Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key (15 page)

Along another wall, a meter-high brick shelf rose from the simple concrete floor. On it were arranged eight ornate oval boxes—with space set aside for a ninth—each of them no larger than his hand. In the corner of the room was a narrow metal hatch that Vaughn guessed was the emergency tunnel Winn had mentioned earlier.

On the opposite wall he saw the crypt.

“This is where Dava hid the Shards,” Opaka said. “Along with some other items we’ve come to revere. Winn and Jaro unearthed it after they first came to Vekobet, and they took the steps necessary to conceal it. This is the most sacred place we have, and therefore offers the most fitting interment for the bones of my friend…the man who
should
have been our Emissary.”

He strode toward the crypt until he could touch the Bajoran characters chiseled into the stone. He felt them with his fingers, read the Terran name that they spelled out.

BENJAMIN SISKO

And in the swelling silence of the musty reliquary, Vaughn felt his entire world unraveling.

T
his can’t be right,
Vaughn thought.
This isn’t what I was supposed to find.

“When did it happen?” he asked.

“Five years ago,” Opaka said. “Less than a year after he started the rebellion. I became Benjamin Sisko’s confidant and the first mate of his ship during the last six months of his life. I looked into his
pagh,
and I saw the promise he was meant to fulfill. I tried to explain what I’d seen in him, what it could mean to Bajor and to the rebels if he would open his mind and seek out the Temple, but he never believed me. We argued about it many times, until he finally forbade me to speak of it again. When we talked about forging a partnership with the dissident movement on Bajor, I thought perhaps I might have another chance to convince him of what I knew to be true, once I got him to stop risking his life on raids against the Alliance.

“But the Cardassians ambushed us. Many died, and Benjamin was mortally wounded. I got him aboard the emergency shuttle along with a handful of survivors just
before his ship exploded. But he was dead by the time we managed to reach Bajor.”

A mistake,
Vaughn told himself, still incredulous.
This is a mistake, that’s all….

Captain Sisko’s counterpart was still alive—that’s what Ben had told him when he’d asked Vaughn to make the crossover with Kira. He’d even told Vaughn that Kira couldn’t be allowed to know what he’d come along to do. And although Vaughn had not understood the need for secrecy and hated keeping it from her, he had gone along with it because he trusted Sisko implicitly.

It’s a mistake,
his mind repeated.
But it was
Sisko’s
mistake.

Suddenly wanting nothing more than to get out of this place, Vaughn turned his back to the crypt. He saw that Opaka was watching him closely.

“Commander,” she said, holding out her hand toward his left ear, “would I be presuming too much if I…?”

He wanted to refuse. She wasn’t the Opaka Sulan he’d come to know, to respect, to care for. But she
was
still Opaka, and he found that it simply wasn’t in him to deny her request.

He nodded. Her touch was familiar, and he relaxed, opening himself up to her perceptions.

When she withdrew her hand, her expression had changed. “I think I understand, Commander.”

“What is it you understand?”

“That there’s something you need to see. Come with me.”

They returned to the surface, and after Opaka had reactivated the security hologram and locked the room
behind her, she led him back down the alley to the infirmary.

They walked into a long patient recovery room. Less than a third of the twenty cots had patients, and most of these were Bajorans. All of them appeared to have sustained superficial injuries, and they were all listening attentively to a comnet feed coming over a speaker embedded in the ceiling. News about Ashalla was holding their attention, and none of them seemed to have noticed Vaughn and Opaka’s entrance.

On the other side of the room, an open doorway led down another corridor.

“What are we doing here?” he whispered, suddenly apprehensive without understanding why.

“Sulan?” someone called.

Vaughn looked up to see a black-haired Bajoran woman, perhaps a few years older than Kira, carrying a box of what looked like medical supplies as she walked out of a side room.

She stared at Vaughn for a lingering moment before focusing her attention on Opaka. “I heard we had visitors.”

Opaka answered the woman with quiet but firm calmness. “Vaas, I need you to begin packing up the reliquary.”

“I suspected you might,” the other woman said with a grim nod as she finger-combed her lustrous black hair away from her eyes. “I’ll get a team together and get started right away. Do you want me to contact Mylea?”

“No, I’ll take care of that myself. Hurry along now.” As Vaas set her box down on the floor and headed out
side, Opaka turned to face Vaughn. “There’s a secure communications unit in Jaro’s office, at the end of this hallway. You can join me there when you’re…finished.” Then she moved quickly down the corridor without another word.

“Wait, finished with
what?”
Vaughn demanded as he started to follow.

That was when he heard Prynn’s voice. It halted him in his tracks.

She was singing softly, a melancholy tune that he didn’t recognize. He followed the sound, which was coming from one of several small curtained rooms that ran along both sides of the wide corridor.

Opaka had already moved on and disappeared into the office. He stood alone in the hallway.

The singing continued, and it tugged at him. Trying not to make any noise, he found the room from which the song was emanating—the only one of the private rooms that was currently occupied, it seemed—and peered through a narrow gap in the curtains that demarcated it. Prynn was sitting in a wooden chair beside a computer screen that displayed what he assumed to be the main portal of this world’s public comnet.

Her chair faced the side of a bed, and lying there next to her was a dying man.

Prynn was holding one of his bony, translucent hands in her own, his thin arm looking impossibly fragile. The hospital gown he wore did little to hide the fact that he was emaciated, his narrow chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly with his slow, labored breathing. His white hair was unkempt, his beard neglected, and
his milky eyes stared sightlessly at the ancient ceiling.

Prynn looked up, halting in midsong, startled to see Vaughn watching her from the corridor.

“Prynn,” rasped the dying man, his voice pitifully weak. “What’s wrong?”

The young woman opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated when Vaughn held up an index finger in front of his lips.

“Prynn…?” the old man said.

“You have a visitor, Dad,” Prynn told him, her eyes still on Vaughn, who shook his head reproachfully.

“Who?”

“I’m not really sure. I just know he comes from far away. I think he’s a friend.” Prynn released her father’s hand and stood up. “I’ll let the two of you talk. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“You should get some sleep,” her father said.

“Later, I promise,” she said, gently kissing his forehead before moving toward the doorway. She said nothing to Vaughn as she walked past him.

Vaughn sighed and stepped through the curtain. At first he simply stood there, more than a meter from the foot of the bed, his revulsion toward the invalid’s utter decrepitude making him reluctant to approach.

“Hello…?” the blind man said. “Are you there…?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Vaughn said quietly as he moved to take Prynn’s vacated chair.

The man in the bed didn’t answer right away. Was it because Vaughn spoke with a stranger’s voice…or because he
didn’t?

“Who are you?”

Vaughn considered evading the question, but only for a moment. “My name is Elias,” he said. “Just like yours.”

Silence again. “I think I understand,” said the other man. “I’ve heard stories…” His voice faded. His lips were parched; his tongue gray and dry.

“Do you need water?” Vaughn looked around and found a sipping bulb on a nearby table. He touched it to his counterpart’s lips and allowed him to drink, hoping he wouldn’t choke.

“Thank you,” the other Elias breathed after he had finished swallowing. His voice sounded clearer now, but was still feeble.

Vaughn set the bulb back down.

“Why did you come here?” Elias asked.

Again, Vaughn didn’t answer immediately. “Someone sent me. But it hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to.”

“What in life ever does?”

Vaughn bowed his head, his eyes clenched shut against the torrent of confused thoughts and conflicting emotions rising up inside him. “What happened to you?” he whispered.

“I got old,” his frail alternate told him, as if nothing else needed to be said.

“But why are you on Bajor, in Vekobet?”

Elias turned his head toward Vaughn as if he could actually see him. But the rheumy eyes were still blank. “Where else should I be? I was one of the last generation of Imperial Terrans. When I was a young man, I watched our civilization transform and weaken, until it was too vulnerable to defend itself from the wolves that came
scratching at our door. Overnight, I went from being a prince and an officer in Starfleet to being a slave. Eventually I wound up on Bajor, sold to the Jaro clan.”

“Jaro? You’re the doctor’s servant?”

“I’m his
friend,
” Elias said, and weak though he was, his anger as he corrected Vaughn was unmistakable. “Essa has protected my family from the beginning, taking us with him wherever he went. He’s great man, with great vision, and I’ve tried my best to help him in his labors.”

Tears formed in the old man’s eyes. “But now, I fear I’ve become a burden to him. And to my daughter.” His voice faded until Vaughn could barely hear him say, “To everyone.”

“You never expected to live this long,” Vaughn realized.

Elias shook his head, his tears finally brimming over and streaming onto his sunken cheeks. “I can tell that surprises you. Maybe where you come from it’s normal for our kind to live to a ripe old age. But here, Terrans almost never make it past seventy. Most of us die from sickness or violence long before we ever get a chance to become…
old.
Essa thinks I’ve hung on this long because I’m so damned stubborn.”

Vaughn smiled in spite of himself. “Is that what you think?”

“Once, maybe. Now…I’m not sure what I’m waiting for. You, perhaps.”

“Me?”

“You think it’s an
accident
that we’re here together now?” Elias asked.

Vaughn blinked. “I told you, someone sent me.”

“But it hasn’t gone the way you thought it would. And now…here you are.”

Vaughn considered what his counterpart seemed to be telling him, and it troubled him greatly. He’d tried to convince himself that his fool’s errand to the alternate universe was a mistake, but an entirely different possibility was taking root in his mind instead. As much as he tried not to think about it, he kept coming back to the same unpleasant but impossible-to-ignore question.

Had Sisko lied to him?

Was
this
the real reason he’d sent Vaughn here, to meet this ruined husk of a man who shared his name? And if that was true, then
why?

Vaughn studied Elias’s pale, craggy, withered face, the thin neck that didn’t seem strong enough to support the weight of his head. So much he saw was familiar, but so much was not. There wasn’t even—

There’s no scar,
he realized.

Vaughn automatically reached beneath the neck of his Bajoran topcoat, felt inside the high collar of his uniform until he touched the raised line of flesh that had been a part of him since his youth. The scar ran all the way up his neck to just behind his left ear. It was a very old injury, one he seldom thought about anymore.

“How much do you remember about Berengaria?” he asked quietly.

A strange look passed across his counterpart’s face. “Why would you need me to tell you about that?”

“I…I’m guessing it must have been very different from the one I knew.”

“What I remember most is that it was a wonderful place to be a boy,” Elias told him. “Wasn’t it that way for you?”

Vaughn closed his eyes. “For a while, yes.”

“Then maybe our birth worlds aren’t so different after all.”

“Maybe,” Vaughn said, opening his eyes again. “I want to ask you…When you lived there, had you ever been to the Vale of Mists?”

“No,” Elias said. “The creatures there, they don’t tolerate intrusion. Why?”

Vaughn tried not to sound disappointed. “It’s not important,” he decided. “I just hoped you might be able to help me remember something that happened to me there a long time ago.”

There was a rumble outside. Vaughn’s chair vibrated beneath him. The water bulb rattled on the table.

“I hear thunder,” Elias said.

Vaughn stood up, listening. “It isn’t thunder,” he said. He moved to the curtain, saw Opaka and Prynn heading toward him from Jaro’s office. Prynn went immediately to check on her father, while the older woman spoke quickly to Vaughn.

“My friends in Singha can make offworld transport available to a small number of us. We can head there as soon as we relocate our artifacts to the Mylean enclave.”

The building vibrated again. “You may not have enough time,” he told her. “Does this place have a basement?”

Opaka shook her head.

“Then keep everyone away from the windows,” Vaughn told her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Vaughn ran out of the infirmary. The rumbling sounded much louder outside, and it seemed to be coming from all directions. He searched for something he thought he’d seen when Opaka had first led him through the alley, and quickly found it: an alcove with a narrow metal ladder that led straight up the side of the infirmary. He grabbed hold of a rung and started to climb.

The roof was a short square wall surrounding a fusionstone dome. Judging from the access panels along the dome’s base and the low vibration he felt through the stone, Vaughn guessed it housed a dedicated power supply for the infirmary, as well as the facility’s climate-control equipment. He kept low as he drew his phaser and crept around the dome’s perimeter.

Once he’d reached the north wall, his view opened up. From here Vaughn could see over the rooftop of the refectory, as well as those of the other nearby buildings. From this vantage point, he had a fairly decent overview of the entire camp.

All around Vekobet, touching down on clouds of dust set swirling by their thrusters, were Klingon ships.

They’ve come for Kira and me,
he realized.
But how would they have known—?

His combadge chirped.
“Kira to Vaughn.”

“Vaughn here. I see them, Captain.”

“Assessment?”

“An invasion force of six
Chutok
-class assault ships
completely surrounding the labor camp. I see soldiers disembarking. If they’re like the
Chutok
s of our universe, we can expect a minimum combined troop strength in excess of nine hundred, backed by ship-based armaments. I don’t think there’s any question why they’re here. We’ve screwed these people but good, Captain.”