by S. D. Perry
“I’m to live here?” Mora said, surprised. It immediately dawned on him what was happening—he was no longer permitted to leave.
“Yes, I think that would be best, don’t you?”
Mora nodded, for there was nothing else left to do. He supposed he should be grateful, after what had happened with Daul, that they weren’t simply sending him straight to a work camp. He was the last Bajoran here, and he’d better not forget it. The Cardassians obviously weren’t going to.
“Gul Dukat, I have something to show you!” Basso burst into the conference room with the isolinear recording in hand, and the prefect looked up from the long table where he was seated with his visitors, a damage assessment team from sciences.
“Basso! I believe I’ve asked you numerous times not to—”
“It’s about Gallitep, sir.”
Dukat immediately stopped what he was doing and excused himself from his visitors. The sabotage of the camp took precedence over all else; Dukat was eager to amplify the blame laid on Darhe’el for the disaster, no small task. Gul Darhe’el had been away from Gallitep when the mass escape and near total destruction of the camp had taken place; at worst, he was guilty of poor timing, although he had specifically asked for that Bajoran scientist, the one who’d acted on behalf of the terrorists. Dukat had gone out of his way to say as much in every report heading back to Cardassia Prime. If there was anything Basso could tell him that might be useful in his quest to see Darhe’el disgraced, Dukat was eager to hear it.
Leaving the conference room, he walked briskly back to his office, the Bajoran at his heels. When the door had closed behind them, he nodded for Basso to continue.
The Bajoran was breathless—from excitement or exertion, Dukat didn’t know. “I reviewed all the security rods from the day of the disaster, as you asked me, and I found one that has something you need to see.”
“Very good,” Dukat said, and sat down at his office desk.
Basso quickly plugged the recording into a nearby monitor and found the sequence he was looking for. Dukat squinted to view the footage. “Enhance,” Basso told the computer, and the focus pulled in on a group of people edging along one of the narrow roads that lined the open-pit mine.
“There,” Basso told him, pointing to the screen. “That’s Shakaar Edon, the leader of a cell just out of Dahkur.”
Dukat nodded. “So, we know who is responsible for Gallitep. But this doesn’t get us any closer to—”
“No, no, sir, there’s more.” Basso progressed the recording a few steps further, to show another crowd shot on a road further below the first point. “Enhance,” he said again, and pointed to the slender red-haired figure that appeared onscreen. He didn’t need to say more.
“Nerys,” Dukat breathed.
Kira mostly felt triumphant, for she’d just taken part in one of the biggest missions in the history of the Shakaar cell. She’d personally had a hand in liberating the worst camp on all of Bajor. She felt dizzied from all the praise that was being heaped on her, from not only Lupaza, but Dakhana, Mobara—even Shakaar himself had commended her courage and clear thinking.
The Shakaar cell had taken proper time and measure to grieve as well as celebrate, for two members of the group had not made it back. Mobara had been unable to get a lock on two of the communicators, and made the assumption that they had been destroyed. Ornak later confirmed that Matram Tryst had blown himself up, taking at least twenty Cardassian guards with him—along with Par Lusa. Par had been only eighteen years old, and Matram not much older than that. But they’d known the risks…just as Kira did.
She couldn’t stop thinking about one small thing, certainly small against the overwhelming sense of victory that had accompanied the sight of all those Bajorans suddenly appearing in the forest of Dahkur, many of them so near to death that Kira knew they would not have made it for one more day inside that camp. They could go home now, and those who were sick could at least live out their last moments in freedom, hopefully with their families or loved ones. But there was one Bajoran who wouldn’t ever see his loved ones again—the scientist who had made it all possible. And that small thing kept at her, throughout the celebration, throughout the glowing aftermath of Gallitep’s liberation.
She had gone to sit outside the cave, watching Bajor’s moons as they very slowly crept from behind the mountains in the west, one after the other. The closest moon was a deep orange, tinted by the haze in the atmosphere. She wondered what it had looked like in the days before the Cardassians’ various mining and manufacturing interests had tainted the air with billowing clouds of pollution. People said the moons were once the color of fusionstone, nearly white sometimes on summer nights. Kira absently drew circles in the dust with a stick, briefly calling to mind thoughts of her mother, the artist, and wondering why she’d never had any talent of her own.
“Nerys,” called a gentle voice—Lupaza, of course, emerging from the cave.
“I’m here,” Kira answered her, setting down the stick.
“What are you thinking about?”
Kira shrugged. “Nothing,” she said unconvincingly.
Lupaza pursed her lips. “You’re not still thinking about that scientist, are you?”
“No,” Kira said. “Yes. A little bit.”
Lupaza squatted on her heels. “Nerys,” she said. “You need to understand something right now. That man—he was a collaborator. It’s true that in the end, he did what he could to compensate for the evil he’d been responsible for, but…it’s only right that he ultimately gave his life for the struggle. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Kira said listlessly, picking up the stick again.
“Nerys,” Lupaza said, her voice not quite so gentle now. “If you want to fight in the resistance—if you really want to be in this cell, or any cell—you’d better get used to the idea that Bajorans have to die sometimes. Not just the people in your cell, which is bad enough, but sometimes…Bajorans have to die, and we have to kill them. It doesn’t matter how brave you are, how strong—if you can’t come to terms with killing collaborators, then you’d better go home to your father right now.”
Lupaza stood up, and made to go back into the cave. “Really, it’s a good thing that scientist was killed. Because if I were him, I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself, after seeing what those people in that camp looked like.”
“You’re right,” Kira said quickly, before Lupaza could go inside. “I know you’re right.” She managed a weak smile at Lupaza, genuinely feeling a little better. Lupaza smiled back, and held her hand out to pull Kira to her feet.
Lupaza went on. “It’s difficult to understand, maybe, but this war we’re fighting…it’s not just a matter of Bajorans versus Cardassians. This is a fight between what’s right, and what’s evil. And the face of evil sometimes looks unsettlingly like your own. It could be someone that you know. It could be a member of your own family. It could be the boy that…the boy you were supposed to marry, the boy you thought was the love of your life. But it’s still evil, nonetheless.”
Kira nodded, remembering what Lupaza had mentioned of her ih’tanu.
“Let’s go inside,” Lupaza told the younger girl, changing her tone. “There’s a glass of copal in there with your name on it.”
“Copal!” Kira exclaimed.
“Sure,” Lupaza said. “You’re old enough to handle something like Gallitep, I think you’re beyond old enough to have a little old glass of copal.”
Kira nodded, eager to taste her first cider with the rest of the cell. For if Gallitep had been her formal initiation into the cell, the event that would finally persuade the others to stop calling her “little girl” would probably be a round or two of copal with Shakaar. It would do the job better than an ih’tanu could have.
A cheer went up as Kira and Lupaza entered the cave, one of many cheers that had been erupting throughout the evening, and Lupaza poured Kira a stoneware tumbler full of strong cider. Kira took a hesitant sip and
willed her face not to crumple with the potent sour flavor that stung the back of her tongue. Another cheer went up as she opened her eyes and raised her cup with a smile.
As the evening blurred into a haze of warm triumph, a cacophony of friendly cheers and songs of victory, Kira recognized that the old ways were really gone for good now. Bajor was a different place than it had once been, a new place. It would never be the same as it was before Kira was born, but her world would be free again. Kira would have a hand in ensuring her people’s freedom, she decided—no matter how many Bajoran collaborators she had to kill to do it. This would be the last time that she would ever mourn the loss of someone who had caused the kind of suffering that she had witnessed at Gallitep. Tonight, she was truly a resistance fighter.
Epilogue
In his office, housed in the business sector of Cardassia Prime, Dost Abor was putting his papers in order as he did every day before he went home. He was a ritualistic person, and though the task was almost entirely meaningless, to neglect it without just cause would have been unthinkable.
When the chime on his comm sounded, he answered it with eagerness, for he was a man whose particular line of work dictated that he had to be ready for anything, at all times. He was anticipating a call, but then there were always those calls that he wasn’t anticipating, and it was important to be just as prepared for the unexpected as for the expected. Abor was nothing if not flexible.
“Mister Abor,” said the woman whose face appeared before him. It was the turnkey in charge of the storeroom at the Ministry of Science, the very person Abor had been expecting to contact him this evening. “We received your request for the item, and it appears that your credentials are all in order. But…we have unfortunate news.”
“And what might that be?” Dost asked, annoyed but unsurprised. The ministry was an inefficient body, even compared to the idiots in Central Command. He already knew the object was lost, he only needed to gather a little more information regarding its disappearance.
“I’m…sorry to have to inform you of this, but the object in question seems to be…missing.”
“Missing!” Abor repeated, with mock surprise. “Tell me, Madam, with an organization as tightly run as yours, how could that possibly be the case?” He did not bother to conceal the sarcasm in his tone.
“Mister Abor, I do apologize, and I can tell you that I don’t know how a thing like this could have happened—nobody has looked at that artifact in years.”
“Who was the last person to see it?” Abor asked her. “Surely there must be an information trail.”
“Well, going by memory alone, I do seem to recall that a former student looked at it, a very long time ago…There was some kind of a to-do about the security system, and the object was classified, but since then—”
“I don’t want you to go by your memory,” Abor told her coolly. “I want you to go by the records. Find out who accessed that object last, and then contact me.”
“Without the container in hand, that may be difficult to ascertain.”
Abor smiled coolly. “Well then,” he told the woman, “I imagine you’ll want to begin looking for the container right away.”
“May I ask why this is so important?” the woman asked him, plainly annoyed at the manner in which she was being spoken to.
“No, you may not,” Abor told her. “It does not concern you.”
A knowing expression came across the woman’s eyes, and Abor punched the disconnect button. If she thought she knew what was going on, she probably couldn’t guess the half of it. But she almost certainly suspected the Order was involved. No matter, Abor decided. If she became a problem, the Order could get rid of her. Tain might be reluctant to arrange it himself, but Abor supposed he had enough influence to make that call on his own.
Of course, it would be ideal to do it before he was sent back to the Valo system. Abor had no intention of allowing another agent to take credit for a breakthrough that was deservedly his to claim. It had been Abor who had uncovered the long-overlooked transmission that he believed might lead the Order to the heart of the risen Oralian Way.
Enabran Tain may have been far less interested in the Bajoran artifacts than his predecessor, but that didn’t mean that Dost Abor had lost interest in them. Abor had recently learned that the artifact from the Ministry of Science was the only one that had ever gone on record as causing anyone to have any kind of so-called “mystical” experience since it had been removed from Bajor.
Abor was not certain, but he believed that the artifact in question had been removed from Bajor under the authority of Rhan Ico, one of many agents who had disappeared during the upheaval that followed Tain’s assumption of office. There was a short interim during which the vast and untraceable contents of the Order’s storage facility had been ransacked by several agents who protested Tain’s impending status; those agents had all disappeared shortly following the incident—and so had at least one of the Orbs of Bajor.
Tain was unconcerned about the breach; the old man was convinced that there was no weight to the stories surrounding the artifacts, the suggestion that whoever possessed them might be privy to a kind of second sight, an indefinable source of knowledge and power. But Abor, who had been in the Order at the time of the first artifact’s retrieval from Bajor, remembered a few details about that original group of Oralians, those the Order and Central Command had conspired to exterminate. The Oralians had developed a particular fascination with Bajoran religion, and the artifacts that came with it. Now that the Oralians were said to be growing in numbers once again, Tain was sure that it was only a matter of time before Central Command began to tolerate them, and possibly even to condone their foolish, imaginary ideologies. Enabran Tain made no secret of his disdain for many of Central Command’s “softer” policies, believing that the military was weakening due at least in part to the sudden influx of wealth from Bajor, turning soldiers who had once been hard and ruthless into soft, complacent politicians—most notably, Gul Dukat.
Reviewing old transmissions when he was last stationed on Valo VI, Abor had discovered an archived communiqué between Yannik Reyar, the military’s liaison with the Order, and his daughter, who apparently worked at the Ministry of Science several years before. Their conversation referenced a Bajoran artifact, one that Dost Abor was certain had been taken from the Obsidian Order, somehow finding its way to the ministry. Tain had shown little interest when Abor sent word that he might have located an item that had been missing from the Order’s catalogued inventory. But, Abor hoped, when he assembled his case, Tain would take notice—for Abor had done a bit of digging since he first came across the transmission, and he intended to find not only the Orb, but the woman who had handled it last—the woman who had apparently attempted to hide it—the woman he believed to be the Guide for the Oralian Way.
THE TEROK NOR SAGA
CONTINUES IN
DAWN OF THE EAGLES
Appendices
The following is a guide to many of the specific characters, places, and related material in Night of the Wolves. Where such an item was mentioned or appeared previously in a movie, episode, or other work of Star Trek fiction, its first appearance is cited.
APPENDIX I: BAJOR
Characters
Akhere Bis (male) resident of Valo II
Akhere Juk (male) resident of Valo II, father of Akhere Bis
Arin (male) kai of the Bajoran faith (Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers)
Aro Seefa (male) resistance fighter, member of the Ornathia cell
Basso Tromac (male) personal aide to Gul Dukat. (DS9/“Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”)
Bram Adir (male) resistance fighter, leader of the Bram cell
Crea (female) resistance fighter, member of the Ornathia cell
Dakahna Vass (female) resistance fighter, member of the Shakaar cell
Darrah Mace (male) resident of Valo II, former member of the Bajoran Militia (Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers)
Daul Mir
osha (male) researcher at the Bajoran Institute of Science
Dava (male) a kai who lived several hundred years prior to the Cardassian occupation
Faon (male) resistance fighter, member of the Bram cell
Furel (male) resistance fighter, member of the Shakaar cell (DS9/“Shakaar”)
Gantt (male) resistance fighter and medic, member of the Shakaar cell (DS9/“Ties of Blood and Water”)
Halpas Palin (male) resistance fighter, leader of the Halpas cell
Hintasi (male) resident of Valo II
Istani Reyla (female) monk, friend of the Kira family (DS9/Avatar)
Kanore (male) resistance fighter, member of the Bram cell (TNG/“Preemptive Strike”)
Keeve Falor (male) resident of Valo II, former member of the Bajoran Chamber of Ministers (TNG/“Ensign Ro”)
Ketauna (male) artist, follower of Opaka Sulan
Kira Meru (female) mistress of Gul Dukat, mother of Kira Nerys (DS9/“Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”)
Kira Nerys (female) resistance fighter, member of the Shakaar cell (DS9/“Emissary”)
Kira Pohl (male) brother of Kira Nerys (DS9/“Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”)
Kira Reon (male) brother of Kira Nerys (DS9/“Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”)
Kira Taban (male) father of Kira Nerys (DS9/“Ties of Blood and Water”)
Kubus Oak (male) special liaison between Gul Dukat and the Caradassian-sanctioned Bajoran government (DS9/“The Collaborator”)
Lafe Darin (male) resistance fighter, member of the Halpas cell, lifelong friend of Lenaris Holem
