Sisko lowered his arm. Slowly, he bent down on one knee, and then he set his phaser deliberately upon the ground. He put his hand on the ground alongside it, spread out the fingers, and contemplated them for a moment. Then he stood up straight and looked at the other man. “I mean it, Tomas,” he said, with all his newfound conviction. “I don’t want to kill you.”
Roeder stared at him. His own hand gripped more tightly at his phaser. He looked back at Garak, sitting motionless in the chair. He turned back to Sisko. His face twisted. “God, Ben, what is this…?” he whispered. “What is this?”
“I don’t understand what you mean—”
“You’re playing with me!” His face had bleached white.
“Tomas,” Sisko said, “I just want to talk.” He took a step toward him. Roeder jerked the phaser away from Garak’s head and pointed it straight at him. Sisko raised his hands. “I just want to talk,” he said again. He risked another step forward, and then stopped when he saw Roeder begin to shake. His eyes were very blue, Sisko thought. He had never really noticed that about him before. Right now they were staring back at him as if looking right into the face of the enemy.
“What about, Ben? What do you want to talk about?” The shaking was becoming worse. “Do you think I don’t know? Do you think I can’t guess why you’re here, right now? You, of all people?”
“Tomas, I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Stop lying to me—!”
“I’m not lying to you! Why the hell would I lie to you?”
“Shut up!” It was wrenched out of Roeder, from the very core; and friable, as if there was barely anything left in him to give. Sisko stood still, waited until the other man regained some control.
“Surely we can settle this peacefully?” Sisko kept his voice cool. “You’re the one that’s been campaigning for peace!”
It was the wrong thing to say; he realized his mistake at once. Roeder’s newfound control transformed into anger; directed, and with purpose. “You have the nerve to talk to me about peace? You know what we’re doing.” he said. “Go to hell, Sisko!”
Roeder took aim. Sisko looked at the phaser. Damn, he thought, wildly, this wasn’t in the script—
And then:
“Roeder.”
Roeder swung round. Sisko stared at Garak, forgotten in the chair. Garak was slumped back. But his arm was free now, and it was raised. He was holding an astonishingly compact, but very functional, phaser.
He fired.
White light screamed out, ripping across the room, scorching Sisko’s eyes. He could just make out a dark shape straight ahead; it fell to its knees as if its strings had just been cut. There was a second shot. The figure slid backward, onto the ground. Sisko jerked forward, unwillingly, like a marionette. And then everything settled, and went still.
“I don’t much like being hit.” Garak’s voice, chill in the empty space. “But I didn’t think he deserved to be shot in the back.”
Sisko stepped forward, and kneeled down. Roeder had fallen awkwardly; he was lying bent back upon himself. Sisko fumbled his fingers beneath Roeder’s collar and tried to find a pulse. There was nothing. Roeder was dead.
His eyes were still open, bright blue and sightless. Sisko reached down and closed them for him, and rested his hand for a moment on Roeder’s hair. Then he looked up at Garak. “Why did you do that?” he said, bitterly angry. “You didn’t have to do that!”
Garak looked back at him. Cold. Like ice. “You’re wrong, Captain. He was going to kill you.”
“You don’t know that!” Sisko shouted back at him. “How could you know that?” He was ready to hit Garak himself.
Garak leaned back in the chair, and put his hand up to his head. He was still holding the phaser. “I wonder, Captain,” he murmured, “if you could possibly lower your voice? I seem to have the most excruciating headache.”
Sisko did not answer. He could still hear the shots. The air tasted acrid; it tasted of failure and disappointment.
“Captain.”
Someone right behind him, speaking very softly. Sisko turned. Chaplin was standing there. She had reached out her hand, and was almost touching his shoulder. She was looking at him with a kind of wary pity.
“He’s right, sir,” she said. “I’m really sorry, sir. Where I was standing, back there—I had a good view of his face. He really was going to shoot you.”
He knew she was speaking the truth. He just couldn’t get it to make sense.
“All right,” he murmured. “All right, Lieutenant.” He moved past her and stood staring around. “Try to get some people here, will you?”
Chaplin tapped at her combadge. “Guy,” she said, “we could really do with that backup now.”
Sisko holstered the phaser, and then went over to Garak and began untying him. Neither of them said a word. When he was finally free, Garak slumped forward and put his head in his hands. Sisko waited. Eventually, Garak straightened himself up; slowly, and wincing.
“Think you’re going to live?” Sisko said, quietly.
“Possibly….” Garak looked down at himself and frowned at the bloodstains. “Although I may have ruined this jacket.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“No doubt.”
Sisko gestured down at the phaser. “Where did that come from?” he said.
“I brought it with me this evening.”
“How the hell did you get past security at the embassy?”
Garak gave him a withering look. “Not the most difficult task I’ve ever set myself, Captain.”
Sisko decided to let it pass. For the moment. “If we can go out onto the street,” he said, “we can get a paramedic to you. Can you stand?”
“Let’s find out, shall we?”
Sisko put out a hand to help. It took a moment or two but, eventually, Garak was on his feet, propped up against him. Sisko watched as Garak studied him closely. He seemed to be contemplating Sisko’s dress uniform. Garak glanced down again at his own jacket. And then he looked back over at Roeder’s body.
“The things we do for Starfleet,” he murmured.
Sisko stared at him. He was sure he had misheard. “What did you say?”
Garak shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Not now.” He considered Sisko’s uniform again. “An interesting moment to choose to have a crisis of conscience, Captain.”
They went outside. The moon lay bright against the darkness, carving out a space in the clouds. “It wasn’t a crisis,” Sisko said, more to the sky than to Garak. “I think it might have been clarity.”
“So Garak decided that the best course of action was to let the Hamexi go,” Bashir explained eagerly, as he read through the data on the tricorder. “Which I think is an interesting aspect of the tale in and of itself…but the point he was trying to make, was just how remarkable it was to find an Hamexi there in the first place. Given just how reclusive the species is, that is. So my interpretation,” the doctor stopped for a moment to catch his breath, “is that some—maybe only just a few—Hamexi struggle against the institutionalization which their wider culture enforces upon them. And that when they do break out of their societal structures, it’s in the most ostentatious ways. Like Brixhta!” He stopped, and looked up at Odo triumphantly.
“I see,” said Odo. There was a pause as a slight ripple shivered through his body. He brought it under control, before speaking again. “And that was the story that Garak told you?”
“Not repeated word for word,” Bashir allowed, “but close enough.”
Odo slowly leaned back in his chair, and contemplated the other man. One eye was closed, and his speech was blurred now, words struggling from the side of his mouth.
“So, Doctor,” he said, “what you are telling me, in effect, is that Garak admitted to you that he played a key part in the plot to overthrow the two-hundred-and-nineteenth Autarch of Tzenketh?”
Bashir frowned and ran through the whole stor
y again in his mind. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” He chewed his lower lip. “On balance, I suppose that doesn’t seem very likely, does it? I could believe the bit about the plot. But not that Garak would actually tell me about it.”
“No. It’s not very likely,” Odo said, closing his eyes completely. “And it might be best,” he rasped, “if we elect not to believe a single word of it.”
Garak stood outside with his back up against the wall, tasting the sharp night air. Each breath he took turned into mist. He looked up at the velvet of the sky, and tried to pick out patterns in its strange embroidery; tried to force familiar constellations onto the alien sky. The moon was shining bright upon his face, and the stars seemed to be pricking at him. Slowly, he raised his hand and, with his thumb, blotted out the moon. Then he closed his eyes and let his hand fall back down to his side. Mission accomplished, he thought. All things considered, he would rather Roeder had lived. But not everything was possible in this life.
He listened to the sound of the river running by. There were voices, low but urgent. Then, even nearer, there were footsteps, approaching. He did not open his eyes. Someone spoke, saying his name. It was Sisko.
Garak cracked his eyes open and moved his head a little to look at him. The captain was standing a couple of feet away, staring down at the ground that lay between them. Still wearing his dress uniform. It looked, Garak thought, rather incongruous. It also looked a mess.
Garak swallowed in some air. He would have preferred to have waited a while before having this conversation. But perhaps now was as good a time as any for them to have this out once and for all.
“Captain,” he said quickly, before Sisko could speak again. Some part of him had been fabricating the speech from the moment that Sisko had appeared in the shadows of the doorway; telling and retelling in a mind fogged with pain. He knew the words would come as a flood, or not at all. “I really am very sorry about your friend. I don’t think he had to die tonight. But it was perfectly clear that one of us was not getting out of there alive. You’ll forgive me if I say that I certainly didn’t want it to be me. And I couldn’t think of a particular reason why it should be you.”
There was a silence. Then Sisko said, “I was just coming to let you know that the medic’s arrived. He’s ready to see you.”
Garak opened his eyes a little wider. “Oh,” he murmured.
“Also,” and now Sisko did look straight at him, “I wanted to thank you. For saving my life.”
The sky above was in disarray, and the moonlight had become too bright. Garak shut his eyes. I even get to be the hero, he thought. “You really are most welcome, Captain,” he said.
“That’s it; I’ve had enough; no more. You can all just stay there.”
Kira and Dax roused themselves and looked at each other in surprise.
“Chief,” said Dax, “are you still at it?”
“Still at it?” The comm fairly crackled with fury. “What do you think?”
“Why don’t you give yourself a bit of a break, Chief?” Kira said.
“A break? Do you actually want me to just leave you all there—?”
“I’d rather,” Kira replied, “that you worked profitably rather than pointlessly.”
There was a pause and a brief burst of static.
“Might be a good idea, I suppose. I’m going round in circles with this damn program—”
“You’ll come up with something eventually,” Dax comforted him.
A deep sigh was transmitted down the com channel.
“Well,” O’Brien said, “this is a piece of good news, at last.”
“What?” Kira leaned hopefully in toward his voice.
“Someone here’s just dug out a pack of cards.”
The whole operation to remove the latinum from Deep Space 9 had taken less than an hour, but it was exactly ten hours after the station had locked down before all systems reverted to the crew’s control. O’Brien immediately transported back from the Ariadne to ops, and started a full systems check. Dax began to run what they all suspected would be a wholly unsuccessful trace on the runabout. Kira and Worf began reestablishing standard security measures. Throughout the station, the doors began to open and the turbolifts began to move.
Bashir, sitting with his chin in his hands on the floor in Odo’s office, watched with relief and fascination as Odo at last began to lose his shape. The whole station began its slow, collective exhalation, but Julian knew that he and his fellows could not even begin to conceive of Odo’s sense of release at the end of this long and torturous day.
Part Three
Last Meeting Place
Only disconnect.
—David Lodge
1
DAWN LIGHT BEGAN TO TRICKLE into the meeting room. Sisko looked up from the viewscreen and out of the window. A chill and watery day was beginning. He glanced across the table at the two lieutenants; saw Marlow yawn and then lean over to say something to Chaplin; saw Chaplin rub at the muscles at the back of her neck and try to listen.
He sighed and turned back to the viewscreen. The news of Roeder’s death had now broken. The reporter finished her short biography of him, and then a piece of footage ran of Roeder making a speech at a pro-peace rally. He did speak extremely well, Sisko thought. Passionately. It was clear he believed every word he said.
“We hear a great deal these days,” he said, “about war. We hear a great deal about our enemies. And we hear a great deal about how we should fight.”
The picture cut to the audience, showing their faces as they listened intently to Roeder. Many of them were nodding.
“Oh god,” Chaplin said wearily, putting her head in her hands. “This is all my fault….”
“Don’t say that,” Marlow consoled her. He looked at her anxiously, and reached out across the table, stopping just a little short of touching her. “There wasn’t anything you could have done.”
“I’d read Garak’s file,” she said. “I should have known he’d try to lose me. I should have got backup the second I realized he’d gone—”
“There was something else happening, Wendy,” her partner said. “Something with Roeder. You can’t hold yourself responsible for that.”
“It’s five in the morning, Lieutenant Chaplin,” Sisko put in quietly, “you’ve just seen a man shot dead, and I know for a fact you’ve not had any sleep. Now’s not the time to be thinking about blame.” Sisko turned back to the screen.
“But we seem to hear a lot less about peace.”
Maybe it was just the lack of sleep, but Roeder’s death, Sisko thought, seemed unreal, like a swift and hideous dream. He had been playing it over and over in his head in the hours since it had happened; had been trying to work out what had gone wrong, how they had come so quickly and so viciously to the point of no return. There was so much he could not understand: why Roeder had been so angry and so mistrustful, what he had said that had made Roeder raise that phaser to kill him…
“And I would ask you—what will you do, when all of our enemies are destroyed? Will you look around and find new wars to fight? Will you make new enemies out of people we once called friends?” He looked out from the viewscreen, straight at Sisko. “And where you have made a wasteland,” he asked, “will you call it peace?”
Sisko looked across at the lieutenant sitting opposite. “Marlow,” he said.
“Sir?”
“What did you think of Roeder?” he said. “His views on the war?”
Marlow gave him a guarded look. “I don’t think it’s my position to say, sir….”
“No?”
“No, sir. I don’t.”
“Not your position to say?”
“No,” he said again. “Sir.”
“Then I’ll say it, Guy,” Chaplin cut in, “if you’re not willing to.” She looked Sisko straight in the eye. “May I speak freely, sir?”
“By all means.”
“I know he was a friend of yours, sir,” she said, “and, believe
me, the last thing I wanted was to see him killed—but he was wrong about the war.” She was still shaking, Sisko could see; was still angry with herself and how the night had ended. Time for her to get some of this out of her system.
“And a lot of junior officers,” she said, “felt betrayed by the things he had been saying in recent months. We’ve been put on the front line again and again by officers like Roeder, and hearing some of the things he said was like a kick in the face. Like we’d put all our confidence in people who had no confidence in us or what we were trying to do.” She stopped, very suddenly.
Marlow had been staring down at the table. When Chaplin finally came to a halt, he looked at Sisko again. “When you’ve put yourself on the line, sir,” he said, quietly, and Sisko remembered what Garak had told him about Marlow, “it’s hard to hear the people who asked you to do it start saying it was wrong.”
“I’m glad, sir,” Chaplin said, “that this war is in the hands of officers like you.”
My God, Sisko thought, we’d better be worthy of it.
“Thank you,” he said, looking back at the screen. “Thank you both.”
It had been a very long shift, and it still was not over. Kira gathered the rest of the senior staff in the ward room. “So,” she said, looking round, “do any of you have some good news for me?”
After a moment or two, Bashir raised a cautious hand.
“Go ahead, Doctor,” Kira said, leaning back in her chair.
“Well,” Bashir said, “from my perspective at least we really were very lucky….” He glanced around at the others and quirked up his eyebrows, as if to acknowledge that he was perhaps alone in this respect. “There were no serious accidents during the time the station was affected. A few minor cuts and bruises,” he thumbed through his report, “just ordinary domestic accidents. Somebody got some minor burns when a door panel that he was trying to force blew up, but that’s about it.” He looked at each of his colleagues in turn, and at Odo last. “Nobody else was affected.”
Kira pushed a hand through her hair. “I guess that’s a start,” she said, and turned to address Odo. “Constable, how’s your investigation coming along? How’s it going with your prime suspect?”
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