2: Deep Space 9
THAT FACE.
Captain Kira's eyes lolled in Taran'atar's direction, glazed, unfocused, dimmed of vitality, downcast just shy of meeting the Jem'Hadar's own unwavering stare. He did not know whether her failure to look into his eyes was the result of her fading strength or a silent expression of her reproach. She lay on her side, half-folded against the bulkhead, surrounded by a quickly spreading pool of her own bright-crimson blood. The ferric odor of it was sweet to Taran'atar, but he took no joy in it. His blade remained embedded in her chest, perfectly on target for her heart.
Next to her in the corridor, in front of the turbolift near his now abandoned quarters, Lieutenant Ro was sprawled on the deck. The acute angle of Ro's upper torso was a testament to the grievous nature of her injuries. Taking down the security chief first had been the wise choice. Kira was more experienced in personal combat, but trying to eliminate her first might have given the other Bajoran time to counterattack, thereby splitting Taran'atar's attention. He had chosen to remove Ro from the equation instantly, then focus solely on Kira.
He pressed the turbolift call button.
Looking down at Kira, a seething anger swelled inside him. Though it had been the Founder Odo who had dispatched Taran'atar to this miserable place, with orders to observe Alpha Quadrant species and cultures, all of Taran'atar's fury now was fixated on the Bajoran commanding officer of Deep Space 9. As much as she had done to earn his respect -- especially because she had not needed to since Odo had expressly ordered Taran'atar to obey Kira as he would obey Odo himself -- she now had come to represent everything that he hated about his exile from the Dominion, from other Jem'Hadar, from the life he had been genetically designed to lead unto death.
Kira's breathing grew ragged and faltered into weak gasps.
The turbolift doors opened, and Taran'atar stepped inside. "Runabout Pad A," he said.
In her dying eyes, Kira's shock and sorrow were evident.
Tired of the oppressive weight of her gaze, Taran'atar purged his mind of unnecessary thoughts and shrouded himself. The turbolift doors closed. As the car ascended toward its destination, he withdrew to its rear left corner and coiled himself to strike in case someone inadvertently joined him in the lift en route to the launch bay -- or attempted to intercept him during his exit from the station.
The car's swift ascent slowed, and there was a faintly audible hum and clack of magnetic brakes and safety interlocks changing orientation as the turbolift switched to a horizontal track of movement. Seconds later the turbolift accelerated again, hurtling around the outer edge of the habitat ring.
In recent weeks Taran'atar had felt increasingly isolated and directionless, and the sense that he had deviated from the Jem'Hadar ideal had torn at him. A visit to the female Founder, held prisoner by the Federation at its secret Ananke Alpha detention facility, had only exacerbated Taran'atar's growing misgivings. For reasons about which he could only speculate, she had in essence denied her divinity and that of all the Founders. He had tried to ascribe her remarks to the strain of captivity, but that had been only the first of many equally weak rationalizations. Could a true deity go mad?
Bereft of purpose, he now was robbed of his gods.
For the past three days, he had sequestered himself in his quarters. His agitation and confusion had fed upon and reinforced one another until at last he'd exploded in a fury. Unleashing his rage on hallucinations of the station's denizens, all of whom he had grown to loathe, he had within minutes destroyed the spare, ugly furnishings of his quarters, broken one tine off his blade by hurling it against the wall, and compromised the integrity of an interior bulkhead by hurling himself against it.
That had sounded an alarm, which had provoked Kira and Ro into hailing him. He had ignored them, prompting them to investigate.
Now he was leaving the station.
The confusion, the indecision, the lack of direction that had plagued him for weeks was gone. Clarity had returned with action. Forward motion was its own reward. Doubt had been replaced by certainty, by an absolute trust that he would know what measures to take when he arrived at his next juncture. He was beyond the vague directives of Odo, braving the uncharted waters of free will.
A deepening hum accompanied the deceleration of the turbolift. It stopped, and the doors opened with a low hiss. Taran'atar's senses detected no one in the corridor outside the turbolift. The turbolift gate opened. "Fusion core," he instructed the computer. "Grid twenty-two." Still shrouded, he slipped out of the turbolift before the gate slid shut. As the turbolift car sped away, he skulked toward the door to the maintenance hangar adjacent to Runabout Pad A.
There were muffled sounds of activity from the opposite side of the door. Taran'atar glanced through the curved pane of transparent aluminum in the rust-hued, circular portal. On the other side, a Bajoran man in a Starfleet engineer's uniform conferred with Ensign Prynn Tenmei, the senior flight controller of the U.S.S. Defiant. Parked on the elevator pad in the bay behind them was the Euphrates. The hangar's top doors retracted slowly into the hull, opening the compartment to space. Only an invisible forcefield stood between the two Starfleet personnel and a violent decompression experience. The engineer pointed out some details on a padd, gestured at the Euphrates, then handed the padd to Tenmei. She accepted it with a small nod, then the two separated and moved in different directions. The man passed through a door on the left side of the hangar, while Tenmei walked briskly toward the runabout and tapped her combadge. A moment later, the small ship's navigational thrusters began warming up with a resonant hum and whine that Taran'atar heard clearly through the door. Tenmei paused momentarily to inspect the runabout's port warp nacelle, then she perused her padd once more. She turned off the small data device and bounded up the step through the open port hatch of the Euphrates.
Taran'atar pressed the manual door-open button. The circular hatch rolled away. He stepped through quickly and tapped the door-close button on the other side as soon as he was clear of the threshold. Still shrouded, he took a whiff of the air. Fuel vapors and the odor of freshly fused duranium bonds masked most of the body scents, but only Tenmei's and the engineer's were fresh enough to be noticeable.
Confident that he was alone in the hangar, Taran'atar walked quickly toward the runabout and slipped gracefully sideways through its closing port hatch. He had expected to depart Deep Space 9 alone, but this scenario, he knew, was not without its advantages.
Prynn settled into the pilot's seat in the cockpit of the Euphrates. With her left hand she powered up the drive systems, and with her right she transmitted her flight plan to Lieutenant Dax in ops. Though the runabout was far less complicated than the Defiant, she treated it with the same professional attention as she methodically worked through the protocol of a preflight check.
Routines and procedures had been a saving grace to her since her return from Andor. Her thoughts had remained anchored there -- on Tower Hill, watching the lightning on the ocean and the wind whipping through Shar's flowing white hair -- even as she herself had made the long journey back to Deep Space 9. Loneliness was not a novelty to Prynn. She had grown accustomed to the feeling, thanks in part to the absentee parenting style of Elias Vaughn, a career Starfleet officer who was never at a loss for urgent assignments.
Shar's absence, however, gnawed at her. She had let him go willingly; she had urged him to go, to leave her and embrace the start of a new path in his life . . . but now, back here, without him, she struggled not to succumb to regret. A future rich with possibilities that Shar thought he had lost had been offered to him, and Prynn hadn't been able to ask him to turn his back on his bondmates, on his family, on his people. Give up his birthright for me, she scolded her selfish side. I couldn't do that. I wouldn't.
Inhaling sharply, she turned her mind back to the task in front of her, a simple flight check of recent upgrades to the Euphrates. The ship, according to Lieutenant Nog, the station's chief of operations, had not been "a hundred percent" ever since Dr. Bashir and Lieutenant Dax had crash-landed it nearly eight months earlier on the planet Sindorin. The young Ferengi engineer's notes had also cited damage inflicted during Captain Kira's mission, weeks later, to save the human colony on Europa Nova. Although the regular duty pilots had reported that the ship had been handling just fine since its return to service in June, Nog had ordered a full upgrade of the ship's warp and impulse systems. So far the work was only half-done, but Nog wanted a short test flight, to set a benchmark for the next round of improvements.
Most of the pilots had concocted excuses to avoid this four-hour solo flight. Prynn had volunteered for it. Despite her new belief that some kinds of damage might never really be reparable, she shared Nog's commitment to hands-on upkeep and respected his attention to minuscule details . . . but the truth was that she just wanted to have four hours of perfect solitude, at the controls of a ship in flight. That the ship had just been retooled to be faster than ever was simply a bonus.
An indicator on her dashboard blinked green twice, signaling that her flight plan had been approved. With a quick, well-rehearsed series of taps, she closed the port side hatch and opened a comm channel to the station's operations center. "Ops, this is Euphrates, requesting liftoff clearance at Runabout Pad A."
"Acknowledged, Euphra...
