Sisko exchanged startled glances with O'Brien and Worf. "I thought Hidret suspected those exiles of being planted, to give the Klingons an excuse to claim the planet."
Worf snorted. "More Cardassian lies."
"More Cardassian lies!" Kor echoed, his voice a bubbling growl. "I don't know where you got that information, but it's wrong. No one here needs to be rescued."
"You're telling me there are no Klingons on that planet?"
The Dahar Master bared his stained and shattered teeth. "I'm telling you that no one needs to be rescued. The Klingons on this planet have chosen their fate, and it is my duty as a Dahar Master to make sure that no one interferes with it. It is a matter of honor."
Hidret pointed an accusing finger at the viewscreen. "And you can make no allowances for the Cardassians who are dying of ptarvo fever, and need the drug that only this planet can provide?"
Kor snorted. "Bring me a Cardassian dying of ptarvo fever, and I'll be glad to let him beam down to Cha'xirrac to be cured. In the meantime, old enemy, the only allowance I will make is to let you turn tail and run before I start firing."
"But --"
"But nothing!" The Klingon's sudden eruption into a roar made even Sisko start. "And if you ask one more question, your answer is going to be a photon torpedo!"
Gul Hidret snorted in apparent disgust, but the triumphant glint in his eyes made Sisko's stomach roil in apprehension. He was starting to suspect why the old Cardassian had engineered this unlikely confrontation. "From you or from your ally?"
"Ally?" Kor demanded.
"The cloaked Starfleet vessel we spoke to several hours ago. Her transmission originated from within this system."
"You spoke to a cloaked Starfleet vessel?" Kor's eyes narrowed. "That means the Defiant is here."
"And they didn't even bother to inform you?" Gul Hidret showed his own teeth in a maliciously triumphant smile. "How rude of them --" A photon torpedo explosion slammed across the open channel, and the Cardassian's smile vanished. "All right, I'm leaving, damn you! Stop shooting!"
Hidret's side of the connection sizzled and went black, but Kor's scowling face didn't vanish with it. "I know you're listening in on this, Benjamin Sisko. If not, then Dax probably is. Take my advice, both of you, and follow that old Cardassian fool out of this system. If you don't, I'm afraid I will be honor-bound to hunt you down and kill you."
CHAPTER 6
"NOW I KNOW why they call this stuff tuq'mor." From several feet above Dax's head -- which was currently at the same elevation as her feet, although none of her was actually on the ground -- Kira peered down through the tangled vegetation at her. Even higher up, an eerily silent troop of lemur-like primates leaped and skittered through the swaying twigs of the scrub forest, spattering them with dislodged rain drops and pollen.
"What does tuq'mor mean, anyway?" Kira asked, her tone so carefully measured that Dax knew she was trying hard not to laugh.
"It's the name of an ancient Klingon goddess. Also known as the mother of curses." Her rump-first fall into a pocket of weaker branches had left Dax suspended in a position too jackknifed to scramble out of. Even though she was surrounded by thickly grown shrubs and intertwining ivy, their rain-slick branches gave her nothing to grab onto. She wriggled a hand down beneath her to see if she was close enough to the ground to push off. Cool muck promptly closed around her fingers, soft and clinging as liquid silk. She cursed in Klingon and wiped her hand across her damp trousers. "See what I mean?"
"I'm starting to." Kira reached a hand down to her through the greenery. "You better let me help you up."
"Brace yourself," Dax warned as they locked hands. "My skeleton alone probably weighs more than you do."
"Never fear. I won't drop you." Kira dug her boot heels into the braided mat of branches on which she stood, making it bounce a little beneath her. She used her smaller weight to advantage, Dax noticed, leaning back to leverage it into her motion without overbalancing. With one smooth pull, she hauled Dax out of her jackknifed spill up to stand beside her, then lifted a smug eyebrow. "Easy as a zero-gee somersault."
"Don't rub it in." Dax snagged an overhead vine to steady herself, feeling the branches creak and sag beneath her weight. Now that she was upright and free, she had time to notice the welt of smarting skin on her cheek where a branch had slapped her during her fall. "I'm already jealous that you can walk across branches I break."
"Sorry." Kira took a backward step to ease the load on the swaying tuq'mor. "Maybe you better go first from now on, to make sure the branches can hold you."
"I probably should." Ever since they had entered the maze of vegetation, they had been forced to walk anywhere from one to three meters above the densely forested ground level, with another meter or two of shrubbery making an interlaced canopy overhead. The air inside the tuq'mor was shadowed and cool, mist-filled in places, and always soundless. No vagrant breeze could stir the densely knotted branches of this ecosystem. It reminded Dax of a coral reef, braced to withstand the crashing of unseen waves. "Although that means we'll be going even slower."
Kira glanced up at the place where the leaves glowed brightest, backlit by unseen sunlight. "We're only making about half a kilometer an hour through this stuff as it is. Another hour or two shouldn't matter. At this rate, we're not going to catch up with Dr. Bashir until sometime next week."
Dax tapped a familiar command into her tricorder, then frowned as she compared the response it gave her with previous readouts. "No, we're getting much closer. According to Julian's comm badge, he's located just a few hundred meters northeast of us."
Kira must have heard the worry beneath her words. "His readings haven't changed at all?"
"No." Dax pushed onward through the tangled branches, trying not to think of all the ominous reasons for that consistency. More to herself than to Kira, she said, "If these Klingon children really are trying to protect the whole planet, they have no reason to hurt Julian. They could have taken him to tend to some wounded survivors --"
"But Boughamer said he was the only one badly hurt," Kira reminded her.
More rain drops dappled down from the forest canopy, stirring up shreds of mist from the swamp below. Tiny, silent lizards leaped through the leaves to escape Dax's progress, jeweled flashes in the shadowy light. "Didn't you say, though, that K'Taran herself was hurt?"
"No, I said she looked hurt," Kira said, gloomily. "She had a bloody bandage wrapped around one leg. But that might have been as much a lie as the rest of what she said."
Dax slanted a curious look back through the greenery at her. "Did she really lie to you, Nerys? I thought you said she admitted to being epetai Vrag's granddaughter."
"She did," the Bajoran admitted with grudging fairness. "And mostly what she talked about was how she didn't think there was any honor in killing the banchory. Or in waiting around for the comets to hit. I suppose she was telling the truth about that, too." Kira snorted. "She's at least fighting to survive sylshessa, instead of just folding her hands and getting sanctimonious about it. I might not like how she's doing it, but I have to give her credit for trying."
Dax shook her head at her friend's exasperated comment. She should have known that Kira, former freedom fighter and military officer, would find more to admire in K'Taran's active resistance to death than in Rekan Vrag's honorable acquiescence to it. "There are as many codes of honor among the Klingons as there are interpretations of Prophecies among the vedeks," she informed the Bajoran. "By not lying to you when she kidnapped Bashir, K'Taran may have been obeying her own code. But, in a larger sense, by struggling to evade the justice meted out by the High Council, in her epetai's eyes she has dishonored their house."
"And was Chancellor Gowron being honorable when he exiled the House of Vrag to certain death on this planet?" Kira demanded.
"Possibly." Dax felt the branches below her thin out over a more watery stretch of swamp, and angled to the left to find more secure footing. Another troop of primates skittere
d out of a flowering hedge as she skirted it, their velvet-plush shoulders freckled with colorful blossoms and pollen dust in an unconscious imitation of Trill freckling. "What a Klingon considers honorable depends as much on context as on precedent. Depending on what infraction the House of Vrag committed, this sentence of exile might have been vindictive, or it might have been an act of mercy."
Kira heaved a sigh. "I'll never understand Klingons."
"And they'll never understand us," Dax smiled. "They find our Vulcan and Human and Trill codes of law almost totally incomprehensible, because they're meant to apply no matter what the motive or result." She paused to map a path across an almost-open stretch of running water before she trusted her weight to the arching branches. "I can understand epetai Vrag and I can even understand her granddaughter. The only Klingon here I find hard to decipher is Gordek."
"Really?" Kira leaped through the screen of delicate branches to land on the other side, if her wildly swaying perch on a flexing limb could really have been called a landing. Her athletic ease was all the more enviable because it was totally unconscious. "What's so hard to figure out about him? He's a petty tyrant who wants to start his own little empire, even if it's only going to last until the next tsunami levels the coast."
"True." Dax ventured out at last on the largest bridging limb. "But the fact that he was willing to bargain with us to get the equipment he wanted --"
The wood cracked ominously beneath her weight as she reached the end. Dax cursed and took a long, not entirely directed step across the cooler breeze of the stream chasm with its murmur of hovering insects, then found herself sinking through bracken like a turbolift descending. A small hand reached out and caught her, this time by the indestructible nape of her Starfleet tunic, and hauled her back to safe footing for a second time.
"Thanks," she said, regaining her breath. "Damn tuq'mor."
"Mother of curses," Kira reminded her. "Maybe we should have made a sacrifice to her before we started chasing after Bashir."
"Or maybe we should have followed that banchory trail, even though it didn't seem to lead in the right --" Dax broke off abruptly. She'd found an open crevice through the hedge wall and thrust her head and shoulders through it, only to emerge into an unexpected chasm in the tuq'mor. It looked as if someone had taken a phaser and carved a canyon through the dense vegetation one meter wide, four meters high and stretching out of sight along its sinuous length. Coppery gold sunlight slanted down into it, warm and inviting. She cursed again, long and hard this time.
"What is it?" Kira demanded, wriggling through the dense hedge to pop out just to Dax's left. "Blood of the Prophets!"
"Mother of curses," Dax said again, wryly, then hauled herself free of the hedge and clambered down to the open path. It was floored by the same silk-soft mud as the rest of the tuq'mor, but her boots sank only a few centimeters in before they hit firmer soil. The banchory had compacted this forest highway as well as blazed it. She cocked her head, listening to the distant, deep hooting that echoed up the path. "If we follow this now, we might have to make a real quick exit."
Kira landed beside her with a squishy thump, oblivious to the spatters of mud that threw across both her and Dax. "Will it take us to Bashir's comm signal?"
Dax consulted her tricorder and nodded. "Yes, it's the perfect heading from here. Almost too perfect..."
Kira glanced over her shoulder, squinting against the sun. "You think it's a trap?"
"I don't know." Dax kept her tricorder on as they walked, watching their mapped coordinates get closer and closer to the ones she was receiving from Bashir's comm badge. "But it's definitely not a coincidence." She skirted a large pile of olive brown banchory droppings. Their half-sweet, half-fetid alien smell was so strong in the still air that she knew they had to be recent. "Wait." She grabbed at Kira's shoulder to stop her, then swung around with the tricorder chirping a proximity alert at her, louder and louder. "According to this, Julian should be within a meter of us. It looks like the signal's coming from the wall of tuq'mor over there."
Kira scowled and began yanking apart the thick stems of succulents, ivy, and shrubs, trying to find a place wide enough to step through. The tuq'mor seemed thicker along the edges of the banchory trail, almost as if it was defending itself against further inroads by the massive animals. When the Bajoran finally found a gap wide enough to squeeze through, however, the shadowy interior looked just as pristine as the rest of the scrub forest. There was absolutely no sign of Bashir, alive or dead.
Dax fought her way into the dense vegetation, then glanced down at her tricorder and frowned. The two sets of map coordinates were now dead-on, but her proximity display still insisted she was a meter away from where the comm signal was originating.
"I'm reading a vertical discrepancy," she said, puzzled. "Julian's comm badge must be at least a meter up from here."
"Or down." Kira slanted a grim look at the wet muck of the tuq'mor, now only a few centimeters beneath their feet. The interwoven mat of shrubbery above it looked undisturbed. "Although it doesn't look like anything's been buried here."
"No." Dax tilted her head back, peering up at the maze of branches above their heads. "Here, you hold the tricorder."
Kira took it reluctantly. "I can climb up there more easily than you can --"
"I'm not climbing." Dax flexed her knees, then leaped upward, catching hold of the two largest branches within reach and shaking them with all her considerable weight. The entire forest canopy creaked and flexed under her assault, sending a scurry of tiny gleaming lizards out in all directions. One of the jeweled glitters didn't leap, however. It fell straight down from the branches, half a meter too far away for Dax to catch.
Fortunately, quick Bajoran reflexes sent Kira diving after it before Dax could even open her mouth to shout. A mat of intertwined ivy strands bounced beneath the major's impact, trampolining her back again just as Dax dropped from her precarious overhead hold. They collided hard enough to elicit mutual grunts, but Kira's fingers never unclenched from around her catch.
"Is it --?" Dax demanded, steadying her companion.
"Yes." Kira rebalanced herself in the tangled tuq'mor, then uncurled her fingers to show Dax the gleam of gold and silver from the Star fleet communicator pin. The frantic chirping of the tricorder confirmed that it was Bashir's. "And it looks like it was at just the right height to have been tossed off a banchory."
From the first moment he'd seen the Defiant, Sisko had loved it for its surprising combination of cheetah speed and leonine power, purebred sleekness and alley cat durability. However, the one thing he had to admit his ship didn't have was space. Where a larger starship like the Saratoga boasted a wardroom for conferences and planning sessions, he had to make do with a bridge where veteran command officers mixed with untested young ensigns and technicians. And when a renowned Klingon warrior has just announced his intention to hunt you down and kill you, the last thing a commander needed was panic among his crew.
"Mr. Thornton," he said, more by way of test than because he really needed to know, "do we still have a fix on the cloaked Klingon ship's position?"
"Aye, sir." The junior engineer glanced over his shoulder, not looking particularly panicked. "I have the long-range sensors cranked to maximum sensitivity. Even though the Klingon ship has reduced its ion emissions to zero and is modulating its waste heat to match the planetary infrared spectrum, just like us, we're still picking up a minute gravitational anomaly along its extrapolated orbit."
"Enough of an anomaly to link to our weapons targeting systems, so we can track and fire on the Klingons?" Odo inquired.
"Yes, sir." Thornton tapped a command sequence into his science panel. "I can also export my tracking data to the viewscreen display, if you want."
"Do it." Sisko watched a fuzzy, computer-generated halo bloom on the distant curve of Armageddon's oxide-stained atmosphere, then glanced over his shoulder as the turbolift doors hissed open to admit his chief engineer. "We've got a
Klingon Dahar Master on the lookout for us, Chief. How invisible are we?"
"We've battened every electromagnetic hatch we've got, from ions to infrared." O'Brien detoured long enough to cast a critical look at Thornton's sensor settings, then gave his young technician an approving clap on the shoulder before continuing to his own seat at the empty engineering console. "Providing you don't want to leap into warp any time soon, the Klingons shouldn't even be able to prove we're here."
"How close can we get to their ship without getting caught?"
"Seventy kilometers, give or take a few." O'Brien grinned at Sisko's surprised look. "I did a little retuning on the shield voltage controls. We're still putting out some magnetic discharge, but now the polarity is tuned to look just like the planet's magnetosphere."
"What about our gravitational field?" Odo asked. "Can't the Klingons track us the same way we're tracking them?"
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