Free Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Soul Key by Olivia Woods Page A

wait for this thing to decide when the time is right before we can get any use out of it?”
    “No. Yes. No—” Iliana gestured with her hands, groping for the words that would explain her sudden flash of insight. Finally she said, “It can’t be a coincidence that my need for justice has led me to this, to the Paghvaram, so soon after I learned about the Intendant! Don’t you see? I’m not meant to use this thing here. I’m meant to return it to where it belongs—to the place where it’s needed—where there’s a Bajor that’s still waiting for the one who is destined to open the Gates of the Celestial Temple.”
    Shing-kur’s eyes shifted to pale blue—the color of her profound uncertainty—as she tried to process what she was hearing. Iliana couldn’t help but feel pity for her. Shing-kur couldn’t see. She wasn’t Bajoran, and she couldn’t possibly understand the immense vista of possibility that had just opened up before Iliana, now that she finally understood which Path she needed to walk.
    The Path of the Emissary.
    “But what about Captain Kira?” Shing-kur asked.
    Iliana grinned. “Captain Kira can wait. First we deal with the Intendant.”
     
    The plan that Iliana ultimately approved was Shing-kur’s, and it was shocking in its audacity.
    Iliana’s immediate goal was to eliminate the Intendant and take her place. The solution seemed obvious enough: Taran’atar had already confirmed that scans of the dimensional transport module—the handheld device that could bridge the two known universes, invented by the same clever human who was now leading a doomed rebellion against the Klingon-CardassianAlliance—were stored in Deep Space 9’s computer system. It seemed reasonable to think Iliana could use those files to fabricate her own DTM and beam across the dimensional gulf to the alternate Harkoum. From there…
    From there, everything got a lot more complicated. For one thing, their knowledge of the alternate universe was limited to the information collected by the crew of Deep Space 9, and it was appallingly superficial—there was no way to be sure about what might await them on the other side of the dimensional gulf. For another, while Iliana might be physically identical to Intendant Kira, she lacked sufficient knowledge of her target to pull off an effective long-term impersonation.
    It was Shing-kur who suggested a less direct, though perhaps more audacious, approach. The key, she argued, was not to risk crossing over to the alternate universe too quickly, but rather to trick the Intendant into believing she had an interest in bringing Iliana to her. The Kressari hypothesized that the DTM could be used as a basis for communication with the other side, and that if they could make contact with the Intendant, then it would simply be a matter of making the alternate Kira an offer she would be incapable of refusing.
    Once Taran’atar had provided them with the specs for the DTM, it took Shing-kur surprisingly little time to reverse-engineer the mechanism. More problematic would be using it to locate the Intendant. She could be anywhere, after all. But Shing-kur reasoned that the government of the alternate Bajor must, of a necessity, have the means to contact at need a Bajoran as politically powerful as the Intendant, no matter where she was.That information would doubtless be classified, but computer records of it had to exist.
    Accordingly, it became the first test of the Kressari’s device to establish an uplink with the alternate Bajor’s government comnet. It then fell to Iliana herself, calling on all the technical skills she’d mastered during her time in the Obsidian Order, to circumvent the maze of virtual safeguards that protected the system’s most secure files…and find the candle in the Fire Caves, as the old proverb went.
    For many hours, Iliana labored nonstop from her secure comm booth, expertly sidestepping virtual tripwires and working constantly to stay one step