She was quoting her uncle again. He smiled. “Walk with the Prophets.”
“And you,” she said. And then she was gone.
Yevir sat down behind his desk and immediately reached for the gold-hued jevonite statue. The figurine had come from the ongoing excavations at B’hala, brought to the Emissary’s wife by one of the prylars working at the site. Yevir wasn’t sure why he felt so strongly connected to the artifact. The figure was peculiar, bearing little resemblance to the more primitive art found elsewhere at the dig. It was a humanoid shape swathed in robes. Its eyes, though mere carvings, still managed to appear as though they watched anything in view. Its nose was ridged like a Bajoran’s, but its forehead also bore raised, scaly scar patterns. Its neck was long and gracefully sloping, held up in pride and unbowed by adversity. When Yevir had first laid eyes on the figure, he had wondered if it represented some millennia-dead Bajoran martyr or holy man, whose facial disfigurements bore testament to the trials he had endured in the name of the Prophets. But almost immediately he saw that it held a deeper, subtler meaning.
Using the same hand with which he had touched Mika’s child, Yevir now caressed the face of the small statue, and he became utterly certain, at last, what the object represented—the melding of a Bajoran and a Cardassian. The blending of the Bajoran nose ridge with the forehead scales of a Cardassian was unmistakable. And why hadn’t he noticed the subtle ridges running down both sides of the figure’s neck before? The statue was obviously the image of a mixed-heritage child like Mika’s, though it was carved millennia before the two planets could possibly have produced such a union. Before, in fact, either people had met or even known of one another’s existence.
Like the hybrid child he had just touched—and like Tora Ziyal, whose memory the Cardassians had resurrected in their overtures of peace—the statue represented a commingling of related species.
It is a symbol of unity.
Hope surged within Yevir’s breast, and his earlier feelings of despair vanished like mist over the fire caves. Replacing them were a cacophony of thoughts and plans, an epiphany of what he must now do.
He tapped at his comm panel, then remembered that Flin had gone for the day. That was fine. What he had to do was perhaps better done alone. Yevir called the spaceport most regularly used by the Vedek Assembly; although it mainly transported civilians, a few of its ships were always at the preferential disposal of the clergy. Using the after-hours automated system, he booked passage to Deep Space 9 on the next available transport, three hours hence.
Finished with the first step, Yevir reviewed his mental checklist of the probable whereabouts of his closest Vedek Assembly colleagues. Vedeks Eran and Scio would be in services now, ministering to the faithful. Kyli and Bellis would most likely already be in private meditation. That left Vedeks Frelan and Sinchante as the two among his inmost circle whom he was likeliest to reach on the first attempt. Yevir keyed both names into his comm panel, and swiveled to face the screen. He reached out with his other hand to touch the jevonite statue on his desk.
Both women answered on the split screen within moments of one another, and Yevir could see that each appeared to be alone in her respective chambers. Incense burned in braziers beside ornate prayer mandalas in both rooms, in honor of the evening temple services, from which the busiest and highest ranking vedeks were understandably excused. It occurred to Yevir only then that he had gotten so sidetracked by his encounter with Mika that he had completely neglected his own evening prayer rites.
“Something has happened,” he said after exchanging perfunctory pleasantries with his two old friends. “I have been seized by a notion so…radical that I can scarcely defend my thinking. And yet, I am experiencing a clarity of mind that tells me this notion can only be the truth.”
As both women simultaneously raised their eyebrows, Yevir began to outline his plan.
6
Ezri was gratified to note that none of the shuttlecraft Sagan’ s critical systems had sustained mortal damage during the encounter with the enigmatic alien artifact. But because the little vessel was limited to impulse power during the trip back from the depths of System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud, the return flight to the Defiant took nearly forty minutes. While they were en route, Commander Vaughn supplied a quick briefing about the Defiant’ s intervention in the fight between the two local space vessels, as well as a summary of the gravest injuries sustained by the crew of the less well armed—and currently crippled—ship. With the help of several hastily dragooned corpsmen, Nurse Krissten Richter was struggling to keep up with the very worst trauma cases.
Ezri hoped that Krissten wasn’t fighting a losing battle. Although she was better than competent, Julian’s assistant was only a medical technician, after all, not a doctor. Julian’s obvious anxiety was perfectly understandable.
As the Defiant hove into view on the screen, so did the battered alien vessel that was keeping station about two hundred meters off her port bow. Ezri forced down any outward show of apprehension as she noted the black rents in the other ship’s pitted hull, obviously the result of an unhappy encounter with a concentrated phaser or disruptor barrage. Most of the internal lights were dark, and only the exterior running lights allowed her to see the lines of the long, irregularly shaped hull.
Relinquishing the piloting chores to Nog, Ezri glanced up at Julian, who stood directly behind her flight chair, his expression anxious as he studied the alien ship. She took his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze as Nog put the Sagan on its final approach to the docking bay built
