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Afterwards

By Cardie-ologist

Palmor Dukat woke with a start from a deep, if nightmare infected, sleep at the sound of the door locks popping open. By the time he had gotten his eyes to focus, the men were already at his bedside. He recognized the biggest of them as one of the two soldiers who had administered his torture in the apparatus. The man had taken every opportunity to treat him brutally and had made no effort to conceal an intense hostility to the prisoner a well known type in interrogation teams, the "intimidator." He was in the company of two other soldiers and a man bearing the insignia of the Second Order medical division. The doctor had a medical scanner, which he passed over Dukat's body several times. Then he threw back the blanket to make a visual and manual assessment of the prisoner's condition. Dukat cried out as the man palpated the area underneath his ribs, where one of the straps had cut through nearly to the muscle. The intimidator laughed but was silenced by a sharp look from the doctor, who, nevertheless, had still not said one word to his "patient."

The examination apparently completed, the doctor nodded to one of the soldiers, who removed the manacles from the prisoner's wrists and ankles, and then, with his companion, pulled Dukat up into a sitting position, leaning him against the wall directly in back of the bed. The intimidator then approached, bearing a small mug that contained a thick, brown mixture. "Your rations, traitor," he said, thrusting the mug into Dukat's trembling hands.

Dukat managed to hold on, driven by the man's clear anticipation that he should drop it and make a mess of himself. The mixture was at room temperature and blandly tasteless, a synthetic creation designed to provide nutrients sufficient to insure prisoners' survival but unappealing enough to deny them any of the pleasures usually associated with food. Dukat was not so much hungry as weak, and he emptied the mug resolutely, if not eagerly. When he had finished, he held out the empty mug to the intimidator with a gesture of mock politeness. The man snatched it back, and despite the doctor's presence, slapped Dukat hard across the jaw. The prisoner had expected the blow and managed to conceal just how much it had hurt.

"Enough, Tarkon," the doctor cautioned. "After the Tribunal he's all yours. Until then, however, the orders are to show restraint. We're required to document the visible traces of the interrogation, and I don't need you to be adding any bruises after the fact." Turning to the others, he said, "See if he can stand up."

The two soldiers lifted Dukat from the bed, stood him on his feet, and let go. He held his balance for about twenty seconds before falling to the floor. No one in the room made any effort to catch him, or to pick him up. Knowing that any efforts of his own to rise would be pathetically unsuccessful, he merely lay very still where he had fallen.

"Hmm, it will take the maximum dosage of palliatives to get him through the tribunal tomorrow," the doctor mused. "I may have to advise them to delay it a day."

"That won't be easy," Tarkon put in. "They've already declared tomorrow a holiday so that everyone can hear the traitor who destroyed the Carduk declare his guilt."

"Well, they won't want to hear it from someone who can't even stand up. The tribunal always goes on only with the prison surgeon's recommendation. They won't oppose me. Besides, I know you. You just can't stand any delay in having him at your mercy." On the floor, Dukat shuddered. The doctor continued, "All right men, let's hold him up so I can record close-up views of the external injuries."

***

Dukat reckoned that the doctor must have recorded over 100 digital images full torso views of his front, back, and sides, then separate images of every bruise and cut. At about image number 75, Dukat felt a surge of pain radiate from his left thigh to his toes. The pain repeated itself about every five seconds. Soon he was feeling similar sensations in all four limbs. He began reflexively to groan, and not long thereafter, his arms and legs began to move convulsively.

"Hold him still, damn you," the doctor snapped at the two soldiers.

"It's the neurothylin wearing off," said Tarkon. "There's not much you can do to stop apparatus twitch without it."

"Well, then, give him some. There's a hypospray in my bag."

"His son is coming in an hour. The Obsidian Order likes for the relatives to see them at their worst. And as you know, even the lowest effective dose will quiet him for at least four hours."

The doctor's self importance did not extend to the dangerous lengths of defying Obsidian Order protocols. "All right," he replied reluctantly. "Secure him to the bed again. I'll come back later and get the last pictures. And there had better not be any new injury sites," he added meaningfully to Tarkon.

***

Trying to fight off the agony, Dukat focussed his concentration on the clanking of his chains as the limbs regularly and rhythmically convulsed. They made a kind of music, punctuated by the cries of pain that he was as unable to control as he was to stop his tremors. Strange that the convulsions didn't come all at once, but in sequence: left leg, left arm, right arm, right leg. He had a ridiculous urge to ask the doctor the medical causes behind the phenomenon. But the doctor was not cut from the same cloth as the talkative young interrogator, whom Dukat had no doubt would have been most eager to explain this mystery.

Neither the pain nor the "music" it generated could quite take from his mind the source of an anguish far worse than even the most exquisite Cardassian torture could produce. What a ridiculous, shameful spectacle he would present to Elmor! He only hoped that it would arouse genuine disgust in his son, not the pity that could doom the whole House of Dukat. Elmor had a very short fuse, and knowing what he needed to do was no guarantee that he would do it. If only he were better at hiding his emotions, like the enigmatic interrogator . . .

His unpleasant reverie was broken at last by the door opening and the equally unpleasant voice of Tarkon the intimidator. "Up and at 'em, traitor," it boomed. "Time to perform for your son and heir." ***

Elmor Dukat was pacing the waiting room of Central Detention like a caged carillex. He was hardly confused as to what was coming, or how he was supposed to handle it. The message his father had left to be opened in case of his arrest had been a model of clarity, and, besides, it only reiterated things that they had gone over orally countless times. Yet Elmor felt the same anger he always felt. Why had his father knowingly embarked on a course of action for which such precautions would be necessary? For those primitive Bajorans and their soft, garden planet? His father had said that ending the Occupation was necessary to save countless Cardassian lives, but how did that square with his admission that he had personally planned an act of sabotage that snuffed out 1500 brave young Cardassians in one blow?

And yet, angry as he was with what his father's beliefs had led to, he could not sustain any anger against the man himself. He had always loved and admired his father deeply. The Dukats prized family even more highly than the always intense Cardassian norm, and the ferociousness of Palmor Dukat the warrior had an inverse relationship to the affectionate nature of Palmor Dukat the family patriarch. That mutual affection, his father's message had stated in no uncertain terms, must now be completely eradicated. Elmor was to denounce his father as an unfit husband and parent, a disgrace to Cardassia, to speak with relish of how any mention of him would be expunged from the chronicles of the House.

For a split second, Elmor felt annoyance with the insistent performativeness of Cardassian public life. He hadn't been a party to his father's actions against the state, hadn't even agreed with his political views. Wasn't that enough to save the House, without his having to enact such a degrading charade? The political and the personal weren't always the same, no matter how much the culture insisted they were. His father would suffer quite enough for his crime without the requirement that his family spit in his face quite literally, if he followed Palmor's advice to the letter. At least the final required act of the performance rather appealed to Elmor. He was to volunteer for duty on Bajor. There he'd have ample opportunity to punish those ridge noses and their mystical Prophets whose inexplicable attraction had doomed his father.

So, angry and annoyed at what was required of him, and, though he dared not acknowledge the feeling, grief stricken, he continued to pace the room. But the most prevalent emotion that usually bedeviled young Cardassians trying to save themselves from being engulfed in their father's crimes was quite absent. Elmor Dukat wasn't for a moment afraid that he couldn't carry this off. He had yet to encounter any situation he couldn't talk his way out of, and self doubt was simply not part of his psychological makeup. ***

Central Command Security Chief Rokat, accompanied by his top aide, himself escorted Elmor to his father's cell. Despite his awareness that no Cardassian Gul had ever committed an act of treason on quite this scale before, Elmor was somewhat surprised at this hands on involvement from the highest levels of the military hierarchy. Rokat's tone was all one of sincere commiseration and disappointment. Perhaps his old comrade Palmor was actually mentally deranged. Such deviance had never before surfaced among the ancient military line of Dukats, and he was *sure* it wasn't likely to surface again. Elmor played along, assuring Rokat that the family had done everything possible to persuade his father to give up his seditious opinions, expressing regret that they hadn't had him put under medical detention. "We just had no idea he'd go beyond talking treason," Elmor concluded, with an affectingly penitent shake of the head.

"Talking it is bad enough," Rokat returned sharply. "It's unfortunate he's suddenly had nothing to say on the matter of his accomplices, even after a very rigorous interrogation. I certainly hope you can persuade him of the foolishness of pretending to be the only man culpable for this heinous crime."

"I'll do everything I can to persuade him," Elmor responded, knowing full well that nothing he could say would loosen the tongue of anyone who had remained silent throughout a "rigorous interrogation."

They arrived at the cell. A soldier positioned at the door keyed in the access code, and it slid open, shutting immediately behind them once they cleared the entry scanner. "Prisoner Dukat, the heir to your House is here to repudiate you and to urge you to reconsider your stubbornness," Rokat announced in formal tones.

Elmor Dukat hadn't had any doubts that he was prepared for this. He was, however, quite mistaken. He knew his father had been tortured, but until this moment he had conceptualized torture only in the abstract, through instructional texts about techniques, instruments and so forth. He had never tortured anyone or seen someone who had been tortured. To be sure, he understood death and its sometimes messy manifestations. In his three years as a tactical officer in the Second Order space fleet he had killed many people, experiencing their deaths merely as flashes of exploding energy on viewscreens. He had also lost comrades onboard ship and seen their bodies scored by photon torpedo blasts and electrical burns or reduced to jellied stains on walls. And, of course, he had occasionally employed basic, short term interrogation techniques, in which you needed specific information fast, and beat it out of captured enemy soldiers. He had, however, never seen the effects on a man's body of a slow and deliberate effort to cause suffering.

His father was immobilized in a cold metallic contraption that couldn't quite restrain the spasms coursing through his limbs. He was biting down hard on a leather mouthpiece thrust between his teeth, trying unsuccessfully to stifle loud moans that issued forth intermittently. His eyes opened and shut in time with the spasms. He was completely naked, and there was hardly a spot on his torso that wasn't bruised, the colors ranging from deep blue black to pale purple to sickly gray green. Where the apparatus straps had been fastened there were deep cuts into the skin, almost like surgical incisions. At the second neck vertebrae on each side, where the primary support straps had been cinched, the skin was abraded all the way down to the neckbones themselves, which gleamed white above encrustations of dark, dried blood. The other abrasions were similarly lined with clumps of dried blood. From beneath the current ankle restraints, fresh, bright blood was flowing.

In a moment of paralyzing horror, as Rokat made his pronouncement, Elmor Dukat took all this in. When the security chief turned to him expectantly, he couldn't at first bring himself to say anything. Then he recognized in his father's eyes not just pain, but the unmistakable look that had been turned on him countless times, usually when his ungovernable temper was about to explode, the look he and his siblings joked about as the "Get hold of yourself RIGHT NOW" look.

His father had actually scripted what Elmor was to say should he ever be brought forward to renounce him, and they had rehearsed it together. The son roused himself from his stunned silence and launched into an expert presentation of this tirade that benefited from all those school oratory contests whose victory medals lined a wall of his childhood sleeping chamber. Since they had by design never discussed what specific crimes might bring Palmor Dukat to disgrace, he did have to ad lib his last line: "Now try somehow to atone for the shame you have brought on our House by telling Chief Rokat the names of your accomplices in this heinous destruction of the flower of Cardassian manhood." For this statement, too, Elmor projected the perfect tone of spontaneous scorn and accusation.

Rokat went over to the prisoner and removed the mouthpiece. "Give your son the answer he requires, traitor," he barked.

Palmor Dukat, able to get out only one or two syllables together between gasps of pain, answered, "I . . . acted . . . a . . . lone."

"That's what he's said consistently, through twelve hours of *intense* questioning, and now in response to your heartfelt entreaty." Rokat turned to Elmor with a gesture of helplessness. "I'm sorry you can't convince the stubborn old fool to be of some help to himself. Nevertheless, we aren't so unforgiving as to deny a last time alone with a family member even to so intransigent a state criminal. You'll have a quarter of an hour." Rokat keyed in the exit code and he and his silent companion left the room.

***

Palmor Dukat knew that he should have remained silent, as the interrogator had advised, but he didn't have the strength to give up this final chance to speak face to face with his son, even though neither of them dared put into words what he was really feeling. Now he waited anxiously for Elmor's first unscripted remarks.

"Because you won't tell them what they want, they're keeping you in pain?" Elmor asked, his countenance grave.

Palmor's impaired communication skills wouldn't permit him to explain the games his jailers were playing with the neurothylin, and, besides, it was best to keep things simple. "Mmm .. . what . . . traitors . . . deserve, yes?"

"So you always taught me, Father," his son replied bitterly. Trying to formulate a suitable answer, Palmor Dukat was caught off guard by a particularly savage spasm in his right arm. He couldn't avoid crying out loudly from the pain. He saw Elmor wince and turn his head away. When he was able to look at his father again, his face bore an expression Palmor knew well, the expression that said, "Consequences be damned!" He had been standing a couple of meters from the restraining chair; now he was quickly closing that distance, holding out both hands. "Father, I can't bear to see you like this," he said.

This would soon turn into a full fledged disaster for the House of Dukat, Palmor thought frantically. He knew what he had to do and mustered all his strength in order to get out a coherent series of sentences in a convincingly derisive tone: "Don't pretend to pity me, Elmor. They've programmed you into a proper puppet of the state. I'd rather you'd died on the Carduk, too." His son's eyes filled with astonishment, then anger, and one of the hands that had been extended to caress his father instead struck him hard on the mouth.

Because of the restraints, Palmor Dukat's head couldn't give with the blow, thus increasing its force substantially. His lip split several centimeters wide, bleeding profusely; one tooth was completely dislodged, another broken. Realizing one minute too late what his father was up to, Elmor Dukat stared in horror at the blood spattered back of his hand, then looked up at him with an expression of mute, hopeless apology.

"Well, that was a stunningly effective move, Palmor Dukat," the father thought as he spit out blood and tooth fragments. "They can hardly doubt the genuineness of Elmor's repudiation now." And yet the boy seemed so utterly miserable. Palmor was fairly sure that his son's tall frame was shielding him from the surveillance recorder's prying gaze, so he risked composing his ravaged mouth into the semblance of a grin and winked at his son. The smile Elmor returned was decidedly sickly, but he nodded his head twice to acknowledge his father's forgiveness. Then he turned on his heel, strode to the door and called for the guard to let him out. By the time the door opened, all trace of the three tears he had permitted himself to shed had been completely wiped away.

***

"This is unbelievable!," the doctor fumed to Tarkon, whom he had angrily summoned to his office. "We're having to take up the time of one of the best dental reconstructionists in Central Command Medical for a condemned traitor, whom we'll then have to coddle for two or even three days in the medical ward just so he can walk and talk at his trial."

"What are you yelling at me for? It's his son that belted him in the mouth as well he should have after what the old lava worm said to him."

"From the way his son was behaving, I'd have judged him far more likely to kiss the prisoner than strike him."

"It's all there on the recording," Tarkon insisted. "His son approaches, swings his arm, and when he withdraws, the man's mouth is a bloody mess."

"It's not difficult, or unheard of, for digital recordings to be altered," said the doctor accusingly.

"You're implying that I hit him? How dare you?"

"It would be quite consistent with your past behavior. And there was a ten minute gap between the time young Dukat left and the time you told me I could resume my examination and treatment of the prisoner."

"Look, I wanted to let him appreciate the additional hurt he'd gotten from his son for awhile, before you filled him full of neurothylin and painkillers. That's all. And you can't prove any different."

"You're right; I can't," the doctor admitted reluctantly. "But listen to me well, Tarkon. The Dukat tribunal and execution are the most important political events on Cardassia in a decade. You will go precisely by the book from now on or I'll have you reassigned. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," the other man snarled and walked angrily out of the room without being dismissed. The doctor sighed and recorded, for inclusion in Tarkon's personnel evaluation file: "Useful thug, but insubordinate and ungovernable. Temperamentally unsuited for command ranks." He was unaware that chief interrogator Garak had filed similar comments the day before.

***

Prior to his father's arrest, Elmor Dukat had led a charmed life, moving from one triumph to another. He was not used to having bad days at all, and certainly never a day as bad as this. After the wrenching encounter with his father, he had been forced to endure his mother's demands for a truthful account of Palmor's condition, and hours of her inconsolable crying at even a highly censored version of what Elmor had observed. At last he could cope no longer and left her to the care of his level headed sister Prelenda. Fleeing the Dukat family home, he went first to one of several mistresses he maintained in Central City. Now he was pursuing a different form of relaxation, in the steam bath at his battalion's officers' club. As the warm waters eased his knotted muscles he simultaneously worked through the tangle of shame and guilt that had arisen from his having added to the agony of his helpless, suffering parent. He did what he always did with guilt: project it outward. "After I've taught those ungrateful Bajorans to acknowledge Cardassia as their rightful master," he said to himself, "I'll find out who put every other mark on my father's body and make them PAY."