“Emissary?” Suki said, guardedly, a sense of shock, and a very deep torrent of confusion, jolting through her. In an instant, Toph’s words to her in the Enterprise sickbay came flowing back to her, ‘Then I was visited by a mysterious voice,’ she remembered her friend saying, after waking up from a place of peace inside her own mind to a universe that seemed to be perpetually at war. ‘She said I had a destiny to complete. That I had to save humanity from being drowned in fire and blood so the Emissary could be born.’
“I don’t understand this,” Suki said, utterly utter confusion reigning through her as she shook her head, “A mysterious voice came to a friend of mine a couple months ago while she was convalescing in the sickbay aboard Enterprise, claiming that she had to ‘save humanity from being drowned in fire and blood in order for an Emissary to be born.’” She squinted with incredulity at this man before her, Sisko, suspicion on her voice. “But if you’re the Emissary…,”
Sisko raised his hand, causing Suki to instinctively stop the flow of words tumbling from her mouth. Suki was amazed at how quickly she stopped herself at Sisko’s gesture. He was one of those people who radiated strength of will, who wore authority as though it were clothes he wore every day. But what most got to her were his eyes, so calm, so in control. There were only so many people who could do that. Jonathan Archer was one, and Aang was another. She had even seen that potential in Ty Lee. As a matter of fact, the people who’d served under her in the past had seen it in her, though she had never understood why.
“From the perspective of you, Toph and Ty Lee,” Sisko said calmly. “I haven’t been born yet. I won’t be born for another one hundred and seventy-seven years. This place we’re in, it exists outside of linear time.”
“So basically,” she said slowly, comprehension filling her, along with a fair amount of shock and annoyance. “It’s the destiny of Toph, Ty Lee, and I to ensure that our race survives so you can be born close to two centuries from my perspective?”
Sisko, a sympathetic look in his eyes said, “That’s basically it.” Sisko shook his head, “I apologize profusely for everything that’s happened to the three of you because of your destiny. You see, I have no more real control over that then you have. From my perspective, the events you’re living through happened nearly two hundred years before I was even born.”
“Then who is behind it?” Suki asked a riot of emotions raging through her, anger and confusion being chief among them. “Who’s pulling these strings? Who’s the reason I’m lying dead on the deck of a Klingon ship so far from home?”
Sisko fixed her with a somewhat perplexed look and folded his arms in front of his chest. “Do you really have to ask that question?” He asked pointedly. “I would think the answer to that question is fairly obvious.”
Suki, mentally slapping herself for her idiot question, lowered her head and closed her eyes in annoyance. “Of course,” she said after a moment of silence between the two of them. “It would be her wouldn’t it?”
“Of course,” a familiar feminine voice said from behind her. Suki, annoyance and anger filling her, turned around slowly. Sure enough, she saw, standing behind her, in the MACO uniform in which she’d been appearing to her ever since that first time in the Western Air Temple what seemed a lifetime ago, the entity that had taken the form of Ty Lee. She gave off that feeling of preternatural knowledge of the secrets and meanings of the universe that the real Ty Lee, and everyone other mortal being she ever met, simply lacked.
“You have to forgive my mother,” Sisko said from behind her, a knowing and faintly annoyed tone on his voice. “She has this unfortunate tendency to do everything in the most convoluted manner possible.”
At the words, “my mother,” Suki, her eyes widened as utter shock and confusion resurged in her breast, turned around gave Sisko a look of utter shock. After a few seconds of her head buzzing in confusion, her shock addled mind finally recovered sufficiently so she could put words to her confusion, even if they remained confined to her mind, You’ve got to be kidding me?
“She took possession of my biological mother and while in control of her, married my father and gave birth to me,” Sisko informed her, a note of sadness in his eyes and voice. “In the real world whenever she appeared to me she appeared in the guise of my mother.” Sisko pointed back to the entity behind her. Suki, curiosity reaching her even through her utter shock turned slowly back around and looked at the entity. Her breath caught in her throat. Standing before her was not Ty Lee, but instead a woman only a few inches taller than her, as both her and Ty Lee had reached their adult heights, with dark skin, black hair and brown eyes, clad in a blue dress. Her features had changed, yet she still possessed that sense of things, that she wasn’t any mortal being, with all the limitations that came with it.
“So, why?” Suki asked after she had worked through the extreme confusion associated with this revelation. “What purpose does my death serve? How does it ensure mankind’s survival?”
“Remember what I told you, Suki?” the being before her said calmly. “That there are those who die who live to tell the tale. You have died, yes. But you’re Starfleet comrades have found you and you will live again.”
Suki stood there, all the breath gone from her lungs, feeling as though rooted to the spot, shock coursing through her. I’m going to live, I’m going to live! Sokka doesn’t have to endure the pain of losing another woman he loves and I don’t have to leave my friends. And I can return to my command, I can still lead the Kyoshi Warriors. The burden of leadership doesn’t have to fall on my friend’s shoulders yet. Then the obvious question entered her thoughts, pushing back the raging waters of happiness that were flowing through her.
“But why?” She found herself saying. “What was the point of putting me through that if I was going to live?”
“I must again apologize,” Sisko responded fixing her a sympathetic look. “But it wasn’t your death that will serve humanity in the trials to come. Rather it will be the experience of dying. You and your friends need to learn that the path the Prophets have set out for you is one of darkness and pain, far beyond anything you ever experienced before you left your world. You needed to know that sometimes that sometimes the path demands of you terrible sacrifice. It’s something I had to learn myself at some great cost.”
She nodded, comprehension dawning on her. If they had simply taken me here and told me without any of the events of the past few months, I would’ve scoffed at it at the least, and dismissed it as delusion at the most. “I understand.” At the mention of her friends fear and concern for Ty Lee and the others, still on the Klingon ship while at least her soul was here, safe outside time. Mingled concern and shame burned through her like a brand as she cursed her own self-centeredness. She sighed, a deep and heavy sigh filled with fear and sadness, and asked, seeking a response from no one in particular. “And are my friends safe?”
Sisko and his “mother” shared a long look with each other. Finally his “mother” said, her voice betraying no emotion, “Katara, Toph, and Zuko all live.”
Relief flooded her like a cool river at the Prophet’s words. She couldn’t bear the thought of Sokka losing his sister and the rest of their friends. He’d known Katara and Toph, and even Zuko, longer than he’d known her, and it would be a disaster for him to lose them, as it would deeply wound her, who’d grown to see them as her own dear friends as well.
“And Ty Lee?” She asked, sudden worry for her executive officer, and , and this she still couldn’t quite belief, best friend, gripping her heart in an icy vise. “What of her?”
Sisko a sad look in her eyes, responded, “She lives, but…,” and Sisko’s eyes abruptly looked to the side away from her.
“What?” Suki said, fear and shock gripping her heart. Sisko sighed and looked back at her.
“Perhaps you should see for yourself,” Sisko said, nodding, his voice mournful. Abruptly the bright light flashed, assaulting her eyes with a painfully bright light. She closed her eyes against the pain when abruptly the light disappeared from behind her eyelids. She opened her eyes to find herself standing in the Enterprise sickbay, Sisko standing next to her and staring over at the other end of the room. She followed Sisko’s gaze over and saw a group of people in gray surgical garb clustered around a biobed at the farther end of the room, nearest the imaging chamber.
“We need to get these veins tied off and these wounds sealed up before she bleeds out,” he heard Phlox’s insistent voice say from the center of the mass of people.
Fear cut at her as deep as a knife and she found her legs moving over to the group of her own volition, Sisko keeping pace with her as they walked. She spotted an opening at the right end of the mass and walked over, her mind numb with fear for her friend and her heart a blaze of pain. She turned around, and shock tore through her as though a bomb had gone off right next to her, the fragments tearing at her flesh. Ty Lee lay on the biobed, her bare arms and legs covered in blood, still showing a slight pattern indented from where they’d cut her uniform away to facilitate access to the flesh wounds, which looked to be freshly sutured and bandaged. The worst part, the part that drew her gaze and squeezed at her heart was that there was a huge gash in her chest near her ribs which everyone seemed to be focused on, surgical gauze was placed around the wound to absorb the dark red blood that was gushing forth from the hideous gash as Phlox, a desperate look on his face concentrated his attention on using the autosuture to repair the veins. Ty Lee’s skin looked deathly pale and there was a plastic tube stuck in her mouth which was connected to a tank of pure oxygen, while a needle stuck out of her arm connected to an IV bag half the size of Suki’s head, continuously draining blood into Ty Lee’s body.
“The Klingons caused several puncture wounds, lacerations, and contusions,” Sisko pointed out, looking at the woman, her body wracked with the abuses of combat as she lay there. Phlox and his medics worked to patch up the damage done to her by the Klingons, oblivious to the spiritual presence of her and Sisko. “They broke her ribs,” he continued, “which caused one of them to puncture her right lung, but they have to get a handle on the bleeding and preventing infection first.”
No! Her mind screamed unwilling to accept the sight of the broken, bleeding woman on the biobed before her. No, she cannot die! Please! “She can’t die,” she said looking at Sisko, tears in her eyes. “My people need her.” The realization she’d been secretly fighting for weeks creeping forward in the back of her mind like some monster out of legend.
“I have no control over these events,” Sisko said pointedly. “This has already happened from my perspective.”
Heedless of Sisko’s words, she finally gave voice to the words that had been at the back of her mind for weeks, lurking there despite every attempt to convince herself otherwise since the rescue of the Kyoshi Warriors from the Rock. “You don’t understand, they need her because…because I failed them as a commander,” the painful realization cut through Suki’s spine like a sword, blowing away the belief that she had redeemed herself with the Boiling Rock rescue forever. “I was promoted for my leadership during the Whale Tail crisis, and ever since then almost every major incident where my leadership has been a deciding factor has been a failure.” She shook her head, anger at herself, at her own failings, ripping through her, “I failed to heed all the warning signs that we were attacking a civilian ship and as a result we slaughter refugees. Then, when I’m finally freed after I was captured, I don’t immediately go and plan a rescue mission to free my soldiers, I instead let myself get dissuaded from rescuing them and waste weeks before planning a rescue mission. Then, in order to carry out this rescue mission, me and my friend Zuko lie to Captain Archer in order to carry it out, deceiving him into thinking that Captain Hernandez, the woman he loves, the woman hecame to rescue, was being held there.” She didn’t care about the fact that there was sound tactical reasoning for not launching a rescue mission. It was her duty to attempt to do so regardless of the tactical situation. It had been her duty, and she failed that duty from the very hour she herself had been freed, and compounded that failure every day, every hour she hadn’t been planning on finding and freeing her men.
“But that rescue mission was a complete success,” Sisko said, an incredulous tone on his voice. “So much so that it is still studied by Starfleet officer cadets nearly two centuries later as an example of near-perfect planning and execution.”
“So?” Suki shouted angrily, a burst of anger cutting through her. “That doesn’t change the fact that I should never have waited as long as I did to rescue my people.” She sighed, looking over at the woman who was being worked on next to her. “Ty Lee, on the other hand, despite the fact that she helped capture my men, helped overthrow the Earth King, has still shown the appropriate care and concern for my people far more than I have. She made peace with them, joined them, led them, kept them alive, and most importantly suffered with them, when I didn’t, and didn’t engage in a game of unending procrastination before taking any steps to at least try and ensure their freedom.” She looked at Ty Lee, and sighed, the inevitable realization coming over her, roiling over her. “I failed them as a leader. She hasn’t.”
That’s it, Suki thought to herself, the realization exploding into Suki’s mind. That’s why, it’s more than just the experience of death. It has to be.
“This is why I’m here,” Suki said, turning to look over at Sisko, understanding in her eyes. “It’s more than just the experience of dying. The last part of me that was still possessive of the Kyoshi Warriors needed to be convinced that my time leading them has come to an end. I gave up on them because I was convinced I was going to die. When you told me I would live, I began to think that I could be the one who led them into the future. But now, I see that’s not true. They need someone new to lead them.” She sighed, “I remember seeing something in Enterprise’s database about the Peter Principle: that something that works will be used in more and more challenging situations until it fails, reaching the level of its own incompetence. I passed that point months ago with regards to the Kyoshi Warriors, and now it’s time, and more than time, that I realized that, and just let them go. I care for them too much to do otherwise, and they deserve a commanding officer who hasn’t failed in the way I have failed. She will stumble, make mistakes, but her failings will be the inevitable mistakes of war, not due the personal failings, the personal weakness of someone like me.”
“Incompetence isn’t chronic you know,” Sisko responded, gesturing at the woman on the biobed. “Yes, you rose to the level of your own incompetence with the Kyoshi Warriors, but there is another uniformed service of your people that you can serve, and will serve, with distinction.”
“Starfleet,” Suki said, understanding, hope rising unbidden in her breast. “But how can you be so sure that I won’t fail there like I failed them?”
“It’s really quite simple, you learn from your mistakes,” Sisko said simply, nodding. And that was the last, as blackness once again consumed Suki’s consciousness.
“I don’t understand this,” Suki said, utterly utter confusion reigning through her as she shook her head, “A mysterious voice came to a friend of mine a couple months ago while she was convalescing in the sickbay aboard Enterprise, claiming that she had to ‘save humanity from being drowned in fire and blood in order for an Emissary to be born.’” She squinted with incredulity at this man before her, Sisko, suspicion on her voice. “But if you’re the Emissary…,”
Sisko raised his hand, causing Suki to instinctively stop the flow of words tumbling from her mouth. Suki was amazed at how quickly she stopped herself at Sisko’s gesture. He was one of those people who radiated strength of will, who wore authority as though it were clothes he wore every day. But what most got to her were his eyes, so calm, so in control. There were only so many people who could do that. Jonathan Archer was one, and Aang was another. She had even seen that potential in Ty Lee. As a matter of fact, the people who’d served under her in the past had seen it in her, though she had never understood why.
“From the perspective of you, Toph and Ty Lee,” Sisko said calmly. “I haven’t been born yet. I won’t be born for another one hundred and seventy-seven years. This place we’re in, it exists outside of linear time.”
“So basically,” she said slowly, comprehension filling her, along with a fair amount of shock and annoyance. “It’s the destiny of Toph, Ty Lee, and I to ensure that our race survives so you can be born close to two centuries from my perspective?”
Sisko, a sympathetic look in his eyes said, “That’s basically it.” Sisko shook his head, “I apologize profusely for everything that’s happened to the three of you because of your destiny. You see, I have no more real control over that then you have. From my perspective, the events you’re living through happened nearly two hundred years before I was even born.”
“Then who is behind it?” Suki asked a riot of emotions raging through her, anger and confusion being chief among them. “Who’s pulling these strings? Who’s the reason I’m lying dead on the deck of a Klingon ship so far from home?”
Sisko fixed her with a somewhat perplexed look and folded his arms in front of his chest. “Do you really have to ask that question?” He asked pointedly. “I would think the answer to that question is fairly obvious.”
Suki, mentally slapping herself for her idiot question, lowered her head and closed her eyes in annoyance. “Of course,” she said after a moment of silence between the two of them. “It would be her wouldn’t it?”
“Of course,” a familiar feminine voice said from behind her. Suki, annoyance and anger filling her, turned around slowly. Sure enough, she saw, standing behind her, in the MACO uniform in which she’d been appearing to her ever since that first time in the Western Air Temple what seemed a lifetime ago, the entity that had taken the form of Ty Lee. She gave off that feeling of preternatural knowledge of the secrets and meanings of the universe that the real Ty Lee, and everyone other mortal being she ever met, simply lacked.
“You have to forgive my mother,” Sisko said from behind her, a knowing and faintly annoyed tone on his voice. “She has this unfortunate tendency to do everything in the most convoluted manner possible.”
At the words, “my mother,” Suki, her eyes widened as utter shock and confusion resurged in her breast, turned around gave Sisko a look of utter shock. After a few seconds of her head buzzing in confusion, her shock addled mind finally recovered sufficiently so she could put words to her confusion, even if they remained confined to her mind, You’ve got to be kidding me?
“She took possession of my biological mother and while in control of her, married my father and gave birth to me,” Sisko informed her, a note of sadness in his eyes and voice. “In the real world whenever she appeared to me she appeared in the guise of my mother.” Sisko pointed back to the entity behind her. Suki, curiosity reaching her even through her utter shock turned slowly back around and looked at the entity. Her breath caught in her throat. Standing before her was not Ty Lee, but instead a woman only a few inches taller than her, as both her and Ty Lee had reached their adult heights, with dark skin, black hair and brown eyes, clad in a blue dress. Her features had changed, yet she still possessed that sense of things, that she wasn’t any mortal being, with all the limitations that came with it.
“So, why?” Suki asked after she had worked through the extreme confusion associated with this revelation. “What purpose does my death serve? How does it ensure mankind’s survival?”
“Remember what I told you, Suki?” the being before her said calmly. “That there are those who die who live to tell the tale. You have died, yes. But you’re Starfleet comrades have found you and you will live again.”
Suki stood there, all the breath gone from her lungs, feeling as though rooted to the spot, shock coursing through her. I’m going to live, I’m going to live! Sokka doesn’t have to endure the pain of losing another woman he loves and I don’t have to leave my friends. And I can return to my command, I can still lead the Kyoshi Warriors. The burden of leadership doesn’t have to fall on my friend’s shoulders yet. Then the obvious question entered her thoughts, pushing back the raging waters of happiness that were flowing through her.
“But why?” She found herself saying. “What was the point of putting me through that if I was going to live?”
“I must again apologize,” Sisko responded fixing her a sympathetic look. “But it wasn’t your death that will serve humanity in the trials to come. Rather it will be the experience of dying. You and your friends need to learn that the path the Prophets have set out for you is one of darkness and pain, far beyond anything you ever experienced before you left your world. You needed to know that sometimes that sometimes the path demands of you terrible sacrifice. It’s something I had to learn myself at some great cost.”
She nodded, comprehension dawning on her. If they had simply taken me here and told me without any of the events of the past few months, I would’ve scoffed at it at the least, and dismissed it as delusion at the most. “I understand.” At the mention of her friends fear and concern for Ty Lee and the others, still on the Klingon ship while at least her soul was here, safe outside time. Mingled concern and shame burned through her like a brand as she cursed her own self-centeredness. She sighed, a deep and heavy sigh filled with fear and sadness, and asked, seeking a response from no one in particular. “And are my friends safe?”
Sisko and his “mother” shared a long look with each other. Finally his “mother” said, her voice betraying no emotion, “Katara, Toph, and Zuko all live.”
Relief flooded her like a cool river at the Prophet’s words. She couldn’t bear the thought of Sokka losing his sister and the rest of their friends. He’d known Katara and Toph, and even Zuko, longer than he’d known her, and it would be a disaster for him to lose them, as it would deeply wound her, who’d grown to see them as her own dear friends as well.
“And Ty Lee?” She asked, sudden worry for her executive officer, and , and this she still couldn’t quite belief, best friend, gripping her heart in an icy vise. “What of her?”
Sisko a sad look in her eyes, responded, “She lives, but…,” and Sisko’s eyes abruptly looked to the side away from her.
“What?” Suki said, fear and shock gripping her heart. Sisko sighed and looked back at her.
“Perhaps you should see for yourself,” Sisko said, nodding, his voice mournful. Abruptly the bright light flashed, assaulting her eyes with a painfully bright light. She closed her eyes against the pain when abruptly the light disappeared from behind her eyelids. She opened her eyes to find herself standing in the Enterprise sickbay, Sisko standing next to her and staring over at the other end of the room. She followed Sisko’s gaze over and saw a group of people in gray surgical garb clustered around a biobed at the farther end of the room, nearest the imaging chamber.
“We need to get these veins tied off and these wounds sealed up before she bleeds out,” he heard Phlox’s insistent voice say from the center of the mass of people.
Fear cut at her as deep as a knife and she found her legs moving over to the group of her own volition, Sisko keeping pace with her as they walked. She spotted an opening at the right end of the mass and walked over, her mind numb with fear for her friend and her heart a blaze of pain. She turned around, and shock tore through her as though a bomb had gone off right next to her, the fragments tearing at her flesh. Ty Lee lay on the biobed, her bare arms and legs covered in blood, still showing a slight pattern indented from where they’d cut her uniform away to facilitate access to the flesh wounds, which looked to be freshly sutured and bandaged. The worst part, the part that drew her gaze and squeezed at her heart was that there was a huge gash in her chest near her ribs which everyone seemed to be focused on, surgical gauze was placed around the wound to absorb the dark red blood that was gushing forth from the hideous gash as Phlox, a desperate look on his face concentrated his attention on using the autosuture to repair the veins. Ty Lee’s skin looked deathly pale and there was a plastic tube stuck in her mouth which was connected to a tank of pure oxygen, while a needle stuck out of her arm connected to an IV bag half the size of Suki’s head, continuously draining blood into Ty Lee’s body.
“The Klingons caused several puncture wounds, lacerations, and contusions,” Sisko pointed out, looking at the woman, her body wracked with the abuses of combat as she lay there. Phlox and his medics worked to patch up the damage done to her by the Klingons, oblivious to the spiritual presence of her and Sisko. “They broke her ribs,” he continued, “which caused one of them to puncture her right lung, but they have to get a handle on the bleeding and preventing infection first.”
No! Her mind screamed unwilling to accept the sight of the broken, bleeding woman on the biobed before her. No, she cannot die! Please! “She can’t die,” she said looking at Sisko, tears in her eyes. “My people need her.” The realization she’d been secretly fighting for weeks creeping forward in the back of her mind like some monster out of legend.
“I have no control over these events,” Sisko said pointedly. “This has already happened from my perspective.”
Heedless of Sisko’s words, she finally gave voice to the words that had been at the back of her mind for weeks, lurking there despite every attempt to convince herself otherwise since the rescue of the Kyoshi Warriors from the Rock. “You don’t understand, they need her because…because I failed them as a commander,” the painful realization cut through Suki’s spine like a sword, blowing away the belief that she had redeemed herself with the Boiling Rock rescue forever. “I was promoted for my leadership during the Whale Tail crisis, and ever since then almost every major incident where my leadership has been a deciding factor has been a failure.” She shook her head, anger at herself, at her own failings, ripping through her, “I failed to heed all the warning signs that we were attacking a civilian ship and as a result we slaughter refugees. Then, when I’m finally freed after I was captured, I don’t immediately go and plan a rescue mission to free my soldiers, I instead let myself get dissuaded from rescuing them and waste weeks before planning a rescue mission. Then, in order to carry out this rescue mission, me and my friend Zuko lie to Captain Archer in order to carry it out, deceiving him into thinking that Captain Hernandez, the woman he loves, the woman hecame to rescue, was being held there.” She didn’t care about the fact that there was sound tactical reasoning for not launching a rescue mission. It was her duty to attempt to do so regardless of the tactical situation. It had been her duty, and she failed that duty from the very hour she herself had been freed, and compounded that failure every day, every hour she hadn’t been planning on finding and freeing her men.
“But that rescue mission was a complete success,” Sisko said, an incredulous tone on his voice. “So much so that it is still studied by Starfleet officer cadets nearly two centuries later as an example of near-perfect planning and execution.”
“So?” Suki shouted angrily, a burst of anger cutting through her. “That doesn’t change the fact that I should never have waited as long as I did to rescue my people.” She sighed, looking over at the woman who was being worked on next to her. “Ty Lee, on the other hand, despite the fact that she helped capture my men, helped overthrow the Earth King, has still shown the appropriate care and concern for my people far more than I have. She made peace with them, joined them, led them, kept them alive, and most importantly suffered with them, when I didn’t, and didn’t engage in a game of unending procrastination before taking any steps to at least try and ensure their freedom.” She looked at Ty Lee, and sighed, the inevitable realization coming over her, roiling over her. “I failed them as a leader. She hasn’t.”
That’s it, Suki thought to herself, the realization exploding into Suki’s mind. That’s why, it’s more than just the experience of death. It has to be.
“This is why I’m here,” Suki said, turning to look over at Sisko, understanding in her eyes. “It’s more than just the experience of dying. The last part of me that was still possessive of the Kyoshi Warriors needed to be convinced that my time leading them has come to an end. I gave up on them because I was convinced I was going to die. When you told me I would live, I began to think that I could be the one who led them into the future. But now, I see that’s not true. They need someone new to lead them.” She sighed, “I remember seeing something in Enterprise’s database about the Peter Principle: that something that works will be used in more and more challenging situations until it fails, reaching the level of its own incompetence. I passed that point months ago with regards to the Kyoshi Warriors, and now it’s time, and more than time, that I realized that, and just let them go. I care for them too much to do otherwise, and they deserve a commanding officer who hasn’t failed in the way I have failed. She will stumble, make mistakes, but her failings will be the inevitable mistakes of war, not due the personal failings, the personal weakness of someone like me.”
“Incompetence isn’t chronic you know,” Sisko responded, gesturing at the woman on the biobed. “Yes, you rose to the level of your own incompetence with the Kyoshi Warriors, but there is another uniformed service of your people that you can serve, and will serve, with distinction.”
“Starfleet,” Suki said, understanding, hope rising unbidden in her breast. “But how can you be so sure that I won’t fail there like I failed them?”
“It’s really quite simple, you learn from your mistakes,” Sisko said simply, nodding. And that was the last, as blackness once again consumed Suki’s consciousness.
