Shar only nodded, looking miserable.
“So we’re bothoutworlders,” Nog said. “Anywhere we happen to be. No matter where you go, there you are.”
Shar nodded again, but continued to remain silent.
“All right,” Nog said. “I’ll get confessional first, if that’s what it’s going to take to get you to talk.”
Shar’s antennae stood up quizzically, illuminated by the artifact’s glow. “I have nothing to confess.”
“Well, Ido,” Nog said, gesturing toward the artifact. “And do you know what I want to confess? I want to confess not being sure I’m really doing everything I possibly can to crack this mystery.” He pushed his chair back and placed his new left leg on the tabletop with a loud thunk.His bowl of tube grubs arced onto the deck with an audible splat,but he ignored it.
Shar blinked in evident incomprehension, and Nog felt his frustrations begin to tear at their fetters.
“Don’t you understand?” Nog said, pointing at his regenerated leg. “That alien thing hurt Dr. Bashir and Lieutenant Dax pretty badly. But Iactually got some goodluck out of it.”
“That is fortunate for you,” Shar said.
“No! It’s terrible! If we reverse whatever that artifact did to the three of us who were on the Sagan,I’ll probably go back to…the way I was before.Right after the Jem’Hadar took my leg at AR-558.”
Shar’s eyes widened with understanding. “Forgive me. I hadn’t considered that.”
Nog felt oddly relieved to finally begin articulating his thoughts on the matter. “I’ve had a tough time thinking about anything else.”
“Perhaps,” Shar said, steepling his fingers thoughtfully, “you could remain aboard the Defiantwhen we insert the away team onto the artifact. Dr. Bashir and Ezri could take the symbiont inside without you and seek a means of reversing their own conditions without altering yours.”
“I already asked Sacagawea about that,” Nog admitted, feeling a surge of shame. He wondered if he was reverting to type—becoming a stereotypical cowardly Ferengi, who’d always opt to hide rather than stand and fight. “As near as I can tell from his answer, everybody who was aboard the Saganwhen we found the artifact is somehow linked. He says that if I don’t go along, whatever Ezri and Dr. Bashir have lost will staylost.”
“Of course we have no objective proof that anything Sacagawea says is true,” Shar said.
“Fair enough. But he’s all we’ve got.”
Shar’s expression grew distant. “I have noticed that you often seem to see the world in terms of things lost or things acquired.”
“Ezri would probably call it a cultural predisposition,” Nog said, pushing his chair back and withdrawing his new left leg from the table. He wasn’t sure where his friend was going with this.
Shar nodded. “True enough. Perhaps it makes it difficult to recognize that the gains we make in life often come with certain losses built into them. That we are defined by our debits as much as by our credits.”
Nog began suspecting that Shar’s words were as much for Shar as for him. He smiled. “You’d make a terribleFerengi.”
Shar answered with a small wry smile of his own. “And your emotional transparency would not make you very popular on Andor.”
Nog wondered if Shar was still trying to deflect attention from whatever secrets he was guarding. He decided that the time had come to confront the matter directly. “Okay. I’ve made myugly confession. Now will you finally tell me what’s been bothering you?”
Shar paused to gather his thoughts, then raised his gray eyes to Nog’s. The science officer’s jaw was set, as though he had just made a major decision. “When you first learned that you were going to lose your leg, and that the loss was to be permanent, how did it make you feel?”
Nog recognized Shar’s primary evasive maneuver immediately. “Shar, why do you always answer a personal question with one of your own?”
“Please, Nog. Tell me how you felt.”
Nog sighed. Sometimes Shar could be as stubborn as Uncle Quark. “All right. I felt…incomplete. It never occurred to me that I’d end up permanently scarred by the war.”
Shar nodded, rocking quietly in his chair. Then, almost inaudibly, he said, “That is precisely how I feel, Nog. Incomplete. Permanently.”
“I don’t understand.”
There was another pause. But this one was suffused with tension rather than evasion. Nog waited, sensing that a floodgate was about to open.
Finally, Shar said, “It’s Thriss.”
“One of your bondmates,” Nog said, well aware that this was an extremely awkward conversational topic for Shar. A Jem’Hadar torturer would have had a tough time extracting such stuff from Shar.
“Yes. She came to the station with Dizhei and Anichent shortly before we left for the Gamma Quadrant. To try to persuade me to return to Andor with them, to marry. Instead, I left on the Defiant.”
“I remember them. I just wasn’t sure exactly why they wanted to see you.”
Shar made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a cough. “Now you know.”
Nog’s throat went dry. “Something’s happened since we left.” Nog knew it had to be something terrible.
“Yes.” Shar’s eyes became as icy as one of the local comets. He dropped his padd on the table, rising to his feet and placing his hands behind his back as though unable to find any better use for them. “Thriss is dead, by her own hand. Our quad is sundered forever. I have no future. And I am solely to blame.”
Shar’s words struck Nog like a body blow. He knew he had never experienced anything remotely comparable to Shar’s loss—even taking the battle at AR-558 into account. Nog knew that in spite of the loss of his leg, he could always marry and have children—and that he didn’t need to be in any particular hurry to do it. But what little he’d studied about Andorian biology had made it clear that members of that species couldn’t afford to live at such a leisurely pace. They had to contend with two extremely unforgiving biological constraints: four sexes and a narrow window of reproductive opportunity.
Nog quietly rose from his chair and approached Shar, following the curvature of the table until the two were less than a meter apart. He watched Shar’s impassive face, well aware that he could offer no words that might assuage Shar’s pain. All he had to offer was his presence.
Acting on a sudden impulse, he offered that presence, stepping toward Shar and drawing him into a gentle embrace. He felt Shar’s body stiffen as though responding to an attack. Then the Andorian relaxed, evidently overcoming the violence that came so naturally to Andorians in dire emotional straits. Shar seemed to be accepting Nog’s gesture as it was intended.
Seconds or perhaps minutes later, Nog disengaged himself and took a step back. I want to help you through this. If only I had the words.
As Nog took another silent step back, Shar broke the lengthening silence. “Nog?”
“Yes?”
“Watch where you’re going. You’re about to step into your tube grubs.”
Still lying on the table, Shar’s padd suddenly began emitting a rhythmic, repeating bleep.Nog felt a surge of gratitude for the interruption. Shar immediately got busy tapping at the padd’s controls.
“The automated linguistics protocols seem to have finally translated a few large chunks of the alien text,” he said, his voice still slightly quavering.
Nog thought Shar sounded apologetic for having even raised the subject when the problem of the Nyazen blockade still remained unsolved. But Nog hadn’t ordered Shar to ignore his computer alarms. And, though he didn’t have time to think much about it at the moment, he had to admit that he was probably every bit as curious about the alien text as Shar was. Maybe the text could even shed some light on defeating the blockade. Nog allowed himself the faint hope that the text might contain just the lucky break he needed.