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Her first thought is: It’s a beautiful language.
It was, truly. Somehow sensual in it’s syntax. Rolled ‘r’s and soft gutturals, far less aggressive than Klingon, with a rhythm to their diction too unpredictable to be like Vulcan, and almost lyrical.
Hearing Bajoran spoken was far preferable to Jadzia than her previous encounters with the ancient ancestor of the tongue, most of which she’d only seen in writing, poured over for days on end to help Benjamin decipher some ancient, Bajoran artifact or cryptic prophecy. Sleepless all-nighters pulled, spent angrily reprogramming the computer to analyze, translate, re-analyze, and spit out crude renderings of an extinct speech.
But on Kira’s lips, the words weren’t dead. They lived. What’s more, they danced. Sounds fell from the Major’s mouth like the melody of an unfamiliar song. Hypnotizing, almost intoxicating.
It’s a beautiful language.
Her second thought is: So why the hell am I hearing it?
This thought only arrives once the music has stopped. Once Kira is staring at her. Eyebrows up, awaiting answer.
Jadzia sets the autopilot and swivels in her chair to face her copilot, “What was that all about? Some kind of old proverb?”
Kira’s eyes go wide and stare at Jadzia’s lips, focusing on them, confused as if unsure they’ve actually moved.
The Major says something else. This time, the song has more strain to it, and the notes raise up at the end like a question.
“Kira…” Jadzia says, “What is this? Are you trying to play a joke on me?”
“ Jadzia… ” Kira answers, in a thick accent, mispronouncing the vowels somehow, and with the emphasis in the wrong place.
This does get the science officer’s attention. They share a long, silent stare.
“You can’t understand a word I’m saying to you right now,” Jadzia asks, “can you?”
A few more bars of that unfamiliar tune.
“Well,” says Dax, “at least that makes two of us.”
She gets up and takes out a repair kit from one of the storage units in the overhead compartment above the pilot’s chair, before opening it and beginning to sift through for a few choice tools.
“There must be a problem with the ship’s internal translator. Doesn’t explain why our commbadges or implants aren’t adjusting for the error, but maybe the matrix has collapsed somehow. Might’ve been that rough patch of space we just flew through. I’ll have to go check the main computer core in the back of the runabout. You stay here and make sure we’re still on course for the wormhole, and — oh, what am I saying? You’re not hearing any of this, anyway.”
Jadzia looks up to confirm her suspicions and indeed finds Major Kira staring listlessly at the controls in front of her.
Of course, realizes Dax with a sigh as she gets to her feet again, Federation ship, Federation technology, Federation Standard for all the controls.
“Here, let me just…” Dax steps up, reaching across Kira’s flight controls to engage her autopilot, acutely aware of the way the Major is staring at her as she does this. Clearly, the Militia officer isn’t comfortable with the level of helpless the computer glitch has left her in.
It had been awhile since Jadzia has had to rely on the basic Federation Standard they’d taught her at the Academy, but she’s soon able to figure out how to at least sync Kira’s autopilot with hers to keep the runabout from going in circles while they tried to sort the matter out.
“Whatever it is,” Jadzia was saying, grabbing the toolkit and heading over to remove one of the panels on the back wall of the cockpit and start sorting through isolinear chips, “It must’ve only just started. I could read my station fine just a minute ago.” She knows Kira can’t understand her, not really, anyway, but she tries to impress a sense of calm and assuredness in her voice.
From the corner of her eye Dax watches Kira watch her as she begins examining the computer chips, looking for cracks or misplaced components or anything that might account for the sudden failure to the translator systems. Kira had started pacing the room, eyes darting around and clear discomfort and rising panic coming from her stance and the tonation of the things she would occasionally mutter to herself. Here and there, Jadzia would catch a word she’d think she recognized. Words sounding like those she had deciphered on various artifacts. Phrases like “prophets” and “believe” and “You have got to be kidding me!” — Well… alright, that last one was mostly just context clues.
Dax laughs to herself as she works. Only Kira could make Jadzia laugh even when she’s only picking up every thirteenth word.
“Relax!” She says at one point stopping her work to look up at the Major, who just makes a face at her. “Right, right,” Dax says, waving her hand in the air, “I don’t exactly remember any Ancient Bajoran Prophecies using the phrase ‘take a breath,’ but don’t pretend you can’t figure out what I’m saying to you.” She takes a chip, points it as well as a sharp glare at Kira, before motioning over to a chair by an offline adjunct station. She adds, somewhat sarcastically, “ You , sit . Me , work .” And she went back to fiddling with the isolinear rods.
In a huff, Kira flops down into the chair beside her, muttering something under her breath that Jadzia can only assume was something to the tune of hating to feel useless. That, or maybe telling Dax to take a long space walk off a short docking port.
She sits, quietly puzzling her way around the trouble, when suddenly the cabin goes dark except for the emergency lights by the active helm.
“ Dax… ” Kira calls out in her heavy accent, followed by what Jadzia can only assume is the Bajoran equivalent of, ‘Please tell me that was something you did.’
“Not me,” Jadzia says and raises from her stance on the floor with her legs crossed to come look at what was still functioning of the ship’s control systems.
As she starts towards the cockpit, she takes one step forward, only to have her foot hang in the air. Before she can stop herself, she’d already pushed off the ground with the other and was now steadily heading towards the ceiling. Kira clung to the console as she rose out of her seat.
“There goes the artificial gravity,” Dax said, swimming through the open area to reach for the handles of the bulkheads. Behind her, the carefully stacked isolinear rods and chips began to weave through the air in an unchoreographed ballet, and she felt a few clink against her heels.
Kira turns around to cast a confused glare about the deck, and Jadzia just shrugs listlessly. “The system must be trying to reboot.”
But Kira still can’t understand.
“Reboot,” Dax said, then tried, “Restart, err, begin again…” she racks her brain and can only remember the Bajoran word for ‘sunrise.’ She says it, but it only causes Kira’s brow to furrow heavier.
Before she can attempt another poor translation, the lights in the cabin return, and each Kira and Dax are dropped from the air and hard onto their backsides.
“Damn!” Kira curses, rubbing at her hip which had landed wrong against the pilot’s chair.
Jadzia stands and finishes her walk to the chair, spinning Kira out of her way to observe the controls. “Just as I thought,” she mumbles to herself, “Complete system reboot.”
“‘Reboot’!” Says the Major, “ That’s what you meant?”
Dax smirks, “I’ll have to brush up on my Bajoran. Looks like the universal translator is back online, too. Thank goodness for small miracles.”
“Small miracles don’t explain it going offline in the first place.”
“No, but this might,” Jadzia says and points to some of the data appearing on the helm display, “Looks like we got caught in a roaming patch of chaotic space.”
“Chaotic space?”
Dax nods, “Jadzia had only read about it. Tobin thought he went through one once, but could never prove it, but these data look like those readings to me.”
“And that explains why the translator went down?”
Jadzia nodded, “Completely scrambled the matrix. And everything else in it, too. We’re lucky the patch wasn’t larger or our higher cognitive functions might have been next.”
“Can we do anything about it?”
Jadzia shakes her head, no. “It’s already disbanded. We could set up some subspace beacons as warnings, but at this point there’s no reason. The chances of another patch forming to the exact same dimensions are…” she shrugs, “Ten hundred thousand to one?”
“Huh.”
Dax looks up at Kira and smiles as she gets back in her seat and lays in a new course for the wormhole, adjusting for the drift they’d suffered during the brief systems failure, “Guess we were just lucky. Remind me to try the dabo tables when we get back.”