Chapter Text
“Doctor...”
Julian Bashir frowned, his eyelids twitching as his mind began to flicker back toward consciousness. A flash of grey briefly penetrated his mental haze. Dark. It was dark, and his face and hands were cold, and he had a dull headache pulsing behind his temples. He seemed to be sitting upright in a chair, his head lolling to one side. It was quiet — too quiet. There should have been sounds all around him, the subtle hum of machinery, the subliminal vibration of a shuttle’s engines. There should have been warm steady illumination and calm air, not the hint of an icy breeze that was caressing his cheek. He tried to turn his head towards the light and winced as pain shot down his neck.
“Doctor.” That voice again, soft yet urgent, rousing him further. The voice of his Cardassian friend, Garak. Normally he could happily listen to the tailor speak for hours on end; now, however, the intrusion only made his headache worse. He heard himself utter a low moan of protest, but his inarticulate rebuke was rewarded by hands taking hold of his shoulders and administering a gentle shake that sent another ripple of aches down his back. “I think you’ve slept long enough. We have a situation here that requires your immediate attention.”
“Wha...?” He blinked his eyes fully open. All the lights in the shuttlecraft were off, including the instrumentation panels. The only radiance came from the open door, and Garak was a stylishly-clad silhouette against the dim grey glow of whatever lay beyond it. He was leaning over Bashir’s chair, studying him intently. Bashir looked up at him in perplexity. “What happened? Where are we?”
“I wish I knew.” He sounded apologetic, and Bashir’s heart sank. Garak, who had been an Obsidian Order agent in a past life he never talked about, was usually at least two steps ahead of any given situation. If he didn’t have answers... “Can you stand? Those energy pulses seemed to hit you terribly hard.”
“Energy pulses?” Memory was starting to return: an anomaly on the sensors, subspace turbulence, a tear in the fabric of space and surges of raw energy that had whipped through the shuttle’s shields as if they weren’t even there. He remembered being slammed back into this very chair, shafts of strange power running through his body as the panels around him went mad; he remembered seeing, out of the corner of his vision, the “plain, simple” tailor fighting with the shuttle’s navigational system. And then only blackness. “You got us down...?”
“Somewhere.” Garak let go of his shoulders and stepped back, giving him space to rise. “But where that ‘somewhere’ is, I honestly couldn’t say.”
“A Class M planet, though.” Obviously: the atmosphere coming through the open door was breathable.
“Fortune seems to have favored us in that respect at least,” Garak agreed as Bashir slowly got to his feet. Every muscle in his body held a lingering ache: clearly he’d suffered convulsions when the energy surges had hit him. He turned his head to the left, and then to the right, then shrugged his shoulders and flexed his arms, but there seemed to be no damage more significant than that.
He turned his attention to Garak. “Are you all right?”
The stockier man smiled brightly. “Oh, you know us Cardassians — we’re far tougher than we look.” In response to Bashir’s more probing gaze he waved one hand dismissively. “A headache, nothing more.”
“I’d better check you out, just to be on the safe side.” And myself as well he thought, moving toward the small locker where the shuttle’s medical stores were kept. As he did so Garak went back to what he’d clearly been doing before waking up his Human companion: one of the lower panels on the main console had been removed and placed to one side to permit access to the shuttle’s inner workings.
“All the ship’s systems are completely dead,” he announced as he got back down on his hands and knees, picking up a small flashlight and directing its beam into the mass of intricately interlaced conduits and circuitry. “A result of the energy pulses, I suspect — I was barely able to keep power flowing to the engines long enough to get us down without the shuttle breaking up during re-entry. It took the last gasp from the power cells just to get that door open.”
“What about sensors and subspace communications?” Bashir took out the emergency medical kit and closed the cupboard door again.
“All deader than Quark’s attempt to run a par-kehh night.” The flashlight beam scanned the inert expanse and Garak emitted a soft hiss. “These isolinear relays are completely fused.”
Bashir came to join him, going down on one knee and setting the medical kit on the edge of the console. As he cracked it open he glanced down at Garak’s elaborately brocaded back, suddenly hopeful: the Cardassian had pulled unexpected technical expertise out of his pocket in the past. “Can you fix them?”
“I’m afraid you’re confusing me with Chief O’Brien.” Garak turned off the flashlight and crawled backward out from under the console, turning to sit back against it and dusting off the knees of his well-tailored pants. “I can tell you that I believe that the surges overloaded the relays, among other things; however, I’m no engineer...”
“But?” Bashir recognized the quality of that pause: it meant that Garak had an opinion to offer on the subject at hand anyway.
“... but I think they’d all need to be completely replaced.”
Bashir filled his cheeks with air and puffed out a thoughtful breath. “So that’s that, then. We can’t take off again and we can’t send out a distress signal.”
“Nor can we close the doors.” Garak looked out at the threatening grey sky and permitted himself a refined shiver. All that was visible beyond the open door were ranks of trees roughly equivalent to conifers marching away down a slope, with mountains in the dim distance — and closer, but still distant, a haze of thin grey smoke rising toward the clouded sky, as if coming from a collection of small fires. “I’m finding this place uncomfortably cold already. We’ll have to seek out better shelter than this.”
“Let’s see how you’re doing first.” He was about to pick up the handheld scanner when Garak stopped him with another hand-wave.
“I wouldn’t bother with that.”
“Why not?”
“While waiting for you to wake up I took the liberty of attempting to use various pieces of equipment. Nothing works. It seems that the energy pulses have disabled every electronic device aboard.”
Bashir frowning, picking up the scanner and opening it; the device, which should have activated automatically, remained dark and silent. He raised his hand to his comm badge and tapped it. There was no chirp in response. If both of those items were dead, the chances were pretty good that the hypospray in the medkit was as well. He removed it and checked. “You’re right.” With another sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he rose and opened the weapons cabinet to do a bit of investigating. “The phasers aren’t working either.”
He closed the doors and looked across at Garak. Their eyes met, and Bashir was certain that Garak knew exactly how desperate their circumstances were. The Cardassian’s tone of voice, however, conveyed no sense of anxiety whatsoever.
“Now," Garak said briskly as he rested a hand on each knee, "let me see if I understand our situation correctly. We’ve crash-landed on a remote planet, in the middle of a wilderness, with no way to get the shuttle off the ground again, no way to defend ourselves — in fact, no electronic equipment of any kind — and limited supplies of food and clean drinking water. We can’t seal the shuttle to provide a stable environment, it’s perhaps zero degrees outside and will certainly get colder with nightfall, and we have no idea what sorts of hungry or venomous animals might be waiting outside that door.” He sounded almost cheerful about their predicament, as if pleased with the challenge it presented.
Bashir nodded. “I’d say that about sums it up.”
“So," he continued as if administering a rather playful examination, "what are our options? Wait here until someone comes looking for us? We might be waiting a very long time indeed, and even if they somehow determine which world we've landed on they have an entire planet to search. Or —”
“— or find out where that smoke is coming from and see if there’s some sort of civilization here.” Bashir glanced out the doorway toward the only sign of possible humanoid habitation. A kilometer away? Maybe a little more. “Perhaps they’ll have a transmitter, or at least decent shelter from the elements.” It wasn’t himself he was worried about so much as Garak: Cardassians, while nominally endothermic, were still reptilian enough that they couldn’t tolerate the same range of cold temperatures that Humans could.
“Very good, Doctor!” He reached up and caught hold of the edge of the console with one hand to pull himself to his feet; evidently at his age he felt he needed the assistance, especially after having just been through a muscle-cramping energy storm. “So-called ‘primitive’ peoples are usually quite adept at creating whatever comfort they can,” he winced on the way up, “no matter how harsh the environment. I’m sure we’ll at least find a warm hearth, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, a decent meal.” He straightened and primly dusted off the seat of his tunic. “I for one have no desire to survive on Starfleet rations until your friends rescue us.”
“We’ll take them anyway.” Bashir turned his attention to another locker, pulling out two large backpacks stored flat.
“Of course. I also suggest that we take any survival equipment we can find.”
“Agreed.” But first he put the backpacks aside for a moment to delve back into the medical locker, pulling out, after some digging, a small bottle. He opened it up and tipped four pills into his hand, then extended them to Garak, who had come over to see what he was doing. “Here. Take two of these.”
Garak eyed the little capsules suspiciously. “What are they?”
“Ipenogysic acid. It’s a —”
“— a painkiller widely tolerated by many different species,” he concluded.
“At least we can do something about our headaches,” Bashir smiled as Garak plucked two of the pills neatly from his palm.
“Thank you.” He tipped back the pills and swallowed them dry as Bashir did likewise and then stuffed the bottle into a side pocket of one of the backpacks. The next several minutes passed without much conversation as the two men went through the shuttle’s stores, pulling out everything that was still useable and figuring out how to best fill the two packs. In the end they had quite a collection of items, including a cold-weather tent, two ultrathin sleeping bags, two camp knives, and all the food and water rations they could carry, plus warm jackets that should keep out the worst of the cold. If the people gathered around those distant fires proved hostile they’d at least be out of the elements with something on their stomachs, Bashir reflected, although they might have to sleep curled up against each other in the tent to conserve body heat. He tried not to think about how well they’d fare if something the size of a grizzly bear, and hungry, happened upon them. Perhaps Garak would have some Obsidian Order trick up his sleeve for dealing with angry wildlife, but somehow he doubted it.
He glanced sidelong at the Cardassian, who was fitting items into his pack with a deft efficiency that suggested he’d done this a hundred times before. Their situation was dire, but there was no cloud without a silver lining: under the circumstances, he had a feeling that Garak’s pose of being merely a simple tailor would have to be dropped out of sheer necessity. He might learn more about him in the next few days than he could hope to learn in a few years on Deep Space Nine, and the knowledge would be a welcome addition to his scant store of information about his friend. Not for the first time, Bashir wondered how he could call this man a “friend” at all... but there was something about Garak that he’d always found fascinating, a quality of mystery that kept him coming back for more, and the tailor-who-was-probably-a-spy had always treated him with warmth and courtesy, inviting ongoing communication. With a little smile he went back to preparing his own pack, resolving to watch for ways that he could catch Garak “out” in the days to come.
By the time he exited the shuttle door Bashir’s headache had almost entirely dissipated. He settled the heavy backpack more comfortably on his shoulders and drew a deep breath of the cold air, taking a long look around as Garak, similarly encumbered, stepped down to join him. The forest all around them was moderately dense and was held in the grip of a silent winter: a layer of snow perhaps four centimeters deep lay on the ground and hung caught in the layered branches of the trees. They stood on an elevated slope amidst mountainous terrain; boulders projected from the ground at intervals and a range of peaks was visible to their left, marching to the horizon in either direction. It was a wild and beautiful landscape, a lovely place for a hike if one wasn’t stranded in the middle of it without hope of immediate rescue. Bashir tried to concentrate on the prospect of friendly natives waiting for them at the end of their long walk, but the possibility of worse luck was hard to dismiss.
Garak evidently noticed something in his expression. "Cheer up, Doctor! If they have need of a physician, your skills should buy us anything we need during our stay.”
“Or perhaps they’ll give us supper in exchange for you hemming their trousers," Bashir quipped.
“I sincerely doubt that!" They started downhill toward the plumes of smoke ascending into the windless sky. "I have all the admiration in the world for the resourcefulness of the noble savage. However, he almost always lacks any fashion sense whatsoever.”
******************************
The terrain was rocky and it took them over an hour to pick their way down the slope to a wide path which had evidently seen use recently. The snow was littered with long thin wagon-wheel indentations and the impressions of large clawed footprints, as well as the marks of a few sets of boots.
“Those don’t look like the tracks of a modern vehicle,” Bashir remarked as they started up the middle of the roadway.
“Indeed they don’t.” Garak neatly sidestepped a sizeable pile of animal droppings. “But at least now we know that we won’t have to depend on our feet to get us everywhere we need to go on this planet.”
Bashir took a moment to do a visual diagnostic on his companion: usual energy levels, straight posture, alert. The visible scales on his neck were a little darker than usual, but he was evidently in good spirits. The cold hadn’t started to affect him yet in any significant way. “How are you feeling?”
Garak grimaced and flexed his shoulders a little under the pack’s straps. “If you must know, my back isn’t terribly happy with me at the moment.” He shot a keen glance back. “And you?”
“I’ll feel better once we’ve made contact, whether we get a good reception or not.”
Garak nodded sympathetically. “Wondering is almost inevitably worse than knowing, isn’t it?”
“I just hope that we can at least get information from them about what’s edible around here and what isn’t, if we have to rough it until we’re rescued.” Getting trace amino acids was going to be the hardest part of that particular nutritional equation; Bashir had no way to treat deficiencies or the illnesses that accompanied them. In his pack he carried a supply of tablets from the survival stores which would satisfy those needs in large part, but they didn’t have enough to last more than a month. Local foods would have to make up for the lack.
“Hmm.” They trudged along in silence for a little way. “Have you ever had K’r’r’aussian biras’s’s stew, Doctor?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“It's the worst thing I have ever put in my mouth. Not even Klingon gagh can compare for sheer vileness. Let me tell you, getting a whole bowl of it down took all my intestinal fortitude.”
“Then why did you eat it?”
“I was negotiating the price on a consignment of silk lingerie, and K’r’r’aussians put great stock in sharing food to seal a contract.” He shuddered dramatically at the memory. “I just hope that my many loyal customers appreciated my sacrifice when they put the lingerie to good use afterwards.”
Bashir couldn’t help but laugh. “So what are you trying to say, exactly?”
“That you should be prepared to discover that the local cuisine is not at all to your taste. I don’t suppose you brought anything with you that can numb the tastebuds, did you?”
“Unfortunately, no.” And the only painkiller they had was the bottle of ipenogysic acid. Hopefully neither of them was badly injured during this little adventure, because there wouldn’t be much Bashir could do to ease the suffering. Doubtless the locals had their own medications for quelling pain, but getting access to them would depend on the natives’ goodwill. “I suppose we’ll just have to —”
Garak stopped in his tracks and held up one hand. “Listen.”
Bashir fell silent. Cardassian hearing was somewhat less acute than a Human’s; he was surprised he hadn’t heard it first, that distant dull rhythmic thud. It was growing slowly but steadily closer, coming upon them from behind. They turned to look back, but the road took a bend around a cliff some hundred meters away and nothing was yet visible.
“I think your questions are about to be answered, Doctor.” Garak’s eyes were narrowed, his body infused with a subtle tension quite unlike his usual easygoing manner.
Hopefully they’ll be the answers we need to hear. As they waited Bashir recalled to mind the content of his Starfleet training briefings concerning first contact with an alien species. The first rule was immutable: no interference with the internal affairs of another species, including through direct intervention or the introduction of offworld technologies. He and Garak had come up with a plausible story on the way down the hill: travellers from a distant territory, lost their way, and so on and so forth, but Garak had insisted on mocking up only the barest outlines of a narrative. Bashir suspected he wanted maximum latitude to improvise as the situation warranted. He’d also advised Bashir to let him do most of the talking, and while Bashir was technically the ranking officer — the only officer — present, he also knew better than to try to outdo a Cardassian spy at spinning a convincing yarn. With difficulty he’d gotten Garak to concede to abiding by the Prime Directive, although the tailor had argued that Starfleet regulations weren’t binding upon him; how closely Garak adhered to that promise remained to be seen. Bashir was fully prepared to give him the equivalent of a good swift kick under the table if he started to stray too close to that particular line in the sand.
Within seconds two figures rounded the side of the cliff, and the thudding was revealed to be coming from the galloping feet of lean-legged heavy-set reptilian creatures perhaps six feet high at the shoulders. Their backs sloped to significantly lower hips and their long dragonish tails were adorned with ragged dorsal spines; similar spines topped short thick necks behind broad jaws full of truly impressive and very sharp teeth. A rough mane of reddish hair flared from their scaled shoulders, and each had a humanoid in armor mounted on its back, seated on long saddles of dark leather with gleaming metal fittings. Both beast and man seemed intent on the travellers in the road, and as they drew nearer the riders reached to their sides and drew businesslike shortswords from sheaths at their hips.
Bashir observed them with amazement. While the scaled and furred creatures were new to his eyes, the species of the humanoids riding them was not.
They were clearly Cardassians.
“Stand where you are!” A barked order echoed back from the nearby hill as the fur-clad riders came to within ten meters of the newcomers to their world. Garak spread his hands and smiled disarmingly, and Bashir decided to follow suit, minus the smile. The riders reined in and slowed to a weighty stop on either side of the men on the ground, looking down at them with suspicion but not with particularly virulent hostility.
“Can we help you, gentlemen?” Garak inquired politely.
“State your name and business,” the taller rider demanded.
Garak’s smile became even wider. “Ah! My name is Khormar, and this is my associate, Bahker. Perhaps you could tell us where we are, exactly? We seem to have become lost.”
“Lost.” The tall rider’s tone was completely flat.
“Yes.” Garak had the butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression that Bashir had been fooled by himself a time or two in the past. He shot his Human companion a look both withering and indulgent. “I told him that we should have hired a guide, but of course he never listens to me.” Back to the rider, with another cheery smile. “How fortunate that you happened by! We were just starting to —”
The point of the tall rider’s sword was suddenly six inches from Garak’s nose. The tailor’s hands rose higher, intensifying the signal of surrender. “Friends, friends!” he cried. “There’s no need for that!”
“We’re not your friends,” the rider said curtly. “Your business!”
“We are but simple merchants,” Garak assured him. “Perhaps you’d be interested in some of our wares? If you’ll just let me remove this pack —”
Garak! If Humans had been telepathic the Cardassian would have gotten a sharp smack across the frontal lobes. The tall rider, however, didn’t seem inclined to let Garak finish.
“Where are you headed?”
“Ah...” Garak was spinning like a champion spider, but even he couldn’t work with no information. “We understand that there’s a rather rich town somewhere in the vicinity.” Now his eyes held a gleam of most convincing avarice. “Zikar — he’s a fellow in the same line of business — was there last spring, and he told us that —”
The shorter rider spoke for the first time, levelling the point of his blade at Bashir. “You say this koraka is your — partner?”
Bashir didn’t recognize the local term, and would have bet that Garak didn’t either, but the tailor picked it right up and ran with it. “Yes. He is. Is that a problem?”
The riders burst into laughter. Garak smiled mildly. Bashir did his best to look like someone who isn’t worthy of further inspection.
After a moment the tall rider shook his head. “What kind of merchant has a slave for a partner?”
“The exceptional kind,” Garak replied, as smoothly as if he’d been expecting exactly that sort of remark. “Now, if you’re not willing to tell us where we are, perhaps you’ll leave us in peace to find our own way as best we can?”
The tall rider grinned down at him. “You have o’wn’s balls, little man,” he said with a trace of admiration, and put away his sword, nodding at his fellow rider to do the same. “But if you’re a merchant, I’m a zioan streetwalker. Doesn’t matter. You’re coming with us.”
Bashir looked up at each of them in turn; their expressions now suggested that they had enjoyed a rather good joke. “Where are you taking us?” he asked.
“Ah, so it does have a tongue!” The tall rider shifted slightly on his mount, making it dance briefly in place. “To see the scholar Xerxex, who sent us on this fool’s errand in the first place.”
“We’ll stick you if we have to,” the shorter rider added conversationally. “He said he wanted you alive; he didn’t say in one piece.”
Bashir glanced at Garak, who nodded fractionally. The tall rider caught the little exchange and smiled thinly.
“Turn around, men, and start marching,” he ordered as he and his comrade reined their beasts round. “Half a sandclock turn’ll bring us to camp, and then our work’s done and we can have ourselves a hot dinner.”
“I hope that applies to us as well,” Garak said a touch wistfully, shifting his shoulders under the weight of his pack and starting to walk again.
“Doubt it,” the rider said shortly.
“Maybe they’ll need some trousers hemmed,” Bashir murmured under his breath. The look Garak shot him was well worth it.