"YOU ARE BAJORAN. What is that like?"
"Let go of me!"
"Please don't kick. It's unbecoming and will get you nothing. I've never been to Bajor, but I know the story of the place—Clus, don't clasp the lady so tightly. There's no reason for crudeness on any part. She's the first of these people I've been able to speak to in person and I'm very curious to have a conversation."
"Don't get your hopes up, mister."
"What is your name?"
"What's yours?"
"I am the High Gul of the Crescent."
"I'm the Mermaid of Flickernock."
In the dim shell of the lower pylon near where the Defiant lay off the docking ring, Kira Nerys cursed herself for getting caught before she could freeze the docking-clamp locks. She cursed herself for getting caught at all.
And it wasn't too hard to curse these guys in the clown suits either. Brigade of the dead.
Her left cheekbone hurt where they'd hit her. Was her lip bleeding or only swollen? Felt like both. She was still dizzy from the ambush, but fought to keep them from seeing that. In her periphery she saw a bruise rising under her left eye. Her hands were still numb, which was why she hadn't been able to fight them off.
Anyway, that was the story she was sticking to.
Before her, an elegant Cardassian man of indeterminate age scouted her placidly, as if he had a week. His face was sallow, but his eyes sparkled. There might be a lack of life in his skin, but there was plenty in his attitude.
He wasn't pacing, wasn't fidgeting, but simply standing, looking at her, almost eye-to-eye with her, a head shorter than any of his guards, princely in an alien way with his shoulders draped by a dusty dark purple cloak. Only when the ship, the whole station, was rocked by another hit did he put out one unconcerned hand to grip the corridor handrail for stability. He didn't seem particularly interested in the fact that the station was being pummeled every few seconds.
"My other two Elites—my men—are dead? Is that correct? I sent them to kill your leader, but I had to kill him myself. So I assume their deaths from that."
At first Kira thought to remain silent, but the answer blistered its way out. "You assume right."
That felt good.
He frowned openly, then motioned to his men. He led the way through the long docking pylon and without ceremony entered the husky fighting ship Defiant. Until now it had lain silent at its post.
Kira inhaled the cool air inside as they moved through the passage onto the bridge. I'm gonna peel Garak when I see him.
The bridge was quiet, cool, even pleasant in a tomblike way, as if waiting for rebirth at the conjuring hands of those who had brought it here to deep space.
The High Gul assigned his three remaining men around the bridge, then pointed at Kira.
"Put her at the helm."
One of the huskies stuffed Kira into the navigator's seat, and he wasn't gentlemanly about it. The physical roughness was designed to show her that she had no choice but to stay here and do as they bade.
The High Gul ran his hand along the back of the command chair. "You know, I'm confused. If Captain Sisko has had this ship at his disposal all along, why has he not launched it himself and done battle with my colleague out there?"
"He was waiting for the planet to turn blue," Kira dashed off, simmering.
"Docking clamps can be released from here," a Cardassian at her far left said, from the engineering subsystems station, "but I'm not sure how to do it, High Gul. It would take a day to learn."
"Don't worry, Elto," the High Gul said.
Something pressed against Kira's bruised cheek. She flinched and looked. A Starfleet hand phaser.
"Release the docking clamps," the brawny animal beside her said. "Launch the vessel."
Kira pressed her hands flat on her thighs and tipped her head sideways, into the pressure of the phaser. "Get stuffed," she said.
She felt foolish, sitting here, knowing Odo was back in that crumbled corridor, left weakened and unable to help, having to deal with the death-littered deck, to stare into the face of Sisko and think of the loss. It had been one of her biggest unspoken fears—to be wounded, weakened, helpless on the field, unable to move the future, waiting for capture or death, not knowing which would be worse, knowing that to be rescued meant a burden for her companions.
Those were thoughts she had banished daily, but thinking of Odo brought them all forward.
"If you do not help," the High Gul said, buffeting the rage of his young soldier, "I will go to warp anyway. Rip the station apart."
She pulled away from the phaser and turned to peer at him. "You aren't the type to do your enemy's work."
The High Gul smiled. "I like that," he commented. "I hadn't thought that particular item about myself, but it's something to live up to."
"Congratulations," she said, "but I didn't actually mean it as a compliment."
"No, of course you didn't. Clus, take Koto and go to the engineering deck. Learn what you can and get ready for battle mode."
"Yes, High Gul."
The big ugly one—now, there was a definitive choice—took the injured one and disappeared into the turbolift. That left only the High Gul and Elto on the bridge.
"Tell me about Sisko," the leader parried while Elto struggled at the engineering subsystems controls. "I've been collecting perceptions about him. To exercise my mind."
"You killed him," Kira condensed. "Isn't that enough for you? It's over, isn't it?"
"But I am a soldier. I gather enemies. The quality of them is how I measure myself. We are all reflections of our enemies."
"You're a reflection of a nightmare. Have you looked in a mirror lately?"
He smiled. "No."
"You might as well, because I'm not going to sit here and carry on a conversation with you."
"Then I will talk. You tell me if I'm right. Captain Sisko was a man with nothing to lose. Enduring, sometimes unremarkable, always shy of the collisions he has felt in his life, and this pocked nightwalk upon which we turn has been his sanctuary. That's why he defended it so fiercely. Am I close about him?"
"I wouldn't know," Kira rebuffed. "I didn't know him very well."
"Oh? Why not?"
"We didn't like each other."
"Are you an officer in the unit Starfleet? A field commission? To appease the Bajorans into letting Starfleet operate this outpost, I would surmise. What is your position in the rank structure here? At first I thought you were a nurse, but then I saw you fight, and you are no nurse. Why do you live upon a Starfleet outpost and wear the livery of its sentinels?"
She swung the seat a little toward him. "Look, Mr. Crescent, your goons jumped us and that's fair, but you're not going to get any information out of me. If you're going to have your gargoyles kill me, then make your point and get on with it."
"Yes," the High Gul said patiently.
Was the patience real or was he a good actor? Kira tried to read his face.
"Let me guess about you," he said, looking at her as if regarding a painting in a gallery. "I fancy myself talented at this, so tell me if I'm wrong. You are a dauntless line-walker, yes? You have inborn vitality, sanded to perfection by the harsh fugitive life you once led on Bajor during the decades of struggle against my people's occupation of your planet. I have to confess to you I respect you and your people for throwing us off. Then, you grew up defensive. Fiercely self-willed. Ready to run on vague instincts when necessary. You're inquisitive. Let me see your eyes … they're cold, but in a hot way. You're diligent, demonstrative, and you possess a will of iron. Am I close at all?"
She stared at him and battled for control over her expression. She'd stopped saying yes, but he was still getting it out of her face somehow.
Though the invaders' leader was a smaller man than the other bruisers, physically he showed signs of once having been strong, and he had a confident kind of demeanor that didn't come from bashing heads. Every time he asked a question, he looked her square in the eyes and waited for an answer, gave her time, even though she might not say anything. He never made a threat, but simply went on to the next question. He had a nice voice, too, and that was somehow unsettling. Bad guys were supposed to rumble and rasp and cackle a lot. Even over the faint buzz of the translators that allowed them to speak to each other, his voice thrummed with easy drama. This guy could read poetry.
"I think your life on Bajor was a trial," the High Gul estimated. "The scars show beneath your youth."
How did he know?
Chilling thoughts of Sisko rang and rang in her head, echoed grimly by the frrruuuummm of Gul Fransu's hits on the station above them, vibrating down through the ship every thirty seconds or so. They were like heartbeats now, part of the life and death of Deep Space Nine.
She sifted her fogged memory of those last moments in the pylon for signs of life in that heap of arms and legs and gushing bodies. She was in charge now. In charge of the station's last few minutes.
"Yes, it was a trial," she said, after weighing this answer's value too. "It was a brutal misery and a constant crippling resistance against barbarians like you."
"Me? Not like me," he said. "I am from much before all that. My legacy is from another time, another Cardassia."
"Are you?" she impugned. "Not from what I've seen so far. You can posture and delude yourself all you want, but let me tell you a little about what you spawned. Burned children … severed limbs … prisoners scalded with boiling tar as an example to others, survivors shown recordings of their writhing families, a civilization already beaten being beaten further down for no reason other than their captors' insecurity. Healthy Bajorans broken and shredded by generations of slavery … the planet stripped until it was useless even to Cardassia. Proud of your children, Mr. Crescent? They boldly carried on the legacy you've pretty plainly shown us today. That's what you slept through. Another time, my backside."
She knew she shouldn't talk, but desire to communicate her fury rumbled to the top. A feeling of dissection took her by the throat, just as this extra-large Cardassian hit man had her by the arms. Any of these monsters could snap her like a twig.
"You're a freak," she told him. "A fossil. I and my people lived out your legacy for you. And you proved it was yours when you walked over so casually and put your knife into my commanding officer while he was still fighting three of your men. That's grandeur, I'll tell you. You can kill me, but that won't kill the fact that I saw what you really are."
The High Gul's face had been impassive, he'd worked at that, she could see, but suddenly a single crease appeared across his brow, just a small change but still a suggestion that her words had plucked a string he hadn't wanted to hear vibrating.
He realized he'd given something away. Quickly he pressed his bloody palm to his head for a moment, and paced across the bridge away from her until he regained control.
"Madam, I need you to help me drive this battleship. Will you help if I promise to use it in defense of the station against the Cardassian force outside?"
She pursed her lips. "You're good with words. But you can't charm me into helping you."
His friendly manner vanished like a light snapping off.
"Seconds matter!" he raged, so sharply that even Elto flinched at the upper bridge console and turned to look.
Lowering her chin instead of raising it, Kira simmered, "Peddle it somewhere else."
Before her, the High Gul's hollow yet elegant face was crimped now, twitching.
She was doing it. She was getting to him. At least she would have that. He might win, but if she had anything to do with it he wouldn't win happy. She could take torture. They weren't getting the Defiant. Judging from the rocks and shocks blundering through the very bulkheads, shaking the ship under them, the station wouldn't take much more of this relentless battering before its shields fell.
She stared at the High Gul and blindly hated him.
She was in command, for the last minutes of Deep Space Nine's existence. It was almost over. They'd lost. Now the only victory left was to not aid the enemy.
"Launch the vessel, sentinel," the High Gul repeated, "or, believe me, I will rip it off the pylon and take half of your station with it!"
Kira pasted him with a poignant glare and folded her arms across her chest. "Then rip it."
"You are maddening!" the High Gul spat. He swung away, then swung back without taking even one step. "You baffle me! You're obviously a survivor, a smart woman—can't you see what's happening here? Surely you've figured out that whoever is there is not a friend of mine! I am not the reason your station is dying!"
She pushed herself to her feet. "You're deluding yourself!" she blazed. Instantly she swung around to Elto—he was poised to jump her. "Don't bother! I'm not going to fight you." When he settled down, confused, she turned her back on him and faced the High Gul. "Who else but you is the reason? You can't charm this away and you can't hide from the moral blame. It's all yours. You and your poisoned culture."
A bone-rattling hit drummed through to them—possibly a hit right on the docking pylon, shaking the ship so hard that Kira grabbed for the helm to keep her balance. As if a figure in a dream, the High Gul barely moved, didn't even shift his feet through the shock wave, but stood still as statuary amid the blur of vibration. He seemed untouchable by the shaking, roaring, bawling of the station and the ship as their deflectors were shorn section by section.
"You're wrong about me, sentinel." He stabbed a conductor's finger at open space, as if directing the music of heavy hits. "This Cardassia is not me. I never tortured anyone nor made a single slave. I am not the Cardassia you know. Yes, of course we were conquerors, but in my time we were never squanderers. It was this new Cardassia who buried me in the vault, so my power would be diminished while they used my reputation, my banners, my pedestal of accomplishments to their own ends. Why do you think I was locked away?"
He came around the front of the helm and spread his hands upon the navigation board before her, leaned forward, and pleaded with his whole being.
"I would kill a million for a reason, but I wouldn't kill even one for no reason."
As she gazed back at him, Kira felt a change deep inside her chest. Pity?
She couldn't tell, but it was there and beating like a new heart. She'd been lied to by a hundred Cardassians in her life, she'd been deceived, bribed, courted by their every wile and had always turned a practiced deaf ear and responded with stony silence.
This time something moved in her at the beckoning of this ghost. It might be that she had weakened in these later few years, during which she had miraculously come to know a precious few honorable Cardassians, knelt in tears at the deaths of some of these, an unthinkable turn of life for her,
Was she that weak?
"Tell me, sentinel," this man asked slowly, "what would entice you to throw off the yoke of Starfleet on behalf of Bajor?"
Everything about him had changed. He no longer threatened with either words or manner. Had he seen the change in her?
They stared at each other.
"How about a chance to see the Cardassia you know torn apart by civil war? … Would this win you over?"