NEW: Kail's Story 4/5 [PG] DS9
Carolann Potee
Author: Carolann Potee
Contact: cpo...@towson.edu
Series: DS9, season 5-ish
Part: 4/5
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Star Trek and all entities relating to it belong to
Paramount.
I just like to write stories about it, so please don't sue me.
Archive: ASC only, but link to
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/9166
Summary:
Kail is a lonely changeling living on Bajor and he falls for a young
woman
who knows him better than he thinks. When they detour to Bajor, will he
be found out? Find out now!
*****************************************************
"Kelsee, why are we on a shuttlecraft?"
"They needed us early, Kail," she explained. "In order to
still be able to start the asteroid survey of the Denorius belt on
time, they need us all to come onto Deep Space Nine as soon as
possible."
"We're heading out in to space," Kail commented, growing
worried. "What about me?"
"Yes, Kelsee, what about Kail?" Connie asked. "Why aren't
we taking him home first?"
"There's an ion-plasma storm heading this way," the pilot
volunteered. "We'll be lucky if we make it to DS9 without too
much turbulence. We wouldn't make it if we had to go back to
drop him off. We'd have had to wait at least a week for it to go
away."
"What will I do on Deep Space Nine?" Kail asked
worriedly. "Is that how long I'll have to stay there? A week?"
"Don't worry, Kail," Kelsee reassured him. "The pilot will
arrange for your temporary quarters once we get there. As soon as
the storm passes, you'll have a booking on the next passage back to
Bajor, compliments of Starfleet."
"That means we can have more time to spend together,"
Connie whispered into his ear. Kail smiled at her comment, even
though he didn't particularly like the idea of leaving Bajor at all.
The Federation wasn't stupid; being so close to the wormhole
meant that they would probably do blood testing of ships'
passengers for Changeling infiltrators. What if he were caught?
"What's wrong?" Connie asked. She had noticed how his
smile had suddenly faded.
"I just don't like the idea of leaving Bajor so suddenly," he
answered.
"Why? It'll only be for a few days, a week at most. You'll
be able to catch the first ship going back to Bajor as soon as the
storm passes."
"No, it's not that..."
"Then what? Why don't you want to leave Bajor?"
"Well, there's going to be so many different aliens there...
And what am I supposed to do there, anyway? I'll be so bored..."
"You're just making up excuses," she said, laughing away
his worries. "I think you're afraid because this is such a new
experience for you. Everyone who comes to DS9 is civilized
enough that they're not going to bother you. If you get bored, you
can always go to a holosuite, or, maybe, you are probably good
enough with machines that you could help out Chief O'Brien if you
wanted. I'm sure he'd be more than willing to give you a job.
There's a lot you can do to pass the time on Deep Space Nine. I'm
hoping that I'll be able to pass a good deal of that time with you,
too."
Her words brought another smile back to his face, and he
took her hand in his. "I suppose you're right."
Connie snuggled up against him once again, and Kail held
her for half an hour until the shuttlecraft started shaking. They rose
to look out the view port and Kail almost gasped at what he saw.
He'd never been in space before, so long as he remembered
anyway, so it was somewhat startling to see the space station Deep
Space Nine looming closer with every passing second. But even
more startling were the clouds of energy they were passing through
to get there. The clouds spewed bolts of energy every so often, and
every once in a while a bolt would lance out toward the craft,
creating turbulence.
"Hang on, we're almost there," the pilot called out to them.
The shuttle docked on the outer docking ring of the station,
and after its shields were reactivated, the turbulence ceased. The
hatch to the shuttle lifted and the inner airlock rolled aside like a
huge gear to reveal the inside of stark Cardassian-gray corridors. A
small compliment of two Starfleet officers were waiting for them
there, both human and wearing medical blue uniforms with small
portable medical kits at their sides.
"Julian!" Kelsee exclaimed excitedly. "I wasn't expecting
such a gracious welcome."
"Actually, it's been quite busy in the infirmary lately and
under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have had time to come and
greet you," Julian explained. "I'm here on business. Starfleet
requires us to do random blood testing to passengers exiting from
most incoming ships, especially those whose origins of flight are
within the general area near the wormhole."
Kail froze.
"So you have to take some of our blood?" Connie asked.
"What for?"
"We'll only need samples from a couple of you," Julian
assured her. "Changelings have been impersonating key Federation
personnel more frequently since the beginning of the war and
random blood testing is the only way to find them."
Julian's assistant proceeded to retrieve a sample from the
pilot and Julian looked directly at Kail, as if to evaluate him. Kail
momentarily forgot to simulate breathing as the doctor reached for
his instrument to take a blood sample with, and then he breathed an
inward sigh of relief when Julian pressed it against Kelsee's arm
instead of his.
That was so close, Kail thought. What if he'd been caught?
What would he have done then? Kail had to leave as soon as
possible. There was no way he could avoid the blood tests forever.
The doctor and his assistant finished inspecting the samples
and turned to leave. "Perhaps I can buy you and your friends a
drink later on tonight in Quark's, Kelsee?" Julian asked.
"I'm sorry, Julian," Connie apologized and interlocked her
arm within Kail's. "I've already got plans to spend the evening with
Kail."
"Oh," he responded, clearly disappointed, but he didn't let it
get to him too much. "Well, perhaps some other time then?"
"Sure thing," Connie assured him as he turned to follow his
assistant back to the Infirmary on the Promenade.
Kelsee gave her one of those 'What are you crazy??' looks
and whispered, "I don't know how you turned him down! He's so
cute!"
"Well why don't you go after him then?" Connie whispered
back.
"I think I will!" Kelsee said smiling, then quickly strode off
after the doctor to catch up with him down the corridor. The pilot,
seeing no need to stick around, returned to do maintenance on the
shuttle, leaving Connie and Kail alone in the corridor next to the
airlock.
The doctor couldn't have been much younger than Kail
himself, but his charm, boyish face, and slight build made him
seem younger and the perfect match for Kelsee. He was tall as well
as quite skinny, but Kail was still a good fourteen centimeters
taller, which must have seemed somewhat imposing. Perhaps that's
why Julian decided to test Kelsee instead.
"So, who's he?" Kail asked.
"Who, Julian?" asked Connie. "He's the Chief Medical
Officer of Deep Space Nine. I accidentally broke my arm playing
Parisi Squares in one of the holosuites just before I went to Bajor
with Kelsee and he managed to patch me up nicely. He asked to
buy me a drink afterwards and I said yes."
"I've heard that Parisi Squares can be dangerous," Kail
commented and followed Connie as she started walking toward the
habitat ring.
"Yes, it can be, but so can life," Connie explained with a
smile.
"Why, Connie," he teased. "I never knew you were such a
thrill-seeker."
She laughed at his comment. "There's a lot you don't know
about me."
"I imagine there's even more you don't know about me,"
Kail admitted.
"What makes you think there's anything about you that I
don't know?" Connie asked, seeming perplexed.
Kail's smile turned to a frown as they stopped in front of
his assigned quarters. "Because if you knew about... all of it... I
doubt you would still like me as much as you do now."
"What makes you say that?" she said, taking his hand in
hers. "I think I'm falling in love with you, Kail, and it's not because
of your family, wealth or anything else like that. I'm falling for you
because you're you, the nicest, most caring man I've ever met."
"But, if you only knew..."
"How do you know I don't already know?" she confronted
him. "I did some asking around about you, you know. I must've
talked to almost all the people in the village and I haven't found
anything at all that would make me change my mind about you."
"No one else in the village knows about some of my...
predicaments," Kail said, frowning again. "No one knows, and I'm
afraid to tell you, but I also don't want to hurt you."
"Then don't, if you're that afraid," she reassured him. "I
have faith in you. I trust you."
"So, what do we do now?" Kail asked, changing the
subject.
"I have to report to Captain Sisko soon, so why don't you
get settled into your quarters and I'll show you around the station
in a few hours?"
"All right," Kail agreed. "I thought maybe I'd look around
the promenade for a while, anyway."
"Good," Connie said. "I'd better go. I'll be back to meet you
later."
"See you then," Kail said as she disappeared around the
bend in the corridor.
*********
Connie had been right about Deep Space Nine. There was
so much to do on the station in the short amount of time that he
would be staying that he completely lost track of time when
Connie came looking for him that evening. Kail was chatting with
a woman who sold crafts and jewelry from a kiosk on the
promenade when Connie found him and managed to finally drag
him away.
"Where are we going?" Kail asked her as she placed herself
between him and anything that might distract him from her quest.
"I rented a holosuite," she answered as she led him up the
stairs to the second level of Quark's bar where the holosuites were
located. "I've got a program that I think we'll both enjoy very
much."
As they approached the door to holosuite two, Connie took
an iso-linear chip from her pocket and inserted it into the slot in the
holosuite's main external terminal. The door opened a few
moments later and Kail was presented with a scene not too unlike
what might have been found on Bajor, but it was vary apparent that
the scene was from Earth. As soon as Connie pulled him inside, the
door slid shut and disappeared and a blast of cool, salty air washed
over him. Bright flashing lights and loud noises also greeted his
other senses from other directions.
The scene was somewhat familiar, and although he'd never
been to a beach before, he remembered studying about them a little
during his education. All the beaches on Bajor had been polluted or
destroyed by the Cardassian occupation, making it impossible to
see such a beautiful scene as the beach he was currently standing
on. Dusk was slowly falling over the scene and most of the
daytime beach dwellers had left, leaving the still-warm sand, the
crashing waves, and the salty, cool breezes relatively unpopulated.
Nearby behind him was a wooden boardwalk that ended in
concrete near a rocky pier with small wooden docks extruding here
and there. Around the concrete part of the boardwalk were paved
streets on which people walked along, marveling at the delicious
smells coming from lines of food vendors and at the flashing lights
emanating from the stores, as well as from the strange-looking
contraptions which contained screaming, happy people that were
cheering with fun and delight.
"So, what would you like to do first?" Connie asked,
smiling in anticipated excitement.
"What are those machines doing to make those people
scream like that?" Kail asked. "Aren't they scared?"
"Those are rides, Kail," Connie explained. "These people
are having the time of their lives scaring themselves silly, but it's
all very safe. No one gets hurt, except for the occasional sour
stomach from riding too many times."
"I see."
"So, what would you like to do first?" she repeated.
Kail looked at her in amazement, looked around at the
rides, then looked back at her with a look that said, 'You expect me
to get on one of those??' She burst out laughing at his confounded
look.
"Why don't we go on that one?" she said, pointing up.
When Kail looked up to see a roller-coaster track and a car
roar by on it, he went wide-eyed in astonishment, and before he
knew it, Connie was taking him by the hand and pulling him
towards the entrance.
"Uh, Connie, I don't know if I want to try this."
"Don't worry, you'll love it," she reassured him. "I know I
do!"
"That's what I was afraid of," he said as she pulled him into
the seat next to her and helped him pull down and fasten the safety
restraints. In a matter of moments before he could change his
mind, the car began moving backwards up the inclined starting
ramp. It was pulled up very high in the sky by a winch and
stopped. Kail looked out around him and enjoyed the almost-dark
sky, the wide and never-ending expanse of beach stretching out to
either side, as well as the salty breeze that surrounded him. The
scene was very peaceful and beautiful but that suddenly changed as
the car was released and plummeted downward at incredible
speeds on the track.
A rush of panic threatened to overtake him when suddenly
the track curved upward into a loop, making him feel somewhat
light-headed. The panic disappeared as the loop turned into an
inverted corkscrew, followed by an inverted loop, then by another,
even bigger loop before the car began to climb another incline like
the first.
"Is that it?" he asked her, his voice cracking with
excitement.
"Nope!" she yelled back just as the car was released for the
second time to travel the same path backwards.
This time, Kail was so excited and felt so thrilled that he
actually screamed with everyone else in the inverted corkscrew
and the loops. He was quite disappointed when the car stopped at
the entranceway at the end of the ride. He had enjoyed the
experience far more than he had expected to, but they had to vacate
the ride for the next group of passengers.
"Would you like to do it again?" Kail asked excitedly.
"I don't think my head or my stomach could take it again so
soon!" She laughed. "Why don't we do something a little more
tame first, then come back to do it again later?"
"Okay," he said. "What do you suggest?"
The two visited the fun house and then the haunted house,
which didn't seem all that haunted to Kail. They ended up at a
particular ride that spun a group of cars around in circles over
inclined surfaces. The centrifugal force nearly squashed them
against the side of the car, and Connie against Kail, but they
managed to get off without becoming too dizzy.
They got on a couple of more rides that threw them side-to-
side or up and down, and passed over a ride called the 'Tilt-a-
Whirl' where the operator was hosing down one of the cars with
water. They stopped to ride 'The Zipper' where the cars were able
to spin each on their own hinges as well as along a rotating, oval-
shaped body connected by a chain. A lot of screams seemed to
come from that particular ride as well.
The last ride they went on was a Ferris wheel. It was not a
particularly exciting ride, but the wheel went so high in the air that
the view of the beach and the boardwalk below was breath-taking.
Connie sat next to him, and Kail put his arm around her
affectionately. She snuggled up and leaned next to him, laying her
head on his shoulder. "I want to thank you for showing me this
program," Kail said. "This place is very wonderful."
"Yes, it is," she agreed. "My father is a holo-programmer.
He made this program for me on my seventeenth birthday. This is
supposed to be a typical beach and boardwalk of the late twentieth
or early twenty-first century Earth. They don't make 'em like they
used to anymore."
"I guess not," Kail agreed.
They sat together in the Ferris wheel car for several
minutes, enjoying each other's company, when all the sudden, the
entire holosuite shook violently. No one else in the program
seemed to notice, so it was definitely not part of the program. They
clung to each other as a second wave of shaking almost knocked
them out of their seats in the car, and no sooner had it stopped
when the power to the holosuite was cut, leaving them in mid-air
about a meter above the floor as the scene around them
disappeared.
They fell to the floor hard, but there was no damage, save
for a sore bottom. Kail stood and helped Connie up.
"I wonder what happened?" Connie said.
"I don't know, but I'd better go see if I can help chief
O'Brien," Kail told her. "It didn't feel like it was that far away."
"Right," Connie agreed. "I'll go with you."
It would have been a simple matter of using the main
computer to locate the chief of operations, but voice
communications and the voice interface with computer were down.
So, Kail had to find an operational computer terminal that hadn't
overloaded from the power surge that blew out the main
computer's interface. Chief O'Brien was on level eleven, only three
levels down, in the main computer core directing damage control
teams and replacing some of the more intricate circuitry himself.
"What happened here?" Connie asked the chief from just
outside the main core.
"A bomb went off over there," he said and pointed to the
mangled bulkhead on their left without even looking up from his
work. "Just powerful enough to do major damage, and the sensors
didn't even pick it up until it was too late."
"How can we help?" Kail volunteered.
"Join one of the damage control crews," O'Brien said, still
not looking up from his work.
They did as they were told and joined someone repairing
holes in the plasma regulator conduits and replacing burnt out
diodes. A couple hours work saw that most of the damaged
circuitry was repaired or replaced, except for the gaping hole in the
protective bulkhead where the explosive was set.
Kail, like a good engineer, kept an eye on everything going
on around him and noticed the only man who had managed to get
the chief to look up from his work on the complex circuitry of the
main computer interface. He was a dark-skinned human man with
an air of command, and the Starfleet rank pips on his collar told
Kail that he was Captain Sisko, commander of the station. Kail
could just barely hear them talking, and he listened carefully as he
worked.
"How are the repairs going, Chief?" the captain asked.
"Well, the damage was pretty extensive," the chief
answered. "Whoever planted that bomb got past the main core's
security protections and made that concentration of the explosive
material just potent enough that it would blow out a good deal of
circuitry, and yet not quite concentrated enough to be detectable by
the station's sensor net. I don't know of any species that is cunning
and fast enough to do all that, even Ferengi, and not set off an
alarm, or at least leave a trace they were here."
"Chief, I want you to get the personnel information of
everyone here," Sisko ordered. "Don't let anyone leave until Dr.
Bashir has had a chance to take blood samples from everyone. I
had the area sealed off after the blast. I think the culprit is here
among us."
"So you think those rumors about another Changeling
infiltrator are true?" the chief asked, clearly concerned.
"It's very likely," Sisko confirmed. "Who else could have
possibly pulled it off?"
"The only way whoever it was could have planted that
bomb without having to completely disable the security alarms was
to come through the ventilation grate up there," O'Brien said and
pointed up at the grate in the bulkhead above them. "I scanned it
and there's no sign of any breaking in."
This is it, Kail thought. This is where I will be found out.
His coloring went noticeably paler and it looked as if a
sweat-like sheen suddenly covered his face, which Connie
immediately noticed. She approached him and laid a cautious hand
on his shoulder.
"Are you all right, Kail?" she asked him. "You look ill."
"I feel ill," Kail said, not bothering to hide his depression.
"Maybe you should go to Dr. Bashir." Connie tried to
comfort him. "I saw him just a few minutes ago around the corner,
I think."
"No." Kail pulled away further. "I'll be fine."
Connie looked up at him sympathetically as the chief
started rounding everyone up to be tested. Kail stood just to the left
of the chief as Doctor Julian Bashir appeared and began the testing,
going from Kail's left to the right in a line. The minutes passed too
slowly for his liking, and Kail could not bring himself to look up
from the floor as Dr. Bashir settled almost directly in front of him.
As Dr. Bashir pressed his medical instrument against chief
O'Brien's arm, Kail almost panicked with anxiety. What will they
do to me? Kail wondered and suppressed an intense urge to bolt
from the room. I have to face this like a man. Maybe they'll go
easier on me when I explain that it wasn't me.
For a long moment, Dr. Bashir did not move. Kail, curious,
looked up to see the doctor staring blankly; but the person whom
his attention was fixed was not Kail, but Chief O'Brien. He was
even more curious now to see what the matter was, and realized it
when he looked at the little vial in the doctor's hand. It contained a
small amount of a gelatinous, amber-colored liquid, a Changeling's
substance.
"It's him!" someone shouted.
***********
Sorry, hafta wait folks! One more part to go!