Rugal felt her hand grip his. The nails dug into his palm. A human woman was running across the street toward them. Hulya’s eyes had gone huge in the oval of her face. “Who is it?” he whispered, but before she could answer the woman had reached them.
“Hulya!” she said, bending down and seizing her into an embrace. “Where on earth have you been? You disappeared into thin air!”
“Rugal, this is Doctor Anders,” Hulya said stiffly. “She was my elementary school teacher.”
Rugal would have lifted his palm in greeting, but since Hulya was still clinging onto his hand, he could not. He murmured a polite “Hello” instead, but since Anders completely ignored him, he might as well have remained silent. “We sent someone past the farm,” she said. “Hulya, we thought you must have been killed too—”
“She’s fine,” Rugal said. “She’s been with me.”
Anders straightened up and looked at him with the usual kind of aversion. Hulya said, “This is Rugal. He looks after me now. You don’t have to worry.” She pulled at his hand, trying to get him to leave. “We should go now. It was nice to see you again.”
Anders touched her arm to stop her. To Rugal, she said, “Who are you, exactly?”
“I already said,” Hulya replied. “He’s Rugal. He’s looking after me. We’re living out on the big Cardassian farm and we’re fine.”
By choice, Rugal would not have revealed exactly where they were, but since it was out now, they would have to handle it as best they could. “Hulya’s been with me since the fall,” he began to explain, but Anders interrupted. “Did you come with the Jem’Hadar?”
“No, I came later. I was looking for a friend of mine. Hulya was living rough and when she came past the house I started looking after her.”
“I see.”
“We’re fine,” Hulya said again. She shook her teacher’s hand from her shoulder and pulled him away. “Come on, Rugal, let’s go.”
By now, he was clinging onto her hand as much as she was to his. When he glanced back over his shoulder, he saw that Anders was still standing in the street, watching them leave. He recalled the Starfleet commander from all those years ago, the one who had taken him away from Migdal. These humans, he thought, they will walk in and do what they think is best for you, whether you want it or not. In the skimmer, Hulya said, “I liked her at school. And then she was in the camp with us. She was one of the ones that got the security fields taken down. But I don’t want to go back there again.”
“Me neither.”
They traveled in silence for a while. Once they were safely beyond the big metal fences of the Khevet estate, he said, “We’ll try to get what we need from the warehouses around the estate. It’s better to trade than to scavenge, but I didn’t like it down there either. Let’s see if we can get by.”
It was a good idea. They found what they needed for the roof and fixed it. Winter settled in. It didn’t snow—thankfully, because he had had enough of snow—but it got colder and wetter, so they stayed in the house. He taught her kotra and she taught him chess. He was worried for weeks that someone from the town was going to come out and trouble them, but they were left in peace. Perhaps they didn’t know about this place behind the walls, and the farm was too big for them to know where to look. So he hoped. Then, a week or so after the shortest day, they had a visitor.
Hulya saw her first. She ran out from the house down into the backyard where Rugal was taking advantage of a cold but sunny day to fix a fence. Hulya had been saying that they should get a goat. Rugal had only the vaguest idea what a goat was, and he suspected it would be trouble, but it was probably less trouble than having Hulya talk relentlessly about their pressing and urgent need for it. What were you supposed to do when children asked for things? Was it better to give in over the goat now, or would that only lead to an escalation of demands that would end with a vast array of livestock, none of which he was qualified to look after? Perhaps he could suggest a hound instead. He had always wanted a hound.
He was pondering the deal he would offer when Hulya, breathless, came to a halt next to him. “Somebody’s coming up the path,” she said. “Cardassian. A woman, I think. Could it be her? Penelya?”
His heart somersaulted in his chest. He took her hand. “I don’t know,” he said, and marveled at how calm his voice sounded. “Let’s go and look.”
They walked around to the front. The Cardassian woman was standing on the step. She was tall, thin, ragged, and when she saw Rugal she fell into his arms as if he had come to save her. Hulya, standing to one side, mouthed: Is it her? Rugal shook his head. “You’re cold,” he said to the stranger. “You’d better come inside.”
Her name was Arani. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you,” she said, as she made short work of a bowl of hot aytlik broth. “They said in Littleport that there were Cardassians here, but I didn’t believe them.” She started to cry, and grabbed hold of Rugal’s hand. “Well,” he said awkwardly, “here we are.”
“Yes.” She smiled at him through her tears. “Here you are.”
He told her to carry on and, as she spoke, he fretted about that word, “Cardassians.” He didn’t like the sound of that. Had he multiplied in number in the minds of the people of Littleport? He put that worry aside and tried to concentrate on the rest of her story.
Arani had been a technician employed by Khevet Agricultural Holdings. She had only been on Ithic for a few weeks when the massacre had happened. “I was based up the road at the central complex,” she said. “We were working on a project to make more arable land available. We were going to extend the holdings down toward Littleport.”
Hulya frowned. “But there were already farms there. People were living on them.”
Arani gave her a bright smile. “Oh, there would have been lots of jobs once the new big farm was in place. There would have been plenty for everyone to do.”
The same way that there had been plenty for the Bajorans to do, presumably. “How did you get away from the main complex?” Rugal said. “Wasn’t it an easy target for the Jem’Hadar?”
Arani gave him a besotted smile. Just beyond her line of sight, Hulya put a finger in her mouth and mimed being sick. Rugal kicked her shin under the table.
“I was away from the complex when it happened. Two of us had gone up to the northern weather station to carry out some data analysis. There was another project,” she lowered her voice and leaned toward him, beckoning him in with one finger, “very hush-hush. We were trying to alter the temperature in some of the colder areas, raise it a degree or two, so that there would be new land available when this area had ceased being productive.”
Rugal drew back. Hulya openly recoiled. Take the world, then ruin it. When would they ever learn? “Did you know Penelya Khevet?”
She frowned, puzzled, and then laughed. “Oh, you mean Penni! Yes, of course, everyone knew Penni. She was adorable. A little clever for her own good. She was an orphan, you know, only got the post because of her uncle.”
Rugal got up from his chair. “Would you like some more tea?” he said politely. When Arani nodded, he went over to the replicator, keeping his back to her so she couldn’t see his face. “Do you know what happened to her?”
“Sorry, no. I wasn’t here, of course.” She didn’t sound very interested in this line of conversation. “Does it matter particularly?”
Did it ever matter particularly whether someone lived or died? Reproachfully, Hulya said, “She was his girlfriend.”
“Oh. I see. I’m sorry, I wasn’t here. I don’t know what happened down here.”
Rugal brought two cups back to the table and wondered whether he should tell her about the building on the edge of Littleport. She hadn’t yet asked him whether he had news about any of her former colleagues. As he sat down, she said, “I was telling you what happened to me.”
So she was. Rugal leaned back in his chair and let her get on with it.
There had been no Jem’Hadar stationed where she was; i
n fact, the weather station was unmanned apart from occasional visits like hers. She had been working when her colleague, Leterik, came in and told her that he was hearing strange transmissions from the main complex and from other Cardassian areas around Ithic. Leterik seemed to think that the Jem’Hadar had started killing people, but Arani couldn’t believe it. “I thought he meant the humans,” she said, “but he was sure it was the Jem’Hadar. But weren’t they meant to be protecting us?”
“That was the idea,” Rugal said wearily.
“Anyway, Leterik was absolutely certain, so rather than fight with him, I agreed to wait at the weather station for a few days until he thought it was safe. We took the flyer down to Kovalet—that’s the big complex up the coast from here—but there was nobody there and part of the building was on fire. I still didn’t think Leterik was right about the Jem’Hadar, but he found some security recordings at Kovalet...” She shuddered. “It was horrible. All those people. They locked the doors, locked them in... Anyway, there was nobody left there. And there were no Jem’Hadar either. I couldn’t understand that. Have they all gone? Where did they go?”
“They left,” said Hulya. “They got in their ships and left.”
“The war ended,” Rugal explained. “The Dominion surrendered, the Jem’Hadar stood down, and then they were recalled.”
Arani seemed to take it as a personal affront. “But they were supposed to be protecting us! Leterik and I went into one town, and the people there started shooting at us! Surely they wouldn’t have done that if the Jem’Hadar had been there? The closer we got to Manea the worse it got. Our flyer got shot down. We started walking, but there were people about and when they saw us they attacked us. Leterik was killed, and then they started hunting me down. I had to run for my life!”
It sounded to Rugal like an exaggeration, but whatever had happened, she had clearly been terrified, so he let it pass. “What happened in Littleport?”
“They weren’t friendly either. They said I should come here, that I’d find Cardassians here. I thought it was a lie, perhaps a trap, but then you walked around from the back and...” She stopped talking and started to cry instead. Rugal and Hulya glanced at each other. “It’s been a bad time,” Rugal said. “But you’re safe here. Why don’t we make a bed for you? You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.”
She fell on his offer gratefully. When he had seen her to her room, he came back downstairs. Hulya looked at him sternly. “She’s not staying, is she?”
Rugal held up his hands in defeat. He didn’t like the idea either—but where else could she go?
Arani did stay, and she continued to exasperate. But Rugal was right—there was nowhere else for her to go. She was woefully unprepared for the catastrophe that had struck her people, and he was frankly amazed she had lasted this long. But then you could never overestimate how resourceful people could be.
Arani had been bored on Ithic. She had only come here because of her job, and she had intended to be back on Prime long ago. She and some friends had planned to live in the capital city, renting a place near the university in the more gentrified eastern section of Torr. She seemed to think this was still an option, if she could only find a way back. The first time she and Rugal quarreled, it was because she was talking about going back to Prime. “Don’t you understand?” Rugal said. “There’s nothing there! The whole place was flattened. The Jem’Hadar killed a few thousand people here. They killed eight hundred million on Prime.”
It was not so much that she refused to believe him. It was more that she seemed not to grasp what he meant when he said these things. She kept talking about her three friends (he assumed they were all dead) and the part of Torr where they were planning to live (which would be a smoking ruin) and she had a list of things that she intended to do once she got back to civilization that she added to daily (none of which he imagined were easily achievable on a world without functioning infrastructure). It was one way of coping, he supposed, but it didn’t strike him as healthy. Eventually he simply tuned her conversation out. But then she started to interfere with what he and Hulya were doing on the farm.
Admittedly he was a novice, Hulya was a child, and Arani had worked for a big agricultural company. But Arani’s attitude set his teeth on edge. “If you’re serious,” she said—as if he wasn’t serious now!—“we can go and get the equipment to do it properly. We can sell to the people in Littleport, Manea too. But all this,” she gestured around his hard-worked fields and laughed. “This is primitive! You might as well not bother.”
For Rugal, their efforts to cultivate this piece of land had nothing to do with efficiency or success—they had the replicator to live off, after all. It was about finding something meaningful to do, something that demanded that he looked ahead, to a future where his efforts paid off. Even if something went wrong, even if it didn’t work out this time around, that was itself a reason to look ahead to next year, when they would do it better, get it right.
Arani didn’t understand, and finally he lost his temper. “If you don’t like what we’re doing here, go. Get out of here. Go back to Prime and try your luck there.”
There were tears, and a door was slammed in his face. He ended up standing outside it apologizing. Eventually she came out, threw his arms around him, and begged him not to send her away. He stood awkwardly, while Hulya glowered nearby, saying he hadn’t meant it and of course she should stay. What else could he say to her? Where could she go? They could hardly send her off to fend for herself. They were stuck with her. But Rugal could see that this was going to happen again and again: she would become frustrated at being trapped here and she would take it out on him. They were at the lowest point of this cycle when Gheta arrived.
It was toward the end of winter, one of those crisp clear days that are very close to declaring themselves spring. This time Rugal saw the visitor first, and he didn’t think for a second that it might be Penelya. Gheta came striding up toward the house, her hand already raised in greeting. “They said there were Cardassians here,” she said. “I’m glad to see you.” She looked around and smiled. “This place is great!”
• • •
They made her redleaf tea and sat at the kitchen table to hear her story. This was something Cardassians did now, Rugal thought, a new ritual: greeting each other in amazement, asking each other how they had got here. Gheta was younger than both Arani and Rugal, not quite at the age of emergence. Her parents had worked for Khevet’s company, and had been based in Kovalet. They were dead now, of course, but Gheta had been hiking in the country when the massacre at the complex happened. “I’ve been traveling around since then,” she said. “I was trying to find other Cardassians. The humans don’t want us around, but there’s no point in going back to Prime, and anyway, I like it here.”
“Wait till you find out how they’re running this place,” Arani said darkly. “It’s all mucking about in the mud and digging ditches. Back to basics.”
Gheta glanced at her, then at Rugal, sulking at his end of the table. She shrugged. “Sounds good to me. That sealed-in complex in Kovalet didn’t save anyone in the end, did it?”
Later, long after Hulya had gone to bed, and when Arani had followed her upstairs, Gheta told Rugal more about her experiences since the war. He was surprised that she had seen so few Cardassians. “They said when I landed that most of them were leaving. I didn’t think they’d have got rid of so many so quickly.”
“It wasn’t deportation, Rugal. It was the second round of massacres.” She caught his expression. “Did you not know about that?”
“No, not at all.” He glanced at the stairs. “Arani said something, but it’s hard to tell what’s exaggerated and what isn’t.”
“She seems like she might be difficult to get on with.”
“I should try harder. It’s not like there are all that many of us left. What happened?”
Gheta curled her legs under her and warmed her hands around her mug of tea. “After the Jem�
��Hadar left, those of us who had made it started coming back to the complexes and the townships. The humans had started coming back too. Some of them were interned, you knew that?”
“Yes, Hulya was, with her mother.”
“Tensions were running pretty high. If it had been only the locals, maybe they could all have ignored each other. Maybe it would have been the same. Anyway, a few ships had landed on Ithic by that time—mostly people getting out of what’s now Romulan space. Can’t say I blame them. The ships carrying Cardassians weren’t allowed to land, but the ships carrying human refugees were. Mostly frightened people looking for somewhere safe to hide. They weren’t the problem. Some of them, however—not so nice. It only takes a handful. They found out about the Cardassian survivors at Kovalet, and they went up there one night and finished what the Jem’Hadar had started. The other humans turned a blind eye. Kovalet was only the start. The same thing happened again and again throughout the summer, all the way up the coast, anywhere Cardassians had started to gather, and out this way nearly as far as Littleport. That’s why you hardly see any Cardassians around here. The ones the Jem’Hadar didn’t kill, the humans got later.”
“Prophets...” Rugal murmured. He had seen so much in the past few years, but he still hadn’t predicted this.
“What frightens me, Rugal—really frightens me—is that when I came through Littleport, there were people talking about the Cardassian enclave out here. They were saying that there was a human child up here, being kept by the Cardassians, and they didn’t like it. To be honest, I didn’t believe it until I saw Hulya with my own eyes. But it’s going to be summer again soon, and I’m afraid that the humans might decide to pick up where they left off last year. Get rid of us once and for all.” She was shaking. She put down her mug, and he leaned over and put his hand on top of hers.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to cause a scene. But it’s been a bad year. And I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I’m not sure the humans are done with us yet.”
Star Trek: DS9: The Never-Ending Sacrifice Page 27
