"You…" said Bashir before he could stop himself. "You're Human."
It was the most immediate trait that he had noticed in this other man - and that which came as the greatest surprise. Cold eyes watched both the room's occupants, from beneath a pair of thin but dark and overhanging brows. He did not know how many others might have come to this planet, but every non-Adigeon he had encountered until that moment had been a native of the same far-distant world.
"Ten points for deduction," the intruder snarled with deep-throated sarcasm. He swept a hand in a broad arc around the landscape of mechanical devices - some active, but most of them hidden like corpses in stasis. "Guess all this hasn't come to naught then. Has it?"
He lifted a long, semi-cylindrical rifle - balancing it a little awkwardly in the crook of his right elbow. A matte-silver casing was wrapped around the outside, divided by a single groove extending along the bottom edge of its muzzle.
"Now get moving." He jerked the energy rifle fractionally sideways to indicate Bashir. The sneer never departed from his sickly, sour-cream face, "Him too."
Positioning herself between the intruder and her patient, Larkin folded both arms with protective determination. "I'm not about to go anywhere with you, and neither is he."
"Did I say you had a choice?" The response came as a fierce, low growl.
"That's not the issue here," Larkin continued stubbornly, her own persistence an easy match for this hostile newcomer's. "This man is not ready to move, and neither of us are leaving this room until I say that he is."
With a contemptuous twist to one corner of his upper lip, the stranger raised the tip of his rifle to the level of Hilary Larkin's head.
"Wait-" Bashir struggled onto his side and felt his stomach contents surge in time to the sudden momentum. He forced himself to sit partially upright, but even his own throat clenched against an emerging attempt to speak. "Don't. It's… It's fine. I'll come."
Legs threatening to give way as he came into contact with the dusty floor, he grunted, and held to the upper surface of the mattress with as much strength as he could gather in his hands and forearms.
"Well?" The stranger's voice was an immediate, sudden fire-burst - the aftershock throbbing and sharp as a knife in Julian's head.
"Give me a moment!" he insisted, breathless.
"He has extensive neuromuscular degeneration," Larkin informed the other man. "Trust me. He won't get as far as the end of this room - not without physical support."
"No," gasped Bashir through clenched teeth. "I can. All I need is… get my balance. That's all. It's…"
He stumbled.
"You know that's not true," Larkin reminded him. "Don't even try to tell me that you're 'fine'."
The tall man stood, watching as even the other's arguments evaporated to nothing. Then he turned sharply towards the older doctor, and gestured with the disruptor rifle in his hands. "Then you. Help him."
"Faster!" The rifle was jammed into the small of Julian's back, forcing him forward until he had almost overbalanced. A sharp, bruising pain burst upward from the bottom of his spine, accompanied by the stranger's cold demand. "I haven't got all day."
The smaller man continued to shadow both prisoners, keeping less than a metre between them. But Julian's steps were heavy, each breath shallow and painful. He kept one arm around his belly and the other across the width of Doctor Larkin's shoulders, allowing them to serve as a thin but sturdy support. His focus remained on the position of the stubborn but only sporadically visible intruder. A footstep, a touch of breath against his neck, or even the occasional pressure of a disrupter muzzle against his skin. All were clues, to pinpoint the man's location as he remained beyond the range of Julian's visual field.
"This is as fast as you can force us to go," insisted Larkin.
"Shut up," came the half-shouted imperative from behind their backs.
"Listen," she tried again. "There's nothing in here that you could possibly…"
"I said, shut up."
Another snaking corridor led to an end point at the very back of the hospital complex. It was not as far as Bashir had assumed. But he found, with his legs still reluctant, that the sensation in his extremities was now as strangely distant to him as if they had been disconnected from his torso. But it's not the same, he reminded himself, as Doctor Larkin's shoulders tensed to take a greater portion of his weight. You're out of any immediate medical danger. The doctor promised…
And what, doctors never lie? The exertion of movement had triggered another bout of trembling.
The farthest end of the passage was marked by a door with a surface the colour of Martian rust. Darker veins of dirt had gathered in the diagonal scuffs across its centre, which had certainly been more pristine in his early childhood memories. The markings beside an orange door indicated entrances to narrower, secret places, where only the hospital staff had ever been allowed to enter.
"Open it." The stranger aimed the tip of his rifle directly at Hilary Larkin, so close that it for a moment it seemed to scrape against the fabric of her outer coat. The doctor's skin flushed with the pressure of holding back another angry retort. Her jaw clenched tightly. But she reached up with her free hand, hesitated for only a moment, concentrating - with a small, thoughtful frown - and keyed in the eight digit access code. How long since she's had to remember those numbers? wondered Bashir, as the familiar security scanner now swept across the contours of her skin.
He slapped his own hands reflexively against the handlebar of a grounded antigravity sled, which failed to prevent the metal from colliding with his belly. Stepping forward, the stranger had given the door no time to slide fully open before shoving both hostages roughly through the marginal gap.
Held upright only by the tension in his arms, Bashir found himself looking in dumbfounded consternation at a trio of other hostages. Every one was a fellow escapee, those who had accompanied him from the distant and nearly forgotten confines of the Institute. And no-one responded with any surprise to Bashir and Larkin's sudden entry.
Only one face was missing. Sarina.
"Down there." The leader manhandled both recent prisoners to separate places on the edge of the cluttered floor. He deposited Hilary Larkin in the storeroom's farthest corner, and forced Bashir to the wall. He fell, and gripped one arm with his eyes tight and teeth grinding hard against each other. The eldest of his enhanced companions, snowy hair drifting around the edges of his crown, had distorted his face into the beginning of yet another bout of fretful sobs. Julian doubted that the others nearby had failed to notice, but they paid him very little visible heed.
"Oh," Jack remarked. "You got here after all."
There was more than a dash of sarcasm in the wordless stare from Julian's tired hazel eyes. He sighed, head falling back against the wall. "You, as well?" he muttered under his breath.
"Oh we're not prisoners," responded Jack, chuckling conspiratorially. He dropped his own voice to a whisper. "You see? You see? It's all a part of our master plan."
Bashir's voice was heavy with more than simple fatigue. "Master plan."
"Easy," Jack persisted. "We pretend to have been captured, and then we find out exactly who they are, what they want, and where they're coming from."
"And after that?" Bashir challenged.
Jack's dark eyes flashed, one hand lifted to his mouth, and finally he turned away with an acute, impulsive scowl. "Fine. Won't tell you then, if you're just going to criticise."
"We were looking for you." Lauren filled in the rest of the tale. "We thought you might have been back here, but there was only one way to be certain. Instead, we found them."
And what were you up to in the meantime? wondered Julian.
Lauren's focus shifted to Larkin, whose own blue eyes were watching the small group with increasing scrutiny. "Your doctor friend?"
A slight sideways glance from Julian was all the confirmation she needed.
"Then that must mean it's over between us." Lauren sounded briefly wistful. But her voice hardened at the sight of Bashir's irritable gaze. "Don't get your hopes up, Julian - it was never that good."
The pain was even more acute across Julian's chest and shoulders, and every attempt to form a coherent response was causing his head to pound. He sighed.
Seeing only three faces at his side, he wondered again what had happened to Sarina. The question expanded like oxidised flame, but caught in his throat - remaining unasked. Somehow, he thought, it was better not to alert the others to these thoughts, or draw attention to the younger woman's absence.
Their captors were agitated, moving about with short, restless strides. There are three of them, Bashir noted secretly. One - a larger man than either of the others present - tapped irritably on the surface of his rifle. But he leant back, glancing periodically over his shoulder and with his face set into a constant, concentrated scowl.
"The one on the left," hissed Jack, sensing the genesis of another question. He nodded to a small, hunched man who had been casting repeated unhappy glances at his two larger companions. "His name is Riley."
"He believes in their cause," Lauren supplied, "But he's a lot less certain about their methods."
Jack nodded emphatically. "Yes. Yes. Exactly," he said, pointing at the tall brunette for added emphasis. He redirected his attention to the same sickly individual who had brought him to this tiny room. "The one in the middle there - that's their leader. Wouldn't try convincing him of anything…"
"I gathered as much," Bashir responded in a clear but only semi-audible whisper. He glanced at the final unidentified stranger. "What about him?"
The soft, childish laugh at his ear came as a moderate surprise - and turned to see that Patrick's expression had opened to a grin. The old man was looking directly at Lauren, chuckling to himself in spite of the tension in their captors' watchful eyes. But there was a pronounced hunch to the third armed stranger's shoulders, unnoticed until that moment, a now-clear deliberateness in his scowl. Almost as though he was trying not to look their way.
She's gotten to someone, then. Bashir spared a momentary glance at Lauren's calmly fashioned smile. And felt the sudden, explosive pain of a disruptor-butt forced hard into his upper body.
"You!" snarled the leader, glaring ferociously enough to silence all protests. "Get over there. You, other side. And shut up, the lot of you. You may have calculated what a disruptor blast feels like at point-blank range. But trust me, that's not the same as knowing it."
I know already, thought Bashir. But for that moment, their best chance would have to be in silent patience.