Conceptually at least, then, Rugal was not surprised when the Jem’Hadar began exterminating the Ogyas garrison. He was off duty when it started but, mercifully, was not yet out of uniform. He was certainly nowhere near sleep. The allied invasion of Cardassia had begun shortly before he had gone off duty. Someone started thumping on the door of his quarters. It was Kelat. “It’s started,” he said. “They’re killing them up there.”
Rugal heard distant disruptor fire and knew at once what Kelat meant. Grabbing his own weapon, he said, “Where’s Tret?”
“Down in the mess. He and Envek and about fifteen or so from the ranks are barricaded in there. They were following transmissions about the invasion. We should get down there. Come on, we’ve got to move!”
As they ran down the corridor, Kelat told Rugal as much he knew. Partway through the battle, the Cardassian fleet had switched sides. Then the order came through from Prime: Kill the Cardassians. All of them. In ops, the Jem’Hadar started firing indiscriminately. One of the men up there had survived long enough to throw open a communication channel and inform the rest of the base what was going on. They could hear it anyway—the shots and the screaming. Then it went quiet. Presumably everyone up in ops was now dead, including Rantok. “He kept on shouting that he was loyal,” Kelat said. “I think they shot him through the head. Surplus to requirements. Isn’t that what Alaren said?” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Alaren was on duty up there too.”
“Don’t think about it,” Rugal advised. “If you plan on getting through this, don’t think about it.”
A klaxon wailed, briefly, making them run more quickly. Then Verisel’s voice came over the comm. “All Cardassian personnel, report to the surface immediately. All Cardassian personnel, report to the surface immediately.”
“Prophets,” murmured Rugal. “I hope they have the sense not to go.” He heard disruptor fire again, slightly closer. He and Kelat reached the stairwell and began to run down. The officers’ quarters were on the second level; the mess hall on the third. All the while, Verisel was issuing her measured, deadly order: “All Cardassian personnel, report to the surface immediately. All Cardassian personnel, report to the surface immediately.”
Rugal heard footsteps above their heads—booted, running, chasing. They put a spurt on and soon came out on the third level. They sprinted down the corridor toward the mess, where they hammered on the door, shouting out their names and demanding to be let inside.
“All Cardassian personnel, report to the surface immediately,” Verisel told them calmly.“All Cardassian personnel, report to the surface immediately.”
The door opened a crack. A shot rang out behind them. Rugal fell inside and Kelat fell on top of him. Someone yanked them in and then the door sealed behind them.
Kelat had been shot in the left leg. Someone threw Rugal a medical kit. “All Cardassian personnel, report to the surface immediately. All Cardassian personnel—”
“Kosst!” shouted Rugal, as he got to work on Kelat’s leg. “Won’t someone shut her up?” He realized Tret was standing over him, one hand holding his disruptor, the other held against his chest. “Is he going to be all right?”
“It’s not so bad,” Rugal said, mostly for Kelat’s benefit. If they weren’t in here for too long, he meant, or if they weren’t forced out. He patched up the damage, and then gave the glinn something to dull the pain. He looked up at Tret. “Rantok’s dead.”
“I heard,” Tret said grimly. He took a deep breath and turned his back to the room. He let his face crumple up in pain.
“Tret,” Rugal whispered, putting out his hand.
“I’m trying not to let them see,” Tret whispered back, clutching Rugal’s wrist like a lifeline. “They’re all terrified. I don’t want them to know I’m hurt.”
“I have to take a look at it,” Rugal said. “I can’t leave it—”
“It’s been fine for the past fifteen metrics. I can wait a little longer.”
They were there for a long time. Verisel kept issuing her order, in tranquil and terrifying tones. “Can’t we stop her,” someone said. “Isn’t there some way to stop her?”
“We need to keep the comm open,” Tret said. He was sitting hunched over at one of the tables. Rugal had given him some pain relief, but Tret wouldn’t take off his armor to let him see how bad it was. Verisel spoke again. “All Cardassian personnel, rep—”
It cut off, mid-sentence. “Is it over?” someone whispered. “Are we safe?” Tret held up his hand, trying to listen. After a moment or two, a quiet but distinct hiss starting coming from the ventilators.
“Gas!” yelled Envek. He dived toward one of the ventilators, shutting it off. Rugal ran across the room to stop the flow of air from the other. Everything went very quiet. They all sat and stood straining to hear anything beyond the confines of the room. There was a brief burst of disruptor fire that made everyone flinch, and then there was nothing. Rugal inched over to Tret. “What shall we do?” he whispered.
“We wait,” Tret replied. “What else can we do?”
So they waited. After forty metrics, the lights cut out, and they had to fumble around for flashlights. Tret would let them keep only one lit at a time. They sat without speaking, Rugal next to Tret, listening to his breathing become steadily more labored. The room was hot and shadowy; gray faces stood out here and there like phantoms, beaded with sweat. One or two people took advantage of dark corners to weep. Twice Tret ordered them to eat, whereupon the silence was broken by a quiet rustling of ration packs, the noise of chewing and swallowing, the odd lackluster remark—then, again, silence. One flashlight died, then a second. Envek started lining them up neatly, like soldiers on parade. There was one more left after the current one petered out. Then it would be dark as a tomb.
Rugal dosed, and he dreamed, distinctly, that the Vorta had come into the room. She walked about, flanked by two Jem’Hadar, and one by one she counted off the pale sweaty faces peering up at her from the darkness. She came to a halt in from of him and said, “Seventeen. Report to the surface immediately.”
“Never,” Rugal replied thickly. Beside him, Tret said, in a sleepy voice, “Did you say something?”
Rugal jerked awake. A voice was issuing from the comm, someone young and tearful. “Is there anyone there?” it said. “I’m Lok, Martis Lok, foot soldier, second class. The war’s over. The Jem’Hadar have stood down. The Vorta says that you can come out now. Is there anyone there?” His voice started to shake. Tret and Rugal glanced at each other and nodded in agreement. Trap.
“Sorry,” said Lok. “I’m sorry. It’s over, the war’s over. But Cardassia’s burning. Is there anyone else left? I don’t want to be the only one left.”
The lights came back on. People shuddered and tried to gather their wits, looking around fearfully, disbelievingly. Kelat limped over to the comm. He found an outside channel and a faint, jumbled transmission. “It’s true,” he said, eventually. “It’s over.”
Tret slumped heavily against Rugal’s arm. Slowly, Rugal lowered him onto the floor and began easing off the other man’s armor. As he worked on the wound, he whispered in Tret’s ear, “I’m going. Do you want to come with me?”
Tret licked his lips. “Where to, Rugal?”
“Somewhere else. Not here.”
The pain relief kicked in and Tret closed his eyes. “I think I’d like to go home.”
“Then we’ll go home.”
Rugal told Kelat that he was taking Tret down to the med center and left him in charge. If the war really was over, Kelat was as good an officer as any to surrender the base to the Romulans. Rugal had no intention of falling into Romulan hands. In a place this remote, after a campaign this relentless, he was not convinced they would bother with niceties like the rights of prisoners. He would rather try his luck on the surface. He was finished with this war. He had never wanted any part of it.
The med center was on the fourth level. Rugal and Tret walked there slowly. Every so often
they stepped over a corpse. Tret’s eyes were wide and bright from exhaustion and drugs. In the med center, Rugal cleaned and treated Tret’s wound more thoroughly. He found surface gear in one of the storage lockers, and coaxed Tret into it. Then he put his hand on Tret’s arm and navigated him out of the room.
At the far end of the corridor, behind a heavily shielded door, were the holding cells. Tevrek was still there. Rugal hesitated briefly, caught between wanting to get away as quickly as possible and knowing that the garresh was by far the best person to hold the remnants of the garrison together. Rugal sighed. He was deserting. He should get away as soon as he could. But there was still some residual sense of duty left—not patriotism, but responsibility to those poor bewildered survivors he had left up in the mess hall. He propped Tret up against the wall and went off toward the holding cells.
Behind the shielded door, the air was thick and sweet. Rugal coughed and covered his mouth. It didn’t take long to find Tevrek’s cell, and it didn’t take long either to establish that the garresh was dead, a victim of Verisel’s final attempt to kill all the Cardassians. Looking into the other cells, he found another dead foot soldier, who had been under charge for sleeping on duty. In the last cell, there was a Romulan.
She was lying on the bunk, and he assumed she was dead too—in the wrong place at the wrong time. He checked the information on the panel on the wall by the door of her cell. Her name was Selik, she was a colonel, and she had been captured during a skirmish on the surface eight months ago. An unlucky one, then, Colonel Selik. Rugal closed her file and was about to leave when he saw her move her head slightly. She looked toward the door and then pulled her legs up in front of her in defense.
Rugal pressed his hand against the control on the panel. The door opened slowly. Selik scrambled up into a sitting position, her arms still in front of her. They and her face were purpled by bruising. She saw his face and his uniform and she cursed him, violently.
“Are you hurt?” Rugal said, in a neutral voice. He took a step forward, holding up his hands to show that he meant her no harm.
“No. Yes. No. Why do you care?”
“I’m a medic. If you’re hurt, I can help. The war’s over, Colonel. We’re not enemies any longer.”
She spat at him. From behind, Tret said, “I think we should take her with us.” Rugal turned. Tret was standing in the doorway. He looked calm, and steady on his feet, and infinitely better than he had only a few moments before. It was amazing what the pain relief could do, keeping you going beyond what seemed reasonable, keeping you able to do your duty. “Why not?”
“For one thing, I don’t think she’s particularly well disposed toward us.”
“She wants to leave, we want to leave. It’s cold out there, and we’ll need backup.” Tret coughed into his hand. “Strength in numbers. All look out for each other. I thought you liked that kind of thing.” He glanced over at Selik. “Coming, Colonel?”
She wouldn’t let Rugal near her. She took his medical kit from him, and he and Tret went to find her some outside gear. Tret took his time over the task, and soon Rugal was shaking from anxiety. Surely someone was going to come looking for them? Eventually Tret was content that he had found the right outfit for Selik, and they took it back to her cell.
She had washed, and it was an improvement. She put on the uniform and the boots that Tret had selected for her, and then all three of them went out into the corridor, where the sickly smell of the gas still hung heavy. “I closed the filter,” Selik said. “Soaked the blanket with water and covered my face. What was going on?”
“Our fleet switched sides at the end,” Rugal said. “The Vorta was ordered to kill the Cardassians. Those the Jem’Hadar didn’t shoot she gassed.”
Selik laughed—a slight sound that danced on the edge of lunacy. Rugal said to Tret, “I want you to remember that you were the one who asked her along.”
They entered the stairwell and went up four levels. At the top level, they climbed up the metal ladder and released the bolts on the hatch. Then they clambered out onto the surface of Ogyas III.
It was as if they had crawled out of the fire caves. The dead air of the base was swept away by a bitter wind. All around was entirely white. Rugal could not determine where the land ended and the sky began. Selik took a few steps forward, then fell to her knees. She gulped in lungfuls of the freezing air and clawed at the snow until her hands were full of it. Tret stood with one hand on his disruptor, one arm wrapped around his body, entirely still. Gently, Rugal touched him on the shoulder. “Last chance,” he said.
Tret stirred into life. He glanced back down the hatch into the base, and then he shrugged. “Let’s go.”
On the second night out, Rugal awoke with a start, thinking he had heard a voice. Selik was standing at his feet. Snow was falling between them, nothing else. The fading glow of their fire lit her up starkly, harshening the sharp contours of her face to skeletal. She was holding a Cardassian disruptor, and she was aiming it at Tret’s head. “Wake up,” she was whispering, softer than the flurry around them. “Wake up.”
Tret’s eyes fluttered open. He blinked. When he saw Selik, he sat up slowly. “Are you going to kill me, Colonel? I don’t suppose I’d blame you if you did.”
Rugal licked cracked lips. Could he get up and across to her before she fired? Would trying only kill Tret? He took in the distance between her and his friend, guessed that he would not be able to do it, and cursed again that they had brought this woman with them. What had Tret been thinking? She was the enemy, cease-fire or not; they had kept her prisoner for eight months during which she had been subjected to repeated beatings. It was written all over her body. No wonder she wanted to kill them.
“I don’t want to die, Colonel,” Tret said. He sighed, as if unutterably weary, as if unable to summon the strength to care that she had a disruptor within inches of his head. “Not even now. Not even after everything...”
He gave up on words and gestured around him at the void. She didn’t look at it. She kept her eyes fixed on Tret. “I want it to stop,” she whispered to him, as if trusting him with state secrets. “I want it all to stop.”
Tret stretched his arms out further. “I know,” he said. “I know.” For a fraction of a second longer she wavered, and then she let the disruptor slip through her fingers. She fell down on her knees and wept. Tret, leaning forward, pulled her into an embrace, and Selik clung to him. “I’ll say again,” Rugal muttered, grabbing the disruptor, “that it was your idea to bring her along.”
Tret didn’t answer. He kept murmuring to Selik—soothing sounds—until her sobs subsided. She took a few deep shuddering breaths, and then she went quiet. Not long after, she fell asleep. Carefully, Tret laid her down on the ground and put a blanket over her. “I’m tired of people dying,” he said to nobody in particular, and almost in irritation, as if complaining that his feet were wet or that he was cold. “I’ll drag her through this wilderness on my back, if it means she stays alive.”
Six, maybe seven days later, they came to one of the outlying Cardassian guard posts. Beyond this was Romulan-controlled territory, a fact they were all brooding over but did not discuss. The guard building, which was squat and black and had appeared out of nowhere from the whiteness, was empty, apart from the bodies of the four foot soldiers who had been manning it. There had been two Jem’Hadar stationed here as well, which would have been enough, but they were gone. Such a remote place, and still there had been Jem’Hadar to carry out the Founder’s order. What could have happened on Cardassia Prime?
They dumped the bodies outside for the snow to cover them, and got the heat and the light working inside. They ate some food, and Tret found a bottle of very rough kanar that they didn’t bother to pour out, simply passing it around between the three of them until it was gone. Tret went to sleep on one of the bunks. Selik, looking out the window, said, “Look.”
Rugal went across to join her. She pointed to the sky and, peering up, he saw the Je
m’Hadar ships leaving Ogyas. Of anything Cardassian, alive or dead, there was no sign.
They didn’t leave the guard post for another three days. There was heat and light, and food for a while yet. Rugal found a kotra board, and he and Tret filled the day with game after silent game. Selik slept. On the third day, she was more alert and she began pacing the small room from end to end. “We must be getting close now,” she said.
Tret was contemplating his next move and didn’t answer. Rugal, without interest, said, “Another week, perhaps.”
She wandered aimlessly around the room. “I’ve been a prisoner for eight months,” she said.
“I know,” Rugal replied, watching Tret’s hand as it hovered over one small purple piece and then moved it to the side.
“That’s a long time.”
“Yes, it is.”
“I didn’t give anything away. Did you know that? I never gave anything away. You got nothing out of me.”
Rugal, now considering his response to Tret, did not reply.
“Not that they’ll believe me, of course.”
She stopped talking. Then, all of a sudden, Tret realized what was about to happen. He jumped up from the table, sending the board flying, and dived across the room. “Don’t!” he yelled, but Selik already had hold of one of the disruptors. She put the muzzle in her mouth, fired, and that was the end of the matter.
They packed and left and walked on. There was nothing but the empty land, the white sky, the cold, snow. Tret struggled; it was chiefly pain medication keeping him on his feet. Sometime during the third day out from the guard post, he collapsed. Rugal got him upright and they went on, but at a drastically slower pace. After falling down a second time, and being forced on a second time, he began to drift in and out of awareness. Rugal, pulling him onward and listening to him murmur, heard him talking to Selik, then to Rantok, then to Verisel, whom he berated in fierce fragmented sentences. At one point he seemed fully alert; Rugal was about to start hoping, until Tret asked him when Selik would be back.
Star Trek: DS9: The Never-Ending Sacrifice Page 21
