Veralla Sil stood closest to the intruder. The leader of the gild, he stepped forward. One of three people who had brought their revolvers to bear, Veralla lowered his weapon. Keev noted that the other two did not.
Veralla said nothing. Instead, he carefully studied the man who had chased Keev, and so she took the opportunity to do so as well. Her gaze never left him as she climbed back to her feet, the hilt of her dagger still clutched in her hand. She first noticed the intruder’s height—not quite that of Veralla, but a head taller than Keev herself. He had short, straight hair, almost black, and though it did not appear perfectly coiffed, she could see that only his sprint through the wood had disturbed its usual neat style. His hands looked clean, his fingernails well manicured. His clothing—light boots, brown pants, and an unbuttoned brown vest worn over a white long-sleeved shirt—seemed an unlikely choice for an outing in the wood. He resembled an office worker more than a freedom fighter, a slaveholder more than a man who worked to free slaves—ice more than sky. Keev couldn’t tell simply by looking at him, of course, but he struck her as one of the Aleira rather than one of the Bajora.
He began to lower his arms, which prompted Veralla to raise his revolver again. The man reacted by freezing, but he did not lift his arms back up. “Slowly,” Veralla told him. “And keep your hands away from your clothing.” He nodded and complied with the orders.
Veralla started to walk around the man, scrutinizing him, but then stopped. “Take two steps forward,” he ordered. As the man did as he’d been bade, the two other gild members holding revolvers—Jennica Lin, a woman and the youngest among them, and Renet Losig, a man and the oldest—stepped back, keeping their distance from the intruder and their weapons aimed at him.
Keev saw that Veralla had instructed the man to move in order to provide enough room in the clearing to walk safely behind him. Veralla did so, visually examining the man from head to toe. While he did, Keev peered at her pursuer’s face. He had dark eyes and a swarthy complexion. Clean-shaven—in fact, closely shaven—he had well-defined features, including high cheekbones and a fine set of evenly spaced ridges at the top of his nose. Keev might have described him as handsome if she hadn’t wanted to plunge her blade into his throat.
Once Veralla had walked a complete circuit around the man, he turned toward Keev. Without a word, he adjusted the revolver in his hand, then held it out to her, grip first. She accepted it, settled it in her own hand—she ignored the blood smeared across her palm and the accompanying pain—and trained it on the intruder.
Veralla turned back toward the man. Keev expected the gild leader to begin asking questions, but instead he remained quiet. Tension filled the clearing. Again without saying anything—hardly unusual for the laconic Veralla—he reached out and patted the man down, starting at his hair and working down to his boots. The man made no move to stop or hinder him in any way. When Veralla finished, he repeated the process from behind the intruder. He conducted his search thoroughly, turning out pockets and leaving no part of the man’s anatomy untouched. For his part, the target of Veralla’s inspection offered no objections, seeming to understand the seriousness of the situation and his need to cooperate.
“He’s clean,” Veralla said at last. He moved back in front of the man. “What’s your name?” he asked almost casually, as though the two men had met at a social event.
“I’m Altek Dans,” the man said. “I’m from Joradell. I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor?” Jennica asked, skepticism evident in her tone. “And you were just out for a walk in the deep wood?” She still had not lowered her weapon, though Keev saw that she had shifted it from one hand to the other.
Veralla ignored the interruption. “Why were you chasing my friend?” he asked. Keev noted that Veralla did not use her name. He also did not reveal the purpose of the gild’s presence in the wood, although that would have been obvious to anybody who’d spent any time at all in Joradell over the previous few years.
“I was not ‘chasing’ your friend,” Altek said, but then he seemed to think better of his claim. “I mean, I was chasing her, but probably not for the reason you think.”
“You have no idea what we think,” blustered Jennica. Other voices were grumbling, and Keev glanced over her shoulder at her compatriots. Besides Jennica and Renet, she saw two of the three remaining members of their gild: Cawlder Vinik and Cawlder Losor, husband and wife, a few years younger than Keev, in their middle thirties. She did not spot the final member of their group until she had gazed around the other side of the clearing. In his late twenties, Synder Nogar crouched behind his duffel; he also had his revolver out and aimed at Altek Dans.
“Why were you chasing my friend?” Veralla repeated. Keev returned her attention to the two men in front of her. Though Veralla had asked the question a second time, his even voice had sounded calm and reasonable.
“I was looking for you,” Altek admitted. He looked past Veralla at the other members of the gild. When his gaze fell on Keev, she raised the barrel of her revolver, slightly but noticeably. She hadn’t intended to do so; it just happened.
Altek looked back at Veralla and went on, “I was looking for all of you. I want to join your efforts. Grenta Sor sent me.” The name meant nothing to Keev, but she thought she saw a glimmer of recognition in Veralla’s face.
“That still doesn’t explain why you were chasing Keev,” Jennica said. Keev did not appreciate having her name announced to the intruder, but at that point, they wouldn’t be able to release him anyway, so what difference did it make?
Veralla turned and stared directly at Jennica. He quietly said her name. Though he added nothing more, he made his message clear: I lead this gild and I am conducting this interrogation, so I will be the only one to speak. In the years that Keev had worked with Veralla, he had never needed to raise his voice or employ excessive verbiage in order to command his troops.
Veralla turned back to Altek. The intruder looked as though he anticipated another question, but Veralla waited quietly. At last, as though prodded to it, Altek said, “I was sent by Grenta Sor, who told me how to reach your location. I was almost here when I saw movement ahead of me in the wood, off to my left. It was that woman—” He pointed at Keev. “—and it looked like she was headed for your encampment.” Altek paused, as though deciding how best to frame what he would say next. “Sir,” he finally managed, though he appeared to be near Keev’s own age, perhaps five or seven years older than Veralla, “I thought she was the enemy.”
Keev found the assertion absurd coming from somebody who had just chased her at a full run. Veralla, though, simply nodded. When he did not say anything, Altek did.
“Look, I thought she was either going to spy on your gild or attack it,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. Since you didn’t know me, I couldn’t just show up here to warn you, and I didn’t want to do nothing. It seemed the best course of action to try to subdue her.”
Veralla nodded again, but then he asked a question. “How do you know Grenta Sor?”
“We work together at the hospital in Joradell,” Altek said. “We’re both physicians.”
“You are an Aleira then,” Veralla said, presenting his words not as a question, but as a statement.
Altek hesitated, but then said, “Yes.”
Keev heard a gasp and more grumbling from the others in the clearing. The Aleira held very different beliefs from the Bajora. The Aleira denied not only the divinity of the Prophets, but Their very existence. Of greater significance, they did not subscribe to the equality of all people. In their lands, they had mistreated visiting Bajora for decades, perhaps even for centuries. Within their borders, they subjugated not just the Bajora, but all who were not Aleira. They maintained a two-tiered system in which their people enjoyed all the benefits of society, with the rest forced to provide those benefits. Participation was not a choice.
Five decades prior, a new vein of Aleiran belief had arisen in the Bajoran city of Joradell. It grew slo
wly at first, with prevalent cultural disapproval of their avaricious, anti-intellectual brand of chauvinism. Still, their numbers increased, and twenty years later, they ultimately seized control of the city. Some of the Bajora and others escaped to freedom, but many had been forced into a life of slavery virtually overnight as the new order had taken power, declaring all non-Aleira as worthy only of either death or use as tools by the state.
“We should kill him,” asserted Jennica, always the quickest in their gild to suggest extreme action—and sometimes to take such action. In the present situation, though, Keev thought she agreed with the young firebrand.
Without looking around, Veralla raised one hand and held it open for a moment, a clear signal that he wanted everybody to remain quiet. Jennica said nothing more. After Veralla lowered his arm, he said, “I went to university with Doctor Grenta.”
Altek’s mouth opened wide in an expression that seemed to mix surprise and relief. “Yes,” he proclaimed. “Yes.” He looked down, not as if peering at the ground, but as if trying to remember something. He muttered to himself for a moment before gazing back up at Veralla. “You . . . you both attended medical classes, but Sor had an aptitude for anatomy that you lacked.”
The statement seemed to Keev an odd response, not least of all because it sounded like an insult. Veralla did not appear to take it that way, though. Rather, he stepped forward and placed his hands on the intruder’s upper arms. “Welcome,” he said, and then called back over his shoulder to the rest of the gild, “Stand down.”
Keev watched Jennica and Renet lower their revolvers. Synder rose from his place behind his duffel and tucked his weapon into the waistband of his pants. They and the others all started toward Veralla and Altek.
The apparent and sudden resolution did not feel right to Keev. “Wait,” she said, so sharply that everybody immediately stopped and peered over at her. “Wait,” she said again, lowering her voice. She looked to Veralla. “You believe him, Sil?” She rarely used his given name, but chose to do so in an attempt to underscore the gravity of her concerns.
“I do,” Veralla said, holding Keev’s gaze. “An old friend has sent Altek to us. An old and trusted friend.”
The words startled Keev, largely because Veralla spoke of friends and trust only sparingly. As the gild leader began introducing their people to Altek, Keev looked away. She replayed Veralla’s conversation with her pursuer in her mind and decided that, at the end, Veralla must have uttered a prearranged sign to the intruder, who had obviously responded with the appropriate countersign—Sor had an aptitude for anatomy, or whatever he’d said. She could think of no other reason that Veralla would so quickly accept a stranger into their group. They already risked their lives every day in their efforts to free individual Bajora from their servitude to the Aleira; placing their faith in the wrong person would put not just their gild at risk, but the entire operation, all the way to Joradell.
“And Kira Nerys, my second-in-command,” Veralla said.
Keev snapped her head around to look at Veralla, who held his arm out toward her, apparently introducing her to Altek. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Keev Anora’s my second-in-command,’ ” Veralla told her.
“Oh,” Keev said, the word almost inaudible.
“I’m sorry about that,” Altek said to her, hiking a thumb back over his shoulder, evidently to indicate their frantic dash through the wood. “I made the wrong choice.” He shrugged. “It was bad timing, I guess.”
“Bad timing,” Keev echoed. She forced up one side of her mouth into what she knew must be a lopsided smile, but she could do no better. She resolved to speak privately with Veralla about their new recruit. The gild leader might have been satisfied with Altek Dans, but Keev wasn’t . . . at least not yet.
Seven
Captain Ezri Dax sat behind the desk in her ready room aboard U.S.S. Aventine. With her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of raktajino, she studied the image of the new Deep Space 9 on her computer interface. She could have viewed it in three-dimensional form utilizing the holographic display built into her desktop, but she wanted to see the starbase in its everyday domain, hanging in space, set against a span of stars.
The overall design of the new station surprised Dax, in that it conjured in her mind the facility that preceded it. Both versions of DS9 possessed a general roundness to their shape, and the three orthogonal rings on the replacement reminded her of the docking ring and the curved docking pylons on the original. Many visible details of the new starbase distinguished it from those of the old, but Dax wondered if anybody else saw what she saw. If so, she wondered if the team who had designed Starfleet’s Deep Space 9 had intentionally attempted to evoke the impression of Cardassia’s Terok Nor.
Regardless of any superficial similarities, though, Dax could tell simply by looking at the new station that it improved considerably on its predecessor. How could it not be an improvement? she thought. Terok Nor had been constructed nearly four decades earlier, by the Cardassians—whose notions of comfort and accommodation none of her hosts had ever understood—and it had been built not as a starbase, but as a plant to process ore.
More than that, though, Dax could see—
An audible alert interrupted the captain’s thoughts. “Come in,” she called. The doors leading to the bridge parted to reveal her first officer.
“Am I interrupting?” asked Commander Samaritan Bowers as he entered the ready room from the bridge.
“Not at all, Sam,” Dax said. Bowers approached her desk, the doors closing behind him. “Have you taken a good look at the new station?” She turned her computer interface around so that Bowers could see its display.
“I saw it on the bridge when we arrived this morning,” he said. “But other than that, no, not really.”
Dax shook her head. “It’s really something.”
“Something good or something bad?” Bowers asked. He sat down in one of the two chairs in front of the captain’s desk.
“Well,” Dax said with a little smile, “it’s certainly no Terok Nor.”
Bowers chuckled. “So then definitely a good thing.” Like Dax, he’d spent several years assigned to the old station.
“I’ll say. For one thing, it obviously wasn’t designed to process ore.”
“It already sounds like a dream posting,” Bowers joked.
“Right,” Dax agreed. “It’s always a positive first step when the place you live wasn’t planned as an industrial site.”
Bowers leaned an arm on the front of the captain’s desktop and peered at the display. “It certainly looks bigger than our old bucket of self-sealing stem bolts.”
“It’s a lot bigger,” Dax said. “I was looking at the specs. They’ve got three times the crew we had, twice the overall population, plus they can handle scores of ships at once.”
“And did you see the park?” Bowers asked.
“I know, a park,” Dax said. “And sports fields and a theater and a swimming complex and who knows what else.”
“You sound jealous,” Bowers said.
“No, not jealous,” Dax said. “I’m sure that thing—” She pointed at the image of the starbase on the display. “—can’t generate a slipstream corridor and travel at hyper-warp velocities.”
“No, but it does have Quark’s.”
“Is Quark back?” Dax asked. “I hadn’t heard.”
“That’s what I’m told,” Bowers said. “And supposedly he’s still keeping the place he set up on Bajor while the new station was being built.”
“Quark has two establishments?” Dax said. “So he’s finally a business magnate?” The news actually delighted her; though Kira and Worf and others hadn’t much cared for the Ferengi, she’d always felt quite fond of him.
Bowers laughed. “I’m sure he’d tell you that he’s wildly successful, but I’m equally sure he hasn’t stopped complaining about how bad business is.”
“If he’s got two b
ars,” Dax said, “then life is undoubtedly twice as difficult for him now.”
Bowers agreed, then asked, “So are you going to go over?”
“To Quark’s?” Dax said. “I guess I probably will. I just thought I’d wait to escort President Bacco over, whenever she’s ready to go.”
“Oh,” Bowers said. “That’s what I came to tell you: the president left the Aventine for the station a few minutes ago.”
“Oh,” Dax said. As the highest-ranking officer aboard ship, she’d intended to escort President Bacco as a matter of courtesy and respect.
“I just happened to be checking in with her security team when she decided to go,” Bowers explained. “I told her I’d contact you, but she said she didn’t want to disturb you. She even refused my offer to accompany her.”
“A politician who doesn’t want special treatment?” Dax said, surprised. “No wonder she got reelected.” Not quite a year earlier, Nanietta Bacco had run for another term. She’d faced some vocal opposition, primarily because of Andor’s secession from the Federation, but after the defeat of the Borg and her deft handling of the Typhon Pact, she’d ridden a wave of popularity and considerable public approval to a decisive victory. She had even earned Dax’s vote.
“So,” Bowers asked again, “are you going to go over?” He hitched his head in the general direction of Aventine’s stern, to where the ship connected to DS9 via one of the station’s airlocks.
Dax sat back in her chair, inhaled deeply, then breathed out in what amounted to a long, slow sigh. “I guess I should get it over with, huh?”
“Julian?” Bowers asked.
“Oh, come on,” Dax said. “That’s what you were asking, wasn’t it, Sam?”
“Well, if memory serves, the last time you two saw each other, you didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”
“No, we didn’t,” Dax said, recalling the last time she’d been alone with Julian, and the tense conversation they’d had over dinner. Not over dinner, Dax remembered. We didn’t even make it to our meal. She could still see in her mind the image of Julian storming out of her quarters, looking back over his shoulder to tell her that he didn’t really care whether or not she approved of the choices he’d made in his life. Though her recollection of that argument remained vivid, in some ways it felt as if it had taken place eons ago—or maybe even never taken place at all. “How long ago was that, Sam?”
Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust Page 11
