Keev leaned forward to peer down past the parapet, and she saw only a pair of shod feet. She followed the line of the body above them to see Veralla again, back in the clearing. “Time is a continuum,” he said, “and the Sisko has altered his.”
“He has departed the road that intersects with sorrow,” Altek said, back in the caverns beneath the Merzang Mountains.
“He has departed the road that ends here,” Ahleen said from atop the fortress wall.
“His road leads away,” Denoray said in the temple, no longer at the table, but standing beside Keev. “He must be told.”
“Is that the message that will guide me?” Keev asked.
“The message already guides you,” Veralla said. “It brought you here.”
“Three roads,” Altek said. “Three peoples.”
“The fortress must not fall,” said Ahleen.
Keev closed here eyes, trying to commit to memory everything she had been told. None of it made sense to her, and yet somehow it did. It all seemed so familiar. She had never been there—To the Celestial Temple!—and yet she had been. She had been a closed hand sent back into the world to learn how to open.
And I did, Keev thought. She didn’t know when, or how, but she knew that she had. She was sure of it.
When she opened her eyes, she stood before the long table in the temple. Denoray Lunas gazed across the pages of the ancient volume before her, then looked up at Keev. “Follow the path,” she said. “When you know where it ends, you will know how to begin.”
• • •
Keev blinked, and when her eyelids opened, she saw Veralla closing the ark in front of her. She remained perched on her knees before it.
“Are you all right, Anora?” he asked. When Keev glanced at him, his eyes held a mixture of awe and fear. She gathered that he envied her whatever experience she’d just had, but that he worried that it had somehow harmed her. It hadn’t. “Did the Tear of Destiny affect you?”
“The Tear of Destiny?” Keev said.
“Yes,” Veralla told her. “So the ancient markings on the ark claim.”
Keev nodded slowly, not quite understanding, but confident that she would. Veralla asked again if she was all right.
“I’m well,” Keev said. “I’m very well.” She pushed herself up and got to her feet. “And I’m taking the Tear to Shavalla.”
Nineteen
Blackmer sat at a desk in one of the offices in the stockade complex, his eyes bleary and his head beginning to pound. He looked again over all the information he had in front of him. It all fit together, but something nagged at him.
“Jeff?”
Blackmer looked up to see Captain Ro standing in the doorless entry. “Captain,” he said, startled to see her precisely at that moment, but not surprised that Ro had risen well before the start of alpha shift. “You’re up early.”
“And either you are too,” Ro said, entering the office, “or you’ve been up all night. I hope it’s not the latter.”
“Well . . . not all night,” Blackmer said, trying to mitigate the truth of his exhaustion, to which the captain would clearly object. “I went to my quarters at about oh two hundred.”
“And how long did you stay there?” Ro asked.
“Just long enough to realize that I couldn’t keep my eyes closed or shut off my brain,” Blackmer said. He had actually lain down in bed, and maybe he had even dozed for a few minutes, but by zero four hundred hours, he’d returned to the stockade.
“I don’t like hearing that, Jeff,” the captain said. “I need you today.”
“I’ll be fine,” Blackmer contended.
“You’ll be fine if I order you to your quarters for some sleep,” Ro said.
“You can do that, but you’d better have Doctor Bashir bring me some sort of medication, because right now, it doesn’t feel like I’m ever going to sleep again.”
Ro looked at him with sympathy, but she remained firm. “Believe me, I know the feeling,” she said. “But we have to get this investigation done right, and we have to get it done soon.”
Blackmer felt his brow furrow. “Soon? Why soon?”
“Because we can’t keep the station locked down forever,” Ro said. “Especially not with imperators and praetors in our midst.”
“Oh. Right.” I should have thought of that, Blackmer told himself. In fact, he had thought of it earlier, but it had slipped his mind. “Well, don’t worry about me; I still have some power in my reactors. And Lieutenant Commander Douglas will be here at oh eight hundred.”
“Jeff,” Ro said. She stopped, took one of the chairs in front of the desk, and leaned in toward him. “Jeff, you’ve got an hour, and then it’s off to your quarters for at least four hours. That’s an order. And if you need Doctor Bashir to administer a soporific, then that’ll be an order too.”
Despite his claim a moment earlier, Blackmer didn’t have the energy to argue. Which should tell me that she’s right, he thought. “Well, fortunately, Captain, we may have just about everything we need already.”
“What?” Ro asked. “Has she confessed?” The captain obviously referred to Enkar Sirsy, but Blackmer understood using a pronoun to identify her; he didn’t like uttering her name either.
“No, she’s maintaining her innocence,” Blackmer said. “Or at least that she remembers nothing about what happened.”
“If she doesn’t remember what happened,” Ro asked, “then how can she be sure she didn’t do it?”
“That was my question,” Blackmer said.
“How long did you interrogate her?” Ro wanted to know.
“A couple of hours, total, in three separate conversations.”
“Has the JAG office sent anybody down to talk with her?” Ro asked.
“Commander Desjardins came down himself,” Blackmer said. Gregory Desjardins had arrived just ten days earlier, relocating the judge advocate general’s office for the Bajor Sector to Deep Space 9. He did not fall within the starbase’s chain of command. “He explained all of Enkar’s rights, including his recommendation that, because of the extraordinary circumstance of the lockdown, she should accept preliminary representation by a member of the JAG office.”
“And she did and then refused to answer any more questions,” Ro concluded.
“No,” Blackmer said. “I mean, she said she would accept a JAG attorney—Commander Desjardins took on the job himself—but she was still willing to talk with me and answer all my questions.”
“By saying she didn’t remember anything,” Ro said, obviously frustrated.
“Whether that’s relevant or not is up to somebody else to decide,” Blackmer said. “For all I know, she might have had some sort of psychotic break and is telling the truth, although Doctor Bashir examined her and pronounced her perfectly healthy. Whether or not she genuinely doesn’t remember what happened, though, it doesn’t change the evidence.”
“And what evidence do we have?” Ro asked. “Anything new since last night?”
“A number of things, actually.” Blackmer turned to the computer interface on the desk and tapped a control surface to transfer the set of files he’d been studying to a padd. The interface beeped, and a moment later, one of the padds lying beside it chirped in response. Blackmer picked up the device and handed it to Ro. “If you look at the first file, you’ll see that we have a rough time line of her whereabouts before and during the dedication. Sensors place her in the quarters assigned to the first minister at twelve thirty hours yesterday, which was the last time Minister Asarem saw her. Sensors also show her returning to her own cabin, but shortly after that, she drops off the grid.”
“Didn’t the first minister notice her chief of staff’s absence?” Ro asked. A day earlier, when faced with the claim that Enkar Sirsy had assassinated the president of the Federation, Asarem Wadeen had rejected it outright. The minister had known and worked with Enkar for a decade and a half, and they’d had a very close professional relationship for ten of those years.
<
br /> “Minister Asarem and Lustrate Vorat chose to walk to the dedication together, accompanied by their protection details, of course,” Blackmer said. “Enkar was supposed to arrive later, along with Onar Throk, one of Castellan Garan’s aides who stayed behind to assist the lustrate. When she didn’t appear at his quarters as scheduled, he tried to contact her, and then he went to her cabin, but she didn’t seem to be there. He shrugged it off and went to the dedication himself.”
“And by that time, she’d already fallen off the sensor grid?” Ro asked.
“It would appear so,” Blackmer said. “Meaning the next question is: how did she get into the control booth?”
“It couldn’t have been by transporter if sensors couldn’t read her,” Ro said.
“Not necessarily,” Blackmer said. “If she was transported from her cabin, she would have vanished from the sensor grid there, but if she materialized with a sensor block in the booth, she never would have reappeared. That would also explain why I couldn’t beam her out of there after the fact. Once we took her from the booth, we were able to beam her directly into the stockade.”
“So that’s what you think happened?” Ro said. “That she transported from her quarters to the booth?”
“It seems most likely,” Blackmer said. “I’m an eyewitness to her presence there after the assassination, and Doctor Bashir’s examination has placed her there at the time of it.”
“What? How?”
“He detected significant amounts of chemical residue on Enkar’s hands and clothing,” Blackmer said. “That’s the second file.” He waited as the captain accessed the data.
“Barium, antimony, and lead,” she read from the padd.
“Elements associated with combustion in the firing of the projectile weapon with which she was found,” Blackmer said. “And Lieutenant Commander Candlewood performed a ballistic analysis on the three projectiles removed from the president’s body. He confirms that they were fired by that weapon.”
Ro sat back in her chair. “That’s all pretty compelling,” she said. “If only she’d used a modern weapon.”
“She obviously knew not to,” Blackmer said. “It’s not as though we hid our general security setup from our visitors.” A dampening field on the station prevented the discharge of any energy weapons not specifically assigned to starbase personnel, and such weapons functioned only when wielded by their registered users. “The doctor also found nothing physically out of the ordinary with Enkar. There was no indication that she had been drugged. And there’s more,” Blackmer continued. “I wondered how anybody could have transported from one point on the station to another without a security alert being triggered. Our own transporters weren’t used, and any beam originating outside the station would have raised an alarm. All of which seems to indicate the use of a portable unit. But that takes energy, and no power sources capable of driving a portable transporter have been detected on Deep Space Nine.”
“Could she have tapped into the starbase’s power grid?” Ro asked.
“That was my thought,” Blackmer said. “So I had Lieutenant Commander Nog sweep the sensor logs looking for any anomalies. His results are in the third file.”
Ro tapped the padd and read what appeared in the display. “Ten separate power drains? Ten?”
“Yes,” Blackmer said, “but each small enough to be within normal fluctuations for the power grid. But you can see that they all occurred at roughly the same time and would have provided more than enough power to use a portable transporter to beam a person to the control booth.”
Ro continued to study the data on the padd for a few more seconds, and then she set it down on the desk. “This is fine work, Jeff,” she said. “This is incontrovertible.”
“It is, but . . .” He didn’t finish his thought, but he brought his hands together, wrapping the fingers of one around the fist of the other.
“Something’s troubling you,” Ro said. “The portable transporter.”
“Yes,” he said. “Where is it? That, and the sensor block in the control booth. We haven’t been able to find either piece of equipment.”
“Could they have self-destructed?”
“Possibly,” Blackmer said. “But we’ve reviewed the sensor logs, and we don’t see anything like that.”
“The readings could have been blocked,” Ro pointed out.
“Yeah, maybe,” Blackmer agreed. “But if the plan was to destroy evidence, then why leave the weapon? And why didn’t she transport out of the booth?”
“If there was a sensor block in the control booth, how could she beam away?” Ro said. “And maybe she wanted to be caught.”
“And now is having second thoughts, so she’s claiming not to remember anything,” Blackmer said. “It doesn’t sound quite right to me. I’d feel a lot more confident about all the evidence we’ve collected if we could find the portable transporter.” In the middle of a frown, he yawned widely.
“Jeff, you need to get some sleep,” Ro said. “Who’s your lead on delta shift today?”
“Lieutenant ch’Larn,” Blackmer said. Lieutenant junior grade Shanradeskel ch’Larn—known as Deskel—had been a member of the DS9 crew on the original station, and he’d been one of only eleven Andorians aboard who had not resigned their commissions after their world seceded from the Federation. “He’s leading a search team in Enkar’s guest quarters right now.”
“All right.” Ro stood up. “I’ll go consult with Deskel. In the meantime, you have your orders, Lieutenant Commander Blackmer: sleep.”
“I’ll try, Captain.”
“At the very least, you need to rest,” Ro told him.
“Yes, sir.” He rose from his chair, and they walked out to the turbolift together.
Blackmer went to his quarters and crawled into bed, where he slept far better than he expected. Five hours later, when he checked in with Sarina Douglas, he learned that their efforts had paid off: his security staff had found the portable transporter device, hidden behind a bulkhead in Enkar Sirsy’s guest cabin.
Twenty
Keev woke up that morning in darkness, as she usually did, but even earlier. She shared a cold meal with Veralla and Altek while all the others—gild members and escaped slaves—slept. At her request, nobody besides Altek had been told that she would be leaving on her own, possibly for good. It had been three days since Veralla had asked her to bring the Tear of the Prophets—the Tear of Destiny—to Shavalla, and in that time, the gild had finished clearing the tunnel and shoring up its walls and roof. Keev would deliver the Tear to the Bajoran city, but she remained undecided about staying there permanently. She hadn’t discussed it with Altek at any length, but when he arrived in Shavalla, clearly they would make their decision together.
“Are you ready?” Veralla asked her. The three of them had walked out into the wood and unearthed the Tear of Destiny in its ark.
“Yes,” Keev said. She carried water, a beacon, and a revolver at her waist, and a small duffel slung over her shoulder that contained tools and small explosives. She had concern that the Tear would not fit through some of the tighter areas within the caverns, and so she had brought the means to expand those just enough to allow her to carry it through.
“I know you don’t care for sentiment in situations like this,” Veralla said, “but I want to tell you that you are a kind, compassionate, brave woman, and it has been my privilege to work with you in our gild.”
“Veralla—” she began, but he held up a hand.
“I know how you feel,” he told her. “Just . . . be well.” And to Keev’s surprise, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. He then turned to Altek. “Take as much time as you need,” he said, and he walked off into the darkness toward their camp. Altek watched him go before turning back to face Keev.
“I still don’t understand why we can’t go together,” he said.
“I don’t really understand it either,” Keev said, “but I trust Veralla. If this is what he wants us to do, it mus
t be for the best.”
Altek nodded, though he looked unconvinced. “Please be careful.”
“I will be,” Keev promised. “I want you to be careful too.”
“I will be,” Altek assured her. “And I’ll be right behind you.”
“You’d better be,” Keev said. “If you’re not in Shavalla within a day of when I arrive, I’m coming back after you.”
Altek smiled. “I like the idea of you coming after me.”
Keev returned his smile. “I bet you do.” She stepped forward until her body pressed against his. She looked up into his eyes, and they kissed.
When they parted, Keev retrieved the ark and started off into the wood, in the direction of the mountains and the caverns underneath. She glanced back over her shoulder, but the dense undergrowth quickly stole Altek from her sight. Still, she heard him say one last thing to her, not loudly, not calling after her, but in his normal speaking voice.
“I love you, Anora,” he said.
“I love you, Dans,” she replied.
Keev couldn’t tell whether or not he heard her.
• • •
Half an hour into the cave, Keev saw a bluish glow in the distance, up around a curve in the tunnel. It did not surprise her to see it, nor did it concern her. After my experience with the Tear of Destiny, she thought, I’m not sure what would surprise me.
Keev continued on until she rounded the bend into the long, narrow portion of the caverns in which the cave-in had occurred. Up ahead, where the gild had removed the rubble and added columns and beams and joists for safety, the blue glow intensified. As though in reply, a greenish emanation began to leak from the joints in the ark she carried.
The Tear of Destiny, Keev thought. I will walk the path that the Prophets have set out for me.
Keev narrowed her eyes against the glare, but it did not overwhelm her in the same way that the Tear had when first she’d seen it. She strode forward, confident, unconcerned, even excited. As she drew closer, she saw that the columns the gild had installed had become translucent, their surfaces in motion like a pond beneath a spring rain. Concentric circles stippled their surface, enlarging until they faded away.
Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust Page 30
