Tigan did not take long to come near enough to the still bewildered Human visitor for their conversation to be held in relative privacy. “Are you all right?” she asked in a tense, hushed semi-whisper.

Julian nodded quietly. He found that he was glancing awkwardly to one side, not wanting to think of how much he must have scared the others around him. “I’m fine now,” he promised. Silence passed between them, still and heavy, but somehow not as uncomfortable as he had come to expect it would be.

He felt the soft, cool touch of the Trill woman’s hands around his own. “I heard you might be going back to your ship,” commented Tigan.

My ship? Julian supposed it could still be true, on some level at least. He turned to look behind him, where Hayes was waiting patiently - having already stepped away to stand at a respectful distance. “Just a moment?”

A return to the Defiant was probably not a bad idea, he reminded himself - concealing the remainder of the unsteadiness, trembling, and the chill that had caused the hairs to rise across his forearms. A chance had come to reacquaint himself with familiar surroundings. Perhaps the last that he would ever get. But every time these thoughts came to his mind, they only augmented the reluctance in his steps. Certainly, a little time could hardly be too much to ask.

“You’re welcome to…” he stammered, and looked down at where their hands were clasped against each other. A glance at Hayes, and then to Counsellor Hsu Mae - and he forced his voice to drop to half volume. “Uh… If you want to… Stay in touch.”

Tigan grinned broadly, nodding once. “I’d love to.”

“So would I,” responded Julian - still keeping his promise to that same quiet, slightly melancholy tone. He realised with only a little surprise that he had not glanced back up again. And smiled. “You’ll make a good counsellor one day, Enxign.”

“Ezri,” she corrected him.

“Ezri, then.”

Cocking her head to one side, Ensign Tigan gave her new friend’s hand a final enthusiastic shake. Her face seemed to glow with its own inner warmth. “I’m glad to have met you, Julian Bashir.”

Strands of ghost-thin orange hair lingered in a cloud above Hayes’ reddened crown, as he ruffled it with an open palm and turned on entering the otherwise empty mess hall. Almost immediately, he raised his head to look directly at the captain, who had entered after him. Was this a standard gesture among doctors? Sisko found that he was wondering. Passed along from one to the next? Or was it just co-incidence that so many of those he’d encountered seemed to have picked up the same unconscious habit?

There was far more than simple fatigue showing in the other man’s eyes, in the line of his back and shoulders. The loose skin beneath his lower eyelids was beginning to sag, already turning to darker hues as though he or somebody else had painted it to look that way. Hayes composed himself quickly, but the outward signs of weariness had been revealed - however briefly - and even now were clearly there to see.

Has he gone off duty, even once, since we left the station? An added thought occurred to Sisko as he looked more closely at the doctor’s mildly bloodshot, grey-blue eyes. Have any of us?

“We’ll be heading back to Deep Space Nine,” he informed the doctor. “As soon as I can be certain that we’re no longer needed here. But I do need to know, will that be soon enough?”

“Perhaps,” came the answer. But Nathan Hayes seemed barely aware that he had begun to shake his head.

“What does that mean?”

“There’s definitely something going on, beyond what we already know.” Hayes told the captain. “But at the same time, there’s not a lot more that I can do without the opportunity to run some further tests. And I’m reluctant to force him to submit to any intervention after everything he’s already been through.”

He sighed. “But of course, if this continues for too much longer, we might be left with no other choice.”

Sisko absorbed this information, with more outward calm than he felt inside. But there was yet one more question which had to be asked. “Do you think this has anything to do with the Cardassians?” A flood of anger rose upwards from inside him, like a snake that was setting itself up to strike. And even as it settled, a powerful phantom taste of acid had fixed itself to the back of the captain’s mouth.

“I don’t think so.” Hayes shook his head. “It’s still quite difficult to say for sure. I’ve received some of Doctor Kalandra’s notes from the Destiny, of course. But judging from the evidence given to us by Mrs Anderson and others, much of this started well before either of them even boarded the Ragnarok. He has me stumped, Captain - and that’s not good news.”

“Bottom line?” demanded Sisko.

The doctor frowned tumultuously, all his attention focused on a search for an appropriate response. “The situation is worse than he’s wanting to admit,” he finally explained. “Any doctor should be able to treat all the standard injuries that one might expect to find with a man returning from captivity, and were that all, the rest would simply be up to time. But there’s more than just that simple problem here. Without some solid physical evidence on which to base a diagnosis, I can’t get to the root of it. I’m sorry.”

Sorry? It took all remaining power of the captain’s will not to demand a better response. The doctor sighed heavily, and he held up a hand. “I know, I know. It’s only a matter of time. Solving difficult problems is a part of my profession, after all. But I’m just not sure that I can solve this one, and that’s… frustrating.”

The Defiant’s internal comm. interrupted Sisko’s chance to inject a response, sounding loudly in both men’s ears. He stepped back, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. The voice had been Jadzia’s.

“Sorry to interrupt your briefing, Captain.” But Dax sounded only slightly apologetic as she turned to find Sisko and Doctor Hayes both striding quickly onto the bridge. A corner of her brow twitched into a briefly pensive frown. She looked first at Sisko and then at the doctor - searching for a perceptible clue as to the course and mood of the two men’s conversation.

“No problem, Dax. What was it that you wanted?”

Perhaps it was only the same remaining anxiety twisting deep beneath the captain’s skin - that had never left him, even once, throughout their journey. Only moments ago, it had been O’Brien and Garak standing before him, waiting to see what consequences he would bring to their future. But the idea of punishing the pair had grated against his conscience like rough-cut glass. Confining them both to quarters was the harshest pronouncement he could bring himself to give. He still needed his Chief of Operations to return to duty on the ship - and even this mildly punitive order had to be wrenched from the depths of his stomach. Almost as if Captain Sisko himself had dug all the way past the flesh of his own belly, and pulled it out with powerful, bloodied hands.

Sisko saw little to indicate how much Dax had gleaned from her fleeting but attentive glance in his direction. He did not have to prompt her to set aside her concerns for a more appropriate time. “No sign of Jem’Hadar,” she told them. “The Destiny reports she has warp drive, weapons and sensors back on line. She’s ready to stand on her own again, and Captain Raymer said to pass along his thanks. Oh, and the reason I called you up here, Benjamin… Odo’s been asking to speak to you on the emergency subspace frequency. He says it’s urgent.”

Sisko sought a place where he could isolate himself from all the other officers, instinct telling him that this was not a conversation he would want the crew to hear. “Constable,” he acknowledged the man whose face appeared on the nearest communications screen. “What can I do for you? Is everything all right?”

“I’m afraid not, Captain.” Odo wasted no time in reaching the point of his communiqué. “There’s been an… incident.”

Trepidation and alarm were quick to rise in Sisko’s conscious thoughts - churning and uneven like an egg that had been whipped too long. He realised as each new doubt came to the fore, that these feelings had been plaguing him for the better part of a week. He braced himself for the inevitability of unwelcome news, mind running over all possible scenarios he could bring to his imagination. Jake! was his first panicked thought. Had the Dominion taken advantage of his absence after all? Had something terrible happened to his son?

But Benjamin Sisko had been a Starfleet officer for over two decades, certainly long enough to have learned how to hold back even the worst of his fears. Premature conclusions could be distracting, he knew - and occasionally, they might even border on dangerous. The backdrop of Odo’s security office appeared to be intact. No sign of great disaster marked the visible portion of the walls.

“What kind of incident?” Sisko prompted.

“Somebody has ambushed one of my deputies with a hypospray.” The explanation began levelly enough - but there was still that rising undertone of perturbation beneath the voice of the station Security Chief. “Apparently less than an hour after he came on duty. They have removed a prisoner from one of the holding cells.”

The captain’s frown grew more pronounced across his face. “Did you see them?”

“I was in a puddle on the floor of my quarters at the time,” insisted Odo. “The culprit must have known my regeneration cycle, or such a breach could never have happened. In any case, it appears that he must have been after Jocelyn Davies.”

“Why would you say that?” Sisko demanded.

Folding his arms across his chest, Odo glanced irritably to one side. His lips pressed together into a tight, one-dimensional line. The captain was not surprised to see the change - Odo’s skills as a Security officer were an essential part of his very core. For anyone to take such clear advantage of his one recognisable weakness…

“It’s quite obvious, Captain.” The Constable sniffed, drawing himself up with a hefty measure of wounded pride “Especially given the fact that our prisoner is gone.”

Many long months had passed, since Bashir had last stepped onto the carpeted floors of Deep Space Nine. This place had been his career, his life, and his reason for living. But whatever years he had spent on the station now carried the sensation of distant memories - parts of a story that barely seemed like it could have belonged to him. Five years, he counted. Had that really been all?

There were still many things that he would never forget. The grey-brown hue of the corridors. The single lengthy stripe running down the centre of every carpet. And of course, that a tall man always had to duck just slightly in order to clear both heavy, circular openings onto the docking ring. And then, he remembered, the corridor itself was dim and curving, grids of light spilling downward from overhead access hatches, and with a subtle odour of slow-moving air fringed with another that was not unlike dry musk.

Even this atmosphere seemed to shift frenetically around him, creating a crescendo to the charged murmur pervading their surroundings. It stopped almost an instant after Julian had stepped through the airlock. He retreated half a metre to make way for what remained of the slow procession of the Defiant’s crew - and to stand in a position from where his eyes could scan the heavily silent, watching crowd.

The captain and Jadzia were last to disembark, stepping over the raised threshold less than a second before the thickly reinforced door rolled noisily shut behind them. Every grunt of its powerful hydraulic hinges could be easily heard - followed by the final crunching clang to signal that their way out was now well and truly blocked. But even then, the attention of their spectators was still firmly directed at the man before them - a man whose civilian attire now felt as strange as in the very first hour, since his Starfleet life had so abruptly come to an end.

Closest to the entry point, Jake Sisko coughed silently and lowered his head as though embarrassed to have been first to meet Bashir’s gaze. His best friend Nog had changed since their last encounter - now dressed in the padded uniform of a Starfleet Ensign with an undershirt of mustard-yellow. Engineering? Bashir wondered, perversely intrigued that the Ferengi youth would be following indirectly in the footsteps of his father.

Nog grimaced at the moment of contact, but did not release the new arrivals from his stare. He continued to peer from beneath his overhanging, hairless brows at the groups of disembarking officers. Recovering quickly, he stepped forward and stood almost to attention - with his hands positioned emphatically against the base of his tailbone. “It’s good to have you back, Sir,” he announced.

“Thank you,” Bashir discovered that he was saying. Others were echoing Nog’s sentiment, but their eyes all clearly showed the unspoken legacy of many days’ rumour and open speculation. Some reached hesitantly forward as though uncertain of whether to grasp the hand of their former comrade. Bashir saw Jake glance once at his father, before moving back into the shadows. Kassidy Yates - whose passing acquaintance had been a valuable one, however little Julian had known her - now brought her hands up to rest upon the shoulders of the captain’s son.

Still further away, he saw his former girlfriend Leeta, watching even more awkwardly and with her mouth open as though trapped partway between speech and silence. But she’s married to Rom now, isn’t she? A reminder of how much had changed in the time that Bashir had been gone - and of how little he now belonged.

“Are you all right?” whispered Cornna uncertainly. Both hands clasped her cousin around the elbow. Julian nodded, although there was little he could do to conceal his moment of distraction.

An anxious attempt to swallow was far too dry to ease the ache of straining muscles in his throat. How much do they know? he fretted in secret, and looked to one side, where yet another person was approaching from the distance. The quiet, polite tone of his voice had turned just slightly breathless. “Major?”

Kira Nerys stepped past all the others and into the foreground, accompanied one step behind by the smooth-faced Chief of Station Security. “Julian.” Now it was her turn to reach up to clasp him by the hand. Her smile of welcome had already started to waver, but then she paused long enough to exchange a silent glance with the Constable.

“Your old quarters are still available,” she told Julian, matching his progress away from the crowd with her usual smooth and well-placed stride. “We saw no reason not to reassign them to you. Perhaps you’d like some time to freshen up.”

Bashir managed to shape his mouth into a close approximation of a smile. “Thank you, Major. Perhaps later.”

He glanced over one shoulder at Corinna, Dax, and Sisko - now painfully aware that same faltering uncertainty had clouded his reply. Doubt was as obvious to him as a knife in his side, but he had to hope that none of the signs had reached the others. Even his steps were far from secure, placed on unsteady feet that threatened to betray him with every lapse in concentration.

“I’ll be along in a moment,” Sisko promised Hayes, and exchanged a glance with the others around them. His focus was quickly redirected towards his taciturn Security Chief. Nodding in response to the moment of contact, Odo stepped deliberately closer to the station commander. He noticed that Bashir had turned to watch them over his shoulder, but the small group disappeared just as quickly, as the captain and Odo strode away around the smoothly curving passage.

“How is he?” asked Odo, inclining his head in the direction from which they had recently come. He was alone with his captain - many metres away along the poorly lit corridor. Neither man slowed at Odo’s gruff attempt to initiate a dialogue.

“I don’t know.” There was a moment of gravity in Sisko’s reply, but no hesitation. He changed the subject with barely a pause. “Now, talk to me. What is it that you haven’t so far told me over subspace?”

“There isn’t really a lot more that I can tell.” But Sisko caught the subtle hint of self-reproach in the Chief of Security’s rough half growl. “Yet. I’ve ordered a station-wide lockdown on all departing shuttles. But I don’t imagine that it’s going to be a very effective means of apprehending whoever was involved.”

Sisko nodded thoughtfully. “A long range beacon could have extended the distance of a transport, anywhere up to three light years,” he murmured - half to himself - then returned his attention fully to the conversation with the Constable. “Did you find any evidence of transporter use?”

“No,” responded Odo. “But we don’t even know for certain that Davies was beamed directly from the holding cell. She could just as easily have been smuggled off the station via the cargo bays, the loading docks - or any one of a dozen other routes. I will continue to investigate.”

He handed his captain a thin, hard padd. But his promise of an investigation had not sounded at all hopeful. “My report.”

The captain was still frowning, quietly pensive, as a nod of acknowledgement was exchanged in lieu of thanks.

“Whoever was responsible, he was certainly thorough,” Odo went on. “All the monitors in Security were disabled. Engineering crews took almost fifteen minutes to bring them back on line. There were no clues left behind in the office, or in the holding cells. No fingerprints, or visual records, or even DNA. Deputy Tallis is currently recovering in his quarters. He claims to remember almost nothing of the incident.”

Sisko stopped a moment to absorb this information. “Some kind of memory block?” he postulated, rubbing the groove beneath his lower lip.

“That’s not impossible,” the Constable replied, continued frustration showing conspicuously beneath the surface of his voice. “But with respect, my primary concern in this matter must be our missing prisoner.”

“Of course, Constable.” When Sisko glanced at his Chief of Security, the darker mood had still not lifted from his eyes. “Keep me informed.”

Odo nodded - his voice now even sterner than it had been in many days. “I intend to, Captain.”