Cathedral by Michael Mangels (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

had an audio accompaniment. A series of weird, grinding, shrill-sweet musical tones stacked themselves into unearthly chords, gliding, jagged, stepwise melodies, and fading, colliding overtone-reverberations.

The music wasn’t exactly Vaughn’s cup of twig tea. But he decided that it wasn’t entirely unpleasant either.

He glanced at Ezri, offering her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “The music of the spheres, Lieutenant?”

“Sorry, Captain. This was something we noticed when we were surveying the Oort cloud in the Sagan. It comes from the subspace vibrations of the icy bodies nearest to the artifact. We translated those vibrations into sounds. I must have accidentally keyed the recording we made. I’ll turn it off.”

Vaughn raised a restraining hand. “No. Let it play.”

With a sigh, he settled back into the command chair, idly watching the artifact as it slowly turned and morphed before his eyes. Though he couldn’t say why, he had become more certain than ever before that the only hope of reversing whatever had been done to Ezri, Bashir, and Nog lay inside that object. Concealed. Mysterious. Perhaps even ultimately unknowable and ineffable, like the thoughts of a god. And the thing hovered tantalizingly beyond his reach, thanks to the vigilance of thirteen Nyazen blockade ships.

He wondered if the eerie celestial music was helping to inspire him to crack the artifact’s mysteries—or if it merely sought to mock his helplessness.

Ezri left the bridge quietly, relieved to be away from its suddenly familiar-yet-alien environment. Surrounded by the cool competence of the bridge crew, she had felt as callow and awkward as though it were her first day out of the Academy.

At least I didn’t fall to pieces right in front of Commander Vaughn, she thought, grateful for that small mercy. But it had been a near thing. She didn’t want to know what would happen the next time someone inadvertently addressed her as “Lieutenant Dax.” She wondered if she should ask everyone to start calling her Ezri. But that wouldn’t take her rank into account, nor the dignity of her job as the Defiant’ s first officer. Lieutenant Tigan, then.

No. It was Lieutenant Dax. And I’m not Dax anymore. I ought to be busted back to ensign.

Ensign Ezri Tigan, late of the U.S.S. Destiny. An assistant ship’s counselor still three months short of completing her psych training, and haunted by fading, ghostly dream memories. No, not memories, she corrected herself. Memories of memories. Ezri Tigan, suddenly dispossessed of the eight variegated lifetimes of accumulated expertise into which she had finally and thoroughly integrated her very sense of self, after more than a year of painstaking, determined effort.

At least Joran’s memories will be gone, she told herself. And Verad’s, too. Those two killers will never bother me again.

But she was also keenly aware that balanced against this slim benefit was the loss of Jadzia’s drive and curiosity; the worldly wisdom of Lela, Audrid, and Curzon; the humor and scientific acumen of Tobin and Torias; Emony’s exuberance and competitiveness; and her own sense of wholeness, which had lately become bound up in the lives of all the hosts that had preceded her, and the reassuring, cumulative gestalt they had formed within the core of her being.

As Quark might say, this was a lousy deal all around.

Ezri thought, not for the first time, that it was only a matter of time before Commander Vaughn realized that she was no longer fit to do the job he had assigned her. She would never again be fit for it. Not without Dax. The Defiant’ s captain needed a rock-solid executive officer and second-in-command, not a struggling counselor. She knew on some visceral level, deeper than even the Dax symbiont had ever touched, that she was no longer worthy of the red uniform of command.

Over the past two days, she had repeatedly asked herself why Vaughn hadn’t already removed her from active duty. Perhaps it was because he now considered her so ineffectual that formally relieving her simply wouldn’t have served any useful purpose.

Her counseling training spoke up then: You could simply ask him, Ezri. But suppose Vaughn hadn’t relieved her because he honestly still believed in her abilities. Would he continue to do so if she were to air her innermost doubts before him?

Ezri struggled to keep her face free of this internal argument as she passed several of her colleagues in the corridors. Crewman Rahim nodded to her as they passed. Lieutenant McCallum, crossing from another direction, didn’t seem to pick up on her distress either, apparently intent on some urgent task elsewhere.

But Kaitlin Merimark stopped as Ezri brushed past and looked askance at the Trill. Kaitlin, who had seen her in the medical bay when she had been near death, obviously wanted to offer some words of comfort. But she just as obviously had no idea what to say.

Say anything, Ezri thought, anything except “Lieutenant Dax.”

Ezri felt a surge of gratitude for Kaitlin’s steadfast friendship. But she also knew she couldn’t deal with comfort just now, any more than Kaitlin seemed to know how to give it.

She realized that she had arrived at her destination, the biochem lab. “It’s my turn to watch over the slug,” Ezri told Kaitlin, immediately aware of how flippant she sounded. She stepped quickly into the lab, sealing the door behind her before Kaitlin could respond.

After she’d dismissed M’Nok from his watch duty, she stood alone in the lab, appreciative of the solitude. In here, she would probably have no chance encounters with anyone, at least for the next few hours.

But she also knew she wasn’t entirely alone. Dax was here as well, floating in some solitary universe of his own, thinking his unfathomable thoughts. Thoughts that had commingled so freely with her own for the past eighteen months. She approached the table on which the symbiont’s artificial environment container sat and stared through the transparent viewport at the symbiont’s dark, ridged surface. She placed a hand on the window. The creature didn’t seem to notice her presence.

Ezri recalled her early trepidation about