Chapter XVI: Fuming Remains
K'vot opened his eyes.
The dimness around him did little but add to the disorienting floating feeling of his being. His consciousness buzzed as he looked around, trying to get his bearings.
"Easy, Colonel. It won't do you any good to fight it. Just ease into it; you'll become accustomed shortly."
K'vot recognized Semil's voice, and slowly turned his head and squinted to see the Vorta at his side.
"As you stop resisting it, your brain will accomodate the sensory inputs more readily."
"I will let you tell me what I may choose to resist the day after I break your skull open with my bare..."
"I've done this hundreds of times, General. I'm just informing you it's far more productive if you're not distracted by your own disorientation."
Orientation, right. K'vot slowly spiraled his neck around to get a better look at the rest of the room -- no, it was a corridor. The emergency lighting had largely failed.
There was a clear acrid stench of smoke in the air - K'vot was surprised at the vivid lucidity of the smell and almost felt the urge to cough. "Remarkable. No simulation has ever felt this real to me."
"That's because it's not a simulation. It's real - well, a real memory, at least."
A shower of sparks to their left lit the hallway, before erupting in a hail of fireball and shrapnel. K'vot instinctively raised his arms to shield himself before realizing he wasn't actually there. The sensation of heat and blast passed through him.
He recognized yelling in Klingon, as a column of warriors advanced through the now open door, illuminating the hazy hallway from the light beacons affixed to their rifles.
The warriors spread down the corridor in an efficient fashion, clearing as they went, noticing neither Semil or K'vot. Apparently, their interactions with this memory would be limited. K'vot could see with the light that it was some sort of prison block, from the heavily secured doors leading off the main passage.
A lieutenant bellowed, "be'Huv!" giving the all-clear.
An important ranking figure strode confidently into the hallway, followed by his personal guard. He made his way past Semil and K'vot, to a cell door that K'vot just noticed had been forced ajar. "You, thief. You will come with us."
K'vot recognized the voice, no matter the passage of thirty years time. It was the General. Younger, but still a refined distinguished warrior, cutting an imposing figure in the fur-lined cloak of his position.
A small, though deep voice resonated from inside the darkened cell. "Tell me why I should."
"Because I will behead you where you stand if you resist."
From inside the darkened room, K'vot could make out the glowing eyes of its occupant. It was the Lethean.
"I think I know what you want - what you're looking for. And I'll take you there."
____________
Semil and K'vot followed the party out the corridor, through the smoldering building, and into a soft hazy daylight.
K'vot was surprised that he felt the need to squint, his eyes adjusting to take in his surroundings. He recognized the brutalist architecture, replete with weighty buttresses and columns.
Semil intoned knowledgeably. "Cardassia Prime. I spent some time here."
As the party started its way along the elevated roadway, Semil gestured across at the view - across the Golhonorr River, past the fuming remains of the First Republic Bridge, towards a large blast crater where Alnetepp Plaza should have been. "Not quite how I remember it."
Now that K'vot could tell where they were, he could piece together when. At end of the War. Klingon, Starfleet, and Romulan forces just establishing a beachhead in the Cardassian capitol after the capitulation of the Dominion. Beaming down to find the proud cities of the Cardassians reduced to piles of still-hot rubble; to find Cardassian children gunned down in their mothers' arms.
At the time, K'vot was just a schoolboy. Training for his 3A bat'leth proficiencies, watching the newsfeed holovids of the devastation of Cardassia. Feeling pride at the warriors who defeated the awful cowards who could inflict such mindless atrocity, even on a race as honorless as the Cardassians.
"We need to keep up. This is his memory; there isn't anything here past what he can see."
K'vot and Semil jogged lightly to keep up with the squadron and their prisoner, past rows of Cardassian corpses, decaying where they had been slain.