Part Two: Past Favours
There was a faint buzzing noise around her and the smell of roses. Earth roses. Ezri opened her eyes and winced as the harsh light of a spring morning burned into her pupils.
The sky…
She was lying on…something…facing the sky. She was….on a planet?
She moved her fingers and shifted her body, just to find out if it was possible to move. Then she wondered when the idea that maybe she couldn't move came from. You didn't often wake up thinking that, did you?
"Good morning."
She turned her head and saw a young man at her side. He looked vaguely familiar and her heart rate shot up, even if she saw no immediate danger, her body seemed to feel there was.
"Where…?" She looked around, and realised she wasn't outdoors at all. She wasn't even on a planet. She was in a biosphere. On a ship?
Maybe.
"…Are you?" The man finished. "I think you've already guessed."
"A biosphere?"
"Not just any biosphere. Welcome to Section 31's little wonderland…Alice."
Ezri drew a sharp breath as his identity clicked into place. "Travin!"
******
"Calm down, doctor." Kira told him.
Bashir rounded on her, his face pale and drawn with worry. She flinched as his eyes met hers, the look of hate and coldness she saw there was one she had never seen from him before. She'd read the file on the Ella Brannon incident and the one part that stood out from all the rest was the depth to which Travin had cut Bashir. The doctor was not a man to hate easily; in fact she would have said he would not hate at all. But Travin had passed that.
"Is there anywhere he'd take her?"
"I don't know."
"Anyway we can contact 31?"
"I don't know."
"There must-"
"There isn't, Kira." He raged, "I don't know anything to do with 31. THEY come to me, I have no way of…" He flopped back against his desk.
"Feel better?"
He shook his head.
"Look, I'll report Dax's disappearance to Starfleet, maybe 31 will get to hear about it."
"And how long will that take?"
"I don't know." She touched his shoulder. " We'll get her back, doctor. I promise."
******
Bashir looked at the hypo by the stand by his bed. He'd tossed and turned in an attempt to get to sleep by the combined worry of Ezri's disappearance and the unsettling feeling of her absence in their bed kept him wide awake. He never liked resorting to chemical means to get to sleep, but he needed to rest. Needed to be unconscious if 31 were going to pay him a visit.
But the hypo would probably render him so deeply asleep, that he wouldn't wake.
He sat up. Travin…He knew so little about the man, about his crimes against 31 and against Sloan. But Sloan had waged a very personal war against him and for someone like Sloan to be driven to that…
And he'd killed Ella.
For nights after, he'd been tortured with nightmares of the death, each one playing out subtly different. Sometimes he'd even save her only to wake to the reality, sometimes he'd die in her place and sometimes the precise moment of her brutal murder would repeat over and over until he forced himself to wake up, screaming her name and thrashing in the bed.
Travin had taken one love from him. And he swore he would not take another.
******
Kira opened her eyes. She sat up in bed, listening hard. Had she heard something? Then the soft shuffle sounded again. It was coming from the living area. Her heartbeat began to race as she remembered how 31 contacted Julian.
Always at night. Always while he slept.
And always the element of surprise…of control was in 31's favour.
She slipped out of bed and padded silently through her quarters, following the direction of the noise she'd heard. Faint star shine filtered through the huge windows casting shadows all around. Which shadow did not belong here?
And then she saw him. A tall man with honey coloured hair that flopped across his brow. He was sitting on the ledge by the window, patiently waiting for her.
"Major Kira?" He asked in a flat accent not too unlike Bashir's.
"I take it 31sent you?"
"Agent Ray Pierce." He smiled, but didn't answer her question.
"Do you know where Travin is?"
"No. Dale is-was one of our best. If he doesn't want you to find him, you won't."
"But you know if he's got Dax?"
"The Trill? I believe so. Not all of us at 31 do, but they didn't know Travin quite so well."
"And you did?"
"We worked together. I admired him," he chuckled, "I didn't like him, but I admired him. Like I said, he's one of the best. Sloan underestimated him, I won't make that mistake."
"This is all very nice and cosy, but it's not going to find us Dax!"
"Yes," he agreed and stood up, "call the doctor, hand your station over to whoever can run it in your absence and meet me at the Chu' La station tomorrow."
"I can't just-"
But the agent touched a minute button on his collar and a dance of tiny lights took him away.
******
Kira carefully docked the Rio Grande in the Chu'La station's only bay. It was only a small supply station orbiting one of the smaller of Bajors moons. Kira had been here many times, mainly with the resistance. She'd hated it then and she still hated it.
Unlike DS9, which the Federation had turned from a Cardassian monstrosity to something Bajor could be proud of, the Chu'La station had received no such make over. Its very walls rang with the cries of the malnourished and over-worked Bajoran slaves who built it.
Behind her, Bashir shuddered, "I didn't think places like this still existed."
"Because you're great and gloried Federation wouldn't allow it? I have news for you, doctor, if there's a need for places like this they exist. Chu'La is the only moon that's not on the designated trade routes. If you're mining down there, this is the only station with supplies for several parsecs."
They left the warm, clean surroundings of the Federation Runabout for the colder air of the shuttle bay. The environmental controls did not have any of the corrective systems of the runabout and the air lacked the right concentration of positive ions. Bashir even thought he detected a slight muskiness from the over recycled air. Kira scanned the area with her eyes but failed to see the man who had come into her quarters the night before.
"He's not here." She said.
"Then we wait?"
"We wait. Come on, doctor, let's see if there's a bar here."
******
Travin brought her a tray of food shortly after she had blurted out his name. He had neither confirmed nor denied it, but she knew she was right. The meal he gave her was simple but well balanced. He obviously didn't have any intentions of starving her.
Well, no immediate intentions anyway.
Curiously, she found she had a voracious appetite, which even under normal circumstances was unusual, she wasn't a very big eater, but under these conditions, she was surprised she wanted to eat at all, let alone the amount she gobbled down.
He watched her while she eat and she wondered whether she ought to engage him in conversation. It was the proper procedure in these cases, get them talking, get them liking you, make it harder for them to end you life.
But she didn't sense, or at least the life experience of the Dax symbiont, didn't sense that that was his aim.
At least not yet, anyway.
"Why did you bring me here?" She asked.
He chuckled, "don't you know?"
******
Several hours passed and every minute grated on Bashir's nerves. And as a consequence, Bashir grated on Kira's. Her own impatience was bad enough; dealing with the doctors was something else.
She sipped her drink and glanced at the doorway for the thousandth time.
Then with the sense that had served her so well as a terrorist, she felt someone behind her. She spun around, pulling her phaser, making Bashir jump.
And there was Pierce and another agent, wrapped in a cloak.
"Congratulations, Colonel." Pierce said. "If you were human and in Starfleet, 31 would be very interested in reflexes like that."
"You probably think that's a compliment. I don't."
"It is."
She didn't even bother hiding her disgust.
"Pierce!" Bashir said, recognising him and the agent nodded.
"It is good to see you again, doctor."
"Where's Ezri?" He demanded.
"We do not know…yet."
"Then why bother bringing us here?"
"So that you could meet my friend," he nodded to the cloaked agent at his side, "away from…more prying eyes, shall we say?"
The agent reached up with a thin, long fingered hand and pushed back the hood of the cloak. It was a young woman.
Bashir felt ice run through his veins at Pierce's next words. "This is Jennifer."
Travin's sister…