Текст книги "Night of the Wolves "

Автор книги: Stephani Danelle Perry

Соавторы: Britta Dennison
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

“Are you finished?” Dukat asked.

Darhe’el straightened, his expression as he looked down at Dukat one of undisguised disgust. “Permission to disembark… sir.”

“Go home, Gul Darhe’el,” Dukat drawled. “Go home to your hole in the ground.”

Darhe’el turned and marched out without another word, leaving the prefect alone with his thoughts. Dukat sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers. The other gul’s lack of proper deference was infuriating, but Dukat knew better than to succumb to it. Darhe’el might be Kell’s favorite, but ultimately he was as powerless to harm Dukat as Dukat was to harm him. Let him bluster. In time Dukat would show them all he was right about Bajor.

Darhe’el was correct about one thing, however: Gallitep’s AI software needed attention as quickly as possible to get the mining operation back up and running. But the Union manpower shortages on Bajor were ongoing, and he couldn’t afford to wait for Central Command to process a request for a specialist to be sent from Prime—the accident had already put them dangerously off quota. The longer it took, the farther behind they’d fall.

It then occurred to Dukat that the answer to his problem might already be within easy reach. Perhaps there was someone at the Bajoran Institute of Science who was qualified to handle the job….

Even as Dukat reached toward his companel to order Thrax to raise the institute, the console unexpectedly chimed on its own accord—in a specific pattern that Dukat knew denoted a personal call.

From Bajor.

He found himself glancing about his office guiltily before he answered, bringing up the image of a young Bajoran woman, sneezing uncontrollably.

“Skrain,”the woman said, between her violent nasal outbursts.

Dukat found himself backing away from the screen. “Naprem,” he said, addressing the attractive woman, almost young enough to be called a girl. “My dear, whatever is the matter? Are you ill?”

She shook her head, unable to speak as another sneeze overtook her. “No, Skrain,”she said, taking an enormous, exhausted breath. She sneezed again and shook her head. “Don’t you know what this means?”

Dukat slowly shook his head, trying to remember what it meant when Bajorans started to sneeze like this. He found it more than a little revolting, actually. Cardassians did not generally have such noisy and appallingly fluidbodily functions.

“It mean—ah—it means that I’m going to—choo– I’m going to have a baby, Skrain.”

Dukat was speechless, and watched her clear her breath for yet another sneeze.

“Did you hear what I said? I’m going to have our baby.”

“How…wonderful,” he said, his voice a little faint.

The room was sweltering. Laren could scarcely bring herself to take a breath; the air was searingly hot and smelled reptilian, the distinct odor of the filthy Cardassians who occupied it.

“Please,” gasped Ro Gale, twisting his body in a futile attempt to relieve the pressure from his wrists. He was manacled to chains that hung from the ceiling. “Get my daughter out of here!”

The Cardassian interrogator ignored her father’s pleas, his horrid skin as pale as fusionstone, his expression a mask of cruelty. His hair, the strange, distinct color of sun-scorched grass, shone hideously beneath the hot lights of the room. “We’re not finished here, Mister Ro.”

Laren’s hands tightened as she looked frantically for a way out. The cloying heat in the room was so intense, she feared she would lose consciousness if she remained much longer. She could not bear to watch her father be humiliated in this way. It shamed her; her father was supposed to be brave. He was supposed to fight the Cardassians, not cry and squeal like a child. She wanted to be out of this room. She wanted to be anywhere else but here, anywhere at all—

And then she was, bundled inside her sleeping bag, sweating between the layers of clothes and the coarse bedroll. She blinked. The light of dawn was just beginning to seep through the dense tree cover overhead.

Dream, just a dream. Forget it.It was what she told herself every time.

She wriggled out of the blankets and stood, began shaking off the dirt and leaves she had used to conceal the place where she slept, deep in the Jo’kala forest. The foliage here was so thick, the forest so wide, that the Cardassian ground tanks couldn’t penetrate the hilly terrain beneath the dense, heavy-branched trees. Soldiers had to patrol it by foot—but no Cardassian knew the forests well enough to venture very deep inside them, not without heavy communications equipment that buzzed and chirped so loudly the dead could hear them.

She rolled up her “bed” and set about organizing her few things. Though it was not yet dawn, she knew it soon would be. She might as well get up and face the day; she didn’t care to go back to sleep if it only meant having the same damned nightmare again and again.

She forced her thoughts ahead, going over what she had to do for the day. She stuffed her pack inside an old bag made from a sheet of Cardassian smartplastic, and slung it up around her shoulders, her phaser rifle fastened down around the bottom. She stretched her thin legs as she did this, and headed toward main “camp,” where Bram Adir and the others were probably still asleep. The nightmare, the memorywas still there, but it grew dim as she walked. She replaced the violence of her father’s death with well-worn thoughts of what it would be like to put a phaser salvo right into the hideously grinning face of that oddly light-haired Cardassian. There were times when she could think of little else.

She had killed four Cardassians already. Four different Cardassian soldiers, on four separate occasions, with her resistance cell. She was one of the best fighters in this bunch, even though she wasn’t quite fourteen yet. Some of the others in the cell still tried to get away with treating her like a child, but she knew better. She knew that her hide was tougher than that of many of the full-grown men she had met in her short time with the rebels. And there was nobody who could pick a pocket like she could, nobody who could steal a holstered phaser right from under a Cardassian soldier’s bony nose. She had a talent for it; Bram had said so, many times.

Part of her ability came with her age, her deceptively girlish face. She knew this, and she took full advantage of it. It did the spoonheads no good to underestimate any Bajoran, but least of all Ro Laren.

It was with that thought that she spied Bram’s bedroll in the ethereal light of the approaching dawn, and she picked up a pebble to chuck at his sleeping form. It pelted the heavy fabric of his dirty blanket, and he sat up like a spring-loaded toy. Bram rubbed his forehead, wisps of dark hair plastered across it.

“What the kosst…oh, Laren, it’s you. I ought to have known. For Prophet’s sake, girl, go back to bed! B’hava’el is just waking.”

“Lazy, that’s what you are,” Laren chided him. She enjoyed pushing Bram’s buttons. He was just so delightfully easy to rile.

Bram shook his head. “I don’t know why I bother to keep carrying you along with us after all the grief you cause me, day after day…”

“Because you need me,” Laren said.

“It’s because you have nowhere else to go,” Bram said, “and I have a foolishly kind heart.” He removed himself from his improvised bed, stretching, and shook his bedroll clear of debris, much as Laren had done.

“I have plenty of places I could go,” Laren said.

“Sure, of course,” Bram said. “Go back to your uncle—”

“I’ll nevergo back there!” Laren said. She turned abruptly from Bram and ran down to the creek to wash her face in the icy water. Bram knew he could infuriate her by mentioning her “parents,” and he always had to play that card when he was annoyed with her, which was much of the time.

Laren had been on her own since she was twelve, when she ran away from her uncle’s house for the last time. After Ro Gale was murdered, Laren’s mother sank into such a state of despair that she had to be taken in by her family. She was no longer capable of looking after herself, let alone her daughter. Laren had been confused by her mother’s reaction—she missed her father terribly, of course, and she understood being sad about it—but why would her mother turn away from her daughter, as well, the only person who might have been a source of comfort? And why subject her child to the random cruelties that had gone on in that overcrowded house, full of so many cousins and foster orphans collected from neighboring villages that her uncle didn’t even know everyone’s name? Laren wouldn’t have dreamed of just…giving up, the way her mother had; a mother was supposed to protect her child. In this, both of Laren’s parents had failed miserably.

After several attempts to strike out on her own, Laren was finally emancipated at twelve, when the adults from her extended family stopped coming after her. It was not the most unusual thing, on Bajor, for a child to be on the streets by herself. Common enough, in fact, as to be unworthy of remark. She was only lucky she’d never been picked up by one of the Cardassian orphan-catchers. Lucky, or smart.

Laren learned how to dodge the spoonheads quickly enough, and how to pick their pockets even quicker. From the older children on the streets she had learned how to break and enter, and how to manipulate simple security systems, even the computers that ran some of the rationing checkpoints. It was a skill that had come in plenty handy when she finally encountered Bram Adir, the man who had taken her under his wing and been a bit like a father to her. Like a father, only bossier, and without much affection. Laren had long ago decided that she preferred it that way. Anyway, who else was going to teach her how to fly raiders? She was hungry to learn everything, but flying offworld—it was worth the price of Bram’s constant nagging and admonishments.

Laren rubbed her face with the creek water and shook the droplets from her fingertips.

Bram came up behind her just then, to fill his water-pack at the creek. “You know I was only having some fun, saying that about your uncle…” He trailed off.

“I know,” Laren said sharply. “Are we ready to go?”

“Nearly,” he answered. He capped off his pack, brimming over with cold water, and fastened the flat pouch around his back with a pair of straps. “Did you fill up your canteen? You’re not sucking off my water like you always do.”

“I only did that one time, and that was ages ago!” Bram had a long memory where Laren was concerned. She followed him as they returned to their base camp, near where the cell’s four raiders were hidden. “Aren’t we flying today, then?”

“Not today,” Bram told her. “I got a tip about something on the surface, a few kellipates outside of town. We’ll need you to override a security system—nothing fancy—just to let the rest of us in, and we’ll take care of the heavy lifting.”

She pouted. “Heavy lifting,” she sniffed. “So I don’t get to kill any spoonheads?”

“There won’t even be anyone there,” Bram told her. “We’re just pinching some supplies. When I said heavy lifting, I meant that literally.”

Laren shrugged, supposing she could live with that. She withdrew her canteen from her improvised pack and shook it—nearly empty. She considered rushing back to the creek, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Bram had plenty of water for the both of them.

Doctor Mora Pol’s hands were trembling as he poured the bluish substance from one beaker into another. He held it up to the light, and then brought it back down to his work surface, where he could measure the changes with his tricorder.

“Pol!” The familiar, clipped voice piped up so suddenly from behind him that Mora nearly dropped the beaker.

“Mirosha, you startled me!” Mora was openly irritated in his reply. Doctor Daul Mirosha was the only other Bajoran in the facility. Although it retained its pre-occupation name, the Bajoran Institute of Science, the Cardassians had taken it over long ago, expunging nearly all of the Bajoran researchers who had once worked there. It had happened gradually, the scientists leaving the institute one at a time, a few finding their way to refugee camps with the rest of the idle Bajorans. But many of them had seemed to disappear—most likely sent to work camps, or possibly even executed. No one spoke of it, not even Mora and Daul.

The two Bajoran researchers knew that someday they, too, would most likely disappear. But for now, the two worked together in tight quarters, under tremendous pressure to yield results in the most unrealistic of time frames.

“How does it look?” Daul asked him, trying to peer around his shoulder at the beaker.

“Well, I suppose I’ll tell you when I’ve run an active scan,” Mora said coolly. “If you don’t mind, that is.”

“By all means,” Daul replied, his tone equally cool. The two men did not always relish each other’s company. It should have been comforting to have another Bajoran face in the facility, but familiarity often bred contempt in these close quarters.

Mora initiated the scan. The test was chemical, a possible precursor to a treatment for Orkett’s disease. He moved a step forward, to free himself of the sour breath of his lab partner, and then frowned at the readouts.

“Let me see,” Daul insisted, reaching for the beaker, and Mora instinctively pulled it away.

“Just a minute,” he snapped. “You’re going to break it if you keep clutching and grasping like that.”

“Are you two finished squabbling?” Doctor Yopal, the director of the institute, stood in the entry, her arms folded.

“We weren’t squabbling,” Daul said quickly, his arms falling to his sides.

Yopal wore the same expression as always, a face mostly bereft of any detectable emotion, aside from a very obviously manufactured upward curve to her lips; that curve was always there. Whether she was angry, thrilled, exhausted, or depressed, Mora could never be quite sure, for her expression never deviated, not even for a moment. He had come to expect no less from her, or from any other Cardassian.

Yopal was usually friendly, sometimes almost intimately so, chatting with Mora about various personal issues from her life just as his old Bajoran colleagues had. But it was all performed with that distinctive little half-turn of a smile, a subtle, consistent indication that her entire persona was a front, pasted over something else. Mora was slightly terrified of Yopal, in spite of her efforts.

“I must say, gentlemen, the state of your notes on this project has been less than satisfactory for quite some time.”

“Doctor Yopal, I apologize,” Mora said, his words tumbling out a little too fast.

“Yes,” Daul spoke over him. “We have done our best to master Cardassian syntax, but I fear that sometimes we focus too much on the work and too little on the vocabulary.”

Yopal made an amused sound. “Men…” she began, the start of a familiar refrain. “You simply aren’t capable of the same kind of attention to detail as women. I suppose you cannot realistically be faulted—you were born with the natural inclination toward immediate results, with less regard for the process of getting there. Sometimes, gentlemen, the journey is as important as the destination—often even more so. I find myself reminding you of this truth far more often than I would a female scientist.”

Mora thought she might as well have been describing the difference between Bajoran and Cardassian, but he only nodded. “Of course, Doctor Yopal,” he said with well-rehearsed sincerity. “Again, my deepest apologies. It won’t happen again.”

She moved on now, wasting no words. “Doctor Daul, I have news for you. You will no longer be working on this assignment.”

There was a terrible moment directly after she spoke when Mora felt certain that he was about to see his friend for the very last time, and he immediately regretted all the moments of unkindness the two had shared. He tried to shoot his friend a look of appropriate apology, but Yopal was still talking.

“Because you have a background in artificial intelligence programming, Doctor Daul, I will be assigning you to begin work on an upgrade to a defective system that currently is in place at a nearby mining facility.”

“A mining facility?” Daul replied. “You mean—at a work camp?”

Mora flinched inside, but Yopal was unmoved, as always, her smile intact. “Yes, Doctor Daul, at Gallitep.”

Mora felt a shiver run through him at the mention of the facility. Every Bajoran knew about Gallitep. They knew it was a miserable, inescapable place, a place to be avoided at any cost.

Yopal went on. “The program is badly outdated, and…there was an incident, recently, that has warranted immediate attention.”

“Certainly,” Daul answered, his tone barely concealing the misery he must have been feeling.

Yopal nodded, tapped her chalky fingers against her upper arms. “Unfortunately, we no longer have many scientists on staff with this type of engineering in their repertoires. You’ll be working mostly alone. As for you, Mora…” She turned, and hesitated.

An anvil of fear settled in on Mora’s chest, his thoughts racing toward his deepest dread. He was about to disappear, like all the other Bajoran scientists who had once worked here, those whose expertise had become irrelevant in the sphere of what Cardassians considered to be useful research. He swallowed down a massive lump before he registered that Yopal had resumed speaking.

“…an unknown sample of organic material, brought in several years ago, by a friend of mine in the military after it was discovered adrift in the Denorios Belt. It doesn’t have any particular priority, but I just ran into her at a conference and I was quite embarrassed to have to confess that I’d not even taken a look at it yet. Just see what you can find out about it, and give me a report as soon as you’re ready.”

“Y-yes, Doctor Yopal.”

She nodded to him, the half smile twitching a little before she took her leave of them.

“Thank you,” he called after her. It seemed somewhat inappropriate to thank her, but he never missed an opportunity. Without Yopal’s continued goodwill, he would have no job. A single misstep, and he’d likely have no life at all.

He watched Daul as he concluded his report on their current research, tidying his house for the latest project—one that Mora knew amounted to collaboration with the Cardassians. But if it was collaboration that kept them alive, Mora was only too willing to comply, sick as it may have made him, and it was abundantly apparent that Daul felt very much the same way. What choice did they have?

Six months after the prefect had received the news about the outcome of his indiscretion with Tora Naprem, Basso Tromac was feeling hot with resentment. It was not a new sensation for him, nor was it one he liked much. He’d been Dukat’s Bajoran adjutant on this station for seven years now, and he wondered if there would ever be a time that he would be treated with respect. He doubted it. Dukat was thoroughly unpleasant even to Kubus Oak at times, and Kubus was a man of great prestige.

Basso was fed up with having to deal with the Kira family. Taban was always surly to him, despite the fact that his visits meant extra food for his dirty-faced children, despite the fact that he brought medicine and goods that Taban was undoubtedly selling on the black market—despite it all, Kira Taban treated him like the enemy, and Basso was tired of it.

He was even more tired of being sent to deal with Meru, time and time again. Basso felt that Meru was a spoiled, inconsolable woman, and as she had gotten older, her demands and her tantrums had become increasingly unreasonable. She had far too much freedom on the station, which worried Basso from time to time. If she’d had the wherewithal, she could have made life very unpleasant for any number of people, especially Dukat. Basso had tried to delicately broach that topic with the prefect, but always met with dismissal; Dukat obviously thought Basso was merely put out at having to cater to his mistress, which did at least hold some measure of truth.

It disgusted Basso that Meru couldn’t simply appreciate how lucky she was to have avoided the mines, for that was exactly where he felt she deserved to be. She had been pretty once, to be sure, but she was far from young now, and though Dukat saw to it that she was regularly afforded the latest in cosmetic treatments to keep her countenance youthful, the ever-present grief in her eyes aged her more than mere time ever could. It gave her a haunted presence, something that never failed to unsettle Basso. He despised being sent to look after her. He would have been happy never to have to speak to her again.

He entered her quarters, where she was seated behind an easel, working on one of her tiresome pieces of iconography. Although Basso had long ago rejected the meanings behind the D’jarras, he still held those from the artist sect in mild contempt, for he had been mistreated by a girl from the Ih’valla D’jarrain his youth.

“Hello, Meru,” Basso said flatly. “I’ve been sent to see if you’ll be needing anything for tonight. The prefect regrets to inform you that he has business on the surface.”

The somber woman’s mouth pulled down in a frown. “Again?” she said, in her mournful way. “He never used to go to the surface. Now he’s down there all the time. I wonder what has changed recently?”

Basso knew exactly what had changed. He hesitated, considering the implications for only a fleeting moment before he said it. “Well, I suppose you weren’t aware that Naprem recently gave birth to a baby girl.”

“Naprem?” Meru leaned back very far in her seat as she regarded Basso with puzzlement. “Who…is Naprem?”

“Why, Meru, I suppose I thought you already knew about Tora Naprem. She is another of Dukat’s…comfort-givers. She resides on the surface, however. I suppose Dukat felt it wouldn’t be decent to have you both on the station.”

Meru looked appropriately shocked, and Basso felt a cruel twist of amusement. Maybe now Meru would think twice about giving the prefect such a difficult time of it, if she understood how disposable she really was. “So, you’ll not be needing anything, then?”

Meru shook her head from side to side, slowly, as if in a complete daze. Basso bowed to her and walked backwards out of the room, letting the doors close behind him. He chuckled unpleasantly as he left the room, but then he considered. He would have to handle the aftermath of this carefully. It would not bode well for him if Dukat were to learn who had leaked the secret to his station mistress. Basso began immediately to formulate his next move, for he would have to be clever to keep his own skin safe.

It was worth it, though,he thought. The look on her face…Definitely worth it.

Dr. Mora ran through the security protocols for his computer, shutting down the laboratory for the night. It was late, and he was exhausted, but he considered himself lucky that he was even going home tonight—Doctor Daul had been spending many a night in the laboratory since he had been put on the artificial intelligence upgrade.

Mora considered the progress he had made with Yopal’s anomalous organic material, which had turned out to be a gelatinous substance with the ability to mimic various forms about the laboratory—even a vaguely humanoid form. The Cardassians were quite impressed with what Mora had heretofore done with it, but beyond party tricks, Mora wasn’t sure what further progress there was to be made with the “odo’ital,”as the Cardassians had begun to call it—the word for “unknown sample” in their native language.

Mora regarded the amber-hued liquid, the color of copalcider, stirring peacefully in a transparent container in the corner of the lab. He considered, with curious pride—as well as some measure of concern—that the liquid had increased in mass considerably since he began running his tests. He had enjoyed his work with the odo’ital,and would no doubt miss it once Doctor Yopal reassigned him to something else—for as soon as she discovered that his research was beginning to plateau, she would no doubt find a new project for Mora, possibly even something as unpleasant as Gallitep’s mining operation.

He sighed heavily as he dimmed the lights and turned to go, but a strangely familiar sound stopped him in his tracks. He turned, looking around the lab, empty of life. “Hello?” he said, a little uneasily.

He was met with silence. He checked himself, chuckling a little at his own tired jumpiness, and turned again. And then again, there it was. A sound that was distinctly…well, it was very much like…it was a sigh.

Ever the scientist, Mora sighed again himself, louder this time. Sure enough, he was met with a response in kind, though he could not be sure where it was coming from. His face prickled as he considered the eeriness of it, but he had a strange hunch that he knew what was making the sound—for he had suspected for months now that the odo’italwas more than just a tank of glop. He’d been possessed of…a feeling, an idea. He believed the goo, unquestionably a new kind of life-form, was more than just some cellular broth. He begun to suspect it might actually be sentient.

Once more he sighed, and once more he heard a similar sound coming from the corner of the lab. He was sure of it now, it was coming from the tank, where the golden soup roiled and sloshed in its container, an approximation of Bajor’s seas during a brilliant storm. The life-form was trying to communicate with him. Mora knew it. And this was the breakthrough he needed right now, to save his tenuous placement at the institute. He ordered the computer to put the lights back up. He would not be going home tonight after all.

Ro Laren’s raider hung passively in space as she waited for a signal from Sadakita Rass, the pilot who was flying the scoutship. The Bram cell always stuck to the same formation when they left the Bajoran atmosphere, dodging the grids by staggering their signals in a particular fashion that confused the Cardassian patrol vessels. Laren tapped her sensor panel impatiently with her fingers before she got the chirp she was waiting for. She put on a burst of speed and quickly changed her direction.

It was not ten minutes later that she saw what her cell was after—the drifting wreckage of an alien freighter, first spied by Sadakita two days before. She had reported it back to Bram, who decided it was worth a second look. Laren had no means of confirming it, but Sadakita believed the vessel had belonged to the Ferengi, the alien merchants who sometimes dared venture into other star systems, even B’hava’el’s, if it meant a big enough profit.

Laren could already see that the freighter had sustained extensive damage to its port side. Probably the inhabitants had bailed out of it, but she was surprised the Cardassians hadn’t taken the ship yet. Maybe they had no use for it. Maybe they’d already stripped it. There was only one way to be sure.

Procedure was to wait for Sadakita to do another patrol sweep before they approached the ship, but Laren was tired of waiting. Though she had never docked on another ship before, she had a vague idea of how it was done, and she maneuvered her shuttle to the vessel’s open bay, taking her stealthy little craft into the derelict’s dark, gaping underbelly.

“Laren,”came a transmission; it was Bram, calling from his own raider. “Is that you I see docking? Wait up on that. It could be booby-trapped.”

Laren considered, and decided Bram was being overly cautious. She didn’t want to wait for him—he probably only wanted to be the first on the ship, anyway. She went ahead and docked, her tiny craft thumping crazily inside the bay of the hulking scow. It came to a rest inside a chamber flooded with blackness, and she put on her night visor. “My sensors say breathable atmosphere, and gravity,” she reported back. “There must still be some kind of auxiliary power system intact, because the drop ramp came up behind me, so—”

“Laren, do not—I repeat—do not exit your vessel! Stay inside it until I can get there. Sadakita’s coming around, and I have to cover her before I can get to you.”

Again, Laren scoffed at Bram’s typical stodginess. He was always telling her what to do, and his advice was often wrong, anyway. She pushed back the glacis plate of her ship and took a deep breath. Her lungs did not collapse; she did not immediately begin choking on poison gases. Bram was afraid to take risks.

She hopped out of the raider, the night visor providing only a scant glow. She produced a palmlight and began to wave it about the bay. She could see nothing that interested her, only the most alien construction techniques she had ever seen.

Laren found an airlock and worked its thick double portals to gain access to the rest of the ship. Passing into the adjoining corridor, she spotted a bizarrely configured control console next to the airlock. It powered up when she touched it, and though it was mostly indecipherable to her, she managed to find the proper key that reopened the cargo bay for Bram. With that accomplished, she continued down the corridor; Bram was only going to scold her, and she wasn’t in any hurry to listen to it.

She aimed her palmlight at a computer terminal she saw in one of the open rooms, and wondered if she might be able to hack into such an alien system. The challenge interested her, and she entered the room.

“What the kosst?” said a man’s voice from somewhere back the way she had come. Laren stopped, confused. The accent, the timbre of the voice—it did not belong to Bram. Someone else was here. Someone Bajoran, apparently, for the curse was not one that a Cardassian would ever use. Laren considered her options. Should she go back to the bay and investigate? Did this person mean to harm her? She drew her phaser, more excited than afraid.

“Who are you?” she shouted.

“Who am I?” the voice answered. “Who are you? This heap is mine—we claimed it over a week ago.”

A man emerged in the corridor then, a gray-haired Bajoran that Laren didn’t recognize.

She lifted her phaser. “Don’t make me ask again,” she said coolly.