Star Trek: Terok Nor 02: Night of the Wolves (12 page)

“You’re too compassionate for them to understand you.” She brushed a strand of wiry black hair away from his face.

“It’s the resistance,” he told her. “Why must they continue to fight me? Can’t they see that I have their best interests at heart? You experienced yourself what kinds of things they do—the recent attempt on my life, you would have been killed, too. They would kill a Bajoran woman in cold blood just to make a self-serving political statement.”

Meru worked not to tense, as she always did when Dukat mentioned the resistance. While she did not agree with every action taken by the resistance fighters, she understood why they fought. She knew firsthand what it was like to go for days without any food, to watch your children suffer from cuts that wouldn’t heal, their bodies too starved for what they needed to thrive. She could not honestly denounce those who chose to resist. And though Dukat was an unusual man among Cardassians, Meru knew it was no use trying to explain it to him. He was unusual, but he was still a Cardassian.

“What’s on your mind, Meru?” Dukat tipped her chin up toward his face with his index finger. Meru smiled as brilliantly as she knew how.

“Only pleasing you after a difficult day,” she told him. After all, she thought to herself, that’s what she was here for. To provide comfort. She was a comfort woman, and it did her no good to think of herself in any other context.

Dukat smiled in turn, and pulled her close.

“Holem, didn’t you hear me? I said, hand me that hyperspanner.” Taryl’s voice echoed through the corridor from where only her feet were visible in the light of Lenaris’s palm beacon. She had been lying on her back for hours inside the cramped opening of the maintenance conduit of the old warp ship.

Lenaris’s palmlight wobbled clumsily around the pile of equipment spread across the floor of the ship’s engine room. He was no novice when it came to tools, but Taryl had things he’d never heard of before. “Is this it?” He handed her a cylindrical object.

She made an exasperated noise. “No, this is a magna-spanner. The hyperspanner is—oh, never mind, I’ll get it.” She hoisted herself from the tube with some difficulty, her movements casting oversized shadows across the convex shine of the inner hull. Lenaris, feeling useless, got out of her way.

The derelict vessel still rested in the same position as it had when Lenaris had first seen it, over a year ago, and it was likely no closer to being fixed now than it had been when he had initially inspected it with Taryl and Lac. Since he’d come to live with the Ornathia clan, the days had passed quickly, lost to the myriad small chores and errands needed to ensure survival. There wasn’t much time to come out to where the vessel lay, and the only one of the three who had any inkling whatsoever of how the engines might be made to work again seemed to be Taryl, and she was also the one with the least opportunity to actually work on it. Seefa, her fiancé, still felt that the business with the ship could come to no good.

But Lenaris and Lac grew ever more determined to see the thing airborne—or at least, grew ever more determined to spend time in the foothills with the ship, tinkering with her instruments and comparing her schematics with the information they managed to gather from various contacts between Tilar and Relliketh. It was a minor obsession for Lenaris, one that he wasn’t sure he ever expected to be fulfilled, but one that took up a great deal of his time nonetheless, whether it was gathering information, looking for an engineer, or poking around in the ship itself.

Of course, time with the ship was limited to the interims between the small operations that the Ornathia cell was beginning to plan and carry out. The cell was still in its infancy, and full-scale attacks were ill-advised at this point. The cell was comprised mainly of the Ornathia cousins and their spouses, none of whom had any real combat experience. But many of them were surprisingly resourceful when it came to refurbishing pieces of useful equipment. The latest venture was a plan to build a long-range communications tower, which would have to be erected on one of Bajor’s moons, probably Derna. Missions planned outside the atmosphere had been very few and far between, however, and took months of careful planning. The tower would probably not be completed for another six months or so—and Seefa was once again vocally opposed to the whole thing, being of the general opinion that offworld travel was simply a bad idea.

Taryl continued to clang around inside the maintenance conduit while Lenaris held the palmlight, waiting for her next order and letting his mind wander. “Holem,” she said, jerking him out of his daydream, “I need you to hold this guide wire while I solder.”

Uncertainly, Lenaris stuck his head and shoulders inside the opening of the maintenance conduit. Taryl was forced to straddle his torso, the conduit much too small for the two of them. He took the wire from her fingers while she soldered the exposed portion in place, holding a small sylus-sized light in her teeth. He could feel his heart pounding as she worked, all too aware of her thighs encircling his waist, and he willed his pulse to quiet itself; he did not want her to know just how much it thrilled him to be in such close proximity to her…

“What the
kosst
is going on here?”

Lenaris dropped his palmlight and quickly ducked out of the conduit; the voice belonged to none other than Aro Seefa.

“Seefa!” Lenaris exclaimed. “I didn’t even hear you.”

Seefa ignored him. “I’ve told you and told you how dangerous this is. I knew your fool brother was still committed to wasting his time with this heap, but you?”

Taryl hopped smoothly out of the conduit. “Calm down, Seefa,” she said. “I’m only having a look around.” She lowered her voice. “I’m humoring my brother a little. This thing’s a lost cause, of course.”

“You shouldn’t even be here,” Seefa growled, but much of the anger had gone from his voice.

Taryl stroked his arm. “I know,” she sighed. “But you know how persuasive Lac can be…”

Lenaris wished he were invisible, and to a degree, it seemed as though he was, to Taryl and Seefa. They often seemed to forget his presence—or that of anyone else—when they were together. He found it increasingly difficult not to resent it a little, especially since he secretly felt that his rapport with Taryl transcended her superficial relationship with her fiancé. But he couldn’t let himself think like that. It would only cause trouble.

In very little time, Taryl seemed to have Seefa almost thoroughly appeased, though he still demanded that she come back to the settlement with him. “If you’ve got any sense,” Seefa said to Lenaris, “you’ll come along with us. And make sure you don’t leave any tools behind. It’s bad enough to leave evidence of our presence here, but I guess if the Cardies think we’re stripping the ship for useful materials, that’s one thing. It’s another thing to let them get the idea that you might be trying to get it airborne.”

“Right,” Lenaris said tersely, picking up tools. Seefa and Taryl climbed the ladder from the engine room to the cockpit, and he was alone.

Feeling hopeless, Lenaris glanced at the schematic Taryl had been using. She was trying to put the auxiliary power core back online, a fairly simple affair for a trained,
D’jarra
-born engineer, but for a self-taught farmer from Tilar, perhaps somewhat beyond her abilities. And yet, Lenaris could see from what Taryl had been up to that she was at least on the right track. But fixing the auxiliary system and fixing the warp reactor were two very different things. If only Lenaris had really been able to find Tiven Cohr, or any experienced engineer—someone who had worked on warp ships before the Cardassians had come. That necessary expertise was in grave danger of being lost to Bajor forever. The Cardassians had put restrictions on such information, and it could be preserved only through word of mouth, the older generation to the younger. But constant violence, disease, and poor nutrition didn’t make for the greatest life expectancy. Bajorans who had been adults before the occupation were becoming scarce.

Lenaris removed himself from the exposed cockpit of the half-buried vessel and clambered down the slope that had been created by the still-buried wing. He headed back toward the village, wondering if Lac had been having much luck with the latest attempts to reach another cell in Hartis province—to plan tandem attacks, and maybe even to get another lead on an experienced warp engineer.

Lenaris greeted a few of the Ornathia cousins and their spouses as he approached the settlement. They were fetching water to be brought back to the village; there still hadn’t been any proper wells dug in this region, most of the Ornathias having traded their plows for coil spanners and phase inductors. There were over twenty small ships of various types in the Ornathia fleet now, most of them hidden beneath natural overhangs of kelbonite that occurred along the mountains just beyond the old mining site. The ships all required constant maintenance, but many of the Ornathias had proven very skilled in keeping up their craft.

Lenaris found Lac at a small corner work table that was set up in his little cottage. Lenaris had built his own dwelling, just a few paces from Lac and Taryl’s house, but when in the village, he spent most of his waking hours here, with Lac.

Lac turned quickly when Lenaris drew back the rough door. “Holem!” he said excitedly. “I think these long-range transmitters are going to be ready sooner than we thought!”

“That’s great, Lac,” Lenaris said, “but that doesn’t mean we should rush the Derna mission. We still need a legitimate Bajoran flight pattern to cover us. We don’t want to underestimate the patrols coming out of Terok Nor.”

He gestured at the roof of the cottage, referring to the orbital station that drifted far above them, visible as an ominous, winking star in the night sky. Every Bajoran was well aware of the heightened Cardassian security that had been falling into place since the station had gone online, a year before.

“Terok Nor is just another reason for us to push harder,” Lac said firmly. “We have to raise our game, take bigger risks.”

“Like the warp ship,” Lenaris said.

Lac nodded, and the two friends smiled at each other, agreeing without words.

Joer Varc smoothed back his unruly shock of hair, the color of the sand dunes of Cardassia’s nearby Cuellar region. It had once been a sensitive topic for him, the unusual color of his hair. In all his life, he had probably encountered only three other light-haired Cardassians, and the distinction had been considered a handicap for him when he had trained for the Obsidian Order. But he believed he had proven himself to be more than just a standout in a crowd, and though it had occasionally been suggested to him that he should darken it, so as to “blend in,” he had resisted mightily. His hair was part of who he was, and to a degree, he liked the idea of being remembered for it.

He headed to his debriefing with near unwavering confidence, eager to begin his preliminary report. This had probably been the easiest and most successful mission he had ever accomplished. From now on, he was going to jockey for more assignments on Bajor.

This was the second debriefing he had attended this week; the first had occurred yesterday, with the Cardassian military. Varc’s cover was as a military glinn, and he was obligated to perform duties just like any other military drone, though his promotion to glinn came through in a miraculously short time, and his ship assignments never lasted longer than a month or two. Nearly every ship in the fleet included an operative from the Order, and each one had to take meticulous care that his or her cover was never blown.

He quickly found the office of Limor Prang, and the door slid back so that he could enter. The older man sat behind a desk so large and so ancient, it seemed to be a permanent fixture in the room. But Varc knew it was actually a recent addition; this office changed location almost as frequently as Varc himself changed assignments.

The old man’s expression revealed nothing as Varc entered the room. Prang addressed him by his code name, something he did not always do when the two were in private. “Ah, Mr.
Kieng
. You look confident,” he remarked. Prang looked as though he was going to say something else, but Varc, excited, seated himself and spoke before Prang could continue.

“In fact, I am feeling confident, Limor. I obtained considerable intelligence from my latest target.”

“Really?” The gaunt old man across the desk appeared distracted, glancing at something over Varc’s shoulder for a moment before focusing back on Varc, who was fairly bursting with his good news.

“He confirmed that most Bajorans continue to abandon their castes. There is a religious leader who has begun to advocate for it, despite the pressings of the kai. He also confirmed that the resistance is gaining considerable headway in his region, and he gave me several names. He was very specific. Those will all be in my final report.” He could not resist boasting. “I saw to it that his small daughter was in the room with us—he was quite preoccupied with her safety. It made him especially eager to answer my questions.”

Prang did not smile, but he almost never smiled. “I’m pleased that you enjoyed yourself, Mr. Kieng. However—”

Varc anticipated his comment. “The man did not survive the interrogation. But it is of no consequence, for I still gleaned everything that was asked of me.”

“
I
shall decide if the man’s death is of consequence, Mr. Kieng. Meanwhile, your personal comm chip has the details of your new assignment. You will board a ship leaving for the border territories in approximately four hours.”