“I’ll answer what I can, Barkan.” I tried to sound defeated.

“Who else was involved with the abduction and torture of Procal Dukat?” he demanded.

“Are you implying I was involved?” I asked incredulously.

“Don’t play me for a fool here. I warn you. Perhaps you possess this impressively high threshold for pain, but there are other ways I can hurt you,” he warned.

“Barkan, I would have been proud to have exposed a traitor like Dukat. He deserved his fate.”

“Is that why Pythas Lok was chosen over you to replace Tain?” Lokar had a source within the Order. “It seems everyone is chosen over you. Don’t you grow weary of being bypassed?”

“Only betrayal makes me weary,” I replied.

“But you’re a failure, Elim. You even failed in your attempt to assassinate me.”

“I didn’t fail with Palandine,” I said quietly.

There was a silence. I hadn’t meant to make my move this quickly, but I prepared myself. His footfalls approached me and a tremendous blow to the back of my head sent me sprawling on the floor.

“You did, Elim. You can’t even begin to measure your failure,” he said with murderous chill. He kicked me in the small of the back. Pleasure instead of pain; a strange sensation. I groaned and remained motionless.

“Get up!” I didn’t move. Barkan aimed a kick at my genitals but he was too angry to be accurate and my upper leg absorbed the blow. A harder, better placed kick between my right hip and ribs knocked the air out of me and let loose another flow of endorphins. I groaned louder, and rolled to a position where I could keep Lokar’s legs in my lidded sight. He was breathing hard, not so much from the exertion as from the rage it was releasing. His weight shifted to his left leg, preparing for his right to kick again. My opportunity–a word Lokar had taught me to respect. As his foot came straight along my line of vision toward my face, I shifted slightly away, grabbed his approaching ankle with both hands, twisted with all my strength and brought him down on his face. He struggled for his phaser, but I had him by the throat from behind and cut off his windpipe. He grabbed my forearm, and the strength of his effort to free his breathing rolled us over and over until he began to weaken from the lack of air. Everything turned red as I poured my last ounce of energy into Lokar’s death. And then black.

The corona of light was now receding from me. I was returning. This time there was no effort involved; I floated in a gentle current of the soothing balm and didn’t care where it was taking me. The others were there–my fellow travelers, their voices murmuring tonelessly, producing a steady sound that permeated the medium and intensified our connection. Their voices speaking to me. Their faces, serene and loving, illuminating the darkness as they floated by. Everyone I have ever known. Family. Faces from childhood. Bamarren. People I had known briefly. People I have known forever. Loved. Hated. We were all just together now, sharing the same nurturing medium as we traveled along our currents until we gradually separated.

I was alone now. The blackness was complete, with the exception of a pinpoint of light above and behind me. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t lonely. The caressing motion of the medium continued to soothe me. The blackness began to pulse with a soft rhythm. And the voices were still with me. I was being prepared. Thump thump thump. No matter what happened, they said. Thump thump thump. No matter the damage. Thump thump thump. Everything can be repaired. Thump thump thump. Don’t surrender to the appearance. Thump thump thump. Trust the mystery. Thump thump thump! Don’t surrender, they said as they began to fade. Thump! Thump! Thump! Everything can be. . . .

I opened my eyes. I was on the floor. Someone was banging from far away. A bare room. Dark. My vision blurred. . . . I turned my body with great effort. It was so heavy and exhausted, if it hadn’t been for the pain I would have believed that it didn’t belong to me. My eyes began to focus. This was a different room. I made out the outline of someone sprawled on the floor near me. Shouts and further banging coming closer. Where were we? I crawled with difficulty to the other body. Is he still alive? I felt leaden and drugged. The body was face down. I reached out and pulled it over, and the head flopped toward me.

Faces formed and reformed. Each one superimposed on the next in a long line emerging from blackness. Maladek. Merrok. . . . The molecular structure of one giving way to the next. . . . Procal Dukat. Tolan. Floating into focus, receding back into the darkness. I shook my head, trying to stop the flow. The Hebitian mask. My face.I grabbed my “face” and screamed into it. The flow stopped. The molecules rushed together and instantly formed Barkan Lokar’s death mask.

The door burst open and several hands grabbed me.

PART III

“Mister Garak . . . why is it that no one has killed you, yet?”

“My innate charm?”

1

Entry:

When I was first “assigned” to Terok Nor, I thought that the Order and Tain would design my punishment in such a way that I would not be wasted. Why let me live if I couldn’t be used? After all, I reasoned, they needed a representative on this forsaken outpost. Lokar’s ore‑processing operation had created a lucrative commercial enterprise on the edge of the quadrant that attracted all types for all reasons. What better place to employ the services of a disgraced but still useful operative?

The military, under the command of Gul Skrain Dukat, had treated the station as its own private fiefdom, but no one complained as long as the mining operation continued to process twenty thousand tonnes of uridium ore each day. And with these high numbers no one was going to object to “excesses” in the treatment of the Bajoran laborers. It was clear that the station’s enormous profits were created by the free labor of a people who had been reduced to mere slaves. It was also clear–as I followed my escort like a sleepwalker, devoid of all feeling, stripped of my past and any hopes for the future–that this was a soul‑deadening environment. An ideal match for my benumbed state. As we entered Dukat’s office, I was greeted by his undisguised contempt.

“Elim Garak. How the mighty have fallen. Welcome to Terok Nor.”

“Oh, I try to visit even our humblest outposts, Dukat.”

“This is going to be more than a visit, trust me. You’ll soon wish that the execution had not been commuted,” he said, regarding me like a lower life‑form he was considering as a source of food. With his long neck and oversharpened features (his ridges, I’m certain, could cut to the bone) he had the look of a predator waiting for the right moment to make the kill. Engaging this look dispelled my previous lethargy; I knew that he held me responsible for his father’s execution. As the moment extended I could almost taste the noxious combination of his hatred and frustration. Obviously it had been ordered that I was not to be touched, and the prohibition only sharpened his predatory hunger. Dukat broke the look and turned to an underling.

“Take him to his new life.” He dismissed us.

As the underling led me along the filthy Promenade, where Bajoran laborers and their Cardassian overseers played out the daily dramas of slave and master, I wondered how my “new life” would fit into all this. Laborers and overseers were equally baffled by the sight of a disgraced Cardassian, as we passed through the cluttered, makeshift living conditions. I could hardly believe that this was a station run by Cardassians. We stepped over the trash that even now Cardassian guards on the upper Promenade level were raining down on the Bajorans who ate and squatted below. Our racial policies were harsh, but Dukat evidently took them to an extreme that reduced the workers to beasts of slavery. This was truly the dark side of the Occupation, and I moved through it all completely in tune with the misery and the pain and the despair. This world was the perfect extension of my inner self.