You can do it, Q'etu. Just get through.
The boy was young. But he already had the necessary skill to slip through the security systems undetected. He was too much like others that Bashir had known - thin, supple creatures with rubbery limbs that could fit through even the most unyielding tunnels.
He rested his aching head against the wall, as it continued to throb with a strong, heavy pulse. He had not noticed earlier, but the silence around him had extended past the point where anybody wished to broach it. Even the surrounding computers were notably dead. With a keen eye on the room's other occupants, he pictured the boy Q'etu, crawling through the labyrinth of hidden vents.
He'll make it.
"Hey." Riley was gazing at a panel just above the level of his eyes, where a red light was flashing on the dark grey surface, rhythmic and repetitive. He inclined his head. "What's that?"
The other two men converged on his position until they both had a direct view of the newly animated display. A frown of perplexity had tightened around the leader's mouth and sweat-lined brow. He pursed his lips and took a single step towards the centre of the room.
"You." His sharp eyed glare was aimed at Larkin. "You know what's happening there?"
The middle aged doctor lifted her chin in a moment of silent defiance, but from the other side of the room came the sound of an old man chuckling.
"Don't you recognise a hail when you see one?" Jack's challenge was loud and brazen. Beside him, Patrick had responded with an open grin.
Muscles tense upon his forearms, the other man raised his disruptor. "Here," interrupted Riley before the leader could carry out his threat. He reached up to touch a panel directly above the level of his head.
"Hello inside?" said a voice. "Do you hear me now?"
"What do we tell them?" whispered Riley. His leader cast him a withering glare.
Hostage negotiation, Bashir told himself, turning his head to one side as though Naron and the imagined Security force were visible through the thick walls of the hospital. Here we go.
"I am Naron," the disembodied voice continued. "I wish to speak to the one who leads you. Which of you can act as a representative?"
Their other two captors were waiting in silence. With only the briefest of hesitations, the leader released a frustrated growl through his teeth. "Yeah," he grumbled. "What do you want?"
The same voice persisted over the comm. "It would help if I had something to call you."
"Fine," the leader shouted to the microphones hidden above him. "Then you can call me Cadmus,"
"Cadmus," Naron acknowledged. "Is that your name?"
"It is as far as you're concerned."
"Very well, then," he continued. "I have a proposal for you, Cadmus. A chance to bring this to a close before it escalates, with little risk to yourself, or to any of your men. Now why don't we take a moment, and see if we can't achieve a reasonable solution to this situation?"
"I'm happy with our situation just the way it is," snarled Cadmus.
Naron's answer was much calmer. "Even with my people only just beyond the outer door?"
"But not inside," the pale man retorted. "Which tells me you aren't finding it so easy to storm this place. I bet you already know we got hostages in with us. Try anything and they'll be the first to die."
He slapped the panel and extinguished the pulse of its small red indicator. A heavy scowl creased the skin around his eyes as he targeted his prisoners with a sharply probing gaze.
"By the way," he muttered, stroking the bottom of his mouth with one thumb-tip. "Where's that friend of yours?"
With the energy rifle raised above the level of his hip, he stepped towards Jack and Lauren. Finally, like a horizontal sweep of a targeting sensor, his focus had moved to include them all. "This isn't any kind of co-incidence, and you people don't just lose track of each other. You do know which friend I mean, don't you? The blonde one. Where is she?"
Five silent faces looked up at him, all tight-jawed, all of them defiant. "Do you expect us to know the answer?" said Lauren - the challenge from the base of her throat as calm and dangerous as that of a stalking lioness. But Julian cast his thoughts to the scene beyond, imagining that he could sense Naron's presence through the walls of the abandoned clinic, and possibly even extend a part of himself to reach the Security team he was sure would already be positioned outside. He wondered, feeling peculiarly restless, how many there might be.
"What should we do?" asked Riley.
"I want to see who this Naron is." Cadmus stepped back, and surveyed the seated prisoners. "And exactly what he knows."
But Riley shook his head. "You can't get into any biographical files from here." Faced with a fearsome glare from his leader, he pointed to the exit. "Only from the central database. It's over where the lobby used to be."
"Right then," growled Cadmus, and indicated his bulky partner. "You're with me. I'm gonna need a hand to get into the central systems. And you-" He returned his attention to the smaller man. "Watch them."
Soft, nagging sounds, that another Human would not ordinarily have noticed, grew even more apparent after Riley's companions had left him behind. Punctuated by silence, every moment only highlighted the soft whine of feedback from a worn-out circuit, and the agitated tapping of Riley's fingernails upon the outer casing of his disruptor. The small man stared obsessively at the communication board, fingers twitching as if this might give him a remote connection to the flickering controls.
Hilary Larkin was quiet, but her constant watchfulness had not abated. Julian wondered briefly how much he could really tell her in a single glance. There was little, he thought, that Jack and the others would not already know.
Cadmus hated his prisoners. That much had been clear from the beginning, as clear as the gleam of fury in his small, dark eyes. But he doesn't want us harmed, Bashir reasoned through the same throbbing ache in his head. He still has some purpose for us. Otherwise he would have killed us all and moved on long ago.
Riley's incessantly rapping fingers made little sound, but what there was intruded quickly upon the course of Bashir's own thoughts. His attention latched onto the staccato rhythm, dividing it into the dots and dashes of an old-style communiqué. But the random bursts of Morse code emerging from Riley's fingertips never seemed to arrange themselves into anything like a recognisable word.
"Will you stop making so much noise?" shouted Jack, his words explosive and sudden.
Tightening his hold on the disruptor until every one of his knuckles was dappled white, Riley flushed, and glared. "Look-" he grumbled quietly. "He wants me to guard you lot, that's fine with me. And that means, you stay quiet. I don't give a damn what you think of the noises I make."
"What a shame," said Lauren. "You seemed so much nicer than either of your friends. Not at all the sort of man to be making threats…"
Riley said nothing.
"I think-" she continued. "You would be far better suited to providing technical support. Making arrangements, negotiating. It must be quite rewarding, to be the one who knows how to handle people…"
Even Julian discovered that he too was slightly mesmerised by the woman's low, mellifluous tones.
Riley shook himself all over, as though pulled from a trance. "I'm not supposed to be talking to you."
"Not supposed to?" The words rang clear in Julian's memory. Larkin watched every one of his movements as, deliberate and tentative, he leaned forward and ignored the shifting ache at the centre of his head. A sudden involuntary tension had come to Riley's shoulders, and with only the faintest dark stubble to define or obscure the lower half of his face, the tension in his jaw was clearly visible.
His quietly haunted gaze was transferred gradually to the weapon in his hands. For a moment, he stared, as if the sight of it was foreign to him. But Bashir's attention was entirely fixed upon the troubled face in front of him. The downcast eyes of their guard revealed an undercurrent of turmoil, and doubt.
Can we use that?
"It's not you I have a problem with," Riley admitted quietly, still frowning. He nodded at Larkin. "It's what she did. What you all represent. We… We can't allow it."
"We?"
Bashir changed his position again. The effort was tiring. But he could sense the pieces of a mystery coming together. He did not want to let them go - not this time. The answer threatened to slip away, even as he finally thought he could speak aloud.
"You're one of the Anti-gens."
Of course. In the back of his mind, he had always suspected. He had seen others like these men before, and knew them. If not individually, then certainly by type. The simmering hatred, barely concealed behind their collective gaze. He noted the subtle changes in Riley's eyes - as well as the new question forming in Larkin's and Jack's.
"What are they?" Hilary Larkin was first to ask.
"Humans." Bashir kept a steady watch on the other man's reaction. "You are Human, aren't you? They think they're protecting the good of humanity. But at some point, they decided that we don't fit that definition."
"Exactly."
Riley jerked backwards, looking pale, as his leader approached from around a covered diagnostic bench. The tacit giant was close behind him. "But then I knew that you would work it out eventually."