by Diane Carey
"Call it what you want," he said. "Let's go."
"I must compliment you on your intelligence network, Captain."
General Martok sat lazily in the wardroom and accepted the challenge as Sisko faced him across the table and drummed out his knowledge of the shattering news.
Beside Sisko, Worf sat stiffly.
"One day," Martok went on, "you must tell me how you learned of our plans."
He knew.
Worf tipped a bit forward. "General, I—"
Sisko snapped up a hand. "How I got the information isn't important."
"I think it is," Martok said. "And so will Gowron."
"General," Sisko continued as if uninterrupted, "I want you to call off this attack."
"And what do you propose we do instead?" Martok's voice suddenly boomed. "Stand by and let the Dominion take over the Alpha Quadrant?"
Sisko matched boom for boom. "You have no proof that there are any Founders in Cardassia."
"The change in government is all the proof we need."
"What if you're wrong?" Worf undergirded.
"That would be unfortunate…for the Cardassians."
"General," Sisko pursued, "I'd advise you to reconsider. The Federation Council has informed Gowron that if the attack goes forward, it will jeopardize our treaty with the Klingon Empire."
Hit full in the face with that statement, Martok mellowed some and the smugness washed out of his face. "Believe me, Captain, we have no wish to antagonize your people."
"Then call off the attack."
Blunt-struck with facing down the Federation, as if it had never occurred to him that the Federation might stand by its most prickly principles and stand against them in favor of the Cardassians if necessary, Martok seemed to be actually considering Sisko's demand.
Ultimately the Klingon said, "I will consult with Gowron. You will have his decision within the hour."
He pushed to his feet and headed for the exit, pausing for a dangerous glower at Worf. There was no hiding what Worf had done. They had only managed to keep from stating it outright. In the end that would change nothing in Worfs favor.
Glaring at his picture of villainy, Martok's eyes dripped contempt and bitter lack of understanding that a Klingon could do what this Klingon had done.
Worf was rare, Sisko knew, one of these ethnocentric types who actually didn't buy into the gang mentality, yet who must constantly grapple with it. Now he might die for it.
When Martok exited and the door passively gasped closed, Sisko didn't quite relax.
"You're not one of them," he said to Worf. "Don't let them fool you."
Worf looked at him, then at the silent door panel as if there might be solutions etched upon it.
"But they are part of me," he rumbled. "It will be during the next days that I must find out how big a part."
The comm panel buzzed—alert signal from Ops. They needed him. Something was happening.
Rather than key his comm, Sisko ignored it. Piqued, he leaned forward and stared at Worf. His voice was rusty with agitation.
"It's just genetics, Commander," he said. "If we were only our genetics, we could be bacteria. Come with me."
Infuriated with all this, with Worf, with Odo, with all these people who couldn't decide where their loyalties lay, toward those with whom they shared principles or toward others with the same physical form, Sisko plowed the way to Ops.
There he found Dax, Kira, and O'Brien at their stations, but looking at the forward screen.
Dax didn't turn. "Captain, I think you'd better take a look at this."
"Report," Sisko snapped.
"As soon as General Martok beamed back to his ship," she said, "he sent a message to the Klingon fleet. It was just one word. N'cha."
Sisko turned to Worf, and the others did also.
Under their gaze he translated, "'Begin.'"
Abruptly O'Brien spoke up. "I'm picking up a huge distortion wave in the subspace field. The Klingon ships are going to warp."
"Can you plot their course?" Kira asked.
"Judging from the vector of the subspace disturbance, I'd say their heading is two-six-nine mark zero-three-two."
Gibberish to any but spacefarers, the numbers were clear as handwriting to Sisko. He gritted his teeth through the storm of possible fallouts coming their way.
"Straight for the Cardassian Empire."
CHAPTER 13
THE WARDROOM FELT HOT. Seated around the table, Sisko's officers were a rainbow of experiences and backgrounds from hundreds of light-years across the known galaxy. Human, Trill, Bajoran, Klingon, changeling.
They were a circus, for sure. And it was for him to make sure that Deep Space Nine didn't become the middle ring.
"The Federation Council is trying to contact Gowron, but so far, they've had no response. Until they've had a chance to speak with him, we've been ordered not to get involved."
Kira Nerys was extraordinarily sedate, as if somehow all her life she had expected this. "The Bajoran government has agreed to abide by the decisions of the Federation Council," she said, obviously by rote. If she had any other opinion, she kept it to herself.
Julian Bashir looked up at Sisko. Frustration played in his large, expressive eyes, and the pain of what the answer meant was clear in his voice. "So this means we're not going to warn the Cardassians?"
The inhumanity of it scalded them all. Sisko looked down at him and found his face numb with the weight of his responsibility, and the bindings thereon.
Dax bailed him out. "The Klingons are still our allies. If we warn the Cardassians, we'd be betraying them."
"Besides," Miles O'Brien added, "what if the Klingons are right? What if the Dominion has taken over the Cardassian government?"
"If my people wanted to seize control of Cardassia," Odo suggested, "that is how they'd do it."
Sisko was about to pound him with a question about how the devil he would know, given that he'd spent a total of about two days with his "people" in his whole existence, but Kira spoke up and kept him from embarrassing Odo for no reason.
"The coup could've happened just as easily without the Founders," she argued. "The Cardassian dissident movement's been gathering strength for years. And with the Obsidian Order out of the way, they might've finally succeeded."
Made sense. It was a flying leap of logic that when a government had a coup, a race from across the galaxy was responsible. The only way the Founders could get here was through the wormhole guarded by DS9, and Dax had carefully recorded every passage of every ship, its bills of lading, crew manifests, and medical reports.
Of course, this wasn't the Inquisition. Ships did come and go relatively freely, and had for months, because there had been relative quiet for months. The insidious could be among them with the innocent.
Worf spoke up with the voice of someone intimate to the attitudes involved. He seemed troubled more and more by the moment. Still acting like bacteria.
"There are many Klingons who say we have been at peace too long," he said. "That the Empire must expand to survive. Fear of the Dominion only gives my people an excuse to do what they were born to do. To fight…and to conquer."
"If they're so eager to fight," Sisko gauged, "who's to say they'll stop at the Cardassians?"
Kira nodded. "Their next target could be anyone…even the Federation."
"If I were you," Dax said to her, "I'd be more worried about Bajor." She scanned the people around her. "Think about it. What good does it do for the Klingons to defeat Cardassia if they don't control the wormhole?"
"If my people return to the old ways," Worf agreed, "no one will be safe."
Sisko ground his foot into the carpet. "Then we've got to make sure that doesn't happen."
"How?" O'Brien asked. "The way I see it, we've only got two choices, both of them bad. If we stand by and do nothing, we risk becoming the Klingons' next target. But if we disobey Starfleet's orders and warn the Cardassians, we may end up starting our own war
with the Klingons."
"Which means we need a third alternative."
They all looked up at him, then at each other, then back at him as if he had one in his pocket.
Hell, he didn't even have a pocket.
"Trust me. You won't regret this. When it comes to keeping warm, nothing beats Vitarian wool undergarments."
Especially if the wearer is very nearly a fish, which you are, my friend Morn, you are.
"And in case you change your mind about the earmuffs, I'll keep them on hold for you!"
As the big alien lumbered out of the shop, Garak wondered when Morn was going to learn not to dominate conversations. Probably never. He was that type.
Oh, well. Another day, another stitch.
Garak pondered his future, with Klingons about the station and rumors of invasion, of collapse in Cardassia—was there a future for him still?
He had for the past years been barely tolerant of existence here, but now, as it was threatened, he began to hunger that it stay. It seemed there would be no going back from exile to a Cardassia that he would enjoy or of whose government he would be part. There were too many who would execute anyone who had ever been in power—that's the way coups played out. All semblance of the old had to be rubbed out, and he was a semblance as well as any. Even worse than some.
He jolted when the comm line chirped—the smallest things were making him jump lately.
Sisko's voice.
"Mr. Garak, I'd like to see you in the wardroom immediately. And bring your tailor's kit."
A tailor's kit in the wardroom. That was a first.
Garak had dreamed in his life of breaking new ground. Today, this would be it. Imagine the thrill of taking measurements in the wardroom. Stunning.
He had long ago stopped trying to anticipate the vagaries of command whim. Sisko might be launching off on some mission of reconnaissance and wish to be dressed like…pick an alien. At least it would be one who did wear clothing.
Striding through the wardroom door without chiming the entry bells, Garak didn't bother announcing himself, as he had been summoned. He expected to see only Sisko, perhaps with one other person. What faced him as he came into the room was the full complement of the assembled senior staff.
Dax was speaking. "Altogether, we're talking about well over a hundred ships, just in the first wave."
She paused as she and all the others turned to look at Garak.
"I'm sorry," he said, wondering if the summons had been some kind of mistake, an old computer recording fed through by a glitch. "Am I interrupting?"
At the end of the conference table, Sisko stood up. "I'd like to be measured for a suit."
Garak looked around. "Now?"
"Right now."
"But, Captain, I have your measurements—"
"Take them again." He came out from the table and stood where Garak could maneuver. Then he glanced at Dax. "You were saying, Commander?"
Dax spoke clearly, very clearly. "I was saying that between the ground forces and warships, the Klingons have committed almost a third of their military to this invasion."
Sisko turned just enough to see the Klingon in the Starfleet uniform. "How long until they reach their target?"
With an uneasy glance at Garak, the big Klingon seemed irresolute. "According to our estimates, the task force will enter Cardassian space within the hour."
The measuring implements were cold in Garak's hands.
Unless perhaps it was his very skin that had gone cold. He looked at Sisko, and knew that his horror was showing in his face. In Sisko's face shone the truth of it. Sisko was caught between a slothful Federation bureaucracy and the Klingons who weren't being very good allies. And all he had to depend upon was one rather questionable Cardassian exile. He had to obey the letter of the law, but somehow follow its spirit along a different path.
As he glanced up, Garak reminded himself not to let Benjamin Sisko's sedate composure cause any underestimation of the man's boldness.
"Don't forget the waist," Sisko said. "I think I've lost a little weight."
"No, no…" Garak gathered his tailor's kit and stepped back from the large man. "Thank you, Captain. I think I have everything I need."
"Look, I don't care what you've heard about me, and I don't care how long it's been since my communication code has been out of favor. I want to speak to Gul Dukat and I shall speak to him. I have critical news. I will get him this news through you this hour or through someone else in the next, and when he discovers that you, his subordinate, failed to put me through, your hide will be the new cover on his flagship's command chair! Put…me…through!"
His intensity pierced the resistant layers, one by one. Things had certainly changed, for he couldn't even use the same lines of communication on which he had relied in the past.
They had to listen to him. He was holding the bomb in his hands.
"Garak." Gul Dukat's elongated face, a Cardassian face, came onto the screen with a frightening flicker.
Garak was startled with the level of relief that struck him on seeing another Cardassian face. Even if it was Dukat.
"Gul Dukat," he began, and instantly controlled himself. This could play well for him in the future. "I have tantalizing information for you. Only I could get it, I want you to remember."
"Garak, you're wasting my time. You've been on that forsaken knob for years. You're one of them now. Why should I listen to you?"
"You're a rapacious idiot, Dukat. But that won't hurt you anymore. Listen to me. The Klingons are amassing a force with which they intend…to invade Cardassia."
Charming! A perfect picture of Dukat, knocked dumb with shock. If only there were a way to freeze it and sell to Quark for marketing.
Dukat's mouth made the word Klingons two or three times before he got it out.
"The Klingons? Why would the Klingons invade us?"
"According to my sources, they believe that Cardassia has been taken over by the Founders."
"That's ridiculous!"
A wonderful base-reaction, but Garak gazed at him with unshielded suspicion. Dukat himself could be one of those liquid primordials.
"Is it?" he asked slowly.
"Garak, you've got to talk to Sisko!" Dukat said. "Tell him he has to find a way to stop the Klingons. Cardassia has enough problems right now!"
Deviously Garak grinned. "Having trouble keeping the civilians in line?"
Dukat's face flushed deep gray. "How do you know about that?"
"I'm afraid after the fall of the Obsidian Order, Cardassian security isn't what it used to be."
"Yes." Dukat matched Garak's sarcasm and threw in a dash of despise. "Shame about the Order. I suppose there isn't much of a demand for unemployed spies. Looks like you'll be hemming women's dresses for the rest of your life."
Keeping the grin on his face was a noteworthy battle and Garak believed he failed. Yet how much lay upon winning a joust with Dukat, when their Empire was on the brink of shattering?
"We can sit here all day reminding ourselves of how much we hate each other," he said. "But you don't have the time. The Klingon fleet will reach Cardassian territory in less than an hour. So I suggest you get ready for them."
Without signature, he snapped off the communication. Dukat could believe him or not.
He would.
Though such names as "idiot" made fine flinging fodder between the two of them, and "rapacious" even better, Dukat wasn't so much the idiot that he wouldn't read fact where fact lay. Garak didn't ask for restoration of rank, maneuver for favors, or suggest payment. Dukat would notice that.
And as much as he hated to admit the miserable even to himself, he was rooting for Dukat.
Black open space erupted in a string of explosions from here to as far as the sensors could see. Ah, beautiful, the reopening of the Klingon sphere of power.
Martok felt proud, lucky, to be the one orchestrating the rebirth. This was as the universe should be. The strong, the mighty, the bold taking i
nfluence which by all right of nature was theirs. There would be a bloodbath first, but that too was nature at work. Wholesale butchery was very often the cost of proper balance.
On his forward screen, white and yellow blooms of disruption flocked from ship after ship as the fleet took the row of outposts here on the Cardassian border.
"Drex." He spoke up, breaking the appreciative silence on his bridge. "Status of the assault on these outposts?"
"All ships reporting success, General," his operations master said. "The outposts are taken."
"I thought so. Tell them to cease fire if possible and conserve their weapons capacity. Prepare to move on to the Cardassian colonies."
"Very good," Drex said with a slight flare.
"So you too are anxious?" Martok looked at him.
"I'm enthused, sir. This will enflame our entire culture as nothing has in half my lifetime."
The fire in the distance had ceased. The long, sparse line of Klingon vessels, stretching far beyond sight or sensor, was dropping off occupying forces onto the outposts, and soon they would be moving on in their single long line to the string of colonies.
"Not the best strategy," Martok uttered.
Drex looked up. "Sir?"
"Just dreaming, Drex. If we had the best of situations, we would have a different strategy." He put his hands together, fingers touching, and made a pointing motion. "We would go in tightly and sharply, in concentration, like a knife. We would thrust straight through to Cardassia Prime, take their homeworld, wrest control from their seat of government, and execute all the political leaders. That's how it's done…but we can't do that."
Leaving his controls to come closer to the command center, Drex lowered his voice. "Because of changelings?" he asked quietly.
Martok narrowed his eyes. "They are frightening, aren't they? An enemy who can disguise himself so well. Because we're dealing with them, we have to make a wide-front assault. The only way to find them is to contain them. We must be sure that no ship escapes from Cardassian space. So we come in like this, in a long, long line, and we destroy anything that tries to leave."