Star Trek: Primmin’s War

By the time of my brief posting at Deep Space Nine, I had already been in Starfleet six years. Like most officers, my career to that point was pretty routine. I had a job and did it, and it really wasn’t much more complicated than that. The assignment, the circumstances didn’t matter. Even as a security officer with increasing responsibility because of my reliability and efficiency and even uncommon insight, if I could be permitted to indulge my ego a little, work was work. There are certainly postings that see challenges, the truly weird things space can throw at you, but the truth is, Starfleet as a whole doesn’t really function that way. It is what it is. It’s like any other office job. I learned as much as I could and did my job as well as I could, but at the end of the day, it was just a job.

At the Cardassian monstrosity run by Bajorans but administrated by Starfleet (honestly, the whole setup itself was so far outside the norm that I couldn’t possibly have known what I was getting myself into), I ended up working alongside a shapeshifter named Odo, who had been running security at the station under the Cardassians but whose services were retained first by the Bajorans and then Starfleet under Benjamin Sisko, whose rank was commander when I served under him. Sisko had seen action at the Battle of Wolf 359, and rumor had it still suffered PTSD from it. Starfleet gave him the assignment half out of his years of experience with the colorful Trill ambassador Curzon Dax but mostly because it had few expectations except a babysitting operation for its role there, more out of fear the Cardassians would prove difficult than any belief the Bajorans would prove a valuable new ally, should they even apply for membership in the Federation, which scuttlebut doubted.

Sisko made it clear I was to respect Odo’s authority, that my job was to concern myself with strictly Starfleet matters. A lot of alien cultures not directly affiliated with us believe we tend to interpret that liberally, and I guess that sometimes leads some of us to act accordingly. I confess I may have leaned that way, initially, when I arrived at the station. I didn’t take Odo’s authority seriously. And then it became clear Sisko did...I guess I got a little lazy. I forgot how unique this assignment was. I began to treat it as just another assignment, just another job.

And I guess this didn’t sit well with Sisko, who like a lot of command officers was somewhat protective of his staff, even Odo, even Major Kira, the Bajoran liaison working under him. I was supposed to slot into this emerging family, and I didn’t.

So I left within a few weeks. 

The good news, or so it seemed initially, was that I was put aboard the Crazy Horse, under Captain Plant, which was assigned early exploration of the Gamma Quadrant, which Starfleet suddenly had access to thanks to the wormhole that popped up in Bajoran space, adjacent to the station, which made Sisko’s job that much more interesting, and increasingly so, and so, so much more important, the more we learned about the Dominion.

Captain Plant was not particularly imaginative, and running security aboard the Crazy Horse meant very little. We didn’t get into trouble, at all. We hardly saw much at all. It was mostly a survey of spacial phenomena. I could tell you all about particle density in asteroid belts, if you’re interested. We never saw the Dominion, never even knew it existed, until, of course, Sisko ran into it.

By that point, ships like ours were pulled out, and Sisko’s shiny new Defiant was given the mandate. Of course, by that point Starfleet had attempted a few more times to assign a security officer to the station, and eventually Sisko, and Odo, relented. Michael Eddington got that job after years spent overseeing colonial resettlement efforts in the region, in and out of the DMZ. I knew Eddington from my Academy days. He always played his cards close to his chest. I guess I wasn’t surprised when he defected to join the Maquis.

The Crazy Horse, with Plant and myself still aboard, didn’t even get to engage in the Klingon war. We were given “strategic defense service” in Bolian space, which is how I met Noi, whom I eventually married. By that point I requested assignment to the Starfleet station in orbit of Bole’s fifth moon, Balamin, from which, utilizing its famed Observatory, there’s an excellent view of the famous Cliffs.

Life at Epsilon Zeta was about the speed I knew best. It was the definition of routine. By the time the Dominion War itself broke out, I was so thoroughly ingrained in the life of the station there was no question that I was to remain there. Nothing much happened. There was no war there. Not even the Breen cared about us, and the Breen are well known for their indiscriminate nature. Just to be certain, I initiated a plan against every contingency of attack by them, and received a commendation for it, if you must know.

Then the war ended, and the enlisted guy they had at Deep Space Nine running operations, Miles O’Brien, stopped by on his way back to Earth so he could teach at the Academy (that daughter of his was precocious!), and we had a brief conversation. He seemed baffled at how little I thought of my time there. But what can I say? It’s just a job. I don’t let it get to me. And I get by! 

So anyway, that’s as close as I got to that whole business. I told you it wasn’t going to be interesting.

Bloodwynd in “A Crisis at Zero Hour”

It had occurred to me almost from the moment I joined the Justice League that I was not interested in superheroics. This is not to say that I was not interested in what superheroes do, but that I was not interested in participating in it myself. The team dynamics unsettled me, the constant suspicions, and I never truly felt a part of it.

Instead, I opted to hold my own council. I looked for a more human scale to this business. My powers, such as they are, appear somewhat grotesque to me, when I am not careful. I wonder if they are not inherently a source of potential abuse. I know where they came from, how they were conceived, and as such my sense of duty can at times seem overwhelming, and I have spent much of my life attempting to calm myself.

Last week something terrible happened. It was the kind of thing that could not be undone, only punished, and yet I found myself wondering what else might be done, so I used my powers in an unconventional fashion.

I brought the man back, and I listened to him. It didn’t take any prompting at all, whether from the emotion of the situation or my fanciful outfit, perhaps the fact that we looked so much like each other. He trusted me. This is what he said:

“I refused, at first, to admit that I had made a mistake. The first instinct anyone has in situations like that is to dig in, in the rash hope that if you believe something strongly enough that you can convince others, through sheer force of will, that everything is absolutely fine. Of course, now I realize people believe what’s convenient in the moment. They’re generous when they’re sympathetic. What I was doing there at all, I wasn’t even thinking about, at the time, but now I can’t stop.

“I was desperate. I made a bad decision. Wasn’t the first time, but sometimes bad decisions are all we have, and we were all in the middle of a series of bad decisions at the time, and most of them were also the right ones, and...Still, it was a bad decision, and I wish I could take it back. I wish I could have just talked it out with someone, but some things people don’t really want to talk about. They voice their frustrations. But they rarely have answers. They have anger. But anger isn’t always enough.

“If given the option, that situation would have turned everything around for me. I’m serious. Never again. I know, vows are easy to make. And they’re easier to break. Sometimes you have to break them just to survive, just to have a chance. But sometimes you have to keep them, to survive, to have a chance. Suddenly nothing was more important than the chance to look back and say, Never again.

“I can’t look at what happened and hate. Hate was never really in me. Desperation. Panic. Fear. But not hate.”

Then he was silent. He asked me what happened next. I told he I honestly didn’t know. If there is a relief to the idea of being a superhero, it’s that the job ends at saving the day, even when you’re too late, as I was that day. It becomes someone else’s responsibility, a network on which we are meant to depend, although perhaps there is room for improvement. I looked at the man and I apologized, even though, again, I was too late. He said, after a moment, that maybe it was okay, that maybe I would get it right the next time, that as long as there was the will to do the right thing, that perhaps, in the end, more people would choose that option, and I would no longer, with all my useless power, feel compelled to apologize. He didn’t say another word. He was dead again.

And I was alone. This is how I prefer it. But there are times I think perhaps I am wrong to prefer it that way. There is much good to be done. This business of superheroes often seems as if it accomplishes nothing so much as giving those of us empowered to participate an excuse to parade ourselves. And yet, sometimes the responsibility humbles me.