Текст книги "Night of the Wolves "

Автор книги: Stephani Danelle Perry

Соавторы: Britta Dennison
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

20

Ro was not immediately as adept at handling Bis’s warp shuttle as she had hoped. She wasn’t certain if she could successfully land the vessel, but the other alternative was to transport herself down to the surface of the gas giant’s lonely moon, with the expectation that she would have to transport herself back up when her task was completed. The prospect was a bit frightening, as she had never handled a transporter on her own, but she decided it was necessary. She could not afford to damage her vessel; warp ships were few and far between for Bajorans, after all.

With a brief recollection of the encouragement Bis had whispered before kissing her good-bye, Ro beamed herself directly to the moon’s surface near a cluster of life signs that she knew to be the tavern where she was to meet her mark. Her molecules having satisfactorily reassembled themselves, she squared her shoulders and entered the little building, advising herself not to come off like an inexperienced, gawking young girl; she had long heard tales of the Orion Syndicate, whose henchmen would kidnap women to be sold as slaves. They sounded no worse than the Cardassians to Ro, but she still wasn’t about to take any chances.

Still, she found it difficult not to stare at some of the people she encountered inside the dimly lit bar—people with brightly colored clothing, not to mention their skin and hair; people with appendages that seemed too long or too short; people with extra sensory equipment, or in some cases, not quite enough; people whose faces looked too smooth, or too lumpy. Ro had never dreamed there were so many different types of people in the galaxy. She knew there were more than just Bajorans and Cardassians, of course, but to be confronted with the reality of it was dizzying. While Bajor struggled, day after day, year after year, the rest of the universe continued to move, everyone carrying on with his or her own business, unaffected by what happened in the B’hava’el system.

Ro had taken a seat behind the bar, a long, black slab with rows and rows of tall colored bottles behind it. A man—Ro supposed it was a man—with bright blue skin and a ridge bisecting his hairless face approached her. “What’ll it be, girlie?”

Ro cleared her throat, looking around for Cardassians. She saw none, but she still wanted to keep as low a profile as she could. She wasn’t sure what to order. “Copal?”she said uncertainly.

“What’s that?” He turned an ear in her direction.

“I said copal—copalcider? Do you have it?”

The man wrinkled his nose. “Where you from, Miss?”

Ro looked around again, before she answered, quietly. “Bajor,” she muttered.

“Speak up!” the bartender told her.

Ro’s gaze froze when she saw someone in the back corner of the room, bald as the bartender, but with a swollen, misshapen head. His skin was an unfortunate shade of orange, his mouth full of teeth so sharp and crooked he could not close it all the way. He wore a strange headband with a couple of flaps that concealed the back part of his head, along with a dark-colored uniform trimmed with fur. He was picking at a plate of ghastly-looking food, and frequently using some kind of tool to remove bits of it from between the varied nooks and crannies of his teeth. But it was his ears that caught Ro’s attention; they were round, and cavernous, and gigantic. Bis had expressly instructed her to look for the person with the most prominent ears. This man’s ears were nothing if not prominent. She felt certain she’d just found DaiMon Gart.

“Excuse me,” Ro told the blue bartender.

“Oh, no you don’t,” the man said. “You’d better order something if you want to sit in here. Only paying customers cool their heels on my chairs, you got it?”

“Tell you what,” Ro whispered. “I have thirty leks that’re all yours, and you don’t even need to pour me a drink.”

The bartender glared at her with suspicion. “What’s the catch?”

Ro leaned in closer. “I want a look at the Ferengi’s tab.” The bartender hesitated, perhaps trying to convince himself that the request was harmless. “I just want to see it,” Ro assured him. “Nothing else.”

“Let’s see the money,” the bartender said.

Ro held up the brown metal hexagon she’d been clutching since she entered the bar, something she’d taken off the body of a dead Cardassian soldier months ago. Union currency was ugly, but it had considerable value in this part of space. Ro was glad she had decided to save it. “Do we have a deal?”

The bartender glanced past her, as if to make sure the Ferengi wasn’t listening. Then he reached toward the counter behind him and produced a padd, which he held facedown on the bar. Ro gave him the coin, and the blue hand flipped the padd over.

Ro found what she was looking for immediately. Gart’s food and drink order didn’t interest her, but the two strings of numbers in the upper right corner of the screen gave her an immediate surge of adrenaline: the transponder code for the daimon’s ship, and the number of its docking bay—both of which would be essential to pay for anything in a place like this, in lieu of hard currency. Ro had just enough time to commit the numbers to memory before the bartender said, “That’s enough,” and took back his padd.

Ro thanked the bartender and made for the exit, past the table where Gart was sitting. She hesitated to listen to what he was saying to the person seated opposite him, an alien woman with her scarlet hair in a complicated topknot.

“What a lot of clothing you’re wearing!” he exclaimed. “You know, I like that in a girl. Clothing. Especially the part where the clothing all comes off.” He laughed, and bits of what appeared to be wormviolently dislodged themselves from his mouth as he did so. Ro shuddered.

“If my cook weren’t trying to poison me,” she overheard him say as she left the bar, “I’d never pay this much for a plate of greeworms. I tell you, he’s had it in for me since he left Ferenginar, but it’s his own fault for getting into the mess with the sub-nagus’s sister—”

Ro could no longer hear him as she found her way outside in the thin, cold atmosphere of the moon. It was dark here; apparently this part of the moon never entirely faced the sun, and the only light right now was from artificial sources posted between the shabby and sparse buildings that spread out from the spaceport. This moon’s sole purpose was as a stopover for travelers…especially those interested in conducting illicit business.

Ro made her way toward the spaceport’s secure hangar facility, constructed of enormous steel girders and smart-plastic dividers backed with force fields to separate the ships. Her first objective would be to break in and find the correct hangar where the Ferengi vessel was docked.

Minutes later, she found it, the massive, awkward vessel looking very much like the one she’d tried to steal years ago, the one that currently lay in pieces at the hangar on Valo II. Ro wasted no time in disabling the force field that would allow her access to the bay. Her next problem would be getting past the Ferengi ship’s security features, and while she knew the DaiMon was preoccupied, she knew nothing of the rest of the ship’s crew—he’d mentioned a cook, and Ro was nervous at the thought that there could be more than one or two other Ferengi aboard. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she’d have to deal with anyone other than Gart. Well, she only needed to get as far as the cargo bay.

She hitched up the satchel around her waist; it held her phaser, comm unit, and the small electrical device that she would soon be leaving inside the vessel. This is it,she told herself, and began working at overriding the controls to the drop ramp.

The minutes ticked by. Ro’s forehead was slippery with perspiration, but she could not spare a moment to wipe her eyes. How much longer would Gart be preoccupied? If he was successful in his pursuit of the alien woman at the bar, would he bring her back to the ship? It seemed to take forever before the drop ramp began to slowly descend, and Ro scampered inside, finding a shuttlebay much like the one where she had once docked her own raider. She’d walked the remnants of that long-ago ship several times with Bis only yesterday, memorizing its layout. In seconds, she was in the cargo bay, surrounded by massive nonmetallic containers filled with unprocessed uridium. She shivered as she removed the electrical discharge device from her satchel and programmed it to react directly with the impact of the locking clamps at Terok Nor. Then she aimed the bomb’s makeshift conducting spike at one of the containers, raised it over her head, and stabbed it through the casing.

She thought she heard voices coming from somewhere to the rear left of the cargo bay, and she quickly scuttled out the way she had come, not stopping to put the drop ramp back up as she ran, removing the comm device from her satchel and placing it in the pocket of her tunic. Once clear of the shipyards, she squeezed the device once, and, like magic, found herself once again on the transporter platform of the little warp ship.

I did it,she thought, and knew that Bis would be happy.

Odo usually had very little control of his senses while he regenerated, though certain external stimuli could rouse him from his state of near slumber. And as it was, something had forced him out of stasis on this particular night. Something was not right in the laboratory, though Odo had no concept of what it might be; he only knew that there was a sound coming from somewhere outside the door of Doctor Mora’s laboratory, and at this time of night, there should be no sounds at all. He remained a liquid, but he poised himself to be ready to morph into something else if he needed to, though he wasn’t sure what that thing might be.

Someone had entered the laboratory. Though the lights were still off, Odo could make out the shape of a humanoid—a Bajoran, he thought. This person looked more like Doctor Mora than like Doctor Yopal and the others, but there was something different about him. Odo wasn’t sure what it was right away, but then it somehow dawned on him. This person was a female. This was a Bajoran female, something he’d not seen before. The female was touching Mora’s computer. Odo wanted very much to get out of the tank and have a closer look, but he had the distinct sense that she was not supposed to be in here. He wondered what to do, and wished Mora would come, but it was nighttime; Mora would not return until the morning.

“Gantt!” the person said, and Odo wondered who she was talking to. The sound of her voice was like nothing he’d ever heard before. She did not sound like the Cardassian women, and she certainly didn’t sound like Doctor Mora.

“Mobara found it, down the hall,” said another voice, coming from somewhere outside. “It’s done. We need to get to the transporter—it’s in the lower level.”

“Come in here and look at this,” the female in Doctor Mora’s laboratory called. “I think this is a Bajoran’s laboratory.”

“Never mind that,” the other person said. “We need to get out of here.”

“Yes, but—”

“Kira, we have to go, now!”

“I’m coming,” she said, and left the room.

Odo felt relieved that the intruders were going, but he also felt something else, too. He felt an oddly placed regret, for the female had made him terrifically curious—curious in a way he wasn’t entirely familiar with. He wanted to know why they had been here, what they were doing. He was too restless to go back into his resting state now, and he contemplated his feelings. He considered that some part of him wished the female hadn’t gone quite so soon. He regretted not emerging from the tank to speak to her, though he knew he shouldn’t have done that, and it was certainly best that he hadn’t. But there was something about her, the novelty of her appearance, her voice—if he couldn’t have spoken to her, he wished he could at least have looked at her just a little while longer.

Daul had been seated inside the cramped little outbuilding, situated along the vast, stretching footbridge strung across the center of the open-pit duranium mine, for well over three hours now. That was almost twice as long as it should have taken him to complete his task, but the Cardassians didn’t know that—at least, Daul hoped they didn’t.

The odd file clerk had accompanied him for most of the day, but just under an hour ago, Marritza had explained that he had to get back to his office, and had placed a much less agreeable Cardassian guard in charge of looking after him. The guard had made it abundantly clear that he resented the assignment, glaring at Daul from the only other seat in the little room where the massive computer was housed. But Daul was relieved at the changing of his guard, for he felt confident that this sentry would give him far less trouble than the more observant file clerk would have.

From time to time, the guard shifted impatiently in his seat and inquired as to how much longer Daul was going to take, and Daul’s reply was always the same: “I’m not sure, but I don’t think much longer.”

Finally, the surly Cardassian made an attempt at conversation. “Just what is it that you’re doing here, anyway?”

“I’m reassessing the mine’s reserve, and reprogramming the system’s algorithm to ignore any veins of duridium with inferior percentage extraction. Eventually, the AI will cease drilling when viable duridium reaches 10 percent or less.”

“Oh,” the guard said, his expression confirming that he didn’t know what Daul was talking about. This guard apparently had little understanding of how the mine operated; he was only here to force the Bajorans to work. To Daul’s great relief, the guard removed the headset he was wearing—the set which enabled him to hear what Daul was saying. He rubbed his head, and held the set idly in his lap.

Daul glanced at the time displayed on his padd. The resistance outfit had been instructed to transport several of their operatives into a specific mine location in approximately five minutes. Daul had no idea if the terrorists really had the capacity to do all that would be required of them for this undertaking; he had left the most explicit instructions he could conceive of, but even so, his own knowledge of transporter operation was anemic—especially considering the transporter in question was Cardassian technology, and not Bajoran. Still, Daul was an intelligent man, a resourceful man—and he believed the plan was feasible. He had to believe in it.

Sneaking a glance at the bored Cardassian sentry, Daul began to tap into the networked security program. It was lucky the file clerk was not here, for he was obviously a man who knew his way around the facility’s computer system and would probably have caught Daul in the act of what he was about to do. Struggling to maintain an aura of calm, he shut down the beam-shield that would prevent unauthorized travelers from transporting in or out of the facility. His task done, he switched back to the AI, thinking it had gone much easier than he would have expected.

He tapped away at the interface, when suddenly, the console began to blink, rattling a line of ominous characters.

WARNING. UNAUTHORIZED SECURITY SHUTDOWN. ENTER AUTHORIZATION CODE FOR THIS ACTION OR SHUTDOWN WILL BE CANCLED IN SIXTY SECONDS.

It took the Cardassian a moment to notice the blinking screen. He shouted something, but Daul couldn’t hear him without his headset. Daul scrambled to his feet, but the guard caught him by the arm, still screaming.

Daul tried to writhe out of the Cardassian’s grip, but it was impossible. Instead, he lunged forward suddenly, bringing the big man with him as the two crashed into the computer console. The sturdy computer survived the impact, but Daul’s ears were ringing from a sharp blow to his chin. His headset fell off somewhere, and Daul could only hear the tremendous, grinding noise from the mine below him.

The screen still flashed: FORTY SECONDS

The Cardassian stood up and pointed his phaser straight at Daul. He spoke into his comcuff, but without his headset, his report would not be heard over the cacophony of the mining facility. Daul threw open the door and scrambled out onto the catwalk. He headed in the direction of the spiraling gravel road that would take him straight down into the belly of the pit, clinging to his feeble hope that he would somehow manage to get past the guards and find his way to where the workers would be convened, and with luck, transported out.

The guard behind him hesitated long enough to fire his phaser, and missed. He gave chase once more, easily gaining on the narrow, swaying bridge, and just as he was about to close in on Daul, the Bajoran doubled back and headed straight for the guard, ramming his head directly into the other man’s armored chest. Unhurt but startled, the Cardassian almost lost his footing, and clung to the sides of the unwieldy structure that held him. The bridge swayed more dangerously than ever. Daul grabbed for his phaser pistol, and almost had it, but the Cardassian’s grip was too strong for him.

Daul made a quick decision. The computer behind him was the primary server for all systems in the facility. It would have to be destroyed before the security shutdown request could be canceled. With a single burst of adrenaline, he slammed the Cardassian’s arm backward and pulled the trigger, aiming straight for the metal cube that housed the AI.

The Cardassian flung his arm back the other way, but not before a shower of sparks lit up the AI station behind them. The little structure shuddered and the catwalk with it, the station pulling away from the narrow footbridge on its legs of crisscrossed scaffolding, tottering backward. In the moments it took to fall across the width of the chasm, before it crashed into the side of the mine, rolling down the steep walls of the pit and exploding somewhere near the bottom, Daul realized that he had not been able to program the system to self-destruct, as he had originally planned. The Cardassian guards would live; Gul Darhe’el would live. It was his last thought, as the guard with whom he still wrestled on the dangerously swaying walkway finally got his phaser pointed in the intended direction, and Daul received a quick, indiscernible blast, full in the chest. He didn’t feel a thing.

Kira compulsively looked back at the door of the basement transporter room. Though she knew they were alone here, that Furel was outside waiting to give a signal if anything went wrong, it was terrifying to be inside an actual Cardassian facility. The only missions she’d been part of until now had been attacks from outside facilities or ships; this was the first time she could remember actually entering Cardassian domain, and it made her feel uncomfortably claustrophobic. She couldn’t imagine how she was going to feel when she was inside Gallitep. She would never have admitted it, but she was having second thoughts.

“I think I’ve got it,” Mobara said from behind the transporter console. “The scientist said you would be beamed directly into the facility if I use these coordinates; you’ll close your eyes, open them, and find yourself standing somewhere in the Gallitep mine.”

“I think we all understand the basic concept,” Shakaar said wryly.

Kira held her breath. What if Mobara had the coordinates wrong, and she were somehow transported into the solid rock that surrounded the open mine? The thought was beyond horrifying. Kira trusted Mobara’s expertise, and she knew that transporter technology had been used safely by the Cardassians for decades, at least. But still…it was impossible not to be afraid.

“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Gantt said to Nerys.

“Of course I am,” she said fiercely, terrified.

Lupaza, who stood close to Kira, reached out to grab her hand. “You’ll do fine, Nerys,” the older woman assured her, but Kira met Shakaar’s eyes for a moment and saw that he wasn’t so sure he should have agreed to let her come along.

Shakaar stepped onto the transporter platform. “I stand here?” he asked. Like the rest of them, he’d never used a transporter in his life.

“That’s right,” Mobara told him.

Lupaza stepped up after him, along with Kira and Gantt. The rest of their strike team would be transported immediately after them, slightly higher in the mine so that they could deal with the guards. There were ten from Shakaar’s cell in all—not as many as Daul had requested in his detailed instructions, but several of their group were already on assignment in Ilivia with another cell when Daul had contacted Shakaar, and they were out of reach. Ten would have to be enough.

“Now, just remember,” Shakaar told them all. “We get inside, make sure the Bajorans are all in a central location, kill any hostiles we find, and then we contact Mobara with these.” He held up one of the comm devices the scientist had given to Furel. Kira fingered hers nervously; it was pinned to her tunic, and she feared she was going to lose it. She unpinned the small oval of metal and slipped it in her pocket.

“Is everyone ready?” Mobara called out, and Shakaar gave a nod.

“See you on the other side,” Gantt said, and Kira shut her eyes tightly.

Lenaris Jau was monitoring one of the dozens of subterranean smelters at Gallitep, so weary that he could scarcely keep his head above his shoulders. So many of the sick workers had died lately, and those who were not affected by disease had to pick up the slack, working nearly round the clock. Jau had no idea how long it had been since he’d slept. Exhaustion and the darkness of the underground tunnels in the mine tended to distort his sense of time. It could have been three hours, it could have been three days. It didn’t really matter.

Jau wondered why the number of workers had been dwindling lately. The dead were usually replaced, but lately they had not been. He wondered why the sick workers were no longer being treated. Those who died were unceremoniously dragged from the mines, to be taken to some undisclosed location for disposal, though it was not unusual for their corpses to remain where they had fallen for up to three days, swelling and stinking in the baking sun. The numbers of dead seemed to have escalated quite dramatically lately. Was it only yesterday that over three dozen people had died, in a single day? There were rumors that Darhe’el was planning to shut down the camp, which would not bode well for the workers here. Jau thought he would walk with the Prophets soon, and mostly, he was too weary to care—if anything, death would be a welcome release from the horrors of this place.

Jau had seen the most unspeakable things of his life happen in this place. He had seen plenty of tunnels cave in, had listened to the screams of those left to suffocate inside. He had seen scarcely recognizable corpses retrieved from the vats of chemicals used to separate the rock from the valuable minerals, and even worse, he’d seen the gruesome-looking survivors from similar accidents, forced to go back to work with no hair, no skin—even no eyelids. He’d heard the groans and wails of people who were “treated” in the camp infirmary, more like a torture chamber or the laboratory of a mad scientist, bent on using live subjects. He’d seen dozens of people crippled from injuries sustained after stumbling down the steeper precipices at the very top of the mine. He’d seen people beaten within an inch of their lives for what Gul Darhe’el perceived as insubordination. But Jau was numb to it, mostly. At least, as much as he could have hoped for.

Jau adjusted the smelter’s temperature, ignoring the echoing groans and wails all around him. He drew his forearm over his brow, wiping the sweat away, when he noticed that the system of conveyor belts that delivered the ore to the smelter had stopped, and the overwhelming noise that usually accompanied it had ceased as well. It took his sluggish mind a moment to register what was going on, and he looked around, his heart fluttering. Something must have gone wrong with the artificial intelligence system, though in all his time at Gallitep, Jau could not remember that happening, even once. No, it had not happened since the accident, which had occurred before Jau had been brought here. An alarm began to tear through the hollow caverns of the mines, indicating a systems failure—the mine was to be evacuated at once. Jau’s breath froze in his lungs; was this going to be Darhe’el’s method of disposing of him, and everyone else here?

Before he could think further on it, he was instantly swept up in a crush of panicking Bajorans. Jau began to run, drawing on reserves he didn’t know he had, pushing and stumbling until he found himself stepping out onto a wide dirt road that curled down from the very top of the pit all the way down here, just a few linnipates from the bottom. He was immediately aware of the heat—more than just the heat from the hot, midday sun that he was accustomed to; it was from a fire, somewhere not far below him. Something burned and scorched with chemical brightness at the base of the pit, sending up great plumes of toxic smoke. Jau began to scramble up the gravel road, trying to get away from the flames below him, but he encountered so many confused Bajorans, he could not get far. The road was packed with people, crying out in panic. Finally, Jau came to the road’s widest point, and realized he could go no farther. He would have to wait for the crowd to thin out, which he suspected would not happen before they were all murdered here, en masse—for it seemed logical to Jau that this was really it—Darhe’el’s final solution had come.

He looked up once, panned the miserable and frightened faces of the crowd that surrounded him, and did a double take. There was a girl standing there, a Bajoran, and he could have sworn that she wasn’t there before. This girl did not look like she belonged here. She looked like one of the younger ones that might have been brought in many months ago, but Jau wasn’t aware of any new workers coming in for some time. And there was something else about her too…There was a bulge at her hip, underneath her tunic, and Jau felt certain he knew what it was—this girl carried a phaser. She caught his eye and moved closer to him, shoving her way through the tight press of gangly limbs and exposed rib cages, bruised beneath too-tight skin.

“Don’t worry,” she said to him, and suddenly, he did worry—he found he still had the capacity to worry, even after feeling mostly nothing for such a very long time.

Ro had not expected to feel so conflicted as she warped back to Valo II. She had been on and off the Ferengi freighter in less than ten minutes; the entire operation really had been as easy as Bis had said it would be. She kept reminding herself of the wonderful, risky, and brave thing she had just done, but the thoughts were not quite resonating within her, and she was eager to find Bis and hear his reassurances.

Still wary of landing the valuable warp ship on her own, she left it in orbit of Valo II, hoping that Bis would be able to retrieve it later. But she could not immediately find him once she materialized on the planet’s surface. He had implied that he would meet her near the landing field when she returned, but she was back much faster than expected, and she did not know where he could be. She went to his house, but he wasn’t there, so she wandered the dusty, tightly packed village, asking those people who bothered to look up as she walked by. It was in the center of the crowded town that she encountered Keeve Falor, the old politician she’d met those years ago with Bram. She did a double take as he passed, and he stopped to regard her.

“You look familiar to me,” the man said, stepping back as he tried to place her.

“I’m Ro Laren,” she said, feeling suddenly as sulky as her younger self.

“The little girl from Jo’kala?” Keeve mused. “Is that right. What are you doing here?”

“I’m helping Bis with something,” Ro said. “Akhere Bis.”

Keeve immediately looked alarmed. “Helping Bis!” he exclaimed. “Tell me he hasn’t recruited you for that foolishness with the alien ship?”

Ro wasn’t sure if Keeve was talking about the plan she had just undertaken, but since he seemed not to approve, she supposed she’d better not confirm her involvement. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to help him,” she lied.

“Prophets help us,” Keeve said. “Bis is young and reckless—he doesn’t understand the great cost that would be suffered by destroying Terok Nor. Thousands of Bajoran lives…It simply doesn’t make sense, to sacrifice what we are trying to preserve.”

“If those lives buy millions more, maybe the sacrifice is worth it.”

“Is that how your resistance is going to save Bajor?” Keeve asked in disgust. “Using arithmetic to decide who lives, and who dies? That isn’t what the Prophets teach us.”

Ro felt a flash of anger at the sanctimonious mention of the Prophets. “At least…at least it would be doing something to fight the Cardassians, instead of hunkering down on this world like a coward, hiding here where they won’t trouble you, and letting them do as they please with Bajor!”

Keeve studied her a moment. If he was angry, she didn’t see it; he only looked tired and sad. “Perhaps to you, I seem a coward,” he said, after a moment. “But I know that when the people on this world still listened to my advice, we were learning things that could have brought the Federation in to aid us in our struggle. We had warp vessels, we had trade relations with other worlds. But that is changing, and the people here have begun to grow impatient. We’ve lost most of our warp ships, and we have to rely on charity from others within this system for our very survival. We’ve fallen out of favor with the Federation, especially since the unfortunate incident that occurred on Valo VI. The Federation once had a lot of questions about what that little group might have been doing there, and I suppose now they have much less of a chance of ever finding out.” He looked at her very pointedly when he said it, and Ro felt a strange thing, a thing she thought might be guilt.