by Diane Carey
"Doctor?"
"Garak? What are you doing lurking about in there? Come out into the light. Why aren't you off the station? Non-Starfleet personnel are supposed to be—"
"I know, on Bajor. Almost everyone is there, except for some Starfleet people still running about. The station is echoing like an empty dumpster."
"You're leaving the station, of course," Bashir said, and raised his eyebrows. "I hope?"
Cautiously, Garak stepped out of the shadows, but couldn't avoid glancing about to make sure the two of them were alone. The infirmary was dim, quiet. Strange how he had gotten used to the comforting protection of crowds.
"Of course I will," he said. "After all, I want nothing more than to cooperate. But what about you?"
"Me?" Bashir's boyish eyes widened within the frame of his narrow face. "I'm one of the department heads. I have a duty station. I can't abandon it."
"But why? There's no one lying ill or injured here, all your injured have been moved—are you staying here to guard a dead Cardassian?"
"No," Bashir said smoothly. "Because I'm a Starfleet officer."
Garak clenched his teeth briefly. "I suppose so. At times I have trouble thinking of you in quite so severe a persona. Tell me, have you found out who the individuals were who attacked Captain Sisko?"
"Nothing gets by you, does it? How do you know about that?"
"Oh, I keep my ear to a few select walls … the attackers were Cardassian, I hear."
"Well, the dead one certainly is. No remarkable qualities of any kind, give or take a shedding of dead skin cells here and there. Is that normal?"
"Skin cells? Oh, very normal, yes. It's seasonal for some regions," Garak conjured.
"Really," Bashir murmured, clearly troubled. "I've never heard of that. It's not in my medical files."
"Then I'm delighted to supply it."
"Mm, yes … and he was malnourished as well, poor sot. Very gaunt. Eyes were somewhat sunken. Veins were thin."
"What is that in front of you? On those two monitors?"
With a sorry sigh, Bashir shook his head at the screens before him. "I'm using computer simulations to try, rather unsuccessfully thus far, to help Odo."
"What happened to Odo?"
"He was cornered. His body was impregnated with a half-dozen or so pellets of neutral material that dissolved immediately and left a fissionable substance in him. Element One-ten, if you've heard of it. If he returns to his natural state—"
"He'll take the station with him and probably a bite out of the planet!" Garak swung away to catch his breath, stared into a blank wall, and whispered, "Ingenious!"
"Ingenious, and not a little diabolical," Bashir said. "He's getting weaker by the minute. I feel so helpless. I don't know what to do for him. I'm the station's chief medical officer and it's my job to know how to care for everyone who passes through. I've gone to great lengths to accumulate a library of biological conditions and treatments … but I've utterly failed to serve Odo. He's always seemed so invulnerable—physically, if not emotionally. . . ."
"Don't torture yourself, Doctor," Garak offered. "In a galaxy full of variations, sometimes the only people who can help someone are his own people. Unfortunately, we're too far away from other shapeshifters to get advice, not that they'd be particularly accommodating if we did ask. Things don't always work out."
Bashir looked over his nose in a scolding manner. "That's a soldier's thinking."
"Yes, it is. It's a different kind of survival than a doctor thinks about, but it's still survival. Odo knows that. You should learn it, too, and forgive yourself."
Garak's own words pounded in his skull, swirling beside the words of the High Gul. The Gul represented a change in government that might be friendly to Garak, yes, yet he was haunted. As the fog of excitement at this possible shakedown of powers was clearing from his eyes, he began to entertain other complexities. Doubt crept into his thoughts. Until now he had thought only of himself, the Gul, and Cardassia—a simple formula with a reasonably predictable result.
His eyes had been pried open by the words of the man whose presence had fogged them. The High Gul had been made chaste by history, polished to an image of brilliance, wisdom, and he was those, of course. Brilliantly inscrutable, wisely ruthless, capable of grand sacrifice, even slaughter on a large scale. The ages of memory had scrubbed him clean, leaving only a pristine paper image.
Garak could live with all that. Every leader had to choose men, legions, even whole populations to die. Strength and resolve were sometimes measured in those terms.
But the High Gul was a man out of time, and that changed things. He wanted to foment panic, set the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Terrans at each other's throats, but he thought he was dealing with the civilizations of eighty years ago, with weapons eighty years behind the times. This was a deadlier galaxy than the days of power eighty years ago.
Today, the Romulans, the Klingons, and all the others possessed strengths the High Gul had scarcely imagined in his own time, a time when the Cardassians were in control of all their known space, and just barely beginning to run into races who might stand up to them.
Now there were plenty. Today, any one of them could lay waste to whole planets, especially in the midst of panic.
The High Gul had no idea about the Dominion plunging through the wormhole to wrest his victory from his very hands and possess what he thought would be his. He saw too clearly in his mind a Cardassia that had long ago shattered. And Starfleet, the force that had managed to tame a dozen viperous forces, had yet to be provoked by Cardassians. Some said that was the only reason Cardassia behaved itself here and now, opting to chafe in silence.
Yet he was the first and only High Gul, clever, quick, and all that, hero of the past, and all knew him. He would have no trouble raising armies, igniting the youth, calling up the misty-eyed veterans.
And how would it all turn out? And when the end shook out, would it be Garak's fault, because he hungered to go home too soon? What good was it to be Vice-Gul in a smoldering graveyard?
"Doctor, by the way," he began again, "because the communications are down, Captain Sisko sent me to tell you you're needed at the relief station on Bajor. In your official capacity. To treat the evacuees."
The doctor looked up again at him, sharply. "But this is where the action will be, where the casualties will be—all my nurses and interns are on the planet already. Did he say why I'm needed down there?"
"Why, yes, he did. There's been an outbreak of food poisoning. They're treating the symptoms, but they need you to help track down the cause and keep it from spreading."
"Oh, dear lord, what next?"
"I can't imagine," Garak threw in.
Outside in the corridor, someone—no, two or three, probably Security—ran by, boots throbbing on the deck in punctuation to the sense of urgency he tried to foster in Bashir.
Bashir pushed to his feet and crossed the infirmary, scooping up implements and treatments for an obsessed thirty seconds, but when he glanced up and their eyes connected, Garak realized too late that his timing had fallen prey to his solicitude. He had lingered too long.
The doctor passed by him a few steps before his natural clairvoyance kicked in. He stopped with his back to Garak, hesitated, and slowly turned. His brows were up, his head tilted, his lips pursed.
"Garak … are you trying to get me to abandon my post?"
They looked at each other across the cold floor.
Bashir strode cagily toward him. "Do you know something we don't know?"
Anxiety played through Garak's mind and he wasn't sure how much showed on his face, but he had underestimated Bashir's ability to pluck it out. Disquiet had plagued him since he last heard the High Gul's words, and he had come here as a result.
He knew he had been cleverly manipulated and had allowed it to happen. Until now the euphoria of his discovery had puffed him up, clouded his thinking. He had accepted the High Gul's mystique, and now as he looked at
Bashir, the one person on the station who approached him without suspicious ginger, he accepted his doubts.
"Doctor," he began, forcing a cynical tone to disguise his apprehension, "you and I have spent many hours in pleasant conversation which has taken, shall we say, the edge off my uniqueness here.…"
"If that's a tacit manner of admitting friendship, I'm with you all the way. But it doesn't answer my question. Are you trying to get me off the station?"
Garak let the gauze fall away from his expression. He had failed in his gamble, in his ruse, even in his attempt to be glib. After that, there was nothing but vulgar anxiety to serve a gasping master.
"Let's just say I have an intuition," he admitted. "I'd rather you weren't on the station anymore."
CHAPTER 13
"MAJOR KIRA! Safety-grid crash!" an ensign shouted. "Where?"
"Reactor failure … danger imminent … Evacuate to docking ring. Automatic shutdown in six minutes … repeat … six minutes to fail-safe …"
"Say it again! I didn't hear you! Can you turn the volume down on the klaxons?"
"Yes—the crash is almost systemwide. It's a major reactor shutdown. Ordinarily the station's separate areas would self-seal, but with the malfunctions we've had all morning, the sealing panels are failing. There's a flush of radiation into occupied areas. Anybody who's not evacuated in five minutes thirty seconds is dead."
"Where's Captain Sisko?"
"Infirmary, I think."
"Have you got the comm links cleared yet?"
"Some, but not to the infirmary."
"Six minutes—damn! What areas are in danger?" Kira Nerys peered over Dax's shoulder at the panels whose readouts were frantically flashing schematics of the station, with certain sections blocked out in bright emergency orange.
Even though she knew Kira could see the monitors, Dax heavily said, "Look."
Before them lay a 2-D architectural diagnostic of the station, simple blue lines in the shape of a giant spindle on a black background. At the heart of the spindle, a jellylike marigold-orange plume boiled from one of the reactor areas, moving like a swarm of killer bees as Dax narrated its path.
"Radiation is flushing upward through the lower core. It'll contaminate sections four, five, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve of the inner lower core, several connecting tunnels, airlocks, cargo aisles, several labs. Shortly after that it'll overtake the infirmary, main engineering, and from there it'll encroach very quickly on the Promenade … and finally Ops. Just a matter of minutes."
"Dammit! Here? Where's the safest place?"
"Docking ring. We still have working seals there."
"All right, that's where we'll go."
Kira was embarrassed when her voice came out as almost a groan, frantic to hold all strings on all kites and not lose any. The whooping klaxons were driving her crazy, ticking down the seconds they had left. She swung around to the other people on post in the area.
"Anderson! Go down to sections four and five and evacuate everybody to the docking ring. Mason, you do the same in sections nine, ten, eleven and twelve. Get somebody to help you. Utang, you go. Never mind your station, just get those people out! Then go down to engineering and see if Chief O'Brien needs extra hands. You and the officers will be beamed out just before fail-safe. After that, it'll take a starship's phasers to get back in here."
Take a step, swing around, take another step, swing around again. On the screens, the creeping mange moved ever through the station, toward her. The station pulsed with the menace of changing allegiance, and she found the idea noxious. Handing over DS9—when had she become so possessive? Starfleet would come and eventually they'd get the station back, but to lapse even for an hour to the malefic power she had fought all her life was a bone-grating thing. The station was no shining prize, only a giant set jaw turning in space, a restive plaza acting as a side door to the wormhole, but it was all Bajor had to prove that somebody besides Bajorans would stand ground here or even cared to.
But DS9 had once been Cardassian, had been built by Cardassians, functioned under a constant veil of having once lived another persona, had survived a change of allegiance, and sometimes Kira felt that the station, like a captured ship under a foreign flag, was only biding time until it changed back.
She pressed her hands to the sides of her head and scrappily demanded clearer thinking. Didn't get it, exactly, but some things took time.
"This is all we need," she roiled. "To abandon Ops! Don't we have any option? Isn't this place double-sandbagged or something? Anything?"
"After a certain point, the computer gives us no choice but to leave," Dax calmly instructed. "The computer is going to do everything it can do to keep contamination from flooding the whole station. It'll force us to abandon these areas as it's programmed to do. As long as it reads 'radiation,' it won't allow traverseways to remain open. It seals them."
"With what? Forcefield?"
"No, energy can fail. The heavy portcullises roll into place. And that's it. We have to beam everyone off ASAP. After that, we won't be able to beam off through the radiation."
Kira stifled a groan. Her chest hurt. "How many people are left on the station?"
"We have a report that all but fifty-one people have evacuated to Bajor. Most of the remaining personnel are Starfleet Security personnel and our department heads, along with a few others who are still getting off."
"Get'em off! What's taking so long?"
"I don't know. Kira … did you authorize launch of one of the runabouts into the wormhole?"
"Me? No."
"Well, look at this. We've got one heading in there right now. There it is."
Pointing at a moving blip on the small screen, Dax fought with her controls for a few seconds; then one of the larger screens popped on, just in time to show a clear picture of the runabout approaching the mouth of the wormhole and the wormhole flashing into its visible mode, a swirling toy of lights and energy. The runabout plunged in without even pausing to adjust approach vector.
"Patch me through to that!" Kira demanded.
"Go ahead."
"Attention, runabout, this is Major Kira. What's your authorization to enter the wormhole?"
They waited. No response.
"Attention, runabout! Identify yourselves!"
"It's no use," Dax told her. "There's nothing coming back over the frequency."
"Is it damped out like the internal communications?"
"No, just no response. It's as if there's no one aboard at all."
"Could it be the saboteurs making an escape before the station is contaminated?"
"Of course it could be."
Rankled and flooded with suspicions, Kira knotted her fists. "Keep a monitor on the mouth of the wormhole. If they decide to come back, I want to know it. Explain to me what happened to the reactor."
Dax played her controls as if enticing information out of the mechanics, but shook her head. "I'm not receiving specific data. Some kind of rupture. I can only presume it was sabotage, not a breakdown, given circumstances."
"That doesn't make me feel any better. Six reactors on the station, only two of them operating, and one of those two ruptures. If it's not sabotage, we're going to go down in a record book somewhere. How did they tap into the technical connections necessary to rupture a reactor? And what disturbs me is that these people might be able to get to the other one and rupture it too. Then, on top of contamination, we're also out of power."
"By then it won't matter," Dax began.
She began to say something else, but stopped as Ben Sisko appeared, packed into the small opening of one of the access conduits, crawled out, unfolded his large frame, and hurried to them, shaking one foot that seemed to have fallen asleep as he crawled through the guts of the station.
Kira swung around. "Sir—"
"I heard it." He shook out his limp and surveyed Dax's readouts. "Whether we have power or not won't make any difference, Major, if we have to abandon DS9 because of reactor cont
amination. Status?"
"Three minutes thirty seconds to fail-safe …"
"Intrastation communications are still ragged," Dax said, "but there are alarms going off everywhere. The computer is about to shut down any traverseways on the station, thinking it can stop the radiation from spreading, but it can't. There are too many malfunctions in smaller grids. If we don't get out of the inner core and get our people out, we're all dead. And, Benjamin, four of our Security men were attacked in the lower core, probably by the infiltrators on their way to or from their sabotage of the reactor." She paused and looked up at him. "Our men are all dead."
His skin wine-dark in the shadows, eyes harsh, Sisko's face turned stony, cheekbones, lips, jaw cut on edges.
"Four more," he said through his teeth. "And infiltrators now have possession of their four phasers. Dax, issue Security Alert One to our personnel here and on the planet. We've got to stop supplying weapons to our enemies."
"I'll do my best to get the message through, Benjamin."
"Sir, somebody launched a runabout without authorization," Kira said, "and it went into the wormhole. It could be the saboteurs trying to escape into the Gamma Quadrant."
"Could be, but it isn't. I launched that runabout myself."
"You did?"
"Yes, I did."
"But why?"
"So it'll be there in case I need it. Or in case I need to use its impulse engines to blow up the wormhole by remote. I have to protect the wormhole as much as I have to protect the station. I have an obligation to the civilizations in the Gamma Quadrant not to let hostile powers go through there, and I have an obligation to us not to let the same come through from there. One can never be too prepared. I'm sure you agree."
"Well, I—"
"Three minutes to fail-safe … repeat, three minutes to fail-safe … all personnel evacuate specified areas …"
"Benjamin," Dax said, "we can beam out to the docking ring in the last four seconds, but after that even the transporter safety features will shut out these contaminated areas."