"Access granted." The low-level sizzle from the barrier emitters at either side of the corridor died away. "Proceed."
Of course, she thought. As Commander Sisko had told her, her being relieved from duty had all been handled informally. As a consequence, no change in her administrative status had been logged into the station's computer. Inside DS9, she
could come and go as she wished, just as before.
She stood in front of the holosuite, her hand a few centimeters away from touching its control panel. McHogue's mocking words were as loud now as if he were there with her, speaking them into her ear.
You speak from ignorance . . . what you know is nothing . . .
The acolyte had found out. Something had brought her there, to that small enclosed space in the heart of Moagitty, a chamber whose walls could fall away, to reveal—
What? There had been no answer to that question then, when Kira had bent down to look into the acolyte's face to try and decipher the few cryptic words that had been spoken. Something about the Kai Opaka; the acolyte had seen her.
The acolyte had seen nothing; a trick, a fraud, another of McHogue's endless displays of illusion. Lies that killed, darkness that extinguished light. Kira knew that, could believe nothing else . . . yet the acolyte had believed otherwise That was what Kira had seen in the acolyte's face: the sureness of complete devotion, the grace and peace that might have been bestowed by the Kai's hand being laid upon the upturned brow.
She couldn't figure it out. The acolyte was trained, as were all the servants of their faith, to tell the difference between the true and the false; thus they served all who carried even the smallest fragments of the Bajoran religion in their hearts. If such a one could be fooled by McHogue, then his lies were indistinguishable from the truth. And that would mean the truth could be found inside the liar's holosuites . . .
"There's only one way to find out." Kira spoke aloud this time, to be comforted by the sound of her own voice in the empty corridor's silence. It didn't help much; her heart was still beating faster as she laid her fingertips against the holosuite's control panel.
The door slid open and she stepped inside. A noise as soft as her breath signaled the door's closing, sealing her into the holosuite's limitless world.
She half-expected to find McHogue waiting there, to welcome her into his domain. Instead, silence deeper and more profound than that of the corridor beyond folded around her; she listened intently, but heard nothing more than her own exhalation and the movement of blood within her veins.
The darkness yielded as she stepped forward; she could feel the soles of her boots treading upon dirt and loose gravel. That was an illusion, she knew as well; the holosuite's low-level tractor beams fed their tactile sensations to her nerve endings. But more than that; any time she had been in a holosuite before, she had found the artificial world more entertaining than convincing. She'd always had to short-circuit the last measure of disbelief inside herself, a process that had never seemed worthwhile to her; the whole experience, as far as she had been concerned, was for those who found it easy to let go of the reality outside the chamber. Now that wasn't a problem for her; the problem was in forcing herself to remember that there was another, presumably larger reality outside this world in which she had found herself. She knew that was the effects of the cortical-induction technology; she had read the reports that Dax and Bashir had uploaded from their research lab. An uncanny feeling plagued her now, that McHogue's hand had somehow reached into her skull and was manipulating each cell and fiber.
Looking upward, Kira saw a field of stars, familiar ones; she could trace the constellations visible from Bajor's northern hemisphere. He took those out of my head, she thought, and put them up there. It was a personal touch that chilled her more than the night air surrounding her.
Another light flicked before her; she could smell the wood fire's smoke, hear the crackle of the small branches that had been placed upon it. The confines of memory closed around her; she knew where she was. She looked behind herself and saw strands of barbed wire, laced with deadlier electrified lines; the glow of the fire made the points of metal look like sparks permanently etched into the blackness. This was home.
Another home, a smaller world, the first one that she had ever known. Something else that McHogue and the CI module had reached in and taken out of her head—the refugee camp in which she had grown up. There were no memories before this.
A group of Bajorans, emaciated limbs visible through their rags, huddled near the fire. Their faces were hollow-eyed, with no thoughts perceptible behind, just the bare consciousness of misery. A child with bones sharp enough to poke through the parchment skin crouched next to her mother, as much to give comfort as to receive it. Words that someone else had spoken now passed again through Kira's head—
. . . starved little rat . . .
—and were gone. None of the people seemed to be aware of her presence, standing at the limit of the fire's glow. She felt like a ghost, come back to spy upon the living, the ones who would never die inside her. The hungering girl-child would always be there, locked inside a place she could see at any time, but never touch.
A sound of something whistling through air, and striking flesh with bone beneath, came from the distance. The only reaction from those around the fire was a squeezing shut of their eyes and an instinctive hunching of the shoulders, as though the blow had landed upon their backs. The sound came again, accompanied this time by a cry of pain.
Kira watched as the child looked up at her mother, then silently drew away, into the wavering shadows cast by the fire. The child looked at her elders for a moment longer, then stepped silently toward the dark shapes of the camp's barracks. Kira followed, her boots making no impact on the ground.
She knew what the child would find. What she herself had found, in a night that had begun so long ago and still hadn't ended. A group of Cardassian guards had a gray-haired Bajoran elder spread-eagled against the side of one of the wooden buildings, the knots of the leather strips cutting off the circulation to the man's feet and hands. His back had been flayed raw, the metal-tipped lash set to maximum penetration. A Cardassian officer watched with a bored expression; all the questions had been asked, the gasped and screamed answers noted. Less than a meter away, another Bajoran knelt, greedily wolfing the ration scraps that had been his reward for betraying the escape plot. A smile passed among the guards as they saw their officer leisurely extract the hand weapon from his uniform's holster and level it toward the informant's head. The man looked up and gaped, his mouth falling open to reveal the dry crumbs upon his tongue.
The child, hiding around the barracks' corner, saw everything. Kira knew the lesson that was being written on her heart.
You want to do everything yourself . . . you can't trust anyone . . .
The officer pressed the weapon's trigger stud.
Go it alone. That's the best way . . .
A line of flame leapt to the informant's brow, as simply as if the officer had laid his finger there. At the centers of the watching child's eyes were two sparks of the same fiery color.
Kira's hand moved to her side; she found not the regulation phaser, but the armament that had become her favorite during the battles of the resistance, a heavy-duty assemblage of metal and power with a barrel that extended almost to her knee. Somehow it seemed light as the air itself as she raised it and locked her arm straight.