by S. D. Perry
“Veja! Are you mad? You can’t go away by yourself, it is far too dangerous to travel alone.”
“Of course, I’ll bring Natima. She always has her weekends free.”
“Natima!” Damar scoffed. “She is hardly fit to ensure your safety! No, Veja, you’ve made your point that you are angry. I have apologized, but there is nothing more that I can do. Please, end this foolishness.”
“I accept your apology, Corat. But I am still going to Tilar. I’ll be sure to contact you from the vineyards, to let you know what you are missing.”
Veja ended the transmission before Damar could argue further, and he smacked his palms in anger against the surface of his desk. He decided that she was probably only trying to bait him. He was not going to give her the satisfaction of contacting her again to argue about something so utterly preposterous. He turned off his companel and went to bed, anticipating a sleepless night.
Miras lasted another week before she made her decision, a week of deep consideration, of working up the nerve—a week of terrible, relentless dreams. She dreamed now, knew she’d fallen asleep because she had to watch it all again, relive the nightmare. The Hebitian woman was gone; now there was only the hidden object, the murder, the twisted, smoking ruins of her homeworld.
Someone touched her, and she woke.
It was a stranger, the man in the seat next to hers. “I’m sorry to wake you, but we’ve gone back down into the atmosphere, and we’re approaching Lakarian City. The pilot says we’ll be there in just a few moments.”
“Oh, thank you, Mister…?”
“Raaku.”
“That’s right, I remember now.” They had briefly introduced themselves shortly after boarding the shuttle. Shortly after Miras had walked away from her old life, possibly forever.
The message of the recurring dreams had continued to unfold for her, although the images remained cryptic, violent, and strange. But she’d come to believe that the discovery of one of the Bajoran Orbs by a Cardassian would mean the end of their civilization—had come to believe it with all her heart, and that belief finally allowed her to embrace her insanity. She had no husband, no children. Her parents lived well outside the city, and she didn’t see them often. Her job was interesting to her, but not especially fulfilling…
And if I’m right about this—if this is a vision, a reality that will come to pass—then I have a responsibility.
She had spent many hours reading through the texts she could find on Oralius, on the Oralian Way—and while many were simple propaganda smears, she’d seen glimmers of a strange but interesting philosophy here and there. From what she could tell, the Oralians were simply spiritual seekers, not the decadent cult she’d always believed them to be.
The brief recorded message from Natima Lang had provided the final push. It had been waiting in her transmissions only the day before, and had confirmed Miras’s information about Gar Osen and the death of the kai—not directly, but clearly enough. Natima had been uncharacteristically grim, her expression solemn as she’d cautioned Miras not to continue concerning herself with affairs on Bajor. She’d added that going public with unapproved information was a punishable offense. When Miras had tried to return the call, she’d found that Natima was unavailable.
With clear evidence that there might actually be something to it all, Miras had acted. She’d packed a bag, made a few calls—and had then managed to scramble the Orb’s access code in the ministry’s database, making it impossible for anyone to retrieve the item without manually opening every single shipping container in the warehouse. All those years studying the ministry’s filing system, preparing for her life’s work, she’d learned a trick or two. There was a chance that nobody would learn of what she had done until someone actually attempted to find the Orb—but Miras wasn’t about to take the chance that she’d be so lucky. She had stepped across a line, a step she couldn’t take back.
The man seated beside her looked out the window of the transport shuttle, at the flat, endless desert stretching all around them, beautiful in the early morning light. “Have you seen the Hebitian ruins before, Astraea?”
“Not for many years,” said Miras, remembering that she was no longer Miras. She had taken the name of the woman from her dreams, whose face had become her own. She was Astraea now, and after what she had done—traveling under a false name, deliberately misfiling the Orb—she could never go home. She hoped that she would find her confirmation, out here in the desert. She hoped she hadn’t just thrown away her career, her life, for no reason at all. “I look forward to revisiting them.”
In the fairly spacious control cabin of the Bajoran carrier, Lenaris and Halpas were having a look at some of the old ship’s navigational systems. While Halpas confirmed that he had never flown this particular model, he was still familiar with most of her instruments. He pointed to a few components, explained their significance to Lenaris, who was feeling slightly overwhelmed with all the information he was quickly absorbing. This was different from studying old schematics—the knowledge Halpas carried included a great deal of information that never would have appeared in any manual.
“Those filter systems there are notoriously touchy,” Halpas pointed out. “While these gauges over here can be sluggish at first, once you warp up they get a lot more loose.” Lenaris nodded, taking it all in.
“The thing to remember is that a lot of the Cardassian ships have blind spots in their sensor grids, like their planet-based systems,” Halpas said. He spoke this in confidential tones, almost as though he expected someone to be listening. “I can show you what I mean once we get out there—” Lenaris felt a thrill at this kind of talk, Halpas’s confidence making it clear that this was really going to happen. “—and even more important than that, Cardassian ships have a tendency to require a power surge in order to arm their forward disruptors. As soon as they transfer power, everything else gets sapped—their navigational systems, their shields—and more importantly for us, their sensors.”
Lenaris nodded vigorously. He tensed as a faint whirring sound went up on the bridge. The lights across the navigational array flickered once, and then settled into a constant glow. The auxiliary systems had already gone online half an hour before, but it was looking more and more like this mission was going to happen. He was actually going to travel at warp—he was going to leave the B’hava’el system. And he was going to rescue his friend.
Halpas walked him around some more of the ship’s controls, quizzing him, pointing out subtle nuances he could remember from the sensor arrays. A few minutes later, Lenaris looked up as Taryl joined them in the cockpit, her expression bright and slightly anxious.
“The warp reactor is online!” she said. “Tiven said it was barely damaged at all—the biggest problems were the antigrav and the thrusters, but he thinks he’s fixed those well enough for a decent takeoff.”
“A takeoff!” Lenaris exclaimed. “I had no idea we’d be there already. We need to get a better idea of how we’re going to mask this thing’s signature before we can even think about it, or else—”
“Or else we just go for it,” Halpas said.
Lenaris looked at the old man, expecting him to be either joking or ranting on one of his notoriously reckless plans—like the Valerian freighter, only this time, with him aboard instead of Darin. “If we do that, they’ll target us before we’re even out of the atmosphere,” he said.
Halpas laughed. “You’re thinking in terms of how a raider flies,” he told the younger man. “A ship like this can break through the atmosphere in the time it takes a raider to power up its thrusters. We’ll be halfway to Jeraddo before the spoonheads have even noticed us. And by then—”
“But once they have noticed us, we’re as good as dead,” Lenaris argued. “Their ships could outrun this thing even if it was operating at full capacity, brand-new. The trick is to stay beneath their notice.”
Halpas shook his head. “We’ll lose them,” he told Lenaris. “You just leave that to
me.” He turned to Taryl. “So, just how many of these balon ships do you folks have?”
Taryl frowned. “Seefa took one, and then the other three who left must have taken at least two…we’ve got about twenty of them now.”
“Twenty! We won’t be needing quite that many. Let’s get back to the village and bring a few of them here…and while we’re at it, I suggest we find some more volunteers. I’m not sure the four of us are up to storming a Cardassian prison camp on our own, no matter how remote the location.”
Aro Seefa had successfully hidden the raider in one of the old drainage conduits, organized a modest food supply for himself, and made his bed. He’d slept, and woken with no idea of what to do next. The concept of leisure time was not one with which he was intimately familiar. In his experience, when there wasn’t something to be fixed or retrieved or altered or built, you slept or ate. And neither of those options was feasible when his stomach was so twisted, knotted with a growing certainty that he’d done the wrong thing, leaving the Ornathias.
Seefa had explored these drainage tunnels and ditches many times when he was young, though his aunt and uncle, who had raised him after the death of his parents, had repeatedly warned him not to. The tunnels were ancient, whole sections caving each spring, and they still flooded in the rainy season. But they ran throughout the farms and vineyards of the Tilar peninsula, holding endless fascination for most of the children that had grown up here. Seefa’s guardians had so many other children to look after—in all, they’d taken in fourteen occupation orphans who’d needed a home—Seefa had managed to explore the tunnels regularly, often using them to return to his family’s lands, where he would hide in the shadows and daydream about being grown and in the resistance, dealing out harsh justice to the Cardassians.
Seefa’s biological parents had been among the first Tilari casualties of the occupation. The Cardassians had announced that they would seize the Aro lands when Seefa was just a small boy. Like many of those farmers who couldn’t conceive of leaving their land, his parents had refused to relocate, expecting the Cardassians to eventually give up and leave them alone. But of course, it had not worked like that.
Seefa’s uncle and aunt, his mother’s brother and his wife, lived on one of the farms that the Cardassians had ignored—an unremarkable katterpod field, adjacent to the Ornathias’ portion of the vineyards, neither of which held much interest for the Cardassians. But the hilly, picturesque tessipates of the Aro family’s famous coastal vineyards—which had been in Seefa’s family for centuries—had been significantly more attractive to Bajor’s occupiers. The climate, right on the water, was well suited to their physiology—the winters mild, the summers hot—and they had promptly claimed it for themselves, turning Seefa’s childhood home into a Cardassian tourist attraction. Numerous resistance attacks over the years had made it less attractive, however, and the place was usually abandoned but for the handful of Bajoran collaborators the Cardassians had hired to keep it up.
His aunt and uncle had finally been relocated to one of the camps—for their own safety, according to the local Cardassian-kept magistrate—and the Ornathias had mostly managed to keep out of sight, moving to the far edge of their old lands. Many of the smaller farms had been allowed to continue—the Cardassians needed someone to refill their bread baskets—but they had refused to give up their stolen prize.
To be so near his family’s rightful portion of the vineyards made Seefa’s heart burn. He could smell the sea on the breezes that passed through the tunnels; a few moments’ walk would take him to the ruins of the home where he’d once lived with his family. It was painful to be here. And yet, this was his home. This was the place he hoped to return to with his own family, where he and Taryl would raise their children, where they would someday die and be buried.
Taryl. She still had not come, though he was sure that she would know to look for him here. They had both played in the tunnels as children, had used them as adults to evade capture, more than once. He was left to assume that she was too busy trying to fix that useless carrier to be concerned with his whereabouts—assuming she even made it back from the trip with Lenaris…
Seefa felt his stomach knot tighter. He didn’t like not knowing where she was, what she was doing. If anything happened to Taryl while he was just sitting here, he would never forgive himself.
It was the fear that finally drove him out of the culvert, thinking that it might be best to head back to the Ornathias, to wait for word. But as he emerged from the tunnel, he heard something that sent him toward the vineyards, instead, away from where his raider was hidden—the unmistakable sound of a ship landing close by. Not a Bajoran craft—it did not have the right kind of unhealthy growl. It was most assuredly Cardassian, a small shuttle, perhaps, or some similar flyer. They had finally come for him, and they had probably traced his balon signature, just as he’d feared. He’d led them straight to him, as easily as if he’d drawn them a map. Foolish!
He thought the ship had landed near the Cardassian “resort” in his family’s vineyard. He crept toward it, moving slowly and silently, finally cresting a low hill covered in wild jumja trees to get a look. It was a transport shuttle, settled closer to the Ornathias’ lands than his own—what he thought of as his own—and there were two Cardassians walking around. Technically, they were trespassing, walking on Ornathia ground, land still owned by Taryl’s extended family; Seefa could see that they were on the wrong side of the hedgerow divider, although he supposed they didn’t care. Why would they? Who would complain?
The Cardassians were women, dressed all in white. Not soldiers, then? The dress of these two certainly suggested that they were civilians…
Two women, alone and vulnerable at the vineyards? It had to be a trick. Perhaps he was being flanked right now, the women decoys.
Hide or attack? Run or fight? He didn’t know, but seeing them just wandering around, touching the overgrown plants, acting as though they had some right to be there—it was infuriating. On top of his uncertainty and shame, his depressing memories—it was too much to tolerate. He quickly decided that he couldn’t afford to be uncertain. He would act, for better or worse.
He pulled his battered old phaser, aimed directly at the two invaders, and sprinted down the hillside as fast as he could. The two Cardassians did not immediately notice him, but as he drew closer they heard him, and looked up. One of them screamed.
“Quiet!” Seefa snapped in a loud whisper. “How many are with you?”
“J—just us,” said one of the women, the one who’d screamed. She looked terrified.
“But more are coming,” the other said quickly. “Many more. Soldiers. If you leave now, you might get away.”
Seefa squinted at the hot blue sky above him, saw nothing but a scattering of clouds. If she was telling the truth, he could run. Or it might already be too late.
“You’d better come along with me,” he said, and gestured in the general direction of the nearest drainage tunnel with his weapon. They needed to get out of sight, fast.
One of the women started to speak to the other, in an urgent hiss. Seefa made an angry noise, and they fell silent.
They reached the culvert and entered the irrigation system, Seefa taking them in confused circles through the complicated labyrinth, wanting to be sure they couldn’t be tracked. They walked for nearly a kellipate, quiet except for the sounds of one of them sniffling, the occasional drip of water. Seefa had to use his palmlight as the tunnels angled deeper, the chill of wet clay making him shiver. He had a vague intention of taking the women back to the Ornathia camp, but it would be a long walk.
“More will be coming,” the bolder of the two women volunteered as he pointed them down another branch. Her low voice echoed. “They know that you’re here.”
“How did they track me? Was it the balon?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’ve been tracking you for a long time.”
Seefa clenched his jaw. He knew it. “How long before they g
et here?”
The other woman spoke in an urgent whisper. “Natima, is this wise?”
Natima seemed to think so. “Let me handle this.”
“You had better tell me all you know,” Seefa said darkly. He turned his palmlight to Natima’s face. She squinted back at him, her lips tight.
“Have they tracked only me?”
The woman hesitated, her pallid face ghostly in the wobbling light. “They have tracked several of you,” she said.
Seefa frowned. “Several? How many, exactly?”
“I don’t know how many,” she shot back. “I only know that it’s more than one.”
Seefa’s heart hammered. If they were tracking shuttles, they might have followed Taryl, too; he needed to know before he risked taking them back to the cell, but it occurred to him that he had never really spoken to a Cardassian before, and he wasn’t sure how best to manipulate them. What were they afraid of? What did they respond to? He had no idea.
“We know about all of you at the vineyards,” the other woman said.
“Veja! Let me handle this,” said Natima.
“What do you mean, all of us?”
“She’s bluffing,” Natima said. “We are only sentries. We don’t know everything, we were only sent to confirm that you were in the area.”
Seefa was confused…and finally, suspicious. “There aren’t any more of us,” he said sharply. “I’m the only one.”
“You just indicated that there were more of you,” Natima pointed out.
Seefa shined his light over the two women. Natima looked defiant, but something deep in her expression reflected fear. The other woman—Veja—appeared frightened out of her wits.
“You’re civilians, aren’t you?”
Neither woman spoke, confirming it.
Seefa sighed, kicking himself for panicking, not sure what to do. They were Cardies, but not fighters; he’d kill them if he had to, but he didn’t like the idea. On the other hand, by taking a couple of tourists hostage, he’d made himself a target; someone would be missing a sister or a wife, a patrol would be sent to find their shuttle, and they’d surely find his makeshift camp. He couldn’t take them to the Ornathias, not without endangering the entire cell…
