Gul Narat awoke slowly, dimly aware that someone was speaking to him. He grunted in response, hoping it would give him time to assess his condition. Not that there was much to it, he soon discovered. His body hurt. His hands hurt worse. His head hurt worse still.
He opened his eyes, but could make out nothing. His vision was blurred. He tried to focus and, with difficulty, realised that he was looking at the ceiling. With a supreme effort, Gul Narat focused his attention on an erratic light he'd noticed near the edge of his vision. It wasn't a light, he soon determined; it was a shower of sparks descending at intervals from a wrecked console. The dim yellow of the warp matrix pulsed softly nearby, fading in and out of his vision.
So he was on the floor of the Engineering department.
He tried to remember why and what he was doing on the floor where he found himself, but it was as though his brain was wrapped in fog. He began to grow frightened. It was unusual for him not to remember. He didn't have anything like the eidetic memory of Glinn Vekal, something obvious to any Cardassian who met them, but a Human or a Bajoran would not have been able to tell. This sluggishness of his mind was something he couldn't recall having experienced before.
Yes, he realised then. His memories of the distant past were intact. Gul Narat did a mental sweep and found that all was as it should be with exception of the last... period of time before whatever had happened to him. He remembered a case study from his training. It was the classic reaction to a head trauma. It was a safe bet that he had a concussion.
Gingerly, he touched his fingers to the place where his right forehead ridge met his hairline, right where the pain was worst.
His hand found moisture and gristle and came away covered in blood and hair and deformed, warped and charred... bits of something that had probably been a part of him once.
The insistent voice registered again, deep and concerned. Right... he should probably address that. His hearing was clearer now, his vision improving, and he saw nobody in his vicinity.
Gil Ressol's body lay close by, but she couldn't be the speaker. For one thing, she wasn't a man; for another, her face had melted.
Gul Narat forced himself to look away from the gruesome sight and again tried to concentrate. He wet his lips, tasting blood and burnt flesh, and tried to determine whether he would be able to speak. His throat was raw and burnt and his lips all but gone. Speech would be difficult and painful; the only question was, how difficult and how painful?
When he decided that, yes, it could be done without embarrassing himself, he lifted an arm to touch the communicator on his wrist. He found twisted and scorched metal, fused to his wrist by the shocks of pain the touch sent through that part of his arm, but it was miraculously functional.
"Here," he said, struggling to sound calm and confident. "What's our status?"
"We're in n-space," the voice, which he recognised as Glinn Ledrec's, reported. "Heavy damage to all decks, especially the forward section and main engineering. I have life support and internal communications functioning but not much else is. The Commander is alive but unconscious. Are you injured, Gul?"
A ridiculous question, but Gul Narat decided not to comment on that. "Not severely," he said, assuming that Ledrec would be able to read between the lines. He couldn't quite bring himself to admit that he was lying half-molten on the floor.
Instead of thinking about that in too great a depth, he looked around the wrecked engineering room. "What about the crew?" He was not optimistic. None of the technicians in his line of sight had stirred yet and he doubted they ever would. It all depended on the difference implied by the word especially.
"No reports yet, Gul. Sensors tell me the shielding on the bridge and around the forward weapons bays held. The lower and rear engineering decks are relatively undamaged, with about eighty-seven percent of the crew alive as far as sensor readings can tell. But I don't know how many of them are going to stay that way."
Glinn Ledrec fell silent for a few minutes, during which Gul Narat tried to concentrate. He remembered...
Engineering. Fleeing from the cube. Consoles exploding. The transwarp blast. At this, Gul Narat smiled grimly. It'd have worked, of course. The Borg cube was no more.
But the Gavran had almost been lost herself. He remembered frantically scrambling to erect some sort of shielding, keeping the circuits from fusing, being forced to disable even life support. At least Ledrec had gotten it back online; the atmosphere would have turned toxic within a few hours otherwise and Gul Narat had to admit he didn't know how long he had been unconscious. Long enough for his Glinn to get some systems online, obviously, which couldn't have been a short time.
"Gul Narat," Glinn Ledrec said over the communicator, cutting into his thoughts, "we're being hailed."
What? Gul Narat mustered the energy to frown, instantly regretting it as the contortion sent pain shooting through his raw nerve endings. "It's Gul Jecett," Glinn Ledrec reported.
"Put her on. Audio only."
There was a short silence over the communicator, but when at last someone spoke it wasn't Gul Jecett. "She refuses to speak to someone she can't see, Gul."
More likely she wanted to see the damages for herself. Well, Gul Narat thought in a sudden flash of inspiration, why not let her? "Very well," he said. "I have nothing to hide."
On the other end of the comlink, Glinn Ledrec made no comment. A monitor over Gul Narat's head fizzed to life, and Gul Jecett glared at him from under a mask of heavy static. His position relative to the screen also meant that she was not only at an extreme angle but also upside-down.
"May I help you?" he asked.
"Gul Delar Narat," said the woman, "you are under arrest. You will return to real space and surrender your ship immediately. Resist and you will be destroyed."
Well. That was unexpected.
"Excuse me," said Gul Narat with a smirk, "but how exactly do you plan to destroy me when your sensors can't even pick us up?" It wasn't a bluff; similar to certain types of nebulae, the interdimensional barrier blinded sensors. And Gul Jecett might be able to extrapolate the Gavran's coordinates in 3-space with time and luck, but there was absolutely no way she could determine their location in 5-space.
But Gul Jecett merely smiled. "You know as well as I do, Gul Narat, that you will have to return to real space eventually. And when you do...and I'll be waiting."
That wasn't a bluff either, he knew. In the space in which the Gavran now found itself, there was no other life, no resources. To stay here would be death. And they could only enter real space from the point they'd left it, and Gul Jecett had in all probability already arrived at the debris field that had only recently been a Borg cube.
He chose not to waste time by protesting his innocence. Instead his mind was racing. It was as if the fog had been lifted, and his brain was functioning more smoothly than ever. "And what crime," he asked cheerily, "am I supposed to have committed?"
Upside-down, Gul Jecett sneered. "Stand up," she said. "I won't discuss this with a man who can't even get to his feet."
Gul Narat concentrated and tried to sit up. Almost immediately, black swirls clouded his vision and the room began to spin. A wave of nausea came over him and he promptly lay down again. "No," he decided; "I think this is comfortable. Now I ask again, Gul Jecett: what is it I'm charged with?"
"You are under arrest," said Gul Jecett, stressing the words, "for the destruction of the penal colony and the Cardassian outpost on board Keltok Nor and the murder of thirty-one Cardassian citizens."
"You didn't beam them to your cargo bay?" Gul Narat asked, feigning surprise. Of course she hadn't; if they were alive she couldn't very well claim that he'd murdered them.
Gul Jecett ignored him, however. "You fired twenty-two photon torpedoes on Keltok Nor while they were running a diagnostic that required them to lower their shields." The Gavran didn't even have that many torpedoes, Gul Narat thought irritably. "You will return to real space immediately and prepare yourself for trial and execution. Jecett out."
The connection went dead.