To The Journey
Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it's not mine. This is an AU story.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Plan of Escape
It had been three weeks. Three weeks of endless waiting.
By Julian's calculations, the message would have reached the wormhole about nine days ago. He'd figured in another day for them to intercept it and send it to Garak, and two more for him to actually get a ship and make the journey. That still left them all waiting with bated breath.
Tasha wished she could ask Julian to recalculate, but he was serving the tail end of a week in solitary confinement for trying to get medical supplies for a now very sick Enabran Tain. The old Cardassian's heart was failing, and they knew he would die without immediate medical attention, but the Dominion didn't care. Julian had been too pushy and been punished for his trouble.
"There."
Martok's voice made Tasha and Jim jump and turn. Two people stood behind him - a Cardassian and a Klingon in a Starfleet uniform.
"Worf!"
His eyes widened as he took her in, but her gaze had already shifted to the Cardassian. "I should have known you would come."
"You're far too trusting," he said gently.
"Not this time. You came, didn't you?"
Garak didn't reply, and she followed his gaze to the bunk where Tain lay.
"What is wrong with him?" Worf asked.
"It's his heart," Tasha said softly. She could see that her assessment had been dead on. They knew each other well.
"Really. There are many people who'd say he doesn't have one."
"He was convinced that you would come," Martok told him.
"He knew I had no choice. Tain. Tain, I'm here."
The man came back to a greater state of awareness. "My message. It got through?"
"It did."
"Worf, can I have a word with you?" Tasha barely gave the Klingon a chance to answer before she pulled him aside, wanting to grant the two Cardassians a little privacy.
"How long have you been here?"
"About five weeks."
"I was afraid of that."
"Why? What's happened?"
"I don't know exactly. All I know is that about four and a half weeks ago, I was told your engagement had been called off."
"A changeling," she said softly.
"I suspect."
"They're releasing him from isolation." Duval had stepped into the room.
"Good." Martok nodded in satisfaction.
"Who?" Worf asked.
"A friend," Martok explained.
Julian, disheveled and disoriented, was shoved into the room. Tasha caught him before he could fall and got him onto a bunk, covering his eyes with her hand so he could get used to the light slowly after a week in the dark.
"Doctor!"
"Garak?" He started to turn his head, but Tasha caught it and held it still.
"Don't try that just yet, your eyes need to adjust."
"I should have known it wasn't you on the station," the Cardassian said.
"How's that?" It was clear the banter was very familiar between them.
"He was far too suspicious. I thought you'd finally begun to learn."
Julian laughed. "You should have known better."
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"No good?"
"Nothing, Data. I'm sorry."
Data had yet to figure out why Tasha had abruptly called off both the wedding and their relationship the day after she'd returned from the Gamma Quadrant. She hadn't even spoken that much to him since. Geordi and Will had both tried to play intermediary, to no avail. She'd closed herself off from the entire senior staff, even Captain Picard.
"It simply does not make sense. It is as though the woman I knew was replaced by a stranger with her face. Does it seem that way to you, Geordi? Geordi?"
The man was staring at him suddenly. "Oh, my God."
"What?"
"Data, that's it!"
"What?"
"She came back from the Gamma Quadrant acting like a completely different person."
"I do not follow you."
"The Gamma Quadrant. Where the Dominion live. The changelings."
"You cannot mean -"
"It makes more sense than anything we've come up with so far. And if she is, Kirk may be too. In which case we need to warn Starfleet."
"How do we test your theory?"
"Just leave that to me."
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Tasha laid a gentle hand on the shoulder of the man she had come to call a friend. Tain's heart had finally failed a few minutes earlier, and his body was still warm.
Garak had stepped out of the room, probably to endure whatever it was he was feeling in private. They all knew Tain wouldn't be allowed any final dignity, but they could pay their respects.
"I don't know what Cardassians believe," she said softly, "and I don't know if you can hear me right now, but in spite of everything I hated about you, I think you were a decent person in the end."
It was somewhat sharp, not at all the sentimentality typical to a wake, but it was exactly what Tain would have wanted. That brashness had characterized their relationship from the first. He would have been dismayed if she'd let a little thing like his death change that.
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"Now?"
"Now." Data nodded to his friend, indicating that he was ready. Their plan depended entirely on timing and surprise.
Right on cue, Tasha walked into Engineering. Geordi, walking past the door, collided with her and they both went down, tangled together.
"I'm sorry!" she gasped, trying to untangle herself.
"No, no, it's my fault." Under the guise of untangling himself, he carefully took a single strand of her hair in his fingers and broke it, cupping his hand around it as he stood back up.
He felt the hair change in his palm. Glancing down, he could see that it had turned into a blob of orange jelly. Casually, he flashed Data the agreed-upon hand signal.
Tasha was hit by a phaser blast out of nowhere, instantly unconscious. As she dropped to the floor, her body began to lose shape, and quickly she was no more than an orange puddle. Gasps and cries emanated from the engineering staff.
"Data to Lieutenant D'Sora. Security to Engineering immediately."
"On our way. D'Sora out."
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"The transmitter Tain used to contact the station," Worf asked. "Where is it?"
They had assembled a meeting of sorts in their barracks. Tain's plan had left them with nothing but two new people to help them form a plan. Now they needed a way out.
Julian opened up the panel in the wall. "You have to crawl through that hole and kind of slide your way up into the wall."
"It took him over a year to modify the old life-support system into a transmitter." Martok's voice held a hint of awe.
"How did he operate it?" Worf asked.
"He wired the message and the transmission coordinates directly into the system circuitry," Martok admitted, knowing that made things more difficult. "That way all he had to do was connect the transmitter to the power grid and let it run."
"Could the coordinates and the message be changed?" Worf asked.
It was, unsurprisingly, Garak who caught on first. "You're planning to contact the runabout."
Worf nodded. "We could activate the transporter and beam ourselves onto the ship."
"And run like hell," Julian added ruefully.
"Re-encoding the transmitter won't be easy," Garak said slowly. "We'd have to reconfigure the array one circuit at a time. "
"Can you do it?" Julian asked.
"Me?"
"I'm no engineer and neither is anyone else here. You, on the other hand, my dear Mister Garak, are a man of many hidden talents. If you can't do it, nobody can."
"It's nice to feel needed," Garak replied with a hint of a smile.
"All prisoners assemble immediately." Everyone jumped when the speaker crackled to life. "Repeat, all prisoners assemble immediately."
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"I don't know what put you onto it, but we're lucky it did," Picard told the duo.
The changeling had been contained behind a forcefield and Starfleet had been warned about Kirk.
"I'm sorry, Data," he added. He knew what Tasha's fate had most likely been, and knew it would devastate the android.
"At least I know," he said softly. "I know she never stopped loving me."
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"I don't believe this!" Julian looked like he'd blow his top. "I mean, I knew he wasn't perfect by a long shot, but something like this?"
They had recieved the news that Cardassia had joined the Dominion, and thus all Cardassian prisoners were to be freed. All Cardassian prisoners, that was, except Garak, who had apparently run afoul of the new leader of the Cardassian government: Gul Dukat.
"You knew him?" Martok asked.
"From a distance. We on the station have worked with him before. I don't know if I'd have called him a friend, but I'd have expected him to come down on our side over the Dominion."
"He lost much of his power in the scandal last year," Garak pointed out. "By joining Cardassia with the Dominion, he probably thinks he can get some of it back."
"What happened last year?" Tasha asked.
"More like what happened nineteen years ago that came out last year," Garak laughed. "He, like many other Cardassian men, had a Bajoran mistress. And everything that can come with it. Well, one of everything anyway."
"A child," Jim said softly.
"Well, she was kept out of sight and then she just disappeared. The details are rather complicated, but suffice to say she reappeared, and Dukat in a rare moment of compassion decided not to kill her."
"How kind," Tasha said coldly.
Garak looked over at her. "From your perspective, perhaps. But most powerful Cardassian men would have done it without a second thought. Instead, he claimed her. Took her home to Cardassia and lost everything he had as soon as it got out. Come to think, that's kind of why I got stuck here."
"You helped to blow the lid off?" Tasha asked.
"Not exactly." There was a faint laugh from Julian. "Ziyal's been living on the station for awhile, she wasn't suited for the outlaw life her father was leading and it was the best option, the only place she'd be accepted. Well, she'd been raised as a Cardassian, and there was only one other Cardassian on the station -"
He had to stop because Jim suddenly burst into hysterical laughter. "I'm sorry," he said when he could speak again. "I've just been there and done that a few dozen times at least."
"Anyway, power notwithstanding, it just stuns me that Dukat would do something so radical." Julian finally brought the conversation back to where they'd started.
"Then you never really knew him." Garak shared a long look with Tasha.
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She couldn't believe the events of the last week. She looked around the crowded Starfleet runabout, resisting the urge to laugh in pure joy. The rational part of her knew they weren't out of the woods yet, but her emotional side saw the monumental achievement. They were free.
The timing itself was nothing short of miraculous. The device they used to take the panel off the wall had been discovered, and the Jem'Hadar had been stopped from physically dragging Garak out of the wall only by the Breen whose name no one could remember grabbing a gun from one of the guards as he bent to open the panel and shooting one guard just as he too was shot, giving them a chance to take down the others. Mercifully, the transmitter had been nearly finished, and the plan had worked. It turned out, from what Tasha heard, that Worf had literally missed a disruptor blast by a fraction of a second when the transporter beam had caught him. Garak had saved his life when he connected that final circuit.
Garak. That was a massive shock in and of itself. About two days in, they'd discovered that Garak was severely claustrophobic, and had despaired of having to come up with a new plan, but the Cardassian had forced himself to return to the tiny alcove, gaining a new level of admiration from Tasha in the process. As Worf had said, "there is no greater enemy than one's own fears."
Julian had sent an urgent message to the station, informing them of his status, hopefully putting them on to the fact that the Julian Bashir on the station was a changeling before it could carry out its mission. He was in the back now, working on Worf, who'd been badly injured in his final fight with the Jem'Hadar. Tasha was trying to boost the signal so she and Jim could send a message to their own points of origin. Jim, who had been knocked out in the fight with the Jem'Hadar, was only just coming around and was trying to figure out where he was. Martok was in the back with Worf, who he'd taken to like a long-lost brother in spite of the fact that her former second-in-command had been disowned by the Klingon Empire - again - the previous year. Just like when Gowron had given Worf his name back the first time, Tasha could see his confidence and pride reemerging after being harshly cut back as this man who was so respected in the Empire spoke highly of him. Garak was trying to catch his breath without looking like he was trying to catch his breath. Duval sat quietly on one of the runabout's passenger seats, letting the events play out around her.
Solam was dead, shot by one of the guards in cold blood in an attempt to coerce the rest of them to talk. They were, Tasha knew, extremely lucky not to all be dead, but the two deaths their escape had cost weighed heavily on her mind. Not to mention Tain, who hadn't lived to see his plan come to fruition after all; everyone knew that if Tain hadn't sent that message, they never would have had a runabout to signal or anyone who could modify the transmitter once Tain's health had prevented him from working.
She checked the sensor readouts and smiled. "Two hours to the wormhole and no sign of the Dominion. I think we're going to make it."
"Yes." Jim had apparently gotten his bearings. "We're going home."
Fair warning, I'm not entirely sure what comes next so I can't make any promises as to how long it'll take to write it.
I know the bits on the Enterprise were really short, but I wanted to touch on the other side but couldn't come up with that much to write.
This episode is heavily based on the two-parter I've been referencing for the past few chapters, In Purgatory's Shadow/By Inferno's Light, and also contains references to the DS9 episodes Indiscretion and The Way of the Warrior. Jim's reference to "been there, done that" doesn't come from any particular episode, but I do remember that there were instances on the show of him getting into trouble over a woman he shouldn't have been dating in the first place.
Please review.