This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper
-TS Eliot, The Hollow Men
She was dying, he knew, she was dead. All that Benjamin Lafayette Sisko could do was to watch or perhaps not to watch and just consider it. And despite the cold restrictions of his choices, he could not decide. All he could do was stare past his soot-streaked uniform at the deckplates of the lifeboat and try to rouse his battle-shocked brain into some form of action. Beyond him, the other officers of the lifeboat moaned or gasped as their injuries were tended to, but Sisko didn't even register them. His crew, his people, his ultimate responsibility was pushed aside by the raw, emotional nerve-endings, and the horror of his position at the precipice of the end of the world.
He lifted his eyes to the viewport, though he did not know why and it would be a long time before he did. Beyond the transparent aluminum he watched as the Saratoga vanished behind a cluster of blossoming explosions-Jennifer's only funereal pyre-and left only debris, surviving crew, and fragile lifeboats as her legacy to the mission. A moment later there was nothing.
She was dead.
She was gone.
And there would never be another.
Ben Sisko thought about his son and the soot that stained his red uniform. All that remained of Jennifer Sisko and the USS Saratoga, NCC-31911. All he had to carry him into the dim, distant future.
The room was still cold.
Sisko scowled and keyed the environmental control on his desk, set the temperature up another few degrees. This damn station was always cold. Cold and gray. Like a Minnesota winter, he mused, remembering the year and a half internship he'd spent there working at Janarious Prime Corporation's main R&D office, learning EPS designs before his acceptance to Starfleet Academy came through.
Beyond the angular, Cardassian-designed viewports of his office, he saw the sprawling Ops center and the skeleton staff currently manning it. Dax, was there, the new Dax. Sisko hadn't sorted out precisely how he felt about her yet, but with a rattle-trap station the only outpost guarding the only stable wormhole ever discovered, and with him the commanding officer of the station, supported by a Bajoran XO who neither liked nor trusted him, the Dax matter would have to wait.
The off-hours lighting had kicked in, casting long shadows over his desk and office. He should be in his quarters now, he knew, but Jake was on a class-expedition on Bajor and the emptiness of his quarters was depressing. He hadn't been alone in a residence long, long time. Since before Jennifer.
So he sat alone in his office-a place where solitude was more welcome-tinkering with the schematics he'd held onto when he took command of DS9. It was a pointless little activity-the equivalent of a holodeck adventure replaying an old battle of some forgotten war. Pointless, but absorbing. As it was, the USS Valiant most likely would never amount to more than a spaceframe suspended alone in a distant berth at Utopia Planetia Shipyards where she would stay until Sisko's credit with the engineering staff ran out and they dismantled her for parts. Or perhaps, they'd produce a prototype. Put her through her paces and record the results, then shelve her until she was old enough or novel enough for a museum.
And what would they say about her? Sisko wondered. That she was an overreaction. Overkill. The product not of the cold, calculation of an engineer's mind, but of pain and anguish and fear of the Borg menace.
Issues beyond his control. Sisko rearranged the nacelle design on his schematics. Expanding them and widening them to house phaser-cannons. That would increase the little ship's firepower by four-fold. He then turned his attention to her structural design. This, he decided, would be the closest thing to an indestructible ship Starfleet had ever seen. This would be a ship that would keep her crew safe. No collapsed beams. No crumbling superstructure. No dead wives...
This time was not like before, Sisko mused blackly as he watched the carnage unfold in vivid, blood-red and vibrant oranges the color of sunsets through the ozone. There was no hesitation, and he watched all that he could through the lifeboat's viewport. The fleet was in ruins, reduced to burning pitted hulks. No old designs this time. No rough, desperate massing of ships ill-suited for battle. On this field there lay the best, the finest technologies of the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans. Akiras, Galaxies, Nebulas, Vor'Chas, Warbirds-all ships designed and built for battle, all drifted dead and useless, massive targets for precision shots from the impassive Cardassian, Dominion, and Breen fleets.
The enemies hung back, casually deigning to go no further. They did not have to. Chin'Toka was theirs. The field was theirs. Possibly all of the Alpha Quadrant would soon be theirs.
Theirs as well was the USS Defiant, abandoned and adrift, tossed by the Breen's torpedoes like mouse that had run afoul of a particularly mean cat. Her hull had buckled, her skin burned and peeling taking her designation and registry, reducing her to so much material. Sisko watched the two torpedoes arc along their deadly trajectory and impact the dorsal hull. These were the kill shots, he knew, the ones that would finally take his ship from him.
He did not look away, for these were not times for cowardice, but watched as the Defiant split down her axis with the massive energy-release of the Breen torpedoes, bled burning gasses, crystalizing vapor, and scatterings of debris; then finally exploded. The ship he had built-the last thing he'd ever built-Jennifer's legacy, and the best thing that had ever been produced by the soul-eviscerating Borg assault on Wolf 359 was now just garbage in the void.
Sisko wondered if this wasn't the best way to kill a man. Simply keep taking everything that he believed himself to be until there was nothing left. The Borg had taken his crew, his mission and his wife. The war had taken his life as a builder and a protector, and now the Dominion had taken his ship, his command, his creation. He spent the slow trip back to the rendezvous point, and the wait for the rescue ships pondering if he had anything left to lose, or if killing him would be redundant.
The silence was getting heavy, and while Joseph Sisko didn't ordinarily like talking for no reason, he didn't like his son's glum manner as he shelled the crawfish. Attitude like that and he'd take the meat with the shell, and then the gumbo would be watery. Besides, Ben was too intense for a boy his age. He had his mother's way about him, quiet and stolid-not like his sister, Judy. Judy was closer to himself-easygoing and engaging. Now if he could get that girl to stop being so damned stingy with the Cayenne pepper, he could be sure that she'd grow up to be fine woman.
Ben noisily split the shell of a crawfish and haphazardly ripped it away from the body in a spray of fresh, moist meat. "Hey there, boy," Joseph called to him, "mind what you do there. Shelling a crawfish's like anything else you do in a kitchen. It's got to be precise and mindful."
Ben scowled at him as he picked another of the shellfish out of his bucket. "They're just crayfish, Dad. Nobody likes 'em anyway. That's why you have to mix 'em in the gumbo-just to people to eat them."
Joseph stepped over to his son and plunked one from the bucket. "You watch yourself there, boy," he said easily, "just because the Academy wait-listed you doesn't give you any right to treat the noble crawfish any disrespect."
Ben turned away, lowered his eyes into his own private, morose thoughts.
"You know back when the Earth was separated into countries, they had animals as mascots."
"I know, Dad," Ben said exasperated. "America's was the bald eagle."
"Ah," Joseph waved the crawfish pointedly, "but did you know that the Cajuns wanted it to be the crawfish?"
"That's dumb."
"That's what a lot of people though. 'Course they were all people who didn't know nothin' about crawfishes."
"They're ugly, little...water roaches," Ben spat.
Joseph shrugged, "Could be, but they're reasoning was solid enough."
"What'd they say?"
Joseph slipped into his best bayou accent, "You put dat eagle on dem train tracks, and dat train come 'long, well, what he gonna do? He gonna fly away, him. But you put de crawdaddy on dem same tracks, you what you think he do when that train come 'long?" Ben's eyes met his father's curious, but not wanting to admit it. Joseph waggled his crawfish. "He gonna put up him claws and try an' stop dat train!"
Ben stifled a laugh. Then let it out in a breathy guffaw. "He's gonna get squished for his trouble."
"But he's gonna stand his ground."
Ben laughed again and took the crawfish from his father's hand. "Maybe they can be the official animal of the Klingon Empire."
"Make a nice ornament on those fancy suits of armor they're always wearing, that's for sure," Joseph laughed with his son.
"A warrior's crustacean," Ben snarled Klingon-like, hefting the crawfish aloft.
They joked and laughed and shelled crawfish late into the muggy, New Orleans night. Joseph considered pausing the reverie to explain to his son that the wait-list was only a minor setback, that with every failure was sown the seeds for new directions and successes and the despair was only the fact that he couldn't yet see them. Two lost wives and a couple of failed businesses had taught him that.
In the end, he decided against it. The boy wouldn't believe him anyway. These were lessons learned over the course of a lifetime, imparted every time that all seemed lost, that the world seemed to end.