Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key (6 page)

As
Defiant
extracted Kira and her people in a lightning-fast emergency beam-out, it occurred to Iliana that Inari could no longer serve as a tool to ensure Ke Hovath’s cooperation. As she settled back into her chair and executed the pod’s preset course for Harkoum, she decided there was no longer any point in allowing him to learn that she had been rescued.

Just as there was no longer any point in sparing the poor wretch’s feelings. The universe, after all, could be a terribly cruel and arbitrary place.

“Say good-bye to Iniri, Hovath,” she said softly as she allowed the Bajoran to see everything that was now appearing on her own monitor.

A few heartbeats later the freighter’s engine core exploded, and all the monitors aboard the shuttlepod went blank with static. Iliana lifted her hand and considered her prize, the green jewel of the
Paghvaram
glittering seductively in her palm.

Behind her, Ke Hovath screamed as if he would never stop.

S
omething was wrong.

Despite the near flawlessness of the manner in which Iliana had gained possession of the so-called “Soul Key,” the artifact obstinately refused to work for her. Her first attempts to access its power purely by force of will had been a dismal failure. When she’d questioned Ke about it, the Bajoran had merely tried yet again to convince her that he knew of no use for the
Paghvaram
other than the one to which it had been put for generations: the annual ritual of the Dal’Rok—an elaborate morality play contrived to pacify the historically volatile villagers of Sidau.

Iliana then did what she considered the only logical thing: she demanded a demonstration. The Dal’Rok had always been a construct, after all—the collective fears of the Sidau villagers given form. If that was truly all Ke was capable of conjuring from the
Paghvaram,
then it was a beginning. Iliana wanted to see it, to know how Ke made it work.

She released him from his underground cell and took
him to Harkoum’s surface, where Fellen and Telal had already rounded up a dozen or so of the most wretched transients from Iljar, the abject starport community on the edge of the broiling wasteland known on Harkoum as Tarluk V’Hel. Made up of undesirables from at least five different species, the miserable-looking group became wide-eyed with terror when they saw Iliana arriving with Ke.

Ke’s face registered disgust. “These people are afraid of you.”

“With good reason,” Iliana said.

“What did you do to them?”

She turned to look him in the eye. “I made sure their fear would be at your disposal.” She slipped off the
Paghvaram
and held it out to Ke. “Now show me.”

The Bajoran reached for the artifact, but Iliana yanked it back. “Know this first, Ke. Do as I ask, and I’m willing to let these people return to their lives, such as they were. But if you try any tricks, they die.”

Ke glared back at Iliana, his face a mask of pure hatred as he took the
Paghvaram.
She could see the flicker of indecision on his face before he roughly forced his palm through the gap in the bracelet into which the artifact was set. She could see that she had been right to threaten the captives; despite everything, Ke simply did not seem capable of enduring the idea of more innocents dying because of him.

He turned and stretched out his hand to the cloudless sky, palm out.

Once again, nothing happened.

Ke’s brow furrowed. He thrust his hand out again,
squeezing his eyes shut in intense concentration. Beads of sweat formed on his brow in response to his mental exertions.

Still nothing changed.

“Why isn’t it working, Ke?” Iliana asked.

Ke opened his eyes. He lowered his hand and stared at his palm, shaking his head in disbelief.

“I don’t know.”

Iliana could see that he meant it. He was genuinely mystified by his failure. He truly expected the
Paghvaram
to work. A troubled expression enveloped his face, and after a moment he offered her a possible explanation.

“I’m no longer worthy.”

“Then you’re useless,” Iliana said, disgusted.

She drew her disruptor and shot Ke point-blank in the head. His body thudded heavily onto the dry earth, which greedily drank the blood that seeped from the imperfectly cauterized blast wound.

Telal sighed and stepped toward her. “Are we done here?”

The Romulan’s brusque tone irritated Iliana. None of her inner circle, save Shing-kur, seemed to appreciate the interest she had taken in the Bajoran artifact. And this latest failure to show them the reason Iliana had gone to so much trouble to acquire it could not help but raise doubts in their minds about her judgment.

But that’s a problem for another day,
she thought.

“Yes, we’re done,” Iliana answered, still staring at Ke’s body.

Telal cocked his head toward their captives. “What do you want us to do with
them?
”

Iliana stooped to take back the
Paghvaram.
“Dump them back in Iljar.”

“Are you sure? They know what you look like.”

She restored the bracelet to her hand and started back toward Grennokar.

“I didn’t say they had to be alive,” she said over her shoulder.

Iliana wasn’t ready to give up. If anything, her obsession with the
Paghvaram
was only intensifying. Now the thing’s ineffable mysteries seemed to taunt her, making her more determined than ever to unlock the secret of its use.

At Shing-kur’s suggestion, Iliana turned the artifact over to her for scientific analysis while Iliana pored over file after file of Bajoran prophecy and theological scholarship, looking for insights that went beyond the empirical. For the part of her that was Kira Nerys, becoming reacquainted with her culture’s sacred scripture and spiritual philosophy felt a lot like coming home.

Even so, it was difficult to find anything that brought her closer to understanding the
Paghvaram,
in part because there was no reference to it in any of the texts that Taran’atar had sent her. It seemed to occupy no place in the history of the Bajoran religion, or in the indistinct visions of the future that paved the Paths walked by the faithful.

Needing a break from what increasingly felt like a pointless exercise, Iliana set aside her reading to look in on Shing-kur, who had spent most of the last several days in the workshop that she had transformed into her personal laboratory.

“Any progress?” Iliana demanded as she entered the lab. The Kressari was making adjustments to a ceiling-mounted sensor array whose scanning nodes were presently triangulated on the illuminated table directly below them, upon which rested the enigmatic bracelet.

“That depends on your point of view,” Shing-kur told her.

“Explain,” said Iliana.

“The scans I’ve taken are consistent with the Orb studies done aboard Deep Space 9. This stone
is
an Orb fragment,” Shing-kur confirmed. “But like its larger cousins, it defies any more meaningful analysis by conventional scanning equipment. I can’t tell you what it’s made of, or how it works, or
why
it works.”

Iliana found it difficult to keep the frustration out of her voice. “So what you’re saying is, you can’t determine anything beyond what Starfleet has already been able to learn about the Orbs.”

“Not quite,” Shing-kur said. “There is one important difference. I can tell you with absolute certainty that this object is not from this universe.”

“We already know that! It came from the wormhole—”

“That isn’t what I’m talking about.”

“What, then? How can you know it came from another universe if the scans can’t even tell you…” Iliana stopped herself and looked at the artifact, realization slowly settling in. “The bracelet?”

Shing-kur nodded as blackness swelled in her eyes. “The bracelet.”

Although Iliana was willing to concede that the
bracelet that held the Orb fragment was beautiful, it was otherwise unremarkable. “What’s so special about the bracelet?”

“Nothing, in and of itself. The metal is simply a solid band of gold composite, consistent with pre-modern Bajoran craftsmanship…but its quantum resonance signature places its origin in the Intendant’s universe.”

The Intendant’s…?
Iliana thought, her mind racing.
But according to the files, the alternate Bajor doesn’t have any Orbs. They haven’t even discovered the wormhole that the Orbs came from yet!

Then suddenly, she had the answer.

“Of course,” Shing-kur continued, “I’m not quite sure yet how this information can help us, but it is a curious…Are you all right, Nerys?”

Iliana had started pacing the room, feeling a smile begin to spread across her face that Shing-kur was already sharing with her.

“It’s fate,” Iliana whispered.

Shing-kur’s eyes adopted the aquamarine-and-pink hues of mild confusion. “I’m…not sure I understand.”

Iliana could scarcely contain her mounting excitement. She went to the Kressari and grabbed her shoulders.

“We’ve been thinking about this all wrong, Shing,” she said. “This thing is an Orb fragment. It’s a construct of the Prophets. The Prophets exist outside of time. A Bajoran would say it works when it’s
fated
to work.”

“Meaning what?” asked Shing-kur. “We have to wait for this thing to decide when the time is right before we can get any use out of it?”

“No. Yes. No—” Iliana gestured with her hands, groping for the words that would explain her sudden flash of insight. Finally she said, “It can’t be a coincidence that my need for justice has led me to this, to the
Paghvaram,
so soon after I learned about the Intendant! Don’t you see? I’m not meant to use this thing here. I’m meant to return it to where it belongs—to the place where it’s needed—where there’s a Bajor that’s still waiting for the one who is destined to open the Gates of the Celestial Temple.”

Shing-kur’s eyes shifted to pale blue—the color of her profound uncertainty—as she tried to process what she was hearing. Iliana couldn’t help but feel pity for her. Shing-kur couldn’t
see.
She wasn’t Bajoran, and she couldn’t possibly understand the immense vista of possibility that had just opened up before Iliana, now that she finally understood which Path she needed to walk.

The Path of the Emissary.

“But what about Captain Kira?” Shing-kur asked.

Iliana grinned. “Captain Kira can wait. First we deal with the Intendant.”

The plan that Iliana ultimately approved was Shing-kur’s, and it was shocking in its audacity.

Iliana’s immediate goal was to eliminate the Intendant and take her place. The solution seemed obvious enough: Taran’atar had already confirmed that scans of the dimensional transport module—the handheld device that could bridge the two known universes, invented by the same clever human who was now leading a doomed rebellion against the Klingon-Cardassian
Alliance—were stored in Deep Space 9’s computer system. It seemed reasonable to think Iliana could use those files to fabricate her own DTM and beam across the dimensional gulf to the alternate Harkoum. From there…

From there, everything got a lot more complicated. For one thing, their knowledge of the alternate universe was limited to the information collected by the crew of Deep Space 9, and it was appallingly superficial—there was no way to be sure about what might await them on the other side of the dimensional gulf. For another, while Iliana might be physically identical to Intendant Kira, she lacked sufficient knowledge of her target to pull off an effective long-term impersonation.

It was Shing-kur who suggested a less direct, though perhaps more audacious, approach. The key, she argued, was not to risk crossing over to the alternate universe too quickly, but rather to trick the Intendant into believing she had an interest in bringing Iliana to
her.
The Kressari hypothesized that the DTM could be used as a basis for communication with the other side, and that if they could make contact with the Intendant, then it would simply be a matter of making the alternate Kira an offer she would be incapable of refusing.

Once Taran’atar had provided them with the specs for the DTM, it took Shing-kur surprisingly little time to reverse-engineer the mechanism. More problematic would be using it to locate the Intendant. She could be anywhere, after all. But Shing-kur reasoned that the government of the alternate Bajor must, of a necessity, have the means to contact at need a Bajoran as politically powerful as the Intendant, no matter where she was.
That information would doubtless be classified, but computer records of it had to exist.

Accordingly, it became the first test of the Kressari’s device to establish an uplink with the alternate Bajor’s government comnet. It then fell to Iliana herself, calling on all the technical skills she’d mastered during her time in the Obsidian Order, to circumvent the maze of virtual safeguards that protected the system’s most secure files…and find the candle in the Fire Caves, as the old proverb went.

For many hours, Iliana labored nonstop from her secure comm booth, expertly sidestepping virtual tripwires and working constantly to stay one step ahead of the system’s more elaborate security measures, until…

There.

First Minister Li’s most recent intelligence briefing, a long and tedious litany of issues great and small to eat up the workday of this world’s supreme political leader, plus a contact list of important offworld Bajorans. Kira Nerys was at the top of the list, followed by her current location aboard the Klingon vessel
Negh’Var
and a secret protocol for reaching her.

Armed with that information, Shing-kur could begin the next phase of Iliana’s plan.

It was a thing of beauty to watch. The Kressari had a surprising gift for manipulation, one that she deftly employed to ensnare the Intendant with the promise of what she coveted most: power. Shing-kur offered the alternate Kira access to a different quadrant of the galaxy, and the means to rally the most formidable army she might ever encounter—the Jem’Hadar of the alternate universe—
with which the Intendant would be able to conquer the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. Shing-kur sweetened the deal further, claiming that the rewards of their partnership were not limited to the universe of the Alliance, but that Kira would have access, without restriction, to the considerable resources of Deep Space 9’s continuum…and, if she wished, to other realities as well.

Best of all, Kira was made to believe that she had been talking to Taran’atar himself the entire time. It had required only one of the many Jem’Hadar corpses still in stasis on Grennokar, some controlled lighting and carefully managed static, and a voice distorter to convince the Intendant—being the vain and venal creature she was—that she had been contacted by a disillusioned soldier in search of a leader more worthy of what he had to offer.

Now everything had come down to waiting while the Intendant completed the preparations that “Taran’atar” had told her would be necessary to begin their enterprise—preparations that would actually pave the way to her own downfall.