Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key (22 page)

T
he Anomaly opened, and he was back in the Gamma Quadrant.

The old Bajoran warp vessel vibrated noticeably when its sublight drive was engaged. More than once during his brief passage through the wormhole, he had doubted his ability to maintain the ship’s structural integrity. He could only hope that the FTL propulsion system would offer a smoother flight; at warp five, it would be a long voyage back to the Dominion.

Through his starboard viewport shone the star Idran, which cast yellow-orange shafts of light into his control cabin. Pivoting the scoutship away from the star, he plotted his course and entered it into the autopilot. The onboard computer acknowledged his navigational instructions, then prompted him to confirm the ship’s heading. After a final tap of his gray finger on the flight control console, the vessel jumped to warp.

The Dominion.

Knowing he was returning home to the ordered, disciplined life he understood so well felt decidedly agree
able. It had been too long since he’d led true soldiers into combat, too long since he’d carried out the will of the Founders.

Too long since he’d acted according to his design.

More than likely a swift death awaited him, as with all deviant Jem’Hadar. The flaw of his nondependency on ketracel-white had been identified before his exile, after all, and that alone would have merited his termination, had it not been a precondition for his assignment to Deep Space 9. But when it became known that this defect had since been compounded—his body’s occasional need to eat, sleep, and dream, as well as all the damage done to his mind by Iliana Ghemor and L’Haan—he doubted that even Odo would have any further use for him, especially once he learned what Taran’atar had done to Kira Nerys.

It was acceptable. Better to die a Jem’Hadar than to live as a deviant.

An alert flashed on his console. The communications system had picked up a faint subspace signal from several parsecs distant. He ignored it.

Moments later, he looked at his console again.
An audio transmission.

Taran’atar put it on the control cabin’s speakers, and was rewarded with a burst of static…and something else as well. He fine-tuned the reception, boosting the gain.

“…anyone…”

Taran’atar activated a filter, hoping it would reduce the white noise until the voice being drowned out beneath it emerged.

“…attack. Please…”

He tried another filter, then another. Eventually the message resolved as much as he thought it would given its signal strength and the limitations of his equipment; a tinny, digitally distorted voice emerged.

“…This is the independent courier
Even Odds,
calling anyone within range of this transmission. Our ship is under attack. Repeat, we are under attack. Please, if anyone is receiving this, we request immediate assistance….”

The message repeated. A loop.

After the eighth iteration, the signal began to break up, despite every signal enhancement he had brought to bear on it. His ship was moving out of the signal’s range.

By the twenty-first iteration, it had dissolved completely.

He turned off the speakers, and his ship continued in silence toward Dominion space. He contemplated the signal for the next nine minutes.

Then Taran’atar made a choice.

He altered course and set out to find the distress call’s source.

F
or the first time in millennia, the Ascendants were gathering.

Raiq felt the heat of her soul rise as more and more Archquesters strode over the lip of the crater on the barren planet to which they had been summoned. Slowly and with purpose they descended its slopes to join the rings of tall, gleaming knights that had already begun forming within the caldera of black volcanic glass. With each new arrival, the crude fire at the center of the assemblage seemed to burn more brightly, its dancing flames mirrored in the reflective surfaces of the Archquesters’ organic armor, and in every mercurial face.

Raiq’s fluted, luminous eyes turned toward the watching stars above; whatever transpired here this night, it pleased her to know that the Unnameable would witness it.

Never in all her long cycles of life had Raiq dared hope to take part in such a congregation. She’d held to her faith that the Fortress of the True would be found in her lifetime…but untold generations of Questers
had come and gone believing theirs would be the time when the Unnameable and their chosen people would be reunited—when the Ascendants would be judged, and burned, and join with their elusive gods once and for all. It was the longing of every knight: that they would live to see their faith rewarded. But the long centuries had seen their numbers dwindle, and had scattered them ever more thinly across the vast reaches of space. In their neverending quest to achieve the Final Ascension, theirs had become a race of nomads, proud and solitary, so that now even the pairings necessary to propagate their kind were few and far between. Not since they had last united for war, ages ago when the heretical Eav’oq had been driven into hiding, had there been a cause great enough to call the leaders of the Orders together.

Raiq knew this was not a call to new action, however; it was, rather, one of desperation. Many knights, she among them, had reported receiving signs that the Unnameable had returned, and that a new breed of heretics had risen to claim kinship with Them. Raiq herself believed she had recently encountered a shaman of the false worshippers. But because of the lifedebt she owed that priestess, Raiq had stayed her swift and vengeful hand, issuing only a thinly veiled warning to Opaka Sulan that she would do well to fear any future contact between them.

Other signs had been just as telling—none more so than the realignment of stars in the very vicinity of Raiq’s encounter with Opaka, and the rumored return of the Eav’oq that had followed it. Yet despite the power of these omens, the Ascendants still had failed as yet
to reach the Fortress of the True, finding instead that they were divided by doubt and uncertainty about the Path they were to take, and sidetracked still further by a conflict with one of this region’s newer empires, the so-called Dominion and the shape-shifting false gods who ruled it.

To answer that growing discord, the Archquesters of the Ascendants were now, by mutual agreement, convening to debate the conflicting interpretations of the signs. Raiq approved; divisions among the Orders at such a critical moment would be their undoing. Unity was the only acceptable course—even if it meant resorting to another civil war in order to achieve it. Better that one side should annihilate the other than both be held back from the True by internal strife. For just as each knight was responsible for seeking the destruction of those who worshiped falsely, so too were the Ascendants avowed to cleanse their ranks of heterodoxy.

As the last of the Archquesters filled the caldera, one knight detached himself from the innermost circle and quelled the central fire with a wave of his long silver hand. As the light died, a dark tetrahedron was revealed within, unblemished by the flames. Raiq held her breath as a ritual she had previously known only through scripture played out before her eyes. The knight’s voice rang out across the crater, calling on the Unnameable to reveal themselves and sanctify this gathering of their faithful soldiers.

At the conclusion of his prayer, the knight silently brought his palms together, then spread his hands wide. In response, the triangular sides of the tetrahedron flow
ered open, and in the dim starlight Raiq could make out the faceted shape within: a crude crystal cylinder, narrow in the middle, flaring at the top and bottom—the last of the revered Eyes of Fire.

Once there had been nine. It was said that in ancient times, the Eyes burned with inner Fire of the True, and through them the Unnameable had watched their followers, and sometimes spoke to them by imparting dreams. But that was before the crusade against the Eav’oq had turned knight against knight, devastating the Ascendants’ homeworld but purifying its survivors. Eight of the Eyes had been lost in the conflagration, and the last one—this one—had been dark ever since.

With the ritual concluded, the knight turned to address the gathering. As he did so, Raiq’s mouth dropped open—along with that of every other Ascendant in the crater.

Within the Eye, a light had begun to burn.

Seeing the shocked expressions of his fellow Archquesters, the officiating knight turned in time to see the light of the Eye flare to blinding intensity. Raiq instinctively brought up her hands to shield her eyes, but it was too late: her vision whited out, the heat of the lightburst warming her armor before quickly dissipating. Slowly her sight cleared, and she could make out the officiating knight standing before the Eye, manually closing the walls of its casket.

Then Raiq realized her mistake.

The officiating knight, having been closest to the burst, had fallen to his knees, and he was still there, covering his head with his hands. But the figure stand
ing before the Eye casket was no Ascendant. She was smaller, unarmored, her dull gray skin punctuated with prominent ridges that defined the edges of her face—a face framed in long black hair.

The Archquesters stared in stunned silence until one of them—Raiq could not tell who—asked the question that surely burned in the mind of every gathered knight.

“Who…are…you?”

The stranger looked out over the congregation, and she answered with the words the Ascendants had waited millennia to hear.

“I am the Fire,” she told them.