Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key (7 page)

Iliana’s inner circle was growing impatient. She had been keeping them at arm’s length for too long, telling them only what she wanted them to know about her plans, which they still believed extended no further than expanding their criminal organization and eventually using her pet Jem’Hadar to inflict some cruel retribution against the commander of Deep Space 9. But it was obvious to them that Iliana was holding back, and her increasing detachment from their operations was
encouraging doubt to flower where once there had been only faith.

Iliana tried to ease those doubts, to offer Mazagalanthi and Fellen and Telal the reassurance they so clearly craved, even though their partnership was nearing the end of its usefulness to her. The bonds they had forged during their escape from Letau and since were not irrelevant, but they were becoming as far removed from Iliana’s sense of her own destiny as her artistic pursuits had become after she had learned that Ataan would never be returning from Bajor.

Her inner circle would never understand those changes, she knew. And with Shing-kur’s willing help, Iliana made sure that none of them would ever survive an attempt to turn against her. A brief search of the arsenal of clandestine equipment in Grennokar’s old storage compartments yielded enough essential components to enable Iliana and Shing-kur to fabricate neurotoxin-filled implants, tiny subcutaneous poison-delivery devices capable of releasing their lethal payloads upon receipt of a specific and individualized remote command. Once the devices were completed, filled, and sealed, Shing-kur used a silent hypospray to inject the devices into the bodies of each of the others, one by one, while they slept.

Afterward, while standing before Iliana, Shing-kur made the ultimate gesture of supreme fealty, willingly giving herself a shot as well.

It was as if her friend already knew that even she would not be able to follow Iliana down the Path that her personal destiny demanded. Moved once again by Shing-kur’s selfless devotion, Iliana insisted that they each take
a remote subcutaneous kill-switch, to use against any one of her inner circle at will should any of them ever be compromised, or become disloyal.

It was the nearest thing she would ever know to exchanging vows with another.

“The more I learn about her, the more amazed I am that Intendant Kira has survived as long as she has,” Shing-kur said between bites of a plant that looked a little like a Bajoran desert cactus. “You’d think her superiors in the Alliance would have put down a megalomaniac like her long ago.” She paused, her rising concern coloring her eyes a bright orange-red. “Aren’t you going to eat your dinner?”

Iliana spared a glance at her cooling slab of roast
porli
before shaking her head. The refrigeration unit full of Bajoran delicacies had been a pleasant surprise when it was found among the cargo taken in one of her organization’s recent pirate raids, but she found herself unable to think much about food at the moment. She felt strangely ill at ease, almost as if she’d forgotten something important, and the feeling had already utterly sabotaged her appetite.

Seated across the table from her in the otherwise empty Grennokar mess hall, Shing-kur made another attempt to engage Iliana in conversation. “I’ll say this for her, though: When the Intendant embarks on a new scheme, she doesn’t fool around.”

“Then she and I
do
have something in common after all,” Iliana said, absently rubbing the hand that held the
Paghvaram.
The bracelet felt cool against her skin.

“Well, she definitely lacks your imagination, but she
is
resourceful,” Shing-kur acknowledged. “She actually seems to be manipulating her patron, the Klingon regent, in much the same way we’re manipulating her.”

“A fitting symmetry then,” said Iliana, now acutely aware that something was wrong. Her hand and wrist were growing colder, as if the bracelet were made of ice. She raised the artifact to her eyes, catching what seemed like a flicker of movement in the tiny bead of green it carried. Iliana gazed deeply into the
Paghvaram
at that moment.

Then the Orb fragment gazed as deeply back into her. And all at once, Grennokar was gone.

She was enclosed instead in whiteness, surrounded by a void in which only the cadence of her heart seemed to exist. She became aware of its echo, a sympathetic rhythm that did not fade, but seemed to gain strength…and she understood that it was not an echo at all.

Somewhere in the perfect emptiness, another heart was beating in tandem with hers.

She turned and saw herself…yet not herself: Iliana Ghemor as she might look today, had she never been altered to replace Kira Nerys—the ghost of a life she’d never lived, her black hair and her gray, ridged skin achingly familiar, like a lost reflection.

The specter was watching her intently, and Iliana suddenly saw the truth behind the other’s deep brown eyes—the essence of who she was, and all she had ever been, revealed in shards of memory that seemed to explode from her like broken glass, fragments of a life that assailed Iliana, assaulted her.

Mocked her.

No.

The Cardassian’s expression had changed. Where once there had been confusion and curiosity, now there was alarm. There was no mistaking the abhorrence Iliana saw in the familiar eyes, the utter loathing, the undisguised contempt.

And there was something else in those eyes now: resolve.

Iliana recoiled as the other woman took a determined step toward her.

Stay…away…from…me!

“Nerys!”

Iliana gasped as the white nothingness all around her abruptly vanished, along with her nemesis. She was once again back in Grennokar, the accusing stare of her distorted reflection replaced by Shing-kur’s vermilion worry. The Kressari’s hands held her own tightly, covering the
Paghvaram.

“Nerys, are you okay?”

“What—what just happened to me? Where did I go?”

“You didn’t go anywhere,” Shing-kur told her. “You just…froze where you were sitting for a few minutes. You didn’t blink. I’m not sure if you were even breathing.”

Iliana jerked her hands away from Shing-kur and stumbled away from the table. She forced herself to look again at the artifact on her wrist, but the Orb fragment now seemed as inert as any ordinary piece of jewelry.

“She’s coming for me,” Iliana whispered.

“Who?”

Iliana felt her panic slowly giving way to anger. “This place…this place needs to go on high alert, effective immediately,” she said.

The vermilion in Shing-kur’s eyes intensified. “What?”

“Tell our people! There’s a dangerous Cardassian woman on her way to Harkoum, an assassin. Put a bounty on her head, promise them anything—just make sure everyone knows she has to be stopped before she gets anywhere near Grennokar!”

Iliana paused, glancing at her palm again. “I have to make my move,” she told the Kressari. “You have to put pressure on the Intendant, Shing. Tell her she’s running out of time, that it has to be soon.”

Shing-kur’s eyes had yet to change to a calmer hue, but she didn’t question her orders—even though she must have known they meant that she and Iliana would necessarily be parting ways sooner than planned.

“I’ll take care of it,” the Kressari promised. “But then I want you to tell me exactly who is coming after you, and how you know about it. Will you do that for me?”

Iliana nodded. It didn’t even occur to her to refuse. It was first time Shing-kur had asked her for anything. And it would likely be the last.

“What about Taran’atar?” asked Shing-kur.

Iliana smiled. “It’s time we brought him home.”

G
hemor ran through the Habitat Ring, on the hunt.

It was clear to her that her target was taking steps not to be found. Maybe he knew she was on him, maybe he didn’t, but his movements through the station during the last fifteen minutes were decidedly evasive. Back on Terok Nor, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But the very limited access she’d been permitted to the labyrinthine recesses of Deep Space 9—however familiar this station seemed—meant that she needed to find her target before he found refuge in some part of the station that had been denied to her.

Instead, he found her.

“Is there something you want from me, Ms. Ghemor?”

Iliana shook her head and turned, momentarily unable to believe that he had out-hounded her. It wasn’t the sort of skill she’d expected from a human.

“How did you do that?”

Benjamin Sisko arched a nearly nonexistent eyebrow at her from the jutting bulkhead against which he’d con
cealed himself. “I picked up a few tricks over the years from a Cardassian who used to live here. He was good.”

“He’d have to be,” Ghemor said.

Sisko stepped out into the corridor. “Now do you mind telling me why you’ve been following me around the station?”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“That much I’d gathered. What about?”

“When we were in ops earlier, Captain Kira was ready to take me back to my universe, to help my people against my counterpart. Commander Vaughn changed her mind, convinced her to take him instead. I want to know why.”

Sisko shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Commander Vaughn.”

As if that were an option now! “I’m asking
you,
sir.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you, Ms. Ghemor,” Sisko said as he started to walk away.

“You mean you
won’t
help me,” Ghemor countered.

Sisko stopped and looked at her.

“I saw the look Vaughn gave you before he beamed out,” she continued. “I’m well trained at reading people’s faces. He was acting at your behest. So I’ll ask you again: Why?”

“Let me ask
you
something, Ms. Ghemor. Why this sudden preoccupation with returning to your universe? Considering all the trouble you went to to get here, you seem strangely eager to return.”

Ghemor felt her anger rising. “I only came to your mixed-up continuum to stop my counterpart before she stole the mantle of Emissary in my universe. I would have
thought you of all people would appreciate the enormity of that.”

Sisko’s tone remained even. “I’m surprised to hear you say that, given that we both know you had the perfect way to stop your counterpart while you were still on the other side. And you didn’t use it.”

Damn him.
“So you sent Vaughn?”

“Someone had to step up,” Sisko said. “Because up to now, too many people have been dropping the ball.” He moved on down the curving corridor.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Captain,” she called after him.

“That’s the difference between us, Ms. Ghemor,” he answered over his shoulder. “This isn’t a game to me.”

“But it is to Them, isn’t it?” Ghemor asked.

Sisko stopped.
That got to him,
she thought, gratified that her words had finally struck a sensitive spot.

“They treat our lives like
kotra
pieces,” she pressed. “Tell me, Captain, how do you go along with it—putting your own people’s lives on the line for some abstract concept of fate, abandoning any sense of free will, any sense of choice—”

Sisko turned to meet her accusing stare one last time. “Everyone has a choice, Ms. Ghemor,” he told her.
“Everyone.”

He left her alone in the corridor, and never looked back.

It was with a profound sense of irony that Ro Laren had become an expert on Bajoran prophecy, studying for endless hours in her quarters.

She’d never been the religious sort—not since the death of her father, anyway. If growing up during the Occupation had made her doubtful of the Prophets, Ro Gale’s cruel and senseless murder before her seven-year-old eyes had solidified her complete rejection of the Bajoran faith. She didn’t deny the existence of the wormhole or the sentients within it, of course. But that wasn’t the same thing as believing they were gods. As far as Ro was concerned, any mysticism attached to them wasn’t merely unnecessary; it served only to muddle the truth, effectively widening the gulf between the darkness and the light that her people’s religion was ostensibly supposed to narrow.

And yet, quite inexplicably, it was Ro’s very skepticism that fueled her absorption of Bajor’s wealth of religious writings. Because of the accepted transtemporal nature of the wormhole entities, no one disputed that the prophecies were essentially imperfect attempts to understand genuine flashes of precognitive insight—courtesy of contact with beings who existed outside of linear time—going back thousands of years. Where people differed, of course, was in their interpretation of those quasimystical ancient insights. Deciphering those florid descriptions had long been the passion of scholars and theologians all over the planet, as well as a serious area of inquiry—ever since the rediscovery of the long-lost Book of Ohalu—of one agnostic security officer on Deep Space 9.

Admittedly, Ro’s attempts to understand the frame of mind of Iliana Ghemor were leading her into turbulent philosophical waters. If Iliana’s intention was indeed
to fulfill the prophecy of the Emissary in the alternate universe, Ro needed to understand what she expected to achieve by doing so.

The obvious first stop was to review the prophecies that foretold the coming of that religious icon. Those texts, at least, tended to agree on the specific circumstances that would define the Prophets’ fated intermediary with the Bajoran people: the Emissary was the one to whom the Prophets would call, the one who would open the Gates of the Celestial Temple, and the one to whom the Prophets would give back life. For Iliana, Ro knew, the key variable in that formula would be the second one. It was the condition that, in Benjamin Sisko’s case, had been fulfilled literally when he discovered the wormhole. The other two criteria were much more open to interpretation, and thus easier to rationalize.

Was that enough to make her Emissary, though? Ro had studied the incident with Akorem Laan, the time-lost Bajoran poet who had, in the opinion of many at the time, fulfilled the prophecy more perfectly than Sisko had. And yet, in the end, it was Sisko—alien, nonbeliever, and wounded spirit—whose connection to the wormhole beings had been reaffirmed.

Sisko…

Ro rubbed her eyes. She needed a break. And thanks to the bargain she’d struck with her physical therapist, Etana Kol, she was sworn to leave her quarters and take her meals on the Promenade; this was to force her to practice using the powered exoframe that allowed her to exercise her legs while her spine continued to heal following Taran’atar’s back-breaking assault.

She reached for her cane and struggled to get out of her chair. How quickly things seemed to change. Had it really been less than a year since she had begun a semblance of friendship with a Jem’Hadar soldier? Ro had always been slow to warm up to people, and those she counted among her friends were few. One of that small number, DS9’s former science officer, Shar, had recently gone back to visit his homeworld of Andor and had never returned. And now Taran’atar—

Theirs was an unlikely friendship to be sure, if one could even call it that. They’d first bonded during a harrowing mission to Sindorin, each one learning unexpected things about the other. Later he had helped Ro expose and capture the assassin of Bajoran First Minister Shakaar Edon. It still made her laugh when she recalled the tense moment when Taran’atar had admitted to being unable to provide Shakaar with reliable intel, and he suggested that she, Ro Laren, make a leap of faith.

People think he has no sense of humor,
she thought.
I know him better than that.

She looked down at the jointed metal struts that covered her uniform from the waist down.

Or at least I
thought
I did.

She pressed her cane down upon the deck, and with slow, difficult steps, she made her way toward the door and out into the corridor.