“Since when did you become so philosophical? You sound like one of those damned Oralian fools.”
“Oralians!” Dukat said between his teeth. Perhaps he was a little more philosophical than he had once been, if only as an effect of his age, but he didn’t see where that was necessarily a bad thing. For Kell to compare him to the Oralians, though, was perhaps the cruelest implication he could have made, especially considering the fate of Dukat’s own firstborn… He nearly choked on the reply he would have liked to make, but the legate went on before he could even begin.
“Yes, and speaking of the Oralians, there are rumors beginning to circulate that there is a resurgence of them here, though I’ve not been able to confirm it. I would like you to keep your ears open for any news you may hear among our people on Bajor.”
“Indeed,” Dukat agreed, remembering himself. The Oralians had been nothing but troublemakers for Cardassia, backward-looking, naive fools who did little more than damage his people’s collective morale-not to mention nearly cause civil war, on more than one occasion. Dukat felt certain that anything Kell had heard was no more than rumor, for the Oralians had all been taken care of many years ago. Dukat would not stand for any alternative.
“At any rate,” Kell said, changing back the subject, “I want to see some quantifiable differences where the Bajoran resistance is concerned. And I want to see them soon.”
“Of course, Legate.”
“Perhaps this truth is lost on you, Dukat, but the citizens of the Union have come to speak your name synonymously with the Bajoran annexation. Whatever way the annexation falls, success or failure, the responsibility rests on you. Not to your predecessors, and likely not to your successors, either, for you are considered to be the true architect of the Bajoran-Cardassian construct. I would advise you to keep that in mind.”
Dukat could find no answer. It seemed that the legate felt resentment about the words he had just spoken, but Dukat was not sure it was something to be envious of, the caliber of responsibility that had just been attributed to him.
The legate started to reach for his console, then paused. “One last thing. I’m sending a new scientist to Bajor-Doctor Kalisi Reyar. She has been doing interesting things with weapons research, and she has a specific interest in Bajor. I think you will find her to be useful.”
“I thank you, Legate. I will let the director of the Bajoran Institute of Science know that she is to have a new player on her team.”
“Very well,” Kell acknowledged, and hit his disconnect button, severing their tenuous connection.
The small group of seven Bajorans slipped through the woods, using nothing but the light of the moons to guide their way. It was cold, for Jo’kala, and Ro felt confident that they would not meet many Cardassian patrols tonight-at least, not until they came upon the military compound itself.
The target was not far from the edge of the forest, and they arrived there in very little time, the remaining three from the cell silently bringing up the rear. “We’re all clear,” Tokiah murmured. “Let’s do this.”
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Ro immediately set about rigging a tricorder to project a Bajoran life sign. She pitched the tricorder within striking range, and a thin, red beam shot out from under the eaves of the squat structure. Ro aimed her phaser at the source of the laser, and took it out neatly with a single shot. She crept closer, beckoning the others, who scrambled behind her, staggering their crouched positions.
It was only a moment before a stiff-legged sentry came out, an exaggerated frown frozen across his features. He was clearly uncomfortable, having been made to stand in the Bajoran elements, and Ro wasted no time giving him a full dose of her phaser. He landed backwards with a nearly comical thud. She leapt forward, stripping him of several pieces of useful equipment, including his comcuff, phaser, tricorder, and padd.
“Hurry, Ro!” Kanore snapped in a loud whisper. “There’s no time to pick off paltry bits of equipment when there’s a full armory in there waiting to be raided!”
“I’m coming,” she muttered, stashing the items away in her clothing. Old habits died hard. She leapt over the sentry’s prone form to the entrance of the compound, where she expertly removed the security panel and worked her particular brand of magic on the bypass loop. The door opened obediently, and the seven Bajorans slipped inside.
Ro’s thoughts condensed as she entered the compound, her vision focused on each pasty, angry-featured Cardassian face, those lumbering bodies clad in shiny gray. She aimed for the neck ridges, the dimple in the center of the forehead, anywhere they weren’t armored, but if she misfired and hit one in the chest, the resultant blast was usually enough to at least disable him for a moment. One soldier caught it just below the shoulder, forcing him a step backward. He shook it off, a tight fist from his uninjured side swinging out to knock Ro’s arms sideways. Keeping her pistol clenched tightly between her fingers, she had only enough time to swing her elbows and slam them up under his chin. His knees buckled and he fell, giving her the opportunity to deliver a pulse directly into his face, leaving a gaping, smoking hole where his lizardlike features had once been. Ro coughed and moved on. At least there wasn’t so much blood where phasers were concerned. Ro had never cared for the sight of blood.
The Cardassians were outnumbered, a mere skeleton crew on duty in what they thought was a secure facility, and it took very little time for the Bram cell to finish them off. The cell was still named after Bram, though he was gone; injured by a Cardassian phaser last year, he had finally died several months later, though he put up a good fight. Tokiah had stepped in to fill his shoes as an ad hoc leader for the past year or so, since he was the oldest remaining member. Kanore begrudged him the leadership, but it didn’t much matter to Ro who led them-she still did pretty much whatever she wanted to do, whether it coincided with her orders or not. Most of the time, she garnered successful enough results to avoid major conflict, but there were those-Kanore, especially-who frequently let her know that she was out of line. Since Bram had left, Ro found that she had fewer advocates for her position all the time, and it had begun to occur to her more and more that Bram might have been the only member of the cell who had really wanted her around for any reason other than her skills.
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“In here!” Tokiah yelled. He and two others had found the compound’s armory, in a room with flickering lights-a stray phaser shot seemed to have hit the environmental controls, for the lights were winking out all over, and the tinny humming of the building’s heat monitoring system had gone silent. Entering the room, Ro immediately saw the force field that protected a long wall of weapons-stacked three and four deep, the aisle as long as three tall men lying end-to-end. There were more weapons than they could carry in one trip, but they couldn’t risk coming back for more. Laren quickly found a console, and tapped her way into the mainframe, searching for the correct Cardassian words and phrases among the jumble of foreign text.
“Hurry!” Kanore said.
“When you learn to do this, you can hurry,” Ro shot back.
She finally found the right command, and the translucent force field skittered out. Kanore took a step forward before Ro shouted at him to stop. “There may be a secondary security measure,” she reminded him, and he obediently froze in place. Ro entered another command, and the lights went out completely, Sadakita and Faon quickly switching on their palmlights to compensate for the close darkness.
“Everyone grab four weapons,” Tokiah instructed, as the rest of the cell found their way to the armory. From the farthest end of the line of weapons, Ro promptly selected six rifles and two pistols, to which Kanore wasted no time in rebuking her.
“You can’t carry all that, it will slow you down!”
“Maybe it would slow you down,” Ro countered.
“Tokiah said-“
Ro bumped his shoulder as she walked past him, heavily weighted down with the massive weapons slung over both shoulders.
“Laren,” Tokiah said, and Ro shot him a look. Just because he was older, because he’d been close to Bram, he thought he could get away with using her given name, as though they were friends. They weren’t friends. None of these people were her friends, and the look she gave Tokiah said as much. He didn’t bother to finish his thought as she left the compound, and she set off into the forest ahead of the others.
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It was not long before she was beginning to think that maybe Kanore had been right. To keep the cumbersome weapons from clanking together, she had to carry them close to her body, across the front of her chest, which was putting a tremendous burden on her neck and shoulders. The obvious solution occurred to her, and she set down her weapons some distance into the forest. With another thought, she turned back for more.
“Where are you going?” Sadakita asked her as she passed, heading back toward camp.
“I cached my weapons in the brush back there,” Ro explained. “I’m going back for more.”
“That’s a bad idea, Ro,” the older woman admonished her. “I don’t have to tell you the facility will be swarming with spoonheads in a matter of minutes. We need to get as deep into the forest as we can.”
“What’s going on?” Tokiah demanded, coming up with the rest of the cell.
Sadakita looked to Ro, apparently unwilling to directly implicate her. “I’m getting more weapons,” Ro said stubbornly.
“Don’t be stupid, Laren,” Tokiah said sternly. “Let’s get going. There’s no time to lose.”
“I’m going back,” Ro said firmly, and continued in the same direction she was headed.
Kanore started to call after her, but she could hear Tokiah telling him to let her go. She drew her phaser-the one she’d taken from the sentry-and jogged back to the facility. How sorry they’d all be when they saw how many weapons she’d lifted from the armory! It would be satisfying to hear Kanore say he’d been wrong.
She was still a considerable distance from the building when she realized that, in fact, the others hadn’t been wrong. She could hear the sound of flyers coming in over the tops of the trees, shining lights down into the forest. She clung to the trunk of a blackwood tree for a moment, looking up at the sky until she was satisfied that the patrol’s spotlights weren’t really very effective at penetrating the tree cover. She felt foolish, realizing that if she wasn’t careful, she could lead the Cardassians straight back to her cell’s encampment. Defeated, she turned back around and picked her way through the dark forest, eventually stopping to find the place where she’d left the pinched rifles.
Convinced she was safely out of range of where the flyers were searching, she slung all six of the rifles back up across her chest and stuffed the pistols into her waist satchel. She sourly noted to herself that if she’d been smart, she would have just distributed a few of them among the others in her cell, when they were still here to assist her. She could have just admitted she was wrong and asked for help. She sighed as she clanked along laboriously, wondering exactly what it was about her that made her so stubborn.
It was daylight by the time she made it back to camp, and Ro was tired, but there was no time for sleep. After a fairly unpleasant morning during which her actions were soundly denounced by nearly every member of her cell, she went to eat her breakfast by herself on a severed tree stump away from the others, grumbling to herself about the poor quality of food this autumn. The cell had been forced to make do with a soup made from a lichen that grew on the bark of the older nyawoods, and though it prevented starvation, it did little to satisfy the belly-or the palate. Ro knew that the food situation would only get worse this winter. Though Jo’kala’s winters were notoriously mild, this had been a lean year around the entire planet. The Cardassians’ constant overfarming-not to mention the industrial pollutants from their mining operations toxifying once-fertile soil-were beginning to have noticeable consequences in the quality and quantity of the already minimal harvest.
Tokiah emerged from a shelter made from a piece of canvas stretched around a circle of poles and topped with a conical roof of brush. It was semipermanent, like most of the buildings that dotted the camp-easy to take down, carry, and reconstruct anywhere else in the forest, if push came to shove. It always did, eventually.
“Ro,” he said, and she did not look up or answer him, expecting to be scolded again.
“Hey! Ro, I’m talking to you!”
“I hear you,” she said in a low voice.
“There’s a subspace transmission on the comm!”
Ro finally looked at him. “And?” she said, annoyed. She had no business with the comm system. That wasn’t her place in the cell-she bypassed security loops and killed spoonheads. The comm was Tokiah’s responsibility.
“They’re making reference to you. Someone is looking for you-someone on Valo II.”
Ro hesitated only a second before she leapt to her feet and scrambled past Tokiah into the common building.
“It’s Ro Laren!” she said breathlessly. “Who am I speaking to?”
The transmission was heavy with interference, and she could barely make it out. Between clicks and squawks she was sure she discerned the words Jeraddo, meeting, and Bis.
“Akhere Bis! Is it you? Is that who I’m speaking to?”
“…ear me?… aren… This is… khere Bis. I’m… ping… t… Jeraddo.”
After a few more back-and-forth relays with Ro shouting and the comm spitting back more broken transmissions, Ro felt some measure of certainty that Bis was requesting that she meet him on Jeraddo, Bajor’s fifth moon, in two days. She couldn’t get more than that out of him, for the comm started to fail in earnest before he could get further, but her mind was made up before his last crackling word. Anything to get her out of here for a while was reason enough to agree to the trip.
“Tokiah,” she announced to the cell leader, waiting outside the common building, “I’m taking a raider to Jeraddo in two days.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Tokiah informed her. “Those ships belong to the cell, Laren. If you want to take a shuttle, it had better be part of an approved mission-for the cell.”
“This is a mission,” Ro said. “I’ll be working with another outfit from Valo II, that’s all.” In truth she had no idea why Bis wanted to meet with her, but that didn’t matter.
“You’re not taking the raider.”
“Really?” Ro said. “So, you wouldn’t be willing to part with a ship for a day or so just to have me out of camp during that time? I mean, it’s possible I’ll never come back, Tokiah. Just think about that.”
The cell leader frowned. “You’ll dance on all our graves,” he said. “You’ve got more lives than a hara, Laren.”
“I’m taking a raider, Tokiah, whether you agree to it, or I have to steal one. I’d rather you made it easy for me.”
Tokiah said nothing for a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t come back,” he finally said, his voice soft.
Ro shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. She’d been a part of this cell for long enough that her memory of her life before it was hazy, existing only in pictures that might not have even had any basis in fact. This cell was the only life she really knew. She swallowed. “Fine,” she said, her voice quavering before she cleared her throat. “Maybe I won’t.”
“Just don’t take the Trakor,” Tokiah said. “That one’s my favorite.”
“The Trakor pulls to the port side,” Ro said, her voice low. “I wouldn’t want it anyway.” She turned and left Tokiah, intending to take a walk by herself. Whatever Bis wanted her for, it had to be better than this. He’d deliberately sought her out; for some reason, he needed her, enough to risk a subspace transmission for it. And that was more than she’d ever gotten from any member of her cell, even Bram-and Bram was dead.
Dukat was on the Bajoran side of the station when he was called to ops to answer a transmission from Gul Darhe’el. He turned from the Bajoran shopkeeper who had been spewing out empty flattery in an attempt to distract Dukat from the fact that he was most likely selling black-market items to some of the wretches in ore processing. Dukat didn’t care enough about it to pursue it further-at least, not immediately. He walked away from the shop without further acknowledging the merchant, the swarm of dirty Bajorans parting to allow their prefect to pass.
He accepted the call a few minutes later, apologizing to Darhe’el for making him wait, both of them aware that he did not mean it. Gallitep’s overseer didn’t bother with any pleasantries, announcing the reason for his call without ceremony.
“It’s over,” Darhe’el said. “The main vein is played out, and the secondaries aren’t worth the cost of running the AI. Besides which, I’ve had to continue treating the workers for Kalla-Nohra, at considerable expense. I’ll need that Bajoran scientist to come to the camp, to shut down the AI…. And I’ll need your approval for the rest of it.”
Dukat felt his body tense. The news wasn’t unexpected, but he hadn’t thought it would come quite so soon. Gallitep had finally outlived its usefulness to Cardassia.
“The rest of it,” he murmured, thinking of what Kell would say. Dukat had long believed that it would be a worthy venture to drill deeper below the surface, but Kell had consistently refused to supplement Dukat’s resources with the personnel and equipment that would be necessary to delve that far. Dukat could only hope that the retirement of such a productive facility as Gallitep might persuade Kell to rethink his decision.
“The workers,” Darhe’el sneered. “Unless you want them on your station. I’m sure they’d appreciate dying in the very lap of luxury.”
Dukat sighed. “I see no great wrong in treating them with basic civility, Gul.”
“Which is why the filthy creatures continue to run over our ground troops, doing as they please,” Darhe’el said. “If I were prefect-“
“Oh, but you’re not, are you,” Dukat said, enjoying the darkness that swept across Darhe’el’s heavy face. “You’ve done an excellent job at Gallitep overall, I’ll give you that. And I’m sure that Central Command will find further use for you, perhaps heading a prison facility, or leading a squadron at the front lines, for one of the colonies. But I am prefect of Bajor, and that means that for the time being, you still answer to me.”
If looks could kill. Dukat smiled, easing back. “I’ll see to it that the necessary technician is sent promptly to deal with the AI. As to the management of the facility’s closure, I’ll leave that to your discretion. Send me your reports, I’ll sign off on whatever choice you make, assuming it’s not unreasonable.”
Dukat nodded and ended the transmission, wondering if Kell would rethink his position, now that Bajor’s most productive uridium mine had played out. Wondering, indeed, what he could do to rework the numbers, to keep Bajor’s output level within the Union’s very high expectations.
Still, he reflected, he should not overlook the bright side to this turn of events: the end of Gallitep also meant the end of Darhe’el, at least as far as Dukat was concerned. Without the option to elevate him to a higher post on Bajor, Kell would have no choice but to recall Darhe’el to Prime.
“Doctor Mora,” Odo said, from where he was sitting in the corner of the lab. Mora waved him off.
“Not now, Odo,” he told him, clicking away at his keypad. “Can’t you regenerate for a while?”
“My composition only requires me to regenerate every seventeen hours,” Odo replied. His pronunciation was flawless, and he’d even begun to learn to put inflection into his voice, though he exaggerated it sometimes.
“Well, maybe you could practice being an insect or something.”
“Doctor Mora, are you nervous?” Odo asked.
Mora looked up at the shape-shifter, whose “face” was appropriately inquisitive. “Yes, Odo, I am nervous. A very important man is coming to the laboratory soon, and I’ve got to be sure that everything is…” He trailed off. He didn’t know what to do for Dukat, exactly, other than have Odo perform for him. He had to figure out a way to make the prefect understand that his research with Odo was important, but he wasn’t sure how to do it without making it seem like a sideshow of some kind.
Yopal had insisted that Dukat would have no interest in what Mora was doing, that he only wanted to speak to Daul about something, and that he wanted to discuss something about weapons with a few of the others. But Mora remained unconvinced. He feared that as soon as Dukat was introduced to him, the prefect would begin asking a thousand questions that Mora wouldn’t know how to answer, and he would find himself in a labor camp before he knew it. And then what would happen to Odo? Mora looked sideways at the shape-shifter, who watched him with his unique non-expression. It always managed to convey sadness, even if Mora couldn’t be sure that the shape-shifter was capable of actually feeling it.
Mora’s computer chirped, indicating that Doctor Yopal was requesting his presence in her office. He headed down the hallway, absentmindedly smoothing his hair back with his hand. Yopal was not alone in her office.
“Yes, what is it, Doctor?”
“We have a new colleague here at the institute. This is Doctor Kalisi Reyar.”
Given leave to do so, Mora turned to regard the other Cardassian woman in the office, a little shorter in stature than Yopal, possibly a little younger, a little more vain; the spoon-shaped concavity in the center of her forehead was filled in with a bit of decorative blue pigment. Other than that, she was nearly indistinguishable from the other women who worked at the institute. They all wore their hair in those peculiarly arranged plaits and bundles, they all had the same wide-open alertness in their eyes. Mora expected to forget her name almost immediately, for he rarely conversed with anyone but Yopal anymore. He extended his hand, and Doctor Reyar looked at it.
“Some Bajorans greet one another by clasping their forearms together,” Yopal told the other woman.
“Yes, I know,” Reyar said, but she still did not extend her hand, and Mora slowly let his drop.
“I wanted you to meet, because I will be putting the two of you together very soon,” Yopal said.
Mora felt his heart skip a beat.
“Not right away, but probably sometime in the coming months. That will give you time to wrap up your current projects.”
“Even Odo?” Mora spoke without meaning to, unable to help it. “He needs constant observation, he needs guidance, supervision. Nobody knows him as well as I do, nobody else can-“
“You will still be permitted to work with Odo in your spare time,” Yopal told Mora crisply. “Just not as often. I suggest you let him know right away, so that he can become acclimated to the change.”
Mora breathed a small sigh of relief. It wasn’t ideal, but at least Odo was not being assigned to someone else. Of course, there was still the matter of this Doctor Reyar… Mora turned to her again. “I look forward to working with you,” he said, trying to sound genuine. He hoped she was at least as tolerable as Yopal.
“Doctor Mora is one of the good Bajorans,” Yopal told Reyar. “He is cooperative, obedient…”
Reyar smiled. “That reminds me of a little joke I heard on the transport here,” she said. “Someone said that the only good Bajoran is one who is about to be executed.” She laughed out loud, and Yopal chuckled politely. Mora began to cough, and for a moment he could not stop.
Yopal patted Mora’s shoulder. “It’s only a joke, of course.”
“Of course,” Mora replied, still coughing.
“Perhaps you’d like to see Doctor Mora’s pet project,” Yopal suggested to the new scientist.
Reyar did not appear to have an opinion one way or the other, but Yopal nodded briskly and the three began to walk down the hall to Mora’s lab. Yopal stood back while Mora opened the door, and the three entered, revealing that Odo had been sitting in the same place since Mora had left him. Reyar gasped.
“What is it?” she asked, and took a step in Odo’s direction.
“He is a shape-shifter,” Mora answered, walking protectively toward Odo. “We don’t know where he came from, and we’ve never seen anything like him. He seems to be unrelated to any of the known shape-shifting species, with a morphogenic matrix that is utterly unlike the Antosians, the Chameloids, the Wraith, or the Vendorians. However, I’ve begun to make certain breakthroughs. Odo, this is Doctor Reyar. Why don’t you show Doctor Reyar… something that you can do?”
Without a word, Odo morphed into a cadge lupus, a shaggy, vicious-looking Bajoran animal he’d learned about from the institute’s database. Reyar took a step back and made a frightened noise.
“Something Cardassian,” Mora said quickly, and the lupus changed into a massive, square-headed Cardassian riding hound, similar to the lupus but with longer legs and short, wiry fur.
Reyar seemed no less horrified. “How dreadful!” she exclaimed. Odo changed back into his humanoid form.
“I have upset you,” Odo said. Reyar ignored him, turning back to Mora.
“So, what kind of progress have you made with it?” she inquired.
Mora was taken aback, for he’d thought Odo’s demonstration illustrated his progress well enough. “Well, I’ve learned quite a lot about him in the time since I was assigned to him. His optimal temperature, his mass, which, by the way, can be changed at will. I’ve also taught him the basics of humanoid speech, as you can hear, and he’s beginning to learn many things that will hopefully help him to someday assimilate-“
“Yes, but I mean, what have you learned about him that will contribute to the betterment of Cardassian society? For isn’t that the ultimate goal here at the institute-and in the sciences in general?”
“Yes, of course,” Mora replied. “But I’m learning about a new species, Doctor Reyar. Surely you see the value in that type of research. It is inherently important to learn all we can about-“
“I don’t really see the value,” Reyar said. “I suppose I’m just a traditionalist that way. But I guess you are to be congratulated for teaching it to do… tricks and the like.” Her tone was dry, or maybe Mora just imagined it was. Cardassian mannerisms still eluded him at times.
The two women left him alone with Odo, who wasted no time getting to the inevitable questions.
“Doctor Reyar. This is a man?”
“No, Odo, she is a woman.”
The shape-shifter nodded. “I thought she looked like a woman. But… I thought it was men who did not make good scientists.”
Mora laughed, a little puzzled. “Doctor Reyar is probably a perfectly good scientist, Odo.”
“But, Doctor Mora, I thought that science, the study of science… the study of… me… I thought this was the quest for knowledge, for information and truth about the environment that surrounds us.”
He was probably quoting something from one of the informational padds he’d been given, Mora thought, and felt a surge of pride that his project seemed to have internalized what he was reading. “Yes, well, Odo, not all scientists have the same priorities, I suppose. Doctor Reyar believes science is valuable only if it makes people’s lives quantifiably better in some way.”
“People’s lives,” Odo repeated. “Whose lives? My life? Your life?”
Mora cleared his throat. He wanted to say the Cardassians’ lives, but he said nothing. Odo was so naive, Mora was well aware that anything he said in the shape-shifter’s presence was likely to be repeated.
“You are learning so quickly, Odo,” Mora finally said. “But it’s time for me to check your liquid mass. If you wouldn’t mind stepping into the tank, please. I need you to revert to your natural form.”
Odo, obedient as always, did as he was told, and Mora shifted his focus to his notes, remembering that he would not be able to devote so much attention to this in the near future. He hoped Odo would understand.
Chapter 19
It seemed a very long time since Daul had used a transporter. The Bajoran Institute of Science was outfitted with one that was used primarily for equipment and supplies, though occasionally the Cardassian scientists employed it to transport themselves from place to place, but the Bajorans were not allowed access to it. This rule was unspoken, but it was very well understood.
Today, however, an exception was being made. The prefect had strongly implied that Gallitep’s overseer was a notoriously impatient man, and that Daul needed to begin his new task as soon as possible. Daul was quickly authorized for transport and beamed directly into a long, cool corridor with chrome doors on either end. He was met there by a lean Cardassian who introduced himself simply as “Marritza.”
“Gul Dukat recommends you highly for your expertise,” Marritza said as he escorted Daul down the corridor.
Daul had the distinct impression that the other man was nervous. He wondered if he was afraid of Bajorans; there was so much propaganda among Cardassians regarding the resistance that civilians probably expected every Bajoran to be ready to spring up and murder their Cardassian neighbors without a second thought.