Twist

In his quarters, he opened the ark, letting the orb's blue light wash over him.

Bareil Zumit was no longer in his quarters, but on the bridge.  The room was in flames, torn apart.  Smoke poured from the deck, thick and acrid, stinging his eyes and lungs, while somewhere, emergency klaxons wailed.  On numerous viewscreens, Starfleet ships blasted the Winn with phasers.  The deck lurched and jolted, throwing bodies like rag dolls.  More consoles exploded.  Bareil fell.

He crawled to each member of his bridge crew, checking them... not knowing why, knowing they were dead.  It was too late to save them.  Their bodies were horribly burned, scarred, mangled from impacts of inertial stabilizer failure.

Each face he looked into was not that of the man or woman it should have been.  They wore non-Bajoran faces... human, Klingon, Andorian, Vulcan, Cardassian, or some other such race.  While he had such people on his crew, his bridge crew was Bajoran, like him.  All Bajoran.

He recognized two.  Both human: Dominic Gray, and Stephen April.

It had been two hours since Arcadia appeared.  The Quantum-class ship, shaped like an arrow, split the tactical layout, an unlikely buffer of sorts between Federation and Corician space.

"These Coricians make me nervous."

Bareil Zumit balked at the captain of the UFS Li.

"You, Vik?"

Few things astonished Bareil.  Such an admission from Vik Inse, one of the toughest, hardest men he had ever known, ranked right up there.

On the Winn's bridge, Bareil, Vik and the senior bridge officers clustered around the holosphere.  A brief confab with Arcadia's captain, Dominic Gray, convinced Bareil, Winn captain and commander of the 46th Fleet, to forego any rash decisions and weigh his options before challenging the mighty Corician Empire.

Of course, it would not be a challenge.  Not to the Coricians... Nor, likely, with the inestimable Stephen April, Arcadia's previous CO and self-appointed ambassador to Coricia, in their corner.

Bareil's first officer nodded in agreement.  "Have you seen their ships?  They're huge... and shaped like... like... and they have these..."  Her hands struggled, trying to approximate dimensions with body language.  She finally gave up.  "They're real big."

"The bigger the giant, the harder the fall," Bareil said.

"Not these giants."  Vik focused his customary hard stare on Bareil.  "Their tech is comparable, but only comparable.  And the bigger the giant, the harder they step on you."

"So you recommend the same as Captain Gray.  Withdraw."

They nodded.

Bareil was shaking his head.  Vik was Bajoran, like him.  Bareil trusted & relied more on his feedback than other COs in the fleet, with whom also he should have conferred.  The two men had fought together numerous times.

Except Bareil Zumit didn't do things that way.  As a relative of those in power among Bajor's religious elite, he had it from a source higher than any Bajoran or Starfleet officer, higher than the top admiral or the Federation president or even Kai Kira, that others would precipitate disaster, if he listened to them, followed them, or allowed them to act on their own decisions.  He had heard it, straight from the Prophets.  "If we can't match their technology or power, so be it," Bareil said.  "But we won't stand out of the way while they invade.  They'll turn us against each other.  They'll destroy us."

"Bareil.  Invade?  Captain Gray—"

"—says they won't invade, if we withdraw," Bareil finished.  "What if we refuse?  Attacking us is an act of war.  It will be on their hands."  He had told Gray as much.

"We're in a provocative stance, on their border," Vik said.

"Coricia can overpower the Federation, but will have a hard time maintaining a grip over a rebel populace.  I don't care how advanced they are."  He sat down on the edge of his command chair.  Though nervous, like Vik, he hid it well.  "April," he thought aloud.  "This is April's fault.  What gave him the right to involve himself?"

"Only April can go to Coricia, sir," Winn's first officer suggested, drawing a sharp glance from Bareil.

Ensign Cheryl Lori settled into her customary position in ops.  The chair creaked under her ample frame.

"Hagutusk, this is Bajor One."  She spoke openly into her intercom, addressing the freighter ten kilometers off the station.  "You're clear for entry.  Proceed on your current heading, and have a safe trip."

The Ferengi ship acknowledged and set off towards the wormhole, soon to arrive in the Gamma Quadrant.  Glancing to be sure no one was watching, Lori slipped a snack-cake from the folds of her uniform and nibbled, studying her console's sensor readings.

It was only a matter of time.  She was overweight, and treading dangerously close to a forced medical suspension, followed by an ordered dietary regimen, before she would be allowed to return to duty.  She knew this.  But she could not help herself.  She loved food.

Something caught her attention: A surge in particle density, around the wormhole's location... brief, then gone.  Well, that wasn't unusual.  The wormhole often generated stray fluctuations.  Hagutusk remained on course.  In moments, a majestic blue vortex would open to receive it, filling the heavens.  Visitors to the station marveled at sight of the wormhole, but the populace of Bajor-1 had been doing this for years — forty years, in fact, since the days when the station was designated Deep Space 9 — and found it very routine.

As Lori finished her snack, the Ferengi captain hailed, squawking about wrong coordinates and Starfleet incompetency.  Lori wiped her lips, checked readings, paused, stared in baffled amazement, then tapped the intercom.

"Commander Nevin to ops."  When there was no immediate reply, she added, "It seems we've... lost the wormhole, Commander."

The station's Bajoran commander never responded.

Long-range subspace beaming was risky, these days.  Starfleet didn't use it much anymore, but for extreme cases.  Apparently those in charge felt this was extreme; so much that they were willing to put Lieutenant Tiffany Hill's life on the line.

On the transporter platform, Hill braced herself.  She had sent instructions to her lawyer regarding her will, good-bye messages to her family to be delivered in case she did not return, and sent her cat to live with her aunt in Brazil.  Her cat's name was Jeanne.  Jeanne wouldn't like the Amazon's desert heat, but it was better than the fate waiting if caught by Yuj, Starbase 17's Ferengi chef, who swore he ate cats.

"Why are they sending you?" asked the young transporter operator, one Ensign Robert Scott.

Hill found Scott disturbing... something about his look, as if all the wheels weren't turning.  His arms were too short, his red hair was flat and resembled a baseball cap, and he walked funny.  He was just... weird.  And he was about to scatter her molecules across the galaxy.  Hill felt more and more uncomfortable with this trip... hence putting her affairs in order.

But, Scott's question was a good one.  Why had she been singled out — a relative nobody, from some obscure base?  There were plenty of Starfleet Public Relations officers, more experienced, closer to her destination.  PR wasn't even her primary role.

"Bureaucracy," she said.  Starfleet didn't always explain why it issued certain orders.  She would learn more upon arrival.

As she heard the coils warming up, and around her the transport chamber brightened, she recalled reports she had been hearing, of people vanishing, throughout the Federation.  She told Scott, "Please don't lose me."  He merely gave her that dead-stare expression.

Starbase 17's transporter room transformed into a different transporter room, with a different man behind the transporter controls.  A second man, dark-skinned and Arabic, stood before her.

"Lieutenant Hill?" he said.  "Welcome aboard the UFS Arcadia.  I'm Commander Dante Winters, first officer."

Hill stepped off the pad, checked herself over then asked the transport controller, "Am I all here?  Intact?"  He appeared puzzled, but nodded.  Hill looked to the Arab man.  "Thank you, sir.  I wasn't told why I was needed.  If you can explain...?"

Starfleet attracts the freaks, Hill thought to herself.  That, or they were getting desperate to refill the ranks, after the lives lost in the recent civil war.  When she thought, Wait a minute... I'm Starfleet, she didn't like the comparison.

Specifically, she was noting this ship's captain, Christopher Gray.  He wanted her to call him Dominic (his middle name) — highly improper, as he outranked her, and they didn't know each other, and even if they did, officers still used a professional form of address while on duty.

Gray seemed eccentric for a starship captain.  A joker.  He liked to kid around.  Hill had a feeling the personality was a put-on, a mask; however, she kept all personal opinions about others to herself.  She had a job to do, and judging others was not it.

Sitting across from the captain in his ready room, she ran through the explanation he had provided.

"These Coricians disrupted the wormhole connecting Bajor to the Gamma Quadrant," Hill said.  "Other than the fact that the wormhole disappeared, no one but you and this other, retired captain... April?... knows yet who's responsible... and my job is to make sure no one learns who's responsible.  Correct?"

Gray was messing with the replicator.  "Hungry?  Thirsty?" he asked.

Hill took his response to be a 'correct'.  She declined.  "Why call me?  I didn't know.  If no one else knows...  I'm sorry, Captain; it doesn't make sense.  Am I missing something?"

"A PR officer was needed."  The replicator produced a steaming mug of coffee.  Gray wafted it under his nose, taking in the scent.  "By April's recommendation.  He's in charge of the mission."

He didn't answer her question.  "Begging your pardon, sir... I'm sorry — If you're withholding sensitive information, I'll understand," Hill said.  "I won't poke my nose where I shouldn't.  But it might help me to know.  I can take a memory erasure afterwards."

"No need.  You'll know soon."  Gray sipped his coffee, apparently taking the moment to gather his words.  When he spoke, he sounded as if he couldn't believe it himself.  "The Bajoran wormhole wasn't all that disappeared," he said.  "Along with it... went the Bajoran population."

Hill blinked, not sure she understood... or liked the sound of it, if she did.  "The Bajoran population.  Of... How do you mean?  Which population?"

"The Bajoran population, period.  So far as we can tell, there isn't a single Bajoran left, in or out of the Federation."

"What?  All of them?"  Hill gaped in shock.  "The planet, Bajor...?"

"Lifeless, except for plants and certain animals.  There isn't a trace of Bajoran civilization.  As if they never were."

He doesn't seem all that bothered, Hill thought.  "The Coricians?  Did they wipe them out?"

Gray shrugged.  "They've yet to state their position.  They neither deny or admit to it.  They're capable.  From what I've heard, they can move entire solar systems.  Or maybe that's what they want us to believe.  But April's suggested they might not be responsible."

"What about hybrids?  Mixtures of Bajorans and other races?"

"The Federation's trying to track them down.  There are surprisingly few, compared to other hybrids.  Bajorans didn't interbreed with other races all that much.  They wanted to keep their own race 'pure'."  The note of disdain in Gray's last sentence told Hill what he probably thought of Bajorans.

"Were they transported somewhere?"

"Possibly.  We're searching.  No one's located them yet.  Where they went, I don't know.  But it will raise questions as to their disappearance.  Coricia will get blamed for it, by some.  Others will label it the work of the Prophets.  Your job, Lieutenant, is to make sure Coricia doesn't get blamed.  There could be... negative repercussions, if you get me."

Hill did.  "Very well.  One more question, sir, of a personal nature, if I may.  Do you know who chose me for this, and why?"

Gray shook his head.  "I have no answer for that.  Sorry."

"I see."

"Report to the bridge.  Use whatever resources you need."