He turned away and walked back to the window. Mhevet was totally at a loss. What had all this been about?
“She’s in the bedroom at the back,” Garak said. “I think she was trying to rest, but if you’re keen to talk to her now, then you should.”
“I think that it’s best all around if we resolve this as quickly as possible.”
“I agree,” said Garak. “But if you could remove her to the constabulary buildings discreetly, I’m sure she would appreciate it. I would too. Should the poor professor turn out to be innocent—as I am as sure as I can be that she will—it would be a great shame if the ’casts had footage on file of her being unceremoniously dragged from a police skimmer.”
“I’m happy to oblige you on that, sir. My personal skimmer is outside, and we can enter HQ through a back door. Let me assure you too that I’m not in the habit of dragging anyone in or out of skimmers, be they professors or not.”
Now he was definitely smiling. “No,” he said, “I don’t imagine you are. You’re direct, Arati, but you’re not brutal. Merely efficient.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“No, Arati,” he said softly, turning back to the window. “Thank you.”
She left and went out to her skimmer to wait for Lang to appear. She gripped the controls with shaking hands. She had faced some pretty terrifying moments in her life—riots, marauding Jem’Hadar—but she hoped never again to have to face down the man with the most frightening reputation on Cardassia Prime. She tried to understand what had just happened—had it been a test? To see how far she’d assert herself, assert her authority over him? Mhevet shook her head. Couldn’t they all just be a bit less, well, Cardassian about things? It would make life easier all around. Still, the threat to arrest him had done the trick—even if it was a test, he now knew how far she was willing to go. And if I’m smothered in my sleep tonight, she thought, I’ll know I’ve made a terrible mistake and that we really do have a monster at the top of our government.
The front door opened. She saw the castellan, in silhouette, and another figure beside him—a tall woman with long hair. Lang. She and Garak exchanged a few words, and pressed palms, and then Lang came slowly down the steps and got into the back of Mhevet’s skimmer.
“Don’t worry, Professor Lang,” Mhevet said as she rolled the skimmer forward and back out onto the road. “I’m sure we’ll have this cleared up soon.” She glanced over her shoulder at the weary woman sitting in the back. Unless you’re guilty, she thought, in which case, your problems are only just beginning.
It was dark and the dust was rising. She drove carefully and slowly back to HQ. On arrival, Mhevet handed Lang over to Dhrok, one of her most experienced and trusted colleagues. She found some coffee, and then she went down to the interview room. Dhrok came out to speak to her.
“She’s quite open that Servek had access to her files. But she denies knowing that Servek had been tampering with them. And of course she flat-out denies murdering her.”
“What about Elima Antok?” Mhevet said.
“Not gotten there yet.”
Mhevet nodded. “I think I’ll come in for this.” She followed Dhrok back into the room and sat to one side as Dhrok asked her whether she knew Elima Antok.
“I know her work, of course,” said Lang. “And I know that it was significant to the war crimes report.” She looked from Dhrok to Mhevet and back again. “Why are you asking me about Elima Antok? Is she in trouble?”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Dhrok. “Have you had any dealings with her, direct or otherwise?”
Lang shook her head. “I’ve read her books. Does that count?”
“I think,” said Mhevet, “that we can consider reading somebody’s books to be a benign activity. Unless there was something particular in her work that you took exception to? Her area of study sometimes covered difficult material.”
“I don’t know why you’re asking me about Elima Antok,” Lang said, “but I thought she was a rising star and a credit to her profession. I was looking forward to her next book.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Mhevet, “Antok was the one who discovered the files on Project Enigma. She’s missing now.”
Lang stared at her, and then put her head in her hands. “Oh, what a mess,” she said. “What a terrible mess.” She looked at Mhevet. “I wish I could help you. But I have no idea what is happening. I have no idea why I—or Antok—would be targeted in this way.”
“Unless you did sign off on Project Enigma,” said Mhevet. “Then everything becomes clear.”
Lang shook her head. “But I didn’t,” she said simply. “I didn’t.”
Mhevet’s personal comm chimed, and she went out to take the message. It was another of the investigators, looking harassed. “Antok’s been found, boss,” he said, “but there’s a complication.”
Mhevet went cold. “She’s not dead.”
“No, chief—”
“Don’t give me surprises like that. What’s the complication?”
The man’s expression became almost comical. “You’d better come and see for yourself.”
* * *
“This is all taking too long!”
Pulaski paced the room at the embassy. Alden, unruffled, continued reading from his padd. “What’s the matter now, Kitty?”
“All I can think of is that poor young woman, at the mercy of that lunatic—isn’t anybody going to do anything about it?”
“Garak has promised us that he’s doing all that he can.”
“Garak!” Pulaski scoffed.
“Parmak believes him.” Alden glanced up at her. “I’m hardly well disposed toward Garak. But Doctor Parmak is completely trustworthy, and if he believes that Garak has nothing to do with this, then I believe him, and we should leave the city constabulary to get on with doing what they do best.” He sighed. “It’s not as if we can go wandering around looking for her ourselves.”
Pulaski grunted and took up watch by the window. Night was falling, and in the bowl of the river valley below, an orange haze was filling the sky. “Smog,” she muttered. “This poor damn planet.”
After a while, Alden yawned, stretched, and stood. “I’m off to bed.” He glanced at Pulaski, tense and tall by the window. “Can I suggest you do the same?”
“You can suggest.”
“You’re a woman with good sense. You know as well as I do that standing by a window and sulking isn’t going to find Elima Antok.”
“Maybe not,” Pulaski said. “But it makes me feel like I’m doing something.”
He shook his head and left the room. Pulaski gave him ten minutes and then turned purposefully away from the window and strode over to the comm on the desk. He was quite right: standing by a window and sulking wasn’t going to find Antok, and she had no intention of doing it any longer. She punched through a message and, a bare ten minutes later, a very sleepy Metok Efheny appeared.
“Doctor Pulaski,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
She gave him a toothy smile. “Everything’s fine, Metok. But I need to go over to the campus.”
He peered at her. She looked him up and down. Pulaski had the vaguest impression that underneath his jacket he was wearing pajamas. “Do you need to go and get changed?”
* * *
Efheny was back at the embassy in record time, fully dressed and carrying two masks, one of which he handed to her. Pulaski eyed hers suspiciously. “What’s this for?”
“The first dust storm of the summer is due,” Efheny said. “It’ll be just our luck if it hits the city tonight, but the air quality was poorer today and I think it will get worse. And if it does—well, you won’t be able to breathe without this.” He showed her how it worked, helping her clasp it around her face and adjusting the straps and the filters until clean air was coming through. He put on his own mask. “Anyon
e with any sense,” he said, his voice muffled, “wouldn’t dream of going out tonight. The first storm is always a bad one.”
“Nobody ever accused me of having sense,” Pulaski said.
They went out of the embassy, and Pulaski almost regretted her decision to go out. The simmering, brooding heat fell like a blow across the face, and she gasped behind the mask, amazed at how quickly the weather had changed in the short time that she had been inside the embassy.
“Awful, isn’t it?” Efheny said.
“Is it like this the whole summer?”
“It gets worse,” Efheny said. “Hotter, for one thing. And the dust accumulates. Some days you can’t see your hand in front of your face.”
“Goddammit!”
“The summers are better than they used to be,” he said. “The soil reclamation work up in the mountains is really starting to have an effect. Ten years ago—it felt like we were in darkness the whole summer. And masks were hard to come by.”
Dante’s Inferno. Pulaski shook her head. She’d known, intellectually, that postwar Cardassia had been a hard place, and—despite the small matter of her kidnap—she was already well disposed toward these talkative, combative people. But facing the dust for the first time—and knowing that this was a shadow of what had once plagued Cardassia Prime—Katherine Pulaski at last fully understood the people of this world. She found that she completely admired them. They had guts, grit, and determination. To come through this hell, to keep on digging deeper into themselves to find the place where hope lived and to keep drawing from that well, to keep on trying and building and healing. That, she thought, was worthy of her respect.
“You people,” she said to Efheny in wonderment. “You’re tougher than a basket of snakes.”
His eyes crinkled behind his mask. “Thank you, Doctor Pulaski.”
He led her to the skimmer, and soon they were on their way to the campus. They used the clearances that had been arranged for her during her tour to get into one of the labs, and she quickly found the scanners that she needed.
“I know what will help us,” said Pulaski as she worked. “Antok is part Bajoran.” She saw Efheny’s expression. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “It happened a lot. So we start by seeing how many people we can find who have at least some Bajoran DNA . . .” She started fiddling with controls. “Now, I suspect there are more people like her in the capital than perhaps most Cardassians like to admit—” She shot Efheny a stern look. “And look! Yes. Almost seven thousand.”
“Seven thousand?” Efheny gasped.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it?” Pulaski said. “Well, that’s what sexual slavery does.” She glanced at Efheny, who didn’t look happy. “Sorry to be so blunt. But I bet you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Bajoran women who were happy to find their Cardassian masters had made them pregnant.”
“I just didn’t think it would be that many . . .”
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” said Pulaski dryly. “Let’s start narrowing it down. We know she’s female, we know her age . . .”
That still left her with almost a hundred women. But not all of these were a quarter Bajoran, and in one or two rare cases the DNA had come from a grand-father and not a grandmother. Soon they were down to about twenty leads, and Pulaski was able to discount some of these—they had not had children.
“All right,” said Pulaski, when they were down to a dozen. “Here’s where we have to start guessing, and I’ll need your help. Here are my likely candidates, superimposed over a map of the city. I don’t know this place, Metok, but you do. Where could you hide someone? Here?” She pointed to the northeast of the map.
“That’s Coranum,” said Efheny. “Big houses . . . Oh, I don’t know! You could find somewhere to hide there, couldn’t you? This is just guesswork!”
“It’s the best we have,” said Pulaski firmly.
“Weren’t you found in one of those new apartments north of campus?” He pointed at the map. There was no red light there.
“Nope,” said Pulaski. “He’s moved on. Guess again.”
“Then, I guess, down here,” said Efheny, pointing toward the southeast. “That’s the edge of North Torr . . .”
Pulaski nodded, recognizing the name of the district.
“And that”—Efheny drew his finger slightly north—“is Munda’ar. Industrial estates. Light industry, replicator plants. Storage and silos. A lot of warehouses.”
They both looked at the red light blinking.
“That’s not a very nice end of town,” said Efheny anxiously.
“Well, that’s where I’m going next,” Pulaski said. She looked at him thoughtfully. “You don’t have to come, you know.”
Efheny squared his shoulders. “I was instructed to help you. So I’ll help you.”
“Good man! That’s the spirit!” She downloaded the data into an ancient Cardassian tricorder.
Back outside, the dust had become markedly thicker, and the wind was rising. They got back gladly into the skimmer, moving it along slowly. Visibility was low. “Sensible people,” said Efheny, “are indoors with their filtration systems maxed out.”
“Who said scientists were sensible people?”
They drove slowly south and east. There was barely any traffic on the road, and those skimmers that were out were also crawling along. They crossed the Liberation Bridge, the river below an eerie orange, and headed slowly into East Torr. They heard the bell of a tram up ahead, and Efheny, peering out into the haze, slowed down the skimmer. The tram came out of nowhere, rattling past, and went on its way.
“We won’t see many more of those,” said Efheny. “They cancel services when the storms start. Most people hole up where they are, if it hits this bad.”
They inched on through Torr. Pulaski saw dull lights behind sealed windows, but no people. The tenements grew narrower and taller, and eventually ended. They crossed another set of tramlines and then entered the industrial landscape of Munda’ar.
Pulaski was holding the tricorder. They were drawing very close to where the red icon was now. She could only hope it was Antok. They’d come on a long and wasted journey otherwise, and they would have to start all over again. Eventually, Efheny pulled up outside a squat dark warehouse. They both got out.
“Look,” Efheny muttered hoarsely. “Someone’s coming!”
Pulaski looked where he was pointing. A figure was coming toward them through the haze. Damn, thought Pulaski. Should have gotten a phaser.
But the figure had his hands up, palms facing out, showing that he too was unarmed. He came right up to them and stopped. From behind his mask, he said, “I knew you were going to pull a stunt like this, Kitty. Has anyone ever explained the Prime Directive to you?”
“Mister,” she said, “I was violating the Prime Directive before you were even out of diapers.”
Alden glared back at her through his visor. “So, have you found her?”
Pulaski smiled. “I think I have.”
A phaser screamed. They dived for cover, and Pulaski said, “Now I know I’ve found her!”
My dear Doctor—
Does anyone come to Cardassia Prime as a tourist? Perhaps—as news filters out that we are no longer the quadrant’s basket case, and that one is not likely to be confronted with the sight of hungry children, or trip over corpses, or catch an infectious waterborne disease—we may see an uptick in visitors. I think there are one or two, more adventurous than the average traveler, who have already come. But they, surely, stick to those areas where they can enjoy art and culture, or perhaps go out into the countryside, where not all is dust and famine, and can at times be grandly, violently beautiful.
We, however, shall move briefly off the beaten track, and pass through Munda’ar. It is not the most pleasant area of town, and unlikely to attract many visitors, but we shall pass throu
gh nonetheless, on the way to somewhere else. This was where the factories were, and the grain silos, and once upon a time you could not hear yourself think in certain parts of the area over the thump of the industrial replicators. Industry on Prime suffered along with everything else—you can’t produce much when most of you are dead and the rest of you are hungry—but things are getting better.
I once said to someone that I had spent too much of my life in small rooms and seedy alleyways. Now that I think about it, I would also add industrial estates. There is something about these places—with buildings often unmanned for large periods of time and toward the edge of cities—that draws people like me to them. For good reason. They offer concealment. They offer hideaways. I seem to have seen the inside of a lot of these kinds of places.
I definitely joined the wrong intelligence agency.
Garak
[unsent]
Nine
“It’s coming from over there!” Alden cried. Pulaski saw that he had drawn a phaser and was holding it up, ready to fire.
“Where the hell are all these phasers coming from?” she said, aghast. “Peter, did you bring that with you?”
“Kitty, someone’s shooting at us!” Alden hissed back. “We’ve got more to worry about than where I got a phaser on Cardassia Prime. Just be glad I’ve got one!” He grabbed her arm with his free hand and gestured ahead with the phaser. “Look!” he said. “Over there!”
Pulaski swung around just in time to see a dark figure dashing away through the haze. Alden began to give chase. “Come on, Metok!” she yelled, running after them, and she heard him hurrying behind her. There was a bright light ahead, high up and slightly blurry, and she realized that it was at the top of a big, dark warehouse. Alden had come to a halt in front of it and was rattling at the doors. “Blast resistance.”
“Where did he go?” said Pulaski when she reached Alden. She too yanked at the doors, but they were firmly locked. “Dammit, where is he? Where’s Antok?”
“All right, Kitty,” said Alden. “Calm down.”
Enigma Tales Page 19
