STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax Read online

  “I’m fine,” he said stiffly. “But you do have to leave.”

  Brinner stepped in front of the pod, his back to the symbiont, facing Ezri as if he was about to challenge her in combat.

  Ezri knew what was wrong, tried to correct the situation.

  “I’m not here to argue,” she said. “What you want to do with your life, that’s your decision.”

  For the briefest moment, Ezri almost had the feeling that Brinner didn’t know what she was talking about. But then he seemed to relax.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “And I ... appreciate your trust. But you really do have to leave. I’m ... supposed to be under medical quarantine.”

  Ezri moved closer to her friend, trying to coax out his playful side. She knew he wasn’t under quarantine. He was just using that as an excuse. “Good, that means no one else will come in to ... disturb us.”

  “Ensign, please ...” Brinner said. He was actually pressing back against the pod as if trying to get as far away from her as possible.

  “Ensign?” Ezri frowned. “My, aren’t we formal.”

  “Ezri,” Brinner said, as if correcting himself.

  At that, Ezri stopped two meters from Brinner. She felt her own face flush, even as Brinner seemed to maintain complete equanimity.

  “Ezri? We’re back to that? As if last week didn’t happen?” After that first night they had spent together, close in each other’s arms, Ezri had told Brinner how her younger brother had first called her Zee, when he was learning to speak and “Ezri” had been too much of a challenge. Ever since then, it had remained her brother’s special name for her, and had become the special name she shared only rarely, and only with those, like Brinner, whom she had welcomed into her heart.

  So for Brinner now to call her “Ezri” was a repudiation of what they had shared, of what she had believed they had come to mean to each other.

  “I’m ... sorry ...” Brinner said defensively, and though he seemed to be upset, his cheeks remained pale. “I ... don’t know what else I can say. ...”

  Males, Ezri thought. “So don’t,” she told him as she closed the distance between them. She brought her hands to Brinner’s face, carefully holding the samsit crystal bottle between two fingers of one hand as she used the other to caress his cheek. Then she leaned even closer and kissed him just as she had that first night.

  Brinner shrank back from her but that only made her more determined. She held him more closely, kissed him more forcefully.

  Still, he made no response.

  Ezri went for broke, delicately biting Banner’s lower lip the way she knew he could not resist. Then teasingly, she pulled back on it, forcing him to finally draw closer to her, one way or another.

  But all he did was cringe, as if what she did was unspeakable.

  Ezri didn’t have to be a Betazoid to feel the revulsion that filled him.

  For one brief moment of emotional torment of which her mother would be proud, Ezri gave in to the realization that she had somehow turned from Brinner’s lover into a repulsive thing he couldn’t bear to touch. It was as if a phaser had fired full power into her heart.

  But then, her self-respect came to the fore. This wasn’t her problem. This was Brinner’s. He was the one who was behaving reprehensibly. He was the one who had changed.

  And then that last word blazed in her mind like a general quarters siren.

  Changed.

  Her eyes widened in horror and because she was so young, so inexperienced, she said the one thing she should not say in this situation.

  The truth.

  “You ...” she whispered in shock. “... you’re not Brinner. ...”

  The hands of the man—the creature she caressed struck her own hands away from his face.

  The fragile bottle of samsit shattered in the violence of his action, and as if watching a slow-motion training simulation, Ezri saw in perfect, horrific detail how the laser-sharp shards of samsit crystal sliced into the thing’s palm, spraying dark droplets of blood.

  Dark droplets that shimmered into golden spheres of elemental changeling flesh before they reached the deck.

  At last, Ezri screamed.

  At last, half-falling, half-running, she pushed back from the monster she had kissed, screaming even louder as the changeling’s arms snaked after her, writhing through the air like tentacles, sliding and slithering around her body like living water, to tighten around her neck and cover her face in a golden gelatinous mass that seeped up her nostrils, into her mouth and down her throat, strangling her from the outside, choking her from the inside, until her world turned black and all she saw was a spray of fiery sparks like those that encompassed Deep Space 9.

  In those final moments, all she felt was the horrible, unending realization of how wasted her short life had been. The heart-wrenching loss of it seemed to last forever. ...

  Seconds, minutes, millennia later, a brilliant, blinding light exploded in Ezri’s vision, drawing her forward as the voice of the Creator of All Things asked, “Are you all right? Ensign?! Answer me!”

  For a moment, Ezri was bemused by the fact that her Starfleet rank had followed her into the afterlife. Then she opened her eyes and realized that the Creator of All Things bore a striking resemblance to Dr. Franklin Solon.

  “Are you all right, Ensign?”

  Ezri sat up from the diagnostic bed, coughing hoarsely.

  “Do you know where you are?” another voice asked.

  Ezri blinked to see a bald human doctor standing at the other side of her bed. It took her a moment to recognize him as the Destiny’s Emergency Medical Hologram.

  The realization that an emergency existed was enough to clear her mind completely.

  “Sickbay,” she said. Her throat hurt but she went on. “U.S.S. Destiny.” Captain Raymer was beside Dr. Solon so she felt that was the most likely location of this facility. “There was a changeling,” she gasped.

  “We know,” Raymer said. She ran a hand through her short gray hair. Her eyes were tinged with dark circles. Her pale cheek was smudged with soot, as if she had been in a firefight. “A biotech heard your screams. We were able to get the security fields up in time. We got it.”

  Ezri sighed with relief, then shivered. “It looked just like Brinner.”

  Solon nodded. “That’s what we concluded. But the security monitors were disabled throughout sickbay so we couldn’t be sure.” His dark eyes kept looking up at the diagnostic readouts behind Ezri, and she was suddenly aware she was wearing only a flimsy blue medical gown.

  “Am I all right?”

  “You’d better be,” Solon said.

  Ezri didn’t like the sound of that. “Why?” she asked. She looked again at the EMH, then around at the other grim medical technicians surrounding her bed. “Where’s Dr. T’pek?”

  “That’s how the changeling came aboard,” Raymer said. She held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. Ezri saw one of them was bandaged, a few spots of blood showing. “She was in charge of changeling detection. ... If not for you. ...”

  Ezri noticed some of the techs were also wearing bandages. She could smell smoke in the air. “Has something happened?”

  “The changeling had a communications device. When we cornered it, the ship was attacked by Jem’Hadar. You’ve been out a couple of hours.”

  Ezri’s mind was spinning. She felt as if she had been given some kind of drug. But before she could ask anything more, she heard a life-support alarm sound from another room.

  A nurse ran to Dr. Solon. “We’re losing it, Doctor!”

  Raymer suddenly took Ezri’s hand. Ezri stared at her blankly.

  “I’ve read your file,” the captain said.

  Ezri lurched as she was lifted on the bed’s surface by two technicians with antigravs. Everyone walked at her side, following her toward the second room. Technicians shouted out medical orders.

  “I know how you feel about symbionts,” Raymer continued, her hand still gripping Ezri’s. />
  Ezri peered ahead through her entourage. Saw two medical tables side by side in the operating theater. One was empty. The other was not.

  “No ...” she gasped, not willing to believe what was about to happen. “Where’s Brinner?! Brinner wanted this! It’s his dream!”

  “We don’t know,” Solon told her. “The changeling probably killed him, just like it killed the real Dr. T’pek.”

  “Brinner,” Ezri sobbed as the technicians locked her bed into place beside the table that held the symbiont.

  “I’m sorry, Ensign, truly,” Raymer said. “But as of now, you are the only Trill on the Destiny. The only one who can save Dax’s life.”

  “Please ...” Ezri whispered as the technicians pressed on her shoulders, compelling her to lie down. She felt a draft as her gown was pulled aside to expose her abdominal pocket.

  The life-support alarm beeped incessantly. Ezri felt hot tears run down her cheeks. Raymer’s hand was rigid in her own. Everything was happening too fast.

  “Ensign, listen to me,” the captain said. She leaned over Ezri so there was nothing else in Ezri’s line of sight. “I’ve spoken with the Symbiosis Commission. With the damage we’ve taken, there’s no way we can get you to new facilities within ninety-three hours. You know what that means.”

  Ezri did. “The joining ... will be permanent. ...” She felt her stomach contract as something cool was sprayed along the edge of her pouch. She wanted to vomit but whatever medication she had been given prevented anything from happening.

  “That’s right,” Raymer said. “So the Commission is firm. No joining can be forced. Whatever happens next, it is your choice. Do you understand? You have to make the decision. The Dax symbiont has less than thirty minutes to live. You have your whole life. But whatever you decide, you have to decide now, one way or another.”

  Ezri turned her head, looked at all the people who surrounded her, staring, waiting, just as her mother had watched her in school plays and on sports days. The pressure. The waiting for failure. The need to be something different. The need to get away.

  “What is your decision, Ensign?”

  “I’m a Starfleet officer,” Ezri said faintly, almost unable to speak. “You could order me.” That would be the easy way out.

  Raymer squeezed Ezri’s hand so tightly Ezri flinched. “Because you are a Starfleet officer, I shouldn’t have to order you. Now, Ensign, what is your decision?”

  Ezri closed her eyes. The thoughts, the fears, the memories that came to her at that moment would take her years to sort through, to order, to comprehend. But somewhere, deep inside, one inarguable fact from her past could not be denied.

  She was a Trill.

  And one, inescapable realization from her present still burned in her consciousness with all the intensity of a dying thought.

  Until now, her life had been wasted.

  By all rights, Brinner should be here now.

  By all rights, the changeling should have killed her, not him.

  Somehow, she had been given a second chance.

  How could she let that chance be wasted, too?

  Ezri opened her eyes. “Do it,” she said softly, regretting those words even as she knew she must say them.

  The eyes of her captain burned into hers. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  To her eternal amazement, for the first time in her life, Ezri Tigan was.

  Beneath alien stars, in the cool of the Las Vegas desert, Ezri Dax withdrew her hand from beneath Vic Fontaine’s sports coat to wipe a single tear from her face.

  “Man oh man,” Vic said quietly. “That was it?”

  “Not quite,” Ezri said. “It took about fifteen minutes to prep me. I had never done any of the stretching exercises, things like that. All I remember was poor Dr. Solon reciting everything he had read about joining over the past few days. I think he was more upset than I was.”

  “Fifteen minutes?” Vic said. “Instead of years of training? And then what, they just plug the slug into the pocket and ... that’s it?”

  “No. That’s just ... just the beginning,” Ezri explained. She retreated into silence as she remembered those first tendrils of connection, that first tentative contact with the mind—with all the minds of Dax. Slow it was, gentle, almost shy, until the pathways were in place, the nerve bundles fused, until, as if she were poised on the edge of an infinitely tall cliff, she had heard the first unforgettable, thrilling whisper of a thought not her own, welcoming her to an existence inexpressible to a single mind.

  “Just the beginning,” Vic repeated. Ezri could feel him slowly shake his head. “So then what happened?”

  Ezri settled in more closely against Vic. She was reaching the point at which words could no longer express what had happened to her. That explosion of knowledge, of awareness, of experience ... it was still overwhelming to her, more than a year later.

  “What happened next,” she said, “was ... everything, Vic. Eight lives and three hundred years of everything, all at once.”

  And as she saw Vic stare down wonderingly into her eyes, Ezri at last understood that, for now, her story had come to an end.

  It was time to tell her stories ...

  LELA

  “What is a person if not the sum of her memories?”

  —Lela Dax

  “Facets”

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch is the only person in the science fiction field to win the prestigious Hugo Award for her editing and for her writing. She has also won the Asimov’s Readers Choice Award, the Ellery Queen Readers Choice Award, and the SF Age Readers Choice Award (all in the same year!). In addition, she’s won the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Locus Award, and been nominated for every possible sf award.

  In the United States, she has published more than fifty novels under a variety of pen names. Her books have been translated into many languages and reprinted worldwide. Her most recent novel is The Disappeared from Roc.

  She lives on the Oregon Coast, with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, and their collection of cats.

  Jill Sherwin

  Jill Sherwin is the author of Quotable Star Trek; The Definitive Star Trek Trivia Book, Volume I; and The Definitive Star Trek Trivia Book, Volume II. She has worked as a writers’ assistant on the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. She sold the story that became the second season Andromeda episode: “Be All My Sins Remembered.”

  First Steps

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  [based on a concept: by Jill Sherwin]

  UNTIL SHE WAS joined, Lela never dreamed of space. She dreamed of leading, of a life dedicated to the service of Trill. But she never dreamed of space.

  How strange, then, that the Dax symbiont had never seen the stars, and yet it was the dream of stars that the symbiont had imparted to Lela.

  Trill had pilots who flew into space, of course—they had warp capability after all—but only a few were authorized to venture outside of Trill’s orbit. She would never be one of them. She’d been tested long ago, and lacked the dexterity, the eye-hand coordination, that a good pilot needed.

  Her future was in politics. She had known that before she was joined. And she’d had great success: She was one of the first women elected to Trill’s ruling council, and she was currently the only woman in that august body. The three that preceded her had retired long ago.

  Yet she felt twinges, longings, that were all centered on the stars.

  She never spoke of those longings, but sometimes, after particularly rough council sessions, she went to the observatory that was attached to the planetary spaceflight center. The center housed space traffic control, the controls for the planetary defense grid, and the finest observatory on Trill, one that was in constant use by the best scientists on the planet.

  Usually the space center was quiet, a place for reflection. She often sat in the observatory and looked at the star charts, or the project
ions from the telescopes that showed up on the screens. Sometimes she spoke with center personnel, and sometimes she just watched.

  It gave her perspective, perspective she sometimes needed when dealing with the other council members. She was still newly elected and they had yet to take her seriously. They had listened—and sneered—at her campaign slogans. She had said she spoke for those who lived only one lifetime—the unjoined, mostly—because she had only lived one so far, and she said she spoke for the newly joined, because she and her symbiont were both new to this. The other members of the council had been joined long before, and seemed to forget, she claimed, that the majority of Trill’s population experienced but a single lifetime before their memories were lost forever.

  Lela found it ironic that her biggest crisis, both legislative and personal, began at the space center.

  * * *

  She arrived one night to find the space center in chaos. Scientists filled the observatory—the large room was so full, she could barely squeeze inside. It was hot and stuffy and smelled faintly of sweat. It took a lot of bodies to make a room that large smell of sweat.

  She was a small woman compared with most Trills and she had to push her way to the front of the group, excusing herself, apologizing, before she could see the screen to know what was going on.

  A ship appeared before her. It was long and graceful, slender and glittery white. There seemed to be no portholes, no obvious engines, and no real place of entry. Just a long beautiful ship that reminded Lela of a feather.

  “What is it?” she asked the scientist next to her.

  He shook his head. “It went into orbit around Trill a few hours ago.”

  And no one had notified the council. She sighed. That was already a problem. But she couldn’t seem to move either. She had never seen an alien ship, although she’d seen holos of the Vulcan craft that made first contact.

  This was clearly not a Vulcan ship. A shiver ran down her spine at the thought. She had been just a girl during the Vulcan first contact crisis, but she remembered it vividly. Trill was horribly divided over the idea of any alien contact. After the Vulcans made their first landing and proposed an exchange of cultural information as a prelude to some kind of lasting friendship, the infighting in the council and among the people of Trill was almost frightening.