DISCLAIMER:All things Star Trek:Deep Space Nine belong to the late Gene Roddenberry by default, I guess, Rick Berman and Michael Pillar, Paramount Pictures and anyone else with a legal claim to the materiel. Absolutely NO infringement of copyright is intended; these characters etc., are not making me any money AT ALL. In fact, like everyone else, I lose on the deal. I am borrowing them just for fun - and will give them back in one piece at the end.

THE SHADOW OF THE TOWER

BY MAGGIE

"Computer; replay 'Morning'."

"COMMAND UNCLEAR -PLEASE REPEAT."

"Glass lunch judge, a bin to let it!"

"COMMAND UNCLEAR - PLEASE REPEAT."

Bashir stared at the computer screen, for a moment wondering what the hell had gone wrong with the blasted Cardassian technology this time --

--and got a shock, the like of which he'd never had before, and would probably not, now, have enough time left to ever have again.

He'd lost the battle; not just against the aphasia virus in his own body, but also in everyone else's aboard the station. The words he saw on the computer screen were total gibberish; they meant nothing to him. There was no way now that he could continue the search for an antidote to the virus; Chief O'Brien was maybe six hours away from death, and there were thirteen others now, including Dax and Commander Sisko's son, Jake, who would follow soon after.

Without someone to carry on that vital research, eventually they would all die; he'd heard nothing positive from Major Kira regarding her search for the creator of the Bajoran manufactured virus and now the chances were he would never know if she succeeded.

Only the Ferengi and Odo, the shapeshifting security chief, had so far not reported sick, and a few of the Bajoran civilians. But that could only be a matter of time. Horror roiled around inside him, like some black-hearted drug making its presence felt; horror and a freezing fear -- and anger. Something deeply basic inside him fiercely and utterly rejected this sudden fact of helplessness to find the antidote which would save them all ... save him ...

But a voice inside him that he'd never really heard before, told him not to be such a child; it told him there was nothing he could do, that it was all over, that things like this happened ...

Defeat. For a moment he was consumed with a hatred of it, then suddenly there were tears in his eyes; he blinked them away. He hadn't wept since he was a child; couldn't even remember if he ever had.

'Dax ...'

He said her name without thinking about it, and it was --

What was it he had just said? It had sounded like ... what?

A thump loudly broke the silence around him, and there was a sudden pain in his right hand; he realised that he'd hit out at the fascia of the computer panel in front of him.

'Unprofessional,' he thought to himself; 'very unprofessional, Julian.'

He bit down hard on the frustration that was threatening to make him do something completely stupid, like yelling for help: 'Help me for God's sake, someone ...'

The words were there, ready to spring into existence; break the silence with the shock of his self-discovery. But they wouldn't come out like that, would they? Not now. He laughed; a short stab of sound ... and remarkably bitter.

He got up suddenly, unable to just sit there any longer; there was still something he could do after all. He could no longer read labels on medicine containers, true; but he knew what they were, and where, and how to administer them. What he was about to do was bad medical practice ... in anyone else, maybe; but Julian knew what he was doing, knew the drugs and his own specialised knowledge inside out and upside down. There was still something he could do to alleviate the suffering ...

Something like relief washed over him as he collected what he would need and hurried from the Infirmary in the direction of the temporary hospital ward in crew quarters ...

*

Dax had been trying an experiment with Jake. She'd pointed to her eye and said 'eye'. What Jake had heard was "paper". He'd then deliberately tried to say 'paper' back to her; unfortunately it hadn't come out 'eye'. Jadzia looked hopefully at Jabora, Dr. Bashir's Bajoran Chief Nurse; the look on the woman's face had told her the results well enough. Jadzia had sighed; obviously the speech rerouting was entirely random.

That had been three hours ago. When Bashir came back into the ward, armed to the teeth with medication and a ton of enthusiasm, he quickly scanned the room to see who else had fallen into the virus' characteristic high fever. There appeared to be three more, making sixteen in this ward alone; and there were some new faces since he'd last been in there. As soon as he spotted Jabara he hurried over to her. Without waiting for any new information from him, she tried to explain about Jadzia's little experiment.

"Forward trying, over black since --" she said, purely reactively, then stopped herself, looking glum.

'Oh no, Jabara, not you too,' thought Julian, trying to keep the disappointment and fear from showing in his face or manner. Up until an hour ago, miraculously, she'd still been okay. He tried to smile sympathetically, but he knew that it didn't really come off. 'Oh well,' he realised, 'better sooner than later.'

'Me too,' he tried to say to her. What came out was, "Blue table." Her shocked expression told him that, although he wouldn't have made sense to her even if he hadn't been talking nonsense, she'd got the message.

Their last chance gone.

He made his way over to the worst of the victims to administer the drugs which would, he hoped, stave off, for a while at least, the eventual conclusion; death. It made him feel a little better just to be able to do this, though not by much.

When he reached Dax, he took hold of one of her hands in both of his own. It was no longer the cool temperature that was normal amongst Trills; she was burning up, along with the fifteen others who had entered the third and final stage of the virus' progressive shut down of the body's systems. His mind was flooded with remembrances of her; that desperate attempt to find some way to communicate with her fellow casualties when she'd still been conscious, her humorously adversarial little smile and the twinkle in her eyes when she'd used her wealth of experience to outwit him as he made yet another advance towards her, the sound of her voice as they conferred over yet another mystery to be solved ... the sound of her voice ...

At that moment he would have given anything to hear it again, even if she was only speaking gibberish.

He noticed suddenly how tightly he was gripping her hand, and immediately let go of it, laying it back near the other on her unconscious form.

He sighed shakily and moved round to the next bed to check on Jake. The boy's temperature told Bashir that the youngster couldn't last much longer. He had to be seriously dehydrated by now, so he took a vial from his case and pumped some more plasma directly into his system.

Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead, although he didn't know whether it was his still shocked emotional state, or the rise in temperature within his own system due to the virus, which he noted with an air of detachment.

Probably both.

Making his way around the ward and administering drugs and plasma where necessary, he tried his best to comfort those whose failed attempts at communication were making them unbearably frustrated. These were mostly amongst the younger of the Bajorans, most of whom had strong and unpleasant memories of their existence under Cardassian rule, and were still experiencing problems.

One young woman became very angry and began hitting out at those around her. Julian, somehow managing to still her threshing hysteria, found himself sitting next to her on the bed with his arms round her, holding her and murmuring words which at least sounded soothing, even if they meant nothing else. Slowly her anger dissolved into tears, her sobs shaking her thin body.

As he rocked her slowly in his arms, it occurred to him to wonder how people ever recovered from wars; the effects never seemed to have an end. He'd heard enough in the last few months from the native Bajorans staffing DS9, who on occasion trailed into the Infirmary in the grip of some horrific memory of the Cardassian slave camps, or of friends, family killed mercilessly, to form a picture of the former occupiers behaviour then which he still found difficult to deal with equitably himself. It wasn't easy to keep a distinct dislike of the Cardassian military from flooding him as he comforted the young woman, but it was necessary, if only to help her and the others like her to recover their lost dignity and self assurance.

Eventually, cried out and exhausted, the fever beginning to catch up on her, the young Bajoran curled up on the bed and fell asleep. Bashir, getting to his feet, weary beyond measure, made to walk round to the next patient and found himself connecting painfully with the deck. A young Starfleet ensign who was sitting on a bed near him, tried to help him up, but Julian no longer had the strength to even keep his eyes open, let alone be anything but dead weight, in the 'up-and-at-'em department.

Finally managing to drag his eyelids back up, he saw Jabara kneeling before him, worry plain on her face. Between them, she and the young ensign managed to get him to his feet and over to the one remaining empty bed, which he collapsed onto. Feeling the warmth of her hand on this forehead, he realised that he felt almost unbearably hot and pulled uselessly at the collar of his undershirt. As Jabara opened his medical case, and, after scanning the contents carefully, gave him a plasma shot, all he wanted to do was fall asleep under a freezing cold shower for half an hour. Someone put a glass of water to his lips, and he gulped the contents, before finally slipping into blessed unconsciousness.

*

He was shaken awake half an hour later -- his mouth and throat on fire with what felt like a rubber ball in his mouth that was probably his tongue, he realised -- by what felt like a minor earthquake; he tried to get up to find out what was going on, not that anyone would be able to tell him in his present condition, but he could hardly move a muscle. He could just about raise his head about an inch and a half to try to look around him ... but not for long. Sleep was dragging at him and he gave in to it. His head falling back onto the pillow, he was instantly asleep.

There was no one left to check on those who were sick; which was most of those aboard the station by now. Even Jabara had succumbed to the fever; she was curled up on a chair at the top end of the ward, unconscious. Her fevered dreams were filled with hellish images of heat and death.

What hope was there for any of them?

*

Bashir woke to find someone once more holding a glass of cool water to his parched lips and he swallowed it gratefully. It took him some moments to realise, with an immense shock of relief, that someone he had never seen before -- a middle aged Bajoran male -- was not only speaking to him, but also that he could understand what was being said to him.

"Dr. Bashir? Can you understand what I'm saying?"

"You ... you found the antidote?" Julian managed to croak. It was then, as he looked around with a renewed sense of hope, observing that some of the erstwhile bed-ridden patients were actually sitting up, looking excited and talking to each other fit to bust, that he noticed Major Kira standing next to the man who had spoken to him; the expression on her face was, for her, a broad grin.

"Major ..." Bashir's enquiry was still croaky, but his voice was stronger now.

Kira glanced at the newcomer as she replied.

"This is Doctor Surmak Ren; he worked with the man who created the virus. And yes; he found the antidote.

"We found the antidote, Major," Dr. Surmak corrected her, his glance indicating Bashir. And the voice, Julian noted, held a note of almost surprised respect. "If you hadn't spotted the typically Bajoran construction technique, the Major here would've had no starting point for her search. And as for the research that you did yourself, into the virus ... you were very, very close, you know. I knew virtually nothing about the virus myself; its creator, Dekon Elig, completed that project alone. I couldn't have finished the work without your notes, certainly not in time to save you and these people; they have you to thank for saving their lives, myself included," he finished, giving Kira a somewhat testy look. Julian had no idea what that look meant, and wasn't about to quiz either this man or Major Kira to find out. He was just glad he was alive, that they were all alive; at least ..

"Chief O'Brien, Jadzia, Jake, are they ...?"

"We caught them in time, don't worry; Doctor Surmak assures me that they're going to be fine," Kira answered him.

Julian felt like laughing, and started to, but ended up choking instead. Someone gave him more water; it was Jabara, grinning all over her face with relief. He took the glass from her and sipped at it slowly.

"Thank you," he told her, giving her the benefit of one of his warm, appreciative smiles. Her grin just got wider.

Looking back at the man at his bedside, he said, "Thank you for helping us, Doctor Surmak;" and his gaze sweeping around the room, his spirit feeding on the happiness he saw around him, he concluded, "We're all very grateful."

That gratitude was reflected in Bashir's warm brown eyes, and, observing it, Dr. Surmak's respect for him deepened. He found himself liking this young doctor, even hoping that there might be a chance to work with him some time in the future.

As the Bajoran administrator moved on down the ward to talk to some of his people, Bashir tried to get up off his bed. He got as far as turning on his side and leaning on one elbow, when he noticed that Kira was still standing near the end of his bed, just looking at him, her gaze unfathomable. He grinned up at her, something of the old Julian coming back into play.

"Yes, Major?" he asked slowly, savouring the words that came out, blessedly correctly. "What is it?"

She opened her mouth to speak, then obviously thinking better of it, just said,

"Nothing."

Julian, having the feeling that she might have actually been about to say something nice to him, was a little disappointed.

Levering himself upright, he swung his legs over the side of the bed; found that he had to stop right there to catch his breath.

"Just what do you think you're doing, Julian?"

"Well, I've got patients to see to, Major."

"I don't think so, Doctor, not right now."

Kira was bouncing a little on the balls of her feet, and the 'I-mean-it' expression on her face stopped any reply that he would have made -- not that she gave him time to reply -- as she continued, "They say doctors make the worst patients; as far as I can see you still belong right there," and she pointed at the bed. "For a while, at least. That's an order," she told him, seeing that he was, once more, about to protest.

He did feel more than willing to comply, as she assured him that Dr. Surmak and Jabara would be able to cope without him for a few hours. Not wanting to be court martialled just yet, Julian lay back down on the bed. He noticed that she was still looking at him; he also noted that a certain amount of the respect that Dr. Surmak had afforded him, could be seen in her eyes.

"Go on, sleep," she told him. "You've earned it."

"So have you Major," he added pointedly, not wanting to go down without at least a show of a little fight-back. "Thank you."

Thank you for managing to find the one man we needed to keep us all alive, was what he meant, and it didn't pass by Kira without notice. A little smile played about her lips as she took it in, nodding to herself.

"Hmm; I guess it's bouquets all round," she concluded.

Bashir watched her as she went over to where Dr. Surmak was chatting to Commander Sisko, who was sat on his son's bed, his arm around Jake; a glow of warmth began to spread itself out inside him as he realised that she'd actually said something nice to him after all. And as he turned on his side to go back to sleep, he remembered that, somewhere back in all that she'd said to him, she had actually called him 'Julian'.

THE END

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