Not long after the twelfth bell sounded across the city, they came to a fork in the road. Erani looked down the right-hand turn, which led away from the city and into open country. “This is where you should leave us,” she said. She jerked her thumb in the other direction. “That’s the quickest route back to Coranum.”
The three of them stared at one another for a few moments. “Good-bye,” Rugal said. He didn’t offer to press palms. “Good luck. I wish we could have been friends.”
“With your father?” Erani laughed. “We could never be friends.” She put her arm around Tekis and led her off into the night. Rugal walked back to Coranum, where nobody would be looking for radicals. He never saw either of them again. Whether they made it through alive, when so many didn’t, he never discovered.
The battle went on through the next day and into the next evening. By sixth bell of the second day, the whole of Torr was back under government control. After that, there was a curfew and spot checks on all shuttles heading in and out of the sector. Rugal went a few times to see Arric and Serna, but on the whole, it was simpler to stay up in Coranum. With no work to do, and too much time on his hands, Rugal quickly became homesick. One night, while he was sitting out in the stone garden desultorily watching a violently hued sunset, Kotan came out to join him. He looked excited, nervous too. “I think,” Kotan said, “that it’s probably safe enough to get a message through to Bajor.”
Rugal’s spirits lifted at once. “If you’re sure it’s safe, then I’d like to try.”
“I also thought that now that I’m able to travel again, we might consider applying to leave Cardassia to meet your adopted father. Bajor would be out of the question,” Kotan said very quickly, “but I can see no reason why neutral territory would not be acceptable. Deep Space 9, perhaps.”
“I thought the borders were closed,” Rugal said cautiously.
“A temporary measure. As soon as law and order’s fully restored, travel in and out of Cardassian space will become as easy as it’s ever been. Easier, I should think. The Council’s committed to showing our neighbors that we are a new nation, that we can participate in the affairs of the quadrant—and not solely as aggressors. A less hostile and more responsive Cardassia.”
Unless you’re a Cardassian citizen who wants to express disagreement. Rugal wondered how Kotan could say these things, whether he really believed them. A position on the Council covered a multitude of sins, it seemed, but if it meant that he could finally speak to Migdal and find out how he had been coping since Etra’s death, Rugal would have gladly spouted any number of platitudes himself.
He thought it would be easier than ever to get through to Migdal. It wasn’t. The problem was not technical, nor did it have anything to do with the fear of surveillance that had constrained them in the past. They simply couldn’t find him. There was no information about him at the most recent address that Rugal had, but that had been months ago. He tried older addresses: the first place they had rented after moving to Ashalla, and eventually even older ones, in the various towns where they had been before trying the capital. But he could not find Proka Migdal, retired policeman and widower.
How could someone disappear? Bajor was not Cardassia. The sparse and heavily edited news that Rugal had gathered from home hinted at a place in growth, prospering, full of new confidence and energy. Could one old man simply disappear?
Rugal gave up trying to find an address for someone called Proka Migdal, and began racking his brains to think of family friends who might still be in contact. They had moved so often while he had lived with them—because he had lived with them—that it was difficult to know whom he should approach. He tried various people in various places, but none had any news of the old man. At last, he found someone with news—not a friend of Migdal’s, but the son of a friend, Darrah Bajin.
Bajin was a middle-aged man with a kindly expression currently tempered with concern. “I’m so glad to hear from you, Rugal. We had no idea how to get in touch, no idea whether it was even possible.”
“Is he there? Is he all right?”
Rugal realized later that he had been assuming that Migdal was ill, in the hospital, or in care somewhere. He understood later that he had been assuming his story was heading toward its happy ending. He had been taken away to a bad place where he had suffered, and now he should be allowed to go home. Surely he had earned it? But Rugal had a long way to go yet, before coming home.
“I’m afraid he died six weeks ago, Rugal,” Bajin said. “It wasn’t painful, not at all, he was just very old. And he missed Etra. We all took turns sitting by him in the hospital, and we’ve all been praying for him ever since. He talked about you all the time, you know.”
Rugal got through the rest of the conversation on automatic, thanking Bajin for looking after his father, for all his kindness. He should have been there, he kept on thinking; and instead he had been here, playing at being a radical. Cardassia had tricked him into caring about its troubles, when he should have been keeping his mind set on Bajor. When he finished talking to Bajin, he sat for a while by the blank screen. There was a quiet tap at the door. Kotan entered. His hopeful expression rapidly disappeared.
“It’s not good news, is it?”
Kotan: the chain that had dragged him unwillingly to Cardassia, the chain that had kept him here. Now there was no escape. “That depends. My father’s dead, which means there’s nobody on Bajor working to get me back. Which I suppose you think is good news.”
“My dearest child, don’t say such things!”
“And don’t you dare say anything about love. It was never about love. It was about possession. I was your child, your son. You wanted me back because you thought I belonged to you. I don’t belong to anyone. I shouldn’t be here, and I should never have been here. He was an old man, and he didn’t have his son with him when he died.”
“Rugal, I am so sorry—”
Every time they had had this quarrel in the past, Rugal thought, he had been too emotional: angry, tearful, upset. He had been a child. Now he felt clearer in his mind than he had ever done. Kotan—Cardassia—had fooled him, promising change, promising a new way of life. It had all been lies. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” he told Kotan. “Never.”
He left the room, went upstairs, and packed. Not much: a few clothes, his earring, Lang’s book, and the picture of Arys that concealed it. He contacted Arric and was offered the couch. Then he went to see Penelya.
“Never is a long time, Rugal,” she said, after he told her what had happened.
He held her to him as if she was the most precious thing in the world. “It isn’t long enough.” He would get back somehow, he swore. He would find his own way back to Bajor, without Kotan’s aid, or his blood money. But he could not help thinking he might have left it too late.
PART TWO
A LONG WAY FROM HOME (2372–2375)
“How many sacrifices will my people be asked to make?”
—Legate Damar
Five
Throughout that first summer of civilian rule, dust and rumors shifted uneasily around Cardassia. Broadcasts remained restricted, and in the absence of anything official, people made their own news. Stories coalesced, gathered pace, spread out—and then shifted again, changed shape. First you heard it whispered that the leaders of the Torr march had been making speeches on the steps of the new Information Bureau. Next everyone knew this was a lie—their families had identified their bodies in Maklar Prison. The next tale to go around was about a gathering of the Oralian Way in a warehouse on the southwest edge of the Munda’ar sector. Three thousand city dwellers—and a further thousand or so from the suburbs—turned up at what everyone knew was the right hour on the right day. Some had come to pray, some to heckle, most to gawp. Officers from the city constabulary—fifty-two twitchy and underpaid conscripts from provincial towns and colony worlds—somehow managed to disperse the crowd without a shot being fired. The whole Union, from cosmopolitan capital to
desert township to border outpost, let out a sigh of relief. A student strike in Culat ended less well, with thirty-four arrests and three fatalities, but the news was successfully suppressed, and nobody but the most cynical believed that story. Many of the tales were downright outrageous: a man standing at the foot of the Tozhat Memorial had suddenly turned into a great white bird and then flown up to the top of the monument, screeching Meya Rejal’s name three times and finishing with a curse. Some people declared it was Changelings, here, at the heart of Cardassia Prime; others said that was rubbish. The problem was that nobody knew for sure, and if the government knew, it wasn’t telling.
In all this confusion, there was one thing that everyone understood: something had changed in Cardassia when the civilian government opened fire upon the assembled people of the city. Even to people who were used to surveillance and disappearances and the quiet persistent knock on the door in the middle of the night, this was something new. In the noisy taverns and geleta houses of Torr, around the staid, well-polished dining tables of Paldar, sometimes even in the chill grand salons of Coranum itself, it could be heard—shouted or mooted or implied—that this time the government had gone too far. If the military had once rounded up dissidents whom Order agents interrogated, that had been expected, almost accepted. But this was meant to be the people’s government. Everything was meant to be different, now.
It was a hot dusty summer, even by the standards of Cardassia Prime. The water ration in urban areas was cut. The capital crackled with suppressed energy and anger, and the provincial cities followed suit. In their temperature-modulated offices in Tarlak, Meya Rejal and the Detapa Council watched anxiously, hoping nothing else would happen before winter came to cool Cardassia City and the rest of the Union with it.
Kotan knew he should be as troubled as his colleagues, but his sympathy for their plight had ebbed considerably since Meya had picked Skrain Dukat over Tekeny Ghemor. Besides, he had other things on his mind. Geleth had embraced the new water ration like a youth movement’s newest and keenest recruit. Now she was sick.
Kotan tried again and again to make her change her mind. “I’m a Council member, Mother. My family and I are entitled to half as much water again—” But Geleth, regal and feverish on the couch in her somber sitting room, would not bend. “If what the government—your government—needs is restraint, than that is what it shall get. We all have to make sacrifices, Kotan. I sincerely hope you are not taking extra.”
Matters came to a head one evening, when he found her crumpled on the floor of her sitting room. She had slipped and fallen, and had been too weak to get back to her feet. As he helped her to the bed, she whispered, “The boy. I want to see the boy.”
Kotan knew from Alon that Rugal was working in one of the free hospitals near the river, and living with friends in the southwest of Torr. He sent a few messages, explaining that Geleth was ill and had been asking for him. For almost a week he heard nothing, and then there was a grudging reply: I’ll come. He had Penelya to thank for this again, if he’d known.
Face-to-face again, father and son eyed each other warily. Rugal looked older, Kotan thought, certainly a man now, and he looked thinner... No, that was not quite it. He looked sparser.
Rugal could still see nothing but the enemy. He was shocked, however, at the change in Geleth. She had become frail; the bones and ridges of her face stood out like accusations. Kotan told him, “I’m afraid she’s going to kill herself over this.”
“Perhaps this is way she wants to go,” Rugal said. “Doing her patriotic duty.” He had been taking half of his ration down to the wharves. People had started drinking the river water and he was afraid there was going to be an outbreak of something soon. Wasn’t public health Kotan’s responsibility?
Rugal returned to visit Geleth as often as his work in the hospital and along the river allowed. Sometimes he would come straight from his shift, falling asleep on the long shuttle journey out to Coranum. Geleth sneered at his work overalls, telling him he might as well be lowborn. He replied that it was more useful than sitting on a couch in the dark. They kept this game up for several visits, but when Geleth abandoned insults and began to talk about her childhood in Anaret province, Rugal knew she had made the decision to die.
When Geleth had been young, before reaching the age of emergence, Anaret had been stricken by drought. The crops failed, the twin lakes shrank, and great billowing dust storms swept across the plains. Times were hard in the cities too, and nobody could get permission to relocate. In her district, Geleth said, all the youth swore to take less of the water and do more of the work. After four years of scraping a living out of nothing, the central government stopped wrangling over the details of the relief package, and built a pipe from the coast.
“It was far too late for the sick and the old,” Geleth said. “We’d stopped their water during the second summer.”
So cruel, and yet there was a crazed kind of bravery about it that was uniquely Cardassian: something to do with extreme conditions, an unquenchable desire to survive, and a callous disregard for individual life. That last had allowed great sacrifices on behalf of the collective, but had also permitted atrocities toward anyone perceived as surplus. Hunger, thirst, privation—Rugal understood better now how this had been the norm for many on Cardassia, and still was for some. It was no surprise that when they had laid eyes on the paradise of Bajor, they had grabbed hold and gorged themselves sick. What would happen, he wondered, if the whole planet went the way of Anaret, or the whole Union? Its structures were already strained, its foundations rotting. How many would be left to die? Would there be any pity to spare?
Late one unforgiving evening near the end of summer, Kotan was summoned to a special meeting of the Five. He was surprised by the invitation; Meya had barely called on him for advice since he had pressed for the return of Tekeny Ghemor. He hoped it was a sign; perhaps Meya was trying to move beyond the partisan politics that had led to the massacre in Torr, and show that she did not hold grudges. Perhaps, with hard work and goodwill, Cardassia could still embark upon a new era.
The usual suspects had gathered in Meya’s private office. Rhemet, Bamarek, Alon Ghemor—all familiar from years of country house gatherings during which they had, on reflection, entirely failed to prepare to govern the Union. Kotan knew that Meya often drafted in others to help the Five—military advisers, for example, or scientific experts. Cases of Sethik’s disease were on the rise along the southern coast of the main continent, and he assumed that it was in this capacity that he had been asked to come along this evening. This assumption changed as soon as Skrain Dukat strode into the room. Unusually, Dukat was not swaggering. In fact, he looked as fraught as a student radical up before the district archon.
“Skrain,” Kotan said amiably as they took adjacent seats. “You’re looking tense. Are the guls giving you a hard time? Or have you simply gone a few days without killing anyone?”
Dukat’s lip curled, but he managed no reply before Meya Rejal called the meeting to order. “Thank you all for coming out this evening. We have a problem.” She pressed one finger against the ridge above her left eye and kept it there, as if to relieve some inner pressure. “Dukat, tell them what you’ve learned.”
Dukat rose splendidly to his feet. Give the posturing monster his due, Kotan thought, he certainly knows how to play to the gallery. “It is my unfortunate responsibility,” Dukat said, “to inform you of the intelligence that has come my way this evening. A Klingon fleet is heading toward Cardassian space. It will pass our borders within thirty metrics and, if unopposed, is due to attack Prime within three days.”
There was a brief stunned silence. Alon Ghemor was the first at the table to gather his wits. “That’s impossible. We haven’t heard a whisper of this at the Bureau.”
Dukat smiled nastily. “The Bureau is not what the Order was.”
Ghemor ignored the bait. “What’s your source?”
“You won’t like it if I tell you.”
“No, but I might be able to shed some light on its reliability—”
“It’s Garak.” Dukat pushed the two syllables out, as if they sat unpleasantly in his mouth. Catching Ghemor’s startled reaction, Dukat eked out a thin smile. “I said you wouldn’t like it. But what is more significant here”—he turned to address the wider group—“is Garak’s own source. Starfleet.”
The ramifications of this news suddenly impacted upon the room. Everybody started talking at once: Is this true? How do we know it’s true? If it’s true, how long till they get here? And, perhaps asked most: Why? Kotan, familiar with Rejal’s working methods, knew that she was giving them a chance to let off steam, but that soon she would want someone to ask a more serious question to bring order to the discussion. He caught her eye and she nodded. “All of you!” Rejal raised her voice above the melee. “Stop panicking and start thinking. Kotan, you have a question?”
“Yes, I do. Could somebody tell me exactly who this Garak is? And why exactly we should trust him?”
Ghemor and Dukat exchanged looks. Ghemor took on the unhappy task of explaining. “He’s a former Order operative. He was a close associate of Tain. As to trusting him... speaking generally, I’d say no, but if it comes to defense of the homeworld, and if Starfleet really is his source...” Alon sighed. “Then I’d have to say, absolutely.”
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