And when will there be time? He heard the question asked with the Kai's soft voice, inside his head. You know there's only now. This time, Benjamin.
His knee had stopped aching, enough for him to get up and hobble to the door of his son's room. The dim light from the ceiling cast his shadow across the bed.
Jake lay with his legs drawn up, a fist pressed hard against face and eyes squeezed tight, like the image of a much younger child futilely trying to ward off bad dreams. Sisko could see that the boy's skin was shiny with sweat; he stepped into the room and laid his hand on Jake's brow, but felt no fever.
He stepped back from the bedside, his own heart more troubled than before. There was so much, in this room as wellas through all of DS9, that he could do little about. Wherever Jake walked in his dreams, he was as alone there as his father was in this world.
Sisko drew the door closed, letting the child go on sleeping. If he could be here when his son awoke, perhaps that would be comfort enough.
For both of them.
CHAPTER 3
Good intentions paved the road to a guilty conscience; which was, Benjamin Sisko had to acknowledge to himself, one of the lesser forms of hell. It was almost mild enough to be put out of his thoughts as he sat down for a briefing with the station's chief of security.
"Is there something on your mind, Commander?" From the other side of the desk, Odo peered at him with concern. "You seem somewhat preoccupied. I could come back later, if you wish—"
"No; no, that's all right, Constable." Sisko shook his head. "It's nothing important; just a promise I made to myself, that I've already broken. I meant to spend some time with my son Jake at the beginning of this shift, before he went off to his classes." The school started up by Keiko O'Brien, the wife of the chief of operations, had quickly reached the level of keeping regular hours, with both a permanent body of students and the children of the station's long- and short-term guests. "But he was already gone by the time I woke up."
"Ah. Family matters." As much as was possible, Odo's masklike face revealed a brief trace of emotion. "I suppose I should count myself fortunate, that I have just one set of duties with which to concern myself."
Sisko knew better. He was well aware that the security chief's orphan status—beyond that even, Odo's singularity there were no other known members of his species—constituted an inner vacuum that continually tugged at his thoughts. Whatever problems Sisko had with bringing up Jake in the artificial environment of DS9, he still knew that he was envied for the simple fact of having a blood relation with him.
"Be that as it may, Constable. Perhaps we should get down to business." He turned toward the computer panel sitting on the desk; the last screenful of Odo's report still showed. Sisko reached out a fingertip and blanked the words away. "This is a very distressing situation that's developed."
"It's more than that, Commander. It's intolerable." Odo's eyes readily displayed anger; now they became two hotly glaring coals. "I won't have it aboard my station."
The security chief's proprietary attitude about DS9 was, Sisko supposed, a displacement of his suppressed familial instincts. Odo reacted toward any threat to the station, any transgression of order within its precincts, as another sentient creature might have felt about one of his own flesh and blood being placed in jeopardy. That made for a zealous execution of Odo's job as the station's top police official; at the same time, the commander knew there was always the danger of Odo exceeding the restraints of the authority that had been given him. Deep Space Nine represented one of the frontiers of the Federation; rights could be too easily trampled on here. all for the sake of insuring the station's survival.
To his credit, Odo had always managed to stay mindful of the letter of the law. If he stepped over the line—and Sisko knew he did; it would be impossible not to, in a place like this, and still get his job done—it was still within the law's spirit. Or at least it had been so far.
"We've had murders on the station before." Odo's voice broke into the commander's reflections. "Given the nature of our operation here, the constraints that we unfortunately have to work under, the transient population constantly moving through, I suppose we have to recognize a certain inevitability of frictions arising between individuals, the chance of illicit profit through violence, and the like. Plus, with our remote location, we will attract a certain mind-set—certain dissolute personalities, shall we say—that somehow believes DS9 is the perfect locale for the settling of grudges and the perpetuation of vendettas." Odo took a deep breath—a simulated humanoid mannerism—in an effort to calm himself. His voice lowered as he gazed brooding at the stars visible in the office's viewport. "I've sometimes wondered if there might not be a certain psychic centrifugal force at work, by which all the disconnected elements in the universe inevitably wind up here on the fringe." He glanced back at Sisko. "It seems unlikely it could be mere coincidence that we get so many of them."
He had heard these dark musings from Odo before, generally at the end of a long, difficult shift. "Your view may be a little prejudiced, Constable. Your job forces you to concentrate on the more aberrant happenings aboard the station."
"'Aberrant' is putting it mildly. Especially with this latest series of events. 'Psychopathic' might be a better choice of words."
The security chief was right about that, Sisko admitted to himself. Odo's report on the murder epidemic that had broken out aboard DS9 had gone into distressing levels of detail.
"This Ahrmant Wyoss individual you have in custody . . . I take it he would have been our third perpetrator? That is, of course, if he had managed to land the blow he had aimed at myself and Major Kira."
"The fourth, actually," said Odo. "Though it's out of our jurisdiction, I believe it's appropriate to count in this series the unfortunate occurrences aboard the Denebian heavy-cargo transport that disembarked from our main docking pylon some twenty cycles ago. The craft was still within primary communication distance when the violence broke out. Three people died in that episode, including the murderer by his own hand. Suicide as the termination of a psychotic rampage appears to be a significant element of the pattern."
"Which would make our Wyoss an important subject of investigation." With a touch, Sisko brought the report back onto the computer panel's screen. He began scrolling through the text. "Since Wyoss is the only one we've managed to apprehend alive. Are there any traceable connections between him and the other perpetrators?"
Odo shrugged. "Nothing definitive. Tangential factors, such as their being aboard the station during overlapping periods of time. I'm still sifting through the data, though; if I can find one element common to all of them—and one that is sufficiently close to being unique—then maybe we'll have something to work with."
"And that is, of course, that our assumption is valid that Ahrmant Wyoss is part of this series." Sisko turned toward Odo from the screen. "He didn't actually kill anyone—fortunately. Or that we know of, at least."
"If he did kill anyone, Commander, it would have to have been done since he came aboard the station. We wouldn't have allowed him entry if there had been any kind of record on him. In that sense, Wyoss is not an unknown quantity; we can track his employment history for nearly two decades. He's had a few batteries of psych tests along the way, and the don't show anything unusual. Just a run-of-the-mill itinerant laborer of marginal intelligence and skills. There are millions of them wandering between planets."