by Dayton Ward
He came upon a squat, ugly building. There was an empty rectangular space set in the front wall that had once been a window, but it had been boarded up years before, making the place look closed. Only the regulars knew better, and Sisko was as faithful a regular as anyone.
Janel Tigan, a handsome young Trill who was employed at Akiem with Sisko, waited in the dusky lamplight at the narrow bar, downing what was probably his fifth or sixth Romulan ale, judging by the empty cups that littered the bar. Janel could put it away with stunning efficiency. Yet somehow, the cocky young Trill never seemed to get really drunk.
“Ben Sisko,” Janel greeted him, his diction giving no evidence of all the Romulan liquor he had apparently drunk. “I was just wondering when you were going to get here.”
“The … meeting ran a little late,” Sisko said, signaling for the bartender to bring him the usual synthale.
Janel cocked an eyebrow. “Late, eh?” he said. “Does this mean Jennifer is really going to work on Terok Nor? You might really be moving away from this”—he gestured around himself—“place?”
“Not sure,” Sisko replied, accepting his drink.
Janel eyed Sisko for a moment, waiting for more, but when it was clear he was not going to get it, he changed the subject a little. “It seems odd that Kira would have her eye on a Terran to join her staff,” Janel remarked. “Did you think she had any ulterior motives?”
Sisko took a long drink and then paused before answering. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “She … implied that she would have liked me to go to work for her. But—”
“You?” Janel repeated, then broke into laughter. “Of course!” he shouted. “Ha! She’s seen the data on you, hasn’t she?” He laughed to himself for a moment. “I guess I worried, Ben, that we’ve caused you to look a little too good, haven’t we?”
“Quiet,” Sisko murmured, though there was only one other patron in the tavern, and he was in a heated discussion with the bartender. It was nothing short of astonishing that Janel’s boisterous personality hadn’t gotten him into more trouble over the years; it was lucky for the man that he was so charismatic. The Orions he was acquainted with seemed to love him, despite his loose tongue, to the degree that he was used almost exclusively by the Cardassians at Akiem whenever the company required interactions with stubborn Orions. But Sisko couldn’t afford the same careless indiscretion Janel showed Akiem’s Orion clients.
“Sorry, there, Ben,” Janel said, a little more quietly. “But you have to admit, I’ve done a real number for you, haven’t I?”
“That you have,” Sisko said. “But who knows how long you can keep it up.”
Janel grinned, but Sisko could sense strain behind it. “I’d like to say indefinitely, of course. But the truth is . . .”
“The truth is, you’re starting to worry.”
“Well, I just find it a little disconcerting that word got back to the Intendant, that’s all. That she actually offered you a job . . .”
“And a ship,” Sisko added. “She offered me a ship.”
“Your own ship?” Janel asked, looking genuinely impressed. Janel’s comings and goings were far less regulated than Sisko’s because he enjoyed a much better status with Akiem, but he certainly didn’t have his own ship.
Sisko chortled. “Can you imagine me, with my own ship? Commanding my own crew?”
Janel frowned. “Can you imagine it, Ben?”
Sisko didn’t answer.
Janel scrutinized Ben for a moment before breaking into a knowing smile. “You’re considering it, aren’t you? I mean, not just considering—you’re fantasizing about it. You’re letting yourself imagine what it would be like to go to work for the Intendant.”
“No,” Sisko lied. “I can’t go to work for her.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Sisko said, feeling suddenly very helpless, and very tired. “Because it would just confirm for Jennifer what she’s been accusing me of for years.”
“Hm,” Janel said. “Well, then, you are in a bind, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not,” Ben replied, “because I’m not going to work for the Intendant.”
“Even though you want to?”
“I don’t want to,” Sisko insisted.
“Oh, Ben.” Janel laughed. “What have I told you? When you’re after something—be it a woman, money, prestige—”
“I’m not after anything.”
“Or freedom,” Janel went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “When you’re infatuated with something, when you’re lusting after it, you can’t let yourself get too immersed in the picture of what it could be like. No, no, don’t let those pictures come. You have to keep yourself from actually thinking about it, if you truly want to get it. Because if you think about it too much, then you will yearn for it. And if you start to actually hurt for it, then you become reckless; you’re a goner, Ben. There’ll be no saving you—”
“I’m not going to work for her,” Sisko interrupted, his voice much louder than he had intended it to be. “I’ll find a way so that she won’t want me in her fleet. I’ll … I’ll get Jennifer’s father to lean on someone at Akiem—someone who can prevent it. Look, I’ll admit I like the idea of commanding a ship. But I know very well that there’s no way Kira Nerys is going to let me just … work for her.”
Janel’s smile became very wide. “No, of course not,” he said. “The Intendant’s reputation—her … appetite … precedes her. But that’s not stopped you from rationalizing it, has it?”
“I … I . . .” Sisko stopped.
Janel continued to smirk, which Sisko was beginning to find a bit annoying. “I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re trying every angle in your mind, you’re thinking of every which way, looking for that elusive loophole that could make it possible. I know how badly you want your own ship. And you’ve got to stop, Ben, precisely because, once you have seen a clear enough image of it in your mind, then there are no lengths you wouldn’t go to for it. I would hate to see you in such a position. A desperate position, that is.” His smile faded. “You don’t want to be that woman’s pet, Ben. Trust me. I’ve heard stories about her that would make an Orion blush.”
“I … won’t let it happen. Not at the cost of my marriage. I care about Jennifer very much. If I didn’t, I would have just accepted the offer right then and there, wouldn’t I?”
Janel’s smile returned, but Ben could plainly see the worry in it now. He wasn’t thinking about the Intendant, or Jennifer. “You need to be more careful with your accounts,” the Trill said pointedly. “We’ll both find ourselves in serious trouble if anyone learns that we’ve been fixing those numbers. And Jennifer and her father could be implicated as well. If you really do care about her—”
“I do.”
“Well, then, I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to have to start doing your job.”
“You mean … actually condemn those people to die?”
“Either that, or get them to pay,” Janel said.
Sisko sighed. “I know you’re right.” He had been forced to hand out a few death sentences in his time at Akiem, but he hardly relished it. In truth, he knew very well that if he worked for the Intendant, he would have to genuinely do what he’d been hired to do, and he had hated himself when he’d done it in the past. That could never be worth having his own ship. At least, he told himself that it never could.
Janel drained the last of his ale and then rose from his bar stool, clapping Benjamin on the shoulder. “Maybe you’d better go home to Jennifer a little early tonight, eh?”
As the Akiem shuttle found its way to another pathetic little moon in orbit of Trivas, Sisko was thinking about what the Cardassian acronym actually stood for. Akiem was the best Terran approximation of the Cardassian letters; Sisko felt it was fitting that the meaning was supposed to be something like “Integrity Drives Our Foundation.” There was a double meaning to it, though, known only to Terrans. The Cardassian word for “integrity” soun
ded very like a particular dialect of a Terran word for “angst.” It was a joke among some Terrans, but as far as Sisko knew, the Cardassians were not aware of this coincidence. Jennifer’s father had made it abundantly clear that Sisko was never to joke about it; such “humor” could lead to very unpleasant consequences.
He was alone for this particular visitation. This would have been unusual just six months ago, but his status had been slightly elevated lately, thanks to Janel’s careful manipulation of the tallies. Now Sisko might find himself doing a solo venture as often as twice a month. He relished these occasions; though the shuttles were tiny, short-distancecapacity things with powerful homing signals, the trips still gave a fairly convincing impression of freedom—not to mention the sweet, sweet silence he could enjoy in the cockpit.
This moon had some long, ancient name that most people didn’t bother to remember. It seemed much too small and insignificant a place to have such an important-sounding name. Apparently, some old Bajoran astronomer had named it for a woman—a woman with a very long name—whom he had been in love with. But nowadays, most people in the Trivas system referred to it either as “the second moon” or “number two.”
Sisko’s shuttle landed on an old concrete platform, possibly the foundation of a long-gone building, set a short distance outside of a scattered Terran colony that he had visited twice before.
This particular client had missed three payments already, and Sisko wasn’t sure how many more he could cover, especially after the conversation with Janel. He might have to engage in some actual coercion if these people didn’t start coming up with some cold, hard latinum. The trouble was, it was no fun to coerce a blind man who’d lost the ability to string two coherent syllables together. The man had been badly injured in a mining accident, and the parent company that owned the mine’s interests had paid to put the man back together again. His medical expenses had been astronomical, despite the fact that the Terran doctors who’d been paid to slap him back together hadn’t done the most competent job at it—not good enough for him to ever be able to work again, anyway.
It was with the blind man’s sister that Sisko usually dealt, a tall, strong-willed woman named Kasidy. She was pretty, voluptuous, and lippy. Part of Sisko dreaded dealing with her again, but another part of him, a part he wished to deny, could not wait to see her. He wasn’t sure which part was going to dominate this afternoon.
The blind man was sitting outside a large round tent supported by a series of poles set into the hard, dusty ground. One of his legs was twisted beneath his body in an unnatural posture, but Kasidy had assured Sisko that her brother always sat that way; it seemed to agitate him if anyone tried to move him. The man, whose name was Kornelius, sat silently, his half-lidded eyes seeming to be shrouded in an unseeing fog.
Kornelius did not stir when Sisko walked around to the entrance of the tent. There was a bell on a string that Kasidy had rigged, and Sisko pulled it while simultaneously throwing back the flap to the entrance.
“Miss Yates?” he bellowed. “It’s Benjamin Sisko from Akiem. Yes, it’s that time again, Miss Yates. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
The tent was dim inside, but once Sisko’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he could see a faint moving shadow from behind a partition, a shadow of a woman’s seated figure. He felt his face heat up for a moment as his eyes traced the lines of the woman’s body. The figure rose, the shadow’s projection on the fabric screen suddenly resembling a malformed giant, and the partition was whipped aside.
“I’m not hiding from you, if that’s what you’re implying, Mister Sisko.”
Sisko folded his arms. “I would never suggest such a thing, Miss Yates. It’s dark in here.”
“Light enough for me to do my mending by,” she muttered, but she picked up a very small palm beacon from the floor, switched it on, and set it back down, its narrow, yellow finger of light pointed at the ceiling. “Power cells cost money.”
“Am I to interpret that as you telling me that you still can’t pay?”
Kasidy angrily gestured to the outside of the tent, indicating her brother. “How am I supposed to pay? I can’t leave him alone all day, and I can’t get much more work than the mending I do—and that’s all just to trade for food, clean water. If the Cardassians intended to patch him up just enough to make him a liability to me, then they did an excellent job.”
“Should they have let him die?”
Kasidy frowned, looking ashamed. “No,” she said in a low voice. “Of course not. But if they can’t understand that he is now a full-time job to me, then I don’t know what else I can possibly tell them.”
Sisko could find no reply, and Kasidy went on. Her shoulders sagged, and she rubbed her fingers along the upper part of her jaw. “It was a trap, the entire job. They would give him work in the mines, they said, but he would have to pay them back for his tools. He would have to pay them back for his clothes, for his shoes, his meals, and the living quarters they gave him. They never mentioned the interest they were planning to charge him—and increase every quarter. They never mentioned that the clothes, the tools—all of it—would cost triple or quadruple what they would have cost for anyone but a Terran, even without the interest. Even before the accident, there was no way he would ever have been able to get out from under them. It’s what they do to all of us Terrans.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “Is this what they’ve done to you, too?”
Ben met her gaze evenly. He felt deeply annoyed with her, though he knew she spoke the truth. He didn’t know what good it did to reiterate the bleak details of reality. “What do you think?”
Kasidy folded her arms. “Well, then, I suppose I can’t entirely fault you for doing what you’re doing. But you know as well as anyone that you’re never going to get one thin strip of latinum from me, or probably from any of your Terran clients, for that matter.”
Sisko struggled for a moment before finally succumbing to his frustration. “Now you listen to me, Kasidy Yates,” he snarled. “I have covered for you and Kornelius the past three months. I wish I could help you, I do. But it’s every man for himself, can’t you see that? If you don’t start paying—and soon—I’m going to have to make good on my job. I’m going to have to turn you over to them.”
Kasidy slowly shifted her weight to one hip, but she didn’t answer, and Sisko rambled on. “I don’t have a choice in the matter, Miss Yates. There’s nothing more I can do. Why can’t you just make my job a little easier and come up with some cash? Do you think … I like doing this?”
Kasidy didn’t budge, her expression unmoved. “You don’t dislike it enough to stop, I’d wager.”
Sisko was getting angrier by the second. “And how am I supposed to stop?” he snapped.
“They’ve given you access to a shuttle! If you had any gumption at all, you’d learn to reprogram it, to sabotage the homing signal. How difficult could it be? You could get yourself out of here.”
“And run for the rest of my life?”
“That’s what I’d do, if I were in your shoes.”
“Well, you’re not, are you?”
Kasidy shifted her weight to the other hip, unfolded her arms. “No, I’m not.” Her gaze was penetrating. Something in her eyes, her expression, Sisko was not sure exactly what, but he suddenly felt that he couldn’t take it anymore. Was she judging him? Did she pity him? He felt a subtle but powerful snap occurring somewhere deep inside him, and his hands tightened into involuntary fists.
“What’s the matter?” Kasidy said softly.
“I … I . . .” Sisko stammered, feeling hot tears beginning to leak from the corners of his eyes. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I just … don’t know if I can keep this up … but I … I … don’t know what else to do.”
“Ben,” Kasidy said, using his given name for the first time that he could remember. “We have to work together, not fight each other. Can’t you see what they’re doing to us?”
Before he quite knew what w
as happening, she had put her arms around him. Her body was warm and yielding. The hands stroking the back of his neck seemed to erase the tension he had been carrying there for years. He couldn’t remember the last time he had held Jennifer like this. He wondered if he had ever held her like this.
“Kasidy,” he whispered, and then his lips were on her neck, and then they were on her soft, welcoming mouth. There was a pallet behind the fabric partition, and Kasidy pulled him to the makeshift bed, gently guiding him down, pressing the weight of her body against his chest and legs.
I can’t do this, I’m a married man. Sisko pushed the thought aside, pushed aside all thoughts of his wife. Jennifer had come to believe that the marriage had always been a farce, and deep in his heart, he feared she was right. He routinely told himself that he truly loved her, but he knew as well as she did that the benefits he could enjoy from the association with her prestigious family would always overshadow any feelings he had ever had for her. At this point, he couldn’t even remember if he had loved her, though he wanted to believe that he had.
He succumbed to Kasidy’s caresses with no further thoughts of Jennifer.
Their bodies moved hard together. Sisko held her so tightly she cried out, and he did not know if it was from pain or pleasure. He didn’t let go, but she didn’t seem to resist him, either. When they finished, they were both slick with perspiration. Sisko let her go, finally loosening his hands. He moved out from beneath her body. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I … shouldn’t have . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kasidy said brusquely. “I know you’re married, Ben. Sometimes you just have to … live for the moment. Because you don’t know how much longer you will live.”
Sisko was silent, numb, as he watched her get up and put her clothes back on. He started to reach for his shirt, but Kasidy sat back down on the pallet before he could dress. She reached for his hand.