Chapter 157 - Through the Looking Glass - Part 8
Stardate 48593.2 - August 5, 2371 - 12:25:55
Staring at the two nearly identical copies of his security officer sitting next to each other in front of his desk, Benjamin Sisko could feel the headache coming on.
He focused his gaze on the one that wasn't sitting with the recognizable stiff backed posture of someone who'd spent four years going through the Academy. “Raine Tendi I take it?”
“Technically,” she nodded before offering a wry smile. “Though I'd really like to change my last name now that I've secured my rule. But of course it's too late to do that because everyone knows me as Queen Tendi.”
Brooks glanced over at her with an odd look. “What's wrong with Tendi?”
“Almost the entire family wants to kill me.” Tendi offered dryly. “Every time I hear the name I have to keep myself from looking over my shoulder for assassins.”
Benjamin made a mental note of that, letting the two women continue their digression so he could build up a better picture of just what kind of person Brooks's doppelganger actually was.
“At least the twins won't have to worry about that.” Tendi grumbled.
“You went with Annika's family name for them?” Brooks inquired in an odd tone.
“Q no,” Tendi shuddered. “Annika hates her parents… No, I went with our birth mothers last name, T'soni.”
The way Brooks cringed at that was more than a little interesting, not the least because it was the first thing Benjamin could ever recall hearing the Asari say about her life prior to the unfortunate spatial displacement that resulted in her ending up on Earth.
“Why did you have to say that,” Brooks muttered half under her breath. “Now Commander Sisko's going to have to enter it into the record.”
“Is there a reason I shouldn't?” Benjamin asked, not particularly against leaving the name out if the Lieutenant Commander had a good enough reason for it.
“Not really,” Brooks reluctantly admitted as she turned a mortified glare at her mirror. “It's just embarrassing for several reasons I really don't want to talk about.”
Tendi rolled her eyes. “Yeah well, the Klingons needed to know my mothers name. And unlike you I didn’t end up adopted into a happy little starfleet family that gave me a new one.”
Putting that aside to dig further into later, Benjamin turned an expectant look to the currently disguised Queen. “I’d like to know just how you got onto my station and just what you are doing here?”
“We beamed over via a Multi-dimensional transporter.” Tendi admitted. “Our O'Brien invented it.”
“And with it you can just beam yourself anywhere in our universe?” Benjamin probed, dreading the security problems Starfleet was going to have to try and deal with if that was true.
“Not anywhere,” Tendi admitted. “I don't know the science behind it myself, but the transporter modifications only work in a few specific solar-systems like Bajor, Barzan, and Halkan.”
“Barzan has a semi-stable wormhole and Halkan is where the first crossover with the Enterprise occured.” Brooks offered helpfully.
“So locations with preexisting subspace instabilities.” Benjamin muttered, hiding the relief from his voice.
“More or less,” Tendi nodded. “In my universe my flagship is currently orbiting right where this station is.”
“As to what I’m doing here,” She shuffled to sit up straight in her chair. “I want my Orb back.”
Benjamin raised a single eyebrow. “Your Orb?”
“Yes,” Tendi scowled. “My Orb. Jadzia stole it from my ship as part of whatever scheme Nerys is playing at.”
“She requested asylum with the Bajoran's.” Benjamin volunteered, narrowing his eyes in the way he knew usually made Brooks uneasy to see if it would have the same effect on her counterpart. “Something about your annexing Bajor and the planet's new government trying to kill her?”
Tendi flinched as if struck. “That wasn't me…” She grimaced. “I mean, the annexing part was. But everyone who directly works for me knows I draw a hard line at killing children or pregnant women if it can at all be avoided.”
“So if she wasn't pregnant you would have ordered her killed?” Benjamin pressed, sensing a lever he could use to dig further into whatever was actually going on here.
Tendi scrunched up her face. “Maybe? But outside of the Orb, Nerys is pretty much at the bottom of my list of priorities given the only thing she really has going for her is a miraculous ability to avoid the consequences of her own actions.”
“Yes,” Benjamin nodded. “We heard about your war with the new Terran Empire.”
“I would have loved to avoid it given how many other issues I have on my plate.” Tendi sighed. “But with the way things were going the Alliance was maybe a year away from losing containment completely. And at that point we would have been fighting a war with them either way. One we probably would have lost given the way the universe seems to actively fight any attempt to stop them from returning to power.”
Brooks pursed her lips, seeming to consider that in a way Benjamin had come to recognize as her mentally debating whether to admit something she probably shouldn’t have known. “It’s probably temporal inertia. Due to certain heavily impactful events already happening in a past future those events want to happen in the current present.”
“What?” Both Benjamin and Tendi said at the same time, the confusion in both their voices making their inability to make sense from the other Asari’s words absolutely clear.
Sighing, Brooks shot Benjamin a somewhat judging stare. “People changed time, but time’s like water flowing through a dug out groove and wants to continue flowing through that groove instead of going down the new path.”
“The dominos.” Benjamin finally followed along.
“Yes, well,” Tendi tiredly sighed. “Putting aside time travel discussions. The simple political truth is that due to the Alliance’s gross mismanagement most of the worlds I annexed were mere months away from signing back up with the Empire.”
Given everything they knew about the Terran Empire that didn’t make a lot of sense to Benjamin, and it must have shown on his face.
“You have to understand,” Tendi continued. “For all its many atrocities, the Terran Empire basically created the same effect your Federation has of dragging the various worlds who join up into importance.”
“Then once they fell,” Benjamin murmured, his mind going back to the many stellar politics lessons he’d had with Curzon over the years. “It would have been the fall of Rome all over again.”
Tendi gave a grave nod. “Worse, because the Alliance’s corruption basically strangled most non-alliance controlled forms of interstellar trade.”And suddenly all of the disparate puzzle pieces of Brooks’s duplicate clicked together for Benjamin. “You’re trying to save those worlds.”
The slight flinch was all the answer he needed so he went on. “And let me guess, you annexed Bajor to try and prevent the Alliance from learning about and exploiting the wormhole?”
“The Alliance learning about the wormhole is inevitable," Tendi said gravely. “One of the Alliance's top scientists, Jennifer Sisko, is working on a new transpectral sensor array to open up the Badlands for resource exploitation. The moment it's finished and starts scanning, the Bajoran wormhole is going to show up like a beacon.”
She kept talking, however the words didn't register with Benjamin, his mind frozen at name.
“Did you say Jennifer Sisko?” He finally managed to get out.
It couldn't be her, he knew that logically of course, but there was still that traitorous little voice in the back of his head whispering, how close is close enough.
“Dont do that too yourself, sir.” Brooks softly put forward before shooting a chastising glare at her counterpart. “It never ends well for anybody.”
“I did,” Tendi nodded, ignoring the other Asari. “And yes, she's your counterpart's ex-wife. If my intelligence is to be believed, the two separated ten years ago after things turned sour between them due to a combination of his cheating and her having all the emotional availability of one of your universe's Vulcans.”
It took less than a second for the obvious connective question to raise itself in Benjamin's mind. “What about Jake?”
“Doesn't exist,” Tendi said, only to purse her lips in seeming consideration. “Or given the oddness of things between our two universes, I suppose it's possible he might be in Nerys's belly right now.”
“She's having a girl.” Brooks offered dryly.
“Oh,” Tendi muttered as a calculating look flashed in her eyes. “That could be problematic in the long term.” She glanced over at Brooks before expanding. “The psych profiles my people put together on Nerys said it was likely she would dump a boy on the father. While a girl would poke her narcissism hard enough that she'd actually make the attempt to raise her.”
“And that’s problematic?” Benjamin frowned, not liking what the Asari was implying.
“Of course,” Tendi nodded before continuing with complete seriousness. “She might raise the girl to come after me as part of some sort of revenge plot.”
Grabbing his baseball off the stand on the side of his desk to help fight off the feeling of annoyance he could feel building, he glanced over at Brooks to see the Asari looking distinctly like she wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.
“I will keep your words in mind, but you need to understand, even if it can be proven that the Orb belongs in your universe, we can’t just give it to you.”
“I’m not planning to keep it,” Tendi snapped. “Its return is part of the annexation deal I struck with Winn.”
Benjamin added that to his mental tabulation before leaning back in his chair with a sigh. “You’re not understanding the problem, Starfleet can’t give you the Orb because it’s not ours and we have no legal grounds to seize it. So if you want it back you’re going to have to ask either the Bajoran’s, or your version of Kira Nerys.”
“That’s,” Tendi began her voice radiating sheer disbelief. “You’re really playing the bureaucratic technicality game?”
“It’s not a bureaucratic technicality,” Brooks countered with clear annoyance at her duplicate. “If we seized the Orb and handed it to you there’s a very real risk of turning the Bajoran’s against Starfleet’s continued presence in the Bajor system.”
“Then just tell your people to look the other way while we steal it,” Tendi scowled. “I’ll even promise to leave everyone on Sisko’s ship alive.”
“That’s not an option for several reasons,” Benjamin told her sternly. “What we can do, assuming everything matches what you claim, is facilitate any negotiations you may wish to conduct for the Orb.”
Which was really all they could do without stepping over several lines he knew would come back to bite them in the ass.
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“You have an Orb.” Major Kira Nerys said the moment the doors to the ambassadorial suite finished closing behind her.
It was just the former Intendant in the room thankfully, her heavily pregnant duplicate relaxing in an overly tight fluffy red bathrobe on the plush looking lounger in the corner of the room.
“Someone’s been snooping where she shouldn’t.” The former Intendant singsonged.
She offered Nerys an amused grin. “Though I suppose I can't really complain given I would have done the exact same thing in your position. “
“Then you're not denying it?” Nerys asked as she walked over to stand in front of her doppleganger's chair.
With a worrying amount of effort the pregnant woman pushed herself up into a full sitting position whereupon she studied Nerys's face for several seconds before grinning impishly. “I think we both know you wouldn't be here asking me if it wasn't already far too late for that, my dear. No, the real question is what your Bajor is going to offer me in exchange for it.”
An odd feeling of disappointment washed over Nerys at the words, though she wasn’t really able to put a finger on why given how predictable the other woman's words were.
“You look disappointed?” The former Intendant giggled.
“It's just…” Nerys began, knowing she was taking a chance here but having the feeling in her gut that it was the right direction to take things. “I thought there would be more to it than that.”
“Well,” the former Intendant sighed dramatically. “There was. It just didn't work out. You see, one of the many things mother managed to get her hands on over the years was an ancient text known as the Book of the Kosst Amojan.”
Nerys's eyes went wide in alarm only for the former Intendant to hold up a finger and wag it scoldingly at her.
“Now, now. Do keep in mind that in our universe it was your Prophets who lost their fight with the Pah-Wraiths and ended up sealed away. Supposedly the book was written by someone touched by the Prophets and detailed how to channel their power and free them from their imprisonment.”
“Supposedly?” Nerys repeated, her voice rife with skepticism, really wishing Antos was here with her since he would have been able to do a much better job of picking out what was likely a good number of lies sprinkled within the former Intendant's words.
“There were protections on the book that prevented anyone from reading it. But I managed to bypass them with the help of an El-Aurien who owed me a favor. Which is when I found out that doing anything would require access to one of the Prophets oh so lost Orbs.”
Tension shot through Nerys at the thought of just what her doppelganger might be able to do with the power of the Prophets at her fingertips.
The former Intendant giggled. “You really should work on your poker face, Major. However you'll likely be relieved to hear that that supposedly was because the only power I was able to draw out from the Orb was the ability to see the many many ways I was going to die.”
And with those words suddenly everything about her doppelganger's arrival made sense to Nerys. “We were your only chance.”
“Not you in specific," the former Intendant corrected with an amused smile. “That little wormhole you call the celestial temple. Everything focused the moment I chose to take our ship through it instead of trying to outwit the many forces arrayed against me.”
“Truely,” she hugged herself, shuddering in an oddly vulnerable way before continuing. “That power was nothing more than a curse. One that thankfully left me when I nearly died while passing through the wormhole into your bright and cheery universe.”
“A curse?” Nerys cocked her head, unable to work out how that might work with everything the other woman had described. “You're going to have to explain that a bit better. Because being able to see how not to die seems like it would be pretty useful.”
“You would certainly think.” The former Intendant sighed, sounding oddly tired given the energy she had shown mere minutes ago. “But imagine feeling yourself die a dozen times for every moderately important decision you make. Trust me when I say it was a torture I would only reserve for my very worst enemies.”
Such a perfectly poetic sounding lesson about being careful what you reach for left Nerys wondering if the Prophets might have taken more than a little umbrage at her counterpart’s trespass. Though she supposed it was probably for the best if she didn't mention that possibility to the woman given she was very much the type to take such a thing personally.
“Like Garak,” the pregnant woman continued with a grin, clearly happy imagining the Cardassian suffering such a fate. “And that horrible Winn Adami.”
“I’m sure we could talk about our shared dislike for Vedek Winn for several hours,” Nerys digressed. “But we need to talk about–”
The chirp of the combadge on her breast interrupted her before she could finish, and she offered the pregnant woman an apologetic glance before turning away from her and tapping the badge to accept the communication. “Kira here.”
“Major,” Sisko’s voice echoed out in acknowledgement. “Are you still with our guest?”
“Yes, sir.” Nerys confirmed.
“Is there any chance you and she would be able to join us in the conference room?”
Glancing back at the other woman, Nerys took note of the way the pregnant woman had almost immediately slumped back down the moment she had turned away. “She could probably use another day or two to recover given her recent injuries.”
Several seconds of silence passed before Sisko’s voice returned. “All right, we’ll be heading down there then. We have another guest from the other universe who wants to have some words with the former Intendant.”
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Author’s Notes: Ug… This episode is dragging on a lot longer than I would have liked, but hopefully it should only be another chapter or two before we’re on to Improbable Cause and The Die is Cast.