Star Trek: Terok Nor 03: Dawn of the Eagles (26 page)

“Why are you fighting the Cardassians?” he suddenly asked.

She looked up from her cup and laughed, though it was not a happy sound. “Because,” she said. “Because everything the Cardassians have, they stole from us. From my people—from
me.
”

Odo considered it. “It has been suggested that the Bajoran people asked the Cardassians to come to Bajor,” he said.

Kira shook her head. “Suggested by Cardassians, I’m sure.” Her eyes flashed, expressing a depth of emotion that he could scarcely imagine. “You see how we’re treated. You think this is something we want?”

It certainly seemed unlikely, but he did not see how his opinion mattered, one way or another. He could only do his job, which was to correct injustices as defined by Cardassian law…which quite suddenly seemed terrifically unfair. Shouldn’t he be allowed to discern fairness based on the specifics of any given situation? Shouldn’t everyone?

He spoke before he had a chance to think further. “I can help you,” he offered, having no idea how he would go about it.

“Help me?”

“Get off the station.”

Her eyes widened slightly, her expression of anger softening somewhat. “How are you going to do that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But…I’ll find a way.”

O
nly two days after Kalisi contacted the university rep, Doctor Moset walked into the hospital’s main computer room with a broad grin on his narrow face.

This is it
, she thought, and relaxed. Finally. The waiting had been uncertain.

“There you are,” he said, walking over to where she sat, running the weekly diagnostics on the security system. “You’ll never imagine what happened this morning.”

Kalisi was the picture of innocence. “What happened?”

He sat next to her, looking around to be sure they were alone. One of the nurses had been in to check something, but had left promptly when he’d seen Moset come in. No one else was within earshot.

“I was contacted by the University of Culat,” he said. “They’ve offered me a position in exobiology, specializing in nonhumanoid. A
chair
, Kali, if it works out. And…I’ve accepted.”

Kalisi widened her eyes. “Crell! How wonderful!”

He took her hand, squeezed it in his own thin, sleek fingers. “We could work together, darling. You must call them back, ask if the weapons position is still open.”

She met his gaze, her own filled with manufactured hope. “I’d like that. But—” She shook her head. “The vaccine…there’s the batch recovery in just a few more weeks. If we want to replicate the master samples, we should start with a new synthesis.”

Moset frowned. “Perhaps I could arrange to come back for a time…”

“No, Crell,” she said, firmly, lovingly. “I will stay. I’ve already explained that I have a project to finish before I can consider their offer, and you’ve accepted. I will see to it that the master vaccine samples are properly adjusted.”

He reached out to touch her face, fingers spidering over her skin. “It is my work, Kali. I couldn’t ask you to stay…”

“You’re not asking, I’m offering,” she said. “Truly, is there anyone else you would trust with the documentation of the process? To see it through?”

She waited, watched him think. She was prepared to lie outright to get him away—create some false family issue she needed to resolve before she could return home, or even suggest that she wanted him to make a place ready for her, calling on the archaic tradition in which a man creates a suitable home for his affianced before she will agree to marry him.

Funny, though, how neither of us has mentioned marriage…
She suspected that he would, before much longer. Or not. In some ways, she knew nothing at all about Crell Moset.

He finally shook his head and answered her question. “You know there isn’t.”

“Let me stay,” she said. “I’ll finish the work, I’ll record everything…And then I can meet you at Culat.”

Moset beamed at her, impulsively raising her hand to his lips, dry as desert grass. “What would I do without you?”

So far, so good.

She smiled back at him. “Does this mean I’ll meet your cousin?”

“My cousin?”

“The one you were telling me about, who walks the Oralian Way.”

Moset grinned ever wider. “Did I say it was a cousin? I don’t recall.”

She laughed. “I thought you had,” she said, and went in another direction, wanting to defer his suspicions. “Ever since you told me about the Way, I’ve wondered…You say the current leader was trained at the Ministry of Science?”

“Yes.”

“As was I,” she said. “I am curious about when she was supposed to have worked there. Perhaps I knew her.”

Moset smiled. “Perhaps you
are
her.”

His attempts at humor were oblique and rarely funny. “What do you mean?”

“Only that when you told me you’d handled the Bajoran artifact—Astraea was alleged to have received her call by touching one of those Orbs, at the ministry. And she is about your age, I believe. You would have trained around the same time.” He chuckled, then turned mock serious. “Tell me, Kali, are you secretly speeding away to Cardassia City when you’re not with me, leading an ancient religion in your spare time?”

Miras.
Instantly, she knew. Her friend from school, who’d borrowed Kalisi’s clearance to look at the Orb, who’d suffered some sort of hallucination that day the computers had glitched…
Astraea is Miras Vara.

She’d planned to use the information about Moset’s relative as her leverage, but if it was true, if the secret leader of the Oralian Way was Miras…

She had to pretend admiration at his clever jest, but her laugh was real. Crell Moset had just inadvertently provided her with exactly what she needed to ensure that she could achieve all of her objectives.

I will be free
, she promised herself, and laughed again.

Making his way through the corridor near the empty habitat ring, Odo was startled when someone grabbed his arm. Without thinking, he dissolved into a liquid from his shoulder to his wrist, removing himself from the clutching fingers. He was considering his response when he realized that it was Dalin Gaten Russol.

“Odo!” The Cardassian appeared unhappy, his movements anxious. “I need your help.”

Odo took a step back. The urgency in Russol’s voice was troubling. “What’s happened?”

“I…I need you to do something for me. There is an isolinear recording in Dukat’s office. I need that recording. My life depends on it, Odo. Possibly more than my life.”

Odo blinked, a conscious action that did not, of course, come naturally to him. It was something that he often remembered to do only when he was beginning to feel distress or confusion. It was one of the first habits he’d been taught. “What is more important than your life?”

“I can’t explain it, Odo. Just understand that this matter is of the utmost significance.”

“I’m sure I can retrieve it for you,” Odo said, and something occurred to him then—something vaguely related to the idea of profit.
An exchange…of goods—or services
. He spoke slowly. “But I will need you to help me with something, as well.”

“Anything I can do for you, Odo, I will do it. Just get me that recording by the end of the day.”

“I will get it for you now, if you like. But there is a Bajoran woman who needs to get off the station,” Odo said. “Do you think you could assist her?”

Russol looked surprised for a brief moment before he nodded. “That’s almost too easy,” he replied. He looked sidelong at Odo. “A Bajoran woman, eh? Why, may I ask, is this particular Bajoran important to you?”

Odo frowned. He was unsure of the answer himself. “It seems to me…if you are unwilling to share more information about your isolinear recording, then perhaps we can agree to keep our motives to ourselves.”

Russol nodded, a smile spreading across his face. “Agreed.”

Dukat was ready to see her, or rather, believed that Kira Nerys might finally be ready to see him. He’d watched the feeds from the processing levels off and on since her arrival, watched her shoulders begin to slump as she saw her future unfolding, grit and grease and no way out. Whatever rebellious spirit had dared her to come to Terok Nor, it had certainly been diminished. He didn’t want her broken, just receptive.

He summoned Basso Tromac to his office, considering how the meeting might unfold: young Nerys, frightened and alone, brought before the prefect, a man she’d been raised to fear and even hate, who’d loved her mother in secret, taken care of her as she had taken care of him. Nerys would never know that part of it, of course. That would be…counter-productive, in any case. But he saw a real opportunity here, to act as a father figure to the girl. Perhaps his could be the firm, guiding hand that would lead her away from her vain struggles, lead her to accept a better life for herself. Surely, it was what Meru would have wanted.

He sighed, wishing that was his only interest. In truth, he also sought distraction from the steady decline in Bajor’s export quotas. Until Kell and the Council finally relented, sending what was needed to keep Bajor profitable—surveyors, geologists, researchers to study pharmaceutical possibilities in the flora; the list of possibilities were endless—there would be no respite from the dropping figures. Bajor would serve Cardassia well for at least another generation, but until the Union was willing to invest, the statistics would tell a different story; would show, in fact, that the planet was beginning to run out of nonrenewable resources.

And the blame would be laid on me
. He disliked the thought of how it might read in the story of the Union, the one dutifully memorized by schoolchildren. He could see how it would look, where the implications would fall…

A signal at his door, and then Basso Tromac walked in. “You wanted to see me, Gul?”

Dukat smiled, his thoughts returning to Nerys. “Yes. I think our Bajoran guest has squirmed long enough. I want you to bring her to me.”

“Here?” Basso asked, his expression giving the rest of his thought away—
and not your quarters?
Puerile of mind.

“Where else?” Dukat asked, his smile sharp.

Basso nodded. “Of course. Right away.”

He left the office and Dukat sat at his desk again. But perhaps he should be standing when Nerys was shown in. Which would be least threatening to her? It was his attention to detail that often won him the things he sought, and disarming the Bajoran girl of lifelong prejudices would be no easy task. This would only be the first session of many, he was sure, but first impressions were often the strongest.

He turned to his computer, calling up her file—calling up both of her files, after a moment’s thought, the original and the one he’d personally edited. Perhaps presenting her with evidence of his sincerity would be a good beginning. A handful of internal memos popped up—authorization requests, mostly—and he quickly answered them, only pausing over one. A waste processor needed replacement, a costly and time-intensive task, and while it needed to be done, he thought it might be put off awhile—

There was a noise, close behind him. Dukat turned, stylus in hand, the briefest pulse of instinctive fear clenching his gut—

—
assassination
—

—and he saw a vole, fat and sleek and holding something in its jaws, disappearing into the air conduit by the door. Another refugee from the storage bays, an ever-present nuisance that continued to thrive in spite of maintenance’s best efforts. The voles arrived in cargo containers from home, lived on the refuse left out by the Bajorans, by careless shopkeepers. Terok Nor represented the very pinnacle of Cardassian technology; that they couldn’t rid themselves of a few voles was an utter embarrassment.

Overcome by disgust, Dukat threw his stylus after it. He picked up a padd from his desk and threw that, too, but the gesture was a futile one. The vole was gone.

His lanky, leaning form, his thin blade of a smile, his strange precision in even the smallest of tasks…Crell Moset was gone, packed and returned to Cardassia Prime. It hadn’t taken long, once the gears had ground into motion, moving the science ministry’s complicated transfer process along. There had been a formal reassignment of staff, a small, private dinner attended by a handful of colleagues, and a final, inevitable night of passion with Kalisi. She had enjoyed the sex. His efforts were sincere and practiced, making it easy to forget the rest of it—what she’d read recently about his experiments with polytrinic acid, for example, on living Bajorans. Or the radiation tests, or the additive to the Fostossa vaccine, or a dozen other things she’d learned since first submitting to his caresses. Her body responded in spite of her thoughts and, she had to admit, because of them, the darker feelings adding a flavor to their coupling that had frightened her, afterwards, but had, at the time, been extremely stimulating.

Only hours after their final, lingering kiss, the very morning his shuttle left atmosphere, she set to work. She destroyed every existing variation of the sterilization component and spent several hours wiping its formulation from the records before she set the machines to work up a new synthesis. Or, rather, the old one. The one that lacked Moset’s additive. On the chance that someone might later try to recover his work at the facility, she altered the lists of chemicals taken from inventory over the past year. Finally, she replicated the original masters and issued the commands necessary to begin full facility batch fermentation. The Bajorans would receive the Fostossa vaccine, nothing more.

It didn’t take long to tear it all down, his brilliant solution to the Bajoran question; she’d managed it in only a few hours. With Moset gone, much of the research facility that adjoined the hospital had been shut down. Another doctor would reopen in a few weeks, someone doing a study on botanical medicine or something equally uninteresting. Kalisi was not bothered by anyone as she worked. Anyway, she had higher clearance than any wandering aide who might wonder what she was doing, running the entire system and every outlet from the computer room, searching each database for particular files that might have been cached away. By midafternoon, she was certain that there was no trace of Moset’s recent work left anywhere in the system. She could do nothing about his personal hardware—he’d taken his work padds with him, of course—but she had reason to hope he wouldn’t be around to use them for very much longer.