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

one for listening, Ezri thought. Eavesdropping, perhaps, but not listening.

“So what are you planning to do?” Yanas said, clearly still attuned to Ezri’s thoughts. The older woman’s tone was harsh, obviously calculated to demoralize. To reassert control. “Will you go back to chasing those Starfleet daydreams again? You need to learn to accept life as it comes, Ezri.”

True enough, Ezri thought, recalling Nog’s dire warning about how little time remained before the “untethering” became permanent. The only question is, Which life?

“Listen to your mother, Miss Tigan,” Bokar said, his lips inclined in a contemptuous smirk.

And in that instant, Ezri made a decision. A command decision, she thought with some satisfaction. Advancing quickly on Bokar, she treated him to a pair of quick rabbit punches to the face, followed by a hard abdominal jab. The gangster’s unconscious form thumped hard against the stone floor. She was gratified to note that he was no longer smirking.

“Problem solved, Mother. At least for now. This time it’s your turn to clean up the long-term mess.”

Ezri noticed then that a Starfleet combadge was attached to the left side of her jumpsuit. Had it been there all along, waiting for her to sever her ties to all her might-have-been lives?

She tapped the combadge. “Defiant, if you can hear me, beam me back. Now.”

Her stomach lurched. Whatever changes were going on within her mind and body seemed to be accelerating. Nausea rose within her, and she felt her knees turning to water. Abruptly, another realization came.

It’s the symbiont. I feel weak because my body needs the symbiont again.

It came to her then that she must have succeeded in “realigning her worldline.” That was the good news. The bad news was that without Dax she would probably be dead within a few short hours.

Yanas’s face was a mask of incredulity. Defiance wasn’t something she encountered very often, whether from employees or from offspring.

“You can’t just leave, Ezri. Why would you return to the life you had before? You never wanted to be joined in the first place.”

“I’m just following your own advice, Mother. Accepting life as it comes.” Or as it came.

“But I need you here!”

“Hire a damned bookkeeper,” Ezri said, her consciousness beginning to ebb. She felt as though she were falling over a precipice into one of the open pergium shafts. A voice from her combadge spoke, perhaps in acknowledgment of her signal. But she couldn’t be sure.

Ezri saw another shape appear, as if out of nowhere, at her mother’s side. Janel smiled in Ezri’s direction. “I’ll take over from here, Zee.”

“I still hate your hair,” Ezri heard Yanas say a moment before darkness closed in around her.

The colorful tunic Moogie had given him for his Attainment Ceremony was already thoroughly soaked with sweat. Nog had already forgotten how he’d gotten here. Wherever here was. He only knew that his pursuers had killed a lot of people. Kellin, Larkin, Vargas. Countless others. They all lay in the dust, some blown apart, others sliced to gory slivers. All Nog could think of was running, and staying ahead of their killers.

Uncle Quark’s voice sprang into his mind unbidden: Maybe you’ll grow up to be a real Ferengi after all. Not like your father.

Clutching his phaser tightly, he ignored the daggers of pain that lanced his side and kept moving as quickly as the absurd terrain permitted. Thanks to the semidarkness and the profusion of tall, irregularly shaped rock formations that seemed to cover every square meter of this Chin’toka hellhole, he couldn’t see them coming. But his sensitive hearing counted dozens of pounding footfalls, all coming toward him. Unvarying in their rhythm, their approach as inexorable as death itself.

He knew he was getting winded. He was also grimly aware that his pursuers never got tired. Sooner or later the Jem’Hadar would catch up with him, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He would have to stop, stand his ground, and fight them. Fight the most relentless, implacable, nightmarish foes he’d ever imagined.

The still-green memory of how they’d shot him during the battle for control of the Dominion’s AR-558 communications array—forcing Dr. Bashir to amputate his leg—sent a jolt of terror through his lobes and down his spine. He paused beside a large outcropping, the dusty air making him cough and wheeze as he struggled to catch his breath.

Sudden confusion struck him as he looked down at his two perfectly good, utterly normal legs. When did the Jem’Hadar shoot me in the leg? The recollection had the quality of a fading dream. He clearly remembered a time six years ago, when Captain Sisko and his Uncle Quark had briefly fallen into Jem’Hadar hands. Nog and his now-missing best friend Jake Sisko had done their best to mount a rescue. Luckily, Uncle Quark’s dignity had been the only thing seriously wounded that day.

Still, Nog couldn’t shake a strange mental image, half memory and half premonition, of wearing a Starfleet uniform. Of serving aboard starships. Of having fought alongside some of the bravest people he’d ever known, in this desolate place. Chin’toka, he somehow knew.

Before he could consider the matter further, an enormous humanoid shape flung itself toward him from behind one of the larger rocks. Without thinking, Nog leveled his phaser and fired with the ease of long practice.

Repulsed by the phaser’s blunt impact, the Jem’Hadar fell backward against the unyielding bedrock, so much dead weight. Nog wanted to look away, but discovered he couldn’t. He squinted in the shadows at the supine corpse’s pebble-textured face.

Nog recognized it. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that he’d seen this particular Jem’Hadar’s face before, many times. He remembered that he hadn’t enjoyed the experience. It made no sense, but this sensation of quasi-memory felt more profoundly real than even his evanescent, dreamlike recollections of Starfleet.

He considered the reassuring heft of the phaser in his hand. Starfleet issue, he decided, not at all certain how he knew that fact either. Perhaps he had been in Starfleet. Maybe that