Cathedral by Michael Mangels (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

can take that away—but I wasn’t the same Julian Bashir everybody here knows. I wasn’t a doctor, but I didn’t seem to mind that. My days were filled with plenty of interesting things to do and a great many wonderful people to speak with. I was living on Earth, where everything anyone needs pops out of replicators. Lack of professional credentials isn’t really a big issue in the heartland of the Federation the way it is in other places, after all. It was an alternate world, and I lived in it as an alternate Julian Bashir, although everybody there called me Jules, including my wife—who was also the mother of our two very happy, very healthy children, a boy of six and a girl of three.

It’s funny. I haven’t let anybody call me Jules since I first found out about my genetic enhancements as a teenager. That was when I started insisting that everyone call me Julian. From that time forward, I’d thought of Jules as dead, and never expected to hear from him again. But running into Jules again wasn’t the most unexpected thing about my little trip. The biggest surprise was discovering that Jules seemed to be a fairly happy man with a lot of friends and family who cared about him.

I can’t help but wonder which of us is better off, Jules or Julian. If I really am reverting into Jules, maybe I ought to stay this way.

18

Vedek Yevir had never paid much attention to his distaste for confinement, but he noticed that it had become unnaturally heightened ever since his visit to the crypts at the ancient city of B’hala months ago. Now, sealed into a bulky radiation suit and skulking about in the dust-choked streets and dim corridors of ruined Cardassia City’s Munda’ar Sector, he was becoming keenly aware of his burgeoning feelings of claustrophobia.

The entire group had come to the shattered core of this vast, secret storage facility. Garak explained to them that the building had formerly been maintained by the Obsidian Order, Cardassia’s powerful and deadly secret police. Nondescript from the outside, the squat gray building had apparently escaped obliteration during the Jem’Hadar bombing spree of the Dominion War’s final blood-soaked hours—but not by much. Still, Yevir was surprised at the extent to which the building, holed and broken though it was, remained intact and standing, given the utterly pulverized condition of the surrounding structures.

Most of the members of the Oralian Way who had come along had remained above, standing guard throughout the facility, alert for the inopportune appearance of any of the Way’s domestic political enemies. Only four of the combined group—Yevir, Macet, Garak, and Cleric Ekosha—had ventured into the subbasements. Yevir was quite surprised that the stout older woman was able to keep pace with the men, then reminded himself that neither he nor the two Cardassians were likely to be more than a decade and a half younger than she was.

Now the foursome was rappelling into the very bowels of the cracked and blasted structure—cautiously. Transporters were useless in this area, owing to the residual hard radiation levels, and not even Garak claimed to know for certain precisely what lay below them. The wrist-and belt-lights they all wore provided some illumination, but a dust-caked darkness seemed to close around them as they descended deeper. Every now and then, a fist-sized creature would come flying at them, apparently drawn by their lights—and obviously well adapted to radiation. Yevir hoped that the animals’ predatory-looking teeth couldn’t pierce their radiation suits, and that nothing larger awaited them further below. “They can’t smell us through these suits, can they?” he finally asked, after the sixth flapping creature dove past them.

“The utoxa? No, they can’t smell you,” Garak said, from the other side of Macet. “There could be some scottril down there, though, and they’ll be able to smell us easily, radiation suits notwithstanding. But phasers can stop them. Usually. If we see them before they see us.”

Yevir hoped that the Cardassian was smiling behind his face shield, but he couldn’t tell for certain. Prophets, protect me. You have not led me this far to allow me to fall to my death, or be eaten by a scottril. Whatever that might be. His prayer comforted him slightly. Enough to get his feet and hands moving again.

“The pattern of destruction seems to intensify as we descend,” Ekosha said, wonder and concern in her voice. “Are you certain anything could have survived this?”

“We have little more to proceed on than the word of Elim Garak, and our faith,” Macet said in a wry tone.

“I’m not at all certain whether to be wounded or flattered, Macet,” Garak responded. “But I must say I find your display of faith encouraging. There might be a place for you in the Oralian Way after all—if only you weren’t quite so ugly.”

Yevir heard Macet and Ekosha laugh, an incongruous sound filtering through their masks and the echoing darkness. Garak checked something on a wall panel, and a few meters below them several doors slid open. “We’re nearly there,” Garak said. “Drop down to the next level and I believe we will have arrived.”

Once all four of them had disengaged from their climbing ropes, they took stock of the room around them. There were numerous computer banks and monitors, all powered down but glowing with the dim light Yevir recognized as a still-functional emergency power source; evidently the radiation levels here were not so severe as up above. Three heavily armed Cardassian guards lay dead, their decomposing bodies scattered around the room, phaser burns visible precisely at the most efficient kill points.

As Garak powered up the computers, punching a number of buttons, it dawned on Yevir that DS9’s former tailor knew the system a little too well. He had clearly been here before. Had this been one of his previous postings, or had he been to this place more recently?

To their right,