Note: Deep Space Nine employs the Bajoran Standard Day, which is 26 hours long. The customary approximations for other lengths of time are based on the same unit: so "39 hours" is shorthand for "a day and a half", "52 hours" is "two days", et cetera.

Part II, Act II: Twice Manipulated

"How long have I been gone?" Martok asked grimly. He was at the back of the cell now, shifting restlessly. He looked like he wanted to pace, but for some reason he was restraining himself.

"Two days," said Tain pleasantly, puffing out his chest a little as he nodded at Julian. "The good doctor joined us yesterday."

Martok's eye narrowed again as he studied Julian. "Doctor," he muttered. More forcefully he said; "Why is a Federation doctor in a Dominion prison camp? Is there war at last?"

He knew perfectly well that the war the Federation was fighting was against his people, not the Founders, but Julian knew better than to say it. "I wasn't captured in battle," he said. "I was taken."

"You'll want to hear this," Tain sang with relish. "Go on, Doctor. Tell him how you were taken."

Julian furrowed his brows in an unspoken question. He knew that Tain saw it, but he had no intention of answering. He simply shrugged one shoulder ever so slightly and put on an expression of affable expectation. Julian shifted around the corner of the bench so that he could face the Klingon General more squarely.

"I was on Meezan IV, attending a medical conference." He had said these words often enough over the last thirty-nine hours, but they still stuck in his throat. His mouth was intolerably dry. Julian reached for his bottle of water and drank more deeply than was prudent. He was wretchedly thirsty, but he wasn't going to draw his first full ration until mealtime tomorrow. His stomach churned, and he remembered his hunger as well. He should have eaten his meal instead of letting his horror get the better of him.

"And?" Tain drawled pointedly.

"And nothing," Julian said tightly. "I went to my room one night after the keynote reception, and I woke up here. I'd been drugged — I still don't know with what."

That thought brought another flutter of panic. He'd thought he had moved past that along with the withdrawal symptoms, but apparently he hadn't. Julian had not just been belligerent when he'd told the Vorta there could be long-term sequelae from certain anesthetics, but that wasn't the bottom of his well of unease.

There was a low, rumbling noise of recognition. Martok's lone eye was wide, his expression one of knowing anger.

"I see why you would think me interested, Tain," he said.

"Not really," the Cardassian chuckled. "There's more."

Martok's head whipped to look at him. "More?" he said suspiciously.

"What are you driving at?" Julian asked, frowning at Tain. He had the uncanny feeling that he was being driven towards something, herded by a master manipulator trying to engineer some mysterious end. But like an actor thrust unprepared into the spotlight, he had no idea what the director was trying to get out of him.

When the Cardassian gave no answer, Martok made a low noise of annoyance. Impatiently, he offered what he believed to be an explanation.

"There are only a few who were taken in such a… dishonourable fashion," he said. "You are one, as am I. I was taken from my camp on Kang's Summit. I was hunting sabre bear — a journey of contemplation and preparation before I assumed my new command, or so I thought. Little did I know the hunter was himself hunted."

"I see." The words were a breath of comprehension. It made perfect, awful sense: Martok had been replaced by a Changeling, and so had Julian. It was only logical that the Dominion had extracted both of them in the same way. Had they been doing this throughout the Alpha Quadrant all year?

"To be drugged like an animal and carried away by night… it is a grave dishonour," Martok said blackly. "If I could find the ones who did this to me, I would wring my vengeance from their lifeless bodies."

Julian appreciated the sentiment, but his own first step would be to interrogate them for every detail of his treatment at their hands. Again, the irrational panic rose up. What had they done without his knowledge or consent? What had they given him or taken from him or changed about him while he slept?

"Tell him, Doctor," Tain coaxed, his voice lilting as if he were prompting a child to recount some delightful tale brought home from school.

Julian's patience with this behaviour broke. "I've just told him," he snapped. "If there's something you think I've left out, feel free to let us all in on the big secret."

"Oh, no, I wouldn't dream of it!" Tain puffed, indignant at the very thought. "It's your story, Doctor. Tell him what happened when you got here."

Julian didn't understand. Was Tain talking about waking under Major Kalenna's watchful eyes? The Cardassians who had tried to steel his boots? The events in the combat ring this afternoon?

"Tell him what Deyos told you about the reason you were taken," Tain said finally, his voice losing some of its goodnatured prodding. This was an order, and he wouldn't ask so nicely next time.

Now Julian knew what he was driving at, but he didn't want to comply. Saying it aloud would only make the whole thing more real. Particularly because Martok's replacement by a Founder was very tangible, very concrete: something established and widely witnessed and objectively true. Up until this moment, some part of Julian's mind had been able to cling to the idea that his own replacement was still just a hypothetical situation.

"What did that soulless p'tak say to you?" Martok growled, spitting out the invective with a vitriol that Julian found strangely vindicating.

"He told me I've been replaced," he said. It took every iota of control he had over his breath and his body and his emotions to speak the words calmly and clinically. They came out flat and leaden, and seemed to drain the life out of the cell. "There's a Changeling back in the Alpha Quadrant pretending to be me. It's probably on its way to Dee—" He hesitated, remembering just in time that the revelation of his posting would mean the General's instant enmity. So far, the Klingon had overlooked the state of war between his forces and Starfleet, but those blinders surely had their limitations.

"On its way to my posting," Julian rephrased. "Once there, the Founder will have access to all key facilities and enormous quantities of classified information."

"Replaced?" Martok echoed, shock in his voice. "Deyos told you this?"

"He took great pleasure in telling me," said Julian. "He must be certain there's nothing I can do about it. No means of escape, or of warning my Captain."

"Taken…" Martok breathed. "And replaced."

Something about the way he said this, and about the crawling horror now creasing the Klingon's craggy features made the last piece of the puzzle fall into place. This was what Tain had sought: not to cajole Julian into saying all of this just to watch him writhe in the misery of it, but so that Martok would go through the throes he was experiencing now. Julian recognized them: the blissful state in which such a thing was unimaginable was shattered, giving way to first disbelief, then denial, and finally horrified comprehension.

"Then I…" Martok spat. His lips contorted painfully. His one eye was fixed on Julian, a gleaming looking-glass of desolation and rage. "There could be a Founder in my place as well? On the Negh'Var? On Q'onos? In the halls of my home?"

"You didn't know," Julian said numbly. His dislike of Tain deepened. The Cardassian had known this was new information: it had been new to him as well, after all. And for some reason he had wanted Martok to find out this way. If he had confided in Julian, the doctor could have found a tactful way to explain the situation. He could have briefed Martok properly, instead of blindsiding him with the truth. Seeing how he had been used, Julian had to battle a red tide of seething anger so that he could salvage this situation.

"You were replaced," he said, finding the calm voice that he used when it was time to give a patient the worst of prognoses. He held back the gentleness, knowing no Klingon would welcome that, but the empathy remained. He explained as clearly as he knew how. "The Changeling that replaced you was feeding advice about the war to Chancellor Gowron; agitating violent sentiment. But it's dead now. It was exposed, and executed by the members of the Order of the Bat'leth."

Martok jerked his head sharply, pulled abruptly out of his dismay. "Executed by the Order of the Bat'leth?" he said, darkly pleased. "Then it can do no further harm to the Empire?"

"No," Julian agreed. "It happened about six months ago. Since then, you've been presumed dead."

Six months and more in this forsaken place… how had Martok survived it? Julian's blood ran cold at the thought.

"And what did it do before that?" Martok muttered, at last giving in to the temptation to pace. He swept past Tain and down towards Parvok's cot. Julian twisted at waist and neck to track him with his eyes. "To be replaced by the enemy, to have your face used as a weapon against the Empire… it is an abomination!"

He was talking to himself more than to any one of them, and Julian let him do it. He knew the turmoil now roiling in the Klingon's heart, and he thought the best thing to do was to give him the latitude to work through it on his own.

But then Martok threw back his head in a savage, thundering roar that shook the pipe frames of the empty cots and reverberated off the tritanium wall plating. He slammed his fist into the barracks door with sundering force, and howled again. The door remained unhurt, but Julian didn't like to think about the state of the Klingon's knuckles.

Parvok was sitting stiff as a board, looking desperate to flee but unable to do so. Kalenna had startled at the first ululation of anguished rage, but she had recovered her composure rapidly. Tain was on his feet now, calmly shaking out his blanket. As Bashir stared at him, he bent to plump up his pillow.

Martok was seething, his chest heaving beneath his armour. He slapped each palm against the door and hung his head between spasming shoulders. He reared back then, and Julian was afraid he meant to slam his vaulted forehead against the door next. He leapt to his feet and braced his shoulder under Martok's right arm. He slid his own between the Klingon and the door, using his left hand to try to push Martok back.

"That's enough," he said firmly. It was his doctor's voice again, settling an agitated patient with reason and competence. "You'll hurt yourself, or you'll bring the guards. Either way, it won't improve matters."

"I do not fear the guards," Martok hissed in contempt. His eyes narrowed. "You. It was you who made them draw back. They would have killed me, and you made them draw back."

He sounded like all this was just coming back to him now, out of the fog of a dream. Julian remembered thinking he looked like someone in the throes of a panic attack, only moved to blinding rage instead of terror. Perhaps he had been right.

"I told them you weren't in your right mind, and that hemming you in was making it worse," said Julian. "I don't know how Klingons cope with solitary confinement, but I imagine it didn't leave you very rational."

"Rational!" Martok scoffed. He pushed off the door, stepping backward and looking Bashir over with an exaggerated sweep of the head. "In the dark and the stillness, what cause has a warrior to be rational?"

"Well, you're out of the stillness now," said Julian, calling the words after Martok as the Klingon stalked back to the far end of the barracks. "I can't let you batter yourself against the door."

Martok snarled and whirled to look at him again. There was a stark desperation in his eyes as he opened his mouth to speak: some terrible question hovering on his scarred lips. Then he froze. He glanced to the left, obliged to turn his head to do so because he no longer had an eye on that side. He looked at Tain, now lying languidly on his side and watching the proceedings with idle interest. Martok closed his mouth and shook his head fiercely, and a low noise of discontent rumbled in the back of his throat.

"We will talk, Doctor," he promised ominously. "But not tonight."

"Fine," Julian said, with more confidence than he felt. His palm was itching, and he resisted the urge to brush away the crust of the new clots. "Perhaps you should lie down and get some rest."

He nodded to the empty cot nearest the door. Martok looked at it and curled his lip disdainfully. Julian remembered Jadzia mentioning that Klingons eschewed soft furnishings, though Commander Worf didn't seem to have a problem with Starfleet beds.

"Or on one of the benches?" he suggested, raising his eyebrows to invite a response.

The General's eye narrowed thoughtfully as he studied Julian's face. It took considerable self-control not to shrink under that scrutiny. Would Martok recognize him? They had never met face-to-face, but during the days when the Klingon fleet had surrounded Deep Space Nine, the Promenade had been awash with warriors. Julian's position on the station's busy thoroughfare of commerce and culture made him conspicuous. Martok might have observed him without reciprocity.

But he only tilted his head back in acknowledgement. "You know something of our ways," he said. "Not many Starfleet officers can say the same."

Julian knew he couldn't afford to let himself become complacent, but if this tacit approval was enough to get him through the night, he was grateful.

(fade)

It was a long night. Julian laid down, his tired body relieved to stretch out again, but he could not sleep. At first, he couldn't get comfortable. Lying as he had before made his knee pulse and throb maddeningly, but rolling onto his other side meant turning his back on the slumbering hulk of General Martok, within arm's reach on the bench. He tried lying on his back, but he'd never been able to sleep that way. Finally, Julian got up and moved the wretched, sour-smelling little pillow to the other end of the cot so that he could lie with his feet to the door. That allowed him to settle on his left side facing into the room, which solved the two proximal problems but still left him lying on a thin foam mattress that didn't adequately distribute the pressure-points of the webbing beneath, and a bunk frame that squeaked irately every time he shifted even slightly.

And he was thirsty, intolerably thirsty. His palate felt like it had been coated with sandpaper, and his tongue was swollen and sticky. He tried to ignore it, reminding himself that it was temporary: he would draw a full ration of water tomorrow, and he owed none of it to anyone. But then the thought that he was coveting two litres of unpleasant-tasting water would rise up and smack him with the desperation and humiliation of his situation. No one should have to obsess over the bare necessities of life, but that was precisely what he was doing. And the Dominion had to know that was the inevitable result of their rationing system. They had laid this trap deliberately, and he was caught in it.

Finally, he caved to the temptation to open his bottle. By his estimate, he had less than three hundred millilitres left, and it had to last through the rest of the night and most of the morning. He drank anyway, savouring every drop. He didn't care about the unpleasant aftertaste. At least it washed away the last of the blood from between his teeth.

Then he began to notice the cold, which was a permanent fixture of this place but easy to ignore while he was up and moving about. Now he was motionless, and his body temperature was dropping to its nocturnal nadir, and no matter how tightly he drew the coarse blanket about him, he couldn't get warm. The Starfleet uniform was supposed to be adaptable to a reasonable range of temperatures, but it wasn't doing its job tonight.

Julian might have expected the heat generated by six sleeping bodies to take the edge off — but it didn't. Romulans, like Vulcans, ran cooler than humans. Julian didn't know if the Breen's refrigeration suit was actually lowering the temperature of the air around it, but it certainly wasn't contributing to a net warming. And Cardassians, though not precisely cold-blooded in a truly reptilian sense, did not have the same mechanisms for metabolic thermoregulation that humans did. Julian and Martok were the only representatives of genuinely hot-blooded species in the room.

If Julian was cold, Tain was probably freezing, and yet he slumbered on. He wheezed in his sleep: a thin, splenic sound that Julian didn't much like. There was something wrong with the aged spymaster, something physical. He was hiding it well, but he couldn't conceal every symptom — not from the eyes of a doctor who had made a study of Cardassian physiology. So Julian fretted about that next, wondering how he was going to broach the subject and what Tain would do when he did.

Finally he did doze off for a while, after a fashion. At least, the manic whirling of his thoughts settled down into vacant apathy and the grey barracks room grew dimmer before his eyes. The lights only seemed to have one level, which was probably another reason sleep eluded him. But at least he was able to drift, chilled and uncomfortable but not really in pain, until he started to believe he might actually be able to sleep.

But then the thirst flared up afresh, and the cycle began all over again.

(fade)

He must have fallen asleep at last, because he awoke to the unpleasant sensation of being shaken by the shoulder. Julian squinted up at Parvok, and then scrubbed his eyes with the back of his thumb. His palm smarted and his left flank ached.

"Time for the count?" he croaked, his dry tongue clicking. Parvok nodded.

"Soon," he said.

Julian sat up slowly. He was groggy and sluggish, and his head ached fiercely. The others were already up and gone, their cots neatly made in preparation for the inspection. Julian's bleary eyes slid across the way to Enabran Tain's cot, under which he had hidden the piece of metal last night. Had it been there the whole time? Was it there still? If so, it seemed the guards did not make a search of the room when they inspected it. He wondered why they hadn't tried to scavenge some tool that would be easier to hide. Klingons had a flair for the dramatic, but all that was really needed for a successful blood screening was a pinprick. Julian decided he would have to find a tactful way to point that out. The risk of being caught with such a substantial weapon were too great.

As he stood, he felt a twinge in the small of his back. He rubbed at it, but even as his hand was moving he knew it wasn't a muscle spasm. It was deeper and somehow keener, and although not more than a six on the pain scale, it brought with it a sickening churning of his empty stomach. It wasn't a consequence of the uncomfortable cot: it was his kidney.

Julian drank the last of his water hurriedly, because it was the only thing he could do to help the situation. He had to hope that it was nothing more than the pangs of dehydration. The differential diagnoses that rattled through his mind was accurate but frightening: drug-induced nephrotoxicity, small vessel thrombosis, glomerulonephritis. He wouldn't put himself at any measurable risk of a kidney stone, but then again, without knowing what had been done to him in transit from Meezan IV, he could not be sure.

Parvok was watching him, shifting unhappily on the balls of his feet. Julian eyed him wearily. "I'm coming," he promised, raking a hand through his hair. It was tangled and dishevelled, the curl more prominent than usual.

The Romulan shook his head. "The bed," he hissed. "There isn't much time!"

Julian looked at his cot. The pillow was squashed and misshapen, and the blanket lay tangled where he had thrown it off, one corner trailing onto the floor. He grimaced thinly. He had thought about the inspection as it related to the risk of a search, but he had forgotten his own obligations in that regard. Did the Jem'Hadar insist on uniformly-made beds as part of their general philosophy of perfect order, or could they possibly know how restrictive and almost infantilizing the edict felt? With the exception of his first two weeks at the Academy, when the practice was part of several exercises meant to emphasize Earth's military heritage and the idea of routine discipline, Julian hadn't been commanded to make his bed since he was a small boy.

He made it now, however, hurriedly but with mathematical precision. He might have been willing to tweak the noses of the Jem'Hadar just to make himself feel better about being robbed of agency, but he wasn't willing to risk consequences for his cellmates. These five people were all from worlds that had uneasy relationships with the Federation, but here, far away from Starfleet and his comrades-in-arms, Tain and the others were the closest thing he had to allies. He had no intention of costing them suffering or loss of privileges — if indeed anything they were permitted here could be considered a privilege.

Julian made it out of the barracks just as the klaxon sounded, and had to hasten into the inspection line. Again, he was forced to the front, but this time he found himself standing with General Martok — who seemed to share neither the other prisoners' desire for anonymity nor their dread of the lighted arena before him.

The count started just as yesterday's had, with the Vorta emerging from the administration pod with his escort of Jem'Hadar. Because he was dawdling, again "losing count" whenever he made a cold, jeering remark to a prisoner, the job took longer than it had to. Julian escaped comment this time, but Deyos curled his lip at Martok.

"Back with us again, General," he said with false grace. "I hope you've learned your lesson. Will you be obliging the Jem'Hadar this afternoon?"

Julian was on Martok's blind side, but he imagined that the General's eye was boring into Deyos's face.

"Today is a good day to die," he growled in his deep, hoarse and somehow melodious voice.

Deyos smiled luxuriantly. It did not reach his eyes. "No," he said chillingly. "Not for you."

He walked on, apparently so satisfied with the exchange that he did not bother with the pretext of starting the count afresh. Six pairs further down, he stopped again, pausing in silence for an especially long time. Without turning his head, Julian could not see the prisoner who warranted such scrutiny, but he could see the clinical curiosity on the Vorta's face as he watched his prey.

When Deyos spoke this time, it was with a clipped cadence that made a sentence of every word. "Stand. Up. Straight."

Across the way, some of the Cardassians were shifting uneasily where they stood. Julian's pulse quickened with an awful premonition.

"You," Deyos said, flicking a finger at the man directly in front of him. "Step out of the line."

The prisoner hesitated. Apparently this was not a familiar order.

"Step out and take your place at the end of the line," Deyos elucidated, his voice tightening with disdainful irritation. How can a sentient being be so stupid, that tone asked.

One of the Romulan prisoners side-stepped the Vorta, abandoning his place in line. He tried to move with military dignity, but his pace quickened after the first two steps. He scurried up the line and fell in on Julian's left side. He was rigid from head to foot as he resumed his squared-off stance.

Deyos nodded into the gap. "Bring him forward," he commanded.

First Ikat'ika reached with one arm, and grabbed the prisoner in the rear line by one shoulder, drawing him firmly forward. It did not look like an unduly brutal gesture, which surprised Julian, but the man on the receiving end stumbled. Now the doctor did turn his head, forgetting himself, and his worst fear was confirmed.

It was the Cardassian who had stolen his boots, the one who was now fighting the pain of broken ribs and his myriad other injuries. He was stooped markedly to the left, one arm clutched tightly across his chest.

"I'll not warn you again," Deyos said brightly.

The Cardassian looked at him with glassy eyes. He was breathing laboriously through his teeth. The improvised dressing was still on his head, plastered in place by a dark clot.

All the other prisoners were trying to keep their bodies still and their eyes front. Julian found himself drifting slightly out of the line, taking a quarter-step forward. He was already looking in the wrong direction. What did a little more deviation matter?

"Soldiers, correct his posture," Deyos said boredly. He stepped away from the swaying Cardassian, beckoning to Ikat'ika. "One hundred twenty-two," he said, indicating the next pair of prisoners.

The two Jem'Hadar who had been behind the First swooped in on the Cardassian. One of them brandished his rifle, clubbing the Cardassian in the stomach with the butt. The other one clouted the side of his head. All the air exploded from the prisoner's lungs, and with it a strangled, wheezing noise that should have been a scream of anguish. He crumpled, falling forward onto the inner shoulders of the two soldiers. They struck him again.

"No!" Julian shouted, horrified. He sprang out of his place in line and sprinted towards them, shoving aside one of the Jem'Hadar. The guard had not been expecting an assault from that quarter, and he took a stilted step to catch himself before he could fall. The Cardassian, however, crashed to the ground, and the other Jem'Hadar raised his rifle again. This time it looked like he was about to bring the butt down on the back of the Cardassian's skull.

Julian had danced nimbly out of the way of his felled patient. Now he lunged in and caught the Jem'Hadar's forearm with both hands, arresting the fall of the weapon. He pushed with all his might, trying to get the guard away from the man now wheezing on the floor. Instead, the Jem'Hadar dropped his shoulder and twisted, upsetting Julian's balance. While he tried to compensate, the heavy power cell casing at the back of the plasma rifle flew up and blasted into the side of his head with concussive force.

Julian fell, sprawling, and landed hard on his left shoulder and hip. The bruises he'd gotten on his first day protested this rough treatment, and his arms curled around his head in reflexive defence. The first guard had recovered his wits, and was now kicking the Cardassian while blows rained down on him from above. Julian struggled to rise, but the second guard was ready for that. An armoured knee came up into the hollow of his chest, and his breath exploded out of him in a primal grunt.

Through eyes still blurred by the coup-contrecoup rattling of his brain against the inside of his skull, Julian saw the rifle rise again. He tried to scramble out of its path, fighting to draw in a lungful of air, but his limbs wouldn't obey him. They scrabbled against the smooth, composite floor, and one of his boots slipped as if in a puddle of something. He caught himself with his elbows before his face could smash to earth, but although he braced himself for the blow that was coming, it never came.

Over the tidal roar in his ears, he heard Deyos said; "Bring the human. Leave the other one. First Ikat'ika, you complete the count."

Scaly hands seized each of Julian's arms, and he was hauled to his feet. He tried to get them under him, but the Jem'Hadar did not wait: they started to drag him down the line of prisoners. He writhed against their bone-bruising grasp, unable to quite figure out how to keep his head from hanging between his shoulders. But he planted the sole of his boot at last, and managed to push off steadily enough to get the other leg moving. By the time the familiar face of Enabran Tain slid past the fog in his peripheral vision, Julian was stumbling along beside the guards.

There was only one Jem'Hadar at the force-field today: his partner was probably busy helping with inspection. There was a static crackle as the field fell for Deyos, and another as it sprang back into existence behind Julian. He fought against the biological imperative to lose consciousness and the thunderous pain in his skull as he was manhandled across the threshold into the Vorta's office. He could not quite straighten himself: his legs felt rubbery, and the Jem'Hadar had an adamantine grip on his arms, keeping him stooped. But Julian raised his head at last, not quite halfway, and forced his eyes to focus as Deyos strode behind his desk.

Blood was trickling into the corner of his right eye, and because he could not figure out how to breathe through his nose, his mouth hung open. The Vorta looked at him thoughtfully and flicked an invisible fleck of dust from one of his computer pylons.

"Now then, Doctor," he said with serpentine relish. "What ever are we going to do with you?"

(fade)