Garak was transplanting several of his favorite flowering orchids when he heard the footsteps. There were other people working in the memorial garden, but these footsteps were heavier than any of them, of measured, solid tread. He looked up.

"Legate Parn," he said casually. "How good of you to visit the garden. Can I offer you the use of a trowel? A pruner? Perhaps a detoxifier? There is so much here to do, and it can be ... rejuvenating to the spirit."

The heavy-set officer studied Garak's tools disdainfully for a moment. "I would never have expected you to continue to play the gardener."

"It is an honorable profession, and one I have practiced before, to good end."

"Ah, yes," the legate acknowledged in his deep voice. "One of many skills acquired in your years of service to Cardassia in the Obsidian Order. Let's see -- pilot, smuggler, tailor, gardener, chef, excavator, computer technician, public conservator, xenoarchaeologist, household servant, forger, interrogator, executioner -- and I'm sure there are other highlights I've missed, in your long and exalted career."

Garak laughed indulgently. "You give me a great deal of credit, Legate. But I'm sure you did not come here to discuss my resume. Please, speak freely, we are, if not alone, at least sufficiently apart from others to be assured of some degree of privacy."

Parn's deep-set eyes narrowed. "I have received word that your ... friendship with Bashir seems at an end."

"Indeed?" He let himself appear amazed. "We have not had time to speak, these last few weeks, Dr. Bashir and I, but I would have thought I would hear if the good doctor were no longer interested in my company. What have you heard that I have not?"

"I have not played games with you, Garak, do not play games with me!" the legate snapped.

"Then perhaps we should be frank with one another." He brushed dirt from his hands. "You are here for a reason. What is it you wish?"

"You stated your actions were for the good of Cardassia."

"And so they are!" Garak assured the other man amiably.

"I want to know where you stand."

Garak raised his eyebrows. "Where I stand?"

"The election is just over a week away."

"Surely my vote will not be the deciding one!"

"At such a time, when matters are so uncertain, who is to say what significance any one vote may have? Or what impact the expressed choice of one person may have upon the choices of others?"

Garak nodded thoughtfully. "Quite true, quite true. And yet, I can think of no one who would consider my choice to be a model for their own."

"Your ... role in fighting beside Damar is not unknown."

He shrugged it off. "It is of no more consequence than the role of every Cardassian who rose up against the Dominion on that day."

"Your discovery of the Hebitian tomb has also earned you certain public acclaim."

"I merely stumbled into it -- anyone could have done so. And that has nearly been forgotten. The archaeologists on the site earn new acclaim with each artifact they reveal. Did you see young Sisko's interview with Professor Dal this morning? Her theory that the murals along the southern wall reflect rituals that correspond to and were perhaps the origin of the annual Fire Festival of the adherents of the Oralian Way is truly fascinating!"

Parn eyed him closely. "Do not try to distract me, Garak. You have implied, in our meetings, that you act for the good of Cardassia -- but you have never stated where you believe that good to be. I have suspected your relationship with the human doctor -- but now I hear that friendship has ended. Such timing raises questions, coming as it does when the Federation aid to us seems to have been assured, if we wish to continue receiving it. Perhaps a personal relationship with the human is no longer advantageous to you?"

"As I stated, I was not aware the friendship had ended! By all means, please enlighten me -- who started such a rumor? And on what snippet of misunderstanding or misstatement is it based? I am sure the good doctor will find it most amusing--"

"Garak!" the legate barked impatiently. "No more! Tell me, who do you support? Where are your loyalties?"

"With Cardassia."

"That is not an answer!"

"It is the only answer I have to give," Garak replied evenly. Though his voice was warm and smooth, his eyes were cold. "If your actions are for the good of Cardassia, then I will support those actions. If Professor Lang and her party have found the path to save Cardassia, I will help them pave it. If the Oralian Way discovers a source of rebirth for Cardassia, I will offer my services as midwife."

"You tell whoever you speak to what they want to hear!"

"I tell you the truth. You need only listen and observe. If you fear you do not have my support, then look to your own actions and ask why!"

The two Cardassians locked glares for several long moments.

No one had ever withstood Garak's stare for long. Ultimately, Parn rocked back slightly on his heels.

"So long as you act for the good of Cardassia," he said with difficulty, "we have no quarrel."

Garak watched the other man stride away through the columns of the memorial garden without waiting for a response. Parn had demanded a declaration of support, of allegiance. He hadn't gotten it. Garak wondered what the legate would do now.

"Well?" prompted Hadar as he joined the legate.

"He won't commit," Parn grunted angrily. "He speaks in riddles that can be taken a dozen ways but admits nothing."

"Riddles. Hmph! I don't trust him," grumbled Hadar. The two military men fell subconsciously into step as they strode back toward the Directorate headquarters.

"That is wise," Parn muttered darkly, but otherwise ignored him.

"Garak may pretend to support us, but he only advances his own agenda."

"Mmmm."

"He could be a threat," Hadar persisted.

"You have a knack for stating the obvious," the legate responded impatiently.

"We should get rid of him--"

Parn interrupted ruthlessly. "Don't underestimate him! He survived Enabrin Tain's displeasure. Dukat's father tried to destroy him, and lost both life and honor. How many enemies have tried to bring him down, and failed? How many assassins have been sent against him? I doubt we know the full tally of Romulans, humans, Klingons, Vulcans, and others whose deaths he is responsible for. He was Obsidian Order, Hadar -- and he's still alive, after all that's happened. Never underestimate him."

For a second the other Cardassian's expression hardened, then he nodded reluctantly. "I suppose he ... is still potentially valuable to us."

"For now. For now. And afterward, we will see...."

Jake had taken a moment for a mug of raktajino from the commissary when he caught sight of a group of Cardassian soldiers sitting in the shade beside the structure. They were stoically silent, either cross-legged on the dirt or perched on blocks of rubble. He recognized them as the men he and Vak had earlier encountered in the storage chamber -- some of the newly-returned Cardassian heroes who'd survived the final battle of the Dominion war.

As he sipped his raktajino, Jake saw their commander emerge from between the double row of supply tents behind the clinic. While the human watched, the glinn distributed a packet to each of the soldiers -- Cardassian military rations, Jake realized, as the men tore open the packets and began eating.

Maybe they didn't realize they could eat in the commissary with the rest of the volunteers and staff?

After a second's indecision, Jake lifted a hand and waved at the glinn. "Hi!"

The soldiers ignored him.

Feeling a little uncomfortable, he almost retreated. Then he reconsidered. After all, he thought, these soldiers had spent months living on whatever they scavenge on an outer moon, hunted and alone with no idea what was happening back home. They'd probably forgotten how to interact with anyone else. And one had to remember what they had come back to -- their world in ruins, its military might shattered, its civilian population still in shock, disease and hunger sweeping across their planet. Maybe they needed time to get used to the situation and open up to the people who'd come to help them.

And if he could establish some kind of friendly relationship with them, they might give him some interviews. Maybe he could get some exclusives on their survival stories.. It might help them, to be able to tell their tales....

Jake tried again. He gestured toward the commissary entrance, "You and your men can eat inside any time of day or night. You don't have to sit out here and settle for those military rations anymore."

Melleen brushed crumbs from his fingers and stood up again. Jake realized the Cardassian was as tall as he was, but broader-shouldered, and well-muscled despite his thinness, from what he could tell beneath the uniform. His uneasiness deepened.

"Uh, Glinn Melleen, right?"

"Are you a gul?" the Cardassian asked abruptly.

"Wha...." Jake blinked, then shook his head. "No, of course not--"

"Then do not pretend to command Cardassians!" Melleen barked.

"Hey, I wasn't--"

"We command ourselves." His gaze shifted toward the clinic, and his thin mouth slitted. "Or we should."

Jake realized the others were all looking at him now, their expressions hard. He scrambled mentally for some graceful way to get out of the situation. There didn't seem to be any.

After a moment, the men all stood up. He felt a surge of panic as they began to march toward him, but they kept moving past him, back toward the clinic. He realized they had each finished the ration packet and were obviously returning to whatever they'd been doing before their meal break.

"Vak's right -- there's gonna be a rush to hate this guy...." Jake muttered to himself.

The woman lay on her side, her chest heaving, unable to stop coughing. Her face was mottled with blue-gray spots. A drip of blood slowly ran from one nostril down the side of her face. The alarm on her bed flashed a warning.

The Cardassian in the biobed next to her struggled to sit up on his elbows. "Nurse?" he coughed a little himself. "Can someone ... help here?"

He swung his knees over the side of the bed, and pushed himself erect. Swaying for a moment, he pushed off with his arms, launching himself toward the woman's bed.

"I'm here," he murmured. There was nothing else he could do for her.

For a second she gripped his hand. Then a shudder ran through her frame. The coughing abruptly stopped and her fingers went limp.

The man found himself on his knees, his face on a level with hers, staring into open, glazed eyes.

Footsteps ran toward them. It was one of the Federation medical staff. "Parmak--"

The sick man held up a shaking hand. "No, Ptacek, stay back...." He reached for the hem of the dead woman's blanket, and pulled it over her face.

"You shouldn't be out of bed, Parmak--"

"I must do this...."

Dr. Ptacek stayed back, resignation on her face. Another dead. She knew the drill. Only Cardassians would view and tend the bodies of their dead, even now in the midst of plague. Even half-dead himself, Parmak would stand guard over the dead woman until other Cardassians came for her.

She wondered how many days before someone would have to perform that service for Parmak.

Bashir slammed his palm onto the counter, then turned away from the tissue scanner. The technicians at the other end of the chamber looked up quickly, then immediately made themselves very absorbed in what they were doing.

The doctor sucked in a very deep breath. Nothing. Again. Still.

He rubbed both hands over his face, fighting down frustration and self-disgust. Why couldn't he come up with an answer? What if there wasn't one -- what if this plague doomed Cardassia?

No. There's a cure. I just have to work harder. I have to keep searching. I--

Julian's thoughts rammed into a duranium wall and collapsed. He snorted a humorless laugh, chiding himself for that moment's conviction that only he could find the cure, if he just looked a little harder, and for the following thought that there might not be an answer, just because he hadn't found it yet..

"Jadzia," he sighed aloud, "I could use your level-headed support and brilliance with me now."

"Doctor?"

"Hmm?" He glanced at the entrance to the controlled-atmosphere research lab. "What is it, Eske? I hope it's not another one of the Directorate -- I'm not sure I'm up to another of them just now."

The blonde human hesitated for a moment, then tentatively suggested, "Doctor, do you think there could be something in the Cardassian medical databases that might help...?"

"We've reviewed everything in the local databases. Five times over."

"Well...." She licked her upper lip. "Just last night Lieutenant Commander Hart's team returned from their repair trip to Culat."

"Yes, I heard they were back. So?"

"Along with local communications, Hart managed to get the University database there back on line -- including the medical and research archives. A Dr. Moset there did a lot of work on viral diseases and treatments, and while he didn't survive, from what some of our Cardassian staff have to say, his work--"

Bashir frowned. "Wait a minute, Dr. Moset? Dr. Crell Moset? The Cardassian exobiologist?"

"Yes, I think that's--"

He stared. "Are you familiar with his reputation?"

"I've heard that Dr. Mo--"

"Moset -- I refuse to call him a doctor! -- spent years on the planet Bajor during the Occupation! He experimented on prisoners and slaves -- on Bajorans, people who had no say in what was done to them, no chance to approve or refuse his so-called treatments, his experiments!" Bashir was all but sputtering as his anger grew. "And when he came back to Cardassia, he was hailed as a hero of some kind!"

"He found a cure for the Fostossa virus--"

"At the cost of thousands of Bajoran lives!" Julian interrupted, unable to keep the disgust from his face and voice. "Aren't you aware of the man's background? His breakthroughs in medicine came because he didn't care if his experimental subjects lived or died! When he joined the staff at Culat, he continued to have Bajoran captives brought to him for his experiments! They were mutilated, subjected to radiation, exposed to poison, even those who survived his research were scarred for life!"

The nurse held her ground. "I'm not suggesting we use his methods, just that we review his research--"

"No!" The shout reverberated across the lab. "And I don't want to hear even the suggestion again!"

Mondrig slipped through the dusk shadows, scowling to himself. His contact hadn't shown up for the rendezvous that morning. The newsvids reported the man had been arrested on charges of stealing and hoarding supplies. Mondrig could no longer count on him as a source of resources and equipment. At such a crucial time, that was a blow.

If he thought anybody knew what he planned, he would have suspected them of countering his moves even as he made them. But no one knew, he'd made sure of that.

Still.... He scowled again. None of the other members of his Coterie had access to the kind of materials he needed, and he didn't have time to recruit anyone else.

But he wasn't about to give up. Not now. He would just have to find another source.

From the faces around the briefing table that evening, a newcomer could have picked out which of the dozen personnel were working on which project, purely from their expressions. The medical staff were glum, on edge, sunk into themselves. The members of the technical team were merely exhausted, haggard from too many long days. The environmental team personnel were bright, optimistic.

Everyone else listened as Lausten continued his report. Most of them had given up trying to understand the process, despite his efforts to keep his explanation of their research simple.

"...So as you see, all the computer simulations have been positive, and the results of every experiment have been exactly as projected," he gestured. "The bio-engineered organism will subsist solely on certain molecules found exclusively in the chemical that forms the basis of the toxins in the air, water, and soil. As it breaks down the toxins, the organism releases byproducts -- harmless chemicals, that normally occur naturally in the soil and water of this planet."

"How do you plan to contain and control this organism of yours?" Aya asked, frowning. "I mean, if anything unexpected happens in the wild, so to speak...."

"The organism is uniquely sensitive to pressure, environment, and food supply. It's bio-engineered that way. It can only survive in a certain narrow range of atmospheric density, and of a specific atmospheric composition. It can only reproduce above a particular altitude, because of the pressure. Essentially, we spread the bacterium above the clouds; it reproduces naturally, thriving on the toxins in the upper atmosphere, leaving harmless and naturally-occurring elements. That limits the number of organisms we need to create to start with -- we seed small batches in scattered areas, and let the upper winds carry them around the planet. There, they'll eat, reproduce, and eat some more. The natural process takes over.

"As the bacterium filters down through the clouds, it reaches a level where it is no longer capable of reproduction. However, it continues to break down the toxins by devouring certain molecules, until it reaches the end of its engineered lifespan, and begins to die off. As the toxins become scarce in the upper atmosphere, the engineered bacterium dies off there too."

Bashir looked up from the PADD he'd been reading. "Your report's pretty thorough. It looks like you've accounted for all possible situations and factors," he commented quietly. "So what's your plan for implementation?"

"Stage one of the bioremediation process will be the seeding of the atmosphere with the specifically altered bacterium in a carefully contained and monitored region."

"And what region is that?" the doctor asked.

"Malavna City. It's a perfect choice for the initial real-life test," Lausten enthused. "As remote and isolated an environment as I've seen on this planet. It's tucked in a bowl-shaped valley up in the mountains. Completely surrounded by higher elevations, even the passes that used to allow access to the city, before transporters made it easy." He looked around, adding wryly, "Used to be a vacation spot, believe it or not, for rich, famous, and powerful Cardassians, because of the thermal caverns and hot springs throughout the area. Incredible geology."

"What happened to it? Or do we even need to ask?"

Tejral interjected solemnly with, "As the relationship between Cardassia and the Dominion deteriorated at the end, some of those wealthy, famous, and powerful Cardassians moved their families there, thinking it was a safe refuge, safer than Cardassia City. Perhaps because of that, and maybe to show that no place on the planet was beyond their reach, the Dominion deliberately targeted Malavna City in the extermination order. All but incinerated the place. Collapsed the caverns. Poisoned the springs. Nothing much left. The toxic duststorm that did so much damage in this province never reached the place, but there's been a steady sprinkle of fallout from the atmosphere above it. The only surviving life form we found up there was lichen, among the rocks."

He sighed introspectively. "Malavna City was over four thousand years old, if Cardassian history and archaeology can be believed. Pre-Hebitian. One of the oldest continuously occupied sites on the planet. Utterly unique. The history destroyed there...." Tejral shook his head.

The reminder brought everyone down, and for a moment the staff mostly stared at the table, recalling the extent of the Dominion's ravages. They had tried to destroy the world's past as well as its present people and culture.

"And stage two?" Bashir asked.

"Assuming all goes as our simulations suggest, we'll be able to observe the full bioremediation cycle in about three weeks. During that time, we'll continue to observe and test, and begin building up stores of the bacterium. After that...." Lausten blew a long breath. "Well, then we see how fast we can spread it through the environment."

Sitting beside Bashir, Aya asked, "Trey, why create living organisms? Why not nanites that you can turn off when the job is done?"

"The bioremediation blueprint called for something that would be part of the local ecology -- not something alien to it -- so we started with a native bacterium. When it's done its job, it'll decompose back into the environment. In six months, no one will ever know it was here. A nanite wouldn't have met that criteria."

"You could have used naturally occurring elements--"

"To tell the truth," Lausten admitted, "we had twin lines of research in that area too. It just didn't work out as well, or as quickly, as these bacteria did."

Aya sighed. "It just seems wrong, somehow, to have created an organism that we know is going to die off in a few months, without an opportunity to survive, or grow, or evolve."

Tejral reminded her, "That's part of bioremediation sometimes, Aya. How much of medicine relies on the deliberate creation of antitoxins, antibiotics, and other ways of killing disease-causing organisms?"

She made a face. "Don't talk bioethics to me, Shane. I'm too tired to argue."

"If you weren't so tired, you wouldn't even be asking the question."

Bashir caught their attention again. "How soon will you be prepared to begin?"

"How soon will this meeting be over?" the planetary reconstructionist countered.

"Now."