“Good. Now, remember. There are usually only two or three Cardassians in there at a time, according to our scans. They have minimum security detail, and only one soldier patrols while the others sleep. There is one soldier awake in there right now, according to the schedule we’ve logged. He should be in the back part of the building, where we think the center of operations must be. You will have to find a console to hack the system. If you can reconnect the security loop quickly enough, you can just slip out, we’ll take off, and they’ll never even know we were here.”
“You think you can handle it, Laren?” Bram was sounding much friendlier now than he had back on Valo II, probably out of guilt for being so mean, or maybe because he was about to let her go straight into a nest of grass vipers.
“Of course I can,” she said stoutly.
“Well, you’ve never lacked confidence,” Bram said, his voice hollow in her earpiece, and the figure in the suit next to her drew its phaser. “I’ll cover you. The minute anything goes wrong-“
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she assured him, her own voice echoing oddly inside the curved plastic of her visor. “This is the easiest job I’ve ever seen. I could do this with my eyes closed.”
“Well, then…”
Laren knew about thirty Cardassian override codes by heart, but she didn’t want to take the chance that this system would shut down once two or more incorrect codes were entered consecutively. She’d do better to just hack her way straight inside, and that would also probably disable any security systems that alerted the inhabitants of the facility that anyone was here. Her hands clumsy in the imprecise gloves of her environmental suit, she used the edge of a spanner to pry open the security panel. With the same spanner, she separated a thick wire from the bundle that revealed itself behind the panel. From a pocket in her suit, she retrieved a pair of spring-loaded snips and clipped a few specific wires. The door opened obediently, and she stepped inside. As soon as she crossed the threshold, it closed behind her, and she headed down the short, glassy corridor, sealing her in from the strange terrain outside. Her breathing inside the helmet sounded noisy and labored.
As she approached a second door, she found another panel imprinted with a Cardassian insignia-the same sort of inverted-teardrop sigil she had seen on many pieces of Cardassian equipment. It mimicked the shape of some of their ships, a fan tapering down into a two-pronged blunt spade at the bottom. This one, however, was a bit different. The bottom looked not so much like a spade as a tail, the whole thing appearing as some kind of ugly, poisonous sea creature. Usually she had seen only the outline of this sigil, but this one was filled in with a pale green, drifting to purple at the top. It looked ominous, and her thoughts wandered to things supernatural-the Fire Caves, Pah-wraiths, and angry borhyas. She pushed that foolishness away and went about her business.
With the spanner, she punched in a universal encryption sequence at the keypad, and then punched in another, and another. Cardassian passcodes never had more than seven characters, at least none that she had seen. But this one-it was different. She began to feel the finest sliver of worry as she tried another sequence. What was different about this facility? She looked again at the colorful insignia near the door and began to wonder if she wasn’t dealing with something a little different from the Cardassian soldiers who tromped around Bajor like automatons.
It was then that she noticed it-faint through the sounds of her own echoed breathing in the spacesuit, but it was there-a discernible clicking noise in her earpiece, as though she were being timed. Shaken, she began to move faster. She had encountered this type of alarm before. If she failed to enter the correct code before the countdown concluded, the system would shut down. She didn’t know how much time she had, but she should probably assume that it wasn’t much.
After a few feverish moments, she thought she had it. She separated another wire and used her snips to clip a few strands. An arc of electricity spit menacingly before fizzling out, and she released a breath. The door slid noiselessly open, and she stepped inside.
She removed her helmet and gloves and took a deep breath, but the heat in the facility quickly made her feel sluggish. She stuffed the gloves into the helmet and tucked it under her arm, looking around for a computer console and fingering the datarod in the pocket of her heavy suit. She found a console not far inside the building, and, trying to be as stealthy as she could in her clunky attire, she quickly began to hack into the system. She had to hunt and peck at the Cardassian characters on the keyboard. She could read Cardassian letters somewhat, but only piecemeal, one at a time, and she struggled to hurry as she murmured the phonetic sounds under her breath.
She jammed the datarod into a port and waited while the download ran. She entered a code to shield the activity from anyone else who might be in the compound, but stopped tapping as she became aware of a sound. Voices.
She plucked the datarod from its port and crouched down below the console, peering just over the edge to see what was going on. She was shocked to see a Cardassian emerge from a doorway built into the floor, and he was talking to someone below him. How could that be? Mace had said that there was only one soldier awake right now, and he was in the other wing of the building. How had he overlooked these two? Could there be a shield that protected them from scans, maybe an underground bunker where they could not be detected? Laren hunkered down further below the console, wondering if she should contact Bram or just try to slip out on her own. The Cardassians had not been wearing armor, he should be easy enough to shoot, if she had to…
She peered over the edge of the console again, and what she saw next stopped her heart in her throat. The second man who had come from below looked… different from most of the Cardassians she had seen in her life. It was his hair. It was not the same tarry black that the vast majority of spoonheads had been endowed with; no, by some quirk of natural selection, this man’s slick hair was a dusty, golden color. A color that Laren had seen on a Cardassian only one other time in all her life. She checked again to ensure that it was true. Of course, it was possible that there was more than one blond Cardassian in the galaxy… but no, this was the one. This was the man who had killed her father.
“Varc,” the dark-haired one said to him, to the murderer. “Come here and look at this. The backup security loop is doing something odd.”
“What do you mean, odd?” The light-haired soldier peered at his companion’s console.
“It looks like there’s a breach out there.”
Laren clutched at her phaser. Four soldiers she had killed since joining the resistance. She was about to make it six. She squeezed her eyes shut, took a breath-and then she sprang up from her hiding place, phaser at the ready. The resultant flash was blinding, and the first man caught it full in the chest. He flew back, crashing into the light-haired one and pinning him to the console behind him. Ro rushed forward without quite realizing what she was doing, to jam the weapon directly in the face of the man who had taken so much from her.
“You!” she shouted, her voice shaking.
The blond Cardassian was shaking off the blast. “What?” he said blearily, but he could say no more, for Laren squeezed the trigger, and then she turned and ran for her life.
Dukat was in ops, looking over the security logs, when Basso approached him. He gave the Bajoran a look that conveyed it was a bad time, but Basso was impatient to speak, and he did so despite the prefect’s unspoken command.
“Sir, it’s about the Kira family…”
Dukat quickly gestured Basso up the short platform to his office, herding him inside. When the door was closed, he turned to him.
“What can possibly be so important that you would bring up such a topic in the center of operations?”
“My sincere apologies, sir, but you see, this is the time when I normally bring the extra allotment of supplies to the Kira family, and I thought that perhaps-” He stopped, expecting Dukat to quickly catch on to where he was going with this, but the prefect said nothing, only looked even more annoyed than before.
“Do you still need me to make that delivery?” Basso finally asked.
Dukat’s eyes narrowed. “How dare you,” he said, his voice eerily low.
“Sir, I apologize, again-please, understand-I only want to know what’s expected of me, considering the… new circumstances.”
Dukat looked at a spot on the wall, and then raised his head, his deeply pensive gaze traveling up to the ceiling. “Let me explain something to you, Basso. I loved Meru with all my heart, and promised her-I gave my word-that I would look after them for the rest of their lives. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir, of course.” Basso inclined his head, in part to keep the prefect from seeing how florid his complexion had suddenly become. He was deeply frustrated, but there was nothing he could do; if Dukat wanted to alleviate his guilt for having Meru put to death, then Basso was going to have to comply. It was that, or work in the mines with the herd animals, and he’d long ago decided that he was not a man who could live without comforts. Food and a warm bed went a long way toward clearing his conscience. If the rest of them didn’t want to cooperate, they could stay in the mines, where they belonged.
He went to see to his duty, cursing the dead Meru.
Lenaris’s mother could not be consoled, not by the reminders of her impending status as a new grandmother, not by her surviving son’s constant reassurances that he was working practically around the clock to find out what had become of Jau. It was a hollow promise, that he would find Jau alive, and he knew it. He had exhausted every means of locating his brother; none had panned out to anything at all.
It was the week after he’d given up, the week that he was distracted by the baby’s quickly approaching due date, when he received word from the Kintaura resistance cell over in Rakantha province that wreckage had been found, not far from the Meiku forest.
“An old raider?” Lenaris asked the woman on the other end of the comm.
“Not exactly,” she told him, her voice tinny. “The ship seemed to have been… modified. It was like a raider, but the wings were-“
“Longer?” Lenaris asked, his heart seeming to stop.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Lenaris let out the breath he had been holding. So it was true. Jau’s raider had gone down. “Was there… Did you find… any remains?” he asked quietly.
“No, there weren’t. In fact, it wasn’t so much wreckage as… the ship came down hard, but a person could have walked away from it.”
“Really?” Lenaris felt his heart start to beat again. “You think… the pilot survived, then?”
“I do, yes. We’ve hauled in the raider, we’ll be refurbishing it-it hardly sustained any damage at all. We’ve been keeping an eye out for the pilot, but-I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there was a recent sweep between Rakantha and Dahkur-anyone found wandering outside Cardassian-imposed boundaries was picked up and taken to… a particular work camp.”
Lenaris let out another hard breath. “A camp on the surface?” he asked. Maybe he could stage a rescue effort.
“Yes, but… it’s Gallitep.”
“Gallitep!” He didn’t have a prayer of getting Jau out. Lenaris clenched his fists, thinking of the stories he’d heard. Severe rationing, death by starvation and exhaustion… medical experiments. Jau was just a boy, he wouldn’t last a week in a place like that.
“I’m very sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s possible he’s still hiding in the woods somewhere, if he has survival skills…”
Lenaris wiped his eyes. In fact, Jau was new to the resistance movement, had lived his entire childhood in the relative safety of the refugee camp. Lenaris had been planning on teaching him a few things, after he really started to get the hang of flying…
“Thank you for the information, Kintaura Two. This is Ornathia Two, shutting down.”
Lenaris turned off the system and rested his face in his hands, allowing himself a moment to catch his breath. He quickly decided to tell his mother that Jau had been killed. If she learned that her son was at Gallitep-
Lenaris was not willing to be the one to deliver a piece of news like that, not to anyone’s mother, but least of all his own.
Laren had not yet caught her breath as Darrah’s ship shot away from Valo VI. She continued to gasp as she tried to answer Bram, whose questions came so quickly, she didn’t have time to answer. “Why didn’t you call for me? Laren, you compromised us! Mace and Keeve made it plain that stealth was the prime objective here. Now they’ll know an intruder has been there, and they’re going to suspect it’s the Valo II settlers!”
“What happened back there?” Darrah said.
“I’m sorry…” Laren panted. “There were more of them than you said… and I didn’t have time to think! I was just about to call Bram, or… sneak away, but one of them noticed the security loop had been disabled…. I had to make a judgment call!”
Bram continued to shake his head. “But you at least got the data,” he said.
“I…” It hit her then. She’d had to pull the datarod before the download had really gotten going. She had never failed before, not when it mattered-and this mattered.
Bram looked horrified. “You… you didn’t even get the data?”
Laren started to argue as she caught her breath, but she let it drop, tired and confused. She had expected to feel overwhelmingly triumphant after killing that man, the man who haunted her dreams. But she didn’t feel anything except exhausted. Maybe it would come later-though she was beginning to doubt it. Her father was still dead, after all.
I had to kill him, though, she thought. Even if it hadn’t been him… I had no other choice. They were about to find me, I wouldn’t have been able to get away.
Darrah’s ship set down on the old airfield that was dotted with an assemblage of disabled-looking air and ground vehicles, including the freighter, which was off near an out-cropping of rock.
Darrah addressed her before they disembarked. “So, what happened back there? You said there were more Cardassians in the place. Tell me exactly what you remember.”
“There were two soldiers who came up from someplace underground,” Laren told Mace. “They didn’t see me at first and I thought I could sneak away, but-“
“I’m sorry,” Mace said, and he looked it. “I would never have put you in that situation if we’d known there were more Cardassians in that facility.” He turned to Bram. “I’m sorry to have put her in harm’s way like that.”
Bram nodded. “It’s all right, you couldn’t have known.”
The three climbed out of Darrah’s ship. Laren didn’t bother to point out that Bram had let her go into much more dangerous situations than that one, and he’d never had any qualms about her being in “harm’s way,” but she only continued with her report as they left the ship behind and began to head back toward the center of the main town. “I had to think fast, I guess. I might have had time to call for Bram, but then I heard one of them tell the other one that the security feed had been compromised. I thought for sure they’d start looking around for me, and so I took them out.”
Bram spoke up before Darrah could. “You mean, they hadn’t seen you yet?”
“I don’t know!” she snapped. “I told you, I had to think fast.”
“It’s all right, Bram,” Darrah assured him. “She did the right thing. Look, I’ll tell you the truth-I don’t think we’ll experience much fallout from this.”
Bram shook his head. “They’re going to know it was you!” he argued. “Don’t sweeten it for the girl, Mace-she messed up, and she needs to know it!”
“No, no, she did the right thing. I’m telling you-the Cardassian military isn’t going to be bothering us over that facility. They probably don’t even know about it.”
Bram looked taken aback. “How do you mean?”
“The Cardassians at that facility, they aren’t military. We don’t really know what they do, but we think they’re an autonomous body trying to keep their heads as low as possible.”
Laren didn’t know what Mace could be talking about. Cardassians were Cardassians were Cardassians. Weren’t they? Indiscriminate killers. They were all the military, as far as she knew… Although there had been that unusual sigil on the panel near the door…
Darrah went on, though Bram looked dubious. “Of course, it would have been better to have kept this mission a little quieter… but let’s face it: despite their loss of personnel, by now they’ll have figured out that no data was compromised. I don’t think we have to fear military repercussions.”
Laren stopped listening as they walked through the depressing outskirts of the town, where clumps of refugee camps had gone up, tents blowing in the high morning winds. She became aware of some people approaching from where the older part of the “city” was, and recognized Akhere Bis and his father.
“Mace!” Juk called. “Back in one piece?”
Laren looked at her toes as they approached; she did not want to have to be confronted by Bis when she’d just failed so miserably. Juk had questions for her, and she answered them tersely, without looking at anyone, Bram filling in the rest of the blanks where she could not provide an articulate answer.
“You… you killed one of them?” Bis asked her incredulously.
“I killed two of them,” she said, trying to sound boastful, trying to feel proud of herself at least for that aspect of the mission-she had finally killed him, the murderer who had robbed her of her father. But she felt nothing. Ashamed, that she’d failed to retrieve the data they wanted.
Bis had nothing else to say. He merely gaped at her while she continued to avoid looking at anyone. She was only half-listening when Juk told Darrah that he could safely take Bram and Laren to a rendezvous with a Kressari freighter captain he knew, who was willing and able to smuggle them back to Bajor.
Laren should have been happy to get away from this desolate rock, but she felt an almost unbearable disappointment, and she wasn’t sure where it came from. Was it the failure of the mission? Could it be because she was going to leave Bis behind? Or was it because the face of that blond Cardassian soldier, his eyes blank with confusion before she took his life, had not immediately provided the relief she craved? Again, she hoped it would sink in later, would suddenly be transformed into a euphoric sense of a mission accomplished. But she only felt a chaotic jumble of nervous emotion, none of it very pleasant at all. Keeve had joined them now, and he began asking her questions straightaway. She tried to focus on what she was being asked, but all she could think of was failure and loss, an interminable black spot of grief, as if she would never be happy again.
Chapter 18
Occupation Year Thirty
Terran Calendar)
The loose rocks beneath her feet rocked and cracked against one another as Kira Nerys scrambled up the side of the hill. The wind was bitter up near the ridge, and she pulled her heavy woolen overjacket close around her, her pack shifting on her shoulders. It was a cold day in Dahkur. It would be winter before long, but until then, Kira had to get used to the constant soaring dips and spikes in the temperature. Throughout the fall, the days would be hot, the nights plummeting nearly to freezing after sunset. It wasn’t anything new, for Kira had lived in Dahkur her entire life. But now that she had left her father’s home, had taken to sleeping outside with the rest of the fighters in the Shakaar cell, she had to get accustomed to waking up with frost over the top of her blankets, the various members of her group huddling together to keep warm while they slept.
The Shakaar cell lived together somewhat communally, though there were a few smaller units within it that took care of their own business. For the most part, the resistance fighters ate together, bathed together, slept together, and divided their chores up among themselves. It had taken some getting used to, but Kira mostly liked it. It made her feel part of something bigger than herself-something important.
“Nerys!” called a woman’s voice, echoing faintly from somewhere down below. Must have been Lupaza, for most of the other women in the cell still referred to her as “you” or “kid” or “little girl.” Most of the men did, too, actually, though they were somewhat kinder than the women. Kira resented it a bit, but she knew they were only toughening her up for what lay ahead. As it was, she’d been on scant few combat missions. Mostly she ran errands, bringing food and power cells to those fighters who were in the field, or relaying information back and forth from one cell to another. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but she was eager to prove her mettle, for she knew she had it in her to be as good a fighter as anyone.
In fact it was Lupaza, calling her name from the base of the hillside, her hands cupped around her mouth.
“What is it?” Kira called down to her friend. “Shakaar sent me up to check the comm relay!” She edged lower to better hear the older woman’s reply.
“Oh, come down, Nerys, he only sent you up there to get you out of the camp. You were asking too many questions, he said.”
Kira was incensed. “I wasn’t either!” she shouted, and began to scoot down the rocky slope, steadying herself against the bigger rocks as she inched lower, trying to avoid causing a slide. “Are you sure?” she asked. “He really just had me go up here to get me out of the way?”
Lupaza nodded. “Yes, he did. He’s-“
“He’s a lugfish!” Kira yelled, sliding the rest of the way down the hill on a bed of moving gravel. “I could have been killed up here! And for what?”
“Never mind, Nerys. Now come on, let’s talk about something fun for a change. Like what you want to do for your birthday! It’s your fourteenth, you ought to do something special, with your family, maybe.”
Kira shrugged. Her fourteenth birthday was supposed to be an event. Since it signified the passage of her ih’tanu, it meant that she was an adult-officially. Of course, Kira felt as though she had already been an adult for some time. A lot of people her age felt that way these days, probably a big part of the reason many girls’ ih’tanu birthdays came and went without comment.
“Did you have an ih’tanu ceremony?” Kira asked her friend.
“Of course I did,” Lupaza said. “Everyone in my village had them. Elaborate celebrations… lots of dancing, food…”
“Did your parents announce your betrothal?” It was an old custom, falling out of practice even before the Cardassians came, but Lupaza had grown up in a very rural region, where some of the old ways had still been observed-possibly were still being observed even now.
“Yes, they did,” Lupaza said softly.
“To Furel?”
Lupaza laughed, though it didn’t sound happy. “No,” she said. “I met Furel much later. The boy I was matched with… he went away, before we would have married. He and his entire family-his father went to work for the Cardassians. I never saw him again.”
“Oh,” Kira said, wishing she hadn’t asked. “I-I didn’t know that…”
Lupaza smiled, artificially bright. “Now, how could you have known? No matter, it was a long time ago, before I got so old.”
Kira laughed. “You’re not so old, Lupaza. How old are you? Thirty?”
Lupaza snorted. “I wish I was thirty,” she said. “Now, what shall we do? I’ll walk you into Dahkur, if you want to speak to your father about it.”
Kira shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “But probably I’ll tell him not to make a fuss.”
“Whatever you want,” Lupaza said softly. “We have to do our best to stick to our traditions, though. We don’t want to forget who we are.”
“I’ll never forget,” Kira said firmly. “No matter what the Cardassians do to me, I’ll never forget who I am, and where I come from… and that they don’t belong here.” It emboldened her to say these words, especially knowing that she was finally doing something about it.
It was on that note that Shakaar came around a shallow bend in the canyon from the side where the caves were. “Nerys! I thought I told you to adjust the comm signal,” he said sternly.
“Oh, drop it, Edon, I told her you were just trying to get rid of her.”
“That isn’t true!” Shakaar protested, his handsome features pulled into an amusingly rehearsed approximation of indignity.
“I can tell you’re lying,” Kira taunted, and he didn’t get angry, or even argue. She was beginning to feel more a part of the cell every day now, even enough to poke fun at its leader. He wasn’t that much older than she, after all, only just in his twenties.
“Come on, Nerys,” Lupaza beckoned. “You can help me with the washing.”
Washing the clothes was a chore that she would have grumbled about back home, with her father and brothers, but here, doing the washing was different. Here, it was part of the struggle to survive, and to win back Bajor from those who had wrongly claimed it. Kira would happily do washing every single day if she thought it could play a part, no matter how small, in driving off the Cardassians.
“Scratch that,” Shakaar said. “I just got a call.” He took something ungainly from his pocket, a piece of equipment that Mobara had built from some scrap. The thing squawked twice in Shakaar’s hand. “Come back to camp. Dakhana must have found something down in the valley, she’s calling for backup. Grab your phasers, let’s get down there.”
“Me, too?” Kira asked.
Shakaar didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” he said.
Kira beamed, fishing her phaser from out of her pack and holstering it in the pocket of her tunic.
“You ready?” Lupaza asked her as they scrambled down the canyon.
“Always,” Kira said, trying to mean it. For although sometimes there was fear that preceded these missions, Kira had never in her life felt the kind of exhilaration and triumph that came with their conclusion. She had waited her entire life to feel that she was making a difference, to do something that might lead her closer to some facsimile of happiness; and, though she certainly wouldn’t consider herself a happy person-not in the sense of being carefree-she was closer to it now than she had ever been before. Fighting the Cardassians, she had decided, was what the Prophets had meant for her to do.
Her head high, she marched forth with her comrades, sure she was ready for anything.
Dukat had always loathed these quarterly debriefing sessions with Legate Kell, but they had become even more unbearable in the past year, during which there had been a noticeable spike in Bajoran terrorist activity. Dukat knew that Kell had been telling anyone who would listen that it was mostly the fault of the prefect’s policies, but he was usually more subtle when speaking directly to Dukat about it.
They went through the polite formalities, both men ensconced in their own private offices, separated by much more than time and space. Kell looked old these days, Dukat thought, and wondered what the aging legate thought of the face on his screen. It had been a long and trying year.
“Gul,” the legate addressed him, signaling the end of the pleasantries, such as they were. “May I ask what, if anything, you have been doing to put a cap on the insurgency?”
Dukat was prepared. “We’ve had some notable successes. Our latest worry is that in many provinces, the terrorists have taken to moving so far into the forests that we can’t locate them, short of burning the forests down-a tack, by the way, which has been performed with some success in a few areas. But it’s a tremendous waste of precious resources, especially in the forests that feature nyawood-a rare and valuable commodity on some worlds, as you know. We’ve barely begun to tap that market.”
“You can’t send automated tanks in after them?”
“The tanks are ill-suited to traversing the wooded areas. I’ve been thinking on the matter, however, and have an idea that you might find interesting.”
Kell narrowed his eyes. “Go on.”
“The Federation-our intelligence indicates that they have access to better technologies than our own,” Dukat said smoothly. “Here we are, squabbling with them over the pitiful little colonies out on the frontier. But if we had a treaty with the Federation, think of the resources we could conserve. Aside from freeing up our troops to be sent to Bajor, we could gain access to Federation military systems-better sensors, better ground travel…”
“A treaty!” Kell sputtered.
“It would be on our own terms, of course. And we wouldn’t necessarily have to hold up our end of the bargain-at least, not in every case. Let me just tell you my proposal-“
“Your job is not to be contemplating imaginary Federation treaties, Dukat. You are to be concerned with Bajor, and Bajor only.”
“Certainly, Legate, but you must agree that these matters are all interconnected. The actions of military leaders on the border colonies affect Bajor, decisions made on far-flung Cardassian outposts affect Bajor, and your jurisdiction affects Bajor as well…”