Work Text:
The screech made by the runabout’s hull breaking apart is so loud and abrupt that it takes Garak a moment to realize that before it happened Doctor Bashir stood up from his seat, trying to yell something. Time fragments. Something must happen to the engines, because the feeling of them rapidly dropping in and out of warp hits Garak in the stomach. Lieutenant Dax is gripping the edge of her seat.
They drop out of warp for the last time, and everything stops shaking. Garak belatedly realizes that he’s on the floor, blood dripping into his eyes. Doctor Bashir is on the floor too. He looks dead.
“Garak,” Dax calls out. “We need to make an emergency landing!”
He manages to stand up and half-crawl, half-walk to the copilot’s seat that he just got thrown from. This time, he fastens the seatbelt. 1
“What happened?” he asks Dax, and he tries to focus. His ears are ringing. He didn’t get to hear the sound Doctor Bashir’s body made when it hit the floor, and he tries to imagine it wasn’t that bad. Then he realizes he’s doing it, and puts his whole attention to the console.
They have a hole in their hull, but the forcefield is holding the air in. For now.
“Our power is rapidly draining,” Dax says. She frantically looks through the map of the surrounding planets.
“The B-897,” Garak says. “Our best bet.”
“That’s barely class M,” Dax responds, but she puts the coordinates in nonetheless. “Brace!”
She makes a move like she wants to undo her seatbelt and run to the back - to Doctor Bashir, and Garak opens his mouth to tell her not to, but the runabout lurches, and his jaw almost gets ripped out of the sockets by the force, as they half-fall, half-fly downward.
Judging by the sound, Doctor Bashir hits the ceiling. Dax’s head is lolling down, her eyes fluttering open and closed. Garak remembers an old Oralian prayer.
He’s pretty sure the next sound he hears is himself dying.
-
He’s alive.
The runabout is halfway buried in the ground, almost upside down. The uppermost window shows the sky, in a worryingly lilac color. Inhaling feels painful, and either his ribs are broken, or there is something wrong with the air.
He undoes his seatbelt and manages to land on all fours. Above him, Dax is struggling with her own.
He crawls to Julian, who looks dead. His eyes are open, but the pupils are blown wide, unseeing. Where do you take a Human’s pulse? There is a gaping wound on the side of Julian’s neck. He puts his hand in it.
Dax comes out from nowhere and wrings Julian out from Garak’s hands. She takes out a tricorder from the Doctor’s pockets, the device offensively intact.
“He has a pulse,” she pronounces. Garak snatches the tricorder out of her hands. Doctor Bashir is breathing now too, shallowly, but he is.
“Don’t move him,” Dax says. “His neck is broken. If you move him, you’ll kill him.”
Garak scrambles back. Now that his eyes are focusing again, he can see that Bashir’s chest is indeed rising and falling. But his browbone seems to be caved in at an angle Garak would prefer not to think about. The odd, ugly smell hits his nostrils, and Garak realizes Julian has wet himself. If Garak was interrogating him, this (along with the unnerving-still-dead-empty-horrible-dead eyes) would be a sign to stop whatever he was doing and call for first aid immediately.
“Are you okay?” Dax asks. She has a first aid kit slung through her shoulder. She crouches above Doctor Bashir with the Starfleet confidence that right now seems reassuring.
“I’m fine,” Garak says through shards of his own broken teeth. “Can you breathe in this?”
Dax wrinkles her nose. “It stinks, but yes. Can you? Maybe your ribs are broken.”
“Did you hear what the Doctor tried to say, before we crashed?” he asks. Dax has stabilized the Doctor’s neck with a brace, and now she was waving probes around him.
She shakes her head. “He was saying something? Maybe he saw something on his station. We can check that later.”
“There wasn’t anything on the station,” Garak says. He would have noticed if there was. And wouldn’t let this happen.
Dax is frowning. “He has a brain bleed. He needs surgery, and I’m not equipped to do that. We need to focus on getting the beacon out.”
Brain bleed.
“Can you go check if the emergency beacon is transmitting, please?” says Dax again, and Garak realizes he’s the one who she’s talking to. He blinks, clearing the fog out of his eyes, and gets up.
The console is currently at the ceiling. He slips once, twice, but he manages to get to it, and somehow straddles the chair and keeps himself upright. He’s out of breath. Only then he allows himself to look back at Dax and Bashir. She’s dosing him with some drug - oh, he knows that one.
“Tell me good news,” Dax says.
“Well, it’s not raining,” he tries to joke. He checks the emitter three times, not wanting to let himself have false hope. “I do have good news. It’s emitting alright.”
“Great,” Dax says. “Stay up there.”
He watches her do a number of medical procedures around Bashir, ranging from recognizable to totally alien.
“Pray tell, Lieutenant, what the standard Starfleet procedure would be, for recovering a downed shuttlecraft? Three business days?” Garak jibes. It’s only partially a joke - he wonders if he’s going to have to lose his best lunch companion after all.
“Is that how the Cardassians do it?” Dax tears her eyes away from Bashir. “Wait for the survivors to die, and send a freighter for scrap metal?”
If it was Garak’s runabout, then yes, but he isn't going to give the Federation more material for their superiority complex.
“As soon as they get our message, they will divert the closest ship our way. And this isn’t an unpopulated area, so I wouldn’t worry about this,” Dax says.
“Four business days, then,” Garak says.
Dax rolls her eyes. “Half a day. Don’t worry.”
Garak wonders if he wants to ask how long Doctor Bashir will survive without medical attention. He decides that he doesn’t.
“This tricorder is giving me false readings,” Dax says, furrowing her brow. “I’m going to get another one from storage. Watch him.”
Garak turns around on the seat he’s perched himself on, and watches Doctor Bashir lie on the floor (what does Lieutenant Dax expect him to do if he notices something happen to him? Perform the brain surgery?). Maybe it’s the neck brace shadowing his face, but he looks less pallid, some color flooding back to his cheeks and lips.
Dax brings back three more medical tricoders, and one regular one. The console behind Garak beeps, and his shoulder protests painfully when he tries to look at the transmission.
“DS9 called, they’re taking the scenic route. Expect rescue in three months, seven days,” Garak says, and jumps off from the seat.
“Ha, ha,” Dax says.
“Four hours,” Garak says, seriously this time. “They’re sending The Athabasca. And a medical team on it.”
Dax nods, and hands the tricorders to Garak. She climbs the wall with the grace of someone who didn’t get smacked against any floors recently. Garak is surprised to realize that she’s double checking to see if what he reported to her was true.
“You don’t trust me, Lieutenant,” he says. It’s surprisingly reasonable, or maybe he shouldn’t be surprised - Dax is close friends with Major Kira, after all, and State knows what the Major told her about Garak. He got too used to Doctor Bashir’s trusting nature.
“No, not really,” Dax says pleasantly. She takes an athletic swing to the co-pilot’s chair, one that Garak didn’t dare attempt.
“Lieutenant, can you access the black box record?” he asks.
“We got hit by something. Debris. No idea why the sensors didn’t catch it, but my best guess is that it was some sort of compound that managed to deflect our sensors. An analysis of the hull will confirm it, but that’s for later. I’ll warn The Athabasca to watch out and scan the sector manually as they move in. What do you want with the black box, Garak?”.
“Find out what Doctor Bashir was trying to say before we crashed,” Garak says. The tricorder is a slightly newer one than the one he has in his quarters, but he figures it out. There indeed is a brain bleed, but how good or bad that is is beyond Garak’s understanding of Human anatomy.
“What was with the false tricorder readings, Lieutenant?” he asks.
“It recorded a hairline fracture in his brow bone, but then it didn’t,” Dax says.
Garak swears the way Bashir’s browbone looked like, it was more than a hairline fracture, but it must have been a trick his own concussion was playing on him, because the tricorder showed no injury in that area.
“Odd,” he says. He accesses the recording of the other tricorder Dax used, and it indeed gave out a reading of a big, nasty fracture, bone protruding into the skull - then, minutes later, when Dax made a closer pass closer to the skull, a hairline fracture.
“Disappointed?” Dax asks, and can’t tell if that’s another attempt at a joke or an accusation.
He tries to come up with a lighthearted enough response to placate her, but first he reaches his hand gently across Bashir’s face, trying to verify the break - or lack thereof - by himself. He’s aware that he’s trying to distract himself from the rest of Bashir’s injuries. It doesn’t stop him.
The Doctor’s eyes shoot open, and he breathes in, wheezing. Garak takes his hand away, as if he has been burned.
“Garak,” Bashir wheezes out, or at least that’s what Garak thinks he says.
Dax is at his side in moments. “Julian,” she says, her hands at his shoulders. “Julian, can you hear me? Don’t move.”
Her voice seems to calm him down, but then his eyes lock on Garak, and his eyes widen in fear. Dax is speaking in hushed, calming tones, but the Doctor wrenches his arm from her grasp, and lunges towards Garak in a feverish show of impressive strength. Absurdly, Garak almost flinches back, but he stops himself and watches Bashir slap the medical tricorder out of his hand onto the floor.
“No readings,” Bashir chokes out, and lets himself get wrestled back to the ground.
“And you said I was a bad patient,” Garak says. “Honestly, Doctor, this would get you banned from the Infirmary.”
“It’s alright, Julian,” Dax says. “Help is on the way.”
“Jadzia,” Bashir says, relaxing.
“You shouldn’t have gotten up from the seat,” she says to him. Her hand is in his hair, petting his (coated with blood) brown locks, as if he were a puppy. Bashir closes his eyes.
It’s honestly nauseating. Obviously Garak is glad that Doctor Bashir is receiving some emotional support, but surely there are limits. This isn’t a love hotel-
Something was wrong. Bashir’s neck was coated in blood, but-
“Lieutenant,” Garak says, as politely as he can muster. “Did you heal Doctor Bashir’s neck wound?”
Dax frowns, clearly unhappy that her petting-Bashir-like-a-tribble session is being interrupted.
‘I thought you did,” she says.
“I didn’t,” Garak says. “And now he doesn’t have it.”
Lieutenant Dax frowns. She peers beneath the neck brace, where the skin is dirty, but very clearly intact.
“Are you sure you saw a wound? Maybe I should examine your head too,” she says.
“I’m not hallucinating,” Garak says, and moves to pick up the tricorder, which causes Bashir to let out a horrifying, pained wail.
“Julian, Julian,” Dax gets back to playing nurse again - Bashir’s hands are seized on her uniform, knuckles turning white.
“He has a concussion,” Bashir grits out. “Seeing things.”
“Then let me examine myself with the tricorder, dear,” Garak says. “Or are you suddenly a strict practitioner of natural medicine? Because I’m afraid I don’t have any herbs on me.”
That placates Bashir, who collapses again, his eyes fluttering closed the moment his head touches the ground.
The horrid smell of fear and blood is cloying and overwhelming, but Garak doesn’t move away. In silence, he waves the tricorder around himself, as Lieutenant Dax silently mirrors his movements next to him.
“You do have a concussion,” Dax says. They repeat the sequence on her.
“And so do you,” Garak notices.
“Not surprising,” Dax says. “You saw how it threw us around. Just the hard stop was bad enough.”
“Consussions don’t cause hallucinations, as far as I’m aware,” he says. Bashir has passed out again, but he still almost whispers.
Dax frowns, and looks unconvinced. “We were examining him under distress.”
“You saw it,” Garak presses, and he’s not sure why this is so important, but it annoys him how resistant she is. “We were trying to check his pulse, but he had a wound on his neck.”
“It’s a little odd,” Dax admits dismissively.
“So how do you think that’s possible?” Garak bites back. He’s not hallucinating this. He hallucinated before, and it was nothing like this. And besides, Dax admitted she saw it too.
Unless he was also hallucinating Dax.
“There was once a planetoid we encountered that was equipped with regenerating technology,” she says. “Or maybe it’s the property of the natural atmosphere that's boosting his healing abilities.”
“Interesting, because our injuries are fine,” Garak points out, and shoves a hand with a scrape on it under Dax’s nose. “So are you going to investigate this?”
Dax whips her head around furiously, her lips pressed into a line. “No, because I’m going to change Julian,” she motions to the Doctor’s soiled clothes. “But you go ahead and take some air samples, if that suits you.”
She stands up, and retrieves some spare clothes and shock blankets. Garak glares at her as she kneels over the Doctor and starts to cut open his trouser leg. She glares right back at him.
“What, are you going to look?” she says to Garak, like he was some deviant.
Garak grabs a tricorder and crawls out of the shuttlepod.
Disaster, he thinks. What a pure, unmitigated disaster. Surviving this conference was bad enough, watching Doctor Bashir’s presentation barely enough to make up for the three days of getting stared at by Federation citizens with varying degrees of unadulterated horror. Then, there was having to watch Doctor Bashir making heart eyes at Lieutenant Dax every breakfast and every dinner. And then, cherry on top, having to watch Bashir most probably die in the next half an hour, all while the lovely Lieutenant Dax seems perfectly content to dismiss all Garak concerns as hallucinations.
He knew what he was going to see, but he gave it a chance either way. Predictably, the air at the planet was just air - perhaps too little oxygen for his taste, but it was perfectly normal air. Some pollution - this planet was a host to Bajoran mining operations two centuries ago, from what he remembered, and that accounted for how scratchy the air felt in his throat.
But no miraculous healing compounds. And no psychactives.
It’s Dax who approaches him first. (He isn’t going to look at Bashir while the man is undressed. Not when she’s here.) Her long neck and pale forehead are covered with a sheen of sweat. She’s gorgeous. Very clearly doctor Bashir has good taste.
“Listen, there’s no need to argue,” she says. “Help is on the way. I get it, you’re scared too.”
“Perhaps you’re projecting, Lieutenant," Garak says.
“I am worried about Julian, sure,” she admits openly. “And I’d swear so are you, certainly you care about him, in your own way, but for some reason you choose to express this by… accusing us of something, for some reason.”
“I wasn’t accusing you,” he says, and wonders if he should start. “You keep on dismissing me. I don’t see why you won’t admit that there is something very wrong here.”
“It’s just not my forefront concern right now,” Dax says. “We’ll have all the time in the world to analyse black boxes, once Julian is safe and healthy.”
“Fair enough, Lieutenant," Garak says, vowing to get his hands on the recording before The Athabasca arrives. “Did you examine him again?”
“No,” Dax frowns. “He screams every time I touch the tricorder.”
“So you’re just not going to examine him? Because he doesn’t want to?” Garak says, disbelieving. “Surely you can overpower a man with a brain bleed, Lieutenant.”
“Obviously I can examine him,” she bites back. “But I don’t see the point in getting his pulse up and worsening his condition by stress when there is nothing we can do for him either way.”
It’s infuriating, but there is some logic to this. You humour the requests of dying people.
“You should get back to him,” Garak says. “Talk to him. That seemed to calm him down.”
Jadzia nods, and they slide back into the shuttle.
Doctor Bashir is conscious again, sitting up, leaning on his elbows. Even before Garak gets close enough to actually see it, he knows exactly what he’s doing.
He’s deleting the readings history on the medical tricorder.
“What are you doing, Julian?” Dax says gently, and pries the device from his hands. Bashir assumes the slack-jawed expression of a profoundly injured man. With a mixture of awe and fear Garak realizes that it’s fake.
Someone is going insane here, Garak thinks. He’s going to make sure it’s not him.
“Do you feel better now?” Dax coos. Funny how she was shooting Bashir down the entire conference. The doctor should have realized that there is nothing women like more in a man than a mysteriously disappearing skull fracture.
“Slightly,” Bashir says. His voice is closer to normal now. “Don’t go again.”
Garak doesn’t stay to find out what he says next. He jumps to the pilot chair (ouch). He pries open the side panel.
The runabout’s interiors carry sound regretfully well.
“I was reading your medical school diaries lately,” Dax says.
“Oh,” doctor Bashir says. “I didn’t think you would.”
“I only managed to get twenty pages in,” Dax smiles.
That seems somehow impolite, Garak thinks. Anyway, it's a good thing he studied Federation data systems in his spare time. He knew it would come in handy.
“That bad?” Bashir frowns.
“I will read the rest, I promise,” Dax reassures him.
Garak tears himself away from eavesdropping and puts his ear to the speaker to listen to what happened right before the crash.
Several listens after, he thinks he knows what Bashir said. A couple more, and he’s sure.
“You don’t have to,” chokes out the real Bashir. “I honestly didn’t think you would.”
The Bashir in the recording says: “Can you hear this? Watch out-”, and then he gets slammed into the floor.
Alright, one mystery solved.
Hear what?
“It’s okay, I don’t think you’re annoying,” Dax reassures Bashir beneath. “You’re just enthusiastic. It’s not a bad thing.”
Garak slows down the recording. He changes the pitch of the sound, the frequency, then tweaks some other things. He still has Bashir’s blood on his hands. And obviously, there is a sound there. Milliseconds before the hull actually cracks, the stress along it makes a noise. It wasn’t on the frequency audible to Cardassians, which is why Garak didn’t hear it. Bashir shouldn’t have heard it too. Even accounting for natural variations of Human hearing. Even when you give a generous, generous space for said natural variation.
Alright.
Garak closes the program and shoves the black box back into its rightful place.
Either Garak has gone insane, which he hasn’t, or this atmosphere has a mysterious compound that makes Humans into fast-healing, super-hearing supermen even before they breathe a molecule of it, or, or, doctor Bashir hears things he shouldn’t and heals faster than possible. Which his medical files make no mention of, and the station’s gossip mill is ignorant to.
Garak looks at the man, trying to see beneath the neck brace and shock blanket. Dax is leaning close to him, and they’re whispering something low enough that Garak can’t hear it.
Was he that naive again? Sentimental, again? Is it a delusion of grandeur to wonder if he was the target? He recalls their first meeting. He was sure that it was his choice to approach Bashir. Was he mistaken? Did they know? He’s mentally comparing younger Kelas and Bashir in his head - what would make Starfleet choose this particular operative to serve as a honeypot, it’s not like they knew Garak would be drawn to him - when he realizes that it’s pointless and paranoid. There is a source of information in this room, and it’s not his own head.
He disengages the beacon in a way that will take at least several minutes to fix.
“Lieutenant,” he calls out. “Something has gone wrong here. Would you mind lending your expertise? I’ll keep an eye on the Doctor”.
He jumps down to the ground, hopefully for the last time today. Dax nods and scrambles upwards.
He kneels next to Bashir.
“Hello, Doctor,” he says.
Bashir seems fully conscious. His eyes are bloodshot, but that’s about it. “Jadzia,” he says, and struggles to get up and away from Garak. It oddly stings. Just because he let go of his delusions doesn’t mean they lost his appeal.
“Lieutenant Dax is busy. I heard you’re dying, is that true?” he asks, gently.
Bashir frowns. “Don’t mourn me yet.”
“There is a rite that Cardassian practice,” Garak says. “It’s called the shri’tal. You could call it a deathbed confession. We believe that keeping too many secrets can weigh you down through the last transmission of your life…”
“I’m not following you,” Bashir says. Garak can tell now that he’s lying.
“You’re not Human,” Garak says. “So what are you? Who do you work for?”
He expects another denial, but instead Bashir defiantly stares him down right in the eyes.
“You can’t prove anything,” he says.
“But I know,” Garak says. “Is that Dax in on this? Does she know?”
Bashir flinches. Garak forces him to make eye-contant.
“You’re dying,” he reminds him. “Either you’re dying, and it doesn’t matter, or you’ll live, and then your secret will be out either way. So tell me the whole truth, or I will tell her now.”
Bashir opens his mouth, and closes it. From the sound of the panels Garak knows Dax will be back soon.
“Go fuck yourself, Garak,” Bashir says weakly. “You're getting more paranoid by the hour. Who do I work for? Seriously? What do you think this is?”
“Get away from him,” Dax says. When Garak doesn’t comply, she kicks him away from Bashir with her boot.
“You were right,” she says to Bashir. “We can’t trust him.”
“That’s what you were whispering about?” Garak responds, disbelieving.
“He sabotaged the beacon,” Dax announces. “Perhaps to make us harder to find. We left a trial of emissions, so I’m not sure what that was going to achieve.”
“He’s turning me against you?” Garak says. “And you don’t think this is suspicious? What did he say to you? That I’m going to make a false accusation in the next fifteen minutes?”
“Are you?” Dax asks. She narrows her eyes.
He doesn’t wait for her to decide who to ally herself with. He lunges for her, punching her in the throat. When she falls backwards, he kicks her in the stomach, low enough to miss the symbiont, then he falls back and scrambles to Bashir. He tears off the neckbrace and grabs him by the hair. Dax screams and gets up to the floor, but it's too late, because Garak is shaking his head around violently.
He gets another boot to the chest seconds later, and releases Bashir, who bends over and vomits on the floor.
Dax punches Garak in the jaw. Then he gets elbowed in the eye.
“If you stopped trying to kill me,” he says between punches, “you will notice that Doctor Bashir is very much still alive. Which I think proves my point here.”
The next punch does a very unpleasant thing to his jaw.
“We’ll talk about this later, Julian,” Dax says cheerily, and goes back to trying to attach Garak’s face to the inside of his skull.
“Jadzia, stop it,” Bashir says. “What has gotten into you?”
“He tried to kill you,” Dax says. “Stay back-”
“He was right!” Bashir yells. “He was right, I’m not Human, please stop fighting! Don’t kill each other over this!”
“You told me not to trust him,” she says.
“I didn’t think you were going to try to kill him,” he responds. She lets go of Garak then.
Bashir touches his face. Garak tries to open his eyes to look at him. It still startles him how well he looks. His eyes are not bloodshot anymore.
“What do you mean not Human, Julian?” Dax asks quietly.
Bashir sighs. “Just… give me a minute.” He takes the discarded tricorder from the floor and takes a reading on Garak, then winces.
“I’m very curious to hear what the possible explanation for this is going to be,” Garak says. “Now that we’re not trying to murder me violently.”
Bashir glares at Garak, and feels his throat. “I’m not talking to you. That still hurt, you asshole.” He snaps the tricorder closed. “I was born Human, obviously. It’s called “accelerated critical neural pathway formation”, technically. Basically, they take your genetic structure- I’m not explaining this right. It doesn’t mean I’m invincible, Garak-”
“-but it means you can’t serve in Starfleet,” Dax says.
“or practice medicine,” Bashir says. “So there you have it. There’s no need to murder anyone, I’ll resign my commission as soon as we get back. And no, I’m not a secret agent, Garak.”
“Did you do this to yourself then?” Garak cuts him off. Surely no one was that ambitious.
“No!” Bashir seems horrified. “My parents did, when I was six.”
“Six?” Dax says. “But why?”
Bashir shrugs, then regrets doing that. “I was, you know, too short, too stupid, too shy, didn’t read yet… And then there was a buy one get everything deal, or they thought that since they were committing one crime already it was worth it, or maybe they just really wanted to have a perfect child, who knows. The accelerated healing, that was definitely one of the of the worst ones to hide, god forbid you get injured-”
“So you lied,” Dax says. “You lied to me. You tried to convince me Garak was hallucinating… and I just wanted to trust you so badly.”
“Jadzia,” Bashir says. “I’m sorry.” He brings his knees to his chest.
“I’ll have you know there were attempts made to extract certain information from me,” Garak says. “It’s not that arrogant of a presumption. It happens.”
“Sure,” Bashir says.
Dax stands up, and brushes her long hair away from her face. Neither of them misses the way that she doesn’t accept Bashir’s apology. She turns around and starts to climb the wall to the console again. It’s the first time she looks tired doing it.
“I have to say, Doctor, I’m impressed,” Garak says. “You’re a better liar than I gave you credit for.”
“I should have known that you’d be the one to notice,” Bashir says. “Honestly, it's a wonder it took so long. You’re getting rusty.”
Something drops down from the seat, and after that, Lieutenant Dax jumps down, landing exactly at the angle to crush it with the heel of her boot. She lifts her leg to show them both - it’s the black box.
“The audio recording equipment in this shuttle is extremely faulty, it has gotten basically nothing from this entire event,” she deadpans.
“Jadzia,” Bashir looks moved. “You shouldn’t.”
“And this doesn’t make you not a Human, don’t be stupid,” she continues. “But it does make you short-sighted. Did you think you would be able to keep this a secret forever?” Dax asks.
“Not really,” Bashir sighs. “But I wanted to do something worthwhile before I was forced out. I don’t know if I did. You shouldn’t cover for me.”
“I’m not testifying against you,” Dax says. “Besides, you’d be surprised at what kind of things Curzon covered up for Starfleet. This is basically nothing compared to that. Don’t tell anyone I said that,” she looks at Garak pointedly.
Bashir looks at Garak too.
“Becoming a Starfleet informator is low on a list of my priorities, trust me,” Garak says. “And I know better than to deprive myself of my best lunch companion. Besides, it’s amazing blackmail material.”
“Ha ha,” Bashir says. “Tell me that’s a joke.”
“It’s a joke,” Garak reassures him. (It’s not a joke.)
“Alright, so as far as covering the evidence goes, the audio is gone,” Dax says, wiping her hands on her uniform. “But what worries me, is that the emergency beacon Garak sent clearly mentions we have a person on board with a head trauma, that needs quick medical attention.” She smiles. “Thankfully, that can be arranged.”
Perhaps Garak is indeed getting rusty, because he doesn’t expect the boot that hits him between the eyes.