Note: Aron Eisenberg (Nog) died today, September 21, 2019. I was seven years old when he slipped into my life, peeking out from behind a tritanium grate. He helped me learn to reach for my dreams, however improbable they may seem. His talent, humour, and goodness will live on forever. May his memory be a blessing.

Part XIV, Act I: Burdensome Legacy

In the legends and tales passed down through his mother's family, Martok son of Urthog had heard tell of an ancestor, many generations past, who had known the shame of imprisonment. Once an advocate of the courts serving in the border colonies during a time of judicial decline, he had been conscripted to represent the first human ever tried under Klingon law — a Starfleet captain, no less, in the days of first contact between the Empire and the people of Earth. Held in contempt of court, that ancestor had been sentenced to a year of penal servitude at the notorious gulag of Rura Penthe. In that place devoid of honour, devoid of hope, this aged man of words and judicial wiles had managed to endure the rigours of brutal manual labour. He had survived so that he might resume his place in Klingon society and battle for reform to the crumbling system that had scorned him. He had lived to know freedom again. He had lived to restore his honour.

It was not a tale to inspire a young boy, yearning to be a warrior. It was not the example of generations of faithful service as soldiers of the Empire that had so driven Martok in his quest to win an officer's commission. It was not the sort of familial legacy that upheld a general in battle, compelling him to do great deeds to honour the achievements of his ancestors. But to a battered man in a pain-riddled body, whose every grinding day was a misery of incarceration, humiliation, and ever disintegrating dignity, it was a mythic beacon of hope. Martok clung to it as a climber on the heights of Kang's Summit might cling to the gnarled and stunted trunk of a stubborn alpine tree, buffeted by the cruel winds of an unending storm.

Here, where his warrior's will could only bear him up so far, the tale of his forebearer, the prisoner who survived, was Martok's anchor in a way it had never been in times of liberty and triumph. As he sat on the too-high bench in the centre of Barracks 6, his ravaged hip cocked up and the opposite boot braced on the cold floor, and waited out the interminable time until his inevitable summons to the ring, Martok weighed his circumstances against it. He was not condemned to toil like a beast of burden in a frozen dilithium mine. Surely being sentenced to the unending string of futile battles was preferable to that.

Or was it? For he was not doomed merely to the battles, but to the defeats. His brief victories were never cause for celebration, followed as they were by five minutes' gasping respite and then the next relentless match. Even the defeats seemed somehow hollow; not merely ignominious in their dishonour, but further debased by the fact that the Jem'Hadar never exalted in conquering him. They took no joy in victory, but only a cold academic interest. The Dominion had bred a soulless people, their dispassion making even the buried and tightly controlled spirit of the Vulcans seem vibrant and ostentatious. That they were unworthy foes in a spiritual sense lessened their worth as tactical opponents. The determination and defiance that had upheld Martok in his first year of imprisonment was worn away on the horns of the Jem'Hadar's detachment.

As closely as he could reckon the time — a difficult proposition in this place of senseless inactivity and unnaturally elongated days — it had been eight months since last Ikat'ika had faced him in the ring. Martok yearned to credit this to his own prowess, as if the First feared to face him. In the deepest recesses of his despairing heart, he knew that it was because Ikat'ika no longer found him a worthy opponent. He had wanted at first to test his handiwork, to gauge by his own hand how the loss of an eye had hobbled the Klingon warrior. Plainly, the results had spoken for themselves: the most skilled and vicious of the Jem'Hadar soldiers no longer felt compelled to try his hand against the prisoner. Martok took little solace in the fact that even the noble Doctor, with his mighty performance in the arena, had not yet warranted the First's personal attention. Doctor Bashir had his own measures of honour and personal worth, neither bound up in battle, and yet he had far exceeded the expectations of any. As it was, he had achieved a great feat. He was not a one-eyed derelict limping towards the eternal defeat. He was not a broken man.

Nor was Martok son of Urthog, the General thought fiercely, squaring his shoulders and holding his head higher despite the ache it put in his neck and spine. The deterioration of his body, from endless combat and inadequate healing and malnutrition, was one thing. The crumbling of his spirit was quite another. Before the arrival of the Federation physician, he had feared it would never survive until Tain's message got out — much less until this Garak came with aid. The example of the human's hope and determination had done much to patch the ramparts of Martok's heart, but in his absence they were weakening again, ground down by the futility of daily life in Internment Camp 371 and the fragility of the hope of escape.

On the cot in the corner, the Cardassian stirred. Martok's eye shifted to him, more out of the old habit of battle-readiness than any interest in the quality of Tain's slumber. For many days now, the aged man had done little but lie there; sleeping often, wheezing occasionally, and complaining as his curtailed breath allowed. Much as it had irked Martok to stand idly by while Tain alone laboured towards their escape, he much preferred those numberless days when the spymaster had toiled inside the wall. This slow crawl towards ignoble death was far more difficult to witness; a fearsome reminder of the fate intended for Martok himself by their dishonourable captors.

Major Kalenna turned her head sharply, ready to intervene if Tain called for aid. She had been taking it upon herself - and upon the reluctant sub-lieutenant - to nurse Tain in Doctor Bashir's place. While he did not doubt that was what the Federation physician would wish, Martok himself would have chosen to offer the Cardassian the courtesy of a swift and honourable death. Even lacking the ritual implements, he was confident he could dispatch the old man painlessly and without distress. For a Klingon, Martok would not have hesitated to make the offer even under the doctor's watchful eye. For Tain, he had not.

It was plain that the Cardassian did not seek death, even for its freedom and the triumphal satisfaction of shattering, once and for all, the shackles of imprisonment. He did not seek, as Martok would in his stead, to lunge forward into his destiny, there to confront the final enemy head-on in glory. Rather, he was employing every last embittered drop of obdurate spite to cling to life with clawed hands and sour determination. Tain was waiting for the man Garak with a purposefulness that could not be explained merely by the allure of escape. If he could command his body half so completely he had commanded his spies, he would live.

For now, he only grumbled. "Bring me my water, Romulan," he said thickly, squinting into the indifferent light. "Has our insufferable moralist returned yet?"

It was the sub-lieutenant who rose from his cot and went to wait on Tain. He did so with obvious reluctance but equally obvious resolve. Like the rest of them, he was determined to carry out the doctor's wishes in his absence. It was the only way any of them could recompense the man for facing a trial that was worse, at least to Martok's way of thinking, than any other the Vorta had devised in this barren place. Bashir had undertaken that bitter torment for the sake of all imprisoned here, and for that he was owed their fidelity as his proxies.

"Not yet," Parvok said, scurrying forward and hastily unscrewing the cap of the canteen.

Tain snatched it from him with a noise of derision that cut off in a sharp but abbreviated intake of breath. He forced an oily chuckle, thumping his breast with his free fist. "I wonder how he's enjoying the Jem'Hadar's hospitality," he sneered. "He's soft, you know. Spoiled. Too used to his Federation-"

The unjust scorn cut upwards into a guttural cough, and Tain moved again. It was not the sluggish motion of the last several days, nor the nimbler ambulation the other Cardassians were beginning to exhibit on this first day out of the deep cold of orbital night. It was a sudden, frantic spasm that seized his limbs and sent the cot shuddering and creaking beneath his bulk as he rocked into a futile attempt to roll onto one side. Grey lips curled back in a rictus of anguish and a single creaking sound emerged from deep in Tain's cavernous chest.

Martok shifted his weight, enduring the twinge in his hip that he could not ignore. Kalenna, nimbler and less battered, was already rounding the bench. Tain lost his grip on the bottle, and it fell, spilling a gout of its precious fluid as it struck the floor and rolled. Parvok dove after it, clearing the path for his superior. The Major seized Tain's emptied hand in her left, and used her right to push his shoulder, rolling him once more onto his back.

"Lie still," she commanded. "You know exertion makes it worse. It will not help the pain. Lie still and try to breathe."

Her famine-lean body obscured Tain's lower face from view, but Martok could see his eyes bulging in their pouches of flesh, enormous with suffering and belligerence. Even with his failing heart ablaze within him, the Cardassian was as stubborn as a blood-ox and as contrarian as any Tellarite. He attempted to resist Kalenna, but there was no strength in his once-powerful body. He went limp beneath her, one dilapidated shoe digging at the thin mattress as he strained against the next tide of pain.

Kalenna let him keep her hand as the other searched his temple for a pulse. Martok rose at last, aware of his uselessness in this moment. He could splint a broken limb or pack a battle wound, but the mysteries of the body's unseen organs were not his to know. Nor were they the Major's, from the look of blank dismay she shot over her shoulder as he approached. She did not know what to do for Tain, any more than Martok did.

"He must not die," she hissed, urgency blazing in her eyes. "He is our attestant, the means to our freedom. He must not die."

Martok nodded tightly. Across the bow of his nose, he caught a hazy glimpse of the sub-lieutenant's dismayed expression before the man clambered to his feet and retreated to the back corner of the cell. The General did not turn to him. His mind was too much occupied with frantic recollections of Doctor Bashir's methods to spare any further thought for the timid Romulan. Even the self-assured one seemed momentarily at a loss.

The next blur of motion came from the right, and Martok's eye swiveled keenly toward the next cot. There sat the ever-silent Breen, brow lights glittering, one gloved hand clamped over the featureless snout of the helmet. Martok stared, dumbstruck, as his own mind fell into pace with the one behind the glass.

"His mouth and nose," he growled urgently. "Seal his mouth and nose, and command him to breathe."

Major Kalenna's expression ignited with something more than triumph, but she turned back to Tain too swiftly for Martok to interpret the flames. She clamped her right hand over the Cardassian's mouth and wrenched her left from his grasp so she could pinch tight his nostrils.

"Breathe out!" she demanded as Tain's eyes shot wide again. "Force your breath against my hands if you wish to live."

It was simpler to command than to achieve, and Tain's chest twitched with the effort of coordinating a breath. He could not do so, and there was a high-pitched whistle as a tendril of air was sucked through Kalenna's thin fingers. She adjusted her palm, pressing harder into the deflated cheeks.

"Out, I said! I cannot breathe for you," snarled Kalenna. "If you want to survive to mock a good man's misery, you must breathe out."

This time, Tain succeeded in puffing his face out like a bellows. The pressure did not last long, and it did not seem to bring relief from the pain. His shoulders twisted against the mat, and the back of his skull sank deeper into the flat pillow. Kalenna followed it with her hand, preserving the seal as she exhorted him to try again.

Martok closed his eye, wishing he still held himself worthy to call upon Kahless in this battle. It would not work. It could not work. Neither he nor Kalenna possessed Bashir's skill or his healer's touch. What had served him would not serve them, and the Cardassian would surely die. The Jem'Hadar would come, and vaporize the body, and when at last the mysterious Garak arrived with his Starfleet conspirators, there would be no one to vouch for four aliens of unknown motive. Could Martok compel them on the strength of a broken treaty to aid him? Could Kalenna persuade them with her deft Romulan rhetoric to mount an assault of the isolation cells, where their only other witness languished under tireless guard? That soldiers of the notoriously magnanimous Federation might take pity on injured, underfed, and filthy prisoners out of mercy alone was a possibility that Martok's pride could scarcely countenance, even now. His honour could not even consider the likelihood that in order to effect an escape, they might be compelled to abandon Doctor Bashir in his lightless crypt.

"Again!" Kalenna cried, something like exultation in her voice. Yanked from his dark contemplations, Martok saw the immense strain on Tain's face as he struggled to comply. More striking was the grim delight on Kalenna's face as the Cardassian writhed beneath her hands, labouring in the futile task of forcing his breath against her. There was no sign yet of success, and it dawned on Martok - with the cold appreciation a warrior feels when gauging the merits of an ancient foe - that the Major, she who had been a high-ranking agent of the Tal Shiar, was relishing the old man's misery in this moment.

Tain's ribcage bucked under the sour-smelling tunic, and his eyes flew wide again. He batted at Kalenna's forearm with one insistent hand, and she withdrew. As the passages opened, Tain gulped an avaricious breath that came out in a strong, steady column. "Damn you, woman," he muttered, and then rubbed his breastbone as he chuckled ruefully.

Kalenna stepped back from the bed, wiping her hands fastidiously on the front of her tunic. When she turned to look at Martok, the icy glee was gone, leaving only fatigued relief.

Martok did not speak to her. Words were no more needed to thank the Major than they were of use to praise the Breen for quick thinking and eloquent gesture. All that remained now was for Kalenna to keep watch over the Cardassian, while Martok resumed his wait to be summoned to the ring - and the Breen, no doubt, would continue to sit in studied silence. The moment's crisis had passed. At least for the present, Tain was alive.

(fade)

Alive, alive, alive!

The one simple word hammered in Garak's head as he ricocheted around his quarters. Only decades of discipline and a sense of professional decorum too deep to be overcome even by such a shock imbued any order at all to his movements. The dresser, for a change of clothes and the small medkit he kept on hand for minor situations. The desk, for the PADD containing comprehensive starcharts based on the most recent Gamma Quadrant intelligence from five major galactic powers. The replicator, because his hands were shaking and a quick swallow of rokassa juice helped him still them. The panel on the wall behind the armchair, where he kept a small disruptor and several data rods containing files it would not do to leave behind. The replicator again, because he had forgotten that the disruptor required a fresh power cell. Then the bed, where he used his precision laser to slice the perfect stitches he had made along the edge of the mattress. He slipped his nimble fingers into the seam and drew out a small cartridge no bigger than a slip of latinum. That went into his pocket, and a quick pass of the auto-stitcher restored the mattress to its ostensibly untouched state.

Alive, alive, alive!

Garak packed his bag with swift precision. He was stepping out into the hall even before it bumped against his hip, slung unceremoniously onto his shoulder. He strode the corridors with the confidence of long familiarity, never pausing to glance at an interchange or a door marker as he made his way to the nearest outward crossbridge. The turbolift would have been faster, but turbolifts were too easy to monitor, too easy to stop. Garak had no intention of being stopped.

Alive, alive, alive!

It beggared belief. Had it not been for the flawless replication of the old, unforgettable code - that masterpiece of cryptographic art that was the greatest intimacy between two cold pillars of the Obsidian Order - Garak would not have believed it. As it was, he had no doubt. Somehow, in defiance of the odds and the might of the Dominion, Enabran Tain was alive. And while he lived, his most faithful servant would come to him, whatever obstacles lay between.

Alive, alive, alive!

Fortunately, the greatest obstacle was a coded airlock access panel. Even without the Federation's childish emphasis on courtesy and accessibility over security, this would have proved very little challenge indeed. It was a rare lock on this station that plain, simple Garak could not pick in seconds. As he rounded the corner, he was already fishing for the recursive descrambler, a tidy piece of bespoke positronics that pleased its maker more than his flashiest sartorial accomplishments. Sharp ears caught the susurration of Bajoran soles on the springy human carpet a moment before the security officer passed the junction behind him. Lost in his litany, Garak shot a carelessly anxious glance back over his shoulder. The man walked on without a pause, oblivious. At another time, Garak might have thought sourly of a season where no Bajoran strolled casually past a Cardassian. Now, his mind was on Tain, out there in the vastness of the Gamma Quadrant and plainly in need.

Alive, alive, alive!

Garak passed his elegant tool over the sensor and heard the hydraulic hiss of the airlock door. What circumstances, he wondered, could have rendered Tain so desperate that of all his carefully cultivated assets, he had only Elim - the betrayer, the disappointment - to reach out to for aid? And yet, despite the catastrophe that had struck the joint Cardassian-Romulan fleet, despite his near-madness in the moment of failure, and despite whatever dire situation he found himself in now...

Alive, alive, alive!

Across the slender causeway, the outer airlock door slipping open to admit him, and Garak was at the runabout hatch. A simple four-digit code unlocked it: why bother to secure a vehicle if the docking access was locked? He spared an inner sneer at the Federation's naivete, but it was brief. His mind was full of Tain, old memories and fresh speculation and terrible urgency flooding his veins.

Alive, alive, alive!

The lights were on, blinding Federation brightness that made his skin crawl and his nictitating membranes snap down to protect his sensitive eyes. Every physical sense responded to the affront, and yet Garak's mental faculties were so clogged with the brine of poisoned emotions that he did not register the strangeness of this until the pilot's seat pivoted, and a sleek Starfleet phaser aimed smoothly on his sternum. Even then, his brain stuttered once more that frantic refrain.

Alive, alive, alive!

Garak had a brief astonished instant to take in the keenly intelligent brown eyes, the elegant bone structure, and the smooth brow lifted into furrows like a rumpled width of silk. He mollified himself with the flimsy excuse that of course he would not sense danger from this particular lurker as Doctor Bashir inclined his head wryly and spoke.

"Going somewhere?"

Garak allowed his friend the satisfaction of a small nod of surrender, as the slimmest of smiles tugged at his lips. "I really must remember to stop underestimating you, Doctor," he drawled, more than a little gratified. His voice tightened and grew deeper as he asked the most essential question for any operative to face when caught in the act - even by a comrade. "How did you know?"

"You mean that you were lying about the contents of the message?" asked Bashir. The phaser was higher now, aimed squarely at Garak's nose. He watched the weapon more out of instinct than genuine concern. He knew better than to expect violence from this paragon of medical ethics, but it paid to be wary. After all, Doctor Bashir had shot him once before, with the comically tiny pistol still considerably more lethal than a phaser set on stun. Of course, then it had been a matter of life or death for the good doctor's friends. What was this but a bit of trespass and attempted larceny?

"You said you'd given up on the Cardassian survivors who were lost in the Gamma Quadrant," Bashir continued. "Well, Ziyal was right: you're not the giving-up sort."

"Very good, Doctor," Garak said, still watching the phaser as he slung his bag off his shoulder. Satisfied that the threat was only a matter of form, he slid into the co-pilot's seat. "You've come a long way from the naive young man I met five years ago. You've become distrustful and suspicious." He was careful to keep too much of the pride from filtering into his voice as he added, "It suits you."

"I had a good teacher," Bashir said with one of his inordinately open little smiles. Garak's own was more guarded, but no less sincere.

Bashir swivelled the chair and got to his feet. "What did the message really say, Garak?"

Garak could not seek his friend's eyes and so stared at the vacant cushion instead. "It was a call for help. From Enabran Tain."

The look Bashir gave him was neither surprised nor quite as interested as Garak would have expected. Even the furrow between his eyebrows seemed a little too shallow as he echoed, "Tain? But you said you'd seen his ship destroyed by the Dominion."

"I did," Garak said, keeping his voice deliberately light. "But Tain was head of the Obsidian Order for twenty years. If he can survive that, he can survive anything." He then dared a note of sincerity he would have offered to no other person aboard this station. "I have to find him, Doctor. I owe it to him."

"You don't owe Tain anything," Bashir said with a note of distaste. He didn't think very highly of Garak's former employer, and like the rest of his opinions, he didn't try to obscure that. "He had you exiled from Cardassia."

"Yes, but aside from that, we were very close," Garak said dryly. Deep in his mind, a bulkhead snapped closed as if sealing off a breach. No time for nostalgia now. No space for pain. "He was… my mentor. And I'm not going to turn my back on him."

Bashir broke eye contact, blinking twice in quick succession as his eyes fell to the deckplate. They had an unspoken pact, forged years ago in a crucible of anguish and wretched rawness, that the Doctor would not mention pain he could not palliate. Garak offered the only relief he could and forced his voice into a cheerful invitation. "If it'll make you feel any better, you can come with me. All you have to do is come up with an excuse why you need the runabout, and we could leave immediately."

An impish smirk illuminated the young man's face, though his eyes were curiously grim. "So let me get this straight," he said, wagging an index finger as he strolled back to the pilot's seat. "You want me to lie to my commanding officer, violate Starfleet regulations, and go with you on a mission into the Gamma Quadrant that will probably get us both killed?"

"I'm ready when you are," Garak said, unable to wholly disguise his delight. The dour and deadly mission he had been anticipating, with untold Dominion patrols ahead and Starfleet making chase behind, suddenly dissolved into an adventure of wit and camaraderie with a skilled and fascinating friend. Whatever awaited them at the source of Tain's signal, the quest alone would be worth the risk.

"In that case," said Bashir, tilting his head back appreciatively; "let's go." As Garak turned eagerly to the control panel, the phaser rose again. "To Captain Sisko's office."

Garak felt himself deflate, and told himself that he did so purely out of annoyance at the hindrance to his mission. He was inconvenienced, not hurt. He rolled his eyes exaggeratedly, and drawled, "Whatever you say, Doctor. I'll come quietly."

He expected a laugh, or at the very least a snort of amusement. Bashir offered neither, and as the two of them moved back towards the hatch, Garak thought the younger man shot a look at the piloting controls that was both proprietary and strangely calculating. Just what had he expected from their encounter?

Garak put the thought from his mind and set about marshalling his arguments for Sisko.

(fade)

He lay curled on his side, staring into the blackness with his limbs tucked close for their meagre warmth. Numb in body and spirit, mind utterly exhausted and just as utterly sleepless, Julian drew in each heavy, achingly cold lungful of air with dogged resolve. He had to keep breathing. He had to keep living. He couldn't just give up, no matter what awaited him outside this box… outside this prison… back there, where the life he loved was waiting for him — and for the devastation of Tain's pledge. But neither could he sustain the anguish of dread, at least not without rest. Sleep eluded him, thwarted by hunger and cold and wretchedness, and so he simply lay there in his near-fetal coil, and forced himself to breathe.

The coarse crosshatching of the floor dug into his temple, his shoulder, his thigh. Julian could even feel the ridges through the threadbare fabric of his standard-issue trunks, reminding him hatefully of the oily web of rags they'd been reduced to after weeks of unremitting wear. He wondered distantly if he ought to take them off, to allow the frigid air to circulate over that last small area of sheltered skin. The rash under the waistband and along the ridges of his inguinal ligaments was raw and stinging, although the patches in his axillae seemed somewhat improved.

Julian felt a twist of guilty disgrace for having let his bodily condition deteriorate so far because of neglected hygiene. He was a doctor. He knew better than that. A tiny part of his weary mind, the part that might have manifested itself as Jadzia's patient voice if he'd still had the mental energy to conjure up any of his friends, protested. He hadn't let himself go unwashed out of indolence or indifference or inertia; his present state had been forced upon him by his captors, who made no provision for that fundamental need. He wasn't responsible for the rash, any more than he was responsible for the sour stench that clung to his body and his hair, or the still more malodorous miasma rising from the pit in the far corner of the floor. If he let himself feel ashamed because of it, he was doing Deyos's work for him.

It was a compelling argument: rational, decorous, in keeping with the training he'd been given as a cadet to equip him to withstand psychological warfare of precisely this kind. But the dignity he'd been acculturated to take for granted was beginning to wear thin at the seams, just like his fetid undergarment. After weeks of ignominies both small and large, Julian found it difficult to remember what it felt like to be free. That terrified him as even the cruel spectres of his imagination hadn't done: the possibility that he might no longer be free even in his mind. The possibility that he was defeated.

Defeated. Or merely exhausted? He knew he wasn't getting enough sleep, even with the perpetual darkness. The cold made that impossible, though he was growing worryingly acclimatized to that as well. He no longer shivered constantly: it came in fits and starts, and he could almost deceive himself into thinking the room was warmer than it had been. He tamped that thought down frantically. He couldn't start questioning such basic tenets of reality. His mind was slipping already. He knew that. He had to focus on what he could be certain of, and what little he could control.

He wondered what time it was. He had heard the ration call, but that seemed both seconds and centuries ago. He didn't know when to expect more water, or even if he could. He hugged crossed arms to his bare chest and tried not to think of the prominence of his ribs. Distant, taunting voices jeered from the depths of memory: schoolyard mockery he'd shaken off at fourteen and quailed under at fifteen, so afraid of the very uniqueness that had been a source of pride. It had taken a long time to learn to take pride in those things again - intelligence, athleticism, ambition. What his Academy classmates had taken for conceit had in fact been a frenetic daily effort to feel at home in his own body, in his own mind. Julian was not about to let Deyos's textbook torture deprive him of what he had reclaimed out of the ruins of his parents' betrayal.

He closed his eyes, though in the dark it made no difference, and visualized the bones of the human hand. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform. The old anatomical litany gave him an anchor; in his mind, in his self. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate.

His shoulders tensed and head hunched at an imagined sound far away, for a moment he was distracted by the memory of circling a lighted ring, face-to-face with the Jem'Hadar tasked with putting him in his place. Julian shook off the memory. He must have imagined the sound. Surely, he could not hear the gong in the ring with several reinforced airlocks between. He commanded himself to focus on the lesson, the recitation, the proof of his worthiness as a physician. But it wasn't the human hand that rose to mind now. It was the Klingon hand, the one he had held and manipulated with gentle surety as he reset small interphalangeal joints. Scaphoid, pseudolunate, quadquetrum, pisiform...

He thought of General Martok. He thought of the ring. And he wondered. When next the General fought, what would be his injuries? More importantly, who would tend them? Alone in the dark, Julian Bashir ached to practice medicine again.

(fade)

Once, five minutes had seemed an eternity; an immeasurable vastness of time during which his muscles grew tense and his bloodlust cooled prematurely. It had been an intolerable interval, an unforgivable disruption to the warrior's rhythm that had pounded through Martok's veins from boyhood. Now, five minutes was too brief a time for labouring lungs and overtaxed limbs to recover from the vigour of the first fight. It was too brief a time to savour the meager satisfaction of a hollow victory over the young and inexperienced Jem'Hadar who had been pitted against him as a token of Ikat'ika's silent disdain. It was too brief a time to gather wit and will for the next onslaught.

"Tenth, step forward." The First's voice was devoid of any passion for the fight to come. He did not even deign to intonate the contempt so glaringly obvious in his choice of contenders. He merely tilted his tusked jaw to usher his subordinate into the ring before announcing flatly, "Klingon, your allotted rest period is expended. Fight or yield."

"I fight," growled Martok, lifting his left leg so that he could stride over the lip of the ring with a force of purpose his traitorous right hip could no longer sustain. Not until the second boot cleared the low, domed lights did he face the bitter realization that, not so long ago, he would have said instead I will never yield.

Perhaps the flickering fulmination in Ikat'ika's eyes was a trick of the uncertain light of the prison yard. To Martok, it was a blazing beacon illuminating his fractured spirit for all to see. His blood burned, not with the heat of battle, but with the searing brand of shame. In that instant, he thought of Sirella, stern and magnificent in the hall of her august forefathers, she who had loved and wooed a victorious commoner in proud defiance of convention. What would she make of this fallen warrior, who in the dishonour of his captivity could not even muster words of sufficient weight to give his foe a moment's pause?

The vacuous echo of the gong gouged his ears like the knell at the gates of Gre'thor. Martok's hand accomplished what his heart could not, and mustered to battle as it reached for the nearest pylon. Again, that cavernous clang of futility. Again, the ceaseless toil of honourless combat was rejoined.

Martok had faced the Tenth before, so often that he could not recall the number of their bouts - though he did not doubt the scabrous automaton would know it. The Jem'Hadar had a weak pivot, too accustomed to meeting his adversaries squarely and apparently incapable of the fluid adaptation that made Ikat'ika, his Second, and his Eighth such unsettlingly formidable opponents. Unfortunately, he had managed to learn that this particular prisoner could exploit this liability. He charged head-on, not wasting time in attempting a swing that could be blocked with a vambraced forearm, reaching one deadly hand straight for Martok's throat.

Before another of his race, he who had once been a storied general poised to command the Imperial Fleet would have disdained the manoeuvre that he chose now. Whether out of weariness, bluntness of reflex, or insidious despair, Martok tilted his head and bared the vulnerable column of flesh that housed his windpipe and the conduits conjoining heart and brain. The dry grey fingers closed upon his neck and began to squeeze. In the vital instant between the Tenth's fractional pause of astonishment at meeting no resistance and the insurmountable clamping of the twin rivers of Kahless ("the carotid arteries", in the noble doctor's prosaic Federation parlance), Martok struck.

A forearm's width apart, his two hands moved as one with the memory of the bat'leth they had once wielded with such skill and honour. His left hand, the weaker in bygone days, was now the one he trusted with the attack. His right merely closed around the Jem'Hadar's wrist, a distraction as the left shot upward in a coiled fist to blast into the coarse skin beneath the Tenth's jaw. Here, without the rampart of horns, his head was most defenseless. Intent upon the fingers digging into the tendons of his arm, the Tenth was caught off guard by the blow from below. His head snapped back with a force that should have fractured the vertebrae of a frailer opponent. Here, it was scantly sufficient to break the grip on Martok's throat. The General sprang back, releasing his own hold and forcing his foe to regroup.

Now began the odious ritual of circling one another just out of arm's reach. Martok despised the artifice of this, the oily oozing of the deadened eyes over his body as the Jem'Hadar studied him with the cool contempt of an engineer examining the primitive technology of a captured inferior. Once, each of these empty vessels of the Dominion's malice had moved through this dance with rigid wariness and intent fascination that had almost exuded respect. Then, they had known what it was to dread a soldier of the Empire. They dreaded him no longer.

With a snarl born as much of this shame as of the heat of battle, Martok lunged, shoulder dropped to blast into the Tenth's midsection. He made contact, but only just. The accursed Jem'Hadar used his own momentum against him and took a grappling hold of arm and hip. From the satisfaction of attack, Martok was forced instantly into the ignoble struggle to keep his feet on the cold floor while the Tenth attempted to throw him. He hooked one boot behind his adversary's ankle, using the talon on the toe to lock in position as he clawed for purchase against the unadorned Dominion armor. There was a moment of perfect counterbalance when the forces between them were equal and neither moved so much as a hair's breadth. Then the Jem'Hadar's strength, rendered superior only by long privation and attrition, prevailed. Martok's backthrust sole slipped, and he was thrown.

His attempt to curl into a landing that allowed for a rapid rebound to battle-readiness was too slow; hunger and inaction had blunted his reflexes, and the daily ritual of mok'bara in the cramped cell was inadequate to stem the deterioration. Hip and shoulder struck the floor with force enough to drive the air from his lungs, and for two hammering heartbeats Martok was breathless and blind. He struggled to get his good knee under him, groping in the blackness for the edge of the ring. The post, he had to strike the post! He might be an enfeebled prisoner, as much a slave to Deyos's whims as his ancestor had been in Rura Penthe, but he would not be felled so quickly.

Sight returned to his lone eye as he found his feet. As the gong sounded beneath his palm, Martok whirled to face the Jem'Hadar again.

(fade to black)