Chapter Text
They had him moving snow, the sort of busywork that had killed a friend of Tom’s last winter, when he was forced to do it right after a tree-felling mission, with no boots. There was little supervision, at least. The prisoners could chat if they wished, but instead, Tom lost himself in the rhythm of shovel to snow, snow to wheelbarrow, wheelbarrow to western wall. His shoulders complained; beneath his prison uniform, he was sweating; and his feet burned with cold, but as he curled his unresponsive fingers around the wheelbarrow’s handles, as he threw all his weight against it to get that wheel sticking in the snow–
“Tom!” said a familiar voice.
It cut through the crowd of prisoners, and drowned off the hum Tom hadn’t noticed he was emitting. He straightened up as Yumelo jogged his way.
“So much energy,” said Tom when she came into earshot. She flashed him a grin, but it faded fast.
“I need your help. There’s someone – I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
Tom dropped his wheelbarrow and followed her at a quick shuffle, the slush of snow catching against his boots. They didn’t have to go far. She led him straight to the “police” hut, where the handful of self-important prisoners who acted as enforcers were given special quarters away from the rest. Tom twitched in the doorway. There were no lights inside, no heat, so he passed through a literal shadow to get inside, through a palpable coldness in the air.
“There,” said Yumelo, grabbing his arm. Tom’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and when he followed Yumelo’s gaze, he could see a Folsan sitting against the wall.
“Gray?” he called.
The only response was an unintelligible mumble. He knew Gray – he’d arrived with him. A political prisoner, not a criminal, who spoke Cardassian so perfectly he’d been able to teach Tom. When had Gray become a cop?
While you were in solitary confinement, a voice whispered in Tom’s ear, fattening up.
He crouched a few meters from Gray and slowly duck-walked forward, his thighs aching. But it was worth it to avoid startling an old friend, even if that friend had become something unrecognizable – something ugly – in the meantime. Tom squinted through the darkness at the patchy hair on Gray’s cheeks, where entire hanks of fur had fallen out. He took Gray’s clawed hands in his own. The skin was hard and peeling, slick with blood where it had cracked open.
“Let me see your mouth,” Tom ordered. When Gray didn’t seem to hear him, Tom used his thumb to pull Gray’s bottom lip downward, exposing the white-edged sores along his gums. The smell of pus clung to Gray’s breath, and when Tom unbuttoned Gray’s collar, there was a dark rash ringing his neck.
“Pellagra,” Tom said grimly. “Or something like it. Can you stand, Gray?”
No response. Tom got one arm beneath Gray’s, unleashing hot sweat and the scent of body odor as he leveraged the Folsan to his feet. Yumelo shored up the other side with her dainty hands on Gray’s hip bone and bulging stomach. A glance behind Gray, at his trousers, showed a dark wet stain of diarrhea, with no scent attached. Like rice-water.
Gray. A pang went through Tom’s chest. In the early days, before he was taken to solitary, he’d gone to Gray’s bunk at night with a group of other men, all of them gathering around to play cards on a dog-eared deck Gray had smuggled in. Once, on a labor party, he and Gray had teamed up to fell trees, and Gray had talked for hours, breathless from exertion but oh-so-casual, about his favorite Cardassian philosophers, his time on Prime at the university, the friends he’d left behind there. Tom couldn’t remember the details now, and he didn’t have any other memories to call on. In a different setting, on a ship, maybe he and Gray would have been best friends. Then again, even as he moved to cover the shit-stain on Gray’s police uniform so no one else would see it, he thought: Maybe I would have thrown him out an airlock instead.
They deposited Gray in the medical line, but Tom knew it was hopeless. On the way back, scrubbing his hands clean in the snow, Yumelo grabbed him by the belt and stopped him.
“What was that?” she asked, her voice low.
Right. She was still new to the camps – relatively. “It’s pellagra,” said Tom. “It’s what happens when something is missing in your diet – niacin, I think. It used to be rampant here. They’d separate the sick into shitters and non-shitters. The non-shitters got a special medical diet, and the disease would go away.”
“But for the shitters, it’s too late?” asked Yumelo.
“Here, it is,” said Tom. Eyes strained, he glanced back at the medical tent. “For Gray, it is. Nobody gets pellagra anymore, since they changed our diet. The eggs we get once a week… but Gray’s a Folsan. Folsans need a special chemical compound found in their local biosphere. Nagai nuts. It’s their main food group.”
“And Lazon II doesn’t have it,” said Yumelo flatly.
Tom shrugged one shoulder. “It’s a delicacy. Years ago, Folsans couldn’t even join Starfleet because our replicators couldn’t recreate the compound. Now, the nuts are so widely traded that the Cardassians could probably get them from the nearest village.”
“If they wanted to.”
Exactly, Tom thought, and he didn’t bother to say it aloud. He saved his energy instead, pushing his wet boots through the snow.
“He’s their cop,” said Yumelo, her eyebrows furrowed.
“Shows how much that matters,” Tom said. He glanced over at his work party, the sunlight glittering off snow and straining his eyes. “If they don’t even treat the informants nicely…”
He’d reached the perimeter, where he left his wheelbarrow and shovel. Normally, on a work party, you couldn’t leave your load behind like this. The other prisoners would steal it, use it for their quota, rob you of your hard-won food ration. But on snow duty, it didn’t matter. The guards didn’t bother to keep track. With a sigh, Tom dug through the hard, icy snow to find the wooden handle of his shovel. Bent over like this, with his knees against his chest, blood rushing to his head, he almost felt asleep. His world narrowed to the red tips of his fingers, the ragged black nails, the pleasant, painful push of wood against his sores. Meditative. Quiet. Slow.
The wail of a phase-disruptor pistol jerked him to his feet.
Yumelo’s fist tightened on the back of his shirt. He reached for her automatically, each shielding the other with their body – anyone looking at them would think they were cowering together, for how much strength they had. They pinpointed the source before anyone else did. The other prisoners had dropped to the ground, hands over their heads, while Cardassian music kicked to life over the speakers.
“Courtyard,” Tom muttered, just as Yumelo pointed to the guard he’d already seen. The guard’s gun was pointed at the sky. They all knew what the music meant. One by one, the shivering prisoners pushed to their feet and forced their unwilling bodies to march.
Tom and Yumelo hung back. Middle of the crowd only. They waited until a good number of prisoners had gone before them and then joined the ranks. To the east, members of the Escape Committee provided cover while their leader battered a weaker prisoner over the head. They claimed his quota and rushed into line with their hands still blood-stained; one of them tipped Tom an insouciant wink.
He looked away. He remembered his first month here, when he saw the same thing for the first time – when he fought back so hard he busted the Escape Committee’s leader over the head and left him unconscious for days. Later, Tom promised himself, memorizing their faces.
The guard was shouting. So deep into the ranks, and with the music blaring, Tom couldn’t make out the words. He watched his fellow prisoners closely, ready to follow their lead as orders rippled to the back. But nobody moved. Instead, a shadow rolled along the edge of Tom’s vision, growing thicker and thicker on the snow as somebody approached.
Gul Dor Rikk.
He was moving slowly, stopping at the end of each row to single out prisoners. They joined him in a slow shuffle, but before they could get near the Gul, the guards would slap their rifles across the prisoners’ chest and shunt them off to the side. Against the wall. Dor Rikk plodded on, his footsteps silent, his long black coat flapping in the wind. At the end of Tom’s row, he bent primly at the waist and peered at the faces in profile, scanning each one in turn.
Only Tom turned to face him. He met Gul Dor Rikk’s eyes coolly, unimpressed. The Gul hesitated, those sharp starved features lighting up as if he saw something he liked.
“You,” he said, and to Tom’s relief, he pointed to the guy at Tom’s left, a political prisoner named Korik. Korik went weak at the knees. He made it out of the ranks only by gripping the clothes of each person he passed, clutching tight enough to tear the fabric, and then he was pushed to the wall just like everyone else.
“Political prisoners only?” Yumelo asked in a whisper.
Tom tried to sneak a glance at the wall. The other prisoners blocked his view. “I think so,” he whispered back. “But not all of us, obviously.”
Yumelo gave him a dubious look, as if somehow, being Starfleet and Maquis didn’t count as ‘political’. He shot the same dubious look right back at her, and with a flinty smile, she subsided. But, he supposed, both of them had committed crimes. The men and women lined up against the wall were intellectuals, academics. Not criminals.
And when Gul Dor Rikk had finished combing the ranks, he raised an elegant gloved hand, and the disruptor rifles fired.
Tom locked his knees. The blue flash of killing light blinded him. He blinked the spots away, all too aware of his height and bulk, what an easy target he made even in the middle of the crowd. But as he’d suspected, when his vision cleared, none of the criminals were dead. All the shots had been aimed at the wall, where the political prisoners now lay slumped, their burning flesh melting the snow.
Gul Dor Rikk gave a pleasant nod to the guards. The blaring music turned down a few octaves, so Tom could hear the sizzle of human flesh. In a whistling, high-pitched voice, the kind that denoted throat cancer or a poorly-healed injury, Gul Dor Rikk said, “Dismissed!”
The prisoners went back to their work. The Escape Committee dropped their loads, confident that no one could steal from them, and lounged in the mining pit where the still-unconscious prisoner they’d stolen from lay bleeding. One of them propped his feet up on the prisoner’s back. Another tugged a hand-rolled cigarette from his pocket and held it between his lips.
“Got a light?” he asked when he caught Tom staring.
Tom’s eyes narrowed. He stepped forward and plucked the cigarette out of the committee member’s hand. “This is one of mine,” he said. “Where did you get this?”
The man with his feet up whistled low. Smiling, gap-toothed from too many fights, the other guy grabbed Tom’s wrist and squeezed until the bones creaked. He stole his cigarette back with a vengeful twist that left the skin on Tom’s arm stinging. Yumelo jumped into the fray, her fists tight at her sides.
“He got it from me,” she said.
Her posture was aggressive, but a quick assessment showed it was mostly aimed at the Escape Committee, not Thomas. He nodded to her, just a slight inclination of the head, and he thought of Gray in his camp police uniform, the dead bodies slumped against the wall waiting for their friends to drag them away, the unconscious prisoner twitching beneath another man’s feet – his hand-rolled tea-steeped cigarettes on this asshole’s lips–
Tom reared back, using all of his weight and strength from confinement on Cardassia Prime, and punched the cigarette right out of the prisoner’s mouth. It disappeared into the snow, leaving droplets of blood where it fell and an empty socket in the prisoner’s gums where Tom’s fist had knocked a tooth loose.
He grinned. He felt the first six blows he got in return. His face, his gut, his kidneys, the tread of a steel-toed boot on his spine. Seven Escape Committee members and one Thomas Riker, with Yumelo slipping wisely into the shadows.
He didn’t feel anything after that.