Текст книги "Days of the Vipers"

Автор книги: James Swallow

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Bennek’s blood ran cold. “Do you want us to leave Bajor?”

Gar smiled and shook his head again. “No, no, you misunderstand. I do not suggest you leave us, my brother. I suggest you joinus.”

Tima blinked, confused. “Bennek, what does he mean?”

He gasped. “You want the Way to merge with the faith of the Prophets?” The thought of such a thing made the Oralian’s heart tighten in his chest. “Give up our identity?”

“You would not be giving it up,” Gar said mildly. “It would be a confluence, an assimilation. The Way could come under the auspices of the Bajoran church, and your people would be protected by us.” His fingers knitted. “A coming together, Bennek. The Prophets can offer so much to you.”

For an instant, he wavered on the cusp of the proposal, the pressures and the great weight of his responsibilities bearing down on him; the temptation to release it all, to let someone else take up the stewardship of the Way, was strong.

And then he heard Dukat’s words once again, the memory of them hard and cold in his thoughts. All that is important now is your responsibility.Bennek’s hands tightened into claws. Hadlo had died trying to keep the Oralian Way from being destroyed by the faithless, and on that night five years ago, Bennek had followed in his footsteps, selling his honor to keep the Way alive. His mentor had asked for sacrifices, and Bennek had made them. But this? What the vedek was suggesting was no less than to accept the slow death of his faith, that which Bennek had struggled to hold off year after agonizing year.

Tima was staring at him, her eyes wide and shimmering with fear. He gave her a nod, reaching inside himself to find the wellspring of devotion he knew lay there. “No,” he replied, with shaky defiance. “I see that you mean well, my brother, and I thank you for your offer, but the answer is and will always be no. Whatever adversity threatens to engulf us, the children of Oralius must not flinch from it. This is our path.” He took a breath, and found a certainty that he had thought long forgotten. “This is the Way.”

Conflicted emotions crossed Vedek Gar’s face; Bennek thought he saw anger there, along with sadness and regret. Finally, the other priest nodded. “I did not expect you to agree, my friend. I hope that my words instead spurred you to remember how much your faith means to you.” He sipped the tea. “That you elect to forge on despite your hardships, that shows the strength of will needed to stay true to your beliefs.” Gar paused, and when he spoke again the warmth in his voice was absent. “But I must warn you that Cardassia will not suffer your presence, even here on Bajor, without question. Soon you may find yourself faced with a terrible choice.”

“The Detapa Council believe Oralius is dead within the Union,” Bennek replied, “but all they have done is cut her to the core of her most staunch followers, driven her underground. The Way will survive.” He got to his feet, and Tima followed. “And whatever choice I must make, I will do it in the name of my faith.”

21

The skimmer hummed over the scrubland, keeping in the lee of the dry riverbed. The Bajoran man with the shaven head and the hard eyes steered with quick, economical movements on the yoke. Every light inside the vehicle had been doused, and he was using a night visor to find his way. Gwen Jones found her attention kept falling back to him. He wasn’t like Nechayev; Jekko lacked her caustic manner and instead, he had a kind of workmanlike quality to him, a sort of grim determination. He was the first real Bajoran she had ever met, and he wasn’t at all what she expected.

In the backseat, Nechayev had her gear pack open, and she was working at the tricorder inside it. Without looking, the woman reached up and passed Jones a small pistol. Jones took the phaser and weighed it in her hand. It was set on heavy stun, and she pocketed the weapon, hoping she wouldn’t need to use it.

She glanced out of the window at the blur of the landscape flashing past. Bright light from Bajor’s multiple moons gave her clear sight for some distance. In the blue-white illumination the scrubland looked sterile and unwelcoming.

“A decade ago this was all farms,” Jekko answered her unspoken question. “Katterpods mostly, and a few kavaorchards.”

“What happened?”

“The Cardassians,” he said, as if that were enough explanation on its own. He talked without looking away from the job of steering. “Bought up a lot of the land through trade blinds, mostly through the Kubus clan. Got it cheap too, no surprise when it was their fault the place was drying up. See the enclave? The spoonheads sank wells there and drew off the water table, made all the farms in the surroundings fail. Folks out here were happy to take the money and go. Didn’t like living next to offworlders anyway.”

“Didn’t someone complain?”

“Probably. And those that did got paid like the rest, or else they’re still out here somewhere, buried in the dirt.”

“That’s horrible,” Jones grimaced.

Jekko drew back the throttle, slowing them to a halt. He shot her a look. “Horrible?” He smiled grimly. “Let me take a guess. This sort of thing is all a bit new to you, isn’t it?”

She colored. “It is, yes. I’m not really a field agent, I’m just an analyst—”

“She’s here to make sure I don’t get caught out by eating with the wrong fork,” Nechayev broke in as the skimmer settled to the ground. “So. What now?”

Jekko retracted the canopy, letting the warm night rush in. “We walk from here.”

The Bajoran pulled a camouflage net from a compartment in the skimmer and concealed the craft in a tumbledown barn. Jones saw evidence of building foundations all around, the overgrown remnants of a dirt track; the place was likely the site of one of the farms Jekko had mentioned. She turned around and saw the enclave in the near distance, a walled settlement capped with the glassy mushrooms of habitat domes. She could just about make out the red glow of sensor pods around the walls. “How are we going to get in there?”

Nechayev beckoned her to follow the Bajoran into a dusty cutting and there, beneath tinder-dry bushes, was the oval mouth of a tunnel. “Drainage conduits from the old farm complexes,” he explained, levering off a metal grille. “Cardassians just built onto them, used the existing infrastructure. If you know where to look, there’s a couple of places inside the walls where the new building marries up with the old. We can get in that way.”

“You’re sure?” Jones asked.

He nodded. “Some data was slipped my way, from a contact in the Korto City Watch. The chief inspector and I go way back.”

“Can you trust him?” Nechayev asked.

Jekko shot her a hard look. “More than I trust you.”

“But you haven’t actually been inside the enclave?”

“No. They haven’t been open to Bajorans, not for a long time, not for anyone without an armed escort from the Union military. For security.” He added the last words with hard sarcasm.

“They’ll have sensors covering any entry points,” Nechayev snapped. “The Cardassians aren’t stupid.”

“No, but they are arrogant, and arrogance breeds over-confidence.” Jekko nodded. “We’ve never used this way in. But I’m betting your Starfleet hardware will be able to bypass any scanners.”

The agent glanced at her tricorder. “We’ll see.” Nechayev drew her weapon and entered the conduit.

Jones followed. “Watch your head,” Jekko told the women. “It’s a long walk, so stay alert and make sure you don’t step in any barrowbug nests.”

“What the hell are barrowbugs?” Nechayev’s voice drifted back from the darkness.

Jones gave an involuntary shiver. “Like cockroaches,” she said, “but as big as your fist, and they spit acidic venom.”

Nechayev swore under her breath, and Jekko waved Jones inside. “After you.”

In the dark of the drainage conduits it was difficult to reckon the passage of time, and the repetitive scrape-thud of their footsteps made it even worse. Nechayev concentrated on the glowing display of her tricorder, using the device to scan the tunnels on the go, automatically forming a route map they could use for their egress. Just as he had in the skimmer, Jekko moved with confidence, turning at junctions and crossing over pipeway intersections, never once hesitating or stopping to refer to the faded glyphs on the curved walls. This guy is good.She grudgingly admired the Bajoran’s trade-craft. He’s committed the entire route to memory.

With Jones’s warning in mind, Nechayev gave a wide berth to the masses of yellowed cottony fibers that clung to the underside of inspection grids and the stone ceiling. At the edges of her vision, she saw spade-shaped things scuttling around them in the halo of her tricorder’s dim light and grimaced.

After what seemed like hours, Jekko halted and whispered a single word. “Here.”

There were a series of steps cut into the crumbling thermoconcrete, and Nechayev looked up to see faint light filtering through a hexagonal hatch over their heads. She flicked the tricorder over to passive scan, and a smear of color appeared on the display. “There’s an isoscanner,” she said quietly. “Detects thermal footprints from a living being over a certain size, or metallic masses like scout drones or snoopers.” She flipped open the emitter matrix panel on her phaser and dialed back the power output.

“Can you deactivate it?” asked Jones, shifting from foot to foot.

“Not a chance,” she replied. “Monitors would register the loss of coverage and the alarms would be screaming ten seconds later. No, this needs a different approach.” She stepped behind Jekko and used the man as a prop to steady her arm. “Shield your eyes.”

“You’re going to shoot it? But didn’t you just say—”

“I have the sensor’s aperture ratio from the tricorder. I’m going to blind it.” She pressed the firing stud, and a lance of orange light reached up and brushed the Cardassian device. “Now, fast!” snapped the agent. “We have less than twenty seconds before the thing cycles and resets itself!”

Jekko was the last one up, and Jones bit down a protest as the big man placed a thick-fingered hand beneath her backside and propelled her up the ladder, shoving her through the hatch. The Bajoran threw himself out of the hole in the floor, and Nechayev forced the duranium hatch back into place, a heartbeat before the sensor pod gave a clicking beep.

“Apologies,” said Jekko quietly. “You were moving too slowly.”

Jones said nothing and brushed at the film of dust over her clothes. Her heart was hammering in her chest and her palms were sweaty. She was afraid to draw her weapon for fear it would slip through her fingers. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Storage blockhouse,” Nechayev replied, glancing around the darkened space of the interior. On either side of them were high racks of skeletal blue metal, each one laden with containers. The air was dry and smelled of ozone.

Circular labels were visible on every storage unit box. Jones peered closely at one of them, frowning. Her grasp of written Cardassian wasn’t that good. “I think these are…machine spares?”

Jekko levered the top off and used a penlight to look inside. “You think so?” He reached in and pulled out a phase-compression rifle. “No power cores installed. These are brand-new, never been fired.”

“There are hundreds of those containers,” Jones muttered. “How many guns is that?”

“A lot,” said Nechayev, giving Jekko a dour glance. She picked and opened crates at random, coming across caches of sonic grenades and inserts for body armor.

Jones found a rack of oval metal clamps that she couldn’t identify. “What are these?”

Jekko took one from her hand and held it up. “Pintle brackets. They slot into sockets on the flatbeds of skimmers so that you can mount weapons on them. A few of these, some heavy phaser rifles, and you can turn any civilian airtruck into an infantry fighting vehicle.” He shot Nechayev a look. “Very useful for an invading army.”

But the agent wasn’t paying attention. She had moved into the center of the broad storage chamber, to a series of low, wide shapes that crouched close to the floor. In the dimness, Jones couldn’t make out what they were. Perhaps they were more lines of containers packed close together. The ozone odor was stronger here, and with it came the scent of lubricants.

Nechayev reached down to take the end of a plastic sheath that hung loose over the object. With a jerk of her wrist, she pulled it up and away to reveal what was underneath.

Jones let out a gasp of fright as she realized she was staring into the black maw of an energy cannon.

“Grav-tank,” said Nechayev, instantly recognizing the lethal scarab-like form of the Cardassian machine’s hull, “Janad-class. Main armament: single spiral-wave disruptor cannon. Secondary weapons: stun-field emitters and phaser turrets.” She ran her hand over the sloping hull plates. “Reactive armor. Shock bumpers. It’s been configured for urban pacification.” Nechayev’s mind caught up with her, and she panned the tricorder over the vehicle.

Jones walked around the tank, pointing wordlessly off into the darkness. There were dozens more shapes beneath sheets of heavy plastic. “How did they get them here?”

“In pieces, probably.” Nechayev gave a humorless chuckle. “In boxes labeled ‘tractor parts’ and ‘baby milk.’”

“And this is only one blockhouse,” said Jekko. “There are dozens of similar buildings in every enclave on Bajor.” He was pale with shock. “Fire’s sake, we never thought there would be things like this…” He stared at the inert war machine. “An entire armored division, right outside the gates of the city. Just waiting for the right moment.” Abruptly, the Bajoran shook off his surprise and glared at the Starfleet officer. “Is this proof enough for your Federation, Alla, or whatever your real name is? Tanks and guns, ready to be used?”

Nechayev nodded. “I think so.”

The light was so powerful that Jones was instantly blinded the moment it fell on her. She cried out and her hands flew to her face, clawing at needles of pain in her eyes.

“Stay where you are!” barked a voice. “Do not move!”

Cardassians!What Jones had thought was fear was swept aside in a tide of even more intense terror. She was rooted to the spot, her thoughts racing away in a rush of panic. They’ve found us I’m captured I’ll be left behind tortured beaten raped killed thousands of light-years from home—

She reached out toward the blurry man-shape in black armor. “Please…”

“I said, do not move!”

Her vision cleared enough to see the guard aim his pistol at her head.

Jekko threw himself over the turret of the tank and down onto the Cardassian glinn, and the beam went wide, screeching through the air. He was briefly aware of the dark-haired girl screaming, collapsing; then the alien was at his throat and choking the life from him. Jekko yanked the Cardassian toward him and butted him hard across the nose, the Bajoran’s head snapping the cartilage where he struck.

The impact made his head ring and the glinn dropped away, moaning.

“Gwen!” shouted the other woman, racing to the side of her companion.

Gwen. At least I know the name of one of them.“Is she dead?”

“Not yet.” The reply was a snarl. The one who called herself Alla pulled her friend to her feet. Gwen was barely conscious, her right cheek discolored from the nimbus of a near hit from the phaser shot.

Klaxons began to wail. Scanners must have registered the weapon discharge.He took a step toward them and nodded toward the hatch in the floor. “Get her out of here. You have what is needed. Take it and go.” The overhead lights set in the ceiling snapped on one after another, banishing the shadows. Suddenly they were exposed, pinned by the stark illumination.

“He…he’s coming with us,” groaned Gwen.

Jekko ignored her and pressed an isolinear chip into the other woman’s hand. “This is your escape route. I have a warp-capable courier at the starport in Korto. Use it and get out of Bajoran space. Go to your people, show them what’s happening here.”

“I will,” the agent promised. “Thank you.”

“He’s coming with us,” Gwen repeated weakly.

Jekko bent down and scooped up the unconscious Cardassian’s phaser, turning his back on the women. Farther down the length of the blockhouse a door slid open and more armed guards came running.

He took careful aim and started firing.

Everything passed in a blur of pain and hazy images. Jones’s right side felt like it was on fire, every nerve across the bare skin of her face throbbing with waves of burning pain. She couldn’t see properly, just indistinct forms and blobs of dark and light.

“Damn it, girl, keep moving!” Nechayev’s breath was hot and close in her ear, and she could feel the whipcord muscle of the intelligence operative where the woman was pressed against her, supporting Jones’s sluggish flesh. “One foot in front of the other, come on!”

The grumble of stone on stone threaded down the tunnel behind them, and Jones tasted acrid dust in her mouth. “I hear thunder,” she slurred.

“Grenades,” was the curt reply. “They’re sweeping through the tunnels after us, blasting as they go. Trying to flush us out.”

“Oh.” The information was washed away in another wave of agony. “Jekko?” Just working the muscles of her face was painful, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Where?”

Nechayev’s answer was forlorn. “He covered for us. Held them off.” She swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “The man bought us time. We owe him not to waste a second of it.”

Jones nodded brokenly. Up ahead, she could make out the tunnel entrance as a circle of fainter shadow.

“Report,” demanded Dukat, crossing the Vandir’s bridge to the communications station.

“Alert from the Korto Enclave, sir,” said the glinn. “Details of an intrusion into one of the staging areas by three unidentified Bajorans.”

A nerve in Dukat’s jaw rippled. “Show me,” he growled, throwing a look in Tunol’s direction. “Those facilities are supposed to be secure.”

“They couldn’t have beamed in,” offered the woman.

“Any transporters would have been blocked by the inhibitor screen.”

Still images drawn from a security drone appeared on the main viewscreen. Dukat saw a Cardassian at the feet of a bald male Bajoran and two more females, one supporting another. Part of a tank was visible in the corner of the frame. “They can’t be allowed to speak of what they’ve seen,” said the gul.

“The male intruder was terminated on-site,” continued the communications officer as a grainy representation of the bald man appeared. “The two female intruders are currently unaccounted for. Search is ongoing.”

Tunol skimmed the report on a padd. “Apparently, they entered the complex through the old agricultural infrastructure.”

Dukat’s eyes narrowed. “Two females,” he repeated. “Enhance that image. I want to see their faces.”

The glinn obeyed, and Dukat found himself looking at two Bajoran women, one fierce in aspect, the other lolling in her arms, apparently injured. It’s them.The certainty of it struck him immediately.

“Sir.” Tunol approached him, seeing the same thing. “Do you think that—”

“They match the Xepolite’s description of the women he brought from Draygo,” he snapped. “Contact detention and have him make a formal identification to confirm it.” Dukat turned and strode toward the turbolift. “In the meantime, I want a cutter and a security detachment ready to depart for Korto City by the time I get to the shuttlebay.”

“This alert is on the wideband, Gul,” Tunol added.

“Every security operative on the planet, Cardassian and Bajoran, will know their faces in a matter of hours. Is it necessary for you to take a personal involvement in this?”

He paused at the door. “If Ico locates these females first, they will vanish as if they never existed.” Dukat shook his head. “I won’t allow that to happen.”

Darrah Mace lolled in his chair, hovering on the edge of a shallow doze. An untouched cup of spiced dekatea on his desk had gone cold, and out beyond the shuttered glass enclosure of his office the precinct was quiet. He had lost track of time; his days seemed to do that more often than not. Sometimes Darrah would look up and realize that he hadn’t left the building for a week, sleeping in his office or up in the bunk room for the shift staff. He didn’t enjoy going home anymore. The house was too big for one person, and he rattled around inside it whenever he was there; but then, he couldn’t bring himself to think about selling it. Even after the divorce, that seemed like admitting defeat. At the precinct there was always life and clamor. He could rest around that; he needed the noise and commotion to center himself. The silence of empty rooms kept him awake at night.

His back was tense and he got up, stretching. Motion caught his eye outside, and he opened the door. Myda and Proka were standing around a monitor console, downloading a priority report onto padds. “What’s this?”

Myda nodded. “A security alert from the Cardassian enclave.”

Darrah grimaced. “Let me guess. Some kid sprayed ‘Spoonheads Go Home’ on the walls again?”

“It’s a bit more serious than that, boss.” Proka’s tone brought him up short. “Several fatalities. One intruder dead at the scene, two fugitives unaccounted for.”

Darrah pushed forward. Suddenly he was wide-awake. “Let me see.”

“They’re claiming three people broke into the enclave,” Myda explained, “killed a bunch of Cardassians, and tried to blow up some civilians. ‘Suspected Tzenkethi or Circle agents,’ it says here.”

“A man and two women,” added Proka, passing Darrah a padd. “I was about to run a facial match with the criminal records database and the citizen register, see if we can pull some identities.”

Darrah tapped the keypad, and the image of the male suspect appeared before him. His blood ran cold. Jekko?His old friend’s face stared up at him, slack in death; the image had clearly been captured only moments after he had been killed. “When…” He heard his own voice as if it was coming from miles away. “When did this happen?”

“Within the last hour,” said Myda. “This is going out to every precinct on the planet.” She sniffed. “As if we don’t have a big enough caseload.”

Proka was watching his commander carefully. “Sir? What do you want us to do with this? It’s a priority alert, immediate attention required.”

“If the other intruders, the women, are mobile, it’s likely they’d be heading straight here,” noted Myda. “They get into the city, they could disappear.”

The inspector’s knuckles were white around the padd. “I need to…I need to look at this,” he managed. “Don’t move on it until I give you the word.”

“Sir?” said Myda, but he was walking away,

Darrah went back into his office and dropped into the chair. Jekko is dead.The image was burned in his mind. A good, trustworthy man with a keen wit, the kind of man you wanted guarding your back, cold and dead in some Cardassian morgue. His fist bunched and he slammed it on his desk, knocking over the cup.

“Boss.” Proka was at the door, holding it open. “We got a problem?”

For a second, Darrah considered sending him away, but then he beckoned him in. “Come here, Mig, and close that behind you.”

Proka did as he was told. “I saw the look on your face. You know the man.”

“Like he was family.” Darrah’s voice caught. “I can’t believe it. He always seemed fireproof, always surviving the worst through basic training and out on the street…”

“He was one of us?”

A nod. “He was my partner when we were Watchmen.” A pained smile crossed his lips. “He would always joke and rub the scars under his stubble. ‘I’m too vulgar to die,’ he would say. ‘Prophets won’t take a man as crude as me for fear of dirtying the Celestial Temple.’ He said that’s why they kept him alive.” Darrah’s expression hardened. “And now he’s dead, shot for breaking into a Cardassian enclave.”

“They said he was trying to plant a bomb.”

“That’s shit!” Darrah was on his feet, enraged. “Jekko Tybe is not a terrorist! I’ve known the man for twenty years, on my mother’s grave I’d swear that!”

“Jekko?” Proka repeated. “I know that name. Didn’t he run Keeve Falor’s security before the minister went to Valo?” He shook his head. “Boss, when the Cardies find that out, they’ll sing it from the rooftops. They’ve already got a shuttle on the way down from orbit with a sweep squad aboard.”

Darrah stared at the pictures of the women who had fled. “I don’t know these two.” A decision formed in his mind. “Get me anything you can on them. If anyone is going to know what happened to him, they will.”

“If the Cardassians find them first, they’ll be gone like they never existed.”

He nodded grimly, his mind racing, the grief and anger at his friend’s death put aside as he fell into the familiar mode of investigation. “Myda’s right, if they’re running, they’ll run to Korto.”

Proka returned the nod. “I could make Jekko’s files get lost for a while.”

“Do that,” he ordered, working the computer on his desk. “I think I might know where they’re going. Keeve Falor still owns some interests on Bajor, and one of them is a storage hangar out at the port.” He turned the screen so Proka could read it. “There’s a ship there right now.”

“You think that’s their escape route?” The constable frowned. “You’re making a bit of a leap there, boss.” He studied the monitor. “The Kaska,a light courier…”

Darrah grabbed his holster and strapped it on. “Kaska was the name of Tybe’s mother.” He made for the door and felt Proka’s hand on his shoulder.

“You sure you want to get in the middle of this? The Cardies will shoot first and not even bother with questions later.”

“My friend is dead,” he growled, “and I don’t know about you, Migdal, but I’m sick of letting the Cardassians get what they want.”

Tima climbed out of the airtruck’s cab and took a breath of the dockland air. She could hear the gentle slosh of the river beyond the warehouses, and the night was pleasantly cooler down here, more so than the heights of the hill district. She thought about Bennek, angry and troubled after his conversation with Vedek Gar. Tima was shocked by the Bajoran priest’s words to her lover, and in turn she saw how much they had affected Bennek. He should have been with them now, helping Tima and the others to pick up the supplies to replace those lost in the firebombing; instead he was in a skimmer racing back to the encampment, withdrawn and sullen. She knew his moods; it was best to let him be alone with his brooding, let him take his own time.

Urad, the thin youth who had been driving the airtruck, stepped out with her. Three more Oralians followed behind. “Couldn’t we have just come back in the morning?” He seemed to enjoy complaining about everything, his gray hands flapping like birds in front of him. “Why do we have to get the food now?”

Tima glanced at him as three figures in hooded docker’s coveralls emerged from the storehouse. “So that the children will not awaken tomorrow and be told that there is no food for their breakfast. We can go back, if you’d like to be the one to tell them and their parents.”

Urad grumbled under his breath and stepped forward to meet the dockers, pulling back the sleeves of his robes. “Let’s get this done quickly, then,” he said, nodding to the hooded men. “Hello. Vedek Gar sent us to—”

The dockworker on the right brought up his fist, and there was a gun in it. Yellow light flashed, illuminating the area all around them, and Urad was thrown back by the force of the blast, rebounding off the airtruck.

“Oralian filth,” spat a voice. “You’re poisoning Bajor! Get off our planet!”

Tima screamed as more streaks of fire lashed out, each of the men panning beam weapons back and forth across the thermoconcrete dock. Two more of her fellow Oralians were hit, the Cardassians dropping into heaps, wisps of sweet-smelling smoke curling from ragged tears in their pastel robes. She grabbed at the front of the vehicle, fingers scrambling over the surface toward the door. Tima saw one of Urad’s friends clawing his way into the cab; then a bolt of the sun ripped into her and she spun away, crashing to the ground.

Life ebbed from her in pulses. Dimly, she was aware of the airtruck humming to life, jetting away under the hand of a panicked driver. The hooded men came closer, and one aimed at the fleeing vehicle.

The one who had fired first shook his head. “No,” he said. “We need a witness. Let him run.”

The other man nodded and raised his wrist to his lips, speaking into a device there. “Reporting,” he said. “Assignment complete.”

Blood bubbled in Tima’s throat and she spat it out in a reflexive cough.

“This one’s still alive,” said the third.

The man who had fired first knelt by her side, bringing his face close to hers. In the moonlight, she saw not the smooth lines and ridged nose of a Bajoran but the deep-set eyes and lined flesh of a Cardassian countenance. Her eyes widened in surprise.

He reached for her, and Tima’s world ended.

“Preliminary identity sweep has been completed, sir.” Glinn Orloc raised his voice to speak over the hum of the cutter’s impulse engines. “Nothing on the male as yet, but you were correct about the women. Hetman Foroe gave a positive identification of them as his passengers. Customs logs from Traffic Control list them as Nechen Alla and Jonor Wenna, agricultural technicians from a settlement in Hedrikspool province.”

“Doubtless those are cover identities.” Dukat nodded.

“Anything else?”

Orloc continued. “We’ve intercepted a report from the City Watch. A skimmer with two females on board entered Korto from the plainslands at high speed, refusing to follow traffic codes.”

“The Bajorans have been given a suitable pretext for the alert?”

“Yes, Gul. The fugitives have been classed as terrorist suspects.”

“Good. Inform the men to employ whatever level of force is required, but make sure they know I want the women alive.”

Orloc saluted and Dukat looked away. Outside, below the cutter’s hull, the sprawl of Korto’s metropolis glowed against the dark of Bajor’s landscape.

Nechayev ditched the vehicle near a public park and hauled Jones onto the first tram they could find. She changed direction twice before taking the route to the starport, all the time working hard to maintain her outward air of calm and control while her heart was hammering against the inside of her rib cage. Jones was muted, the bandage and the antishock drugs from the skimmer’s medical kit turning her into a pale ghost of her normal self. The lateness of the hour worked in their favor; there were fewer people around, so Nechayev had a better view of who might or might not be following them. They avoided Militia patrols and groups of Cardassians who seemed to be out on the town. It was only three hours since they had left Jekko behind, and yet it felt like forever, a drawn-out night without hope of a dawn.