Psycho-Medical Profile: Report of DS9 Chief Medical Officer Julian Bashir, M.D.

Though Kira has always possessed the tactical and strategic skills to do her job exceptionally well, it is in interpersonal communication, self-assurance, and finding the imagination extinguished by a refugee's atrophied childhood where she has grown the most since this officer first encountered her in 2369. Having lived on the edge of life and death for so long, Kira's emotions are always close to the surface and they can be unusually strong: love, grief and anger being the most prevalent. She has also slowly come to grips with both the violence of her past actions and her strong anti-Cardassian disposition.

Young Kira Nerys faced the same terrifying and brutal life faced by many of her Bajoran brethren: her father, a farmer or gardener by trade, was killed fighting in the resistance while her mother, an icon painter, died of malnutrition in the Singha Refugee Camp when Nerys was 3. She had at least two brothers and apparently no sisters; all they had to play in the camp growing up was Bajoran springball, but she had some crafts such as finger-painting at age 4 in the camp school. Having forsworn any artistic aptitude, she ironically would have been a member of the artist J'barra of Ih'valla, had the ancient Bajoran caste system survived the Occupation.

At the age of only 12, after working in the mines, the orphaned Kira was recruited by Lorit Akrem into the province's Shakaar resistance cell, named for its leader. A year later, after running errands and cleaning weapons, the group finally accepted her fully when Shakaar approved her replacing a missing member for a raid on a Cardassian skimmer. The earring she wears today was made from the metal of the skimmer by cellmate Lupaza, after Kira killed the entire unloading complement while giddily trying to impress the group.

A year later she helped to temporarily liberate the Cardassians' notorious Gallitepp labor camp, and eventually learned to fly outdated Raider craft against her oppressors. She suffered during the winter of 2360-61 along with the rest of her cell in her native Dahkur Hills caves, unarmed and hungry; her group evaded Cardassians for 10 years in the area. Through it all Kira never served time in Cardassian prison, but she was once rescued from a Cardassian interrogation center with her fellow cellmates.

Her war for Bajor's liberation had to include murder as well, such as when she helped plasma-bomb the home of Gul Pirak in Hathon, and when she checked aboard the Terok Nor station in 2365 to kill a native collaborator with the Cardassians; the latter took a toll on her soul no amount of eventual victory could erase. Ironically, she met Odo and Quark for the first time on that mission and was almost caught, the truth not coming to light until years later as the station's post-withdrawal first officer.

She accepted a major's commission and the post as Bajoran military attaché to Ben Sisko and the Starfleet administrators on DS9 following the withdrawal in 2369 - although she had initially turned it down and opposed the Bajoran provisional government's move to invite Starfleet in. As she and Sisko grew to work and trust each other while respecting their own agendas, she was temporarily recalled early the next year pending reassignment during the abortive coup on Bajor, just after she risked life and career to rescue reluctant Bajoran hero Li Nalas. It was then when she first truly met Vedek Bareil, then the front-runner to replace Kai Opaka, and they fell in love.

Despite the coming of Bajoran independence, grief would continue to be a constant for Kira. It was she who performed the Bajoran death ritual for Opaka soon after, when the kai was trapped in virtual death in the Gamma Quadrant. The next year Kira was at Bareil's side when a scandal in a no-win scenario during the occupation dashed his chances to become Kai; a year later she faced his death alone on the eve of his Cardassian peace treaty that Winn would later take the credit for. But Kira had some solace, blocking Winn's drive to be secular leader of Bajor as well when she helped diffuse a crisis and bolster her old resistance leader Shakaar to the post instead. She in turn fell in love with him a year later, lending no less a figure than Gul Dukat to note her obvious attachment to strong male personalities. In addition, Kira was also attracted to Tom Riker despite her involvement with Bareil; after his theft of the U.S.S. Defiant, she eventually talked him into taking Dukat and Sisko's deal of surrender with a rare Cardassian prison term that she vows she'll help him escape from some day.