Cathedral Read online

  The creature landed, its splayed feet absorbing the impact of the fall on its spindly legs. Although there were variations, all of Taran’atar’s current attackers were from the same alien species. Oversized arthropods, each of them had two legs and two arms, plus a lengthy curled and segmented tail. Their three-meter-tall bodies were protected by carapaces of black, organic armor. Their heads were elongated and gourdlike, with mucus-dripping jaws from which issued a screech that would have struck terror into most humanoids.

  Taran’atar had already dispatched four of them, but at least six more still crawled in the shadowy canyon, and he wasn’t sure that there weren’t more lurking nearby that he hadn’t seen yet. He had to use additional caution because of the creatures’ acidic blood; his hide was tough, but healing from extensive burns was not how he wanted to spend the next several days.

  Standing, Taran’atar feinted to the right with his arm club, and as the creature dove to that side, the Jem’Hadar soldier scissored his leg out, sweeping it into the feet of one of the aliens. It toppled, off balance, and he grabbed a rock, smashing its skull in one brutal blow. Its death screech reverberated through the canyon.

  Suddenly the din became overwhelming as the shadows uncurled themselves and the creatures screamed down at him. His count had been wrong. There were at least a dozen of them left, and they were angry. Skittering and bounding down the rock walls, they came at him.

  Roaring his own rage, Taran’atar met their attack, forcing two of them into each other so that their snapping jaws ripped into each other’s heads, green ichor spewing about the canyon. He ducked from underneath their dying bodies to find another alien in midair, about to land atop him. He thrust the arm club upward with all his strength, punching through the creature’s thorax and spine, impaling it. The move may have eviscerated the beast, but its weight drove it down onto Taran’atar’s hand, the blood burning through his gray scales and down to softer flesh beneath.

  The creature opened its jaws, snapping at Taran’atar’s face. The Jem’Hadar then saw a disconcertingly sharp set of inner jaws shoot out toward him. With both hands occupied holding the beast’s scrabbling claws and ravening mouth at bay, Taran’atar had little choice. He opened his mouth wider than the width of the alien’s inner jaws, and bit down on the creature’s extrusion. He felt it crunch inside his teeth, and caustic ichor sprayed onto his face. He tossed the alien to the side, pulling the severed limb from its chest and spitting out the vile appendage he had just bitten off.

  The other creatures prowled on the walls, skittering upside down like spiders, wary of the fearless Jem’Hadar. He let out a bellowing roar that echoed through the canyon.

  “Hey, pallie!”

  Taran’atar looked around for the voice that called to him. Finally he saw a man—a gray-haired human dressed in black and white—standing on one of the ledges up the canyon wall. Light spilled from behind him, and the sounds of other humans and music echoed from the light.

  “Would you mind terribly keeping the noise down to a dull roar, please? You’re drowning out the band. And truth to tell, you’re spooking some of the high rollers.”

  Taran’atar was about to respond, when one of the aliens jumped him from behind, its claws raking around his chest. Reaching up, he grabbed the creature’s elongated head, using its forward momentum to flip it over his head. As it hit the dirt, the Jem’Hadar smashed his hand down in a chopping motion, severing his attacker’s neck and allowing its head to roll into the canyon.

  Looking back up toward the human, Taran’atar saw him exiting through what appeared to be a doorway set into the illuminated area. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he heard the departing human say something that sounded like, “Sheesh, and I used to think Worf had a problem with holosuite violence.”

  At times such as these the task with which Odo had entrusted him—to live among Alpha Quadrant humanoids in an effort to understand their often incomprehensible ways—seemed utterly unachievable.

  4

  Chief medical officer’s personal log, stardate 53574.7

  It’s good to get off the ship from time to time, even if only to take part in a routine survey mission of a solar system’s frozen hinterlands, where the most interesting sights are icy boulders and planetesimals which receive so little illumination that many of them can’t actually be seen. But Chief Engineer Nog finds the region fascinating for professional reasons, as does Ezri, whose scientific curiosity—the legacy of Tobin and Jadzia—has been coming to the fore quite a bit ever since the Defiant first embarked on its current explorations of the Gamma Quadrant.

  Ezri will be in charge of the mission, and she seems extraordinarily comfortable with the mantle of command that comes with being the Defiant’s first officer. I have to admit that her increased confidence in recent months has taken some getting used to. The Ezri Dax I fell in love with, after all, could have been a poster child for disorganization and personal chaos.

  But I’ve concluded that I don’t mind the change one bit.

  The universe sang to the shuttlecraft Sagan.

  In a manner of speaking.

  If, Julian Bashir thought, one was willing to apply a rather liberal dollop of imagination to the cacophonous sounds reverberating through the cabin.

  “It’s beautiful,” Nog said, leaning forward in the copilot’s chair, smiling into the faint glow of the cometary cloud visible through the viewports. Something, gods only knew what, was causing the crystalline ices of the region’s various frozen bodies to resonate like tuning forks at various shifting frequencies. Of course, those vibrations couldn’t generate actual sounds in the vacuum of System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud, but the Sagan’ s sensors were capable of measuring the vibrations and rendering them in the shuttle’s cabin as something audible—if not entirely enjoyable.

  Unless, Julian thought, one happened to share Nog’s sometimes rather outré musical tastes.

  “Absolutely beautiful,” the young Ferengi engineer repeated, indicating a visual display of an icy ten-kilometer-wide body that suddenly glissaded back and forth through an entire series of overtone pitches. The timbre was an eerie mating of glass harmonica and chainsaw.

  From the portside seat, Lieutenant Ezri Dax fixed Nog with a good-natured scowl. “‘Beautiful’ isn’t the first adjective that springs to mind, Nog. I guess nine lifetimes just isn’t long enough to acquire a taste for free-form splitter music.”

  “Free-form, yes,” Nog said, wrinkling his nose. “Splitter, definitely not.” It appeared that the word “splitter” had left a bad taste in his mouth.

  Standing behind the cockpit seats, Bashir smiled at them both. “Sounds more like Sinnravian drad,” he said, keeping his expression carefully neutral.

  “Exactly, Doctor.” Nog grinned as he examined a sensor display. He sounded impressed. “Humans usually aren’t very familiar with the atonal minimalists.”

  “Humans aren’t blessed with the same…auditory endowments as Ferengi,” Bashir said, not wishing to be drawn into the aesthetic debate he sensed was brewing.

  “Humans usually can’t stay in the same room with drad,” Ezri deadpanned. “But Julian is knowledgeable about drad. And splitter. And other diseases as well.”

  Nog pouted, and Julian forced down a smile. Serious work lay ahead, after all. After Shar had mysteriously opted out of this survey mission—a development that Ezri had proved oddly reticent about discussing—Nog had stepped in enthusiastically. Of course, the Sagan’ s visit to this system’s comet halo had at least one major engineering-related application: the use of cometary bodies, because of their crystal lattice structure patterns, as sites for high-bandwidth, long-range sensor relays. Nog had seemed rather excited about the prospect of using a solar system’s Oort cloud bodies as natural enhancers for a small number of devices that might provide detailed scans of distant habitable planets—as well as advance warning of the presence of potentially hostile sentients—from as far off as a light-year.

  The Sagan’ s
sensors had been probing the region’s field of sparsely distributed icy bodies for the better part of an hour, and had turned up several unanticipated—and so far inexplicable—waves of subspace and gravi-metric distortions, which Nog and the Sagan’ s computer had transformed into an ongoing atonal musical performance. But the point sources of these anomalous readings remained elusive. Julian was beginning to feel fidgety, not to mention redundant, in the company of an accomplished engineer and a polymath with lifetimes of potentially relevant expertise. Serves me right for being so interested in so many things—and for letting Ezri bring me along on this mission as her good luck charm.

  The “music of the spheres” struck a particularly pungent note, rudely interrupting Bashir’s reverie. “All musicological analysis aside for the moment,” he said to no one in particular, “what haven’t we considered yet as the possible cause of the distortion waves that have been, ah, serenading us for the past hour?”

  Ezri’s keen expression brought a vivid picture of Jadzia to mind. Of course, he thought. She’s in Jadzia’s element now. Loving someone possessed of so many facets was a lifelong process of discovery and accommodation.

  “From everything we’ve observed so far,” Ezri said, “I’d still say it’s clearly an interdimensional effect.”

  Bashir nodded. “But centered exactly where?”

  “If we had access to the Defiant’ s sensors,” she said with a shrug, “we might know that by now.”

  “If the Defiant were to come any closer,” Nog said, shaking his head, “her warp field and cloaking device emissions would only drown out whatever it is we’re, um, not finding out here.”

  Bashir sighed. “So we’re going to be at this for another few hours, most likely.”

  “Looks that way, sir,” Nog said. “Or maybe even longer.”

  Even as Nog spoke, another wave of dimensional distortion crashed against the icy comet fragments, causing several to emit a momentary, ear-splitting howl, which faded into discordant background harmonies as the computer automatically cut the volume back to a more agreeable level.

  Ezri grimaced. “Kids today. Their music is just noise.”

  Bashir agreed silently, suddenly feeling old. Give me one of Frenchotte’s Romulan oratorios any day.

  Nog had either ignored or missed Ezri’s jab. He seemed ready to applaud, as though he’d just heard one of Vic Fontaine’s Las Vegas sidemen lay down a particularly adroit jazz solo.

  Ezri leaned forward over the console, a worried look momentarily crossing her face. “That one peaked pretty close to our position,” she said.

  “But where did it come from?” Nog said as he studied a gauge on his side of the cockpit.

  Then the universe abruptly stopped singing. Instead, it opened its maw as if to swallow the shuttlecraft Sagan whole. Or at least that was how Bashir assessed matters during the split second it took him to glance out the fore viewport and shout, “There!”

  “Hard to starboard, Lieutenant,” Ezri snapped in a calm, authoritative voice. Seemingly gone forever was the tentative, uncertain Ezri whom Bashir had first met more than a year ago. Nog tapped a quick command into his console and the shuttle lurched, forcing Bashir to grab the back of Ezri’s seat for a moment while the inertial dampers caught up with the sudden shift in velocity.

  The cabin lights flickered, went out, and were replaced a moment later by the faint glow of emergency power.

  “Engines?” Dax said, her voice full of iron authority.

  “We still have impulse power and thrusters,” Nog said.

  “Take us out to five-hundred klicks, then bring us about. I want to see this thing from a safer distance.”

  An eternity later—though Bashir knew that perhaps only ten seconds had actually passed—the Sagan was parked in a stable orbit, apparently safe from the dark leviathan that had reared up at them from out of the ether.

  “What is it?” Bashir asked, his momentary surge of fear giving ground to curiosity and wonder as he looked out the viewport. Whatever it was, the object was enormous. It hung in space, a faintly glowing hulk composed of crosscut planes and angles. Even with his genetically enhanced mind, Bashir had trouble counting just how many intersecting vertices the thing possessed. As the alien structure slowly rotated in the void, each new face it presented seemed entirely different, even after it had made what must have been a complete rotation. Gold, silver, and ruby colors vied for attention on its multitextured surfaces. The object utterly defeated the eye, sometimes appearing to be a tangle of impossibly intersecting Platonic shapes, planes, and lines, other times taking on the aspect of a Gothic cathedral. It brought to mind the visually deceptive works of the ancient Terran artist M. C. Escher.

  It didn’t make any sense. Surely, Bashir thought, he ought to be able to keep track of this thing’s architectural lines, however weirdly its alien builders may have arranged them.

  “Whatever it is, it looks pretty benign from this far out,” Ezri said after studying the thing in silence for a few minutes.

  “I wonder why we didn’t see it sooner,” Bashir said.

  Dax stared thoughtfully through the viewport.“Maybe the object’s own subspace distortions are turning the surrounding cometary bodies into a natural cloaking device of some kind.”

  “Well, now that we can see the thing, what do you suppose it is?” Bashir repeated.

  “The Divine Treasury?” said Nog, his eyes as wide as deflector dishes.

  “I certainly hope not,” Bashir said.

  “Why’s that?” Ezri wanted to know.

  “Well, don’t most Ferengi believe that the Divine Treasury is the first thing they’ll see after dying?”

  Nog swallowed hard. “You’re right. I hereby withdraw the comment.”

  “Whatever it is,” Ezri said as she glanced at a readout, “it’s about four times bigger than a Galaxy-class starship—at least it is at the moment.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you,” Bashir said. “Are you saying that its size is changing?”

  Ezri nodded, evidently fascinated by the numbers she saw scrolling past. “As near as I can tell, it’s turning on some sort of interdimensional axis, and different amounts of its mass are peeking through into our universe at different times. It might be a four-dimensional object moving through five spatial dimensions, or it might have an even higher number of macroscopic dimensions. We’re seeing just the shadow it casts in three-dimensional space. And that shadow changes as the thing rotates through higher-dimensional space. We almost flew right into its interdimensional wake.”

  “Well, that’s certainly a relief,” Bashir said.

  “That we weren’t accidentally swept away into the nth dimension?” Ezri asked, cocking an eyebrow in his direction.

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  He smiled. “It’s one of the conceits of the genetically enhanced, I’m afraid. Unless something is out-and-out incomprehensible, we generally expect to be able to figure it out, and usually rather quickly. So it’s comforting to learn that the thing is an imponderable—like the birth of the Inamuri entity we witnessed shortly after the Defiant entered the Gamma Quadrant.”

  Ezri smiled as she returned to her readouts. “I’m not letting you off the hook that easily, Julian. We’ll figure out what this thing is, eventually. The incomprehensible just takes a little longer.”

  “Well, we don’t need to know what it is to figure out what it’s doing,” Nog said. “From these sensor readings, it seems pretty clear that this object is the source of all the dimensional distortions we’ve been picking up.”

  “Our cosmic concertmaster,” Bashir said, staring appreciatively out the fore viewport at the ever-shifting vista that lay before them. “I wonder how long it’s been out here, waiting for us to come along and discover it?”

  “I’ve already started running analyses on the hull materials,” Nog said. “I don’t have anything conclusive yet, but it’s old. Something like half a billion years old.”
/>
  Bashir was speechless. Any civilization capable of building such an enigmatic structure had to be far more technologically advanced than the Federation. But why had they built it? And what had become of the builders?

  Ezri’s eyes locked with Bashir’s, and he immediately recognized Jadzia’s quirky I-love-a-mystery smile.

  “Like I said, the thing doesn’t look so dangerous now,” she said. “Any objections to my ordering a closeup inspection?”

  Since the Defiant’ s Gamma Quadrant explorations had begun, there had been times when Bashir had thought it strange to be taking orders from a lieutenant— who also happened to be the woman he loved, as well as Commander Vaughn’s first officer. But more recently he had begun learning to sit back and enjoy the ride.

  He grinned at Ezri. “You’re in charge, Lieutenant.”

  Ezri grinned back at Bashir before turning toward Nog. “Lieutenant, let’s have at it.”

  Nog parked the Sagan in a close orbit, only about fifteen kilometers from the nearest part of the continually changing alien structure. Ten minutes of exterior scans revealed that the hull materials did indeed contain a fair amount of gold, platinum, and other precious metals, along with a number of transuranic elements that Bashir had never seen before. And he still had yet to see a precise repetition of any of the weirdly morphing structure’s surface features—which presumably meant that they had yet to see it make an entire revolution on its axis through higher-dimensional space. Though he wasn’t a specialist in higher-dimensional topology, it was obvious to him that the artifact’s surface convolutions had to be incredibly complex.

  Bashir found himself pacing back and forth in the cabin behind Ezri and Nog, who busied themselves at the sensor consoles.

  What’s inside the bloody thing?

  “Keep trying the deep interior scans, Nog,” Ezri said. “And watch the subspace horizon line. We don’t want to get close enough to that thing’s dimensional wake to fall over the edge.”