Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key (21 page)

E
zri Dax stood on the bridge, watching the wormhole open yet again as she considered everything that had transpired aboard
Defiant
during the past few tumultuous hours—as well as the recent developments from Deep Space 9’s mirror image.

According to the reports that had just come in—and the evidence of Dax’s own eyes—O’Brien and his people had successfully beaten back the Klingons who had seized Terok Nor, and had succeeded in steering the station away from the wormhole’s event horizon. The station appeared to have sustained only minor structural damage from the tremendous shearing forces of the wormhole’s mouth, and had already been settled into a stable parking orbit that corresponded—coincidentally?—to Deep Space 9’s position back home.

Thanks to the Talarian fleet and the two
Defiant
s, the Klingon fleet had been entirely routed from the B’hava’el system, at least for the present.

Vaughn had beamed to
Defiant
with Taran’atar in custody, and the Jem’Hadar offered no resistance as Lieu
tenant McCallum and Ensign Gordimer escorted him straight to the brig.

Dax turned as Vaughn stepped out of the turbolift and onto the bridge, where he cast an appreciative glance at the damage that surrounded him, as well as the organized mayhem of the crew hustling to make final repairs.

He offered Dax a knowing smile. “You’ve never really captained a starship until you’ve wrecked the bridge at least once,” he said before moving on to a mutual debriefing, each bringing the other quickly up to speed about recent events.

Together, Dax and Vaughn soon reached the conclusion that the only important question that remained unanswered was what had happened to Kira and the two Ilianas. If Taran’atar was to be believed—and Vaughn seemed to think that he was—then Kira and Ghemor had gone after the Intendant alone, and all three were unaccounted for in the aftermath of the explosion that had destroyed Terok Nor’s primary airlock.

If they’d been blown out into space, it seemed impossible to think that any of them could have survived.

And then Ezri saw the wormhole open again.

No ship entered or emerged, but Rahim reported detecting two unknown energy emissions: one aimed at Terok Nor, the other at Deep Space 9’s
Defiant.

A moment later a blinding flash appeared on the bridge, smack between the flight control station and the main viewscreen. At the center of the intensifying brilliance, for just an instant, Dax thought she saw the familiar shape of a Bajoran Orb, before the light coalesced into the familiar form of Captain Kira.

Dax allowed a broad grin to escape. “Captain on the bridge!” she cried.

The bridge became a party after that. And as word spread, the jubilation spread throughout the entire ship. Nerys was peppered with questions, naturally, but she kept saying, “Later.” She said she was beyond tired, and frankly looked it. All she wanted now, she said, was for the crew to finish making preparations to get under way for the journey home.

“Captain,” Sam said suddenly. “We’re getting a hail from Terok Nor.”

“On screen,” Kira said, turning to face the transmission.

It was Ghemor. Or, at least, Ezri
thought
it was Ghemor. She looked like herself again—Cardassian. But her visage carried a strange serenity now that Ezri could recall having seen only once before.

On Benjamin’s face.

Ghemor was in ops. Beside her stood O’Brien and Keiko Ishikawa, along with two Bajorans that she recognized as Jaro and Winn.

“We just wanted to thank you and your crew for everything you’ve done, Captain,”
Ghemor said to Kira.
“But if you don’t mind, everybody here has agreed that it’s time that the people of this universe got back to handling their own affairs.”

What a nice way to tell us to get lost,
Ezri thought, suppressing a grin.

“So what happens next?” Kira asked.

Ghemor grinned.
“What happens is that things really start to change around here.”

“For the better?” Kira asked.

“We’ll see,”
Ghemor said, and the transmission ceased.

Dax watched as Kira took the command chair, sighing as she settled into it. The captain took one final look at the image of Terok Nor before she spoke the words Ezri had been waiting to hear.

“Set a course for the wormhole, Ensign Tenmei. Take us home.”

K
ira leaned forward in the straight-backed chair she had brought with her to security, her elbows resting on her knees, her eyes fixed upon laced fingers. She was less than a meter from the force field barrier that separated her from Taran’atar, but not a word had passed between them during the entire ninety minutes that had elapsed since she’d seated herself in front of his holding cell.

Finally she lifted her head. “What am I going to do with you?”

On the other side of the invisible barrier, Taran’atar answered her only with silence. But she refused to let that silence dissuade her. On some level, she suspected she was doing this more for herself than for him.

Can that be true? Has it become more about me than about him?

She considered the feel of her heartbeat beneath her breast, the steady rhythm of the artificial organ upon which her life had depended ever since the Jem’Hadar had destroyed the original one. Perhaps Sisko had been right when he’d suggested that Taran’atar had been
too confused and too conflicted by Iliana’s control to distinguish friend from foe when his new god had summoned him to her side. Something inside him had simply broken in that moment, and he really was not to blame for the lethal violence he had unleashed upon her and Ro.

“I think…” Kira began, and then immediately lapsed back into silence.
Why is this so hard? He’s himself again. Julian confirmed that there’s no longer any trace of Iliana’s control.

So why can’t I simply do what I came here to do?

She looked into his hard, cobbled face. It was unreadable. And she knew that was the problem, right there: she couldn’t tell what he wanted. In fact, the very idea of wanting anything was alien to him. For all of Odo’s good intentions, when you got right down to it Taran’atar was little more than the test subject in an ambitious social experiment—one designed to test the possibility of breaking the patterns that the Founders had engineered into him.

An experiment aimed at enabling weaponized sentient beings, creatures familiar only with obedience and violence, to live in peace by choice.

The problem with such test subjects, unfortunately, was that they were sometimes tested to destruction.

So how can this possibly end for him?

She bowed her head and tried again, speaking slowly. “I think I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that what happened—the things you’ve done—weren’t your fault.”

“But it was.”

Kira looked up. They were the first words Taran’atar had uttered since he’d surrendered.

“I’m guilty,” he said.

Kira sat up straight. “Of what?”

“Of being weak,” Taran’atar told her. “Of being vulnerable. Of being a liability to you and those for whom you are responsible. In the Dominion, such crimes are irredeemable.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Kira said. “But you aren’t in the Dominion. You’re in the Federation, where we have far more shades of gray to our lives.”

“So I have seen.”

“There’s something I want to ask you….”

The Jem’Hadar nodded slowly. “Ask.”

“All right. If I were to release you from your service to me, what would you do with your freedom?”

“I would return to the Dominion,” came an answer that sounded almost like a reflex to Kira’s ear. “I would report on my actions, and then accept the judgment of those who understand what it means when a Jem’Hadar soldier breaks his oath.”

“You don’t want to be judged,” Kira said quietly. “You want to be punished.”

“I
deserve
to be punished.”

But Kira wasn’t satisfied with that. And she wasn’t certain that he was, either.

“If you’re so convinced of your own guilt, then why haven’t you simply taken your own life?” she said. “After all, other Jem’Hadar have done the same thing for far less.”

Taran’atar didn’t answer her that time.

“You see?” Kira said at length. “Shades of gray. I can appreciate your preference for a black-and-white existence. It’s a lot simpler—binary: yes or no, on or off, live or die.

“The problem for you, as I see it, is that you’ve already crossed over into a world that’s a lot more complicated than that. You’ve started questioning the order of things. I honestly don’t know if there’s any going back for you once you’ve crossed that line.”

Again Taran’atar answered only with silence. Kira sighed and stood up, coming to within a few centimeters of the security force field.

“You once told me that the faith we both had in Odo could be our common ground,” she said.

“I remember.”

“I’m going to honor that faith for both of us. So there are two things I want you to know. The first thing is that there’s a decommissioned Bajoran scoutship at Port Four on the Docking Ring. It’s been disarmed and it won’t do better than warp five.

“The second thing is that we’ve repaired the damage you did to your quarters. It’s exactly as it was before.

“What I’m telling you is, you have a choice. You can return to the life you had before you were compromised, try to move beyond it, and rebuild what you have here. Or you can leave. Go where you want. As I said, the choice is yours. I’m setting you free…. What you do with your freedom is up to you.”

Kira reached toward the control pad on the holding cell’s outer wall, and the force field snapped off. Then she turned away from him and started to leave.

“I was not meant to be free,” Taran’atar said.

Kira stopped at the exit, and answered him over her shoulder. “Maybe. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to find a way to deal with freedom, just the same. The strings have been cut. All of them. For better or worse, Taran’atar, you have to make your own choices now. But whatever you decide to do from this moment on, you won’t be able to hide behind your genes anymore.”

Kira walked out, not waiting on his decision.

With a gentle upward push, Sisko tossed the baseball a rough meter into the air. By the time the small sphere reached the apex of its ascent, he had completed his backswing, and he was now following through as the ball fell to the level of his heart. The crack of wood against tightly stitched pseudoleather echoed across Kendra Valley as the ball rocketed into the clear sky, sailing over the line of trees that defined the western edge of his and Kasidy’s home on Bajor.

In the shade of his favorite
nya
tree, Sisko lowered his bat and scowled as he watched the ball disappear from sight. It was still arcing too far to the right. Never in his life had he seemed to have so much trouble keeping his aim true.

He stooped to retrieve another ball from the half-empty bucket at the base of the tree. As he straightened, he caught sight of a familiar figure marching toward him across the meadow that led back to the house: Vaughn.

Like Sisko, the commander was in civilian clothes—black turtleneck shirt and matching trousers under a light brown jacket. But this informal attire did little to
mask the tension in the older man’s bearing as Vaughn closed the distance between them. Ben saw what was coming, and he let the bat and ball slip from his fingers, keeping his hands at his sides.

Vaughn came at him and swung, striking Sisko hard across the jaw.

Sisko stumbled back a half step and breathed, letting the pain do its work, waiting as his vision blurred for a moment and then cleared. From the instant he’d learned about Vaughn’s return to Deep Space 9, he’d expected this, and the commander’s choice to come to him in civvies had merely clinched it; Vaughn simply wasn’t the type to strike a superior officer while wearing the uniform. And they both knew Sisko had it coming.

“You son of a bitch,” Vaughn snarled. “I trusted you.”

“I know,” Sisko answered quietly. “And I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” Vaughn repeated the words as if they’d been spoken in an unfamiliar language. “Do you have any idea what I did over there?
Do you?”

“Yes. I do,” said Sisko. “You ended one person’s suffering so that others could be saved.”

“Why?
Why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“Oh, the hell you didn’t,” Vaughn said. “The hell you didn’t! You played on my trust, you told me everything you knew I’d need to hear to get me to play your game. You even convinced me to lie to my own CO—your friend! You planned all that very carefully, Captain, so don’t you dare stand there and tell me to my face that you didn’t have a choice!
Everyone
has a choice!”

“It was necessary.”

“Necessary for
whom?
” Vaughn demanded.

Sisko sighed. “You know Who, Elias.”

Vaughn stared at him. When he found his voice again, it seemed on the verge of cracking. “Was it supposed to be me? Did you send me over to—” He stopped, as if afraid to ask the question, then tried again. “Did I have to go through all that because They meant for me to become the other side’s Emissary?”

“Would you really believe any answer I gave you at this point?”

That seemed to surprise Vaughn. “I don’t know…. Probably not.”

“Then maybe you should let it go for now.”

Vaughn shook his head. “Don’t do that! Don’t talk to me as if there’s some dire secret you’re protecting me from.”

“It isn’t for your protection, Elias,” Sisko said. “It’s for everyone else’s. It was never about you. It was about making sure that when events do finally come to a head, all the right players are on the field, exactly where they need to be in order to win.”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Vaughn asked. “Do you have any idea what you sound like? What the hell has happened to you?”

Sisko abruptly turned away and recovered his bat. “You haven’t known me long enough to ask me that.”

Vaughn yanked the bat out of his grasp, forcing Sisko to look at him. “Maybe not. But I know what the people who served under Captain Benjamin Sisko think about him. I know he earned their respect, their admiration, and their loyalty. And with all due respect, sir—that
doesn’t sound like a man who would manipulate someone as callously as you manipulated me.”

“Maybe I’m just not deserving of my sterling reputation,” Sisko said, the bitterness of his words ringing in his own ears.

“Or maybe you’ve simply gotten in too deep with this whole Emissary thing,” Vaughn said. “You aren’t living by
your
rules anymore. You’re living by
Theirs.”

Sisko had no answer.

The commander’s knuckles were white around the slender end of Sisko’s bat. Then, as if fearing what he might do next, Vaughn broke it against the trunk of the
nya
tree.

“Find someone else to play your games, Captain,” Vaughn said as he walked away. “I’m done with them.”

Ro hobbled off the turbolift on her cane and stepped into the Habitat Ring. She would need to hurry if she was going to have time to shower before her next physical therapy appointment with Kol. Now that the station was starting to settle back into some semblance of normalcy, she found that she couldn’t wait to be free of her damned exoframe. Subjecting herself regularly to Kol’s sadistic ministrations was the only way she had to keep her recovery time to a tolerable minimum.

Sweat beaded on her forehead as she rounded the curve of the deck that led to the sector of the ring that housed her quarters. She could see her door.

Almost there.

As she got closer, she noticed that someone had stuck a small envelope to the external keypad.

That’s odd,
she thought.
Who would
—Oh. Quark. Of
course.

She shook her head as she grabbed the envelope and keyed the door open with her thumb.
He just won’t give up,
she thought, letting her cane drop as she reached her sofa. She settled into the cushions and unsealed the envelope.
What’ll it be this time? Another holosuite invitation? Dinner in his quarters? A weekend getaway in Ashalla?
Despite the fact that she and Quark had, by mutual agreement, decided a few weeks ago to keep things casual between them, he was still an incorrigible flirt.

Ro took out the piece of hardcopy and unfolded it.

It wasn’t from Quark.

The note bore a few handwritten Bajoran characters, including the Bajoran analog for the sender’s initial. The message was brief:

Ro stared at the note for a moment until she took it in and comprehended it. Suddenly, she found it difficult to breathe. Her emotions seethed. She wasn’t even sure which emotions they were, only that they were coming too fast and threatened to overwhelm her. She closed her eyes against her conflicted feelings and crumpled the note in her fist.

She tried to relax, and after her breathing had finally settled down she read the note again.

This time tears welled up in her eyes.

“Computer,” she called out, reaching for her cane. “Locate Taran’atar.”

“Taran’atar is not aboard the station.”

Ro blinked. “Repeat.”

“Taran’atar is not aboard the station.”

The cane fell from Ro’s fingers, landing on the carpet, along with her tears. She didn’t answer the door when Kol came calling a short while later, and she wept long into the night.