Chapter Text
Negotiations fall apart, once the corpse is discovered.
There is some nuance to it, of course, but what is nuance when your friend’s dead body has been found in a stasis container in Cargo Bay Four?
Before that, however, it goes a little something like this—
It has been fourteen years since the end of the Dominion War. While no longer standing on the brink of annihilation, Cardassia’s recovery is still measured in decades and centuries, not months and years.
As the result of a few lines of very particular language the second Bajoran-Cardassian Peace Treaty signed two years after the bombardment and the surrender of the Founders, Cardassia has not been at liberty to join the Federation lest they be found in violation of the non-aggression clause by entering in a military alliance with a foreign power. With a population still reeling from a death count just over one billion, an economy that seizes and retracts at the slightest panic, and a planet suffering from the long term effects of nuclear radiation and climate change, the new Cardassian Republican has not been in a position to risk Bajoran military aggression by making even the smallest of overtures—despite many populist attempts to get the issue on the ballot via voter referendum—towards joining the United Federation of Planets.
Until now.
The number of people who will know just how Bajor agreed to enter into the Federation with the same binding agreement with the Cardassians is small. No one else was in the room—rather, holosuite—where it happened. The Castellan of Cardassia, the Bajoran Military Minister, and an encrypted karaoke program that they’ve used together off and on in the years following the ceasefire—and copious amounts of liquor.
When they emerge in the small hours of the morning, reeking of kanar and granary alcohol, an agreement has been reached.
Bajor would waive that specific section of the non-aggression clause provided that they both entered the Federation on the same binding resolution. Cardassia would stand down their military, but be unable to apply for peacetime military aid, weapons, or technology for a term of seven years, and in return would be able to, at last, formally requisition the industrial replicators they had been begging the Federation Disaster Relief Corps for for the last decade. Bajor would host the signing ceremony in Bajoran space, on the same Terok Nor where the Cardassian occupation of Bajor ended. Upon signing, the space station would once again be christened Deep Space Nine and be administrated by a combination of Bajoran and Starfleet personnel.
Castellan Garak and Minister Kira shake hands, and return to their home worlds to beg, bargain, and blackmail their respective governments into accepting the terms of the agreement.
But now, Julian Bashir is dead.
The mood on the station has been altered dramatically, everyone poised for the inevitable diplomatic calamity and power struggle over the investigation that is sure to follow.
The Bajoran security personnel have cleared out for the most part, only a few officers remaining to secure a perimeter around the cargo bay, awaiting the arrival of a medical examiner before doing anything further such as removing the body from the stasis container to the station’s small morgue. They kept the lid open, at Kira’s request—the model is advanced enough that even with the container open, Julian Bashir—Julian Bashir’s body—remains in the stasis field. If Garak and Kira didn’t know better, it would appear that he was merely sleeping, if not for the petechial hemorrhages on his eyelids, and the tinge of blue at his lips.
But Kira and Garak know better.
Garak can’t stop staring at the manifest attached to the steel crate, addressed to Kira’s Chief of Staff. If it had been addressed to anyone more prominent than that the crate would have been flagged and searched even before it made it onto the station. Anyone less prominent, and it might not have been searched at all. The manifest’s screen shorts and then fizzles, shutting off briefly before turning back on.
The address is written in Bajoran, but the customs form in Standard. The shipment, per the Bajoran security officer in charge, originated from a colony world near Andor.
Should he be appalled at showing any amount of weakness? Garak has seen more than his fair share of dead bodies, definitely created more than his fair share. With his childhood and education, he’s fairly certain that he’s never met death as a stranger. But now he finds that he cannot force himself to look. Or rather, cannot bear to see.
His own security, far more prudent and discreet than any Bajoran officer, linger in the shadows beyond the doorways.
“When was the last time you heard from the doctor?” he asks, almost nonchalant.
Almost. Kira knows him better than that, a fact that rankles him.
“I imagine around the same time you did—at Ezri’s zhian'tara, twelve years ago. He volunteered to host Joran.” Folding and unfolding her arms, she glances at him out of the corner of her eye. She can’t stop looking at Bashir—Bashir’s body. Pursing her lips, she takes a step forward hesitantly, and then takes another. “You really haven’t heard from him, all these years?”
He can hear the doubt in her voice and wants to resent her for it, but can’t find it in himself to.
Garak also wishes he wasn’t telling the truth.
“No,” he answers; a single, crisp syllable.
Her chest rises and falls with a deep and uneven lungful of air. What emotion is she hiding? Anger, despair? Working her jaw, she drops onto her knees one at a time, moving slowly, intentionally, but still with an odd gracefulness that he’s always thought suited her very well, even when she still wanted him dead. “I always assumed you were lying to me. We all did. Miles and I both—we thought that you were in on it. Whatever he was doing. We thought that you were keeping him safe.”
“I wasn’t.”
He wishes he was.
“We just thought…”
Faintly, he almost wishes she would finish that. That someone—ancients know it would never be him—would give voice to those thoughts. But Kira’s voice trails off. Absently, she shakes her head.
“There were times that I thought I had caught his trail, times that I thought I had figured out what he was doing… but no, Minister.” Almost out of habit, playacting a role that no longer quite fits, he clasps his hands behind him and gives her a small bow. “I haven’t received any communications from Dr. Bashir, not since a week or so before Captain Dax’s zhian’tara. He told me he was hosting Joran for her, since Captain Sisko was unavailable. That’s the last I heard from him.”
It’s a lie, but a small one considering. He did receive one further message from Dr. Bashir after Ezri Dax’s zhian’tara, a subspace missive letting him know that he’d been inspired by his interaction with Kira-as-Jadzia to reread the works of Iloja of Prim. But then… nothing, in all the long and empty years to come.
“I just thought…” Kira whispers, letting her fingertips graze Dr. Bashir’s cold brow, combing through a few strands of hair coated in frost. The arcing blue and white perimeter field of the stasis container jumps and fizzles around her wrist. With a jolt, Garak realizes that Dr. Bashir never knew Kira as a mother of a child that she got to keep. “Oh, Julian. What did you get yourself into that you couldn’t ask any of us to get you out of?”
Nothing, Garak thinks, that the doctor actually wanted to get himself out of.
Carefully, slowly, he allows his eyes to wander over Dr. Bashir’s body. His gaze trips over the familiar, lanky limbs, the poorly fitted, nondescript clothes, the thick soles of his boots. His eyes blur when they get to his face—his skin as bronze as it was the last time he laid eyes on him, but his features are deepened by lines and wrinkles that didn’t exist before. What would it have been like, to have watched the doctor age before him? To have seen him grow into himself and middle age by his side? Garak lingers on the silver at his temples, the smattering of white and grey in his beard, before his eyes swoop down his shoulders and biceps and forearms to his hands, the nimble surgeon’s fingers that saved so many lives during the war.
“What’s that in his hand?” he asks, his body moving closer and into a crouch before he can think about it.
“What?”
Kira blinks up at him.
“There’s something in his fist.”
Carefully, she peels open his fingers, revealing a small datarod, shimmering red and blue as the filaments reflect and refract the fluorescent light.
“What is it?” she whispers, holding it up close to her face before passing it to Garak. She doesn’t need to look to know that Garak is already holding out his hand for it. It’s been many years since they spent the last days of war together, hiding in a basement, but the kind of camaraderie forged in a foxhole dies hard.
Especially when somehow, when the battle is over and the war is won, you are somehow the last two standing. When there is no one else left, the journey from Bajor to Cardassia or Cardassia to Deep Space Nine isn’t so far after all.
Politics has made strange and lonely creatures of them both.
Turning it over in his hand, Garak examines the object, pretending that it takes longer than a few moments to place the device from a report from the Main Intelligence Directorate that crossed his desk months ago. “It’s an isolinear datarod. It’s not a model that’s available on the open market. And I imagine it is heavily encrypted.”
“Do you think… it’s from Julian?”
H used to think that one day love wouldn’t taste like blood in his mouth. His life has always been divided into things he could want, and things he could have.
“Or whoever killed him. It’s not a coincidence that his… that he was found so easily, on the eve of the signing ceremony, in this space station.”
“No. I agree,” she murmurs. “But what is the message? And who is the intended recipient?”
“I imagine we will find out soon enough.”
“Right.”
He flips the datarod over in his hands, watching the filaments catch in the light over and over and over again. “It will take me some time to bypass the encryption on this, if you would like to use that time to contact Dr. Bashir’s family.”
“His mother passed away a few years ago. I don’t think Julian would care for us to inform his father,” Kira replies. Garak doesn’t ask her why she knows that; it would make sense that Dr. Bashir’s friends would have looked for him to show up at his mother’s funeral. Shaking her head slightly, Kira continues. “And since he is no longer under my command, I’m under no obligation to. No.”
A small voice inside his head, the one that resembles Tain, goads him. Makes him want to tell Kira that there was a time where she would have done anything to offload Dr. Bashir as her problem.
“I mean his real family, Minister Kira,” he says, the ligaments in his knees protesting as he pushes his legs straight. He wipes imaginary wrinkles from his trousers. “You, the Professors O’Brien and their children, Captain Dax.”
Kira swallows hard, before tearing her eyes away from Dr. Bashir to look at him. Really, really look at him, her gaze flaying but not excoriating.
“You.”
He pretends not to hear her.
“What was that?”
“And you,” she says, at the same volume as before, wearing an expression on her face that communicates that she knows he’s full of shit. “You were his family too, Garak.”
He hesitates. “Just so.”
“Garak—”
He can’t stay if she’s going to do this. With a small, theatrical sort of wave he turns on his heel, his security detail falling silently in line behind him and to his sides as he sweeps out of Cargo Bay Four.
“I really ought to get to work on cracking the encryption on this datarod, Minister. The sooner I do, the sooner we may find out what happened to our dear doctor.”
Once more, his mouth is flooded with a familiar taste, bitter and metallic.
All in all, it doesn’t take him very long to slice through the encryption. The internal workings of Dr. Bashir’s mind are as plain to him as they were back when they had lunch together every week.
He wonders, as he’s getting past the firewall, if Dr. Bashir meant for it to be this easy for him.
Alone, in his diplomatic quarters, on a nicer level of the habitat ring than he ever had a legitimate reason to visit while he lived on the station, he rewrites layer after layer of code, easily out-maneuvering security measure after security measure. Until, all at once, it stops and the screen on the computer goes blank.
Then, thousands of files open in rapid succession.
Newspaper articles, holoimages, holovideos. Reports, both classified and not, written in multiple languages from at least seven governments he can identify as they pop up on the screen before being immediately blotted out by the next file—the Federation, Bajor, the Klingons, the Romulans, Cardassia. More. Mission files and reports and secure subspace messages. Lines and lines of communications in code, some Starfleet, some not. Garak feels a small point of pride knowing that Dr. Bashir had successfully spied on the Cardassian Union and not gotten caught. More secure subspace messages, more classified documents, more holovideos and newspaper articles. Assassinations, pandemics, political scandals made and fixed and remade.
Then, dossiers. Names, dates of birth, operation summaries, covert actions taken domestically, covert actions taken on foreign soil. Families, home addresses, org charts. Mission briefs and debriefs. Orders signed by Starfleet Admiralty and the uppermost echelons of the Federation government.
Collusion and corruption, authored by the very institution that Dr. Bashir once held so dear.
The files begin to slow, and then stop, the computer straining to process the strain. A final window opens, a cover letter addressed To Whomever May Receive This Message.
Frozen to his seat, Garak licks his lips, feeling his breaths come in shallow bursts. Slowly, with great consideration, he scrolls through the message. It takes him multiple times to read it and actually process the words. On this datarod is the contents of my life’s work—Operation: Bloodstone. This datarod is capable of remote uploads, and remote data wipe in the event of a security breach, so take care. Taking a measured inhale of breath, he starts to click through the files. I joined Starfleet medical because I wanted to save lives. By the end of the Dominion War, I had learned that no one is innocent. We all have blood on our hands. Some of us more than others, all in the name of saving the quadrant from the biggest threat it had ever come up against.
Garak wonders how large of a network Dr. Bashir had managed to build. This couldn’t possibly be the work of just one man, could it? Although, Dr. Bashir was hardly worth just one man. He had always been able to shoulder the burden of five, ten men. After the war, Section 31 became less friendly in their advances. It was made clear to me that if I wanted to remain in Starfleet, remain a free Federation citizen at all, I would have to concede to their recruitment tactics. I decided to make my own way, to carve my own path than to surrender to the options presented to me. I suppose that’s my God Complex and arrogance finally getting the better of me. There was Dr. Bashir himself, of course, at the center of the web. But who else? Other augments? Was there a quiet dissident movement within the Federation, potential double and triple agents with Section 31 itself?
If he focuses on the loose threads, on the small details, on the seams and buttonholes and secret clasps, he won’t lose his mind. It’s an old trick, one that goes back to the earliest days of when he made a vocation of tailoring.
Herein lies the past fifty years of covert operations by Section 31. Use it to make the galaxy a safer place. Use it to make the Federation live up to its ideals, the ones I swore a solemn oath to uphold. The ones that many a soldier and civilian alike have laid down their lives for in service of their country.
Your servant,
Julian S. Bashir
Garak looks at the chronometer—it’s gone just past 0200, about three hours since he started working on de-encrypting the data rod. More than four but not quite five hours since Dr. Bashir’s body was uncovered in a cargo bay. Two days, maybe three, since he was murdered and packed into a stasis container. He suspects that one of the faces that flashed before his eyes on the computer screen was the cold arbiter of his demise.
The stasis container keeps sticking, for him. Was it waiting? Did Dr. Bashir know that an agent had been sent for him? Or had he developed a healthy sense of paranoia?
He puts it out of his mind.
There’s more questions that demand an immediate answer, and Dr. Bashir has already kept him waiting for twelve years. Working his jaw, he lifts his hand to the comm badge on his chest.
“Castellan to Cardassia One. Convene my senior staff, and place them on standby. And I need Minister Kira in my quarters, immediately. She’ll know what it’s about.”
By 0600 hours, they both know that the geopolitical situation of the Alpha Quadrant has changed drastically.
Secret wars, secret prisons, agents in every branch of government and military service, matching even the worst of Tain’s designs for the Obsidian Order and the Old Cardassia. The Federation, a beacon of hope in the sublime darkness of space. Nothing more than a thin patina of utopia painted over the same zero sum games that play out in the rest of the darkened corners of the four quadrants.
This information could topple multiple governments.
“There’s no other way to put it,” Garak says, still trying to make sense of the avalanche of intelligence. “This is treason.”
“What Julian did, or Section 31?” Kira asks, flipping through files on her PADD too quickly to be actually reading them. “I thought treason was in the eye of the beholder, Castellan.”
“Don’t quote me at me, Minister. I’ve had far too little sleep for that.”
“Yes. Too little sleep,” she replies dryly. Her eyes are swollen, and rimmed with red, and not just from lack of sleep. I know you, you old lizard, she wants to say. I saw you when Ziyal was murdered, your mother. The Cardassia of your youth. There’s no one left now. No one but me, and we hardly like each other. She doesn’t say it, but knows that she could. She could break him, if she really wanted to. But the urge isn’t there anymore, they’re just two old soldiers trying to hold a fragile peace together with both hands. “We have a decision to make.”
There’s no decision. They are both people bound by duty to their people. For the first time in nearly a century, their interests align.
“You have to contact your First Minister.”
“Yes, I do.”
“This was all technically addressed to the Bajoran government,” Garak reminds her, slipping back into the role of the politician. He would not want her to compromise her position for him, if for no other reason than he enjoys having such a highly-placed ally on Bajor.
She has to stop herself from rolling her eyes.
“Well, thank the Prophets that Bajor currently has Cardassia with it’s back against the proverbial wall politically, so that we would be in the stronger position to receive this intelligence first,” she muses, standing. “But I do think it’s in our best interest for the Castellan of the Cardassian Union to be brought in on this discovery, to strengthen our diplomatic position.”
Garak makes a small sound at the back of his throat, not even bothering to look up from his computer portal. “It’s because I can scramble the Cardassian military and only the First Minister can scramble the Bajoran militia.”
Kira gives him a sharp look that he does not deign to receive, and then sighs.
“It’s because you can scramble the Cardassian military and only the First Minister can scramble the Bajoran militia.”
“I’m glad we can still see eye-to-eye on certain things.”
“This was much easier when Cardassia was still the enemy.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” he says, almost wistful. She knows him well enough to know that it’s a farce—it all is, with Garak. It’s only when he allows you close enough that he lets you see the edges of the farce, the cracks in the playacting, the fraying seams. The wounded, lonely man under the obsequience and servience. She wonders if, beyond the few political allies he’s mentioned over the years, there’s anyone on Cardassia he also shows the cracks to.
She knows no one’s seen under the mask since Julian.
“Yes,” Kira answers bluntly.
He cracks a truly miserable facsimile of a smile. “You wish Captain Sisko was here.”
Her returning grin is just as spurious. Fourteen years, and no one in the galaxy has seen hide nor hair nor received a prophetic vision or even a smoke signal from Benjamin Sisko. Not even his wife or children.
“Now would be a particularly helpful moment for the Emissary to return from the wormhole, I will admit.”
The USS Archimedes docks a few hours later, no less than a day and a half ahead of schedule, and exactly as soon as a ship of that class could arrive when travelling at maximum warp, after receiving a subspace call bearing bad news.
There’s no fanfare for the first Starfleet detachment to the Bajoran space station since they left eight years ago, and very few pleasantries as the captain of the Archimedes makes her way onto the docking pylon ahead of her crew. Within ten minutes of Ezri Dax stepping on board, they’ve reconvened inside the small morgue attached to the infirmary, where Julian Bashir still waits for the Bajoran medical examiner in the stasis container. Poison is the preliminary conclusion from the station CMO. Poison, possibly a neurotoxin. But they don’t have the materials on board to run a full toxicology lab.
His body is guarded by two governments—and now a third, Starfleet security dressed in Starfleet gold joining the Bajoran Militia officers and Cardassian security drones posted in the hallway.
Garak can’t shake the feeling of deep abiding wrongness. Even as the practical realities following the Dominion bombardment demanded an easement to custom and tradition, one of Cardassia’s oldest and strongest taboos remains—it is verboten for an outsider to view their dead. He’s not yours, he tells himself. He was never yours. He is more theirs than he was ever yours. But still, something ancient and aching is singing in his blood, telling him to wash the doctor’s body with a gentle touch, to shear a lock of hair to tuck away as a token of mourning, to adorn him with dust and oils and wind the familiar cloth of a funeral shroud around his slender form. To tuck away his slackened features from view, to obscure his face under white linen, to keep him safe until he can be welcomed into the final embrace of the motherworld.
It is wrong for others to see Bashir like this.
His temper flashes under a veneer of politeness and disinterest.
“It might as well have felt like a bee sting,” Ezri whispers, fingertips brushing over the tiny red pin prick on the side of Julian’s neck. It had never had the time to bruise, let alone scab over. “They likely targeted him in a high traffic area. He would have been dead in minutes.”
Don’t touch him, Garak wants to bite out. Get your hands off him.
Kira makes a low noise from the back of her throat that is clearly agreement. “But that doesn’t solve the question of how he got here .”
Garak can think of a dozen ways he would have done it, if he had been with Dr. Bashir when he met his end.
“An asset. Or an ally. Perhaps the person he was supposed to meet, or someone making a dead drop in the area. Someone who would have known to get him to us. Someone who knew where the datarod—or one of the copies of the datarod—was, and its purpose.” He keeps his hands steadfastly at his sides, imagines his spine as a steel rod in his back. If he bends at all, he will shatter. A voice that is remarkably like Tain’s reminds him that sentiment has always been, and always will be, his greatest weakness. He should be so lucky that someone eliminated the doctor for him, lest he be embarrassed in the height of his political career by something so common and exploitable as genuine affection. “Someone who we have reason to thank for their sense of duty to the doctor, and his mission.”
I should have killed your mother before you were born. There are things he can love, and things he is allowed to have. Somehow, loving the doctor from afar didn’t keep him any safer.
(Dr. Bashir always regarded him with a softness that was excruciating. It was safer for Garak, who was more comfortable regarding himself as an unlovable, monstrous thing, to keep him at a distance.
To be known meant that there was a possibility that he would be redeemed. Which would be the biggest sin of all.)
“A friend,” Ezri says, disguising a sniffle as a cough.
“Pardon?”
Kira nods. “Whoever sent Julian here , to Deep Space Nine, was Julian’s friend.”
What does it matter? He wants to yell. Why does it matter if Dr. Bashir had friends out in the cold, if none of them could keep him safe when it mattered? When none of us could keep him safe? When I—
Garak swallows hard, and matches Kira’s sharp nod. “Yes.”
The rest of the morning disintegrates into chaos.
Kira gets a response from the Bajoran First Minister—keep working, keep going through the reports, keep the course. Pretend nothing is wrong to the Federation, do not allow Cardassia to take over the situation. Do not tip your hand to anyone.
Kira’s response to that is to roll her eyes, show the subspace message to Garak and Ezri, and continue sorting through unredacted reports and dossiers. She finds, for the first time in her life, that she is deeply grateful for the unwavering loyalty, efficiency, and obedience of Cardassian political staffers; almost every half hour to the minute, one of Garak’s senior counselors appears at his shoulder with a new summary memo breaking down the salient information of a covert operative or operation. Her brain struggles to keep up with the rapid intake of information, and when one of her own staffers lets her know that the transport bearing Miles O’Brien has finally arrived, she pushes herself up off the couch she’s inhabited for hours now, sighing as she rolls and stretches and pops the tendons in her neck, grateful for the break.
Miles himself appears in Garak’s quarters a few minutes later, his eyes stamped with exhaustion and his shoulder weighed down heavily by the Starfleet-issue duffle bag that he uses these days mostly out of habit than anything else.
“What do you know?” she asks, dropping her PADD on an end table to meet him at the door.
“Hello, Nerys,” Miles deadpans, eyeing the swarm of activity in the room. “The transport was fine, Nerys. I’m fine, Nerys, even though I’ve had less time to process this than you have. Keiko and Yoshi are doing well, everyone sends their love—Garak.”
Even though he jerks in surprise, Miles is not overly shocked to see Garak appear seemingly out of thin air in his periphery.
“Mr. O’Brien. Retirement suits you. I regret the circumstances.”
Miles blinks slowly, fixing Garak with a tired stare. “Me too.”
“Miles, I’m sorry.”
“I know, Nerys.” He allows her to lead him over the cluster of plush couches in the center of the living room, waves off the offer of coffee or tea or something to eat as he drops down into the soft cushions, carding his hands through his hair. “I don’t know much more than you do. Julian contacted me four years ago, when I retired, and reminded me not to stop looking over my shoulder even though I’d left the service. Thought he’d just been getting paranoid, in the wind for so long.”
Garak takes a long sip of red leaf tea, setting the cup down delicately on the saucer. “Perhaps the correct amount of paranoid, considering.”
Miles sighs. “Yeah.”
Slowly, nervously, focusing on the feeling of the fabric sliding against her palms, Kira rubs her hands over the linen of her trousers. But she’s seen enough of Julian’s work now to be almost certain. “Julian—someone who might have been Julian—sent us critical intelligence nine years ago about a remnant Maquis cell planning to attack Ashalla on the anniversary of the Bajor-Cardassia Peace Accords. He saved hundreds of lives with that message. I can’t help but wonder what it cost him to send it.”
The three of them sink into silence for a long moment, and the unobtrusive sounds of a dozen other Bajorans and Cardassians diligently working background slowly crowd in—fingers tapping out notes on a PADD, the hiss of the replicator as it churns out another cup of tea, the low hum of the computer as it processes another file. Within moments, it’s oppressive.
“Any calling cards from Section 31?” Miles asks.
“I wouldn’t know them,” Kira replies.
“We won’t know until the full toxicology report comes back,” Garak says, blinking in that slow, reptilian way of his. Kira was never certain how much of it was an act, or if Garak’s more traditionally humanoid mannerisms were the act. “But even then, I’m afraid I’m only kept apprised of the en vogue poisons and venoms via the National Security reports that land on my desk and when I decide to surprise the Intelligence Directorate with a visit to remind them that I’m just as capable of rewriting security codes as they are.”
“I can’t believe you’ve actually gone legit, Garak.” Miles huffs out a small, wry laugh.
Garak’s expression is grim, and unchanging. “Little good it’s doing me today.”
“Hey. He’d be proud of you.”
Kira winces at Miles’ words. They’re said earnestly enough, and with good intent—the exact kind of thing that might back Garak finally break and lash out. None of them can afford to break yet, not until they see this through.
“Little good it’s doing me today,” Garak murmurs, eventually. The cracks are showing, but something in him is resolute not to shatter. Instead, he takes another sip of tea, even though he must be getting a mouthful of dregs at this point. Taking a deep breath, he sits forward, placing the empty cup on the low table before them, strewn with the detritus of their night’s work. Carefully, he laces his fingers together, long nimble fingers with neat, clipped nails. “Shipping his body to us seems indiscreet for Section 31. I agree with Captain Dax’s earlier assessment. It was an ally who made sure he got to us. And not long after death. I’m no mortician, but I am… familiar with the stages of decomposition after death. He was placed in stasis moments, if not minutes afterwards. Section 31 would have obliterated his body, if they could have. The fact that they could not has me… suspicious.”
“I cannot believe you just gave me a straight answer,” Miles says, almost smiling.
“It’s the day for it,” Garak grouses.
“You look like shite.”
“As do you.”
“Feel like it, too.” Miles nods congenially. “Has the Archimedes docked yet? I couldn’t see from our approach to the station.”
On cue, Ezri approaches with a new armful of PADDs full of new files to break down and summarize, fresh from the computer terminal. “Molly is aboard, Miles, if you’d like to see her. She’s in the quarters you’ve been billeted for your stay. We figured you’d appreciate us keeping her out of this.”
Not that Lieutenant Molly O’Brien hadn’t tried to insert herself into the situation, once she had become apprised of it. But Kira knew better than to involve Miles’ protective paternal instincts in the diplomatic incident they were in the process of creating, and Molly knew better than to defy a direct order from her Auntie Nerys and Captain Dax, her commanding officer. Garak, who she mostly knew as the man who made the prettiest dresses of her childhood days, had far less standing to tell her what to do.
“Dax.” Miles does startle, this time, nearly falling off the couch. “Thank you. Yes, I do appreciate that.”
“I put her on babysitting duty, instead,” Kira says, thinking of her own small cadre of adopted half-Cardassian, half-Bajoran war orphans crawling the walls in her own quarters.
“I’m sure she loved that,” Miles says, his mouth curving into the beginning of a true smile.
“If you’d like to see her—”
He shakes his head. “I’d—I’d like to see him first, if that’s okay?”
Something on Garak’s face shutters entirely, tamping down on any hint of emotion, real or performative.
“Of course it is,” Kira says, her gaze skipping from Garak to Ezri and back to Miles.
Miles hesitates, his brows furrowing together as he considers his next words.
“I have a hunch.”
“What do you mean?” Ezri asks.
“It wasn’t just well wishes, in Julian’s message,” Miles says slowly, tasting the words as they come out of his mouth. “He had a question for me about synaptic devices similar to one we’d uh—had passing familiarity with, from the war. He knew the physiological and biological end of it, of course, but he said I was the only person he’d trust with the engineering end.”
Kira is once again drawn to watching Garak’s face, waiting for any hint of a reaction. There is none.
“What do you mean?” Ezri runs her fingers up and over the PADDs in her hand.
Miles shrugs. “I mean I think I might know why Julian got to us, even if we don’t know how. His body isn’t the message. His body contains the message.”
The stasis container, Kira thinks. Of course. His augmentations. Julian had called himself a human computer, more than once.
“Prophets, Julian,” she says with a sigh, letting her head roll back and her eyes fixate on the ceiling. “What did you get yourself into?”
Garak refuses to make another visit to the morgue, electing to remain in his quarters.
“The datarod that was in his hand—that was just a backup. This is more. This is much, much more. There’s files here that were only created a few days ago,” Miles says, holding an engineering scanner of his own design up to Julian’s unmoving head, the interaction of the device and the stasis container filling the room with a low metallic hum that echoes and reverberates off the concrete floors and steel walls.
File after file, folder after folder, populates into the PADD in his other hand.
It turns out, Julian had turned himself into a computer. How he got the device implanted into his brain was anyone’s guess, but based on his personal log, he’d spent time under a false identity in Ferengi and Klingon space as a doctor, currying favor and earning funds to bankroll his operations. It was possible he’d bribed an erstwhile colleague to not ask any questions about how his physiology could support the device in the long term and perform the operation.
“How much more?” Kira asks wearily. Folding her arms under her chest, she leans against the wall. “We’re gonna be up all night again sorting through what we had already.”
“There’s also—he recorded messages, for all of us. He wanted to say goodbye,” Ezri says, watching the files upload to the PADD in her hand as well.
“What?” Kira’s head jerks upwards.
“I guess he thought it was safer, since we’d hopefully be the only ones—I guess he hoped that we’d get his body. Or like Garak said, that it’d be destroyed. He labeled the folder ‘Tennyson Verse 50.’ See? Be near me when my light is low, for me. And life, a fury slinging flame, for Kira. All the wheels of being slow, for his mother. Well, we don’t need to worry about that one. And time, a maniac scattering dust , to Garak, and for you, Miles—”
Miles makes a choked off sound.
“Pretentious git. He never changed.”
Garak accepts the datarod with his message on it gently, holding it in his fingertips as if the metal might scorch him. Mr. O’Brien gives him a stilted nod, and then gives him space.
He feels underwater, or as if he’s witnessing his own life through a greasy film laid over glass. The short whole walk from the hatch of his erstwhile living quarters to the more private bedroom, his brain struggles to keep up. This is the first time in fourteen years he will hear Dr. Bashir’s voice, the last time he will see his living face, his cheeks reddened, his eyes bright. This is the last time he will hear Dr. Bashir’s voice, the last time he will see his face. He can’t think about it, so he doesn’t. He can’t think about it, because if he does, he’ll crush the datarod in his hand in a fruitless measure to preserve Dr. Bashir’s immortality. He can’t think about it, because then he has to feel it, and then it will kill him.
So Garak doesn’t think.
Eyes unfocused, hands numb, he sits at the smaller computer portal in the bedroom. Switches the computer on, inserts the datarod. Clicks on the file when the drive loads.
The video player opens on the viewscreen, and the visage of Dr. Bashir appears in a thick ivory sweater, his hair long and wavy, pulled back into a bun. His face is clean shaven, unlike body in the stasis container. His eyes are dark, and warm, and earnest.
Garak doesn’t think. Just sits, motionless, as the file plays.
“Garak, If you are seeing this, it means that you were able to retrieve the files stored on the cybernetic synaptic device I had planted in my head. It means that my mission was successful, that you carried it through to its end. I knew that I could trust you with this, the most important part of my plan.”
Garak doesn’t think.
“There was no one else who would have been able to execute the most critical juncture of this operation.”
Garak doesn’t think.
“I could collect as much intelligence and conduct as much counterintelligence as possible, but it would mean nothing in the end if my labors did not end up in the hands of a good man—”
Lungs burning with a silent scream, Garak thinks, rage coiling in his limbs. Everything rushes in at once, unrelenting and hot and suffocating. He manages to not punch the viewscreen, but just barely, yanking the datarod out of the port. The video pauses, the file corrupting. Dr. Bashir’s face lingers for a moment, before the file corrupts entirely, the program freezing and crashing.
He needs a drink.