by Неизвестный
"Major, at one time I thought that this was just a personal trait of yours, one that I would just have to get accustomed to." Sisko's voice turned coldly formal. "But upon reflection I find that Kai Opaka was unique in more than one way. She was the only Bajoran I ever met who had cultivated the virtue of patience."
"Patience—" Kira could barely keep herself from exploding. "Commander, we don't have time for patience. We've suffered enough."
Sisko drew himself up to full height, his shoulders broadening against the booth's upholstery. "If that's the case, then despite our earlier assessment, your world may be a long way from readiness for Federation membership and its benefits. The Bajoran government has to learn that there are limits, even for the Federation. The Federation Council has concerns other than the welfare of Bajor and its people; there are other worlds and other races who have claims—and perhaps better ones—on the Federation's attention and development resources. And more importantly, some of those worlds have a lot more experience and skill at political maneuvering than the Bajoran provisional government has shown. This is exactly the kind of struggle where patience is not just a virtue, it's a strategy. The winning strategy."
She had heard the lecture from him before. Despite her fatigue, she could feel her spine turning to steel. "Reassessment is a two-way street, Commander. If Bajor is so far down the list of the Federation's priorities, then you'd better be prepared for Bajor to take a good hard look at what it gets out of dealing with the Federation."
"I see." Sisko's voice softened. "And is that what you want, Major? For Bajor to go its own way?"
Inside herself, she again felt the tug, two opposite vectors of force, the division between the oldest loyalty of her heart and the new one she had assumed. "No—" She shook her head. "I wouldn't be here at Deep Space Nine if that were what wanted."
"Very well." Sisko drained the last of his synthale and pushed the empty mug away from him. "You've demonstrated the depth of your commitment to the station's mission before; I have no cause to doubt you on that score. I'd like to remind you, Major—and you may regard this as a personal rather than a professional comment—that you're not the only one here who has to make a difficult choice between one path and another." He reached for the booth's security curtain, his hand stopping before drawing it aside. "I'll need a complete report on your assignment. And I mean absolutely complete: names, alliances, antagonisms, influences that we can bring to bear on different factions and individuals in the provisional government . . . everything. We're going to have to do a lot more of our own messy work from now on."
Kira watched the commander threading his way among the crowded tables, heading for the bar's exit. Her own drink sat half-finished in front of her. She lifted the mug and took a sip, the taste sharply bitter on her tongue.
The lights were off in the suite, but he could tell that someone was home. A touch upon the otherwise still molecules of air, the barely detectable sound of breathing. His son, asleep.
Sisko let the door slide shut behind him, blocking the angled fall of light from the station's corridor outside. His own shadow was swallowed by the room's darkness. He moved forward, walking with practiced ease around the low tables and chairs, and other familiar accoutrements of this small, private world. And almost immediately banged his knee against something large, heavy and unexpected.
"What the—" He bit off the exclamation of pain and surprise. The sound of the collision hadn't woken Jake. He hobbled to the nearest control panel and brought up enough light by which to see.
The object in the middle of the room was the wooden crate that Major Kira had brought back from Bajor.
He sat down heavily on the sofa, rubbing his shin. One of the Ops deck crew must have taken the initiative to have the crate transferred here from his office—or perhaps he himself had given the order; right now he couldn't remember. For a moment, he imagined that the crate had walked by itself to his quarters, like the proverbial white elephant. His heart felt leaden as he gazed at the rough wooden sides.
And that sense came without even undoing the locks and prying open the lid. He already had a good notion of the crate's contents. Bits and pieces . . . On old Earth and other worlds, the bones of saints had been the objects of veneration. Presumably, the crate held nothing as ghoulish as that; the Kai was still walking around with all of her bones safely tucked inside her, even though at the other end of the galaxy.
The Bajoran priests—the professional colleagues, as it were, of the Kai—had described in general terms what had been packed away in the crate. A small chest of precious woods, darker than the night sky, and inlaid with symbols formed of shining metal, that held a half-dozen or so scrolls of religious texts, hand-copied by the Kai when she had been a novice over a half-century ago. They were of no great value beyond that of remembrance of the one who had so carefully brushed the intricate characters upon the vellum leaves. Other things, even closer to perfect muteness, their animating spirit departed: a hand-carved table that had sat in a corner of the Kai's sleeping chamber, the oil lamp from the niche in the stone wall, a sequence of ear ornaments, each wrapped in feather-edged paper, each more elaborate and bejewelled than the one before, all of them signifying the mortal woman's ascent through the hierarchy of her people's faith.
Foolish veneration was discouraged by the priests; the Bajoran religion had enough wisdom to teach that only living were sacred. There had been a time when these things would have been destroyed; but someone among Kai Opaka's remaining brethren had had the kindly—or cruel—inspiration to send them up to the Deep Space Nine station, as though it were the planet's attic. So I could deal with them instead, thought Sisko. Perhaps that was justice for his part in bringing about the Kai's fate.
If he had strength enough, he knew, it would be best for everyone if he shoved the unopened crate out one of the station's airlocks. But he knew also that he wouldn't.
Commander Benjamin Sisko felt tired and alone now, surrounded by the overlapping hollow shells of the station, and the empty regions of the cold stars beyond. The only one who had sensed the burden of command he bore was gone, as good as dead. The galaxy, or the little part of it that he carried around with him, was an emptier place without the Kai in it. A pang of guilt penetrated his brooding. The bleak notions of absence and loss reminded him that he had barely any contact with his own son over the last few shifts. There had never seemed to be any time.
And when will there be time? He heard the question asked with the Kai's soft voice, inside his head. You know there's only now. This time, Benjamin.
His knee had stopped aching, enough for him to get up and hobble to the door of his son's room. The dim light from the ceiling cast his shadow across the bed.
Jake lay with his legs drawn up, a fist pressed hard against face and eyes squeezed tight, like the image of a much younger child futilely trying to ward off bad dreams. Sisko could see that the boy's skin was shiny with sweat; he stepped into the room and laid his hand on Jake's brow, but felt no fever.
He stepped back from the bedside, his own heart more troubled than before. There was so much, in this room as well as through all of DS9, that he could do little about. Wherever Jake walked in his dreams, he was as alone there as his father was in this world.
Sisko drew the door closed, letting the child go on sleeping. If he could be here when his son awoke, perhaps that would be comfort enough.
For both of them.
CHAPTER 3
Good intentions paved the road to a guilty conscience; which was, Benjamin Sisko had to acknowledge to himself, one of the lesser forms of hell. It was almost mild enough to be put out of his thoughts as he sat down for a briefing with the station's chief of security.
"Is there something on your mind, Commander?" From the other side of the desk, Odo peered at him with concern. "You seem somewhat preoccupied. I could come back later, if you wish—"
"No; no, that's all right, Constable." Sisko shook his head. "It's nothing importa
nt; just a promise I made to myself, that I've already broken. I meant to spend some time with my son Jake at the beginning of this shift, before he went off to his classes." The school started up by Keiko O'Brien, the wife of the chief of operations, had quickly reached the level of keeping regular hours, with both a permanent body of students and the children of the station's long- and short-term guests. "But he was already gone by the time I woke up."
"Ah. Family matters." As much as was possible, Odo's masklike face revealed a brief trace of emotion. "I suppose I should count myself fortunate, that I have just one set of duties with which to concern myself."
Sisko knew better. He was well aware that the security chief's orphan status—beyond that even, Odo's singularity there were no other known members of his species—constituted an inner vacuum that continually tugged at his thoughts. Whatever problems Sisko had with bringing up Jake in the artificial environment of DS9, he still knew that he was envied for the simple fact of having a blood relation with him.
"Be that as it may, Constable. Perhaps we should get down to business." He turned toward the computer panel sitting on the desk; the last screenful of Odo's report still showed. Sisko reached out a fingertip and blanked the words away. "This is a very distressing situation that's developed."
"It's more than that, Commander. It's intolerable." Odo's eyes readily displayed anger; now they became two hotly glaring coals. "I won't have it aboard my station."
The security chief's proprietary attitude about DS9 was, Sisko supposed, a displacement of his suppressed familial instincts. Odo reacted toward any threat to the station, any transgression of order within its precincts, as another sentient creature might have felt about one of his own flesh and blood being placed in jeopardy. That made for a zealous execution of Odo's job as the station's top police official; at the same time, the commander knew there was always the danger of Odo exceeding the restraints of the authority that had been given him. Deep Space Nine represented one of the frontiers of the Federation; rights could be too easily trampled on here. all for the sake of insuring the station's survival.
To his credit, Odo had always managed to stay mindful of the letter of the law. If he stepped over the line—and Sisko knew he did; it would be impossible not to, in a place like this, and still get his job done—it was still within the law's spirit. Or at least it had been so far.
"We've had murders on the station before." Odo's voice broke into the commander's reflections. "Given the nature of our operation here, the constraints that we unfortunately have to work under, the transient population constantly moving through, I suppose we have to recognize a certain inevitability of frictions arising between individuals, the chance of illicit profit through violence, and the like. Plus, with our remote location, we will attract a certain mind-set—certain dissolute personalities, shall we say—that somehow believes DS9 is the perfect locale for the settling of grudges and the perpetuation of vendettas." Odo took a deep breath—a simulated humanoid mannerism—in an effort to calm himself. His voice lowered as he gazed brooding at the stars visible in the office's viewport. "I've sometimes wondered if there might not be a certain psychic centrifugal force at work, by which all the disconnected elements in the universe inevitably wind up here on the fringe." He glanced back at Sisko. "It seems unlikely it could be mere coincidence that we get so many of them."
He had heard these dark musings from Odo before, generally at the end of a long, difficult shift. "Your view may be a little prejudiced, Constable. Your job forces you to concentrate on the more aberrant happenings aboard the station."
"'Aberrant' is putting it mildly. Especially with this latest series of events. 'Psychopathic' might be a better choice of words."
The security chief was right about that, Sisko admitted to himself. Odo's report on the murder epidemic that had broken out aboard DS9 had gone into distressing levels of detail.
"This Ahrmant Wyoss individual you have in custody . . . I take it he would have been our third perpetrator? That is, of course, if he had managed to land the blow he had aimed at myself and Major Kira."
"The fourth, actually," said Odo. "Though it's out of our jurisdiction, I believe it's appropriate to count in this series the unfortunate occurrences aboard the Denebian heavy-cargo transport that disembarked from our main docking pylon some twenty cycles ago. The craft was still within primary communication distance when the violence broke out. Three people died in that episode, including the murderer by his own hand. Suicide as the termination of a psychotic rampage appears to be a significant element of the pattern."
"Which would make our Wyoss an important subject of investigation." With a touch, Sisko brought the report back onto the computer panel's screen. He began scrolling through the text. "Since Wyoss is the only one we've managed to apprehend alive. Are there any traceable connections between him and the other perpetrators?"
Odo shrugged. "Nothing definitive. Tangential factors, such as their being aboard the station during overlapping periods of time. I'm still sifting through the data, though; if I can find one element common to all of them—and one that is sufficiently close to being unique—then maybe we'll have something to work with."
"And that is, of course, that our assumption is valid that Ahrmant Wyoss is part of this series." Sisko turned toward Odo from the screen. "He didn't actually kill anyone—fortunately. Or that we know of, at least."
"If he did kill anyone, Commander, it would have to have been done since he came aboard the station. We wouldn't have allowed him entry if there had been any kind of record on him. In that sense, Wyoss is not an unknown quantity; we can track his employment history for nearly two decades. He's had a few batteries of psych tests along the way, and the don't show anything unusual. Just a run-of-the-mill itinerant laborer of marginal intelligence and skills. There are millions of them wandering between planets."
"That's something else of which we get more than our fair share." Sisko tapped a fingernail against the words on the screen. "And you believe that you can connect this extremely ordinary individual with our little group of dead murderers?"
"Commander. He did take a swing at your head with an open pryblade—"
Sisko interrupted with an upheld hand. "Yes, of course; I mean with something besides that small datum." He managed a wry smile. "In my career, I've had several attempts on my life, and I've never assumed yet that they were all part of a single epidemic. They all seemed to be more of the sort of phenomenon that comes with the territory, as it were."
"In this case I believe we have indicative, if not conclusive, evidence. Ahrmant Wyoss was brought to my attention by one of his work-group supervisors, who had become alarmed by signs of a deteriorating mental condition on Wyoss's part. Specifically, an alteration in personality accompanied by verbal pronouncements of a disjointed and violent nature. A psych screening was performed on Wyoss and the results tagged and forwarded to me. I immediately noticed the similarity between the transcript of Wyoss's bizarre ramblings and the few recordings and ex post facto accounts of the dead murderers. For example, the comm line to the Denebian transport was inadvertently left open, and we have close to a quarter hour of that individual's comments to himself—along with some fairly gruesome sound effects—as he went about his self-appointed task. In all cases, and certainly in Wyoss's, there are common elements of an absorbing fantasy construct in which the individuals seem to be trapped. The murders themselves appear to be the result of some kind of level autistic functioning, in which the components of the normally perceived environment—such as other people—are seen as parts of another, completely enclosed world. And judging from the nature of the murderers' responses to those perceptions, it's not a particularly pleasant world."
Everything Odo said had been in his report; Sisko could look at the computer panel and see nearly the exact same words. Going over it this way had given him time to sort through his own thoughts on the matter.
Unfortunately, there were still not enough facts at
hand on which to base a course of decision.
Sisko gazed up at the office's curved ceiling. "As long as we have this material from the murderers—and presumably more material forthcoming from our attempted murderer—we should put it through as much analysis as possible. There may be something we're overlooking. . . ."
"I quite agree, Commander. That's why I've asked Lieutenant Dax to begin a separate investigation. I've turned copies of all my records pertaining to this case over to her, and given her complete access to the prisoner Ahrmant Wyoss. She indicated that she understood the urgency attached to this matter, and has already started work on it."
"Dax?" Sisko brought his gaze back down. "But why not Dr. Bashir? I would've thought that he had more expertise in what would seem to be largely a psychological inquiry."
Odo's posture stiffened against the back of his chair. "In fact, I did initially approach our chief medical officer. I'm afraid, however, that Dr. Bashir was not cooperative."
He had been afraid of that. The chief medical officer was, if nothing else, a man of principle, as yet unalloyed by the compromises that a few more years of experience might bring.
"I'll speak to him." With a few taps of his finger, Sisko sent the report back to the computer's confidential archives. "In the meantime, Constable, give this matter your highest priority. Notify me at once of any new developments."
"Of course, Commander."
As soon as Odo had left the office, Sisko pushed his own chair back from the desk and stood up. He had a good notion that the chief medical officer was already waiting for him.
* * *
"Because it is, in essence, a medical problem. That's why, Commander."
Science Officer Jadzia Dax could hear the tension in Bashir's voice. The doctor only had his experience with Benjamin Sisko as a commanding officer aboard DS9 to go on; he didn't have the decades of knowing Sisko as a human being that her symbiont partner had brought to their shared consciousness. It was always easier for a Trill to view the great emotions of mere humanoid life, the angers and jealousies and other passions that loomed so large to those experiencing them, as mere epiphenomena, ripples on centuries-old seas.