Lesser Evil

by Robert Simpson

  “I don’t know how to ride a bike.”

  “Excuse me?” Dad said.

  “I don’t know how to ride a bike,” Molly repeated.

  Dad looked up at Molly’s parents in complete incomprehension.

  Keiko looked embarrassed. “You have to understand, she grew up on a space station….”

  Dad rolled his eyes and shook his head, then turned back to Molly. “Well, I have a solution to that. I have an old bicycle in my basement that my son used to ride when he was your age. How would you like to have it?”

  Molly’s eyes lit up. She turned to her mother. “Can I, Mommy?”

  Keiko grinned. “I don’t see how we can refuse,” she said.

  “Yes!”

  “That’s just fine,” Dad said, beaming. “You and your parents can try it out in the park, tomorrow. After a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast.”

  “Sir, we wouldn’t dream of imposing any more than we already have,” O’Brien protested.

  Dad’s smile fell. “So what are you saying, Chief? Are you going to deprive an old man of the company of these children?”

  “No, sir. I just meant—”

  “Never mind, never mind,” Dad said, brushing off O’Brien’s explanation. “I’m not taking no for an answer. You’ll all stay the night, at least, and we’ll have a fine time. And tomorrow, Molly can try her new bicycle.”

  “What do you say, Molly?” Keiko prompted.

  “Thank you, Mr. Sisko,” Molly said.

  Dad laughed. He laughed!“You’re very welcome, Molly. Of course, you’ll need to take off that pretty necklace first. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to such a lovely thing.”

  Molly touched the ornate silver chains around her neck, adorned with pendants of different sizes and shapes. Judith had noticed it when she first laid eyes on the girl. It wasn’t like anything she had ever seen before, and she had to agree, it was lovely.

  “May I ask where she got it?” Judith said to Keiko. “It’s very unusual. Is it Vulcan…?”

  Keiko looked at O’Brien, who decided to answer the question himself. “Actually, it’s Bajoran,” he said quietly.

  Dad’s eyes darkened, but only a little. “Well, on your Molly it’s positively beautiful, Chief,” he said, then looked at him sternly. “She obviously takes after her mother.”

  Miles snorted and shook his head, sipping from his beer.

  “Dad, enough already,” Judith chastised him.

  “Oh, I’m just kidding,” Dad said, and slapped O’Brien on the shoulder, causing Miles to choke on his beer. “Anyone with children like these is welcome in my home any time. As long as he stays out of my kitchen.”

  “Noted, sir,” O’Brien gasped, coughing. After a moment he went on, “You know, the necklace was actually a gift from someone. I don’t think about it much anymore, because it happened the first year we were on the station, but it’s actually a bit of a mystery.”

  “What do you mean?” Judith asked. “You don’t know who gave it to her?”

  “No, I do,” O’Brien said. “It was Kai Opaka. She was the religious leader of Bajor at the time. The thing is, she was lost in the Gamma Quadrant right after that. See, she’d come to the station after spending her entire life planetside, and had asked Captain—I mean, Commander Sisko, to take her through the wormhole. I prepped the ship they took for the journey. Opaka and I passed each other in the airlock, and she was wearing that necklace. Then suddenly she looks at me—and I swear it was like she could see inside me—and she says, ‘You have a daughter, don’t you?’ Now, I want to stress I’d never met this woman before. There was no reason for her to know anything about me, and Molly was only a year old at the time. But when I told her I did have a daughter, she took off the necklace and put it in my hand, asking me to give it to Molly. Then she stepped into the ship like she never expected to come back.”

  “So what happened?” Judith asked.

  “She died,” Miles confirmed, then added, “sort of. She wound up trapped on the surface of a moon in the Gamma Quadrant. There was nanotechnology—artifical microbes—in the biosphere that resuscitated anyone who died there, and Opaka had been killed when the ship crashed. She came back to life, but she was now dependent on the nanotechnology, which wouldn’t function outside the moon’s biosphere.”

  “So she was trapped there?” Judith asked, apalled.

  O’Brien nodded. “I’m afraid so. I know Julian—Dr. Bashir, DS9’s chief medical officer—worked for years on a cure, but he never had any success. Then we met the Dominion, and our dealings with the Gamma Quadrant became more complicated.”

  “Why would anyone introduce technology like that to an uninhabited moon?” Dad asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t entirely uninhabited,” O’Brien said. “It was actually a penal colony for two small warring factions of a Gamma Quadrant species. They had refused to stop fighting, so they were sentenced to fight, and die, and fight again, forever. From what Julian told me, Opaka believed that what happened to her was preordained. She dedicated her life to teaching the factions peace.”

  “My God,” Dad muttered, shaking his head.

  “She sounds like a remarkable woman,” Judith said.

  O’Brien nodded. “I talked to Major Kira about it afterward. Opaka had been a force for peace and unity on Bajor for a long time. Her loss was a blow to everyone. But the thing is, she never doubted for a second that everything that happened to her was happening for a reason. She really believed she was serving a higher purpose, something bigger than herself.”

  Judith saw that Dad was listening attentively. The point of O’Brien’s story clearly hadn’t escaped him. “I understand what your trying to say, Chief,” he said, shaking his head, “but my son—”

  “Sir, with all due respect,” O’Brien said, “I knew your son as a father, a soldier, a diplomat, a ship wright, an explorer, a religious icon, a baseball fan, not to mention an exceptional cook.” This drew a smile from Dad, and Miles went on, “None of those things were responsible for what happened to him. From what I know, he sacrificed himself for a world he’d come to love more than himself. During his life he was responsible for saving countless lives. You should be proud of him.”

  “And my grandson?” Dad asked bitterly. “For what was he sacrificed?”

  “Dad,” Judith said. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you need to remember that Jake was a grown man. He was already taking responsibility for his life before the war ended. Wherever he is, whatever happened to him, he chose it.”

  “How can I know that, Judith? How can anyone know?”

  “I don’t pretend to know anything,” Judith said gently. “None of us do. But are you so determined to assume the worst that you’re afraid to have any hope at all?”

  “Judith—”

  “And what about Kasidy? While you’re here missing Ben and Jake, she’s missing them on Bajor, about to give birth to your grandchild. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Dad looked at Molly, humming contentedly to herself as she finished the last of her jambalaya. His gaze went to Kirayoshi, who a half-hour ago had demanded to be held and subsequently fell asleep in his mother’s embrace.

  With a sudden movement of his arms, Dad pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “I need to get up early. Judith, you’ll see to our guests, won’t you?”

  Judith sighed. “Yes, Dad.”

  “Then good night,” he said, and headed off to bed.

  “That’s it, Molly—keep pedaling!”

  Keiko knew there was little chance of Molly falling over, as her father was holding the back of the antique bicycle that she was struggling to learn to ride. She even kidded him that everyone must have ridden bicycles when he was a little boy growing up on Earth, but he assured her that he wasn’t that old. “I learned a lot younger than you when I was a little boy in Dublin,” he said. “My brothers taught me. There’s no better way to learn balance.” He did admit that he’d skinn
ed his knees more often than he made it from one end of the street to the other without falling off. But there was little risk of that happening to her, as he was holding on tight.

  At least, that’s what she believed until she looked over her shoulder and saw that her father was no longer holding on, and was still standing next to her mother at the far end of the block.

  “Aaah!” Molly screamed as the front wheel lurched to the left, then right; before she knew what had happened, she saw the wheels of the bicycle swoop over her head and could feel the back of her elbow scraping on the rough concrete.

  “Molly!” Miles O’Brien and his wife Keiko shouted in unison as they ran to where their child had fallen. “Are you all right?” said Miles, bending down to lift her up.

  “Wow!” laughed Molly with a broad smile. “That was great!”

  “I’ll get a dermal regenerator,” said Keiko, brushing off the back of Molly’s pants as Molly stood her bicycle back up and started to climb onboard again. Before she could check Molly’s arm, the little girl was off running down the sidewalk.

  “Scrape already forgotten,” said Miles, smiling as he watched his daughter wobble erratically off, fall, get up, laugh, and start over again. “She’s a natural.”

  “She could never do this on DS9—or the Enterprise, for that matter,” said Keiko. “Can you imagine Captain Picard’s reaction to a child on a bicycle in the corridors?”

  “Picard? What about Odo? I can hear him now: ‘No pedaling on—’”

  “‘—my Promenade!’” thay finished in unison, Keiko dropping her voice down a couple of octaves. They laughed. “He always tried so hard to come across so stern, when you know deep down he probably wanted to turn into a bicycle just to find out what the fascination was.”

  “How’s the bike working out?”

  The O’Briens turned to see Joseph Sisko walking toward them.

  “It’s been wonderful, sir,” Keiko said. “Molly’s having the time of her life. We want to thank you again for your generosity, and your hospitality.”

  Joseph waved away Keiko’s gratitude. “You don’t have to thank me, Keiko. This visit has helped me to realize there’s a lot more I need to be thinking about right now than my own feelings. In fact, that was actually what I came out here to discuss with you. I have a request to make.”

  Miles looked at Keiko, then back to Joseph, smiling. “Well, of course, sir. Anything.”

  Joseph grinned wryly. “I think you may regret saying that when you hear me out,” he said. “I want you to take me to Bajor.”

  21

  Dax sat with Prynn in the ensign’s quarters, letting her vent the grief, the outrage, the anger, and the hatred she felt for Vaughn. He had tried to talk with her, Dax knew, but the shock of what happened was still too recent and too raw.

  “He couldn’t have been sure,” Prynn was saying. “He says she was going to assimilate me, but how could he really know? Dr. Bashir said the autopsy was inconclusive.”

  Dax nodded. “I know. But he insists on what he saw, Prynn. And this was right after the Borg corpse down the hall tried to assimilate the Founder. Do you really think he was imagining it?”

  Prynn covered her eyes with one hand, trying to rein in her emotions. “I don’t know what to think. I just know we were so close…and he deliberately killed her. My father killed my mother. Again.”

  “You’ll get no argument from him on that,” Dax said. “He really believes that’s true, that he’s killed Ruriko twice. He may be more devastated by this than you are. But there’s something you both need to understand and accept before this goes any farther: Ruriko Tenmei died a long time ago, as a hero, saving lives. The thing that was in sickbay wasn’t her.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What I’m telling you is that Dr. Bashir’s latest tests have confirmed what he feared all along: the damage to your mother’s brain was too extensive. There was nothing left of her to bring back. She was all Borg.”

  “That isn’t true. I saw her, I heard her. She responded to me. She said my name.”

  “Did it?” Dax asked, deliberately dropping the female pronoun. “It’s hard to know exactly what it actually said, isn’t it? I mean really know beyond any doubt. And the drone never said anything else, did it?”

  “Why did she respond to me, then?”

  “Julian believes it was a form of imprinting,” Dax explained. “You were the first life-form the drone encountered when it regained consciousness. It targeted you for assimilation. But as weak as it was, with so many of its implants removed or neutralized, it need time to re-create its assimilation system. Do you understand what I’m saying? You weren’t that thing’s daughter. You were its target.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “Dr. Bashir will confirm it if you ask him. It’s up to you. But if you believe nothing else I tell you, Prynn, I hope you’ll believe this, as someone who once, in an earlier lifetime, allowed her spouse to die and remained estranged from her daughter for eight years because of it: neither you nor your father will recover from this unless you do it together. You need to decide if the grief and anger and hate you feel right now, and the self-loathing Vaughn feels, are stronger than the love I know you share.”

  Prynn shook her head, “I don’t know if I can do this, Ezri.”

  “Prynn,” Dax said softly. “It was the Borg that killed your mother. Don’t let them destroy what’s left of your family. Don’t let them win.”

  Prynn said nothing, and after a moment Dax stood up and departed, promising to look in on her later.

  As Dax expected, Vaughn was waiting for her in the corridor, a confused expression on his face.

  Dax pressed an index finger to her lips and gestured for him to follow her. She led him up to deck one, and suggested they go to his quarters. Inside he asked the question that she knew he needed to ask.

  “Why did you lie to her? There are no new test results. Ruriko was alive in there, somewhere, despite what the Borg implants were making her do. That much Julian was certain of before the end. He told me himself. She really was regaining her humanity, even if it wasn’t strong enough yet to fight off the assimilation imperative.”

  “That’s right, I lied,” Dax said. “Someday you can tell her the truth, Elias. Maybe when she’s found someone who means to her what Ruriko meant to you. But until then, she won’t understand that you didn’t really kill Ruriko to save Prynn, or even to save the Defiant. You did it for Ruriko. So that whatever was left of her wouldn’t have to live one instant with the horror of turning her own child into a monster.”

  Vaughn closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, Dax saw that they were rimmed red. “I think I finally understand what L.J. was trying to tell me before I left the station.”

  “L.J.?” Dax asked. “You mean Admiral Akaar.”

  Vaughn nodded. “He warned me not to take Prynn on this mission. He said he wasn’t worried about the crew; he was worried about the two of us.”

  “There’s something to be said about taking the advice of your elders,” Ezri said lightly, knowing she didn’t need to remind him that Dax’s life spanned over three hundred years.

  Vaughn laughed bitterly. “I might have guessed you’d still have some pearls of wisdom to dispense.”

  Dax shook her head. “Not really. Just a little common sense. Give her time. Give yourself time. And try to forgive yourself.”

  After Dax left, Vaughn sat on the edge of his bunk and stared at the deck for long minutes. His tears fell silently.

  22

  “Kira to bridge,” she whispered. “I’m about to enter engineering. Stand by.” Leading with her phaser rifle, Kira hit the control for the Jefferies tube seal, and the doors split, opening into light.

  She heard no sound save the thrum of the warp core some distance away. Peering out, she saw that the tube opened into another junction room, with other tube entrances surrounding her, except for the single door that led out.

  T
aking a deep breath, she moved toward the door. It opened at her approach, and she turned into the next room quickly, searching for a target.

  She had to creep through a few more sections before she finally spotted Montenegro in the warp-core chamber, bent over the master systems display table, his back to her. Knowing an easier shot would never come, Kira took aim with her rifle. Montenegro didn’t turn, but she sensed a change in his attitude that made her certain he was aware of her. He was already a blur of motion as her finger pulled back on the trigger. The beam missed him, and he was gone from sight. Kira cursed and doubled back in the hopes of cutting him off from another direction.

  “Well, well,” Montenegro said, his disembodied voice cutting through the vast engine room. “So the gullible little Bajoran has made it all the way to the end of the maze. I almost wish I had some cheese to reward you with. You know, I think that’s the thing we like most about your people, Colonel. As meat goes, you’re so very easy to steer.”

  Kira spun as she crept around a corner, searching for the source of the voice. Keep him talking.“Is that what we are to you? Meat?”

  Laughter. “What else? You’re lower life-forms, Colonel. Get used to the idea. You think walking upright, developing language, building starships, and fighting wars is a sign of superior intelligence? You have no idea what true intelligence is capable of.”

  “So tell me,” Kira said, firing off a shot at a shadow that disappeared too quickly. The phaser blast blew a hole in the wall where the shadow had been.

  Laughter again. “Careful, Colonel, you might shoot something important. Not that I’m surprised. Humanoids think too much with their glands, and not enough with their brains. That’s why you’re all so easy to conquer.”

  “My people have been conquered before,” Kira said, climbing up a ladder to the upper level. “It didn’t last. I seriously doubt you’ll do any better.”

  “The Cardassians? Please, Colonel. That only underscores my point. A more useless species of humanoids we’ve yet to encounter. But you Bajorans—you’re the biggest joke of all. There you are at the threshold of time, space, and omniscience, and you squat on your mudball waiting for something to come through to you, rather than step inside yourselves. That’s just one of many things we plan to correct.”