What You Leave Behind Read online

With a bitter glare, Garak said, “I’m tending to the Colonel’s injuries. I have to lift this board. Prop her up.”

  “Why are you bothering to do that? We have to dig ourselves out of here.”

  “Damar, that would be futile. Look at the size of those blocks. If we are still and patient, I’m sure that soon other members of the resistance will be along to dig us out. They’ve got scanners. They’ll be able to find our life-signs and get us out of here.”

  “It wouldn’t be wise to wait, Garak.”

  “Why not?”

  “Primarily because the room is filling with water. Obviously the blast broke an alluvial line under the buildings.”

  Garak turned and gawked down at the floor.

  Water? Oh, yes. Kira let her hand slip from her side, and it fell into icy liquid swirling just below the thing she was lying on. That felt good. She liked cold water. Bracing!

  “Maybe we can swim out,” she said. “We can build a raft and float out. I can knit some oars. Give me a couple of minutes. You want yours pink or brown?”

  “If we don’t escape, Garak,” Damar said sharply, “then you would be better doing the merciful thing.”

  Turning away from Kira, Garak glared fiercely. “Are you serious? What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting you stop tending her and let her slip into a coma, rather than tend her until she’s conscious just so she can be aware that we’re about to drown or have the rest of this building fall in upon us.”

  “She can hear you, fool!”

  “She’s unconscious, Garak. Look at her. Her eyes are glazed over.”

  “At least they’re open. I’ll take care of her. She isn’t your concern.”

  “Get back here and help me! If we’re going to get out, you’ve got to lift some of these blocks.”

  “Very well, but if you mention—what you just said again, I’ll—”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’ll throttle me with a crumpet. Get over here.”

  Kira listened with amusement at their argument. They thought she was dead, and really she was just lying here painting and knitting and sewing her feet on.

  “Oh, look,” she said. “A rat.”

  They didn’t pay any attention. Over there, climbing out of a metal pipe, was a little northern provincial redrat. The redrat bobbed its pointy head up and down, surveying the rising water that was draining into their cavity. As it paused at the mouth of its little pipe, more water began to flow out of the pipe, preventing the rat from going back up the way it had come. Desperate and confused, it clawed around the mouth of the pipe, trying to climb the metal, but there was no way to do it. Frantic, the rat scratched furiously, then fell two feet to a jagged ledge of broken rock. From there, it scurried down a single metal rod, then jumped onto the end of the wooden slab upon which Kira lay, near her knee.

  “It’s going to bite me,” she mentioned.

  Garak ignored her. He was back over there, accepting chunks of conglomerate from Damar and pitching them aside.

  “Have you noticed that wherever you go in the whole galaxy, no matter what kind of planet you’re on,” she muttered, “there are some kind of rodents? You’re everywhere. I mean, some of you have different colors or extra feet, or hair that looks more like feathers, but you’re all rodents. There’s got to be something evolutionarily inevitable about rodents. There’s not that much difference. Look at you, for instance. You’re bright red, and you’ve got the prettiest blue eyes. Blue? Look at me! … I’m right, they’re blue. And you don’t have a tail. All the other rats I’ve seen have tails. There must be some predator on Cardassia that catches prey by the tail, so you evolved away your tail and that way it’s harder to catch you. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  The rat raised its snout and sniffed around, standing up on its little feet and grasping with its tiny pink hands at Kira’s kneecap while it had a look around. As the water rose beside her, Kira watched the redrat waddle up along her thigh to her resting hand. It sniffed her hand.

  “Don’t bite me,” she told it. “I don’t want to knock you into the water. Truce, all right?”

  The rat didn’t bite her. Instead it climbed onto her hand and moved hesitantly up her arm to sit just south of her elbow. It looked around again, sniffing furiously, hearing the rush of incoming water. The water was up around Kira’s ankles now, making its way toward her knees.

  “Here,” she said. “Stay where you are.”

  Summoning all her strength, concentrating hard, she flexed the fingers of her right hand. Her thumb had no feeling, but her wrist moved. Closing one eye with determination, she raised her entire right arm as if it were already floating. The rat rose too, as Kira lifted her arm. Up, up, finally to a shelf of broken wood that looked as if it might have been a piece of furniture an hour ago.

  “There you go,” she huffed, weakened by the effort. “Go on, get off.”

  The rat made a single little jump, and landed on the jut of wood.

  Kira’s arm slumped back to her side, falling partly over her body. “Better now?”

  “Thank you,” the rat said. “What are you doing here?”

  “We planted a bomb to harass a clutch of Breen patrols. We blew up their barracks. We got caught in our own explosion through. Miscalculated.”

  “The fuse or the escape route?” it asked.

  “Oh, well, that’s what those two were arguing about,” Kira explained. “They’re blaming each other for getting caught down here.”

  “Do they argue much?”

  “All the time. Just like they’re doing now. Listen.”

  Kira gestured with her limp hand at Garak and Damar, who were now calf-deep in water even though they were standing on the slanted side of the collapsed pile of building conglomerate.

  “All the potential glory of an empire, and this is what it comes to,” Garak was complaining. “Subservient to the prancing Founders and the insipid Vorta, and now we’re even lower than the Breen.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Damar snarled back. “The Obsidian Order got thrown out because you spent so much time sneaking about, preparing for a conquest while never launching one, stabbing everyone in the back, trying to gain advantage, avoiding what you were preparing for. Eventually you ended up even stabbing each other in the back. While Cardassia was involved in stealth and suspicion, sneaking around, trying to be clever, trying to gain influence and loyalty, and gaining strength, the Klingons and Romulans and Federation were gaining territory. When you were finally ready, we were already surrounded. So much for the wonders of stealth.”

  “We survived,” Garak argued, heaving another stone from the pile. “We prospered, our children were healthy—we were gaining power. Have you ever played that human game chess? Sometimes you can look at the board and still not really see who’s winning. But you wouldn’t understand that, Damar. You just count pieces.”

  “How have we done under your way? Strutting and blustering—even when you can take an enemy by stealth, you announce to him you’re going to do it, and then you have to either completely expend yourself winning, or you lose. If it weren’t for the Klingons, you’d be the biggest fools in the galaxy!”

  Damar smashed a stone hard into the water with a terrific splash that lanced them all with sharp cold droplets. “At least the galaxy knew we existed! We didn’t plan and plan and think and hide. We had a chance to win! We came closer than ever before! Yes, when you do something you have the chance to lose, but we won! Cardassia was in its heyday under us!”

  “But you didn’t win! You got kicked out of Bajor,” Garak told him. “If the Dominion hadn’t come in and saved you, you would’ve been pushed back here to the home planet and locked in your rooms. And even the Dominion is only using Cardassia—”

  “Look out!”

  A deafening rumble tore through their basement room. Garak pulled Damar down from the sheet of tallus. Together they splashed into the rising water. Less than a second later, the whole wall of tallus erupted, pushed ou
tward as if swelling, then crumbled and collapsed into a somewhat flatter heap of wreckage. Where the wall of blocks had been was now an obstacle of solid iron in a tangle of pipes.

  “What is that!” Garak sputtered, coming up in an oily slick on the water.

  “It’s a furnace boiler,” Damar bitterly said. “We must’ve loosened the floor under it.”

  He swam to the enormous mass of iron and pressed against it with both hand. It budged not a centimeter.

  “That’s the end of it. We can’t possibly move this. We’re finished unless they find us in the next few minutes.”

  “Yes, well, if I were in a better mood I’d wring your neck before the water drowns you.” Garak paddled over to Kira’s plank, but there was nothing he could do for her. The water now lapped at her pelvis and she could feel the chill up her spine.

  “They don’t like each other,” the rat observed, “do they?”

  “Oh, there’s a certain commonality,” Kira explained. “They’re not all that different. Garak was on the political outside and Damar was on the political inside. If you ask me, under neither of them has Cardassia done particularly well.” She paused, and looked up at Garak as he plucked at the padding he’d placed on the side of her head. “It’s funny … what he said. If Martok and Worf were here, those words would be stuffed right back down Garak’s throat.”

  “About the Klingons?”

  As Garak and Damar split to opposite sides of the wreckage, seeking an alternative way out of their underground coffin, Kira raised herself to a sitting position with tremendous effort. This way she could read a long stick that looked like it might’ve been a chair leg. Now, if she lay back again, she could use her right hand—her left wouldn’t move at all—to raise the chair leg onto the crashed furniture where the rat was struggling along, flanked by lapping water.

  “There. Climb a little higher,” she offered.

  The rat thanked her again, turned its back, and scurried up the chair leg to the top of a cabinet. Its ruby red back glinted in the single electrical light that still worked.

  A light? Until now, she hadn’t paid any attention to the fact that she could still see down here. She hoped the light stayed on. Suddenly the idea of darkness frightened her. She shivered.

  “It’s getting cold,” she mentioned. “Don’t come down here again or you’ll get wet.”

  “It’s nice of you to worry about me. That Cardassian seems to be worried about you.”

  “Well,” Kira murmured, “I have to admit we’ve become friends over the years. Didn’t start out that way.”

  “Is something wrong, Kira?” Garak slipped back into the water from where he’d been inspecting the upper wall. “Did you say something?”

  “She’s been muttering all along,” Damar said from the other side. “She’s delirious.”

  “I’m not delirious,” Kira told him. “I’m talking to the rat, not to you. You see,” she went on, “I wanted nothing more than to kill them both for a while there. Look at us now. Working together to try to get out of here before the rest of the block comes down on us.”

  “Which one of them do you like better?”

  Kira laughed. Only a rat would think like that.

  “Well,” she began, “from my point of view, they’re both wrong. Look at Garak. He’s spent years on Deep Space Nine and he’s gotten to like the people there, but he still doesn’t realize that if he gains, someone else doesn’t necessarily lose. When something good is created, everyone gains! That’s why the Federation, without blustering, without threats, without conquering, just keeps moving along and getting bigger and better—and people want to join it.”

  “Is that who you are? Federation?”

  “I’m Bajoran. I’m just trapped here. Temporarily. And don’t forget it’s just temporary. I’m sure not staying on this Cardassian rock any longer than I absolutely have to. Sooner or later somebody’ll break through and get us all off. Until then, we’re working to break the Dominion’s hold on Cardassia. The Federation’ll be here eventually. That’s how it works.”

  “Not by conquest?”

  “Not unless it’s really provoked. It moves inexorably along and along, not forcing anybody to come in, and it just works better. If you push and take and just be a bully, eventually somebody’s going to stand up to you, you’re going to run into somebody bigger—or three people who are collectively bigger. The Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans, Breen—even the Dominion—they spend all their time trying to figure out the best way to bully. That’s the only difference between Garak’s way and Damar’s. Should they bully by walking right up to someone and trying to hit him, or by sneaking up and punching him in the back? Eventually, neither way gets the best results. The Klingons figured that out, y’know, now that I think about it. They still strut around, and they like their facade of bullying, but they know that all those years of galactic snarling just brought them to poverty. Now they go along with the Federation. It’s about time. I wonder what’s taking the cook so long?”

  She lay back again, exhausted. The air was stuffy and dusty, in spite of the water gushing in. Crumbs of broken rock, insulation, brick, and wood layered her clothing and made her mouth dry.

  She wanted to drink some of the water crawling up her legs, but her hands wouldn’t form into a cup.

  The rat climbed higher on the crushed furniture, ran to the edge to look over at the rising water, then sniffed around the perimeter. “I smell fresh air.”

  Kira raised her aching head again. “What?”

  “There’s air coming through this hole,” the rat said. “I don’t think the building is completely collapsed.”

  “If it’s not, maybe there’s another way out!” Kira pushed herself up on an elbow.

  “Kira, don’t move!” Garak called. “If you fall off that board, you’ll drown.”

  “The rat found some fresh air. Garak, come over here! Damar!”

  “What does she want, Garak?” Damar appeared around a slanted piece of ceiling material, swimming up to the shoulders.

  “Something about fresh air,” the other Cardassian told him, and also paddled closer.

  “I don’t blame her. It smells like dead gutfish in this sewer.”

  “I wish it were a sewer,” Garak commented. “Then perhaps there would be a way out.”

  “There is!” Kira insisted. “Look! The rat’s climbing through an opening up in that corner. Look. Well, look!”

  “She’s pointing up there.”

  Garak moved to Kira’s side and squinted into the corner where the rat had disappeared through a ragged hole near the ceiling.

  “Damar, I see some light!” he exclaimed.

  “Stay with her. I’ll go.”

  As Kira sank back against Garak and he pulled her higher on the plank, they watched Damar pick his way up the strewn wreckage to the corner and peer into the nearly hidden hole. Drawing a breath through his nostrils, he proclaimed, “That is open air!”

  “Can you see anything?” Garak called.

  “I see light … I can see part of the street! There must be a room that hasn’t collapsed, and an outside wall that fell away! Hurry! Bring those steel bars and help me tear away this wall material!”

  “There’s a hammer over there!”

  Vigorously now, Garak splashed around Kira to the place he had seen a hammer, which would until now have been useless to them. He also gathered several reinforcement rods, then carefully made his way up the pile of furniture and crushed building wreckage to where Damar was already pulling at the wallboard.

  “Stay awake, Colonel,” he called back to Kira. “We’ll have you out of here in a matter of minutes!”

  Damar put his powerful shoulders into using a steel rod as a crowbar, causing part of the wall to rip like paper. The wall protested, making a terrible squawk, and for a moment Kira thought her friend the rat might have been stabbed.

  “Don’t hurt him!” she called. “After all, he’s the one who found the fresh air.” />
  “Relax, Kira,” Garak insisted. “We’ll have you in the infirmary in no time. Our unit medic will cure you in a flash. By tonight you’ll be back to your old vigorous self, with a phaser in your hand and a gleam in your eye.”

  “And you will be back in your nanny’s arms,” Damar commented, “sipping tea and having your feet massaged.”

  Garak’s eyes gleamed. “Is that an offer I can count on? I never knew you could be so accommodating!”

  “At least we’ll be free in time for the regional resistance meeting tonight,” Damar said, typically already thinking of what had to happen next. “We’ve got to convince them of our plan. If I have anything to do with it, we will wrest our planet from the fools who would collaborate with the Dominion.”

  “If I recall correctly, not too long ago that was you doing the collaborating. Now look at you—you’re a Cardassian legend. The great Damar, who the Jem’Hadar thought they had killed, but who rose again out of the ashes of shame to destroy so many of the enemy and fire an entire rebellion on his home planet! You’re a born rebel, Damar. You just don’t know which side to be on at any given moment.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Damar grumbled back.

  Kira smiled. They didn’t really hate each other. Necessity had made them compatriots. Now they both knew what they wanted—the Dominion’s paws off their home planet.

  Could be worse. She’d fought for the same thing. Except that her fight had been against the Cardassians.

  Now she was fighting with them.

  What a silly universe. Painted feet, talking rats, and Bajorans fighting alongside Cardassians. What unexpected leap would happen next?

  Who said wars had to be bad? Look how much good this one had brought. She’d make friends of enemies. She was part of a whole planet’s finding out what it meant to have to fight for its identity.

  “After all,” she said, “that’s all I wanted to teach the Cardassians all along. Maybe this time they’ll learn.”

  “Hold on, Colonel,” Garak called as he and Damar tore the wall apart.

  More and more outside air piled in through the hole they were making.

  Of course, the water was up to her neck now. Whose bright idea was it to take a bath at a time like this?