Station Rage Read online

  Framing Odo's narrow form as he stood in the middle of the dusty deck, along the cold outer-hull walls of this cramped chamber were twelve stone slabs, and upon those slabs, in unlikely repose, lay Cardassians.

  Emaciated, sunken, grayer and more snakelike even than in life, with skin shriveled to paper and exposed veins collapsed, corpses so long dead were even more disturbing than if they'd been killed today, O'Brien thought as he gawked from behind Sisko's considerable shoulder.

  They weren't covered with anything. No shroud, no protective covering, nothing. Only dust blunting the bright colors of their unfamiliar clothing and coating their bony faces. It wasn't death as he would have expected. It was a shade or two uglier. Nor were they lying in any particular position. Some were on their sides, some on their backs, some with hands on their chests, some with arms flopped over the sides of the slabs on which they lay, as if they had tossed around during sleep.

  Sedate as a Vulcan, cloistering an unexposed temper, Ben Sisko didn't move much. At first he seemed only to be counting the corpses again, making certain there weren't any hidden corners or cabinets in here or anything tacked to the ceiling.

  "Some of these tunnels are sensor-shielded, sir," O'Brien said. "That's why we don't know what's in 'em." As he watched, the engineer found a bizarre similarity between Sisko and the dead of their enemies—the same massive body structure, wide shoulders, broad chest, the same wide brows, and even the same black dots for eyes that could drill like an old-fashioned barn tool. He was built like them, as if given to Deep Space Nine to stand up against them, as if to say to the Cardassians in a subliminal manner that, no, they couldn't have the station back.

  They'd lost it, and it was Ben Sisko's now.

  "Oh, this is just great!" Major Kira blurted when the silence got to her. She swung this way and that with her hands out. "You've desecrated a Cardassian tomb!"

  O'Brien blinked himself out of his stupor, and realized she was blazing at him.

  "Well, how could we know?" he said quickly.

  "You couldn't leave well enough alone? You had to explore these forsaken tunnels? Now what!" When Sisko flipped his enduring gaze to her, she gathered herself. "Sorry, sir … now what?"

  "Now," Sisko rumbled, "we follow procedure."

  "There isn't any procedure for this!"

  "Then we'll invent some procedure." He tapped the comm badge on his chest. "Sisko to Dr. Bashir. What's your location?"

  "I'm … somewhere in the tunnel … this is very difficult going, sir …"

  "Take your time, Doctor."

  "We should've beamed him through, sir," O'Brien said in empathy. "That tunnel's a sorry wreck."

  "We'll get it cleaned out before we bring anyone else through it, Chief." Sisko picked his way through the two-inch-thick carpet of dust that made a puff every time his boots struck. "Be a hell of a field trip for the boys once we make it safe."

  Kira was leaning over one of the corpses, her shoulders tight as she looked into the staring Cardassian face, the mask of her lifelong enemies. "Shriveled," she muttered. "Doesn't look like anything recent."

  "You don't know that," Odo pointed out. He wasn't going near any of the bodies, O'Brien noticed. "Don't touch any of them. You don't know what they've got."

  "This isn't a time for jokes, Odo," Kira said.

  The shapeshifter raised his chin. "I'm not making any. There's no sterile field here."

  Kira shrugged, but looked at the corpses near her and stepped back. "I don't like this. . . ."

  "Major," Sisko began and turned to her, "could they have been killed by the Bajoran underground who didn't want the bodies seen?"

  "No one in the underground would treat Cardassian bodies so well," Kira admitted with a telling roll of her eyes. "A disposal chute would've been too good. Besides, we wanted the bodies seen."

  A sound—a crackle and bump—in the tunnel made O'Brien turn back the way he had come. In the back of his mind he'd been waiting for this, knew it was coming, and reached through the craggy opening to help Julian Bashir stumble through.

  "I knew it," O'Brien muttered as he drew the doctor in by one arm.

  Bashir's boyish face was as gray as those corpses over there, his bronze hair indistinguishable from the dusty ceiling, his uniform sleeve torn and blood draining from his arm to his hand and from there to the deck.

  "Doctor—" Sisko stepped toward them.

  "I'll be all right, sir." Bashir's soft British voice was scarcely better than an unconvincing gasp, his large eyes wide with relief at finally finding the end of this particular tunnel. "Cut myself on something. I'm not even sure what."

  "We should've provided a Security escort," Odo grumbled from near one of the Cardassian slabs.

  "Oh, my …" Julian Bashir let his jaw drop as he leaned into O'Brien's grip and stared into the chamber. "My goodness, what is all this?"

  Professional fascination capped his initial shudder as the doctor stepped past them one by one, to gaze across the chamber at all twelve corpses, then to focus on the nearest one. With his bloody hand he dug into his medikit and found a medical tricorder, and began to wave it over the body as it stared up at him. Its head was tilted slightly to one side, and seemed to be looking into his eyes, which bothered everybody but the doctor. And maybe Odo.

  O'Brien, though, found himself leaning a bit off to one side to avoid those staring eyes. "Julian, don't you think we'd better tend that arm?"

  "One moment." Already lost in metabolism.

  Or what was left of it.

  "Cause of death?" Captain Sisko asked straight off.

  The doctor bobbed his eyebrows and frowned at his medical tricorder. "Something's interfering with my readings … I'll need better equipment."

  "Never mind that. Just give me what you've got."

  "Well … their heads aren't bashed in, there aren't any gashes, stab wounds, or other major trauma to the bodies … all organs are present—"

  "Are they mummified?"

  "You mean like the pharaohs?"

  "I mean, has anything been done to the bodies after death, like the blood drained or anything put in there."

  The doctor's brow tightened. "Not that I can discern … there's some reading of blood, but it's in a rather dry form. I can't tell about the amount."

  "Doctor, I'm just trying to find out if this was done to them on purpose or if they were trapped in here and fell asleep in the cold, or what. Can you at least tell roughly how long they've been here?"

  "This skin tissue is confounding my readings a bit, but the clothing"—Bashir recalibrated his tricorder—"seems to be on the order of seventy-five years old. At least, that's what I get from the state of molecular decay of the fibers."

  "Any contamination that you can find, Doctor? Any danger to us here?"

  "No, sir." Bashir hung on the word as if unsure. "I'm getting some very faint readings … might be bacteria, but they don't read as contagious. The skin is so strange … probably the age … and I've never had a chance to autopsy a dead Cardassian, so I have no experience, but judging from my readings here I think we're safe, sir."

  "Safe," Sisko rumbled with that low voice. He strolled from the middle of the chamber to the farthest slab, looked into the face of the dead Cardassian as if to find something scratched in the paperlike skin, then came back again. "We won't catch a plague, but we're still trapped. They weren't murdered by Bajorans and therefore were probably left here by other Cardassians. How will the Cardassians feel about our breaking into a burial chamber? What do you think, Major?"

  Kira flinched. She'd been about to touch, fingertips only, the arm of one of the corpses.

  Suddenly she was set apart from them, away from all humans and even away from Odo. All at once she was Bajoran. She was the soldier of the underground again, not an officer with a Starfleet field commission, but a spit-fisted fighter who had the longest and most antagonistic relationship with Cardassians of anyone on the station. At the moment, she was their only expert.
r />   "Sir," she began, her eyes wide as Julian's now and filled with the responsibility shifted to her, "I'm used to dealing with live Cardassians … that is, unless I helped make them dead ones."

  Sisko stepped toward her. "You must know something about their traditions. Is this a normal form of interment? I've heard they like to bury their dead in space. Is that something new? The doctor says these bodies are seventy-five years old. How can that be, on an eighteen-year-old station? Come on, Major—you've done battle with these people since you were a child. Don't you know any of their legends or beliefs? Superstitions? Religions? Voodoo? Anything, Major?"

  "None that ever looked like this!" Kira smiled mirthlessly and gestured in dismay at the baffling scene around them. "I've never seen uniforms like these before either! If that's what they are … they could be some kind of tribal outfit. I've heard the Cardassians used to be divided into tribes. Or I suppose they could be burial clothing. . . ." She stepped from the corpse nearest her to the one near Odo and poked at the unfamiliar body-armor-type leggings. "Looks like something a Klingon would wear."

  "But not these colors," O'Brien spoke up, and was startled by his own voice. Yes, he wasn't imagining it—there was an echo in here. How the devil could that be, with a ceiling this low? Damned Cardassian architecture. "I've never seen either Klingons or Cardassians in bright red and orange and purple like these people. Don't know that I'd wear it myself."

  Julian Bashir straightened up, but leaned the heel of his hand on the slab under the Cardassian he was examining, and blinked and groaned. "Bit stuff in here, isn't it?"

  "Sit down." Sisko scooped up the doctor's good elbow and maneuvered him to a place where he could sit. "You're losing blood, remember?"

  "Oh … yes."

  "I'll take care of it." O'Brien grabbed at the reason to move, do something, distract himself from the grisly scene around them. He didn't have the constitution to be an archaeologist. "Where's the medikit?"

  "Over there. Dropped it." Bashir pointed at the deck near the slab, then gazed at his bleeding arm. "I haven't the faintest clue what cut me."

  "The tunnel is set up with booby traps," Sisko said. "We'll have a crew go through and clear it."

  Plunging into the immediate task of cutting away the torn sleeve, sterilizing Bashir's arm, and putting a temporary bandage on it, O'Brien started to say something, but clamped his lips and made himself stay quiet. He wouldn't say anything the captain didn't already know. Diplomatic implications, military ones—a Cardassian tomb a quarter of a century old? Loaded with problems.

  Sisko was an enigma of a man to Miles O'Brien, who always knew his purpose day by day. As an engineer, O'Brien had the comfort of dealing in tangibles. He liked things that way. Even when theories crept in, he started to sweat. Diplomacy—now, that was just asking for trouble. Sisko could have said goodbye to the bundle of problems of a deep-space station, never mind one where a stable wormhole had been discovered. Now DS9 was not only a way station but a gatehouse, a place coveted once again by the Cardassians, who had once abandoned it as junk.

  "Seventy-five years," he uttered as he gazed at the dead soldiers. "Well back into the warring history of this sector. Long before the Federation found our way here. I imagine there aren't many artifacts or preserved bodies from that era. We've got ourselves quite a find here."

  "What do we do?" Odo asked.

  "I know what do to," Sisko said, and raised his hand to his badge. "We call our friendly local Cardassian."

  CHAPTER 3

  "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 cont
inued 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."