Текст книги "Night of the Wolves "

Автор книги: Stephani Danelle Perry

Соавторы: Britta Dennison
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

OCCUPATION YEAR TWENTY 2347 (Terran Calendar)

4

Opaka Sulan had just been asked the question that she did not know how to answer. It was not the first time she had been asked it, and she knew it would not be the last. But the question still distressed her, because it was such an important one.

Having left the comfort of the sanctuary, she and Fasil had begun to travel to the refugee camps, looking for charity wherever they could find it. Already she had found that a great many people were eager to hear what she had to tell them, and as she traveled from one camp to another, her audiences had begun to grow.

She was no longer calling herself a vedek, asking those who listened to her words to refer to her simply as Sulan, but she had encountered many who still continued to address her as Vedek Opaka. She did not dissuade them, only made it clear that the kai no longer approved of her viewpoints and therefore it was not right that she use the title herself. This seemed to satisfy the congregations—congregations made up of skeptics, travelers, elderly men and women, youthful rebels, and the pious faithful. They sat together on the hot, dry ground, the dust baked into a hard crust by the midsummer sun. And yet, still the occasional determined bunch of salamgrass would grow in patches big enough and soft enough for some young mother to lay down her restless infant as she listened to what Opaka had to say. It humbled her to look beyond the insular life she’d led for so long as a vedek and to see how her brothers and sisters lived in these difficult times.

Though her congregations came from many walks of life, and had once belonged to all facets of Bajor’s ruined society, they seemed to have one thing in common—they were hungry to hear Opaka’s words. They were hungry to be told that Bajor could be whole again one day, if they would only forget their differences and unite against a common oppressor. Opaka had been revitalized by the eagerness and faith of the people who came to listen to her, so much so that she would occasionally be stricken with silently joyous bouts of tearfulness after her sermons had concluded.

But…then there is this.

“Do you condone the resistance? If you believe we must unite to be strong against the Cardassians, then you must also believe that it is right that we fight them. But the prophecies have always been clear on their advocacy for reason over conflict.”

She had considered the question many times, and still had no clarity to pass along.

“We must look inside ourselves,” she finally told the man, who was barely older than Fasil. He had long, sandy hair and wide-set, earnest eyes. “We must come to terms with our individual beliefs. It is not for us to judge one another, but rather to decide what each of us can do, ourselves, to make a difference. Above all, we must be unified—and in the Prophets, we can find that unity.”

The crowd responded with exclamations of agreement, thankfully making any further comment unnecessary, and she moved to other topics.

Later, as the small crowd began to disperse, Fasil approached his mother. She could see his dark head as he made his way toward her through the cluster of people. He suddenly looked very tall to Sulan, with unusually broad shoulders for a teenager, and she realized that he must have shot up just in the span of their weeks traveling. His sixteenth birthday had come and gone, and Sulan could no longer deny that he was a man, his ideas and desires grown beyond her jurisdiction.

“Mother,” he said. He sounded annoyed, and she instantly knew what he was going to say. “You skirted the issue. When that man asked you about the resistance—”

“My business is not to be an advocate for the resistance. I am here to address other matters.”

“You’re wrong. You must take a firm stance regarding the resistance if you want people to continue to listen to you.”

Opaka shook her head. “I won’t do it, Fasil. My message is not about fighting. My message is about setting aside our differences.”

“So that we can fight.”

She continued to shake her head, but she was disarmed, and her son knew it. It did gall her to avoid the topic, but she felt ill-equipped to deal with the matter. Her own feelings regarding the conflict were still complicated, but she refused to suppress the core of her message just because she hadn’t yet sorted out how to approach every aspect of the concomitant issues.

“Mother, I may as well tell you. I’ve met some people here…and I’ve decided to join the resistance. I’m going to fight.”

In an instant, Sulan felt her body rooted to the spot where she stood, paralyzed, though her hands seemed to move of their own volition. They crept to her chest and covered her heart. She could feel the same choking tightness inside that she remembered when she had finally accepted that Bekar was dead.

“You’re doing what you feel you must do,” he continued. “You left the sanctuary. You have begun to speak out against the words of the kai. Almost nobody would dare to do what you have done, but I believe that what you have done is right. Now I ask that you support me in what I believe is right.”

She shook her head, her voice losing strength as she spoke. “Let the others take up arms. Let someone else do the fighting. I need you.”

“Bajor needs me.” His piercing dark eyes, framed by thick eyebrows and the hollowness of a man-child who had never eaten a full meal in his life, reflected a deep, unwavering conviction.

She regarded the tall stranger before her with his unfamiliar build and impenetrable gaze, and she knew that she could not talk him out of doing anything that he had set his mind to do. “If the Prophets will it…”

“If the Prophets will it, then Bajor will be whole again one day. But it takes more than the will of the Prophets. It takes the will, and the strength, of the people.”

Opaka clasped her hands together and then pulled them apart, to raise them up in prayer. Fasil obediently closed his eyes and prayed with his mother, and then he took one of her hands in his own. “Don’t be frightened, Mother. The Prophets will be with me.”

Opaka looked around the camp from where they stood, taking in the flattened landscape and the limping figures of exhausted people as they returned from ration lines, the faraway clanking of Cardassian mining machinery and the faint collective whimpering of hungry babies, too young to understand why they had to go to sleep with empty bellies. She knew she was doing right, could feel it in her meditations each day, could see it in the faces of those who came to listen. But with the sudden understanding that Fasil would be gone from her soon, seeing the desolation that had become their world, hearing the hungry cries of children—for the first time in her life she felt her faith flicker. She needed to believe that the Prophets still walked with them, needed it so badly…But what if…

She let the feeling go, refusing to follow it any further. She recognized it for despair, for the very thing she’d left the sanctuary to fight against. She turned instead to watch her grown son as he walked back to the place where he had made his camp, feeling her heart break a little.

Bajor would indeed be strong again one day, because of Fasil, because of all these children who had grown up under Cardassian rule, who didn’t have a simpler time to reflect back upon. Who wanted better, and would fight to get it. It was in that instant that she knew she could not afford to forget her faith again. Not with what was now at stake.

Kira Meru stared at the Bajoran woman who appeared before her, facing her in the mirror above the severely designed Cardassian dressing table. She struggled to accept what she saw there. This woman’s face lacked the scarred, rawboned quality she had come to know of her own reflection, and her hair—too shiny, too carefully arranged. If she stood, she’d see curves now, instead of bony lines. The heaviness in her eyes and in her expression, that wasn’t entirely wrong, though it was more somber now than it had ever been. It would have eased Meru’s mind considerably if she could have just made herself believe that the woman in the mirror was nother, but she knew that nothing was that simple anymore. She had to accept that this was her life now.

The place in her psyche that could definably be called her heart did a little dip as she thought of that contrast between beforeand now,but she eased out of it with remarkable facility. It surprised her, how quickly she had come to understand that there was nothing to do but accept it, that there was no sense whatever in allowing the horror of what had happened to her to reach out and pierce her very soul, that crying and curling up in a ball on the ridiculously massive and ornate bed in her quarters would do nothing to ease the agony of being torn away from her family. The only sensible choice was to forget these things, motherhood and love, and sweep herself into the mysterious cocoon of alien elegance, where her natural reactions had no appropriate place.

She touched her hair—the stranger’s hair—and moved it away from her face, examining the new earrings that Gul Dukat had given her. They were not ceremonial in nature, only decorative. Though Dukat had not specifically told her that he did not want her to wear the traditional Bajoran ear adornment, when he had given her this pair as a gift this morning it seemed to suggest that she’d better forgo her customary jewelry for now. They were beautiful, the delicate spirals of metal reflecting a shimmering array of heliotrope and deep violet as they moved, with tiny blue stones at the curlicued base. They matched the pale purple of the tunic she now wore, a far cry from the body-hugging gown she had reluctantly donned when Basso Tromac had first brought her to Terok Nor with the other comfort women.

She started as someone entered the quarters, and then relaxed somewhat when she saw it was Dukat—although she never relaxed entirely when he was with her. Dukat had been very kind, it was true, but he was still a Cardassian, and he was still the reason that she was here, instead of down on the dingy, starving surface where life had been so difficult, and yet so much happier than it was here on this stark station. But Dukat was also the reason that her family was going to be looked after from now on, her children given extra food and medicine, never to cry out in hunger or sickness in the middle of the night, ever again. He had promised her.

“Hello, sweet Meru.” The deep tone of his voice was like a heavy stone over fine gravel, but his languorous pronunciation still took the edge off some of Meru’s discomfort. She had to appreciate that he had done his best to make her at ease. He had been refreshingly honest with her, confessing that when he “rescued” her from that overzealous officer at the reception, it had actually been a charade, something that Dukat had set up in advance in order to win her trust.

He had admitted to her how much it pained him to take this time away from his own family: his wife back on Cardassia Prime, his children of whom he was so movingly proud. Meru could see immediately that this man was lonely. He had brought her here because he was just as lonely as he had unwittingly made her, and she understood that it was now her job to do anything she could do to replace his emptiness with something warm, something that he could touch. Her own children’s lives depended on it.

Meru knew that she should be revolted by him. She should have loathed him for separating her from her husband and her babies, and for making such a crude ploy to manipulate her. In truth, she was a little disgusted with herself for not hating Dukat, not recoiling from his every advance. But she didn’t hate him. She had tried to make her friend Luma Rahl understand it, but maybe there was no understanding it. Meru was through trying to justify it. She wasn’t happy, but ultimately she cared for Dukat, a little. They had been too intimate for her to do otherwise; she saw things in him that she believed no one else could have seen.

“Hello, Dukat.”

“I’ve told you, Meru, I want you to call me by my first name.”

“Yes, I know…Skrain.” Her eyes flicked down as she said it. She was still so accustomed to a person’s given name being second. Besides, she felt that his first name did not suit him. He was too polished a man to have a name that sounded so brusque, almost violent.

He sat down on the massive bed and patted the space next to him, indicating that he wanted her to come near. She stood up and moved to his side with a strange combination of reluctance and anticipation. While it pained her deeply to be unfaithful to her dear Taban, she had found in Dukat a generous and conscientious lover. In all her adult life, it had been rare for her to make love simply for its own sake, the uncertainty of home and the chaos of constant uprootings making those clandestine, stolen moments something less than thoroughly satisfying. Her couplings with Dukat were an entirely different animal from what she had come to know with her husband.

He placed his hands, such cool, bloodless gray hands, on the curve of her neck and stroked it with the back of his fingers. She shivered, not entirely from the coldness of his flesh. “I’ve just come from a meeting,” he murmured.

“I’m sure you were wonderful,” she said, meaning it.

His face broke into a smile. She had quickly come to appreciate his smile. “I wish you had been there,” he said. “I could have used the support.”

Meru only smiled back in return, knowing that it was all he needed from her until he was finished speaking.

“Legate Kell does not understand what I am trying to do. He thinks I’m a fool for abolishing child labor in the camps. He thinks my plan to bring in better medical facilities is costly and unnecessary. None of them understand that a drop of prevention is worth an ocean of cure.”

“You’re too compassionate for them to understand you.” She brushed a strand of wiry black hair away from his face.

“It’s the resistance,” he told her. “Why must they continue to fight me? Can’t they see that I have their best interests at heart? You experienced yourself what kinds of things they do—the recent attempt on my life, you would have been killed, too. They would kill a Bajoran woman in cold blood just to make a self-serving political statement.”

Meru worked not to tense, as she always did when Dukat mentioned the resistance. While she did not agree with every action taken by the resistance fighters, she understood why they fought. She knew firsthand what it was like to go for days without any food, to watch your children suffer from cuts that wouldn’t heal, their bodies too starved for what they needed to thrive. She could not honestly denounce those who chose to resist. And though Dukat was an unusual man among Cardassians, Meru knew it was no use trying to explain it to him. He was unusual, but he was still a Cardassian.

“What’s on your mind, Meru?” Dukat tipped her chin up toward his face with his index finger. Meru smiled as brilliantly as she knew how.

“Only pleasing you after a difficult day,” she told him. After all, she thought to herself, that’s what she was here for. To provide comfort. She was a comfort woman, and it did her no good to think of herself in any other context.

Dukat smiled in turn, and pulled her close.

“Holem, didn’t you hear me? I said, hand me that hyperspanner.” Taryl’s voice echoed through the corridor from where only her feet were visible in the light of Lenaris’s palm beacon. She had been lying on her back for hours inside the cramped opening of the maintenance conduit of the old warp ship.

Lenaris’s palmlight wobbled clumsily around the pile of equipment spread across the floor of the ship’s engine room. He was no novice when it came to tools, but Taryl had things he’d never heard of before. “Is this it?” He handed her a cylindrical object.

She made an exasperated noise. “No, this is a magna-spanner. The hyperspanner is—oh, never mind, I’ll get it.” She hoisted herself from the tube with some difficulty, her movements casting oversized shadows across the convex shine of the inner hull. Lenaris, feeling useless, got out of her way.

The derelict vessel still rested in the same position as it had when Lenaris had first seen it, over a year ago, and it was likely no closer to being fixed now than it had been when he had initially inspected it with Taryl and Lac. Since he’d come to live with the Ornathia clan, the days had passed quickly, lost to the myriad small chores and errands needed to ensure survival. There wasn’t much time to come out to where the vessel lay, and the only one of the three who had any inkling whatsoever of how the engines might be made to work again seemed to be Taryl, and she was also the one with the least opportunity to actually work on it. Seefa, her fiancé, still felt that the business with the ship could come to no good.

But Lenaris and Lac grew ever more determined to see the thing airborne—or at least, grew ever more determined to spend time in the foothills with the ship, tinkering with her instruments and comparing her schematics with the information they managed to gather from various contacts between Tilar and Relliketh. It was a minor obsession for Lenaris, one that he wasn’t sure he ever expected to be fulfilled, but one that took up a great deal of his time nonetheless, whether it was gathering information, looking for an engineer, or poking around in the ship itself.

Of course, time with the ship was limited to the interims between the small operations that the Ornathia cell was beginning to plan and carry out. The cell was still in its infancy, and full-scale attacks were ill-advised at this point. The cell was comprised mainly of the Ornathia cousins and their spouses, none of whom had any real combat experience. But many of them were surprisingly resourceful when it came to refurbishing pieces of useful equipment. The latest venture was a plan to build a long-range communications tower, which would have to be erected on one of Bajor’s moons, probably Derna. Missions planned outside the atmosphere had been very few and far between, however, and took months of careful planning. The tower would probably not be completed for another six months or so—and Seefa was once again vocally opposed to the whole thing, being of the general opinion that offworld travel was simply a bad idea.

Taryl continued to clang around inside the maintenance conduit while Lenaris held the palmlight, waiting for her next order and letting his mind wander. “Holem,” she said, jerking him out of his daydream, “I need you to hold this guide wire while I solder.”

Uncertainly, Lenaris stuck his head and shoulders inside the opening of the maintenance conduit. Taryl was forced to straddle his torso, the conduit much too small for the two of them. He took the wire from her fingers while she soldered the exposed portion in place, holding a small sylus-sized light in her teeth. He could feel his heart pounding as she worked, all too aware of her thighs encircling his waist, and he willed his pulse to quiet itself; he did not want her to know just how much it thrilled him to be in such close proximity to her…

“What the kosstis going on here?”

Lenaris dropped his palmlight and quickly ducked out of the conduit; the voice belonged to none other than Aro Seefa.

“Seefa!” Lenaris exclaimed. “I didn’t even hear you.”

Seefa ignored him. “I’ve told you and told you how dangerous this is. I knew your fool brother was still committed to wasting his time with this heap, but you?”

Taryl hopped smoothly out of the conduit. “Calm down, Seefa,” she said. “I’m only having a look around.” She lowered her voice. “I’m humoring my brother a little. This thing’s a lost cause, of course.”

“You shouldn’t even be here,” Seefa growled, but much of the anger had gone from his voice.

Taryl stroked his arm. “I know,” she sighed. “But you know how persuasive Lac can be…”

Lenaris wished he were invisible, and to a degree, it seemed as though he was, to Taryl and Seefa. They often seemed to forget his presence—or that of anyone else—when they were together. He found it increasingly difficult not to resent it a little, especially since he secretly felt that his rapport with Taryl transcended her superficial relationship with her fiancé. But he couldn’t let himself think like that. It would only cause trouble.

In very little time, Taryl seemed to have Seefa almost thoroughly appeased, though he still demanded that she come back to the settlement with him. “If you’ve got any sense,” Seefa said to Lenaris, “you’ll come along with us. And make sure you don’t leave any tools behind. It’s bad enough to leave evidence of our presence here, but I guess if the Cardies think we’re stripping the ship for useful materials, that’s one thing. It’s another thing to let them get the idea that you might be trying to get it airborne.”

“Right,” Lenaris said tersely, picking up tools. Seefa and Taryl climbed the ladder from the engine room to the cockpit, and he was alone.

Feeling hopeless, Lenaris glanced at the schematic Taryl had been using. She was trying to put the auxiliary power core back online, a fairly simple affair for a trained, D’jarra-born engineer, but for a self-taught farmer from Tilar, perhaps somewhat beyond her abilities. And yet, Lenaris could see from what Taryl had been up to that she was at least on the right track. But fixing the auxiliary system and fixing the warp reactor were two very different things. If only Lenaris had really been able to find Tiven Cohr, or any experienced engineer—someone who had worked on warp ships before the Cardassians had come. That necessary expertise was in grave danger of being lost to Bajor forever. The Cardassians had put restrictions on such information, and it could be preserved only through word of mouth, the older generation to the younger. But constant violence, disease, and poor nutrition didn’t make for the greatest life expectancy. Bajorans who had been adults before the occupation were becoming scarce.

Lenaris removed himself from the exposed cockpit of the half-buried vessel and clambered down the slope that had been created by the still-buried wing. He headed back toward the village, wondering if Lac had been having much luck with the latest attempts to reach another cell in Hartis province—to plan tandem attacks, and maybe even to get another lead on an experienced warp engineer.

Lenaris greeted a few of the Ornathia cousins and their spouses as he approached the settlement. They were fetching water to be brought back to the village; there still hadn’t been any proper wells dug in this region, most of the Ornathias having traded their plows for coil spanners and phase inductors. There were over twenty small ships of various types in the Ornathia fleet now, most of them hidden beneath natural overhangs of kelbonite that occurred along the mountains just beyond the old mining site. The ships all required constant maintenance, but many of the Ornathias had proven very skilled in keeping up their craft.

Lenaris found Lac at a small corner work table that was set up in his little cottage. Lenaris had built his own dwelling, just a few paces from Lac and Taryl’s house, but when in the village, he spent most of his waking hours here, with Lac.

Lac turned quickly when Lenaris drew back the rough door. “Holem!” he said excitedly. “I think these long-range transmitters are going to be ready sooner than we thought!”

“That’s great, Lac,” Lenaris said, “but that doesn’t mean we should rush the Derna mission. We still need a legitimate Bajoran flight pattern to cover us. We don’t want to underestimate the patrols coming out of Terok Nor.”

He gestured at the roof of the cottage, referring to the orbital station that drifted far above them, visible as an ominous, winking star in the night sky. Every Bajoran was well aware of the heightened Cardassian security that had been falling into place since the station had gone online, a year before.

“Terok Nor is just another reason for us to push harder,” Lac said firmly. “We have to raise our game, take bigger risks.”

“Like the warp ship,” Lenaris said.

Lac nodded, and the two friends smiled at each other, agreeing without words.

Joer Varc smoothed back his unruly shock of hair, the color of the sand dunes of Cardassia’s nearby Cuellar region. It had once been a sensitive topic for him, the unusual color of his hair. In all his life, he had probably encountered only three other light-haired Cardassians, and the distinction had been considered a handicap for him when he had trained for the Obsidian Order. But he believed he had proven himself to be more than just a standout in a crowd, and though it had occasionally been suggested to him that he should darken it, so as to “blend in,” he had resisted mightily. His hair was part of who he was, and to a degree, he liked the idea of being remembered for it.

He headed to his debriefing with near unwavering confidence, eager to begin his preliminary report. This had probably been the easiest and most successful mission he had ever accomplished. From now on, he was going to jockey for more assignments on Bajor.

This was the second debriefing he had attended this week; the first had occurred yesterday, with the Cardassian military. Varc’s cover was as a military glinn, and he was obligated to perform duties just like any other military drone, though his promotion to glinn came through in a miraculously short time, and his ship assignments never lasted longer than a month or two. Nearly every ship in the fleet included an operative from the Order, and each one had to take meticulous care that his or her cover was never blown.

He quickly found the office of Limor Prang, and the door slid back so that he could enter. The older man sat behind a desk so large and so ancient, it seemed to be a permanent fixture in the room. But Varc knew it was actually a recent addition; this office changed location almost as frequently as Varc himself changed assignments.

The old man’s expression revealed nothing as Varc entered the room. Prang addressed him by his code name, something he did not always do when the two were in private. “Ah, Mr. Kieng. You look confident,” he remarked. Prang looked as though he was going to say something else, but Varc, excited, seated himself and spoke before Prang could continue.

“In fact, I am feeling confident, Limor. I obtained considerable intelligence from my latest target.”

“Really?” The gaunt old man across the desk appeared distracted, glancing at something over Varc’s shoulder for a moment before focusing back on Varc, who was fairly bursting with his good news.

“He confirmed that most Bajorans continue to abandon their castes. There is a religious leader who has begun to advocate for it, despite the pressings of the kai. He also confirmed that the resistance is gaining considerable headway in his region, and he gave me several names. He was very specific. Those will all be in my final report.” He could not resist boasting. “I saw to it that his small daughter was in the room with us—he was quite preoccupied with her safety. It made him especially eager to answer my questions.”

Prang did not smile, but he almost never smiled. “I’m pleased that you enjoyed yourself, Mr. Kieng. However—”

Varc anticipated his comment. “The man did not survive the interrogation. But it is of no consequence, for I still gleaned everything that was asked of me.”

“ Ishall decide if the man’s death is of consequence, Mr. Kieng. Meanwhile, your personal comm chip has the details of your new assignment. You will board a ship leaving for the border territories in approximately four hours.”

“The border territories? Oh. Yes, sir.”

Prang did something unprecedented then, continuing to glance over Varc’s shoulder, probably at the timepiece on the wall. He smiled slightly, an expression that Varc was sure he had never seen before. Varc wanted to turn to look at what the old man could possibly be so amused by, but he felt it would be impudent.

“You sound disappointed,” Prang remarked.

“Oh, no, sir—certainly not! It is only that I felt my expertise with the Bajoran people might be of further use there.”

Suddenly, to Varc’s great astonishment, he heard a voice somewhere behind him. He whirled around.

“I find it somewhat distasteful to interview Bajorans,” the man behind him said. He was standing very near the wall, and he had been so eerily silent and motionless that Varc would never have imagined there was anyone there at all. Limor Prang had obviously known of the stranger’s presence all along.

“And why might that be?” Prang inquired, as if it were completely ordinary for a confidential debriefing to be attended by a third party who had not even bothered to make his presence known. Varc was embarrassed and flustered that he had not seen the man.

The man’s eyes were held open very wide as he spoke, conveying a sense of extraordinary eagerness. Varc found his expression disquieting, particularly the slight curl at the corners of his mouth that did not straighten when he spoke. “They appear to wither so easily, but in truth, I have found them to be very skilled at lying. Surprisingly so, really. They will often allow themselves to die before the truth is ever revealed. Torturing them is useless, and in the end, I’m actually left feeling a bit sad about the whole business.”

Varc was dismayed at this admission, for it seemed to be an acknowledgment of weakness, but Prang’s reaction was dispassionate.

“Now, a Cardassian interrogation—” the man went on, “there’s a challenge I can appreciate.”

It was Varc’s turn to dispute. “I find the interrogation and torture of my own countrymen to be far more distasteful than that of aliens who conspire to destroy the Union.”

The stranger continued to half smile. “Indeed. Except that if a Cardassian is a dissident—a traitor—then I can hardly regard him as a countryman. He is far worse, in my eyes, than any hostile alien, who likely retains loyalty to his own society’s values.”