A SORRY, SAD little place to spend generations, with only cobwebs for banners. Not a flag, not a drum, no salutes nor any murmurs of appreciation for the grander age moved the stale air here.
What a place to hide a hero.
Damned Starfleet efficiency. When Chief O'Brien sealed something, it was bound to stay sealed. Breaking in made for a torturous hour of picking and chipping, with that bogus CONTAMINATED AREA sign glaring down. Couldn't use a phaser—it would be picked up. Couldn't do too much damage, or his tampering might be too easily discovered … too soon.
Garak's hands were cold and stiff, though he was working hard and breathing like bellows. His clothing was snagged and his thick skin scored by the long crawl through the tunnel. He knew what was hidden in there, and though those bodies had been in this room for eighty or more years, he was eaten up by the idea of leaving them in there alone for one more hour. Every minute of his trek down the tunnel, and now every minute of picking away the sealed bulkhead, chewed at him without remittance.
Suddenly he flinched and spun around to look behind him. He thought he saw that large, dangerous living shadow of a man who could stop him from his task. But there was no one there.
Still, he continued to flinch and look. Sisko hadn't seemed bothered by what they saw down here, but then, Garak knew, he hadn't understood it. Yet, in Sisko's eyes had been a flicker, a hesitation, a clue that he suspected something.
He always suspected something. This was a man who was looking through the galaxy for a crashworthy seat and was enraged when anyone disturbed it—but not so much that he didn't want to keep his foot to the fire. He wanted a safe nest in which to raise his son, but he couldn't make himself leave the frontline. He had found an anchorage, but at the eye of the wormhole. He hunted excitement, yet roared when it came.
And he suspected it everywhere, Garak knew. Before long the eerie and inconsistent details of this tomb began to congeal in Sisko's mind, and he would be here again. Why were there dead Cardassians here, and why were the bodies so old, yet not dissolved to dust? Why had they been mummified, when in fact the Cardassians did no such thing to their dead and never had?
Shy of every collision, Sisko would before long be haunted by these questions and, just as he was the ghost of those he had been forced to leave behind in the tragedies of his life, he would begin to haunt the database of Cardassian culture, looking for what happened eighty years ago. It might start as a casual question to Jadzia Dax … "By the way, while you're doing that, would you take a look at Cardassian history for me? When you get the chance."
And the chance would come soon, and Sisko would be here again. That was all the time there was.
Garak's pipeclay-gray hands began to shudder and go pale as he forced back a panel of the bulkhead. Inches from his face, his knuckles turned bony with strain, every vein and ligament cracking to the surface.
It was a chamber of blighted hopes into which he stepped. Beaming in had been a completely other experience from this one, from putting his foot forward and carrying his weight into the presence of these elegant Cardassians of the past, of an age when Cardassia was the power of this sector, when the Federation trembled at their first meetings. Mmmm, such a time.
Garak fell back until his shoulder blades touched the ragged bulkhead, closed his eyes, and drew in a long breath of the dusty, brittle air. Eighty years … a long, long dream.
Crackle—he swung around. Noise in the tunnel—
He hunkered down, out of a shaft of light provided by one of the small illuminators left behind by the others. There was nowhere to hide but a pathetic shadow, no place to slip into or behind. He was stuck, found out. Into his mind flooded a half-dozen stories about why he was here, each a little wilder than the one before. None that Sisko would buy.
Insulation drifted from the tunnel ceiling onto the cluttered deck, making a crunching noise as the larger flakes fell.
His heart thundered against his ribs. His dinner nearly made a second appearance, but he held control. And the edge of the bulkhead panel so tightly that his palm was bleeding when he let go.
He was still alone. In a way.
The thought struck him like a hand in the middle of his back, and he pivoted again to face the slabs and their dwellers as if they themselves had struck him. His legs were shaking now, too. If he were caught here, too soon, there would be fire, there would be slaughter.
The twelve bodies lay in casual mummification, each lying as if he had simply reclined to take a nap.
Garak blinked at his thought and leaned forward from where he was, squinting into the dimness. Yes, all these were male.
He expected that, but one could never be sure. Eighty years, after all. Things changed. Lies were told. Stories fermented. Customs cracked.
When he gathered his nerve, he went to the far left end of the curved row of slabs, to the body two from the end.
A Cardassian indistinguishable from any other, except to a Cardassian. Garak was thankful that Sisko didn't know many Cardassians, or there would have been a focus for the big man's instinctive suspicions. He would have seen the difference. He would have noticed the uniform.
Legs quivering, Garak lowered himself to both knees. From his pocket he took a standard palm-sized heating unit and attached it to the side of the slab, and turned it on.
Within moments, the unit began to hum, and the slab to change color.
He scooted back a few centimeters and looked at the sunken, shriveled face of the Cardassian on the slab.
"I offer you all my honors, leader of my father, and I hear you whisper. This is the best time of all. Now I hand you all I have built here and turn myself over to you. I will bring you back to influence in this powerful age … and you will do the same for me."