by S. D. Perry
“Well,” Basso said, “that’s not entirely true, Gul. She has been on the station such a long time now, she has learned how to bypass many of the security protocols that were originally installed to keep her safe. She doesn’t necessarily choose to use them, but I’ve caught her leaving her quarters at unauthorized times, and fooling around with her library computer—”
“Why haven’t you mentioned this to me before now?” Dukat snapped.
Basso did his best to look pained. “I have tried, Gul Dukat, I have really tried to discuss it with you, but you never seemed concerned when I pointed out that Meru had too much freedom…”
Dukat’s eyes became faraway again. “Yes,” he murmured. “You have tried to warn me. At any rate, we must tighten up the security that surrounds her.”
“It’s an excellent idea, though I’m not sure she’ll tolerate it. She has always been so…ah, high-strung, we might want to ease her into the idea. Otherwise, she might try to resist you…”
“High-strung, yes. I suppose that does describe her, somewhat…”
“Although,” Basso added. “If I may say—I sincerely doubt that she would really try to contact Athra, for revenge or any other reason—”
“Did you say revenge?” Dukat broke in.
“Well, it does make sense. Just as you were saying, she is a high-strung woman, and she does have a great deal of freedom to poke around, if she wanted to…and if it came into her head to try and make trouble for you…”
Dukat shook his head. “I am going to speak with her. You go on to ore processing. I will speak with you later.” Dukat waved him in the direction of the turbolifts.
Basso headed for ore processing with a little more confidence than usual. It wasn’t everyone who could successfully put a bug in the prefect’s ear, so to speak. He hoped he could continue to steer the prefect in the proper direction, for if this went the way he wanted, he could finally rid himself of those duties that concerned Meru, and the effort of watching after her impossible family.
“My name is Mora.” He had said it at least a hundred times today, and he was tired of the sound of his own voice. His mouth felt pasty, his throat sore from speaking, but he could not give up, not until Odo could repeat the words, and produce some indication that he actually understood them.
The shape-shifter gestured to himself, as Mora had been doing. “Mem,” he said. “Mem-ma.”
Mora sighed, exhausted. Did Odo understand what was going on here? Or was he merely mimicking the sound of Mora’s voice? Could it be that he was not sentient after all—at least, no more than a tyrfox or a batos? He regarded the readouts on the electrostatic field that surrounded Odo’s “head,” and increased the frequency.
He continued to work with him for another seemingly endless round of call-and-response, with Odo’s pronunciation gradually becoming more precise, and then less so, and then more so again. Mora believed that Odo was eager to please him, but then it may have only been an illusion brought on by Mora’s own isolation. He occasionally feared he was spending too much time with the creature; he hadn’t seen his parents in weeks, usually coming home to his family’s residence long after they had retired for the night. And Prophets forbid he should ever meet an eligible woman! The idea of it seemed about as likely as the possibility that the Cardassians would turn tail and leave Bajor tomorrow. For better or worse, Mora was married to his work here, and he probably always would be.
“Mynameissssmore…uh,” said Odo.
“Very good, Odo!” Mora positively beamed, for this was probably the best pronunciation Odo had managed so far.
Odo’s “eyes” occasionally rolled around, drifting lazily like those of a person touched in the head. It was an unsettling effect, though Mora had noticed lately that he seemed to understand the concept of “looking” at something. Right now, his gaze appeared to be trained on the door to the laboratory, and his expression was convincing enough to compel Mora to turn around and look. Sure enough, Doctor Yopal was standing in the doorway. Mora almost praised Odo for it, but Yopal spoke before he had the chance.
“Do you think he believes…that his name is Mora? Or do you think he even understands any of it at all?”
Mora felt immediately dejected, despite all the progress he’d been making this afternoon. “Well, only time will tell,” he said stiffly.
Yopal went on speaking, her usual refrain about men and the sciences, and to Mora’s grave embarrassment, Odo began to chatter behind her, a string of senseless syllables. “Mem. Dobake. Goobsine.”
Yopal at first raised her voice to speak over him, but she abruptly stopped speaking after a moment, looking at the shape-shifter with curious surprise.
“Mem dobake good sine-tiss.”
Yopal turned to Mora with openmouthed astonishment. “Do you hear what he just said?” She turned back to the shape-shifter. “Say it again, Odo’ital!”
“Mem dobe bake good sine-tist.”
“That’s right!” Yopal beamed. “That’s right, Odo! Men don’t make good scientists!” The Cardassian woman then did something Mora had never dreamed she was even capable of: she laughed.
“Odo,” Mora began, not sure quite how to respond.
“He’s making a joke, Mora!” She laughed again, and Mora was stunned at how natural her laughter sounded. But even more alarming than the revelation that the Cardassian scientist was capable of genuine emotion was the change that had come over Odo’s “face.” The strange pulling at the corners of his mouth looked anything but natural, but it was certainly nothing that he had ever even attempted before today—at least, that Mora had ever seen.
“He’s smiling,” Mora said.
“Yes, he is,” Yopal agreed.
This time, Mora laughed along with her.
Keeve Falor was a quiet-speaking man, dressed as shabbily as everyone else on Valo II, but with an even more elaborate earring than the one worn by Akhere Juk. Laren did not recognize the design; she only knew a few of the D’jarra symbols, and his was not one that she had ever seen before. Bram, however, seemed to know Keeve right away, though by his face or his D’jarra, Laren wasn’t sure.
“Minister,” Bram said reverently, as Juk and Mace began the introductions.
Keeve broke into a sheepish laugh. “Not Minister. Not for a long, long time.” He extended his hand to Bram, who shook it warmly. “We’re all more or less equals here on Valo II.”
“But we do often defer to Keeve when a decision is to be made,” Juk cut in.
Laren mentally nodded to herself; the D’jarras did still have some pull here, just as she had imagined. Keeve’s D’jarra must have designated him to the class of politicians and civilian leaders.
The adults commenced to talking about what to do with this and that, where could Laren and Bram make their camp, how could they return to Bajor, the specifics of which did not particularly interest Laren—at least not while Bis was standing so near. She imagined that Bis had probably lived on this windy, dusty rock his entire life. He had never even seen a proper tree before. The foliage here was scraggly, with sparse leaves and dry, crackling branches, nothing at all like the grand forests in Jo’kala. She pitied him, a little.
Laren wondered many things about Bis. Had he ever seen a Cardassian, here on this world? Had he ever flown in a shuttle? Was he impressed that she had been in a raider all by herself?
“So, if you and your daughter would like, we could set up a tent for you, just outside of—”
“I’m not his daughter,” Laren interrupted Keeve fiercely. She’d have expected Bram to have told him at least that much.
Keeve looked surprised, and a little amused. “Begging your pardon, my dear. So how is it that you came to be in a ship all alone, in Cardassian-controlled space?”
Bram answered for her. “I look after her,” he said. “She’s something of an orphan. My resistance cell has taken her in. We’re teaching her how to fly—”
“I already know how to fly.”
Kee
ve continued to look surprised, and Bram spoke quickly.
“Laren, please. My apologies—I’ve not done a very good job teaching her any manners. She lived on the streets, when I found her, running with a crowd of beggars…”
“I’m no beggar,” Laren interrupted. “I stole things from the Cardassians. That’s why Bram wanted me along, because I can break into their stockades better than any of the grown-ups in the resistance cell. He needs me to disable the security feeds before anyone approaches.”
Keeve looked a bit unsettled as he turned to Bram. “She can’t be more than twelve,” he said.
“I’m fourteen!” Laren shouted.
“Laren! It’s true, Keeve, the girl does have talent. She can hack into a security system like nobody’s business, and I can’t even begin to figure how she does it.” He shot her a pointed look. “I’d never tolerate her impertinence if she wasn’t good for something.”
Keeve’s expression reset itself to one of thoughtfulness. “Is that right?” he said, and he turned to look at Laren. “So, you fight in the resistance, do you?”
Laren decided she didn’t like his tone. “Yes,” she said sulkily. “And what do you do, here on Valo II, to try and drive out the spoonheads?”
Keeve’s eyebrows shot up and he addressed Bram. “I see what you mean, about the manners,” he said, one corner of his mouth twisted into a forced-seeming smile. He turned away for a moment to speak quietly with Juk and Mace, arguing good-naturedly in hushed tones. Laren could barely catch the gist of what they were discussing, but she was fairly certain it had something to do with her. Juk’s voice rose above the others more than once, saying, “She’s only a child!”
“You’ll have to help me set up our tent, Laren,” Bram said, apparently trying to draw her away from the conversation, but Laren did not answer, straining to hear what the other men were talking about. She caught Bis’s eye as he shifted his attention from his father’s conversation back to her, and she quickly looked away again, forgetting the men for the moment.
Keeve stepped away from the tight circle he’d made with the other two, and he turned back to Laren. “Well, Laren. If you can hack into Cardassian computer systems, then we might just have a little job for you. You ask what we are doing to fight against the Cardassians, and I’ll tell you. We observe. We gather information. And we have a little reconnaissance mission that I think might benefit rather well from a little girl who knows how to bypass a Cardassian security system. A simple download at a hidden facility. Does this interest you at all?”
Laren lost her attitude in no time at all. “Yes!” she said. She stole a glance at Bis to see if he was watching, and sure enough, he was staring right at her. Her eyes met his for a moment, but she was too excited to be embarrassed. This was the perfect opportunity to impress him, and maybe she’d even get to kill a spoonhead or two.
16
Lenaris could not resist flicking out his hands to steady the flight yoke. His little brother turned to him, burning with annoyance, to judge from his expression. “I know how to do this, Holem.”
“I know you do, Jau. But I keep thinking that you might want to wait until after we exit the atmosphere before you—”
“Leave him alone, Lenaris.” Ornathia Sten spoke from where he crouched in the back of the raider. It was a tight fit with the three of them in the little ship, but since most of the cell’s raiders had been taken to the Lunar V base, they generally had to commute in cramped quarters.
“I’m going to be flying on my own for this raid,” Jau said firmly.
“Of course,” Lenaris said, meaning to be reassuring, aware that he probably sounded condescending. As always, according to Jau.
Jau shook his head, and Lenaris decided it would be best to keep silent. Jau was sixteen, and though it was true he was as good a pilot as any of the grown men, Lenaris still couldn’t help but regard him as a baby. The age gap was enough that Lenaris wasn’t entirely sure how it was that Jau had come to be the gawky near-adult he was now; Lenaris had already left home to join the resistance before Jau had even learned his first words. But this mission called for every available pilot, and he could not argue that Jau was capable. It was only…Lenaris wasn’t sure what his mother would do if anything happened to Jau. He wasn’t sure what he would do.
It was a long way to Jeraddo in a sub-impulse raider, the moon where the Ornathia cell had managed to store most of their raiders, since Pullock V. They couldn’t keep all of their ships in Relliketh, where the cell was currently headquartered—as quickly as Taryl came up with new fuels, new ways to mask them, the Cardassians found ways to detect them, and the fleet was too large now to keep together.
The Ornathia fleet had regrown in recent years, as more people joined the cell. Some of Taryl’s cousins who had originally fled back to their families’ farms had returned to the cell after the Pullock V report had gained notoriety. Some of the raiders could still be stored in the Berain mountains, where the natural kelbonite in the rock shielded them from overhead scans, but the constant lifting off from the same location was risky, and Lenaris had suggested moving some of the shuttles to Derna, but Taryl had insisted that it would not be wise to keep the communications links and the shuttles in the same place. Halpas had been the first to suggest Jeraddo; the sparsely populated moon was of little interest to the Cardassians, their presence there minimal. It was the perfect place to hide their ships.
Lenaris tried to make conversation to pass the time. It never hurt to remind everyone of the basics, either. “So, we’ll go in with a typical kienda fan formation, with me and Sten in the lead. Jau, you and Nerissa will flank, and—”
“I know,” Jau said wearily. “And the Legans will be at the tail. We pull down until we’re just about fifty linnipates above the base, and then we drop our ordnance in the center of four parked skimmers, and pull up. The blast should take out at least sixteen skimmers, if we position our explosives in the correct place, so make each hit count.”
“Yeah,” Lenaris said lamely. From the back, Sten chuckled.
Lenearis said little else until they reached the site, where they cruised over the forests of Jeraddo and quickly found the cave they had dubbed Lunar V. There were twelve raiders in all here, many of them engineered entirely from scrap, mostly by Taryl. These improvised ships lacked the comprehensive sensors that some of the older raiders were equipped with, though Taryl hoped to change that eventually.
It was one of these “newer” birds that Jau would be flying, since he was considered an apt enough pilot to compensate for the lack of equipment. The Legan brothers were barely competent fliers, and Lenaris would have been happy to have left them behind entirely, but they were short on pilots just now. Taryl was pregnant, and Lenaris wouldn’t have dreamed of putting her in harm’s way. She was safely back at Tilar, working on the communications upgrades. Halpas and a few of the others were on Derna right now, calibrating new relay towers to keep the cells on Bajor connected. And there had been an accident recently. The warp carrier had been taken out to try and make contact with some of the Bajorans outside the B’hava’el system, and it had never returned. Seven people were on that freighter, seven members of the extended cell, seven friends, brothers, sisters, parents, children—seven pilots. Lenaris had to make do with what was left.
The Legan brothers were coming in with Ornathia Nerissa, and Lenaris didn’t trust them to take one of the scrap raiders. No, it was better to put them in the idiot-proof ships, though he didn’t feel especially confident they wouldn’t find some way of getting themselves lost—or, more likely, killed.
Lenaris quickly claimed his own shuttle, and they set to work. The little vessels had to be pushed manually from the cave, and the three men worked to move their vessels out into a more reasonable takeoff position, stomping through the heavy foliage and sidestepping the unusually large insects that patrolled the moon. The second of their transport shuttles docked while they were struggling, and Nerissa and the Legans emerged to help
them. They managed to get each ship into position, each one loaded with appropriate ammunition, each double-checked according to Taryl’s extensive list.
There were a few backslaps and encouraging words, and it was time. Each man or woman climbed into his or her vessel, all looking deferentially to Lenaris. It had never been said—at least, not within his earshot—but he knew they considered him the leader. It wasn’t a job he’d lobbied for, but he couldn’t deny the responsibility.
“Good fighting, everyone,” Lenaris said, and pulled the glacis plate of his raider closed. He tapped in a few commands and lifted his shuttle into Jeraddo’s mild sky, pushing through the sound barrier and out of the atmosphere in almost no time at all. There was little in the way of shock absorption. The inertial dampers did their best to keep up, but Lenaris was still rocked crazily about his cockpit before the shuttle broke into the openness of space.
He immediately tested the new sensor array that Taryl had come up with. He could see where the others were, and he tapped a command to each of them in code. Jau was the first to respond, and Lenaris felt a tightening pride in his chest, surpassed only by the residual traces of fear for his little brother’s safety that still lingered.
Prophets, keep him safe.
Dukat’s duties on this day had not permitted him to visit Meru as soon as he would have liked. For Dukat, there was no love that would ever transcend that which he shared with his wife, but between his few and far-between visits to Cardassia Prime, he grew lonely for female companionship. Most of his Bajoran dalliances had failed to hold his attention for long, but Meru was different. It could truthfully be said that he loved her. He may have been distracted lately by the birth of his new daughter, but his consideration of Meru had not faltered, only been put aside while he enjoyed the heady experience of having such close access to the newborn in his life. His children on Cardassia Prime had mostly been born while he was away on assignment, and he had been permitted to spend only brief stints of time with each of them while they were infants. His new half-Bajoran daughter represented a risky situation for him, but the cautious nature of the experience was easily displaced by the intense joy at her beautiful presence.
