Lenaris stood up and walked out of the MCC without another word. Ro watched him leave and, alone again, realized that the general had painted a picture she hadn’t stopped to consider.
Every Federation planet had its own domestic peacekeeping force. Starfleet dealt with matters of interstellar scope, but every world still needed a home guard to deal with local security issues according to local law. Bajor was no exception, and the Bajoran Militia wasn’t dispensable. Contrary to Major Cenn’s earlier rant, nowhere near half the Militia was transferring to Starfleet. The real percentage was actually minor for a global military, and would disappear as the Militia stepped up its own recruitment efforts to replenish its lost numbers .
On the other hand, Ro could easily see how a period of doubt and uncertainty would accompany such changes—at least in the beginning, as the new order took hold. She imagined that every world found its own way of dealing with the transition. And again Bajor would be no exception.
Maybe…maybe I can even help it along.
Straightening in her chair, Ro tapped her workstation’s interface. “Computer, access the Bajoran Central Archives and search alldatabases for allreferences to the Sidau village in Hendrikspool Province. Then establish an uplink with the mainframe on Starbase Deep Space 9 and conduct the same search. Authorization: Ro, phi-delta-seven. Execute.”
Having spent her early years in Jo’kala and the camps closest to it, Ro hadn’t been to Ashalla in her youth. It wasn’t until after the Dominion War that she’d gotten to see other parts of her homeworld for the first time, including the capital. What had struck her on those occasions was how old a city Ashalla really was; its elegantly designed buildings and ornate thoroughfares of red-brown granite and sand-colored fusionstone were built millennia before anyone had ever heard the word “Cardassian.” It was sobering to see how much of her people’s heritage—how much memory—the city still held, and more sobering still to learn that most of civilized Bajor was just like this, even after everything the Cardassians had wrought. After she’d returned to the planet of her birth, she realized with a profound sense of sadness that she no longer knew this world, had never known it at all.
Was that the real reason I found life here unbearable after the war?she wondered. Had the scope of Bajor’s unique cultural identity, restored to fullness in the aftermath of the Occupation, so overwhelmed her that she felt like an alien among her own kind?
Now, as she walked down one of the city’s main streets, the weight of Ashalla’s vast memory bore down on her again. Except that this time it seemed to lessen as Ro came closer to her destination, until she realized that this district must be one of those that had been completely rebuilt in the years following the Occupation. Where most of the city was defined by structures so ancient it was easy to think of them as eternal, this part of Ashalla showed little of Bajor’s past. Mostly it was new buildings, although several had been built in a style clearly designed to evoke what had been lost here. To Ro, it made the losses that much more tragic.
It had been Vaughn’s idea that they should meet in this part of town. He had finished early for the day at the evaluation center, and said he had accepted an offer to be given a tour of the Tanin Memorial. The commander hadn’t elaborated, but Ro had assumed that it was one of the dozens of monuments across the planet honoring the fallen of the Occupation. As she drew closer to the site, however, she learned by way of the signage leading toward the memorial that it had been created to honor a single man, a vedek who died here some years ago, just after the Occupation ended. There was no statue, no great spire or majestic abstract sculpture. Just a single broken column, apparently salvaged from an older structure, standing in the midst of a meditation garden.
The other thing Vaughn had neglected to mention was who his tour guide was.
She spotted them from across the street, strolling together along one of several flower-lined paths that snaked through the memoriaclass="underline" Vaughn, his hands clasped behind his back, walking alongside Opaka Sulan.
The former kai of Bajor, her short, unadorned gray hair catching the midmorning light, wore none of trappings of her old office. Dressed instead in the simple vestments of a monk, without the traditional hood, Opaka projected a serenity that was striking. She wore a pleasant smile, one that Ro thought was the most genuine she’d ever seen.
Vaughn, for his part, a head taller than the stout woman beside him, seemed to have his attention completely focused on whatever conversation they were having. At one point, he gestured inquiringly at a bed of esaniflowers along their path. Opaka stopped and stooped to cup one delicate white blossom in her right hand, looking up at Vaughn as she answered whatever question he had asked. Vaughn seemed delighted, and freed one hand from behind his back to help her respectfully to her feet. Then the hand disappeared again, and the two resumed their stroll in comfortable silence. Ro had heard that the commander had come to value Opaka’s friendship a great deal since the Defianthad returned from the Gamma Quadrant. It appeared that the ex-kai reciprocated the sentiment.
Ro caught up to the pair, but had to clear her throat to get their attention. They looked up. “Lieutenant!” Vaughn said. “There you are.”
“Commander, Ranjen,” Ro said, remembering that Opaka had eschewed various lofty titles she’d been offered since her return to Bajor, finally accepting a more humble one that spoke to her only current vocation: that of a monk engaged in theological study.
Use of the title seemed to please Opaka. She smiled warmly at Ro. “It is good to see you again, Lieutenant.”
“Likewise,” Ro said. For all her skepticism of the Bajoran religion, Ro liked Opaka. As kai, she’d given people courage and hope during the Occupation, and her nearly seven years in the Gamma Quadrant seemed to have cultivated that characteristic. Her soft-spoken assurances that Bajorans need not fear to explore their beliefs as individuals had gone a long way to defusing the schism created by the Vedek Assembly’s mishandling of the Ohalu prophecies, which had long been suppressed as heretical.
Vaughn looked around at the memorial appreciatively. “It’s quite moving, isn’t it? When Sulan offered to show me this place, I wasn’t prepared for the tranquility it evoked.”
Ro looked around. It was all right, she supposed. The garden was certainly lovely, but she always became restless in such places. She’d never been the meditative type, and she suspected that she simply lacked the sensibility to appreciate the memorial properly.
Something on the ruined pillar caught her attention: a partial engraving of a Bajoran glyph in the broken stone, still legible. “Was this originally the site of the Taluno Library?”
Opaka nodded. “It was little more than an empty relic by the end of the Occupation, kept afterward out of a desire to preserve as much of Bajor’s past as possible. Not long after the Gates of the Celestial Temple were opened, my friend Tanin Prem, a vedek, lost his life here when a bomb left over from the struggle against the Cardassians detonated, destroying what remained of the building.” She gazed wistfully at the column. “This memorial was just being started when the Prophets called for me to leave Bajor. I’m glad to see how beautifully it turned out. Prem would have enjoyed such a place.”