Daul made a quick decision. The computer behind him was the primary server for all systems in the facility. It would have to be destroyed before the security shutdown request could be canceled. With a single burst of adrenaline, he slammed the Cardassian’s arm backward and pulled the trigger, aiming straight for the metal cube that housed the AI.
The Cardassian flung his arm back the other way, but not before a shower of sparks lit up the AI station behind them. The little structure shuddered and the catwalk with it, the station pulling away from the narrow footbridge on its legs of crisscrossed scaffolding, tottering backward. In the moments it took to fall across the width of the chasm, before it crashed into the side of the mine, rolling down the steep walls of the pit and exploding somewhere near the bottom, Daul realized that he had not been able to program the system to self-destruct, as he had originally planned. The Cardassian guards would live; Gul Darhe’el would live. It was his last thought, as the guard with whom he still wrestled on the dangerously swaying walkway finally got his phaser pointed in the intended direction, and Daul received a quick, indiscernible blast, full in the chest. He didn’t feel a thing.
Kira compulsively looked back at the door of the basement transporter room. Though she knew they were alone here, that Furel was outside waiting to give a signal if anything went wrong, it was terrifying to be inside an actual Cardassian facility. The only missions she’d been part of until now had been attacks from outside facilities or ships; this was the first time she could remember actually entering Cardassian domain, and it made her feel uncomfortably claustrophobic. She couldn’t imagine how she was going to feel when she was inside Gallitep. She would never have admitted it, but she was having second thoughts.
“I think I’ve got it,” Mobara said from behind the transporter console. “The scientist said you would be beamed directly into the facility if I use these coordinates; you’ll close your eyes, open them, and find yourself standing somewhere in the Gallitep mine.”
“I think we all understand the basic concept,” Shakaar said wryly.
Kira held her breath. What if Mobara had the coordinates wrong, and she were somehow transported into the solid rock that surrounded the open mine? The thought was beyond horrifying. Kira trusted Mobara’s expertise, and she knew that transporter technology had been used safely by the Cardassians for decades, at least. But still… it was impossible not to be afraid.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Gantt said to Nerys.
“Of course I am,” she said fiercely, terrified.
Lupaza, who stood close to Kira, reached out to grab her hand. “You’ll do fine, Nerys,” the older woman assured her, but Kira met Shakaar’s eyes for a moment and saw that he wasn’t so sure he should have agreed to let her come along.
Shakaar stepped onto the transporter platform. “I stand here?” he asked. Like the rest of them, he’d never used a transporter in his life.
“That’s right,” Mobara told him.
Lupaza stepped up after him, along with Kira and Gantt. The rest of their strike team would be transported immediately after them, slightly higher in the mine so that they could deal with the guards. There were ten from Shakaar’s cell in all-not as many as Daul had requested in his detailed instructions, but several of their group were already on assignment in Ilivia with another cell when Daul had contacted Shakaar, and they were out of reach. Ten would have to be enough.
“Now, just remember,” Shakaar told them all. “We get inside, make sure the Bajorans are all in a central location, kill any hostiles we find, and then we contact Mobara with these.” He held up one of the comm devices the scientist had given to Furel. Kira fingered hers nervously; it was pinned to her tunic, and she feared she was going to lose it. She unpinned the small oval of metal and slipped it in her pocket.
“Is everyone ready?” Mobara called out, and Shakaar gave a nod.
“See you on the other side,” Gantt said, and Kira shut her eyes tightly.
Lenaris Jau was monitoring one of the dozens of subterranean smelters at Gallitep, so weary that he could scarcely keep his head above his shoulders. So many of the sick workers had died lately, and those who were not affected by disease had to pick up the slack, working nearly round the clock. Jau had no idea how long it had been since he’d slept. Exhaustion and the darkness of the underground tunnels in the mine tended to distort his sense of time. It could have been three hours, it could have been three days. It didn’t really matter.
Jau wondered why the number of workers had been dwindling lately. The dead were usually replaced, but lately they had not been. He wondered why the sick workers were no longer being treated. Those who died were unceremoniously dragged from the mines, to be taken to some undisclosed location for disposal, though it was not unusual for their corpses to remain where they had fallen for up to three days, swelling and stinking in the baking sun. The numbers of dead seemed to have escalated quite dramatically lately. Was it only yesterday that over three dozen people had died, in a single day? There were rumors that Darhe’el was planning to shut down the camp, which would not bode well for the workers here. Jau thought he would walk with the Prophets soon, and mostly, he was too weary to care-if anything, death would be a welcome release from the horrors of this place.
Jau had seen the most unspeakable things of his life happen in this place. He had seen plenty of tunnels cave in, had listened to the screams of those left to suffocate inside. He had seen scarcely recognizable corpses retrieved from the vats of chemicals used to separate the rock from the valuable minerals, and even worse, he’d seen the gruesome-looking survivors from similar accidents, forced to go back to work with no hair, no skin-even no eyelids. He’d heard the groans and wails of people who were “treated” in the camp infirmary, more like a torture chamber or the laboratory of a mad scientist, bent on using live subjects. He’d seen dozens of people crippled from injuries sustained after stumbling down the steeper precipices at the very top of the mine. He’d seen people beaten within an inch of their lives for what Gul Darhe’el perceived as insubordination. But Jau was numb to it, mostly. At least, as much as he could have hoped for.
Jau adjusted the smelter’s temperature, ignoring the echoing groans and wails all around him. He drew his forearm over his brow, wiping the sweat away, when he noticed that the system of conveyor belts that delivered the ore to the smelter had stopped, and the overwhelming noise that usually accompanied it had ceased as well. It took his sluggish mind a moment to register what was going on, and he looked around, his heart fluttering. Something must have gone wrong with the artificial intelligence system, though in all his time at Gallitep, Jau could not remember that happening, even once. No, it had not happened since the accident, which had occurred before Jau had been brought here. An alarm began to tear through the hollow caverns of the mines, indicating a systems failure-the mine was to be evacuated at once. Jau’s breath froze in his lungs; was this going to be Darhe’el’s method of disposing of him, and everyone else here?
Before he could think further on it, he was instantly swept up in a crush of panicking Bajorans. Jau began to run, drawing on reserves he didn’t know he had, pushing and stumbling until he found himself stepping out onto a wide dirt road that curled down from the very top of the pit all the way down here, just a few linnipates from the bottom. He was immediately aware of the heat-more than just the heat from the hot, midday sun that he was accustomed to; it was from a fire, somewhere not far below him. Something burned and scorched with chemical brightness at the base of the pit, sending up great plumes of toxic smoke. Jau began to scramble up the gravel road, trying to get away from the flames below him, but he encountered so many confused Bajorans, he could not get far. The road was packed with people, crying out in panic. Finally, Jau came to the road’s widest point, and realized he could go no farther. He would have to wait for the crowd to thin out, which he suspected would not happen before they were all murdered here, en masse-for it seemed logical to Jau that this was really it-Darhe’el’s final solution had come.
He looked up once, panned the miserable and frightened faces of the crowd that surrounded him, and did a double take. There was a girl standing there, a Bajoran, and he could have sworn that she wasn’t there before. This girl did not look like she belonged here. She looked like one of the younger ones that might have been brought in many months ago, but Jau wasn’t aware of any new workers coming in for some time. And there was something else about her too… There was a bulge at her hip, underneath her tunic, and Jau felt certain he knew what it was-this girl carried a phaser. She caught his eye and moved closer to him, shoving her way through the tight press of gangly limbs and exposed rib cages, bruised beneath too-tight skin.
“Don’t worry,” she said to him, and suddenly, he did worry-he found he still had the capacity to worry, even after feeling mostly nothing for such a very long time.
Ro had not expected to feel so conflicted as she warped back to Valo II. She had been on and off the Ferengi freighter in less than ten minutes; the entire operation really had been as easy as Bis had said it would be. She kept reminding herself of the wonderful, risky, and brave thing she had just done, but the thoughts were not quite resonating within her, and she was eager to find Bis and hear his reassurances.
Still wary of landing the valuable warp ship on her own, she left it in orbit of Valo II, hoping that Bis would be able to retrieve it later. But she could not immediately find him once she materialized on the planet’s surface. He had implied that he would meet her near the landing field when she returned, but she was back much faster than expected, and she did not know where he could be. She went to his house, but he wasn’t there, so she wandered the dusty, tightly packed village, asking those people who bothered to look up as she walked by. It was in the center of the crowded town that she encountered Keeve Falor, the old politician she’d met those years ago with Bram. She did a double take as he passed, and he stopped to regard her.
“You look familiar to me,” the man said, stepping back as he tried to place her.
“I’m Ro Laren,” she said, feeling suddenly as sulky as her younger self.
“The little girl from Jo’kala?” Keeve mused. “Is that right. What are you doing here?”
“I’m helping Bis with something,” Ro said. “Akhere Bis.”
Keeve immediately looked alarmed. “Helping Bis!” he exclaimed. “Tell me he hasn’t recruited you for that foolishness with the alien ship?”
Ro wasn’t sure if Keeve was talking about the plan she had just undertaken, but since he seemed not to approve, she supposed she’d better not confirm her involvement. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to help him,” she lied.
“Prophets help us,” Keeve said. “Bis is young and reckless-he doesn’t understand the great cost that would be suffered by destroying Terok Nor. Thousands of Bajoran lives… It simply doesn’t make sense, to sacrifice what we are trying to preserve.”
“If those lives buy millions more, maybe the sacrifice is worth it.”
“Is that how your resistance is going to save Bajor?” Keeve asked in disgust. “Using arithmetic to decide who lives, and who dies? That isn’t what the Prophets teach us.”
Ro felt a flash of anger at the sanctimonious mention of the Prophets. “At least… at least it would be doing something to fight the Cardassians, instead of hunkering down on this world like a coward, hiding here where they won’t trouble you, and letting them do as they please with Bajor!”
Keeve studied her a moment. If he was angry, she didn’t see it; he only looked tired and sad. “Perhaps to you, I seem a coward,” he said, after a moment. “But I know that when the people on this world still listened to my advice, we were learning things that could have brought the Federation in to aid us in our struggle. We had warp vessels, we had trade relations with other worlds. But that is changing, and the people here have begun to grow impatient. We’ve lost most of our warp ships, and we have to rely on charity from others within this system for our very survival. We’ve fallen out of favor with the Federation, especially since the unfortunate incident that occurred on Valo VI. The Federation once had a lot of questions about what that little group might have been doing there, and I suppose now they have much less of a chance of ever finding out.” He looked at her very pointedly when he said it, and Ro felt a strange thing, a thing she thought might be guilt.
Troubled, Ro looked past Keeve to see that Bis was approaching her, his face unable to contain its excitement. Sensing that Ro was done with him, or wishing to avoid confrontation with Bis, Keeve moved on down the road, toward his own residence.
“Is it done?” Bis asked her eagerly, and Ro gave him a single nod, her head feeling heavy. This time, she did not respond when he grabbed her tightly, lifting her nearly off her feet.
“We have to celebrate,” Bis said. “Come with me, we’ll have spring wine at my friend Lino’s house.” He gestured toward a dwelling not far from where they stood.
“We did a good thing, didn’t we?” Ro said.
“We did a brilliant thing,” he said. He laughed out loud, a picture of jubilation.
“And… the people on the station…”
“What people?” Bis said, beginning to walk.
“The Bajorans,” she said. “They’ll… walk with the Prophets? Is that what you believe?”
Bis looked puzzled. “That’s right,” he said, but his voice sounded a little less excited now. He stopped walking. “Come on, Laren. Just think. We’re going to be responsible for killing Gul Dukat! Gul Dukat and Kubus Oak, all their henchmen. We’re going to destroy Terok Nor! Do you have any idea of the significance of it?”
“Yes, I know,” Ro said. “But Keeve Falor just told me-“
“Forget Keeve Falor!” Bis said, and he sounded angry now. “Just wait-once Terok Nor is really gone, once the prefect is dead-Keeve and the others will see that I was right.”
“Of course,” Ro said. She thought of the botched mission on Jo’kala, her last. She’d been so sure the others would see that she was right-but she hadn’t been.
“I left the ship in orbit,” she told him.
“That’s for the best,” Bis told her. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow, when I take you back to Jeraddo.”
Ro swallowed. Back to Jeraddo? “Right,” she said, feeling her chest tighten.
Bis’s friends Lino and Hintasi were both inside a little house with a dirt floor, one nearly identical to Bis’s, but older and smaller. It was mostly dark inside, with dirty and mildewed fabric covering the open windows. A pile of blankets was heaped in a corner, making do for a bed. There were several bottles of spring wine on the floor where Lino and Hintasi were sitting, and they saluted with a bottle as Ro entered, shouting their congratulations and pushing a bottle into her hands. She was only too happy to drink it, thinking her nerves deserved it.
She took a sip, wanting to make it last, but she found herself drinking deeply, thirsty for the effect. “I hope it was worth it,” she said, coming up for air. She sat on the floor, took another drink.
“It’s worth it,” Bis assured her. “I can’t think of a better reason to finish off the last of my father’s spring wine. The last time we drank a bottle was-“
“No, I mean-all of it. I mean-what if the Cardassians just send another prefect? What if they just build another station? What if it’s all just-“
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lino interrupted.
“Why is it ridiculous?” Ro asked, and as she said it, she began to think, to really think, about what she’d done. To the Cardassians, Bajor was just one little planet. Killing the prefect might not matter much to them at all. Certainly, the destruction of Terok Nor would mean a setback, but perhaps their resources were truly infinite. Perhaps there were exponentially more of them than there were Bajorans. Ro suddenly recognized that maybe Keeve Falor had been right, all those years ago when he’d sent her on the cautious reconnaissance mission; maybe gathering information about the Cardassians before fighting them was the better approach, after all.
“Come on, Laren,” Bis said, starting to sound a little upset. “Don’t you remember what you said all those years ago? About just killing the Cardassians on Valo VI? And then you did it! You shot them, all by yourself. Even though I would have been scared to death, I never would have been able to-“
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Ro interupted. “I didn’t have to kill them. I could have gotten out of there before they would have seen me, I could have called for Bram, but I compromised the mission, and I killed them anyway.” She took another deep drink from the bottle. “I thought… I thought if I killed him… I’d never have another nightmare, I’d stop feeling so terrible about what happened to my father, but it made no difference. None!” She dropped the empty bottle on the dirt floor, fighting tears.
No one spoke for a moment. “Laren,” Lino finally said. “I think I understand how you feel. But those Bajorans on the station, they’ll walk with the Prophets soon, can’t you see that? And-“
“How comforting it must be for you!” Ro interrupted. “To have something to believe in, to have something to justify what we just did. What I just did!” She tried to reach for another bottle, but thought better of it. The wine had hit her fast.
“I want to be alone for a while,” she announced, and pushed herself up off the floor. She stormed out of the little house, a strange, buried part of her almost wishing that Bis would follow her, but he let her go.
Chapter 21
Kira fought down the panic that threatened to overtake her-for it appeared that something had gone very wrong. The Bajoran scientist who had briefed the Shakaar about this operation had neglected to mention anything about the burning wreckage that was currently at the base of the pit. He had indicated that the Bajorans would be corralled by the Cardassian guards, but instead, Kira was confronted with a brace of panicking people, pushing at the slowly moving queue that spread out across the entire perimeter of the pit, the line of Bajorans undulating in an upward direction. But Kira needed to bring them all in together, and she did not know how four people could possibly round up all these hysterical wretches in one central location. Hysterical and terrible in their weakness, their sickness, their injuries and too-thin bodies. There were no Cardassians to be seen, but she heard phaser fire and screams coming from some of the upper tunnels. Gallitep was a nightmare, worse than she’d imagined.
She caught the eye of a man who seemed to have a recognizable degree of lucidity, and she moved closer to him. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “Help is here. I need someone to help me gather everyone together in a central location. Can you do that?”
The man, who Nerys quickly realized could not be more than a few years older than she was, cleared his throat with difficulty. “I can try,” he croaked. “Someone needs to tell them to calm down, or people are going to start shoving each other off the paths and we’ll all wind up down there.” He nodded toward the pit, where the flames from the crashed building were finally dying down, its three broken and twisted legs crookedly awry, but the smoke was thick, and many people were beginning to hack and cough.
Nerys began to shout, her eyes streaming from the chemical smoke below. “People, people! Please, try to calm down!” Her voice was lost over the crying and shouting, and the man did his best to shout along with her, until the people nearest them began at last to still.
“We’ve come to help!” Kira shouted, though she didn’t know if her voice could be heard. Above her, she could see Gantt, attempting to calm down another small group that surrounded him on an even narrower road than the one where she stood. She hoped Shakaar was with him. She couldn’t see Lupaza anywhere.
“We need to get these people together in one place,” Kira told the man urgently. “Is there any way-“
“One of the larger tunnels,” the man replied. “The one I just came from goes back far enough to get everyone inside.”
“Let’s do it,” Kira said. The smoke was getting even thicker now.
“They may be reluctant,” he warned her, beginning to cough. “It was in one of the tunnels that the accident happened a few years ago-the one that caused so many to become sick.”
“We’ll have to convince them,” Kira said, and began to beckon to those closest to her, while the young man led them back in the direction of the tunnel. Kira saw the signs of protest, but she was firm. “Please!” she insisted. “You have to listen to me! We’re going to get you out of here, but you have to trust me, just follow him-” She pointed to her nameless assistant, and wormed her way through the people to get to Gantt, to tell him what was happening.
“Gantt!” she screamed, and after a few more shouts he finally saw her through the smoke, and looked down in her direction. She could not get to him without walking the full rotation of the circular road, at least a kellipate. “Get them down here! This way! If you see any of the others, tell them-there’s a big tunnel down here where we can herd them all together and transport them out!”
“Transport us out?” someone cried, and many more people began to talk at once, shouting back and forth in an excited, squabbling rumble, through the coughing and choking from the smoke. “Are we being transported out?” “Where are we going?” “Who is taking us there?” “Where are the Cardassians?”
“We’re taking you someplace safe!” Kira shouted, and repeated the words again and again until they began to spread throughout the crowd, hopefully to those on the other side of the pit. Kira could no longer see them through the haze, though it seemed to be clearing-either that, or she was getting used to it.
The process of herding everyone into the tunnel was slow and painstaking, and many people continued to resist, trying to move in the opposite direction and holding up progress, but Kira had help from others who apparently felt that the chance to get out, no matter how slim, trumped their fear of some kind of trick. By the time Kira entered the black, sweltering tunnel behind the enormous crowd of people, she began to have second thoughts. Not only was it hot and dark in here, but the smoke had made it almost impossible to breathe. By the time everyone could get to the tunnel, many of them might suffocate.
But there was no time to reformulate the plan; there were a hundred things or more that could go wrong. Kira still had no idea what had happened to Shakaar and Lupaza, nor any of the others who had been transported after her, although she thought she could hear phaser fire above her. She saw no guards, and feared they might have all been transported into the offices above, only to come back at any moment-or worse, bring in reinforcements to put a stop to the escape. Worse yet, there was the possibility that Mobara and Furel, who were back at the Institute of Science, had been caught at the industrial transporter. Then they would all be trapped here with no other means of getting out.
People in the back of the tunnel were coughing and crying. “I can’t breathe!” shouted a woman. “Get us out of here, please!”
Standing at the mouth of the tunnel, Kira recognized Lupaza coming closer with more people. “Lupaza!” Kira cried out. “We have to get these people out of here, quickly! It’s going to take too much time to get everyone together, we’ll have to begin transporting them now!”
Lupaza turned to regard the long rope of people still advancing toward the tunnel through the thinning smoke, listened to those at the back of the cavern who cried out in the claustrophobic darkness, and gave a quick nod. She pressed her comm device.
“Mobara, it’s Lupaza! I’m here with Nerys-we have to start transporting people out right away.”
“How many would you estimate are with you?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “Can’t you just lock on to our signals and get as many out as you can?”
“I think so,” he said. “I hope so,” he added. “I don’t know the first thing about what this transporter beam is capable of, but I’ll widen it to its full distance capacity and see where that gets us.”
Kira shut her eyes tightly and felt a distinctive pins-and-needles sensation in her limbs and torso. When she opened her eyes, she was somewhere else; somewhere in the Dahkur woods-and she was surrounded by dozens of bewildered-looking people, malnourished, injured, coughing, and crying-and then muttering and exclaiming their amazement over what had just happened.
“Wait!” someone standing near Kira cried out. “Where’s Tynara?”
“Tynara will be here!” Kira shouted. “Please, remain calm, everyone. Just stay here with me, the rest will be here soon.” She hoped it was true.
Many people had now fallen to their knees, shouting with joy, others were crying, though Kira couldn’t tell if it was from fear or jubilation. Some still appeared to be in a daze, rubbing their faces in confusion or simply staring up at the trees as if they’d forgotten what trees looked like. Many were calling out for missing family and friends, searching for people who were not here yet-and who might not ever come, Kira thought, for even if Shakaar and the others made it with the rest of the survivors, plenty of Bajorans must have died today, either as a result of the accident that had caused the fire, or from having been too close to fleeing Cardassian guards who haunted the upper reaches of the mine.
After what seemed like a very long time, Gantt and Shakaar arrived with a smaller group of people.
“Did we get everyone out?” Kira pressed Shakaar.
“As many as we could see,” he told her, his tone hasty and dismissive, looking among the faces for the rest of his cell. Kira recognized others from the Shakaar cell in the growing, noisy crowd, Dakahna and Ornak and the young couple from outside Tamulna who had just joined the cell, but two were still missing, and Shakaar was trying to get clear word from Mobara regarding what had happened to them.
“Edon,” Lupaza prompted him, “we need to get these people to safety.”
Kira interrupted. “The scientist,” she said. “What about him? Mobara is supposed to…”
“Nerys,” Lupaza said gently, “the scientist is gone. He was in the structure when it fell from the suspension bridge above us.”
Kira shook her head. “But…” she said, “you can’t be sure…”
Gantt put his hand on her shoulder. “He’s gone,” he told her. “Now, we’ve got to get these people out of here. We’d better let Mobara know to get him and Furel back to the camp, and we’ve got to get these people somewhere safe.”
Swallowing hard, Kira nodded.
Valo II had grown dark, the people in the tents and rotted wood huts and eroding brick houses all gone to sleep. Ro knew that somewhere, Bis was probably looking for her by now.
Ro made her way to the landing field on Valo II, where the Ferengi freighter lay scattered in pieces. But she knew the comm was still functional, the comm that Bis and his friends had used to formulate their careful plan-the plan that she was now about to sabotage.
She managed to contact DaiMon Gart quite easily; Ro still recalled the comm code she’d seen on his bar tab. His face appeared on the tiny screen alongside the aural device. “DaiMon Gart,” she shouted, hoping the universal translator was still working.
“Who are you?” the Ferengi DaiMon said gruffly.
“I’m a… terrorist, DaiMon Gart. I wanted to let you know that… I put a bomb on your ship.”
The Ferengi’s eyes suddenly went wide with fear, and he began to shriek. “What?” he cried. “Why would you have done such a thing? I’m an honest man! Is this about the ion coil assemblies? Because they were in perfectly good shape when I sold them, I assure you!”
“No… it’s not… it’s… look, DaiMon Gart, you have to eject your cargo, now, or it’s going to react with the bomb and you’ll never see another… ion coil assembly… or anything else… ever again!”
The man stopped screaming, and looked suspicious. “Eject my cargo? Are you mad? Do you have any idea how much latinum I’m going to be making with this run?”
“Which is more important to you, DaiMon-latinum, or your life?”
The Ferengi considered for what Ro thought was an absurdly long time before finally making his decision. “My life,” he said grudgingly.
“Then you’re going to have to eject your cargo, DaiMon. I’m sorry. If you don’t believe me, you can send someone back there to confirm that there’s a device in the bay, but I’m not sure I’d advise tampering with it. The men who built it were a bit on the amateur side.”
The DaiMon appeared to consider this for a moment. “I believe you,” he said. “You’ve got an… honest face.” He said the last part with clear revulsion. He muttered to himself for a moment, looking over his control panel. “Yes,” he said, “you’re telling the truth, aren’t you? My scans show an object of unidentified origin and composition in the cargo bay…” He looked positively miserable. “Why would you do this to me?” he cried.