“What do you mean, odd?” The light-haired soldier peered at his companion’s console.
“It looks like there’s a breach out there.”
Laren clutched at her phaser. Four soldiers she had killed since joining the resistance. She was about to make it six. She squeezed her eyes shut, took a breath—and then she sprang up from her hiding place, phaser at the ready. The resultant flash was blinding, and the first man caught it full in the chest. He flew back, crashing into the light-haired one and pinning him to the console behind him. Ro rushed forward without quite realizing what she was doing, to jam the weapon directly in the face of the man who had taken so much from her.
“You!” she shouted, her voice shaking.
The blond Cardassian was shaking off the blast. “What?” he said blearily, but he could say no more, for Laren squeezed the trigger, and then she turned and ran for her life.
Dukat was in ops, looking over the security logs, when Basso approached him. He gave the Bajoran a look that conveyed it was a bad time, but Basso was impatient to speak, and he did so despite the prefect’s unspoken command.
“Sir, it’s about the Kira family…”
Dukat quickly gestured Basso up the short platform to his office, herding him inside. When the door was closed, he turned to him.
“What can possibly be so important that you would bring up such a topic in the center of operations?”
“My sincere apologies, sir, but you see, this is the time when I normally bring the extra allotment of supplies to the Kira family, and I thought that perhaps—” He stopped, expecting Dukat to quickly catch on to where he was going with this, but the prefect said nothing, only looked even more annoyed than before.
“Do you still need me to make that delivery?” Basso finally asked.
Dukat’s eyes narrowed. “How dare you,” he said, his voice eerily low.
“Sir, I apologize, again—please, understand—I only want to know what’s expected of me, considering the…new circumstances.”
Dukat looked at a spot on the wall, and then raised his head, his deeply pensive gaze traveling up to the ceiling. “Let me explain something to you, Basso. I loved Meru with all my heart, and promised her—I gave my word—that I would look after them for the rest of their lives. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir, of course.” Basso inclined his head, in part to keep the prefect from seeing how florid his complexion had suddenly become. He was deeply frustrated, but there was nothing he could do; if Dukat wanted to alleviate his guilt for having Meru put to death, then Basso was going to have to comply. It was that, or work in the mines with the herd animals, and he’d long ago decided that he was not a man who could live without comforts. Food and a warm bed went a long way toward clearing his conscience. If the rest of them didn’t want to cooperate, they could stay in the mines, where they belonged.
He went to see to his duty, cursing the dead Meru.
Lenaris’s mother could not be consoled, not by the reminders of her impending status as a new grandmother, not by her surviving son’s constant reassurances that he was working practically around the clock to find out what had become of Jau. It was a hollow promise, that he would find Jau alive, and he knew it. He had exhausted every means of locating his brother; none had panned out to anything at all.
It was the week after he’d given up, the week that he was distracted by the baby’s quickly approaching due date, when he received word from the Kintaura resistance cell over in Rakantha province that wreckage had been found, not far from the Meiku forest.
“An old raider?” Lenaris asked the woman on the other end of the comm.
“Not exactly,”she told him, her voice tinny. “The ship seemed to have been…modified. It was like a raider, but the wings were—”
“Longer?” Lenaris asked, his heart seeming to stop.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Lenaris let out the breath he had been holding. So it was true. Jau’s raider had gone down. “Was there…Did you find…any remains?” he asked quietly.
“No, there weren’t. In fact, it wasn’t so much wreckage as…the ship came down hard, but a person could have walked away from it.”
“Really?” Lenaris felt his heart start to beat again. “You think…the pilot survived, then?”
“I do, yes. We’ve hauled in the raider, we’ll be refurbishing it—it hardly sustained any damage at all. We’ve been keeping an eye out for the pilot, but—I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there was a recent sweep between Rakantha and Dahkur—anyone found wandering outside Cardassian-imposed boundaries was picked up and taken to…a particular work camp.”
Lenaris let out another hard breath. “A camp on the surface?” he asked. Maybe he could stage a rescue effort.
“Yes, but…it’s Gallitep.”
“Gallitep!” He didn’t have a prayer of getting Jau out. Lenaris clenched his fists, thinking of the stories he’d heard. Severe rationing, death by starvation and exhaustion…medical experiments. Jau was just a boy, he wouldn’t last a week in a place like that.
“I’m very sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s possible he’s still hiding in the woods somewhere, if he has survival skills…”
Lenaris wiped his eyes. In fact, Jau was new to the resistance movement, had lived his entire childhood in the relative safety of the refugee camp. Lenaris had been planning on teaching him a few things, after he really started to get the hang of flying…
“Thank you for the information, Kintaura Two. This is Ornathia Two, shutting down.”
Lenaris turned off the system and rested his face in his hands, allowing himself a moment to catch his breath. He quickly decided to tell his mother that Jau had been killed. If she learned that her son was at Gallitep—
Lenaris was not willing to be the one to deliver a piece of news like that, not to anyone’s mother, but least of all his own.
Laren had not yet caught her breath as Darrah’s ship shot away from Valo VI. She continued to gasp as she tried to answer Bram, whose questions came so quickly, she didn’t have time to answer. “Why didn’t you call for me? Laren, you compromised us! Mace and Keeve made it plain that stealth was the prime objective here. Now they’ll know an intruder has been there, and they’re going to suspect it’s the Valo II settlers!”
“What happened back there?” Darrah said.
“I’m sorry…” Laren panted. “There were more of them than you said…and I didn’t have time to think! I was just about to call Bram, or…sneak away, but one of them noticed the security loop had been disabled…. I had to make a judgment call!”
Bram continued to shake his head. “But you at least got the data,” he said.
“I…” It hit her then. She’d had to pull the datarod before the download had really gotten going. She had never failed before, not when it mattered—and this mattered.
Bram looked horrified. “You…you didn’t even get the data?”
Laren started to argue as she caught her breath, but she let it drop, tired and confused. She had expected to feel overwhelmingly triumphant after killing that man, the man who haunted her dreams. But she didn’t feel anything except exhausted. Maybe it would come later—though she was beginning to doubt it. Her father was still dead, after all.
I had to kill him, though,she thought. Even if it hadn’t been him…I had no other choice. They were about to find me, I wouldn’t have been able to get away.
Darrah’s ship set down on the old airfield that was dotted with an assemblage of disabled-looking air and ground vehicles, including the freighter, which was off near an out-cropping of rock.
Darrah addressed her before they disembarked. “So, what happened back there? You said there were more Cardassians in the place. Tell me exactly what you remember.”