Overkill

Chapter One

It had been five years since she had been abducted by the Cardassians, but to her it seemed like five centuries. She had been through hell. She had been daily abused both mentally and physically. She now felt like a lost Borhass; unloved and unmourned. Because she had killed every last one of her Cardassian abusers, there would be no death chant for her when her time would soon come. She believed that the Prophets had deserted her and that she was alone in the vast universe, not quite herself anymore.

She remembered how it all began. She had been assigned by Captain Picard to ferry a deceptively peaceful young Cardassian dissident back to his space in a distressed Enterprise shuttlecraft. Once at his outpost, he had drugged her and sexually assaulted her. She screamed with pain and terror, choked and gagged as his long forked snake-like tongue slithered down her throat as he was doing it. The act resulted in her first pregnancy. She remembered watching later, paralyzed with another drug and with horror, as the half-Cardassian child she had carried for nine months was brutally killed, cooked and eaten as soon as it was born by her abusers. They lied to Starfleet about her being killed in the line of duty. Tears filled her eyes at the memory as she, dizzy, sneezing and sick with yet another unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, steered the stolen Klingon shuttlecraft back to Federation space. Every sneeze brought her more pain in her wounded and extended belly.

A Klingon named Tok had outwardly befriended one of them and had taken pity on her. He had procured an old-style hand phaser from a Ferengi and had secretly given it to her. Armed with this cell-phone-sized concealed weapon, she disintegrated them all. She had been surprised at how easy it had been to kill her abusers. With the first one, she felt a certain immense satisfaction which startled her. She then had picked them off one by one until she was left all alone on the small Cardassian outpost, where she had been beaten, tortured, starved and violated. It had been so easy, in fact, that she decided that it had all been a wonderful dream and that this was another method of Cardassian torture. She, however, patted the small hand-held weapon in her pocket, thankful that it at least was real. She felt a bit more secure when she held it. Tok had sold the Klingon shuttle to her captors, knowing that she would eventually need a vehicle to escape, once she disposed of the Cardassians. She barely remembered boarding the shuttle that she now steered, and she could not fully believe that she was really finally free. If she had taken a Cardassian shuttle, she felt she would not have survived. It had been relatively easy to mask her Bajoran life signs. The child within her helped with that regard. For days she had been alone on the shuttle, eating Klingon food to sustain herself. She hated it, but was grateful for the alien's help. She had asked for his help in Klingon; her Cardassian abductors not knowing the language. He had spoken to her first, asking her if she was all right. She answered in Klingon that she had been abducted and needed his help. He seemed impressed that she knew Klingon and told her in that language that he would rendezvous with her near Terok Nor. She did not know that the war was over and that it had been renamed Deep Space Nine, having not been informed by her captors. She whispered a quiet thank you to Tok, even though he might have been a delusion as well. She continued on at full warp speed for what seemed like days until she reached the station.

As she arrived, she became convinced that Tok had not been real. There was no other Klingon ship in sight. However, the large variety of life signs on the station and the view out her window of a number of alien ships and Federation starships left her puzzled. As the people on the station hailed her, she tried to answer, but was suddenly hit with a wave of dizziness and fatigue. Not having slept or eaten much in the way of nourishing food for days and running purely on adrenaline and fear, she passed out.

When she awoke, she saw a human doctor in a Starfleet uniform bending over her in concern. He told her that he was unable to save her unborn child and that she would have died if she had carried it to term. He asked her what her name was. It took her a few minutes to remember it, and she was also still worried that this was all an illusion. When she was in captivity, she was not allowed to use her real name, forced to use an ugly Cardassian one that was more of a curse than a name. Her voice was barely above a whisper, and when she did try to speak, she started to cry from the pain in her throat.

"I'm Ensign... Sito Jaksa…If you are Cardassians in disguise...please be merciful and kill me… If you aren't...please grant me asylum."

Bashir waved a scanner over her head, discovering the reason for her discomfort. Her throat and her vocal chords had been damaged. He quickly ordered a nurse to give her something for it while she remained conscious, which wasn't going to be a long time. He instructed her to swallow when he administered the medicine. She closed her eyes, finding relief from her pain. She lapsed into another coma soon after.

Their new patient was very ill indeed. There was evidence of massive trauma; mostly in her pelvic region, and she had been bleeding internally. He did not recognize her name, but he called Captain Sisko upon hearing her rank. Sisko knew who she was, and was astonished to find out that she had survived. Bashir's new patient was in critical condition, but he assured the captain and a very horrified Major Kira that she would be all right in time. He had given her a shot to ease her pain and so he could perform emergency surgery to repair her damaged organs. The captain had no trouble whatsoever granting the young woman asylum, and had contacted the captain of the Enterprise about finding their presumed dead young officer alive. They had docked the Klingon shuttle to the base. It had lost most of its fuel, for the girl had taxed the engines in her effort to escape into Federation space. The good doctor looked down with compassion at his badly injured new charge. Having seen a file photo of her, he realized that despite what had happened to her, she had not lost her youthful appearance. Sure, she looked worn, haggard, pale, and a bit malnourished, but he could still recognize her from her picture. The doctor was also concerned about her mental state, but that was a secondary concern for now. Treating her injuries that he could see was his top priority.