When There are No More Tomorrows Part One: Locarno on the Slab

Onyx-17
Southeast Continent
Reconstruction Center Alpha

The sound of the hopper's explosion wrenched Bashir out of his sleep as certainly as if a stimulant had been injected into his carotid artery. He rolled from his bunk, his bare feet thumping on the polymer floorboards of the quarters, and reached out for his field uniform. His genetically-enhanced brain processed the sound of the explosion, bypassed the panic and confusion and unaltered human brain would have been momentarily seized by, and immediately presented him with the courses of action. He stepped into his terrain boots and pulled on his hostile environment jacket and stuffed the pockets with medical supplies. Then he grabbed his med-pack and slung it over his shoulder and with two long strides was out the door.

Reconstruction Center Alpha, like all the Federation's RCs, was a vast collection of interlocking, polymer units. Plastic boxes of varying sizes and utilities, a set as neat and simple as children's toys. The units stood polymer plates, the underside of which molded itself to the scarred, rough terrain, and Bashir saw that the hopper had fallen from a low altitude and was burning on just one of those plates.

Bloody hell...The polymer's were fairly rugged, but the fuel core of a hopper could burn through tritanium if given enough time. He mentally prepared himself for melt-related burns and wide-scale toxin-inhalation. While he couldn't make out specific faces on the silhouettes framed by the blazing, orange of burning hopper, he could easily tell that they weren't wearing masks. The night had a purplish tinge to it beyond the fire and commotion. Bashir had learned in his three months here that this put them just after Onyx-17's midnight period. Most of the people here would have either just gotten off-duty or stumbled out of the bar. Less than half would've taken their regimented rad-tablets or precautionary de-tox injections. He made mental note to prepare medical for cases of low-level radiation sickness as well.

It took him less than three seconds to get to the burning hopper and push past the rescue personnel. He shouted his identity to the ones who didn't know him and made it to the perimeter. The hopper's engines and thruster-deck were burning hottest, while the alloy spaceframe lay twisted and blackened off to the side. Rescue personnel in anti-flammatory ponchos had pulled the bodies out of the wreckage and lined them up a meter or so apart. Three neat lines, like a Roman numeral. Medics clustered around them, moving listlessly.

The alcohol in his system was making his limbs seem leaden, and he had the ugly feeling it had taken some of the edge off his mental acuity, though he had neither the time nor the inclination to formulate some sort of spot test for this. Synthehol was a rare commodity after the war-most of what was left over was the straight stuff whose effects couldn't be overridden.

He fell to a kneel before the first body-a blackened, gummy shape. His tricorder hummed a negative: zero cardiac, respirator, or brainwave functions. Bashir bolted to the second. Two medics were binding wounds with derm-seals. "Get the other! Get her! This one'll make it!" the medic gestured frantically to the third body, a woman.

Bashir crouched beside her, unslung his pack. Then he saw her face and froze for a moment.

Doctor Christina Rudofsky. Bashir had been getting drunk and fending off her advances earlier in the evening.

But he only froze for a second, then he moved.

Rudofsky's injuries were less severe than the others, but that was deceptive. She hadn't been burned badly, but she'd been torn through by shrapnel from the explosion, and her body pulped by the impact. His tricorder registered vital signs dropping like stones.

"Come on...come on!" he muttered as he pulled out a tissue regenerator and keyed it to the heart and lungs. He used it through a wound in her side and monitored his success on his tricorder. Cardiac functions began to level off, but didn't look like they'd hold, and Bashir knew they wouldn't unless he got her to sickbay OR where he could reinforce the mended tissue. But while the cardiac functions leveled off, the rest were still falling."Get me a hypo-twenty CCs of oxy-medalin. Now!" he called out to one of the medics standing over his shoulder, a powerfully-built man with a livid scar running down his cheek and an overwhelmed expression on his face.

After a second of hurried fumbling, the medic pressed a hissing hypospray to Rudofsky's neck. The oxy-medalin would minimize the need for respiration by carrying the oxygen directly into her bloodstream, but like everything else it was only a temporary solution. Her pulse was dropping below thready. Broken bones had ripped through veins and arteries and she was bleeding internally from over a dozen lacerations, and he couldn't move her until he had the worst of those taken care of.

He wielded the tissue-regenerator like a sniper wields a gun, with the same assurance and accuracy, but he could not stabilize her vitals. After he repaired the fourth and last tear in her aorta, the mending on them gave, and her pulse dropped to zero. The tissue-regenerator was useless now-the wound had to be repaired on a molecular level with a bonding compound in an OR, and there was no time to get her to one.

With her heart a limp sac uselessly tensing and releasing, and her lungs incapable of holding or distilling oxygen, and her spleen, kidneys and liver all perforated from shrapnel and her own skeleton, her body shut down.

Two minutes later, Bashir declared Christina Rudofsky dead.

He stood unsteadily, his cramping muscles crying out, his equilibrium bent by the residual alcohol, and he began stowing his medical gear as the medics pulled a tarp over her body.

The rain started then, pouring down from clouds he could not see in a sky as dark as ink. It smelled like chemicals, and they'd all have to take de-tox injections after being exposed to it.

2

USS Lexington
Command Ship: DeLambry Plan

Bashir had never been aboard a Sovereign-class ship before, but tried to not to be overly impressed. In the final days of the war, as the Breen were leading the Dominion forces to one victory after the next, Federation shipyards had been producing capitol ships at speeds unparalleled in the history of Starfleet. Bashir had the feeling he'd be aboard a lot of the things in the next few years.

Still, it was an impressive vessel. Nothing at all like the Defiant, which contained most of Bashir's starship experience. The corridors were more like those of a building or a starbase, with room for three, nearly four people to walk abreast. They were well-lit, the ceilings high, the panels along the bulkheads vast and plentiful as opposed to Defiant's small, functional ones.

The Ready Room where the hearing was to take place was roughly the size of the Defiant's entire bridge and far less cluttered. Aside from the curving, black table, there was little else. Some support consoles set into the wall, a few small viewscreens, and a lot of empty space. Bashir felt a slight tremor of irrational uneasiness ripple through him. A feeling that such spaciousness was antithetical to the adequate functioning of a starship, that there must be some high price exacted for this luxury. They would probably all die for this. He shook it off. Too much time aboard the Defiant ducking low accessways and tending to the wounded in a sickbay the size of a closet.

Chief Engineer LaForge, however, was obviously as in his element as he ever would be, and Bashir remembered then that the latest USS Enterprise was a Sovereign-class vessel.

"It's the fact that he's an Admiral," LaForge explained an answer to a question Bashir hadn't asked. "A Galaxy-class ship would be better suited for this sort of mission. The Sovereigns just aren't hard-core scientific vessels. They don't have the capacity to carry nearly as many civilians, either. Something like the DeLaney Plan requires a more versatile command ship. Something that can stay stationary for months on end and simply manage operations. But no, he's an Admiral and he wants a powerful-looking ship. A mean-looking ship..."

Then the doors opened and the object of LaForge's derision came through the door. Naturally, LaForge stopped speaking immediately, as Admiral Ross entered, flanked by Captain Coleridge and Security Chief Zorion. They made as unusual trio as was possible, Bashir thought. Ross, a stocky, dull-eyed plodder, was a man who'd proven to be effective at getting things done. He could manage the red tape, wrangle with all manner of petty bureaucrats, hard-headed captains, and mercurial planetary governances, and still manage to get the job completed. He'd certainly done so during the Dominion War (though history was already taking shape, and it cast Captain Sisko in the role of the power behind the throne).

By contrast, Coleridge was a hands-on man. He'd ascended through the Engineering Division, and probably would have been heading up the Engineering staff on a starbase somewhere had it not been for the DeLambry Plan, which was catapulting Engineers through the ranks as quickly as Command Division officers had climbed the ranks during the war. Rebuilding the Quadrant was, after all, a fairly involved project. Coleridge was just the man to do it, if not ideal for the Captaincy of a planetary resuscitation project. He had almost no leadership skills beyond knowing how to build, rebuild or repair stuff quickly and easily and with whatever materials happened to be on hand. For the purposes of the DeLambry Plan, however, that was good enough.

Warrant Officer Zorion, on the other hand, was as functional as a bayonet. One of the very few Ellora in Starfleet, he'd grown up in a hardscrabble colony just outside the Sona'a system, and as such he and his hadn't been absorbed into the Sona'a like most of the rest of his race. His childhood on a barren, cold planet had been hard, and he wore it on his face. Unlike Ross, who looked like a water buffalo awaiting the yoke, or Coleridge who had the slightly preoccupied gaze of a man mentally working out a energy-coupling algorithm, Chief Zorion looked as if he'd like nothing better than to stomp you or anyone else into the dirt and then peel away your secrets.

LaForge and Bashir stood attention, were promptly "at eased"-ed and the group huddled around the conference table-Ross at the head, Zorion and Coleridge on one side, Bashir and LaForge at the other.

"Well, Doctor," Ross began, his voice typically dispassionate except for a low undercurrent of concern, "I wish we didn't have to meet again under these circumstances..."

"Understood, sir," Bashir responded. He didn't really like Admiral Ross. While he didn't necessarily blame him for the events at the conference on Romulus (certainly Section 31 had pulled more strings than simply his) he harbored some lingering resentment for anyone who had chosen not to take a stand against the outfit that had attempted a program of genocide.

"This is indeed a tragic occurrence. Doctor Rudofsky was well-known and much-loved at Starfleet Command. They are understandably curious about the events surrounding her death. Particularly now that Chief Zorion has found indications of an explosive device."

Bashir's scalp prickled. He hadn't heard this.

"It was a Cardassian device," Zorion said implacably, in his low, vaguely-reptilian voice. "A Crockogator-type mine to be exact. Named after an amphibian native to Cardassia-Minor which actually plucks their birds out of the sky." Zorion pressed an unseen button on the table before him, and suddenly and entire LCARS display lit up. He activated the small holo-viewer and two views of the mine-a standard depiction and a cutaway-appeared between them and spun slowly. "The mine is buried shallowly and engages passive sensor sweeps. When the sensor is tripped by something at a particular altitude, small thrusters at its base fire it at the target. When it hits, it explodes. It's a low-yield warhead, but with any atmospheric craft, all it needs to do is compromise the hull to knock it out of the sky."

"Insidious," Ross shook his head. His naivete still didn't fail to amaze Bashir.

"We've been stepping on the things all over the place," Coleridge said wearily. "A regular person isn't tall enough to trip one, but until you clear an area, any atmospheric transports have to beg off. That brings everything to a standstill. I've pulled three teams of power-grid detail in the Northwest Region alone to dig up the things."

"I've been working on a way to neutralize them," LaForge jumped in. "These things make a retreat or an advance pretty much impossible unless you can just turn them off. I don't know if it's a ship signature, an IFF signal, or just a random EM pulse on the right harmonic. I've got a team working on it, but our resources are stretched pretty thin."

"I understand," Ross replied. "Would the resources of the Lexington help?"

"Yes sir. Without having to share resources as we do on Onyx..." he trailed off.

"Good, now Doctor Bashir, would you give us a briefing of what happened after you heard the lander explode?"

Bashir straightened and folded his hands on the table. "I grabbed my medkit and proceeded to the crash site. When I got there, the pilots were already taken care of. One was dead. The other stabilized by the medics. I proceeded to work on Doctor Rudofsky with the aid of two medics-Lieutenant Vance and another I didn't recognize-however, we were unable to stabilize her. Her wounds were simply too severe. Even if we'd gotten her to a sickbay immediately, I'd've needed a full surgical team. Even then...it would have been touch and go."

Ross nodded gravely. The same way he nodded when an attack had gone bad, or a system had fallen. Bashir wondered precisely what the man's emotional range was. "And when was the last time you'd seen Doctor Rudofsky? Would that have been during your duty shift in the OR that day?"

"No sir," Bashir answered, and hesitated. Ross certainly wouldn't sympathize with this part. "We'd had drinks together at the staff club."

"Oh?" Ross raised an eyebrow. "Alcoholic beverages?"

He thought he saw Coleridge's eyes roll. "Yes sir."

"Were you drunk at the club?"

"Yes sir," Bashir answered solidly.

"What about when you worked on her?"

"No."

"How long was it from when you left the club to the time when the hopper exploded?"

"Approximately three hours, sir. I was sleeping."

Zorion broke in, stating neutrally: "The medics I interviewed later all testified that Doctor Bashir was sober and in full command of his faculties."

"I see," Ross nodded, then sighed. "I never had the impression that Doctor Rudofsky was much a drinker."

"It had been a particularly bad day, sir," Bashir replied, wincing at that memory, too.

"That was the...uh...tainted medicine?"

"The molecular cohesion of the NorCom-112 we were using had deteriorated."

Ross's brow furrowed again. "The uh..."

"NorCom-112 is a synthetic protein which white corpuscles mistake for all manner of diseases and viruses. It's sort of a one-shot vaccination to build up the immune system when a patient is recuperating from major surgery. When the molecular cohesion breaks down, however, it becomes poisonous and attacks the major organs. With the war, screenings of the NorCon-112, as well as other medical supplies, has been less stringent. It's harder to keep track of them, their dates of production, that sort of thing."

"And there is no way to tell..."

"No sir. Not without doing intensive molecular screenings of our entire stock."

"How long would that take?" Ross asked.

"With the facilities of the Lexington, it would take us approximately one year to analyze our current supply. That is, with shifts working continuously."

Ross seemed to deflate a little. Bashir suspected he'd been doing a lot of that since he'd taken this job.

"That day, every person we treated in the OR died," Bashir paused for a moment as the strangled screams of the recovery room floated through his brain, meshed with the memory of patients he'd tried to save from the Quickening...When they were too loud, he pulled himself back to conference.. "As I mentioned, it was a very bad day," he said quietly.

"So it would seem," Ross said darkly, then looked up. "Well. I appreciate your taking time out to meet with me. Please keep me apprized of your progress in your respective areas."

They all agreed, exchanged the proper pleasantries, and parted. LaForge went off to his promised land to investigate the mines. Coleridge and Ross to meet with the rest of the system captains, leaving Bashir alone, to look out the vast viewport at the brown/gray orb slowly rotating in the distance.

Onyx-17. A crippled world. One of countless in the Quadrant. As Bashir looked at it, he felt again the death of the rugged optimism he'd felt when he'd signed on to set up the medical facilities here. Now it just seemed an impossible task.

There was a sound behind him. He turned and saw Chief Zorion contemplating the same view from further back in the room.

"Looks like we'll soon have our mine problem taken care of," he said off-handedly.

"Yes," Bashir answered, trying to cover the ill-ease he felt around the man. "We'll be able to finally put teams in the Southwest continent."

"And it only took one dead doctor," Zorion said archly. "With costs that low, we'll have this mess cleaned up in no time."

3

His OR shift already covered, Bashir found himself in no particular hurry to return to the planet's surface. It was another strange reaction, he noted. Whenever he'd been aboard the Defiant or a Runabout, he'd felt an underlying sense of vulnerability that he didn't lose until he'd stepped onto the station or a planet. Now, however, he felt warm and protected in this tritanium bottle-much more so than on the ruined rock it orbited. He utilized the Lexington's long-range communications array and raised Deep Space Nine. A lieutenant he didn't know was manning Ops-it was the late-night cycle on the station. Bashir took the time it took her to route the transmission to Ezri's quarters to banish the encroaching emptiness and loss he felt, had been struggling with since the war ended and half of the command staff and the people closest to him had gone their separate ways.

"Julian!" Ezri wore her peach silk peignoir that accentuated the finch-like narrowness of her shoulders and matched the hue of the trail of spots that gracefully curled from her neck, around her shoulders. Her hair was still parted, but the part was a little ragged from sleep-as mussed as it would ever get, he knew. She looked boyish and fragile. He took her in, felt his heart shudder as if injected with adrenaline.

"I'm aboard the Lexington. I decided to take full advantage of the communications systems while I could." He smiled warmly, but there was a brittleness to it that worried him. Could Ezri pick it up? "How are you?"

"Things here are fine. Kira had a standoff with the Romulans yesterday, but nothing happened. It was just one of those political things. And you know Kira, she's not going to back down, even when she should."

"I know."

"I sent you a message with a surprise a few days ago. Did you get it?" Her head dipped and crystal-blue eyes glittered upward coyly.

Bashir shook his head. "No. Not yet. The subspace transmitters in this area are few and far between. And they're overloaded with a backlog. I'll get it soon."

The playfulness vanished from her face, replaced by concern. "How are things, Julian?" And there it was: the voice that pierced him more thoroughly than any blade or phased energy bolt. It was the voice of the one exquisite creature in the Universe that loved him.

"Not well," he admitted, unable to lie to her. "Things here are much worse than I ever anticipated. The population is starving. Crime is rampant, so we end up with many more personal injuries than we anticipated. Aside from that, the cases of malnutrition, radiation poisoning, and toxification aren't leveling off. They're increasing."

"You'll be able to get in under control," Ezri said with quiet assurance.

He nodded and looked at the floor, not wanting to show her the uncertainty he felt.

"I have confidence in you, Julian. I'd've never let you go if I didn't."

He brought his gaze to meet hers, then touched the screen, imagining the cool smoothness of her cheek. Her fingers rose and, on the high-rez screen, touched the image of his. He held her raw, honest gaze, saw the faith in it, and let it bleed him until he was lost in it.

4

The base was as he'd left it, but Bashir made his rounds anyway. He shouldn't have, he knew. Stepping from the oxygen-rich, toxin-free environment of the Lexington to Onyx-17 and breathing that planet's thin, poisonous air drained him of all energy within an hour. Still, he was Chief Medical Officer, and he had his responsibilities.

Chief Nurse Alyssa Ogowa apprized him of the day's events succinctly and dutifully, her eyes looking forever wounded and mournful. Her husband had been incinerated along with the USS Shamir on the Vulcan Front. They were running low on rad-tablets and may possibly run out before the next shipment from Starfleet Medical arrived. Bashir told her to ready a treatment clinic to give all personnel who didn't receive them injections of the radiation-neutralizer. When injected into directly the bloodstream and not fed to the body in a slow dose, as the tablets did, the compound would leave the patients flushed, disoriented, and with a heart racing fast enough to seem like they were experiencing cardiac arrest. But it would stave off radiation sickness and only shorten the number of duty hours they were usable, not their lifespan. If it came to this, efficiency would undoubtedly suffer, and Bashir made a mental note to speak with Coleridge about who was expendable and who they needed 110 percent from. If it came to rationing the tablet, the latter would get them, the former would get night sweats.

Ogowa also informed him that Haz-Mat units had found indications of a new toxin in the atmosphere that may or may not kill them all within a matter of weeks if they didn't all get injections of the necessary protein-blockers. Haz-Mat wouldn't be able to say for sure for another few days, but by then the irreparable damage would have started.

Wide-scale injections for all personnel. Perfect. But Ogawa, thinking two steps ahead as always, had synthesized a disposable one-unit hypo that could be issued to the personnel so they could inject themselves and thus, not tie up the majority of the base's medical personnel.

And it went on that way-the reports from the planet's various medical teams cataloging the number of radiation-related illnesses, toxin-related illnesses, projected death-tolls and life-expectancy. The equatorial regions were virtually dead-the heat of them expediting the metabolic rates of the local flora and fauna, causing them to ingest and process the planet's poisons faster than anywhere else. The poles were almost toxin-free, as they were too cold and dry for anything to stay in the atmosphere and soil for very long. They also were by-and-large uninhabited and never occupied by the Dominion. Coleridge was at this moment formulating plans to move as many of the planet's inhabitants to them as soon as possible. Bashir wished him luck in selling that one to the survivors.

And there was another food riot, the time in Damask province. The relief ships had been overrun by the local population and looted. The pilots were okay, since the inhabitants had no interest in them once the rations were removed. They'd started about killing each other for the dry nutrition packets at that point. Like any other food riot.

Bashir made some notes, reviewed the next day's roster and went back to his quarters. It was only late afternoon, but already his head hurt and his lungs felt like gravel. The sky was its typical charcoal-gray-the only color it ever was during the daylight period, thanks to a couple crashed Jem'Hadar battleships which had lost attitude during a battle with insurgent Cardassian forces in the last hours of the war. The behemoths had augured into the island continent of Seltriss and effectively laid it waste as they blew plumes of toxic dust into the atmosphere. The time that had happened on Earth, and entire planetary eco-system had been wiped out within a year. Onyx-17's was holding on by its fingernails, and until the Federation Atmospheric Sweep Teams could arrive to clean it up, that hold would erode further and further every day.

In his spartan quarters, Bashir sat in the rumpled, dirty uniform he was too tired to remove and checked his mail. Ezri's message had arrived-just a short note telling him how much she loved and missed him. She'd included a holophoto of herself nude. She was reclining on her bunk, arms stretched out supporting her, legs modestly crossed to show only the slightest trace of the sable triangle of her pubic region. Her smallish breasts were flushed pink and pointed slightly upward as if directing attention to the deliciously seductive, yet innocent expression on her face. Bashir loved that expression, for it encapsulated her, Ezri, the Dax he'd fallen hopelessly in love with. It was the uneasy coexistence of Ezri Tigan, a shy, naive, somewhat introverted young woman and a symbiont with seven lifetimes of indulging its lust for life.

Sex was one of the places where that coexistence was rockiest. Ezri Tigan had not had many romantic interests in her life. Growing up under the thumb of a demanding mother who'd always been vaguely disdainful of the woman her daughter was growing into had left her shy and insecure. Much of her life had been spent in books, pressing herself harder and harder to be good enough to gain admittance to Starfleet Academy, and, once there, to excel. Once commissioned she found herself unable to approach men and women in a romantic manner. Much of the time she simply watched other pair up and indulged her instincts as a counselor, analyzing what the others did and how they did it. But too often she'd come back to her own insecurities about her personality, her shyness, and her (Ezri's perception, certainly not Julian's) decidedly unfeminine body.

She'd been a virgin when she was joined, a dynamic that had gotten lost beneath the pile of more urgent psychological ramifications of that experience, but when she and Julian made love, she found herself both immeasurably practiced and experiencing the pleasure for nearly the first time. It was disorienting and difficult for her to process, but not unenjoyable. This was the true intimacy they shared, and it was through this that Julian's concerns of his feelings for Ezri being ghosts of those for Jadzia were vanquished. What he shared with Ezri he could have never had with Jadzia, and he would never trade them away.

He'd worked hard in those first weeks after they began dating to settle and understand his feelings for Jadzia. He'd been infatuated with her, certainly, but there had been love there as well. Yet they'd served together for quite some time before Worf came along, and yet he'd never made any serious overtures. Not even when life on DS9 had pounded him from callow, cocksure young doctor into the kind of mature, experienced man Jadzia would have engaged. There had to be a reason for that. In the end he settled for the explanation that best encapsulated his feelings. It was irrational and nonsensical, but then so was love. Julian realized that his love for Jadzia had simply been his love for Ezri gathering strength and waiting for her arrival.

He zoned in on her face in the photo, and a hard copy, and held it in his hand as he fell asleep on his cot.

5

"Doctor Bashir!"

The combination of LaForge's urgent voice and the pinging of his quarters' chime shook Bashir out of a concrete sleep. He checked the time: 1920 hours. He'd only been asleep a little less than two hours. Muttering blackly, he pulled himself upright and sat on the cot a moment to let the dizziness dissipate. Why the bloody hell was LaForge so damned energetic? He should have been sidelined by the same biological reaction to the toxins and radiation on this godforsaken rock as Bashir. Thinking evil thoughts about possibly subjecting the Chief Engineer to an extended battery of metabolic and physiological tests in order to divine an answer to this question, Bashir slid the picture of Ezri into the breast pocket of his field uniform and answered the door.

"Doctor," LaForge barked and stepped inside. "Sorry to wake you up, but I've got something you'll be interested in seeing."

"Doubt that," Bashir grumbled but waved a hand to his desk/computer unit. The small engineer slid into the chair like quicksilver and began punching up diagnostic displays, the inserted an isolinear chip into the drive slot, talking a mile a minute as he did.

"Our team was working on that mine when we found this. I tried to contact Admiral Ross, but he's in a meeting. So is the captain."

"Same meeting, I'll wager," Bashir said as he sat on the edge of his cot nearest the computer screen.

"And Chief Zorion is off somewhere..."

"Food riot," Bashir explained, and LaForge nodded. A moment later a set schematics appeared onscreen.

"Recognize these?"

"No."

LaForge turned to face him, and Bashir could have sworn that the LEDs in his ocular implants brightened a few degrees. Maybe it was a design feature conceived by some wag of a prosthetics engineer.

"These are the inbuilt design specs encrypted into the computer chip that serves as the brain of the mine that took down Doctor Rudofsky's hopper. Notice anything odd?"

"Mines aren't my bloody forte. perhaps if you'd be so mind so kind..." But then he did notice it. A Starfleet insignia at the edge of the schematics. "I thought Zorion said it was a Cardassian mine."

"He thought it was," LaForge explained. "So did we until we managed to silicon-print this. There wasn't much of the device left, remember. But this stuff is like DNA: it's in every part of the device that does something."

"I didn't know Starfleet used such things," Bashir tried not to sound naive, but Starfleet was touchy about using mines. If you forgot to collect all the ones you deployed, they were a real lingering mess.

"I'm not sure we ever used these," LaForge answered. "It's a copy of that Cardassian CrockMama, or whatever it was. When the Breen were using their energy-dampening weapon and driving the Allaince back, Starfleet Command wasn't as concerned about the new weapon as losing ground."

"I'm not following you."

"Well the Enterprise and most of the command staff was at the initiative briefings held immediately after Chin'Toka fell, that's how I know this. See, the new weapon was scary, but not of greatest concern. I mean, we've gotten around Borg technology, Jem'Hadar technology, Romulan cloaks...it's just a matter of time. And with the full resources of the Alliance on it, everyone was pretty confident that we'd figure our a shielding system pretty quick. The main tactical concern was how much territory they took, and how entrenched they'd be when we tried to take it back."

"So they built these to deploy on Alliance worlds, so if they fell the Dominion would have troubles occupying them and establishing a position."

"Right," LaForge gestured with both hands. "They just copied the Cardassian version."

Bashir played out the situation in his head. It didn't track. "But the Onyx system fell while we were still in lifeboats at the loss of Chin'Toka. They'd've never deployed them here...so how'd it get here?"

"Better question, Doctor: who reprogrammed it to pick up that hopper's signature? We've got ships coming in and out of that pad every minute of every day and it picks up this one and takes it down? Eight months after we opened this base for business? I don't buy it."

Bashir felt his skin grow cold. "She was murdered," he breathed.

"Sure looks that way, Doctor."

Bashir thought quickly. "This would have had to come from a Starfleet weapons depot. The armory here or at any other base wouldn't keep something like this. Where is this planet's depot?"

LaForge punched it up on the terminal. "Uh...Zone Seven. Damask Province."

"Right in the minute of a damn food riot," Bashir winced.

"Maybe Zorion could take a look when he's done putting down the riot," LaForge suggested, but Bashir had grabbed his field jacket.

"Like hell. Someone murdered one of my staff doctors, and I'm not about to wait to find out who and why. Come on, we have to grab a hopper before night recon takes them all."

"What?" This time Bashir was sure LaForge's implants glowed brighter. "Why do I have to go?"

"I don't know a thing about this technology. You do."

"But there's a riot going on there!"

"Next time you should think about these things before you wake me out of a good sleep."

6

The Atmospheric Transit Vehicles, or "hoppers" as they were commonly known, were in

essence non-warp capable shuttle craft with bulked out bodies to carry more personnel or gear and heavy thruster decks where the nacelles would be. LaForge managed to snag a smaller one with room for only a handful or so passengers, which made maneuvering it out of the congested drop lanes much quicker and easier. Once out of the zone, he opened up the impulse decks and let the ugly machine scream toward the Northern continent and Damask province.

"I still think this is a bad idea," he said reproachfully, but didn't take his hands off the controls. Bashir heard the environmental systems adjust themselves to make up for the rapidly increasing hull temperature.

"No better time than the present." Bashir was looking through the supply kit, pulling out pieces they could use. "Here," he set aside a field jacket. "You'll want that. It's colder there, and the thermocentric lining of the uniforms won't keep all the chill out."

"Thanks. Just tell me if there's anything useful in there. Like a cloaking device."

"A few phaser pistols. Might as well take them." Bashir slowed a couple of power packs in the sleeve pockets of his jacket. He couldn't conceive of needing them, but since the war he'd become more cautious about such things.

"Yeah, set them to 'wise-beam' setting," LaForge said, disgustedly. "I can't believe I'm doing this."

"You've been on a starship too long. Back on DS9 we did this sort of thing every week or so."

The young engineer threw him a hard look. Bashir noticed his implants again. "I'd really like to take a look at those ocular implants sometime, Commander."

LaForge was taken aback. "Why? They're functioning perfectly."

"Oh no. I'm just fascinated by them. Maybe sometime you'll let me pop them out of your skull. Look them over, run a few tests, that sort of thing?"

LaForge just stared at him a minute, then slowly turned back to the controls. "I can't believe I left the Enterprise for this."

7

The supply depot had been erected amid the ruins of one of Damask's ancient cities. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been a mind-bogglingly massive breech of Starfleet protocol, but the ruins afforded them some protection from the weather, and the preservation of Onyx-17's historical architecture was quite low on the local's list of concerns. Under food, water, medical care, etc.

But most of the temporary residences for the refugees and homeless (referred to by Starfleet as "Displaced Persons" or DPs) were set up in concentric arcs emanating from the depot and surrounding base. The rioters were storming through the pre-fab streets like a reddish ochre spilled through an ornate carving. The residents of Onyx-17-distant relatives of the Chin'Tokans-were humanoid with slightly enlarged foreheads and flipper-like hands. Most wore Starfleet issue all-weather garments supplied by the relief teams. The things were ugly as sin, but warm and durable and treated to keep the DPs free from a host of bacterial infections the wounded planet was swarming with. In the midst of the riot.

Tall bonfires lit the gloom of the mid-afternoon (in this region), and Bashir could see individual humanoid figures lit up before them.

"What are they burning?" LaForge asked rhetorically. "The pre-fab structures are polymers. They couldn't ignite one of the vehicles without a photon grenade or two..."

"Maybe they got their hands on some," Bashir commented dryly.

"Why would they do that? We're just trying to help out. We're trying to rebuild their world here."

"They're tired of being subjects of everyone else. First the Cardassians, then the Dominion, then the Alliance, then the Dominion again. They're tired of not having any say in whether they live or die."

"Well just so we have a choice, I'm putting us down on the edge of the ruins. No bonfires there and sensors don't indicate a heavy humanoid presence."

"Sounds like a good idea."

LaForge brought the hopper down on a flat slab of stone that had once been a town square or a church or something. At the sight of them, the few residents scrambled away. They didn't implicitly fear Starfleet personnel, LaForge knew, but occupation by the Cardassians and the Dominion had certainly taught them the value of being somewhere else during times of civil disobedience. They stepped out into the cool, dry afternoon winds, and LaForge noticeably burrowed into his field jacket. Then he produced his tricorder and did a quick geographic scan. "We'll never make it through the ruins here. It'll take hours to go a couple meters with all the collapsed superstructures. We'll have to go through the aqueducts. They seem intact enough to be safe."

Bashir looked to where he was pointing and saw the openings in the base of a far wall. "All right. Let's go quickly."

LaForge shook his head. "You don't have to tell me twice."

The aqueducts were bone-dry and cavernous and blacker than space. They strapped high-penetration lights to their wrists, but still relied upon LaForge's enhanced vision to navigate the labyrinthine stone tunnels. The Planetary Engineer took the lead quite easily, Bashir noticed. Perhaps it was just the initial insanity of flying into the middle of riot that had put the man off. Either way, Bashir could understand how this man could ascended to be Chief Engineer of the Federation's flagship and hold it for over ten years.

Now, he was sensing a reversal of their roles. Bashir had to fight down flashes of panic that stung him like micro-seizures. All he could see were the occasional slices of cracked stone, curved walls, ornately-carved ceilings as his lights cut through the thick blackness. It was disorienting, perpetually seeing fragments, but never the whole.

"About thirteen meters ahead," LaForge said with certainty. Something skittered on stone, around them, above them, between them. "What the hell was that?"

"My tricorder's picking up a life form, but the residual radiation and charged particles of the ruins are interfering with a clear reading."

"So you don't know what it is?"

"No," Bashir answered ruefully.

"Swell," LaForge muttered. A moment later, Bashir heard the man's phaser slide out of his holster. Bashir drew his own.

They rounded a corner and saw light, flickering, sickly orange light, but to Bashir it was like stumbling upon an oasis in the Sahara. "We must be close to the outlet. That's firelight."

"Looks that way." LaForge closed his tricorder and slid it in its pouch at his hip. They wound through another snaking tunnel, the light growing brighter and it was soon intense enough for Bashir to make out the full shape and details of the tunnel around him. It felt as if he was setting foot on solid ground after being in a zero-G environment. They rounded yet another bend and came to the mouth of the aqueducts.

LaForge shook his head, "Never thought I'd be so glad to see the polluted sky of this planet."

"Me either," Bashir concurred as they hopped down the meter or so from the opening of the aqueduct to the rubble-strewn ground. LaForge pointed southwest.

"Depot's about two CUs this way."

CU, Bashir remembered, stood for Community Unit. It was the equivalent of a city block, applied to the prefab housing units the Corps of Engineers used for the refugees. They started toward the edge of the plastic, prefab community, but only got a couple meters.

Suddenly the spattering of errant refugees scurrying around the fringes of their vision coalesced into a crowd, a living, moving entity.

"This is not good," LaForge muttered under his breath. Bashir said nothing. They were standing in an open area between the edge of the base and the ruins, surrounded on two sides by high stone walls-the remnants of an ancient government building. Behind them were the entrances to the aqueducts, but they were cut off from those. The crowd was spreading out in an urban pincer-maneuver, cutting them off from the aqueducts behind and the base perimeter ahead.

Bashir turned, faced the surge of refugees. They were an unlikely mob, he thought somewhat improbably, all dressed in the same ugly, clean, well-mended garments. But anger blazed in the eyes, deep-set beneath their forehead ridges. Many held weapons, clubs, polymer strips chipped into shanks, tritanium bars, and a few old-fashioned flaming torches. They shouted challenges and threats, but Bashir couldn't lock on to any common theme or rallying cry. It was simply a mass of very angry people looking for an outlet. Someone to take it out on.

Beside him, he heard LaForge adjusting the settings of his phaser. Bashir decided to bank on a long shot. "I'm a doctor!" he shouted, holding up his medkit, hoping they'd pay more attention to that than the phaser in LaForge's hand. "We're here to take care of the wounded!"

A stone slammed his chest just above the sternum. He reeled back, the wind knocked out of him. He gasped, wheezed, tried to control his breathing, and dimly registered LaForge go down beside him.

Bashir swung his gun-arm out in a clumsy arc, but a stone slammed his forehead, and a needle of pain bisected his brain. He couldn't think properly, couldn't make a decision or analyze his situation. His genetically-enhanced coordinator and reflexes were useless. Another blow scrambled his vision. Beside him, in one facet of his eyesight, he saw men with metal pipes descend upon LaForge. An imperative cut through the pain and shock: render assistance! He pointed his phaser, but couldn't get his vison to coalesce to aim properly.

And then the bodies plowed him under and he found himself at the center of a screaming, sweating rain of blows. His hand shorted out in pain, losing the phaser, his breath banished from his lungs, and his vision closing in upon itself. A fist rammed his right kidney, sending a wash of pain through Bashir's torso, spasming his back into a bow. He tried to scream, but didn't have the breath. Twisting his head, he saw the crowd closing in, emboldened by the acts of a few brazen assailants.

Julian Bashir thought of Ezri as the crowd rushed him. He filed away the pain of his body and concentrated on being back in her back, surrounded by her warmth and her scent, losing himself in those bluest of eyes.

...those bluest of eyes...

...bluest...

...blue like the explosion that sent the mob toppling like bowling pins...

Screams, shouts, warnings, the weight lifted off of him...

He closed one eye so that he could see better, locked on to one image and squinted the remaining eye until it became decipherable.

Zorion. Staring down at him, a massive tetryon pulse launcher slung, battle-ready, over his shoulder.

From the distance, a voice: "Picked a hell of a time to drop in, Doctor."

8

Zorion had a medic with his team, a petite, blonde woman who quickly and efficiently set about tending to the worst of Bashir and LaForge's wounds. They had concussions and skull fractures which were easily mended. Once the worst was handled, Zorion ordered her to take care of the mob-which was still unconscious on the ground-then tossed Bashir his med-kit.

"Physician heal thyself," he said with a wry grin. "We're under orders in our urban pacification role here. Any heads we break we have to fix."

"Well, thank you again," Bashir croaked from a dry throat. He pressed a stimulant-filled hypo to his carotid artery, then offered it to LaForge.

"Hate to have our Chief Engineer and Chief Medical Officer both killed on my watch. That'd be a letter of reprimand for sure. And the damndest thing would be the fact that I'd have no idea why you two cementheads were out here in the first place. The review team would question me as to why you two were here and I would have to answer, 'Because they're cementheads, sir. Damndest thing.'"

Bashir was impressed with Zorion's ability to pick up on human aphorisms, if not his ability to deploy them in these circumstances.

The Chief of Security propped the pulse-launcher against a wall and stood over them. To Bashir, sitting on a chunk of masonry, the Elloran looked towering. "So why don't you sate my curiosity, Doctor."

Bashir fumbled with a coagulant-enhancement cartride for the hypo. "Commander LaForge can explain it better."

LaForge's head whipped around. "Oh no. I'm not the one who insisted we pilot into the middle of a riot."

"You were at the controls," Bashir pointed out.

"Because you insisted!"

"Well you were the one who woke me up all energized by these recent developments..." Bashir gave himself the injection, and again offered the hypo to LaForge. When the engineer reached for it, Bashir pulled back. "Tell him or I let you bleed to death."

"Sirs," Zorion purred with feigned respect, "while this exchange is indeed fascinating and does conclusively prove you are both, in my humble opinion, cementheads, it doesn't really answer my question."

"Watch what you call superior officers," LaForge groused, eliciting only a tolerant smile from Zorion who, as Chief of Security, held a position which on a practical level outranked both of them, even if his actual rank of Warrant Officer did not.

His silence got to LaForge first. "All right, I'll tell it."

Bashir handed him the hypospray.

"You'd probably mess up the details anyway." He gave himself the injection and told Zorion what he'd learned. When he was finished, Zorion's eyes had narrowed like a monitor lizard's.

"Well...," he growled. "This is quite a development, isn't it?" He stood and looked out at his team, tending to the injured mob. "Yes, I think a visit to the supply depot is definitely in order."

"What about them," Bashir waved at his inert attackers.

Zorion shrugged. "I had the pulse-launcher at its lowest setting. They'll wake up with some nasty headaches. My people are just making sure none of them are irreparably damaged. Tensions in this area between Federation personnel and the DPs are bad enough without any of them getting killed by our hands."

"That's for sure," LaForge said.

"But they all look well enough to me. And I am dying to check out the depot..."

9

The Federation Supply Depot was a thirty-story building that from the ground seemed to extend all the way into the charcoal sky. Inside, it was warm and well-lit in the same manner as all the rest of the pre-fab buildings. Usually, Bashir found this uniformity annoying, but with the encroaching night had come cold winds that cut through their field jackets and whipped ashy dust across their faces with the sting of a horsewhip.

Zorion's authority got them through most of the checkpoints, guards, clerks, and various other layers of bureaucracy until they got to the quartermaster. He was a wiry man with unruly blond hair and a slightly nervous manner.

"Ensign Basking, isn't that correct?" Zorion demanded in his silky, hissing voice.

"Yes, sir...I mean..." Basking fumbled with his padd, nearly bobbling it into a stack of medkits. "Yes...yes I am. Yes."

"We'll need to peruse your logs, Ensign. Please isolate and transfer all materials dealing with mines, passive anti-personnel weapons, deployment methods...whatever you have."

Basking blinked several times and looked from Zorion to Bashir to LaForge back to Zorion. "I don't...uh...I'm not sure I..."

"You don't have to, Ensign," Zorion snapped.

"Um, yes....yes sir. I can just...There's a terminal in the office. The..." he cocked his thumb toward the small, overslung office formed by a trapezoid in the ceiling's upper northwest corner.

"That'd be excellent, Ensign," Bashir said soothingly and watched some color return to Basking's face.

Zorion didn't join them in the office, but chose instead to do a visual inventory of the depot's mines. Bashir suspected the man just wanted to beg off analyzing long lists of numbers.

And long lists of numbers was what they were treated to. They scrolled down the screen of the terminal that dominated the small office. Aside from the terminal, there was simple metal desk, some molded chairs, and a couple of padds stacked in the corner. One wall was a solid window which, improbably enough, looked out over the expanse of the interior of the depot, affording them, as LaForge put it, "a marvelous view of a lot of crates."

They scanned the numbers for a few minutes, but it only took a few minutes.

"These numbers are off," Bashir noted.

"What do you mean? We just did a preliminary count. You can't..."

"I'm remembering the troop-deployment records from this area. I had to review them shortly after the war ended in preparation for this project."

LaForge's LEDs intensified again. "But that was almost a full year ago!"

"It's a long story," Bashir muttered, then pointed to the screen. "Look at the inventory memo here-This depot has an approximate 15% weapons overrun. According the explanations here, it's due to 'unexpected troop activity.'"

"Seems logical to me," LaForge shrugged. "They had attachments, transfers, units stopping off here..."

"But they never did," Bashir explained. "That was in the deployment records. They gave a history of troop movements in the area to make it easier to ID unknown casualties. Connect them with their units and so on.

"Here's the problem: this planet and this province saw a very low level of troop movement. The Dominion fleet presence from the Chin'Toka system prevented that. There were almost never group troops just passing through, and certainly not enough to warrant a fifteen percent surplus of weaponry.

The engineer looked at him for a beat, then stroked his close-trimmed goatee. "I wonder if..." His dark fingers played over the keypad, calling up a separate set of lists. "Well," he breathed. "Look at this..."

Bashir looked over the lists, then nodded slowly. "Seems that surplus was only in the area of small arms and explosives. No rations, med-packs, water pouches..."

"I may not be an infantryman," LaForge said, "but I do know that when they stock up a supply depot, they don't just settle for the guns."

Bashir tapped his comm-badge. "Bashir to Chief Zorion-"

Then the terminal exploded in a spray of polymer bits and burning filaments. LaForge hit the ground, but Bashir spun his body to face the direction of the phaser bolt. Basking stood inside the room, pale as milk, trembling and sweating. He moved to fire again, but Bashir's enhanced reflexes and coordination beat the ensign to the punch, sending a high-powered phased-energy beam into the man's shoulder. Basking spun, grabbed his shoulder with his good hand as the gun arm began to twitch spasmodically.

"Drop it!" LaForge yelled from where he was getting up off the floor. Basking looked from one to the other, then charged the other end of the room. Bashir tracked him, but didn't fire, trying to understand what the man was doing. When Basking grabbed a chair with a slung it side-arm. Bashir fired, the beam hitting Basking dead-bang in the spine, just as the chair shattered out the cheap, transparent polymer of the window. Basking should have gone down but didn't. He kept moving forward, propelled the last few steps by a blast of panic-induced adrenaline. He leapt, seemed to hang for a moment swept by the wind currents of the cavernous depot then disappeared a moment before the crackling thud echoed through the building.

---

Part Two Welcome to the Jungle

Had it been less than one DS9-standard day, Bashir wondered, that he'd been here, in this room, with these people, aboard this ship? Once again, the ruined ball of Onyx-17 loomed large in the Lexington's viewport, setting a grim pall over some already grim proceedings.

"I was not aware of Doctor Bashir's or Commander LaForge's, ah, actions in this matter," Coleridge said stiffly, but wearily, to a troubled-looking Admiral Ross. Bashir pitied him as far as he generally allowed himself to feel sympathy for superior officers. Ross's usual roster of headaches regarding the planetary resuscitation just swelled to include a criminal officer who'd thrown himself out a window rather than face an investigation. There was no way to make that look status quo.

"Captain Coleridge was involved in his weekly battery of meetings here," Bashir explained, trying to keep the dryness out of his voice. "He was unavailable for consult."

"So was Chief Zorion," LaForge said quickly. "There was a riot..."

"Riot?"

"Civil-unrest action Damask Province," Coleridge said.

"I see," Ross answered grimly. He seemed to be getting used to such things. For his part, Bashir filed civil-unrest action in his expanding Starfleet lexicon. "Well, let's cut to the chase on this one, gentlemen. What's the connection? Starfleet Command is going to want a full explanation, and I'd like to submit a report that I can say was authenticated by my Planetary Commander and his Chief of Security."

"It seems our less-than-intrepid Ensign Basking was likely involved in stockpiling weapons," Zorion said in his silky, yet crisp voice. "My opinion is that he was selling them on the black market."

"Oh God," Ross buried his face in his hands. "Starfleet small-arms in the hands of criminals and terrorists..."

"We'll be seeing a great deal of that," Zorion added, nonplused. "It always happens after wartime."

Ross looked up, over his fingers, like a man facing an unpleasant, inconceivable truth. Bashir marveled again at how tactically and administratively brilliant the man was, while still retaining such a high level of naivete.

"Yes," Ross said neutrally. "But our own people..."

"There is still the question of the mine and Doctor Rudofsky's shuttle," Captain Coleridge added.

"There is no clear answer to that," Zorion said evenly, "and our Ensign Basking certainly isn't of much help. I've put together a team of my best investigators to look into the matter at the supply depot to see if our Ensign Basking was a part of a larger criminal ring within the troops stationed there or if he dealt directly with the underworld. If it's the former, they'll be exposed and arrested. If it's the latter, we'll gain as much information as we can and turn it over to Starfleet Intelligence. They're rather adept at handling these sorts of things."

"But the mine..."

"Probably fell into the hands of pro-Dominion sympathizers," Zorion went on. "There are scattered groups of such sympathizers all over the system."

"I know," Ross sighed heavily, "but most of them haven't committed acts of violence on this scale. Thrown stones, some minor arson, but actual tactical weaponry..."

"Maybe someone got a few from Basking," Bashir suggested. "Perhaps that's what he was doing with the weapons."

Zorion's black, reptilian eyes narrowed when he looked at Bashir. "We'll know if he did."

2

"You're trouble, Doc," LaForge said as they got in the turbolift.

"Where's your sense of adventure, Geordi?" It was the first time Bashir had used the engineer's name, and the comradery of it felt good. Even if it was artificial. "We exposed a major criminal enterprise at the heart of Starfleet. We've given Chief Zorion some people to interrogate and terrorize, and Admiral Ross something further to worry about."

LaForge sighed. "Okay, first off, Doc, we're a hell of a long way from the heart of anything out here. Secondly...well, you're right about Zorion. I've never seen him so happy. As for Admiral Ross-"

"He's an Admiral. They're paid to worry."

"Well, I've also got plenty to worry about. The damn atmospheric scrubbers aren't detecting the full degree of the toxins, which is putting us way behind schedule. So if you don't get us some culture samples, we'll be even further behind. And if that happens, Doc, Admiral Ross's main worry is going to be you."

"I'll have Doctor Behnke get you the bloody cultures."

"Good," LaForge muttered grudgingly, and looked at the doors to the lift. It whined to a halt and opened. They stepped out into another spacious corridor (Bashir estimated that Sovereign-class vessels had approximately 32 kilometers of corridors, having done the mental calculations during his System Personnel Meeting that morning). They stepped into the open, spacious transporter room. A short Bolian worked the controls.

"You spend much time on the holosuites here?" Bashir asked the still-exasperated engineer.

"They're called holodecks aboard starships, Doc. And no. I never really got into the fantasy elements."

"Do you enjoy espionage fiction?"

LaForge looked at him quizzically.

"Oh you know, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsythe, David Morrell...that sort of thing?"

"Yeah," LaForge shrugged. "I guess I like a good spy novel. Why?"

Bashir said nothing, just filed that fact away for later use.

3

He skipped the rundown from Alyssa Ogowa, primarily because he didn't want to know what had transpired in the last ten hours. Despite the front he'd put up for Ross, Coleridge, and LaForge, Bashir still felt the aches of his injuries at the hand of the mob. He was drained and agitated from lack of sleep, unnerved at watching a man commit suicide in front of him.

He just wanted to sleep.

Bashir undressed and fell, naked, only his cot. "Computer play all received transmissions in the past seventeen hours," he ordered listlessly. The first two were updates from Starfleet Medical on the modified treatments for radiation burns. As usual, Bashir had discovered them already through trial and error, pain and death. He skipped through them and wondered about the offhand suggestion O'Brien had made in the transmission he'd sent before Bashir shipped out for Onyx. They could really use more people like us here, Julian. People who've been on the front lines and know the way things work in reality, under fire, and not in some textbook or classroom...

San Francisco. The Bay. Golden Gate Park...It was tempting, he admitted, but in a facile way. Earth held nothing for him right now. DS9 was where the need was. Where the refugees stopped en route to resettlement colonies, where the injured soldiers and survivors passed through on the their way home from the long war. Where Ezri was.

She appeared in the next transmission. She must have come off of her duty shift, because her hair was adorably mussed, and her uniform jacket was unfastened and hung open.

"I'm sorry I can't talk longer, Julian, but with all the fleet activity in this area they've been limiting long-range transmission time. Things have gotten so crazy here. Starfleet has taken The Defiant away from Commander Kira. They've got a new captain who'll be stationed here to command it. A new crew. They still haven't recruited a replacement for Odo. Deputy Jaxor does his best, but he's in over his head, and he's the first to admit it. I've been seeing him three or four times a week just to talk through the stress of the job. Neela has been keeping the station rotating, and she's pretty good at training the new Starfleet engineers. And the Klingons just keep passing through, but no one's talking about where they're going

"I miss you so terribly, Julian. I feel like a piece of me is gone. It's all been so strange, our relationship. I'm not complaining--you know that-but you've been such a huge part of my life. Of Jadzia's life. You're this universal constant, and I just can't imagine my life without you.

"I'm rambling. Sorry. I miss you. I hate falling asleep and waking up alone. The nights are too long, the bed is too cold, the mornings just seem empty and tiresome. Please come home soon, Julian."

She kissed the tips of her fingers and touched them to the screen.

And whatever could San Francisco offer to compete with that?

3

He awoke with a start, literally shaken from bed. Bashir found himself sitting up in bed, poised to act before the thought had even fully coalesced in his mind. He waited a moment until it returned from the amorphous state his sleep had molded it into.

Alcohol.

Doctor Rudofsky had been drinking like a proverbial fish that evening-Bashir had even commented on it, eliciting a small fragment of her past. Growing up in a manual-labor colony on Primareous Major where the adults drank hard and had no use for Synthehol.

But it didn't fit. Perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps the events of the past few days had shaken him from dead center and he was seeing phantoms. Bashir called up his medical logs and the logs associated with the hopper explosion.

The information scrolled down his screen, and he quickly found the reports he needed.

No, he was not mistaken.

Bashir dressed quickly and headed out into the cold, inky night.

4

"Aww...This better be damned good, Doc," LaForge griped as he hunched in the doorway to his quarters.

"Do you have access to the wreckage of the hopper?" Bashir asked hurriedly?

"That doesn't qualify as good."

Bashir pursed his lips and choked down the urge to slap the engineer silly. "Do you?" he demanded.

"Why?"

Bashir handed him his padd. "Look at this."

"Why don't you just give me the summary, Doctor. I'm not really in the mood..."

Bashir snatched the padd away from him, scrolled down, then highlighted the pertinent portions of text. "I'd been drinking with Doctor Rudofsky not two hours before the explosion. She'd started drinking before I got to the lounge. She continued after I left."

"What was she having?" LaForge asked absently as he scratched his neck.

"Whiskey on the rocks. Look at her blood alcohol level." He handed the padd back to LaForge whose implants whirred slightly as they zoomed in.

"Zero? Is that what it says, doc?"

"Yes," Bashir shouldered in beside him and pointed. "These chemicals here indicate the presence of an alcohol dissipation compound. She was deliberately counteracting the alcohol in her system."

LaForge shrugged. "Maybe she didn't want to be drunk."

"Seems so. Obviously wherever she was going it was important that she be stone sober. I inventoried the wreckage of the hopper. Look at this," he pointed again.

"An isolinear data rod."

"What could a Cardassian data rod be doing on her hopper?"

"They're not uncommon. Not among engineers anyway. At least two-thirds of my crews have spent some time in Cardassian space, and at least half the stuff we're working with is Cardassian. There's a heavy exchange of technologies. It's a pain."

"But she wasn't an engineer. Why would she have it?"

LaForge opened his mouth, then looked at the polymer floor. "Are you gonna let me go back to sleep if I pull whatever usable information there is off the thing?"

Bashir rolled his head modestly. "I was hoping..."

"All right, hang on..." LaForge gathered his uniform.

5

"This is actually easier than it seems," LaForge explained as he activated the modular sensor array that was poised over the debris from the hopper.

The main engineering lab was a low, vast building, crammed with equipment and temporary offices. It was clean and brightly lit, and LaForge maneuvered through the maze of equipment piles, pre-fab cubicles, and work stations with the ease of a shark navigating a coral reef.

Miles would be in heaven here, Bashir thought.

On the monitor before them, the computer was busily extrapolating and assembling the data fragments from the pieces of the data rod.

"This is going to be sketchy, doc," LaForge explained. "But we should be able to elicit a couple of decent karobytes of information, here."

Bashir looked on the smaller monitor by his wrist which displayed the assembled information.

"Nothing very interesting. Medical logs, communications sub-routines...looks like filler information. But why would she have-"

Then the big file loaded.

An image file. A face. Coordinates. Times.

"Looks like we got something," LaForge said.

"A meeting of some sort. On Keltis Prime."

"The moon?" LaForge asked, only vaguely believing it. It was an added layer of irony that Onyx-17's only moon was more pleasant and habitable than the planet itself. Throughout the war and immediately after, Keltis had become a port-of-call for anyone in the area with money. The last bastion of capitalism in a ruined sector.

"What was she going there for?" LaForge wondered aloud.

"Well," Bashir said slowly. "We have a picture. We have coordinates. We have place names..."

"No."

"...locations...

"No."

"...there must be some craft handy..."

LaForge glared at him. "No, doctor."

"I've never been to Keltis. Have you?"

LaForge sighed.

6

From a high orbit, the moon was as nondescript as the planet it circled, but from an atmospheric vantage, the ruddy surface of the moon gave up elaborate canyons, ravines, and moraines. The polar caps had migrated with a vengeance on this moon, sending forth an armada of glaciers that carved deeply into the moon's crust.

Keltis Prime was one of the larger ports on Keltis, a self-contained city that dangled off the precipice of a thirty-kilometer deep canyon. From twenty kilometers up, the city looked like a diamond set into a ball of clay. From ten, it was a bejeweled platter glittering in the night. And from landing-vector approach it was a complex, slightly run-down compression of functional buildings and half-hearted artistry.

This was not a city, Bashir reflected as they cruised in for a landing. This was not a community draped on the support system of utilities and commerce and trade. This was precisely the opposite. Keltis existed because there were people with disposable currency who needed somewhere to spend it.

There had always been places like this, though, Bashir knew. Strange little outposts of capitalism gone rampant, as if the exchange of monies and goods could stave off the violence that gripped the world around them. It may have been possible once, when wars were fought over resources and land. But this had been a rawer type of war. A more pure type of war. This had been a war on the part of the Dominion to exterminate everyone else. A free-market system was no shield against those who burn such things to the bedrock to eradicate all traces of them.

Yet here it was, owing its existence to the fact that by the time the Dominion noticed it, the Alliance had begun its push into Cardassian space.

"You know where this place is?"

Bashir nodded. "I think I've got a pretty good idea from the data fragments on the isolinear rod."

"If this was a pre-arranged meeting, what makes you think the person will still be there?" LaForge asked as he glided on a landing vector.

"Because it was a passive meeting. She was going to meet someone where she knew to find him. There's every indication that he spends quite a bit of time around this place."

LaForge took his eyes from the hopper's controls for just a second-just long enough to nail the doctor with hard, inquisitive stare. "What kind of place?"

7

"Dabo!"

And the crowd went predictably wild, pushing in around the winner as if hoping his luck were an infectious thing that they could catch. More likely the bolder and entrpreneurial-minded were hoping to snatch a few errant bars of latinum.

"You brought me to a casino!" La Forge exclaimed, probably trying to be emphatic, but competing against the natural noise of the place. It was a high, bowl of a structure whose nucleus was devoted to the gaming tables and the bar which ran half the perimeter of the structure. Above them were rings of balconies where men and women of varying stages of undress-either by choice or by profession-were leading lucky gamers, drunk losers, decadent-minded debauchees, or any combination of the three in and out of the doorways set into the darkness. LaForge didn't seem to have noticed that feature yet, and Bashir decided to keep him fixed on other things.

"Dabo," he explained loudly. "I could show you how to play."

"Doc, we could get court-martialed just for being here!"

"Well, that's an overstatement..."

"We're in the middle of...What the hell is going on up there!"

Uh-oh. "Perhaps we'd better mingle...

"There're prostitutes up there!"

Bashir fought the urge to grab LaForge's arm to keep the man from running out the door, flying home and burning all flight logs. "We're here as a Starfleet presence. Just don't...partake in the services."

LaForge looked at the floor and heaved a mighty sigh-one that was visible to Bashir even in the strobing dark/light/dark of the casino. "Let's just find this guy and go."

"That's what I was thinking. You stay near the main entrance; pretend to be interested in that bakuiat game. Use your implants on infrared to track me. When I find him, I'll signal. You'll be able to keep track of both of us."

"Fine by me. Closer to the door the better."

Bashir gave his shoulder a fraternal squeeze, but LaForge didn't seem to be getting in the spirit.

Quark's had never been like this, Bashir reflected as he wove through the clusters of adrenaline- and greed-fueled gamblers and hangers-on. They were of all ages and species-Bashir even thought he caught a Cardassian face in a clot of revelers surrounding a mekshoo mesa. Yes, the variety and abundance of beings drawn to the energy and lure of treacherous chance was identical to Quark's, but being stationbound his space had been limited. This place seemed to go on forever. Gambler's Valhalla. And the lighting was more severe and dramatic. Whereas Quark's was dimly-lit enough to afford the bar patrons a suitably morose atmosphere and the gamblers a suitably exciting one; this place was nearly dark unto black, with the most prominent light-sources being set in and around the gaming tables, so that the crowds around them were afforded the illusion of being the most important people in the room.

He was conspicuous, he knew, but he hadn't had the presence of mind to bring civilian clothing on the hopper. Let your excitement get the better of you, Julian, he thought furiously, and you'll be dead before any of this is sorted out. He wished Miles were here. Miles had always possessed the workman-like pragmatism necessary to reign in and channel Bashir's own boyish energies. Still, he was lucky this time around. No one paid any attention to the uniform. The tables, the gamers and the winners commanded attention, everything else was mere distraction. Besides, there were so many different types of beings here, what was one in a Starfleet uniform?

Bashir cruised amid the tables and gamers like a shark, assessing and analyzing. He'd committed the face to memory from the grainy picture on the padd, and his genetic-enhancements were once again making life easier all around. He was confident that he could spot the man, even disguised.

But the man wasn't in disguised.

He was standing over a dabo table, throbbing like a living organ, fed by the intoxicating excitement of the revelers around him. He looked the same as he did on the padd-middle-aged (by human standards), but lean and lanky, with sunken features and a foolish mouth. In the fragments they had from the data rod, he'd been referred to only as "The Gambler" and that seemed as apt a description as any.

Bashir made a quick motion with his hand for LaForge's benefit, then closed in. He'd lost weight since beginning his work at Onyx-the field rations were pure carbohydrates which burned off quickly in the course of his work-and he slipped between the clapping, cheering bodies with relative ease. When he bumped people, he put up his hands innocently flashed his most charming smile. No one took a second look at his uniform.

It took nearly ten minutes, but he managed to sidle along the edge of the dabo table until he stood next to The Gambler. He fixed his gaze on one number in particular, allowing him to keep The Gambler in his peripheral vision while not staring. The pinging of the table accelerated, then decelerated, and the crowed pressed in, the tension palpable.

"Dabo!"

The tension broke. The crowd erupted in vicarious catharsis. The Gambler turned slowly, holding aloft the latest bounty of winnings like an enemy's severed head, allowing his transitional fans to adore him even further. For this moment he was their god. For this moment he was the being they wished they could be.

And then he saw Bashir. In that instant, he didn't display recognition, merely reaction. His wrist flicked, sending bars of gold-pressed latinum up and then down in a glittering shower. With his other hand, he scooped up the rest of them and tossed a few more. Suddenly, Bashir was caught in a living vice as bodies closed in, pushed him aside, crushed him against the table in the scramble for the valuable bars. An elbow rammed his kidney, then a body bent him ninety degrees over the table. People were on the ground. Other people were trampling them.

The Gambler was gone.

Then, over the cacophony of the frenzied crowd, Bashir heard Laforge's voice. "Heading my way..."

Bashir grabbed the edges of the table and pulled himself up. He secured his footing, ignored the dealer's enraged shouts, and leapt. The extra height added a few extra meters to his jump, sending him through a throng of people who toppled around him like dominoes. Bashir didn't register anything, but the floor beneath his feet and the silhouettes figures at the far end of the room. He ran like a Galaxy-class starship, muscling through any resistence.

LaForge's voice again: "Doc, I got him here. He's-" A sudden scratch and then Bashir couldn't hear anything but ambient noise and the rush of blood in his ears. He threw aside a portly Wastuquian and saw the melee near the door.

LaForge was on the ground, The Gambler's ankle in a ferocious grip. The Gambler was in a half-crouch, and Bashir had the impression he'd just taken a blow. Bashir closed. Thirty meters. LaForge pulled himself up and grabbed the thin lapels of The Gambler's coat. The Gambler grabbed a platter of drinks from a passing waiter and swung it in a cruel arc, spraying shards of glass and slender ribbons of liquid as it shattered against LaForge's skull.

Bashir grabbed for his phaser, only to remember that it was at his hip. Instead, he unzipped his uniform jacket and reached for the small "cricket"phaser that was attached to his uniform shirt by a molecular adhesive. He hadn't even gotten it drawn by the time The Gambler burst through the doors.

"I'm fine! Let's go!" LaForge shouted, dragging himself off the ground. Bashir said nothing, simply took the man's word for it and they exploded out of the casino into the rain-slicked streets of Keltis Prime. Bashir was disoriented, but LaForge pointed at a figure on the winding main road. "There!"

They chased, the soles of their regulation boots adapting to smooth, slick stones of the road. The Gambler wasn't much of a runner, and they closed the distance easily. A hoverbus loitered at the end of the street-where it diverged into three narrowing avenues-effectively boxing the man in. "Got him!" Bashir hissed.

Just before the car hit them.

It wasn't a fatal collision-the vehicle's dampening field effectively knocked them aside before the machinery could come near them-but they went sprawling on the slippery road, and it afforded the Gambler time enough to climb around the hoverbus.

"Shoot him!" LaForge shouted from the other side of the road, where he'd made it to his knees. But Bashir had lost the cricket and couldn't the tiny, gunmetal object on the black street. He looked up, saw the driver of the car leap out amid two other passengers. One was familiar.

The medic from the hopper accident. The one with the livid scar.

Bashir wanted to shout, "He's ours!" but his brain wouldn't let him. It refused the logic of the scene.

The medic wasn't in a uniform, but a long raincoat, which suddenly swirled aside to reveal a short Romulan disruptor rifle. Bashir managed only a strangled croak before jade-green bolts of energy sizzled through the night and slammed The Gambler's body. For a moment the man was frozen in space, his body seeming to glow with the intensity of it. The he fell like a burnt tree limb into a heap which sizzled on the wet street.

Still shuddering from the rush of adrenaline, Bashir stood, took a step toward the group. The scarred man looked over at him. Their eyes locked. The scarred man's were as dead as the eyes of a Borg, and the total absence of fear or concern about his actions made Bashir more afraid than the act itself. The shooter's eyes quickly dipped to the street, and he bent over and scooped something up with the hand not cradling the rifle. It took a moment before Bashir recognized the cricket phaser. The shooter looked it over with what appeared to be feigned mild interest, then he stretched his arm out and fired. LaForge shuddered spastically and then went limp. The shooter turned on Bashir. The doctor set his feet to lunge, but hadn't even tensed his legs to initiate the action before the orange beam lashed out and erased the world.

8

The room, again. The room, the people, the ugly planet in the viewport. Bashir wondered for one surreal moment if perhaps he was dead, and this was some sort of an updated purgatory. Perhaps he died during Operation Assault. Perhaps the Defiant had been pulverized with the countless other Alliance ships in their drive to take Cardassia.

But had he done anything in his life so bad as to warrant spending eternity in this room, being reamed out in slow motion by Admiral Ross, while Captain Coleridge wished he were anywhere else, and Chief Zorion watched with oblique amusement? He didn't think so.

"You were told to desist any investigation of this matter," Ross droned with the slightest edge to his words. Not technically true, Bashir thought, but didn't bring it up. It wasn't the strongest of defenses.

"Now you have compromised a potential investigation by Starfleet Intelligence-"

Potential investigation? he mulled. How do you foul up something that hasn't even started yet?

"As well as possibly causing the death of a civilian who may or may not be related to these incidents."

Improbably enough, Zorion came to their defense. "I don't believe that is the case, Admiral. With all due respect," he added silkily.

Admiral Ross looked at Zorion as if the Elloran had just implacably told him that the warp nacelles had just fallen off the ship. "Would you mind explaining that, Chief Zorion?"

Zorion punched a few of the LCARS on the table, and the viewscreen opposite them coalesced into the image of the scarred assassin who'd stunned both LaForge and Bashir. "This man, so aptly described by Doctor Bashir, is known as Sonag. No other or alternate names available in the database. He appears human enough, but we really don't know. What we do know is that he happens to be on the scene of not less than fourteen murders of individuals connected to the Orion Syndicate.

Bashir felt his hackles rise. Now things were taking form. A very ugly, very nasty form.

Zorion's announcement had the same effect on everyone at the table. Ross leaned in as if considering some inexplicable enemy ship deployments, Coleridge looked even more like he'd rather be anywhere else, and LaForge-who up until this point had been sitting morosely beside Bashir, occasionally throwing him a murderous look-took a deep breath and set his jaw.

"What does this man do for the Syndicate?" Ross asked seriously.

"Well, our best guess is he kills people," Zorion said without a hint of condescension. "Unfortunately, Starfleet Intelligence either doesn't know or is not telling anything further. Either way, it would appear that the individual pursued by Doctor Bashir and Commander LaForge had run afoul of some very dangerous people. Their involvement may have expedited his death, but given the probable proficiency of Mr. Sonag, probably not by much."

"The Orion Syndicate," Ross said slowly. "What would doctor Rudofsky be doing with them?"

"We have no evidence that she was involved with them," Bashir said, trying to inject the right note of humility in his voice. "We found the identity of the deceased among the wreckage of Doctor Rudofsky's hopper. She may not have known of his connection to the Orion Syndicate. In the end, we don't know of his connection to the Syndicate, Doctor Rudofsky's connection to him, or any connection between her and the Syndicate."

Ross suddenly looked like a man pushed in the deep end. "Well what do we know, for God's sake?"

"Not much," Zorion said matter-of-factly. "Starfleet Intelligence is cagey on the subject of the Orion Syndicate, and truth be told, they weren't been terribly interested in them during the war. The information available is sketchy and primarily conjecture. The region we're in, the type of work we are engaged in, both make engagement with the Syndicate inevitable."

"There's a lot of equipment and materials flowing into this sector," LaForge said. "The Syndicate makes a lot of money selling that kind of stuff on the black market."

"And in the wake of the war, the black market is thriving," Zorion finished.

"Then it's probable that Ensign Basking was involved with the Syndicate as well," Coleridge stated bluntly.

"We haven't found any evidence of that so far," Zorion said.

"But you weren't looking for it, either," Ross pointed out. "Give his quarters, his logs, his contacts-give them all the once-over again."

Zorion looked a bit taken aback. Strange, that...Bashir thought. "I wouldn't make any preliminary conclusion as yet," he said, somewhat unsteadily. "After all, we have only one unknown man-not a Starfleet officer-killed by an individual who may or may not be working for the Syndicate. It's counter-productive to make any assumptions at this time."

"It's the best thread we've got to pull on," Coleridge said wearily. "Might as well pull on it until we find another. Or until something comes loose."

Admiral Ross set his mountainous shoulders. "I agree."

Zorion looked from one to the other, then said crisply: "I'll re-track the investigation and keep you apprized of anything I find, of course."

"Good," Ross said, then turned his gaze to LaForge and Bashir and put some iron in it that Bashir didn't much buy. "As for you two, I would hope that this latest information would convince you that you're in over your heads here. This situation is much larger than you realize, and neither of you has the background, the experience, and most importantly, the authorization to pursue this any further. Do I make myself absolutely clear?"

"Perfectly, sir," Bashir answered.

"Yes sir," LaForge said.

"Good," Ross nodded, but didn't thaw his gaze. "I expect then I won't see either of your names on any reports regarding further investigation of Doctor Rudofsky's death, the Orion Syndicate, or anything else?"

"No sir," they both said in unison.

"Good," he tugged at his uniform. "Last time I checked there were still things to build and people to heal down there."

9

By that evening a light mist had transformed into a hard rain, but the good news was that it's PH was high. Off the charts according to the meteorological toxicologists. It was even safe to touch human skin for periods less than two continuous hours. The first wave of atmospheric scrubbers were having an impact.

Bashir pulled on a protective poncho and slogged through the chemical-scented mud to LaForge's quarters. Like all the rest, they consisted of a polymer Quonset hut with a simple keypad/comm on the door. He chimed.

"Yeah?" LaForge's voice came from the speaker.

"Geordi, it's me."

"Aw no...Doc, I don't care if the Borg Queen beamed into your quarters and told you that she personally killed Doctor Rudofsky. I'm staying here tonight."

Bashir smiled at that. "No theories. No calls to action. I came to apologize. Now let me in."

Silence.

"Come on, Geordi. It's bloody raining out here and I'm probably contracting some as-yet-unheard-of toxic mutagen, so let me in." A moment later, the door buzzed open, and Bashir slipped inside, trying not to let too much of the chemical-laced rainwater come in with him.

"Hey, that stuff isn't going to melt the floor is it?" LaForge asked. He was sitting at his workstation in his duty slacks and T-shirt, his hardwired eyes poring over a padd. A dozen others were scattered about the workstation.

"You tell me. They're your scrubbers up in the atmosphere." Bashir stowed his poncho on a peg molded by the door.

LaForge barked a short laugh, but didn't take his eyes off the padd. "I wouldn't know, Doc. I've been running all over the place with you."

Bashir sat heavily in one of the seats molded into the wall. "Look, I'm sorry about dragging you into all this. I get a bit...impetuous at times. This business has me seeing every shadow with a phaser."

LaForge put down the padd. "I know what you mean. It's hard to make sense of it. Starfleet officers involved in the black market. A criminal organization buying Federation materials..." he rubbed his eyes. "I sure am a long way from the Enterprise."

Bashir nodded slightly. "I suppose I was fortunate, in a perverse way, out there on DS9. We had things like this delivered to our doorstep."

"We got to warp out of there after an hour or so," LaForge said reflectively. "We put out the fire. Captain Picard stabilized the situation. And we left the rest to people like you." He tapped the padd against his chin. "And to tell you the truth, Doc, I never much thought about what happened next."

"And here we are," Bashir continued the thought. "With no fires to put out and no situation to stabilize."

"Yep, and this time we've got our own people selling-"

It took Bashir a moment to process what precisely happened next, and by the time he did it was all over.

The polymer door had shattered like pane of glass that someone had thrown a brick through, and Bashir's arms raised reflexively against the spray of melted, plastic shrapnel. Even with his eyes squeezed shut, he knew what happened. He recognized the sound. The rapid throb and accompanying hiss of a disruptor weapon. He also heard the impacts-a screen explode and the walls melt, something toppled.

After that moment passed, however, he scrambled across the room. He'd known Geordi had fallen-he'd heard enough bodies hit the ground to recognize it in his sleep-but until he bent over him, he hadn't been sure of his worst fears.

They were confirmed.

Geordi was twisted like a broken piece of string, a fresh, hissing burn on his uniform shirt. Bashir also knew well the scent of burnt flesh.

"Ahhh..." Whatever Geordi was about to say was strangled in his throat as he clenched his teeth. Bashir reached under Geordi's cot and located the standard medical kit the Starfleet Corps of Engineers had placed there as they had in every unit. His medical tricorder was holstered at his hip. He pulled it out and flipped it open, but left it on the ground until he injected Geordi with the anesthetic from the kit. At the hiss, Geordi's body relaxed and he inhaled a deep, wheezing breath.

"Doc," he wheezed.

"Don't try and speak."

"You're just bad luck..." he managed and started a little chuckle before the anesthetic took him.

The medical kit was limited, but he could at least put together a decent compound to slow his metabolism, slow down the damage until he could get him to the infirmary. Only then did he run the diagnostic wand over the injury. The blast had disrupted Geordi's right kidney, portions of his spleen and liver and dozens of veins and arteries. But those results were expected. What was unexpected was the localization of the damage.

A disruptor would have scrambled the contents of his chest cavity at best.

This was a Starfleet phaser wound.

10

Saving Geordi's life was a matter so easy that it'd be alarming for anyone who'd ever strapped one on and relied on it to defend their life. Some quick work with a tissue regenerator while he rerouted most bodily processes through technology. It was a slow process to be sure, but not a difficult one. When he finished, LaForge's organs were repaired, but weak and healing, and the man was left to regain his strength over the next few days.

Coleridge was waiting for him in the post-op ward with a padd clutched in his hands as if it were the most precious thing in the Universe. Bashir made him wait until he'd disposed of his gown before acknowledging him.

"He'll live. I give him about thirty-six hours of recovery time, and he'll have to take regular injections of terol-thirteen-a tissue reinforcement protein. It shouldn't react with the rad tablets or antitoxins."

Coleridge nodded dispassionately. "Security doesn't have any record of anyone entering the base, but it wouldn't be very difficult. Here," he handed the padd to Bashir.

"What's this?"

"Your marching orders, Doctor. You chose to undertake a security investigation on your own accord. You chose to pursue it even after you were told not to. Now our Chief Engineer is recovering from a gunshot. Most likely because of what you stirred up. You're a loose cannon. You run off in all directions against common sense, and you don't follow orders. I don't want you on my planet, and Admiral Clark doesn't want you on his detail. You've got three days to get this medical unit in order for your replacement and to pack your things."

He turned on his heel and walked away without another word.

11

There were a great many things Bashir would have liked to say to Captain Coleridge: You couldn't command your way out of a wet sack...you haven't the intestinal fortitude to stand up to a clueless bureaucrat like Ross...you were tending to the engineering systems of a comfy starbase, while hundreds of thousands were dying on the front lines of the bloody war that created this mess, so what makes you think you can clean it up? Or, paramount in his mind: Maybe if you took a damned interest in actually commanding your people, they wouldn't end up dead quite so often!

But he didn't, naturally. There were other things at work in Bashir's mind. Things that were unsettling him. His removal from the project didn't bother him much more than to wound his pride. What could they do to him? Court-martial him? Doubtful, since it would shine an unflattering light on both Coleridge and Ross's combined abilities to manage the situation. Send him back to DS9? There was punishment; a return to the only home he had left and the arms of his lover. Enter a letter of reprimand in his file? Bashir was long past caring about such things, and so were most Starfleet officers in the wake of the war.

What bothered him was the Starfleet phaser rifle (and it indeed must have been a rifle, he reflected, as hand phasers were incapable of firing bolts) used in the attack on Geordi. Indeed, the whole attack upon Geordi and the death of Doctor Rudofsky had ominous overtones. When Miles had gone undercover inside the Orion Syndicate to find a traitor in the uniform, it wasn't questioned that he was risking his life. After all, it would have been a simple matter on their part, within their nebulous territory. This, however, was different. These were attacks upon Starfleet personnel on a Starfleet outpost. Bashir doubted the Syndicate was so unwise or suicidal. The whole system was under Starfleet's jurisdiction and, as in many areas since the end of the war, Starfleet was running it with a bit of a martial mind set. Why risk bringing Starfleet Intelligence agents swarming through their local cash-oasis of Keltis Prime? Starfleet Intelligence, if they were lucky. Ross could order in the Federation Marines to lock the place down tighter than a drumhead. No one at Command would care. They'd welcome the opportunity to cut this particular head off the Orion Syndicate hydra.

So why wasn't that happening?

Bashir used his clearance to monitor all Security, Intelligence, and troop orders and deployments for the system, and he found nothing to indicate that vigorous pursuit of the Syndicate was in effect. Was command that slow? Probably Ross-he had a thousand details to juggle and wasn't much of an action man on the best of days-but Coleridge? Impossible to tell. The man didn't give up any of his real personality or motives.

Was the assault on he and Geordi sanctioned?

Bashir pulled on a poncho and stepped into the rain. Three days be damned. If he didn't break this thing lose now, he'd never have the three days.

Because if it was indeed sanctioned, he'd never make it back to DS9 alive.

12

Getting into the armory turned out to be ridiculously easy once he threw caution to the wind. He used his command codes to override the lock and walked in. There would, of course, be a log of his activities, but Bashir suspected by the time anyone would be pulling that for evidence things here would have significantly changed. For the good or for the ill.

He went to the racks of phaser rifles. They took up most of the level he was on. Bashir thought quickly-no sense in dragging out what could already be an all-night job. The phaser rifle that had strafed Geordi's quarters would have to be a newer model. A Type 3a or 3b, he thought, since the old, ugly Type 3 that had been Starfleet's workhorse and the standard-issue rifle on DS9 fired sustained beams and not bolts. That left the compression models: the wide, 3a and the black, bullpup 3b. Which would have been used in the attack, Bashir couldn't hazard a guess. He'd only ever used the Type 3, however that didn't mean he couldn't narrow the field a bit.

He set his tricorder to detect passive energy levels and scanned the phaser rifles, one rack at a time. To his immense relief they all registered uniform energy levels. Standard security protocol, he guessed. Power up before the weapons are stowed. You'd hate to be issued a weapon that was down to three shots. He scanned rack after rack until one caught his attention: a 6-percent power dip. It was one of the Type 3b Compact rifles, short and with a folding foregrip. Bashir remembered a staff meeting wherein Sisko had announced that Starfleet would be issuing them to all starship crews due to their small size. Then the war had broken out and new supplies had become a struggle.

It was an ideal rifle for a quick ambush, he noted. Concealable enough to carry under a poncho unnoticed. Bashir didn't touch the rifle, but pulled the sensor-wand out of his tricorder's port and did a micro-cellular scan on the rifle's grip, trigger, and foregrip. Immediately the scanner's displayed a series of DNA traces. Bashir eliminated all but those which were older than the time of the attack. One DNA type remained. All he'd have to do now would be to cross-reference it with the personnel logs in sickbay.

Easy enough...

The scuffling sound behind him made Bashir spin. The whine of a phaser charging made him draw his own and bring it to bear on the vaguely humanoid silhouette that approached him.

"Doing a bit of field work, Doctor?" Zorion asked from behind the bulky mass of a type 3a phaser rifle. Its wicked barrel loomed in Bashir's vision so vividly that he could see the crackle of tiny blue veins of static discharge arc along the pincer-like split emitter resonator.

"Pity I'll have to bring all that hard work to an end now."

A blue flash swept everything else away.

---

Part Three The depths of my sins, the blackness of my heart

He had been born a middling, dim-witted boy, clumsy and dense. His mind did not process things with the speed or efficiency of others his age. And so while little Jules Bashir's contemporaries were learning to re-format their computer's memory cells and the fundamentals of throwing and catching a ball, he lagged behind, stymied by a slightly underpowered brain. He was, of course completely alone. Children are the ultimate practitioners of libertarianism, and as such the weak, the slow, the uncoordinated, and the none-too-bright are casually left behind and not given a second thought unless it is to wring some amusement out of their ridicule.

Jules Bashir's parents-being after all, parents-were devastated by their son's plight. They were not ashamed of him or embarrassed by him, but every failure, every grade he failed to get, every task which remained elusively beyond his mental grasp, every missed catch, every wobbly, off-target throw, every one struck them like a visible blow. The human heart is not a tangible thing, and it can break an infinite number of times. It was to spare them all a lifetime riddled with heartbreak that his father had done the unthinkable-had broken Federation law-and remade his son from Jules into Julian.

And it was Julian Bashir's genetically enhanced reflexes-the ones that had allowed him to throw and catch and pass unerringly, heroically-that allowed him to roll out of the path Zorion's phaser bolt with microseconds to spare, the phased energy discharge so close that it burned the hair on the right side of his face. As he evaded, he fired a single shot aimed from memory. It angled off into darkness but not before it sliced through the phaser rifle. Zorion thrust the wreckage away from his body and leapt backward before it exploded.

Bashir hit the rack of rifles to his left, allowed himself to rebound and swung into a firing stance, tracking through the acrid smoke and fumes of the slagged rifle. Zorion rose from his right periphery, and Bashir twisted his gunarm around until he felt the emitter cone of the phaser press into Zorion's flesh.

But a cold barrel dug into his throat.

"We appear to be in the midst of what you human's call a Mexican standoff," Zorion rasped between heavy breaths. "Though I can't say I understand the basis for this phrase."

"It doesn't have one," Bashir choked, then swallowed. "Someone said it. Someone else liked it. It took off from there."

They paused a moment-a moment dead except for their racked breathing as they struggled against the bestial adrenaline rush. Finally, Zorion said, in a voice that struggled to remain level, "This is pointless, Doctor. You cannot run, you cannot hide, and you cannot kill me. As of this moment, your career in Starfleet is over. The only question is how you would like it to end-by resigning your commission and facing a general court-martial or by being hunted like a common criminal. The choice is yours."

Bashir breathed a few more times, wondering if he was getting enough oxygen to his brain. "What?" he gasped incredulously. "You're bloody arresting me?"

"That is a part of my duties, Doctor,"Zorion said with irony that was very obviously feigned. He was as off-kilter as Bashir.

Bashir let his phaser fall. "I thought you were here to kill me."

The pressure of Zorion's phaser lessened, but didn't disappear. "That isn't a part of my duties, Doctor."

"I thought you were sent by the Orion Syndicate."

"I was under the impression that you were the Syndicate's assassin," Zorion said, doubtful.

"Why the hell did you think that?"

"I had my reasons," Zorion retorted defensively.

Bashir stood, easily shrugging away the weapon in his neck. "Well, I'm not. But I can tell you who is."

Zorion stood. "Who?"

"We'll need to go sickbay."

2

"This will take a few minutes, but not very long..." Bashir said distractedly, as he set the program in motion.

"I haven't heard the name of the culprit yet," Zorion called, almost mockingly from where he lounged in the corner, his rifle held at port-arms.

Bashir turned from his terminal. "And I haven't heard the explanation for why you stuck a phaser rifle in my face."

Zorion looked at the floor uncomfortably and shifted the rifle. "I had a particular theory that you seemed to be bearing out when I interrupted you. I'm not so certain of it anymore."

"Oh?"

"We have no idea how to connect Doctor Rudofsky to the Orion Syndicate, but we also have no idea what she was doing with them. The one folds into the other quite neatly, don't you think?"

"Yes," Bashir answered. "But that's hardly an earth-shattering leap of deductive reasoning. Nor," he added pointedly, "cause enough to nearly kill me."

"The weapon was set to level one. You'd've had the equivalent of a nasty sunburn and a very bad headache."

"Yes well, there was no way I could have known that. Was there?"

"Much of the purpose of wielding a weapon is intimidation," Zorion replied acidly. "Anyway, Doctor Rudofsky is the victim of an assassination by the Orion Syndicate. Why? Why would they attempt such a bold maneuver? Killing a Starfleet officer on a Starfleet base? Unheard of. They would have needed the help of a fairly sophisticated network here on Onyx, don't you think?"

"Yes," Bashir answered stiffly. Zorion had been thinking the same things he had. And arrived at the conclusion that he had been the culprit.

"This also seems unlikely, Doctor, doesn't it? How many Starfleet officers-before recent events anyway-have been corrupted by the Syndicate that you know of?"

"One," Bashir replied. "It's difficult to bribe people who don't use money."

"Exactly. So isn't it more likely that a rank officer is the single spider in this particular web. Someone who could have cleared the way for an assassin to enter the base. Give them the appropriate access codes and authorization. Sentry patrol routes. And finally the means to get into the armory.

"And after a bit of thought I wondered why a person of such rank would need to hire someone to do the job. They'd have these things themselves..."

"And you arrived at me as a culprit?" Bashir exclaimed irritably.

"Everyone who's become dead in this little equation was with you shortly before it happened. Doctor Rudofsky was drinking with you shortly before she got aboard the hopper-or so you say, as no one can corroborate your story. Ensign Basking was with you and Commander LaForge when he jumped."

Suddenly the pieces fell into place and fit. They fit imperfectly, but Bashir could see how those things could be overlooked. "You thought that Geordi and I were involved somehow. We killed Basking and then I attempted to kill Geordi. But Geordi didn't die, did he?"

"No," Zorion admitted, "but he's not conscious, either. And what would be more believable: that you and LaForge were alone in a room when a mysterious assailant just happened along and sprayed the room with phaser-fire, hitting LaForge but somehow, miraculously missing you-"

"Which is the truth."

Zorion ignored him, "Or that the aforementioned happened, and you attempted to save his life, very nearly did so, only to have the patient take a sudden turn for the worse and pass away."

"The latter," Bashir conceded, "would be more credible."

"So credible, no one would ever think to question it," Zorion said.

"And you followed me."

"And saw you go into the armory."

The computer chimed, "Match found."

Bashir turned and regarded the computer screen. "We have a name."

3

Lieutenant (j.g.) Sharpe was pulling his chin above the bar without the slightest bit of difficulty or hesitation in his corded, muscular arms. A fine sheen of sweat glittered across his forehead and the back of his neck and shoulders. Dark stains made rough wedges down the front and back of his T-shirt from the neckline. His chestnut hair was swept back from his brow, making him appear simultaneously regal and rugged.

His powerful body made fifty-seven of the short journeys from below the bar to above and back while Bashir and Zorion watched from an overhang on the upper level of the gymnasium, It was getting late, the Onyx night growing deeper and more impenetrable, and it was driving most of the people out of the gym. They didn't much like the idea of trying to navigate to their quarters in this opacity. Sharpe didn't leave, though. He's not done with his pull-ups, yet, Bashir thought bitterly. He's not afraid of the dark, either.

By the time Sharpe made it to seventy-nine before the gym was empty save for Zorion and Bashir who'd sauntered over to him.

"Good evening, Lieutenant," Zorion said silkily, adding: "Junior Grade, that is."

"Something I can do for you, Chief?" Sharpe grunted, not falling out of rhythm.

Bashir did his best impression of a perplexed Quark. "You perspire quite a bit, Lieutenant."

"Yeah...I'm working out." He didn't give any regard to Bashir. Not to his rank. Not to who was in the scheme of things unfolding around the base.

"Sweat is a wonderful provider of DNA, did you know that? Perspire on something and you might as well engrave your initials on it. Did you know that?"

Sharpe did a few more pull-ups before answering. "Enh. No. Didn't give much of a damn either."

"You should," Zorion said easily. Then his fist shot forth with speed that dazzled even Bashir's genetically-enhanced reflexes, and smashed into the tip of Sharpe's sternum with a dull thump. The man's sudden intake of breath was louder than the impact-a shrill, astonished whine-and the man fell heavily from the bar into a heap on the floor.

"Chief!" Bashir snarled in warning.

"Now, now, Doctor," Zorion said placating, though his eyes were flat and dead and intent. "I'm merely trying to get that man's attention. I've a lot to compete with after all. Rigorous physical workouts. Stimulating maintenance details. Attempting to kill two Starfleet officers. Most likely involved in the murder of one..." His boot exploded against Sharpe's temple, and the man fell sideways, rolled over once, then came to rest on his hands and knees.

"Zorion!"

Zorion drew his phaser. Bashir moved to grab it, but then Sharpe sprang like a loosed animal. One precise shot from Zorion's phaser put him back on the ground. Only then did Bashir recognize the red-rimmed eyes and the animal scent of his sweat.

"Was it the psy-tabs?" Bashir asked. Sharpe blinked rapidly, his brain struggling to process Bashir's assumption. This time it was the doctor who kicked him-hard and once in the same temple Zorion had kicked.

"Why, Doctor..." Zorion teased blackly.

"He's on psycho tropic tablets," Bashir snarled. "They re-arrange the brain's chemistry. Usually to rewire fear or pain into exhilaration or pleasure. You can smell it in his perspiration. Smells like a bloody Clydesdale. Straight-forward manipulation won't affect him much." Then he turned back to Sharpe.

"When did you start on them?"

Sharpe pressed his hands to the side of the head that Bashir had kicked. "I was at Chin'Toka," he spat defiantly. "I was a damn infantryman! They killed eighty-thousand of us before we held that damn rock!"

"Where did you get them?" Zorion demanded.

"Everybody had them. Or something." Sharpe paused to press the heel of one hand against his head as if trying to keep it from exploding. "There was lots of medical contraband. Supply vehicles got shot to hell and looted. You found things on dead guys...Everybody carried their own little stash. Their own hypo of anaesthetic or hyper-coagulant, whatever-in case the medic got taken out. Some people got the tabs. They were better. You just didn't give a damn if you got hit when you had one of those things in your system. You weren't scared, even when guys were being blown to chunks around you. You'd walk through your best friend's arterial spray and face down a wall of disruptor fire and just keep shooting. Your arm gets blown off-screw it you got another. Your leg gets blown off-screw it, you got grenades. Hey, I know what it sounds like but if you had see what happened..."

"I did," Bashir said quietly. "I was at Chin'Toka, too. A field medic. I'm not impressed."

"You got to go home!" Sharpe cried, spittle flying randomly from his lips. "You didn't have to stay and see everything else. What the Dominion did to the natives and the counter-attacks, and then when the Breen came into play they just started slaughtering..."

He was cut off by Zorion's boot catching his throat. "Let's get on the same page, Lieutenant Junior Grade. I don't care about the war, about Chin'Toka, or about whatever demons you're trying to quell with these things. All I care about is where you get your supply."

Zorion tried to sit up, rasped, then was seized by a fit of coughing.

"All right then, I ask. You nod. Sound good?"

Sharpe nodded wildly as he continued to cough.

"After the war you had to get the tabs black market, yes?"

A nod amid the coughing.

"So you found the Orion Syndicate," Bashir concluded.

A shake of the head.

"They found you."

Nod.

"They own you," Zorion asked.

Nod.

"You set the bomb that killed Doctor Rudofsky," Bashir asked, tasking bile.

A head shake so vigorous it exacerbated his coughing fit. He made a physical effort to control it, then managed: "Only..." his index finger stabbed at Bashir, "...and LaForge...never before..." he broke off, wheezing, his eyes bulging and watering.

"I'm willing to bet, however, that you can take us to whoever did, yes?" Zorion's smile showed sharp incisors.

Sharpe's sudden, shrill wheeze was almost comically timed. His red-rimmed eyes widened in horror at the prospect. Bashir spoke quickly before he could protest. "Any attempt to kill me or Commander LaForge is doomed now, you must understand that. Unless you take me to meet them, they'll kill you for failing. You do understand that?"

"Yeah...I...but..."

"The only way to resolve this is a face-to-face between me and whoever is in control of the Syndicate in this sector."

Sharpe looked at Zorion, then at Bashir, then his left hand began to tremble with such force that it tapped a code against the floor. "Petrilax," he said quietly. "That's his name: Petrilax."

4

Keltis Prime throbbed with the same energy it had just a day earlier, when Bashir and LaForge had witnessed the execution. The streets, the buildings all seemed to pulse faintly like a living thing. For the good or for the ill, Keltis Prime was alive. Onyx-17 was not. Even in this alley, wide, lined with trash, and improbably empty, life was palpable.

"I can't believe I'm doing this!" Sharpe whined, his tone more air than sound. "I might as well take that phaser and put to my own head. Just pull the trigger and...This is so nuts!" A white light caged by corroding wires caught his lean face and deepened the circles under his eyes. His pupils were pinpricks, and a fine laquer of goatish-smelling sweat glistened. Bashir felt his already-tight stomach twist again. He was meeting a very powerful, very dangerous man and his guide through this wasteland was on the far side of reliable.

"You're doing this because it's the only thing you can do," Bashir answered easily, hoping it would calm Sharpe and prolong his usefulness.

"Like hell," the man snorted wetly. "I had that phaser I'd dust you in a second. Take the hopper and head into the freight lanes."

"Uh-huh," Bashir acknowledged dubiously. "And then what? How far do you think you'd get with both Starfleet and the Orion Syndicate looking for you?"

"Maybe," Sharpe was cut off by a fit of shallow, racking laughter, "I could defect to the Gamma Quadrant...Ask for...sanctuary from the Dominion."

"That'd work," Bashir commented aridly.

"Damn, but we could at least have had that crocodile-head security guy-"

"Zorion's still on active duty. He can't make a trip out here without endangering that. I've been reassigned anyway. I've got little left to lose."

"We're both going to die, Doc," Sharpe muttered, then stopped so abruptly, Bashir thought he'd had a seizure. Then he felt the prickling static discharge and saw the faint shimmer around Sharpe's form.

"Jeez..." Sharpe grunted as he bounced off the force-field. Bashir spun and saw the man directly behind them with the leveled plasma rifle.

Sonag.

"It can exhaust it's power pack in less time that it would take your phaser to hit the street, so please don't try anything stupid." He spoke with the ease of a man who knew he'd be walking away from this altercation alive.

"I've no intention of that," Bashir assured him.

"Damn...damn...damn..." Sharpe hyperventilated. Now sweat was running in rivulets down his cheeks and jaw.

"Good," Sonag answered steadily. "Now I want you to very slowly withdraw that phaser from its holster."

Bashir did so, not taking his eyes off Sonag, who-being the professional that he was-didn't lock on to Bashir's gaze, but continued to sweep the alley with his own gaze.

"Good. Now would you please set it on level seven."

Bashir did that as well.

"Excellent. Now do us all a favor and shoot your comrade there, would you?"

"What!" Sharpe's eyes widened even further and his head swung with neck-snapping speed from Sonag to Bashir. He worked his tongue once before Bashir fired and sent him reeling against the wall of the alley. Sharpe rebounded and landed in a heap of refuse. All in all, Bashir thought, a soft landing. Without being asked, he tossed to phaser to Sonag's feet.

"Well done, Doctor," Sonag said with just a hint of appreciation. "How long will he be out?"

"An hour at least," Bashir answered, then faced the man. Sonag lifted the rifle and slung it over his shoulder and a trio of other men stepped from the shadows of a brick doorway into the sliced white light of the alley. Two were Tarlacs, with V-shaped bulges on their foreheads and manes of glittering gold that only added to their resemblance to huge feline predators. The Romulan disruptors they held didn't help defray that much, either. The largest of them, a short, stout human, was unarmed and immaculately though unpretentiously dressed.

"I'll go out on a limb and say that you're Petrilax," Bashir asked the human, who smiled broadly even as Bashir heard Sonag resetting the controls of his rifle.

"And you are the intrepid Doctor Julian Bashir."

Bashir bowed his head slightly.

"Well," Petrilax stuffed his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and bounced casually on the balls of his feet. "We have a great deal to discuss, Doctor, and not much time before the village idiot over there wakes up." He walked past Bashir, held up a small controlpad that he thumbed once, and the force field shimmered and then vanished. "My hopper is over here. Shall we Doctor?"

Bashir studied him. The offer wasn't negotiable, he knew, but he wanted a sense of the man before he got in close quarters with him. Petrilax's bland, round face seemed affable enough, but there was a hard glint in his eyes, and he knew that Petrilax could have Sonag toss him out of the hopper at twenty-thousand feet and wouldn't look away until the body hit the ground.

"Sounds fun," Bashir said with less enthusiasm than he'd tried for.

The hopper was a plush, inefficient luxury model with a transparent aluminum passenger compartment mounted behind a small cockpit. The passenger compartment was semi-circular and ringed with a cushioned couch. A craft as small as this wouldn't have a working replicator, but Petrilax had a ration-storage compartment from which he produced single-malt whiskey for he and Bashir. The only other person with them was Sonag, who'd traded his rifle for one of the Romulan pistols and kept it casually trained on Bashir. Someone was flying the hopper, but Bashir did not see who. The two Tarlacs had stayed behind to "mind the inert body" as Petrilax had put it. "I own the hotel and the bar that comprise two walls of that alley, but accidents will still happen."

"You seem inordinately concerned for the man who runs this system," Bashir said, earning a rueful smile from Petrilax.

"Oh yes, the Orion Syndicate runs everything. Pulls all the strings, makes the politicians dance, et cetera...The truth is, Doctor, undue attention will get me killed by my people. It's a hazard of the profession. Now add to the mix the fact that we have as much to fear the UFP's law-enforcement agencies as we do from one another, and you see the value of maintaining a low profile."

"Hard work being a crime lord."

"I sense you're funning with me, Doctor."

Bashir shifted on the couch and looked down at the sprinkling of lights that was Keltis Prime. "You killed some of my people. I want to know why."

Petrilax squinted, perplexed. "If you're out for revenge, you're going about it the wring way."

Sonag's disruptor twitched in Bashir's direction. "No," Bashir said, "not revenge. Just an explanation. You'd ask the same of an adversary who'd killed your men, wouldn't you?"

Petrilax considered this. "If it were clearly a part of a larger business endeavor, then yes, I'd expect a reasonable explanation. I'd ask for it without rancor or retribution. Is that what you're doing, Doctor?"

"Yes," Bashir answered, meeting Petrilax's gaze.

"Well, I haven't lasted this long by making my profile any higher than it needs to be," Petrilax rotated his head on his shoulders. "So let us just say that your colleague was involved in a business deal with my organization and that they attempted to violate the terms of deal."

"And you sent your man..." Bashir gestured to Sonag.

"The penalties for circumvention of the rules of this business were well-known."

"Was it drugs?" Bashir asked, suddenly aware of his brazenness and wondering if it'd get him killed.

Petrilax laughed curtly. "Drugs and Starfleet...not a good combination."

"Weapons?"

"We're beyond weapons, but it really doesn't matter," Petrilax said with a dismissive gesture. "What I'm curious about it why you're here. Why you're really here."

Bashir leaned forward slightly. "You don't believe my explanation?"

Petrilax smiled coldly, then gazed down at the cityscape of Keltis Prime. "It's not a matter of what I believe. It's a matter of my knowledge of human nature."

"Oh?"

"I do believe, Doctor, that you are the moth and all of this," he gestured expansively, "is the flame. This far out on the rim, it's a cash economy. Starfleet credits won't get you much in way of luxury and when you're living in the ruins amid starving populations, luxuries-the sweet anaesthetization they bring-suddenly take on increased importance. Don't they?"

Bashir said nothing.

"Your Starfleet morality is getting in the way isn't it?"

"I'm a Starfleet officer," Bashir answered neutrally, "and a doctor. I'd need more than simple temptation."

"What you need, Doctor Starfleet, is validation."

"Of what."

"Of what you've learned to be true," Petrilax answered simply.

"Which is?"

Now Petrilax leaned forward, his eyes suddenly alive and beguiling as any dark prince. "You've been through a war, Doctor. You've seen thousands die. You, yourself, personally have probably seen hundreds...and who knows how many you've killed with your own hands. Suddenly all of that Federation-bred tripe about the sanctity of individual life is exposed as the lie it is. Aren't I correct? Life is very cheap. Look out the bulkhead. Can you see the people in the city?"

Bashir looked. "Vaguely," he said.

"They look like specks."

"Dots."

"Now," Petrilax continued, " what if I told you that you could have ten strips of gold-pressed latinum if you erased one of those specks? Do you feel a terrible moral dilemma building, Doctor? One speck. Completely unnoticable, isn't it? What if I told you you could have one hundred bars is you erased a thousand of those specks."

"That would be noticeable," Bashir commented.

"If we look at the city, Doctor, perhaps. If we extend our view skyward and extend this to the system..." He smiled warmly at Bashir. "You know this already don't you? Life is very cheap."

Bashir looked out the bulkhead, then turned back to Petrilax. "So who do I have to kill to earn my strips of latinum?"

Petrilax's face took on an expression of fatherly pride. "Well I had in mind our other, less-than-intrepid Starfleet friend. Being a doctor..."

"It wouldn't be very difficult," Bashir replied with confidence, then added. "I am, however, in some trouble with my superiors. I may be transferred-"

"We can take care of that," Petrilax said easily. "Just go back and do what you need to do."

"Next round of anti-toxin injections," Bashir suggested, "perhaps Lieutenant Sharpe will have a reaction."

Petrilax extended one, soft hand. Bashir took it.

5

"I can't believe you shot me!" Sharpe was moaning as Bashir piloted the hopper back to Onyx-17. He'd been optimistic when Sonag had had to dump the unconscious Lieutenant in the hopper's other seat, but the heavy-stun had worn off shortly after they'd left the moon's atmosphere.

"If I hadn't, they'd shot both of us," Bashir replied tightly. "And the weapons wouldn't have been set to stun."

"Yeah, but..." he shook his head, thrashing mussed, sweat-weighted hair. "So what happened, anyway. Everything straightened out?"

"Yes," Bashir answered, not looking at him.

"So I'm, you know, okay with everything?" There was no missing the desperation hiding behind the poorly-feigned nonchalance of his voice.

"Oh yes," Bashir said, slightly disgusted with himself. "You're taken care of."

6

Zorion office in the Security Center was small, but immaculately orderly. Padds were stacked perfectly, their edges forming flat, even planes. Gear was stored in racks set into the wall and covered with a humming forcefield. Zorion himself sat behind a bank of three dozen monitors. Odo would have liked this office, Bashir thought.

He slapped the isolinear rod onto the control arm of Zorion's chair. "This is what they gave me," he said.

"Encrypt program?" Zorion's normal arch affectations were gone. His eyes glittered with anticipation.

"Yes."

He took it and slipped it into the port on his left control panel. "I've got the program reconfigured to account for random variables. Plus I added all the data Starfleet Security has on the Orion Syndicate. It should be able to isolate the code, break it, and tell us who's on their payroll."

"It's either Ross or Coleridge," Bashir said. "They tipped their hand when they told me not to worry about my reassignment."

"We shall see..." Zorion muttered distractedly as he glued his vision to one of the screens before him. After a minute of tense silence, he clapped his brownish hands together. "Excellent! Phase one complete. We isolated the code. They were hiding it on a low-bandwidth frequency. Easy to miss amid the squelch of the background radiation..." His lips pulled back to reveal sharp, white teeth. "Clever bastards!"

"What's wrong?"

Zorion's face relaxed, but his eyes narrowed and hardened. "Doctor, I am torn between admiration for these people and the desire to beat them to death with my bare hands."

"I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive concepts," Bashir said with a faint smile.

"The transmissions are filtered out as background noise by the communications grid and filed in the deletion bin where they stay for a period of six standard days until all files in the bin are purged. This gives the recipient ample time to access it from their terminal."

"Which aren't regulated or logged," Bashir completed with a grimace.

"If it was received by a particular individual, we'd have a log of it, but Security doesn't have a log of every person's activity on their personal terminal."

"We'll have to flush them out another way."

But Zorion's attention was fixed on his screens again. "Mmmm...Now the computer's extrapolating Starfleet orders which correspond to the times when signals were received or transmitted....Damn. Too many." He downloaded the information on to a padd and handed it to Bashir. Maybe your smarter-than-the-average-brain intellect can distill what's random and what's not."

Bashir looked it over. It took him less than thirty seconds, and he didn't even need his enhanced-intelligence. Just his knowledge of medical ordinance.

"Code eight-one-seven-four-two," he said, tasting sawdust.

"What's that?" Zorion asked.

"It's bigger than guns."

7

Sharpe spun, propelled by Zorion's shove and slammed into the expanse of plasteel containers, bounced off and sprawled on the hard floor of the supply warehouse.

"What is this?" he yelped. Bashir aimed his phaser at him.

"I told you you'd be taken care of," he said, biting back his anger, "And this was Mr. Petrilax's solution."

"Aside from that," Zorion added neutrally, "Doctor Bashir is quite upset, and I can't say that I blame him. He may kill you just on principal."

"What?" Sharpe's eyes, wild with panic, darted from Bashir to Zorion, then back. "What principal? What the hell..."

"Being a party to mass-murder," Bashir fumed.

"I didn't...I just...you and LaForge..."

Bashir fired. The orange lance cut so closely to Sharpe's face, his cheek flushed with the heat of it, but instead it gouged the crate behind him and a clear liquid poured out of the smoldering hole onto Sharpe.

"Do you know what that is?"

Sharpe looked at the soaking spot in his uniform, then back to Bashir uncomprehending.

"NorCon-112," Bashir explained. "Medicine. An important one. It builds the body's immune system. Very good for field use or post-operative use. Do you know what the best part of it is?"

Sharpe still looked blank and panicked.

"The best part is that it's so generic it can be used on almost any race in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants."

"Humans, Romulans, Klingons," Zorion said conversationally.

"Cardassians," Bashir said through clenched teeth. "Breen. Jem'Hadar we don't know about yet."

"We know the Dominion supply lines were stretched too thin. We know that many of their front-line troops were without rations, gear...and medical supplies. I wonder how much the Cardassians who held Betazed or Haightint Prime would pay for Nor-Com-112?"

"Or if they would pay," Zorion mused. "They had a whole planet to plunder after all. They could have paid in priceless art, natural resources, slaves."

"Or their own weapons," Bashir added. "I imagine a Cardassian fighter or a few crates of rifles would fetch a fair price on the black market."

Sharpe was on the verge of hyperventilating, his face slick with the dribbling Nor-Com solution and his own perspiration. "I didn't have-"

"But that supply of medicine had to come from somewhere. Which means it had to be accounted for after the Syndicate stole it or received it or whatever they did. Approximately twenty million cases were diverted to the Syndicate's hands during the war. That's quite a bit, and very noticeable. It had to be substituted with something.

"And this is where the real ingenuity comes into play. Nor-Com-112 is quite perishable. On standard day past expiration and it's destroyed. If it's used when its molecular structure has begun to break down, the patient dies. Painfully."

"The outdated supply of this medicine is transported to an automated storage station orbiting a star. They're launched into said star," Zorion explained. "There are seven such stations in the Alpha Quadrant. Only a select few Captains and Admirals have the command codes for those stations. But someone who did reprogrammed them to terminate disposal of the Nor-Com. Why do you suppose that was?"

Sharpe wasn't in any condition to draw conclusions, so Bashir answered for him.

"They substituted the expired Nor-Com for the usable supply!" Bashir's phaser beam burned another hole in another crate, destabilized it, and brought it tumbling down. Sharpe let out a shrill whine and scrabbled out of the way.

"Hundreds of Allied troops died in agony because of the Orion Syndicate!" Bashir fired again, forcing Sharpe to lurch away again.

"And one Starfleet traitor," Zorion answered coldly.

"It wasn't me!" Sharpe cried and tried to propel himself backward, but the wall of crates wouldn't let him. He didn't register their presence and kept kicking out with his feet, scrabbling uselessly and mindlessly like a crab. "You even said so! It had to be...Captain or Admiral, but..."

"You aligned yourself with them!" Bashir spat, closing in on him. "You tried to kill me! You tried to kill Geordi! You did whatever they asked. A vile, corrupt organization, and you just let them pull your strings!" He leaned forward, grabbed the soaking collar of Sharpe's uniform, then hauled him to his feet. "And now you're going to help us stop them!"

8

The shuttlecraft angled into the atmosphere of Keltis Prime like a bullet with an efficiency of purpose no hopper could match. Zorion calmly worked the controls, allowing the autopilot to take them in, while he adjusted the shield variances to compensate for the searing heat of re-entry.

Bashir checked the comm-panel before him, even though the display hadn't changed since they'd taken off. The false message was there in the deletion file. Perhaps it had ben accessed. Perhaps not. There was no way to tell. Bashir was betting that it had. A relationship such as this one wouldn't work without some greater efficiency than messages laying in wait for the recipient to look for them. More likely Coleridge or Ross or whomever had some sort of a warning installed that let him know when one the messages had been deleted.

Sharpe was back at Onyx-17, waiting in a holding cell until this evening's events were done. Then he'd either be witness or a defendant, depending upon how things turned out within the next hour or so. He was the loosest piece of the puzzle-a superfluous component. Still, Zorion wanted to make a clean sweep. Actually, the Security Chief was beginning to worry Bashir. While Bashir could feel the anger burning on his skin for greedy, amoral monsters like the Syndicate; the craven, pathetic men they manipulated and allowed themselves to be manipulated by them; and the collaborators who so easily betrayed their oaths and obligations-Zorion's cold control could be masking anything.

"I hope our guest doesn't do anything foolish while we're away," he said after awhile.

"He won't be able to get loose," Bashir replied.

"All the same, I wish I'd stunned him," Zorion said casually.

"I don't think that's necessary," Bashir said doubtfully.

"I'd like to have all the same," Zorion said with just a bit of brightness in his voice. "It would give me pleasure."

"Taking this a bit personally, aren't you?"

Zorion's smile froze and became plastic as he looked wistfully out the viewport. "There were only a handful of colonies not enslaved by Sona'a. You know, many of that first generation to be taken regarded us and our colonies as paradise. An idealized place where all Ellora ran free amid the lush foliage, picking ripe fruit off the trees and feeding it to their offspring." He laughed, what Bashir supposed was a bitter laugh, but it was difficult to tell. Zorion had a perpetually-arch sensibility.

"In fact, Doctor, my colony was little more than a very large ghetto. When the rest of the race was taken our society's infrastructure collapsed and we were left with nothing. Our economy disintegrated, our means of production were pillaged by the Sona'a. Our finest leaders and scientists murdered or taken. Our entire society crumbled into a bestial existence. Very household had a gun, because the easiest way to get something was to take it, and there was always someone who'd try to take it from you. Food, your clothing, a bar of candy...

"When seismic disruptions tore seven of our major cities apart, Starfleet sent a relief team. I was twelve years old then. I liked their uniforms."

And Bashir knew all the rest, if not the specifics then the conceptual elements. The uniform, the ships, the insignia glowed like holy relics-the sort that had driven armies to war, that had inspired great artists to create, and had fueled the hearts and souls of less extraordinary men. He had filled his life with them, obsessed over them. An existence in the service of Starfleet had become the sum goal of his life. It was what he would do. There would be no failure.

And now they dealt with men who'd so casually disregard all that Zorion had turned his life over to. They profaned his religion, and by virtue of that fact, insulted and ridiculed him.

Bashir knew it.

"We'll set down about a half kilometer away and transport to the site. We can set the controls to kill everything down to the warp core. No energy readings to find."

"All right," Bashir's voice was hoarse, his mouth suddenly dry.

"I hope this works," Zorion remarked with his trademark casualness.

"If it doesn't you can share a transport out to the stockade with me."

"Oh. Joy."

9

"Do you have an idea of how we'll handle this, assuming of course it works?" Bashir asked as they hurried through the narrow alley. For his part, Bashir felt about ready to leap out of his skin at any moment, but by this stage of the game it was long overdue. Nothing that had happened earlier-the investigations with Geordi, the attack by the mob, the assault--none of it shook him as much as the prospect of this night's outcome. Tonight his world would be shaken. Perhaps he'd die. It was very likely he'd go to jail. Whatever happened, things would not be the same. There would be no orderly processing of his duty orders and simple transport back to DS9.

Unless, of course, all their gambles and ploys had failed and absolutely nothing happened tonight. Which was, in its own way, the worst possible outcome.

"Well," he prodded in a sharp hiss, "do you?"

"Yes," Zorion responded unflappably. "I have a very large rifle, which I will use to shoot as many people as possible."

"Well that's just wonderful," Bashir griped. "I thought that you were Security. That you had plans and contingencies and scenarios..."

"This seems as good a time as any to wing it," Zorion replied as he paused at the mouth of the alley to fix the multi-spectrum viewers to his face. They actually looked like little more than sunglasses, but attached themselves to the area around the wearer's eyes with a molecular adhesive so they could not slip off. They allowed the wearer to see in IR, low-light, ambient light, energy-emission, and probably a host of ranges Bashir didn't know or understand. With them on, the Elloran paused to check the settings of his rifle, then quickly ran his thumb over its pincer-like emitter-barrel. "I suggest you draw your phaser, Doctor," he said, his voice trembling with anticipation.

"I really was hoping not to have to," Bashir muttered as he did so and set its intensity to level five.

"Oh, why a change of pace now?" Zorion craned his neck, twisting one way, then the other. "All right," he pulled Bashir up to the entrance of the alley where he squeezed in next to Zorion. The alley emptied into a large, open street which had been blocked due to a demolished building some ways away. Now it was a de facto courtyard that local merchants had utilized as their own extended stock room. At the north end, crates stood in cubist spires. Seventy meters away, near the southern and south eastern end were barrels and perishable-liquid insulators. At all four walls were narrow alleys and walkways, true to the strange architecture of the Onyx system.

"No traps or triggers," Zorion said. His viewers would have picked up on the energy signatures. "We've got a few minutes. I'll be behind the crates. I'm going to set up a transport baffler at either end, which should suffice if any of them have transporters. Are you sure you still want to make the dramatic entrance?"

"Yes," Bashir said, feeling the fear recede a bit in the face of his outrage.

"All right. Best of luck. When the shooting starts, duck." Zorion darted into the courtyard and disappeared in the deep blackness behind the crates. Bashir waited, feeling his nerves drawing tighter and tighter until he imagined them fraying and snapping like guitar strings. Sweat prickled along his shoulder blades and the back of his neck. He felt it across his forehead as well, and he wiped it away with his sleeve. He'd've liked to have discarded his uniform jacket, but didn't. As much as he would have enjoyed being more comfortable, he needed to have his uniform on when he confronted them. For, like Zorion, it meant something to him, too."

Seven minutes later, the first group arrived. It was Petrilax, Bashir noticed, flanked by Sonag and the two leonine Tarlacs. Sonag carried a Jem'Hadar rifle, and Bashir felt his sweat turn cold. He knew exactly how devastating such a weapon was. By now he'd tended to countless wounds inflicted by them. The Tarlacs carried smaller, more concealable Sona'a disruptors. He wondered if the sight of them was injecting ice into Zorion's veins the way the sight of the Jem'Hadar rifle had to him.

They took up a position in the center of the courtyard in a wan, yellow circle of light cast offhandedly by a distant streetlight. They didn't speak, and they didn't look confused or disoriented. They'd done this before.

A moment later the telltale blue swirl of a Starfleet transporter shimmered in the middle of the courtyard a few meters from Petrilax's group.

The transporter field fell away, and Bashir could see the figure clearly enough to recognize him.

His heart fell.

"What the hell is this all about?" Admiral Ross demanded. Petrilax's men didn't point their weapons at or near him, and it seemed clear to Bashir that the Admiral was obviously too important to be bullied, threatened, or killed.

"You called us," Petrilax answered.

"I did not," Ross snorted. "I told you, we only meet under the most dire of circumstances-"

"And what do you call the screw-ups at Onyx-seventeen?"

"Doctor Bashir has been taken care of!"

"Doctor Bashir is now on our payroll," Petrilax snapped, clearly bristling at the other man's authority.

"You fool! Bashir's using you. He's a team player! He can't be bribed-" He was obviously remembering their short, but nasty exchange after the Section 31 affair at Romulus.

"You put too much stock in your vaunted Starfleet virtues and honor," Petrilax sneered.

Bashir took a breath and stepped out of the alley. "Apparently, I did too." The men started and scrambled, but Bashir lifted the phaser so they could see it better. "Don't try anything!" he snapped. "This is set on its widest setting, it'll take you all out!"

Petrilax looked serene as if understanding this conflict would be settled by others. His guards, however, stirred like restless animals. Bashir had a bad feeling about this. Ross stepped forward, feigning confidence and control.

"I guess I shouldn't have expected you to go easily, Doctor. Now why don't you put down that phaser and we can all relax and work something out."

Bashir gritted his teeth. "Is that the extent that they've corrupted you? You think that you just buy or bargain your way out of this?"

"Well," Petrilax said, amused, "you are the very picture of ramrod Starfleet discipline. Didn't I misjudge your character."

"Shut up!" Ross snapped at him, then returned his attention to Bashir. "You can't do anything, Doctor. It's my word against yours. Stun me, and I'll have you up on charges. Kill me, and you'll spend the rest of your life in a penal colony. It's a lose-lose scenario."

"Why don't you just let me worry about that," Bashir said. "I'll take my chances with Starfleet Security."

"It'll never come to that," Ross answered, still projecting calm and confidence. Why not? He was right; it was his word against Bashir's If it was ever even an investigation, Bashir would be surprised. Ross could put any spin on this situation he wanted, and he would come out of it just fine.

That is, if you ignored or didn't know about Zorion listening from behind the crates, activating the transport bafflers, and hearing the whole thing.

"Why?" Bashir demanded, changing the subject. "How could you sell yourself out so thoroughly, you bloody traitor?"

"Grow up, Doctor," Ross replied dismissively. "It's a complicated world, and we've just come through a difficult war. Certain unpleasantries needed to be done. The Syndicate had certain information we needed. They'd met and worked with the Dominion in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. What they'd learned during those dealings with the Dominion was worth getting our hands a little dirty. I know you have a childlike naivete, but-"

"You're lying! That doesn't explain the NorCom-112. It doesn't explain how you could let hundreds, if not thousands, of patients die in agony from outdated medication!"

Ross's dark eyes locked with Bashir's, then flicked away, as panicked and desperate as Sharpe's had been.

His hand slapped his commbadge.

Nothing happened, but Petrilax's men were already in motion.

Anticipating the protection of a transporter force-field, one of the Tarlac's had thrust Petrilax behind it, while the other fired. Bashir dodged the bolt easily, but his boots caught on a discarded piece of junk hiding in the darkness, and he fell. His hands tensed, firing the phaser, and sending a long, fan of energy into the night sky.

The Tarlac readjusted his aim as the other and Sonag lifted their own weapons. Bashir swung the phaser in their general direction and fired again, confident the wide beam to take them all out.

Except that the phaser buzzed disconcertingly.

The single, wide-dispersion shot had utterly exhausted its energy cell.

Bashir rolled for cover as Sona'a disruptors whined. When he came up, he saw that of them had grabbed Ross around the throat and had jammed his weapon into it.

"Stand and disarm yourself," the Tarlac snarled.

Bashir slapped a fresh energy pack into the phaser's curved handle. Bashir peered over his protective pile of junk and saw the flare of red phaser-fire lash out from the crates. Zorion had taken no chances on the Tarlac being able to reflexively squeeze the trigger of his disruptor. He'd set his rifle to the highest setting, and the Tarlac vanished in puff of quantum energy.

Ross stumbled forward, produced something from his belt. By the way his hand was positioned, Bashir guessed it was a cricket phaser. A moment later, a red beam lanced out at him, driving him back to the ground. He heard the heavy pounding of Sonag's Jem'Hadar rifle and the explosion of packing crates.

Bashir looked up again, and saw a thick current of energy spraying between the barrels and the crates. Sonag had taken shelter, and now he and Zorion were slugging it out. Ross was bolting for an alley, while the other Tarlac was drawing a bead on Bashir. Bashir fired first. His narrow-beam shot nailed the Tarlac center mass and knocked him backward, his weapon firing reflexively into Petrilax's back. For an instant the crime lord's body was tinged with a glowing outline, which became a halo, and then a moment later his whole form turned to one rapidly dissipating flame.

Which left Bashir, Ross, and the two professionals.

"Go after him!" Zorion shouted. Bashir saw him amid the flames of the crates, his rifle cradled in one arm as if it were an additional appendage. "I'll take of this! Get him before he gets out of range!"

Bashir ran, hearing the heavy exchange of fire resume behind him.

Ross had ducked down a blind alley, and Bashir nearly had his face burned off, when the Admiral had discovered this and backtracked. His genetically-enhanced reflexes yanked him out of the way as the beam gouged the wall near him and sprayed him with hot mortar. Bashir fired blindly, more to frighten the man than anything. Ross fired again, but not at Bashir. In the strobing light of the phased-energy, Bashir saw that he'd blown out a sewer grating and dropped through. Bashir hurried over, looked down in, but could see nothing.

The aqueducts would deep enough that Ross wouldn't be able to transport out-not with the level of kelvinite ore in this planet's crust-but they could take him to safety. And while between he and Zorion they had enough to bring charges, Bashir simply couldn't accept the thought of letting go. Not after this long.

He took a breath and leapt into the darkness.

10

Bashir landed heavily, his feet splashing through a good nine inches of water before hitting the stone. His phaser was raised and aimed, though all he could see was darkness and retinal patterns. Ross could have waited to ambush him and cut him down the moment he dropped in from the world-but he hadn't. Bashir wondered how much of the old warrior was left in Admiral Ross. He wondered what there was left of the man. He hadn't proved a particularly effective tactician during the war-without Captain Sisko's brilliance, the Dominion would have overrun Federation space a dozen times over-and now even his guise of the dull, plodding bureaucrat had been peeled back. What was the man? What hopes, dreams, ambitions did he have? What possibly could have been the lever that, once manipulated, caused him to betray the Federation?

His tricorder came alive as if thirsting for this darkness, its display almost blinding. He could see the complex network of the aqueducts on its compact screen, as well as Ross's position. Fifty meters ahead, and down a northeast branch. Tricorder in one hand, phaser in the other, he ran. The water sloshed around his ankles, though little actually penetrated the environmental-material that comprised the uniform, and his boots were watertight. Still, he felt the cold closing in around him, and sometimes imagined he could see his breath steam in front of him.

A thin, red phaser line, lit up the tunnel into a vision of hell, and seared his cheek. He fell against one slick, curving wall and fired his own phaser into the darkness, heard it impact and stones fall. In the moment of scarlet wash-out, he caught Ross's stocky figure descend down an on-rush ramp that Bashir would have missed in the darkness. He raced ahead, found the sloping ramp and started down, only to lose his footing in the thin run-off and the residual slime it left behind. He cried out a quick, blunt curse as he fell forward, rolled on his shoulder, and landed with a slap on the main platform. Now foul-smelling water penetrated the seams and edges of his uniform, and the chill was penetrating his flesh. He pulled himself quickly and reached for the tricorder, only to put his hand in empty water. He toyed with the idea of firing the phaser on its lowest setting a few times until he found it, but he figured that all that would do was give away his position.

Machinery creaked and groaned ahead. He ran for it, his footsteps splashing loudly. He got about thirty meters and then the floor disappeared. He cried out, flailed for any purchase, but didn't lose his grip on the phaser. His left hand caught a pipe, and jerked his embryonic fall to a halt, very nearly twisting his arm out of its socket. Feeling the fear engulf him, he kicked out, searching with the toes of his boots until he found a ledge. Then he braced himself, a solid, but flexible bridge between the unseen ledge and the pipes, and haltingly worked his way over to safety. Finally, he released the pipes and fell into a crouch in the brackish water, pain searing through his shoulder down his arm and side.

Red lights pained the world in shades of the inferno.

Bashir spun, disoriented, saw the arcing tunnels and platforms around him and realized that he was in one of the main switch-rooms of the aqueducts. His platform was one of about ten at various levels that connected to tunnels of varying depth and angle. There were meters of empty space between the platforms connected by metal bridges that spanned gulfs of impenetrable darkness, and inconceivable depth. The bridge that connected Bashir's platform to the tunnel entrance had been retracted.

Ross stood on the slight ledge on the other side. One hand on a control keypad, the other still holding the cricket phaser trained on Bashir. In the red lights, Bashir could see dark stains on his uniform and a glitter of sweat on his forehead and cheeks.

"I guess we've got a problem here," Ross huffed, still projecting a hollow air of control. Bashir knew it was false. He was out of breath and running out of options, and now they stood, face-to-face with phasers trained on each other. His Syndicate partners were dead, and his dealings revealed.

"You can't run, Admiral," Bashir told him. "Not without me taking a clear shot."

"And I can hit you, too. So what do we do?"

"Well," Bashir said tensely, "I hope you don't attempt to bribe me."

"I think we're beyond that, Doctor. Even if I rattled off the numbers. The amount of money you could make. A shame. It really does boggle the mind."

"I don't want your bloody money," Bashir spat. "What good will it do me? What can it buy me that I don't already have?"

"One of the benefits of being in the Federation, Doctor," Ross stated. "You'll never be exploited by money. But there are other things. Other things that can be promised."

"You know what I want?" Bashir baited him. "I want to know why. I want to know how. I want to how what makes an Admiral in Starfleet get into business with common criminals. What makes him sacrifice hundreds of his comrades for a crime syndicate. Please don't try to sell me the bit about information on the Dominion-there's nothing the Syndicate could have possibly offered that we didn't already know. So what was it Admiral? What did it take?"

"The war," Ross answered without a trace of reflection of self-exploration. "Every day I saw the lines move, the ships deployed. Some came back, some didn't. What did that mean? What did this mean? Were we losing ground there only to gain it here? Were our supply lines stretched too thin here? These are the things I dealt with every day, and within the course of that day we went from losing the war to crushing the Dominion, to being completely overrun within a matter of hours. This was my reality for two years.

"So I planned for the future. I made arrangements with Syndicate. They needed something they could sell on the black market to as many species as possible that still couldn't be traced back to Starfleet. The NorCom-112 fit that bill quite nicely."

"And what did you get?"

"Latinum," Ross answered without hesitation. "The only currency I knew would be in use after the war. You see, Doctor, if we lost I'd need resources. Something to help me escape."

Bashir felt his mouth twist into a scowl as if he'd bitten into something rotten. He thought he could kill the man right here and now. "And you let hundreds of men die, just-"

"Hundreds of thousands have died in this war!" Ross shouted, looking flushed in the red lights. "I saw their names. I saw the numbers. I saw how many died in interstellar combat, how many died in planetbound combat, how many were killed in battle, how many died in the hospital, how many died traveling to the hospitals. Believe me, Doctor, when you've seen the numbers I have, adding a few digits to ensure your own survival means absolutely nothing."

"Just specks, eh?" Bashir asked, his chest growing tight and heavy as significant portions of the world fell apart around him.

Ross's gaze was steady and level. "Not even."

Then Ross shot him.

Bashir jerked backward, the right half of his body suddenly consumed by what felt like molten mead poured through his veins. His arms and legs shook spastically as he found himself sprawled in the water again. Gritting his teeth against the pain and the onrush of shock, he fired his own phaser. The slender beam stitched across the distance that divided them, missed Ross, and destroyed the keypad that controlled the hatch behind Ross. It exploded with more force than Bashir would have guessed it was capable of, causing Ross to flinch, loose his footing on the ledge and swan his arms out uselessly as he over compensated. He didn't bother with the doctor, but faced the great chasm, looking down into it. He flailed a few more times before plummeting into the darkness as if it had reached up and taken him. His scream echoed long after Bashir heard his body hit ground.

His comm-badge was useless, he knew. And that was all right. He was tired anyway. Bashir felt his body grow cold, but didn't know how to avoid that, being as he was laid out in ankle-deep water.

Instead he thought of Ezri, imagined her body warming him. The memory of her eyes was the last conscious thought his brain processed in the aqueducts.

11

USS Enterprise
Interim Command Ship: DeLambry Plan

Bashir had thought the process would take weeks, but Captain Picard, it seemed, was content to take the words of two Starfleet officers as well as the physical evidence of the transmissions and the movements of the NorCom-112 that had never been destroyed. After telling his story to a few Starfleet Security Commanders from his bed in sickbay, Bashir now found himself sitting across from Picard himself in the captain's ready room. Picard was a severe man, though not quite as intense and glacial as Captain Sisko had been. Under different circumstances, he might be likable. Aloof, but likable.

"This whole matter," Picard said in a tone that suggested he'd just discovered evidence of Federation war crimes, "is deeply, deeply unsettling. That a Starfleet Officer-an Admiral-could be so thoroughly corrupted by nothing more than the lure of money is enough to cause one's faith in the organization we serve to be shaken to the very foundation. Fortunately, there are men like yourself, Commander LaForge, Security Chief Zorion to reaffirm that faith."

"Thank you, sir." Bashir nodded slightly. His phaser burns and residual cellular disruption was healing nicely, but at its own pace, and the right half of his body was still sore and weak.

"We should be thanking you, Doctor. You uncovered this obscenity despite numerous threats to your own safety and security. You resisted the lure that so easily drew in Admiral Ross, and your Chief Zorion rather effectively neutralized some very potent threats to the civil safety of Keltis Prime."

Which, when you stripped away Picard's euphemisms meant he'd killed Petrilax and his bodyguards. Sonag was found alive, but heavily stunned. Starfleet Intelligence would squeeze him for every drop of knowledge on the Syndicate he had, and then decide which of the seven races who currently had warrants on him they'd turn him over to.

"Your assignment as of your discharge from our sickbay is in question, Doctor," Picard said, leaning back in his chair to indicate that he'd changed tracks. "Your transfer was declared null and void, of course, as Captain Coleridge is currently removed from the project and being questioned. At this point, Doctor, the decision is entirely yours."

Bashir nodded. It had been a question he'd asked himself over and over again as he lay in sickbay, waiting for his body to heal enough for mobility. It wasn't a difficult question, he knew. Each time he asked, the answer was the same. "Respectfully, sir, I'd like to return to DS9. I've already established the infrastructure of the hospitals on Onyx-17. Once Commander LaForge completes the atmospheric scrubbing, the need for chronic treatments will diminish. At that point the greatest need will be for mobile medical units. Not a Chief Medical Officer."

Picard nodded seriously. "Very well. Doctor Crusher believes you'll be fit enough to travel in a day or two. As it is, DS9 has already sent an officer to accompany you back. They seemed to have expected your decision."

Bashir leaned forward as far as his damaged body would allow. "What officer?"

12

It was her, of course, and Bashir had to struggle to keep from attempting to dash across her quarters and sweep her up in his arms. Instead, he merely locked his arms around her body, buried his face in her cropped hair and held on to her as if she was religion.

"I missed you terribly," Ezri Dax whispered into his shoulder.

"Terrible," he said, "doesn't begin to describe how I've felt without you." A number of more suitable words flashed through his mind: lost, fearful, incomplete, but there would be time enough for them later.

They sat together and drank replicated tea, while the watched dawn climb across Onyx-17 in the spacious viewport. Geordi's atmospheric scrubbers had been in full effect for the past two standard days, and the results were easily visible to the naked eye. As the sun claimed more and more of the visible planet the atmosphere, once a dun, dull grey, sparked with the dissipating cloud-cover as the chemicals and toxins broke down. The effect was like a rainbow had blanketed the planet, and they watched it sparkle. Ezri watched with rapt attention. Bashir, for his part, was content simply to see the reflection of it in her eyes.