“I’m flattered by his confidence,” Daul said. In truth, he was anything but flattered. He was disgusted, and he was terrified to consider what he was about to be confronted with at Gallitep. At least last time, he hadn’t been made to travel to the actual camp; his software had been electronically implemented into the mine’s online system from the institute’s database.
“It has been explained to you what you are expected to do?” Marritza inquired.
Daul nodded. “Yes, I’m to reprogram the system to begin a gradual shutdown. It will have to be done in two sessions, however. I trust Gul Darhe’el is aware of this necessity?”
“I will be sure he is informed,” Marritza said. “My job is to keep the camp’s records and the details of its operation up to date, but I daresay Gul Darhe’el will not wish to be troubled with such minor matters. He has so much else to concern himself with…” The clerk smiled then, with a strange trace of what seemed like bitterness.
Daul found the Cardassian to be very unlike any other he had encountered, his expression difficult to read. Of course, Daul couldn’t purport to have a very broad understanding of the Cardassian psyche in general, but at least most of them seemed to be motivated by the same things. Marritza seemed somewhat more… complicated.
As the two men traveled up the corridor, Daul was made very aware of the intense droning of the mining equipment outside: drills, ore-processing conveyors, smelters, and the rushing water from the great concentrator that delivered slurry to a tailings pond many kellipates away from the site.
But beneath the tremendous grinding, echoing din, there was another sound, one that Marritza seemed to be taking great pains to ignore. To Daul at first it sounded like the faint cries of a tyrfox, or perhaps a pack of faraway cadge lupus; but Daul immediately knew what he was hearing-the cries of the prisoners here, the moans of the dying workers, suffering as they were from Kalla-Nohra. Daul cleared his throat. “Doesn’t Darhe’el see to it that the workers who are ill are properly treated for their condition?”
Marritza gave a quick nod, almost frantic. “Oh yes,” he said. “Productivity is of the utmost importance here. Darhe’el is adamant about the treatment of all victims of the disease-Bajoran… and Cardassian… alike.” In the inflection of his voice, which sounded very much as though Marritza repeated a long-rehearsed falsehood, Daul thought he detected a single truth-that Marritza himself was infected with the disease. Without meaning to, he gave the other man a look of sympathy. Marritza looked away, and Daul decided to avoid further mention of the subject.
They reached the end of the passage and Marritza keyed open a door. Suddenly the narrow, neat corridor was enveloped in a roar of sound; the floor beneath their feet gave way to a trembling catwalk, which opened up over a yawning chasm. The wind whipped fiercely overhead, the narrow footbridge swinging gently, though it was protected from the relentless gale by the walls of the open-pit mine, which shot up at a kellipate from where they stood. This bridge had been constructed at what was once near the very bottom of the mine, but the hole had plunged far beneath this point in more recent years, and the spindly catwalk was suspended hundreds of linnipates above firm ground.
Daul glanced up, where the burning sun hung motionless in the cloudless sky, beating down heavily on the workers in the massive pit beneath them. Marritza handed him a headset, which would drown out the noise and allow them to talk to each other. Daul stepped gingerly onto the footbridge that spanned the mine.
The vast pit had been gradually but efficiently excavated over the course of many years, crisscrossed with scaffolds and enormous systems of conveyors to remove the chunks of rock and minerals from the ground. This had once been a massive hillside, likely covered over with trees and foliage and wildlife; now it was a bare, steaming crater, surrounded by many tessipates of complete desolation; it was the closest thing Daul could imagine to the myths about the Fire Caves. Before Terok Nor had been constructed, Gallitep was the center of ore processing in the B’hava’el system. Daul thought that Bajorans could never have conceived of a thing so unsightly and terrible as this place.
The steep, spiraling gravel roads that were cut into the sides of the pit were dotted here and there with workers, some of them disappearing into tunnels that had been dug randomly all around the perimeter of the mine. Though Daul could not see clearly most of the workers from where he stood, those nearest to him staggered on thin, bandy legs, their bare chests and backs covered in open sores and blistering sunburns. They wielded traditional shovels and spades and truncheons, hacking away at the exposed rock, slowly but persistently widening and deepening the abyss beneath them to get at the valuable minerals embedded in the ground. Also visible were a number of Cardassian guards, swaggering between the hapless miners and occasionally stopping to shout criticisms or reprimands. Most of the guards did not venture far into the pit, apparently preferring to remain close to their respective stations, well-built corridors like the one from which Daul and Marritza had just come.
Daul followed Marritza a quarter of the way across the diameter of the pit, until he came to a little building which abutted the swaying catwalk. Here was the center of the system, the brain of this entire operation-the primary server. The artificial intelligence program, which drove the core mining drills, was located here; those drills sought out the richest veins and pointed the scavenging miners in that direction, to pick out and process the precious metals by hand.
Daul began the reprogramming sequence that would eventually shut down the entire system. It was a complicated process, but the clerk waited patiently as he tapped in code. Beneath them, workers groaned and labored, guards shouted, and the machinery ground relentlessly on. As Daul neared the end of the first-stage closure, he found himself compelled to ask his unusual escort a question.
“What will happen to all of them when this camp is closed?” Daul finally asked, looking down into the enormous cavern below him.
Marritza did not immediately answer. “Darhe’el will take care of them,” he said in a low voice.
Daul was not sure if he should inquire further, though he did not know what the other man meant. “Oh-I see,” he stammered, and went back to his task.
“Do you?” Marritza asked him. He gestured out to the open space that surrounded them. “For Gul Darhe’el-for Cardassia-these workers are valued only for their productivity. You yourself, Doctor Daul, are valued only for your particular expertise here. Is that how it was on your world, in your culture, before we came here?”
Daul considered. Bajor valued its people as more than what they were capable of producing-they were valued as individuals, as relatives, as friends-as Bajorans. Daul slowly shook his head.
“When the camp shuts down,” Marritza went on, not looking at Daul, “these workers will lose their value. That value has already begun to decline, because of their illness. Do you understand?”
Daul thought perhaps he understood what Marritza was trying to tell him, but he didn’t understand the logic-nor did he understand why the Cardassian was telling him, either. “Yes,” he croaked, and finished his work.
“Good,” Marritza said. “Are you finished?”
“For now,” Daul replied. “I’ll have to come back to finish the job.”
Marritza attempted to smile as he guided Daul back toward the footbridge outside the little building, and again Daul thought he detected bitterness. “I’m sure Gul Darhe’el will be very pleased with your work.” He removed his headset as he ushered Daul back inside the cool, stainless chrome corridor, the echoing voices of crying men and women somehow louder now, and Daul was transported quickly and efficiently back to the institute.
Ro was to meet with Bis near the Lunar V base on Jeraddo, a place where another cell had begun stashing ships years ago. Since that time, other cells had begun bringing their own ships here, or using the base as an offworld meeting point to coordinate large-scale attacks that required the cooperation of more than one group.
In addition to her anxious curiosity about why Bis wanted to see her, she could not deny that she was nervous to see him again. In the years since she had been to Valo II, she had never met another boy who had turned her head the way he had, and she had built up a bit of mythology about him in that time. She wasn’t sure whether he would be able to live up to it.
Ro docked her little raider, the Lahnest, near where she knew the underground base was. What had once been jungle had been partially cleared away to create a suitable landing field, but much of the canopy and brush had to be left behind so as to obscure the Bajoran presence here. In fact, the landing area was smaller than even the poorest farmer’s field, and it apparently hadn’t been used in a few weeks; the fast-growing vegetation of this moon was already starting to fill in again.
Ro waited for what seemed like a very long time before she saw another vessel coming, starting out as a dot in the sky, gradually but quickly expanding into a light-capacity ship that she knew was the same one Darrah Mace had used for the rendezvous with the Kressari, three years ago. The ship cracked through the atmosphere of Jeraddo, singing in a telltale high-pitched greeting that took Ro’s breath away. He was here.
When he finally arrived, she somehow forgot to be nervous. Here approached a tall man, handsome as he had promised to be as a teenager, his eyes piercing and his smile apparently genuine-he was happy to see her. Ro couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
“Ro Laren!” he exclaimed. “I can’t tell you how glad I am you decided to meet me!”
She cleared her throat. “So,” she said, trying to sound casual, “what did I come all this way for? I hope it’s good.”
“Oh, it is good, it is,” he said, and she saw him swallow as he came closer to her, scrutinizing her face. She realized that he was very nervous about this meeting, and it occurred to her that he probably had a mythology about her, too. It was entirely possible that she would fail to live up to his estimation of her, just as easily as the reverse could be true.
“Well,” he said, “you might remember that we didn’t have much in the way of organized resistance on Valo II. But I want to change that. I’ve been working on an idea for a long time.”
Ro frowned. Still no organized resistance? Had she come all this way, pinned all her opportunities on just one idea, still in the planning stages? “What kind of an idea?”
Bis grinned. “Terok Nor,” he said.
Ro was a bit taken aback. “Terok Nor?” she repeated. “What about it?”
Bis’s smile grew even wider. “Think about it. It’s the perfect target, really. It’s the seat of the occupation, it’s where the prefect lives, and where half the Cardassian ships in this system are docked at any given time-“
“I still don’t follow,” Ro said. “What do you mean, a target? You just said you don’t even really have a cell-you’d need an entire army to attack Terok Nor, and an army is exactly what the whole of Bajor doesn’t have. Even with every single resistance cell on the planet, we’d never-“
“That’s the brilliant part,” Bis said. “We won’t be the ones to attack it. We’ll get someone else to do it for us.”
Ro made a face. “Who?”
Bis’s smile finally faded. “Do you remember that Ferengi freighter? The one you-“
“The one Bram and I tried to claim, before Darrah Mace suddenly took us on an unexpected vacation?”
“Right. That freighter is going to be the key to taking out Terok Nor once and for all.”
Ro folded her arms, intrigued.
Bis went on. “We never really got much use out of that ship, except to transport refugees, but it was just too cumbersome to be used as a ferry. Something went wrong with one of the engines, and my father-he’s one of the best engineers on Valo II-he couldn’t figure out what to do with such an alien system. So we started stripping it for useful parts, but other than that-“
Ro nodded, shooting him a “get to the point” look as politely as she could manage.
“Anyway, my father got the comm online a long time ago, and we started picking up a lot of Ferengi back-and-forth chatter. Without even meaning to, we started to learn a lot about some of the Ferengi supply runs-and about the Ferengi in general. Like, for example, they’ll do anything for profit.”
“So… you can spy on the Ferengi,” Ro said. She knew next to nothing about the Ferengi, except that they were avaricious and commerce-driven. Some were even pirates. Short pirates.
“Right. They do a lot of trade in and around the Bajoran sector. There’s even a regularly scheduled run that goes between Lissepia and New Sydney every two weeks, and they go right through the B’hava’el system.”
Ro still couldn’t see any significance in the information and she shrugged, waiting to hear more.
“That run is usually carrying a very unstable cargo-unprocessed uridium. They’re not supposed to carry more than a certain amount, according to regulation, but they’re a profit-minded bunch, and they routinely ignore the rules. They have begun taking on bigger and bigger loads lately, from what we’ve been hearing. I’m sure they’re making an absolute fortune on it.”
Ro frowned, beginning to see where this was going. “Those ships… if their cargo were exposed to a big enough electrical discharge…”
“They’re bombs waiting to happen,” Bis told her. “Very powerful bombs. And there’s one particular Ferengi ship in the fleet that does a routine stopover in this system-“
“-at Terok Nor,” Ro finished.
Bis nodded, pleased she had caught on. “That’s right,” he said. “And that’s where you come in, Laren. I don’t know anyone on Valo II who has even the faintest idea how to override a security system, but you, you could sneak onto that Ferengi vessel and spike one of the containers with an electrical bomb. It could be set to go off just as soon as the ship docks, and if we get to it just before it heads for Terok Nor-“
Ro was shaking her head. She was vaguely aware of at least one truth about Terok Nor: there were more Bajorans on that station than there were Cardassians. Innocent Bajorans-people who had been brought there against their will and forced to labor in what were supposed to be the most abysmal conditions one could imagine, second only to the horror stories she’d heard about Gallitep.
Bis misread her hesitation, and he smiled reassuringly. “I’ve thought of all the details, Laren,” he told her. “I’ve been putting this plan together for over a year. Contacting you was the next step, and now that you’re here, nothing can go wrong. If you come back with me to Valo II, I can tell you everything. What do you say, are you in?”
Ro looked around Jeraddo, looked at her raider where she had left it, and paused. This plan was madness, for more reasons than she could even begin to address. But she could only think of Tokiah, his saying, “Maybe you shouldn’t come back.”
“I’m in,” she said softly, and Bis surprised her by throwing his arms around her and letting out a whoop of triumph. Startled, she hung in his arms like a limp fish, having managed to avoid being embraced by anyone since she was a child. He released her, probably sensing her discomfort, and the two began the walk back to his ship, Bis rattling off more details about his reckless plan, Ro pushing away the uncomfortable thoughts that were beginning to stir her conscience.
For all the worrying Mora had been doing about Dukat’s visit to the institute, the prefect paid him approximately no attention whatsoever. Yopal had not been wrong when she’d advised him that Dukat would only be interested in weapons systems, for he spent almost the entire visit talking to Daul and the new scientist, Kalisi Reyar. The prefect left without so much as a hello to Mora-not that Mora would have wanted it any other way.
With Gul Dukat gone, Mora could finally let down his guard a bit. He eased his nerves with a uniformly dull task, performing a routine calibration on some of his tools. Daul entered his laboratory quietly.
“Hello, Pol,” the other Bajoran greeted him. Mora hadn’t spoken to his colleague since well before Dukat’s visit. They hadn’t spent much time together at all, in recent weeks.
“Hello, Mirosha. Did you survive your encounter with the prefect?”
“I did, though I won’t pretend that I enjoyed it.”
Mora chuckled. “I’d bet not. I’m thankful he left me alone.”
“Yes, well. He wanted to talk with me about the system at Gallitep. He was pleased with the work I did before, and apparently he found me trustworthy enough to send me to the actual camp, this time.”
Mora stiffened. He wasn’t sure what to say to his old friend, and he merely followed up with an “Ah,” and a clearing of his throat.
There was a moment of silence before Daul softly spoke again. “Are you curious to know what I saw there? Why he wanted me to go?”
Mora cleared his throat again. “Not really,” he said.
“No, I’m sure it’s easier for you not to think about it, as it would be for me, if I wasn’t forced to. It seems that our benevolent Cardassian benefactors have elected to shut down the mining camp. They’ve finally managed to strip it clean of anything they deem useful. That means the workers there will have to be properly disposed of, since so many of them are suffering from Kalla-Nohra syndrome and aren’t worth the effort of transporting elsewhere. As for the others, those who are still healthy-well, my understanding is that it would be inefficient to try and weed out who is sick and who isn’t, so…” Daul shrugged. “I’m to disable the artificial intelligence program before the… genocide begins in earnest.”
Mora felt sick. “I-I’m sorry, Mirosha. It’s not pleasant, I know, but… it’s what we must do, to stay alive.”
“That’s right,” Daul said. “And I’ve heard you’re to be paired up with Doctor Reyar. I wonder if you know what she’s working on. It’s an anti-aircraft system, to shoot down Bajoran raiders as they attempt to leave the atmosphere. I’m told it’s a brilliant concept.”
“Is that right?” Mora kept inflection from his voice.
“Doesn’t this bother you, Mora? Doesn’t your conscience trouble you? For you have to know that we are collaborators here. Nothing less than traitors to our own people.”
Mora shook his head. “I don’t know if I see it that way,” he said, his voice still low and careful. “We’re following orders, Mirosha. If we tried to do anything differently, we’d be killed, and replaced by someone else.”
Daul stared at him a long moment before answering. “That’s one way to look at it,” he said finally.
Mora continued on with his equipment as Daul left the room, and wondered if it was true, about the anti-aircraft system. Well, he reasoned, everyone knows the rebels are all as good as dead. It’s inevitable that they will eventually be killed, or caught and executed. Perhaps I’d be doing them a kindness, helping to speed up the process of putting a stop to the rebellion. They’re fools, doing what they do, and for what?
“For what?” he repeated out loud. For freedom? It seemed preposterous. The Bajorans would never be free, not with the hold the Cardassians had on this world. Compliance was the best alternative. At least it was a better alternative than death.
Valo II looked exactly as Ro had remembered it, only somehow even more depressing. Clearly there had been a bit of a population explosion since she had seen it last, for the clusters of shanty structures and tents near the landing field had trickled back farther into the scrubby brush, and the shabby town where Bis’s father lived was even more crowded than she remembered it. There were people everywhere, and they all looked unhealthy. Rheumy eyes; hacking, persistent coughs; open sores; drawn, emaciated faces. People were walking through the worn corridors between the tightly packed houses, carrying baskets of soiled rags, dried alien-looking fruits, or headless porli fowl. Lean and rawboned women walked surrounded by their dirty children. Old men sat on the ground in scattered hopeless groups, talking reservedly and smoking hiuna leaf-a cheap, unhealthy crop that helped to stave off hunger but shortened the life span significantly with its resulting ailments.
In fact, Ro thought, everyone here was slowly dying in one way or another: respiratory afflictions, starvation, communicable disease, or exposure. It sickened Ro to acknowledge to herself that at least the Bajorans back on their homeworld had the Cardassians to feed them-in exchange for slavery. She wondered if, despite its terrible appearance, Valo II might be preferable to Bajor for that reason.
Bis spoke to her as they walked. “In three days,” he told her, “the Ferengi captain-DaiMon Gart, he’s called-will be docking at the moon of a gas giant not far from this system. That will be his last stop before Terok Nor, and that’s where you’ll take the device to his ship.”
“That simple, is it?” Ro replied, trying not to stare at a woman with an especially prominent neck goiter.
“For you it will be,” Bis said confidently.
“But what if I can’t do it?” Ro said softly. “I don’t know the first thing about Ferengi security systems.”
“We can have a look at the freighter,” Bis said. “That should give you some ideas, shouldn’t it?”
Ro sighed. “It might,” she said, but she still felt doubtful.
“Look, if all else fails, you can just bribe him to get on the ship.”
“Why would he agree to that?”
“The same reason he agreed to take on such an incredibly dangerous cargo in the first place.”
“What am I supposed to bribe him with?”
Bis frowned. “That’s one part of the plan that might not work quite so well,” he confessed. “You see, we have a stolen Cardassian padd, and we might be able to convince him that he can access Cardassian passcodes with the device… but we’re not sure if he’d believe it-“
“I thought you had this all figured out.”
“Well,” Bis said, “there is one other solution.”
“What’s that?” Ro said sourly.
“Seduce him.”
Ro stared at him in disbelief before she broke out in rueful laughter.
“What’s so funny about that?” Bis protested. They had come to his father’s house, and Ro followed him inside.
“Right. Me, seduce an alien. Me, seduce… anyone,” she snorted.
The house was dark, and Bis lit a candle on the mantelpiece of a crumbling fireplace. It was likely this house had been built here long before the Cardassians came to Bajor, when the world was still considered an exciting new frontier land, a promising place to settle. Ro looked around the room and saw how those auspicious hopes had eroded. The room, with stone walls and a cracked and deteriorating wood floor, was blackened with the smoke from cooking fires and smelled strongly of ash and dirt. There was almost no furniture, aside from three sleeping pallets that were arranged around the fireplace.
“This is where you sleep?” She gestured to the pallets.
“No,” he said. “My cousin’s children sleep there. He had no room for them in his own house-he lives with his sister-in-law. His wife is dead, and we took in the children when his sister-in-law’s house got too crowded.” Bis took the candle and gestured to a corridor that led them to the back of the square house, and Ro followed him before he stopped.
“Why would you say that?” he asked softly.
“Say what?”
“About you… seducing anyone?” He looked embarrassed.
“Because it’s absurd,” she told him sharply.
“Haven’t you ever-” He stopped, and she was forced to look away. She considered what he was asking before she replied.
“No,” she finally said. “I haven’t.”
The candle flickering between them, Ro was aware of the sudden awkwardness there, too, standing in the corridor between the tiny rooms of this desolate house.
Bis stepped into one of the small rooms, revealing a bare pallet, a heap of worn clothing. He set the candle on a small, rough chest, the light casting long shadows across their faces, and turned to face her. He put his arms around her then, the feeling strange and terrifying and electric. As she had been on Jeraddo, she was clumsy in his embrace, not sure how to respond. But her body knew, and after a long, warm moment, she felt herself soften to his touch. Nobody had ever approached her this way, and as he drew back to kiss her, his face moving toward hers, she realized, for the first time, how much she had wished that someone would.
Kira pulled a knot of something unpleasant out of her mouth. A bone, perhaps? She hoped it was a bone, for something about the shape of it suggested a tiny little beak. She examined it, decided it was just a bone splinter, and laid it down on the long wooden table where the members of the cell took their meals together. “Ugh,” she exclaimed. “Who made this food? Furel?”
“It was Shakaar,” Dakhana Vaas told her, nodding toward the back of the cave.
“Oh,” Kira said, a little embarrassed. She wouldn’t want Shakaar to hear her complaining.
“It’s all right, little girl, he knows he can’t cook.”
Kira resented Dakhana calling her “little girl,” since they were only a couple of years apart, and anyway, Kira had been with the cell for more than a year. She silently wished she was taller, or at least as tall as Dakhana.
Shakaar came into the main body of the cave from where he’d been sitting with his precious and notoriously troublesome comm system since just before mealtime. He leaned his hands against the end of the table, his expression suggesting news.
“Listen up,” he said, the unusual tension in his voice imploring everyone to look up. The older members of the cell occasionally heckled Shakaar for his tendency to mumble, but he was not mumbling now. “We’ve got a chance to get into Gallitep.”
“Gallitep!” Dakhana exclaimed. “Who’s your informant? Is he reliable?”
“I believe so,” Shakaar said. “But even if it’s just a rumor, this is an opportunity that I don’t think we should pass up. It’s too important. The Cardassians have decided to shut down the place for good. It’s too much trouble to relocate the Bajoran workers, so…” he trailed off, passing a hand over his grim face.
“So they’re going to kill them instead,” Furel said, the disgust in his voice plain.
“Yes,” Shakaar said. “Right now, I just need a couple of volunteers to go down and meet with this contact in order to get more information about the plan. It’s a little risky-“
“Risky,” Dakhana warned. “Shakaar, we’re talking about Gallitep! There’s no way to even approach that camp; there’s nothing around for kellipates except booby-traps and Cardassian patrols, the air security has to be the tightest anywhere on the planet, and Gul Darhe’el is-“
“I’m talking about a meeting at a safe location not far from here,” Shakaar said. “I wouldn’t usually ask anyone to meet with a contact when I can’t vouch for his reliability. But like you said, Vaas, this is Gallitep. This person is supposed to have inside knowledge of the camp, and it could be the only way anyone could even-“
Kira spoke up before anyone else could. “I can go.”
Shakaar turned to her, hesitating. Kira was sure he was going to say no, but he surprised her. “Okay, I have one volunteer. Who else?”
“Well, I’ll go with her, of course,” Lupaza said. “So that means Furel is coming.”
Furel folded his arms and nodded without a word, his eyes reflecting hard determination. Kira wondered if he might have known someone who had been taken to the camp; almost everyone had relatives who had died or gone to work camps, but Gallitep was different.
“That should be fine,” Shakaar told them. “You’re to go and meet this person at the Artist’s Palette at six-bells tomorrow. Whoever he is, he’s asked that we perform some sort of favor in exchange for the information. I don’t know what the favor is, but-“
“But I’m sure we can handle it,” Furel finished. “We will handle it.”
Shakaar nodded. “If this information is legitimate, we can’t afford to be skeptical. Those people in that camp can’t afford it, either. This is their last chance, and it sounds like we don’t have much time.” His gaze panned around the room. “This is one that we have to get right, no matter the cost.”
He had no doubt that Gul Dukat was going to be furious when he delivered this piece of news, but Basso Tromac could scarcely conceal his persistent smile when he approached the prefect’s office. Of course, he would not have the satisfaction of saying “I told you so,” not to Dukat. Such a move would certainly mean a death sentence for anyone, especially for a Bajoran. But at least Basso would get to see the look on his face; that alone would be worth the outburst that was sure to follow.
“Gul,” Basso addressed the prefect as he entered the office, seating himself behind the enormous desk without being asked; his relationship with the prefect had at least become secure enough that he no longer had to wait for permission just to sit down in his presence. Dukat looked up from his filing computer, gave him a nod, and pressed his fingertips together, an expression of impatient expectation on his face.