He immediately tested the new sensor array that Taryl had come up with. He could see where the others were, and he tapped a command to each of them in code. Jau was the first to respond, and Lenaris felt a tightening pride in his chest, surpassed only by the residual traces of fear for his little brother’s safety that still lingered.
Prophets, keep him safe.
Dukat’s duties on this day had not permitted him to visit Meru as soon as he would have liked. For Dukat, there was no love that would ever transcend that which he shared with his wife, but between his few and far-between visits to Cardassia Prime, he grew lonely for female companionship. Most of his Bajoran dalliances had failed to hold his attention for long, but Meru was different. It could truthfully be said that he loved her. He may have been distracted lately by the birth of his new daughter, but his consideration of Meru had not faltered, only been put aside while he enjoyed the heady experience of having such close access to the newborn in his life. His children on Cardassia Prime had mostly been born while he was away on assignment, and he had been permitted to spend only brief stints of time with each of them while they were infants. His new half-Bajoran daughter represented a risky situation for him, but the cautious nature of the experience was easily displaced by the intense joy at her beautiful presence.
But today, he must not be thinking of Naprem and the little one; he must do what he could to make things right with Meru. For if what Basso was saying had any truth to it, she might have taken it into her head to do him harm. He was only too aware of the Bajoran propensity toward revenge-numerous attempts on his very life were ample proof. He considered a handful of Bajorans to be among the people closest to him, but he could not forget that they were a naturally mistrustful, jealous race. No matter how much he loved Meru, no matter what he did to placate her, he could never be entirely sure that she would not someday turn on him. And he feared that the day might have come.
He entered her quarters without knocking, as he always did, for she knew to always be prepared for him, at every moment. It was one of the things he loved about her, that most often she was able to drop whatever she had been doing to come to him. Of course, there were those times when Dukat had been forced to exercise patience with her; she was only humanoid-only Bajoran, after all. She was remarkably cool-headed for a Bajoran, but she was still prone to occasional bouts of sulkiness. Dukat didn’t always care for the effort of maintaining her, but she wasn’t generally overly needy. He hoped that this latest rash of irritable behavior would pass, as the others had passed-usually easy enough to smooth over with a gift, or sometimes just a little extra time to herself-though lately, perhaps she’d had a bit too much of the latter. Dukat knew he’d better come up with a promise of a vacation of some sort, just the two of them, even if he couldn’t immediately deliver it. He was a busy man.
“Hello, Skrain,” she said, the same breathless way she always said it. Dukat had once found it to be interminably exciting, but it had lost much of its appeal these days. There was a part of him that now considered his relationship with Meru to be a bit superficial-even tawdry, compared to what he shared with Naprem. Naprem, so beautiful as she nursed their child, a nimbus of sunlight highlighting her hair, her cheeks… the backdrop of the elegant old estate he had chosen for her and the child, isolated, surrounded by carefully tended gardens and trickling fountains… The purity of the atmosphere did little to recommend those indistinguishable dalliances with Meru here on the station, in her artificially lit quarters, surrounded by the dozens of paintings she was always churning out-wooden-faced old priests from millennia ago. Dukat was sick of the sight of them.
He took her by the hands. “Meru. It has come to my attention that you’ve not been happy lately. I apologize that my business has taken me away so frequently. I propose that you and I plan a retreat for the near future-the two of us, for a week, perhaps. Anywhere you would like to go in the B’hava’el system-or farther, if you want. I can think of numerous places we’ve not seen yet.”
Meru was quiet, appearing to be struggling with her response. “It’s very kind of you, Skrain. You know how I’ve enjoyed the traveling we’ve done in the past. But I feel… that your mind, your heart, they lie elsewhere these days. I… I know about the child, Skrain, and I understand. And I was hoping that perhaps it would help you to understand my position, as well.”
Dukat’s breathing became tight. He did not want to lie to her, but he did not care to discuss Naprem, either. “Meru, whatever it is that has you so upset, I assure you it has no bearing on my feelings for you. Please, let’s discuss happier topics. What can I provide you with that will ease you from this pall?”
Meru shook her head, appearing frustrated, and Dukat squeezed her hands. He began to speak again, but she cut him off in a rush of words. “Let me go,” she said, her voice strangled. She began to cry. “I want to go home, Skrain, can’t you understand that? I want to see my family again-my husband!” Her face crumpled and stretched unpleasantly, and Dukat let her hands slip away from his.
“I… see,” he said faintly. He felt an unfamiliar writhing inside. He could not quite place the emotion he was experiencing. It was a combination of things, things he was not sure he could identify. Anger? Sadness? Embarrassment? Whatever it was, it was perhaps the most unpleasant sensation he could ever remember, and before he quite knew what he was doing, he had flung out his arm and knocked over Meru’s easel, its contents of paint and canvas splattering and crashing to the floor. Meru let out a sharp cry.
“Skrain! Please-can’t you see? I love you, but-“
“But it’s not enough!” he roared. “It’s not enough, all I’ve done for you, for your family-you would still choose your cowardly vole of a husband over a man like me, is that it?” He lunged for her, and he felt the back of his hand make contact with the hard surface of one of her well-sculpted cheekbones.
“No!”
Dukat abruptly stopped. Meru hid behind her hands, shoulders hunched in fear. A livid mark spread quickly across her face. Dukat turned slightly to see his reflection in the mirror above her dressing table, and he did not like what he saw-a panting man, his slick hair flung loose around his ears, an expression of dirty, dying rage still spread across his face. He straightened up, caught his breath, and smoothed his hair back, though Meru still crouched and sobbed.
Dukat did not care to think of himself as an abuser of women. He spoke coolly. “I have to go now, my dear,” he said. “I will send Basso to see if you need anything, as always. Perhaps we will continue this conversation later, when we’ve both had time to clear our heads.”
Meru continued to whimper and cry piteously as he left the room, and the sound of it made him sick to his very core. He was immensely bothered by the awareness that he could not erase the scene he had just created. He could pretend it had not transpired, but he knew that every time he laid eyes on Meru, it would return to him in all its shameful detail. Once out in the hallway, he quickly pressed his comcuff. “Dukat to Basso. Please meet me in my office immediately.”
He did not like what he was going to have to do, but he could see no other reasonable alternative. As prefect, he was forced to make difficult decisions every day; some took their toll on his conscience, to be sure, but he never let that dissuade him from his duty.
Laren sat back on her haunches to regard the tent she and Bram had just finished assembling. It wasn’t much, but it would do. Keeve had warned them that the nights this time of year could be quite windy, making it inadvisable to try and sleep out in the open-the lack of substantial tree canopy exacerbated the blowing dust, a condition that apparently caused respiratory problems for a number of the residents here.
“Why would they choose to stay on such a world if they have access to warp vessels?” Ro grumbled. “This place is worse than the worst parts of Jo’kala.”
“Valo II wasn’t always like this,” Bram reminded her.
“But it’s like this now,” Laren pointed out.
Bram sighed. “They aren’t welcome anywhere else,” he said, tugging on a rope to test its strength. “Bajorans are outcasts on many other worlds, considered burdensome refugees. This place may not look like much to you or me, but at least they can call it their own.”
He squinted toward the place where the “town” was located, and Laren thought he looked sad. She wondered, fleetingly, how old Bram was. What kinds of things had he seen as a young man, when he was her age, or younger, before the Cardassians came to Bajor? She had never really considered it before. She started to ask him, when a traveling speck caught her attention. Someone was headed toward their camp, and she thought it might be Bis. Laren started to tell Bram, who had ducked inside the tent, but then decided that she’d prefer to speak to Bis alone. She began to walk out toward him, to meet him before Bram would have a chance to notice that he was coming.
“Hi,” she called out, as she came close enough to ensure that it was really him. “What’re you doing?”
“I came to tell you something,” Bis said, his green eyes immediately shifting away from her face. “My pa says to tell you that you can join us for breakfast in the morning.”
Laren fell in step with Bis as she came closer to him, and began to deliberately walk in the opposite direction from Bram’s camp. “How old are you?” she asked him.
“I’m sixteen just last month,” he said, and cleared his throat.
“I’m fifteen,” she said, before remembering that she’d already told Keeve she was really only fourteen. Bis didn’t point out the discrepancy. “Do you ever fly those warp ships?” she asked him.
Bis looked ashamed. “I… have flown them with my father,” he said. “Not by myself.”
“Are you coming along, on this mission?”
Bis’s mouth twisted. “I don’t know,” he said. “I want to, but…” His voice trailed off.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” he replied.
They continued walking in silence.
“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” Bis suddenly blurted out. They stopped walking.
Laren felt a flush of excitement. “I’ve never met anyone like you, either,” she told him. She took a step closer to him; perhaps now she would find out what all the fuss was about with kissing and the like, but just as she thought it might be about to happen, Bram’s angry voice blared out from behind them.
“Laren! I don’t appreciate your just walking off like that. Prophets’ sake, I thought a wild animal had carried you off! If you’re going to go wandering, you might want to give me a heads-up. Now, come back to camp, I need your help digging a latrine.”
Laren wrinkled her nose with embarrassment and looked to Bis with apology. “I have to be getting back, anyway,” he mumbled, and scurried off in the opposite direction while Bram herded Laren back to their miserable camp.
“What did I tell you about that boy?” he admonished, but Laren wasn’t really listening. She dragged her feet on the way back, considering the possibility of sneaking out later on, but rejecting the idea on the basis of Bram’s confounded twitchy sleeping habits. The man tended to wake up at the slightest sound; a useful trait in the resistance, but pretty infuriating for a pair of curious teenagers.
Mora’s eyes grew heavy as he blundered through his notes; he knew Yopal would trouble him about the grammatical errors, but he couldn’t be bothered with it now; he was tired, though excited. He’d managed a few conversations lately with Odo wherein the shape-shifter had demonstrated inarguable reciprocity; there was simply no longer any doubt that the being was self-aware.
“Doc-tor More-ah,” Odo said from behind him, his newfound voice rough and guttural. Mora started. He’d been under the impression that Odo was “sleeping.”
“What is it, Odo?”
“Doctor More-ah, Doctor Yopal. He is… not the same… as you are. He looks… not the same.”
“She,” Mora corrected Odo. “Doctor Yopal is a woman, Odo. There is a distinction between humanoid men and women, remember?”
“Yes,” the shape-shifter said. “Woman. She. Doctor Yopal is a woman.”
“That is correct.”
“And men. Don’t make good scientists.”
Mora smiled reservedly. Odo had never stopped delivering this refrain from time to time. Perhaps it comforted him, as the first intelligible phrase he’d come up with on his own, but Mora failed to be quite as amused by it as he had been the first few times.
“So says Doctor Yopal, Odo.”
The shape-shifter cocked his head, an affectation he had picked up somewhere. “Women look not the same as men.”
“Well, it isn’t only that she is a woman and I am a man, Odo. Doctor Yopal and I… we come from different worlds. Our features are dissimilar because we are of different races. There are many different varieties of humanoids in the galaxy, Odo, and they all have distinguishing features.”
“Different. Doctor Yopal is different from Doctor Mora.”
“Yes. That’s correct. She is a Cardassian, and I am a Bajoran.”
Odo said nothing for a moment, then he gestured to himself. “And Odo. Odo is not a Bajoran. Odo is not a Cardassian.”
There was nothing in the creature’s expression or inflection of voice to suggest it, but Mora had a distinct impression of sadness. “No,” he answered. “Odo is a shape-shifter.”
Odo said nothing, and Mora decided that he wanted to change the subject. “You have learned to speak so quickly, Odo. Did you understand what I was saying, before I began my attempts to coax you to speak on your own?”
Again, Odo’s face did not change much; though the shape-shifter had been experimenting with expression, he was revealing nothing now. “Understand. Odo did not always… understand. But some sounds… some words, began learned.”
“Why then, did you not try to speak?”
The shape-shifter tried a smile, an effect that never failed to unsettle Mora. “Odo did not know if Mora wanted it.”
“You mean, you didn’t think I wanted to hear you speak?”
The shape-shifter nodded jerkily.
“Well, there was plenty you could have said!” Mora exclaimed, but Odo only continued to stare, his strange, barren expression continuing to reflect absolutely nothing to suggest what might have been going on in his brain, as though “brain” even applied.
Mora cleared his throat. “I’ve got to finish my notes, Odo. Why don’t you go back to your tank.”
Odo said nothing, just obeyed. As always, Mora was left with the hunger to know more, though he had no choice but to follow a certain protocol. Had he been left to his own devices to study the shape-shifter, he would have carried out the process much differently, but it was imperative that he perform in the manner laid out by the Cardassians, for there was no telling what would happen to Odo if Mora were pulled off this project. Indeed, Mora had come to regard the shape-shifter as more than just a “project,” for he saw Odo more often than he saw his own parents. With as much time as he spent with the shape-shifter, teaching him, testing him, he almost felt that Odo was part of his family, now.
Dukat had called Kubus Oak to his office to harangue the man about his failure to deliver more workers to Gallitep in a timely manner, for the mines were still operating at far below capacity since the accident, now six months gone. Kubus was full of excuses, as usual. He claimed that Dukat had warned him never to pull his workforce from Dahkur province, which was utter nonsense-Dukat had never said anything of the sort. He advised the so-called “secretary” to tell his men to pick up any stragglers found outside the proscribed boundaries and bring them to Gallitep at once, for Darhe’el had been contacting Dukat on the matter with annoying frequency.
Kubus was just leaving to go back to his quarters and do whatever it was he did in there, when a breathless Basso Tromac arrived in his office, unusually late to the briefing.
“My apologies, Gul,” Basso said. “There was a mechanical problem at the docking ring that needed to be resolved. It could not be helped.”
“Well, you’ve missed the conference,” he told the Bajoran. “Kubus is just leaving, and I’ve no reason to repeat our conversation. Although… I do have a question or two for you, Basso, if Kubus will excuse us.”
The Bajoran official took his leave, and Dukat immediately set to interrogating his aide. “Have you come from the hospital?”
“Yes, sir. I took the last shuttle back, but as I said, there was a problem at the docking ring and all passengers were briefly detained while the engineers-“
“I’m not interested,” Dukat said tensely. “I want to know of Meru’s condition. Is it-“
“Terminal, yes, sir. Doctor Moset confirmed that it is a particularly virile strain of the Fostossa virus. She is not expected to make it through the week.”
Dukat’s chin dropped on his chest. “Such a tragedy for one so young,” he said softly. “I suppose I will have to go look in on her in the next few days…” He felt a genuine regret as he said it. A hard ache persisted in his chest, thinking of her, frail and nearly lifeless in the clinical isolation of the hospital-yes, he’d better go to her, soon. He owed it to her to make her final moments as comfortable as possible. Although perhaps she would prefer to see her Bajoran husband…
Dukat felt his face darken in resentment as he remembered the sob caught in her throat. “My husband,” she’d said. After all the years he’d spent with her, everything he’d done to make her happy… and at the back of her mind, always it was him.
Dukat looked up at Basso, who was waiting to be told what to do next, for like all Bajorans, he scarcely had a mind of his own. “I will see what I can do to visit her,” Dukat said.
“It is understandable if you can’t make it down to see her,” Basso said. “You are a busy man, an important man. You can’t be expected to keep constant vigil by her bedside while she wastes away-“
“That’s enough,” Dukat snapped. “You’ve done your job, now get out of here.”
“Yes, sir,” Basso said obediently, and left the office.
Dukat sat down heavily in his chair. He wanted to unburden himself from thoughts of Meru, but it was proving difficult.
Difficult decisions have to be made every day, he reminded himself. Being prefect of Bajor was not an easy job; it required great strength of character. It required a man who did not allow his personal feelings to distract him from those things that must be done, discomfiting as they might sometimes be.
Lenaris’s raider entered Bajor’s atmosphere like a dart. He clung to the yoke, the thrusters propelling him at dizzying half-impulse speed, too high a speed for even the best Cardassian pilots to keep their ships underneath the atmosphere without losing control. The little raider tore through the air, the proximity sensors clicking madly as he came closer to the target, and he reduced his speed, keeping his attention divided between his ship’s course and the transponder signals that told him whether the rest of his team was still with him. They all were, though the Legans were predictably straggling a bit, but not so much as to compromise their formation. Lenaris prepared to descend.
The blood rushed to his face as his ship looped and fell, a straight plummeting nosedive toward the surface of the planet, the hills and glens of Musilla province rushing at him. There was a Cardassian naval base directly below, a “secret” installation that the Ornathias had learned of through contact with another cell operating in this region.
Lenaris kept his direction steady, correcting for sideslip and watching his altimeter fervently. He dropped closer and closer to the surface, trying to remind himself not to glance away from his instrument panel for even a second. The temptation to do so was nearly irresistible, as he had no guarantee that the base was really down there, aside from the testimony of another Bajoran he’d never actually met in person. But if the resistance was to work on a global scale, it was imperative that he trust his faceless contacts. The base was below him. It had to be.
He got his confirmation in the form of an automated missile, showing up first as a hot blip on his transponder and then streaking across his viewscreen. He expertly maneuvered around it, though he felt panic overtake him for an instant when he saw his brother’s craft yawing dangerously on his proximity sensors. Jau corrected and the missile went straight for the Legans, who were flying too close together, as usual.
“Come on…” Lenaris held his breath. Duravit managed to pull up in time to avoid it, but the blinking light that represented Fin’s ship did not come back on again.
No! He didn’t even have time to cry out, another missile was coming. This time, Lenaris took it out with his phaser banks before it came close enough to be in dodging range.
The formation was broken now, with only Nerissa still pulling straight down in a determined line. “Good girl,” Lenaris muttered, and hoped she’d have the wherewithal to take out any more missiles by herself.
He set his ship back into a nosedive, and another missile came after Sten’s ship, which had veered far off to the side, swooping back almost into its original course. Sten managed to steer the missile away from the others, and Jau took it out before it got too close.
Nerissa dropped her explosives pack and a cloud of fiery orange debris came billowing up from the base below them, her raider riding the wake of it. Lenaris pulled up to avoid the blast front, trying to tap in a code to the other ships-proceed with formation. But only Sten seemed to have gotten the transmission, for the others were still flying in erratic confusion.
Lenaris decided he could pay them no mind, and continued on with the task at hand, plummeting toward the surface and ejecting the load of explosives just a few kellipates above the military ships that he could now see, lined up in neat rows. He pulled his flight yoke abruptly to his chest and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach as the force of the movement pinned him to his seat. The blast erupted behind him, and his ship twisted violently in the sky before he could straighten it out again. Another blast followed, and he knew that one of the others had dropped his load as well. Three out of six wasn’t bad, though he hoped at least one more could manage to let loose its ordnance
He set his course back for Jeraddo, aiming at a sharp, upward angle, getting plenty of distance between his ship and the base before checking his transponder to see who was still with him. Three shuttles limped behind him, the fourth having straggled somewhere out of atmospheric range. Legan Duravit, Ornathia Nerissa, and Ornathia Sten. Jau’s signal was gone.
Numb, Lenaris started to turn back, but his transponder indicated another ship in the vicinity-a skimmer. In fact, two skimmers. No, he checked again, and now there were four, and they were headed straight for him. He increased his speed to sub-impulse and straightened out his trajectory. He would not be leaving the atmosphere just yet, not until after he’d worn these spoonheads out. He checked his transponder one more time for Jau, but his brother’s raider was still nowhere within range, and Holem didn’t have time to consider it.
“Follow the leader,” Lenaris breathed, and dove suddenly back down toward the trees.
Chapter 17
Laren walked at a rapid pace, her legs working to keep up with the longer strides of the men. Keeve was escorting Darrah Mace to his ship, and Bram was close behind. Darrah was giving out the particulars as they walked.
“You’re going to need environmental suits,” Darrah said.
“Suits!” Bram said, looking flustered. “I thought this was a simple job!”
Laren was thinking much the same thing.
Mace nodded. “It is simple,” he said tersely. “Once we get her into the facility, it’ll be a simple in-and-out. But Valo VI has no breathable atmosphere-“
“Valo VI?” Bram interrupted. “I always thought there were only five planets in this system.”
“Valo VI is barely a planet,” Mace replied. “It’s somewhere between a dwarf planet and an asteroid.”
“The facility is on an asteroid?” Bram looked flabbergasted.
“It will be fine,” Laren said quickly, looking to Mace for confirmation.
Darrah nodded. “The facility is underneath a beam-shield. You can’t be transported directly inside. That’s why you’ll need the suits.”
“What are the Cardassians doing there?” Laren inquired.
“Well, we don’t know, of course,” Darrah replied. “But we’re hoping to catch them at something that will bring in the Federation.”
“Why don’t you just kill them?” Laren said. “Who cares what they’re doing?”
“Laren!” Bram said sharply.
“It’s all right,” Keeve said to Bram. He addressed Laren, his tone shifting toward condescension. “I understand why you might feel that way. But you have to remember that everything is interconnected. It’s like Torasia’s sixteenth prophecy: ‘You can cut down the tree, but the roots still hold fast to the rain.’”
Laren made a face. “What does that have to do with anything?” she said. “Those prophecies are all a lot of gibberish.”
“Laren!” Bram grabbed her by the shoulder, his fingers digging painfully into her flesh. “I’ve had enough of your blasphemy, your disrespect!” He took a swipe at her, caught her earring in his hand, and flung it to the ground. “You aren’t fit to wear that,” he told her, snarling.
Keeve waved his hands. “She has to make her own peace with the Prophets,” he told Bram. “You can’t do it for her.”
Bram released her, and she rubbed her shoulder where he’d grabbed her, feeling angry, but mostly surprised. Bram had never put his hands on her like that before. She bent down to pick up her earring. The fleshy part of her ear burned where the ornament had been torn away, and she looked at the chained bits of metal in her hand. It was an old and silly tradition, but this was something of her father’s. She put the earring back in her pocket, not looking at anyone.
“We need to do this,” Darrah said, clearly uncomfortable.
Bram nodded. “Come on, Laren,” he said gruffly, as much an apology as Ro could ever expect to get.
It was a short trip in the high-powered ship Mace flew. Bram and Laren spent most of it getting acclimated to the cumbersome suits they would have to wear. They were old and smelled thickly of the dust of Valo II, having been in a storage locker somewhere at the planet’s shipyards. Finding one that could be easily adjusted to Laren’s small frame was a challenge. Laren had been impatient to get started, but once they were actually in orbit of the tiny, irregularly shaped planet, her confidence began to ebb, not for the job itself, but for the unsettling novelty of the transporter beam. To her, it was the worst part of the mission, and she was eager to get it over and done with.
Darrah explained the properties of the transporter and gave her a little communications device that could be tapped to hail him back on the ship so that he could transport her back to safety again, but once she was beneath the beam-shield, the transporter beam would not reach her, and she would have nothing but her own senses to rely on. Of course, this would normally be nothing new to Laren, but on an unfamiliar asteroid in a musty-smelling environmental suit that inhibited her freedom of movement, the rules seemed to have changed a bit.
Darrah had said he would do his best to transport them within walking distance of the facility, but when Laren found herself crouched in the middle of unfamiliar terrain, her visibility limited behind the mask of her environmental suit, she at first thought Mace must have made a terrible mistake. There was nothing anywhere in her line of sight, just rocks and misty blackness, but after a half-second of disoriented searching, she found Bram somewhere off to her side, and he gestured to something behind them.
Behind me. The facility was only a few paces away, in the opposite direction of where she had been facing. She followed Bram as he scouted around the perimeter of the glinting shield. The shield was dome-shaped, translucent in the misty atmosphere. The buildings beneath it appeared as sprawling, squat boxes. She could not see any feasible way to get inside, until Bram pointed out to her an innocuous passageway with a simple keypad device to admit travelers.
A voice crackled in Laren’s head and she started at the odd effect of the radio inside her environmental helmet; it was Darrah, back on the ship. “Laren? Bram?”
“We’re here,” Laren said, almost in unison with Bram.
“Good,” Darrah replied. “Do you see the facility?”
“Yes,” Laren said. “There’s just the one passageway, like you said.”
“Can you bypass it?”
“Yup,” Laren said without hesitation.