“Essentially, yes,” Orisin said. “But more to rule out that possibility than to give it credence. In general, average people do not have enemies. There are always going to be individuals who don’t get along with you, sometimes from a simple clash of personalities, sometimes for cause, but it’s truly unusual for anybody to develop strong enough and violent enough emotions to seek revenge by committing a heinous crime.”
“Are you saying that Rebecca’s abduction has nothing to do with us?” Kasidy asked. “That it’s . . . random?” She didn’t know which prospect scared her more—that somebody took their daughter out of vengeance, or that they did so for no reason at all.
“No, I don’t think that what happened is random, because you two are not ‘average people,’ ” Orisin said. “As the Emissary of the Prophets, Captain Sisko holds an eminent place in Bajoran society. As his wife, Ms. Yates, so do you. But it was still important to check on your histories. Through the night, I had a team of investigators comb through your lives. Before and after you became the Emissary, Captain, you had a long career in Starfleet, and you, Ms. Yates, spent years on freighters, eventually to the point where you commanded your own ship.” The major’s eyebrows dipped momentarily, as though in sudden realization. “In fact, I should be addressing you as Captain Yates.”
Kasidy waved her hand before her in a dismissive gesture. “Ms. is fine,” she said. She thought to tell him again to call her by her given name, but chose not to bother.
“At any rate,” Orisin continued, “it can’t be said that people in such positions don’t ever end up with adversaries, but those are typically professional—meaning political or martial in nature for you, Captain Sisko, and commercial for you, Ms. Yates. But such relationships rarely lead to an incident like this. It seems improbable to me that what’s happened came as the result of a promotion Captain Sisko failed to give a deserving candidate in Starfleet, or of a victory in a military confrontation, just as it’s unlikely to be because Ms. Yates won a delivery contract over a competitor. Still, I wanted to check possibilities like those. To that end, Overgeneral Manos enlisted the aid of Starfleet Command, and Minister Wintik that of the Federation Department of Commerce.” Manos Treo occupied the highest position in the Bajoran Militia, Kasidy knew, and Wintik Barr led Bajor’s Commerce Ministry. “We did identify several professional incidents where somebody professed their hatred for Captain Sisko, as well as a number of other instances that could have—whether reasonably or not—earned him somebody’s enmity. We found fewer such occurrences for Ms. Yates, but there were still a couple. For both of you, though, we saw nothing that caused us particular alarm.”
“So if you don’t think this is professional,” Ben said, “then you think it’s personal.”
“It could be,” Orisin said, “but I don’t think so. If somebody sought revenge on either one of you, why would they do this?” He shrugged, as though to underscore his point. “To hurt you for some real or imagined slight? All right, but then why wouldn’t they do more than this?”
“More?” Kasidy asked. She could conceive of only one action worse than taking Rebecca away from her temporarily, and that would be to take her away permanently.
“If somebody sought revenge against you, why wouldn’t they physically injure you, or even kill you?” the major asked. Kasidy noticed that he studiously avoided proposing that they could have harmed Rebecca. “And if motivated by a thirst for vengeance, why do so anonymously? If this act was specifically intended to hurt you, then it succeeded, but if it was meant to avenge a particular wrong that one of you perpetrated—or that somebody thought that you perpetrated—it’s failed.”
“Because we don’t know who did this,” Kasidy said. “Because we don’t know why they did it.”
“Precisely,” Orisin said.
“Somebody could still contact us,” Ben said.
“And I think somebody will,” Orisin told them. “But not to inform you of the reason they wanted to hurt you. That just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They’ll contact you in an attempt to extort a ransom.”
“A ransom?” Kasidy said. “That makes even less sense. We have nothing of value that anybody would want—at least, nothing that any other Federation citizen couldn’t get for themselves.”
“For the most part, I’d agree,” Orisin said. “But there is one thing you possess that nobody else on Bajor has.”
Kasidy understood what the major meant, and Ben said it. “The title of Emissary.”
Orisin nodded. “Yes, you’re the Emissary,” he said. “And according to the Ohalavaru, your daughter is the Avatar.”
“You think Ohalu worshippers did this?” Kasidy asked. She knew the place they afforded Rebecca in their faith, but she also understood that their convictions painted them more as believers in science than in the divinity of the Prophets. In many ways, Kasidy’s views lined up more with the Ohalavaru than with those of the traditional Bajoran faithful.
“I don’t know,” Orisin said. “It’s unclear whether an Ohalavaru or a mainstream believer would have more of a motive to do this. It’s conceivable that a traditional adherent wanted to make a statement, or to somehow undermine the tenets of Ohalu.”
“In either case, the question of why remains,” Sisko said. “What is it they could possibly want?”
“I am of the strong opinion that whatever demand they make will be of a religious nature,” Orisin said.
“Like . . . what?” Kasidy asked.
“Maybe . . .” Ben began, and then he stood up. “Maybe they’ll want me to renounce my title as the Emissary or . . . repudiate Rebecca’s status as the Avatar.” He peered down at Kasidy, and though he didn’t smile, she could see—
What? she wondered. Satisfaction? Excitement?
“I can do that,” he told her, and then he repeated it to Orisin.
“We’ll have to hear their demands,” the major said. “It could be the reverse; they could want you to proclaim yourself kai, or insist that you demand Rebecca be worshipped by all Bajorans.”
“I don’t care,” Sisko insisted. “If they want me to make some sort of public pronouncement—even if it’s contrary to my own beliefs—I’ll happily do it. It means nothing compared to getting Rebecca back.” He sat back down.
It did not entirely surprise Kasidy to hear Ben make such a declaration, but she felt relieved to actually hear him say it. In her heart, she believed that, like her, he would make virtually any sacrifice to preserve the well-being of their daughter. But Kasidy also had to admit, at least to herself, that another aspect of Ben’s avowal merited her approval: the potential of him formally abdicating his role in the Bajoran religion. She wanted to chastise herself for the sentiment as soon as she felt it, but she discovered that she couldn’t. Although she had grown more accustomed over time to her husband’s place in the beliefs of Bajorans, she had never completely accepted it—or trusted it. As the Emissary, Ben had faced death—had on one occasion even chosen to risk his life for the possibility of experiencing a sacred vision.
And the wormhole aliens took him away from me for eight months, Kasidy thought. She had been so thankful that Ben had returned in time for Rebecca’s birth, but she still feared that, someday, the Prophets might remove him from her life again. And from the life of our daughter.
To Ben, Orisin said, “It’s good to know what you’re willing to do,” but his demeanor seemed tempered. “What you do, and what we do, will depend on—” The major cut himself short as another officer stepped up beside him, a Bajoran padd in her hand. “You have a report, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said. The day before, she had been the officer to follow Ben out into the Deserak Wilderness. She had short red hair and only three shallow ridges on the bridge of her nose. Kasidy wondered if she had a fully Bajoran heritage, but then noticed that the lieutenant’s ear tapered up almost to a point. From just casual observation, she looked as though she could have a Vulcan forebear among her Bajoran ancestor
s. Kasidy had never heard of such a coupling, but she didn’t doubt that they took place. “Sergeant Elvem just transmitted his findings from Johcat. They found the travel pod.” She held up the padd. Orisin quickly took it from her and perused its contents.
“What about Rebecca?” Kasidy asked, though she realized the foolishness of the question the moment it left her mouth. If their daughter had been recovered, the lieutenant surely would have led with that information.
“There’s no sign of her yet,” the lieutenant said.
“Where is the travel pod?” Ben asked. “Has it been scanned for DNA?”
“The pod was found in a municipal square in Johcat,” Orisin said, still consulting the padd. “It’s a public vehicle, meaning that it’s available to any citizen who needs to use it. It could therefore be difficult to isolate individual, untainted DNA samples.”
“There’s more on that, sir,” the lieutenant said, and she pointed to the bottom of the padd’s screen. Orisin read from the device before continuing.
“The record of the digital IDs used to activate the pod was wiped,” he said. “Scans of both the interior and exterior of the pod show that it was recently irradiated. That destroyed any biological evidence that might have been left behind.” He handed the padd back to the lieutenant. “Tapren, instruct Sergeant Elvem to have his team canvass Johcat, visually and with sensors. Send whatever resources he needs. I want you to review the transporter logs into and out of the city since the abduction, and to check boarding manifests for any space vessels launched from the surface. Check with the Musilla CSC if necessary.”
“Right away, sir,” the lieutenant said, and she quickly headed back into the front room.
“You think that Rebecca was taken out of Johcat?” Kasidy asked. She could barely think about the fact of her daughter’s kidnapping without breaking down, but the idea of Rebecca being carted around from place to place by strangers horrified her. It also made her angry.
“We have to consider the possibility that she’s been moved since being brought to the city,” Orisin said. “I think it may be time to make your daughter’s kidnapping public.”
“What?” Ben said, clearly uncomfortable with the idea. “Why would we do that? Wouldn’t that just threaten the kidnappers? Push them toward acting in desperation?”
“They’ve abducted your child. They’re already desperate,” Orisin said. “Announcing their crime to the public could draw them out, force them to make their demands of you sooner rather than later. Everything we know tells us that the kidnappers want your daughter alive. If they wanted to harm her, they would have done so already. But they transported her out into the Deserak Wilderness rather than beaming her into a tree. They took her to Johcat in a travel pod instead of leaving her somewhere out in the wild.” He paused to grab another chair from the table. He set it before Kasidy and Ben and sat down to face them at eye level. “By making the abduction public, we effectively deputize the four hundred thousand people of Johcat—the entire population of Bajor, really. People will take note, and if they see your daughter, they’ll report it. If they observe an everyday detail that seems out of the ordinary—a neighbor who stops coming out of their home, a colleague who becomes furtive and distrustful, a flat or a building that’s been empty but suddenly appears occupied—they’ll report that. It will generate plenty of false leads, but we’ll follow every tip until we find the one that’s true. We only need one of them to point us to your daughter.”
“But the kidnappers will know that,” Kasidy said. “If we announce what’s happened, they could get scared . . . decide to abandon their plans and . . . and . . .” Kasidy couldn’t say aloud the worst possible outcome.
“I understand your concerns,” Orisin said. “I can’t tell you that your fears aren’t justified. I think making a public statement now could help us, but it’s not yet critical. We just found the travel pod. It’s possible that we’ll find more clues in Johcat.”
Kasidy turned to Ben. The flesh beneath his eyes had a purplish tint. He looked drawn and worried and scared and angry, all at the same time. She felt the same things and knew that he would be able to see that. They didn’t say anything to each other, but they didn’t have to; he knew what she thought.
“For right now,” Ben said, “let’s wait to announce the abduction.”
Orisin hesitated. Kasidy suspected that he weighed whether or not to push them on the issue. He didn’t. “All right,” he said. “We won’t say anything publically yet, but I want the two of you to think about it more. I’d like you to consider it as an option for us at some point . . . a tool we can use. Even if you believe it’s not appropriate to use that tool now, there may come a time when it becomes not just potentially helpful, but necessary.”
Ben nodded. “We’ll think about it.”
“Good.” Orisin stood up and placed the chair back at the dining room table. “If there’s anything you need, please let me or Lieutenant Tapren know.” The major headed back into the front room.
Ben took Kasidy’s hand in his. “It’ll be all right,” he told her. She nodded, though she didn’t know if either one of them believed that.
As they sat quietly together, Kasidy wondered why Orisin had suggested going public, especially since the major believed that the kidnappers would soon issue their demands. She wanted to hear those demands, and then to accede to them as quickly as they could—anything to bring Rebecca back to them without putting her in any further danger.
Kasidy thought about the next steps that the Militia’s investigators would take. Orisin had ordered them to surreptitiously search the city, visually and with sensors, and to double-check transporter logs. They needed to find the next link in the chain that would take them from the transporter terminal in Adarak to wherever Rebecca had been taken.
With a jolt, Kasidy realized why Orisin wanted to announce the abduction to the public. Ben had followed Rebecca’s transporter signal to the Deserak Wilderness, and the major and his team had tracked her from there to the city of Johcat. But in the square where the public travel pod had been flashed clean and then abandoned, the trail had gone cold.
Gamma Quadrant, 2386
Commander Anxo Rogeiro followed the captain and the rest of the senior bridge crew into the observation lounge in silence. The first officer knew that Sisko did not favor calling his officers together in so formal a manner. The captain preferred to discuss issues either on the bridge or with smaller groups in his ready room. Even though the gravity of the situation demanded a meeting of the entire senior staff, that needn’t have taken place in the observation lounge. Rogeiro suspected that the dispiriting mood on the bridge—brought about by the abduction of the children and the marooning of the ship—had motivated the captain to put himself and his officers in motion, to get them on their feet and moving, to provide them with a change of scenery, if only briefly.
Sisko positioned himself at the head of the long, arc-shaped table, and Rogeiro took the chair to his right. Sivadeki, recovered from her aural surgery, sat down with Plante, Uteln, and Althouse, all of them across from the first officer, their backs to the large ports that spanned the length of the compartment. Corallavellis sh’Vrane moved to the far end of the table, while Ambrozy Kosciuszko, the ship’s chief medical officer, arrived from sickbay and took the seat beside Rogeiro. The exec noted the absence of Robinson’s chief engineer.
“Where’s Relkdahz?” he asked. He activated his combadge with a touch, but before he said anything, the second set of doors to the conference room parted with a whisper. The chief engineer entered in a rush, appearing to glide across the deck. An Otevrel, Relkdahz possessed an upright, generally cylindrical physique that narrowed slightly at his midsection. A row of small tentacles circled his green body about a third of the way up, with a second set of larger tentacles a third of the way down. Most of Relkdahz’s appendages functioned exclusively as muscular hydrostats—extremely dexterous structures capable of contracting and elongating, of bending
, twisting, and hardening—but two of his upper stalks ended in optical receptors, while two others ended in auditory nodes. He wore a black tubular garment around the lower portion of his body and a gray, gold-collared uniform around the upper half.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Relkdahz said as he made his way to his species-specific “chair” at the end of the inner side of the table. Otevrel could not bend their bodies in a manner that allowed them to sit. Rather, they leaned against a shallowly inclined flat, which had two pair of stubby arms, one upper and one lower, about which they could wrap their tentacles. Relkdahz settled his almost two-meter length into his chair. “We were exploring a means of reinforcing the warp field when we engage the main engines,” he said to explain his tardiness. “We’re trying to find a means of keeping the warp field up even without a foundation of subspace to support it.” His words sounded tinny and a bit mechanical after being filtered through the portable translator he wore around the base of one of his upper limbs. Like all members of his species, he spoke by way of a vibrating flap atop his body. His unprocessed speech always reminded Rogeiro of somebody humming a song with an unfamiliar melody.
“The meeting’s just starting,” the first officer told Relkdahz. Rogeiro considered asking the chief engineer to expand on his staff’s labors with respect to enabling the ship to travel again at warp speed, but he instead turned toward Sisko so that the captain could officially begin the meeting. The exec’s professional dynamic with his commanding officer worked exceedingly well. In the five years they’d served together, they had developed a conversant functional relationship that helped the two of them—and consequently the crew—to perform at the highest levels of efficiency.
That hadn’t always been the case. Starfleet Command transferred Rogeiro to Robinson not long after the Borg Invasion, at the same time that Sisko took command. Unexpectedly, the new captain came aboard with a despondence and a reticence that did not track with either his service record or his reputation. In particular, his unwillingness to communicate complicated the first officer’s ability to meet the needs of his commanding officer, and therefore of the ship and crew. Rogeiro initially attempted to work around the situation, hoping that the captain would ultimately emerge from his melancholy and self-imposed isolation. When that showed no sign of happening, the first officer confronted Sisko. Months passed after that with little alteration in the captain’s behavior, to the point where Rogeiro considered reporting the issue to Starfleet Command. But it turned out that the exec had planted seeds of change because, at last, Sisko softened and grew more expressive. The atmosphere aboard Robinson improved virtually overnight. Only later, after the two men became friends, would the first officer learn of the incredibly difficult circumstances that had brought the captain so low and driven him so far down.
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