She gazed around at the empty, darkness-shrouded shapes that filled the world into which she had entered. McHogue's world. Then she began walking, toward the bright doorway of the horizon.
The first impact hit as he entered Ops. A silent shuddering rolled through the station's frame, strong enough to jar him back against the open doorway. As the tremor subsided and he regained his balance, Bashir could see the Ops crew scrambling to their emergency positions; the deck's readouts erupted with a surge of data and sector alarms.
"Where's Dax?" Commander Sisko, leaning over the central control panel, turned quickly toward him. "We're going to need her up here—immediately."
"I don't know; the last time I saw her was in the research lab." Through the soles of his boots, Bashir could feel another low-level pulse moving through the station. "I came straight here from my quarters when the general alert went out. What's going on?"
Sisko nodded toward the perimeter-scan readouts. "We've got some spatial field disturbances coming our way; major ones. Their point of emanation seems to be Bajor. Severity seems to be increasing as well; I've already sent O'Brien on an all-levels sweep, to secure as many stress points as possible before the next one hits."
The readout was only roughly decipherable to Bashir. He looked back to the commander. "Is this something we'll be able to ride out?"
"Hard to tell. Dax has much more experience with interpreting these phenomena. She can tell us if the acceleration curve is close to its peak or whether it has further to go yet—"
"Commander, we've been able to get no response from Dax." Odo came up beside them. "There's been no answer to the direct comm request we've sent to her."
"That first jolt may have caused some damage inside the lab; you'd better get down there, Constable." Sisko looked toward Bashir. "You, too, Doctor; she might be injured. Get her patched up and back here to Ops, as soon as possible." He turned away, clasping his hands behind his back as he studied the spread of readouts on the overhead panels.
If she's alive—Bashir couldn't stop himself from thinking the worst, as the turbolift swept him and the security chief toward the lab.
Odo glanced from the corner of his eye at Bashir. "I'm confident we have nothing to worry about, Doctor. It's been my observation over the years that Trills are remarkably resilient, especially to sudden blows or falls. They do, after all, have two functioning neurosystems within their bodies."
Another rumbling surge hit the station, knocking Bashir against the side of the turbolift. The lights of the small space flickered and dimmed; beyond them, he could hear the structure of DS9 creak and groan, the frame members straining against their connectors, like an ancient sailing ship heeling beneath a storm-force gale. That was a bad one, he thought, feeling then a trace of embarrassment at how simple and stupid the words had sounded inside his own head. Of course it had been bad; for the mass of DS9 to have registered any shock at all was an indication of the storm fury radiating out of Bajor. A storm without wind, without any atmosphere at all in the vacuum surrounding the station; it was as if the fabric of space itself, the network of invisible connections between atoms and stars, was being crumpled like a rag into a fist. This little bubble of light and sentience floating in the Bajoran asteroid belt could be snuffed out between one tightening fold and the next.
The turbolift's interior brightened; with a hissing noise, it resumed its course, a twisting path through DS9 that had always reminded him of med-school diagrams of peristaltic motion. That didn't seem amusing now; if the turbolift's advance sensors had detected sufficient torsion damage to the transit shaft, it might have shut itself down, trapping them midway until a rescue crew reached them. If one ever did.
"Thanks—" He let Odo pull him by the forearm, steadying him again on his feet. "Maybe I should worry more about us than her."
When they reached the lab, they found it empty. Or apparently so—Bashir thought he could sense Dax's presence, or some intangible remainder of it. He and Odo stood next to the bench, looking around the area.
"She should be here," said Bashir. His level of concern had gone up another notch. "Where else could she—"
"Watch out!" Odo's voice was a sharp command, simultaneous with his hand grabbing and pulling him back away from the bench.
He saw it then, below eye level; he had almost set his hand on it as he'd stepped forward, searching for Dax. The disassembled CI module, its black casing set to one side, had been powered up; he could tell that much from the luminous sparks moving through its microcircuits. At the same time, he caught the scent of charred wiring insulation and burnt-out components. Even as he looked at the module's exposed innards, another piece of it failed, bursting into a white-centered flare, then darkening just as quickly to a twisted black lump the size of his thumbnail.
"Careful," admonished Odo, as Bashir reached to touch the module. He could feel its heat against his fingertips; he drew his hand back and picked up one of the probe tools that had been left scattered on the bench.
A cautious insertion of the tool's point unleashed a fury of sparks; he shielded his eyes and leaned away, to keep his brows from being singed. When he dropped his protective forearm, he could see that the module was dead, its circuits reduced to black cobwebs, already crumbling to ash.
"What happened to it?" Odo regarded the object's remains with his usual deep distrust.
"Hard to tell . . ." He poked a few more times into the blistered circuits. "I think even O'Brien would have a hard time running a post-mortem analysis on it now. My guess would be that a self-destruct program was triggered somehow; damage this thorough is pretty hard to explain any other way. It'd have to be deliberate."
"Perhaps our friend McHogue decided that he didn't want people prying into his secrets anymore." Odo looked away from the device, toward the unlit recesses of the lab. Another low-level vibration passed through the station, strong enough to rattle a case of glass chemical vials mounted on the wall; Bashir steadied himself against the edge of the bench. "We don't have time to concern ourselves about it now. We still need to find Dax."
A quick search through the rest of the lab yielded no sign of her; Odo returned to the bench area and contacted the Ops deck. "We're not having much success down here; has any other indication of Dax's whereabouts been found?"
Sisko's voice answered him. "Negative, Constable. We've been attempting to run a trace on her comm badge, but we're not getting anything." A barely controlled frustration ran beneath the words. "If something had happened and her badge had been destroyed, the comm desk would have picked up a interrupt signal. Otherwise, the only possible explanation is that Dax has somehow managed to exit or been taken from the station. But there hasn't even been a runabout leaving the docking pads in the last two shifts—"
"Transporter activity?"
"None, Constable. It's as if she's disappeared right out of our midst. . . ."
Bashir tuned out the others' voices, leaving them behind himself as he peered at the computer panel's screen. He was fully aware of Dax's thoroughness; if her mysterious absence was somehow related to her work on cracking the CI module's secrets—and the charred state of the device indicated as much to him—then she would have left a record on the file directory they had shared between them.
He found the most recent additions, date-stamped only a couple of hours ago. Leaning closer to the screen, he quickly scanned across the words into which Dax's voice had been transcribed. He could almost hear her calm, dispassionate tone, the careful dissection of event and evidence. . . .
Another voice spoke, the echo of what he had heard spoken by Commander Sisko less than a minute ago.