However, I must add a word of caution, based upon my time of observing Garak back on DS9: it can be difficult to verify his stories, wherein the whole truth as often as not can live comfortably alongside a veritable painter’s palette of improvised omissions, ad hoc distortions, and highly creative half-truths—not to mention the finely crafted whole-cloth lies of a master prevaricator and confabulator. Therefore, a warning here is in order: Caveat lector (Let the reader beware).
I’ve heard quite a few reports lately—not all of them confirmed by the Federation News Service or other mainstream media outlets—that Undine infiltration of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants during the war years may have been a lot more extensive than most people have been led to believe.
GARAK: Unquestionably. The documents that the Federation Council recently declassified speak for themselves. A picture of the Undine conflict is finally emerging that shows it as very much like the Dominion War that preceded it. Only this picture is painted across a much larger canvas. Undine agents can be literally anywhere—and are far more difficult to detect than were the shape-shifting Founders of the Dominion.
You’re speaking about the Undine War in the present tense, even though the common wisdom is that the Long War is now behind us—years behind us, in fact. Most people think of it as a thing of the past, like the Dominion War, or the Borg collective’s attempt to alter Earth’s history.
GARAK: You just used a rather intriguing turn of phrase, Mister Sisko: “common wisdom.” What a semantically twisted idiom. I suspect, however, that it is as much an oxymoron as its elocutionary cousin, “common sense.” That’s certainly true with regard to the Long War, a name that has proved to be far more appropriately descriptive of its subject than most people would prefer to believe. I’m sure that Mister Drake agrees with me on that point.
So you don’t think that the war is behind us?
DRAKE: My career in diplomacy has taught me a few inviolable rules, Mister Sisko. And one of those is never to assume that an enemy you’ve defeated is necessarily going to remain defeated simply because you’d like to put the unpleasantness of the fight behind you.
GARAK: I tend to agree, Liaison Drake. That must be the reason you and I get along so well. In fact, it is often those things that are “behind” you that can be the most dangerous. I give you some of the recent activities of the changeling Laas as a case in point. I trust you’ve heard of him.
Of course. Laas was one of Odo’s “siblings.” One of the hundred infant changelings that the Founders sent out into the universe maybe centuries ago.
GARAK: Then you may also be aware that Laas and some of his confederates who comprise the so-called Missing Ninety-seven are discussing the creation of a new Dominion.
I’ve heard, though I’m not sure what to make of it yet. It could amount to nothing more than a pile of rumors. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
DRAKE: Merely watching and waiting isn’t always the smartest course of action, Mister Sisko—whether we’re talking about changelings from the Gamma Quadrant or even more powerful shape-shifters from fluidic space.
I don’t know anybody who seriously believes that the Dominion will ever cause us any trouble ever again. So let’s talk about the Undine: Are either of you actually arguing that they still pose a real danger, even now?
GARAK: Much as I would prefer that it were otherwise, I can’t rule out the possibility that Undine infiltrators are moving about freely across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants even now. Perhaps even here on Cardassia Prime itself.
I’m surprised to hear you say something like that on the record.
GARAK: I’ve said a good deal more than that on the subject, addressing your Federation Security Council directly. Not to mention your new president and his cabinet. Unfortunately, no one in your government seems eager to give sufficient credit to the highly likely possibility that I am right—despite my having presented them with my own eyewitness reports on the matter. I’ll also level the same charge at your news services.
Well, Mister Garak, I’m more than happy to put your own eyewitness account of recent Undine activity on the record, for whatever it’s worth. But first I have a question: Aren’t you concerned that you might encourage a level of paranoia that could do a lot of the enemy’s work for them?
GARAK: Mister Sisko, paranoia is the only truly rational response when someone really is out to get you.
Are you saying that you had an individual, personal encounter with an Undine?
GARAK: I am indeed, Mister Sisko. And it happened not too terribly long ago, right here on Cardassia Prime, though it was some time after the so-called end of the multifront war that the Undine started—and have never entirely stopped trying to prosecute, so far as I can tell.
What happened?
GARAK: It was during the temporary breakdown of Cardassia’s planetary climate-control grid, not quite two years ago. The weather-generation systems were being recalibrated and fine-tuned as part of our long-term climate remediation program—a program that the Federation helped Alon Ghemor’s government institute many years earlier, during the immediate aftermath of the Dominion War. We’re still coping with many of the attendant problems today, in fact.
I hadn’t realized that the Dominion had inflicted such extensive environmental damage on Cardassia Prime.
GARAK: Well, to be completely fair to the Dominion, the Allies can share some of the credit for that. Certainly, the majority of the particulate matter that blocked out the sun for months—and, not incidentally, caused crop failures on a previously unheard-of scale—entered the upper atmosphere after the Jem’Hadar vaporized Lakarian and several other densely populated cities. But the dust kicked up by the Allied fleet’s subsequent invasion of Cardassia Prime, to say nothing of the many inadvertent additions our liberators made to our civilian casualty lists, also helped to exacerbate the problem.
DRAKE: With all due respect, Mister Garak, you’re not being fair to the Federation. During war, we have always done everything possible to keep civilian casualties to an absolute minimum. That was one of the Federation’s guiding principles as part of the Allied invasion force, even during the darkest hours of the Dominion War.
GARAK: I have never disputed that, Liaison Drake. However, neither of the non-Federation components of the Allied invasion force have ever pretended to possess any such scruples. In fact, the Klingons appeared willing to go well out of their way to offer public demonstrations of that lack. The Romulans, by contrast, at least displayed the virtue of treating us with arrogant indifference.
However, it wasn’t my intention to wander into a minefield of pointless recrimination and finger-pointing. The simple fact is this: when pulverized, cities tend to loft rather large plumes of smoke, soot, and debris skyward. This effect can blot out the sun for months, even years, disrupting photosynthesis and cooling the planet to the point where natural climatic feedback loops fail and the prospect of a runaway “icehouse effect” can become a very real danger. In the short term, however, the bulk of the atmospheric chaos—which included such charming features as crop-destroying acid rain—fell across the broad, strong backs of Cardassia’s small but increasingly indispensable population of agriculturists.
DRAKE: Those climate effects constitute a phenomenon that one of Earth’s great atomic-age thinkers called “nuclear winter.” The Klingon homeworld experienced something a lot like it more than a century ago, after Qo’noS’s moon Praxis exploded.
GARAK: “Nuclear winter.” With the human propensity for such elegant turns of phrase, one would expect Earth to have produced a great deal more interesting literature than it has. Forgive me—I’m digressing again.
As I was saying, unless certain drastic early steps are taken to counter such a catastrophe—the onset of a so-called nuclear winter, as you humans describe it—then famine will inevitably follow, marching arm in arm with disease. And no civilization can long survive such a double-pronged assault—even a civilization a
s old and sophisticated as Cardassia’s.
Fortunately for your homeworld, the aid sent by the Federation seemed to have blunted the worst of the environmental effects. We sent doctors, medicine, food, industrial replicators—even atmosphere processors aimed at repairing at least a good portion of the global climate damage.
GARAK: All of which proved essential, and earned the undying gratitude of both the Ghemor government and the Cardassian people. But the wounds we sustained during the Dominion War were so deep that even the Federation’s best efforts were only barely adequate to stanch the worst of our collective bleeding.
Cardassia truly passed through the eye of a needle that initial postwar year, particularly during that especially unforgiving first southern winter. Many couldn’t cope with the constant, grinding hardship, particularly the very young and the very old. Of course, the Jem’Hadar’s parting gesture had been to reduce the number of mouths we had to feed by nearly a billion. So I suppose we owe them a debt of gratitude for the help they so generously provided in resolving certain aspects of our resource allocation issues.
Restoring Cardassia’s climate and atmosphere to normal was obviously a much bigger problem than I’d realized.
GARAK: It’s a decades-long process, at the very least. And as I said, it isn’t over even now. Our climate engineers are still making minute adjustments from day to day and week to week. Atmosphere remediation and management is an extremely delicate and difficult-to-anticipate business. A malfunction in, say, a key temperature-regulation node can alter the weather locally, and the climate as a whole, in fundamental ways—in addition to entirely predictable ones. It was just such a global climate-control malfunction that brought my transport pod down over South Forbella’s Great Desert, only a few hundred decas* from this very city.
Where were you going at the time?
GARAK: I was conducting Castellan Lang to a joint session of the Detapa Council when a rather powerful—and entirely unscheduled, I might add—bolt of lightning struck our craft. We were under attack, but there was precious little I could do about that after we were hit, even though I did everything I could from the copilot’s chair. The blast disabled several key systems, and we would have dropped into the desert like a meteor were it not for the flying expertise of a member of the castellan’s security detail, the man who was serving that day as our main pilot. The ship avoided utter destruction as a consequence, though only just; she made an extremely hard landing on a stretch of radioactive wasteland that had been declared unfit for habitation since the Dominion War.
Was anybody hurt?
GARAK: Oh, yes. The pilot died in the impact. But fortunately there were no other fatalities.
You said this lightning strike that brought your transport down was “unscheduled.” But you also characterize it as an attack. Isn’t it possible that your craft just happened to wander into a desert squall and got hit by an entirely natural electrical discharge?
GARAK: That’s possible, certainly. But not in any way credible. One would have to maintain an entirely unhealthy belief in coincidence, and I have never been accused of harboring such an irrational faith. Considering the degree of weather control we’ve had to exercise as part of the ongoing climate normalization program, a random lightning strike is rarer than a nine-legged riding beast. And a stray bolt of atmospheric electricity is orders of magnitude less likely to hit anything consequential than would have been the case in the old days, when we used to let the climate “run wild.” Therefore a random lightning strike capable of finding the transport ship carrying the castellan of the Cardassian Union is essentially an impossibility—orders of magnitude less likely than finding, say, a Klingon capable of chewing with his mouth closed.
Good point—about the odds surrounding the lightning strike, not about the chewing. So you were attacked and forced to make a hard landing. What happened next?
GARAK: I probably should amend my description of our craft’s touchdown. The term “hard landing” paints entirely too cheery a picture of what had just happened to us. “Crash landing,” or perhaps even simply “crash,” would be far more accurate. The transport was a total loss, right down to the comm system. I suffered a broken arm in the impact, but at least I was able to remain conscious. Castellan Lang was out cold, a consequence of the rather alarming, though happily nonfatal, head injury she had sustained (of course, at the time we had no way to be certain that the castellan would survive).
Only one member of the castellan’s two-man security detail survived, and somehow he managed to do so without suffering so much as a scratch. He was a young military officer named Krota. I should have taken his apparent invulnerability as the first sign that something wasn’t right—something other than the fact of the lightning strike itself, that is. But, as you humans are so fond of saying, hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
You and Krota were in a pretty serious situation. What did you do?
GARAK: Why, Krota and I did the only thing we could do: we tended to the castellan’s injuries as best we could using the transport’s first aid supplies, saw that she was resting comfortably and that the transport was secure, and then set out for the nearest sign of civilization.
A nearby city or town?
GARAK: No. That would have been far too convenient. Unfortunately, the only sapient-created artifact within a day’s walk of our crash site—besides our wrecked transport, of course—was one of Cardassia Prime’s weather-remediation stations. It was part of the climate-regulation network that the Ghemor government had begun building immediately after the end of our Dominion occupation.
A weather station. Did it have a crew, or was it automated?
GARAK: Many such facilities were, and still are, completely automated, with staff visits occurring at regular intervals to address basic maintenance issues and to execute periodic equipment upgrades. As luck would have it, this particular weather station did indeed have a live caretaker, according to Krota, who managed to raise him briefly on his personal comm device. Unfortunately, a magnetic storm came up and interrupted our transmission before Krota could get much past the “hello” phase of the conversation.
You weren’t able to tell this caretaker how serious your situation was?
GARAK: Nor were we able to explain that we had the castellan with us—or that she was in urgent need of medical attention.
Was this storm another “unscheduled” weather event, like the lightning that caused the crash?
GARAK: It was most certainly unplanned, at least by anyone in authority. And it left us with only one real option: to leave the transport. Unfortunately, both the castellan’s injuries and the storm conditions outside the transport made it unsafe to bring her along.
You left Castellan Lang unattended?
GARAK: But also safe and in relatively stable condition, considering the circumstances. There was really nothing further we could do for her—other than do whatever we could to expedite the arrival of help, which we as yet had no assurance was on its way.
But you say you were under attack. If that’s so, weren’t you leaving the castellan at the mercy of whatever enemy might have brought the transport down?
GARAK: It certainly could appear that way—unless one takes into account the fact of the storm itself. The ferrous metal content of the sand particles being lifted by the storm’s winds generated a great deal of static electricity. All that flying grit not only provided a barrier to locating the crashed transport visually, it also set up a highly effective sensor screen. An enemy using tricorders, or even orbital scans, would have been confounded for several of your hours—potentially a long enough interval to allow me and Krota to summon help. So we set out on foot for the weather station, across one of the nastiest stretches of irradiated desolation you can imagine. If you need a visual reference, think of some of the landscapes that characterized your own world’s postatomic horror.
Were you confident you could make it, even with the storm?
GARAK: Well, as I said
, I knew we were within a day’s walk from the facility, though the storm had made it all but impossible to get and keep our bearings visually, let alone to zero in on the place with handheld scanning devices. So I took the point as we pushed forward in what we hoped was the right direction while Krota continued trying to make contact, using his mobile comm unit.
Weren’t you carrying any communications gear of your own?
GARAK: We had only one other mobile comm unit with us—the one that had belonged to the castellan’s dead pilot/bodyguard—but we had decided to leave it aboard the transport. If the castellan were to awaken before we returned, and if the storm were to subside sooner rather than later, she might have needed it. As it turned out, we needn’t have bothered; the storm raged on for most of the remainder of the day, erecting what amounted to a solid wall of flying magnetic particles that no comm signal could penetrate.
Well, since you and Castellan Lang both survived the incident, can I presume that you made it to the station?
GARAK: That certainly would have made for a more pleasing narrative than what actually occurred, at least from my perspective. I’m still not entirely sure what precipitated it—perhaps it was the ionization in the air, or some other effect of the persistent and intensifying storm—but as Krota hiked into the storm he began to… change. Right before my eyes he became one of those… three-legged things that the Federation seems so delighted not to be actively fighting at the moment.
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