Star Trek: Terok Nor 03: Dawn of the Eagles (4 page)

“It’s worth it to have run into you,” she said, feeling bold. “It’s always a relief to confirm that an acquaintance has come back safely from the front lines.”

“They’ll never finish me off, though it’s not for lack of trying.” His face twisted slightly, his eyes growing distant before he refocused on Natima.

She cleared her throat, fidgeting with the netcam in her hands. “Do you have any comments that you might like to share with the Union public?” she asked him.

Russol snorted. “No,” he said, and his voice was unmistakably bitter. “I suppose I would have something to say, if I thought that anyone would listen to my opinions instead of execute me for them.”

Natima was shocked; she knew from their past conversations that Russol had a bit of a radical streak, but she had not expected him to state anything so bluntly. She was not sure how to respond.

From the corner of her eye, she thought she recognized another of the men that were coming across the tarmac from where the returning ships were docking. Turning slightly, she identified the features of a man whose name did not come to her right away, but his profile and expression was immediately reminiscent of quaking regret, of a time that Natima generally took pains to avoid revisiting. Bajor. Terok Nor.

Natima looked away. This was Corat Damar, the former fiancé of Veja, Natima’s old friend and colleague from her days on Bajor.

She tried to turn so that Damar would not see her, hoping to avoid an uncomfortable reunion. His memories of Bajor were probably even more unpleasant than Natima’s, for it was on Bajor that he had lost the woman he loved. Veja Ketan had not died, but she had been injured so severely as to render her incapable of bearing children, which, according to Cardassian tradition, made her ineligible for marriage.

In a way, Natima had always thought, Veja’s ultimate fate was worse than if she had died, for although she was alive and generally well, Damar could not marry her, and Veja was very unlikely to marry anyone. Some women in her position would have taken a lover, but Veja was not the kind of woman to indulge in such tawdry dalliances, and anyway, it was clear that there was no other man for her but Damar. Natima still spoke to Veja from time to time, and had learned recently from her that Damar had married and had an infant son. Veja had delivered the news with heartbreakingly false indifference. The entire subject depressed Natima so profoundly that she wished never to think of it, let alone to speak of it. Natima was unmarried herself, but she had never been especially interested in the prospect of marriage and children. Veja’s life’s dream had been to raise a family. The circumstances on Bajor had taken that from her.

Natima risked a glance in the hope that the soldier had gone away, but he was there—and he raised his head and looked at her. She saw the hardness in his expression go slack for a moment as he recognized her, hidden sorrow rising to cloud his gaze. Natima could not look away now, for it would be impolite to pretend that she had not seen him. She smiled quickly, but he did not smile back, looking very much as though he intended to go on his way without acknowledging her. Though it was rude, the possibility that she would not have to speak to him filled Natima with great relief.

“Miss Lang?” Damar called.

She could not reasonably ignore him in Russol’s presence, not without a lengthy explanation that she would rather not give. She nodded to Russol.

“Another time, I hope,” she said lightly, and he smiled, spreading his arm in a gesture of polite dismissal. Damar strode through the other soldiers in his unit to approach her.

“Hello…Gil Damar,” Natima said, after searching his uniform for signs of his rank. She was surprised to see that he was still a gil, for it seemed that his military position had been rising rather quickly back on Terok Nor, over a decade ago. She remembered, then, that he had been a favorite of Dukat—until he had fallen from the prefect’s good graces, following the incident that resulted in Veja’s injury.

“Hello, Miss Lang,” Damar addressed her, his voice reflecting an edge that indicated a pronounced dislike. He had never made a secret of his opinion of Natima, and she knew that he would not have approached her at all without compelling reason.

“I am here on behalf of the Information Service,” Natima said, raising her netcam. She hoped to keep the exchange relatively free from topics that would cause discomfort for either of them. “Perhaps you would like to make a statement—”

“Do you ever speak to Veja Ketan?” Damar interrupted.

So much for avoiding discomfort
. “Yes,” she said, keeping her voice hard and steady. “I still see her from time to time. She works within the fact-checking division of the service now, and mostly stays out of the field. She has a little house on Cardassia IV, but then she also stays in the Paldar sector, during the cold months.”

“So…she is well,” Damar said hollowly. “She is…does she ever speak of me?”

Natima coughed. “No,” she lied. She did not wish to continue this line of conversation. “Tell me, Gil Damar, do you have anything to say to the people of Cardassia regarding the situation in the border colonies?”

“The border colonies,” he snarled. “They are a waste of Cardassia’s resources. I won’t miss being there.”

“So, you’re not to be sent back, I gather?”

“No. I’m to be made glinn next service quartile, and then I’m to join a freight crew for a shipping operation.”

Natima nodded. All of Cardassia’s interstellar shipping concerns were overseen by Central Command. Officer on a freight crew was still “military” work, but it was a lucrative and therefore much coveted assignment; there were subsidies, contracts, even benefits, depending on the runs. Still, there was no glory in such work.

“Well then! Congratulations are in order regarding your new rank—and your new assignment,” Natima said. She could hear how brittle and false she sounded. “I hear that serving on a freighter can be an exhilarating existence—plenty of travel, meeting people, experiencing new cultures—”

“I’m sure it will suit me fine,” Damar said flatly. “But Bajor is where I would rather be.” He spat on the ground, as if to illustrate his feelings on the matter.

Natima stepped back from Damar, speechless and disgusted at the gesture. Why would Damar want to return to the place that had nearly destroyed him? Natima herself had vowed never to go back to Bajor if she could possibly help it. Besides the danger, there was the remoteness, the climate, the awful smells—and the dust! Natima would never forget that terrible, choking dust, from the reddish dirt that turned to mud in the humid cold, thick and crusty like wet concrete.

“I would devote my life to the pursuit and execution of the insurgents of Bajor,” Damar said, his expression icy cold, completing his statement without words.
Because of Veja.

“But…the Bajoran resistance movement…it is only getting more dangerous,” Natima said carefully. “We’ve practically tapped out the Bajorans’ resources anyway. We might as well—”

“It’s not Bajoran resources I care about,” Damar snarled. “It’s exterminating the people who live to make Cardassians suffer. I don’t know why we haven’t begun using biogenic weapons in the B’hava’el system yet, but I can tell you that if I were stationed on Bajor, any unit under my command would not fail to drive those terrorists out of the dirty little caves where they squat and scheme. They are a backward and violent people, and their existence does nothing to perpetuate humanoid progress.”

Natima flinched. He was wrong to suggest biogenic weapons; that would give the Federation cause to finally put an end to the Bajoran annexation. The Union was already walking a fine line between occupation and genocide—a thing that the Federation was very unlikely to tolerate, since they couldn’t seem to prevent themselves from meddling in other worlds’ affairs. But Natima was not comfortable arguing with Damar. It was not only because she understood his personal stake in the matter, but because her own opinions concerning Bajor tended to lean toward the dangerous. Central Command did not always bother to distinguish the subtle differences between mild dissent and high treason. Natima decided to end this encounter; though she might seem brusque in doing so, she had nothing more to say to Corat Damar. “If you will excuse me, Gil—”

“Certainly,” he said, and turned abruptly away from her to follow the rest of the soldiers to the transport station, where they would be sent home to their families for a night or two before heading off to their next assignments.

Natima thought, as she watched him go, of the word he had used to describe Bajorans—
backward.
It may not have been entirely inappropriate, in certain contexts, but weren’t Cardassians also backward, in their own ways? For if Damar and Veja had still wished to marry, to raise a family, why could they not have taken in an orphan child to raise as their own? Natima knew only too well the dire conditions of the orphans left behind on Bajor to fend for themselves in a hostile, alien society—not to mention those abandoned children who lived right here, in the Cardassian Union. But it would have been unthinkable for someone like Damar to defy the social constructs of what was acceptable as a traditional Cardassian family. She had dared to broach the subject with him once, and had always regretted it. Damar was a man who did not take tradition lightly, no matter how irrational it might have appeared to an outsider—or to someone like Natima, who had once managed to glean a sense of her world through the eyes of an alien observer, at least for a moment, and had not much cared for all that she’d seen.

Of the regularly stationed assignments the Obsidian Order had to offer, the surveillance post at Valo VI was easily the quietest. For those agents who preferred a little solace now and again, a short stint on Valo VI was a welcome respite. But to be sent for more than a few months was cause for concern, especially among the older agents who were not yet ready to turn in their sigil. The long-term post to Valo VI was synonymous with retirement. It may have been preferable to death, but for an Obsidian Order agent who had grown accustomed to a lifestyle of unpredictable chaos, being stationed indefinitely at a static listening facility was as near death as one could get while still breathing.

Dost Abor suspected that his own circumstances were different. He had committed no error that he was aware of to have warranted his placement on Valo VI for such a very long time, and he was far enough from retirement age that it made little sense for him to have been put out to pasture so soon. His conclusion was that Tain perhaps considered him a threat. Abor figured he had two alternatives. The first would be to prove his mettle to Tain by accomplishing a breakthrough that could not be ignored and that would guarantee his placement back in the field, where he belonged. The second would be to kill him. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, though it would be something of a trick. Abor felt fairly certain that nearly every agent had entertained such thoughts from time to time, but Tain still sucked air.

This facility, housed beneath an allegedly impenetrable force field on a rather miserable asteroid, was one of many that was unknown to those outside the Order, Cardassian or otherwise. Although there had been a single security breach at this facility some years ago during which an operative had been killed, no data had been compromised, and Abor’s superiors had shrugged off the incident as an inconsequential break-in by Bajoran scavengers looking for an easy target. Enabran Tain had never been particularly concerned about Bajoran comings and goings, since he, like most Cardassians, considered them to be a vastly inferior species that posed no genuine threat to the sanctity of Cardassia—unlike Gul Dukat, who couldn’t even get a handle on their pathetic uprisings.

Deep in the bottommost level of the Valo VI Facility, Dost Abor had taken a moment away from the monotony of his post to answer a call from another of his colleagues in the Order, a man named Kutel Esad. Abor had been acquainted with this man since before his recruitment into the Order, when the two were both in their culmination year at school, but Kutel’s needle-sharp face had changed very little in all those years. It had often been said that Kutel was old before his time, both in appearance and in outlook, and now, in late middle age, he had finally grown into his cautious nature.

“Hello, Dost,”
his old friend greeted him.
“You indicated in your communiqué that there was some item of business you wanted conveyed to Tain?”

“Indeed, Kutel,” Abor said smoothly. “In reviewing transmissions sent from the Ministry of Science at approximately the time of the object’s disappearance—”

“The object?”

Abor hesitated with some impatience. He had forgotten, of course, that Esad would not know what he was talking about without a bit more explanation. “The Orb, I mean. The object I recovered from the ministry’s storeroom.”

The item in question had been stolen from the Order sometime during the upheaval that followed the assassination of Tain’s predecessor, and had landed in the hands of the Ministry of Science on Cardassia Prime. There it had lain, almost forgotten, except for a single report of a disturbing reaction experienced by a young scientist, many years past. The item had not been seen since, not until Dost Abor ordered a thorough search for it, which had yielded results earlier in the month.

Esad nodded now as he remembered.
“Yes, the Bajoran artifact. Tain had it refiled within the Order’s collection, but we have never been able to glean anything of value from any of the so-called Orbs. I must tell you that he was puzzled why you went to so much trouble to locate this particular object.”