"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."