Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key (17 page)

“W
hat have you
done?”
Iliana hissed.

She scowled at Taran’atar in the privacy of her chosen quarters aboard Terok Nor, a relatively spacious cabin that had once been shared by O’Brien and his lover. Too many artifacts of their life together were still here—a few framed photographs, a chipped porcelain cup, a blanket that still reeked of sex—and Iliana’s failure to have gotten rid of them by now only served to darken her mood even further.

Taran’atar answered her anger impassively, standing at ease in the middle of the main room, his uneven gray skin and black coverall stained with dirt and dust.

“I did exactly as you commanded,” he told her. “Five designated targets were identified and captured.”

“But you personally killed nine of Kurn’s men!” Iliana was pacing back and forth between the Jem’Hadar and the cabin’s viewport. “The general is furious!”

“The fatalities were justified,” Taran’atar said. “The first five were about to use lethal force against Kira and Vaughn. This was in direct violation of your orders.”

“What about the rest?”

“Fatalities six and seven occurred after the three Bajorans were captured. One of the enclave’s leaders—Winn—provoked her guards. It was necessary for me to intervene to prevent her death.”

“
How
did she provoke them?”

“She spat on them.”

Iliana rolled her eyes. “And the two Klingons you killed aboard the ship during the return flight?”

“They attacked me in retaliation for the deaths of the first seven. I merely defended myself.”

Naturally.

“Was I at fault?” Taran’atar asked.

Iliana sighed and rubbed her temples. “No,” she said at length. “No, you weren’t at fault. You did well, Taran’atar. Now go get cleaned up and wait for my next summons. When you’re not in your quarters, it’ll be best if you stay shrouded. At least until I can smooth things over with Kurn.”

“Understood,” Taran’atar said, and he immediately took his leave of her, shimmering into invisibility as he marched out into the corridor.

As the door closed behind him, Iliana reflected that Kurn’s newest call for Taran’atar’s head was actually a minor inconvenience in the larger scheme of things, one she would gladly endure as her endgame approached. But first she needed to deal with her new guests.

The first one would be the hardest.

It was a brief ride by turbolift to the appropriate level of the Habitat Ring, followed by a short walk to the correct cabin, but the journey furnished her with an
eternity in which to reflect upon and curse herself, yet again, for her weakness and overemotionality. She never should have allowed herself the pointless indulgence of looking for the Ataan of this universe—and when that excess had nearly brought disaster upon her, she should have simply left him to rot on Letau. And now, after he had revealed the thing that had driven her to such distraction over the last half-day, she knew she should not be going to visit the focus of her latest crime of sentiment: this continuum’s Dakahna Vaas.

Ataan’s wife.

“I was hoping we could talk,” was how Iliana began a moment after entering Vaas’s cabin. To the dismay of the Klingons, she was keeping Vaas under minimum security: two guards outside a single-occupant stateroom, just like Ataan.

At least the Klingons could take some comfort in the fact that the station’s
other
rebel prisoners were faring far less well than these two.

“I won’t betray my people, Intendant,” Vaas said immediately. “So whatever you think you’re going to accomplish here, the Pah-wraiths can take you and anyone who follows you.”

Iliana was suddenly overcome with the desire to embrace the other woman, which she barely suppressed. Vaas’s defiance was genuine and fearless. Just
like my Vaas.
She was older and more careworn, of course, and she had undoubtedly lived a life that had been far different from that of the beloved friend Iliana recalled from Kira’s years in the resistance.
But the fire is the same.

“I’m not here to ask you to betray your people, Vaas,”
Iliana said. “I strongly suspect you would willingly die before you ever did such a thing.”

That seemed to catch Vaas off guard, but the belligerence remained. “That’s right. I would.”

“So it’s just as well that I’ve come to see you for another reason,” Iliana said, settling into a chair while Vaas remained standing. “I’m here because of your husband.”

The other woman began to offer her the obligatory denial. “I don’t have a—”

“Ataan is here, Vaas. He’s on Terok Nor.”

That silenced her, if only for a moment. Iliana took the time to admire the long black hair that had always been her friend’s single most distinguishing physical feature.

The Bajoran’s body had not vanished with the rest of the simulation. Nor had the knife that protruded from the back of her adversary’s neck. Blood was pooling beneath the black hair.

“What have you done to him?” Vaas demanded.

Iliana shook off the memory. “Nothing he won’t recover from, I promise you. Especially now that I’ve kept my end of our bargain.”

Vaas looked at her suspiciously. “What bargain?”

“Later,” Iliana said, waving away Vaas’s question. “First I want to ask you something. If you answer truthfully, then I promise to return him to you unharmed.”

“I already told you, I won’t betray my people.”

“My question has nothing to do with the dissidents.”

“I don’t trust you, Intendant.”

Iliana nodded. “Fair enough. But you can trust this: If you don’t cooperate, you’ll never see Ataan again.”

One of Vaas’s hands curled into a fist, then slowly relaxed. She took a chair opposite Kira, spun it around, and straddled it.

“Ask.”

“How did you and Ataan fall in love?”

Vaas scoffed. “Is this a joke?”

“No,” Iliana said. “It isn’t.”

“You want to know how my husband and I fell in love? That’s
it?
”

“That’s it.”

“What meaning could that possibly have for you?”

Iliana shrugged. “Think of it as a test of your honesty.”

Vaas hesitated, shaking her head at what undoubtedly seemed like the greatest absurdity she’d ever heard. Then, with a small shrug, she began her tale.

“Twenty years ago Ataan was assigned to Bajor as part of an exchange program between the Obsidian Order and Bajoran Intelligence.”

“You were with BI?” Iliana asked.

“Back then, yes. I was an analyst, and I was curious about our young visitor from the Order. The exchange program was ostensibly to foster trust between our two organizations, but in practice it was all for show. Both BI and the Order isolated their visitors from anything they considered truly relevant. My superiors seemed content to allow me to baby-sit Ataan—that’s how they saw it—and they tasked us with minor and irrelevant assignments, which were very obviously chosen to waste Ataan’s time for the duration of his stay on Bajor. We didn’t care. He grew to love Bajor over the next five years. And he grew to love me.

“When his assignment was over, Ataan was recalled to Cardassia, as we both knew he would be eventually—but not before we wed, quietly and in secret.”

“Because mixed marriages are forbidden among Cardassians,” Iliana said.

“Premarital dalliances outside one’s species are one thing,” Vaas said. “But a mixed marriage is seen as a threat to the sanctity and purity of what Cardassia values the most highly.”

“Family.”

“Yes.”

“That must have been difficult for you both.”

“Ataan always returned to me as often as his duties permitted over the years. Love endures.”

Vaas fell silent, and Iliana replayed the tale in her mind, sifting through the words chosen, the details given and omitted, her changes in inflection, the movements of Vaas’s eyes, face, and hands, and the subtle shift in posture as she spoke. Iliana parsed it all, individually and collectively, and quietly reached her verdict.

“That’s not the whole story.”

Vaas shrugged. “It’s all you need to hear.”

“Not if you want to be reunited with your husband.” Iliana rose to leave.

Vaas grabbed her arm and forced her to turn around. “I did as you asked!”

“Let go of me,” Iliana warned.

“I told you the truth about how we fell in love!”

Iliana delivered a sharp blow to Vaas’s sternum with the heel of her palm. The other woman fell backward, winded, and dropped to a sitting position on the floor.

“No,” Iliana said. “You told me things that were true, but you weren’t honest. Lies of omission are still lies, Vaas. And the truth, I now believe, is that you were already a dissident when Ataan was assigned to Bajor. Perhaps you were born into the movement, or perhaps you weren’t. But you were its inside operative at Bajoran Intelligence, and when the dissident leaders learned about Ataan, he became your assignment. Your task was to seduce him, to make him fall in love with you, with Bajor, and eventually, when he was sufficiently ensnared, with the dissident movement itself. All so that when he returned to Cardassia,
he would be one of you.
A believer. A double agent in the service of sedition.”

“I love my husband!”

“Perhaps you do. But that wasn’t something that happened immediately. It came later. It was something you learned over time.”

Vaas glared at her as she finished catching her breath. “You have…an impressive imagination, Intendant.”

“Only because I’ve known…others like you, Dakahna Vaas. You put your world and your people before everything else, and you make whatever sacrifices are necessary in their service.” Iliana unsealed the door and stepped through it. “I have no intention of allowing that cycle of misery to continue.”

“You sadistic, lying filth!” Vaas roared, lunging toward the door as it closed in her face. Iliana could hear her pounding her fists against it while she screamed.
“Is this how you gratify yourself? With mind games? Why are you doing this? Give me back my husband! Ataan!”

Iliana couldn’t get to the turbolift fast enough.

Of all the inversions she had encountered since learning of the alternate universe, this one had been the most…what? Shocking? Distressing? Unbelievable? What word could possibly be sufficient to describe the raw emotional upheaval of learning not only that both Vaas and Ataan were still alive in this universe, but also that they were joined together?

Happy. It made you happy.

She recoiled from the thought as quickly as it came, suddenly understanding why she had sabotaged any chance she had of earning the love of either of them. That, after all, was what she had wanted all along, wasn’t it? To somehow win them over to her, these alternates of the people she remembered having loved and murdered—as if she could atone for what she had done to them, and thereby recover some semblance of the happiness she’d always believed she had lost forever.

But to accept the possibility that she might find a source of joy outside of the revenge she so craved introduced an intolerable element of doubt—one that she knew she had to crush at any cost if she was ever to know what it was to be whole again. Ataan and Vaas were the source of that doubt, a challenge to her resolve that she had to overcome.

Even if it meant killing them both.

Again.

“Murderer! Terran monster!”

Vaughn found it difficult to argue with Winn Adami as she lunged at Ashalla’s destroyer.

He’d been conscious since his capture—unlike Kira, who had been out cold when more Klingon troops had moved into the demolished refectory in the aftermath of Taran’atar’s rampage and taken her and Vaughn back to one of their ships.

He’d felt fortunate to be able to walk under his own power; the Jem’Hadar may have dealt him a nonlethal blow in knocking his legs out from under him, but they still ached—as did his left scapula ever since it had struck the dining hall’s hardwood floor. That Vaughn had no broken bones—only a minor laceration on his forehead and a wound from a finger-length shard of wood that had become embedded in his right forearm—was certainly as much a product of luck as anything else.

But it wasn’t until after he’d been marched outside and across the smoking, corpse-strewn desolation of Vekobet that he realized Kira had been the lucky one; she’d been spared having to see the carnage that she and Vaughn had unintentionally brought down on this place by crossing over and drawing Iliana’s lightning down on those around them.

Stow that kind of thinking, Mister,
he told himself sternly.
You didn’t provoke any of this insanity. Get your head right, and do it
now!

Once he and Kira had been beamed up to Terok Nor, the Klingons immediately separated them; they placed Vaughn alone in a bare cargo hold, leaving him to wonder whether his captain had been transferred to someplace similar, or if she had simply been sent directly to her death.

I said, stow it!

Vaughn tested his prison. All the access panels and ventilation shafts had been welded shut, and recently from the hasty look of the workmanship. He had no tools with which to engineer an escape; the Klingons had taken his combadge almost immediately, and the bay was utterly empty.

All he could do now was wait.

Forty minutes after his arrival, a group of Klingon guards tossed Jaro and Winn into the cargo bay with him. Both of them were beaten and bruised, and their rumpled, torn clothing was covered in particulate rock, as if they’d been dug out of a cave-in just prior to their capture.

“I guess Kira and I didn’t buy you quite enough time to get away after all,” Vaughn said, regret sitting in his belly like an inert, indigestible lump of stone. “The Klingons must have discovered the escape tunnel.”

Jaro nodded sadly. “They did.”

“But you mustn’t blame yourself, Elias,” Winn said. “I know that you and Kira did everything you could.”

“But the Klingons got what they came for anyway,” Vaughn said glumly, despite the stern voice of experience that continued to insist that he belay that sort of negative self-talk. “And right now that adds up to Kira, both of you, and probably everybody and everything else we were trying to get safely out of Vekobet.”