Star Trek: Typhon Pact 06: Plagues of Night Read online

  Still, it’s possible he could have been there, she thought. The news feed had not identified the ship that had recorded the explosion on the station and had then been struck by the resultant debris, and so the prospect at least existed that it could have been Robinson. Even as Kasidy set aside the notion, recognizing the irrationality of her fear, she could not as easily set aside the emotion that had taken hold of her.

  She reached behind her and pulled the chair back to the companel, where she again sat down. She worked the controls to call up a message she had stored in memory for the past two months, though she had many times considered deleting it. Just as often, she played it back, searching for understanding and acceptance even as the words devastated her anew.

  Ben appeared on the screen, a thin cover of black hair atop his head, his face freshly shaven. As many times as she’d viewed his message, Kasidy still couldn’t quite get used to seeing him without his goatee. He’d had the beard the day she’d first met him more than ten years earlier, and he’d continued wearing it at least until the day he’d walked out of the house for the last time.

  “Kasidy, it’s Ben,” he said. Kasidy could see a dimly lighted room behind him, presumably his cabin aboard Robinson. Just visible on the left side of the screen, tall ports showed the elongated streaks of starlight that indicated a ship traveling at warp. “I know that in a few weeks it’ll be a year since I left. I know that I’ve hurt you, and I’ve done so in a way that’s probably unforgivable.”

  Probably unforgivable, Kasidy thought, echoing the phrase that had provided her a measure of hope over the past two months. Probably unforgivable. If Ben considered forgiveness possible at all, then didn’t that indicate that he aspired to reconciliation? What other need would he have for her absolution?

  “No,” Kasidy said aloud, speaking over the recording of Ben as his message continued to play. For several months after her husband had walked out, Kasidy had judged their rift as an argument—clearly a major argument, but one that she believed they would eventually talk through so that they could work out their differences. At no time in those first three months did she think that their marriage had come to an end. Beyond that, for perhaps as long as half a year, even as the depth and severity of their separation became clear, she still expected Ben to one day walk through the front door of their home and take her in his arms.

  “And I do love you still, Kasidy,” Ben’s message continued, “and I imagine that I always will. And it’s because I love you, and our beautiful Rebecca, that I had to leave.”

  The words sounded suspiciously like an excuse. I love you so I have to leave you. Didn’t irresponsible parents who abandoned their families often make the same claim? You’ll be better off without me. Anger welled within her.

  “Kas, I know that you don’t believe in the Bajoran Prophets,” Ben went on, “at least not in the way that I do. But I have conversed with them, I have communed with them, and they have guided me on a journey that allowed me to help, and even save, the people of Bajor. I don’t regret that. I can’t regret that.

  “But I do regret how my relationship with the Prophets has impacted us … how it has impacted you and Rebecca. I told you before we got married that the Prophets had let me know that if I spent my life with you, I would know nothing but sorrow. And you said that it sounded like a threat. But it wasn’t.

  “It was a gift.”

  Before she consciously knew that she meant to do so, Kasidy brought the side of her fist down hard onto a control on the panel. The playback of Ben’s message paused, and Kasidy felt a strong urge to thrust her knuckles into the companel screen. “‘A gift,’” she spat at the image of her husband, as though he could hear her.

  Kasidy understood Ben’s justification for categorizing the statement of the wormhole aliens as something positive; she had listened to him numerous times as he explained it in his message. She understood it, not because of his words, but because she had lived it, and not just once. Ben’s decision to leave her and Rebecca a year earlier had not been the first time that he’d done as the wormhole aliens had bade him, to the detriment of their family.

  There had been the shock of his disappearance from the surface of Bajor after the end of the war, and then his materializing before her in a vision to announce that he could not go home with her just then, or at any specific time in the future. He vowed to return at some point, but he also reaffirmed his status as the Emissary of the Prophets, and asserted that they still had much for him to do. Kasidy accepted the situation because she had feared him dead, and because she could do little else, but the eight months of her pregnancy that she spent without her husband had been difficult.

  There had also been the time that Ben had heeded his own visions from the wormhole aliens and prevented Bajor from joining the Federation. Worse than that, Ben willfully declined medical care when those visions threatened his life. In an obsessive attempt to fully understand the tapestry of the aliens’ plans for the Bajoran people, he plainly demonstrated that he considered the seeking of that knowledge more important than his continued presence in the lives of Kasidy and Jake. Although his death would have left a gaping emotional void for both of them, Ben never relented on his dangerous quest; only when he’d fallen unconscious and Jake intervened had his approaching death been prevented.

  Ben had also been willing to risk his son’s own life for what he deemed the greater good. When one of the wormhole aliens forcibly took possession of Kira Nerys’s body, and one of their adversaries invaded Jake’s, the two engaged in a battle that threatened the lives of both combatants, as well as the existence of DS9 itself. Ben had a ready means of averting or ending the conflict, but even as he hoped for a victory that might well mean the death of his son, he allowed it to continue. After Kai Winn took steps to bring the battle to a premature and inconclusive close, likely saving Jake or Nerys or both, Jake forgave his father. Kasidy also found a way to let it go, but it occurred to her at that moment that Ben need never proclaim his position as the Emissary of the Prophets; over the years, his actions left no doubt as to his priorities.

  Over time, the presence of the wormhole aliens in Ben’s life did not alone drive his actions; so too did their absence. Eight years earlier, when Jadzia died and the wormhole collapsed, cutting Ben off from the aliens, he took Jake and went back to Earth. He abandoned Deep Space 9, his Starfleet obligations, his friends—and Kasidy. She had been away from the station at the time, making a cargo run aboard Xhosa, and when she returned to DS9, she learned that he had gone. He’d left a brief message for her—Kasidy thought she still probably had it stored on an isolinear optical chip somewhere—apologizing and trying to explain his actions, but also imploring her not to contact him until he came back to the Bajoran system—if he came back to the Bajoran system. That quickly and that impersonally, she discovered that her serious romantic relationship with the man she loved might be at an end, and she could do nothing about it.

  “I am a fool,” Kasidy said, as though speaking to the image of her husband. How could she be surprised that he hadn’t come back to their house on Bajor, when clearly he didn’t value his family more than he did “the will of the Prophets”?

  “I should’ve been expecting it.”

  Kasidy let herself fall against the back of the chair as a heavy sigh escaped her lips. As so often happened, her thoughts and feelings whirled in a dizzying array of confusion. She felt angry with Ben, but also with herself. A sense of deep sadness suffused her, and her mind worked overtime to formulate some means of repairing the damage done to her family.

  Looking at the companel screen, at the frozen mask of Ben’s face there, Kasidy also felt something she seemed powerless to keep herself from feeling: love. She had known Ben for more than a decade, had been romantically involved with him for most of that time, and she remembered well all the reasons she had fallen for him. She had never met anybody else with his strength of will, with his sense of right and wrong, with his resolve. He overcame t
he terrible loss of Jennifer, his first wife, to open up to Kasidy, to laugh with her, to delight her with his cooking, to share a passion for baseball, to entwine their lives in ways that brought both of them profound happiness. They spent a great deal of time together, particularly after his return from the wormhole, and most of it had been wholly joyful.

  Most of it, Kasidy thought, but not all of it. Events beyond their marriage had intruded, pulling Ben away from their home and involving him in troubling, sometimes dangerous situations. In hindsight, she could see that, bit by bit, those affairs eroded something inside of him. The residents of the small village of Sidau suffered a brutal massacre. The Ascendants and the insane Iliana Ghemor confronted Deep Space 9 and the people of Bajor. Endalla became the scene of a terrifying threat to local space.

  More recently, events had struck closer to home. Their close friends Audj and Calan perished in a fire in their home almost three years earlier. During the Borg invasion, Elias Vaughn suffered a traumatic brain injury, and he remained in a coma. Ben’s father died.

  And there had been Rebecca’s kidnapping. Kasidy couldn’t trace all of her marital troubles with Ben to that time, but the threat to their daughter had exacerbated Ben’s growing isolation. That in turn concretized Kasidy’s feeling of disconnection from him. When he went back to Starfleet to aid in the efforts against the Borg—a decision she understood but did not favor—she hoped that they could essentially make a new start when he returned home. Though she feared for his well-being while he was away, it never truly occurred to her that he would never come back to her.

  Kasidy sat forward in her chair and reached for the playback control. Ben’s lips began moving again, and he said the words that she had heard so often that she could probably recite them from memory. Still, she found that she needed to hear them again.

  “The Prophets do not exist in time the way that we do,” he said. “And neither did I in the time that I spent with them in the Celestial Temple, so I have some firsthand understanding of this. The Prophets live a nonlinear existence, but more than that, they live a continuous existence. It’s how they can generate accurate prophecies, how they can know the future: they live in what we call the future, the past, and in the present. They are aware of every moment in their lives at all times. And they also see potential moments in uncountable possible timelines.”

  As they always had, the ideas seemed fantastical to Kasidy. She could not quite conceive of the existence Ben described. At the same time, she did not disbelieve him.

  “I don’t think I can explain it any better,” he continued. “But I lived that way, and even though I can’t remember the details of it, of a future that was the same as my present and my past, I do remember how overwhelming it was. And I recall the nature of it … the reality of it.

  “My point is that when the Prophets told me that I would know only sorrow if I spent my life with you, they weren’t threatening me. They were telling me what they had already seen … what they were seeing at that instant. They saw me marry you, and they saw my life inundated by sorrow. They also saw an existence where I did not spend my life with you, and where I was not inundated by sorrow.”

  For a moment, Kasidy’s vision blurred. Tears formed in her eyes. She knew the words about to come.

  “For you, Kasidy, for your love and because I love you, I could suffer many things. But this isn’t about making things better for me; it’s about saving you. And Rebecca. If I stayed with you, I would know nothing but sorrow, and at some point, that sorrow would include something terrible happening to you, and something terrible happening to Rebecca. That would be my greatest sorrow.”

  As Ben listed some of those awful things that had happened around them and to them before he’d left, Kasidy’s tears spilled from her eyes and down her cheeks. She didn’t believe in Bajoran prophecy, or in the divinity of the aliens that resided in the wormhole, but despite all that had happened, she believed in her husband. She believed that he still loved her.

  “The sorrow was getting closer, and deeper,” he told her. “I couldn’t let something happen to you and Rebecca. It was hard enough when we almost lost her the first time.

  “I didn’t tell you all of this before I left because I know that you don’t believe in the Prophets, and I knew you wouldn’t believe in the truth of their prophecy. But that’s what this is: a prophecy. And unless I heed their advice, it will continue to come true.

  “I love you, Kasidy. And despite what I’ve put you through, I suspect that you still love me too. I think it’s okay for you to love me, at least in the way that I still love Jennifer. But I was eventually able to let go of Jennifer enough to fall in love with you. I think it’s okay for you to let go of me in that way. When you’re able, I want you to be open to love again.

  “I’m sending this message to you because I think it will help you—today, and I hope, tomorrow. I hope you’ll let it help Rebecca too, when she’s ready to know all of this.”

  Kasidy’s hand hovered over the playback control, ready to halt the recording. She did not want to hear what would come next, but she also knew that she needed to hear it again. If she wanted to move forward, she would have to hear it all.

  “Right before I started recording this message, I transmitted a petition to the courthouse in Adarak to dissolve our marriage. It might have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it will be the best thing for you.

  “I love you. And I’m sorry.”

  On the companel screen, Ben reached forward and touched a control. The message winked off, replaced by the Starfleet emblem. Kasidy’s tears flowed freely, and for a few minutes, she let them. She loved Ben, and she resented him. He genuinely believed the warning—or threat—given him by the wormhole aliens, but had he taken any actions to beat back that warning? Had he entreated the aliens to do something to alter their prediction? Had he done everything he could possibly do to keep his family intact?

  Kasidy deactivated the companel. Not for the first time, she pondered the dilemma Ben thought he faced: stay with his wife and daughter, and in so doing, risk their deaths, or leave them. Faced with the same dreadful choices, what would she do?

  And what do I do now? she asked herself. After receiving Ben’s message two months earlier, she had checked with the courthouse in Adarak. The administrators there did indeed receive a petition for the dissolution of Kasidy’s marriage to Ben. She had yet to endorse the document.

  “Maybe it’s time I signed the petition,” Kasidy said, allowing herself for the first time to consider granting her husband the termination of their marriage that he’d requested. For so long, she had expected Ben to come home to her, and when he hadn’t, she’d then spent countless hours attempting to figure out how she could convince him to return. “But maybe I just finally need to let go.”

  Kasidy nodded to herself, tentatively trying on the idea of agreeing to end her marriage. Could she find the strength within herself to accept the loss of her relationship with the love of her life? Whether she could or not, she realized, she found something else: the determination to refuse to accept one of the consequences of Ben’s leaving.

  For fourteen months, Kasidy had withheld the truth from their daughter. After having already explained to Rebecca about her father captaining a starship in order to help protect the Federation from the Borg, Kasidy transformed that reality into a convenient explanation for Ben’s subsequent absence. She told Rebecca that Starfleet needed him to continue to command a starship—not entirely a lie—but she also led her daughter to believe that Ben would one day return to them. Kasidy often sat down with Rebecca and watched family holovids, all of which included Ben; Kasidy did not want her daughter to forget her father, or to think that he no longer cared about her.

  Kasidy reached forward and reactivated the companel. She would grant Ben the end to their marriage that he had set in motion, but in exchange, he would also have to give something to her—to Rebecca. According to Ben, the wormhole aliens’ prophecy invo
lved his life with Kasidy, but she realized that it said nothing at all about his relationship with their daughter. If Ben wanted to cease being Kasidy’s husband, so be it, but she would not allow him to stop being Rebecca’s father.

  Kasidy worked the controls of the companel. She still wished to make certain that Ben had not been present at Utopia Planitia at the time of the accident there, but she also wanted to enlist the assistance of a friend who could get through to Ben, who could remind him of his responsibilities as a parent and urge him to reestablish a relationship with Rebecca. Kasidy thought she knew somebody who could help her on both counts.

  The insignia of the Bajoran comnet appeared on the companel display. “Releketh Province, Vanadwan Monastery,” she said. “I’d like to speak with Vedek Kira Nerys.”

  2

  Captain Benjamin Sisko looked up from his personal access display device as the door chime fluttered through his quarters. Seated on the sofa beneath the tall ports in the outer bulkhead, he felt the impulse to stay quiet, to keep still and not respond. Though he had yet to change out of his uniform, the evening had grown long, he had dimmed the lighting in his cabin, and his browsing of the padd in his hands had left him feeling isolated. Like a man in an escape pod, the lone survivor of some remote starship catastrophe, he endured, but he remained adrift.

  Except that as the captain of U.S.S. Robinson, he could not drift, he could not hide. For the better part of a year, he had tried to do just that, keeping himself aloof from his crew. His reasons had been manifold. Having been forced by circumstances to abandon his wife and young daughter, Sisko felt no desire at all to befriend anybody new—nor even to communicate with anybody outside the ship whom he already counted as a friend. Beyond the bitterness permeating his everyday existence, which made even the most basic personal interaction with others difficult, he also sought to avoid putting anybody else at risk by getting close to them. More than a year on, he finally understood the folly of such thinking, recognizing that the warning the Prophets issued to him spoke only of the dangers of his spending his life with Kasidy, and not with anyone else.