Текст книги "Trill and Bajor "

Автор книги: Andy Mangels

Соавторы: J. Kim,Michael Martin
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Rena

The relentless rattle of the rain on the corrugated metal roof smothered the sounds inside the rest-and-sip. Rena observed customers scrape their stool legs along the rock floor, saw an open mouth cheer after a triumphant round of shafa,winced as a glass slid off a waiter’s tilted tray and shattered on the ground; she heard little of it. Only the storm.

She nestled into the notch at the back of the corner booth, for the moment content to be an observer instead of a participant in the surrounding cacophony. If circumstances required her attention, she would know it. Hadn’t Vedek Triu said, only a few days ago, that her path would be revealed as she walked it? Prophets willing, Triu’s advice had been inspired and Rena’s presence in this place had a purpose. In this moment, Rena wasn’t sure what that purpose was; she doubted the answers to Topa’s mysteries were hidden in the smoky half-light of a rest-and-sip. But Rena had to believe that if she allowed herself to learn from all possibilities she would find her path.

Her meditations, unfortunately, had been little help in that regard, and that troubled her. Restlessness was an alien state of mind for her and she wasn’t sure how to cope. Typically, Rena could linger for long hours over minute details from the subtle gradations of color in the throat of a climbing lanaflower to the patterns on a beetle’s back. She enjoyed being allowed to float atop the surface of her life, propelled by the currents of chance.

But not today. Not yesterday, either, now that she considered it, or rarely since she’d returned from university. Easygoing Rena must have stayed behind in the Dahkur Institute of Art while Compulsively Responsible Rena had returned home. I have promises to keep,she thought. I have kept the first by going to the Kenda Shrine to honor Topa. I need to return to Mylea to keep the others.Circumstances, however, appeared to be conspiring to prevent her from attending to her duty.

Late that morning, an unexpected cloudburst had unleashed mudslides, forcing a temporary shutdown of the River Way, an ancient road that bisected Kendra Province, starting in the northernmost peninsula, then paralleling the Yolja River to the sea. Rangers had escorted all southern-bound travelers—including Rena—into the neighboring villages to wait until the repair crews had done their work. A rapid rise in the river necessitated that all water traffic stop as well. With Mylea still more than thirty tessijens away, Rena had no choice but to wait out the storm.

Time had slipped by. She’d eaten a hot plate of batter-dipped tetrafin, caught up on the local gossip, and taken a short nap. Now, the sweltering sourness of many bodies being squeezed into a smallish space for long hours combined with deep-fried fish stink saturated the air, while the lethargic orange-gray beams creeping through the windows warned of the aging day. What had been tolerable at midday had grown tiresome. Instead of enjoying the respite from her journeying, Rena struggled to keep frustration in check. Not that she was eager to assume the responsibilities waiting for her at home; more like she had better ways to spend her time than alone, eating bad food in a middle-of-nowhere dive as a veritable hostage of an overeager public servant who worried about a little mud.

She scanned the crowd, searching for Sala’s distinctive curly red hair, but couldn’t find him. This many customers must be keeping him running, she thought. Draining the dregs from her mug, she signaled Vess, a waiter she remembered from her stop here a week ago, to bring her another. She listened to the rain, seeking a sign of when it might pass, but the storm gave no indication that it had exhausted its pent-up energy. Vess swung by, sending her drink spinning off his tray onto her table, leaving behind a trail of foam until the mug slowed to a stop in front of her. She gulped the ale without fanfare, then picked through a bowl of breadsticks until she found one that seemed less stale than the others. The warm brightness of the alcohol gradually softened her frustration, and she decided she might as well settle in. She might be drunk in another hour, but intoxication might make being stuck more bearable.

Rena swung her feet up onto the bench and leaned back so she was flush against the wall, her bedroll cushioning the small of her back. She reached into her knapsack, searching for her sketchbook. One of her peers at the university had tried converting her to a paddlike sketch unit that could be used with a programmable stylus capable of mimicking brushstrokes, re-creating the texture of charcoal or chalk—even reproducing the drip patterns of ink. The technology was fun, but Rena hadn’t been convinced: too much work to learn a new way when the old way sufficed. Besides, she liked the feel of the pebbled parchment beneath her palm, how colored pigment stained her fingernails, reminding her of what colors she’s used last.

She unwrapped her sketchbook from the waterproof cloth she stored it in. Skirt draping off her bent knees, she propped it against her thighs and studied the rendering she’d done last night. She gazed at the charcoal smudges for a long moment, examining the curves and figures that had seemed inspired by warm spring moonlight. She frowned. Why she had thought that such a design would be a fitting memorial for Topa’s grave marker? She’d have to start over. Again. Maybe. She might be succumbing to the tyranny of perfectionism that inevitably derailed her projects. For once, you need to finish something, Rena,she scolded herself. Time to make good on all that “promise” and “potential” you’re supposed to have.

Or maybe your first instinct was correct and this design is a disaster.

Resignedly, she ripped the sketch out of her notebook, balled it up, and tossed it toward a tray full of glasses perched on an empty table across from her booth. The trajectory of the balled-up drawing drew her gaze toward a table of rivermen who sat nursing mugs of shodi,nonchalantly checking out her legs. Following their blurry-eyed gazes, she smoothed her skirt down over her calves toward the tops of her boots. Discontented grumbles and slurred complaints resulted, but Rena ignored them. Sorry, gentlemen, show’s over,she thought, reasoning that one of these days, Sala ought to hire a band or some dancing girls if his customers were so pressed to find entertainment that they’d resort to attempting to sneak a peek up a girl’s skirt. But there was one in the crowd at the table who didn’t appear interested in her underclothing; Rena realized he wasn’t one of the regulars.

He wore a riverman’s requisite soil-smudged jumpsuit, but his brown face lacked the wrinkled, chapped roughness that the wind-whipped rivermen developed over years of pushing barges up and down the Yolja’s lower curves. Black stubble covered his chin and cheeks, but it was obvious to Rena’s eye that the younger man had only lately decided to sport a beard. The haze made it difficult to determine whether he was Bajoran; he wasn’t wearing an earring. He must have felt her gaze, because he looked up from his drink to meet her eyes. He wore a kind, openly friendly expression, and because he hadn’t been trying to look up her skirt the way the others had, she smiled; he reciprocated. As they maintained eye contact, she briefly considered signaling for him to come over and sit with her, though she wondered about the propriety of the gesture, considering her—her– situation. Is that what I’m calling it now?But she’d been traveling alone for the past four days—ever since she left the Kenda Shrine—and the sound of a friendly voice not her own would be welcome. She wasn’t asking to buy him a drink or to share a dance, gestures that might be misconstrued for obvious reasons. Before she could act, a waiter had tapped the young man on the shoulder, diverting his attention. It’s a sign. Decision made,she thought, wondering what it said about her that she felt a twinge of regret.

She returned her focus to her sketchbook and the empty page in front of her. The same dilemma faced her now as had faced her when she first learned, that before he died, Topa had made three requests of her, his only living grandchild. The first request was that she go to the Kenda Shrine to obtain a duranjafrom the vedeks. Topa had never explained why a duranjafrom Kenda was important save only that a vedek from that shrine had helped him immeasurably during the Occupation. Whatever his reasons, Rena wouldn’t deny a dying man his wish.

His second request seemed on the surface to be simpler, especially for an artist: design his grave memorial. For Rena, asking the Emissary himself to preside over Topa’s death rites might have been easier than granting thatrequest. How to express a remarkable life in a couple dozen centimeters of metal! How to show Topa’s bravery, his kindness…If they had satisfied her, she could have resorted to the usual labels—resistance fighter, devoted father and husband, advocate for Bajoran independence. The labels failed to explain Topa.His nimble mind, always spinning ideas; even in his final days, confined to his bed as his immune system cannibalized his central nervous system, he would order Rena’s aunt Marja to keep the Ohalu book on playback. Vedek Usaya would stop by and feign mortification that Topa would pollute his faith with the radical text, and heated debate would ensue. She remembered how, before he was sick, he would stand in the middle of the stone-paved street in front of his bakery—the bakery that had been his father’s and his father’s father’s. Eyes closed, head tipped back, he would turn his flour-powdered face to the sky to be warmed by the sun. Once, as a little girl, Rena had seen him standing in the street swaddled in fog, his face up. Pragmatically, young Rena had pointed out that the sun was in hiding. Topa hadn’t budged, saying only, “But I know the light is there. When it finally breaks through the mist, I’ll be ready.” The metaphor was lost on the child, but not on the adult Rena, who wondered if she was the one now patiently waiting for the light, or whether she’d given up and retreated into the shadows.

“Excuse me?”

Roused from her reverie, Rena realized that the unfamiliar riverman stood at the edge of her booth. His youth surprised her; he had to be close to her age. From his smooth hands, which bore evidence of recent lacerations, she surmised that he couldn’t have long been in this line of work. And he was definitely human—a handsomehuman, with an engaging smile. Maybe a recent Federation transplant. She looked at him questioningly.

“I noticed you had some hardcopy,” he said, gesturing at her notebook, “and I was wondering if you could spare a sheet.”

At university, she’d been subjected to her share of creative pickup lines from men wanting to make her acquaintance, but this was a flimsier attempt than most. “You have a sudden desire to sketch one of your comrades?”

He shrugged sheepishly. “There’s a lady over there”—he nodded in the direction of the barkeep—“who’s offered to transmit a message to my family for me. I just need to write it down for her.”

Ripping a sheet out of the binding and passing it across the table, Rena said, gesturing, “Have a seat. You need a stylus too?” She unfastened a knapsack pocket and removed a writing instrument.

He nodded and scooted into the bench opposite her. Rena watched as the Federation boy—“Fed,” as she’d started to think of him—scribbled out several rows of Bajoran characters. As he wrote, he explained, “There’s no transmitter on the barge—there’s definitely not one here—and I don’t expect I’ll be to Mylea for a few more days.”

“You have business in Mylea?” Rena asked, curious. She’d heard gossip that her friend Halar had met an alien boyfriend who’d been doing dockwork over the winter and wondered if this Fed boy might be him.

“Not so much business as it felt like the right place to go when I took off from home a week ago. I figure I might be able to catch a shuttle or transport out from there. If I like it, maybe there’s a fishing outfit that could use a hand.”

The stylus flew across the hardcopy with a fluency Rena found highly unusual for an offworlder. Since the end of the Occupation, a number of students from all over the quadrant had dribbled into Bajor’s universities, including the one in Dahkur. In her limited experience with them, she’d found that the majority were translator-dependent; few of the aliens spoke Bajoran and none of them could write in it. Odd. She supposed he could be a local. A few Federation citizens came to Bajor when Starfleet stepped in to help the provisional government eight years ago. “So you haven’t signed on to work the river for the summer?”

“Nah. Linh was going to let me off at the next stop anyway. Someone back in Tessik told me about a must-see archeological site—Yyn?—that she thought I’d like. I kind of have some experience in archeology so I thought I’d check it out on my way to Mylea.”

“You won’t have much luck at Yyn for another week—the site’s only open to the public during the days leading up to the summer solstice,” she said, wondering about the story behind his archeological experience.

Before she could ask, three quick chimes announced a message coming over the comm system. The chatter in the room subsided as the crowd waited expectantly. Rena hoped for good news.

“Due to ground instability and the risk of flash floods, the Provincial Ranger Units have decided to close the River Road and the Yolja barges indefinitely.”

A collective groan—of which Rena was a part—pronounced the crowd’s opinion on this development. She looked over at the bar, where the uniformed ranger spoke into the communication unit, and determined that he was far too cheerful about ruining their day.

He continued, “Arrangements have been made for all of you to be hosted in the adjacent village. My deputy will inform you of your housing assignment.”

“You—”

Rena twisted around to see a uniformed deputy pointing at her.

“And you,” he said, pointing to Fed. “Will be assigned to the Daveen Vineyards with the rest of the rivermen from your crew.”

Rena rose, preparing to protest being lumped together with the motley barge crew, but when she considered the other dour, sneering faces in the place—some of whom appeared to be more intoxicated than Fed’s crewmates—she sat back down. With a sigh, she started packing up her art supplies and arranging her pack so it would be easier to carry.

“They aren’t bad guys,” Fed said, as if reading her mind.

Rena flushed hot, wishing she weren’t so obvious. “I’m sure they’re fine. I’m feeling a lot of pressure to get home and this delay isn’t welcome.”

“Emergency?”

“Responsibilities.”

“Ah,” Fed said. “That I understand.” He scooted out of the bench and she marveled at his height—nearly two meters. “I’ve gotta go get my gear, but I just wanted to offer to, you know, walk with you if it would make you feel more comfortable.”

Mildly amused, she looked at him, blinked, and looked longer, uncertain if she should bow in response to his unexpected chivalry or if he would be offended if she laughed—good-naturedly, of course. Manners and rural Bajoran rest-and-sips rarely came together: too many years of eking out survival under Occupation conditions had made these outposts respites for hermits, homesteaders, and other independent types who wanted to be left alone. Seeing genuineness in Fed’s face, her impulse to laugh gave way to a smile. “Looks like I have myself a steward.”

He arched an eyebrow in question.

“Back in the days of djarras,highborn ladies traveled with specially trained protectors called stewards.”

Bowing deeply, he looked up at her and with a broad grin said, “Accept my services, m’lady?”

This time Rena couldn’t help laughing. “If I must,” she said with mock annoyance and slipped her pack onto her shoulders. In truth, however, as she followed behind Fed’s crewmates lurching toward the door, Rena knew that any sense of safety she felt came from Fed’s presence by her side.

Ro

Whoever they were, Ro decided from her temporary workstation in the Militia’s mobile command center, they knew exactly what they were doing.

To the standard orbital sensor sweeps and the security cameras at the Jalanda spaceport, the Besinian freighter was unremarkable. The medium-powered commercial ship—a nondescript cargo carrier capable of warp five at best—had arrived with an empty hold ostensibly to meet with Bajoran exporters within the city. The export company named in their transmitted request for landing clearance confirmed that the owners of the ship had made an appointment for this very morning three weeks prior, but it was never kept.

Their credentials, as Lenaris suspected, were forgeries. No record of the identities provided by the crew existed anywhere. Nor did the ship’s registry. Ro managed to verify that a Besinian freighter fitting the description of the one that landed on Bajor had been purchased anonymously at auction from a Yridian salvage dealer on Argaya just over a month ago. That, along with the appointment made with the Bajoran exporters, made it appear more and more as if this was something long in the planning.

Only two occupants of the craft ever left the ship, and they had carefully avoided the cameras at the spaceport. They did a fine job of making it look inconspicuous, but Ro wasn’t fooled. There was intent behind everything these killers had done. They’d even arrived with their own skimmer.

Satellite imaging had shown the heat trails of thousands of similar surface craft knotted in and around Jalanda, hundreds in the countryside beyond, and scores leading into the mountains to the southwest. But only one had cut across the nature preserve to the north, toward the site of the village. It was a three-hour journey in either direction, and the satellites had shown both transits. Those travel times fell precisely between the Besinian freighter’s landing, the destruction of the village, and the ship’s departure, leaving little doubt about the connection. They were on Bajor less than seven hours, and when they were gone, nearly three hundred people were dead. But while assembling a reliable chronology of events had been a fairly simple matter, the whos and whys of the crime remained elusive.

Ro rubbed her tired eyes while she spoke to her console. “Computer, search telemetry from Deep Space 9 for information on all incoming and outgoing traffic in the Bajoran system for the past twenty-six hours. List any non-Bajoran and non-Starfleet vessels, and pull any scans taken of those craft.”

“You’re looking at it from the wrong angle,” a sharp voice said.

Ro looked up. The only other person present in the command center, a gray-uniformed major, was seated at a workstation some distance away. He wasn’t looking at Ro, but his body language was tense.

“Were you speaking to me?” she asked.

“The Besinian freighter,” the major said. “You think if you figure out who they are and where they came from, you’ll figure out what they wanted.”

“That’s right.”

“It won’t work,” the major said.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, it is. Short of our actually capturing and questioning them, whoever was on the ship knew it wouldn’t matter what we might learn about them. Otherwise they’d have covered their tracks a lot better.”

“Maybe they weren’t that clever,” Ro said. “Maybe they were just careless and lucky.”

The major shook his head. “I don’t think so. But I do think you’re wasting your time investigating the perpetrators.”

Ro leaned back and folded her arms. “And I suppose you have a better suggestion, Major…?”

“Cenn Desca. And yes, I do. But I doubt you’d be interested.”

Ro’s eyes narrowed. What the hell was hisproblem? “Since you’re obviously hoping I’ll take the bait, let me oblige you: Why do you doubt I’ll be interested, Major Cenn?”

“Because it involves looking atBajor, not away from it.”

“Excuse me?”

“You think all the answers are out there,” Cenn said, nodding his head in the general direction of the ceiling. “I wonder if it’s even occurred to you to look for them here, on Bajor?”

“The perpetrators aren’t on Bajor.”

“But the crime is.Why else destroy the village so completely, unless they were trying to hide something?” The major shook his head. “I don’t even know why I’m wasting my time. You’re Ro Laren. You’ve made turning your back on Bajor into an art.”

Ro stood up sharply, throwing back her chair. It crashed loudly against a console behind her. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but I am notrequired to put up with this.”

“Go on, then, leave. Again,”Cenn said as she started to turn away. His accusatory tone stopped her, held her against her will. “That’s what you do best, isn’t it? I’m sure, now that half the Militia is following your example, you must feel vindicated for giving up on Bajor during the Occupation.”

“Major Cenn!”

Cenn snapped to his feet and came to attention. Ro stared at him blankly, scarcely aware that General Lenaris was standing in the open doorway that led outside.

Lenaris’s steely voice cut through the sudden silence. “Report to Colonel Heku, Major. Tell him I said you’re to assist in sweeping the western slope for additional evidence.”

“Yes, sir,” Cenn said, and headed immediately toward the exit. Lenaris moved aside to let him pass, then closed the door behind him.

The general turned to Ro, who still hadn’t moved. “I’m sorry about that. Do you want to file a complaint?”

“No,” Ro said.

Lenaris seemed to relax and started walking toward her. “Any luck yet in your investigation?” he asked.

Ro shook her head, having barely heard Lenaris’s question. Anger and embarrassment mixed with confusion as she realized how completely she’d allowed Cenn to get under her skin. I’ve endured people judging me before. Why did I let it rattle me this time?

Lenaris, to his credit, didn’t press her on the matter. He seemed content to wait and see if she wanted to talk. Well, he would be waiting a long time, then. She was done talking. Screw this and screw these people. She never needed them before, and she sure as hell didn’t need them now….

“Do you—” she said quietly, suddenly unable to keep the words from forcing their way out of her mouth. “Do you think he’s right about me?”

Lenaris sighed, then settled into a chair at the workstation next to Ro’s. A thick silence settled between them.

“You know,” he said at length, “I remember the day you testified publicly before the Chamber of Ministers about your activities after you turned Maquis. Fighting the Cardassians, fighting the Dominion. You gave that testimony right before you received your honorary commission in the Militia.”

“I didn’t realize you were there,” she said, sitting back down and wondering why he was bringing thatup.

Lenaris shrugged. “No reason you would. I was just one member of the Militia brass among many in the back of the room, and I was only a colonel then. Still, your testimony made an impression on me.”

Curious in spite of herself, Ro asked, “Any particular part?”

“Everything you didn’t say.”

Ro frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Let’s just say I’ve found that sometimes you can form a clearer picture about someone from what they don’t say than what they do,” Lenaris told her. “That day, the things I didn’t hear made me throw my support behind your appointment to the Militia.”

Ro found it hard to conceal her surprise. “I…I didn’t know that. Thank you.”

Lenaris waved the matter aside. “No need for that, although I admit it was an uphill fight. I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to learn that there were a lot of senior officers who didn’t want you there. It was difficult to get enough votes in the command council just to keep them from letting Starfleet arrest you, much less give you a job. As far as they were concerned, you were undependable and unpredictable. You were a complication in our relationship with the Federation. Worst of all, in a lot of eyes, you’d turned your back on Bajor when it needed you most.”

“Maybe they were right,” she said.

“I didn’t think so.”

She looked at him again. “Why not?”

“Because of everything you didn’t say,” Lenaris said with a smile. “You never really explained why you came home.”

Ro shrugged. “What’s to explain?”

“Maybe nothing,” Lenaris conceded. “But maybe the lack of an explanation is more telling than anything you could have said out loud. I think deep down in your paghyou regret leaving Bajor when it needed every fighter it had, and you’ve carried that guilt ever since. It’s why you kept looking for a new fight. You hoped to find one in Starfleet, but that ended badly, not once, but twice.”

Ro kept her expression neutral as the ghosts of Garon II paraded across her vision. She blinked them away. She wondered if she would ever stop seeing them.

“Then the DMZ conflict flared up,” Lenaris went on, “and it gave you the first real opportunity to do what you didn’t do for your own world. When the Dominion wiped out the Maquis, you just shifted the fight over to them. I’m guessing you didn’t even expect to survive. But you did…and once you ran out of fights, and thought you had finally atoned for giving up on Bajor, you came home.

“That’s what I heard that day in the Chamber of Ministers. That was what you didn’t say. And I thought you were right. Whatever sin you feel you committed against Bajor, Laren, you’ve long since atoned for it.”

Ro said nothing.

“For what it’s worth,” Lenaris said, “Major Cenn isn’t usually such an ass. He’s actually a good man. That outburst was out of character. It’s just that…to some people in the Militia, the transfer of so many personnel to Starfleet is a shock to the system, one that they need time to work through.”

Ro glared at him. “And I suppose my being here at such a time, with my past, back in a Starfleet uniform, just pushed him too far, is that what you’re telling me?”

“You know that isn’t what I meant.”

“Then what are you saying, General?”

Lenaris leaned forward, and Ro could tell he was making an effort not to lose his temper. “I’m asking you to try to understand what some of us in the Militia are experiencing, now that the reality of the changeover has settled in. We’re not stupid, Laren. We know Bajorans need to be in Starfleet, to have a voice in its operations and its policies, and to share responsibility for shaping and implementing them. But there still need to be Bajorans who will put Bajor first, and their voice needs to be heard, too. The more of us who put on a Starfleet uniform, the more the rest of us fear that Bajor’s voice will be lost in the multitude.”

Lenaris stood up and walked out of the MCC without another word. Ro watched him leave and, alone again, realized that the general had painted a picture she hadn’t stopped to consider.

Every Federation planet had its own domestic peacekeeping force. Starfleet dealt with matters of interstellar scope, but every world still needed a home guard to deal with local security issues according to local law. Bajor was no exception, and the Bajoran Militia wasn’t dispensable. Contrary to Major Cenn’s earlier rant, nowhere near half the Militia was transferring to Starfleet. The real percentage was actually minor for a global military, and would disappear as the Militia stepped up its own recruitment efforts to replenish its lost numbers .

On the other hand, Ro could easily see how a period of doubt and uncertainty would accompany such changes—at least in the beginning, as the new order took hold. She imagined that every world found its own way of dealing with the transition. And again Bajor would be no exception.

Maybe…maybe I can even help it along.

Straightening in her chair, Ro tapped her workstation’s interface. “Computer, access the Bajoran Central Archives and search alldatabases for allreferences to the Sidau village in Hendrikspool Province. Then establish an uplink with the mainframe on Starbase Deep Space 9 and conduct the same search. Authorization: Ro, phi-delta-seven. Execute.”

Having spent her early years in Jo’kala and the camps closest to it, Ro hadn’t been to Ashalla in her youth. It wasn’t until after the Dominion War that she’d gotten to see other parts of her homeworld for the first time, including the capital. What had struck her on those occasions was how old a city Ashalla really was; its elegantly designed buildings and ornate thoroughfares of red-brown granite and sand-colored fusionstone were built millennia before anyone had ever heard the word “Cardassian.” It was sobering to see how much of her people’s heritage—how much memory—the city still held, and more sobering still to learn that most of civilized Bajor was just like this, even after everything the Cardassians had wrought. After she’d returned to the planet of her birth, she realized with a profound sense of sadness that she no longer knew this world, had never known it at all.

Was that the real reason I found life here unbearable after the war?she wondered. Had the scope of Bajor’s unique cultural identity, restored to fullness in the aftermath of the Occupation, so overwhelmed her that she felt like an alien among her own kind?

Now, as she walked down one of the city’s main streets, the weight of Ashalla’s vast memory bore down on her again. Except that this time it seemed to lessen as Ro came closer to her destination, until she realized that this district must be one of those that had been completely rebuilt in the years following the Occupation. Where most of the city was defined by structures so ancient it was easy to think of them as eternal, this part of Ashalla showed little of Bajor’s past. Mostly it was new buildings, although several had been built in a style clearly designed to evoke what had been lost here. To Ro, it made the losses that much more tragic.

It had been Vaughn’s idea that they should meet in this part of town. He had finished early for the day at the evaluation center, and said he had accepted an offer to be given a tour of the Tanin Memorial. The commander hadn’t elaborated, but Ro had assumed that it was one of the dozens of monuments across the planet honoring the fallen of the Occupation. As she drew closer to the site, however, she learned by way of the signage leading toward the memorial that it had been created to honor a single man, a vedek who died here some years ago, just after the Occupation ended. There was no statue, no great spire or majestic abstract sculpture. Just a single broken column, apparently salvaged from an older structure, standing in the midst of a meditation garden.