The shuttle began to straighten, pulling out of its wide turn to port. “Coming onto our new course,” Prynn reported. Vaughn watched as she headed the shuttle toward the source of the pulse, half a world away.

30

Kira walked down the dimly lighted hall, tired after a long shift. She had accomplished a great deal today, but the one item that had eluded her had been a conversation with Taran’atar. Now, on her way to her quarters for a light dinner and a period of meditation, she had decided to track him down and deal with the matter before another incident occurred. She had contacted him via the comm system and found him in a holosuite; he had offered no objections to her stopping by to speak with him.

Kira stepped up to the door of the holosuite, wondering what spectacle she would witness this evening, what sort of hideous, unimaginable beast she would find Taran’atar fighting. Or will it be something simple,she thought, like a Borg?She had observed him taking part in his combat training programs several times now, and it had been both horrible and fascinating to watch him in battle. She found the precision and callousness with which he killed troubling, even in a simulated environment, but at the same time, his tactics and physical abilities impressed her. Certainly, for a humanoid his size, his strength, dexterity, and stamina were unparalleled. So far, she had watched him defeat a huge, insectile beast with claws that could have snapped him in two; an incredibly fast, flying creature with twenty-centimeter fangs and razorsharp wings; a horde of mugato;and a small army of Breen soldiers.

Now, as she touched the control pad beside the door, she found herself more than a little curious about what she was about to see. The door opened with a mechanical hum, and for a moment Kira could not make sense of the scene that lay before her. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the holosuite appeared black, but matched the actual surfaces of the room in dimension. Taran’atar stood near the center of the space, peering straight ahead. A series of blue filaments hung in the air before him, some straight, some curved, some vertically oriented, some horizontally. Much smaller than the lines and figures, a series of red markings marched through the air all about them.

Kira moved inside and around to her left, along the line of the wall, attempting to get a better view of the scene. She circled around toward Taran’atar, to see from his angle the images suspended in the air before him. Only when she had drawn close to him did she get an idea of what she was looking at: mathematical equations and their graphical representations.

The symbols in red were unrecognizable to her, but the manner in which they had been laid out suggested mathematics, as did the lines and figures. There seemed to be x-, y-, and z-axes hanging in the air, as well as several other forms, including curves, cones, parabolas, and several irregular polyhedrons. This looked essentially like a trigonometry lesson.

“What is this?” Kira asked.

Taran’atar must have heard her enter and approach him, of course—few things escaped a Jem’Hadar’s notice—and so he did not start when she spoke. When he answered her, he continued to stare at the mathematical tableau. “You know it as ‘calculus,’” he told her, “or ‘differential equations.’”

“Well, some people know it as that,” Kira said.

Now, Taran’atar turned and looked at her. “I do not understand.”

“Mathematics and I never got along very well with each other,” she said.

Taran’atar stared at her and said nothing. She was about to explain her remark when he finally said, “Let me render the statements in your own language.” He ordered the computer to translate the symbols into Bajoran. The red characters vanished, replaced a second later by others.

Kira shrugged. “I recognize the numbers and letters now,” she said, “and even some of the symbols, but it’s all still Romulan to me.”

Taran’atar studied the statements for a moment. “This is not Romulan,” he said.

“It’s just an expression,” Kira explained. “It means that I don’t understand it.”

Taran’atar regarded her silently, his eyes staring into hers. “How can that be?” he asked. “You operate spacecraft, you utilize weaponry.”

“Yes, I do,” Kira agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I understand the numbers behind them.”

“But…” Taran’atar seemed at a loss for words, and despite his continued and evident discomfort with being on Deep Space 9, as well as his curt nature, Kira had never before seen him speechless.

“I learned by doing,” she told him. “And the more experience I gained, the easier it became to acquire new skills and sharpen the old ones. But as for the theory behind piloting a runabout or aiming a phaser…I guess a lot of the technology helps with that.”

“What if you lacked the technology?” Taran’atar asked her. “What if your survival depended upon this?” He gestured toward the red figures and blue shapes, his hand passing through one of the equations and—Kira assumed—the curve it defined.

“If I had to rely on mathematics to live,” Kira said, a smile on her lips, “then I suppose I’d die.” Taran’atar said nothing. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t die,” she amended, “but I’d have to act intuitively, not by calculation. Like I did in your simulation with the Rintanna.”

“Do you understand none of this?” Taran’atar wanted to know, looking again at the mathematical layout. For all of the unfamiliar experiences Kira had seen him endure since arriving aboard the station, he seemed more puzzled now than she had ever seen him.

Kira turned her full attention to the graph and the statements. A memory of her father and her brother, Pohl, attempting to tutor her rose vividly in her mind. The scent of the parchments on which she had tried to do her exercises filled her nostrils, and she could almost hear her brother’s frustrated voice endlessly repeating the intricate concepts to her. She peered at the mathematics hanging before her and looked for anything more than just familiar. She walked around Taran’atar and indicated a pair of equations. “This is a derivative of that,” she said, pointing first to the lower equation, and then to the upper. She then found the two-dimensional curve that went along with it, a tangent connecting to it at one point. It was probably the simplest set of equations and figures in the room. “It’s the instantaneous rate of change at the intersection of the curve and the slope.” To her surprise, Taran’atar nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

She tried to find something else she understood, but could not. “These are more derivative symbols,” she said, waving her hand through several other statements, the red light flashing over her skin like momentary tattoos, “but I don’t understand them.”

“They are partial differential equations,” he said.

Kira suddenly realized that Taran’atar obviously read Bajoran. The Jem’Hadar really were amazing creatures— beings,she corrected herself; people—and she wondered what they might evolve into once unshackled from the Founders’demands that they live only as soldiers. She remembered when a Jem’Hadar infant had been found and brought to the station more than five years ago. Odo had believed that the Jem’Hadar, which had developed into an adult inonly a few days, could be freed by the proper care from his genetically engineered predisposition to violence. Kira had disagreed with him, and she had ultimately been proven right in that instance, but now, here was Odo making the argument to her all over again, and this time, she was beginning to see that he might be right after all.