What You Leave Behind Read online

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  CHAPTER

  1

  “Doctor Bashir. The time is oh-five-hundred.”

  At least he wasn’t alone.

  “Right….” Oh, how he hated the garlicky voice of that computer in the morning.

  The light hurt his eyes.

  “Julian … we have to get up.”

  A much nicer voice. Julian Bashir shifted his arm to cuddle mode as Ezri Dax maneuvered herself closer. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “It’s a big day,” she told him. There was a faint dose of fearful anticipation in her voice. A week ago, he wouldn’t have noticed it, but things changed here every day lately.

  “It was a big night,” he countered. “It cleared up a lot of questions.”

  She turned her pixie-like face up to him. A childlike face, framed in boyish short-clipped black hair, a permanent flicker of uncertainty always passing through it.

  “Such as?” she asked.

  He brushed his hand along the trail of melanin spots on the side of her face, the subtle markings that identified her as one of the most elegantly unique creatures of the known galaxy. “How far those spots go down, for one thing.”

  She smiled, but not without a sparkle of embarrassment. “I suppose you’re going to want to tell Miles.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you tell him everything?”

  Without saying that today they’d all have other things on their minds, Bashir pushed away the rush of possible answers—she was right, he did tell Miles O’Brien everything—and how did she know that about the two men already? She was wrong, and he knew when things between a man and a woman, or a man and a Trill, or a somebody and a somebody else were better kept private.

  Rather than blurting what he was thinking—my God, you’re so young!—he admitted, “True, but this time, I’ll make an exception.”

  “Good,” Ezri murmured. She didn’t believe him, he was sure of that. “Now, we really should get up. We don’t want the Defiant leaving without us.”

  “You know,” Bashir mentioned, “I’ve never gone into battle with someone I’ve slept with.”

  She smiled. “There’s a first time for everything.”

  Not making any move to get up, Bashir added, “Now that we’re finally together, it’d be a shame if anything happened to one of us.”

  Another twist came into her expression, and she didn’t say any more, but Bashir picked up her thoughts as if he had suddenly become clairvoyant. She had been so lonely, so unsure of herself since having seven lifetimes of memories thrust upon her from another person, and another and another … her own identity had abruptly been put on hold, and she was now responsible for a cache of thoughts and knowledge that she hadn’t absorbed. Not all Trill prepared all their lives to have a squirmy receptacle thrust into their bodies and then take over their existence. She was, as far as anyone knew, the only Trill never to be prepared for joining. That made her very special.

  Bashir tried to empathize, but how could he? He was one man, inside one body, with one lifetime to worry about. Yet he admired and pitied Ezri Dax in the same moment, and he questioned his own reasons for wanting the comfort of her touch in these troubled times in deep space.

  “Let’s make a pact,” she said. “We both come home alive.”

  A handshake—simple, but potent.

  He took the hand. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  She smiled. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

  No, no, this wouldn’t do. He leaned toward her, and she met his kiss thankfully, with welcome in her eyes. But then it was over, and before anything else could set in they had rolled out of bed on opposite sides and might as well have landed at opposite ends of a football field.

  Ezri drew her uniform on very quickly, as if the blankets had been her protector and now she couldn’t be unprotected. And Bashir, ridiculously, had yanked on his trousers quite faster than usual—now how was that a way for a grown man and physician to behave? As if he were dressing in front of a … all right, she was very young, never mind that she was three hundred years old.

  The medical wonder of Trilldom struck him again—certainly this girl was no three hundred years old, yet the eight accumulated lifetimes and those of eight hosts all stored within her unprepared mind reached back all those centuries, racking her with confusions he could only guess toward. Sixteen lives bottled up inside that girl over there, who yet was pitiful in her isolation.

  As were they all, upon this turning wonder. As were they all….

  * * *

  “Miles! You’re late! You have to report in fifteen minutes.”

  “Coming, dear.”

  Oh, yes, the joy and fulfillment of having his family with him finally! If only there weren’t a war. Every beginning of watch was like this now—the laughter of his children, the humming of his wife, the clatter of family life—and he knew too well how quickly that paradise could crash and burn. He’d seen it before, the war coming out of nowhere to Deep Space Nine and rushing the station with all the complex agonies and strife caught up in those three little letters … w, a, r….

  Thank the Lord the baby couldn’t spell yet. But Molly could, and she understood.

  That caused pain to Miles O’Brien, as he stepped from his bedroom, pretending there was no care in the universe that could shatter him today. It was only for the children. He couldn’t fool Keiko.

  “Now, remember,” he told his wife as she turned to him while feeding the baby, “Kirayoshi has his checkup tomorrow morning at oh-nine-hundred.”

  She nodded, and he felt silly for having pretended she didn’t remember. By reminding her, he was also putting a spotlight on the fact that he wouldn’t be here tomorrow. He was leaving, and asking her to go on with family life as if nothing were wrong, nothing were happening.

  “I’ve already confirmed the appointment with Nurse Bandee,” she said courageously. “One more bite….”

  “And try to get some rest,” O’Brien pressed on, “and don’t stay up too late writing that paper on whatever those trees are called—”

  “They’re called Arfillian blossoms and they’re not trees, they’re shrubs.”

  He sighed. “All right … anyway, be sure to get some sleep and … oh, yeah, and—”

  “Miles,” Keiko scolded gently, “stop worrying. We’re going to be fine.”

  Fine, she said so easily. Back here on the station, trying to play house on the edge of a war zone, living in a pretty little cottage made of alien metal, just barely managing to keep out the inhospitableness of space with bulkheads that could be so easily ruptured by enemy fire. Just a few light-years from the front—was this a place to raise a family? He had thought being together would make up for all the risks, for the tortures of knowing where he would be for the coming days.

  He’d been wrong.

  “I know,” he said anyway, and leaned over for a kiss.

  “Just you be careful,” Keiko told him.

  “I always am—M
olly, don’t touch that!”

  His daughter recalled her hand just before it would’ve violated the sacred space around the model he and Bashir had so lovingly built. Then she realized her hand had come away with one of the miniature US Army soldiers. Quickly she reassigned the soldier within the Alamo walls.

  Only as his little girl’s ivory hand dipped over the adobe stone partition did O’Brien realize how very large the model had grown. Now taking up a significant portion of the room, the Alamo seemed very real and consequential to him, its soldiers like shipmates. He and Julian had committed many hours to this historical problem of siege and conflict, supply and isolation. One needn’t be a scholar to see the symbolism, and how close he felt to those trapped men and women, struggling to hold out against impossible odds—

  “I let you play with my toys,” Molly complained.

  “It’s not a toy,” he insisted. “It’s a model.”

  Keiko’s doll-like eyes teased him as she continued feeding the baby. “Then maybe it belongs in a museum.”

  O’Brien glanced at her, suddenly embarrassed that the Alamo had sucked away such a large portion of their living quarters. Did seem to have taken over, didn’t it?

  “I suppose I could give it to Julian….”

  “Sounds good to me,” Keiko instantly said. “Speaking of Julian, have you told him about Starfleet’s offer yet?”

  “I haven’t had time,” he stalled.

  Molly wedged her way between them. “I knew it!”

  O’Brien looked down. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We’re not going back to Earth,” his daughter told him bluntly, “that’s what it means.”

  “Of course we are,” O’Brien said to her. “Daddy’s going to teach at the Academy … as soon as the war’s over.”

  Molly’s big brown eyes batted at him. “Then why haven’t you told Julian?”

  As O’Brien groaned, Keiko smiled. “Out of the mouths of babes.”

  Guilt grazed O’Brien’s sense of honor and duty. “I’ll tell him … when I think he’s ready to hear it.” To get himself out of this, he ducked down to kiss Kirayoshi’s plump little face. “I love you. Be a good boy, now. And you,” he said, turning again to Molly, “listen to Mommy while I’m gone.”

  “I always listen to Mommy.”

  As his daughter pranced away, Miles O’Brien found his wife in his arms, a rather more poignant gesture than his little girl’s farewell. He felt ghastly about Molly’s not knowing where he was going today, that this wasn’t an ordinary patrol or your average mission away from the station. Was she old enough to know the truth about where he was going? Should he pay her the respect of telling her? What did the men tell their daughters as they left for Normandy Beach? Protect them with soft deceptions, or give them the honor of knowing what their fathers were setting off to do? Tell them it was nothing, or that it was more important than anything ever before?

  Should he spare the little girl, or should he think of the woman she would be someday, a woman who deserved to be proud, to remember a significant and poetic moment of farewell with her father, who might never return?

  Why wasn’t he wise enough to know what to do?

  Keiko held him tightly, not in a kind of goodbye, but in a kind of sorrowful pledge. Every parting was the last, just in case, and every kiss a promise.

  “Just you be careful,” she murmured.

  “I always am.”

  He always said that, or something like that. An extra squeeze—the sure sign that he could no longer fool her or assure her away from the cold bitter truths of Starfleet service in these dangerous days. She knew too well how quickly, how permanently, things could change on, and around, and because of … Deep Space Nine.

  * * *

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s doing wonders for my head. Except it’s my stomach that’s bothering me.”

  “Well, if it helps, morning sickness usually ends after the first trimester.”

  “That’s three months! I don’t think I’m going to make it!”

  “You’ll make it.”

  That’s an order.—

  Oh, better not add that part. Still, it so often did the trick—once a commander, always a commander. Don’t say it, don’t say it….

  Orders came much better from his low-pitched and decidedly unfeminine voice. How could he rumble out a comfort without sounding like a foghorn in the distance? He could no more make her feel better than create wind in space.

  Always a commander, but it had been twenty-odd years since Benjamin Sisko had last become a father. Twenty very odd years, one might say. Tending a deep space station in upheaval, in a war zone, with cloaked enemies spinning around at arm’s length was nothing to tending a woman in the first grip of motherhood. He’d completely forgotten the whole idea, having had absolutely no plan of getting himself into this all over again.

  Still, he found himself working too hard to press down a grin. Couldn’t let Kasidy think he was laughing at her discomfort. For her, this feeling represented no real live baby, not yet anyway, for she had never experienced the wonder of new life in her arms. For Kasidy Yates, this was little more than a recollection of spacesickness, so long ago conquered. For Ben Sisko, though, it was a tiny beacon of hope and joy in a very bleak void. He longed for the cry of his child, the wonderment in tiny searching eyes, and as any soldier understands, something more in his life to fight for instead of fight against.

  She lay her head on his shoulder. “Promise me something, Ben,” she moaned. “Promise you’ll come back to us.”

  “I promise.”

  Yet they both knew the power of that promise wasn’t in his control.

  Suddenly her eyes shot wide, her face flushed, and she bolted to her feet, rushing for the head like a phaser shot. The door panel slid open, barely fast enough, then hissed shut behind her in time to spare Sisko the joyous sounds of impending motherhood.

  “I don’t believe it….” she said slowly.

  “I said I promise,” he insisted.

  “It’s not that—”

  He wanted to help her, to change things on her behalf—but he’d learned long ago he couldn’t take a hit for anyone in his crew, and there were certainly things he couldn’t do for the woman he loved. Men since time immemorial had been unable to do much, no matter what technology they concocted for the advancement of life’s qualities.

  Oh, well….

  The main door chime spared his having to go over there and mutter comforting sounds into the bulkhead.

  “Come in,” he called.

  The door opened and his first claim to empathy wraithed in, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

  “Glad I caught you.” Jake Sisko bumbled to the replicator, apparently thinking about coffee, then changed his mind and didn’t order anything. “I figured I’d walk you to the Defiant.”

  Sisko stood up. “I’d like that.”

  “How’s Kas?”

  Through the bulkhead she answered for herself with a trumpeting moan.

  “That answer your question?” Sisko said as the head panel opened again and the light of his life staggered back to the couch.

  “Reports of my death,” Kasidy complained, “have been greatly exaggerated. But not by much.”

  Jake frowned. “Isn’t there something you can take to make you feel better?”

  Sisko shook his head and waved a quick hand, not wanting that subject opened up again. He’d been bitten often enough on that suggestion. “She doesn’t believe in taking medication unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  When Kasidy groaned again, Jake shook his head. “Sounds necessary to me….”

  “If you’re going to go,” Kasidy snarled, “then go. Waiting for you to leave only makes me feel worse.”

  Sisko moved to gaze down at her, determined by proximity if nothing else to show her that he was trying to be supportive. “You’re sure I can’t get you anything?”

  But she was gone again—back
to the head. Zoom. Hiss. Clack. Heave.

  Despite his amusement, Sisko’s pride as he turned to his son got the better of him, and he grinned. “I think she’s sure.”

  “Times like this,” Jake commented, “make me glad I’m a man.”

  “Me too,” Sisko admitted as they went out the door side by side. “Damn it, now I feel guilty about it. Well, I suppose that Mother Nature in her wisdom put the better individuals in charge of … of …”

  “The hard part?” Jake leered sidelong at him. “Are you saying men are wimps?”

  “No, but I do feel bad lately.”

  “About what?”

  “Well … about getting a good night’s sleep, for one thing.”

  “Why should that make you feel bad?”

  “First of all, because it’s hard for Kasidy to get one. She keeps tossing and turning. And that excuse for a goodbye … she was doing everything she could to avoid a real goodbye. She thinks they’re bad luck.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Not in so many—”

  “And what else?” Jake interrupted. “What’ve you got to feel guilty about? You’re in charge of a primary outpost in the middle of a center of action. Most military men would grovel to get a position like yours! All the news networks are constantly buzzing about activity at and around Deep Space Nine! The comings and goings, the ships in and out, the changes of control over areas of space around here—Dad, WTYX on Devona Four actually has a DS9 update twice a day!”

  “Hm. There’s not that much news coming out of here, I hope,” Sisko drawled. “After all, we do have our strategic and tactical secrets to keep. There’s a limit to the ‘people’s right to know.’”

  “I don’t think so,” Jake countered. “Freedom of the press is—”

  “Not going to be the first topic of this day, of all days, thank you very much. I already tell you too much, if you get my meaning.”

  “And I’ve put my position as the commander’s son before the people’s right to know. I understand the importance of secrecy too, you know.” Jake shrugged. “It’s still no reason to feel guilty. Getting a good night’s sleep, I mean.”

  “That’s not really it,” Sisko admitted. “The station’s on constant alert status, permanent yellow alert, every Starfleet crewman required to be ready to report to battle stations in three minutes or less, and every one of us, including the illustrious commander, required to get rest on pain of siccing Dr. Bashir on you with a sedative. Did I give that order? What was I thinking?”