3
Ezri leaned against the locked doors of her quarters, pressing her forehead and palms against the cool Cardassian metal. She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, letting them out slowly, trying to calm her mind and heart.
As she had anticipated, it had been an emotionally difficult awakening for Commander Raza. He was the Kejada's first officer, and it had devastated him to learn that all but three of his shipmates were dead. Ezri had gotten him through the worst of the shock, to the point where he had focused all of his concern on Lieutenant Sedtha. Bashir had done all he could, short of letting Raza get up and see her, to reassure the commander that his crewmate would live. The doctor had promised Raza that he could see her the following day, and Ezri had assured him she would be there if he wanted.
After Raza had either gotten used to the shock or simply gone numb with it, Bashir had allowed Vael and Houni to visit him for a few minutes. That had helped, Ezri knew. It had given Raza some strength to see two living, healthy members of his crew.
She turned so that her back was to the door and leaned her head back, opening her eyes to stare at the ceiling.
The initial shock and grief Raza had experienced weren't what was bothering her. She was a trained psychologist and knew how to deal with it; indeed, she had helped Vael and Houni through the same thing only days ago.
It was what had come before Raza had learned of his ship's fate that unsettled her. When he had regained consciousness, he understandably didn't know where he was. Bashir had introduced himself and Ezri and explained to Raza where he was and, very briefly, why. Raza had been surprised to see Ezri. More accurately, he had been surprised to see Dax. She hadn't remembered, but he did, that one of his previous hosts, Tren Raza, had met one of Dax's previous hosts, Emory Dax.
It had only been once, at some political reception Emory had attended after returning from the Olympics on Earth. Tren had been a Trill politician and so of course had been at the banquet, and they had bumped into each other quite accidentally and begun talking. Tren, Ezri remembered, had followed Emory's Olympic journey with interest.
Ezri remembered the meeting, but in completely the wrong way. When the memory came back to her, it was of looking down at Emory, instead of up at Tren. She had been seeing her host through his eyes. It wasn't just an imagined displacement, too. She had felt his interest in talking to this young athlete who had the courage to have journeyed all the way to Earth. She remembered what he had been experiencing at the time, the taste of the wine he had, the sense of self and purpose he carried with him, his minor irritation that he had to waste another night at a political function.
On top of that, she had Emory's memory, the right one. She could, if she tried, remember looking up at Tren, the slight nervousness at talking to such a high ranking politician, the smell of the food around her.
Ezri clung to Emory's memory, wondering where the hell the hallucination of Tren had come from. It scared her, but she didn't want to say anything to anyone. What would they say in return? She would probably get the standard reassurance that the symbiont would take some getting used to, and she could expect her mind to play tricks on her.
With a sigh, Ezri pushed herself away from the door and padded through the suite in the dark. She changed and got ready for bed without turning the lights on, not wanting to catch her face in the mirror right now. She was half afraid she'd see Jadzia looking back at her, or even worse, someone she didn't know.
She climbed into bed and did a short meditation to center herself again. Kira had helped her a great deal by giving her some meditation instruction, which had been immensely valuable after being joined. A deep sense of being Ezri returned, and she was able to go to sleep peacefully.
She awoke with a jerk in the middle of the night, wide eyes staring into the darkness. Ezri lay perfectly still, straining her hearing, trying not to breathe.
There was someone in the room with her, she was sure of it.
Slowly, she turned her head a fraction of a centimeter and saw a darker area at the foot of her bed. Someone was standing there. She dared not move any more and forced her breathing return to a deep pattern, so it would seem as if she was sleeping.
Suddenly, whispered voices filled her hearing and it was all Ezri could do not to scream. She ordered her lungs to keep breathing normally and rolled over as if shifting in her sleep, so that she was facing the bedside table. She strained her ears again, trying to make sense of the whispering. It was definitely a number of voices, and what they were saying would have been intelligible if she understood the words. It seemed to be a great many languages, but none of them were familiar to her.
She took a deep breath and grabbed her combadge.
"Dax to security! Intruder alert in my quarters! Computer, lights!"
The whispering vanished as the lights came on full. Ezri whipped around to see the invader and found her bedroom empty. Jumping from her bed, she grabbed the nearest thing she could find to use as a weapon, a candleholder she'd received for a birthday from a friend at the Academy. She crept into the livingroom, holding the candlestick ready to throw.
There was no one there, either.
Ezri stood with her back to the nearest wall, looking around.
"Computer, identify any other life forms in my quarters," she ordered.
"No other life forms identified."
The sound of the doors opening made her jump, but it was Odo and two of his deputies that hurried in. The deputies had phasers drawn and ready; Odo was unarmed, but still gave off the impression he'd be the worst one to face in a fight.
"Counselor?", he asked upon seeing her. "Are you all right?"
Ezri nodded, then remembered the candleholder and lowered it.
"Where did the intruder go?", the constable demanded.
"I don't know," she admitted. "It could– I may have been dreaming. I woke up and thought I saw someone standing near the foot of my bed."
Odo gestured at his deputies to search her quarters; it was a measure of his respect for her that he didn't suggest she had been seeing things.
"If there was someone there, Counselor, we will find him."
"I'm sorry to have called you out for what was probably just a dream," Ezri admitted.
"I'd rather you have called us than not," Odo replied. "Perhaps it was just shadows, but I'd rather be chasing shadows knowing that the people on this station are smart enough to call security when they think they're in trouble."
Ezri was grateful, and she knew Odo meant what he was saying.
The deputies returned.
"No one, sir. No indication that anyone else was here, either."
"We'll do a sweep of the station," Odo said. "And I'll inform Captain Sisko."
"Thank you," Ezri said.
He nodded at her.
"As a precaution, I'll post a guard outside your door as well."
Ezri felt more relieved than she'd expected, and thanked him again. Odo nodded curtly and instructed one of his deputies to stand guard. All three security officers left, and Ezri stood in the silence for a moment before shaking her head and wearily returning to her bedroom.
She slept fitfully the rest of the night, straying in and out of dreams in which people from races she had never seen mingled with familiar faces on the station, and shadows played strangely in the lights, flickering here and there. She awoke in the morning feeling tired, but didn't allow that to stop her from facing her day. She had appointments to take that morning, which she did, and a raktajino with Kira prior to that helped give her a much needed boost. Following her morning appointments, Ezri ate a quick lunch, then headed down to the infirmary, where she found Commander Raza up and about, awaiting her.
So she found herself on the Kejada several minutes later, after Bashir had deemed Raza fit to move about the station. The commander had wanted to see what remained of his vessel, and since the engineering crews had neutralized the ionic radiation and sealed the hull breaches shortly after the ship had been towed into DS9, it was safe for him to embark. Ezri went with him at his request, walking silently beside him. It reminded her of Tren and Emory; he was tall and she was not, and he had a somewhat imposing presence.
Work crews of all sorts were busy on the ship when they went aboard. A young Starfleet security officer greeted them at the airlock and let them pass . Raza was silent when they stepped aboard his devastated ship. He looked around, as if not recognizing what he saw, then sighed heavily.
Ezri waited until he stepped forward again and they walked down the corridor slowly, bypassing repair teams and several science officers who were going off duty.
"This looks almost like when they were building the Kejada," Raza said abruptly. "There were teams everywhere, people all over the place, running back and forth, always fixing something."
"How long before launch were you assigned?", Ezri asked.
"I was assigned as soon as construction began. Captain Taemer and I both were. I arrived in Sol about four weeks before launch. There was still a lot of work to be done then. And still a lot to be done now, it seems."
Ezri only nodded, glancing around. Despite the obvious damage to the ship, and the fact that seventy-nine people, including civilians, had died here, she had noticed an odd shift in her comfort levels since they had come on board. She actually felt more at ease here than she had all day on the station. In a way, she wasn't surprised; after the previous night, her feeling of security had been shaken. Here, access was restricted, and logs were kept of each person's time of entry and departure.
They made their way, not consciously, to astrometrics. Ezri stood outside the lab, peering in at the scientists working at the computer consoles. The lab had been cleaned up considerably since the day before and the damaged consoles repaired. Now T'Sarak and two other officers were considering some information displayed on the large wall screen, discussing it quietly, while the few others inside worked on projects of their own. Two more science staff had been moved back to DS9 to work with Tanner and Soran, to make better use of the space available to them.
"This is where we found you," Ezri said, looking up at Raza.
"In astrometrics?", he asked, surprise flashing across his face.
Ezri nodded.
"You don't remember?", she asked.
He frowned, then shook his head.
"No, I don't… Why would I have come down here? Who else did you find here?"
"No one," Ezri replied and, now that she came to think about it, that was strange.
"It was the middle of the night," Raza said. "So no one would have been on duty. We only had one science officer on duty, on the bridge. That was Lieutenant Sedtha. Is that where you found her?"
Ezri shook her head.
"She was found in one of the turbolifts. Chief O'Brien thinks that's what saved her. The bridge had a hull breach."
Raza looked startled.
"I was on my way to the bridge when this happened," he said. "At least, I was supposed to be. Lieutenant Commander Vrit't had called both me and Taemer."
"We found her on the bridge," Ezri confirmed, and saw the look of pain on Raza's face. "It's possible that she sent Sedtha down to meet you to work on analyzing the storm."
Raza nodded, but did not look convinced.
"I don't remember," he sighed. "I can't remember anything between Vrit't waking me up and then waking up on DS9."
"Julian said you had a serious concussion. That kind of memory loss isn't surprising."
Raza nodded, but looked unhappy.
"Still…", he murmured, then put a hand on the wall of the corridor. He shook his head. "This was my home, Counselor. These people were my friends. And now it's all gone because… well, because of the wormhole, really. Because we passed through the wrong system." He paused, sighing again. "No matter how many times you hear the warnings at the Academy, it never prepares you."
"No," Ezri agreed sympathetically. "It never does."
Benjamin Sisko sat at a table on the second level of Quark's Bar, overlooking the main floor and the dabbo area. Below him, a few people were playing; business on the station had dropped off noticeably everywhere due to the war, even though the Federation had succeeded in retaking the station. There were a handful of people at the bar, including Morn, of course, as well as some of Sisko's own staff and some members of the Blessing Way's crew. There weren't very many people on the upper level, and those present had chosen tables in darker corners, as if to hide themselves from the universe.
Sisko couldn't blame them. He himself was sitting up here rather than on the first floor in hopes that he wouldn't been seen. He felt uneasy, disquieted. It wasn't just the war, although that was a now familiar day-to-day stress on his mind.
It was something else.
It was the Kejada, moored in their port, a hollow shell of a ship, with only four survivors. Its presence was a constant reminder of not only of the dangers of space travel, but of the devastation of the war.
It was haunted. Not with translucent specters floating through its corridors, but with memory. Sisko had grown up in New Orleans, so he wasn't completely ready to dismiss the idea that something could linger after death and remain attached to a particular place. But with the Kejada, that wasn't it. It haunted the minds of his crew, of the people who were working on the ship. Sisko believed everyone who had heard about the tragedy must have run through their minds their own personal scenario of what it had been like. Then there were the survivors themselves. Raza remembered almost nothing, of course, nor Houni. But Vael did, and she had been frank about telling him everything, no matter how disjointed some of the memories had been. Of course, that had gotten around somehow, and been more fodder for the always active imaginations on that station…
It was haunting DS9 simply with its presence. There were very few crewmembers who came off a work shift from the Kejada without complaints of goose bumps, uneasiness, or the feeling that someone was watching them. Only the Vulcans didn't seem bothered, which was no surprise at all.
But there was more than just that. Something felt wrong on his station. Sisko had been living here for seven years now, and it had been a real home to him for over three. As the commanding officer, he felt the life of the station inside of him. It was as much a part of him now as he was a part of it. And there was something lurking in the shadows of his mind, something unpleasant.
Whatever it was, the Kejada had brought it with her, he knew. Perhaps when the Enterprise towed away the derelict ship, the shadows would be taken, too.
Hin'Adri sat in a tree, legs dangling over either side of the thick branch, hands pressed against the rough bark as she surveyed the scene below her. She knew Yul'ahi was on his way to find her, and grinned when she heard his voice in her mind.
"Hin, are you going to come down or make me come up there?"
Her grinned broadened.
"I'm not moving," she replied, laughing softly to herself.
A few moments later, her brother was pulling himself deftly up beside her, shaking his head at her.
"You are more stubborn than a pundrun," he said, ruffling her grey-white hair. She swatted at his hands, giggling. He wrestled easily with her, taking care not to knock either of them from the tree. He was much taller than her, being ten years older, and brawnier than most men she knew. But then, he was a metal and woodworker, and spent his days apprenticing in the shop down the street from their home.
"What are you doing up here anyway?", he asked.
She pointed upward. Through the thin veil of leaves, the violet sky was darkening to a deep blue-purple and the stars were beginning to emerge.
"How many stars to you think there are, Yul?"
"You know as well as I do that the galaxy has over one hundred billion stars, Hin."
"I want to see them. Ones we've never seen before."
He ruffled her hair again.
"One day you will, Engineer Hin'Adri," he said fondly.
She grinned at him. She had just been accepted into the pre-engineering apprenticeship program. They had need for subspace tunnel engineers, and her interests and skill profile fit their requirements. She was going to be there one day, not too many years from now, building subspace passageways into areas that the Trisepat had never been before. All those stars were there, just waiting for her, and she felt as if she could simply reach out her hand and claim them.
Ezri awoke in the morning, the dream fading as her eyes opened. She frowned, trying to remember what it was she had been dreaming. There had been a tree… She had been sitting in it. Which hadn't been so odd at one point; before she'd been joined, Ezri had never had a problem with heights. But she had inherited Curzon Dax's dislike of them; he had fallen out of a tree once. It was something she battled with now, trying to overcome a paranoia that was not really hers. A joining counselor on Trill had told her that in time, Ezri would probably triumph over Dax in this case, which would be beneficial to future hosts.
Good for them, she thought wryly. Curzon should have put more work into this.
She rose and began getting ready for her day, with a dull, nagging feeling that she ought to be somewhere, but couldn't remember where. As she passed by the bathroom mirror on the way to the shower, she caught a flash of her reflection and thought she saw Jadzia glancing back at her, only for a fraction of a second.
I need a vacation, Ezri decided activating the sonic shower, From myselves.