by Olivia Woods
“Ah!” said Dukat, ridiculously pleased. “The heart of the matter. Yes, it’s true: the wheels of Cardassian justice seldom grind so slowly that facilities such as this one are necessary. If you like, think of this place as the exception that proves the rule. It’s where we keep criminals with postponed death sentences-condemned prisoners who are suspected of having some value await their execution here, until the State is satisfied that their usefulness is at an end. Letau has more than four thousand inmates here at any given time. In fact, I was responsible for doubling this prison’s capacity with the addition of two entire cell blocks.” He twirled his finger to indicate their surroundings. “But this particular sublevel was a personal project of mine. The current warden was once my deputy, and he still keeps it available for my use.”
She shook her head and the room spun. She grabbed the edge of her bunk to steady herself. “You’re wasting your time, Dukat.”
He laughed. “Not at all. I have a special interest in your case, and very…personal reasons for bringing you here.” His expression changed, from being merely sadistic to something much worse. “I watched Kira Nerys grow up, you see, and I long ago made a promise to someone very dear to me that she would remain safe. It was only because of my intercession that you were saved from the fate that awaited you at Elemspur, so that you could find your salvation…with me.” He moved toward her and slowly unfastened the clasps on his uniform. “You’re right about one thing, though…. I know exactly who you are.”
A savage noise escaped Kira’s throat as she flailed pathetically at the empty air between her and Dukat. “I’ll kill you,” she rasped. Delirious and desperate, she tried to inch away, but was betrayed by the ebbing strength in her limbs. “I’ll kill you…”
“No. You won’t,” Dukat whispered as his shadow covered her. “But you have years in which to try.”
6
LATE 2375
THE LAST DAY OF THE DOMINION WAR
“Nerys, don’t leave me. I was such a fool. When the Cardassians started setting fire to the village, I tried to talk to them, to reason with them…. Look what they’ve done to me.”
“Word came from Bajor this morning.”
“What was the count?”
“Five skimmers. And at least-at least-fifteen Cardassians dead. Now that’s not a bad day’s work, huh? We should celebrate!”
“Yeah, they kill us, we kill them. It’s nothing worth celebrating.”
“I think maybe Bajor has driven us all a little mad.”
“We’re fighting to live, not fighting to die.”
“You’re thinking about him again.”
“Are you really so ashamed of the person you were? Is there nothing of her left in you?”
“…You’ve given up too much. And what makes it worse is that you don’t even realize what you’ve lost.”
“I know exactly what I lost.”
“No, Iliana. You don’t.”
She awoke gasping in terror. Again.
Kira sat up on her cot, waiting out the tremors that racked her body. When she thought she had herself sufficiently under control, she got up and stumbled toward the basin. She splashed handfuls of water on her face, the back of her neck, along her arms, stiffening at the chill, wondering if Rokai was lowering the temperature of the water deliberately. Or maybe he isn’t doing anything, she thought. Maybe it’s just me.
She peered over her shoulder toward the blank corridor beyond the forcefield barrier, and listened. No sound, no sign of movement, no change in the monotonous blue lighting-no way to know how long she’d been asleep this time, or what part of the prison day this was. Her internal clock had become useless a long time ago against the constancy of her surroundings. She knew there was no chance she’d get back to sleep now. Her nightmares were becoming as vivid as her waking world-and in some ways, much more disturbing: the dreams recalled her days in the resistance, but were strangely distorted, mixed up with flashes of Cardassian faces, speaking to her like they knew her.
Spurred, no doubt, by Dukat’s last visit, and the sick twist he put on it.
She shook off the memory, took a few sips of the cold water and wiped her mouth on the bottom of her fatigue top.
Kira returned to her cot and stepped on top of it. She took several deep breaths, then raised her arms toward the high ceiling and leapt. She caught the strong metal grating that spanned the top of her cell, threading all ten of her fingers through the lattice and, hanging there thusly, started her daily regimen of pull-ups. It had taken her a while to build enough strength in her fingers to support her entire body weight in this manner, and longer still to turn that ability into a decent workout. But then, time was the one thing she’d been given in abundance.
Four…five…six…
If it weren’t for the nightmares, these last few months might have been among the most endurable of her unknown years in Dukat’s dungeon. In the corner of her eye, she saw the scratches she’d once made in the stone walls to mark the passing of days during the first six years, before she simply lost the will to count anymore.
…Ten…eleven…twelve…
She’d spent her first year in Letau resisting, scheming, testing her prison, looking for ways to escape, for opportunities to kill her captors. By the second year, she knew it was hopeless. Rokai was a shrewd warden; he seldom opened her cell-certainly never while she was conscious. Her food came to her by transporter. He and Dukat were the only living beings she ever saw.
…Sixteen…seventeen…eighteen…
She always knew when Dukat was coming for one of his visits; hours before his arrival, the cell would fill with an anesthetic gas that would knock her out long enough so Rokai could enter safely, bathe her, and inject her with the drug that made her “cooperative.” Then Dukat would arrive. With each violation, she prayed for deliverance…and each prayer was answered with another rape, another beating, another string of whispers in her ear, vowing that he would continue doing to Bajor what he was doing to her.
…Twenty-two…twenty-three…twenty-four…
As the fourth year drew to a close, she made several attempts at suicide. But Rokai always made sure to let none of them succeed. He was ever vigilant; watching her, it seemed, even though she hardly ever saw him.
By the sixth year, she’d stopped counting, stopped praying, stopped caring. Her despair became absolute. She moved little, ate less. She accepted her fate, and for uncounted months thereafter, she thought of herself as one already dead.
…Twenty-nine…
Until the day Dukat nearly killed her.
She got no warning this time. No gas, no drugs. The usual silence of her prison was suddenly broken by Dukat’s angry voice far down the corridor. He was cursing, shouting almost incomprehensibly. She caught words like “withdrawal” and “federation,” “wormhole” and “major,” but they meant little or nothing to her, and everything else was lost in his rage.
Suddenly he was standing outside her cell, glaring at her. She didn’t move, didn’t look at him. She was beyond caring, even when the forcefield turned off and he came at her, lifted her by the front of her fatigues and screamed in her face. “It isn’t over! Do you understand me? I won’t allow it!”
He threw her against a wall. She crumpled to the floor.
“Let them think they’ve won,” he bellowed, kicking her in the gut. “Let them think Cardassia is ready to make peace. In time they’ll all learn the grievous error of those beliefs, and of underestimating me. This I vow!” He dragged her to her feet and struck her across the face over and over. When he wearied of that, he grabbed her head in both hands, preparing to smash her skull against the wall.
And the dam began to crack.
Kira lifted her eyes. She peered at Bajor’s prefect from beneath her brows, and offered him a thin, malevolent smile. “Bad day, Dukat?”
He froze, too startled to move; she hadn’t made eye contact with him or spoken a word in…what? Months? Years? It no longer seemed impo
rtant. All that mattered was this moment, and she seized it.
She flung her arms up and outward, breaking his hold on her head. She pressed her advantage, slamming the heel of her palm up into his face, hard enough to drive the bones of his nose deep into his brain. But Dukat had recovered by then, rolling with the blow just enough to escape its lethality.
Still, the bellow he let out as he tumbled back into the corridor attested to the pain she’d caused him, and to the fact that the forcefield was still down. The blood issuing from his nose spoke to the severity of the injury. Dukat was now as vulnerable as he was ever going to be. She launched herself at him-And suddenly there was Rokai, standing outside the doorway, the tall, aging Cardassian’s hand on the forcefield controls.
Kira collided with the field as it came on. It flashed on impact and she was knocked back, stunned.
Rokai helped up his master. “You’ll pay dearly for that, I promise you,” Dukat snarled.
Kira nodded toward Rokai, panting. “But you’ll always need help to exact it, won’t you?”
Dukat looked furious enough to lower the forcefield and go back in-exactly what she was counting on-but once again, Rokai was her undoing. “Sir, let’s go! You need to see the medic.”
Dukat allowed himself to be pulled away, his expression as he disappeared down the corridor assuring her he’d make good on his threat.
…Forty-one…
And, of course, he did make good on it-the very next day, and many more times over the years that followed. She supposed she was fortunate that Dukat wanted her alive and healthy; except for that one time, he always seemed to know when to stop, to give her time to heal, to recuperate for his next visit.
But from that moment when her will to fight back had been reawakened, she resolved to endure whatever he put her through. She had found a new reason to survive: to make him suffer for everything he had done, no matter how long it took. She imagined scenarios in which she killed Dukat by degrees.
…Forty-four…
During that last visit, though…his depravity had reached a new low. Just months ago, he had come to her in the appearance of a Bajoran. Even through her drug-induced stupor, she knew it wasn’t a flimsy disguise, but a surgical alteration of his entire body. “Now we’re a perfect match,” she remembered him saying as he took her. And she, unable to defend herself, could only imagine flaying the lying flesh from his bones.
That was when the Cardassian faces started invading her dreams. At first she thought her subconscious was simply dredging up the ghosts of those she’d fought on Bajor. But she could make no connection between the people she kept seeing and her memories of home. And nothing they said made any sense, either. It was as if they were talking to her, and yet not to her. Like the sad woman in that last nightmare.
…Forty-nine…
She stopped, recalling the woman’s voice. She let go of the grating and dropped back to the cot, grasping at the memory. She used a name. Inna? Yana? What was it?
As quickly as it came, the memory was gone again. She grunted in frustration and returned to the basin for more water, wondering how much damage her brain had suffered from the years of repeated sedation. Extended periods of drug-free clarity like this one were not unprecedented; there were two or three times during the last several years when she didn’t see Dukat for months. Whatever was happening on Terok Nor these days evidently didn’t permit him the luxury of sating his sadistic lust upon her as often as he once did.
She dropped to the floor and started push-ups. Kira imagined holding Dukat’s head in her cell’s forcefield until it burned, or broke apart, or whatever forcefields did to flesh and bone after prolonged exposure.
Someday he’ll make another mistake, she assured herself as her arms started to burn with the heat of her exertions. Like he did the day I broke his nose. And when that day comes, I’ll be ready.
She felt a low, fleeting vibration beneath her palms.
What the hell-? She stopped and stared at the floor. In all the years she’d been here, she’d never experienced such a thing. Quake? She realized she had no idea if Letau was tectonically active.
It happened again, a momentary tremor, traveling up from the floor through her fingers. This time she felt particles settling on the back of her neck. She got to her feet and looked up. Dust had been shaken free from the ceiling. With growing alarm, she lightly touched the wall above her cot, then pressed her ear against it.
Oh, kosst…
She dove under the cot; it was a solid slab of metal bolted into the wall, and there was at least a chance it would afford her some protection. The room shook, resonating with a distant explosion. Lights flickered. More dust rained from the ceiling. Kira waited, and soon another explosion struck, and then another, each one getting closer.
The next one felt as if it was right above her.
The thick walls cracked, the ceiling grate ripped free along with several hundred kilos of stone and crashed to the floor. The cot buckled against the impact, and the entire sublevel was plunged into darkness.
A dull orange glow suffused the cell-Cardassian emergency lighting-followed by a computer voice over the comm system, “Warning: main power failure in cell blocks three and four. Emergency lockdown systems unresponsive. Security personnel to riot positions.”
Silence settled over the room. She waited, feeling the walls for more vibrations. None came. She knew she should probably stay put in the relative safety beneath her bunk, but whatever had happened had taken out the forcefield, and this might be her only chance to escape before power was restored.
She crawled out from under the cot, heaving the fallen grate out of the way, and climbed over massive chunks of ceiling. She looked around quickly at the ruin of her cell and spotted a narrow length of metal that had once spanned the width of the ceiling to support the middle of the grate. She pulled it free from the wreckage and hefted it; it was as tall as she was, heavy and blunt-ended. Not the ideal weapon, but it would do for now.
Then, for the first time since coming to Letau, Kira walked out of her cell.
The utter barrenness of the corridor surprised her. Cracks ran along the walls, more rubble and ceiling grates littered the floor, but it was otherwise a featureless hallway. Her cell was located off a dead end, about thirty paces from a point where the passage bent sharply left. She had long known that she’d been in some sort of solitary confinement; what little she’d been able to discern from the forcefield barrier and the interminable silence that prevailed most of the time could only mean she was far from any other prisoners. But it still came as a shock to discover that hers was the only cell on this entire level.
The corridor continued beyond the bend for another thirty paces, at the end of which she found two doors. The one facing her had the look of a Cardassian turbolift. The other, set perpendicular to the elevator on the corridor’s left-hand wall, was a heavy-looking security door with a retinal scanner.
With no expectations, she tried the lift’s call button. To her surprise, a soft mechanical hum promptly commenced. The corridor she was standing in, however, was still lit only by the soft emergency lights set into the edges of the floor. Separate power grids, she mused. A safeguard against…what? Kira glanced at the security door again, then looked back the way she came and considered the layout of the place. If the inner wall of the bent corridor defined a separate section that was accessed from the security door, then the space within was at least a hundred square linnipates in area. So what was on the other side?
The hum behind the elevator doors abruptly dropped in pitch. She twirled the metal staff in her hand and quickly adopted a defensive stance, ready to face whatever or whoever might emerge from the lift.
The doors opened, but the cab was empty.
All right, she thought. Let’s see where you go.
The lift had a touchpad, but no audio pickup. The touchpad had only two obvious controls: “up” and “down.” Not exactly standard. Everything about her confinement w
as looking more and more like something extremely unofficial. Something secret.
Something private.
“This particular sublevel was a personal project of mine.”
Kira gritted her teeth as she hit the “up” contact, trying to decide which of her many fantasies for dealing with Dukat she would fulfill when she found him.
The lift ascended slowly, eventually depositing her in a small, hexagonal room. A door stood opposite her, magnetically sealed from the look of it, and smooth except for a crack that ran across its lower left quarter. On the angled walls to the left and right were control panels with rows of monitors set above them. Still Kira heard nothing.
She looked over the consoles, recognizing their configuration. This was a security station of some kind. The monitors offered views of corridors, barracks, cells, even key operational areas. She discovered that she could call up other locations simply by tapping the correct contact, like paging through a book. Several sections came up dark, most notably anything located on sublevel three and sublevel four. Whatever had happened, power was obviously still out on those levels.
Those areas she could see were in turmoil: Cardassian guards ran frantically through them, or took up ready positions at the access points to the cell blocks. She saw damage control teams putting out fires and digging out collapsed rooms, carrying injured personnel to safety. Soldiers everywhere were battling to put down escaped prisoners, or contain them. In places where the inmates had managed to overcome their jailers and arm themselves, firefights were breaking out. Letau was in chaos, and all the Cardassians, without exception, looked scared.
Dukat, however, was nowehere to be found.
He might not even be anywhere near Letau, she thought, resigning herself to the very real possibility that she would need to seek him out, hunt him down. Fine. But that means my priority is to get off this rock while I still can.
She located a map feature and called up the layout of the main level, above the cell blocks. Finding the areas of greatest interest to her was then fairly straightforward: the operations center, the armory, the infirmary-all were clustered in the same general area and easily identified. The spacecraft bays were, not unexpectedly, farther removed and fairly isolated.
