“Yeah,” she said, nodding, “I do.” She ducked back down and pulled a ration pack from the survival cache. Holding it up so that Shar could see it, she asked, “Would you like something to eat?”
“No, thank you,” he said.
Prynn walked around the locker and back over to where Shar lay on his back atop his bedroll. On the way, she decided that she was glad they had opted to transport. Unable to get much closer to the source of the pulse, they had done as her father had ordered and beamed in the opposite direction. She did not believe that it would do them any good, but she was pleased that she no longer had to see the shuttle wreckage. The rest of their new surroundings appeared the same as the old—flat and featureless—just without the embellishment of the crash site. Now there’s a regret for you,she thought. If I’d only been able to land the shuttle….
Shaking off the thought, she sat down on her own bedroll, awkwardly lowering herself onto it. Though they had taken off their helmets, neither she nor Shar had removed their environmental suits since they had transported. In Shar’s case, with his mangled leg, the process would have been unnecessarily painful. And since he had not been able to take off his suit, Prynn had simply not bothered to take off hers.
She began to unwrap the ration pack. Beside her, Shar said, “I should have gone home sooner.” Prynn looked over and saw him staring up at the sky. She did not say anything. If he needed to talk about this now, then she would let him. “I could have taken a leave of absence from Starfleet,” he went on. “I could have even gotten posted to some planetside assignment on Andor.” He paused, and when the seconds began to stretch out, Prynn felt that she should say something.
“I’m not so sure how easy it is to get Starfleet to transfer you wherever you want to go,” she offered.
Shar turned his head to the side and looked over at her. “I was selfish,” he said flatly.
Prynn looked at him for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know you very well, Shar, but you don’t strike me as a selfish person. I suspect that if you were, then you wouldn’t be feeling such remorse right now.” She glanced down at the partially unwrapped ration pack in her lap, and found that she really was not hungry after all.
Shar turned his head back and stared up at the sky again. “I just wish I had done things in a different way,” he said.
“We all make choices,” Prynn told him. “And they’re not always the right ones.” She thought she had come to understand that in the past few days better than she ever had. “Look, you can’t change the past,” she said, and the picture of her mother’s face rose immediately in her mind. Not wanting to risk any painful emotions following after it, she quickly pushed the image away. “At least, you can’t change it,” she said, seeking to lighten the moment, “without getting paid a visit by the Department of Temporal Investigations.”
Shar smiled again, but in a way that seemed genuine this time. “Have you ever had to speak to one of their investigators?” he asked, his tone a strange mix of curiosity and disdain.
“Not personally,” she said, “but one time, when I was on the Sentinel—” Something moved quickly to Prynn’s right, and she looked in that direction. In the distance, a huge plume shot into the air, a thick, agitated column of smoke—
Not smoke,Prynn saw as the rising mass joined seamlessly to the gray sky above, both obviously of the same composition. She quickly stood up, the ration pack falling to the ground from her lap. As she watched, the column expanded outward, like the result of a massive explosion. “The pulse,” she speculated, but then wondered if her father had managed to detonate the devices—
Dad,she thought, and then realized that she had opened her mouth and screamed the word. She stared in horror at the scene. The gray mass continued to spread outward.
“Prynn,” Shar called. “Prynn!” She tore her gaze away and looked down at him. “The helmets,” he said, and pointed past her. She turned like an automaton, stiffly, not really conscious of her movements. “Prynn!”Shar called again, and she looked out and saw the middle third of the horizon filled now, and the column advancing in all directions. She shook her head, as though waking herself from a dream.
The helmets,she thought, and she finally moved, picking them up off the ground. She raced over to Shar and gave him one. He pulled it on over his head, and she bent and helped him twist it into position and then lock it into place. Then she stood back up and did the same for herself.
The instant before the shock wave struck her, she saw the lid of the survival locker crash closed. Then a wall of increased pressure slammed into her, knocking the wind out of her and carrying her backward off of her feet. She flew through the air like a leaf before a hurricane.
At least five seconds passed before she hurtled back onto the ground, hard. Her head snapped back, hitting the back of her helmet. She gasped for air, trying to catch her breath. The gale rushed past, clawing at the contours of her environmental suit, and roaring loudly in her ears. Below her, the ground began to shake violently.
Prynn inhaled great, desperate gulps of air, involuntary attempts to return oxygen to her lungs. She struggled up onto her elbows, and saw blue electrical charges arcing across the metallic portions of her suit. Ahead, she saw nothing—not Shar, not the bedrolls, not the survival locker, nothing but a great, writhing wall of gray bearing down on her. Her gaze followed it upward, and she saw the cloud cover above descending rapidly toward the planet’s surface. Instinctively, she threw her arms up in front of her face.
Suddenly, she was surrounded by the thrashing, penumbral mass. The pressure around her increased, and she felt her environmental suit pushing in on her on all sides.
Her last conscious thought was of her father.
65
Quark stood behind the bar, motionless and staring at the display on the companel. He knew what was coming.
“During the past half-year,”Shakaar said, “I have spent time touring Federation worlds…”
This evening, the bar was busier than it had been in a long time, with a virtual mob surrounding Hetik at the dabo table. Earlier, the hum of voices, the ring of glassware, and the delicious clink of gold-pressed latinum had combined in a way Quark had come to think of over the years as the sound of success. But after Shakaar had begun his speech, the mélange of noises had dulled as the attentions of his customers had been drawn first to Shakaar’s voice, and then to his image on the companels around the bar and out on the Promenade. Bajorans had mostly been the ones initially distracted from their drinking and gambling by the first minister, but before long, almost all of the bar’s patrons had stopped to watch and listen to Shakaar.
“Today, here aboard Deep Space 9,”the first minister continued, “a summit commenced to consider that petition. Attending along with me are ambassadors from Alonis, from Trill…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Quark said, waving his hand in front of the display. “We know who the players are.”
“Shhh,” Treir said beside him, slapping him lightly on the arm.
Quark’s mood plummeted by the second as he watched Shakaar delivering his address from the station’s wardroom. I can’t believe I served that man drinks there,he thought.