Chapter Text
This is Doctor Kela Jobel, Director of the Symbiosis Commission of Trill, United Federation of Planets. We are under attack and we request immediate aid. Repeat, immediate aid requested.
This is Doctor Kela Jobel, Director of the Symbiosis Commission of Trill, United Federation of Planets. We are under attack and we request immediate aid. Repeat, immediate aid requested.
This is Doctor Kela Jobel, Director of the Symbiosis Commission of Trill, United Federation of Planets. We are under attack and we request immediate aid. Repeat, immediate aid requested.
The words hissed in fuzzy static. It was a closed loop, which usually meant the sender feared either a loss of access to their communications system or its total destruction.
Symbiosis Commission, this is the USS Qushji. We have received your distress call. Can you provide any details of the attack?
Ensign Lopez cycled the message through a full spectrum of frequencies, then turned their head to address the chair behind them.
“No response, Captain.”
“Keep trying, ensign.” The chirp of a combadge preceded the next announcement. “All senior staff, report to the deck one conference room.”
The captain’s voice travelled to the combadges of the senior staff—and, unbeknownst to anyone on the bridge, to a terminal in family quarters that had a couple of months prior been surreptitiously linked to the senior crew all-calls without anyone noticing.
Garak always preferred to get his information directly from the source.
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In the end, Julian had not chosen the Enterprise.
That was a surprise; people generally didn’t go around turning down postings on the flagship. But Julian wanted a position he had earned through his own merit, not one his friendships secured for him. He wanted to be commissioned based on his own skill as a doctor, not because he had fucked Commander Data or because Worf occasionally felt he owed a life debt to Garak from the internment camp that had never been properly repaid. (This was a debt that Worf only decided existed when he had been out of contact with Garak for sufficient amounts of time; close proximity strained their respect for each other.)
Garak, of course, also loomed large over the decision-making process. The Enterprise was constantly involved in first contact, peace negotiations, leading battles, transporting diplomats, and hosting cutting edge scientific experiments. Julian loved his husband, and he trusted that Garak would not harm Julian unless he were certain that it was the only available course of action in pursuit of a greater good (and possibly not even then— Garak had taken to lamenting that Julian had a deleterious effect on his priorities), but Julian still did not trust that Garak could mind his own business.
The options aside from the Enterprise had not been plentiful. The Cerritos had notably been willing to accept Julian without Garak, but that was out of the question. Although Garak refused to admit it, Starfleet offered the best protection for a man who had made himself an enemy of nearly all Cardassian factions. (The reformists despised his past with the Order, the traditionalists hated that he had been a rebellion leader, and the moderates loathed him because it was the only thing the other two could agree on.)
In the end, Julian had chosen the Miranda-class Qushji and prayed that they would be able to stay out of trouble.
It had been a silly hope.