by Diane Carey
Fransu's hot black eyes shot to Renzo and bored through as the seconds ticked away. Neither said anything.
"Gul Fransu, this is the Central Distribution Auth—"
"I know who you are. Get on with your explanation of where in the broad green galaxy are my shipments."
"The requisitions came through, but you neglected to attach Form Twelve to each requisition. I explained that to Glin Renzo—"
"I did include the Form Twelve. I did, I did."
"But only one Form Twelve for the entire shipment. There must be a separate Form Twelve for each individual requisition. I told you that. According to Article Blue-Twenty-Three, I'm not allowed to move forward without that."
"Article Blue? A blue Article?"
"In the Blue section of the twenty-third manual. I can't take action without the proper form, sir."
"Oh, I know! If my own blood were on fire and I didn't have the proper form for a hose, you would turn me down!"
"Thank you for comprehending."
"Oh, I comprehend, you …" Fransu's considerable shoulders sagged beneath the weight of iron bureaucracy.
Only Fransu could see the face upon the viewer, but Renzo could imagine the pasty deskworker on the other end of the communication. Some people, even some Cardassians, reveled in detail work and inevitably they found their perfect place in the universe, usually making grief for field officers whose turn it was to run some desk somewhere.
Glancing again at Renzo and seeming to draw strength from his assistant's presence, the Gul leered with blunted rage at his private viewscreen. "What else do you need?"
"That should be all."
"Good."
"As long as you have your protocol clearances."
Fransu's lips peeled back against his teeth. "Yes. Yes, I've got those. I've got all of them. Boxes of them."
"Very well. I look forward to processing your orders. Salutations to Glin Renzo. This is the Central Distribution Authority signing off."
"Goodbye. Many goodbyes. Burning goodbyes. May you die of goodbyes."
The hazy light cast from the screen onto Gul Fransu's roundish face suddenly fell away, leaving only the harsh light from the ceiling lamp. His eyes once again flipped to Renzo, and he sank in his seat, shrinking like a beaten animal.
Renzo defied a smile and simply asked, "You don't know what a protocol clearance is, do you?"
"I'm not certain I could even spell it, Renzo."
"Would you like me to have him killed for you?"
"To what satisfaction? There are ten thousand more of him, lined up to sit behind that desk and give pain to whoever sits behind this one. They are the 'Give Gul Fransu a Twisted Spine Consortium' and there is no getting to the bottom of them, not even with a Blue Form Article P-Nine Z-Four dash growl."
Renzo nodded. "Frustrating, I know. To have reached so high a rank as you have, yet suffer rotation."
"Rrrrotation," and here was the growl. "Ridiculous decisions by the barrel! All these minutia, pushed farther and farther up the command chain, because no one below wants the responsibility of having made a decision. Not even the smallest decision! Do you know that Gul Ebek contacts me every day during my rotation, just to needle me about it? He saves back all his needs until my rotation, then floods me with acquisition requests for his cursed squadron! I should push his promotion schedule and get him on this rotation, and on that day I will be needling, believe me, I will be needling hard."
Renzo fell to silence and waited for the Gul's mood to change. He wished he had better news.
Intuitive even through his fog of fury, Fransu was now staring at his aide, and there was no silence through which Renzo could shield his reasons for coming in here. He sat now on the crawling hint that he'd made a mistake.
"Tell me there's an emergency," Fransu snarled, and began to lean forward. "Tell me we're at war. Someone's blown up the homeworld. My mother-in-law has been unmasked as a Klingon agent. Tell me something to get me out of this, short of shooting myself through the head!"
A swipe of his arm plundered half of the desk's contents onto the floor with a bitter rattle.
"Nothing so insignificant as a war, I'm afraid," Renzo said. "We've gotten a private signal for you from Terok Nor."
"From where?"
"Terok Nor. Our occupied station near Bajor."
"So what? What do they want? We don't run that station anymore. Let them whine to Starfleet if they want something."
Gathering himself with what he hoped appeared to be an effort, Renzo didn't hide his foreboding. Perhaps if he stalled a few seconds, the age-old message would deliver itself.
It didn't. Fransu continued to glare at him as if Renzo were Form Twelve with boots on.
Renzo held himself stiff in his seat, lowered his chin, and raised his brows. "Sir … it's not from any of the people there. It's an automated signal."
The commander paused, peering at him, as memory nipped and tugged.
"A very old signal," Renzo added.
Fransu's eyes suddenly went narrow, then shot wide, and all other imprints of a bad day dropped from his face. "Not just that someone has broken in …"
"No, sir. That someone has activated the revive sequence."
"Revive!" Fransu seized.
They knew each other very well. Decades upon decades of mutual dependence, of spiraling up through the ranks together, of wars and wounds and rotations inward and outward. Renzo read Fransu's face as easily as reading a child's story, and knowing that, Fransu made no attempts to hide his roiling thoughts.
"Revive," he uttered. He stood up, and paced around Renzo's chair to the other side of the office. "Curse me that I didn't take care of this before … that I avoided making the decision all those ages ago, Renzo … what was I then, that I failed to erase the problem at the time?"
Quietly Renzo said, "You were a thief who couldn't sell a stolen piece of art, but couldn't bring yourself to destroy it either. So you hid it."
"I couldn't bring myself to kill him," Fransu agreed. "I should have. But I thought I could engineer the future."
He placed his hand flat on his desk and gazed at the clutter here and on the floor, and he sighed a great sigh.
"You were right," he said heavily. "I should have taken your advice then as I have learned to do since then. Now our grim harvest comes back to poison us."
Renzo stood up, but didn't move toward his commander. "I should have advised you more strongly. I was greedy, too. We were very young."
Without looking up, Fransu nodded. He stood in disturbed silence for many seconds, gathering the full realization that he had gone in a few moments from making piddling decisions to making quadrant-shattering ones.
"Very well," he scratched out. "Prepare my flagship. Pull the maintenance crew off. Notify my prime crew to report in two hours. Load the ship with full armaments. Talk to Glin Angat—he owes me his career. Tell him I want warp-nine drones launched into the Bajoran sector and every bit of communication blanked out. Tell him to lose any record of where those drones have gone. Make sure he understands that part. No one is to know where the drones have gone. If he gives you any problem, contact me immediately."
"He'll give us no problems, I'm sure."
"And call Gul Ebek. Tell him he's been promoted and his first duty will be to replace me on rotation."
Plucking the commander's uniform jacket from its hook on the wall, Renzo held it so Fransu could slip into it. "Command will be confused at your leaving rotation early."
Fransu neither nodded nor disagreed, for his mind was already far away from here.
"Once I make this problem die as it should have died long ago," the Gul said, "that will be the best trouble I've ever been in. If necessary, I'll leave an unexplained cloud of dust where that station is now floating. Then it and its foul contents will be in the dead past, where they all belong."
CHAPTER 7
"THE NEWS DOESN'T get any better, sir. I've checked into Cardassian customs, as much as we have
information about, but it's almost impossible to get any information without arousing suspicion. I can't exactly tell them I want to set up a museum or I'm writing a school paper."
Kira Nerys squirmed in her seat. Cardassians weren't exactly her favorite topic of conversation, or research, or anything. She'd spent half her life fighting them and the other half trying to forget they ever existed, and felt doomed to be eternally confounded on both fronts.
Before her, Captain Sisko sat like a monument behind his desk, dark and quiet, absorbing whatever she said without breaking his smooth expression. "I understand, Major. Just tell me what you do know and we'll go from there."
"If we try to investigate too much," Kira went on, "we risk news getting out that we found a Cardassian mausoleum on the station. Never mind the Cardassians, I don't think the residents'll be very happy about that."
"I don't think we have a problem," Sisko said, "as long as Garak keeps his mouth shut, and he didn't seem as if he wanted to talk about it."
Kira leaned forward in her chair and leered as if at Garak himself. "He's just about as likely to—"
"Bashir to Captain Sisko."
Sisko held up a placating hand to her, then keyed his comm unit. "Sisko here. What is it, Doctor?"
"About our quiet residents, sir. On the cell samples I took, we may have another problem. I don't know precisely what was preserving those fellows, but I have reason to believe that now they've been exposed to air, their cell structure may begin to break down and they'll start to decay. I don't know how long you intend to take in making your decisions, but I doubt the Cardassians will be too pleased at getting their relatives back as bones and dust and strings of scaly skin."
"Can you do something about the decomposition?"
"We might consider putting sterile fields around the bodies to keep any microbes from—"
"That would be an absolute admission that we knew they were there. We'll leave them as they are for now and take our chances. Is that all, Doctor?"
"Yes, sir, that's all, but I thought you ought to know."
"Thank you." Sisko shook his head and looked at Kira. "So the clock ticks. All right, Major, what did you find out about Cardassian customs? I supposed you'd better speak faster now."
For a moment Kira couldn't tell if he was joking or not. "Well, I was right about the fact that they don't usually preserve bodies like that. I mean, they don't preserve them at all. And they don't leave the bodies of their fallen behind if they can possibly retrieve them."
"Which leaves us with the same haunting question … what are these bodies doing here at all, and why were they moved here, as they obviously must have been?"
"I say we flush them into the sun." At Kira's left, Odo finally spoke from where he stood near the wall in a shadow. Typical Security officer—always ready to be jumped. "Or phaser them. They're just corpses. Dead tissue. Bones and scales. I'm not afraid of dead Cardassians, but I certainly don't want live ones on this station."
"We can't do that, Constable," Sisko said evenhandedly. "We may find we have a responsibility to the families of those individuals down there."
Odo shook his head and folded his arms tight around his narrow chest. "Dead is dead. What can the affection be for a lifeless corpse? I don't understand this attachment to bodies."
"That's because you don't have one," Kira sniped, running her forefinger along her mouth.
Just as she was about to turn to him with an apology for her joke at his expense, Odo came out of his shadow and stood over her.
"Feel free to discard me after I die, Major. I would find it an insult to have my dead remains put in some ornate bucket and 'visited' every few months."
Kira pivoted a calculated smile at him. "Okay, I won't visit you."
Odo fumed down at her, small eyes complex and probing from within his smooth mask of a face, as if he couldn't decide whether to say thank-you or not. So he turned to Sisko.
"She's right," the shapeshifter said. "They don't leave bodies. That makes this either a mistake or a trap. And we'd better know which."
"So what you're both telling me," Sisko picked up, "is that I've either got a minor annoyance here or a major diplomatic problem, and I'm leaning toward assuming the latter. The Cardassians are high-strung. If they don't prefer to leave their soldiers' bodies behind, I doubt they'll prefer the idea of having their mausoleum desecrated. But if those were my relatives, I'd want to have them back and take care of burial myself. I know what it's like to lose someone and not have something to bury. Deep Space Nine's not going to be part of that story for anybody else, if I have anything to do with it."
CHAPTER 8
"REPORT."
"High Gul, I have seen many corridors, but I saw no windows. There are science labs, at least three that I found—"
"Their purpose? What do they analyze or build?"
"I don't … know that, Excellency."
"Go on, then, Koto."
"But one of them is an infirmary!"
"Good. Go on."
"Turbolifts go everywhere, horizontal and vertical, as well as a honeycomb of accessways behind the walls."
"What is the architecture?"
"Pardon me?"
When the young soldier became confused by the question, Elto stepped forward to their leader, who was a head shorter than any of them yet could put them all spine-tight to a wall with a glance. "High Gul, it is Cardassian architecture."
"You're certain of this? I wouldn't want you to be mistaken, or our decisions will be bad ones."
"I recognize the corridor structure and the building material."
"Rhodinium?"
"Yes, High Gul, rhodinium sheeting with some molybdenite and other alloys used for structural support members. The power conduits and computer stations are clearly Cardassian. I can read them. But, Excellency … we see no Cardassians here. Many aliens of many kinds, but no Cardassians."
"Have you done a sensor scan for other Cardassians?"
"We are trying, but these controls have been altered and we don't trust them."
The High Gul tipped a glare at him. "No Cardassians in a Cardassian installation."
"None that we can find. And we see no one here who is Taldem either."
"None of our own people … none of the planet's natives … then who controls this place? Did you see anyone you recognize?"
"Yes, Excellency. Ferengi, Bajorans, and others who may be Bajorans, but have no ear cuffs."
The High Gul stood in one place and resisted his urge to pace. Any movement could give them away, and if he seemed nervous, then his men would become nervous. "Bajorans," he thought aloud. "Slaves from halfway across the sector. Why would they populate a Taldem installation? Unless, of course … we are no longer on Tal Demica."
"You mean someone has removed us from the planet?" Koto gasped, with such bald shock that he seemed like a child in spite of his bulk. "But why?"
"My political enemies have long claws," the High Gul said. He held his voice down, and managed to keep the venom out of it. They would all take their cues from him, from his attitude, and from his anger. He must stay calm until he understood the situation.
Then, however, his men would expect him to act, and he would do that. But there were so many questions here, and he would have some of them answered first. They were awake now, but they might as well still be in the sleep, as little as they understood about their surroundings. Elto, Koto, Malicu, and Ren were back with their perplexing discoveries, but Fen, Clus, Ranan, and a few others were still out on reconnaissance. Entertaining a fleeting hope that they would manage to keep themselves unseen on a populated installation with no other Cardassians behind whom to hide, the High Gul kept his posture in check. His demeanor was critical. Confidence, even if it was a lie, a temporary one.
"What else, Elto?" he asked, breaking into his own thoughts. "Reach for conclusions. Jump, if necessary."
Elto paused to think, as if determined to come up to the task demanded of him. "Excellenc
y, the communications setup and computer junctions are Cardassian design, but there is something that disturbs me. These are modern devices, all up-to-the-minute technology, and some is even beyond my skill as an engineer, yet everything here is … old … showing signs of wear."
"Old?" The High Gul swung to face his bulky second-in-command. "New science that is old? How old?"
"I would guess by the wear," Elto said hesitantly, "fifteen, twenty years."
The High Gul turned from him to keep the worry on his own face from shining too sharply on Elto. With one hand he touched the gritty knuckles of the other and felt the silt of time.
"And dust …" he murmured, his gaze unfocused. "All this dust … twenty years …"
Koto's eyes bulged suddenly and he shuddered with realization and choked, "My wife! My daughters!"
The youngest of them, their thick-skulled, eminently devoted Inos, stepped forward with his fists balled. "High Gul! Who would dare keep us suspended for twenty years! To keep you suspended? You, who started it all!"
"We were put in suspension by our own command, to be the final gauntlet," Elto said. "To rise again from the talons of the enemy and destroy him! How did our enemies gain control of us?"
"We cannot assume it was only our enemies," the High Gul said grimly. "This may have been done to us by fellow Cardassians."
"What Cardassian would do this to another Cardassian?" Koto stammered, shaking violently now, seeing in his mind only visions of his wife and children.
"None," Elto snapped back.
"There are those," the High Gul corrected. He could provide a brave image for them, but he would not deceive them. All the evidence indicated that they had been stolen from their original place of suspension, taken right off the planet, moved to another planet, and hidden away in this vault.
But why?
"If this is true," he went on, "then our families are grown, our wives are old. We were left to molder here while our civilization, our families, our fellows went on without us. Worst of all is the probability that our suspended forms were used as bargaining chips or artifacts, trophies in some twisted struggle—used against Cardassia—I can scarcely think it! Our anger is easy and I am angry, but there will have to be action, too, and we must calculate very carefully our actions. We have advantages here … we must be clever to use them. Elto …"