Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

“We’ve lost attitude control,” Roness yelled.

Another fragment crashed into Sagan.The sickening sound of rending metal filled the cabin. The shuttle moaned like a wounded animal, and then it began to tumble. Ezri flew out of her chair, just able to bring her left arm up as she struck the ceiling. Now,she thought with maddening clarity, the shuttle will head back down to the planet.She was thrown into the side bulkhead, and then backward. She had just enough time to be amazed that she did not feel any pain.

And then darkness took her.

Ezri awoke slowly. At first, she became aware of sounds around her, soft, syrupy rhythms she could neither place nor understand. Her first coherent thoughts were of Trill, and of the Caves of Mak’ala. For a time, she drifted in her mind through the interconnecting pools, communicating with the other symbionts, and waiting an almost painfully long time to move out into the world, and then from there to the rest of the universe. And then, finally, she was Lela Dax, and more than the sum of the two of them. Lela, and then Tobin, and then all the rest, through to Ezri. Ezri Dax, aboard Destiny,Deep Space 9, and Defiant.

Aboard Sagan.

Ezri opened her eyes and did not know where she was. She peered at the ceiling and recognized Defiant.She tried to lift her head, but found herself too weak.

“Doctor,” a woman’s voice said, “she’s awake.”

Ezri heard footsteps, and then a face entered her field of vision, a woman with blue-green eyes, and reddish blond hair braided and pulled back against her head. Ezri knew this woman, she was sure. She remembered having a drink with her in Quark’s the night before the mission…yes, when the woman and Sergeant Etana had been saying goodbye…the woman’s first extended mission, her first extended time away from Etana. “Krissten,” she said.

“Yes,” the nurse said.

“Ezri,” came another voice, and it took Ezri only a second to recognize Julian’s mellifluous tones. His dark, handsome face appeared above her, beside the nurse’s. “How are you feeling?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but only an unintelligible sound emerged.

“That’s all right,” Julian told her, reaching up and running a hand tenderly across her forehead. “You’ve been thrown around quite a bit. The good news is that you’re going to be all right.” He smiled at her, a smile that she had already taken into her heart.

“The shuttle,” she finally managed to say. “We were on board the shuttle.”

“Yes,” Julian said, and his face changed slightly, she saw, the smile maybe no longer as wide.

“What—” she started, and again she tried to raise her head. Julian put a hand on her shoulder and restrained her, gently pushing her back down. “What happened? The Vahni?”

“You saved the Vahni,” Julian said.

The fog seemed to begin lifting from around Ezri, and she became more aware of her surroundings. She turned her head to the right and saw a biobed and medical displays. “How did I get here?” she asked.

“Later, Ezri,” Julian told her, and he looked up at the nurse. She nodded and moved away.

“What happened?” Ezri asked, raising her voice.

“Your shuttle lost power,” Julian told her. “As it started to fall back toward the planet, we were able to grab it with a tractor beam and transport you off.”

The nurse reappeared, and it looked as though she handed something to Julian.

“What about Gerda?” Ezri wanted to know. “How is she?”

“You need to rest,” Julian said, and he reached up toward her neck.

“No, now,” she said, her voice loud and insistent. “How is Gerda?” Instead of an answer, she heard the sibilant puff of a hypospray, like somebody whispering into her neck.

“Rest, now, Ezri,” Julian said, not responding to her question. But as she closed her eyes and let sleep pull her back into its velvety folds, she could not help but think that Julian had already given her an answer.

22

Taran’atar stood alone inside the turbolift, watching the walls of the shaft rush horizontally past the open front end of the car. He reviewed the details of his current operation, as few and as simple as they were, and thought about delaying his plan. He could even abandon it completely.

You taste fear,he told himself, disgusted with his vacillation. He had been charged with a campaign by the Founder, and he would see it through, however long it required, however many operations he had to prepare and execute. No matter the vagueness of the Founder’s directive, or its apparent pointlessness. A god had spoken, sent him a mission, and he would see it through.

Or die.

The turbolift slowed, then stopped in front of a set of doors. They parted and slid into the bulkhead, revealing a corridor within the habitat ring. Taran’atar waited. When nobody entered the lift or passed by, he shrouded and moved out. The muted sounds of voices drifted to him, some coming from farther down the corridor, others from behind the closed doors of the quarters on this deck. The smells of food and of the beings who lived here permeated the air. He detected no threats to him, and so he set out purposefully toward his objective.

As he walked, Taran’atar thought about the Founder, who had instructed him to immerse himself in the various cultures he would encounter on Deep Space 9, and in the various aspects of life in those cultures. After spending as much time as Taran’atar had on the space station, doing little besides standing in the operations center and going into battle when he could—even if that meant utilizing the holosuites—he knew that he must do something more. He had observed Colonel Kira in combat, both in the Delta Quadrant and once in the holosuite, and he had spent a few days in the week prior to Defiant’s departure roaming the ship, but still, he knew that had not been enough. Even the colonel had suggested to him that there was more to see here than just the operations center and the holosuites. And so he had begun to travel to various locales throughout the station.

Two people came walking down the corridor together toward Taran’atar. One was a human male in a Starfleet uniform, he saw, the other a Bajoran female in a Militia uniform. He wondered if they might be coming from the place to which he was headed. As they drew nearer, talking with each other, Taran’atar gauged their movements, waited as long as he could to commit, and then flattened himself against the bulkhead. They passed him, never even having suspected his presence. Contempt welled up within him for these Alpha Quadrant beings and their pathetic observational abilities, but then more of the Founder’s words echoed in his mind: Don’t judge them. Experience and try to understand, only. Judgment will come later.He put the beings out of his mind and continued on down the corridor.

The first place Taran’atar had gone to “experience” Alpha Quadrant life, other than the operations center, had been Defiant.After Commander Vaughn had asked him to come aboard the ship to answer questions about the Gamma Quadrant, Taran’atar had decided to remain aboard, and he had returned daily, roaming through the ship and watching the crew as they prepared for their mission. But then the little being, the Ferengi, had run into him. And the Ferengi had feared him.

Correctly so,Taran’atar thought now. Jem’Hadar soldiers had maimed the little being, destroyed one of his legs. The Ferengi had experienced the superiority of the Jem’Hadar, and his subsequent fear was justified. Taran’atar understood, though, that his encounter with the Ferengi had not served the goals the Founder had laid out for him. He had inspired fear, and had himself felt disdain for the pitiful little being, and neither of those things furthered his mission. He had failed, and that was unacceptable.

After that, Taran’atar had selected other locations and activities with which he was not familiar. He had already visited several of these—shrouded, to avoid incidents like the one with the Ferengi—and now he was about to visit another. He arrived at a set of closed doors, beyond which lay his destination. He stood across the corridor and waited for somebody to enter or exit.

Thirteen minutes and thirty-five seconds later, the doors opened, and a human woman in a Starfleet uniform walked out. “Okay, bye,” she said, looking back into the room. Out of habit, Taran’atar measured her at a glance—medium height and weight for her species and gender, blond hair, green eyes, the blue collar that designated her as working in the sciences. When she had cleared the way, he moved quickly, turning sidelong to steal through the closing doors. Once inside, Taran’atar peered to his right, then took two silent steps to an empty space along the bulkhead.

The room was fairly large. Three oval windows in the back wall looked out into space, the trio flanked on either side by a pair of wide, tall cabinets. The cabinet on the right stood closed, but the one on the left was open; inside were several empty shelves, but others were filled with colorful artifacts that Taran’atar could not identify. A table sat in front of the leftmost window, with two long, but much lower, tables lining the left and right bulkheads. In the center of the room, mats and pillows and blankets were strewn about, and amid these meandered nineteen small beings.

Children,Taran’atar thought, grasping the concept, if not the reality, of what he saw. Two other beings—fully formed males—stood near the windows. All of the beings appeared to be either Bajoran or human, though two of the children may have been descended from both species.

The children were even smaller than Taran’atar had anticipated. He found himself unable even to speculate about their ages. Had they been Jem’Hadar, he would have put them at just a few days old, but he knew that most humanoids developed far more slowly than that. It was a sign of weakness.

Taran’atar stopped himself. Withhold judgment,the Founder had told him. Taran’atar stood against the wall, watched, and listened.

In an unsystematic, even a chaotic, manner, the children gathered up the mats, blankets, and pillows, and carried them over to the open cabinet. There, they dumped their cargo into a pile. One of the adults—the human; the other was Bajoran—thanked them, picking up the material and placing it onto the empty shelves in the cabinet. Despite the lack of ceremony, the actions seemed ritualistic to Taran’atar, though he could not fathom their meaning.

After the children had completed their task, they returned to the center of the room, where they sat down on the floor. Near the middle of the three windows, the adult Bajoran thanked the children for cleaning up, then asked them if they wanted to look at some animals. The children sent up a clamor, some of their words indecipherable, but they identified the Bajoran man as Gavi. From the table by the window, Gavi picked up a group of placards, each a third of a meter by half a meter in dimension. Then he crouched down, setting the placards on his thighs.

“Okay,” he said, “what animal is—” He raised the top placard and displayed it for the children. “—this?” Taran’atar at once recognized the pictured beast, a brown-haired, four-legged pack animal native to Bajor called a pylchyk.The children all yelled their own responses, most of which were correct. Gavi said, “That’s right. This is a pylchyk,”apparently ignoring the children who had called out the wrong answer, or given no answer at all. “This animal lives on Bajor, and the people there use it to carry supplies and to tend their fields.” Gavi’s tone of voice, and the manner in which he pronounced his words, seemed very strange, almost as though he believed the children incapable of hearing or understanding him. Taran’atar wondered if these might be defective children. He knew that defective Jem’Hadar were occasionally bred; when that happened, they were simply destroyed.

Gavi looked over at one of the children, a small human girl, and said, “Can you tell me the name of this animal, Claudia?” The girl, who had not properly identified the animal the first time, stared back at him without saying anything. “This is a…” He waited for the girl to say the name of the animal, but she said nothing. “Come on, Claudia, I know you can do it. This is a pyl…a pyl…”

“Pylchyk,”the girl erupted, and all of the children cheered.

Taran’atar watched as Gavi went through all of the placards, showing them to the children and then asking questions and talking about the animals on them. Taran’atar found himself fascinated by the process, despite—or perhaps because of—his lack of understanding about the purpose of the exercise. And Gavi even presented pictures of a few animals—including trenicats and cotton-tailed jebrets, both supposedly native to Ferenginar—of which Taran’atar had absolutely no knowledge.

After Gavi had shown all of the placards, he asked the children who among them wanted to draw. The group made loud noises in response, several of the children putting their arms up in the air as though attempting to call attention to themselves. Gavi then asked what they should draw today, and again the children responded, although Taran’atar could not tell if all of the responses actually answered the question. Gavi held up his hands, palms out, and quieted the children by saying, “Wait, wait, one at a time.” Then he pointed to the child closest to him, a young girl who looked essentially human, but with some vague Bajoran characteristics. “What would you like to draw today, Mireh?” he asked her.

“I want to draw the wormhose,” she said.

Gavi smiled at the girl, leaned in, and poked her in her midsection. “Okay, Mireh. We can do that. But it’s not called a ‘wormhose.’”

The girl laughed—at least, Taran’atar thought it was laughter, though it could have been some other sort of spasm. “It’s not?” she said.

“No,” Gavi told her, and then he addressed all the children. “Who knows what it’s called?” he asked. A number of the children pushed their arms straight up into the air again, and two of them yelled, “The wormhole!”

“That’s right,” Gavi said. “The wormhole.” He leaned back in to the girl. “Can you say that, Mireh? Can you say wormhole?”

The girl looked at him, crossed her arms in front of her, and said, very definitively, “Yes.”

“Well, okay,” Gavi said, laughing. He stood up and said, “So let’s draw.” The children stood up and headed for the little chairs around the tables at the sides of the room. Gavi joined the human man, and the two moved across the room to the other cabinet, from which they extracted large pieces of white paper and what appeared to be colorful drawing implements.

Something bumped into Taran’atar’s leg. He looked down, just in time to see himself finish shimmering back into visibility. A human boy stood beside him, apparently having wandered while making his way to one of the tables. A sense of shock filled Taran’atar at even having been approached without realizing it. And for this boy, this little human, to have penetrated his concentration and concealment…he felt humiliated.

“Look at the alligator,” the boy said, staring up into Taran’atar’s face. Unlike the Ferengi aboard Defiant,this being displayed no fear of him. He gazed up at Taran’atar with a smile, then raised his arms. “Up,” the boy said.

The human man yelled– “Hey, get away from him!”—and then Gavi gasped. Taran’atar looked up to see the two men glaring at him. Gavi walked slowly forward, his arms outstretched, palms out, as though trying somehow to ward off Taran’atar. “Don’t do anything,” he said, and Taran’atar wondered what he thought Taran’atar might do. “They’re only children,” he added.

As Gavi neared, Taran’atar looked past him at the other man, and saw an expression of fear and anger on his face. It occurred to him that perhaps these men had also encountered Jem’Hadar in the past, as the Ferengi had, and perhaps they had been wounded by them as well. The children, though—Taran’atar saw that most of the children were peering at him and smiling; some looked surprised, and some looked curious, but none of them appeared scared. Interesting,Taran’atar thought, though he was unsure of the import of what he had noticed.

Gavi stopped two paces from Taran’atar. Still moving slowly, he bent down and reached out for the boy. His fingers closed around a sleeve of the boy’s shirt, but the boy pulled his arm away, his eyes never leaving Taran’atar. Gavi, with an obvious sense of desperation, lunged forward, snatched the boy by the shoulder, and reeled him into his arms. The boy said, “No,” loudly, but Gavi told him to be quiet in a very stern tone of voice, and the boy quieted.

“Take him, Joshua,” Gavi said, staring at Taran’atar’s face, but clearly not speaking to him. The other man stepped forward and gathered the boy up, then moved back toward the windows again. Gavi asked, “What do you want?”

Taran’atar held Gavi’s gaze for several seconds before he said anything. The Bajoran stood slightly crouched, his muscles tensed, his attention focused, and Taran’atar perceived that he would stand his ground if Taran’atar charged. After three months on the space station, this was perhaps the most interesting thing Taran’atar had learned.

“Only to observe,” he said at last.

Gavi’s expression did not change, although Taran’atar sensed an alteration in his stance. A moment ago, he had been poised to fight, but now he had relaxed somewhat, evidently trusting Taran’atar’s words.

A fool,Taran’atar thought. He could be on the man before he had a chance to scream, snapping his neck where he stood. This time, Taran’atar did not correct himself about judging the beings here; this was simple truth.

“I think,” Gavi said, “I think you should leave.”

Taran’atar nodded. “Yes.” He took two quick paces to the doors, which opened before him. He stopped for a moment, still curious about all that had gone on here, not so much with respect to the two men, but with the children. Taran’atar turned and looked back into the room, at the boy who had bumped into him.

The boy looked back at him for a moment, then held out his arms in Taran’atar’s direction, and said, “Alligator.”

Taran’atar whirled and left, more confused now than ever about life in the Alpha Quadrant.

23

Vaughn was angry.

Clad in full dress uniform, he stood in an area that the Vahni called the Remembrance Garden. The word remembranceinduced just that for Vaughn right now, bringing to mind the lovely picture of the city that Ventu had thoughtfully presented to him. Both the gift and the giver had been lost in the collapse of the tower, and as Vaughn stood amid the enormous congregation of Vahni assembled in the garden, he craved vengeance: for Ventu, for the more than three thousand Vahni who had died in the quakes and aboard their interplanetary ships, and for Ensign Roness. But vengeance, Vaughn knew, always carried with it a steep price, and in the end it paid for nothing. Short of that, the need for justice beckoned, though like so many things—beauty, truth, duty—the notion of what constituted just actions varied with perspective.

At one end of the garden—an area in the city’s largest park that could easily have accommodated Defiantfor landing—a group of Vahni marched solemnly up onto a proscenium. The lack of ordered sounds, disturbing to Vaughn even before the tragedy, he now found almost unbearable. The shifting mass of bodies in the garden made a noise like a collective death rattle. For comfort, he clung to the sounds of the crew, sad though they were; more than half of the ship’s complement had accompanied him to the ceremony, and all had wanted to attend. The memorial had lasted nearly two hours now, and as the crew had listened via their translators to the sentiments of the several Vahni officiating, tears had flowed. Sam Bowers had been particularly hard hit by the loss of Gerda Roness, though Nog, T’rb, Kaitlin Merimark, and Jeanette Chao had also been close friends of the young ensign. Dr. Bashir had also seemed very moved during the Vahni tributes, though Vaughn suspected that the doctor’s emotions were further beset by his concern for Dax; besides her own harrowing experience in the shuttle, she now faced dealing for the first time with losing a person under her command.

The Vahni on the stage had arranged themselves in rows atop a tiered platform, and one of them stepped forward from the center of the lowest row. Two large displays, one on either side of the stage, ensured that all in the crowd could view the proceedings. “My [untranslatable]Vahni Vahltupali, and our honored friends from the United Group of Planets,” the woman conveyed, “as we conclude our observance, we would like to share our grief through a rite of [untranslatable].”Low tones stood in for the missing words.

Around the garden, the Vahni all bowed, and Vaughn saw the ocular organs ringing the heads of those nearest him squint closed. Then a change passed through the many-hued assemblage, the flesh of all the Vahni drifting from their natural colors to an indigo so dark that it was almost black. No sounds came through the translators. Vaughn bowed his head and closed his eyes, wondering what human analogue there might be for this communal experience. Were the Vahni crying? Chanting? Was this a moment of silence—a moment of darkness?

Right now, darkness suited Vaughn. The irony of what had happened here, with respect to his own life, had not eluded him. He had recently climbed from a life of secrecy, struggle, and death, into one of openness, cooperation, and exploration. And here, less than two weeks into his first mission of discovery, the darkness had risen up behind and overtaken him. But Vaughn would not lament his own fate at a time when the futures of so many had been ripped away, and the futures of those left behind had been irrevocably damaged. What he would do was what he had done for decades: he would fight.

Already, the easiest battle had been won. In the three days since the destruction of the Vahni moon and the quakes on their world, the crew of Defianthad obliterated the potentially deadly fragments of a planet in the Vahni system that had also been destroyed. While Sagan’s extensive damages would require a week to ten days more to repair, Chaffee’s plasma leak had quickly been patched. The mended shuttle and Defianthad tracked down those planetary fragments that had might have, in time, headed toward the Vahni world and caused great devastation.

The tougher battle, though, still needed to be fought.

This time, the enemy would likely not be as easy to detect or vanquish as rocks floating through space. Since the Vahni moon had shattered, Ensign ch’Thane and his team of scientists had been able to determine that a strange, unidentifiable energy pulse had passed through the system at warp speed. The velocity implied an artificial cause, but although he crew had been unable to ascertain the exact nature of the pulse, all observable indications actually indicated a natural source.

Vaughn heard a rustling sound, and he raised his head and opened his eyes to find that all of the Vahni had reverted back to their regular colors. The Vahni at the front of the stage stood up fully and again addressed the crowd. “Now, please join us as we [untranslatable].”Without turning—what need did they have to turn, Vaughn realized, when their eyes encircled their heads?—she raised her tentacles high, paused, and then brought them down dramatically. The flesh of the group on the stage erupted in a panoply of colors and forms, the individuals synchronized for the first few seconds, and then diverging in an amazing visual display. The translators captured the initial seconds—“We look to the sky and see”—and then delivered only the low tone that signaled uninterpretable communication. All around the crew, Vaughn saw, the Vahni in the crowd began changing the colors and shapes on their flesh in time with the changes occurring on the Vahni onstage.

They’re singing,Vaughn thought in wonder. His sense of appreciation for this extraordinary species only served to redouble his resolve to prevent the destructive force of the pulse from ever being visited upon them again. According to the Vahni, such events had been taking place on their world for more than two centuries. They had always occurred without warning and in no discernible pattern, except that the length of the intervals between them had decreased each time, while the level of destructive power had increased. Two hundred years ago, the quakes had happened decades apart, causing little damage; the latest event had followed the previous one by less than a year, and obviously had been the most powerful they had ever experienced. Worse than that, Ensign ch’Thane’s simulations revealed that, had the Vahni moon not been in the path of the pulse, effectively eclipsing it and preventing most of it from ever reaching the planet—and Defiant—the surface of the Vahni world would have been devastated, and many of its inhabitants lost. Vaughn knew that if another pulse passed through the system, with no moon to provide even the possibility of escaping its full force, the Vahni civilization would likely be wiped out.

And Vaughn would not allow that to happen.