Star Trek: Fall 02: The Crimson Shadow

by Una McCormack

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  First Pocket Books paperback edition October 2013

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  Cover design by Alan Dingman

  Cover art by Doug Drexler

  ISBN 978-1-4767-2220-7

  ISBN 978-1-4767-2228-3 (ebook)

  To Jenny, for guidance

  Historian’s Note

  The main events in this story take place just after the castellan arrives for the dedication of the new Deep Space 9 (Star Trek: The Fall—Revelation and Dust) on August 24 to September 4, 2385 (CE).

  Part One

  The Emotion

  “Earth is the goal. She stands at the end of all things.”

  —Preloc,

  Meditations on a Crimson Shadow,

  Vol. III (Earth), 3, iv

  One

  My dear Doctor,

  I was sorry not to see you on your last trip home, but by all accounts it was a hasty visit, and my own availability was also sadly limited at that time. The ambassadorial life proves more hectic than that of a tailor, and these days my lunches are neither as lengthy nor as entertaining as those we once enjoyed in the Replimat.

  I left your world ten days ago and am now en route home—and upon the Enterprise, no less! To gain admission to your flagship is surely a great honor. As you know, my spirits lift merely at the thought of returning to Cardassia, a luxury denied me for so long. And while I must admit that your world fascinates me more and more as I grow to know it better, the desire to be surrounded by my own people, to feel the hot sun of my own world upon me once again, is as strong as ever. You asked me in your last letter whether I had considered returning home again for good, and it is true that this thought is never far from the back of my mind. But the alliance between our civilizations remains still uncertain, and I believe that there is more that I can do yet. Duty to Cardassia will always drive me—never, I hope, to the excesses of the past. . . .

  We will be welcoming your president to our world. Is this the first time that a serving president of yours has visited us? I’m sure that your brilliant brain would be able to answer that question in an instant. Whether or not she is actually the first, I hope that she will find herself most welcome. I have seen a great deal of Nan Bacco in the past few months as we negotiated the terms under which Starfleet would finally remove its personnel from our world. I respect her vision for our peoples and admire her breadth of literary learning. She has proven an acceptable substitute lunch partner in your absence.

  Keep well, Doctor. And do keep an eye upon your news services. Very soon the eyes of the whole quadrant will be able to see your president standing alongside our castellan, and, while you will not catch a glimpse of me (I am, after all, in the habit of living in the shadows), you can rest assured that they have been brought together, in part, by the hand of:

  Your affectionate friend,

  Elim Garak

  * * *

  Before the fire, before the fall that destroyed the Cardassian empire and all but obliterated that clever, subtle, proud people, their capital city was a sight to behold. Coming down from lower orbit in a shuttlecraft (as this world’s most forgiving, most forgiven son—Elim Garak—often had cause to do in the course of his long career), you could see the whole of the city rising up before you. Here, on the south side, nestled by the river and harassed day and night by the screech and roar of shuttles, lay the Torr district where ordinary lives were lived out in tenement blocks crammed close together, and the bittersweet scent of gelat drifted irresistibly from the corner houses.

  Beyond rose up the steel-and-glass towers of Barvonok, gilt-edged and glitzy, where the money acquired from empire was transmuted by some strange alchemy into more wealth for the district’s financiers. If you turned your head to look west, you could spy the long, low lines of the warehouses and factories of Munda’ar, receiving goods and materials from client planets, distributing them throughout the homeworld. In Akleen, long coppery lines of well-kept ithian trees signaled the avenues along which the Cardassian military had so proudly paraded for many long years. And, last of all, there, to the north, on the high ground, far above the city, was Coranum, where the rich and (thus) the powerful watched from their mansions distantly but assiduously over the great empire that was their chief possession. All this you could see as your shuttle made its descent; and if, like Elim Garak, you loved this place—your home—so deeply that you would oppress the best part of yourself in its service, then your heart would quake at the sight, because it was everything to you.

  The city was gone now, long gone. The fire had taken it all and not discriminated. Old or new, rich or poor, building or person, the occupiers had not cared. As long as you were Cardassian, you were to be destroyed. You were to be wiped out, as if you had never existed. And so it was that all the tenements and towers, all the mansions and counting houses—they all came tumbling down.

  Yet there is something indestructible about the Cardassian spirit (as that people’s most unquenchable son, Elim Garak, can tell you). And from the bones and the cinders a new city was coming into being: bravely, and uncertainly, and not without setbacks. New towers were being raised, and between them ran new alleys, leading to new opportunities and new bolt-holes. Yet something of the old remained, haunting the half-formed city like a revenant.

  Take the northern part of Torr (not chosen at random, for some of this story concerns that district closely). Once this had been an area of densely populated tenements, whose inhabitants traveled daily by tram out to the munitions works in Munda’ar. At the end of the Dominion War, when the Jem’Hadar came calling, they found many to murder here, and the narrow dead-end streets did not facilitate escape. In a few short days, this busy life-filled district was reduced to rubble and ashes and corpses. Then the Federation arrived, their hands open, offering shelter, food, and medical assistance. When the rubble was shifted, and what remained of the corpses was buried, new buildings popped up, little prefab affairs, gray and functional and uniform. The survivors clustered gratefully within them. And slowly, slowly, they began to put their mark upon them.

  Something of the old was impr
inted upon the new. The prefabs somehow arranged themselves in memory of the old streets and walkways, and the old murals reappeared on the sides of the new buildings. The survivors brought back with them what was left of their old friendships and rivalries, their tattered possessions all the more prized for having almost been lost for good. This new corner house was where you went because it stood on the rubble of your old haunts; this walkway ran along a route that had been out of bounds for you and your family for time immemorial, so you did not cross that space. And above all, the old ethos survived—the old belief: that to be Cardassian was to be (despite all evidence to the contrary) the very best that there was. The old way of life—with its reliable work, steady patterns, and close-knit groups—was largely gone, but the northerners did their best to re-create it.

  North Torr was militant too—always had been. Northerners were different from the peaceniks that clustered around the east side of the district, and they held these people largely in contempt. North Torr supplied the soldier boys who served the Union—not the legates but the ranks—and had done so proudly for generations. Northerners couldn’t understand why it was these days that talk about their service wasn’t so welcome, why the military didn’t seem to want their sons anymore. Hurt pride, dispossession—this was rich soil for demagogues in search of a constituency. There were plenty in the new Cardassia with their eye on this opportunity.

  North Torr was never the easiest place on Cardassia Prime for a newcomer trying to find a home, and that had not changed much. Yet it was here, nonetheless, that a young man by the name of Rakhat Blok had, for the last couple of months, been trying to make such a home for himself.

  Blok had the tired and bewildered look shared by many Cardassians of his generation that resulted from the early and savage extermination of a deeply inculcated romanticism about his culture. If anyone had asked (and nobody did), Blok would tell them that he had been born on one of the empire’s agricultural worlds and, desperate to get away from a life of boring and backbreaking work, joined up during the first recruitment drive that took place when Skrain Dukat seized power and handed over the empire and its people to the Dominion.

  Blok had taken to soldiering. Although he was only a foot soldier, he was used to repetitive tasks and doing what he was told. Blok could say (if he’d been asked) how he’d liked the company, and the sense of purpose, and having more money in his pocket than ever before. He’d liked feeling part of something bigger than himself. In fact, he’d liked the whole business right up until he’d been deployed to the Romulan front. He hadn’t liked that at all, and by the time the war was over, the question of likes and dislikes seemed something from a different age. The war ended in the blink of an eye, and in the space of a few hours—Blok could tell you—he went from proud servant of the Union to refugee from the Jem’Hadar to Romulan prisoner of war. When the Romulans finally released him, he went home, where it turned out that everyone was dead. He’d liked that least of all.

  A story countless Cardassians of his generation could tell, if anyone asked. And, like many of them, the man called Blok had not wanted to drift around the ruins of his old home among the ghosts of so many dead families, so somehow he’d ended up on Cardassia Prime, in the capital, looking for work. The locals pegged him immediately as an outsider (there were enough of them about these days, taking the jobs), and proceeded with caution.

  He found digs in a block built from old Cardassian stones and new Federation plasticrete. This space he shared with an old woman who muttered constantly under her breath and a male of indeterminate age who stank of kanar and didn’t say a word, but could be heard most nights through the flimsy walls yelling in his sleep about choking, choking, choking. . . . Blok took to staying out late, pounding the alleys and walkways, and sleeping through the day. The dust that lay on the city wasn’t so bad at night.

  Every night he passed a geleta house on the corner of his street. He didn’t at first dare to enter, but at last, late one long and lonely evening, he went inside. The regulars took one look at him, moved closer together, lowered their voices, and ignored him. But Blok went back every night and sat by himself on the periphery, listening to the camaraderie of their tight circle, building up a picture of their connections, and wondering how he could get inside.

  They talked a lot, these people, more freely than they ever had under the old regimes, and more freely than they realized. They talked about the hound racing, and what they’d heard on the day’s ’casts, and how you couldn’t get decent kanar anymore. They talked a great deal about how things weren’t as good as they used to be. They talked about the new young politician who understood how they felt and said things they liked to hear. They talked about the trouble last week in the southern city of Cemet, and how those students didn’t know how lucky they were.

  One night, about four weeks after his arrival on Prime, Blok sat listening to them, silently counting the coins lined up in front of him. If asked, he could have described how an army pension wasn’t anywhere near enough to cover the cost of living in the capital these days, and how he couldn’t find work. Doors seemed to shut in his face. Sitting and counting coins and listening to the unfriendly company complain how you could only get four days’ work in five at the moment, Blok decided not to hold his tongue any longer.

  “Four days out of five!” His accent, off-world and rural, sounded clumsy and out of place among these fast-talking locals. “What I’d do for that, eh! I haven’t worked since I got here. Nothing! There’s nothing for me. What’s someone like me supposed to do, eh?”

  There was a silence. Blok could tell what they were thinking: If you don’t like it here, son, you can always go back to where you came from.

  “It’s not like there’s anything back home. I don’t just mean work. There’s no people. No buildings. Do you know what it’s like on some of the client worlds, eh? Do you have any idea? I fought the Romulans for the Union—”

  That got a reaction. “Everyone’s had hard times,” said a man at the back, who had a thin white scar cutting down sharply through one of his eye-ridges. He was cradling a heavy glass in both hands and looking down into it, as if contemplating what other uses he might make of it.

  “And I don’t see why we should put up with it any longer,” said Blok. His voice got shriller as he strove to convince his audience that he meant every word of what he was saying. “There’d be work for everyone, if it went to Cardassians. But it doesn’t. The government is at the mercy of Starfleet officers and Federation officials! They don’t want us to get the jobs. They’d have nothing to do. If we did what they were all doing, they’d have nothing to do. We’re becoming dependent on them. Like servants. Like slaves. You know the worst of it? The other day, I saw a Bajoran, strutting around as if she owned the place! A Bajoran!”

  The room was quiet for a moment, and then a low rumble of agreement rose up, ending on a growl of discontent. That old enmity had not been forgotten, not here in North Torr. Many of its old boys had lost their lives to the Resistance, trying to protect the Bajoran people from themselves.

  The boundaries shifted and—suddenly, dizzyingly—Blok knew he’d been admitted. He’d put the key in the lock and this time it had turned. He looked down into his glass, which had been filled, and then people asked for his story. So he told them a version of it, and his glass got filled again and again, and Blok was admitted into the brotherhood of North Torr. At the end of the evening, when they all reluctantly left the warm little space for their less than satisfactory homes, Blok stood on the step of the geleta house, wavering slightly from side to side, and felt a steady hand upon his shoulder.

  Turning, he found himself face-to-face with a male he’d noticed now and again throughout the evening, who hadn’t spoken but who had been listening to everything closely. His grip was firm, Blok noticed, and he didn’t smell of drink.

  “You’re a man who deserves better,” he said to Blok.

  “I am,” Blok said, firmly, if with some slurri
ng. “I do.”

  The man pushed a data card into Blok’s hand. “You go home,” he said, “and have a good sleep, and contact me tomorrow. I can put work your way. Good work, steady work. Work I think you’ll like.” He smiled, all teeth, and winked, and then turned and walked down the street, leaving Blok to weave his way unsteadily home, back to his cot and another man’s nightmares. But he did what he was told, and slept well, and the next afternoon the data card was still there, so he thought he might as well use it.

  * * *

  Captain Jean-Luc Picard was not accustomed to realizing that the person he was addressing was no longer paying him attention. Particularly not when the person was sitting in the captain’s own damn ready room.

  “Ambassador,” Picard said, “is something the matter?”

  The Cardassian ambassador to the Federation, who hitherto had been a most conscientious audience, started and drew in a soft breath. Opening a palm, the ambassador gestured toward the observation window. Picard, turning to see what sight could possibly have proven so riveting, saw a pale brown disc, pocked and marked with dark shadows, around which two moons were suspended like weights hanging heavily upon a scale.

  Cardassia Prime.

  A prickle of apprehension ran along Picard’s spine. The ambassador, however, was looking tenderly at this hard bare world, as if he would take hold of the whole planet with both hands and caress it, if he could. Would I look at Earth in the same way? Picard wondered. With love, yes, and with longing—but with a devotion as fervent as this? I hope not. I hope I am not so intemperate.

  Garak, perhaps sensing the other man’s disapprobation, gave a self-deprecating smile. “Forgive me, Captain,” he said. “But the sight never fails to move me. There have been times when I thought I would never see it again.”