“Where are you going?” Sadakita asked her as she passed, heading back toward camp.
“I cached my weapons in the brush back there,” Ro explained. “I’m going back for more.”
“That’s a bad idea, Ro,” the older woman admonished her. “I don’t have to tell you the facility will be swarming with spoonheads in a matter of minutes. We need to get as deep into the forest as we can.”
“What’s going on?” Tokiah demanded, coming up with the rest of the cell.
Sadakita looked to Ro, apparently unwilling to directly implicate her. “I’m getting more weapons,” Ro said stubbornly.
“Don’t be stupid, Laren,” Tokiah said sternly. “Let’s get going. There’s no time to lose.”
“I’m going back,” Ro said firmly, and continued in the same direction she was headed.
Kanore started to call after her, but she could hear Tokiah telling him to let her go. She drew her phaser—the one she’d taken from the sentry—and jogged back to the facility. How sorry they’d all be when they saw how many weapons she’d lifted from the armory! It would be satisfying to hear Kanore say he’d been wrong.
She was still a considerable distance from the building when she realized that, in fact, the others hadn’t been wrong. She could hear the sound of flyers coming in over the tops of the trees, shining lights down into the forest. She clung to the trunk of a blackwood tree for a moment, looking up at the sky until she was satisfied that the patrol’s spotlights weren’t really very effective at penetrating the tree cover. She felt foolish, realizing that if she wasn’t careful, she could lead the Cardassians straight back to her cell’s encampment. Defeated, she turned back around and picked her way through the dark forest, eventually stopping to find the place where she’d left the pinched rifles.
Convinced she was safely out of range of where the flyers were searching, she slung all six of the rifles back up across her chest and stuffed the pistols into her waist satchel. She sourly noted to herself that if she’d been smart, she would have just distributed a few of them among the others in her cell, when they were still here to assist her. She could have just admitted she was wrong and asked for help. She sighed as she clanked along laboriously, wondering exactly what it was about her that made her so stubborn.
It was daylight by the time she made it back to camp, and Ro was tired, but there was no time for sleep. After a fairly unpleasant morning during which her actions were soundly denounced by nearly every member of her cell, she went to eat her breakfast by herself on a severed tree stump away from the others, grumbling to herself about the poor quality of food this autumn. The cell had been forced to make do with a soup made from a lichen that grew on the bark of the older nyawoods, and though it prevented starvation, it did little to satisfy the belly—or the palate. Ro knew that the food situation would only get worse this winter. Though Jo’kala’s winters were notoriously mild, this had been a lean year around the entire planet. The Cardassians’ constant overfarming—not to mention the industrial pollutants from their mining operations toxifying once-fertile soil—were beginning to have noticeable consequences in the quality and quantity of the already minimal harvest.
Tokiah emerged from a shelter made from a piece of canvas stretched around a circle of poles and topped with a conical roof of brush. It was semipermanent, like most of the buildings that dotted the camp—easy to take down, carry, and reconstruct anywhere else in the forest, if push came to shove. It always did, eventually.
“Ro,” he said, and she did not look up or answer him, expecting to be scolded again.
“Hey! Ro, I’m talking to you!”
“I hear you,” she said in a low voice.
“There’s a subspace transmission on the comm!”
Ro finally looked at him. “And?” she said, annoyed. She had no business with the comm system. That wasn’t her place in the cell—she bypassed security loops and killed spoonheads. The comm was Tokiah’s responsibility.
“They’re making reference to you. Someone is looking for you—someone on Valo II.”
Ro hesitated only a second before she leapt to her feet and scrambled past Tokiah into the common building.
“It’s Ro Laren!” she said breathlessly. “Who am I speaking to?”
The transmission was heavy with interference, and she could barely make it out. Between clicks and squawks she was sure she discerned the words Jeraddo, meeting,and Bis.
“Akhere Bis! Is it you? Is that who I’m speaking to?”
“…ear me?…aren…This is…khere Bis. I’m…ping…t…Jeraddo.”
After a few more back-and-forth relays with Ro shouting and the comm spitting back more broken transmissions, Ro felt some measure of certainty that Bis was requesting that she meet him on Jeraddo, Bajor’s fifth moon, in two days. She couldn’t get more than that out of him, for the comm started to fail in earnest before he could get further, but her mind was made up before his last crackling word. Anything to get her out of here for a while was reason enough to agree to the trip.
“Tokiah,” she announced to the cell leader, waiting outside the common building, “I’m taking a raider to Jeraddo in two days.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Tokiah informed her. “Those ships belong to the cell, Laren. If you want to take a shuttle, it had better be part of an approved mission—for the cell.”
“This is a mission,” Ro said. “I’ll be working with another outfit from Valo II, that’s all.” In truth she had no idea why Bis wanted to meet with her, but that didn’t matter.
“You’re not taking the raider.”
“Really?” Ro said. “So, you wouldn’t be willing to part with a ship for a day or so just to have me out of camp during that time? I mean, it’s possible I’ll never come back, Tokiah. Just think about that.”
The cell leader frowned. “You’ll dance on all our graves,” he said. “You’ve got more lives than a hara,Laren.”
“I’m taking a raider, Tokiah, whether you agree to it, or I have to steal one. I’d rather you made it easy for me.”
Tokiah said nothing for a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t come back,” he finally said, his voice soft.
Ro shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. She’d been a part of this cell for long enough that her memory of her life before it was hazy, existing only in pictures that might not have even had any basis in fact. This cell was the only life she really knew. She swallowed. “Fine,” she said, her voice quavering before she cleared her throat. “Maybe I won’t.”
“Just don’t take the Trakor,”Tokiah said. “That one’s my favorite.”
“The Trakorpulls to the port side,” Ro said, her voice low. “I wouldn’t want it anyway.” She turned and left Tokiah, intending to take a walk by herself. Whatever Bis wanted her for, it had to be better than this. He’d deliberately sought her out; for some reason, he needed her, enough to risk a subspace transmission for it. And that was more than she’d ever gotten from any member of her cell, even Bram—and Bram was dead.
Dukat was on the Bajoran side of the station when he was called to ops to answer a transmission from Gul Darhe’el. He turned from the Bajoran shopkeeper who had been spewing out empty flattery in an attempt to distract Dukat from the fact that he was most likely selling black-market items to some of the wretches in ore processing. Dukat didn’t care enough about it to pursue it further—at least, not immediately. He walked away from the shop without further acknowledging the merchant, the swarm of dirty Bajorans parting to allow their prefect to pass.
He accepted the call a few minutes later, apologizing to Darhe’el for making him wait, both of them aware that he did not mean it. Gallitep’s overseer didn’t bother with any pleasantries, announcing the reason for his call without ceremony.