Chapter 7 – Meet the Neighbours
As the relentless Mokan sun was finally setting and cooler air began wafting into the hut, three Romulan guards turned up at the entrance. Two carried disruptors, while the third was balancing a stack of boxes. One of the armed men walked over to the still-prone, nearly motionless Toller and poked him with his weapon, disinterested calculation in his eyes. "Is this man in any shape to eat?"
The question was directed at Tom, who had woken up at their heavy-booted approach. He shook his head to clear out the haze and disorientation as the Romulan's words filtered into his consciousness. Clearly, the guards had been watching him minister to the stricken man, first from the guard towers and then from the monitoring devices hidden in the ceiling, and had him pegged as the guy to ask questions about the man's conditions – ranking officer entitlement be damned. Nyere didn't even seem to notice.
"He'll be fine in a little bit," Tom said with a yawn. "Leave it, and we'll see to it that he eats something." The Romulan with the boxes shrugged, deposited his load on the floor and all three left without another word.
The fatigue that had caused Tom to doze off was not dissipating; it had been evening when he left the Enterprise, and his body clock was beginning to tell him that some serious sleep might be a good idea. No doubt the cocktail of drugs he had been injected with, and the hour-long walk in the furnace that was the Ulak One yard, had taken their toll as well.
Food first, though. He reached for one of the boxes and found something that looked suspiciously like Starfleet emergency rations – compact, square and brown. Hard-pressed calories, yum. But there was also a piece of hard cheese, some flat bread, and to his surprise, a bit of fresh produce – a couple of lengthy tubers that looked like close relatives of the Terran carrot, and two unfamiliar round things that might be vegetables or fruit. He bit into one, and found it juicy and not too revolting. The texture was like something that might grow on a succulent plant, like cactus fruit.
"Where does this stuff come from, I wonder?" he asked into the room. "It doesn't taste replicated. You don't grow anything in the camp, do you?" A shrug from Nyere was the only response. Tom shrugged back, and ate the remaining vegetables before heading to Toller's bunk to try and interest him in his portion, figuring the water and fructose content, as well as the electrolytes in the slightly salty-tasting tubers, could only be helpful to the guy at this stage.
When he got to the bunk, Toller's eyes were open. They had lost the sunken, dried look Tom had noted earlier when lifting the unconscious man's lids, but now stared at him in undisguised resentment.
"Who the fuck are you, and why did you interfere?" he whispered hoarsely.
Schmidt intoned around a ration bar, "Toller, meet Tom Paris. Fresh conversational blood, just what you always wanted. You keep complaining about us boring you to death. So now you have the perfect reason to stay alive. Lucky for us."
Toller's eyes fixed on Tom even more sharply then before. "Tom Paris? Admiral Paris' brat? My, my, what a prize. Hey, you guys, know who this is?" His eyes darted from one to the other of his comrades, looking for responses that didn't come.
"Supposed piloting ace, killed three people and then lied about it. Was all over the news just over a year before the Hiroshima left McKinley on her mission, don't you remember? Late '67 or early '68? Got kicked out of Starfleet and, from what I heard afterwards, turned into a total lush. Daddy's pride and joy. No wonder he ended up here. Just don't expect me to be nice to him."
He turned to Tom - who had rolled, then closed his eyes tightly but failed to shut out the spiteful voice - with a look that distilled nearly ten years of unfocused rage and hatred. "You're gonna regret what you did there. Scum."
Schmidt shrugged diffidently. "Like I said, fresh conversational blood. Should make things interesting for a bit. It's not like you're a prize yourself, asshole, getting Massoud killed like you did. He was a good man, unlike some. So shut the fuck up or go back out there, bake yourself some more and for God's sake, finish the job this time." He concluded picking over his meal, carefully placed the box by the front door – obviously a requirement - and laid back on his bunk to resume his examination of the ceiling.
Tom decided to ignore Toller's diatribe; really he had no choice, what with the Romulans listening in. Besides, what had just gone on between the two men seemed like an old exchange into which he just happened to have been introduced as a new variable. If anything, Toller's unwelcome reminder of the events of Caldik Prime could only serve to cement his credibility with any Romulans listening in: Tom Paris, twenty-four-carat Starfleet fuck-up.
But Tom also figured – since he wasn't entirely without the occasional vindictive streak himself - that if that's how Toller wanted to relate to the new kid on the cellblock, he could bloody well look after his nutritional needs himself. As far as Tom was concerned, his Hippocratic duty had been discharged in full.
He walked back to his bunk and stretched his long body out on the thin mattress. "Eat the fruit, Toller. It's good for you," he drawled. "And for Kahless' sake don't talk with your mouth full. Or at all, for that matter."
His feet dangled slightly over the end, even though he'd been told he'd been given the bunk that used to belong to Gorman, apparently the tallest of the human captives. Romulans were obviously not built for height, and were not inclined to make accommodations in their furniture for those who were.
Tom mentally took stock of what he had learned; certainly, on the surface the place compared favourably to other detention facilities he had heard of, or experienced first-hand. Compared to Akritiri, it was positively humane: Food, water, shelter, access to daylight, the ability to move around outside - for the humans, anyway. Disease prevention, however sullenly and unsympathetically administered. No clamps.
And yet.
Half of the human population had died, all at the hands of their captors, one of them in circumstances amounting to torture. At least one had gone crazy, two of the others were on their way. A favoured punishment was to allow prisoners to be subjected to physical abuse by other prisoners, possibly to …
No, don't go there, Paris. … Deep breath. Right. Moving on.
If any of the inmates – human, Romulan, Reman or Cardassian - had been convicted of a crime, Nyere hadn't mentioned it. That meant chances of release were probably nil. And then there was the cloak, the insidious secrecy. Few governments ever hid things they were proud of, Tom figured, as his thoughts started to blur and he felt a sudden yawn coming on.
As Tom felt his eyes close and sleep claim him for good, a single incongruous phrase rang like a chorus through his mind: There's no place like home. There's no place like home. And he thanked his wife and his best friend - circling in an illegal orbit overhead, protected by an equally illegal Romulan cloak - for the ruby slipper inside his gut.
…..
As Tom had figured, anytime five males slept in a small room together, it was a statistical near-certainty that at least one of them would snore. Since he did not, that had narrowed the odds on his cellmates. Sure enough, one of them – Karsgaard? – did, and to top it off, Toller kept flailing around and mumbling in his sleep, probably a knock-on effect from his earlier heatstroke.
In the best tradition of fighter pilots throughout the ages, Tom was able catch a few winks of sleep virtually anytime and anywhere, but he had also always been a light sleeper. And once he was awake, that was pretty well it, regardless of the time of day.
And so, well before the grey dawn of Mokan rose to breathe life back into the lizards that were hiding under the rocks above the prison camp, Tom Paris unfolded himself from his bunk and carefully stepped outside, trying not to wake his podmates. It would not be unusual for a new inmate to be unable to sleep, he figured, and he hoped he would not attract Romulan opprobrium by entering the open yard at an unusually early hour. Ulak One inmates, Nyere had told him, were free to leave their hut whenever they were so inclined – special privilege, not accorded to any of the other inmates.
Then again, where would they go, surrounded by a five-metre fence reinforced with a lethal force field and topped with razor wire …?
The night air was not exactly cool, given the radiant heat emanating from the sand in the yard and the hut's walls, but a huge improvement over the day-time furnace; the light breeze from the sea was an additional boon as Tom looked around to take what sights he could into memory. The perimeter areas were lit, glaringly so; nothing would be able to move across either one of the two barren corridors without detection. High overhead lights also illuminated the open areas between the various huts housing prisoners.
Ulak One, where the humans resided, was separate and apart from the others for reasons that probably made sense to the Romulans. The Cardassians, spread across two camps, had to make do with an hour of access to their small courtyard for an hour at a time, one at a time; the yard belonging to Ulak Three, which housed the "less nasty" Cardassians as Nyere had put it, could be seen at the far end of the humans' yard. Ulaks Three and One were separated by a well-lit corridor that appeared to be patrolled regularly.
According to Nyere, only the most compliant among the Reman prisoners, housed in Ulak Four – barely visible from One - were allowed outdoor 'recreation', but only as an earned privilege, presumably for providing useful intelligence or information. The inmates of Ulak Five were never seen outside.
Apparently, despite the physical distance between the Ulaks, a limited prison grapevine had established itself and functioned reasonably well. The guards tolerated the occasional shouting across fences – probably recording every word as potentially useful intel. They would step in only if insults started flying or matters under discussion, in their view, threatened the peace and security of the facility - or if one of them was in a rotten mood and needed an easy outlet.
In addition, members of the various groups met on occasion in the infirmary, and it was there and from the late engineer Gorman that Nyere had picked up most of his information on the Cardassian and Reman inmates. Since it was information known to the Romulan guards, and information that would rather obviously be passed to a newcomer at that, he had willingly shared this in the hut while he and Tom had worked on reviving the unappreciative Toller.
The Remans were, as Talar had indicated to Riker, indeed the putative remnants of Shinzon's rebellion; the fact that they had not simply been flushed out of an airlock or lined up against the nearest rock and phasered into their component particles had initially struck Tom as being rather un-Romulan. But Nyere had explained that apparently the newly constituted Romulan senate had passed a motion – not of leniency, but to ensure that individual members of the rebellion should 'remain available' for ongoing testimony against others in the movement as investigations proceeded. They now had been so 'available' for over two years. The thought made Tom shudder.
Putting his mind firmly back into the now, he surveyed his surroundings in silence, or whatever passed for that here, given the constant chirping of nocturnal insects and near-subsonic hum of the perimeter force fields. The omnipresent floodlights turned the night to near day, leaving only the barest glimpse of unfamiliar stars; additional roving searchlights glinted off the razor wire. The heat was still radiating in waves off the roofs of any buildings he could see from his vantage point. He could see the shadowy movements of guards in the lit towers or along the spaces in between the different camps and hear the occasional crackle of the perimeter fence, as another hapless creature discovered too late that it's back ridges had evolved just this much too high. Intermittent shadows darkening the lights suggested night-time flying creatures, chasing the ever-present bugs – the only living beings free to come and go as they wished.
As he stood there in the illuminated night, allowing his mind to reach into and absorb this place that he had been sent to investigate, it struck Tom as mildly curious that with all the advances of prison technology the old standbys such as floodlights, razor wire and perimeter patrols seemed to cross cultures, and prevail even as far as the Neutral Zone. Or maybe it was all just about symbolic trappings, like the oak paneling in court rooms, the blue or green of surgical gowns, the black uniforms of security personnel, the ripping off of a pip to signify supreme displeasure?
Symbols. Tom lightly touched the blue mark on his neck. TEP-FPSNZ-INS-0766. A symbol, alright. Give a person a label, and those who like to judge will be perfectly placed to do so - to point their fingers, and to turn away, without a further thought to what might lie beneath.
What this particular symbol meant to others had been made perfectly clear to him on a number of occasions, even after it had been covered up. What it meant to him – he'd figure it out, eventually. Probably not today, though.
Then, suddenly – a piercing cry cut through the night, followed by a wailing repetition of the same pleading phrase, over and over, in a language which Tom did not understand and didn't recall hearing before. Reman, probably. Not a cry of anger or murderous rage, like the voices of Akritiri that sometimes still echoed in his head. No - somebody was looking for answers, courtesy of a politely worded motion passed by the Romulan Senate. The cries were the response the good senators would never hear.
No sounds like this would ever be heard as the result of official questioning or mandated punishment in the Federation. Certainly not in places like Auckland, that well-manicured and impeccably run Rehab Colony, where people were at least theoretically pointed towards release and a possible public telling of their experiences.
No – if there were cries sent into the New Zealand night, those would always be limited to certain 'private functions' … And those in turn would involve gags, to ensure that the peaceful nights in those park-like surroundings under the Southern Cross were not shattered, like this night was on Mokan. He knew.
Tom shuddered involuntarily, gritted his teeth and quickly suppressed any impetus to examine these thoughts too closely. Clamped them down out of habit – just another gag put on the memories of silent screams, and the knowledge that the mouth they could not leave had been his own.
As the tortured pleading continued its disturbance of the night, this night, somehow in a detached portion of his brain Tom managed to mentally record its origin and location, adding it to the map of the facilities that his navigator's mind had started to create.
Ulak Five – check.
Tom turned back to the hut planning to try and get more sleep, in the hope that he had buried the memories beyond the reach of nightmares and that whoever had been snoring had rolled over, when he heard the crunching of boots on sand. One of the guards, making his rounds.
"Hey you, Terran, back in your hut."
The guard was carrying a disruptor, but had not touched it – in threat or otherwise. Taking this as a good sign, Tom decided to try conversation. He was here, after all, to gather information from whatever source he could.
"Sorry, is there a curfew? I'm new here. I thought in this Ulak we could go out anytime."
The Romulan came closer, his disruptor lifting slightly now. Instead of responding to Tom's opening gambit, he looked him up and down slowly, deliberately. Then he nodded, and somewhat gruffly said,
"Yes, I see you are the new prisoner. But there is a curfew when I say there is one. There is one now, prisoner. Back in the hut."
"Thanks, understood. No disrespect meant, sir. But I have to say, this must be the most pleasant time in this place, quiet, and without that heat. Too bad we can't just sleep through the day and come out now, isn't it."
As he spoke, Tom made a show of slowly moving backwards towards the hut; no point in unnecessarily antagonizing the guard. He noticed with interest that the disruptor was drooping again. Maybe the guy wasn't averse to a chat after all, once their relative roles had been established to his satisfaction. He decided to give it another try.
"Is it always as hot as it was today, or does it get worse? I mean, are there seasons here?"
"Three seasons. Rain, Hot, and Really Hot. Right now, it's Hot."
"Oh great. How many seasons have you already spent here then? Must be tough."
When in captivity, always show sympathy to your guards, they had been told at the Kirk Centre. Most don't want to be there anymore than you do. The ones that do, you can usually tell – don't try to talk to those. Allow the others to tell you of their frustrations with their superiors. Their marital difficulties. Their dreams and desires.
Tom remembered the incident in Voyager's first year, when a Captain of a Romulan science vessel had agreed to transmit messages to Starfleet - after Janeway had appealed to his sense of family. Romulans made a show of looking and acting superior, tough and suspicious, but unlike their Vulcan brethren, they apparently had an emotional side that could be tapped into. If one was careful.
The guard came closer, eyeing Tom warily but with a certain amount of curiosity now. He stopped for a moment, clearly weighing the benefits of indulging in a spot of conversation against the consequences of failing to assert his authority. Curiosity and boredom won out. "I am in the second year of a three-year assignment."
Tom shook his head in sympathy. "No idea how long I'll be here myself, but if you're not supposed to be behind bars - that's a long time. Do they let you bring your family?" Those buildings outside the perimeter …
The guard's eyes dropped and he shook his head, vehemently. Bingo. The sore spot. "No. The only person who has been able to bring his family is the Commander." The resentment in his voice was palpable, but all Tom could think was - Talar brought his kids?
"Good lord," he said instinctively. "They must be awfully bored here."
The guard snorted derisively, his voice dripping with favourite grievances now. "Hardly. He had the prisoners in Ulak Four dig them a pool, which the rest of us are only allowed to use once a week, for an hour. And they have a holosuite all to themselves, where they get to have their schooling and all the fun they want."
A holosuite? Interesting. Tom hadn't known Romulus used holo-technology. But with Federation ships rumoured to be going in and out of the Neutral Zone, anything was possible … "It must get awfully dull around here for you guys. Do you have much contact with Romulus, or other places?"
"Oh, once in a while. Occasionally we see ships coming in, like the one that dropped you off. But unless you're one of the Commander's personal protection squad you don't get to get close to them. The rest of us just get to watch them come down from afar. I liked the one you came in on. It seems … functional, with pleasing lines. The Commander's son likes it too, I am told. He is building a model of it."
The mysterious Ares, no doubt. "Must be tricky, doing that from memory. I used to build models when I was a kid. Sail boats though. I mean, you need to keep looking at the thing you're building models of a lot, or you screw up. Has he got pictures? Else, how often does he get to see that thing?"
"Often enough, about every couple of …" The guard stopped suddenly, his eyes narrowing. "You ask too many questions, Terran. Back in your hut. Now."
He lifted the disruptor and pointed it at Tom's face. Not slow to figure that the conversation was over, Tom raised his hands in a defensive gesture and slowly moved back towards the entrance of the hut.
…..
The morning, once it actually broke, brought an opportunity for ablutions. One by one the prisoners were told to move out to a shower facility at the back of the hut, which Tom had failed to notice until now, blocked as it had been by a force-field reinforced fence. The four regular inmates went to the shower one by one, in a sullen procession the order of which appeared to have been determined years ago and never changed. Tom went last, with an interest he carefully managed to disguise as fearful apprehension.
The guard, a different one from the one Tom had attempted to chat up the night before, but wearing the same air of bored resentment, motioned Tom with his disruptor to take off his clothes. "You have five minutes," he growled – information which Tom understood was given in something close to kindness, since the newcomer could not possibly know this and might end up with skin covered in soap until the next shower, three days hence. Tom took the hint and lathered and rinsed early and quickly, taking the reminder of the time just letting the cool water run over his head and – unsuccessfully - trying to figure out an unfamiliar gizmo of Romulan origin that might or might not have been a razor. The guard left as soon as the water stopped, his duties over.
The towel was far too small for someone of Tom Paris's height, but the rising heat and dry air made thorough toweling quite unnecessary; in addition, the slight breeze on his wet skin made for probably the last minute or two of relative comfort the day would bring. And so Tom simply waited for his skin to dry off before getting back into his clothes – no change having been provided for those, the prospect was not inviting – when he heard a wolf whistle from the end of the yard.
A tall, stockily built, solitary Cardassian stood in the much smaller yard in Ulak Three, and made a show of eying Tom's lean body up and down through the two fences.
"What have we here?" he shouted, in heavily accented but flawless and rather colloquial Standard. "Fresh meat? Nice. I like 'em fair. Bit pale and scrawny for my taste, but not bad for a human. Haven't had one of you guys for a few days now. Hopefully, it won't be long before we get to know you a bit better, and they send you here, not to the bloody Guls. I promise, I'll be first in line." He licked his lips demonstratively and made a universally obscene gesture with his hands.
Tom's throat went dry, and his thoughts shattered.
No. Not again … The Bolian … Don't … No, he's Cardassian … Dad?
Slowly, deliberately, he succeeded in clamping down on the gibbering panic that had sent his heart racing.
Two lines of fencing, loaded with lethal force fields, between him and me. They're just taunts.
Breathe, Paris. Fucking breathe.
Once Tom managed to reassert control over his racing mind and his over-productive adrenal glands, part of him understood that this was a test – carried out quite deliberately in full view of the guard towers. A test of what, he wasn't certain, but some return posturing was probably called for. He was glad the man was too far away to see the sweat beading on his forehead, to hear his still-panting breath.
And so Tom forced himself to make a show of putting his clothes back on slowly, leisurely – not provocatively, but top first, in order to demonstrate that he didn't care about the taunts – before finally responding to the man, his breathing under control now. "What, you guys don't have any decently built bodies over there? Or is it you don't have showers, so you can't come too close to each other without tossing your ration bars?"
The Cardassian looked at him with calculation in his eyes, and something close to an appreciative smile curled one of his lips. "Ah. I get it. You're the new Gorman. Funny man. Very funny. Hope you last longer than him though, and aren't quite as stupid. He managed to get himself and a bunch of my friends killed when the guards took him and his Captain down. In our camp."
"Sorry to hear that," Tom replied. "Nothing to do with me, though. Before my time. What happened?"
He was intrigued to see the Cardassian shake his head 'no' almost imperceptibly, before replying, "I wasn't there either. Guards said it was some kind of fight. I heard Gorman said the wrong thing to someone, managed to get his wires crossed somehow. Romulans separated them with a plasma cannon. Poof, up in smoke." His hands mimicked an explosion, but his fingers stayed pointing towards the sky just a little longer than strictly necessary.
Tom nodded slowly, holding the man's eyes to the extent possible, forcing himself to see past the raised, snake-like ridges, the thick, corded neck, the unblinking, lashless eyes. Said the wrong things. Wires crossed. Up in smoke. Message received, with thanks. Although Nyere should have been the one to hear this, not the man who knew better than anyone other than Commander Talar that the distress call had in fact gone out. Nyere would have given his eyeteeth for this news.
"I'll keep that in mind," Tom said. "At least for now. Be seein' you."
"You do that, pretty boy. You keep that in mind." The Cardassian licked his lips lasciviously, before turning his back and resuming what appeared to be the purpose of his presence outside: a quick march around the small yard, stretching his legs and swinging his arms wide in what would likely be the only physical exercise he would get for some time. Kahless knew how many they were to a pod in his camp, how exercise time was allocated.
The encounter had clearly run its course; any further exchange might attract unwanted attention. Tom ran through what he had heard in his mind. The Cardassian clearly wanted the Terrans to know that Gorman had succeeded in building his transmitter in their camp, but did his final words signal that they were interested in renewing the collaboration, or was he warning the humans away?
Not that it mattered to Tom particularly; his focus now, apart from learning more about the prison, was on getting the four humans out in his own way. He had the means; all he needed was the opportunity.
And how could you read a Cardassian, anyway, and why would you want to collaborate with them? You sure as hell couldn't trust them. His father was living proof.
Still … The Cardassian's voice when he referred to 'the Guls' was laced with ill-disguised contempt, and Ulak Three had co-operated with Gorman.
Who, then, were the Cardassians in Ulak Three? The ones Gorman had sought out, voluntarily, again and again?
Still breathing a little faster than normal, Tom picked up his small box of convenience articles. It contained soap and a toothbrush, and the obscure shaving thing. He had tried to glide it over his chin, pushing at random openings and managing to figure out how it worked just before the water had run out.
Running his hand over his still mostly stubbly chin, he imagined the look of disgust that would cross B'Elanna's face were she to see him like this. During their time on Voyager, when his mind had been taken over by an alien ship he had called Alice and his personal hygiene had taken a distinct nose dive, the first thing the love of his life had done - a mere token minutes after their emotional reunion - was to drag him into the sonic shower and hand him his razor. For B'Elanna Torres, absence of facial hair in her mate would trump sentiment any day.
If she'd still speak to him at all, when he got back.
Craving nothing so much as the normalcy of his family and the toy-strewn familiarity of his quarters, Tom gave one last longing look at the shower, now dry and glinting dully in the already sweltering morning sun. His eye was caught by something that looked like lettering in the centre of the showerhead, and he moved in for a closer inspection.
There it was: the same logo he had noticed on the ceiling tiles: near-circle 'C', enclosing a smaller 'B'. Definitely not Romulan – no, in the bright light of day, there was no doubt: this was Terran Standard script.
What had the guard said? A shuttle – one that looked like the Flyer - came by every couple … what? Weeks? Months? He had caught himself before finishing the sentence.
But did it really matter how often a Federation ship visited this place, in the face of the mere fact that one did? It didn't take a genius to figure out that such a ship likely had brought at least some of the things that had equipped the place where the human prisoners were held.
Tom cursed softly to himself and headed back inside the hut. Over seven years in the Delta Quadrant he had learned to trust his own intuition more than any sophisticated sensor array, acquired wisdom or command decision.
And right now, that little voice inside his head was telling him with increasing insistence that what he had seen to date inside the prison facility on Mokan was little more than a glimpse through a keyhole.