HollowMen

by Una McCormack

  “It gave them a fair amount of leverage in the discussions,” Ross admitted. “Cretak is already talking about need for access to Deep Space 9—”

  Sisko gave a slight smile, and looked to where Cretak and Veral were in what looked to be quite formal conversation with one of the Klingon delegates. “She’s going to have to take that up with the first minister,” he said.

  “I’m not worried too much about her, to be honest,” Ross said. “From all I’ve seen this week, the senator seems to be firmly behind the alliance. She’s shrewd, and she’s doesn’t miss a trick, but…” He nodded. “I think we can do business with her.”

  “I guess that’s all we need,” Sisko said. He raised his hand to his mouth, stifling a yawn. He looked around the room, at the people talking to each other. Too easy, he thought, in all of the chaos to forget what the real business of the week had been: the conference, the attempt to bind the alliance together more tightly. The business of winning the war. As they stood there, a silence opened up between the two men; the memory of their charged conversation seemed to be about to cast a shadow. They both roused themselves into motion simultaneously; they both began to speak at once.

  “You first,” Sisko murmured.

  “I just wanted to ask,” Ross said quietly, “will you go and see your folks, Ben?”

  “Yes,” Sisko replied, “I think I can do that now.”

  When Brixhta slid into a seat at the bar, Quark did not go over to him at first. He watched for a little while as the Hamexi worked at a little piece of machinery. Another of his toys? Quark had no idea.

  At last, Quark made his approach. He poured a glass of tonic water, and set it in front of the Hamexi. “Thank you,” Brixhta said, and drew it toward him.

  “So,” Quark said, watching for any clue to emerge from beneath the brim of the hat, “do you want your crate back?”

  “No,” Brixhta said, busying himself with the water. “Keep it. Sell it. Whichever suits you best.”

  “All right…” Quark tried another way in. “You do know that it made Odo very suspicious that mine was the only place on the Promenade where people could get food for hours—”

  “Odo is of an uncommonly suspicious cast of mind.” Brixhta drained the water. “I am sure I hardly need to tell you of that.”

  “Not really, no….” Quark watched as Brixhta pushed the glass back toward him. Looked like he was going to have to be more direct. “The auction is over, you don’t want your crate back, and…” Quark stopped to select his words. “There are—now—plenty of other places on the Promenade where you could eat. Is there something in particular that has brought you into the bar today, Mister Brixhta?”

  Brixhta beamed at him. “I’ve come to settle my bar bill. What else?”

  Quark came in closer. He waggled a finger at Brixhta to get him to lean in. The Hamexi obliged. What Quark was about to say he did not want anyone to hear. Not ever. He did not much want to hear himself say it.

  “It’s on the house,” he whispered.

  There was a silence. After a moment or two, Quark started to get worried. He ducked his head and peered beneath the hat. When he looked in there, he could see that Brixhta was genuinely moved by his words.

  After a moment or two, Brixhta gathered himself together, reached inside his jacket and retrieved a little piece of pink plastic. He pushed it toward Quark. “A pleasure doing business with you, Mister Quark. Truly—a great pleasure.”

  Brixhta drew himself up from his seat, and touched the brim of his hat. “Farewell,” he said, and left.

  Quark watched him depart. He picked up the empty glass and stared down into it. He checked under it. Then he shook his head at the door.

  “Well,” he said, in most aggrieved tones, “he might have a left a tip.”

  At home, the kitchen was warm; its scent and its heat were all-embracing. At the worktop, Ben Sisko, Starfleet captain, commanding officer of Deep Space 9, loving parent of a teenage son, and Emissary to the Prophets of Bajor, was chopping up onions under his father’s vigilant eye.

  His sister was perched up on the counter nearby, one leg tucked beneath her, watching her brother and her father as they worked. Ever since Judith was a kid, ever since she’d first shown all that promise on the cello, she had been excused from cooking duties. Just in case she did something to her hands; just in case something hot spilled or a knife slipped. Thirty years on, and her brother had still not forgiven her for what was, he reckoned, a blatant and—even more unforgivably—successful strategy to get out of her share of the chores.

  “Finely,” his father said, leaning over to look. “What are they supposed to be? Piano keys?”

  “That’s my department,” Judith said, and smirked.

  Her brother glared up at her. “Can’t you make yourself useful somehow?” he said. “Dry something, or put something away?”

  “I’m keeping you company,” she said. “Isn’t that useful enough?”

  “Not from where I’m standing….” He stopped chopping and put down the knife. His eyes had started watering. He screwed them up and tried to resist rubbing them. Judith picked up a dishcloth and threw it at him.

  “Thanks.” As he wiped his eyes, he said, “You ever heard of a Cardassian composer called Ilani Tarn?”

  Judith looked back at him in surprise. “Well,” she said, with a quirk of the lips, “aren’t you getting cosmopolitan in your old age?”

  He frowned at her and tapped the handle of the knife—once, twice.

  “She’s Cardassia’s greatest living musician,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Is she any good?”

  Judith laughed. “Yeah, Ben, I’d say she was pretty good!”

  “The…” What was it they’d called it? “…the trikolat. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t expect you to study, you know, for when we meet.” She looked at him more closely. “What’s this all about, Ben?”

  He started work on another onion, and had to check to make sure that his father’s back was turned when the knife didn’t cut too straight. “You saw the news, I guess,” he said, “about Tomas Roeder?”

  “Yes, I saw it.” She shook her head. “Hell, that was sad. You have any idea what happened with him?”

  Her brother reached for the cloth and wiped his eyes again. “I think he was pretty sick by the end, Jude. Some kind of breakdown, I think.” He went back to work. “He mentioned Ilani Tarn the other night—he was at some concert she gave, a year or two back.” He glanced back up at her. “I met him at the embassy. The night he died. He asked about you,” he added. “Asked to be remembered to you.”

  She gave a gentle smile. “That’s nice,” she murmured. “You know, I was at that concert too. I wish I’d known he was there; it would’ve been good to catch up.” She looked at her brother sharply. “You do know that there was nothing there, don’t you? He was just kind once to a friend’s little sister when she was a young student all alone in a big city.”

  “I know.” He went back to the chopping. After a moment or two, his sister spoke again.

  “Something troubling you about it, Ben?”

  “Maybe…”

  “Care to take a guess what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Jude,” he said. “It’s not been an easy trip back. And then for that to happen…” He sighed. “Somehow,” he said, “I just can’t help thinking it didn’t have to end like that. It didn’t have to end with him dying.”

  Their father came back at this point with the peppers. He looked at his two children disapprovingly. “What’s all this talk about people dying?” he scolded. “Not in this kitchen. Not tonight.”

  So they finished up the cooking and sat and ate together; and talked instead of Judith’s last tour, of Joseph’s impressions of the station, of how Jake’s writing was coming along. When they were done, they sat happily for a while replete amid the comfortable wreckage of the meal. Then Judith got up from the table and went over to the piano
. Her brother and her father watched her in the candlelight, and she started playing a few slow chords. She always complained the piano was way out of tune, had done for years, and yet she always managed to get a decent sound from it, at least as far as her brother could tell. After a few bars, the tempo picked up a little, and she began to sing along, softly.

  “Heaven,” she sang, “I’m in heaven…”

  “So, Ben,” Joseph turned to his son, “when are you going to tell me what it is that’s on your mind?”

  Sisko picked up a piece of bread and began to wipe up the last of the sauce on his plate. “I can’t, Dad.”

  “Oh, I think you can,” his father replied. “You can just leave out the details. Doubt I’d understand much about them anyway.”

  “It’s complicated—”

  “Well, given the way you’ve been, I didn’t think it was going to be something easy.”

  Sisko sat up his chair and looked in surprise at his father, who looked straight back. “How have I been?”

  “Oh, your usual. Big black cloud hanging around your head. Feeling it all just a bit too much and not saying anything about it.”

  “I see.” Sisko bit into the bread and thought for a while. “I went to see James Leyton the other day,” he said at last.

  “Was he the one who wanted to take my blood without my say-so?”

  “Yes,” Sisko said. “That’s the one.”

  Joseph’s pursed lips said more than enough about what he thought of Leyton. He gave his son a canny look. “Now what could have sent you there, I wonder?”

  Sisko shrugged, and pushed the bread around the plate a little more. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe, because I put him there, I owed him a visit at least….”

  “And now tell me the truth, Ben.”

  Judith was still singing; the sound of her voice and the melody filtered through the room, giving each of them space but still binding them together. Her brother listened to her sing for a little while.

  “A few weeks back…” Sisko began, and then stopped. He looked up at his father, sitting and waiting patiently. “I made some choices, Dad, and did some things,” he told him, “and I’m not proud of them.”

  Joseph nodded slowly. “Did it get you into trouble?” he said.

  “No,” Sisko said. “No. And that’s part of the problem.”

  “Should it have got you into trouble?”

  Shrewd old man. “Yes,” his son murmured, “yes, it should.” He ate the last of the piece of bread.

  “And which is worse, Ben?” Joseph asked him. “Thinking you went too far, or knowing you weren’t punished for it?”

  “I thought it was the second—”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry yourself too much about that,” his father said, “since from what I can see you’ve been doing a fair enough job of punishing yourself. So we’re back to the first. Did you go too far?”

  Sisko raised his hands. “I don’t know, Dad! That’s just the problem, I don’t know!” He sighed. “It was too far; by any measure—but what’s come out of it…” He thought of how the conference had ended. “I think that may have made it worthwhile.”

  His father did not answer right away. He piled a couple of dishes together, stacking the knives and forks on top. “This morning,” Joseph said at last, “I went out to get the vegetables for our dinner tonight. And I dithered and dithered, over what to get, and how much. Trying to guess how much the two of you would eat tonight. And I ended getting far too much. Some of it’ll go to waste, I guess,” he said ruefully, looking back toward the kitchen, “and you know how much I hate that…” He gave his son a sharp look. “What I’m saying, Ben—if it’s not plain enough to you already—is that the kind of decisions an old chef like me has to make are little ones. How many vegetables should I get in for the day. And still I can’t make them easily. But I guess they’re nothing,” he said, “to the kind of decisions you must have to make.”

  “But still we have to make the right decisions. We have to be willing to do the right thing—”

  “Well, you know, Ben,” Joseph sighed, “I’m not so sure you can really get the measure of a man by knowing what he’s willing to do. It’s what he’s not willing to do that’s the real measure.”

  Sisko picked up another chunk of bread and began to smear sauce around his plate again. His father waited.

  “The other night,” Sisko said, “I had a choice to do something, something that would have…would have been better for me.” Because Roeder really had meant it, Sisko understood that completely now. Chaplin had seen it, Garak had seen it—Roeder would have shot Sisko, if he hadn’t been shot first.

  “And?”

  “Couldn’t do it.” Sisko bit into the bread.

  His father sat in silence for a moment, and then he said, “Don’t tell me all the details, Benjamin—there are some things an old man with a bad heart doesn’t want to hear his son say—but what happened?”

  Sisko ran the story through his mind until he had something he could tell his father. “Someone else did it,” he said.

  “Well,” Joseph replied, “so that’s on his conscience then, isn’t it?”

  It was true, Sisko realized, relief rushing into him, filling him. His hand had not fired the weapon that killed Roeder; his hand had not planted the bomb that killed Vreenak.

  “And that’s why,” his father was saying, “I’d rather it was you making those decisions than men like that Leyton fellow. I should think he still doesn’t know what it was he did wrong.”

  “And yet sometimes I have to wonder,” Sisko murmured, “whether I should be the one making those decisions; if there isn’t someone else who’d do a better job of it—”

  “It’s thinking that way that makes you fit for it. And I know you’ll make the best decisions that you can,” his father said softly. “And that will be enough, more than enough. Because no matter what it is you do, you’re still a good man, Ben Sisko. You’ll do the best you can. So,” he finished, “I think you’re in just the right place.” Joseph picked up a piece of bread and bit into it. “Which is all for the best, since you don’t have what it takes to make a really good chef.”

  “Dad—”

  “You’d think,” Joseph complained, “that a man who knows how to build a ship that can sail across space would understand cayenne a little better.”

  Sisko started to laugh, very softly. He looked out at the candlelight, glowing warmly. The sound of the piano, he realized, had stopped. Judith was coming back over to the table. She took her seat again and eyed her brother and her father fondly. “You two set the world to rights now?”

  Joseph Sisko looked lovingly at his son. “As right as it’ll ever be,” he said.

  2

  IT WAS A BARREN PLACE, on the border. Nothing happened there. On Federation star charts it was called Santa Helena. The Maquis, with a sense of dark humor borne of their own marginal way of life, had nicknamed it Destiny. The Cardassians had used it as a marker for a place where they passed in and out of their space, but they had not named it, only given it a number. Not even the disaster at Sybaron had been enough to draw it into the fray. One day, perhaps, it might achieve significance, but not yet.

  Santa Helena’s third moon, however, was a slightly different story. It seemed to attract a certain amount of traffic. The Maquis, for example, had often made use of it; but they, of course, were all gone now. Still, even these days, its location—out on the border—made Santa Helena’s third moon a very useful place. The handful of people who knew about it came from all over the quadrant, and connected with each other; they did their business, made their exchanges, and then they went on their way.

  When Brixhta made landfall there, the runabout had already arrived. The android was sitting patiently at the helm, waiting for its next set of instructions. He patted it fondly, and switched it off. Everything else was just as it should be. The runabout had not been traced. And in the back, the vials of latinum were stacked up, await
ing collection.

  There was only one thing preying upon Brixhta’s mind. His employer had been maintaining a stony silence. The last time Brixhta had heard from him had been just before he reached Deep Space 9. He had sent out a transmission to Earth, confirming his imminent arrival on the station. And he had received a reply back, acknowledging his message, and sending him the security files he needed. When at last Odo had released him from the holding cell, and he’d been free to leave DS9, Brixhta had sent out another communication, then another—but there had been nothing in reply. Caution, no doubt. Brixhta had often heard it said that it paid to be cautious.

  He settled himself around the controls and, once again, tried the secure frequency. His message was very short, almost cautious:

  In my possession.

  This time, he received a reply. It had all the right signals.

  Coming to collect.

  Garak was sewing; had been ever since they’d got back on board the Rubicon. Some kind of embroidery, Sisko thought…in fact, Sisko didn’t know what the hell it was, except it was holding all of Garak’s attention. Balanced on the console next to the tailor there was a cup, and Sisko caught the aroma of redleaf tea. Looked like Garak had given up on Earl Grey after all. Perhaps he had decided it had too much of a nasty aftertaste.

  Sisko watched the tailor work for a while; watched the needle go in and out of the cloth. The pattern or whatever it was looked pretty complex. “That’s keeping you busy,” he said.

  “It has to be ready,” Garak murmured, “for an ih’tanu ceremony taking place only a few days after we get back…and I was far too distracted to work on it while we were on Earth….”

  Sisko watched a little longer, then stood up and stretched. After a moment or two, Garak broke the silence between them.

  “You told your superiors all about Vreenak, didn’t you?”

  Sisko locked his hands behind his head and looked down at the lights on the console. “Yes,” he said. “I did.”