The Bajoran Connection

Torrent found Soundright in his office, masturbating.  A small, round holoprojector, shaped like an ashtray, sat on the desk, generating its image: A larger-than-life blowup of the kai, from the breasts up, in full kai regalia, an intensely red robe under white flowing hood.  The hood was pulled back, exposing the woman's reddish-gray hair, short but thick, and soft, white skin that looked younger than she was... the most she ever revealed of herself in public, besides her hands.  She grinned seductively at Torrent as he walked in.  Sperm abruptly sizzled on the holoprojector, blotting and distorting the image.  Soundright noticed the intrusion and swiftly shoved his tool away, then the projector, dropping it in a desk drawer without turning it off.  He took an instant to compose himself, not facing Torrent.  Slivers of light danced on the wall behind the desk, around the drawer's edges.

Torrent didn't need to see the act to have Kira Nerys etched forever in mind.  He doubted the assistant inspector was the only one getting his rocks off over the Bajoran.  Religion inspired people to all sorts of crazy, extreme, sometimes sexual, perverted things.  Anyone who watched news holos, or frequented entertainment programs, knew the face of Kai Kira.  The Bajoran was lovely, for a woman in her sixties (by Earth standards).  She didn't look a day over forty.  It seemed odd, a religious figure in makeup, which she wore in most of her appearances; Soundright's holotoy duplicated that visage.  She was beautiful, even sexy, made up.  But plain?  That was a different story.

Torrent rolled his eyes.  What would Bajor's eminent kai, the spiritual leader of the Bajoran Church, have to say, if she knew there were men (and maybe not men) fantasizing over her?  It was not an enthusiasm Torrent shared.  Religion wasn't his thing, nor were Bajorans.  He didn't know her, never met her... and had no interest in meeting her... but he considered himself a fair judge of people.  She'd probably call it sick.  Or maybe she wouldn't.  Bajor's religious leaders didn't live by vows of chastity, because they never took such vows.  As a result, sex scandal stories often came out involving vedeks, prylars and past kais.  Scandal... gossip... Those also held little interest for Inspector Dell Torrent.

Soundright, with the equipment put away, turned to face him, feigning a casual air.

"Inspector."  He didn't ask Torrent to signal or knock before entering.  This was headquarters, and nobody locked doors, or told each other to knock.  Soundright obviously didn't care what internal security recorded.  There were things Torrent didn't know about him, personally, and didn't bother to know unless he had to.  Only professionally.  This was one of those things he could do without knowing.

Torrent said, "Why don't you get a holosuite?  Or does your new religion forbid it?"

Red lines from the drawer flickered over Soundright's crotch.  Hair, maybe, or the robe.  Soundright looked embarrassed.  Forget what the kai might say: What would his wife say?  Torrent knew he spent most of his holocredits, when he had time.  Most of the time he didn't have time to use them.  This job kept them both busy.  Not that it gave him any sympathy for the assistant inspector.

He flipped open a holoscreen, not as blatant or fancy as holo-Kira, showing one of the latest reports in the Denver case.  "If you're so keen on Bajorans, here's another one for you to ogle."

Soundright cleared his throat, studying the display.  "Dead...?  How?  We caught the guy."

"It's mutative," Torrent reminded him.  "Like an animal on the loose.  And it's up to us to cage it."

"We should turn this over to Starfleet.  The diplomats are on a short fuse.  They'd probably feel better with them handling it."

Torrent gave him a serious look.  "Starfleet handles what Starfleet handles.  This is a civilian case.  And it's still ours," he added, pointedly.

Soundright sighed.  "We need Ellor.  He created the damn thing."

"Wishful thinking.  Maybe you should holo him.  If you think it'd help."  Soundright pursed his lips, quiet.  Torrent offed the report and turned to the door.  "If you think you can part with Her Eminence, there's a transport pad with your name on it.  Be there in ten minutes.  Don't forget your thermal."

The crew didn't waste time.  The Romulan ship took off, but it might be back.  They worked feverishly to accelerate automated systems, cutting nonessential processes, routing and rerouting power as reactors came back online.

Paul didn't sit around like a fifth wheel.  He jumped in up to his elbows, staying on the bridge, just in case.  Hunkered against a console, he had time to rethink the situation from a tactical perspective.  In a few minutes, they could get underway, maybe intercept that thing again before it reached Bartok.  If it tore through two Bartokian cruisers already, it might be able to take out more.  Maybe Arcadia was the only ship in range able to stop it.  Maybe nothing could stop it in time.  But he didn't come all this way for nothing.  He vowed to try.

Romulan.  What was a Romulan ship doing, attacking Bartok?  On the surface, it wasn't hard to grasp.  Romulans = Federation allies.  Bartok sat between them, almost on their border.  It seemed too obvious.  The Federation already tried that on Arcadia, his homeworld, on the other side of the quadrant, using Klingon forces.  This seemed a replay of that incident, almost.  The Federation could fight its own wars.  Yet to maintain a semblance of neutrality, they got others to fight their wars for them, by turning them against each other.

But a single Romulan ship?  Even one equipped with fighters didn't stand a chance in prolonged battle against the Bartokian fleet, in their core system.  No.  That ship had another purpose.  Paul had a hunch, but wouldn't know, or speculate, until full sensors came back.  Right now there could be boarding parties running around on board, and they might not know it, short of someone calling up on the intercom and telling them, without internal sensors.  That was what he was working on with the bridge engineers.

And Lou... whatever the hell that thing was, possessing Lucky Lou... it could have destroyed the ship.  Discharge the antimatter interlocks, cause a core breach... adios, Arcadia.  Lou had been taken to the infirmary behind the bridge, and kept sedated, under guard, in case whatever that was came back.

Kosst Amojan.  Paul remembered reading about that at the Academy.  A noncorporeal lifeform... something to do with Bajor, or the station, Bajor-1, when it was called Deep Space 9... during the Dominion war, before Bajor joined the Federation.  What was it doing here, now?  How did it get inside Lou?  Why was it trying to destroy the ship... or was it trying to destroy the ship?  Maybe just slow it down, let the Romulans get away?  Why would it be working with Romulans?  Where did it go?

Another perspective came to Paul's tactical mind.  The Romulans were Federation allies.  What the Humanists knew, but few others believed, was that they always had been.  Publicly, Romulus' ties with Vulcan grew strong over the last thirty years.  Technically, they were never severed, not even with the Romulan exodus from Vulcan in Surak's time.  Romulus was a Vulcan colony.  It was one of those open secrets; the kind everyone knew, but pretended to ignore, until they convinced themselves in a kind of mass self-hypnosis that what their leaders and news reporters told them must be true.  While the general public dismissed or was made ignorant of this fact, Humanists had known it for a while.  Vulcan and Romulus cooperated long before the 'Reunification movement' – as in the Babel incident, 91 CE, when (it was later discovered) Vulcans and Romulans worked together, behind the scenes.  Valdore, V'las, Syrran, T'Pau... all the way back to Surak.  They could live for centuries, long enough to see plans through.  There had been theories that Romulus manipulated Vulcan.  But the true manipulators were clever.  It was the other way around.  They ushered in the Federation.

If Vulcan manipulated Romulus, who manipulated Vulcan?

A lynchpin of the Humanist credo, for many who called themselves Humanists, was the controversy around Cardassia's infamous occupation of Bajor.  Some called the occupation a hoax... claiming it never truly happened, or was engineered, designed to gain sympathy for the Bajoran people, to give them power.  'Those poor Bajorans', people thought.  What they suffered, what they had to endure... all the hundred of thousands butchered in Cardassian camps.  Sympathy gave Bajorans a foothold in the UFP.  Since then, they had been spreading.  Bajoran temples had been springing up all over the place since Bajor joined the UFP.  The religion of the Prophets was the most easily quantifiable religion in the modern, once godless Federation.  For a race with the power of the Prophets on their side... beings who could foresee the future... why would they let themselves fall to Cardassian conquerors?  Again, the masses conveniently ignored this fact.  Bajor had a history of spaceflight and culture vastly predating Vulcan's, and Earth's, and hence the Federation's.  This led to the claim that Bajorans had been manipulating and rewriting history, even longer than Vulcan.  Since both were so central in Alpha Quadrant affairs, for millennia, since before the Federation began, they had to be in it together.

If Bajor manipulated Vulcan, as Vulcan manipulated Romulus... who manipulated Bajor?  And why?  Why manipulate Bajor, Vulcan, Romulus, Earth... the Klingons, the Federation, the Dominion, the Borg... every major planet or power in the known galaxy? – perhaps the entire universe...?  Who stood to gain the most from it... and why?

As soon as Paul thought 'Bajor', something fell into place.  Bajor... Prophets... Pah-wraiths.  That was it.  Kosst Amojan.  The name of a Pah-wraith.  But weren't the Pah-wraiths destroyed?  Sealed inside caves, or something?  How could noncorporeal beings be sealed in mere caves?

"We'll have full systems in two minutes," one of the engineers said.

Paul nodded.  "Good."

The Antarctic plain.  A vast, frozen land, one of the coldest places on Earth.  Once the planet's most desolate region, populated only by wildlife – for eons devoid of human/humanoid habitation – 25th century Antarctica was neither desolate nor unpopulated.

It was still cold.  Weather control carefully maintained the frigid temperature, against the rest of the equally regulated global climate.  Bitter winds knifed through the thermal.  Even inside the protective personal forcefield, the air was thin.  His skin felt dry.  His lips wanted to crack.

Night here at the southern end of the planet was long... dark, and surreal.  It was hard to believe they were out there: a hundred domed cities, Shackleton, Scottsville, Mahgill, Hyōtenka, dotting the icy landscape, emanating their light into the harsh, subzero air... filled with millions of people.  Humans... and not humans.  Not surprisingly, Andorians loved it.  Every Antarctic settlement had sizable blueskin communities.

With unaided vision, he could barely see them.  He was glad, for that much.  The rest of the overpopulated Earth lacked that saving grace.  They were everywhere... in every city, every warm piece of land.  Klingons in the Asian mountains.  Vulcans in the hot, dry desert regions... sections of the African Sahara which were still desert; the Australian outback, the middle east, the American west.  Ferengi in India, Indochina, Indonesia.  Talaxians in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean.  There were Tellarites... Ktarians... Bolians.  Hell, aquatic humanoids, "meroids" (as in mermen), lived in the oceans.  Cardassians resided in what used to be Mexico and the Brazilian Amazon.  What would the ancient Aztecs, Mayans, Incas think, if they could see the gray-skinned, reptilian aliens in their homelands...?

Greeks, Sumerians, Celts... He wondered what all of Earth's ancient peoples would think.  If they could see it as it was today... if they could see what their world, and their lands, had become... they would be stunned – ashamed, at what their descendants had done.

It was difficult to think of Earth as once 'great' and 'proud'.  Earth always had its problems.  The sad fact was, Earth was a victim of manipulation.  Manipulation by aliens... before that, manipulation within.  There was a region, once known for contributions to history, science, culture, unparalleled by anywhere or anyone else on the planet.  Europe.  They built civilization.  They erected cities; they painted, made music, wrote stories, concocted medicines and discovered the universe.  They voyaged across the world, and, yes, conquered, while primitives in Africa, Asia, South America, still lived in huts after thousands of years.  Centuries later, those same primitives still lived in filth, no progress, no evolution, while Europe's descendants unveiled the fabric of life and rode to the stars.

Those less advanced wanted what the civilized world offered... too stupid to realize, what made them less advanced would destroy what they sought.  In the 21st century, third-world immigrants poured into predominantly white, Caucasian, Europe and America – the seat of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, the most advanced leap in Earth history ever seen.  They had been coming little by little, for a long time.  The 21st century was the turning point.  Races of different color and genetic backgrounds... brown, black, red, yellow.  The primitives eventually outnumbered whites.  No longer minorities, they became the majority.  And with them they brought their primitive ways... crimes, drugs, hate, murder, ridiculous beliefs.  They came, and turned against those they envied.  It was the end of white culture... the end of everything Europe's descendants built and created.  Traitorous, greedy leaders, driven by lust for wealth, in the grip of some evil no one understood, sold it all away.  The heathen hordes desecrated it, littered all over it, let it sink into decay, and destroyed it.  People who could have done something, did nothing.  Foolish, lazy, liberal-minded humans.  Just like the ancient Romans, they had surrendered to foreign invaders.  They had given away their countries, and later their planet.

Earth's once proud bastions of civilization sank into hellholes.  Those who would build the future nearly faded into history.  Then came the 'war to end all wars'... the nuclear armageddon.  2063.  Little did anyone realize, it was a blessing in disguise.  It burned away the trash.  It cleansed the Earth.  The resulting social upheaval brought the changes needed for so long.  Those who built civilization rebuilt it, and retook their place as masters of Earth's destiny.  For the next three centuries, they were at the forefront of human progress... man's exploration and colonization of the stars.  They led the way.

Unfortunately, the war didn't eliminate the ability to make mistakes... or history's tendency to repeat itself.  And now, 350-odd years later, they were right back where they started, on a more massive scale.

This time, someone was trying to do something about it.

Dell Torrent looked at the body at his feet... frozen, turned blue by the cold.  Another Bajoran; the latest in a string of dead Bajorans.  Bajorans had become widespread on Earth as well, over the last hundred or so years.  Now they were becoming widely dead.  Soundright was correct.  This was a diplomatic matter.  The Bajoran ambassador had federal agents coming, no doubt Bajorans.  But they had not ordered Torrent off the case.

The method, along with the original perpetrator, had been identified; the motive resolved: A genetic weapon, tailored to target Bajoran DNA.  As in Denver, where this started, not just any Bajorans: Only those surgically altered to appear human – those who assimilated into human society, taking human names and identities; who tried to pass themselves off as human.  The perpetrator: Neither human nor Humanist, as Torrent initially thought.  Another Bajoran – Ellor Esirad, a scientist who didn't pretend to be anything but.  He saw the "human" Bajorans as race traitors, sellouts, ashamed of their heritage, and took it upon himself to punish them.  God (or in his case Prophets) forbid, after all, that anyone should want to look or seem human.

It was not far-fetched.  Bajorans killed their own during the war of the Cardassian occupation... eliminating anyone seen as a liability or collaborating with the enemy.  They had even taken shots at the Federation, trying to draw them in.  Now one of those terrorists was the most highly respected Bajoran alive.  Her name: Kira Nerys.

The mystery now was not only why the gene targeter still claimed victims.  They thought they had stopped it... but it had taken on a life of its own, continuing to strike in various, random locations, all over the planet, leaving Bajoran after dead Bajoran in its wake.

The woman laying frozen represented the other half of this dualfold mystery.  A Bajoran created the bioweapon... but didn't put this woman's body out here, on the ice.  Someone else did – using the bioweapon's effects for their own ends.  Putting her here, for all to see and anyone to find, sent a message.

Questioning Ellor was problematic.  He was believed dead... and missing.  Torrent saw the body, and the bioscans.  The DNA targeter had mutated, and gotten him... a genetic Frankenstein, amok.  Later, Ellor's body vanished from the morgue.  No one had a clue to where, or how.

Now it was targeting all Bajorans.  Warnings had been issued; Bajorans were being called into quarantine, for their protection.  Very few were allowed to leave the planet, for fear of it spreading to Bajorans elsewhere.

Every form of transmission had been checked and ruled out... except one.  Torrent was no scientist, but.. despite how outlandish it seemed, even to him... he believed it was possible.

Twenty years ago, wormholes had become the rage – the popular and only means of transit throughout the four quadrants of the galaxy, even to other galaxies... in the form of the Kahn artificial wormhole network.  Through the wormhole network, people could beam to other planets, via transporter booster relays which kept their energy patterns from degrading.  They arrived at their destination without experiencing the trip, in relative comfort, sooner than any ship could deliver them, without any of the intervening hassles.  Experts predicted Kahn wormholes would eventually supplant starships as the most common method of interstellar travel.

At the time, the Bajoran wormhole – based in the Bajor sector, connecting quadrants Alpha and Gamma... pivotal in the 2370s, during the war with the Dominion – saw its significance dwindle.  Though stable, it was just one, fixed wormhole, connecting two points... the Gamma end of which was dangerous to traverse, in light of uneasy relations with the Dominion.  But artificial wormholes could go anywhere.  Their value laid in that versatility.

Something went wrong.  By the 2390s, the wormhole network became unstable, potentially fatal.  The Federation had to shut it down.  Since then, for long-range travel, they had been using Borg transwarp conduits, arranged by tenuous treaty with the Borg... and for that reason, only when needed.  For most common operations, they reverted to standard warp drive.  'Standard' warp drive in the early 25th century was far more advanced than the late 24th century (translated: faster), yet still limited.  With stable wormholes hard to come by, the Bajoran wormhole regained importance.  It at least allowed passage between two quadrants, separated by thousands of light years; a distance requiring decades to cross at warp.

The Bajoran wormhole had another kind of significance.  It was called the 'Celestial Temple' of the 'Prophets'.

The 'Prophets' were aliens, noncorporeal energy lifeforms, inhabiting the wormhole.  For thousands of years, they had been sending 'gifts', 'messages', 'visions' and other forms of guidance, to the Bajoran people.  The Bajorans built a religion around them, worshipping them as gods.  Supposedly... Torrent wasn't Bajoran, and though he had seen, heard and read things, he wasn't sure what to believe... supposedly, the Prophets lived 'outside' of time, or in all times at once.  They could see the past, present and future just as he viewed a row of surveillance monitors.  One on the left was the past... the one in the middle, the present... on the right: the future.  Compared to someone who lacked that vantage... of knowing what laid behind, what laid ahead, and being able to gain perspective, to see the shape of it all, how it fit together... wouldn't he be a god, by comparison?

Bajorans possessed strange energy devices, gifts from their gods, called 'orbs'.  Each orb, Torrent learned, had a special function; a purpose of some kind.  He didn't know all of their purposes, or what it was like, but reportedly, all a person had to do was look at one, and... something happened.  The person had an experience – an 'orb experience'.  From what Torrent had been able to learn, one of these orbs, the "Orb of Time", could send a person through time.  Time travel.  Some dismissed it as superstition; a hallucination in the mind or minds of those who shared the experience.  No one publicly endorsed it, of course.  People would try to go back in time for every little thing, or forward for a glimpse of the future.  He didn't quite believe it either.  But if time travel was possible... and many widely accepted it as fact... maybe this Bajoran scientist, Ellor, used it to introduce his DNA targeter into Earth's Bajoran populace, in the past.  As a result, it was only now becoming active, in this time, the time he came from.

Maybe Ellor himself went back in time, physically.  Maybe he wasn't really dead, or maybe these 'Prophets' could bring people back from death.  Maybe they took him 'home', like some Bajoran Christ, resurrected.  To these Prophets, he could be their loyal servant; their Job, their Noah.  Torrent hadn't seen a lot of the strange things people claimed to exist, out in space, or on other worlds... but he had seen enough to make him think.  Bajoran myths, legends, folklore, were rife with stories of wondrous, miraculous feats attributed to the Prophets.  Noncorporeals, made of exotic forms of energy... like these Prophets... Maybe they were capable of anything.

Every god had a devil, apparently.  For the Prophets, it was the Pah-wraiths... anti-Prophets, 'evil' to the Prophets' 'good'.  Bajoran tales repeatedly echoed the theme of good versus evil, in the form of the Prophets and Pah-wraiths, locked in some kind of endless cosmic struggle which Torrent didn't begin to understand.  Was the Celestial Temple 'heaven'?  Inside the wormhole?  A gateway to another place, or a different place altogether?  Whatever it was, these forces, these energy beings, coveted it.  The Prophet-aliens had inhabited the wormhole, and/or the temple, for millennia... maybe eons.  The Pah-wraiths, according to what he had read (if he could believe what he'd read), once lived there, until the Prophets kicked them out.  The Bajorans (some, anyway) claimed that because the Pah-wraiths once inhabited the temple, evil was unleashed upon the universe.  The Pah-wraiths supposedly took it over for a brief period some 30-odd years back, but the Prophets banished them again.  Supposedly.

This Bajoran belief, that each side was key to the nature of the universe, made an abstract sense.  If the Prophets were 'good', then good, and hope, was alive.  If the Pah-wraiths were in this so-called 'Celestial Temple'... then evil reigned.  The question became... if this was correct... which side currently inhabited the wormhole?  Bajorans said, 'the Prophets'.  But if that was true... was this supposed to be a 'good' state of affairs, currently raging in the Federation?

Torrent was an ostrich.  He kept his head down; he tried to do his job and just get through life without too much unpleasantness.  He didn't deny it.  But he was not blind to what was going on.  Bad stuff.  A lot of bad stuff was happening.  The world was going insane.  Killings, rapes, muggings... theft, disease, destruction... wars and rumors of wars.  How could so many wrongs, so many vile and evil things, somehow amount to 'good'?

Bajorans swore up and down it was the 'will of the Prophets'.  Torrent had a feeling they saw it that way because 1) they benefited handsomely from Federation membership – like most aliens, at the expense of humans... 2) they were sadly mistaken, or misinformed – maybe it turned out that the Prophets weren't the wise, benevolent and beneficent gods Bajorans claimed them to be... or 3) they were just lying.  If they were lying... and options 1 & 3 could go together... maybe they were tools, or servants, of the Pah-wraiths.  Maybe Pah-wraiths retook the temple.  Maybe the Prophets never actually banished them.  Or maybe, just maybe, the Prophets and Pah-wraiths were the same thing.

A 21st century human philosopher, Mach Normandy, founded a cult on the belief that God and Satan, in Earth's Christian-based religions, were the same deity.  If there existed a devil, went Normandy's argument, then God created him.  If Satan was the prince of evil, and God allowed this character to reign on Earth (accounting for evil in the world), then God was responsible.  If God didn't exist, then it didn't really matter.  But if God existed, then He was to blame.  If God was to blame, why not call them the same thing?

It meshed well, in Torrent's mind, with his theory.  His mother used to say he wasn't a thinker, a cerebral type.  Being a detective forced him to think; to get imaginative... to look for causes to any and all kinds of effects, for ways to put the puzzle pieces together.

It was only a theory.  Proving it went a bit beyond his means.  Still, it resonated within.  It felt right.  Kira Nerys, a former terrorist, now Bajor's spiritual leader, was a celebrity, hailed like a modern Pope.  People converted to the Bajoran religion every day in her name.  Her picture was everywhere.  She had more clout than the Federation president, and far more public influence.  If there was any truth to the claims of these so-called Prophets, then perhaps that was the explanation: why Bajoran temples were springing up all over the place... why Bajorans were more and more visible... why they were the virtual holders of power in the Federation... why they were targeted for genocide.

Soundright appeared, materializing in the oppressive Antarctic night.  The light-fixtures erected around the scene revealed another man accompanying him, in a Starfleet uniform.  A Bajoran... with curiously red hair.  Torrent half-expected him to turn out to be the kai's brother or something; a relative, here on her behalf.  He would have diplomatic immunity.

The Bajoran newcomer shivered in the Antarctic chill, but not at sight of the body.  He adjusted and amplified his thermal regulator, until steamy wisps of heated air roiled around his body.  Torrent gave Soundright a look.  Soundright said, "He showed up right after you left."