Vaughn sat back in the captain’s chair. Exhaustion washed over him like a warm wave, trying to coax him into the deeper water of sleep—or perhaps unconsciousness. But there was much yet to do. There were still Jarada ships to avoid, and light-years to travel before Defiantarrived safely back at Deep Space 9. He would have to check to see if any other of the crew had been injured. His own left arm had been burned in the fire at the conn, his right hand even more so, and he would have to have Dr. Bashir patch him up.
And he would have to say goodbye to Prynn.
But not right now.
“Normal lighting,” Vaughn said. “And get rid of those alarms.” Around him, the bridge brightened and quieted, Bowers making the necessary adjustments. Vaughn looked up and said, “Ensign Roness, Ensign Senkowski, report to the bridge.” Relief at the conn and engineering stations for Dax and Nog.
After the acknowledgments came back, Vaughn rested his elbow on the arm of the chair and let his head fall into his uninjured hand. He wanted very much not to think about anything, not to feel anything.
Vaughn closed his eyes. For now—for right now—he was content to pretend that he was at peace, in a life that continued to know no such thing.
2
Kira Nerys slid her thumb down the cracked, ruby-colored spine of the oversized book. She felt the raised hubs and the textured surface of the aged tome, both smoothed from wear, and smelled the faint, musky scent of its binding. Flecks of gold passed beneath her touch, remnants of inlaid letters long ago eroded away by the attentions of many readers through many years.
“When the Prophets Cried,”she said aloud, pronouncing the title in a voice not quite soft enough to be a whisper. Her hand descended to the base of the book, and she let her fingertips hang the edge of the glass shelf. She stood like that for a few moments, her arm outstretched, alone in her office.
The old volume beckoned to Kira, like the open invitation of a longtime and trusted friend. Often throughout her life she had turned to the venerable work for spiritual and emotional guidance. Penned hundreds of years ago by Synta Kayanil, a vedek revered even in her own time for her insight, the collection of religious exegeses, historical recountals, and prophetic writings had provided Kira with a solid foundation on which to build and rebuild her faith—both in her gods and in herself. One of the few possessions she esteemed, and the only one she retained from her early childhood, the book had occupied a significant place in her life for almost as long as she could remember.
But now When the Prophets Criedhad been denied her. With the Attainder imposed upon her by the Vedek Assembly, Kira was forbidden to study any of the Bajoran canon. Of course, she mused, she could simply pull the book from the shelf and read it anyway, and nobody would ever know.
Nobody but Kira herself.
She leaned in toward the book, her hand still dangling by two fingers from the shelf, the glass pleasantly cool to her touch. She breathed in deeply. Commingled with the musk of the cover was the slightly acid odor of the pages within. Kira had never really liked that smell, exactly, but it had always afforded her a sense of familiarity, even a sense of being…well, home, though the concept of homewas necessarily a broad one for her. Before the end of the Occupation, less than eight years ago, she had lived her entire life either on the run or in a refugee camp, and so home had been wherever she had rested her head at night. To a great extent, she thought, that continued to be the case. Even having spent the years since the liberation of Bajor residing on DS9, she did not now think of the station as the only place she belonged. All of the Bajoran system—Bajor and the other planets, their moons, the wormhole, even the Denorios Belt, and yes, Deep Space 9 too—the entire system formed her home.
Kira stood away from the shelf and let her hand drop to her side. To her right, just within the limits of her hearing, voices and the workaday sounds of ops drifted through her closed office doors. She looked in that direction and, through the glass, saw personnel arriving for the start of the day shift, relieving the crew that had worked through the night. Kira had come to her office early today, ahead of the morning shift change, a consequence, she supposed, of the events surrounding the Iconian gateways and her days spent thirty thousand years in the past. Her experiences back in time—whether real or imagined—during a formative and long-forgotten era in Bajoran history had brought her to a deeper appreciation of her people, and to a greater sense of her own responsibilities in the present day. Her abiding trust in the Prophets, and in her own ability to walk the path They had laid out for her, had been reinforced in a way she had not known she had needed. She had returned to DS9 with a strengthened resolve to help her people through these turbulent times—despite the Attainder.
Because of her faith and her belief in the precepts of her religion, Kira would never challenge the edict set down by the Vedek Assembly. Ironically, a transgression of that very nature—acting in contravention of the wishes of Vedek Yevir Linjarin—had led to the Attainder in the first place. Allowing that the ancient Ohalu text unearthed at the B’hala archeological site might not be apocryphal, and convinced that the people had the right to decide the issue for themselves, Kira had posted a complete translation of the book to the Bajoran communications network. She had taken the extreme and irrevocable action, clearly opposed to Yevir’s intention of keeping even the existence of the old work hidden, because she had believed it the right thing to do for her people. But the only reasons to violate the Attainder would be for her own benefit, insufficient cause in her mind to defy the vedeks.
Kira walked over to the replicator set into the wall to the side of her desk. “Raktajino,”she said. “Extra hot, with two measures of kava.”The machinery hummed to life and, amid the striated shimmer of materialization, deposited a mug of the scalding Klingon beverage onto the replicator pad. Kira curled her fingers around the handle of the mug and brought it up to her lips. Wisps of steam carried the stout aroma of the black liquid wafting up to her nose. She sipped, and the hot, sweet raktajinofelt strong and vitalizing as it flowed down her throat.
A smile crossed her face as she was reminded of Etana Kol, a sergeant in the station’s security detail. Kol often remarked that the colonel’s internal organs must be composed of rodinium in order for her to be able to drink such hot beverages, and Kira usually responded by claiming to have a taste for warp plasma or phaser fire or the like. The banter had become an ongoing ritual for the two women whenever they shared a meal at the Replimat after attending temple services.
Temple services.
For more than a month now, Kira had not prayed—had not been permitted to pray—among her fellow Bajorans. Even with her determination to face this time with dignity and fortitude, she could not deny that she missed visiting the temple and being surrounded by people who believed what she believed, who knew what she knew. And there were other things she missed as a result of the Attainder: experiencing the effects of an Orb encounter, speaking about matters of faith with vedeks and prylars…even simply wearing her earring.
Kira absently lifted a hand to her right ear as she crossed to her desk. She set the raktajinobeside the desktop computer interface and sat down, brushing the tips of her fingers along her lobe as she did so. It still seemed strange to her, that sensation of a bare ear; she felt exposed somehow, almost as though she had left her quarters without fully dressing.
Recognizing the tenor of her thoughts, Kira pulled her hand away and let it fall onto the desk with a rap. She did not wish to think about those things that were missing from her life. Instead, she wanted to concentrate on all that she did have, and on the direction her life was headed—on the direction she would take it.