“I must warn you that what I’m about to tell you is going to be very… disappointing,” Basso began.
Dukat looked weary. “Yes, you said as much this morning, when you asked to meet with me. Now suppose you get to the point, Basso.”
“Of course, sir. You know that I’ve tried to keep very careful tabs on the Kira family, though in recent years Taban has refused to accept any more of your generosity. He has become quite… bitter since his wife-ah, that is, since Meru passed on. I have done my best to keep track of the children, but they are older now, and they tend to-“
“Yes, I’m aware of the Bajoran child’s propensity to wander. I wonder if this story has an ending, Basso.”
Basso cleared his throat. “Of course, Gul. You see, the daughter, she-“
“Yes, Nerys. Beautiful girl.” He sighed. “What’s she, about fourteen now?”
“That’s correct, sir. She has been increasingly difficult to locate in the past few years, roaming and coming home only on very rare occasions.”
“But of course, you have ensured her safety,” Dukat said carefully.
Basso began to feel worried. “I have done my best, sir. It’s true that Bajoran children are allowed a certain amount of freedom, but certainly not to this extent. I wondered if she might have taken to running away, but when my people in the village spoke to Taban, he seemed entirely unconcerned for her safety. It seems that he… knew where she was. She-“
“So, she is safe,” Dukat said, appearing to relax somewhat.
“Well, yes, she seems to be safe, but-you see, sir, what I’m trying to tell you is that I have information to suggest that Nerys has joined the resistance movement.”
He risked a direct look at the prefect’s face. Surprisingly, Dukat did not look angry, exactly. He looked surprised, but not angry. Basso could not quite place his expression, but if he hadn’t known better, he’d have said the prefect looked… concerned.
“Only fourteen years old,” Dukat finally said. “After all I did for her as a child. I saw to it that she was sent to school-art school, as her mother wished, though apparently she didn’t take to it. I never would have predicted an outcome like this.” Dukat pushed himself up from his chair, folded his arms, wandered toward the back of the room. “Do you know where she is, Basso?”
“Sir, I don’t know yet, but I am doing my best to locate her. My contacts have suggested that she must be hiding in the Dahkur hills, with one of the cells in that general vicinity, but we can’t nail down which one. It seems possible that even her father doesn’t have that information.”
Dukat sighed again, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose.
Basso could not quite puzzle out the meaning behind the prefect’s reaction. Sad, fearful, strangely introspective-nothing like what he’d been expecting. He couldn’t help but feel cheated. Dukat spoke again after a moment, and Basso wondered if the Dukat he’d expected to see was about to make an appearance.
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“After all I did for her,” he repeated, but his voice was colder this time, as if he’d had time to contemplate the meaning of it all. “You must find her, Basso, and you must bring her to me.”
“Of course,” Basso said reluctantly, realizing that he should have expected this order. Dukat went on.
“And she must be completely unharmed, do you understand me? No excuses.”
“Un… harmed? Yes, yes… certainly,” Basso stammered, and left the room without being told to. He knew the prefect well enough to know when it was time to leave him, and anyway, he needed to get away so he could think. What had gone wrong? He’d been expecting an expression of horrified shock, followed by a lengthy tantrum and an order to kill the ungrateful girl, a standing order that would probably never be carried out. Instead, he’d gotten himself a great deal more work, he realized. Locating Kira Nerys, hiding somewhere in the Dahkur hills with one of any number of resistance cells, and bringing her to the prefect-alive-that was a tall order. A nearly impossible order. And Basso had no one but himself to blame for it.
Daul had traveled a considerable distance on foot; at least twenty kellipates. Such a long walk was rare, a feat he hadn’t undertaken since he was a child. Average Bajorans rarely went anywhere anymore, except perhaps to the nearest food ration lines, and Daul didn’t have to worry much about that, being one of the few who was still gainfully employed underneath the Cardassians. He had more to worry about from another Bajoran than he did from a Cardassian, for he had all the necessary credentials that could get him out of a sticky situation, if he happened to be stopped by a soldier. It was a mostly comfortable position to be in, though a fragile one. But this journey he had taken today was so far out of his comfort zone, he could scarcely fathom why he had chosen it-for he had come here voluntarily. This whole thing, this was his idea.
He was nearly to the place that was once called the Artist’s Palette. It was still called that by the locals, though there was nothing around to suggest its former moniker. At one time, the leaves and flowers on the trees here had been brightly varied in hue; purple and green and pink and orange, from the springtime throughout the fall. Now, the few trees that still produced leaves were uniformly clad in a dull, sickly yellow. The Cardassians had long ago leached the minerals from the surrounding soil, using a process that required an acidic chemical to retrieve the elements used in making certain types of polymers. Those polymers were essential in the construction of Cardassian dwellings. The elements were shipped to a facility on Pullock III where the support structure for the dwellings was manufactured, which were then shipped back to Bajor and combined with other parts, things made on many other worlds, using Bajoran raw materials to power the transport ships-ships built from Bajoran metals and fueled with Bajoran fuel. None of it made a bit of sense, really, when one started to consider it, but Daul supposed there wasn’t much he could do about it.
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Yes, there is. This thing he was doing right now.
Three people were approaching. Three Bajorans. A teenaged girl and a pair of adults, a man and a woman. Were these the people he was waiting for? The palms of his hands felt slick and cool. Perhaps these people were about to kill him for being a collaborator. Perhaps I deserve it.
“Are you here to speak to me about… Gallitep?” Daul said, hoping his voice didn’t betray his anxiousness.
The young girl turned to her companions. “Aren’t we supposed to have a code word?” she murmured, just loud enough for Daul to hear.
Daul remembered quickly-the man he had spoken to had suggested a code word. “I almost forgot,” he apologized. “Ah, rah-vu sum-ta.” It was Old Bajoran, a word that meant something almost like “child of night”-the classic poetical name for a cadge lupus.
“That’s right,” the older woman replied. “Okay, then. Tell us what we need to know.”
Daul cleared his throat and began to speak, his words tumbling out. “I suppose you are familiar with the setup of Gallitep, the physical characteristics of the camp-“
“Yes,” the man said. “It’s impossible to approach.”
“Except from inside, yes.”
“From inside?” This was the woman.
“Via transporter. I am to be taken to Gallitep in a few days, and I think there may be a way to transport a few more people in after me. There is a transporter code that will allow for it, and I think I may have gotten access to the correct code.”
“But…” The teenage girl looked at her companions. “How would we get access to a transporter?”
“You think you may have gotten access?” the man said, speaking over the teenager.
Daul held up his hands. “I believe I have,” he corrected himself. “It is risky, but I believe it can be done. There is an industrial transporter at the Bajoran Institute of Science, not far from here. This transporter could not only get people into Gallitep, it could get them out, as well. If someone who can operate a transporter was able to lock on to a large group of people, that person could perhaps transport them out of the camp, and possibly to a place of safety-“
“I don’t like all this perhaps and possibly that I’m hearing,” the man said.
“I only want to emphasize that there are risks,” Daul said. “But please believe me when I tell you that the goal is worth the risks. I have been inside the camp, and although I only saw a fraction of what I suspect goes on there, I didn’t have to see much to understand that Gallitep is the worst place Bajor has ever seen.”
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“We can do it,” the woman said confidently. “I’m sure we can.”
“Why… how did you get inside Gallitep-and then back out again?” the teenager asked.
“Shh,” the older woman shushed her. “It’s not important.”
“No,” Daul said, inexplicably wishing to be honest with these people. “It’s all right. I work at the science institute. I was conscripted to develop the computer system that runs the camp.”
The girl’s mouth hung open for a moment and then snapped shut. “Oh,” she replied, and then looked away.
“Yes, I helped to design it,” Daul went on, “and now, I will help put a stop to what it is intended to do. But I don’t suppose that will redeem me. Still, maybe I can at least look at myself in the mirror again.”
“Maybe,” the woman said, and though she tried to remain neutral, she could not mask the tightness in her voice. She despised him, he could see it on her, hear it in that single word.
“I have brought you an isolinear rod with more details. More importantly, this rod will allow you access to the Bajoran Institute of Science. You must wait until nightfall, when everyone has gone home, and you will be required to enter a code to deactivate the security system.”
The woman and her companions nodded, listening closely now. At least they could set aside their hate for something so important. At least there was that.
“I will be at the camp when it happens, working on the system. I will purposely delay the work so that I am still there when you arrive. At a given time, I will program the system to simulate a mining accident, which will force the Cardassian guards to corral the workers in a common place. That is where you will come in-someone will have to transport into the camp in order to create a lock-on target for the transporters. The transporters can be programmed to lock on to Bajoran targets only-the procedure is outlined on the datarod. When it is done, when the Bajorans are safe, I will initiate the computer system to destroy the camp. The self-destruct system should kill any remaining Cardassians. At that point, you will have to transport me out as well.” He said the last part hopefully.
The man nodded. “I think we can handle that,” he said.
Daul started to remark on the second part of the task, but then he remembered something. “I almost forgot,” he said. “You’ll need these.”
The three Bajorans looked curiously at the four little comm devices he produced, relics he’d stolen from a vault at the institute, where examples of Bajoran technology were stored for later study. “These are old, but they still work. They’ll be necessary for you to project a signal that can be locked on to by the transporter. You can also use them to communicate with each other, even over great distances. And they operate on frequencies the Cardassians haven’t monitored since the Militia was disbanded.”
“I know what a combadge is,” the man said, a little curtly. He took the devices and pocketed them.
Daul went on. “I suppose your leader told you that I am asking for a favor, in return for this information?”
The woman cleared her throat. “What is this favor, exactly?”
“I would do this myself,” Daul explained, “but I won’t have the opportunity before I leave, and I have no plans to return to the institute after I’m transported to Gallitep.” He hesitated, sensing impatience from the three nameless rebels, and he went on, “Do you have the ability to hack into a computer system, including high-security files?”
“I can hack into any system,” the woman assured him.
“Good. The rod will give you more detail. There are specific data files on the institute’s computer, and the data in question must be irreparably corrupted. No one can access it ever again. I assume that will not be a problem?”
The woman almost looked amused, which Daul took to be an affirmative reply.
The man raised his eyebrows. “That bad, is it?” he remarked.
Daul thought of the system Mora Pol would soon be implementing, thought of the cold, hard smile of Kalisi Reyar. “You’ve no idea,” he said.
Chapter 20
Ro was not immediately as adept at handling Bis’s warp shuttle as she had hoped. She wasn’t certain if she could successfully land the vessel, but the other alternative was to transport herself down to the surface of the gas giant’s lonely moon, with the expectation that she would have to transport herself back up when her task was completed. The prospect was a bit frightening, as she had never handled a transporter on her own, but she decided it was necessary. She could not afford to damage her vessel; warp ships were few and far between for Bajorans, after all.
With a brief recollection of the encouragement Bis had whispered before kissing her good-bye, Ro beamed herself directly to the moon’s surface near a cluster of life signs that she knew to be the tavern where she was to meet her mark. Her molecules having satisfactorily reassembled themselves, she squared her shoulders and entered the little building, advising herself not to come off like an inexperienced, gawking young girl; she had long heard tales of the Orion Syndicate, whose henchmen would kidnap women to be sold as slaves. They sounded no worse than the Cardassians to Ro, but she still wasn’t about to take any chances.
Still, she found it difficult not to stare at some of the people she encountered inside the dimly lit bar-people with brightly colored clothing, not to mention their skin and hair; people with appendages that seemed too long or too short; people with extra sensory equipment, or in some cases, not quite enough; people whose faces looked too smooth, or too lumpy. Ro had never dreamed there were so many different types of people in the galaxy. She knew there were more than just Bajorans and Cardassians, of course, but to be confronted with the reality of it was dizzying. While Bajor struggled, day after day, year after year, the rest of the universe continued to move, everyone carrying on with his or her own business, unaffected by what happened in the B’hava’el system.
Ro had taken a seat behind the bar, a long, black slab with rows and rows of tall colored bottles behind it. A man-Ro supposed it was a man-with bright blue skin and a ridge bisecting his hairless face approached her. “What’ll it be, girlie?”
Ro cleared her throat, looking around for Cardassians. She saw none, but she still wanted to keep as low a profile as she could. She wasn’t sure what to order. “Copal?” she said uncertainly.
“What’s that?” He turned an ear in her direction.
“I said copal-copal cider? Do you have it?”
The man wrinkled his nose. “Where you from, Miss?”
Ro looked around again, before she answered, quietly. “Bajor,” she muttered.
“Speak up!” the bartender told her.
Ro’s gaze froze when she saw someone in the back corner of the room, bald as the bartender, but with a swollen, misshapen head. His skin was an unfortunate shade of orange, his mouth full of teeth so sharp and crooked he could not close it all the way. He wore a strange headband with a couple of flaps that concealed the back part of his head, along with a dark-colored uniform trimmed with fur. He was picking at a plate of ghastly-looking food, and frequently using some kind of tool to remove bits of it from between the varied nooks and crannies of his teeth. But it was his ears that caught Ro’s attention; they were round, and cavernous, and gigantic. Bis had expressly instructed her to look for the person with the most prominent ears. This man’s ears were nothing if not prominent. She felt certain she’d just found DaiMon Gart.
“Excuse me,” Ro told the blue bartender.
“Oh, no you don’t,” the man said. “You’d better order something if you want to sit in here. Only paying customers cool their heels on my chairs, you got it?”
“Tell you what,” Ro whispered. “I have thirty leks that’re all yours, and you don’t even need to pour me a drink.”
The bartender glared at her with suspicion. “What’s the catch?”
Ro leaned in closer. “I want a look at the Ferengi’s tab.” The bartender hesitated, perhaps trying to convince himself that the request was harmless. “I just want to see it,” Ro assured him. “Nothing else.”
“Let’s see the money,” the bartender said.
Ro held up the brown metal hexagon she’d been clutching since she entered the bar, something she’d taken off the body of a dead Cardassian soldier months ago. Union currency was ugly, but it had considerable value in this part of space. Ro was glad she had decided to save it. “Do we have a deal?”
The bartender glanced past her, as if to make sure the Ferengi wasn’t listening. Then he reached toward the counter behind him and produced a padd, which he held facedown on the bar. Ro gave him the coin, and the blue hand flipped the padd over.
Ro found what she was looking for immediately. Gart’s food and drink order didn’t interest her, but the two strings of numbers in the upper right corner of the screen gave her an immediate surge of adrenaline: the transponder code for the daimon’s ship, and the number of its docking bay-both of which would be essential to pay for anything in a place like this, in lieu of hard currency. Ro had just enough time to commit the numbers to memory before the bartender said, “That’s enough,” and took back his padd.
Ro thanked the bartender and made for the exit, past the table where Gart was sitting. She hesitated to listen to what he was saying to the person seated opposite him, an alien woman with her scarlet hair in a complicated topknot.
“What a lot of clothing you’re wearing!” he exclaimed. “You know, I like that in a girl. Clothing. Especially the part where the clothing all comes off.” He laughed, and bits of what appeared to be worm violently dislodged themselves from his mouth as he did so. Ro shuddered.
“If my cook weren’t trying to poison me,” she overheard him say as she left the bar, “I’d never pay this much for a plate of gree worms. I tell you, he’s had it in for me since he left Ferenginar, but it’s his own fault for getting into the mess with the sub-nagus’s sister-“
Ro could no longer hear him as she found her way outside in the thin, cold atmosphere of the moon. It was dark here; apparently this part of the moon never entirely faced the sun, and the only light right now was from artificial sources posted between the shabby and sparse buildings that spread out from the spaceport. This moon’s sole purpose was as a stopover for travelers… especially those interested in conducting illicit business.
Ro made her way toward the spaceport’s secure hangar facility, constructed of enormous steel girders and smart-plastic dividers backed with force fields to separate the ships. Her first objective would be to break in and find the correct hangar where the Ferengi vessel was docked.
Minutes later, she found it, the massive, awkward vessel looking very much like the one she’d tried to steal years ago, the one that currently lay in pieces at the hangar on Valo II. Ro wasted no time in disabling the force field that would allow her access to the bay. Her next problem would be getting past the Ferengi ship’s security features, and while she knew the DaiMon was preoccupied, she knew nothing of the rest of the ship’s crew-he’d mentioned a cook, and Ro was nervous at the thought that there could be more than one or two other Ferengi aboard. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she’d have to deal with anyone other than Gart. Well, she only needed to get as far as the cargo bay.
She hitched up the satchel around her waist; it held her phaser, comm unit, and the small electrical device that she would soon be leaving inside the vessel. This is it, she told herself, and began working at overriding the controls to the drop ramp.
The minutes ticked by. Ro’s forehead was slippery with perspiration, but she could not spare a moment to wipe her eyes. How much longer would Gart be preoccupied? If he was successful in his pursuit of the alien woman at the bar, would he bring her back to the ship? It seemed to take forever before the drop ramp began to slowly descend, and Ro scampered inside, finding a shuttlebay much like the one where she had once docked her own raider. She’d walked the remnants of that long-ago ship several times with Bis only yesterday, memorizing its layout. In seconds, she was in the cargo bay, surrounded by massive nonmetallic containers filled with unprocessed uridium. She shivered as she removed the electrical discharge device from her satchel and programmed it to react directly with the impact of the locking clamps at Terok Nor. Then she aimed the bomb’s makeshift conducting spike at one of the containers, raised it over her head, and stabbed it through the casing.
She thought she heard voices coming from somewhere to the rear left of the cargo bay, and she quickly scuttled out the way she had come, not stopping to put the drop ramp back up as she ran, removing the comm device from her satchel and placing it in the pocket of her tunic. Once clear of the shipyards, she squeezed the device once, and, like magic, found herself once again on the transporter platform of the little warp ship.
I did it, she thought, and knew that Bis would be happy.
Odo usually had very little control of his senses while he regenerated, though certain external stimuli could rouse him from his state of near slumber. And as it was, something had forced him out of stasis on this particular night. Something was not right in the laboratory, though Odo had no concept of what it might be; he only knew that there was a sound coming from somewhere outside the door of Doctor Mora’s laboratory, and at this time of night, there should be no sounds at all. He remained a liquid, but he poised himself to be ready to morph into something else if he needed to, though he wasn’t sure what that thing might be.
Someone had entered the laboratory. Though the lights were still off, Odo could make out the shape of a humanoid-a Bajoran, he thought. This person looked more like Doctor Mora than like Doctor Yopal and the others, but there was something different about him. Odo wasn’t sure what it was right away, but then it somehow dawned on him. This person was a female. This was a Bajoran female, something he’d not seen before. The female was touching Mora’s computer. Odo wanted very much to get out of the tank and have a closer look, but he had the distinct sense that she was not supposed to be in here. He wondered what to do, and wished Mora would come, but it was nighttime; Mora would not return until the morning.
“Gantt!” the person said, and Odo wondered who she was talking to. The sound of her voice was like nothing he’d ever heard before. She did not sound like the Cardassian women, and she certainly didn’t sound like Doctor Mora.
“Mobara found it, down the hall,” said another voice, coming from somewhere outside. “It’s done. We need to get to the transporter-it’s in the lower level.”
“Come in here and look at this,” the female in Doctor Mora’s laboratory called. “I think this is a Bajoran’s laboratory.”
“Never mind that,” the other person said. “We need to get out of here.”
“Yes, but-“
“Kira, we have to go, now!”
“I’m coming,” she said, and left the room.
Odo felt relieved that the intruders were going, but he also felt something else, too. He felt an oddly placed regret, for the female had made him terrifically curious-curious in a way he wasn’t entirely familiar with. He wanted to know why they had been here, what they were doing. He was too restless to go back into his resting state now, and he contemplated his feelings. He considered that some part of him wished the female hadn’t gone quite so soon. He regretted not emerging from the tank to speak to her, though he knew he shouldn’t have done that, and it was certainly best that he hadn’t. But there was something about her, the novelty of her appearance, her voice-if he couldn’t have spoken to her, he wished he could at least have looked at her just a little while longer.
Daul had been seated inside the cramped little outbuilding, situated along the vast, stretching footbridge strung across the center of the open-pit duranium mine, for well over three hours now. That was almost twice as long as it should have taken him to complete his task, but the Cardassians didn’t know that-at least, Daul hoped they didn’t.
The odd file clerk had accompanied him for most of the day, but just under an hour ago, Marritza had explained that he had to get back to his office, and had placed a much less agreeable Cardassian guard in charge of looking after him. The guard had made it abundantly clear that he resented the assignment, glaring at Daul from the only other seat in the little room where the massive computer was housed. But Daul was relieved at the changing of his guard, for he felt confident that this sentry would give him far less trouble than the more observant file clerk would have.
From time to time, the guard shifted impatiently in his seat and inquired as to how much longer Daul was going to take, and Daul’s reply was always the same: “I’m not sure, but I don’t think much longer.”
Finally, the surly Cardassian made an attempt at conversation. “Just what is it that you’re doing here, anyway?”
“I’m reassessing the mine’s reserve, and reprogramming the system’s algorithm to ignore any veins of duridium with inferior percentage extraction. Eventually, the AI will cease drilling when viable duridium reaches 10 percent or less.”
“Oh,” the guard said, his expression confirming that he didn’t know what Daul was talking about. This guard apparently had little understanding of how the mine operated; he was only here to force the Bajorans to work. To Daul’s great relief, the guard removed the headset he was wearing-the set which enabled him to hear what Daul was saying. He rubbed his head, and held the set idly in his lap.
Daul glanced at the time displayed on his padd. The resistance outfit had been instructed to transport several of their operatives into a specific mine location in approximately five minutes. Daul had no idea if the terrorists really had the capacity to do all that would be required of them for this undertaking; he had left the most explicit instructions he could conceive of, but even so, his own knowledge of transporter operation was anemic-especially considering the transporter in question was Cardassian technology, and not Bajoran. Still, Daul was an intelligent man, a resourceful man-and he believed the plan was feasible. He had to believe in it.
Sneaking a glance at the bored Cardassian sentry, Daul began to tap into the networked security program. It was lucky the file clerk was not here, for he was obviously a man who knew his way around the facility’s computer system and would probably have caught Daul in the act of what he was about to do. Struggling to maintain an aura of calm, he shut down the beam-shield that would prevent unauthorized travelers from transporting in or out of the facility. His task done, he switched back to the AI, thinking it had gone much easier than he would have expected.
He tapped away at the interface, when suddenly, the console began to blink, rattling a line of ominous characters.
WARNING. UNAUTHORIZED SECURITY SHUTDOWN. ENTER AUTHORIZATION CODE FOR THIS ACTION OR SHUTDOWN WILL BE CANCLED IN SIXTY SECONDS.
It took the Cardassian a moment to notice the blinking screen. He shouted something, but Daul couldn’t hear him without his headset. Daul scrambled to his feet, but the guard caught him by the arm, still screaming.
Daul tried to writhe out of the Cardassian’s grip, but it was impossible. Instead, he lunged forward suddenly, bringing the big man with him as the two crashed into the computer console. The sturdy computer survived the impact, but Daul’s ears were ringing from a sharp blow to his chin. His headset fell off somewhere, and Daul could only hear the tremendous, grinding noise from the mine below him.
The screen still flashed: FORTY SECONDS
The Cardassian stood up and pointed his phaser straight at Daul. He spoke into his comcuff, but without his headset, his report would not be heard over the cacophony of the mining facility. Daul threw open the door and scrambled out onto the catwalk. He headed in the direction of the spiraling gravel road that would take him straight down into the belly of the pit, clinging to his feeble hope that he would somehow manage to get past the guards and find his way to where the workers would be convened, and with luck, transported out.
The guard behind him hesitated long enough to fire his phaser, and missed. He gave chase once more, easily gaining on the narrow, swaying bridge, and just as he was about to close in on Daul, the Bajoran doubled back and headed straight for the guard, ramming his head directly into the other man’s armored chest. Unhurt but startled, the Cardassian almost lost his footing, and clung to the sides of the unwieldy structure that held him. The bridge swayed more dangerously than ever. Daul grabbed for his phaser pistol, and almost had it, but the Cardassian’s grip was too strong for him.