To The Journey

Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it's not mine. This is an AU story.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Making Connections

"Some extension course," Tasha said to Julian. "You were doing those numbers in your head like a human computer."

"And she would know," Kirk added. "She's marrying one."

Under normal circumstances, this would have warranted at least an elbow, but now it sent a pang through her as she realized for the first time in a week what this captivity meant. "Yeah, if we ever get out of here."

"Don't be so pessimistic." Tain crawled out of the wall. "We'll get out of here."

"But Jim's right," she added. "It was almost like listening to Data doing those calculations."

"You must be exaggerating. How's it coming along, Tain?"

"Quite well. So what do I do for this tedious hour you insist on?"

Tasha had managed to find a way to apply her own skills at tactical to the situation and had insisted that Tain take an hour break after every six hours of work so that the guards wouldn't notice that he never seemed to be anywhere. It was also an excuse to force him to give his aging body a chance at some much-needed rest.

"It couldn't hurt you to get to know us for awhile."

"I suppose not," he admitted. For reasons she couldn't understand, he seemed to have almost a soft spot for her. "But really, I'd like to speak with you for a few moments. Alone."

"Do you mind?"

"No." Julian signaled to Commander Duval, who had been guarding the door. The Breen was still there but it was easy to register him as a sort of non-presence. He barely moved and hadn't spoken a word to anyone yet.

"I know who you are," Tain said once they were alone.

"I haven't tried to hide that," she replied impassively. What was he getting at?

"I know a little bit that you haven't been telling."

"Such as?"

"Where you met Garak. And under what circumstances."

Her blood ran cold. "How -?"

"You're not the only one who's good at mathematics here. I knew there was something of interest to Garak on Celtris Three, and a little snooping revealed what - or rather who - Dukat had there."

"Don't mention that name," she snapped. Then the fire drained from her. "Please. It's hard enough being imprisoned without all the reminders of the last time I was taken prisoner in the line of duty."

He gave a very slight nod, acknowledging her statement. "I recognized your name the moment you introduced yourself. Your mention of him only confirmed it. Garak took a few risks for you."

"Did he?"

"Something about you must have charmed him. He tried to trade for you with - you know who. Also offered a few pointers, supposedly on interrogation. For example, that it might be worth feeding a captive so they're coherent enough to talk. All in the name of effective information-gathering, but your information wasn't that good, and he hadn't been so insistent about anyone else, ever."

Five days of hell and I never knew I had a secret ally. Her experience with Garak had been limited to a few brief, moderately kind words, the only ones she'd heard in that entire time.

"For what it's worth, I agree he went too far."

"I've heard a lot about the Obsidian Order. What makes you so much better?"

"There is an art to what we do."

"An art to torture. That's a laugh."

"He had no real reason to do what he did. There wasn't any real information he could get from you, and Madred must have known he couldn't break your Captain Picard that easily. You weren't even supposed to be there in the first place. It wasn't information-gathering, it was the causation of pain for personal pleasure. Breaking you for the sake of breaking you."

"What's the difference?"

"Any crime is a worse crime if it serves no purpose."

"Your race doesn't live by that. They kill for sport."

"The Ordernever did. We were careful about our targets."

"You can justify murder and torture all you want, but that doesn't make it right."

"Maybe not in your mind. But an Order agent never enjoys torture. It's a necessary evil, a means to an end, nothing more or less than that. Your Federation may see it as cruel, but it isn't on the same level with hurting someone for the sake of hurting them."

"You've never taken pleasure out of hurting anyone?"

"Of course I have. Haven't you?"

"What?"

"All right, you've never actually hurt anyone. But haven't you ever been delighted to lock someone up? Haven't you ever wanted to hurt a prisoner?"

"When we captured the man who killed my sister," she admitted softly, "I had to put my second-in-command in charge. I didn't trust myself to be alone with him."

"There, you see? How is that so different?"

"Because I restrained myself. I didn't torture him."

"As I restrained myself. It didn't matter what I wanted. I did everything according to Order procedure. Something others of my race never were able to understand."

"I won't concede that it was right what you did, no matter how you argue it."

"I'd be disappointed if you did." The familiar rapport was starting to come back.

"But I will admit that you aren't so different from humans a few centuries ago," she said grudgingly. "What you did was wrong, Enabran, but it would be wrong for me to act like humans are somehow superior because of it."

"Agreed."

xxxxxxxxx

"There are a number of stories flying around about you, Captain," Tain said. "And half of them false, I don't doubt. It can't be true that you resurrected a dead man."

"Well, I had very little to do with it. It was a combination of extremely improbable circumstances."

"A dead man was brought back to life?" Tain said in astonishment. "How?"

"Well, it's a two-part thing. Spock, my first officer, knew he was about to walk to his death. Our warp drive was down and we were in imminent danger. If we didn't get out of there in time, we would all be dead. He entered the contaminated reactor room to fix the drive. But before he did, he implanted his memories, his consciousness if you will, in another man. It was meant to be taken back to Vulcan and entombed, if you will. But it didn't work that well."

"What happened?" Tasha asked. "The details aren't public knowledge. I only know of the result."

"Well, it's a bit of a complicated story, and even I don't fully understand that. What I can tell you is that during the battle that got us into that situation, a device was activated that created a new planet out of a lifeless one. We shot Spock's coffin into the atmosphere of that planet, intending for it to incinerate in the atmosphere. Instead it soft-landed, and the power of Genesis resurrected the body. With no small difficulty," here he briefly glanced out of the corner of his eye at Martok, but didn't say anything to him, "we returned the body, and the man bearing his consciousness, to Vulcan, where experts were able to rejoin them."

"There's a device that can remake dead planets?" Solam's voice was soft with awe. "Why have we heard nothing about it?"

"First of all, it didn't work. The planet went through its entire cycle of life in a few weeks before becoming even more inhospitable. Secondly, the device was destroyed, and most of the scientists involved were killed by a madman trying to steal a ship."

"Were you involved in the creation of this device?" Martok asked.

"No. Well, I suppose it couldn't have happened the same way without me, but I wasn't directly involved. Why?"

"You know an awful lot about it."

"I got involved right at the end. But frankly, the deaths of those scientists were my fault. I made a stupid mistake, followed it up with another stupid mistake, and thanks to that a lot of good people died."

"What are you talking about?" Tain asked with an air of detached interest.

"We ran across a ship with some odd lifesigns, and discovered a number of sleeper pods. We should have left well enough alone, but no, we had to investigate. That ship contained some of the worst criminals Earth has ever known, and we woke them up. Then we dumped them on an uninhabited planet and never came back to check on them. By the time someone ran across them, the planet had undergone serious emotional change, and Khan and his men were mad as hell, leading them to kill all those people."

"What were they doing in space in the first place?" Martok wasn't as guarded about his curiosity.

"It was a transport ship, a form of prison if you will. It wasn't safe to keep them anywhere on Earth, them being what they were, but no one was really comfortable with mass executions."

"If you don't mind my asking," Duval put in, "what were they? You're getting ahead of yourself."

"They were a race of genetically engineered humans. One of Earth's worst experiments ever. These super-humans, if you will, decided they were better than anyone else and nearly took over the world before anyone stopped them."

"Genetic engineering?" Martok frowned. "Like what the Dominion do?"

"Ah - how do I explain -" Kirk faltered.

"Genetic engineering," Julian explained slowly, "is the process of selectively altering a person's DNA to change their characteristics. There is some similarity with the Jem'Hadar, but it's not quite the same thing. In their case the modifications are worked into the clones from the time of cloning. It's more like the originals were engineered, and now they just clone the engineering. They're born, if you can call it that, exactly as they are. In those humans, the modifications were made to alter people who were already living. It's also currently illegal in the Federation, following the incident Captain Kirk mentioned."

"As it should be," Kirk added emphatically. "People like that don't belong in society. They're dangerous to the last man."

"You don't know that!" Julian snapped, suddenly almost defensive.

"Why do you care? You're not one of those doctors who'd like to run genetic experiments, are you?"

"No - that's not it -" he protested, fumbling.

Tasha's jaw dropped as her blue eyes lit up with understanding. Finally, it all clicked. "No, I don't think that's it at all."

"Then what is it?" Jim was quite agitated now, but Tasha knew it wasn't personal. Khan and the subsequent events had robbed him of two of the most important people in his life, not to mention his ship and a lot of good crewmembers.

"Human computer may have been a bit of a stretch, but I wasn't imagining things when I thought you were doing those calculations faster than a normal human could. Recreational mathematics wouldn't teach you that. And you know an awful lot about exactly what human genetic engineering is and what it does."

Julian sighed, dropping his face into his hands. "I was six years old," he admitted softly. "I didn't even understand what was going on. When I was a child, I was - severely impaired mentally. My parents couldn't stand it. I was taken to a secret treatment facility and had my DNA resequenced. It wasn't until I was fifteen that they even told me what they'd done." He met Kirk's eyes finally. "I don't want to be better than anyone else."

"Why keep it secret, then?" Kirk asked rather harshly.

"All I want is the same opportunities that would be given to a person who wasn't engineered, and yet if anyone knew I wouldn't have them. I didn't ask to be this way. Why should I spend my life an outcast because of it? Why should I be barred from serving in Starfleet or practicing medicine because of something that was done to me without my understanding or consent?"

"You have advantages -"

"Medicine's not a contest! I mean, sure, there are awards, and if they wanted to ban me from ever receiving an award then I'd understand! Medicine is about saving lives. That's what I want to do."

"It isn't right!"

"Jim, will you shut up and listen for a second?" One good thing about being on more equal terms with Jim than she was Picard was that she didn't hesitate to tell him off as long as they were off-duty. "Whether it was right or not isn't Julian's concern. He didn't make that choice. Now that it's made, the question is what to do about it? Denying him the right to practice medicine or serve in Starfleet won't undo what was done. To me it seems like nothing more than retribution, a punishment for being submitted unwillingly to an illegal medical procedure."

This actually seemed to take him aback for a second. "I - I never thought of it that way."

"Listen, Jim. I know what Khan and the others took from you. But just because they were genetically engineered and they did that doesn't mean that every genetically engineered person is responsible." She took his arm gently and sat him on a bunk, realizing he was starting to calm down. "You told me that the Khitomer accords were a sign of the fact that you'd learned to stop blaming all Klingons for killing David. Maybe it's time to bury this hatchet now."

"I - ah -"

"Just think about it." She squeezed his arm, then left him and walked over to hug the distraught doctor. "Don't worry. He'll come around."

xxxxxxxxx

"Strangest thing that ever happened on my ship?"

Tasha's prediction had come true. Bashir and Kirk were still walking on eggshells a bit around each other, but the ice had started to thaw. It was clear Kirk was taking Tasha's words of admonishment seriously. He'd been the first to respond to the question Bashir had thrown to the floor, as it were.

"Probably the ship getting taken over by a race of breeding furballs."

"You mean the tribbles?" Julian asked.

"Yes. You must really be sharp on history."

"Ah - not exactly. We sort of got caught up in the middle of that."

"Time travel." There was a definate glint of amusement in Kirk's eye. "What happened?"

"Remember the man you arrested at the end of that mission?"

"Yeah, what about him?"

"Well, he managed to get aboard the Defiant at the same time as we had a device that could take someone back in time. He decided to go back to that time and assassinate you before you could make that discovery. We ended up crawling all over the station and the ship trying - successfully, I might add - to stop him. We got caught up in a bar brawl, too."

"Oh, I remember the brawl."

"Remember the first guy you asked who started it?"

"Yeah, vaguely, what about him?"

"Miles O'Brien. Chief of Operations, Deep Space Nine."

"Oh, dear God." Kirk was laughing now.

"He thought it was the funniest thing. Especially that he lied to you. 'I lied to Captain Kirk'! He couldn't wait to tell his wife."

Their laughter melded, as for the first time they really talked as friends. "I take it that since I'm here, it turned out all right."

"Yes - with one hitch. Our Chief of Security had a few too many pockets on his coat, and he forgot to check them until we were already back to our own time."

"Oh, don't tell me -"

"Worf told me about that!" Tasha inserted herself into the conversation. "It drove him up the wall!"

"It took us ages to get them all off the station. We found an uninhabited planet to settle them on. Miles and I managed to devise a transporter that would track tribble lifesigns. We got them onto a ship and sent them off. Plenty of food and space."

"The two things tribbles need the most of."

"Exactly."

"You time-travel much on that station?" Kirk asked conversationally. "I remember we always seemed to be someplace - or rather, sometime - we weren't supposed to."

"There's only one other that I remember. An accident with a temporal singularity interacted with some chronoton particles on our hull, and so we materialized exactly where we were supposed to -"

"But not when," Kirk finished. "And we're not talking about a few days, are we?"

"Try a few centuries. 2024, to be exact. We were supposed to be in Starfleet Headquarters. Instead we materialized outside a train station."

"Wait a second." Tasha sat up slowly. "San Francisco, 2024 -"

"The Bell Riots," Kirk finished for her. "How close did you come?"

"We got caught right in the middle of it," he said softly. "I've never seen anything so awful. The Sanctuary was bad enough to start off with, all those people crammed into a tiny space, killing each other for food or over a slip of the tongue. Gabriel Bell was killed trying to save Captain Sisko from a fight."

"But that's -" Kirk began.

"The man they named the riots after," Tasha finished.

"Captain Sisko took on his identity. Convinced someone to fake his death after it was all over. But, God, I didn't know it could get that bad. I mean, humans like to think we're so much better than Klingons or Cardassians or Romulans, but if push comes to shove, if something happens to the Federation, if things get bad enough, how would we react?"

"I think humans have failed that test a few times in more recent history." Tasha shared a long look with Jim, and she knew they were on the same page mentally. "The Federation usually tries to pretend those happenings didn't happen because they don't want to answer that very question.

"I remember talking about that with Captain Sisko after we got back. He told me that his very first mission, a special assignment when he was still in the Academy, involved a check-in visit to a planet that the Federation had lost contact with a few years earlier. Apparently in the interim, it had pretty much completely self-destructed. Curzon - Dax's last host, you know - he was there too, and was actually down on the planet. Jadzia got very tight-lipped, wouldn't even talk about it."

"It's a pretty horrifying sight," Tasha said quietly.

"You've been there too?" Julian asked. "Were you on that mission?"

"I was rescued by that mission," she whispered. "I was fifteen years old, and I'd lived on that planet my whole life."

"Was it really as bad as Captain Sisko said?"

"Worse. He didn't actually see it, they wouldn't let him beam down. Jadzia's probably closer to understanding how bad it really was."

"Closer? You mean she's not all the way there?" Julian looked horrified.

"I suspect not. A brief mission, fully armed, can't really capture what it was like to live there."

"No, I suppose it can't. It's just - Jadzia said it made San Francisco 2024 look tame."

"It probably did. I can't imagine Earth ever got that bad."

"Why - why don't more people know about that? Why hasn't anything been done?"

"The Federation handled the Turkana situation very badly. They didn't do anything until it was too late and then they weren't able to evacuate everyone in time, even the people who were in the most danger. To step up now and do something would be to admit a serious mistake on the Federation's part."

"So they won't do anything because they don't want to admit they were wrong?"

"In a nutshell," Jim put in before Tasha could comment. "Have you ever heard of Kodos?"

"Governor of Tarsus IV, ordered half the population to be executed to save the other half," Julian said softly. "So?"

"There's a lot about that that isn't commonly known. Like the fact that Kodos actually usurped power from the Federation-appointed authorities after the famine started. They didn't want it known that the disaster happened under Federation authority. It's also not commonly known that the Federation government asked for help several weeks before the famine seriously begun. A few blighted fields were discovered, but the Council blew off their requests for assistance until it got so bad that they didn't have time to get out there before people began to starve. I suspect they only listened the second time because of some well-placed blackmail."

"Blackmail?"

"Let's just say a certain Captain contacted a friend of his, an Admiral, someone who was strongly principled, and let slip that the first call had been made. This Admiral confronted the Federation Council and threatened to reveal both calls unless the Council took action to help the colonists."

"That Captain wouldn't happen to be sitting in this cell, would he?" Julian asked, even as Tasha was shaking her head, knowing Jim had been a child on the colony when this had happened.

"No, but you're close. It was my father."

"You never told me that," Tasha said softly.

"Well, he didn't ever actually tell me. My brother told me a few years later that Dad had been going crazy trying to get Starfleet to rescue people on the colony."

"But if your father wasn't there -" she began.

"I was spending the summer with a family friend. It was supposed to be fun. It was at first."

"You were there?" Julian asked softly. "My God. If anything in history sounded worse than the Bell Riots -"

Julian was cut off by a knock on the wall. He pulled off the panel and Tain crawled out.

"Well, that's done. Now we wait."

I know some of this is rehash but I wanted to establish a bond between the characters.

In addition to In Purgatory's Shadow/By Inferno's Light, this episode references the TOS episodes Space Seed and The Conscience of the King, the TOS movies The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, and the DS9 episodes Past Tense, Doctor Bashir I Presume and Trials and Tribble-ations, and was written with my personal stuffed, chirping tribble in my lap. Anything outside the canon of those episodes (the new tribble planet, for example) is my personal invention.

What did Kirk mean when he said Genesis couldn't have happened the same way without him? Think about who was on the team.

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