Ezri was gratified to note that none of the shuttlecraft Sagan’ s critical systems had sustained mortal damage during the encounter with the enigmatic alien artifact. But because the little vessel was limited to impulse power during the trip back from the depths of System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud, the return flight to the Defiant took nearly forty minutes. While they were en route, Commander Vaughn supplied a quick briefing about the Defiant’ s intervention in the fight between the two local space vessels, as well as a summary of the gravest injuries sustained by the crew of the less well armed—and currently crippled—ship. With the help of several hastily dragooned corpsmen, Nurse Krissten Richter was struggling to keep up with the very worst trauma cases.

Ezri hoped that Krissten wasn’t fighting a losing battle. Although she was better than competent, Julian’s assistant was only a medical technician, after all, not a doctor. Julian’s obvious anxiety was perfectly understandable.

As the Defiant hove into view on the screen, so did the battered alien vessel that was keeping station about two hundred meters off her port bow. Ezri forced down any outward show of apprehension as she noted the black rents in the other ship’s pitted hull, obviously the result of an unhappy encounter with a concentrated phaser or disruptor barrage. Most of the internal lights were dark, and only the exterior running lights allowed her to see the lines of the long, irregularly shaped hull.

Relinquishing the piloting chores to Nog, Ezri glanced up at Julian, who stood directly behind her flight chair, his expression anxious as he studied the alien ship. She took his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze as Nog put the Sagan on its final approach to the docking bay built into the Defiant’ s ventral hull.

Julian returned the squeeze, though his expression remained grim. Ezri could tell at once that he was already in “triage mode.”

“Bashir to Defiant. Please beam me directly to the medical bay.”

The clear tenor voice of junior engineer Jason Senkowski responded, “Acknowledged.”

Ezri released Julian’s hand so he could take a step back. Noting that Nog’s attention seemed occupied, she mouthed a silent “I love you” to Julian just before the shimmering transporter beam took him. A moment later, the Sagan floated upward into the narrow shuttlebay in the Defiant’ s belly and was maglocked into its parked position as the docking-bay door silently rolled closed beneath it.

Ezri’s stomach suddenly lurched up into her chest. For an absurd moment, she thought that the Dax symbiont was trying to escape from her body.

She became aware of Nog’s concerned stare. “Are you all right, Ezri?”

She opened her mouth to speak, and heard herself release an unflattering and uncharacteristic burp instead. I haven’t yarked on an instrument panel in over eighteen months. Why the hell should I be getting spacesick now?

She assayed a weak smile as she started shutting down systems and putting her console into “safe” mode. “I’m fine. Lunch must not have agreed with me.”

“I warned you,” Nog said with a grin. “You should have had the tube grubs.” The thought made Ezri feel as green as the skutfish that plied the floors of Trill’s purple oceans.

Nog had obviously noticed. “Maybe I’d better run some diagnostics on the Sagan’ s food replicators.”

Ezri’s stomach heaved again. “I’d rather not discuss food at the moment, Nog. Let’s just finish locking down this shuttle. And we have to get that alien document transferred to the bridge.”

Nodding, Nog thumbed a comm panel and called Lieutenant Bowers.

“Bridge. Bowers here.”

“Sam,” Nog said as he began scratching at his leg. “I’ve just started uploading a pretty big file to your station.”

“I see it,” Bowers said. “It’s coming through now. What is it?”

“Text. Alien text, and we’re going to need a translation and a cross-linguistic analysis of the thing.”

Now it was Ezri’s turn to stare at Nog. He hadn’t stopped scratching his leg.

His left leg, she realized with some surprise. The biosynthetic one.

“That’s one big document, all right,” Bowers said with a whistle. “There’s megaquads and megaquads here.” Ezri heard Bowers crack a joke featuring the phrase “billions and billions,” an expression which apparently had been mistakenly attributed to the Sagan’ s human namesake. She wished she felt like laughing, but decided instead that she’d settle for not feeling nauseated.

“Thanks, Sam. Nog out.” The engineer continued scratching his leg.

Ezri’s own distress melted away, at least somewhat, as she allowed herself to segue into her “concerned counselor” mode. Though she had spent three months on the command track, none of her nurturing instincts had dulled. Besides, focusing on something other than her own lurching insides seemed like a good idea just now.

“Phantom limb still bothering you?” she asked. She knew all too well that Nog didn’t appreciate any tiptoeing around the subject of his biosynthetic limb. It was usually best just to be up-front about such things, at least with Nog.

“No, not really,” he said, only now seeming aware of what he had been doing. “I usually don’t think much about it. I mean, it was a lot worse during the first few months after AR-558, but it still happens from time to time. The itching, I mean.”

Ezri furrowed her brow as the obvious solution came to mind. “I wonder…” She trailed off, lost in thought.

“Wonder what?”

“Nog, do you mind if I put my counselor hat back on for a moment?”

He bared his sharpened teeth good-naturedly. “Bearing in mind, of course, that free advice is seldom cheap.”

“No charge, I promise. But I wonder if your old psychosomatic symptoms might have begun flaring up again lately because of delayed stress.”

Nog looked skeptical. “From AR-558? Sure, that battle was hell, and it cost me a leg, but—”

“I don’t think this is only about AR-558,” she said, shaking her head. “At least not directly. I think it’s really about Taran’atar.”

Nog looked blank. “I don’t follow you.”

“Ever since Taran’atar came aboard DS9, you’ve been forced to share space with a Jem’Hadar soldier.”

“Oh. And it was Jem’Hadar who shot my leg off at AR-558.”

Ezri winced at that image. “Sounds like you’ve already done the math.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Nog said, his mouth a grim slash. “And I’ve concluded that the less I have to see of any Jem’Hadar soldier, the better I like it.”

Ezri was taken aback by Nog’s vehemence. “Why?”

The young Ferengi appeared to consider carefully just how much he wanted to reveal before replying. Ezri was about to try to change the subject to something less threatening when he said, “Right before we left for the Gamma Quadrant, I had a little run-in with Taran’atar that convinced me I’ve been right about him all along.”

Ezri’s counselor instincts went into overdrive once again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that all Jem’Hadar are cold-hearted killers, and nothing can change that. Not even a direct order from Odo.” Nog turned away, apparently concentrating intensely on an instrument panel.

They finished stowing the Sagan in silence. After Ezri advised Commander Vaughn that they were coming up to the bridge to make a preliminary report about the alien artifact, she and Nog disembarked into the narrow shuttlebay, entered the adjoining corridor, and made their way to the turbolift.

“Bridge,” Nog said, his voice hushed.

“Taran’atar isn’t responsible for what happened to you at AR-558,” Ezri said, trying to keep her tones even and nonjudgmental.

“No. But he won’t let me forget it, either. Just by being on the station. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad to come on this mission—no unnecessary reminders.”

Ouch, Ezri thought. I deserve that for trying to play counselor as well as first officer. Still, she hated to leave emotional loose ends hanging. Aloud, she said, “I don’t want to see you let an old resentment like this fester. It won’t do you any good in the long term.”

Just as the turbolift reached the bridge, Nog told the computer to halt it. She noticed that sweat had broken out on his hairless brow. “Ezri, I appreciate your help, but I’m fine. I can put up with having a Jem’Hadar on the station because I’m trained to follow orders. But nobody can order me to like it. Or to forgive the Jem’Hadar for taking my leg.”

Ezri nodded and told the computer to release the turbolift doors, which whooshed open a moment later. Stonily silent, Nog preceded her onto the bridge.

No, I can’t order you to forgive anyone, Nog. Only you can do that.

 

The twelve aliens Commander Vaughn had beamed to the medical bay had suffered injuries ranging from third-degree burns to fractures to blunt-force trauma to punctures. The two who were conscious spoke a few words that the universal translator evidently found as unintelligible as Bashir did. Their long, willowy forms, awkwardly arranged on the too-short biobeds, were equally alien, their black, chitinous exoskeletons reminding him of a cross between hardwood saplings and giant versions of the crustaceans his father sometimes caught on Invernia II. Their almost perfectly round heads bore black-whiskered faces that were oddly evocative of both praying mantises and sea lions.

And there was something very familiar—weirdly comforting, in fact—about their deep, dark eyes.

As Bashir, Ensign Krissten Richter, and a pair of corpsmen tended to the messy details of improvisational trauma surgery, all of them elbow-deep in alien gore, Bashir quietly entered the mental room in which he stored his childhood memories and took his first patient down from a high shelf at the back of a little-visited closet. The first surgical procedure he had ever performed had been sewing up the torn leg of Kukalaka, his favorite plush bear, at the age of five.

Seeing the eyes of his childhood companion writ large on these alien faces tempted him to dub his patients “Kukalakans.”

Nurse Juarez’s temporary absence had never been felt more accutely. But Edgardo was still on bed rest in his quarters, waiting for his leg to finish healing after an EVA mishap two days ago.

Three of the aliens had expired during the time it took the Sagan to return, and it had since taken nearly thirty minutes of extremely messy surgery before Bashir felt confident that no more of them were in imminent danger. Eight of the aliens were now curled up on biobeds or on the floor. Although they were all unconscious and weak, they appeared stable for the moment, and comfortable enough in the Defiant’ s class-M atmospheric mix.

Bashir wiped his gloved hands across the front of his amber- and umber-splattered surgical smock. Just as he was about to order Ensign Richter to transport the healthiest five of the lot back to the alien ship, the vital signs of the ninth creature took an abrupt turn for the worse.

The being lying on the biobed before Bashir would have stood nearly two and a half meters in height—were it capable of standing. Below its elongated, bulbous head were two upper limbs; farther down jutted three equally long lower extremities—none of which seemed sturdy enough to bear the being’s weight. But at the moment Bashir was far more concerned with the thick yellow ichor that had once again begun bubbling up through the brutal diagonal tear in the creature’s blue-black abdomen. The first round of protoplaser suturing on the wound had evidently not held.

Bashir placed the dermal regenerator on a higher setting and quickly stanched the worst of the bleeding. Satisfied that his makeshift suturing job would remain in place this time, Bashir slowly moved his tricorder across the creature’s belly to scan for evidence of internal bleeding. But it was damned difficult to interpret tricorder readings on creatures one had never before encountered, or even read about.

Bashir glanced up at Richter, who looked on with concern etched into her sharp features. One of the corpsmen, the youthful-looking Lieutenant John Candlewood, watched impassively for a moment before moving on to check the vital signs of some of the other unconscious aliens.

Krissten appeared to need a little encouragement. “You and the corpsmen did some fine work here, Krissten,” Bashir said.

Tears welled up in the young med-tech’s large, blue-green eyes. “Not fine enough for three of them.”

Bashir spoke in a tone he usually reserved for his most grievously ill patients. “Some patients are beyond saving, Krissten. Even the ones we know how to treat.”

Closing her eyes, she nodded slowly. No one ever gets used to death, he thought. And nobody ever should.

Bashir glanced down at the tricorder display. One of the creature’s large thoracic vascular channels was leaking fluid into its body cavity. A humanoid with an internal injury like that would probably have bled to death within a minute or two.

“I’m going to have to go in there again and patch up that blood vessel,” Bashir said. Assuming that it is a blood vessel, he thought as he picked up a laser exoscalpel from the instrument tray beside the biobed.

“Initiating sterile field,” Krissten said, her training evidently overcoming her emotional distress.

Bashir’s brow furrowed as the field’s faint blue glow arced across the alien’s wounded thorax. Four minutes later, Bashir had neatly cauterized the ruptured vessel without disturbing any of the surrounding—and still mysterious—organs and tissues. It appeared he had succeeded in stopping the creature’s internal bleeding.

So why was the alien’s breathing suddenly becoming so labored?

Krissten was clearly troubled by the same thing. “I don’t understand why he’s starting to have respiratory trouble now,” she said with a shake of her head. “If our atmosphere were poisonous to them, we would have known about it the moment they came aboard.”

The creature opened its eyes, gasped, and released a string of guttural sounds that could have been coughing or an attempt at speech. The only thing Bashir knew for certain was that the medical bay’s universal translator hadn’t placed them in the latter category.

The alien fixed both of its glistening, plum-sized black eyes on Bashir and reached weakly in his direction with one spindly arm. The creature’s three opposing digits trembled as they clenched and unclenched. Krissten took a cautious step backward. But Bashir saw no threat in the alien’s gesture; he took it instead as a plea for help. The creature’s quivering, willowy limb brought to mind the time he had spent with Ensign Melora Pazlar, whose thin Elaysian bones were probably just as frail because of her homeworld’s low gravity.

Of course. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

The weak alien lowered its trembling arm and let out a painful-sounding wheeze. Bashir tapped his combadge. “Bashir to Nog.”

“Nog here, Doctor. What can I do for you?”

“Can you get me a reading on the artificial gravity levels aboard the alien ship?” Bashir smiled at the perplexed look on Krissten’s face.

Nog’s voice was infused with the enthusiasm of a busy engineer hard at work at his craft. “I can do better than that, Doctor. Shar and I are already aboard helping them pick up the pieces of their engine room. And the gravity here is one of the biggest nuisances we have to deal with.”

“How so?”

“Well, if you try to walk too fast, you end up falling on your butt in slow motion. I’d say the local gravity is set at about point-one-five of standard.”

Bashir recalled having seen the ancient 2-D images of Apollo astronauts “bunnyhopping” across the lunar surface in their bulky environmental suits, and sometimes toppling over, tortoise-like, after having taken a bad step. And there were the Russian cosmonauts who’d had to be carried from their capsules on stretchers after returning to Earth from months-long zero-gee orbital missions.

“Thank you, Nog. Bashir out.” He nodded to Candlewood, who had been following the exchange intently and immediately took the hint.

“Adjusting the local artificial-gravity environment to Earth-Lunar standard, sir,” Candlewood said as his fingers moved briskly over a wall console.

Bashir felt immediately lighter, and the wheezing alien at once began breathing more easily and deeply. The unconscious patients also seemed to have been invigorated by the change, as their respiratory muscles suddenly found themselves with considerably less work to do. Bashir imagined he saw a look of gratitude in the unfathomable oil-drop eyes of the creature who lay before him. He offered it a reassuring smile, though he was well aware that his countenance was probably as inscrutable to the alien as the alien’s was to him.

Bashir turned his gaze toward Krissten, who was gripping the edge of the surgical table with white knuckles. “Have you had any low-gee training, Ensign?” Bashir said.

“Not for years and years,” she said, still clutching the table like a rock-climber who had just watched a buddy plummet into an abyss. Krissten did not seem reassured by Candlewood’s deft, deliberate steps as he went off corpsman duty and exited the medical bay. “Kol is a fan of zero-gee recreation. Not me.”

Bashir smiled, recalling a low-gee hoverball tournament he had once played against Krissten’s girlfriend, Deputy Etana Kol, who had won two out of three of those matches. He suppressed a sudden urge to show off his genetically enhanced reflexes.

“Just move carefully and slowly,” he said. “I’ll help you stow the surgical equipment.”

He reached for the exoscalpel that he had placed on the instrument tray and lifted it. He scowled when he noticed that it was still activated. Could have sliced my thumb off if I’d picked the damned thing up wrong. How could I have forgot to turn it off?

He moved his thumb toward the “off” toggle.

For a moment Bashir’s hand seemed to defy him, and he lost his grip on the instrument. It felt as though his hand had been slickened with tetralubisol. Damned gravity.

He bobbled the device, grabbing at the still-active exoscalpel as it fell—and succeeded only in batting it toward his patient. Krissten yelped as she, too, grabbed for the instrument, bumping Bashir and knocking him down in the process.

The alien on the biobed screamed as the exoscalpel sunk hilt-deep into its chest, precisely where a human’s heart would have been.

 

“Doctor, it was as much my fault as yours,” Krissten said after they had repaired the damage and had once again stabilized the patient. Luckily, the exoscalpel had not hit anything vital.

Bashir stood silently beside his again-unconscious patient, the crisis past, the surgical gowns already doffed and in the matter recycler. The healthiest five aliens were already back aboard their own ship. Bashir rubbed his hands together. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, they didn’t feel quite clean.

Finally he said, “Thank you, Ensign. But you weren’t the one who forgot to deactivate the exoscalpel.”

She wasn’t ready to let it go. “You’re not used to lunar gravity, Julian.”

“It shouldn’t have been a problem for me,” he said with an emphatic shake of the head.

Krissten’s face was a study in concern. “An accident like that could have happened to anyone, under the circumstances.”

Not to anyone with my talents. Not to anyone with my genetically engineered reflexes and stamina.

Not to me.

It occurred to him for the first time that something substantive might really be wrong with him. He recalled the vertiginous, seconds-long eternity during which the shuttlecraft Sagan had collided with the giant alien artifact’s interdimensional wake. The shuttle had been tossed about on the quantum foam like a cork on some wine-dark cosmic sea. Could the encounter have caused the Sagan’ s crew to suffer unpredictable deleterious effects?

But why this effect? It made no sense. And neither Ezri nor Nog had complained of any symptoms. Perhaps he was jumping at shadows.

He forced a weak smile. “Maybe you’re right, Krissten. Thank you.”

Behind Bashir, the medical bay door hissed open to admit someone.

“I prescribe rest for the entire medical staff,” Krissten said, smiling back at him. “Then we can forget that any of this ever happened.”

If only it were that easy.

Bashir thanked the ensign, then turned to the doorway.

Ezri stood on the threshold. He wondered for a disjointed instant just how much she had overheard.

“I was curious about the last of our patients,” she said as she entered. Then she scowled and gripped the door-jamb tightly. “And what the hell’s going on with the gravity in here?”

Bashir gave her a quick explanation of the environmental needs of his alien patients, as well as an update on their steadily improving condition.

“Do you think these people might be able to shed some light on that alien structure we ran into out there?” she said. “Commander Vaughn is getting pretty curious.”

Bashir smiled wryly at her understatement. Vaughn had stopped by earlier, during the busiest part of the surgical procedures. He’d obviously been beside himself with questions about the two groups of aliens, their conflict, and the weird structure that the Sagan had encountered out in the Oort cloud—questions that he’d had no opportunity to ask.

“There’s no way to know what they can tell us,” Bashir said, “until we figure out how to talk to them.”

“Good point. Until then, can you spare some time to help me brief Commander Vaughn and the rest of the senior staff about our survey mission?”

Bashir glanced back at Krissten, who nodded affirmatively. Her wan smile reminded him of how fidgety she always became during staff briefings. She was obviously content to stay here and watch over the last four convalescing aliens, letting the officers sit shuffling padds around a mess hall conference table. She evidently liked formal meetings a good deal less than she did the lowered gravity.

“I’ll call you immediately if anyone’s condition changes, Doctor,” Krissten said, making an effort to appear casual while clinging to the side of one of the biobeds as though her very life depended on it.

“All right,” Bashir said. Smiling, he turned to Ezri. “After you, fearless leader. Let’s regale everyone with our tales of derring-do from the far frontier.”

  *  *  *

Because of the alien ship’s low gravity and dim, amber-colored illumination, Nog moved about with extreme care. Junior engineers Permenter and Senkowski seemed completely involved in their attempt to mime basic engineering concepts to the tall, thin pentaped who seemed to be in charge of the engine room.

Nog was glad that Shar had come along as well. Although the Andorian science officer was still more tight-lipped than usual, Nog hoped that getting engaged in the repairs to the alien ship would help draw him out, encourage him to discuss whatever had been bothering him.

Nog noticed that Shar, who was absently holding a hyperspanner, was looking in his direction. Shar’s antennae twitched in evident curiosity.

“Are you unwell, Nog?” Shar said.

“I’m fine,” Nog lied. In fact, he felt anything but fine. The itch he’d first begun to notice while parking the Sagan had continued unabated and seemed to be intensifying. Until maybe forty minutes ago, Nog had been willing to consider Ezri’s suggestion that the itching might have been psychosomatic, something related to his acknowledged aversion to being forced against his better judgment to share space aboard DS9 with Taran’atar. But now it felt as though hundreds of carnivorous Hupyrian beetle larvae were building a hive in his biosynthetic leg. How could the cause of this be something in his head?

He promised himself that he’d run, not walk, to the Defiant’ s medical bay just as soon as he was certain that this wreck of a warp core wasn’t going to blow up in everyone’s face. Until then, he’d cope with the discomfort. Concentrate past it. Suck it up.

Deal with it, Cadet! Deal with it!

He recalled his earliest Academy days. New plebe cadets couldn’t afford to display any sign of weakness. Especially not Ferengi cadets. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, reminding himself that his lowly cadet days now lay more than two years behind him was doing precious little to bolster his confidence.

Nog came out of his reverie when he noticed that Shar was still looking at him expectantly. He was thankful that Permenter and Senkowski were still preoccupied with their instrument calibrations. Nog tried to put on his best tongo face for Shar, though he didn’t want to appear as evasive as his friend always did whenever he was asked a direct question about his family. Concentrating on that helped distract him from the mounting agony in his leg.

Until he saw the alien ship’s chief engineer extend two of its impossibly slender lower limbs toward one of the countless handholds that covered every bulkhead, loft itself spiderlike toward the ceiling, and fetch several of its tools and instruments with its remaining three appendages.

Watching a creature whose movements so resembled those of a Talarian hook spider made it very difficult not to think about legs, itching or otherwise.

Shar still stared at Nog, his antennae fairly vibrating with unasked questions.

Nog knelt long enough to fetch an EPS pattern tracer from his open toolkit. He focused past the pain in his left leg as he rose.

“I’m fine, Shar. Really. Now let’s finish getting this engine room shipshape so we can get back to the Defiant.”

 

The alien structure turned slowly end over end, hovering in midair about a meter above the longest table in the mess hall. Commander Vaughn sat at the head of the table, his fingers steepled before him as he watched the object’s ever-changing profile.

How long has it been drifting all alone out there? Vaughn thought, his soul filled to bursting with an almost religious ecstasy at the sight of this marvelous, inscrutable thing. How many aeons have come and gone since its builders turned to dust?

Seated across the table from Vaughn, Ezri Dax absently scratched at her abdomen. Then she gestured toward the hologram that dominated the Defiant’ s ad hoc briefing room as she finished relating the tale of the Sagan’ s near collision with the ancient object. Dr. Bashir sat beside her, listening attentively. The four remaining chairs were occupied by Lieutenant Sam Bowers, Ensign Prynn Tenmei, and science specialists Cassini and T’rb.

Vaughn looked around the room. Bashir, T’rb, and Cassini began reading the sensor reports that now scrolled across everyone’s padds. But Bowers—whose specialty was tactical and security rather than science—seemed completely entranced by the image of the artifact. Tenmei appeared utterly absorbed by it as well.

Vaughn smiled to himself. Maybe the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.

Vaughn watched as the artifact turned, shrank almost to invisibility, then grew a series of outsize flanges and sprouted structures resembling the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral. Then, as ephemeral as a ring of smoke, the thing’s shape changed utterly yet again, adopting an austere, Platonic solid aspect.

“I don’t suppose anybody will mind if the tactical officer asks a really obvious and dumb question at this point,” Bowers said. “But how does this thing change its form? I’ve never heard of any type of architecture capable of doing that.”

“Strictly speaking, Lieutenant,” Bashir said, “it isn’t really changing its form at all.”

“Come again?” Bowers said, looking perplexed.

“Imagine you’re on a boat floating on an ocean,” Bashir said in a professorial tone. “Floating nearby is an iceberg. All you can see of the iceberg is the little bit that’s peeking out of the water. The bulk of it is hidden by the water.”

“All right,” Bowers said, clearly expecting more.

Bashir obliged him. “Now imagine that the iceberg is slowly rotating on an axis that’s deep under the water. You’ll continue to see just a fraction of the ice at any one time—but always a different portion of the whole.”

“And,” Cassini added, “if you row your boat too close to the spinning berg, you’ll be caught in its undertow and get dragged under the water with it. That’s what appears to have nearly happened to the Sagan.”

“Metaphorically speaking,” T’rb added, rubbing at the vertical line that bisected his sky-blue forehead.

“So what is the thing?” said Ensign Tenmei.

“It could be anything,” Bashir said with a shrug. “A space colony. An observatory. A retail establishment.”

“A police station,” Bowers said.

“An interdimensional ski lodge,” Tenmei said with a tiny smirk.

“A hospital,” Dax said quietly. “Or a church.”

“Whatever it is,” Bowers said, “could it be related to the fight between our alien guests and the folks who attacked them?”

“Until we crack the language barrier,” T’rb said, “the reasons for that conflict will pretty much be anybody’s guess.”

Bowers scowled. “Maybe not. It would help if some of our engineering detachment could snoop around a bit aboard the damaged ship. See if they can find what they’re doing way out on the fringes of this system.”

“Unfortunately,” Vaughn said, “the aliens seem to be supervising every move our people make over there. It looks like interviewing our patients may be our only hope for figuring out the aliens—and the artifact.”

Vaughn noticed the wry smile that had appeared on the doctor’s face at Ezri’s suggestion that the artifact might be a church of some sort. “Regarding the alien object,” Bashir continued, looking in Ezri’s direction as he spoke, “all we really know is that an intelligent and perhaps extinct species built it more than five hundred million years ago for some purpose which remains obscure. We also know that this structure possesses certain higher-dimensional characteristics that we don’t fully understand. We really don’t have any other information—except for the alien text file we downloaded from one of the thing’s internal computers.”

Vaughn smiled back at Bashir. From Vaughn’s perspective, the doctor was a mere pup. Vaughn knew that in his century-long life, he’d very likely forgotten more than even a genetically enhanced thirty-five-year-old could have learned. But Vaughn was often impressed by how painstakingly empirical Bashir could be in the pursuit of knowledge. And he was occasionally amused by the young doctor’s apparent obliviousness to all matters mystical. He recalled the Orb experience that had led to his taking command of this ship—and to this mission. Yes, mortal beings had built the alien artifact; this was not the work of enigmatic gods or supernatural spirits.

But knowing those facts made the thing no less wonderful or awe-inspiring to Vaughn.

Aloud, he said, “That alien text file has got to be the key to discovering the artifact’s origin and purpose.” He fixed his gaze on the Defiant’ s security chief. “Mr. Bowers? Lieutenant Nog placed the text file in your care. Please give us a report.”

Bowers touched a control on his padd, and the holographic image of the alien artifact was replaced by scrolling lines of swooping, unreadable characters. “For starters,” Bowers said, “the file is huge. More than eighty megaquads, which is about a third of our computer core’s overall storage capacity.”

“That fact alone is going to put a real strain on our number-crunching—or, in this case, text-crunching—resources,” said Cassini.

“It’s too bad we have to tie up so much of the computer core,” Tenmei said, “with a document we can’t even read.”

“You mean we can’t read it yet,” T’rb said, apparently very sure of his abilities. “Cassini and I have already started running a cross-comparison between this text and samples of written language groups we’ve downloaded from adjacent sectors of Gamma Quadrant space.”

Cassini sounded equally confident. “It might take a while, but if we’ve ever flown anywhere near the Gamma Quadrant’s equivalent of the Rosetta stone, we’ll crack this thing. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Perhaps then we’ll also be able to converse with Dr. Bashir’s new patients,” Vaughn said.

Bowers leaned back wearily in his chair. “That would be a relief, sir. It’s damned difficult to work out repair schedules and visits to the aliens in the medical bay when all you have is the one or two concepts the universal translator can recognize. Everything else comes down to hand gestures and interpretive dance.”

“We can’t assume that the language the Kuka—that the aliens speak,” Bashir said, “is in any way related to the ancient text.”

It’s not like Julian to stammer like that, Vaughn thought, scowling. Glancing at Ezri, he thought he noticed something different about her as well. She seemed to be getting rather pale. And was one of her eyelids beginning to droop?

Stroking his neatly trimmed beard, Vaughn said to Bashir, “I want to know more about this interdimensional wake the Sagan encountered near the artifact. Specifically: Could it have had any harmful effect on the shuttle’s crew?”

Bashir paused for a moment before answering. “It’s possible, sir. But I’ll need to run some tests before I can say for certain.”

“I have run some tests,” said Tenmei. Vaughn and Bashir both favored her with a blank look. “On the Sagan itself, I mean. The Sagan is in close to optimal condition. Except for a peculiar quantum resonance pattern, that is.”

“Meaning what?” Vaughn said.

Tenmei shook her head and shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

Vaughn abruptly put aside every reverent thought he’d had about the alien artifact thus far. He didn’t like the direction this was taking one bit.

Vaughn looked at Ezri again. This time he had no doubt—she was indeed looking pale. Why hadn’t Julian noticed? “Lieutenant, how long have you been feeling ill?”

Ezri sighed wearily, evidently deciding it was best to come clean. “It happened…I think it started during the flight back from the alien artifact.”

“I see.” Vaughn was fully aware that this fact might or might not be significant. Shifting his gaze to Bashir, he said, “Has anyone else from the Sagan’ s crew experienced any symptoms?”

The doctor suddenly looked uncomfortable, as though he wanted to be parsecs from the mess hall. He appeared to be groping for words.

That wasn’t like him at all.

“Doctor?”

“I…believe I may have experienced a lapse in concentration while tending to our alien patients,” he said finally. “I’m not at all certain what to make of it. If anything.”

Vaughn felt his cheeks flush with anger. He glared first at Bashir, then at Ezri. “And you were both planning on reporting these difficulties exactly when?”

Bashir stiffened at that. “With respect, sir, at the time neither of us was aware that there was a problem. I’m still not entirely convinced there is one now.”

Vaughn moved his hand through the air as though to wave the question of timeliness away. “All right. But what about Nog? How has he been feeling?”

“I’ll contact him,” Bashir said. “He’s still making repairs to the alien vessel.”

At that moment, Dax cried out and collapsed across the conference table, clutching her belly and screaming in pain.

 

Ignoring the pain raging in his leg, Nog watched as the alien EPS conduits finally lit up in the correct sequence. Power had begun flowing into the proper channels. And, more importantly, nothing had exploded.

Permenter heaved a theatrical sigh of relief, then displayed an I-told-you-it-was-going-to-work grin to the still sheepish-looking Senkowski. Even Shar wore a triumphant smile, which Nog knew was a carefully constructed affectation on the Andorian’s part, for the benefit of the humans around him. Even the alien engineer looked pleased, his chitinous mandibles moving from side to side to display what might have been happiness or gratitude.

“Release the magnetic bottles now, Shar,” Nog said. After Shar touched the appropriate controls, Nog could feel the rumble in the deckplates that signaled the resumption of a controlled matter-antimatter reaction. Now that warp power was partially restored, the rest of the repairs would go forward much more easily. Force fields could be erected strategically throughout the ship, buttressing the collapsed sections and reinforcing the crude patching that had already been applied to some of the exterior hull breaches.

But I won’t have to supervise the rest of it directly, Nog thought, now eager to get to the Defiant’ s medical bay so that Dr. Bashir could examine his leg.

The deckplates continued throbbing, with increasing intensity.

The throbbing sensation moved up from the deckplates and into Nog’s left leg, which suddenly felt as though it had been thrust directly into an unshielded antimatter pile. Nog screamed and watched the bulkheads trade places in slow motion. Deck became wall. Bulkhead became ceiling. His back pressed up—or down?—against something cold and unyielding.

He looked up, straight into the impenetrable eyes of the alien engineer. Beside the alien stood Shar, his image pulled and twisted as by a crazily warped mirror.

“Defiant, emergency beam-out!” he heard Shar shout as darkness engulfed him.