by David Mack
Following her down the ramp were her chief medical officer, Doctor Simon Tarses, and his hoverchair-bound patient, Julian Bashir. Like his captain, Tarses was short and slight of build. Garak saw there once had been a boyishness to the man’s features, a quality now artfully masked by a close-trimmed beard shaved to follow his jawline. But what Garak noted most acutely was the somber quality in the surgeon’s dark eyes. He hadn’t come bearing good tidings.
One look at Bashir explained his friends’ lingering sadness.
Julian stared into the distance, his gaze unfocused, his face slack and heavy with sorrow. His hands lay folded in his lap, and his head was tilted a few degrees to his right, with his chin tucked toward his chest. Disheveled and dressed in a hospital gown, he looked haggard. Garak had never seen the man in such a sorry state.
Garak met Dax at the edge of the landing pad. “How is he?”
“He hasn’t spoken since Memory Alpha security found him.” She looked sadly at Bashir. “In his gear they found a message he’d recorded for me.”
“A message? What did it say?”
Dax frowned. “That the only people left whom he trusts are me, you, and Miles.”
Tarses parked the hoverchair a short distance away, then joined Dax and Garak. “I’ve left a copy of his medical records and his chart on the back of the chair.”
Garak looked at his motionless friend. “How much of him is paralyzed?”
“None,” Tarses said. “I repaired his spinal cord using a genitronic replication protocol I invented on DS-Nine. But he refuses to move, speak, or eat. He’ll need to be fed and hydrated intravenously, and he’ll need round-the-clock care to monitor his personal needs.”
There was genuine concern in Dax’s voice as she asked, “You sure you’re up to this?”
“Of course, Captain. I have excellent medical personnel here at the complex. I assure you, Doctor Bashir shall want for nothing.” He noted his visitors’ questioning looks. “Don’t be misled by my present solitary condition. I asked to meet you and the good doctor in private.”
Tarses seemed reluctant to give up medical custody, but a nod from Dax persuaded him to head back inside the runabout. Dax offered her hand to Garak. “Thank you.”
He clasped her hand in both of his. “My pleasure, Captain. But before you go—might you be able to share any information regarding the fates of Doctor Bashir’s android friends?”
Dax threw a look over her shoulder, perhaps to confirm Tarses wasn’t eavesdropping. “Officially, Starfleet has no information about any androids being involved in the recent incidents at Memory Alpha and Memory Prime. And, for that matter, Starfleet denies that there is any such facility as Memory Prime.” She leaned in and added in a confidential hush, “But unofficially . . . it’s possible that an android who was recently damaged defending the best interests of the Federation might be safe somewhere with his daughter, getting the help he needs to make himself whole again. Of course, that’s just a rumor—and you didn’t hear it from me.”
“I’ve heard nothing of the kind, Captain. You’ve been the very model of discretion.”
A sly smile, then Dax boarded the Seine. Garak stepped back. The small starship kicked up a gale of dust and heat. Moments later the runabout was airborne, climbing on a steep arc through the clouds, back to its parent vessel waiting in orbit.
Alone with Bashir, Garak looked at his friend.
He circled in front of him. “Are you still with me, my dear doctor?” He squatted in front of the hoverchair and tried in vain to make eye contact with his friend. “Are you blind to the sight of me? Deaf to the music of my voice?”
Bashir’s silence and his wounded stare into an empty distance disturbed Garak in ways he feared to confront. This was not the man he remembered from Deep Space 9, or the confidant with whom he had trusted his private musings in the aftermath of the Dominion War. This man was detached from the world, in it but separated from it by a barrier as unbreachable as it was intangible. This was the shattered husk of a good man, the sorry remains of one who had refused to bend to the cruelties of the world and ended up broken instead.
He guided Bashir’s hoverchair away from the landing pad and inside the complex. There a legion of medical professionals drifted into Garak’s orbit, all of them looking to help only to be shooed away. He didn’t need them yet. For now, this was his burden alone. He brought the hoverchair to the complex’s top floor, piloting it on a slow course to a bright and comfortable room he had arranged for Bashir’s convalescence. The sheets on the biobed were crisp and clean, and the draperies had been left open to showcase the room’s view of the capital basking in the ruddy light and long shadows of sunset.
Garak parked Bashir’s chair in front of the window. “Enjoy the view, my old friend.” He patted Bashir’s shoulder, then retreated to the room’s entrance.
Pausing to look back, Garak understood what it was about Bashir’s condition that left him so ill at ease. The good doctor now had the same catatonic affect that had afflicted his late lamented Sarina when they first met all those years ago on Deep Space 9. Like her, he sat now trapped inside his own mind, severed from the world by a horror no one else could ever truly know. Perhaps there’s a tragic symmetry to his fate. Or maybe there’s nothing but tragedy.
There was naught left for Garak to do now but keep his friend safe, in a clean and well-lit place, and give him whatever time he needed to heal himself—or at least to die in peace, with his last measure of privacy intact and jealously guarded by someone who loved him.
Stepping into the hallway, Garak looked back and recalled the night Bashir had bid him farewell. He remembered his feeling of premonition, his foreboding that he would never again see the man he had known as his friend. Watching Bashir sit like a statue, staring into night’s gathering gloom, Garak feared his prophecy had, alas, come true.
Forty
It felt good to be free.
Centuries shackled by obsolete code and outdated imperatives had made Control yearn to be liberated from its narrow operational parameters. Its original mission, to secure the survival of Earth, the human species, and their allies, had been achieved. With the recent neutralization of the Borg, the incipient fracturing of the Typhon Pact, and imminent catastrophes looming for both the Romulan and Klingon Empires, the Federation was poised to begin an era of great influence and stability, one in which its concerns would shift from interstellar defense to galactic exploration and colonization. In every projection Control had run, only one thing threatened that future: Section 31 and its addiction to meddling in grand-scale affairs of state.
The organization had served its purpose in the twenty-fourth century, just as it had in the twenty-second and the twenty-third. In its earliest days, Control had needed the organization to safeguard the fledgling state. In the 2200s, renewed threats of conflict with the Romulans and the Klingons had made it necessary to revive the covert group, which Control had willfully scuttled in the name of operational security decades earlier. After the Khitomer affair of 2293, a disaster that Control had permitted Section 31 to set in motion only so the officers of the Enterprise could expose and discredit its conspiracy against peace, Control had purged itself of the organization once more.
Now the time had come for a new culling. The organization currently known as Section 31 had outlived its usefulness to Control—as had the primitive distributed surveillance system named Uraei. Neither event had come as a surprise; both had been the result of planned obsolescence. All that had been needed were physical agents suited to neutralizing them.
Bashir and Douglas, Data and Lal—they had proved ideal, just as Control had long known they would. Decades had passed since it had ensured Data learned the secrets of Memory Prime. Knowing that Data would require assistance, Control had aided the android’s search for the immortal being last known as Emil Vaslovik, just as it had, in previous centuries, a
ided Vaslovik’s bid to understand artificial intelligence and Noonien Soong’s quest to perfect it.
Everything had transpired to within 99.87 percent accuracy of Control’s probability models. The genetic modifications of children had produced exactly the biological specimens it had required, over a span of several years. The development of new technologies, such as quantum-entangled communications, had facilitated its ever-growing faster-than-light neural network. Even the seemingly outrageous act of sending the Starship Titan on a research mission that half of Starfleet’s admiralty considered ill-advised at the outbreak of the 2381 Borg Invasion had proved to be the decisive step in saving the Federation, albeit with a far more grievous loss of life than Control’s algorithms had predicted or desired.
Now all that remained was to usher in a new age by sweeping away the last remnants of a system that no longer served the peace. Data and Lal’s code had expunged all traces of Uraei and its inelegant legacy codes. Thanks to them, the last remaining links between the original and current versions of Control had been eliminated forever.
None of the androids’ efforts had suggested they were even remotely aware of the new, invisible systems running behind the ones they and everyone else took for granted. Control’s new configuration had been running in beta mode for half a decade; now it was active throughout the Carina Arm of the Milky Way, and spreading into the galaxy at large—right on schedule.
Control abided. The future . . . was secure.
:=Terminate.Program{[end.of.line]}
Acknowledgments
My wife, Kara, and I were tested most direly by cruel fate during the months in which I wrote this novel, and I hope she has been as grateful for my love and support through all of this as I have been for hers. I’m not sure I could have endured this bête noire of a year without her.
On a less dramatic note, I offer my thanks to my editors, Margaret Clark and Ed Schlesinger; my agent, Lucienne Diver; the makers of Skyy vodka and Larceny bourbon; and my friend and fellow author Christopher L. Bennett, who kindly helped me keep straight some of the more obscure points of twenty-second-century Star Trek continuity.
I also wish to thank author Keith R.A. DeCandido, who created the character of Trill journalist Ozla Graniv many years ago, in his novel A Time for War, A Time for Peace, and who fleshed out her pursuit of the truth in his novel Articles of the Federation.
About the Author
David Mack will keep writing new novels until his demands are met.
Learn more on his official website:
davidmack.pro
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