It looked like a Cardassian female, but there was something very different about her. Her features had a soft innocence to them, attractive, but still childlike. There was a pinkish cast to her skin that Jake had never seen on a woman with neck ridges. Her black hair—he couldn’t tell how long it was from that angle—sat pulled up into an attractive arrangement on the back of her head. Her dress seemed typical of the few Cardassian women he’d known, tastefully fitted, but with a touch of Bajoran simplicity to the design. No, it was the color that set her apart. Jake couldn’t remember seeing a Cardassian woman wearing burgundy before.
Curious, he walked into Quark’s and up to the second level, ignoring the understaffed barkeep’s latest attempt to get him to wait tables. Scanning the level, he found a vacant table from which he could observe this woman. If this really was Dukat’s daughter, it made things more interesting. Every source he had said that Kira had sent Tora Ziyal to Bajor to keep her safe during the Dominion occupation. What was she doing back?
One of the overworked Ferengi waiters brought him a root beer, which Jake gratefully accepted. Quark had tried to get rid of all of the Earth foods after Starfleet relinquished control. But, never one to miss an opportunity, Jake’s continued presence on the station made him keep a small supply on hand. His waiters evidently had standing orders to bring Jake root beer whenever he entered the bar.
As Jake had no intention of developing a taste for kanar, it was a small favor that he appreciated.
He pulled up his most recent article on the padd’s display in an attempt to cover the fact that he wasn’t working. A clattering brought his attention to the floor, where a charcoal stylus had fallen and rolled toward his chair. Jake quickly reached for it.
“You dropped this,” he said, backing it with the most winning smile he could manage as he handed the stylus to its owner.
“Thank you,” the woman replied with a polite smile of her own.
At this distance, Jake could see the faint ridges at the bridge of her nose. “Excuse me, but aren’t you—?”
“Tora Ziyal,” she said, smiling. “You’re the Emissary’s son.”
“Jake Sisko,” he replied. “I thought you’d gone to Bajor?”
Ziyal gestured for him to sit down. When he had relocated to her table, she quietly explained. “I did, but it didn’t work out. This is the only place that I feel at home.”
Jake almost laughed. “I know the feeling.”
“Really?” With a slight cant of her head, she asked, “Don’t you have family on Earth?”
For a moment, Jake thought better of revealing any personal information, even if it was otherwise easy to obtain. There was something a little too disarming about her, something that made him feel comfortable almost immediately. That, in itself, was dangerous. If Ziyal reported any of it back to her father, he might never see his family again. Did he dare give Dukat that kind of leverage? His gaze wandered to three Jem’Hadar soldiers on the lower level, their overbuilt sidearms holstered, surveying the bar in a manner that suggested they were ready to draw their weapons at the slightest provocation.
They could kill me whenever they wanted and Dad would never know.
Why worry about giving Dukat more leverage when he had all he needed sitting comfortably in the barrel of a Jem’Hadar pistol?
I’ve got to trust somebody. The others will barely even give me an interview, let alone talk.
“My grandfather and my aunt,” he finally replied.
Ziyal stared down at the sketchpad on the table, a wistful look in her eyes. “You’re very fortunate. All I have is my father.”
Setting aside the urge to ask her about Major Kira, Jake followed Ziyal’s gaze to the piece. It was a deceptively simple rendering of “what looked like a pool of “water in a forest, a bird dipping its beak for a drink. It reminded him of some ancient Japanese art that Mrs. O’Brien had shown them in school, full of subtle detail. He could almost feel the energy flowing through the strokes, few as they were. The design had the effect of a tidal current, moving him through the work like a leaf on a gentle breeze. “That’s beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Jake swore he could almost see a blush in her cheeks. “I’m thinking of calling it ‘The Seat of Power.’ I tried to imagine what the station might be like if it were a place on Bajor, with all of the ebb and flow of the universe coming through it. It’s a place of great importance, and great energy. My father has already said he wants to display it in his office when it’s done.” Her lips pursed as she stared down at the unfinished piece. “It’s not quite what I envisioned, but it’ll do.”
It’ll do? I’ve never seen anything like this! This needs to be someplace where everyone can see it, not just Dukat. Is that bird supposed to be her father? I heard she had a blind spot for him, but if she thinks he’s half as innocent as she’s drawing him, she needs to take another look.
Six months ago, someone so blatantly naïve living in a war zone might have worried him. However, after being accused of such naïveté for something as simple as expecting freedom of the press from the Dominion, Jake was no longer sure that was such a bad thing.
“It’s—it’s beautiful,” he repeated.
Ziyal took a deep breath. “I want to see if I can do more pieces like the ones the Cardassian Institute of Art wants to exhibit.”
Jake’s eyes widened. He may not have been a painter, but he knew what recognition like that meant to an artist. “That’s wonderful! Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” she replied politely. If he hadn’t been watching, he would have missed the brief flash of discomfort that crossed her features. “I heard that you’re a writer?”
Jake shrugged, trying to cover his curiosity. “Sort of. I mean, it’s hard to be a writer when nobody but Weyoun is reading your stories.”
“But, you still write, don’t you? How can you continue to put the words together and not consider yourself a writer?”
She’s got a point. I was writing long before the FNS job came through. Now I’m just a writer with no readers. When Dad gets back, that’ll change. Dad won’t stop until he takes the station back, I know he won’t.
“My father is having a dinner party tonight,” Ziyal said. “He invited a few of the Bajoran shop owners to help everyone get used to working together. Will you come?”
Jake felt his cheeks warm. The idea certainly was appealing. There was something genuine about Ziyal, something he would never have expected from Dukat’s daughter. Something beyond his journalistic curiosity was piqued.
The idea of being there for part of the peace process interested him, and might even be an article that would get past Weyoun, if he spun it just right.
However, Jake couldn’t shake the feeling that showing up at one of Dukat’s parties, even if he had been invited, might be overstepping his bounds. They’d think that he was only there as a reporter, which wouldn’t be wrong, but his stomach churned at the thought of how any display of friendliness toward Ziyal might be taken.
“I’d like to, but I’m not sure your father would like that,” Jake replied. “I’m not exactly one of his favorite people around here.”
“You will be welcome if you should change your mind,” she said.
He leaned back in his chair. Every instinct he had said that there Was a major news story waiting to happen in Tora Ziyal. His grandfather once said that you could tell people who were going to make a difference in the world. He hadn’t appreciated that until now.
What Jake couldn’t tell was whether the difference was going to be with her art, or with her personality. He couldn’t see how it would be possible to dislike Ziyal. If they did, she’d probably manage to change that with just a few words.
Fodder for an article, artist for his books, whatever else she might have been, Tora Ziyal was someone that Jake knew he could just sit and talk with.
They chatted about anything and everything that crossed their minds for the next two hours, from the way her mother would si
ng her to sleep when she was a toddler to his grandfather’s method for peeling eggplant. Once he explained to Ziyal what an eggplant was, he was even able to get Quark’s replicators to manage some passable aubergine stew. The fact that Jake couldn’t remember every measurement of the recipe made the sampling of the end product more of an adventure.
She liked the taste of the Terran dish, and they made a pact that every time they met in Quark’s, they would try to sample a delicacy from the other’s culture. The Bajoran food he could live with, but after some of the smells around the Cardassian eateries, Jake was sure that Ziyal had gotten the better part of that deal.
No subject seemed to be off limits for either of them. Before he realized it, they were talking about things he’d never even told his father. The story of her mother’s death in the Ravinok’s crash hit Jake particularly hard, forcing him to share the story of his own mother’s death on the U.S.S. Saratoga at Wolf 359.
“I heard a little about the Borg when my father took me back to Cardassia,” she said. “That your ship took them on and there weren’t any survivors at all. ...”
That was when the alarm on Jake’s padd went off.
“What’s that?” Ziyal asked.
Jake sighed. “It’s when I was thinking of going to bed.” A yawn pulled at his lips, but he managed to fight it off. It was so comforting talking to Ziyal, almost like the long conversations he and Nog used to have. He hadn’t realized how much he missed having Nog around.
“Maybe you should listen to it,” she said, a gentle chiding in her voice. “We both have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Looking down at his padd, he realized that she was right. Somewhere along the line, he’d begun making notes about little things Ziyal was doing, the way she would stare intently whenever she was listening to someone, how she would glow with pride whenever the subject of her father came up, details that he hadn’t even realized he was noticing.
“I’ll talk to you again sometime?” he asked.
Ziyal smiled. “Of course.”
As Jake headed back toward his quarters, he found himself looking forward to ‘sometime’ more than he had since the Dominion’s arrival.
Tora Ziyal watched Jake leave the bar with a mixture of trepidation and happy anticipation.
The misgivings were becoming an unfortunate part of everyday existence. Life as the daughter of Gul Dukat hadn’t proven to be the grand experience that she’d imagined when they’d left Dozaria. Ziyal had witnessed her father’s fall from grace firsthand, and it hadn’t been pretty. Her own people—at least, that was what she’d wanted to consider them—had wanted her dead for the simple crime of being half-Bajoran. She’d never told her father about the night that an anonymous figure in a Central Command uniform cornered her as she was coming home from the market, threatening both herself and her father if they didn’t leave the planet. Dukat had been troubled enough just trying to keep his wife from carrying off Ziyal’s half-siblings.
Tora Naprem, Ziyal’s Bajoran mother, had always said that the Cardassians valued family above all else. Memories of the love that had rained upon Ziyal’s head before they first left Terok Nor never failed to remind her of the promise of that statement, but the level of hatred she’d experienced from her own stepmother on Cardassia made that love pale in comparison.
Ultimately, it had all fallen down around them, their home, her father’s power base, any stature they had possessed, all of it gone in a heartbeat thanks to the racism of a people she wasn’t sure she wanted to belong to anymore.
She knew her father wanted nothing but the best for all Cardassians, no matter what they may have thought of him. Dukat was doing the best he could, and his deal to bring the tattered remains of the Cardassian Union into the Dominion was just another step in that direction.
She’d grown accustomed to feeling trepidation. But the happy anticipation? That was something new.
She’d met the Emissary only on a couple of occasions before Starfleet had been forced to abandon the station, but she got the impression that the father was not that much different from the son. Her own father seemed to believe that Sisko would eventually bow to Dukat’s inherent superiority, but Ziyal didn’t share that belief.
Unlike her father, Ziyal also knew Benjamin Sisko as the Emissary of the Prophets, a man of holy writ. She felt a sort of kinship with him, a comfort in the thought that, like her, Sisko was someone caught between two cultures. They were both living bridges between worlds. She aspired to the kind of success that Sisko had found in his role as Emissary. If her art could bring that about, then so be it. It was a mantle that she would gratefully accept.
She hadn’t expected to like Jake Sisko, but she found him just as intriguing as his father. The young man must have been groomed for Starfleet, so for him not to follow in his father’s footsteps had to have been a difficult decision. He had a creative spirit, but he needed encouragement. Why was Weyoun the only person reading his stories? Maybe if she gave him the audience he so desperately needed, it might be enough to keep him going. She knew the path that Jake strode far better than she’d ever care to admit. She’d thought herself comfortable with the idea of her art only being for her own benefit for the longest time, until Vedek Nane had encouraged her to follow her talents.
Perhaps she could offer Jake the same encouragement.
As she watched him leave the bar, she saw a Cardassian soldier standing in the entryway, also watching Jake. She wasn’t sure who he was, until he turned back toward the bar.
Her stomach sank at the sight of a familiar sneer on Damar’s face.
Kira turned the chair in Rom’s quarters around, sitting with her arms folded atop the back. “A newsfeed?” She appeared to consider the idea for far longer than Jake had anticipated. “Jake, are you sure about this?”
“Yeah,” he said, pausing in his pacing of the room. “We could get stories out to the station’s general population about what’s going on. We might even be able to get the information to Bajor. If we can get it to Bajor, I just might be able to get someone to send it to the Federation News Service. Didn’t the resistance use something like that during the Occupation?”
Kira nodded. “Dukat used to have an entire team of soldiers scouring every Bajoran publication for secret messages to the resistance. I think it became an obsession of his after a while.”
“The only thing bothering me is, how do we get it out there without Dukat finding out it’s me?”
One red eyebrow raised. “Good question. If it’s going to come from within the station, he may think it’s you anyway.”
Jake didn’t like the sound of that. “Rom, can we play around with it in the comm system? Scramble its origin?”
The Ferengi seemed momentarily perplexed by the question. “Um, if I had the current access codes, put in something that will bounce it through the system a bunch of places, we can have every transmission come from a different origin. Maybe if we run it through a triphasic subspace oscillation router, or couple it to a code scrambler.”
“So, you think this will work?” Jake asked.
Rom nodded. “The only problem is putting the router into the system. Ooh! There may be something my brother has that can help.”
“Do I want to know about this?” Kira asked. Seeming to think better of the idea, she said, “No. No, I don’t. Not yet. Rom, do whatever you need to do to get this going. And if you can find a way to mask the signal and get it through the subspace transmitters to Bajor, do it.”
The Ferengi nodded.
A thin smile spread across Kira’s features. “I’ll bet Dukat will bury his nose in it just like he did during the Occupation. So let’s lead him on. Don’t put anything substantial in it, Jake. No matter how we end up getting it out there or how much we try to hide its existence, Dukat will find out about it. He always does. If there’s nothing to the stories, he’ll drive himself to a frenzy just trying to find messages that aren’t there.”
Jake rolled the idea around
in his mind for a bit. It wasn’t what he’d hoped for, but it was a way to help the cause. He didn’t care much for the idea of tying his hands in such a manner, but he could use it as an exercise in creative writing. Trying to keep any kind of meaningful information out of the articles would take more creativity than he’d attempted since his admissions tests for Pennington.
Dukat on a wild-goose chase might be exactly what we need. He’ll probably know it’s me, but anything that makes his job more difficult is good for the resistance.
Jake took a deep breath, not sure if he wanted to broach the next subject. Finally deciding that he didn’t have much to lose, he asked, “Maybe if I worked on an article about Ziyal for the FNS, Dukat wouldn’t think I had time for the newsfeed?”
Kira flinched, but recovered quickly.
“I thought maybe if somebody told Ziyal’s story, how she wants to be a bridge between the Bajorans and the Cardassians, it might help heal a few old wounds. She definitely is news. The fact that the Cardassian Institute of Art wants to exhibit her work needs to be mentioned. She’s got to be the first person of Bajoran ancestry to have their work shown like this.”
Kira leaned forward in the chair. “They did steal a lot of Bajoran art during the Occupation, but I think you may be right.”
Before he could devote another word to the subject, Dukat’s voice came over the comm. “Major Kira, please meet me in my office.”
Jake gave her an inquisitive look. She just shrugged. “What is it, Dukat?” Kira said, an edge of accusation in her voice.
“The Cardassian freighters carrying those industrial replicators for Bajor will arrive in the morning. I would like to discuss the transition arrangements with you in person, Major.”
Sighing, Kira pulled herself out of the chair. “On my way.”
As she strode through the door, Jake realized what was wrong. Something had come between Ziyal and Kira, something that was making the major uneasy. It took about a half-second for Jake to deduce that the something in question was Gul Dukat.
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