“Den D’Naali.” The alien said, its vertically cleft mouth parts wrapping awkwardly around the sounds. Shar was surprised at the pure, almost crystalline quality of the synthetic voice issuing from Bowers’s hand-held universal translator unit. “Den D’Naali bu kereve. Croi Ryek’ekbalabiozan’denlu bu Nyazen den. Enti Leyza.”

Shar’s antennae pitched forward in the alien’s direction. Thanks to the ministrations of Dr. Bashir and Ensign Richter—to say nothing of several miniature antigrav units now strapped to various points around its body—the creature seemed healthy and strong—and apparently eager to communicate. Shar suddenly felt certain that they had finally broken the linguistic impasse which had so far thwarted all but the crudest attempts at communication. With Shar’s certainty came a surge of unalloyed joy, the heady rush of imminent discovery. It reminded him of why he’d joined Starfleet in the first place.

Another realization startled him then: This was the first time he’d experienced this sensation since he’d learned of Thriss’s suicide.

Shar turned to Bowers. “I believe we’ve just made a major breakthrough.”

“You mean you understood that?” Bowers nodded toward the insectile alien, then resumed scowling at the translator in his hand.

Shar shook his head, his antennae bobbing. “Not a word of it. But we’re finally hearing phonemes that humanoids can reproduce. We now have a starting point.”

Shar knew well that language acquisition closely mirrored brain development. The brain of a preverbal humanoid child possessed twice the number of synaptic pathways as that of an adult, only to winnow out some connections while reinforcing others. As billions of neural circuits fell away, gradually collapsing a nearly infinite array of perceptual possibilities down to something more manageable, language emerged. Meaning coalesced as the still-growing brain pruned itself of excess capacity, honing and sharpening language and intellect in the process. In the absence of a clear linguistic key, Shar was becoming convinced that only a technological analog of this process could decrypt the aliens’ puzzling language.

A thought flitted through his mind, unbidden and unwelcome: Would Thriss’s death hone him in similar fashion, or would it merely leave him forever diminished and incomplete?

“Nearly a solid day of work,” Bowers said. “And all we have to show for it so far is a few syllables of Gamma Quadrant baby babble. Not to mention megaquads of untranslatable alien sehlat scratches.” He handed the translator over to Shar in a gesture of resignation.

Bowers’s sentiments caused Shar to question, if only for a moment, his newfound certainty about their progress. How much of it was merely an attempt to cast off the crushing weight of grief that had lately settled upon his soul? Thriss was dead. Work was solace. Nevertheless, they were on the right track, Shar told himself. We have to be.

The mess hall doors slid open and John Candlewood stepped briskly into the room, holding yet another iteration of the reconfigured Pinker-Sato phonology module up to one of the room’s overhead lights. He squinted for a moment at the translucent module’s almost indiscernible filigree of isolinear microfibers, then nodded to Shar in apparent satisfaction.

“I think Cassini and T’rb got the replicator specs fine-tuned enough this time,” Candlewood said as he handed the fingernail-sized chip to Shar, who accepted it with laconic thanks. “This one’s loaded up with the main computer’s latest quadrantwide cross-linguistic comparison algorithms. Let’s hope this one doesn’t overload the translation matrix.”

Shar nodded, noting that the mess hall still smelled of ozone and burned insulation from the previous attempt to, as Bowers had put it at the time, “hot rod” the translator by means of a high-speed link to the Defiant’ s main computer core. In the depths of that system, a sophisticated linguistic cross-matching program was currently busy comparing both the ancient text and the alien’s every recorded utterance with all known Gamma Quadrant language groups; cross-correlating disparate samples of speech and writing; seeking syntactical and phonological relationships; and methodically winnowing out what amounted to cubic parsecs of coincidental linguistic chaff.

“I wish we could tear Senkowski and Permenter away from that alien engine room long enough to give this new chip a test-drive,” Bowers said as Shar snapped the new Pinker-Sato module into the translator’s haft. “After all the time they spent studying the hardware that translated the Vahni language, this assignment ought to be right up their street.”

Candlewood cleared his throat, a look of friendly umbrage on his face. “I had a little bit to do with that, too, Sam—not that I’m trying to steal any credit from Nog’s people. But we had a little more to work with in that situation. Even though the Vahni language was completely visual, it still had a far greater overlap with other known dialects than what we’re working with here—and the Vahni already had their own translation equipment.”

“Nog expects the alien ship’s most urgent repairs to be finished within the hour,” Shar said.

“The aliens will be able to ship out then,” Bowers said, stroking his chin. “And I’ll wager they’ll insist on taking the last of our, um, guests with them when they do. I wish they’d given us access to something other than their engine room. It would be nice to know why they’re here and what their fight with the other alien ship was all about.”

“Perhaps our guest will be able to tell us soon,” Shar said, nodding toward the alien, whose long and spindly body was splayed gingerly across two mess-hall chairs. “Though I don’t doubt that his people will wish to be on their way as soon as possible. But as Mr. Candlewood has pointed out—”

“Call me John,” Candlewood said.

Reminding himself once again of the human penchant for informality, Shar nodded and displayed his best synthetic smile. “As John has pointed out, Senkowski and Permenter wouldn’t be likely to decipher this language any more quickly than we can.”

“So we’ve got maybe an hour, tops, to do the impossible,” Bowers said. “Otherwise, our new friend goes home without helping us puzzle out the alien text. And whatever it has to say about that Oort cloud artifact.”

“We’re lucky he’s even still here,” Candlewood said. “If his own medical bay hadn’t been wrecked when his ship was attacked, he’d probably already be gone.”

“And if we fail to return him by the time the aliens are ready to leave,” Shar said, “we can’t rule out a hostile reaction on their part.”

“So we’re back where we started,” Candlewood said. “We may have a few phonemes, but we’ve still got no syntax or semantics. And no Rosetta stone to bail us out.”

Nodding, Shar recalled what he’d read about the Rosetta stone at Starfleet Academy. That artifact, discovered nearly six centuries ago in the Terran town of Rashid, bore inscriptions of identical texts in Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Only a prior knowledge of Demotic and Greek had allowed the stone’s translators to comprehend the enigmatic Egyptian picture language. Without the Rosetta stone, those obscure inscriptions might have remained unreadable, their authors’ voices forever stilled.

Shar surmised that whatever Rosetta stone the Gamma Quadrant might hold had spread itself across whole sectors ages ago by the slow process of inter-stellar cultural and linguistic diffusion. It would take all the processing power the Defiant’ s computer could muster to reconstruct those ancient language migration patterns—in effect sweeping up and reassembling the local Rosetta stone’s billions of metaphorical shards.

“Display the alien text,” Shar said.

Candlewood responded by giving the computer the appropriate command. A parade of large, cryptic characters, pictograms consisting of undulating lines, asymmetrical polygons, crosshatches, and intersecting and broken shapes, coalesced in the air above the table. There were no perceptible spaces between the symbols, nor anything resembling punctuation marks.

The alien’s deep, oil-drop eyes watched the lockstep march of the pictograms without any evident recognition.

Bowers cast a doubtful glance at Shar. “Think we’ll actually find out what he knows this time?”

“I believe,” Shar said, activating the translator, “that we have only one way to find out for certain.”

Shar discreetly angled the translator toward the alien, not eager to have his action mistaken for an attack. But the creature showed no sign of noticing, evidently engrossed in the parade of airborne text.

“Old, very, perceives me, self/ego,” came the translator’s melodious voice, the alien’s speech-surrogate. “Perceives me not old very merely. Indeed, but is oldoldold.”

Bowers startled Shar by suddenly launching into what appeared to be a brief victory dance. Candlewood grinned broadly, evidently expressing similar sentiments.

The text is not simply old, Shar thought, too intent on the unfolding mystery to join in his colleagues’ jubilation. The alien recognized it as very old.

“Maybe it’s his people’s equivalent of the Book of Genesis,” Candlewood said, his thoughts obviously moving along lines similar to Shar’s.

But Bowers didn’t look ready to celebrate just yet. “Remember, nobody here can read Genesis in the original Hebrew.”

“Perhaps he only needs some clarification,” Shar said, handing the translator off to Candlewood, then taking a padd from the table. He activated the padd’s display, which began mirroring the holographic text that still flowed past the alien’s rapt gaze. The padd tapped into the stream of data on syntax, phonology, and psycholinguistics now coursing back and forth between the translator and the main computer.

Parenthetical enclosures began to appear around certain regularly repeated groupings of symbols, isolating each such sequence inside an oval border. Shar recalled that the scholars who had interpreted the Rosetta stone’s hieroglyphs had referred to such markings as cartouches—discrete words or phrases, rendered in a language that might as well have been devised light-years away from Egypt.

These groupings of characters, of course, were no revelation to Shar—or to anyone else in the room, for that matter. The repetition of certain symbol strings was one of the first discoveries made during the initial computer analyses of the alien text. But absent a lexicon of any sort, these recurring character groupings had been utterly devoid of meaning.

Now, thanks to the newly enhanced translator, they at least had a potential means of interpreting the alien’s reactions to seeing those symbols.

Long minutes passed as the isolated strings of symbols continued scrolling past the alien’s watchful eyes, one after another. The alien sat impassively, saying nothing further.

Bowers’s wry comment finally broke the silence: “Looks like it’s all Greek to him after all.”

Shar’s certainty was finally beginning to fade in earnest. He could see no sign of recognition whatsoever on the creature’s face. Assuming, of course, that he was equipped to recognize such emotional cues in these beings, which he almost certainly wasn’t.

Suddenly, the alien spoke up, loudly. “Enti Leyza.”

The reconfigured translator, steeped as it currently was in quadrantwide linguistic comparisons, seemed to balk for a protracted moment. Shar typed a command into his padd, instructing it to display the translation of the alien’s utterance as text.

“Run the display in reverse,” Shar said, frowning at his recalcitrant padd. Candlewood moved the holographic text backward, very slowly.

“Enti Leyza!” The alien said as a particular cartouche hove back into view. He pointed toward it with a long, chitinous digit.

“Freeze it!” Shar said, then stared at the complex, symbol-strewn oval that was suddenly suspended motionless in midair.

“He recognizes that symbol,” Candlewood whispered. “There’s no doubt about that.” Shar had to agree.

Bowers grinned. “Gentlemen, I think we may have just found our guide to the scenic spots of this part of the Gamma Quadrant. Sacagawea, allow me to formally welcome you to the Corps of Discovery.”

“Sacagawea?” Candlewood said, looking puzzled. Shar wasn’t certain he placed the name either.

“In honor of the captain’s enthusiasm for the Lewis and Clark expedition in ancient North America,” Bowers said. Shar thought he sounded defensive.

“Until we can figure out what he actually calls himself,” Candlewood said with a shrug, “I suppose it’ll have to do.”

Shar continued concentrating on the string of symbols, perhaps as intently as the alien was. The bristling shapes within the cartouche struck him as both comforting and disturbing—and somehow familiar.

Then he wondered if their ancient author might have been playing an onomatopoetic trick. Acting on a hunch, Shar instructed his padd to display, directly in front of the alien, a holographic image of the mysterious deep-space artifact the shuttlecraft Sagan’ s crew had encountered in System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud.

The resemblance between the cartouche symbols and the artifact’s oddly shifting spires suddenly became obvious.

“Enti Leyza! Enti Leyza!” Shar thought he heard something akin to fear in the synthetic translator voice, though he immediately dismissed the notion as ridiculous.

Still, the alien appeared to be cowering before the image.

“Do we have an English equivalent for Enti Leyza yet?” Candlewood asked, fairly bouncing with eagerness.

Shar glanced down at his padd, then nodded. Two words flashed in alternation on the display, as though each was trying to elbow the other aside. Their starkly contradictory meanings made Shar’s antennae rise straight upward.

“Enti Leyza translates either as ‘cathedral,’” he said, “or ‘anathema.’”

“Maybe it’s both,” Candlewood offered.

“Talk about your love-hate relationships,” Bowers said. “To be honest, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about organized religion myself. Maybe our guest here feels the same way.”

“At any rate, we know he recognizes at least one of these symbols,” Shar said, succumbing to the allure of a mystery that seemed on the verge of surrendering some of its secrets. “Perhaps his reaction demonstrates that this text is an archaic form of his own written language.”

Candlewood made a subtle adjustment to the translator, then raised it as though in benediction. “Now that we’re no longer forced to communicate entirely via charades and diagrams of the periodic table,” he said, “let’s just ask him.”

 

His pulse thundering in his ears, Bashir lay on his back on the diagnostic table, seeing the twinkling lights of the resonance imaging equipment from an entirely unaccustomed angle. He kept his arms at his sides, just the way Krissten had asked, though he found it difficult to resist the urge to withdraw into himself by wrapping them tightly across his chest.

He experienced a brief interval of heart-clenching fear—“dentist-chair anxiety” was how he thought his father might have described it—between the moment when Krissten began keying the activation sequence into the control pad and the appearance of the dim lights of the submolecular scanner. The intersecting, moving beams bathed his body in an eerie orange glow.

He calmed as the scan progressed, then felt a renewed jolt of terror as he recalled having been subjected to a similar procedure, nearly three decades ago, by the illicit genengineers on Adigeon Prime. He closed his eyes as the scan continued, trying to banish the unaccountable sensation of soldier ants crawling deep beneath his skin.

A moment later he became aware of Ezri at his side, holding his hand. He smiled weakly at her, not eager to let on just how unnerved he felt. “Didn’t hurt a bit.”

Ezri grinned, her earlier pallor now only a fading memory. “I’d be pretty surprised if it did. Unless your body’s individual molecules have suddenly developed their own nerve endings.”

Bashir sat up and saw that Krissten was studying an adjacent computer terminal, where the results of the deep-tissue scan were already slowly scrolling up.

“I took the scan down past the DNA level this time,” she said. “So we can do a cross-comparison with the scans we already made of Lieutenant Nog and Lieutenant Dax.”

“And of my weirdly healthy yet still disembodied symbiont,” Ezri said, gesturing toward a shelf across the room, where the Dax symbiont’s medical transport pod sat. Bashir heard a brittleness in her voice, a sense of loss that Ezri appeared to be trying to conceal beneath a bantering façade.

Her other hand was still in his. He squeezed it, and she squeezed back hard, as though life itself depended on maintaining her grip. Meeting her beseeching gaze, he whispered, “We’ll get to the bottom of this business, Ezri. I swear it.”

“You always did have a fascination for lost causes, Julian,” she said quietly. “But my body has rejected the symbiont. It no longer needs me. And apparently I no longer need it.”

Bashir wasn’t fooled by her flippant tone. He knew, of course, that Ezri had never wanted to be joined prior to the emergency that had brought Dax into her life, when the symbiont had been near death during its brief stay aboard her ship, the U.S.S. Destiny. But during the past eighteen months, Ezri’s formerly neurotic personality had begun to flower, and Bashir attributed that fact largely to the influence of the Dax symbiont. He had watched, sometimes with alarm, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with satisfaction, as she had made continuous progress integrating her own personality with that of Dax and those of the symbiont’s previous eight hosts. And he knew that having all those lives, memories, and talents summarily ripped from her psyche had to be a trauma of unspeakable proportions.

“It’s not a lost cause just yet,” he said, putting on his best confidence-instilling smile, though he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. “We’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the Persian army yet. So we’ll keep right on defending Thermopylae. That’s a medical order.”

His reference to the holosuite “hopeless battle” scenarios of which they had both become so fond lately succeeded in bringing a faint smile to her lips. “So we hold the mountain pass. Then back to Sparta, either with our shields or on them.”

Bashir gently disengaged his hand from hers, rose, and crossed to Krissten and the medical display. He watched the chaotic rising and falling of the indicators.

And suddenly realized that he wasn’t at all certain how to interpret them. He felt a surge of panic, then reminded himself that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen peculiar readings. It would simply take a little time to figure them out.

Of course.

A deep frown creased Krissten’s brow as she evaluated the display. “I just overlaid your quantum signature scan onto the ones we took from everybody else who was on the Sagan.”

The readings didn’t look right, but he couldn’t quite say why. “There’s something else there,” he said.

“That’s an overlay of the quantum resonance scans that Ensign Tenmei took of the Sagan itself.”

“And your interpretation, Ensign?” Bashir said. Nothing was making sense.

“You can see it for yourself, Doctor,” she said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Look at the way the aberrant quantum profiles line up on each and every one of these scans.”

His heart raced. The lines still meant nothing to him. He wondered if this was what aphasia felt like.

“Of course,” Bashir said, unable to find any other words. “But…I’d like to hear some independent confirmation.” What the hell is wrong with me?

Krissten cleared her throat before speaking. “Julian, it seems pretty obvious that you, Nog, Ezri, and the symbiont are all exhibiting the very same weird quantum resonance pattern that Tenmei detected coming from the shuttle. And it’s getting more pronounced hour by hour.”

Bashir belatedly noticed that Ezri was standing beside him, also studying the indicators on the display. “So this has to be related to the shuttle’s having passed through that alien artifact’s interdimensional flux.”

“I’m no science officer,” Krissten said, “but it sure looks to me like your proverbial smoking gun. But that’s not all.”

Krissten touched the screen, which suddenly displayed two large, intertwined helical structures. Bashir immediately recognized it as a schematic representation of a strand of humanoid DNA. He was relieved to discover that he could still understand something.

“There’s a progressive change going on in the DNA patterns of every one of you,” Krissten said, sighing in frustration. “But I’ll be damned if I can figure out why it’s happening. Or what it’s ultimately going to do to all of you.”

“For starters,” Bashir said, “it seems to have grown Nog a new leg. As well as given Ezri and the symbiont mutual independence.”

“But what about you, Julian?” Ezri said, an edge of concern in her voice.

Krissten changed the display yet again, but Bashir couldn’t bring himself to look directly at it. He could no longer deny what was happening to him. On some visceral level, he knew without needing any confirmation from the instruments.

“Progressive neurological degeneration,” he said, studying the weave of the carpet near his right boot. It felt strangely liberating to voice aloud the thought he’d tried so hard to avoid for the past two days. “At the rate I’m declining, by tomorrow I’ll probably no longer be able to function as this ship’s chief medical officer.”

“You don’t know that,” Ezri said.

“I can feel it, Ezri.”

“I think we need to run some more tests,” Krissten said, but Bashir couldn’t hear any hope underlying her words. She knew he was right.

Fatigue once again crept up on him. His eyes ached, and when he spoke there was more acid in his words than he had intended. “Ensign, I’ve already been scanned down to the Planck scale.”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you see a clear pattern of neural degeneration?” he said. “A systematic collapse of synaptic pathways?” In his mind’s eye, he saw the windows of the Hagia Sophia, in which hundreds of small candles were slowly guttering and flickering out, one by one. The image chilled him to the marrow.

Krissten nodded silently, though with obvious reluctance.

“Then we already have the essential picture, at least in broad strokes. Call in Ensign Juarez and Lieutenant Candlewood. They’ll be able to help you further interpret the data you’ve already collected. I want to know how long I have left.” Feeling a sudden leaden weariness, he turned and strode toward the door and entered the corridor.

“Julian,” Ezri said, dogging his heels.

He stopped and put his hands on her shoulders, in what he hoped was a reassuring gesture. “Ezri, I need to be alone. To rest.”

“Well, it’s good to hear you admit that every once in a while. But there’s obviously more to it than that. So tell me.” Her voice had none of the steel he’d become accustomed to over the last several months. She sounded every bit as frightened and vulnerable as he felt.

He decided that now wasn’t an occasion that called for a stiff upper lip. “I believe I’m…reverting, Ezri. Regressing to what I was before Adigeon Prime.”

Her eyes widened with sudden understanding. “Before you were genetically enhanced.”

“I can’t begin to explain it,” he said, nodding. “But somehow our encounter with the alien artifact has begun…undoing my genetic resequencing.”

She seemed to mull that over for a moment before responding. “It sounds crazy, but it fits. Nog and I are reverting, too, if you think about it. He’s become the two-legged Ferengi he used to be. I’ve been turned into the unjoined Trill I was before the Destiny brought me together with Dax. And you’re becoming…” She trailed off.

Slow, plodding, uncoordinated, dumb Jules Bashir, he thought. The little boy who was such a grave disappointment to his oh-so-doting, upwardly mobile parents.

“Maybe this isn’t such a great time to rest, Julian. If you’re really slipping as fast as you think you are, then our best chance to find a cure might be sooner rather than—”

He cut her off. “Ezri, I don’t know if I could find a cure for this even if I were at the top of my game.”

She folded her arms before her, donning a smile that he sensed was purely for his benefit. “It’s not like you to just give up, Julian. The Persian army still hasn’t even shown up yet.”

“I’m not giving up. I’m just trying to make you understand that the cure, if it exists, isn’t going to come out of the medical bay. It’s going to come from inside the alien artifact that caused all of this in the first place.”

His mounting weariness was becoming acute, and she now seemed aware of it as well.

“All right, Julian,” she said, seeming to draw on some inner reserve of strength. “Get some rest. I’ll take what you’ve just told me straight to Commander Vaughn. If there’s a cure anywhere aboard that artifact, I swear to you we’ll find it.”

He thanked her, then excused himself. Alone, he found himself momentarily lost on his way to the quarters he and Ezri shared, but quickly recovered and found his way.

Once the door was sealed behind him, he collapsed onto the narrow bunk and considered what lay ahead: a transformation from the educated, accomplished, nearly superhuman Julian Bashir to plain, slow, unmodified Jules.

Jules.

He had repudiated that name during his childhood, after his parents had, in effect, repudiated him—when they’d had his DNA illegally rewritten when he was only six years old. Whatever Jules might eventually have accomplished if left to his own devices had been rendered moot from that point on, forever after consigned to the shadow world of roads not taken. Inaccessible mirror universes.

After Adigeon Prime, the frustrating learning disabilities he’d suffered as Jules had slowly receded over the horizon of memory, banished to an obscure corner of some boarded-up cloakroom within his mental Hagia Sophia. Reborn, young Julian excelled intellectually, academically, and physically—but not spiritually. All too often he had felt like a created thing, an object designed to replace a child who hadn’t measured up to his parents’ lofty expectations.

Which, in a very real and undeniable sense, was exactly what he was.

He vividly recalled the day, three short years ago, when he had taken his parents to task over this. Facing the distinct possibility of dismissal from Starfleet because of his illegal genetic alterations, he had wished that Richard and Amsha Bashir had never taken him to Adigeon Prime, that they’d instead simply allowed nature to take its course with young Jules, for better or for worse.

That errant wish now appeared to be coming true—and the brutal reality of it horrified him. He realized now that it meant the loss of abilities and talents that he had come to take for granted over the better part of three decades. The loss of what he sometimes feared were the only things that gave him value as a human being.

The loss of self.

Bashir closed his eyes. But instead of sleep, he sought a cobbled street in Istanbul, where a flight of stone steps led him up to the front of the silver-domed Hagia Sophia. He stood for a moment just outside the main gallery of his memory cathedral, apprehensive about what might await him inside, but determined to survey the damage regardless.

He entered, expecting the series of chambers that curved around the dome’s interior to be disordered, ransacked, essentially empty. Instead, he saw a party of white-smocked men and women, busily constructing walls with bricks and mortar. He smiled, uplifted for a moment by the hope that they were here to make repairs, that their presence was evidence that he was somehow recovering his faculties, that he was going to make a recovery without recourse to whatever inscrutable powers had deconstructed him in the first place.

Then his heart sank like a burned-out star abruptly collapsed by its own gravity. The white-smocked men and women weren’t making repairs. They were walling off staircases, doorways, and vestibules. They ignored his screams, continuing their work as though he weren’t even present.

Brick by brick, they were isolating him from a lifetime of memories—and systematically robbing him of every skill he’d ever come to take for granted.

 

Vaughn sat in the command chair, listening to the various busy sounds of the bridge consoles. He quietly mulled over what Ezri had just told him before she returned to the medical bay to assist Candlewood and Richter with their quantum-scan analyses. Clearly, the Oort cloud artifact—which, according to Shar, the aliens regarded as either a place of worship or as a chamber of horrors—held the solution to the puzzle of what had befallen the shuttlecraft Sagan and her crew.

And he was determined to get his hands on that solution, no matter the cost.

Vaughn rose and approached the science station, where Shar was intent on a scrolling display of the alien text. Many more of the symbols were now separated into groups by variously sized ovals, rather than running in an uninterrupted sequence. It certainly looked promising.

“Making any progress?” Vaughn said.

Shar lifted his eyes from the display only for a moment. “It’s difficult to know for certain. I’m beginning to wonder if Ensign Cassini might have been a bit too optimistic about our chances of success.”

“At least we’re finally able to converse with our new friends,” Vaughn said. He gestured toward the main viewer, where an image of the D’Naali ship hung suspended against the stygian darkness.

D’Naali. Vaughn turned the name over in his mind as his eyes swept the long, tapering lines of their vessel. Relief warred with frustration within him. On the one hand, it was a relief not to have to refer to the insectoid creatures solely as “the aliens” anymore. On the other, Shar’s initial translations of Sacagawea’s speech had yet to shed any real light on the nature of the mysterious space artifact—or on the reason the D’Naali vessel had been chased and attacked.

The turbolift door slid open, and Vaughn turned toward the sound. Lieutenant Nog stepped onto the bridge, leaning heavily on a cane. His new left leg had grown considerably over the past day. At first glance, it was a perfect match for the right one and seemed to be getting stronger by the hour.

Vaughn still found it difficult not to glance at the new limb. “How did the last round of repairs go, Lieutenant?”

Nog smiled, obviously happy to be back in his element. “She’s spaceworthy, just as long as no one else attacks her anytime soon. I told the D’Naali captain he can get under way whenever he needs to. Once we get Sacagawea back aboard his vessel, that is. I have to say, Shar’s revamped translators really made the technical conversations go a lot more smoothly.”

“Does that mean you were able to learn anything more about why the D’Naali were being chased out here?” Vaughn asked. “Our running into them so close to the alien artifact can’t be a coincidence.”

Nog shook his head. “They never did give us access to much of their ship, outside of the engine room and a few of the most heavily damaged portions of the hull. And whenever you ask them a direct question…” He trailed off.

“They’re evasive?” Vaughn prompted.

“I’m not sure it’s deliberate. The translators still haven’t ironed out a lot of the wrinkles in their language. So the D’Naali are about as easy to understand as some of Morn’s Lurian Postmodernist poetry.”

Vaughn had heard some of Morn’s poems shortly after his initial arrival aboard Deep Space 9. The occasion had been an “open mike” night at Quark’s; Vaughn recalled that he hadn’t comprehended so much as a couplet of Morn’s work. He made a mental note to recommend Shar for a promotion if he could coax just a little more performance out of the universal translator.

“Captain,” Nog said, “if you don’t need me up here at the moment, I’d like to get back to engineering. While Permenter and Senkowski and I have been off the ship, Merimark and Leishman have been a bit overworked.” Vaughn watched as Nog looked down at his regrown limb yet again. Nog’s smile made him appear more genuinely happy than Vaughn had ever seen him.

Tenmei was grinning in Nog’s direction. “It’s always best to stay on Merimark’s good side,” she said. “Especially if Leishman’s hid the candy stash again.”

It suddenly occurred to Vaughn that Nog could have saved time by making his report over the intercom. Of course, it wasn’t every day that one’s amputated leg grew back. Who could fault the lad for wanting to use it as much as possible?

“Dismissed,” Vaughn said with a paternal smile, then watched as Nog exited.

He looked toward Bowers, who occupied the tactical console. “Please open a channel to the D’Naali ship, Mr. Bowers.”

“Aye, Captain,” Bowers said.

Moments later, a bug-visaged alien face appeared on the screen, its vertical mouth parts spread in what might have been a D’Naali smile. “Grateful thanks of ours you have, humandefiantcaptain. Indebtedness, with thanks/ beholden again reiterated/multiplied.”

“Not at all. We were happy to assist you.”

“Anything in recompense/requital, we offer with gladness/joy to provide/make available. State the need/ request.”

Vaughn blinked while he parsed the translator’s fractured grammar. Then he realized that the D’Naali commander was not only presenting his thanks, he was offering to provide something of value in return for the Defiant crew’s labors.

He decided to seize the opportunity. “There is one thing we’d like to ask of you.”

“Denominate that one thing, I request.”

“We need to survey a remote part of this solar system. In the outer comet cloud. We could use a guide who is familiar with the territory.”

The D’Naali lapsed into what seemed a thoughtful silence before he spoke again. “Answer/result is affirmative/positive. Ryek’ekbalabiozan’voslu now dwells aboard your vessel.”

Vaughn realized that the other captain was referring to the D’Naali whom Bowers had dubbed Sacagawea.

“We would be grateful if Sacagawea would act as our guide,” he said, glancing back toward Bowers, who now looked somewhat embarrassed. Vaughn was aware, of course, that the translators had been calibrated to render the nickname into the D’Naali language. “If he is willing.”

The D’Naali captain made a sweeping gesture with one of its slender limbs. “Unneeded it is to check. Ryek’ekbalabiozan’voslu will be/is obligated to be your guide. What time-interval is requested/required?”

“A few solar days at the most,” Vaughn said. “Then we will return your crew member to you.”

The D’Naali captain’s head bobbed up and down. “Assent granted readily/with enthusiasm. After/following five turnings-of-the-star, we will await/expect your return to this place/coordinates.” And with that, he vanished, replaced by an exterior view of the D’Naali ship.

Vaughn returned to the captain’s chair, sat, and looked at the conn station, where Tenmei was posted. Her dark eyes regarded him expectantly, and he could see that she had already laid in a course.

“Best speed to the alien artifact,” Vaughn said.

 

The flight into the fringes of the system’s Oort cloud, guided by the subspace beacon Nog had deployed during the Sagan’ s close encounter, took less than ten minutes. Vaughn ordered Tenmei to bring the Defiant to a relative stop a mere one hundred kilometers from the coordinates where the Sagan had nearly been swept forever out of normal space by the enigmatic artifact’s interdimensional effects.

In the center of the screen, an indistinct structure appeared, growing steadily in apparent size as Tenmei increased the viewer’s magnification levels. At first, Vaughn thought it might be one of the countless dead, icy bodies that spangled this cold, remote region of the system. These objects were diffused throughout the Oort cloud, covering a volume of space so vast and dimly illuminated by this system’s distant sun that any one icy body was scarcely distinguishable from any other.

But the object that was growing on the screen swiftly resolved itself into something else entirely. Its artificial nature was now clearly discernible, as it continued its stately, eternal tumble through the unfathomable interdimensional deeps. Its shape was constantly morphing as new, hitherto unseen facets rolled into view. Spires, arches, buttresses that evoked Gothic buildings appeared and vanished, each in their turn. Curving, swirling lines seemed to fall into existence, then straightened into right angles, contorting immediately afterward into shapes that no mind could fathom but which nevertheless bewitched the eyes.

The feeling of awe that had descended upon him when he’d first viewed a holographic image of the object returned tenfold. In spite of himself, Vaughn had to wonder if he was staring into the business end of another one of the universe’s transcendent, inquiry-resistant mysteries. He recalled the peaceful, floating death-dream he’d experienced after touching a Linellian fluid effigy, a memory that remained green despite being nearly eight decades old. The artifact also brought to mind the life-changing epiphany he’d received from the Orb of Memory, when he had helped recover it from the derelict Cardassian freighter Kamal only a few months earlier. That encounter had forever altered the trajectory of his life, ultimately leading him to DS9, the Defiant… and finally out here, to confront the ragged edge of the human experience. In the presence of the weird alien construct, he could not help but recall his far more recent sojourn on the world of the Thoughtscape entity, which had forced him to confront the many mistakes he had made as Tenmei’s absentee father. Over his almost eighty years of Starfleet service, he had witnessed enough inexplicable events to credit the notion that some things just might remain forever beyond human ken.

During the Defiant’ s approach, the bridge’s population had gradually increased. Vaughn glanced around the room and noted that Shar, Merimark, Gordimer, and science specialists T’rb and Kurt Hunter were all present. Along with Bowers, they stood totally still, staring owlishly at the geometrical contradiction that slowly somersaulted end over end on the screen, a conglomeration of Platonic shapes viewed through a tumbling kaleidoscope.

Vaughn’s feelings of awe were being steadily mellowed by an overtone of caution. He couldn’t help but recall Bowers’ report on Sacagawea’s obviously conflicted feelings toward the ancient edifice that now held the entire bridge so spellbound.

Cathedral. Or anathema.

A hard determination rose within him to get at the truth of it, no matter what it took. Cathedral. Anathema. Either way, the artifact represented the only hope of reversing—or even understanding—whatever changes it had wrought upon his first officer, chief medical officer, and chief engineer.

His friends.

Vaughn saw that Tenmei was already running a series of passive high-resolution scans on the object’s interior.

“Anything, Ensign?” he said.

“Negative, Captain. It’s a blank wall.”

“We’re going to have to work for it, then. Switch to active mode.” He turned to Shar and T’rb, who had already begun busying themselves at a pair of adjacent consoles on the bridge’s upper level. “The moment our sensors turn up the smallest sign of internal activity, I want to know about it.”

“Standard sensors negative,” T’rb said. “It’s like the thing isn’t there.”

Vaughn smiled. T’rb’s off-the-cuff comment was almost literally true, since most of the artifact’s mass lay outside normal space.

“I’m picking up a graviton absorption signature,” Shar said. He sounded almost triumphant, as though he’d just proved a pet theory. “Evidently the object is sweeping up energetic particles and carrying them into its own higher-dimensional spaces.”

“What about positron tomography?” T’rb said to Shar.

“Already engaged.” Shar frowned, his antennae and his gray eyes seeming to work in concert in an effort to bore a hole in his instrument display. “There,” he said at length. “I’m reading a hollow space in the object’s interior.”

T’rb and Tenmei immediately tied their consoles in with Shar’s. They quickly began nodding to each other, confirming Shar’s discovery.

Then T’rb scowled at his readings. “The boundaries of the hollow space seem to be fluid. In motion.”

“I see it, too,” Shar said. “It must be a distortion effect caused by the object’s being in multiple dimensions simultaneously.”

“Or our sensors are just reading it wrong,” T’rb said dryly.

Vaughn didn’t like the sound of that. “Ensign Tenmei, can we beam an away team safely into the interior?”

Tenmei looked at her console again as though to double-check, then nodded. “I believe so, though I can’t get a reading on the atmospheric composition, if any. And Chief Chao had better stay away from those shifting boundaries.”

“I’ll tell her to aim for the middle.” Vaughn said, and turned back toward Shar. “Lieutenant ch’Thane, I want you to assemble an away team, with full environmental suits. Jury-rig an EV suit for Sacagawea and bring him along.”

“Yes, sir,” Shar said. “I request permission to lead the team as well.”

“I don’t think so, Lieutenant,” Vaughn said with a gentle shake of the head. “I want to keep you on board. We still need a working translation of that alien text, and so far you’re better grounded in it than anyone else.”

The young Andorian’s eyes flashed with an intensity Vaughn had never seen before. His aspect was half plea, half fulmination. “The computer and some ancillary equipment are handling the bulk of the work now, sir.”

It wasn’t like Shar to argue with him right on the bridge. Something was wrong. For some reason, the usually reticent science officer appeared to need to go.

“All right, Shar. You can come along. But I intend to lead the team myself. I want to keep a low profile, but I also want plenty of secur—”

“Incoming bogeys, Captain,” Bowers said, his fingers suddenly moving at blinding speed across the tactical console.

Vaughn shifted instantly into his combat-imminent mode as everyone who had been standing about watching the screen scattered to various battle stations. “Are they coming from the artifact?”

“No, sir,” Shar said from the science station, fully intent once again on his own console. “From the sunward direction.”

“How many?” Vaughn wanted to know.

“Eleven,” Bowers said. “No, thirteen ships. Closing fast, in a tight wedge formation. Configuration matches the hostiles we chased away from the D’Naali ship. And they’re powering weapons.”

Though his heart thudded heavily in his chest, Vaughn maintained a studied outward calm born of decades of practice. “Yellow Alert. We’ll maintain a passive posture as long as possible, but I want you to keep the shields and phaser banks warm, Mr. Bowers. And give me a tactical display.”

The image of the mysterious alien edifice vanished, replaced instantly by a baker’s dozen bulbous, blocky aggressor vessels, each of them very similar to the ship that had opened fire on the Defiant and the D’Naali earlier.

“Lead ship’s range is three hundred thousand kilometers,” Bowers said. “Closing fast.”

“Hail them, Mr. Bowers.”

The ships continued their inexorable approach. “One hundred and fifty thousand,” Bowers reported.

Vaughn rose. “Any response?”

“Negative.”

“Keep trying,” Vaughn said. “And ready phasers.”

Bowers: “Sixty thousand and closing.”

“Aren’t you going to raise shields, Captain?” Tenmei said. Vaughn heard the subtle Are you nuts? timbre that colored the phrase.

“Not yet. Be ready to fire on my command, Mr. Bowers. A shot across the lead ship’s bow.”

“Aye, Captain,” Bowers said, showing no sign of apprehension.

Then, to Vaughn’s immense surprise, the aggressor flotilla broke formation, with most of the ships tumbling rapidly away from the Defiant.

“They must have picked up our weapons signature,” Tenmei said. “Maybe we scared them off.”

“I wouldn’t count on that, Ensign,” Vaughn said.

Bowers consulted his console and quickly confirmed Vaughn’s suspicions. “They’ve slipped around and behind the artifact. Now they’re coming around toward our side of it and are taking up new positions between us and the object.”

“Confirmed,” Shar said.

Vaughn fumed silently. Damn! Suckered me. They weren’t planning to attack. They were trying to set up a blockade.

Aloud, Vaughn said, “Hail them again, Shar.”

Shar’s antennae lofted in surprise. “Sir, they are hailing us.”

“Put them on.” And let’s hope the translator that’s good for the goose is also good for the gander.

The viewer image shifted again, this time revealing a dimly lit ship interior. A squat being that reminded Vaughn of nothing so much as a blotchy snowman draped in seaweed regarded him with an inhuman, unknowable expression.

This could only be a member of the species that Shar’s enhanced translator had tentatively identified as Nyazen.

The translator spoke in a voice that evoked something halfway between wind chimes and highland pipes: “Cathedral/anathema never you to be sullied/defiled by seekers-of-curiosity, such as we believe/intuit to be your motive/purpose/goal.”

He doesn’t want us near the artifact. Either because it’s holy, or because it’s dangerous.

Vaughn spread his hands in what he hoped the Nyazen would take as a benign gesture, though he wasn’t at all certain that the creature even had hands as such. “I understand that you don’t wish to let strangers approach this…object. But it has brought harm to members of my crew. We believe that it also holds the key to undoing that harm.”

“Believe you, we cannot. Your vessel, a D’Naali contains/shelters. Blood-foe/ancient-vow-to-destroy D’Naali represent/are/shall ever be. Trust with you not achievable/ advisable, therefore.” The Nyazen abruptly vanished from the screen, replaced by the artifact, slowly tumbling through the yawning interdimensional gulfs.

It took Vaughn only a moment to gather the Nyazen’s meaning. His sensors have picked up Sacagawea’s presence aboard the Defiant.

Bowers spoke quickly, his voice half an octave higher than usual. “Energy readings spiking aboard all thirteen ships’ weapons tubes.”

“They’re opening fire,” Tenmei said.

It was no longer possible to read any ambiguity into the Nyazen fleet’s motives. “Shields up, Mr. Bowers!” Vaughn said. “Lock and load.”