Текст книги "Cathedral "

Автор книги: Andy Mangels

Соавторы: Michael Martin
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“But the Bajoran Militia is going to be part of Starfleet soon,” Quark said. Your choices look pretty much the same as mine. But where will yours take you?

Ro took another drink and nodded. “Once the ministers sign those entry documents, home won’t be a refuge from the Federation anymore. At least, not for me.”

“And the Bajorans will become just like the hew-mons,” Quark said. “Flat broke, but too well fed to realize it.”

“To outsiders,” Ro said, raising her glass in an ironic toast. “So the next big question is, What do we do next?”

We?

Even as his despair about his personal financial prospects deepened, Quark allowed himself to nurture the hope that he was finally connecting with Ro on some level deeper than mere infatuation. But if she, too, was planning to leave the station, would he ever get the chance to capitalize on that?

Quark was suddenly terrified that the wrong word from him right now might drive her away from him forever. “Don’t go,” was all he could think of to say.

He realized a moment later that Vic had returned, his entrance evidently obscured by the gathering Dom Pérignon haze. “Let me guess,” Quark said. “You heard everything we just said.”

Vic grinned. “I heard enough, pallie, to make one thing as clear as where Goldwater stands on JFK: You two gloomy Guses are made for each other.”

Ro’s nearly empty drink slipped from her fingers and tipped over. She ignored the stain that was slowly spreading across the tablecloth. “Come again?”

“Listen, those ancient Chinese cats might have really been onto something when they decided to make ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ into the same word.”

“I don’t follow you,” Quark said, wondering if his holosuite was beginning to malfunction. That would be damned inconvenient, with Nog over ninety thousand light-years away at the moment.

“Neither of you can see a way of making a go of it under the Federation flag,” Vic said, looking first at Ro, then at Quark. “Which means that you’re both going to have to get out of Dodge. Away from Starfleet. And away from a cashless Promenade.”

“Right,” Quark said. So far, Vic was only stating the obvious. Where was this leading?

“Dodge?” Ro said, obviously perplexed.

Vic sighed and shook his head in an exaggerated display of patience. “Okay, let me spell it out for you in great big letters, like the Sands’ marquee: You two need to gallop off to the frontier and go into business together.”

After a parting wink at a nonplussed Ro, Vic returned to the stage and began to sing “Fly Me to the Moon.”

A moment later Quark realized that Vic was, yet again, uncannily right. He looked at Ro and saw the same realization beginning to dawn in her eyes as well.

“I think we need to talk,” he said as he righted her glass and filled it again, emptying the bottle in the process.

Ro smiled. “Later,” she said, and held out her hand to him. “Dance with me.”

Quark felt a grin spreading across his face and took Laren’s hand. They stepped onto the dance floor together.

Seated behind the large desk in the station commander’s office, Kira didn’t bother to look up from the security report she had been reading until after the door had hissed open and admitted her latest visitor.

She was surprised to see Colonel Lenaris Holem—no, she corrected herself, GeneralLenaris Holem—striding toward her desk.

The general’s broad smile belied his mock-chiding tone. “Working this late is a bad habit, Colonel.”

“Occupational hazard,” she said, returning the smile. “I’m going to have a very busy day tomorrow.” Tossing the padd aside, she rose from her chair in deference to Lenaris’s superior rank.

His lips curled in a good-natured scowl. “Please. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing colonels leaping to attention in my presence. Especially not you.”

Kira felt her own smile increase in wattage. She had always genuinely liked the large, blunt-featured Militia officer. “Well, if you won’t take a salute, then I hope you’ll accept my congratulations on your promotion.”

He touched the month-old general’s pin on the collar of his gray uniform tunic, as though he thought a Vayan hornfly had just lit there. Kira knew that Lenaris had been promoted from colonel to general in recognition of his accomplishments as commander of the Lamnak fleet during the evacuation of Europa Nova, a non-Federation Earth colony whose population had been threatened by theta radiation a few months earlier. It also hadn’t escaped her notice that she, the overall commander of that extremely complex mission, had received no promotions or commendations whatsoever.

So goes Militia politics,she thought. For the Attainted.

But she knew that Lenaris wasn’t responsible for her shabby treatment, either at the hands of Yevir Linjarin’s plurality in the Vedek Assembly, or from his sympathizers within the Bajoran Militia. She knew that both groups bore little love for her after her official excommunication from the mainstream of Bajor’s religious life. Yet, on the eve of the planet’s entry into the Federation, neither group seemed able to muster sufficient courage to fire her on purely religious grounds.

Still, Lenaris’s promotion served as a depressing reminder to her of how far she had fallen in the eyes of so many influential Bajorans.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, gesturing toward the sofa in the meeting area of her office. She moved over to the replicator, from which she extracted two cups of alva nut tea, the general’s favorite beverage. “And why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

“I didn’t call ahead,” said the general as he sat, “in case you already knew the answer to your first question. You might have found some convenient excuse not to see me.”

She handed one of the two steaming mugs to Lenaris. “My door is always open to you, Holem. You know that.”

“I do. And I’m grateful for it.” He took a careful sip of the hot, fragrant liquid. Settling back into the sofa, he said, “You know, I nearly turned down this promotion. After Europa Nova, it felt like the High Command was deliberately snubbing you by offering these general’s bars to me.”

“Turning down a promotion wouldn’t have made the Militia any nicer to me, Holem. Besides, you’ve earned it many times over.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know about that. But before I said anything foolish, I realized that I’d have a better chance of changing the attitudes of the old-guard brass as a general than I would have had as a colonel.”

“Maybe,” she said, eager to see where he was headed.

“And that brings me to the reason for my visit,” he continued, gazing directly into her eyes over the top of his mug. “Ten days ago I decided to follow the path of Ohalu. I have committed my life to the tenets of Ohalu’s Truthseekers, and to the Ohalavaru Way.”

Kira nodded. She had heard the rumors of grumblings from certain highly placed Bajorans about Yevir’s heavy-handedness. And that the authors of some of these complaints had, perhaps out of sheer frustration, thrown their support behind the Ohalavaru, the group whose formation Kira had apparently inspired by disseminating Ohalu’s prophecies a few months back—an action that had led directly to her Attainder.

“It’s not exactly a secret,” Kira said. Beginning to wonder when the general intended to make his point, she sipped slowly at the contents of her mug.

“You should join us,” Lenaris said.

Kira nearly spit her tea across the room. “What?!”

He appeared unmoved by her reaction. “It was your actions that catalyzed the Ohalavaru movement. And your Attainder that gave it drive and purpose.”

Lenaris’s reasoning sounded insane to Kira’s ears. “My actions drove a wedge into the Bajoran faith.”

He scowled. “That’s Yevir and his cronies talking. I think Kira Nerys knows better. Besides, are you really prepared to spend years on your knees begging the forgiveness of Yevir and his toadies?”

She felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “I never asked for any forgiveness. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Exactly. I’m glad you’re prepared to admit that you don’t have to play their game. You have nothing to lose by joining us and throwing your public support behind Vedek Solis, our nominee for the kaiship.”

Kira knew Solis well and liked him quite a lot. A week ago, she had been somewhat surprised by the news that Solis had become the nominal Ohalavaru leader. His sincerity and goodwill could never be called into question; he had always worked hard for the benefit of the Bajoran people, during and after the Cardassian Occupation. Kira would never forget the quarrel she had had with Odo more than a year earlier, after the constable had briefly detained Solis for conducting charitable fund-raising activities aboard the station without a permit. The vedek’s actions had brought some quick, desperately needed relief to Bajoran flood victims. Like Odo, the man she had fallen in love with, Solis usually wasn’t one to place the niceties of paperwork ahead of the urgent needs of people.

But she saw a huge flaw in the general’s logic, and didn’t hesitate to bring it up. “I’m Attainted. I’d be useless to you.”

“Stop listening to the orthodoxy’s propaganda,” he said, military steel flashing behind his voice. “You obviously don’t have a clear picture of how much general discontent there is on Bajor about your Attainder.”

Or about how thoroughly I’ve fractured my people’s faith,she thought, a bitter taste in her mouth.

“Attainted or not, you’re considered a hero by many people,” Lenaris continued. “A hero in war and a hero in peace. And now you can be a hero in a profound cultural struggle.”

She felt anger warm her cheeks. “I never wanted to be anybody’s hero. And I’m not going to be a religious symbol. That’s Yevir’s game.”

He sighed. “Nerys, have you ever had the pleasure of meeting Li Nalas?”

“Of course I have,” she said, frowning as she recalled the day the brave symbol of the resistance was murdered by other men bent on remaking Bajor in their own image. “You know that. We’ve both met him.”

“So we both know that we sometimes aren’t given a choice in these matters.”

Kira was incredulous. “You’re saying it’s my destinyto support the Ohalavaru?”

“Call it what you will,” he said, shrugging. “But we both know that your support would greatly influence whether or not Solis becomes the next kai. Unless you prefer to see Yevir in that position. Remember, he’s a relatively young man. He could be kai for the rest of your life.”

Kira couldn’t dispute the general on most of these points. But it all still felt fundamentally wrong to her.

After taking a long, silent moment to compose her thoughts, she said, “I simply can’t risk dividing Bajor any further. Especially not so close to Bajor’s official entry into the Federation. Until Bajor’s admission, the Emissary’s work here is incomplete.”

It was Lenaris’s turn to appear incredulous. “The Emissary? Benjamin Sisko. Nerys, I have nothing but respect for your former commander, but he is part of the past. You should embrace the future instead.”

“That’s precisely what I’m trying to do, Holem. If the Ohalavaru would simply stand back, be objective, and try to look at the bigger political picture, they might be able to see that now isn’t the best time to open up political rifts. Surely Vedek Solis can understand that.”

“It was Vedek Solis who asked me to speak with you today.”

Kira let out a weary sigh. “Has either of you considered the Bajor–Cardassia talks?”

“As little as possible,” he said with another shrug. “What about them?”

“The talks are stalled at the moment. What chance will we have of restarting them if we’re preoccupied with our own religious squabbles?”

Lenaris was clearly unmoved. “If the talks with Cardassia are stalled, then you can rest assured that the cause is Cardassian intransigence. Nothing that’s happening on Bajor now or in the future will change that one way or the other.”

But Kira knew better. She had already spoken at length about this very topic with Shakaar. And as far as she was concerned, the first minister could make a nice living conducting master classes in intransigence.

“General, I’d like you to speak to Solis for me,” Kira said after another lengthy pause. “Ask him to be a little gentler in pushing the Ohalavaru agenda. At least until the current business with the Federation and Cardassia is resolved. There really is a bigger picture to consider here, Holem. Bigger than Solis. Bigger than Yevir. And certainly bigger than either of us.”

Lenaris rose and set his empty cup on her desk. He looked sad, deflated. “You’ve changed, Nerys.”

She bristled. “Yes. I’ve become a bit wiser about doing what’s right for my people.”

“You worry about dividing Bajor,” he said with a bitter laugh. “But that sinoraptor’s already jumped the fence. That happened the moment you uploaded Ohalu’s suppressed prophecies onto the Bajoran comnet. The only question we ought to be asking now is how best to manage that division.”

“I’ll leave that to wiser heads than mine, thank you.”

“Whoseheads?” Lenaris walked over to the painting that hung on her wall, idly examining it for a moment before turning back to her. “Yevir’s? Vedek Scio’s? Vedek Eran’s? The other hard-liners? This ‘division’ you’re so frightened of might actually be the beginning of Bajor’s future unity, Nerys. The start of a transformation into something with more vision than the current orthodoxy has. Something truer to the plans of the Prophets.”

Kira’s thoughts wandered back to the pivotal battles she had fought on behalf of the ancient Bajora after she had been thrown thirty millennia into her planet’s past. She hadn’t hesitated to get involved then. But grappling in the same way with the future seemed an altogether different matter.

“Let history make those decisions,” she said. “Not me.”

His voice rose in both passion and volume. “Nerys, you arehistory. Wasn’t it you who introduced us to Ohalu’s truth after the vedeks tried to destroy it? Wasn’t it you who created this ‘division’ in the first place?”

“I’m not proud of it. I just did what had to be done to let our people make up their own minds about their faith. To keep Yevir from short-circuiting those decisions by suppressing Ohalu’s prophecies.”

A triumphant smile spread slowly across the general’s face. “You acted to defend prophecies which have turned out to be utterly, perfectlycorrect. Not just some of them. Allof them, Nerys. Given those facts, how could Ohalu’s writings be anything butthe inspired words of the Prophets? And isn’t your first duty to them?”

Kira couldn’t avoid the ring of truth his words carried. How easy it would be to simply go along. To use the Ohalavaru as a weapon against Yevir and his ilk. But at what cost to Bajor’s future? Other than her Orb experiences, she had never claimed to have any special knowledge of the minds of the Prophets. But surely such convulsions couldn’t be part of their plan.

“No,” she said quietly, her voice pitched almost in a whisper.

The general nodded, then took a different tack. “Do you think you might be more kindly disposed toward us if we were to convince the Vedek Assembly to reverse your Attainder?”

She decided that she had had just about enough of this. Friendship and rank would go just so far. “Why not just tow all fourteen planets in the system into a straight line?” she said. “It would probably be easier. Besides, my religious status is something personal, between me and the Prophets and—”

“—and none of my damned business,” he said with a chuckle, interrupting her. “Forgive me, Nerys. I overreached myself.”

The general moved toward the door, which opened for him. Then he turned around on the threshold and faced her. “It’s clear to me now that you’re not ready to come along with us on this. At least not just yet.”

With that, he bid her a warm good-bye and departed. Alone in her office, Kira recalled how tenacious a fighter her old friend had been during the bad old days of the Occupation.

And she was absolutely certain that she hadn’t heard the last of the Ohalavaru. Or of their agenda for Bajor.

15

Taking care to tread quietly, Ezri entered the quarters she shared with Julian. She wanted to look in on him once more before preparing for the tactical briefing.

“Hello, Julian.”

He was sitting cross-legged on the bunk, his usually immaculate hair disheveled, his uniform jacket torn and askew, his eyes closed as though he had been deep in meditation. When they opened, she saw a momentary whirlpool of confusion in their brown depths.

Then he smiled at her.

She smiled back, relieved. She hadn’t startled him this time. And he wasn’t throwing things. Or screaming.

“You’re quite pretty,” he said, his voice sounding like a kilometer of gravel-strewn road. Her smile wavered as she looked into his eyes. Did he even recognize her?

Her gaze was drawn to the uneven lettering that Julian had evidently burned into the bulkhead during one of her absences. Beside a few archaic Terran words was scrawled Voice and nothing more.

Was that how Julian saw himself during his lucid moments? Ezri found the idea difficult to understand. She had come to believe in his steady judgment, his rock-solid humanity, the way a mathematician accepts a geometrical axiom. She found the phrase Julian had carved to be a far better description of herself. Nothing but appearances, she thought. Pips on a uniform that’s no longer even the right color.

She recalled her counseling training. “Impostor syndrome” was how the texts had described the feelings she was having. The irrational conviction that one’s continued presence in a given job is somehow fraudulent. What frightened Ezri most about the notion was that it felt completely rational.

Because she knew it was the truth.

It was then that she noticed the laser scalpel on the beside table. The instrument lay discarded, apparently forgotten, atop a battered copy of a book titled Alice in Wonderland,a favorite from Julian’s childhood. Ezri noticed then that the scalpel was still lit up and active. Not good. She realized that he must be stashing away some of his instruments. Or perhaps her own shortcomings had prevented her from finding and removing all the dangerous objects that were already in their quarters.

Some exec I am. I can’t even keep the sharp objects away from the man I love.

Carefully meeting Julian’s curiously childlike gaze, Ezri sat on the bunk beside him. Without calling attention to the gesture, she carefully picked up the scalpel and shut it off with a quiet flick of her thumb. She also took the dermal regenerator.

He noticed. “Those’re mine,” he said, scowling, his eyes hawklike.

Careful,she told herself. The last thing she wanted was to provoke him into another frustrated tantrum. She didn’t want to be forced to have him sedated. What would be left of him after he woke up?

“It’s all right, Julian,” she said, trying to keep her tone pleasant without offering any condescension—that would be a sure way of setting him off. “You weren’t planning on doing any surgery anytime soon, were you?”

Only then did she notice the small teddy bear that lay partially concealed by the chaotic bedclothes. The threadbare animal was missing an eye. She recognized Kukalaka, Julian’s childhood teddy bear, which she had once been amused to discover that he still owned. Until now she hadn’t realized that he had brought it along with him to the Gamma Quadrant.

Then she saw the crazy quilt of razor-thin, intersecting lines across the stuffed creature’s abdomen. Obviously Julian had been using Kukalaka to practice whatever surgical skills he could still remember.

His eyes narrowed. “I’m a doctor. I need my instruments.”

Julian’s manner made her think of her brother Norvo. When they were little, he had announced that he was a dilithium miner. Norvo’s face had had that same earnest expression.

“Yes, Julian. But doctors keep their instruments in the medical bay.” She tucked the tools into a pouch on her jacket. “I’ll take these there for you, while you stay here and get some rest.”

“I don’t needto rest.” He pushed himself off the bed, reaching his feet with a stumble she’d never seen before. “I have to go to the medical bay, too.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Julian.”

He elbowed his way toward the door. In the room’s tight confines, it was difficult to stay out of his way.

“There’s a patient I need to see.” The door whooshed open as he approached it. He made a dismissive gesture toward Kukalaka, who still lay on the bed. “A realpatient. There’s some…therapy I need to administer.”

Sacagawea,she thought. He was talking about their D’Naali guide.

“Julian, you need to stay here. You’re in no condition to care for a patient. Besides, Ensign Richter and Ensign Juarez can give the alien whatever therapy he might need.”

He regarded her in silence for a lengthy moment, apparently about to explode in an emotional outburst. But when he finally spoke, his voice was surprisingly calm and gentle.

“You don’t understand, Ezri. The therapy isn’t for my patient. It’s for me.”

Ezri suddenly understood something: Whatever skills the artifact had taken from Julian, his courage and determination—his emotionalintelligence—still remained with him, at least in some measure. And she knew that now wasn’t the time to hide—or to surrender. Not while the alien artifact still held onto its secrets.

All he seemed to be asking for was some simple dignity. Maybe,she thought, that’s the only thing nobody can ever truly take from any of us.

Tears stung her eyes as she forced aside all thought of her own loss. Simultaneously galvanized and shamed by Julian’s courage, she arrived at a command decision.

“Let me walk with you to the medical bay, Julian.” A moment later, they were moving together down the corridor.

And for at least a few fleeting minutes she felt far less like an impostor. She wished she could believe that the feeling would last.

Right ahead of Shar, Nog stepped onto the bridge. He relished the solid feel of his left leg as he put his weight on it. The new limb seemed every bit as strong as the other one. Don’t get too attached to it,he reminded himself, then nearly laughed aloud at the absurdity of the notion.

Seated at the ops console, Ensign Tenmei glanced over her shoulder, acknowledging Nog and Shar with a smile and a nod. Commander Vaughn swiveled the command chair in their direction, an expectant expression on his face.

“Have you found a way around the blockade problem yet?”

Nog shook his head, feeling somewhat disappointed with himself. “Not quite, sir. We’re still working on that.”

“We did make another discovery, Captain,” Shar said. “And we thought it best to bring it to your attention immediately. It concerns the alien text.”

Vaughn’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve translated it.”

“Partially,” Shar said, nodding. “I believe we’ve uncovered some of the artifact’s history, or at least some sort of…origin myth.”

“Go on,” Vaughn said, stroking his silver beard thoughtfully.

“Apparently the Oort cloud artifact was once located on the surface of an inhabited planet,” Shar said.

Bowers approached from the tactical station, his curiosity obviously piqued. “And where is this planet now?”

“Lots of places, as far as we can tell,” Nog said. “And in lots of little pieces.”

“The artifact’s world of origin was apparently destroyed aeons ago,” Shar said, “in some great, planetary-scale cataclysm.”

“Caused by what?” Vaughn wanted to know.

“We think by the artifact itself,” said Nog. “Whatever the artifact did released enough energy to send it way out here, to the outskirts of the system.”

Vaughn gestured toward the main viewer, which continuously displayed the object’s eternal tumble. “It’s powerful enough to destroy an entire planet?”

“I don’t think there’s much that’s beyond its capabilities,” Shar said. “The text mentions a progenitor species, perhaps ancestral to both the D’Naali and the Nyazen, who constructed the artifact to ‘reap the bounty of the many unseen realms.’”

Bowers frowned. “‘Unseen realms’?”

“Parallel universes, perhaps,” Vaughn said. “Maybe it’s some kind of interdimensional power collector.”

“That’s our best guess,” Nog said. “We think it was designed to draw energy out of higher-dimensional spaces and the parallel universes adjacent to our own.”

Bowers looked impressed. “I guess that would explain why parts of the thing are always bobbing in and out of normal space.”

“And it might also explain,” Tenmei said, “the weird quantum resonance patterns the Sagan’s been giving off. The shuttle must be carrying the fingerprints of some of those other universes.”

Shar nodded, his expression dour. “And if the artifact issome sort of energy collection device, that might also account for the power-draining effect it had on the Sagan.”

“So what do you suppose happened to the people who built this thing?” Vaughn asked, his eyes riveted to the artifact on the screen.

Bowers’s brow wrinkled in thought. “And how did they manage to incorporate stuff into this text about what happened aftertheir homeworld got blown to kingdom come?”

“That’s been bothering me, too,” Nog said. “From these translated fragments, it looks as though a number of people were aboard the artifact during the disaster. A few survivors evidently amended the text.”

Shar glanced at his padd before weighing in on the matter. “Those survivors may have persisted for many generations, and might even be the remote ancestors of the D’Naali, the Nyazen, or both. Whatever really happened is shrouded in mythological language, so it’s hard to be certain. But it appears that the attempt these beings made to mine the adjacent dimensions unleashed forces that literally ripped their homeworld apart.”

“And the artifact itself survived because it was in the eye of the storm,” Vaughn said.

Shar nodded. “Exactly.”

“And the forces that destroyed the planet flung the object way out here,” Nog said. The image of the powerful artifact caroming off billions of frozen planetesimals and icy Oort cloud fragments brought to mind a complicated bank shot on some cosmic dom-jot table.

Vaughn rose from the command chair. “Good work, gentlemen. Mr. Bowers, you have the bridge. Mr. Nog, I want you and your people to keep searching for a way around that blockade.”

“Aye, sir,” Nog found himself suppressing a sudden urge to smile. For some reason he couldn’t quite articulate, he felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough. But he knew that a good engineer didn’t discuss such things with his captain until afterhe’d taken the time to test them.

“Shar, I want you to come with me,” Vaughn said on his way to the turbolift.

Shar’s antennae rose in evident curiosity as he fell into step beside Vaughn. “Sir?”

“I want to know whether Sacagawea can shed some light on your translations,” Vaughn said, throwing a backward glance toward the image of the artifact. “Maybe he can even help us use it to get inside that thing.”

Striding into the medical bay a few paces ahead of Shar, Vaughn found the tableau that greeted him almost too painful to look at.

Julian Bashir was a mere shadow of himself, his hair mussed and beard stubble darkening his face. The doctor’s dark eyes resembled those of a frightened child. In spite of it all, he persevered through what appeared to be an attempt to examine his D’Naali patient, who sat impassively on one of the biobeds. Ezri and Ensign Richter hovered close by, their faces masks of pained sympathy as the doctor moved haltingly, waving a medical tricorder before Sacagawea.

“You’ve taken good care of him, Julian,” Ezri said, sounding awkward. “He seems…quite healthy now.”

Vaughn cleared his throat, immediately drawing the attention of Ezri and Richter. “I’d like to speak to our guest for a moment.”

Bashir turned toward Vaughn, staring at him without any apparent recognition. Vaughn found the idea of such a loss of self chilling in the extreme. Being over a century old, he sometimes wondered if senility would one day overcome him in much the same manner. It was difficult to imagine any worse fate.

“With your permission of course, Doctor,” Vaughn said, keeping his eyes on Bashir rather than on either of the two women. Regardless of his current condition, this was still Bashir’s medical bay; Vaughn wanted to be as solicitous of the doctor’s dignity as possible, without drifting into condescension.

Quietly lowering his tricorder, Bashir nodded.

Vaughn approached the tall, willowy alien, who regarded him with unfathomable, fist-sized eyes. Shar looked on quietly, evidently content to observe.

“We need your assistance,” Vaughn said.

As though mounted on gimbals, the alien’s head swiveled closer to Vaughn. “Debt/obligation I have,” it said, the universal translator rendering the words in incongruous bell peals. “With delight do I discharge same. What need/desire have you?”

“Your adversaries are preventing us from getting close to the…cathedral. We must find a way around that difficulty.”

The creature’s mouth parts moved laterally in what Vaughn thought might have been a smile. “Understand. You need/require interior access to the cathedral/ anathema.”

So far, Vaughn had had no luck in getting Sacagawea to explain why his people and the Nyazen were such bitter enemies. The creature either did not understand or was deliberately holding something back. Vaughn hoped he would make better progress pumping the alien for information about the artifact itself.

“Yes,” Vaughn said.

Sacagawea pointed a long, branchlike finger toward Bashir first, then Ezri. “Access you desire/require because of this pair. Touched by the cathedral/anathema have they been both. Misaligned in their worldlines are they both as consequence/result. And both deteriorating/worsening steadily, per timeunit.”

Remarkable,Vaughn thought as he parsed the alien’s tortuous locutions. Ezri and Richter both stood by, saucer-eyed.

“How could it know that Julian and Ezri have been altered by their contact with the artifact?” Shar said, sounding nonplussed.

His own curiosity already moving at high warp, Vaughn wanted that question answered as well. But he also felt an irresistible desire to learn more about the artifact itself.