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 Worfhad 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 theDefiant 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 theDefiant’ 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.