“But are you still planning on living on the station?”
“Yeah. I know that might be a little awkward, but I—”
“Not at all. It might be a good thing.” Nerys smiles. “You know, the station counselor Starfleet assigned us just quit. The Bajoran militia is in the market for a replacement. Maybe a private contractor.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yeah. Of course, you’d still have to interview.”
“I’m not worried. I have an in with the boss.”
Twenty minutes later, Ezri is clipping a Bajoran militia commbadge to her collar and skipping out of ops. She tracks down Lenara in Vic’s, sitting by the symbiont pool.
“You know we’re not supposed to be in here,” Ezri chides playfully. “Not unless you have eighty more siblings hiding out to join to these babies.”
“I know.” Lenara sighs. “I’m saying goodbye.”
“How’s Vic taking it?”
“Well, he made a veiled threat about joining a folk band to sing songs about parental abandonment and generational disillusionment, but he perked up once I said he could comm me day or night.”
“Ugh.” Ezri grimaces. “We’re going to have a sixty-year-old lounge lizard hammered-hailing us every Friday night.”
“How’d Nerys take the news?”
“Good.” Ezri points to her new commbadge. “I’m a private contractor now.”
“She let you keep your job?”
“On a part-time basis. The militia doesn’t have deep enough pockets to pay me full-time, but I’ll still have enough hours to keep up with my patients, which is the important thing.”
“What about your research?”
“It’s Starfleet property now. Someone will pick up where I left off eventually.”
Lenara stands up, rubbing Ezri’s arm. “I never meant for you to give up your career for this.”
“I know.” She cups Lenara’s cheek. “Know that I don’t resent you at all. For any of this. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me, okay.”
Lenara kisses Ezri’s palm.
“My life may not be turning out the way I thought it would when I entered the Academy, but it’s a good life. It’s my life, Ezri and Dax’s. Until the day I saw you, I thought I could go on living the life I’d planned before I was joined: become a counselor, get a boyfriend, rise through the ranks. But that was Ezri Tigan’s life, it didn’t belong to me anymore than Jadzia’s or Curzon’s. But you proved me wrong; being joined changes everything. You turned my life completely upside down. . . and I can’t wait to spend the rest of it with you.”
—
Morn leads Julian and Jake down to the basement, where Kasidy and the baby have been staying for the past week. (Morn, apparently, has been riding the couch upstairs after spending a night in Lauren’s bed.)
Jake practically jumps down the stairs to get to Kasidy. “Are you okay? Is the baby okay?”
“I’m fine.” Kasidy rocks the baby, bouncing her up and down as she walks. “We’re both fine.”
Jake wraps an arm around her shoulder. “I don’t know why you would leave the station in the middle of the night like that, but I’m glad you did. I can’t imagine would have happened to you if you were in bed sleeping when those Lurians broke into your quarters.”
“Try not to think about.” She pats his cheek. “Do you want to hold your sister?”
“Yeah. Of course. Are you sticking with Rachel Yvette?”
“Yep.” Kasidy gently passes him the baby. “Support the head. There you go.”
Julian brushes path them, leaving the little family to their moment as he looks for Garak, whom he was told would be down here. It doesn’t take long to find Garak on the couch, sleeping sitting up with a half-finished onesie on his lap and the new free press muted on the vidscreen.
With any other lover, Julian would stroke their hair or kiss their cheek to wake them up, but he’s honestly too afraid of Garak jamming that sewing needle into his eye to try any of that.
“Garak,” he says softly. “Garak.”
Garak wakes with a start, waving the needle in front of himself like a sword.
“Garak,” Julian laughs. “It’s me.”
“Oh.” Garak blinks several times. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to waking up in public.”
“In public?” Julian kneels down in front of Garak, placing his sewing on the end table. “This is your house.”
“I suppose it is.”
Julian rests his head on Garak’s lap and finds a semi-comfortable sitting position on the carpet. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Garak strokes his hair.
“For leaving when you needed me. When all of you needed me. Not just Jack and the others, but Alexander and Kasidy, hell, even Morn. I thought they needed me on DS9, but there’s nowhere else in the universe that needed me more than Cardassia. Than this house.”
“I think we managed well enough without you.”
“‘Managed well enough’ isn’t good enough for me. You deserve better than that. I should have been here to assist Alexander, to make Kasidy more comfortable, to treat Jack’s broken hand. . . It didn’t hit me until I was standing around, utterly useless, waiting in Vic’s while you were weathering a revolution and Kasidy delivering a baby, it didn’t hit me until then that hanging around Deep Space Nine wasn’t going to bring me my family back.
“For months, I thought if I stayed in the same place, did the same job, played the same holoprograms, kissed the same girl, that feeling of belonging would come surging back. That I would somehow feel just as connected and loved and part of something as that last night we spent together in Vic’s. But that’s not how it works. Sometimes, you just have to move on, and when you do you discover that the people you loved were never really gone from you to begin with. Even if they’re on Earth or Qo’noS or outside of linear time. Family is always there with you.”
Julian takes Garak’s hand, interlacing their fingers.
“I promise—” He kisses Garak’s wrist. “I promise to be here with you and the family you’ve given me here. They’re a gift, one I can never repay. And. . . I love you for it. That and a million other reasons that scare the living daylights out of me.”
Garak doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything but the familiar, “My dear doctor.” It’s enough.
Chapter 18: Epilogue: Phone Rings, Door Chimes
“I’ll get it!” Julian calls. Not that anyone else is exactly rushing for the door. Garak is off basking somewhere, Nulat and Alexander are downstairs playing that two-dimensional dance game, and Jack has sealed Lauren, Patrick, and Sarina in the kitchen with him on some “chemistry” project.
Julian is not feeling excluded at all. Not at all. Not one bit. (He likes chemistry, too.)
He hustles to the door, ready to kiss Kasidy’s cheek, hug Jake, and hold Rachel for the first time in over a year.
Instead, Julian opens the door and stands in silent horror as unexpected guests fill his foyer. Joseph Sisko shakes his hand. Ezri and Lenara hug him. Worf nods at him. Lwaxana smooches him on the mouth. A little Betazed boy kicks him in the shin.
By the time Kasidy, Jake, and Rachel reach him, all Julian can do is whine helplessly, “Why?”
“Sorry,” Kasidy mouths, stepping inside.
Julian briefly considers running away before closing the door and facing his guests. “Hi. Welcome to Cardassia.”
“I hope you don’t mind us tagging along,” Ezri says.
“When we heard the Xhosa was coming to Cardassia,” Lenara says, “we couldn’t resist visiting Nulat.”
“Oh, no. Of course, I don’t mind,” Julian says.
“And you know, then we had to tell Worf, because he was on the station,” Ezri says. “I don’t think it would be very fair for us all to come for a visit and not invite Worf to come see Alexander.”
“Oh, right.” Julian scratches the back of his head. “That would’ve been rude.”
Joseph scoops
up Rachel, who’d been standing on her own, gripping her grandfather’s pant leg to steady herself in Cardassia’s foreign gravity. “And I couldn’t let my grandbabies go to Cardassia without their Grampa there to protect them,” he cooes. “Could I? No, I couldn’t.”
“No.” Julian sighs. “You couldn’t.”
Julian looks to Lwaxana, who is wiping a smudge off the Betazed boy’s face—her son, perhaps? From that disaster of a marriage a few years back?
Julian coughs. “And Ambassador Troi. What brings you to fair Cardassia?”
Lwaxana takes Joseph’s free hand, gluing herself to his side like a swooning schoolgirl. “Well, you know how newlyweds are. You can barely keep your hands off each other let alone be on separate planets.” She pauses, as if listening in on someone, before tsking, “Oh, Jake. Such an archaic attitude about older people and sex. Especially for someone with your taste in women.”
“Right.” Julian clasps his hand in front of his chest. “Who’d like a tour?”
—
Julian tries to take them into the kitchen—it really is a nice kitchen—but the door is locked shut. Which is interesting, because as Julian knows, that door doesn’t have a lock. He raps on the door.
Jack, Sarina, Lauren, and Patrick poke their heads out of the kitchen, resting one on top of the other. Their faces are covered with what Julian hopes is flour and not some kind of explosive.
“What?” Jack snaps, but softens when he sees Rachel. “Hey, it’s the baby.”
Pretty soon Jack and the others are out of the kitchen, circled around Joseph and Rachel, each taking turns holding the toddler, who, for her part, seems to be enjoying the attention.
Setting Rachel down on the ground, Jack finally asks, “Who are these people?”
“Guests,” Julian answers. “I was just giving them the tour.”
“Have you showed them the. . .” Patrick lifts his eyebrows.
“Oh, no. I haven’t. Come along this way, everyone.”
Julian leads them out into their workspace (only slightly modified since the first time Julian saw it; now Patrick’s teddy bear has a friend, and there’s a sewing table for Garak), where he flips on the main holographic console.
“This is what we call the Holowomb.”
“The hollow womb?” Ezri asks.
“No, no. The Holowomb. It’s the first fully holographic, fully customizable uterus. It operates completely independently of replicated matter and any organic lifeform, except for the implanted embryo, of course. Obviously.”
Julian paces around the hologram. “Now I know what you’re thinking: how does it work? How can hard light sustain and create life? Good question. The answer, I think you’ll find rather interesting. The idea actually comes from the symbiont pool you were keeping in Vic’s. Now, as we all know, Quark cut off the replicator line to Vic’s right after the war ended to save money. So, you either have to buy your own food and drinks from Quark’s or eat hard light at Vic’s. But even with no replicator line, the symbionts in Vic’s flourished. Why? Because holographic matter functions like normal matter as long as it is being projected to do so. So, for instance, you could remove both of my lungs this instant, and I could breathe perfectly fine with holographic lungs, as long as, of course, I was positioned under a holoprojector.
“This is all fairly easy to extrapolate from the existing data. But, what the symbionts at Vic’s proved is that non-holographic matter is capable of incorporating holo-matter to such a degree that the changes wrought by that holo-matter become, after a certain point, permanent. This is why the symbionts didn’t shrink as soon as you brought them out of Vic’s. And that is essentially the same reason why you can take an embryo, put it inside the Holowomb, and have a non-holographic infant in a matter of months.
“Which is particularly important in a Cardassian context, where eighty-three-point-nine-five-four percent of the population is experiencing fertility issues due to the Dominion’s bombardment of—
“Yes, question?”
Lenara lowers her hand. “The methodology for your experiment is. . . fascinating. But I think we’d all like to see the results.”
“Oh. You—you want to the see the—of course. Absolutely. Follow me.”
He takes them out into the backyard where Garak is stretched out asleep on a rock slab with Silara lying on top of him.
“Aw,” their guests coo.
Garak opens one eye. “Please, don’t sneak up on me while I’m sleeping. Especially when the baby is in the room. I don’t feel like explaining the bodies to my constituents.”
“Has she dropped off?” Julian asks.
“No.” Garak holds Silara to his chest as he sits up. “I think the sun is still too stimulating for her to fall asleep.”
Julian comes closer, taking Silara with a kiss to her forehead. “I think the sensory issues were to be expected.” Julian turns around to find his guests and housemates crowded around him. “Er, this is Silara.”
“Can I hold her?” Ezri asks.
“Yeah.” He holds the baby out. “Just be careful.”
Sarina winces as Ezri takes Silara. “Support the head.”
“Keep her head elevated,” Jack warns.
“Don’t let her—” Patrick starts.
“I’ve held babies before,” Ezri says.
“But you haven’t held our baby,” Lauren says.
“Ours is better,” Patrick adds.
“Half-mutant, half-Cardassian,” Jack says. “Can’t find that anywhere else in the universe.”
“So.” Worf looks between Sarina and Lauren. “Which one of you is the mother?” Ezri’s heel comes down hard on Worf’s toes. “What? I was merely asking a question.”
“Neither of us are the mother,” Sarina says.
“Silara doesn’t have a mother,” Julian says. “That’s the beauty of the pre-implantation system we’ve devised. It takes nothing more than two cheek swabs of diploid cells to make a viable embryo. Which is critically important on Cardassia where infertility not only interferes with the body’s ability to create and sustain pregnancy, but also the body’s ability to generate gametes. Irreversible sterility being one of the most common effects of—”
Rachel sticks her hand over Julian’s mouth and shouts what Kasidy told Julian is her new favorite word: “No!”
Julian lowers her hand. “I think Rachel is a little tired of the science talk. Drinks, anyone?”
As they head in for drinks, Patrick murmurs, “Our baby wouldn’t get tired of science talk.”
—
Garak crosses his arms over his chest. “Why are you really here?”
Lenara swallows her bite of tiabo. “To see Nulat.”
“And that’s why you two are outside in the scorching Cardassian sun with me rather than inside with her.”
“Fine.” Ezri puts down her jivar. “We came to ask you a favor.”
“Then ask. You came all this way.”
“Julian told us about how Jack and Patrick and Lauren figured out a way to reclaim land poisoned by the Dominion using ancient Cardassian technology. We were hoping they could do something similar with the Caves of Mak’ala.”
“We’ve had our best scientists on it for almost a year, but they’ve come up with nothing,” Lenara says.
“I thought the holographic caves worked just as well as the real ones,” Garak says.
“They do,” Ezri says. “But the Guardians don’t think it’s fair that the symbionts have to abandon their home because it’s toxic to Trill. I mean, obviously, not being surrounded by people slowly dying in their name has been good for the symbionts’ spirits, as telepaths—that’s largely why they’re maturing and reproducing so quickly—but, ideally, we’d want them to live in their home environment with healthy, caring Guardians.”
“We’ve already brought this up in front of the senate allocations’ committee,” Lenara says, “and Trill is prepared to give Cardassia two industrial, solar-powered replicators in exchange f
or your help.”
Garak takes a sip of his froteen juice. (He never drinks anything hard after basking; the alcohol cools his blood.) “I’ll look into it. Although, I should warn you, it could take some time to train someone to use the Hebitian technology.”
“Can’t you just give us Sarina or one of the others? Heck, we’d even take Julian,” Ezri says.
Garak shakes his head. “We have a new baby in the house; none of us are going anywhere. We barely get our work done as it is without adding another responsibility.”
Ezri smiles. “At least you’ve got plenty of help.”
“Oh, yes. Tell me that when you’ve got five humans standing over your shoulder, telling you how to properly descale an infant.”
—
Dressed in her indoor clothes, insulated against the humanly-tolerable climate controls, Silara takes Rachel’s poking and prodding remarkably well. Of course, Kasidy is keeping a very close eye on Rachel’s grabby hands.
“She ate a bug yesterday,” Kasidy remarks.
“A bug?” Julian asks. “How’d she get ahold of a bug on DS9?”
“Quark.”
“Of course.”
“I was bringing her through the bar to take her to see Ben.” (With Kira and Lenara’s help, Kasidy created a short holoprogram of Sisko’s old recordings so Rachel can see, hear, and touch her father. So she’ll know him when he returns. There was a minor station scandal several months ago when Rachel’s first word was “dada” to holographic-Sisko. Several Bajorans thought it was a religious miracle; Kasidy just thought it was incredibly, albeit unintentionally, hurtful.) “I turn my back for one minute and she takes a tube grub off a waiter’s tray, sucks the whole thing down. And the worst part is Quark charged me for it.”
Julian laughs. “Of course. He’s Quark.”
Rachel’s index finger dives dangerously close to Silara’s left eye, prompting her thin secondary eyelid to close.
“Come on.” Kasidy drags Rachel away from the baby by the elastic waist of her pants. “I think that’s enough. Go play with Jake.”
The Trail: A Star Trek Novel (New Frontier Reloaded Book 1) Page 25
