Trying to sow seeds of suspicion, Jartek? Even now?
“Sometimes,” Garak said, imbuing his voice with a patient weariness, “it is helpful to keep people in places where they are less likely to surprise you. Or,” he added, more cheerily, “as my father used to say—keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
Or dead, as Tain had been most usually wont to add. But Garak saw no need to endow Jartek with that particular piece of Order wisdom.
No need to squander all my inheritance.
His sense of purpose restored, Garak turned his attention away from Jartek, and away from the display, and looked out of the window, out onto the real world. Night had fallen on the city, and the rain was falling too, falling as if it would never stop.
“I think,” said Garak softly, watching the patterns made by the rain on the plastic of the window, “that it’s time I paid Korven a little visit.”
16
“To be honest, Macet,” Miles said, “I’m surprised she’s not gone and done it yet. I thought suicide bombers just went in and did the job.”
“That’s true,” Macet murmured, “which tells me we’d do well not to consider her a suicide bomber.” He looked up from Nyra to Miles. “There’ve been a couple of explosions in the capital recently. No one was killed and, well, let’s face it, there’s not all that much of the city left to blow up these days. So it could just have been resulting from damage from the Jem’Hadar purge.”
Miles nodded. “Power supplies left damaged and unattended, that kind of thing?”
“Exactly. Or,” Macet continued, and looked back at Nyra, “it could have been stage one of something. And this,” he tapped the screen, “could be stage two.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m not an expert by any means, O’Brien, but if the people behind this girl just wanted to make some news, surely she’d have been told to take the place out straightaway, and the vedek with it. But all this time spent making demands?” Macet shook his head. “There’s a political agenda here. One that we’re going to hear more of, I suspect. But that, thankfully, is not my concern—rather it’s the concern of my political masters. My business is with Nyra.”
“So what about her?”
“Well, in the eyes of her masters, young Nyra is completely expendable. And I imagine they’ll have done their best to convince her of that too.” Macet gave an odd smile. “As I’m sure you know, it’s not that hard to persuade a Cardassian to give up her life for some greater good.” He focused on the monitor again. “I’m sure I can get Nyra to understand that she’s being used—but what would be the outcome of that? Would it just tip her over the edge, if it makes her feel betrayed or let down? Am I better pointing out that she has other loyalties too?”
“Other loyalties? Like what?”
“Well, for one thing, she knows all the people in that room, I’d guess—or many of them at any rate. Relatives. Children she’s been to school with. Do you think she really wants to see them dead?” Macet took a deep breath. “Well, there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?” He reached out to switch the com back on.
“Nyra,” he said, softening his voice. “Nyra, can you still hear me?”
Framed within the screen, Nyra twisted her head, almost as if she was trying to ward off Macet’s words. Miles swore under his breath and rubbed a finger behind his collar, letting some warm air in to touch the back of his neck. Talk to us, girl!
Macet remained impassive. “Nyra, can you tell me if you can still hear me?”
There was a moment’s silence, and then: “Yes!” the girl shouted back, angrily.
“Good,” Macet said, his voice remaining smooth. “Can I ask you to do something for me, Nyra?”
“What do you want?”
“I’d like you to keep on talking to me, Nyra—please.”
“Why?” she shot back. “Why do you want me to keep on talking? We’ve been talking for ages. I don’t want to talk any more! When are you going to do what I want?” Her hand crept up along her chest to where the red light was still burning on and off.
Miles went cold with fear. His hands clenched at his sides. He risked taking a look at the far corner of the screen. Keiko, only just in shot, had closed her eyes. But the line of her jaw was set.
“I will do it, you know,” Nyra said. The shaking in her hands had reached her voice. “I mean it!”
“I believe you, Nyra!” Macet said quickly. Miles winced. Take it easy, Macet! Don’t panic her. “I believe you! But are you sure it’s what you really want to do?”
“What?”
“Look around you, Nyra. Look at all these people in the hall. You know them all, don’t you?”
Nyra whispered something, but they couldn’t make it out.
“What did you say, Nyra?”
“Yes…yes…I know them….”
“Can you tell me some of their names?”
Nyra shook her head.
“You don’t know their names? There, at the front, aren’t there some people you go to school with? Can you tell me which of them are your friends?”
“Can’t…I don’t want to!”
“All right, Nyra, that’s quite all right. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do—remember that. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But tell me—isn’t that your mother there on the stage next to you?”
Suddenly, Nyra’s shaking got a whole lot worse.
Wrong move, Miles thought, and glanced over at Macet. He was rubbing anxiously at his beard. He knew it too.
Damn! How are we going to get back from this?
Miles looked at the other pictures, on the smaller display screens lining the main screen. There were three entrances to the lecture hall—the main entrance and two emergency exits up near the dais itself. There were four men stationed at each one, plus another six men up on the roof. All had their weapons out, all were ready and waiting to act as soon as Macet gave them the order.
Macet had checked on them too. His hand was now right above the control that would cut the sound link to the main hall, cut the link so that Nyra wouldn’t hear him give the order.
Miles held his breath. Macet’s hand was hovering over the com. Nyra’s was shaking and you could see red through the translucence of her skin.
And then, as if a prayer was speaking itself, someone said Nyra’s name. As if offering the response, the image on the screen juddered and, for a moment, all that Miles could see on it was the blank brown of the fake wood that covered the floor of the hall.
“Don’t tell me we’ve lost it…” Macet growled.
For an age that in reality lasted bare seconds, the world behind the screen was unknowable. And then the picture slipped back into focus, resolving itself slowly into the figure of Vedek Yevir Linjarin, sitting upright in his chair.
“Nyra,” he entreated her, again.
She turned to stare at him, the sweat beading cold upon the ridges of her face. It was getting late now. The automated light system had activated in the lecture hall. To Miles’s eyes, it gave Nyra’s gray skin an even more ghastly hue.
“That is your name, is it not?” Yevir said. “Nyra.”
She nodded. Her fingers twitched, syncopating with the votive light upon her chest, which pulsed on, untroubled by all that was happening around it, entrenched in its purpose, in its promise.
Watching her—watching Yevir—and thinking of Naithe, Miles was twitching too. “Bloody hell—not again!” he muttered, his hands steepled before his face.
Until this moment, Yevir had been sitting with his hands clasped under his robes. He drew them out now, slowly, and set them down at rest, flat upon his knees.
“My name is Yevir, Nyra, Yevir Linjarin.”
And then he sat still. Nyra watched him as if in a trance.
He’s like a snake charmer, Miles thought, rapt himself.
Macet leaned forward to speak into the com. “Vedek Yevir,” he said, his voice s
o relaxed they might have been meeting at the long-forgotten reception, “I am sure that your intentions are good, but Castellan Ghemor has asked me to speak on his behalf to Nyra—”
“That may be so, Gul Macet.” Yevir turned his head away from Nyra, and his face stared out directly from the monitor (and how the hell does he know which way to look?) and said, “But it is my distinct impression that Nyra no longer wishes to speak to you.”
Macet cut the com. “What I am…hoping,” he said, his tone rather more taut than Miles had heard it so far, “is that Yevir has just got on the right side of Nyra.”
“Good cop, bad cop, huh?” Miles tapped the side of the console.
Macet stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“I mean—you had just turned into the villain, hadn’t you? And now Yevir’s stepped in between you and Nyra, he might have taken some of the pressure off her.”
Macet nodded. “Well, that’s what I’m hoping. For a little while, at least.” He stared at the display. “Provided the fact that he’s an alien doesn’t count against him. She didn’t exactly like Naithe very much, did she?”
“Well, she was just showing a bit of common sense there.”
“Yevir is Bajoran,” Macet pointed out. “And a particular focus for her discontent.” He glanced at his waiting men and listened to the shorthand of the communications passing between them, stating positions, status…His eyes narrowed.
“D’you really think they could make it in time?” Miles asked.
Macet gave a noncommittal grunt. “Well, it’s what they’re being paid for,” he muttered. “Not that keeping them on standby like this for hours is going to be good for their reflexes.” He straightened himself up. “For the moment, they’re going nowhere. The surest way to keep everyone in there alive is to talk this girl down. So she won’t talk to me any more? Then let’s find out what she has to say to the man she claims she wants to kill. Let’s find out if she really can kill him after talking to him. Violence tends to become just that bit harder,” he said, “when you can put a name to your enemies. When they stop being faceless. There aren’t that many people with the nerve for it.”
17
Garak had frequently found himself entertaining the notion that a joke on a cosmic scale was being perpetrated against him. A joke perpetrated, most likely, by some trickster-god, whose peculiar sense of humor seemed to be matched only by a regrettable taste for the melodramatic.
To pluck an example from out of the dead, night air…Throughout his exile, Garak—while never wholly abandoning the hope of the triumphant restitution of his birthright—had struggled not to remember Cardassia. It was a mission that had necessitated some formidable acts of will, which, he had to confess, he was not always entirely capable of performing. Nonetheless, he had applied himself to the task with his characteristic zeal, had negotiated the occasional lapse of concentration; and had, finally, caught sight of Cardassia again. Viewed upon a screen, it had been distant, it had been tantalizingly out of reach, but it had been subtle and beautiful. It had been everything that he had tried not to remember.
He had then spent the next few weeks buried away in a cellar and glimpsing the elusive grail of his homeland only at night. And when, at last, he came back up from the underground, he surfaced to look upon a city burning and to the rising awareness that it was not just the city, and not even just the planet, but his whole civilization going up in flames.
So you did not want to remember? the gods said, as they turned the sky black and blotted out the sun. Then look upon our mercy! We have answered your prayer!
It seemed that those whom the gods wished to destroy they first made Cardassian.
It was at this point in his ruminations that Garak would most usually come to the decision that he really was taking himself far too seriously. For one thing, if there were gods, it seemed highly unlikely that they would be taking so much time out of their celestial pursuits to devote such particular attention to the fate of Elim Garak. Garak rather feared that this might constitute the inexpressibly vulgar sin of vanity. Nevertheless, he could not rid himself entirely of the suspicion that if there were gods, it seemed that they were capricious. They were not to be propitiated. And they frowned upon the just and the unjust alike.
Take Korven, for example. When Garak had first encountered him, Korven had been the very model of a Cardassian military man. He had been an exemplary cadet. He had accelerated through the ranks, and was among the first in his cohort to acquire the coveted insignia of a legate. He had put down a civilian insurgence in Lakarian City with such aplomb that he had briefly acquired a soubriquet (although it couldn’t have been particularly memorable—certainly Garak could not call it to mind now). He had taken command of the Twelfth Order and turned the garrison on Sarpedion V from one of the least regarded in the Union into arguably the most effective. He had served his term with the expected and requisite ruthlessness on Bajor.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way (and Garak secretly suspected the baleful atmosphere of Bajor), Korven had also managed to acquire some rather idiosyncratic political beliefs—thus providing more evidence for Garak’s long-standing and as yet still thoroughly robust theory that the military should never, ever be encouraged to think for itself. And it was the perhaps inevitable expression of these beliefs—in the form of a bomb planted outside the offices used by the Obsidian Order for intercepting and decoding transmissions from Starfleet Intelligence—that had initially drawn Korven to Garak’s attention. Nobody had been killed in the blast and very few injured—in fact, compared with the rate of attrition being inflicted at the time by the resistance on Bajor and taking into account the fact that the offices had been due for an expensive refurbishment, it counted almost as a net gain. But it had been more than enough to attract the ever-watchful eyes of the Order. And when, after a deftly conducted investigation, Legate Korven had brought himself to Garak’s particular attention, Korven’s military record, his exemplary service, and his unmemorable nickname had counted for precisely nothing. The Obsidian Order, after all, derived a certain amount of professional pride from not being easily swayed.
From thereon in, it had all been really rather unexceptional. Korven had had more of a desire to live than die a hero. And so, with the application of no more than his usual methods, Garak had very quickly succeeded in persuading Korven to tell him everything he knew. Whether Korven similarly considered the experience unremarkable, Garak seriously doubted. Because when Korven and Garak finally parted ways, Korven had been left with the (quite accurate) impression that he had only narrowly avoided a most unpleasant execution. He had been firmly reminded that obedience to the state was by far the truest way for any Cardassian. And he had been left in no doubt that he would be very wise to consider Garak a mouthpiece for that state. And so Korven went back to the True Way, this time with a leash around his neck, with Garak at the other end.
Garak had seen no particularly urgent need for Ghemor to be apprised of all this. But not even Garak himself was entirely able to judge the full extent of his reasons why. It was true that it suited him, as it often had in the past—and particularly in front of Jartek—to derive a certain mystique from the rumors and the uncertainty surrounding his former profession. Moreover, habits died hard and Garak—trained in the old school when it came to deniability—still stood firm in his belief that there were certain aspects of the political process from which the world at large (and Ghemor in particular) was best kept protected. Discretion, you might say, was the better part of good government. And when information had been acquired—or extracted—with so much care and attention, it seemed a shame to pass it on casually. Indeed, it seemed almost disrespectful of the source.
And yet…and yet…it was just conceivable, it was just within the realms of possibility, that there was another reason why Garak had not told Ghemor all that he had done to Korven, why he had buried this fragment of history. For when the balance was weighed, when the account was drawn up and la
id out, it had to be conceded that Korven—for all his crimes—had not deserved Garak. Just as Cardassia—for all her crimes—had not deserved the intensity, the implacability, of the fire that had consumed her.
And yet here Cardassia was, and the city at her heart smoldered—charred black and raw—with Garak passing through it like a shade. Passing through it with his hand set upon his weapon, while dust-filled rain clouds spread out against the ruin of the sky, obscuring the gaunt light of the Blind Moon. Passing through it, seeking restitution.
The rain had thinned to nothing more than an acrid dampness in the air, and it tasted sour upon his lips. As Garak continued on his pilgrimage down through the lost ways of the city, he heard, carried toward him upon the air, the distant chorus of disruptor fire, the plaintive falling harmonies of a siren. He saw the smoke and the fumes rising from burst pipes and the metal wreck of buildings still twisted into their death throes. He caught the bitter stench of the burial pits.
This is Cardassia, nor am I out of it.
And so it was that when Garak reached his ultimate destination his mind was verging upon the metaphysical. He made his descent down the final few steps to where Korven lived. And there he would have to concede that it was one point of evidence in favor of some fundamental unity of purpose at work in the cosmos that certain things were understood universally. There were certain truths one might call self-evident—that a red flashing light meant danger, that punishment had very little to do with crime, that a knock on the door in the middle of the night is always feared within.
Concealed by the darkness, with only that blind moon as his witness, Garak stood upon the last step and hammered hard upon the door. Two or three minutes passed, within and without.
I do believe I may be expected….
A particularly thick black cloud scudded across the dimmed sky and the moonlight fractured. The world waited in anticipation before a harsh, artificial light went on inside. Then Korven opened the door—and his skin grayed further at the sight of the man leaning against his doorframe, smiling at him and blocking his exit. His face was transfigured into that of a man who had once told everything he had to know, and was ready to do it all over again.
Cardassia and Andor Page 10
