OCCUPATION DAY TWENTY
2328 (Terran Calendar)
Epilogue
The darkness opened up for him, just once, a rush of painful white light flooding into his sensorium. Everything about Darrah ached, as if he had been taken at both ends and twisted like wire. Among the blurs there was a face framed with dark hair, a pleasant face with kind eyes.
“Wenna?” Speaking came hard, but he managed it. He tried to raise a hand to touch her face, but he couldn’t get it off the bed. She reached down and took it, her smooth skin against his rough, scarred flesh.
“My name’s Gwen, actually,” she said, in that not-quite-Hedrikspool accent. “Just rest, Mace. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”
He had been dreaming, or something close to it. Fires, he remembered. The smell of burning. And dry, rough skin being drawn across his body, serpents massing in the dark. He blinked the motes of dream-thought away, concentrating on the woman. Part of her face seemed pinker than the rest, as if she’d been sunburned. He slowly remembered her in the hangar, the burns there from a phaser’s near hit. She looked much better. He wanted to tell her that. But something about her was wrong. He couldn’t place it.
The hangar—that seemed like only moments ago. Like the ship, like Syjin, like the explosion. Only moments ago. “How…long?” Darrah labored to make the shape of each word.
Gwen’s pretty face clouded, and the darkness started to roll back over him. “Just rest,” she repeated.
Darrah didn’t want to, but the choice was taken from him. He fell away into the black.
He had no sense of intervening time, just disjointed images, sounds, sensations. When all these finally stitched themselves together, he awoke in the medical center of the Starfleet ship, surrounded by busy people in white jackets. They ministered to him for a while and pronounced him well.
A severe-looking Andorian brought him to a bowed room where one wall was a series of portals looking out over the disk of the starship’s primary hull, over a cluster of warp nacelles and out to the static blackness of space. The void reminded Darrah a little too much of the darkness that had claimed him, and he sat with his back to it. He didn’t understand the shape and meaning of the rank sigils worn by the blue-skinned woman. She told him her name was sh’Sena. She sat across from him with a human male who tried to look friendly, watching. The Andorian dipped her head forward in that way that her species did, so that the antennae rising from her skull were trained upon Darrah, sensing him. She told him this was a debriefing, but he had given enough interrogations in his life to know when he was on the wrong end of one.
After a while, after a few questions too many, he began to get irritable. “I’m tired of giving you answers and getting nothing back,” he snapped. “I want you to do some talking now.” He pulled at the collar of the nondescript coverall garment they had given him to wear. It was itchy against his flesh, rubbing the dots of scar tissue from the dozens of small lacerations he had suffered aboard Syjin’s dying ship. His hand kept falling to the place on his hip where his phaser would have been; they had let him keep only his earring, although it was tarnished and in need of some repair. He pitched forward suddenly, startling the human. “I’ve told you what happened on Bajor, now what are you going to do about it?”
“That’s not up to me,” said sh’Sena.
“Then, who is it up to?” he demanded.
A door slid open and another human entered. He was of average height, athletic, but he carried himself with a poise that Darrah noted immediately. The reactions of the other Starfleet officers confirmed it. This was the commander.
“I’m Captain Mark Jameson,” he explained. “Mr. Darrah, you have to understand the circumstances. Things have moved very quickly.”
Mace was about to argue when a horrible thought struck him. He swallowed hard. “How long? How long was I out for?”
Jameson frowned. “By Bajoran reckoning? You were unconscious for twenty days.”
A choke of air caught in his throat. Like only moments ago.“Where…where are we now?”
“Still in the Bajor Sector. We’ve been monitoring the situation on your home planet, gathering information and tracking signals. As I said, things have moved quickly while you were recovering.”
Darrah felt sick. What does he mean?He was gripped with sudden terror that Bajor had somehow been destroyed, the planet flashed to atoms by some catastrophe.
“You do deserve answers,” said the captain, getting to his feet. The other two officers followed him to the door.
“These people will try to give them to you, if they can.”
As Jameson and the others left, two women entered the room. Alla and Wenna. But not.
“I’m Lieutenant Alynna Nechayev,” said the blond woman. “You’ve already met Gwen Jones.” She nodded to the dark-haired girl.
Jones placed a steaming cup in front of him. “Dekatea, from the replicators. It’s not quite the real thing, but I thought you’d like it.”
“Thanks.” He sipped the drink; she was correct. Darrah blinked, and rubbed the ridges on his nose with his index finger. “You both look…weird without them.”
Nechayev spread her hands as she sat. “This is who we really are.”
Darrah nodded, but inwardly he doubted the woman would ever really show him that. She wasn’t like Jones, all close to the surface. Nechayev was one of those people who sank into their own depths, hiding almost all of themselves.
“How are you feeling?” asked Jones.
“Lost,” Darrah said, with a sigh. “Look, isn’t it possible for me to claim asylum or something with you people?”
The women exchanged glances. “If you want to, yes,” said Jones.
“And then you could do something? Call in Starfleet?”
Nechayev shook her head. “Doesn’t work that way. Bajor is an independent world, Mace. We can’t just intervene in its affairs.”
“But you can come and spy on us?” He blew out a breath, exasperated. “How can you sit back and let the Cardassians invade?”
Jones’s face was sad. “We can’t stop it, Mace, because it’s already happened. Bajor is under Cardassian occupation.”
“What? No! They had troops and tanks, but they don’t have control—”
“Yes, they do. Two weeks,” Nechayev broke in. “It’s been two weeks.” She shook her head. “Key figures in the Bajoran Chamber of Ministers have officially announced that the unrest on your planet was caused by a terrorist group, the Alliance for Global Unity. They claimed they were working with militants in the Oralian Way to destabilize Bajor, funded by the Tzenkethi Coalition and the United Federation of Planets.”
“Key figures?” he spat. “Lale?”
“Lale Usbor is dead,” said Jones. “Murdered by Oralian radicals, so the newsfeeds would have you believe. Minister Kubus Oak is currently acting as interim secretary for planetary affairs.”
Jones tapped a keypad set into the tabletop, and a monitor on the wall ran a series of clips from intercepted public broadcasts. Darrah’s gut twisted as he saw Kubus being sworn in at the Chamber. His eye was caught by the sight of Jas Holza in the background. The man’s face was a rigid, unexpressive mask. He looked beaten and cowed. Of Militia leaders like Coldri Senn and Jaro Essa there was no sign.