From Cardassia With Love

The World is Not Enough

            Bashir woke up to a pleasant slap on the face.

"Julian! Get up!" Komananov shouted as a startled Bashir fell over the edge of the couch and hit the stone floor.

"Kira, what...?" Bashir rubbed his eyes as they adjusted to the brightness of the room. Someone had turned the light level up to a hundred percent for some blasphemous reason.

"I told you I'm not Kira!"

"What are you talking- Oh no," Bashir screamed internally when he saw the major was still in her historical costume. He must have been asleep for at least a few hours and they were in still in the holosuite. He contemplated asking Odo about what progress they were making on fixing the transporter but decided that if it was taking this long then the answer was probably not encouraging.

"I'm trying to remember, Duchamps must have drugged us, but where are we now?" Bashir got to his feet and adjusted his now wrinkled suit. The room they were in was an ornately decorated sitting room. As Bashir took in the high ceilings and the various mineral samples on display on every table in the room, he was struck by the view.

"Anastasia, look!" Bashir pointed at the window as realization struck him. The building they were in was perched on a snowy mountain peak, overlooking a cavernous valley below. "We're on a mountain! I forgot this scene was a part of the program. Hold on, what happened to Garak?" Bashir jumped to his feet and began to search each corner of the room frantically.

"Oh, him. I forgot all about him." Komananov muttered in irritation. The whereabouts of Bashir's friend did not seem all that concerning when the fate of the world was still at stake.

"This is serious, he could have gotten hurt or..." Bashir's face twisted in frustration as he considered other possibilities.

"Or what, Julian?"

"...or he left the holosuite while I was unconscious. If he left me in here to fix this by myself then I swear..." Bashir fumbled with the lapel of his suit before he found the combadge hidden underneath.

"Odo, where's Garak?" Bashir growled a little too loudly into the badge. On the other end of the line, Eddington winced at the volume of his voice. The constable stepped back to the lieutenant's side.

"Doctor, the scanners are showing that he's still inside the holosuite. Why what happened?" If Odo could have sighed, he would have. He had enough to worry about at that moment without their Cardassian friend getting lost in some computer-generated fantasy.

"That's a relief, I guess. I thought he'd left. But I have no idea where he is in here!" Bashir held his forehead in his hand.

"He's a capable man, doctor. I'm sure he can stay out of trouble for a little while without a chaperone. I'll tell you if we make any new progress, Odo out."

"Julian, it is possible that your friend never left Paris." Komananov offered while making a mental note to ask Agent Bashir who this "Odo" was later.

"Possible, yes." Bashir rubbed his chin and looked at over the snowy mountain peaks. "But for the syndicate to just let an associate of mine walk away free? That isn't their style."

At that exact moment, as Bashir pondered over what fate had befallen his friend, Garak was struggling with the conundrum of how to remove a blindfold while his hands were tied behind his back to a pole. It was a crude form of imprisonment but effective, nonetheless. Garak could not tell how long he had been unconscious before he'd woken up in this state a few moments ago. He judged that he must have been moved as the temperature of the room was far colder than Qadir's quarters, and the air had a sterile smell like a laboratory. Occasionally he heard the sound of footsteps coming closer and fading away into the distance. There were distant voices, all either too low to hear or in some obscure Terran dialect that the universal translator would not decipher.