Enigma Tales

by Una McCormack

  Ab-Tzenketh is a very silly place. I’ll tell you more about it one day.

  Coranum. I suppose they were happy here, the rich, although my father lived here, and I can’t say that he was exactly happy. Self-satisfied, often, but never happy. He, like most of the people running Cardassia by the end, was completely detached from reality. But then, it has been my observation that the very rich and powerful do not have to bother much with reality. They are entirely cushioned from it and the consequences of their actions. For that reason, at least, I am glad that my father died in prison. I doubt he reflected much upon his actions in his last days—you could tell me more about that, I suppose—because reflection was not in his nature. But if for one brief moment he understood even a little of what he had done, grasped how many lives he had blighted . . .

  I am fooling myself, of course. You might remember that almost the last thing he said to me was to issue orders about whom I should kill next for him. Then he tried to bribe me with a memory, and then he died.

  For reasons that one of your Starfleet counselors would not find difficult to guess, I have made my home here. It is not a mansion, by any stretch of the imagination, although it is built, in part, from the ruin of one. I came home to nothing. I brought back with me only what I had acquired on the station, and I had lived lightly there, hoping that I would suddenly be called home. Even after the Obsidian Order fell, and I knew that it would take nothing short of a miracle for me to return, I had lost the habit of acquisition. I brought some books back with me, some clothes, some pictures, and many memories. It was a start. Most of what I own now I have pulled from the wreckage. I live among the flotsam and jetsam of my species.

  My home is five small rooms built from some of the larger pieces of stone that I found, and a pile of building material supplied by the Federation when they were here. I will be the first to admit that it has a ramshackle air. But I am comfortable here. The rooms are comfortable. The chairs are comfortable. The kitchen is comfortable. I was mad to leave.

  My real pride is, of course, my garden. I have worked hard here. Parmak helps, although he has a tendency to kill plants on touch—worrying in a doctor. He can’t do too much damage. The plants are hardy, the flowers have their own agenda, and not even Parmak can kill dry stone monuments. At night, when the air is clear and there is no dust, you can sit outside in the lamplight, among the cool stones and the sweet herbs, and you see the whole city below, and you are content.

  Come and visit one day. You will like the view from the hill.

  Garak

  [unsent]

  Six

  Pulaski woke and groaned. She was lying on the floor and she felt sick. She rolled over, groaned again, and grasped out for the side of the bed. She felt for her combadge. Nothing there. She opened her eyes and slowly, with her legs wobbling beneath her, pulled herself up from the floor and came to rest sitting on the edge of the bed. She gave another groan.

  “I am too damn old for this damn nonsense,” she grumbled to the room at large.

  The empty room. There was no sign of Antok and no sign of their captor. Pulaski rubbed first one leg, then the other, trying to shake off the last of the numbness. The effects of being stunned were, she thought, considerably less pleasant than a hangover. The treatment was much the same, however. She needed to drink plenty of water.

  As soon as she had the queasy feeling under control, she hauled herself up and hobbled over to the bedroom door. It opened at her approach. Whoever this guy was, if he wanted to be a success in the kidnapping business, he needed to start thinking about locking doors. She poked her head out of the door.

  “Hey,” Pulaski called out, looking up and down the corridor. “I’m awake. I’m not going to try anything funny. I can’t try anything funny, not after you stunned me. But I need a drink of water, okay?”

  No reply. She left the bedroom and inched her way down the corridor, partly through incapacity, partly because she didn’t want any passing Cardassian kidnappers jumping her. Again. She tried the doors, one by one. The bedroom where she had initially woken was empty. There was a small bathroom on the right-hand side of the corridor, also empty, and the door at the end of the corridor opened into an empty L-shaped living space. She poked her head in and called out, “Hey! Elima? Are you there? What’s going on?”

  Nothing. She went into the room. Nobody. She found the kitchen area, equipped with basic equipment, and tried the tap. Water came sputtering out. She ran it until it was cool (a Cardassian would have looked on in horror at this profligacy), filled a glass, and sat down with a bump on the nearby couch. This could be a nice apartment, she thought, looking around. A young professional couple would probably be very happy here before their family arrived. Space would be tight after that. Yes, it would be great for them. However, Pulaski was eager to be free of the place. She gulped the water down, feeling better as she did so, and pondered her situation.

  The first thing that puzzled her was how her captor had a Starfleet phaser, but a little thought soon resolved that. Starfleet had been here for years leading the reconstruction effort and, even with the best intentions, equipment, even weapons—particularly weapons—had a way of walking off. It was not ideal, but it happened. There were safeguards, but there were also ways to work around this. Presumably this phaser had been stolen and left behind when Starfleet removed all its forces and equipment from Cardassian space. So no clues there, other than that her kidnapper knew how to lay his hands on a stolen weapon. Well, he hadn’t struck her as a particularly upstanding and law-abiding individual.

  Her next question was why she of all people had been snatched. Her captor, before resorting to violence (all right, before she’d taken a pop at him), had said something about wanting to know why she was on Cardassia. Well, she’d been pretty clear about that, or so she thought: she was here for a speech, to accept a medal, and to generally press the flesh with some politicians and academics, and create goodwill (and ideally not create any more diplomatic incidents). There wasn’t anything complicated about this, just as there wasn’t really anything complicated about Kitty Pulaski, but for some reason this Cardassian had gotten the idea she was up to something. Antok was sure that she had been taken because of what she’d learned about Lang. But why Pulaski? People didn’t generally tell Pulaski secrets, particularly not state secrets. She’d only go blurting them out to the nearest passing journalist. No, if this Cardassian thought she was here for some nefarious purpose, he’d picked the wrong person.

  “Should be talking to Peter,” she muttered, and laughed. But her humor was gallows humor: what worried her was that she wouldn’t be able to persuade her captor otherwise. That could get nasty, if she didn’t get a move on.

  She stretched her legs out, thumping each one in turn to get the circulation going.

  “Come on, Kitty,” she told herself, “time to get moving.”

  Pulaski stood up and walked gingerly over to the big windows that took up the whole of one wall. She looked out across the city. Antok had said she thought they were on the far side of Paldar, a district to the north and west of the capital, but she might as well have said they were in Brigadoon for all the good it did Pulaski. She peered out at the other buildings. They looked deserted. Did anyone even live here? Did the trams run out here? How could she contact someone to arrange her rescue? She drank some more water. Again and again she came back to the question: Why the hell was she here? Who was her captor? Who was he working for? Pulaski pondered this. She knew she had put her foot in it during her interview with Mayrat: Could it be connected to that? Had she said something to anger supporters of the military? How did this all square with Elima Antok and what the historian had told Pulaski about Natima Lang? Pulaski had publically supported Lang, and the next thing she knew she was kidnapped and held with a woman who had discovered files that could discredit Lang. That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Did someone think that Pulaski had been s
ent here with instructions to ensure Lang succeeded Therok? But the figure lurking behind the campaign against Lang was none other than . . .

  Pulaski leaned her head against the reinforced plastic of the window.

  . . . the castellan.

  Pulaski knew that people could change. Yes, yes, people were amazing, they had revelations all the time that transformed them. They got religion, took up sports, or created performance poetry, or got a lover, and all of a sudden it was like they were twenty years younger. But did people really change? Could they? Would they, if they were in power and intent on securing a particular outcome? Would Elim Garak, former operative of the Obsidian Order, hesitate for even a couple of minutes to put a young historian and a grumpy doctor (Pulaski balked at “old”) out of action for a while in order to get a desired outcome? Pulaski was very afraid that he would not. The castellan was easily the most powerful man on Prime. He’d been part of the Obsidian Order, one of the most effective surveillance organizations in the quadrant. He’d been in power for three years now—long enough to reestablish the Order’s networks and their working methods. Who would stop him? He was, by all accounts, almost universally admired. Even Antok, a quarter-Bajoran, with more reason than most to loathe the Order, had made a pretty good apology for him. But he wasn’t a good man, was he? Bad men did good things all the time, most often to distract from the worse things they were doing. And kidnapping didn’t rate highly in Pulaski’s book.

  All of this made the doctor feel pretty precarious. It also made her keener to get the hell out of this empty apartment. “Empty?” she muttered, looking around. “Downright creepy.” She hated the quiet, the sense of abandonment, and, most of all, she was deeply afraid—not for herself, she was game for anything, but for Elima Antok. Sure, Antok had grown up on Cardassia during its toughest times, but their captor was twitchy. That meant he would probably make split-second and not entirely rational decisions. For Antok’s sake, Pulaski needed to get out of here as quickly as possible and get help.

  She finished the water and headed for the exit. Extraordinarily, it opened. She went out of the apartment onto the landing and looked around carefully. Nobody to be seen. No alarms going off. The whole situation was baffling. Why go to all the trouble of capturing her, she wondered, and then leave the way open for her to escape? Had her captor hit some difficulty and been delayed? Was the stun supposed to last longer? Whatever the case, those were his problems, and, on balance, Pulaski was happy to leave him to them. She wondered if she was meant to get away, but dismissed the idea as too complicated even for Cardassians.

  “Don’t assume cleverness when a cock-up is the more likely explanation,” she muttered, and walked along the landing. She decided to avoid the elevator, in case she met her captor coming back, and took the steps down instead. She slipped out through an emergency exit and stood outside. The air felt markedly grittier this morning, and she coughed a little at first, but that soon settled. She’d have to get a mask for the rest of the trip. Efheny would get it. She looked around the empty estate. No one about. No one to ask for directions. She had no idea which way to go, but downhill seemed better than uphill, so off she went.

  It was a strange district, she thought as she walked through. A series of squat, brand-new apartment blocks, only some of which seemed to be inhabited, and then not completely. A few private skimmers stood around here and there. Perhaps one day there would be plenty of families here. She’d heard that the birth rate was soaring. So perhaps it would become busy, vibrant, lived-in—one day. Right now it was sparse and even rather bleak. You couldn’t help thinking about the families that might have lived here, the children that might have been playing outside, if only the Jem’Hadar hadn’t had their way on Cardassia Prime.

  “Get a grip, Kitty,” she told herself. “You’re getting morbid.”

  She had plenty of her own problems right now; she needed to focus. She walked along the road and saw a skimmer heading toward her. Could it be him, her captor? She looked around, but there wasn’t anywhere to hide, and she was pretty conspicuous—a human wearing the most crumpled Starfleet dress uniform this side of graduation—so she just strode on. The skimmer went past and didn’t even slow down.

  At length the road came out onto what she guessed must be part of the main circular going around the city. She wasn’t too keen on walking along here, given how quickly the traffic was speeding past, but there was a narrow access pathway for pedestrians, and, besides, there was nowhere else to go. She walked on. She guessed from the position of the sun that it was past the morning rush hour; the traffic wasn’t heavy, but it was steady, coming past her at speed. After about a quarter of an hour, she reached another access road, and there she saw a small building, built from gray Federation plasticrete and, from the boxes displayed outside, clearly a shop of some kind. She went down toward it and strode inside. The proprietor, a middle-aged male with greasy hair and a scar along one cheek, took one look at her—human, in disheveled Starfleet dress uniform—and pointed to the public comm in the corner.

  “I don’t have any money,” Pulaski said.

  “You lot never do.”

  “But I do need to use the comm.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your need looks greater than mine. Besides, I always liked Starfleet. Taught me how to play soccer.”

  He threw a keycard over to her, which she caught (“Thanks!”) and stuck into the comm. “Hey,” she said, when Alden’s face appeared on screen. “It’s me.”

  “Kitty?” Alden sounded beside himself with relief. “Where the bloody hell are you?”

  “No idea.” She called over to the proprietor, who shouted back their location. “Exit 49, just northeast of Paldar. Mean anything to you?”

  “It’ll mean something to somebody—”

  “Don’t bring anyone! Come yourself!”

  “Kitty, what the hell is going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. Bring some painkillers, will you? I’ve got the mother of all headaches coming on.”

  She cut the comm. She handed the keycard back to the proprietor. He took a good look at her and handed over a bottle of water, which she accepted gratefully. She went outside to wait, sipping steadily at the water. Yes, the air quality was definitely worse. A few more days of this and you’d struggle outside. After about five minutes, she heard the throb of engines overhead. She looked up. Two air skimmers were heading this way. They came closer. The proprietor came out. “Hey,” he said, “I don’t want to interfere, but are you on the run by any chance?”

  “What?”

  “Those are police skimmers.”

  She looked up, and suddenly she had a very bad feeling. She looked around.

  “If you’re thinking of running for it, you should probably try that way,” the proprietor said, pointing off behind the shop. “The other way is open countryside. At least that way you might get into Paldar and under cover.”

  “Thanks. Hey, this won’t get you into trouble, will it?”

  He shrugged. “I told you, I like Starfleet officers. Doctors in particular. I’ll be fine.” He looked up. “Don’t rate your chances much, though.”

  “I’ll take them,” said Pulaski, and ran. Because one thing she knew for sure—she didn’t want to end up in the hands of the Cardassian police. Not with Elim Garak calling the shots.

  * * *

  Once upon a time in the Cardassian capital, the Torr sector had been its most densely populated area, housing the service grades that kept the city running. Tucked alongside the bend and the curve of the old, slow dirty river, with narrow dead-end streets of crowded tenements, rickety walkways, tiny eateries, and busy geleta houses, it had been fertile ground for the Jem’Hadar death squads. They had killed and killed and killed, and then dragged all the buildings down upon the dead. Clearing Torr—as Elim Garak could tell you, as Arati Mhevet could tell you—had been one of the lo
west, most desperate, and most grievous episodes of the aftermath. Those memories, no matter how hard one tried to push them away, surfaced at the oddest moments. Nobody who had dug, with sticks and bare hands, through the rubble of Torr in the hope, dashed over and over, of finding life, or who helped carry out the bodies and stack them high, would forget that time. Nobody who had experienced their stench would forget the great funeral pyres, darkening the sky with ash that seemed never to clear, clogging dry mouths with the reek and residue. But things can change. Cardassia had changed. More than ten years after the Fire, Torr was a shadow of the vibrant, grimy place it had once been, but in recent years, as the page turned slowly on the past, some of its old spirit had begun to return.

  As any xenosociologist can tell you, social class is not a monolithic construct but is complicated in multiple and intersecting ways, and the two main districts of Torr, although united in their lack of financial and social capital, had quite distinct cultures. North Torr, rubbing up against the factories and silos of the Munda’ar sector, had been home to the laborers who drudged on the assembly lines and distribution centers. Sometimes this life was not enough and their children looked to make their fortunes elsewhere, worlds that the military had conquered. Northerners had, in times gone by, been proud of their long tradition of sending their sons to be the foot soldiers of the Union. Since the war they had taken less easily to the new open culture than others of their species, longing for the security and pride of the past. But they had, after some gentle persuasion, taken somewhat to Elim Garak, grudgingly admitting that for all his inexplicable fondness for Federation things, he wasn’t the kind of man to let humans get the better of him. There was something undeniably Cardassian about Garak that drew the northerners to him. They did not believe that he would forget them or their sacrifices—and they were right. Garak knew that their resentments, if exploited by the unscrupulous, would mean the end of his democratic project. For this reason alone, Garak would not forget the people of North Torr. Besides, he had sympathy for them. He too had drudged long years for the old Cardassia, sacrificed again and again the better part of him, and like the northerners that had brought him nothing but sorrow.