Part VII, Act III: Dismissed
Julian's throat closed in dread. "What are you talking about?" he croaked.
Tiellyn smiled and leaned over him again, bracing a hand on either side of his hips. "Oh, didn't I explain?" she said. Then she glared sharply over her shoulder to where Deyos stood near the partition. "You are dismissed."
"Dismissed?" Deyos sneered incredulously. "This is my command centre. You can't just dismiss me."
"I think you'll find I can," said Tiellyn indolently. She nodded to one of the Jem'Hadar standing near the exit. He strode immediately to the other Vorta's side, tall and menacing.
Deyos's eyes narrowed as if he did not quite believe the soldier would lay hands on him. In the end, he decided not to test it. "I should hear my First's report on the count," he said, trying to sound as if this was an incidental matter completely unrelated to anything they'd been discussing. "The prisoners are known to be difficult."
"So you've said," Tiellyn observed, her voice very dry. She stopped short of rolling her silver eyes, but likely only for aesthetic reasons. "Go and take your report, then, and you needn't return. I'll find you when I want you."
Deyos looked ready to make an unwise retort, but the Jem'Hadar looming at his shoulder shifted pointedly, and the Vorta moved for the door.
Julian knew the sound was coming, but it still made him flinch. He was beginning to think he was making his startle reflex worse by anticipating and trying to compensate for the clatter of the doors. But in his current state there wasn't anything he could do to control his body's responses, and he tensed almost as badly when the door slammed closed again. His battered muscles protested miserably, and his head ached.
Tiellyn leaned forward, quick as a cobra, and planted her palm in the middle of his chest, applying steady pressure that reminded him she had not mended his ribs.
"You see," she said, savouring the syllables; "I had to come back for you because the results from my first set of samples were… anomalous. Your immune system markers in particular were very strange. Nothing that would show up on a routine hematology scan, mind you. Subtle differences. They might have been the result of poor collection methodology, or perhaps our vessel passed through an unidentified quantum singularity. Anything is possible, don't you think?"
Julian didn't answer her. Anything he tried to say at this point would only breed suspicions.
"So here I am, to take new samples," she said, twisting her dark lips with grim delight. "And to watch that little toad jump, of course. Don't you find it diverting? These camp commander Vorta; they think they're so important. The little lords of their private little asteroids, puffed up with pride because they can push around a couple hundred unarmed aliens. But do you know what, Doctor?"
For once, she uttered the title conversationally, reserving her contempt for Deyos and his ilk instead of wasting it on Julian. He didn't speak, and tried not to stiffen as she leaned closer, so close that their noses almost touched and he could smell the faint fruity aroma on her breath. He recalled the same scent coming from Deyos, but he couldn't quite remember when, not in his present state of feverish exhaustion and strain.
"An asteroid is only a rock," Tiellyn whispered throatily. "And the prisoners are little better than animals. It doesn't take skill to subdue an animal. Only force."
Julian closed his eyes and turned his head away, troubled more by her proximity and her power over him than by the taunt. She laughed and straightened, increasing the pressure on his sternum as she did so.
"Oh, don't take it too much to heart, human," she said. "We're all just animals in the eyes of the Founders. Some of us are simply… more accomplished animals. And some of us are like you."
This last word dripped with scorn. She withdrew her hand, and a moment later he heard the clatter of instruments as she rummaged through her cart. "I know I have it somewhere," she murmured. "Ah!"
She was back at his side in a moment. He didn't want to look at her. She gripped his jaw and straightened his head. "Another thing unusual about you?" she said. "How much sedative it took to keep you under. You kept swimming towards consciousness like a Argrathi eel in an aqueduct sluiceway."
Speaking against the pressure of her hand was difficult. At least there was very little pain, now that she had mended his cheekbone. "I'm an ultra-rapid cytochrome metabolizer," Julian said thickly, unable to move his jaw properly. "It's a natural variation in—"
"Ye-es," she said slowly, thoughtfully, cutting him off. "That's what it says in your Starfleet medical files. "But the thing is, Doctor, we accounted for that. Or thought we had. Yet it was insufficient. I've never given a humanoid prisoner a dose like that. Even the Klingon only took two-thirds the amount you burned through in the end, and we transported him much farther. I confess I wondered whether it would cause brain damage."
Remembering the mental haze under which he had laboured for his first couple of days in the prison, Julian felt his pulse quicken. His eyes snapped open and locked on her face. "What did you give me? What drug? Or was it a combination—"
She laughed, a chromatic quicksilver sound that made him shudder, even though he knew she'd be able to feel it. "Oh, you're sadly mistaken!" she sang. "I wasn't trying to consult with you! Nor am I going to answer any of your questions. I got what I came for, and you're better off now than when I arrived. Be grateful for that, human. Many would give what little they have left to receive such care."
Care? She called this care? She had belittled him, discussed him like a specimen, ignored his rights and his dignity, refused him even the smallest consideration or comfort. At this very moment, she was gripping his face as one might muzzle a disobedient dog. She raised her other hand. There was another tool in it, unrecognizable in its Dominion-designed housing. She thumbed a plate near its base, and it began to hum.
"Hold still," she warned, adjusting her grip on his mandible. "I've never done this on a face before."
The whine of the instrument altered as she applied it to his jaw, and Julian had to fight the urge to struggle. He didn't know what that thing was, or what it was capable of doing to him. The wild, panicked thought that if she'd never used whatever-it-was on a face, he didn't want his to be the first flashed uselessly through his mind. She had spoken so coldly about dissecting the bodies of sentient beings: she clearly was not averse to experimentation.
All he could do was obey her and stay as still as possible. There was nothing else he could do to protect himself.
A familiar, acrid stench wafted up to his nostrils: burning hair. His jaw felt warm where the tool hovered near his skin, ruffling the stiff bristles of sixteen days' growth of beard. Then there was a crackling, tickling sensation as something flaked away from his nerve endings. He could only spare a small, despairing plea that it wasn't his skin… but he didn't smell burnt flesh, only hair.
As she moved the tool down from his ear, he thought he understood. He felt something prickly and very lightweight sprinkle down onto his throat. He wanted to raise his hand to his face to confirm, but while he was still uncertain he didn't want to take the risk. He waited as the tool moved closer to his mouth, and the Vorta's grip changed again. When the first hair landed on his lip, he knew he was right. She was shaving him.
Inexplicably, she was shaving him. He kept still while she finished, restraining the urge to sneeze when an incautious breath drew a few felled hairs into his nostrils. Finally she reached his other ear, and the buzzing abruptly ceased.
"There," she said, coolly disgusted. "Now perhaps you'll look less like an ape. Brush off: don't just lie there in your own mess!"
Julian did brush off, not because she had commanded it but because he was seized by a sudden longing to feel a smooth cheek again. He spread his hand over his jaw, wiping away the trails of threshed stubble and taking a moment to revel in the relief that it was gone. It was a very close shave, just as close as he was able to achieve with his little blue razor cube at home. But reality quickly superseded relief. She hadn't done it for his sake, but to further assert her power over him. And now his neck itched.
Tiellyn was studying him again, dispassionate and appraising. She looked like an archeologist examining the fifteenth identical unremarkable relic unearthed from a dung-heap. "Better," she pronounced at last. "You're not as ugly as most Alpha Quadrant species. If not for those ridiculous ears, you'd be almost handsome."
It took almost the last dregs of Julian's spirit to curl his lip at her. Remembering her words to Deyos earlier, he twisted them back upon her, "I don't think you want to measure which of us has the more ridiculous ears."
Her eyes widened and her lips parted in momentary astonishment, and then she laughed, tossing her head so that the earrings danced. "You are incorrigible!" she said. "I see why you've driven Deyos to such lengths to subdue you."
Julian didn't think this was worthy of a response. He turned his head away from her, trying to brush some of the scratchy shorn hair from his neck. The effort made his arm ache.
The klaxon sounded: two piercing blasts. Julian's eyes moved instinctively towards the comm output on the ceiling. His mouth, already dry, seemed to shrivel into a desiccated sandscape of palate and tastebuds and gums. His stomach, almost forgotten in the ordeal of his "treatment", awoke with a snarl of famine. His salivary glands burned dryly.
Tiellyn had followed the sound as well, but now she was watching him with great interest. "What's that signal mean?" she asked.
Julian tried to answer, but his mouth was too dry. He pressed his lips together and closed his eyes. Not again. He couldn't fail to draw his rations again. His hunger, at least, was his own, but when he failed to get water, everyone in his barracks paid the price.
But what could he do? He was trapped in here, behind a guarded door and a force-field. Dizzy and weak as he was, he didn't know if he could stand, much less try to evade four Jem'Hadar. If he asked her to let him go, she would only laugh again and find further cause to debase him.
A finger and thumb clamped down on his right earlobe, twisting it painfully. "I asked you a question, prisoner," Tiellyn said, her voice suddenly dangerous.
"Mealtime," Julian croaked, giving in not to the discomfort, but to the helplessness. Was there anything in this wearisome Galaxy worse than helplessness?
"Oh." The single, stilted syllable was unreadable. He tried anyway. Surprise? Disappointment? Comprehension? Then she curled her lip.
"I suppose you're hungry, venial little creature that you are?" she mocked. "The human is a greedy animal, always thinking with its stomach."
Julian fixed her with the closest thing he could manage to a stony glare. But his empty belly betrayed him. It let out an audible gurgle, wrenching wretchedly under his ribs. Tiellyn's eyes gleamed with malicious satisfaction. Hot, humiliated rage swelled impotently in Julian's chest, but he was powerless. He held his tongue.
The Vorta abruptly released her hold on his ear and turned crisply around, showing him her back in the neatly tailored tunic. She closed one side of the instrument tray with a clack, and then stowed away the container of blood and tissue samples. She wafted a lazy hand at the Jem'Hadar, not troubling to face them.
"Take the specimen away," she instructed. "We're finished here."
Julian couldn't quite believe what he had heard. He had no time to process it, either, because rough hands were seizing his bare shoulders, sitting him up while another soldier grabbed his feet and swung them over the side of the middle crate. While he had been lying down, the unsteadiness in his head had been almost bearable. Yanked suddenly upright, so quickly that even his neck couldn't tense fast enough to keep his head from falling back as he went, the fragile homeostasis was shattered, and mind-bending vertigo overwhelmed him.
His vision was eclipsed by a dozen black pulsars, all flaring and bursting at once. He felt a bubble of nausea and bile burst up through his cardiac sphincter, scorching his esophagus. He made an inelegant sound: urp! His flank and his head and his trapezius ached. One sharp javelin of pain pierced his left side. The Jem'Hadar didn't care about any of that: the soles of his boots slapped the floor as they yanked him to his feet.
In that moment when everything else was scrambled sensory chaos and the looping threat of syncope, one sensation stood out. Julian could feel his uniform jumpsuit, pushed low during the unceremonious and humiliating baring of his torso, sliding down his hips. Reflexively, he grabbed for it. His hands were unsteady and he had no real control over them, but somehow he managed to arrest the garment's undignified descent. He tangled the deflated sleeves about his wrists, trying to hold it up even though his fingers really wouldn't grasp.
There was a Jem'Hadar on either side of him now, driving him forward with iron grips on his arms. He was starting to think he'd develop permanent divots in the places their fingers always settled, if his captivity dragged on much longer. It was an inane thing to imagine, especially at a time like this. His thoughts were very muddled.
His vision still hadn't cleared when the door shrieked open. Julian balked, digging in his heels and managing, somehow, to arrest his forward momentum, at least for a moment. "Wait!" he cried, hating the frantic note in his voice but frankly amazed he had managed to raise it at all. "My clothes…"
His shirt and his singlet were still lying on the floor somewhere behind, where the Vorta had dropped them disgustedly. The air in the corridor was much colder than the air in Deyos's office: his skin was erupting with gooseflesh, and he started to shiver. He couldn't afford to loose one garment, much less two.
"Move!" the Jem'Hadar commanded.
"Give them to him," Tiellyn countermanded boredly. "I have no use for the vile things."
There was a thunder of heavy boots, and Julian was jostled as a third soldier pushed past the one holding his right arm. A loose bundle was thrust against his stomach, and his forearms flopped up to pin it there. He could feel the familiar jersey knit of the turtleneck, and the coarse, oily stiffness of a strip of old blanket. Then they were moving again, and he could only focus on trying to move his feet so that the guards didn't simply drag him.
(fade)
They turned him unceremoniously out into the atrium, staggering, dizzy, still blinded by artifact from the sudden change of position, and half-naked. Julian stumbled when the flung him forward, unable to catch his balance or arrest his fall. His arms were entangled in his garments, and he only just managed to thrust up one forearm as he fell, so that his brow didn't smash into the stone floor. He pressed his eyes against the taut fabric stretched over his bare arm, heaving painful breaths while the world spun around him, and trying to get his knees up under his body. He'd been here twelve Dominion days: how was it he hadn't learned how to maintain his balance and coordination when shoved about by the guards?
He heard them move off, but other feet were pounding towards him, the sound of these soles less crisp. They skittered to a stop too near his head and he cringed, trying instinctively to shrink away from the unknown threat. Whoever it was, they dropped to their knees and cold fingertips brushed his right shoulder.
"What have they done to you? Your clothes… your arm…"
Julian recognized Kalenna's voice, and heard the strained anxiety. He didn't understand why she was so upset. His arm was fine: it was just trapped at the end of a tether that seemed to consist mainly of his left jumpsuit sleeve. He was more concerned about his back, bare to the frigid air, and alive with pilomotor prickles.
Kalenna was touching the arm in question now, having abandoned the right one. She probed his deltoid, and then felt his shoulder. As her palm settled over his scapula, Julian understood. She was worried about the fracture.
"She fixed it," he rasped, trying to push himself up so he could look at her, and failing utterly. "It doesn't… fixed it…"
He didn't know if he'd made himself clear. Other boots were approaching, not as quick but every bit as purposeful. Far heavier, too, with a break in the gait to accommodate a compromised hip. General Martok.
"Prisoners!" a stern voice barked, some distance away. "Return to formation immediately."
Kalenna's voice was almost in his ear. She was curled over him, sheltering his head and shoulders protectively. "Can you stand? Are you able…"
"Allow me," Martok rumbled, and Julian found himself being once more hoisted to his feet. The Klingon handled him with more care than the Jem'Hadar had done — he could not be said to be gentle, precisely, but the motion was steady and sustained instead of abrupt and brutal. A cascade of cloth tumbled from Julian's arms as he rose, and Kalenna rose deftly to gather it up.
"Prisoners!" the Jem'Hadar repeated, nearer now.
Martok growled at him. "We're moving," he snarled, and Julian, braced against him, could feel the rumble of his voice through his armour. "Do you wish us to leave him here?"
"All prisoners are to assemble for ration call, or vacate the common area," the Jem'Hadar declared in that rote way they had of repeating the rules.
"We're assembling," Kalenna said quickly, almost placatingly. "So is he."
The Jem'Hadar made a noise of indifferent disgust, but they were already walking, Julian trying to keep pace with Martok and still struggling to hold his jumpsuit up around his hips. His vision started to clear in random blotches, and he could make out the dark snake of the meal line as it grew closer.
"Sub-Lieutenant!" Kalenna commanded briskly. "Fetch his bottles at once."
Julian couldn't pick Parvok's face out of the string of pale, dark, or grey-hued ovals, but he could imagine the fearful expression. "But the guards—"
"At once, Sub-Lieutenant!" Kalenna barked. It was a stern, militaristic command of the sort no officer could disobey.
One of the bodies broke from the line and took off at a brisk trot. The next thing Julian knew, he and Martok were in the queue themselves, standing right behind the Breen. He sucked in a cold breath through his nostrils, disturbing the loose hairs he'd inhaled earlier. His whole body clenched with the force of the sneeze, and to his shame, he failed to shield bring up his elbow in time. Both arms were still entangled in his jumpsuit.
Strangely, the sneeze cleared the last of the blackness from his vision, and Julian's eyes managed to focus just in time to catch Martok's almost comically perplexed expression. Of all the things they had expected of him, a sneeze apparently did not rank very high.
"Thank you," Julian huffed thinly. He looked at Kalenna, who was standing just out of the line too his right. "I'm… the Vorta doctor…"
Apparently, his eloquence had not returned with his sight. She seemed to understand. Lips pressed into a thin line parted as she said softly; "She treated your wounds?" Then her eyes travelled down his bare body, resting on his hideously discoloured flank. "Not all of them."
"There wasn't much she could do about that without opening me up," Julian said, finding that the words came after all, if he approached them with his clinician's mind. "I didn't want that."
"And she respected your wants?" Martok said skeptically. Julian looked at the mangled web of scar tissue where his left eye had once been, and felt suddenly sick with abhorrence. Had that hateful, soulless woman handled the newly-blinded General with the same contempt she had exercised on him? Of course she had.
"Not entirely," Julian admitted. "I honestly don't think she cares what happens to my kidney."
She hadn't cared about any of it, except as it served her ability to collect her samples and her readings. And whatever perverse pleasure she had taken from shearing off his young beard.
Kalenna had his shirts and the demolished bandages bundled under her arm now. Julian looked around, wondering where his two rescuers had stowed their canteens. Then he saw that the Breen carried six instead of two: the others must have handed them off.
His head was still reeling slowly. He had to resist the urge to rest it on Martok's broad, armoured shoulder. Julian shifted his weight, trying to bear more of it himself, and he felt the General's grip travel a little further down his arm. Now he was being supported, not carried.
"Doctor," Kalenna said awkwardly, her eyes flicking down towards his legs. "Your garments…"
Julian looked down, finally disentangling his arms and bundling both sleeves into one fist. The jumpsuit rode very low, exposing not only his trunks, but the fact that their waistband was still folded back, baring almost the last inch of his torso and the dark thatch of curls on his pubis. A hot flush rose in Julian's cheeks as he hurried to cover himself, tugging the trunks back up into place. He glanced at his shirt and singlet, in the crook of Kalenna's arm, and decided that wrestling with them while trying to keep his feet was unwise. He hitched the waistband his jumpsuit back up where it belonged, and took an unsteady half-step away from Martok. He motioned at the collar of the garment.
"Can you help me?" he implored, glancing at the General.
They both helped him. He eased his aching left arm into its sleeve, and then slipped the right into the other. Martok drew the garment up over his shoulders, and Kalenna helped him close it. It felt strange to feel the familiar fabric of his uniform directly against his skin, without the usual intermediary layers, but at least modesty was satisfied and he no longer had to worry about keeping the damned thing from sliding down his legs. He let Martok nudge him two steps forward as the line moved up. His legs felt weak and unsteady, but they held him.
Parvok had returned: he slid into place behind the General, Julian's bottles crowded into his arms with his own. Kalenna took them, fumbling for a moment with the shirts. Julian felt a stab of guilt, followed quickly by a sense of futility. She'd need both hands to draw her rations, but so would he. So would they all.
Enabran Tain, who had been standing ahead of the Breen in line and not even deigning to look behind, turned abruptly and snatched the garments from Kalenna's arms. He rammed them into his left armpit, leaving that forearm and hand free to hold his bottles while his right hand started plucking canteens from the Breen and thrusting them at Julian and Martok.
"You're all a crowd of children," he hissed disdainfully, no trace of his usual play-acted ebullience. "Incapable of solving the simplest problems. Get into the line, woman, before the guards take exception! And you," he added, glaring at Julian. "If you're going to faint, be sure to step aside so you don't collapse on the conveyor. The Jem'Hadar don't take kindly to spillage, and if you cost any of the other prisoners their meal, I won't be able to protect you."
Julian didn't feel faint, at least not especially. He wondered how bad his colour must be for Enabran Tain, hardly assiduously watchful of his welfare, should think it likely he would. It had been horrible to lie there so long, half-clad and helpless with the Vorta looming over him. Now he thought he was probably fortunate she'd kept him like that so long. Without the physical respite, he might not have been capable of standing now.
The line moved up again, and Tain handed off his bottles to the first Jem'Hadar.
(fade)
He had meant to put on his shirts as soon as he was back in the barracks, but once Martok had helped him to his cot, Julian found he could not resist the temptation to stretch out upon it. For the first time in days, he was able to do so unaided. His left arm and shoulder were sore, but sound, and there was no nauseating explosion of agony when he moved them. He did feel a sickly sloshing in his abdomen as he eased himself onto the mattress, the left side burning dully. But it was bearable, as was the tired throbbing in his knee. When he laid his head down, there was no dagger of white-hot pain in his cheek: only a tired, bruised feeling where the inflammation was already receding around his repaired zygoma. Julian's eyes drifted closed almost immediately, slumber seducing him with promises of healing.
Major Kalenna had been separating clothing from rag, and she brought his shirts to him, neatly folded. Julian managed to look up at her long enough to murmur his thanks. He knew he ought to sit up and put them on. He understood that without every one of his sparse layers, he was going to wake freezing. But it was just too much effort to cope with the necessary exertions. He took the shirts and tucked them under his head instead, a welcome buffer between his skull and the lumps in the pillow.
Kalenna's lips rippled into a tiny, amused smile. Then she moved to spread his blanket over him. Martok was striding around the room, gathering the others. During the waking hours, at least, the others were able to be generous.
"Will one of you watch the door?" Tain huffed. "If the corridor is clear, I need to get into the wall and back to work. Unless you'd all like to linger a little longer in this holiday spot?"
"Sub-Lieutenant, watch the door," Kalenna instructed, far less sternly than she had uttered her last command to Parvok. She took the blankets from Martok. "Would you assist Tain, please?" she asked.
The General grunted his assent and stumped off. From the door, Parvok gave the all-clear. Kalenna was still draping blankets over Julian's mercifully anguish-free shoulder when he drifted off to sleep.
(fade)