Star Trek: Deep Space Nine®: These Haunted Seas, page 71
Nog whispered, “She was one of the ones who beamed aboard to help us after we tripped the web weapon. If I could find a way to get Commander Vaughn to let me invite her to stay with the Defiant permanently, I would. She’s a whiz with the cano pliers—and I’ve never seen an engineer who could diagnose a circuit board faster. Except maybe my father.”
“Is she going with you?” Shar asked, wondering if the glow in Nog’s face indicated that he might find true love, or at least serious infatuation, on this journey.
“Her husband—they call them consorts here—is a bigwig in the government. He’s going to be on board, too. He’s like the science minister or something? Mutters a lot.”
“M’Yeoh. Yes, I’ve met him. Why is he going with you?”
“We need a senior government official in order to be able to trade at the Consortium. He was the only one who didn’t need to be here for Ezri’s gig.”
Shar knit his brow quizzically. “Gig?”
“We need to go to Vic’s more when we get back, Shar. You’ll pick up the lingo in no time. You need to get into the groove.”
Shar felt confident he could live a fulfilling life without knowing what a “groove” was, let alone getting into one.
The Avaril had been gone from Luthia for less than a day when the Yrythny General Assembly summoned Ezri to appear before them. She shouldn’t have been surprised—they’d been anxious from the beginning.
Vaughn had only just launched when a messenger appeared with her nonnegotiable schedule, loaded with committee meetings from breakfast to bedtime. Having only a cursory knowledge of the Yrythny, she hardly had enough information yet to make any substantive pronouncements as to the merits of each case. She had wasted no time in assigning the entire away team to research while she’d locked herself into the makeshift office space provided her by the government. After a few minutes standing on her head (which seemed to settle her nerves) she had begun mapping out strategy, searching Curzon’s memories for any relevant experiences he might have had. What she concluded was that whenever circumstances hurtled Curzon into the unknown, he was phenomenally gifted at faking it. Some help you are, Old Man.
So she had treated her meetings as she would a surprise exam or a red alert. Focus. Breathe. Study the situation. Act, not react. And try not to panic. It worked for the most part. A thirty-two-hour diet of position papers had filled her head with facts. Whether she could put them together in a useful fashion was another issue altogether.
She was about to find out.
Nothing like having some prep time, Ezri thought, shuffling through the padds loaded with Yrythny history, law, customs and geography brought to her by Candlewood and Shar. She read as quickly as she could, catching the main points and leaving the fine print for later; hopefully, no one would be quizzing her. She’d just finished perusing a treatise on Wanderer rights when Shar appeared in her doorway.
“The escort’s here, sir,” Shar announced.
“Already? They’re early!” Ezri moaned. “Help me gather all this up. And find me something I can carry it in. I don’t know when I’ll be coming back here today.”
Shar quickly procured a shoulder bag and loaded it up with any and all items Ezri might need. “Coral Sea Wars, then Black Archipelago Conflict,” she pronounced finally. “First Proclamation on Rights came with the Peace Talks.”
“I think Black Archipelago comes before the Coral Sea Wars,” Shar commented, then added “sir.”
“After! Let’s go!” She marched out of the office and into the exterior corridor, where the escort to the Assembly Hall awaited her.
Since he’d first set eyes on it, Vaughn knew that the Avaril rivaled even a Romulan warbird in size. After living aboard her for only a day, he decided that she conformed less to his notions of a starship than she did to a warp-capable space station. Finding his way around identical spiraling corridors and dozens of transport car tracks proved challenging. If their wide-eyed expressions of confusion were any indication, his crew felt similarly.
Because Defiant was still, to all intents and purposes, uninhabitable until repairs were completed, the crew had been provided accommodations aboard Avaril. Bowers, who had been supervising the removal of personal crew gear from Defiant, had mistakenly guided a group, arms laden with duffel bags, to the Avaril’s engine room. Wisely, Chieftain J’Maah had designated several large empty rooms close by Defiant’s bay to serve as living space, minimizing the square meters in which the Starfleet crew could get lost. To facilitate intercultural understanding, Chieftain J’Maah had provided them access codes to the unrestricted portions of the ship’s database. The voyage to the Consortium was expected to take four days in each direction, so Vaughn had issued a standing order that all Defiant personnel were to spend at least two hours daily exploring the political and social contexts of the sectors they were traveling through. In addition, attendance at scheduled inter-crew mixers was mandatory (the exception being Nog and his engineers: repairing the Defiant took precedence over all activities for the duration of the journey). For himself, he was determined to memorize the layout of the Avaril; he hated getting lost.
But there were practical concerns that required adaptation, such as the sleeping accommodations. Because the rooms given over to the Defiant crew weren’t actually designed to be quarters, nothing remotely resembling a bed was available. Bashir and Prynn had been assigned to collect sleeping bags, blankets and pillows from Defiant. After the first night sleeping on the Avaril’s decks, Vaughn expected the crew’s tolerance for noise, snoring and quirky bedtime routines to increase markedly.
With Bowers, Bashir, and Prynn still fine-tuning housekeeping and his briefings with Chieftain J’Maah completed, Vaughn was left with a block of time before he was scheduled to join the Avaril’s senior staff, including Science Minister M’Yeoh, for dinner and a discussion of what to expect at the Consortium.
From what Vaughn had gathered so far, M’Yeoh, in his ministerial position, would secure credentials for Vaughn to conduct trades under the Yrythny’s sponsorship. Vaughn’s impression of the science minister since their first encounter was of a sniveling career politician. Descending from one of the oldest and most prestigious Houses on Vanìmel had been enough to secure M’Yeoh a high government position. Developing a constructive working relationship with him over the next few days might prove challenging. Vaughn had never had much use for inheritors of power; they were too often more trouble than they were worth, in his experience.
Checking the time, Vaughn noted that he had about half an hour before he was to present himself in J’Maah’s quarters. Having heard that the crew had organized a poker game for later in the evening, Vaughn decided to go on a personal errand now, before the meeting with J’Maah, freeing him up to play a few hands after dinner.
Though he knew unscheduled hours might be infrequent in coming days, he decided to forgo practicality and download the next volume of The History of Terran Civilization from the Defiant’s library into a padd for recreational reading. He’d finished the volume on Alexander the Great the day before they’d encountered the Cheka weapon; he was eager to revisit the rise of the Roman Empire.
With most of the crew settling into their new living spaces, Vaughn wasn’t surprised to find the corridors outside Defiant’s bay empty. He entered his personal access code into the doorpad and strode across the bay, the hollow clap of his shoes against the deck-plates echoing through the chamber. Like a recovering patient, Defiant rested on her seldom-used landing legs. Supplementary power modules attached to external access ports and long, snakelike umbilicals trickled energy into the ailing vessel’s environmental systems. Vaughn patted her hull affectionately, hoping for her quick recovery. He ordered the hatch to open and he climbed aboard. Given the chance, Julian would lecture him about unnecessary radiation exposure, but the hyronalyin would cover him for more than the fifteen minutes the task required. Besides, decontamination was progressing at a good clip, and Vaughn wanted to sit in the captain’s chair, feel the armrests beneath his hands, take in the view from the center of the bridge. He might not be Defiant’s first love, but he felt their courtship was going well and he missed being in her company.
He hadn’t taken ten steps down the corridor beyond the airlock when he swore he heard the sound of a door closing. Tensing, he kept still and waited for any further sounds, but heard nothing. He didn’t dare ask the computer for information. At the closest functional companel, he initiated internal and external sensor sweeps; both yielded nothing. As far as the computer was concerned, Vaughn was the only organic being in the repair bay. Still, he couldn’t shake the sense that someone or something had been here—if not when he arrived, then certainly just before.
The Defiant had been boarded illicitly—he was sure of it. He wished the violation were unexpected, but the only unexpected part was how soon into their journey it had happened. Though his hosts had been gracious since achieving an “understanding,” Vaughn knew intuitively that he needed to be wary.
Thus far, all his interactions with the Yrythny, save the manipulative têteà-tête with the Assembly Chief, had been nonconfrontational and cordial. Vaughn had collided with enough admirals and politicians in his day to recognize that getting a job done sometimes required playing hardball. Since the unpleasantness back in Luthia, the Yrythny had facilitated his every request and resolved every concern he raised. That alone troubled him. Though it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the Yrythny’s unhesitating cooperation had been bought with Vaughn’s concession to allow Ezri to mediate, Vaughn had become too old and suspicious to take anything for granted. He found himself wondering what the next round of demands would be. If any more unauthorized visitors come aboard, I need to know how, and why, and who’s being so bold—without needlessly worrying the crew. I will not be surprised again.
With great reluctance, Ezri tore her eyes away from the ceilings, and offered a courtly nod to two door attendants awaiting permission to admit her to the Grand Assembly Chamber. She had assumed upon seeing the hexagonal domes, the vaulted ceilings trimmed in gold, the filigree archways and the kilometer of inlaid marble floor, that she had reached the Chamber, but her escort, with some amusement, had informed her this was merely the lobby. She had gasped audibly when she saw the exterior chamber walls were encrusted with mosaics made of salmon, red, black and melon-colored corals, gemstones and burnished metals. Her escort, upon seeing her interest, explained that the pictures told the tableaux of Yrythny mythology and religion. How the Other had come from a faraway world to stir the primordial oceans of Vanìmel with its magic, thus allowing the Yrythny to leave the dark depths where they had always dwelt and be quickened into warm-blooded sentience. Within the artistic flourishes, exaggerated proportions and motifs, Ezri recognized the various stages of Yrythny evolution from amphibious animals to upright sentients, to a space-faring people who had constructed Luthia and developed warp drive. The picture-book story spread out above her was a helluva lot prettier than the pages of text she’d been force-fed. Certainly studying the mosaics could qualify as job related; she resolved to request the time to do so.
Shar cleared his throat and she realized the door attendants had placed their ceremonial scepters in a wall rack in preparation to admit her to the Chamber. Breathing out, she smoothed her uniform and waited for her cue. She could do this. Of course she could do this. Hadn’t she made dozens of presentations before her classes at the Academy? This would be a piece of cake. She could tell that joke about the human, the Klingon, and the Romulan who walked into the Vulcan embassy, and then…
Upon seeing close to a thousand stern-faced Yrythny, dark eyes fixed on her, Ezri’s mind blanked. She gulped. All the representatives stood in unison—a thunderous sound in the vast chamber—acknowledging her entrance. Those sitting closest to the center dais, the Upper Assembly representing the Houseborn, wore heavy robes of sapphire; those sitting on the balcony levels rimming the oval-shaped room, the Lower Assembly representing the Wanderers, wore green robes. She climbed a small number of stairs onto a rostrum of the presiding chairs. A backless bench was placed in front of a long flat table where Assembly Chair Rashoh, Vice Chair Jeshoh, Lower Assembly Chair Ru’lal and Lower Assembly Vice Chair Keren sat, soberly waiting for her.
As soon as she sat down, the entire Assembly resumed their seats. Ezri shifted on the bench, trying to remember whether sitting with her legs crossed or tucked neatly together with ankles linked was more dignified.
The Assembly Chair touched a control, illuminating one of the closest representatives. Ezri guessed this was how the chair recognized a speaker. Her guess was confirmed when the delegate stood and addressed the Assembly.
“We have discussed, Assembly Chair, the matter of this outsider, Lieutenant Ezri Dax, functioning as a Third, and both assemblies have agreed by a narrow margin, to accept her input. I propose a resolution, which I am now sending to my fellow representatives.” He thumbed a switch, ostensibly sending the text of his resolution to the other desks in the Chamber, “…that this Ezri Dax take up residence, planetside, in the House of my birth, Soid, where she can best learn the manner of our people and then render a judgment. I move for a vote.”
He hadn’t been sitting more than a minute when hundreds of lights began flashing on every level of the room. The Assembly Chair recognized a delegate seated near the Yrythny who had just spoken, but without permission another delegate on the opposite side of the room stood up and began speaking until yet another delegate stood and began speaking over the words of the other. Ezri jerked back and forth, trying to keep track of what was being said, the speakers, the lights, the points of order and resolutions, but found it impossible. The Assembly Chair’s fingers flew across his desk panel, his jaw clenched, but none of those clamoring for recognition heeded his points of order. Jeshoh, Keren and the others looked on helplessly.
From what little she did follow, Ezri learned that members of each House protested any House but their own being designated as the one she would visit first. In turn, the Lower Assembly representatives felt that focusing on the Houseborn issues would prejudice her before she had a chance to hear the Wanderer side. As lights from the top of the Chamber went off and on, voices grew more heated, argumentative rhetoric stopped being funneled through the Master Chair and instead went directly toward the “enemy” party. Several delegates, robes catching on balustrades or on chairs, climbed over barriers separating delegations and further punctuated their arguments with their fists. Jeshoh shouted for order, as did Keren, but their calls were ignored.
And Ezri discovered that many hate-infused faces directed their venom at her. Seeing contempt and mistrust wherever she looked, she hoped the leadership had a plan to protect her, just in case she was mobbed. Thinking she could even attempt something of this magnitude was such a mistake. Have you lost your mind, Ezri? This is crazy!
And then she remembered. A crumb, a fragment of a memory and she rooted around for the rest of it.
…Lela felt their hostility, their scorn, as she made the long trek from the door to her seat. As if being a woman, being young and being her symbiont’s first host weren’t enough to prejudice them against her, she knew she had a controversial proposal to make. Most of her colleagues would vehemently disagree with her idea, and it stood little chance of passing, but she knew that she had to make the proposal anyway because she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t. Further, she knew that she would deserve their sneers and mocking whispers if she couldn’t stand on the courage of her convictions. She knew that courage wasn’t the absence of fear, but rather, acting in the face of fear. Rising from her desk, she lifted a hand, requesting the president pro tempore’s attention, and when he refused to see her, with a shaky voice she said…
“…I am here because I believe in the cause of peace,” Ezri began. “Because I believe that my unique perspective gives me the ability to see through the thick forest of rhetoric and rivalry and find the clarity that lies beyond the dark and shadowed path.” And as Lela’s words flooded back to her, Ezri’s confidence increased, her voice ringing out more clear and strong, striking a chord with the quarreling Yrythny until gradually, they settled down, resumed their seats and prepared to listen.
Of course I can do this, she thought triumphantly. I’m Dax.
6
“What is this, the eleventh time you’ve searched Jake’s quarters?” Ro observed, the door hissing closed behind her.
Sitting on the couch in front of a storage box, Kira looked up from the antique book she perused. “These items were transported from B’hala. I think I’ve only looked through them three or four times.” She took a sip from a mug sitting on the coffee table. “A fifth time can’t hurt.”
Ro sat down in a chair across from Kira. “Nothing new, I assume.” In the course of her duties, she, too, had examined the contents of every box stacked against the walls. Anything he’d left behind had been systematically analyzed and catalogued. Though foul play wasn’t readily evident in the circumstances surrounding Jake’s departure, Bajoran and Starfleet security were treating the disappearance like a criminal investigation.
“I thought maybe knowing Jake’s frame of mind when he left might give us some clues. I’ve been thumbing through the book the investigators found on his nightstand, but so far,” she paused, examining the spine of the novel and reading aloud, “The Invisible Man hasn’t proved to be much help.”
“The forensic behavioral specialists from headquarters combed through his personal logs, his books, his schedule, who he was eating dinner with—his diet even—and they didn’t draw any conclusions.”
“But I know Jake. I should be able to see nuances that the experts might not,” Kira said, dropping the book back into the carton. Replacing the lid, she pushed the carton aside and moved on to open another numbered container. She examined an insert listing the carton’s contents. “Looks like work clothes and family pictures in here.”
