"SISKO TO DAX. Patch me through to Garak, please."
They all paused and waited.
Something about this made O'Brien hold his breath. This would be one of those moments when their local, friendly—if there was a definition for conditional friendliness—Cardassian became more than a haberdasher, more than an exiled alien no longer welcome among his own. This was a time when Garak would become consummately Cardassian, though the Cardassians didn't want him. He was their Cardassian, Deep Space Nine's, maybe even Starfleet's, from moment to moment.
O'Brien suddenly couldn't wait to see the tailor's smart-ass face and hear his explanation for this.
But nothing happened. No response.
"There's a haze of interference down here, sir," O'Brien said. "Try again."
The captain's brows twisted with dissatisfaction, and he tapped the badge again. "Sisko to Dax, come in—"
"Dax here, sir."
"Patch me through to Garak. I need his monumental wisdom about a little problem brewing down here. No—on second thought, never mind patching me through. Just get him, stuff him into a transporter, and beam him directly through to me."
O'Brien glanced at Kira, and it was as though they could both see Jadzia Dax smiling over her control board. She'd enjoy that.
"I'll have him there in a few minutes, Benjamin. Dax out."
"The Cardassians aren't going to like this, sir," Kira said suddenly, as if she'd finally let the attitude of her longtime enemies distill in a calm corner of her mind. "They might assume we did this."
The hum of a transporter made them stand aside, and in a moment there was another gray face in the crowd, this one animate and full-faced.
"Captain, how impertinent. Beaming me into the bowels of the station without so much as a pardon-me?"
"That's right, Mr. Garak," Sisko said bluntly. "Right into the bowels."
O'Brien gave in to the reflex to stand a little in front of the injured doctor—he didn't trust Garak. Everyone was suddenly tense again, for they all realized Garak had been beamed into the center of the chamber facing Sisko and with his back to the bizarre decor.
"I don't like leaving my store," Garak said. "I'm not an employee of the station, you know, I'm not one of your crew, I'm not at your beck and call. Constable, I'm sure you can explain the—"
The Cardassian expatriate swung around to lobby Odo, but in his periphery caught the corner of one of the slabs, and that was enough. He swung all the way around, arms out at his sides, mouth gaping, eyes like balls.
A terrible thing, to see a person so sledgehammered with shock.
O'Brien felt his eyes tighten with sympathy, but also with curiosity. They were dead. So what?
Garak didn't even seem to be breathing. He was up on his toes now, pivoting to take in the whole picture of the twelve corpses arranged without ceremony on their slabs, their heads turned this way and that, arms frozen in whatever position they'd fallen into decades ago.
"I need your opinion, Mr. Garak." The captain spoke out through the spectacle before them as if asking for a merchandise list. "Who do you think I should inform about this first?"
"You can't tell anyone!" Garak choked, then shouted, "Not anyone!"
Sisko closed in on him. "Why not, Mr. Garak? What've I got here? It's just a tomb, correct?"
"Just a tomb?" Garak pressed the heels of his hands to his head and stumbled away, staring from one corpse to the next. "There's no such thing as just a tomb!"
There was a glint of victory in Ben Sisko's eyes as he raised a brow and looked toward his own crew, toward where O'Brien stood over Bashir, with Kira farther to their right.
"These are old." Garak was hovering over one particular Cardassian corpse, a sunken individual, not as massive as most of the others. His voice was barely there. He was speaking to himself. "Eighty years, maybe. From the previous age … the age of the High Gul … remarkable!"
"Why is it remarkable?" Sisko prodded.
"Because these are soldiers!"
"How do you know that?"
"Because tailors don't get this kind of treatment!" Garak shook himself and straightened up, then stepped back to gaze upon the bodies longer. "For me, they'd probably just flush my body out into space. I'd be grateful if they just waited till I died to do it."
Kira lanced Garak with a blistering glance, then stepped between him and Sisko. "I think you should tell Starfleet before you notify the Cardassian Command."
"Mmm." Sisko continued looking at O'Brien as if waiting to see if he could goad another opinion out of him.
The engineer looked down and the doctor looked up. O'Brien knew what was expected of him—he'd served on a starship, not just a space station, and he'd watched his captain and officers tumble and brace under the flexing of galactic borders, interstellar personalities, and unthinkably long-armed protocol. Why didn't he have an insight or two?
So O'Brien threw in what he knew. "Depends how much control you want to keep, I'd wager, sir."
Sisko was watching Garak, who was now creeping from one slab to the next. Garak held his hands to his chest like a squirrel, and now reached out to poke one of the corpses, then flinched back as if he expected it to jump up. The silent faces of the dead gave them nothing.
"Notifying Starfleet," Sisko said, "triggers a certain series of shiftings of responsibility. So-and-so is then required to notify such-and-such, who has to contact this and that, and of course along the way I get less influence and less control. Ultimately interstellar law and the treaty between us and the Cardassians kicks in." With a frown at the sudden complications, Sisko shook his head. "Maybe I should just hand these bodies over to the Cardassians right away and be done with the whole matter."
"I wouldn't," Garak said, twisting to look at him without really turning. He was working hard to control his voice, but his eyes gave him away.
With his teeth gritted, Sisko pressed, "Why not?"
"You'd better pull up the agreement between the Cardassians and Starfleet, Captain. It states, 'As long as there are Cardassian citizens-in-good-standing residing on this station, the Cardassian Central Command retains the right to inspect the premises.'"
"So what? Other than you, and you're not a citizen-in-good-standing—"
"Because the clause doesn't specify between live Cardassians and dead ones, Captain. For technical purposes, a dead Cardassian has all the rights of a live one. If you think they'll miss this opportunity, you haven't been paying attention!"
"I have been," Sisko droned. "There's a Critical Information Clause in the treaty that says each side must consider the beliefs and creeds of the other when confronted with situations like this one, even if we don't know what those creeds are."
"That leaves the Cardassians open to making up a creed to fit the situation," Odo said. "It's not a very well written treaty."
"We were in a hurry," Kira drawled. "We wanted them out of here. It can't be that hard to keep them out."
Sisko glanced at her. "You know as well as I do that Cardassia intends to get this station back and get control over the wormhole. That's in their medium-range plans and I'd be a fool to ignore it. The treaty's only a thin veil while they bide their time. I'm sure you don't want that any more than I do, Major."
"Well … no, sir, of course I don't. But I know the Cardassians." She didn't even offer Garak a look, but spoke as if he weren't there. "They're superstitious and possessive, but they're also manipulative. They'll want to do their own ceremonies around these corpses and anoint them and parade them as past heroes and use them to shore up current morale. If they discover we kept dead Cardassian soldiers here in this condition, unburied, unburned, just stuck on slabs, drying out like so much meat—"
"The Cardassians will insist this station be reoccupied until a proper investigation can be carried out," Garak said.
Irritated now, Sisko glowered at him. "Define 'proper.'"
"You define it! As long as they want, that's the definition. Such a performance can be unending. They could claim you or I or anyone did this, and investigate forever!"
"Pity's sake," O'Brien groaned, then realized he wasn't helping much. "Do you know how much mischief they could commit on a sanctioned stationwide inspection?"
Odo came out of his shadow, stiff with composed anger. "After they evacuated, it took nearly a year to clean out all the listening devices, trip switches, booby traps—the whole station was like that tunnel out there. We'll never be able to have another secured meeting if we let them get their toes back inside our doors for sanctioned inspections!"
"And the resident Bajorans won't be happy about having a Cardassian presence on the station," Kira admitted. "We took this station at the cost of plenty of lives and we don't intend to let it slip back. Any number of my people would be pleased to slip a blade between some Cardassian ribs. We'd have to divert Security forces to protect the Cardassian inspection team."
"Then we'd be spread thin," Odo added, "and we'd have to ask for additional troops."
"Then everybody'll be here," Sisko picked up. "Cardassia, Starfleet—everybody. If I tell Starfleet, then they'll be under obligation to inform the Cardassians, who can then lever inspections on the station. That's if I knew about all this, and if my crew were efficient enough to tell me these bodies were here. Luckily I'm not very bright. Neither are any of you."
"Thank you, Captain," Garak heaved.
"Chief—"
O'Brien blinked, his mind tumbling with visions of armed, angry Cardassian inspection teams thumping through the toothbare corridors of this giant set jaw in space. DS9 would become an even hotter hell's kitchen than it already was. "Sir?"
"I want you to seal this area up again and put a 'contaminated' notice on the bulkhead. We'll lock it all up on both ends until I have a chance to do some unofficial looking around … find a path without thorns."
"That could take months, sir."
"They won't be any deader, Chief. All of you keep your mouths shut until I figure out what the next step should be. Until then, it's just going to be Halloween around here for a while."