Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key (5 page)

She craved far more than that: she wanted—needed—to
hurt
Kira Nerys profoundly before finally killing her. The exact shape of that vengeance was something she still had to determine. But Iliana had become convinced that whatever form her revenge would take, it would best be achieved with an organization at her back.

Fortunately, convincing her fellow former prisoners to continue following her lead proved to be far simpler than she had hoped. Shing-kur’s devotion to her since
Letau was pure, and could be called upon to serve as an example to the others; the Kressari seemed satisfied to make Iliana’s needs her own, and supported her every decision. She was, in fact, Iliana’s sole confidant.

The others were fairly simple creatures at their cores, motivated by little beyond a thirst for profit and a contempt for the respective societies that had either rejected them, hounded them, or betrayed them. To build upon the tentative loyalty Iliana had earned from them during their escape, she needed to provide all of them with what they desired most.

With Shing-kur’s support, Iliana painted a picture of an organized group of criminal operatives working out of Grennokar, with themselves at the top of the organizational hierarchy. She told them that this emerging brave new age of protectorates, in which the Allied powers were carving up the battered Union into swaths of loosely policed space—ostensibly to assist in preventing a descent into complete anarchy while Cardassia licked its Dominion War-inflicted wounds—would not last forever. But it
would
give them a definite window of opportunity they could not afford to squander. She argued passionately that the ships and worlds of this region would never be more vulnerable than they were at the present moment. This vicinity of space was now ripe for the picking, and the five of them were uniquely positioned to bring in that harvest.

The young gunrunner, Fellen Ni-Yaleii, bought into her vision at once; Iliana felt certain she could fan the Efrosian woman’s interest into passionate enthusiasm before very long. Mazagalanthi, the Lissepian smug
gler of illicit technologies, had been somewhat more reserved, but finally gave his full support to the proposal. Telal, ever the skeptic, had taken some convincing, but in the end even the Romulan freelance assassin had allowed himself to be ensnared by the very real possibilities and opportunities that Iliana had laid out for the group.

The group spent the weeks that followed bringing the most useful sections of Grennokar back online, as well as recruiting mercenaries from those few old industrial communities on Harkoum that still clung to life as havens for every type of outlaw from dozens of worlds. And as the structure and aims of Iliana’s emerging criminal enclave gradually emerged, the group began undertaking seemingly random acts of piracy in several of the adjoining sectors, slowly escalating to more ambitious targets: outposts, colonies, even elaborate confidence games.

And as the rewards began pouring in, Iliana gradually exploited her inner circle’s growing euphoria, reaching out to them as trusted friends. Eventually she confided in them the tale she wanted them to believe about her imprisonment on Letau—that she was the victim of an imposture being carried out to this very day, by a fraud who had claimed Iliana’s real identity aboard the Federation’s starbase in the B’hava’el system.

Iliana’s subtle manipulations had their desired effect: Bit by bit she was transforming their already solidified loyalty into something much larger, much more heartfelt, and far more difficult to quantify: zeal.

These pirates and former prisoners were no longer merely Iliana’s accomplices, or even her friends.

They were now her followers.

“Nerys, did you hear what I said? There’s a Jem’Hadar aboard Deep Space 9!”

Iliana sighed and turned all the way around to face Shing-kur, who was standing just inside the threshold of the modest quarters Iliana had claimed as her own shortly after their arrival at Grennokar. Her Obsidian Order training had given her valuable insights into the detention center’s design, and she had immediately recognized the unremarkable-looking room for what it really was by its very inconspicuousness.

True to her suspicions, she had discovered that the room’s rather ordinary workstation allowed—with some painstaking navigation of its labyrinthine security system—exclusive access to some of the detention center’s more interesting amenities, such as a personal armory, a secure subspace communications booth, a self-destruct system, and a vault containing a shocking amount of latinum. If the dust present was any indicator, Dukat and his scientists hadn’t known about any of it. Whoever had been in charge of this place when it was first built certainly had a flare for the dramatic. But then, she reflected, that was true for most Cardassians.

Kressari, by contrast, possessed notions of drama that were not immediately recognizable outside their species. Their rough, hard-edged faces, lacking the flexibility of either Cardassian or Bajoran skin, did not emote in the
manner of most humanoids. It wasn’t until Iliana looked into Shing-kur’s eyes that she saw the excitement there, evidenced by the deep black that filled her irises. Iliana had become quite fluent in the chromatic language of Kressari emotions, including even the subtle variations in Shing-kur’s ocular palette. She had learned to decode instances such as when one color encircled another, and the meaning conveyed by the expansion and contraction of those colors. It was a fascinating vocabulary of visual signals, in many ways as complex as the kinesics of any of the various species Iliana had studied during her Obsidian Order training. Interpreting the meaning behind those cues was usually easy, Iliana found, though she had to
see
Shing-kur’s eyes to fully grasp the emotional context of her words.

Even so, there were still times when it could be a challenge to “read” the Kressari accurately. News of a Jem’Hadar visitor to the other Kira’s station was odd, to be sure, but Iliana failed to understand why this was a source of excitement for her confidant. It certainly offered Iliana no solace from the bitterness she was finding increasingly difficult to tamp down.

“A Jem’Hadar on Deep Space 9. What is that to me, Shing?”

The Kressari stepped farther into the room and, as if suddenly concerned about being overheard, lowered her voice to a whisper. “According to what I’ve been able to find out, he could be there awhile,” she said. “His name is Taran’atar. Supposedly he was sent by the colonel’s changeling lover as some kind of cultural observer, and
the assignment is open-ended. This may be the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”

Iliana thought she understood where Shing was going with this, and she shook her head irritably. “If you’re thinking of doing to the colonel’s new pet what Dukat’s fools did with the Jem’Hadar on Harkoum, so that he’ll go into a berserker rage and kill her, I won’t have it. She’s mine to destroy, Shing.”

Flecks of blue grew inside the Kressari’s eyes, conveying mild disappointment. “I’m not suggesting anything of the kind. I’m proposing that we put the Jem’Hadar under
your
control. Directly.”

Iliana stared. “What in the world are you talking about? You were the one who couldn’t believe Omek and Vekeer were arrogant enough to tamper with creatures that dangerous! Now you want to follow in their footsteps? Are you insane?”

“Hear me out,” said Shing-kur, spreading her hands placatingly. “I’ve been studying the research that was done here, and I think I’ve figured out where Dukat’s men went wrong. If I’m right, there may be a noninvasive way to override the Jem’Hadar’s behavioral programming and transfer his obedience imperative to you. And the best part is this: We won’t need to strap him down to a table and pray that he doesn’t kill us before his brain explodes. We can do it remotely, from the safety of Harkoum.”

Iliana was beginning to think she might have to reevaluate her estimation of the Kressari flair for the dramatic. She folded her arms before her.

“How?”

“The short version? A subliminal waveform embedded in a subspace communications signal.”

Iliana almost laughed. “That’s it?”

“It’s actually considerably more complicated than that. But as I said, that’s the short version.”

“And you’re telling me that once he’s exposed to this…waveform, he’ll obey my every command?”

“Every
command,” Shing-kur assured her. “And if it works the way I intend, he won’t even be aware of what we’ve done to him…especially since his new master will appear identical to his current one.”

A sleeper. How deliciously ironic.
Iliana turned and started pacing the office.

“Nerys, are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening, Shing. I’m just trying to consider all the implications.” She stopped in front of the Obsidian Order’s spectral Galor-emblem that still decorated one wall of her quarters and focused on it while she spoke. “How soon can you put your plan into effect?”

“I’ll need several weeks at minimum to configure the pulse correctly,” Shing-kur said. “One of our people will need to hack into Deep Space 9’s medical database and download a copy of any scans the station’s doctors have made of the creature.”

Iliana nodded, knowing that several of their hirelings were sufficiently proficient with Cardassian computer systems to pull off the job. After learning that Bajor was spearheading relief efforts to Cardassia Prime from all over the quadrant, and that those efforts were being coordinated from Deep Space 9, Iliana knew it afforded
her the perfect means by which to keep tabs on what was going on aboard the station, as well as on the two worlds Iliana had lost.

At her instruction, several of the smugglers in her employ began hiring themselves out legitimately as freelance cargo carriers, making regular runs as part of the relief effort. The required stopovers at Deep Space 9 allowed them some freedom of movement aboard the station for brief periods at a time, and they reported what they observed or overheard during those visits back to Shing-kur. Visits to the station’s Infirmary were not uncommon.

“All right,” she said. “Put someone you trust on it, and get started on developing the pulse as quickly as you can. And Shing…”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

Shing-kur’s black irises became ringed with vermilion—the pattern Iliana saw most often when she looked into her confidant’s eyes. “You never need to thank me, Nerys,” she said softly before turning and leaving Iliana’s quarters.

Iliana watched her go. She had known for some time that Shing was in love with her. Not in any way that could be consummated, of course; the profound differences between their respective species made such a thing impossible, even if Iliana’s ordeal of the past fifteen years had not purged her of any interest in physical intimacy. And for her part, Shing-kur made no such overtures. Her love for Iliana clearly wasn’t about that. Rather, it was the adoration of one individual for the
essence of another—a tender and unconditional affection for the intangible part of another person’s being.

Had Iliana believed herself capable of reciprocating those feelings, Shing-kur certainly would have been more than deserving.

But she understood all too well that her own emotional spectrum had been bled of such vivid colors a long time ago.

The next several weeks went by swiftly. A seemingly galaxywide crisis erupted during that time, involving the spontaneous opening of innumerable transspatial gateways. The brief period of instability that had grown out of the event came and went before Iliana could decide how she might take advantage of it—much to the relief of her lieutenants, who had considered the situation too dangerous and unpredictable for their liking.

Still, the transient emergency had made Iliana imagine how she might employ such power had she been in a position to gain control over it.

As Bajor’s movement toward Federation membership accelerated in the aftermath of the gateway crisis, Shing-kur reported that her subliminal waveform was ready at last. They were delayed from putting it to work, however, when Deep Space 9 became engulfed in a conspiracy by a species of hostile sentient parasites bent on dominating the Bajoran civilization; the discovery of that threat had forced a lockdown of the B’hava’el system.

The deceptively small creatures had already usurped the body and the identity of Bajor’s political leader, the man Iliana remembered as her friend and commander
in the Bajoran resistance, Shakaar Edon. Iliana’s emotions at learning of his death were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, she had found the fact of Edon’s demise and the circumstances surrounding it both horrific and heartbreaking. On the other hand, the fact that it had all happened right before Kira’s eyes seemed to make it all worthwhile.

It was during the days that followed the successful ending of the parasite menace—a resolution that had brought with it both Bajor’s admission to the Federation and the inexplicable return of Benjamin Sisko, the supposed Emissary—that a relative calm settled over Deep Space 9.

That was when Shing-kur told Iliana that she thought she was ready to attempt the subversion of Kira’s Jem’Hadar, because there was finally a reasonably high chance of success.

Bypassing the station’s comm system so that their signal wouldn’t alert station personnel to the incoming transmission—and then following that system to the correct companel—took a bit of finessing. But when the shatterframe screen in Iliana’s secure comm booth suddenly came to life with the Jem’Hadar’s grim visage, Iliana smiled at him from across the many light-years that separated Harkoum from Deep Space 9 and uttered the words she’d been waiting months to say.

“Hello, Taran’atar.”

S
hing-kur’s waveform performed exactly as she had predicted; Taran’atar’s altered thralldom made him the perfect mole, enabling him to collect all manner of interesting intelligence that was stored aboard the station, transmit it to Iliana, cover his actions from detection, and retain no memory of what he did—except perhaps in the way one might remember a fading fragment of a dream.

“I’m surprised you’re using him purely as a spy,” Shing-kur volunteered one day, finding Iliana as she often did these days: sitting alone in the old prison administrator’s office, reading from a padd.

“For now,” Iliana answered, her eyes never leaving the device. She had developed a particular interest of late in the Celestial Temple and the Orbs, both of which had been absent from Kira’s life until after the Occupation. Taran’atar had obligingly performed exhaustive searches on Iliana’s behalf for any data relating to them. “Let me guess: you thought that if we were successful with Taran’atar, I would immediately begin preparations to
infiltrate the Gamma quadrant so we might put your waveform to more widespread use, bending the armies of the Dominion to my will.”

“Something like that,” the Kressari admitted.

“Patience, Shing. Leading untold billions of Jem’Hadar soldiers back through the wormhole and onto Captain Kira’s very doorstep just before I place her head on a pike is a tempting idea, but it lacks a certain…”

Iliana trailed off, suddenly frozen by the content of the file she was reading.

“Nerys?” said Shing-kur. “What’s the matter?”

When Iliana found her voice, she could manage only a strangled whisper. “Another Kira.”

“What?”

“Another Kira,” Iliana rasped. “Another
universe.
”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look!” Iliana shouted, holding the padd out to Shing-kur. “A parallel universe with another Kira Nerys!”

Shing-kur took the padd and read through the file while Iliana paced the room, scarcely able to breathe, clutching fistfuls of her hair in both hands, feeling as if she might come apart at any moment.

“All right,” the Kressari said finally. “But why is this upsetting you? This woman had nothing to do with—”

Iliana stopped in front of Shing-kur and backhanded her across the face. The impact against the Kressari’s hard skin was more painful for Iliana than it was for Shing-kur, but her confidant shrank from her anyway, letting the padd drop to the floor, her eyes turning lavender with sadness as Iliana’s rage poured out and broke across her like a wave striking a rocky shore.

“How can you know me as well as you do and still not understand what this means to me?
Another Kira
is out there, Shing, claiming my identity, keeping from me what’s rightfully mine!”

Shing-kur said nothing. Iliana grabbed her by the front of her tunic and shoved her against the wall.

“And doesn’t that imply that there’s a potential infinitude of alternate Kiras,” Iliana screamed, “in innumerable alternate universes,
each of them carrying a piece of me?”

Iliana recalled very little of what happened after that, but when she became aware of herself again, she was on the floor, surrounded by the wreckage of the office, weeping uncontrollably. And Shing-kur, bloodied and bruised, was cradling Iliana’s head in her arms, rocking gently back and forth, whispering softly in her ear.

“We’ll get them somehow,” she promised Iliana. “We’ll get all of them.”

In time Iliana returned to herself, but she was not the same afterward. She could feel it. Something deep inside of her had changed somehow. She became consumed with the belief that she would only feel whole again once all the other Kiras had been eradicated. Once she had punished each and every one of them for the torment she felt, for the love they’d taken from her, for the life she’d been cruelly denied.

She spent days sequestered in her quarters. Shing-kur ran interference for her with the rest of her followers, taking responsibility for the outburst that had led to the Kressari’s injuries and the destruction of the
office. Iliana thought she could imagine what the others thought of Shing-kur’s excuses and evasions, but she was beyond caring. Nothing they were doing seemed to matter anymore. None of it would fill the void in her soul.

She should have known that Shing-kur would never give up trying.

“Nerys,” Iliana heard as she sat alone in the soul-salving darkness of her quarters. A trapezoid of light stretched across her floor, ascending the wall that faced her chair; illumination from the outer corridor, let in by the open door. The light framed Shing-kur’s shadow. “Nerys, there’s something I want to show you. I think you’ll like it.”

Iliana said nothing. Shing-kur’s shadow grew larger. Iliana became vaguely aware of a padd being placed in her lap.

“Take your time with it,” the Kressari said, and then she was gone again.

How many hours passed before Iliana finally summoned the volition to read what Shing-kur had brought her, she couldn’t say. She knew only what she felt afterward, that her friend had left her with a precious gift.

A ray of hope.

It was a grouping of several files, selections from the data Taran’atar had sent her about the Orbs, the wormhole, and the alternate universe. Some of it Iliana had already read, but all of it was cross-referenced with a file that was entirely new to her, an obscure paper by a Bajoran philosopher named Ke Hovath, from a backwater village in Hedrikspool Province:

SPECULATIONS ON THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CELESTIAL TEMPLE

Highlighted parts of the selected files stressed the popular belief that the Bajoran Orbs were structured vortices of the energy within the wormhole, and the fact that the wormhole itself was transspatial in nature, as evidenced by the passage it once facilitated to and from the alternate universe.

The connection Shing-kur seemed to be making immediately became clear enough: perhaps the Orbs themselves offered a way to access other realities. Ke Hovath’s whimsical thesis seemed to imply something of the sort, though it didn’t go quite so far in its speculations. Still, Iliana could see that it represented a promising beginning…especially after she finished reading several attached log transcripts describing the Deep Space 9 crew’s single interaction with Ke and his village, years ago, and the curious object that was in Ke’s care.

An Orb fragment. An artifact that hardly anyone knows about, and which wouldn’t be missed until far too late, provided we take the proper precautions. This thing could be the key to unlocking
all
the doors of the wormhole.

An infinitude of doors, beyond which existed an infinitude of Kiras.

In the pale glow of possibility that Shing-kur had given her, Iliana delved back into the mountains of data that Taran’atar had sent her, acquainting herself intimately with every last detail she could find concerning the wormhole, the Orbs, the prophecies of the Emissary,
the so-called Intendant of the alternate universe, and the state of that continuum.

And Iliana began to plan anew….

From the safety of her cloaked shuttlepod, Iliana watched the live images beamed from the Besinian freighter in grim amusement. The sight of Captain Kira and her crew scouring the ship for answers to the puzzling questions raised by the events of the last twenty-six hours was enormously entertaining. But it was apparently not a sentiment shared by Iliana’s current captive.

“You’re not her,” Ke Hovath snarled. “You’re not Kira Nerys. Who
are
you?”

Iliana shot him a bemused look over her shoulder. Safely contained behind a force field in the pod’s aft section, Ke seemed to have recovered somewhat from the manifold traumas she had inflicted upon him over the course of the day. It was an admirable feat; the immolation of almost everyone in his beloved village of Sidau still had to be fresh in his mind, right alongside the threats Iliana had made against his young wife, Ke Iniri.

Perhaps the young scholar was made of somewhat sterner stuff than appearances had led her to believe.

Or it might just be his shock at seeing the image of Captain Kira’s face on Iliana’s monitors, a sight that contradicted the man’s earlier belief that the Kira he knew was the one responsible for the recent horrors he’d been made to endure. This revelation seemed to have restored some of Ke’s shattered world, if only slightly. But apparently it had been enough to embolden him.

Iliana would need to deal with that.

She continued to watch as events unfolded on her screens. Kira was studying the bodies her people had found in the freighter’s engineering section. The captain was clearly taking great pains to reconstruct what had happened aboard the Besinian ship, but she evidently had yet to notice the active-scan cameras that were catching her every move, every nuance of every facial expression.

The destruction of Sidau had been regrettable but necessary—a precaution Iliana had taken to delay the inevitable pursuit she expected to come from Deep Space 9—by ensuring that no witnesses survived to tell the authorities what had happened, or what had been taken from them.

Kira and her medical officer were moving toward the airlock now, following the trail of life signs that had led them to poor, hapless Iniri. Iliana was careful to restrict that feed to a monitor that was out of the restrained Ke’s present line of sight, and routed the accompanying audio to her own personal earpiece. There was no value in allowing him to jump to the comforting conclusion that his beloved wife was being rescued. She was, after all, the most effective lever Iliana had over him.

“Oh, my God.”

The voice that issued from Iliana’s monitor came out as a whisper, from Kira’s medical officer, a young man the captain had addressed as Doctor Tarses. A young man who seemed overwhelmed by the killing ground he had found aboard the freighter. To his credit, the doctor
appeared to recover from his revulsion quickly enough; Iliana watched impassively as he beamed out with a hysterical and traumatized Iniri.

Then Iliana kept her camera’s eye focused tightly upon Kira as the captain moved on to the corpse-strewn bridge, where a heavily disruptor-burned female Arken-ite and a charred, hulking Nausicaan lay unmoving in the bloodbath’s grisly epicenter.

The Besinian freighter and its variegated and anarchic crew had been among the more troublesome of Iliana’s assets. It had lately become
so
troublesome, in fact, that Iliana had come to consider it more liability than asset. The cargo vessel’s crew members were widely known within her organization for thinking themselves deserving of greater rewards for their contributions and for encouraging other mercenaries to voice similar sentiments.

Using them for Iliana’s mission to Bajor—without informing them it was intended to be a one-way trip—had given her the opportunity to rid herself of a growing nuisance, and also served to demonstrate the price of dissent to any like-minded mercs that might have remained in her employ.

When
Defiant
had finally caught up with the freighter, Iliana had immediately stowed the bound and gagged Ke in the vessel’s shuttlepod, then made quick work of the Besinian crew before rejoining her sole live captive, with whom she quietly slipped away from the scene of carnage that she had wrought. Then she had activated the little auxiliary vessel’s cloaking device to cover her departure from the freighter’s modest, single-craft-sized shuttlebay.

And from this remote and rapidly retreating place of
relative safety she continued to monitor in detail everything that transpired on the doomed cargo ship.

Iliana watched as Kira received a report on the freighter’s bridge monitor.
“Captain, I’ve managed to get the warp drive operational,”
the young engineer said,
“and have already initiated a restart sequence, which should take no more than fifteen minutes.”

As the engineer continued to furnish additional details, Iliana beamed inwardly. Her pursuers now had less than a minute before the sabotaged antimatter injector would do its lethal work. She leaned forward in her seat aboard the shuttlepod, watching the captain’s face intently, waiting to see if Kira would put it all together in time. It would be very disappointing if she didn’t.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,”
the captain told her engineer.
“Stand by for further instructions.”

Kira stood on the bridge, a thoughtful expression on her face. Iliana leaned forward anxiously in her seat.

A grin escaped onto Iliana’s face, then began to falter. Was killing her nemesis really going to prove to be this easy?

On the viewer, Kira’s expression suddenly changed.

“We’ve got to get out of here,”
the captain told her subordinates.

There you go,
Iliana thought as her doppelganger ordered her boarding parties to prepare to return to
Defiant
on her command. She felt perversely gratified by her opposite’s quick thinking and prudent suspicion; she had obviously begun to suspect that the fifteen-minute engine restart sequence her engineer had begun had also set into motion a far briefer autodestruct program.

Iliana glanced down at the chronometer on her wrist.
But have your suspicions awakened in time to do you any good, Nerys?

Tapping the Starfleet combadge on her chest, Kira said,
“Kira to Nog.”

“Nog here, Captain.”
came the response from the freighter’s engine room.

“Shut down the restart sequence, Lieutenant.”

“Sir?”

“Shut it
down,
Nog,”
the captain said curtly.
“That’s an order.”

“Aye, sir,”
replied the engineer.
“Initiating core shutdown…. Uh-oh.”

“What is it?”
Kira wanted to know, her face abruptly going pale.

“The antimatter injector isn’t responding. It’s continuing to cycle up to release, and the rate is accelerating. Sir, this thing is going to rupture any second.”