsubstantiated—that Bajor’s most recent councillor had maneuvered his predecessor out of his way.

  Ro had no time to think about politics, though. As she grabbed soap and a washcloth, she began to consider the day ahead. With the news of the assassination made public by the Federation Council, the captain had agreed with Akaar on dropping the communications blackout, but the starbase remained on lockdown. The only person who’d been permitted to enter or exit DS9 had been Captain Sisko, for the purpose of communicating with Admiral Akaar, but that didn’t mean that others didn’t want to depart.

  After Ro had made her own starbase-wide announcement of the president’s death, she had been contacted by every single visiting head of state. She had her first officer relocate all of them from the rooms backstage in the theater to their guest quarters—still under guard by her crew, as well as their own protection details—and then she went to speak in person with each of them. They all professed their sorrow at the loss of Nanietta Bacco, as well as their distress about the course of events, but they also each requested—and in the case of the Cardassian, Klingon, and Gorn dignitaries, demanded—that they be permitted to leave Deep Space 9 and return home. Chancellor Martok offered the most vociferous petition; in a long conversation with Ro, he ranged from wanting to board his starship and blast away from DS9 whether or not the Starfleet crew released the docking clamps, to wanting to be allowed to march down to the stockade and exact vengeance on Enkar Sirsy with his own hands.

  Captain Sisko had warned Ro that the political officials would want to leave at once, as had Admiral Akaar. The commander in chief’s caution, however, also came with a directive from the Federation Council: she had two days, three at the most, before she had to allow the heads of state and their delegations to depart the starbase—and they counted the day of the assassination as the first day. Nobody, including Ro, suspected that any of the other dignitaries or their people had anything to do with Enkar Sirsy’s crime, but she needed to confirm that while they all remained within her grasp.

  And don’t forget that ten thousand civilians are due to arrive on Deep Space Nine in a few days, Ro reminded herself. Though a small consolation, she understood that the current situation on the starbase could have been a great deal more complicated had all of those residents already been in place. Knowing how many things she had to accomplish that day, she decided that she would assign her first officer to deal with the looming arrival of the residential population. Cenn would have to develop a new schedule and slow the process down, at least in the near term.

  As though in a dream, Ro gradually realized that she felt pain. She looked down at her left forearm and saw small amounts of red mixed in with the white lather from the soap. She quickly rinsed her arm, then pulled it out of the spray and watched as more of her blood seeped from the abrasions she had scraped into her own skin. Trying to scrub away your guilt, Laren? she asked herself cynically. It wasn’t good enough that Deep Space Nine blew up on your watch; now you let the leader of trillions die.

  A surge of energy curled her hand into a fist and she ached to hit something. She wanted to throw a punch into the glass enclosure of her shower, or into the less-forgiving bulkhead. She wanted to see something break, even if it turned out to be her own fingers. But she couldn’t. As a captain with as grave a responsibility to discharge as she’d ever had, she needed to be a leader to her crew—the leader to her crew.

  Tamping down her emotions, Ro rinsed her arm again, then shut off the shower. She dried herself off, dabbing gingerly at her wounded arm, and walked through her bedroom into the living area of her quarters. She wished she could order the replicator to produce a dermal regenerator, but they hadn’t been programmed or enabled to produce devices. Instead, she asked for a simple bandage, which she then wrapped around her forearm to the top of her wrist.

  Ro started back into her bedroom, but stopped when she saw the jumja tea packets on the console table. She considered having some, but realized that, given her fitful night, she needed something a great deal stronger. She returned to the replicator and ordered a mug of raktajino.

  Back in her bedroom, Ro donned a fresh uniform. She finished the raktajino, then went back into the ’fresher to examine herself in the mirror. She still looked as though she hadn’t slept well—she suspected that a lot of her crew would look that way—but she appeared improved from when first she’d crawled out of bed.

  “You need to be a strong leader today,” she told her mirror image. “Your crew needs you.” She always tried to be the best captain she could be, and she hoped that she’d so far succeeded during the current crisis. She thought she had, but her address to her crew had been hard. She hadn’t known what to say or how to say it, but almost her entire crew had been witness to an attempt on the life of the Federation president; they had both a right and a need to know whether or not Bacco had survived.

  After exiting the hospital and escorting Captain Sisko to Robinson, Ro had gone to the Hub, where she’d thanked her officers there for their professionalism in securing Deep Space 9 as well and as quickly as they had. She then went to her office, called in Cenn—more to lean on than for any other reason—and then she’d engaged the intrastarbase comm channel.

  “This is Captain Ro,” she’d begun, “to the crew, residents, and guests of Deep Space Nine. As you all must know by now, and as most of you observed yourselves, during the dedication ceremony today, President Bacco was the victim of an attack on her life. She was struck three times by shots fired from a projectile weapon.”

  Ro had looked over at Cenn for his support, knowing that the most difficult part had arrived. He nodded once, slowly, and by that simple act communicated his solidarity with her.

>   “Doctors Bashir and Boudreaux attended the president at once,” Ro had continued, “examining her wounds and determining her medical needs. They transported with her to the hospital, hoping to administer lifesaving measures. It is my sad responsibility to report that the president’s wounds were too grave to be treated successfully. At fourteen-oh-eight hours starbase time, President Nanietta Bacco was pronounced dead.”

  Ro’s voice had begun to break on the final word, and she took a moment to breathe in deeply to collect her emotions. Cenn walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. That connection, that support, helped.

  “An individual has been taken into custody for the perpetration of this monstrous act,” Ro had gone on. “The investigation continues and evidence is still being gathered, and Deep Space Nine will remain locked down until those efforts have been completed.” She did not reveal the deadline imposed by the Federation Council on releasing the visiting dignitaries to their vessels.

  “I know that this incomprehensible act and its repercussions are difficult to deal with,” she had continued. “Nanietta Bacco was a strong and popular president. She will be missed, but the Federation must and will endure. Bajor’s own representative on the Federation Council, Ishan Anjar, has been appointed president pro tempore, a position in which he will serve for no longer than sixty days, until a special election can be held. In the meantime, Starfleet needs you to perform your regular duties as best you can. I need you to do that. You are a fine crew, and we will get through this together.”

  The captain had looked again at Cenn, who nodded to her, clearly endorsing what she’d said. “Ro out,” she finished, ending the announcement. She then asked a question of her first officer: “How do we go forward from here?”

  “I don’t know,” Cenn had said. “I think we have to do what we Bajorans have been doing for a very long time: we just carry on.”

  At the time, Ro hadn’t thought much of that answer, which had seemed to her like no answer at all. But as she stood looking at herself in the mirror that morning, she wondered if Cenn had been right after all: they could only place one foot in front of the next, marching from today into tomorrow. Eventually it would grow easier.