by Various
He and Keiko lay together on the sofa for a while, cuddling in the warm and shadowy main room of O’Brien’s quarters. Though she hadn’t stirred and he couldn’t see her eyes, he was certain that she was still awake. As they rested against one another, their breathing became synchronized; inhaling and exhaling together, it felt almost as if they were one body harboring two minds. It was the closest that O’Brien had ever felt to anyone, and he found the sensation deeply comforting and reassuring. It was a cure for the loneliness that had plagued his life before she’d arrived; she was his panacea, his salvation.
O’Brien’s contentment was fleeting, dispelled by a legion of concerns. “The real problem isn’t just Bashir,” he said. “It’s him and Zek together.”
“I know,” Keiko said. “Zek’s shrewd and knows how to get things. Bashir knows how to rile people up. Zek gets them guns, and Bashir tells them who to shoot. It’s a dangerous combination.”
He nodded. “You’re telling me.”
She pushed herself up to a sitting position. “Miles, listen to me. You have to find some way to keep the two of them in check, or they’re going to end up pushing you aside.”
Slipping out from under her, O’Brien sat up and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “I’m not sure I can, Keiko. I mean, it’s not like I was elected leader. It just sort of worked out that way. If they start leading in a different direction and everybody else wants to follow, who am I to tell them any different?”
Disbelief pitched her voice. “Who are you? You’re Miles O’Brien. You’re the man who started this rebellion.”
“That doesn’t make it my property, Keiko.” He got up, paced a few steps away from the sofa, then turned back. “These people are free to follow me or not. I didn’t force anyone to join up, and I didn’t make anyone follow my orders. But after we lost Ben Sisko, everyone started lookin’ to me for answers. I don’t know why, but they did. So I did my best not to get ’em killed. But if they’d rather follow Bashir…” His voice trailed off and he turned away from her, unsure how to proceed. Part of him had grown weary of being in command, but at the same time he was also accustomed now to having his orders obeyed. Feeling that control beginning to slip away filled him with a fear he hadn’t felt since before the rebellion. It was a state of being he was loath to re-embrace.
She pressed herself gently against his back and coiled her arms around his thick and rounded waist. “People followed you because they could sense that you’re a good man, Miles.” Her face was next to his, leaning over his shoulder. “They knew you’d help them go forward to something better. But men like Zek and Bashir will take them backward, to the way the Terrans used to be.”
Keiko’s warning summoned a memory from O’Brien’s past, from one of his encounters with the Captain Sisko from the alternate universe. He remembered the disgust and anger that the other Sisko had shown when he’d realized that this universe’s Bashir had been torturing the captured Intendant Kira. Despite all the times that O’Brien himself had felt such revulsion at Bashir’s behavior, he had never possessed the courage to intervene until after the other Sisko had shown him how. It was a moment that had cast into sharp relief for O’Brien the fundamental difference in human nature as it existed in their two universes, and it had given him something to which he could aspire. He had enforced a ban against torture on Terok Nor since that day—much to Bashir’s and Zek’s chagrin. The pair had often mocked O’Brien for showing mercy to the enemy, but the truth was that it wasn’t the enemy O’Brien had meant to spare but his own people. He would defend the rebellion from becoming the monsters it fought against. It was an agenda that he knew Bashir and Zek did not share, and he feared for the future of all who followed them on their dark road of vengeance.
“You’re right,” he whispered finally. “They’ll destroy everything if I let them take command. But there’s nothing I can do to stop them short of betraying them—and I won’t do that.”
Keiko sighed heavily. “I know.”
O’Brien reflected on the man he’d once been. Younger and hotheaded, the engineer who Sisko had nicknamed “Smiley” would have been quick to anger, ready to eliminate a dangerous rival like Zek or Bashir without remorse. That was the way things were done. Life was cheap and death easy; mercy was a fault and cruelty a virtue. Then, by degrees, everything had changed.
Years of battle had worn O’Brien down, chewed him up in its maw of terrors. At first he’d watched fellow Terrans die in battle; later he found that he was losing comrades; and lately he caught himself thinking of the dead as fallen friends. The stronger his bonds of affection for these people became, the less eager he was to put them in harm’s way. War demanded sacrifices, however, and so he had continued to order his people into combat. The only thing that had made it bearable for him was that, at every opportunity, he had gone with them, putting his own life in jeopardy, sharing the risks.
Then he’d met Keiko. She had arrived on Terok Nor a few months ago, aboard a stolen transport ship with more than a hundred liberated slaves of various Terran-subject species: Andorians, Tellarites, Bolians, Denobulans, Vulcans, Terrans. All of the refugees had followed her as their leader because, in addition to having once been their supervisor in an Alliance mine, she also had been the one who had organized and led their uprising and escape to Terok Nor. The more O’Brien had learned about Keiko’s organizational abilities and tactical skills, the more impressed he had been. Within a few weeks of her arrival, he had made her his executive officer on Terok Nor.
At the same time, she had also become his lover.
Now every kiss, every embrace, every moment alone with her made him savor the taste of life a little bit more, and made him all the more reluctant to go back out to battle. Leeta and Bashir had been more right about him than they had known, or even than he himself had been able to realize until tonight: love had made him soft—it had given him a reason to live.
Kira’s new quarters aboard the I.K.S. Negh’Var were little more than a single gray bunk in a crowded berthing compartment. Hers was the top bunk in a stack of four, on a narrow aisle four stacks deep on either side. Thirty-two other slaves, both male and female, and of various species, resided in the tiny space and shared a common lavatory and a single shower stall, both of which were filthy and reeked.
The surface of her unpadded bunk had lifted from a hinge on its far side to reveal a shallow storage space underneath. Inside she had found two identical uniforms, drab gray coveralls. Duras had ordered his guards to strip Kira’s black body suit, and they had done so with undisguised amusement. “Put one uniform on now,” he had commanded her. “Wear the other while the first is being washed. The Intendant commands you to remain clean and presentable while you remain in her service.”
After she had dressed, the Klingons had escorted her to her new workspace, in an anteroom not far from Ro’s command suite. Compared to her quarters, her workspace was an oasis of privacy and comfort. Little more than a closet, it was less than two meters wide, with barely enough room for her to slip past the edge of her desk to her narrow, metal seat. The light over her head flickered constantly, throwing annoying shadows and flares across the display of her workstation. Like the rest of the ship’s extremely utilitarian interior, the walls of the tiny compartment were featureless, greenish-gray metal. And when the door closed, Kira found herself alarmingly, painfully alone.
It was so hard not to reminisce about the life she had lost. Gone now were the scores of retainers and slaves, the trusted corps of fawning subordinates. Her every move was observed on the Negh’Var. Other people decided when she was allowed to eat, when she could sleep, what she was allowed to keep stored under her bunk. Ro called her an “adjutant,” but the truth was that Kira had been attired, quartered, and spoken to like a slave in every respect except for her official duties. Those, she was coming to realize, were the labors of a minor bureaucrat. A very boring, ineffectual, and obscure bureaucrat.
The parade of mindless tasks was ceasele
ss. Administrative formalities complicated even the simplest items of business. Triply redundant layers of review and approval made swift action impossible even on items of minimal consequence. There were dozens of requests pending for Ro’s approval of changes to minor ordinances for outlying colony settlements on Bajor VIII, a petition for subsidized duranium refining on Bajor VII, a bill to levy a new tax on uridium producers in Rakantha province, applications for mining licenses to explore the bedrock under Mount Kola—and legal injunctions trying to block those licenses because excavating Mount Kola would mean destroying the ruins of Parek Tonn. It was all the sort of mind-numbing toil with which Kira had never bothered; even during her early years in Parliament, she had made a point of delegating tasks like these to petty, softly middle-aged career civil servants who were not qualified for anything more challenging.
Hours passed in a slow, excruciating march of tedium that was punctuated only by the arrival of new busywork on her monitor. Endless drudgery piled over upon itself, all of it bleeding together and driving Kira deeper into a state of indolent misery, which was the only acceptable camouflage for her rage. This was a subtle form of torture, and she was certain that was exactly as Ro had intended it. This is her idea of a joke at my expense, Kira thought, her temper simmering behind weary eyes. Making me answer to cretins. Wasting my talent on pointless chores unworthy of my gifts. Not because it’s necessary, but just because she can.
The sheer pettiness of it was enough to make her want to scream. Realizing that her workspace likely was soundproof, she threw back her head and let her anger explode. Her shriek of rage was hoarse and colored with bitterness and despair. It didn’t help.
When the last echoes of her fury ceased to repeat themselves in her lonely thoughts, she planted her face in her hands. The darkness of her own palms was her last bastion of sanity, her last refuge against the small-minded tyrant who, for now, she was forced to serve. Plumbing the depths of her own memory, she found little reason to hope that her fortunes would improve. The system was rigged, and everyone knew it. Accumulating power was difficult, slow, and costly. It could be lost without warning. Recovering from a reversal such as the one Kira had recently suffered was unheard of. In all likelihood she was going to live out the rest of her days as a slave to her inferiors, and unless she found a way to harness and defuse her rage, it would be her final undoing.
There’s nothing else for you to do but go back to work, she told herself. This is the hand you’ve been dealt. At least you aren’t working under a whip in a uridium mine…or back on Qo’noS, being violated by Martok. Be grateful for small mercies.
A deep breath quieted her thoughts. She forced herself to relax and slow her breathing. When she opened her eyes, she checked the chronometer. The shift would end in less than two hours; her first day in thrall to Ro was almost over.
On the edge of her table stood a small pile of unevenly stacked padds from the Bajoran government. Each one was jammed with a different kind of data. All were marked “urgent.”
Kira shoved the padds into the corner behind her chair, then turned back to review the information displayed on her monitor. Working her way quickly through several overlapping screens of data, she found something at least marginally interesting: reports from Bajoran and Alliance criminal investigations that had been flagged for Intendant Ro’s review.
Reasoning that any kind of true crime had to be more interesting than reading another briefing on quadrotriticale production in Dahkur province, she loaded up all the current investigation files. The first few were disappointments to her—a few risible requests for clemency from captured Terran rebels sentenced to be executed on Bajor. A quick skim of another read like a textbook example of the brewing conflict between the Klingons and the Cardassians: a Klingon transport leaving Bajor had been hijacked by its onboard domestic slaves—a smattering of Terrans and Andorians, a Tellarite, and a Vulcan—who had taken the vessel’s crew and its fifty-six Alliance passengers hostage. A nearby Cardassian cruiser had intervened and resolved the matter by simply destroying the transport, killing everyone aboard, friend and foe alike. Such tactics were frequently employed by the Cardassians, which was one of the reasons Kira had known never to trust them: they had no honor. Unfortunately, despite the political uproar the incident had caused on Bajor, it was becoming increasingly clear that Ro supported the Cardassians.
After filing away the hijacking report, she skimmed through several more, none of which seemed particularly interesting at first. Most of them appeared to be routine thefts and piracies, or, in some cases, poorly disguised war profiteering.
As she neared the end of the reports, however, she felt a sense of foreboding. Something felt amiss, as if there was an invisible thread of motive running through several of the items she had read. She went back and read them again, consciously looking this time for links, commonalities, themes.
Soon, four reports had found their way to the top of the stack and now were arranged side by side on her display. Ninety-one days earlier, two industrial-sized loads of kelbonite had been heisted from a supply depot on Bardeezi Prime. Sixty-three days earlier, a fully loaded dilithium freighter vanished en route to Ajilon after shipping out from the refinery on Korma II. Fifty-nine days earlier, a freighter carrying a full shipment of antimatter from the refinery on Loval exploded in deep space en route to Goralis—allegedly an accident, blamed on a faulty containment module. And eighteen days earlier, the Cardassian garrison on Amleth IV came up short of nearly two hundred heavy combat rifles during its latest small-arms inventory.
Kira stared at the data, almost shocked that no one in Klingon Imperial Intelligence or the Cardassian Obsidian Order had seized upon these reports. Fuel for a matter-antimatter reactor, combat weapons, and enough shielding material to block something huge from even a close-range sensor sweep. These four ostensibly disparate incidents, viewed together, had the mark of the Terran Rebellion all over them.
Her shift would be over in a few minutes. She wondered how she ought to proceed. If action wasn’t taken quickly, there might not be time to stop whatever the rebels were planning. For all Kira knew, it might already be too late. Something clearly had to be done immediately. A spark of self-interest kindled then in her imagination. This was the sort of opportunity that, if parlayed to maximum advantage, could elevate her standing with the Alliance considerably.
The chain of command dictated that Kira report her findings directly to Intendant Ro. Given the circumstances, however, she decided not to do her successor any favors.
3
T his is exactly what I said not to do,” O’Brien protested.
Walking as slowly as Zek wasn’t easy for O’Brien; not strangling the elderly Ferengi was even more difficult. O’Brien, Bashir, and a small group of high-level rebellion leaders shuffled along the lower level of Empok Nor’s dark, abandoned Promenade, making their way in agonizing half-steps behind Zek as he moved like congealing sap toward a flight of stairs.
“You’re always too cautious, O’Brien,” Zek whined, his nasal bleat of a voice as sharp as a weapon. “We need to act now, before the Alliance gets reorganized.”
“That’s no excuse for getting careless,” O’Brien said. “Doing everything at once, in the same place, is bound to draw attention—and that’s the last bloody thing we need.”
Lifting one arthritic foot and his gnarled walking stick onto the lowest stair, Zek dismissed O’Brien’s concerns with a wave of his hand. “You say careless, I say bold. Setting up one facility takes less time.” Another arduous step up left Zek winded. “Doing it here means we can trade spare parts with Terok Nor. And the sooner we finish, the sooner we can start fighting this war on our own terms.”
O’Brien knew that there was some truth in what the Ferengi was saying. Zek’s aged feet might be slow, but his mind remained quick and razor-sharp; his reputation as one of the rebellion’s best strategists had been well earned. Lately, however, O’Brien had begun to notice a disturbing trend in Z
ek’s pronouncements and mission plans: overconfidence.
“Let’s say you’re right,” O’Brien began.
“Of course I am,” Zek interrupted.
O’Brien continued, “It would only take one mistake to compromise our security on this station. For instance, hijacking all its supplies from systems in the same sector.”
Zek forced his left foot up another step. His breathing was a bit more labored now, and his temper was beginning to show. “It’s been months, O’Brien! If the Alliance was going to notice anything, they’d have done it by now.” He grunted as he advanced upward another step. “You’d be afraid of your own shadow if the lights in this place worked.” Profound wheezing followed Zek’s next climbing step. Seconds later, when his breathing calmed a bit, he added, “It’s not like I didn’t cover my tracks. For the love of money, I made it look like the antimatter tanker blew up. Deep-space hijackings don’t get much cleaner than that.”
“You still should have consulted me first,” O’Brien said.
Turning back to face him, Zek blurted, “What for? So you could tell me a hundred reasons why it wouldn’t work? Well, it did.”
Glowering at Zek’s back while they climbed the last few steps to the upper level of the Promenade, O’Brien felt as if he had made the mistake of coming alone to a gang fight; Zek was clearly taking the lead in planning the rebellion’s next steps, and Bashir was drumming up all the support Zek would need to overrule any dissent or challenge. Even though they were all supposed to be on the same side, being part of a coalition led by Zek and Bashir filled O’Brien with dread. The Ferengi’s motives might be superficially benign, but his tactics, though they were undeniably bold, were foolhardy. This latest stunt of his only confirmed it.
O’Brien stepped onto the upper level as soon as Zek was out of the way. Bashir and the others followed them up, and the group spread out along the row of sloped windows facing out toward the docking ring of Terok Nor’s twin-sister station, abandoned years ago by the Cardassians near the cometary debris ring of the Trivas system. Unlike Terok Nor’s majestic view of the surface of Bajor, Empok Nor looked out only on the vast, star-flecked sphere of infinity.
