His silence and hers closed over them, as though the lab had been sealed against the vacuum surrounding the cold stars.
What they had viewed together on the computer panel's screen had been only a few minutes long . . . but that had been enough. The comm technician had signaled them that a fragmentary transmission had been received from the surface of Bajor; the exact source was the new city of Moagitty. Even with the reconstructive enhancement techniques run on the transmission by the station's central computer, what remained of the signal's audio component was little more than roiling static. But the visual portion was more than enough to indicate what had happened in Moagitty—or what might still be happening, if there were any inhabitants left alive.
Murder, thought the doctor. But even that word implied some function of humanoid intelligence, a comprehension of an action and its consequences, even if that was the psychopathic desire for the shedding of another creature's blood. What the images received from Moagitty showed was something beyond that, a force of nature implacable as the hurricanes buffeting the walls from outside. It was as if the storm had broken through and brought with it not the cleansing fury of wind-driven rain, but a red torrent that washed battered corpses against the gaming tables and other abandoned instruments of pleasure. A war zone contained within the domed spaces of the city—or its aftermath, when the force whose enemy was all life had strode onward.
"There may be still someone alive there." Bashir pointed to the blank screen where the images had been. "Whoever sent the transmission . . ."
Dax shook her head. "It's possible, but this doesn't constitute any real evidence. The transmission may have been recorded and then beamed here by the city's autonomic security system. It would be a standard design protocol for such an alarm message to include as much detail as possible on whatever situation might be encountered by an outside rescue operation. As it is, there was so much data lost coming through the electromagnetic fields surrounding the planet that the time stamp encoded on the sub-band frequency is missing. If the transmission had been assembled by a living person, it may have been recorded hours, even days ago, and set on a repeater uplink until DS9 received it; by this time, the person responsible may be as dead as the others that we saw."
"True, but . . ." He tried to find a rebuttal to her argument; the thought of so much loss of life was beyond his ability to bear. "But we don't know," Bashir said slowly, "how much of Moagitty's interior the alarm transmission would show if we had received it intact. There may be sectors of the city that at least some of the people were able to seal off, to protect themselves from whatever this . . . this process is that's started."
The Trill science officer considered his words. "There's always that chance—but I would hesitate to raise our hopes on that basis. From what we've been able to ascertain of the CI modules' effects, any psychotraumatic behavior would have erupted on a nearly simultaneous basis throughout the city; it wouldn't have spread from area to area, like a traceable vector of contagion. The likelihood of anyone being able to take defensive measures against such a rapid and widespread outbreak of violence would be infinitesimally small."
Bashir had found one thread to cling to; he wasn't about to let it go, however the odds weighed against it being correct. "I can't operate on that assumption, even if it is the most logical. As a doctor, that is; I have to base my actions on the possibility, no matter how remote, that some fraction of the city's population will be found still alive, when the storms finally pass and the station will be able to launch a rescuesortie. And if that's the case, then those survivors will require medical attention. The DS9 infirmary will be the first place to which they'll be brought; I need to have our facilities ready for an undetermined number of casualties, anywhere from one to hundreds of them."
He slid off the stool that he had dragged over to the lab bench, and began gathering together his data padd and the hard-copy working notes that had accumulated over the last several shifts. The weight of Dax's gaze was palpable against his shoulders.
"Am I to assume that your assistance in this research will no longer be available?"
With the stack in his hands, Bashir glanced back at her. "I'm sorry," he said. "But at this point, I believe we've already found out all we need to know. We could go on forever, tearing apart that one CI module and running computer simulations of its programming, and every time we did that we'd find out a little more—and what good would it do? We'd essentially be right back where we started from."
Listening to his own voice, its rush of words, he knew that he was unloading his sense of frustration upon Dax—a frustration that he was aware she felt as well, that Commander Sisko and everyone aboard the station felt by now. All that had been their hope to accomplish, the mission of Deep Space Nine, was being annihilated in front of their eyes. The fragmentary transmission from Bajor hadn't been the sounding of an alarm, but a death knell, a mute obituary sealing others' lives and their own hopes. The development of Bajor, after its ransacking at the hands of the Cardassians, was to have been a triumph of Federation policy against the type of consuming greed that left only wreckage and bare-scraped, valueless stone behind; this world would have someday joined with others as an equal. . . .
Or perhaps more; he was not so much of a rational materialist to be unaware of the ennobling grace that sometimes resulted from such suffering as the Bajorans had endured. There had been a few occasions when Commander Sisko had broken his silence about such matters, commenting briefly and somewhat mysteriously about the unique spirituality shared between this world and the absent Kai Opaka. The commander hadn't achieved his rank by an indulgence in softheaded mysticism; yet Bashir knew that something inside Sisko had been changed, made different from ordinary humanity, by what he had encountered both on Bajor's surface and inside the wormhole. The doctor had had his own experience along those lines, just enough of a meeting between himself and the wormhole's extratemporal inhabitants so that he would know better than to doubt the existence of the universe beyond the one he normally saw. Perhaps that knowledge was what Bajor would have brought in turn to the Federation, a means of passage even greater than the wormhole's access to the Gamma Quadrant. A passage to something within each sentient creature, that would never have yielded to a scalpel or the finest optic probe; a passage to the soul.
And that was what was being murdered upon the surface of Bajor; all those possibilities beyond present understanding. What would become of a world that had suffered such a wound? A wound to Bajor's soul, the consequence of its bartering away the grace it had once possessed. Bashir and everyone else aboard DS9 could only wait and watch, listening for the silence that would mean all the storms were over. And they could go down and unseal the oddly peaceful city, and find whatever was left inside . . .
"I understand." Dax's voice entered the desert to which his thoughts had led him. He glanced at her and saw the same bleak realization apparent inside her. "It wasn't that long ago that we started this investigation; I really believed then that we would find some kind of answer, some way of preventing this from happening." She touched his arm. "Julian . . . I still think it's possible. If we just keep trying . . ."
He shook his head. "It's a little late for that now." The lab door slid open, and he carried his things out into the corridor.
At the infirmary, he dropped the data padd and the other items onto his own desk—it had been a number of shifts since he'd last seen it. He propped his hands against its edge, working out the fatigue that had accumulated across his shoulders.