by Andy Mangels
“They aren’t bad guys,” Fed said, as if reading her mind.
Rena flushed hot, wishing she weren’t so obvious. “I’m sure they’re fine. I’m feeling a lot of pressure to get home and this delay isn’t welcome.”
“Emergency?”
“Responsibilities.”
“Ah,” Fed said. “That I understand.” He scooted out of the bench and she marveled at his height—nearly two meters. “I’ve gotta go get my gear, but I just wanted to offer to, you know, walk with you if it would make you feel more comfortable.”
Mildly amused, she looked at him, blinked, and looked longer, uncertain if she should bow in response to his unexpected chivalry or if he would be offended if she laughed—good-naturedly, of course. Manners and rural Bajoran rest-and-sips rarely came together: too many years of eking out survival under Occupation conditions had made these outposts respites for hermits, homesteaders, and other independent types who wanted to be left alone. Seeing genuineness in Fed’s face, her impulse to laugh gave way to a smile. “Looks like I have myself a steward.”
He arched an eyebrow in question.
“Back in the days of djarras, highborn ladies traveled with specially trained protectors called stewards.”
Bowing deeply, he looked up at her and with a broad grin said, “Accept my services, m’lady?”
This time Rena couldn’t help laughing. “If I must,” she said with mock annoyance and slipped her pack onto her shoulders. In truth, however, as she followed behind Fed’s crewmates lurching toward the door, Rena knew that any sense of safety she felt came from Fed’s presence by her side.
6
Ro
Whoever they were, Ro decided from her temporary workstation in the Militia’s mobile command center, they knew exactly what they were doing.
To the standard orbital sensor sweeps and the security cameras at the Jalanda spaceport, the Besinian freighter was unremarkable. The medium-powered commercial ship—a nondescript cargo carrier capable of warp five at best—had arrived with an empty hold ostensibly to meet with Bajoran exporters within the city. The export company named in their transmitted request for landing clearance confirmed that the owners of the ship had made an appointment for this very morning three weeks prior, but it was never kept.
Their credentials, as Lenaris suspected, were forgeries. No record of the identities provided by the crew existed anywhere. Nor did the ship’s registry. Ro managed to verify that a Besinian freighter fitting the description of the one that landed on Bajor had been purchased anonymously at auction from a Yridian salvage dealer on Argaya just over a month ago. That, along with the appointment made with the Bajoran exporters, made it appear more and more as if this was something long in the planning.
Only two occupants of the craft ever left the ship, and they had carefully avoided the cameras at the spaceport. They did a fine job of making it look inconspicuous, but Ro wasn’t fooled. There was intent behind everything these killers had done. They’d even arrived with their own skimmer.
Satellite imaging had shown the heat trails of thousands of similar surface craft knotted in and around Jalanda, hundreds in the countryside beyond, and scores leading into the mountains to the southwest. But only one had cut across the nature preserve to the north, toward the site of the village. It was a three-hour journey in either direction, and the satellites had shown both transits. Those travel times fell precisely between the Besinian freighter’s landing, the destruction of the village, and the ship’s departure, leaving little doubt about the connection. They were on Bajor less than seven hours, and when they were gone, nearly three hundred people were dead. But while assembling a reliable chronology of events had been a fairly simple matter, the whos and whys of the crime remained elusive.
Ro rubbed her tired eyes while she spoke to her console. “Computer, search telemetry from Deep Space 9 for information on all incoming and outgoing traffic in the Bajoran system for the past twenty-six hours. List any non-Bajoran and non-Starfleet vessels, and pull any scans taken of those craft.”
“You’re looking at it from the wrong angle,” a sharp voice said.
Ro looked up. The only other person present in the command center, a gray-uniformed major, was seated at a workstation some distance away. He wasn’t looking at Ro, but his body language was tense.
“Were you speaking to me?” she asked.
“The Besinian freighter,” the major said. “You think if you figure out who they are and where they came from, you’ll figure out what they wanted.”
“That’s right.”
“It won’t work,” the major said.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it is. Short of our actually capturing and questioning them, whoever was on the ship knew it wouldn’t matter what we might learn about them. Otherwise they’d have covered their tracks a lot better.”
“Maybe they weren’t that clever,” Ro said. “Maybe they were just careless and lucky.”
The major shook his head. “I don’t think so. But I do think you’re wasting your time investigating the perpetrators.”
Ro leaned back and folded her arms. “And I suppose you have a better suggestion, Major . . .?”
“Cenn Desca. And yes, I do. But I doubt you’d be interested.”
Ro’s eyes narrowed. What the hell was his problem? “Since you’re obviously hoping I’ll take the bait, let me oblige you: Why do you doubt I’ll be interested, Major Cenn?”
“Because it involves looking at Bajor, not away from it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think all the answers are out there,” Cenn said, nodding his head in the general direction of the ceiling. “I wonder if it’s even occurred to you to look for them here, on Bajor?”
“The perpetrators aren’t on Bajor.”
“But the crime is. Why else destroy the village so completely, unless they were trying to hide something?” The major shook his head. “I don’t even know why I’m wasting my time. You’re Ro Laren. You’ve made turning your back on Bajor into an art.”
Ro stood up sharply, throwing back her chair. It crashed loudly against a console behind her. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but I am not required to put up with this.”
“Go on, then, leave. Again,” Cenn said as she started to turn away. His accusatory tone stopped her, held her against her will. “That’s what you do best, isn’t it? I’m sure, now that half the Militia is following your example, you must feel vindicated for giving up on Bajor during the Occupation.”
“Major Cenn!”
Cenn snapped to his feet and came to attention. Ro stared at him blankly, scarcely aware that General Lenaris was standing in the open doorway that led outside.
Lenaris’s steely voice cut through the sudden silence. “Report to Colonel Heku, Major. Tell him I said you’re to assist in sweeping the western slope for additional evidence.”
“Yes, sir,” Cenn said, and headed immediately toward the exit. Lenaris moved aside to let him pass, then closed the door behind him.
The general turned to Ro, who still hadn’t moved. “I’m sorry about that. Do you want to file a complaint?”
“No,” Ro said.
Lenaris seemed to relax and started walking toward her. “Any luck yet in your investigation?” he asked.
Ro shook her head, having barely heard Lenaris’s question. Anger and embarrassment mixed with confusion as she realized how completely she’d allowed Cenn to get under her skin. I’ve endured people judging me before. Why did I let it rattle me this time?
Lenaris, to his credit, didn’t press her on the matter. He seemed content to wait and see if she wanted to talk. Well, he would be waiting a long time, then. She was done talking. Screw this and screw these people. She never needed them before, and she sure as hell didn’t need them now . . . .
“Do you—” she said quietly, suddenly unable to keep the words from forcing their way out of her mouth. “Do you think he’s right about me?”
<
br /> Lenaris sighed, then settled into a chair at the workstation next to Ro’s. A thick silence settled between them.
“You know,” he said at length, “I remember the day you testified publicly before the Chamber of Ministers about your activities after you turned Maquis. Fighting the Cardassians, fighting the Dominion. You gave that testimony right before you received your honorary commission in the Militia.”
“I didn’t realize you were there,” she said, sitting back down and wondering why he was bringing that up.
Lenaris shrugged. “No reason you would. I was just one member of the Militia brass among many in the back of the room, and I was only a colonel then. Still, your testimony made an impression on me.”
Curious in spite of herself, Ro asked, “Any particular part?”
“Everything you didn’t say.”
Ro frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Let’s just say I’ve found that sometimes you can form a clearer picture about someone from what they don’t say than what they do,” Lenaris told her. “That day, the things I didn’t hear made me throw my support behind your appointment to the Militia.”
Ro found it hard to conceal her surprise. “I . . . I didn’t know that. Thank you.”
Lenaris waved the matter aside. “No need for that, although I admit it was an uphill fight. I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to learn that there were a lot of senior officers who didn’t want you there. It was difficult to get enough votes in the command council just to keep them from letting Starfleet arrest you, much less give you a job. As far as they were concerned, you were undependable and unpredictable. You were a complication in our relationship with the Federation. Worst of all, in a lot of eyes, you’d turned your back on Bajor when it needed you most.”
“Maybe they were right,” she said.
“I didn’t think so.”
She looked at him again. “Why not?”
“Because of everything you didn’t say,” Lenaris said with a smile. “You never really explained why you came home.”
Ro shrugged. “What’s to explain?”
“Maybe nothing,” Lenaris conceded. “But maybe the lack of an explanation is more telling than anything you could have said out loud. I think deep down in your pagh you regret leaving Bajor when it needed every fighter it had, and you’ve carried that guilt ever since. It’s why you kept looking for a new fight. You hoped to find one in Starfleet, but that ended badly, not once, but twice.”
Ro kept her expression neutral as the ghosts of Garon II paraded across her vision. She blinked them away. She wondered if she would ever stop seeing them.
“Then the DMZ conflict flared up,” Lenaris went on, “and it gave you the first real opportunity to do what you didn’t do for your own world. When the Dominion wiped out the Maquis, you just shifted the fight over to them. I’m guessing you didn’t even expect to survive. But you did . . . and once you ran out of fights, and thought you had finally atoned for giving up on Bajor, you came home.
“That’s what I heard that day in the Chamber of Ministers. That was what you didn’t say. And I thought you were right. Whatever sin you feel you committed against Bajor, Laren, you’ve long since atoned for it.”
Ro said nothing.
“For what it’s worth,” Lenaris said, “Major Cenn isn’t usually such an ass. He’s actually a good man. That outburst was out of character. It’s just that . . . to some people in the Militia, the transfer of so many personnel to Starfleet is a shock to the system, one that they need time to work through.”
Ro glared at him. “And I suppose my being here at such a time, with my past, back in a Starfleet uniform, just pushed him too far, is that what you’re telling me?”
“You know that isn’t what I meant.”
“Then what are you saying, General?”
Lenaris leaned forward, and Ro could tell he was making an effort not to lose his temper. “I’m asking you to try to understand what some of us in the Militia are experiencing, now that the reality of the changeover has settled in. We’re not stupid, Laren. We know Bajorans need to be in Starfleet, to have a voice in its operations and its policies, and to share responsibility for shaping and implementing them. But there still need to be Bajorans who will put Bajor first, and their voice needs to be heard, too. The more of us who put on a Starfleet uniform, the more the rest of us fear that Bajor’s voice will be lost in the multitude.”
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 all databases for all references 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 memorial: 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 esani flowers 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 Defiant had 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.”
