Текст книги "Dawn of the Eagles "

Автор книги: Stephani Danelle Perry

Соавторы: Gene Rodenberry,Britta Dennison
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

OCCUPATION YEAR THIRTY-NINE

2366 (Terran Calendar)

18

The Oralians still met in the Torr sector, in an underground shrine that was conspicuously adjacent to the Cardassian theater—hiding in plain sight, among the most prominent features of Cardassia City. It was here that Thrax Sa’kat met with Kutel Esad late one evening, long after Cardassia City had fallen silent for the night, with only a few of the civilian city guard out, idly patrolling the sector. Thrax was still a soldier of Central Command, and Esad was still an agent of the Obsidian Order, but their status did not mean that they weren’t cautious when they made the exchange of the curiously bulky object, draped with a cloth and tied about clumsily with a piece of rope.

“This is the one?” Thrax inquired.

“I do not know if this is the object that Astraea first encountered at the Ministry of Science,” Esad replied. “Retrieving this item required a great deal of haste on my part, for although Enabran Tain is no longer the head of the Order, his successor is not exactly a fool.”

“No, of course not,” Thrax said, gratefully accepting the object from his friend. The bundle was heavier than it looked.

“I was able to confirm one truth about this item which you may find helpful,” Esad told him. “These objects had designations among the Bajorans—each was said to be for a specific purpose. I do not know what designation the others in the Order’s collection bear, but I know at least that this one was known as the Orb of Wisdom.”

“The Orb of Wisdom,” Thrax repeated. “I believe Astraea will be pleased.”

Esad seemed uncomfortable with something, and he regarded Thrax. “Have you told her that you intended to retrieve this item for her?”

“Not exactly,” Thrax confessed. “A very long time ago, I may have implied that I would try, but…”

Esad’s lips thinned. “If I may give you some advice, Thrax…”

“Certainly. Your advice is always welcome.”

“That object…should not remain on Cardassia Prime.”

Thrax involuntarily clutched the object tighter. It had been his intention that the Orb would be a gift for the followers of Oralius—for Astraea.

“But…the Guide should have the Orb, Kutel. It was the Orb that brought her back to us, that returned Astraea to Oralius once again. Don’t you suppose it was meant to be here, where she is?”

“The object belongs to the Bajorans,” Esad pointed out.

“But there is no way that you or I could possibly return this to Bajor,” Thrax argued. “I believe that Oralius meant for us to have it.”

Esad was silent for a moment. “I fear that it will put Astraea in danger,” he said.

“Then why did you agree to retrieve it?” Thrax protested. “I don’t understand, Kutel.”

“I don’t either,” the other man admitted. “When I originally came into possession of the Orb, I thought you were right—I thought that those who walked the Way should have it. But then…then I…I touched it, and I was…”

“You…opened it?” Thrax was stunned. Astraea had told him that nobody else had been able to open the case, nobody but her.

“No,” Esad said. “I didn’t open it. It happened when I placed my hand on the case. It didn’t happen immediately. I lifted the item, and then…it seemed…as though I was beginning to…” He trailed off, looking embarrassed. “I was overcome,” he said finally. “With the feeling that it should be taken from Cardassia Prime, right away.”

Thrax continued to clutch the Orb case to his chest, looking at the sheepish face of his friend. He did not want to listen to what Esad was saying, but he felt a strange, reluctant pull…

“The Orb is for the Oralians,” he told Esad firmly, and turned to carry the heavy case into the shrine. Esad murmured a good-bye as Thrax let himself inside the ground floor front, a small, darkened shop that sold replicator parts. It was surprising to Thrax that a man as normally businesslike as Kutel Esad would so quickly succumb to mystical ideas regarding the Orb. Although Thrax believed very strongly in the power that the item possessed, he had been under the impression that Esad was much more skeptical of it himself. Esad was a practical man. Overly cautious, perhaps.

Thrax carried the item down the back stairs of the shop, into the office where Astraea met with individual followers. He set the item on her table and began to tug at the wrappings that Esad had hastily swaddled around the case. As the item was revealed to him, his breath hitched in his chest. Its appearance was appropriately impressive, and he wondered where it had come from. Had the ancient Bajorans fashioned this splendid case for the precious relic that resided inside?

The object belongs to the Bajorans.

Ignoring the voice in his head, he put his hand gingerly on the case and waited to be overcome, as Esad had described himself. But the case was cold, and Thrax felt nothing. He smiled to himself, in part with relief to have been released from the worry that Esad had planted in his mind. He pictured how pleased Astraea would be when she learned that his efforts had finally produced this happy result, and then he left the shrine, reassuring himself once again that it was the safest place for the item, at least for now.

It was dark and still in this part of the city. Kira Nerys checked her scanner as she approached the improvised holding facility, and it quickly confirmed what she already suspected: there was a Bajoran life sign behind those walls, but it was fading fast. Tahna would not hold out much longer.

Kira had come here following a tip given to her by Tahna’s nephew, who lived in Dahkur. Tahna had returned to his family’s home for a quick visit over two weeks ago, but when he had not returned to the Kohn-Ma cell’s hideout, Biran put word out to his family to inquire after him. His family insisted that they didn’t know where he was, but Kira was unconvinced, and contacted them again, asking if there was anything they recalled about the route he had taken that might help him to be found. After a great deal of coaxing and questioning, Tahna’s teenage nephew finally confessed to Kira that the Cardassians had taken Tahna from his uncle’s house in the middle of the night. The soldiers had threatened the rest of the family, telling them they were lucky they weren’t all being taken—and that if they told anyone what had happened to Tahna, it was likely they would be.

Kira knew that Tahna’s abduction wasn’t some random security sweep, nor were the soldiers likely to take a single man from a Bajoran home if they were merely looking for workers. Tahna had been targeted specifically, most likely in connection with the resistance. He was being questioned somewhere, which meant that he was certainly still alive—and Kira knew she had to save him, not only to preserve his life, but to preserve all of their lives. Tahna was strong-willed, but he couldn’t hold out against Cardassian torture without eventually spilling secrets of the Shakaar and Kohn-Ma cells’ whereabouts. Nobody could.

Shakaar had managed to gather enough intelligence to suggest that Tahna would have been taken here, a makeshift interrogation center in a crumbling, abandoned section of Dahkur City, where they were questioned and decontaminated before being taken to their final destinations—usually prison camps, or in some cases, public execution. Kira could only hope that if it had been the latter, Shakaar would have heard something about it. There had been no reports of Cardassian executions since Tahna’s disappearance.

Kira was supposed to be staking out this place. She was deliberately chosen for most long-range reconnaissance because it had been determined that she was just small enough not to trip the Cardassian detection grid—she didn’t need a shielding device to go out, though she carried one, just the same. The others had planned on coming tomorrow, after Kira devised a plan of action for the most effective means of attack. But as she read the life sign on her handheld scanner, she knew that Tahna probably could not wait until tomorrow. She had already anticipated this possibility. Shakaar had firmly instructed her not to try anything on her own, but Kira didn’t see that she had a choice.

The facility had only a single guard, the Cardassians’ assumption that the detection grids would keep out unwelcome intruders acting as its own security device. Kira wasted little time in strategizing the best way to take out the guard without arousing the attention of anyone inside. She waited, squatting on the deteriorating cobblestone street between two sagging buildings where she could not be seen. Picking up a piece of the broken road in her hands, she threw the chunk of stone somewhere off to her left. The soldier reacted immediately, drawing his phaser and looking to the place where the stone had landed.

Kira drew back into the shadows, listening carefully to the sound of the sentry’s approaching footsteps, and then she sprang out noiselessly, praying that she would cast no shadows. But the soldier did not turn around when she approached. He bent down, examining the ground with his palm torch. “Voles,” he mumbled to himself. Kira took a wide step forward, just before he rose to his feet. He scarcely even made a sound when she leapt upon him, twisting his neck with all her might. A crack, a thud, his palmlight clattering on the uneven ground, and it was over.

She kept her phaser at the ready, trying to keep her senses balanced as she carefully approached the entrance of the facility. The more carefully she listened, the more she was certain she could hear someone crying. The sound was faint, fainter than her own heartbeat, but Kira knew that it was Tahna. Her resolve hardened as she crept through the unblocked doors.

It was here that she finally encountered a seated guard, but she was ready for him. She swung her leg up and around to connect with his ear before he could react—best not to use her phaser until absolutely necessary. He staggered from the blow, drawing his weapon. He was shaken, but not especially hurt. With Cardassians it was necessary to strike at just the right place, where the brittle cartilage on their faces was the most vulnerable. In the instant before he brought up his weapon, Kira leaned in and drove the heel of her hand into his mouth. She felt and heard the satisfactory crunch just above his upper lip. The Cardassian lost his disruptor as he fell, but Kira did not stop to pick it up. She scurried past him and kept going into a darkened corridor, following Tahna’s echoed groans and cries.

She walked as silently as she knew how, slipped around a corner—there, a Cardassian standing behind a computer console, and before he could even look up, she shot him in the chest with her phaser on its highest setting. He fell backward and seemed to take a very long time to hit the ground. Kira looked to see what he had been doing at the console and was immediately greeted with a grisly scene. Displayed across his viewscreen, Tahna Los hung from the ceiling of a dank corridor that must have been somewhere below her, judging from the sound of his screams, while two expressionless Cardassians were taking turns peeling back slices of flesh from his naked back. Tahna screamed in agony, and Kira threw her hands over her face, but not before she saw that the same Cardassians were carefully, painfully cauterizing the flesh back into place with a crude dermal regenerator, presumably so they could begin to cut once again, after his tender skin had artificially healed back into lumpy scar tissue.

Kira frantically pecked at the computer to try and assess Tahna’s location, but after an agonizingly long moment with no success, she decided instead to simply follow the sound of his terrible cries. She found a spiral staircase and quickly descended, discovering a dim and sweltering underground corridor with a line of three doors. Her ears were full of the sound of it now, and the echoing sound of the questions the Cardassians were putting to the hapless Tahna:

Kira Nerys—you know her. Where is she?

Had she really heard her own name? Or was her imagination just trying to amplify her own terror? It must be the latter, for their voices were muffled, in part by Tahna’s groans. He began to scream again, either determined not to tell them anything, or simply in so much pain that he couldn’t speak.

Thinking with some uncertainty that she had found the right door, she took out the lock with a quick burst of her phaser and let herself inside—to find that Tahna was not in this room at all. A nearly emaciated woman was chained to the wall by her wrists. For an instant, Kira thought she was dead, and almost turned to leave her—but the woman suddenly coughed up a bilious spew of green all down the front of the rags she was dressed in, and shuddered with the resultant coughing fit that followed. Appalled, Kira rushed to her, using her weapon to burn away the chains that bound her to the wall.

“Get out of here!” she whispered, but the corpselike figure made no move, only stared at her with confused, dead-seeming eyes.

“It’s too bright,” the woman complained, her voice husked and raw. “Shut the door.”

“You’re free, you have to go,” Kira insisted, but she could not afford the time it would take to help her, for Tahna’s strangled cries had begun again.

At the next door, Kira found her target—but there were three Cardassians in the dark, hot room, not the two she’d expected. She aimed the line of her phaser fire at the restraints that held Tahna to the ceiling, and as he fell to the ground she wasted no time in swinging the beam around to hit one of the two Cardassians who had been administering Tahna’s torture. The first one fell, but not before the other two Cardassians in the room could react. The nearest of them, the one she had not anticipated, managed to grab her, and the other relieved her of her phaser, though she kicked and screamed with all of her might.

“Tahna!” she cried. “Los!” But he lay completely still on the floor where he had fallen, apparently dead.

“You killed him,” one of the soldiers said cruelly. “He was connected to a life support system, and you put him into shock.”

“No!” she screamed.

“I told you she’d come after him,” the other Cardassian laughed to his companion. “You owe me twenty leks.” Kira could feel his groping fingers beginning to travel to places where she could not tolerate them. She screamed louder, but Tahna still did not move, and Kira bit her tongue as the Cardassians continued to hatefully explore her with their hands, tugging at her clothes. Through their sick laughter, she tasted hot salt in her mouth, unsure if it was blood or tears.

The lights flickered before they went out entirely, the Cardassians loudly expressing their angry confusion, and Kira managed to kick one of her assailants hard enough to make him lose his grip on her. The other Cardassian only held her tighter in the blind darkness—until a burst of blue light suddenly filled the chamber, and there was a loud thunkas the soldier who still held her fell to the floor, dragging Kira with him and pinning her to the floor. She struggled to free herself from the weight of his body while she heard some crashing and struggling, the other Cardassian shouting before more phaser fire lit up the room, and then, as suddenly as they had gone out, the lights were powered back up. They were dimmer than before, humming noisily, apparently driven by a crude backup system—but at least Kira could see again.

Breathless, Kira looked around the room to see that Tahna had weakly crawled to his knees. Near the doorway stood the emaciated woman Kira had freed just a few moments before, a crazed, haunted expression lighting up her eyes, and a smoking phaser—presumably Kira’s, snatched from the table where the Cardassians had left it—clutched tightly in her hand.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kira said, and helped Tahna to his feet. He leaned on her heavily, barely able to stand. The other woman reached out one terribly thin and dirty arm to steady him, and together, the two women dragged him up the spiral staircase, and outside toward freedom.

Odo could find no words. He watched his forensic analyst go over the scene of the explosion for the third time, apparently trying to find any extraneous evidence that would point to a conclusion other than what they were all thinking—that Odo had condemned the wrong men to death for the attempt on Dukat’s life. Not that it would have mattered much to the Cardassians—Bajorans were all guilty of something. Odo had found this assumption to be almost universally held by his Cardassian cohorts. But the shape-shifter had always done his best to refute this prejudice, and he worried now that he had failed.

This new explosion, which had taken place on the Promenade earlier today, had missed Dukat and his entourage by such a narrow margin that the sleeve of Dukat’s uniform had been singed, his hand badly burned; but his life had been spared yet again, thanks to one of his soldiers, who had managed to get the prefect out of the way just before the device was detonated. It was, curiously, the same soldier who had saved the prefect during the last assassination crisis, but Odo quickly surmised that it was because Dukat had specifically chosen this man to accompany him on an almost daily basis. At least, that was the conclusion that Odo wanted to be true.

“Can you give me a preliminary picture of what the evidence is suggesting to you, Dal Kaer?” Odo solemnly inquired of the analyst.

Kaer’s mouth was an unmoving line as he faced the security chief, and then he spoke. “Whoever committed this crime was apparently in league with our three suspects from earlier in the week,” he said without emotion.

Odo nodded. “A fair conclusion,” he allowed, though he was thinking something very different. “It is a shame then,” he added, “that our three suspects have been executed already. Otherwise they could perhaps help us with this investigation.”

Kaer looked taken aback. Odo had not intended to let so much apparent bitterness show in his voice, and he modified his tone. “But there is no reason to speculate on lost opportunities,” he said. “We must make the most of the evidence that we have access to.”

“Indeed. I’ll have Gil Letra round up a sampling of our usual troublemakers from the Bajoran sector and he can begin questioning them right away.”

Odo nodded, as he normally did to such a suggestion, but an overwhelming possibility had him deeply troubled—the possibility that Dukat’s current Cardassian adjutant somehow knew about the bombings, for it was simply too uncanny, in Odo’s mind, that the soldier would have known to push Dukat out of the way just before the explosion erupted. Dukat would reject the hypothesis immediately; Odo knew there was little point in even suggesting such a thing. After all, several identical bombings had occurred in Musilla Province recently, and Dukat would be sure to point out that his assistant could hardly be associated with those incidents. But Odo also knew that it was not unheard of for Cardassians to occasionally assist in Bajoran mischief, for a large enough bribe, or for their own political gain.

Odo wondered if perhaps this soldier had caught wind of a terrorist plot, agreed to help carry it out in exchange for some favor or bribe, and then saved his prefect at the last moment so he would appear to be a hero. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. However, Dukat would never accept the idea. This case would likely remain open, just like that of the Bajoran chemist who had been killed. Dukat didn’t care about justice so much as he cared about making an appropriate display of punishment to keep his workers in line, and though Odo wanted to deny that truth, it was in cases such as this one that it became impossible to ignore. That he was an instrument in carrying out Dukat’s draconian policies was troubling, to say the least.

The shape-shifter returned to his office to log the evidence into the security database, for all the good it would do anyone. He planned to regenerate immediately after his business with this case was completed, but as soon as he entered his office, he saw that it would be impossible. The Ferengi child was waiting for him.

“Chief,” Nog implored him, rising to his feet. “My uncle says to tell you that he’s dropping the charges against my father. Please—you’ve got to let him out.”

“Then why isn’t your uncle here?” Odo said, brushing past the small alien.

“He’s too busy tending his bar. He tried to contact you, but you were unavailable—”

“I’m in the middle of a high-profile investigation,” Odo said. “I don’t have time to resolve these petty family squabbles right now. Tell your uncle that if he wants his brother released, he’ll have to come to my office and fill out the paperwork himself.”

“But…chief…there’s nobody to tend the bar, and I thought you might—”

“Quark might have thought of that inconvenience when he had your father arrested,” Odo said irritably. Of course, it was all utter foolishness. Once again, the Ferengi were having a pointless tiff, and once again, Odo had been dragged into it. This time, Quark was accusing his brother of attacking a customer, a claim Odo found to be unlikely, but the Kobheerian freight officer substantiated the claims, and Odo had no choice but to put Rom in a holding cell until he could be processed and fined.

The young Ferengi left the office, clearly upset and concerned for his father, and Odo began the process of entering the latest data into the files on the explosion from this afternoon. But something was troubling him—something more than the obvious discrepancies regarding the apparent assassination attempt. He was bothered by the false claims Quark and the Kobheerian captain were laying against Rom. Though it was the sort of thing he usually paid the very least amount of attention to, his thoughts persisted in suggesting that Quark was up to something. There was a pattern in these arrests of Rom, and while Odo might be naïve, he was not an idiot.

Odo was tired, and his body was practically quavering with the desire to liquefy, but he decided his hunch was worth a second look. He made his way back to the holding cells, where several imprisoned Bajorans called out to him from behind the force fields. He disabled the field that held the Ferengi, who was sitting silently by himself in the corner, apparently trying to avoid any interaction with the angry Bajorans in the vicinity. He did not immediately realize that the force field had been deactivated, and Odo was forced to call to him.

“Rom,” Odo addressed the other man. “Come into my office, please. I have a few questions for you.”

“Uh. Okay,” the Ferengi replied. “But I already told you. I didn’t hit anyone.”

“Yes, I heard you the first time. But I’m curious to know—why are you lying for your brother again?”

Rom looked simultaneously astonished and terrified, his mouth falling open to expose his jagged teeth. “That’s not true, Odo!” he cried. “I don’t know anything—just ask Quark!”

“Yes, so he’s told me, on more than one occasion,” Odo said, folding his arms and tapping his fingers restlessly against his elbow. The urge to regenerate was becoming a need.

The Ferengi continued to jabber, but Odo already knew what the truth was, for it had happened twice before. Odo would not play along this time. “Your brother and the Kobheerian were conducting some sort of transaction.”

“No!” Rom said stoutly.

“The Kobheerian is gone now. Did your brother have you arrested so you couldn’t interfere? Or was it because he simply wanted to divert attention away from himself?”

“I don’t know anything about any transaction,” Rom insisted. “I don’t know why he had me arrested. I was just—”

“Yes, how could you have known what your brother was up to, when you were locked in here?”

“That’s right,” Rom said hopefully, though he didn’t seem to understand where Odo’s logic was going. Odo knew he had hit on the correct scenario, though there wasn’t any way to prove it. He wasn’t sure if he was quite so concerned with proving anything anymore, at least, not today.

“It worked the first time he did it, which was shortly after you accidentally implicated him with that business that got him fined for dealing in illegal Jibetian goods. It worked the second time he did it, last month, when the Boslic freighter captain was spending so much time in the bar. But this is the last time he tries it. I want you to be sure and tell him that, Rom. I’m dismissing your case. You’re free to go.”

The Ferengi did not even stop to thank him; he only scurried out onto the Promenade and back to his brother’s crooked establishment. It had occurred to Odo numerous times that if Quark’s bar were eliminated from the station, an exceptional percentage of the petty complaints that clogged his arrest roster would simply cease to exist. But then, he considered, the station’s residents would find some other means of causing trouble, and anyway, Odo did not have the authority to make such a suggestion.

In fact, how much authority did he really have here? He could release an unfairly accused Ferengi waiter, but beyond that, he was simply adhering to a rigid set of rules laid out by the prefect—rigid for anyone but Dukat himself. And within the rigidity of those laws, Odo had begun to discover that there were many curious instances in which following Cardassian policy to the letter resulted in the conviction of innocent men—as in the case of Rom’s frequent incarcerations at the behest of his brother…or the case of the three executed Bajorans.

He pushed away the latter thought yet again, for there was nothing he could do to resolve it. It was time for him to regenerate, and he went to retrieve the vessel where he could be safely contained in his natural state. But before he could be lulled into comfortable senselessness, he recalled some of the incidents from his days on Bajor—days when he had decided that what the Cardassians were doing on this world was wrong in its entirety. Odo had believed it until he had come to Terok Nor, and had met several Cardassians whom he thought he could relate to, on some level. Their laws had seemed sensible to him at the time—comfortably well-defined, unlike the Bajorans, for whom just about anything could fall under the definition of “good.” But now he was forced to rethink his assessment of the Cardassians once again, and he was revisiting his previous ideas of the so-called annexation more often than he wanted to.

If it was true that the occupation was wrong, then could any of the Cardassians’ actions, their laws, their decisions—could any of it possibly be right? Or must it all be rejected as further extension of their evil? Odo had to acknowledge that he didn’t know anymore, that the definition of what was right as it was given by a Bajoran terrorist, or his friend Russol, or the prefect, or the Ferengi bartender, all definitions seemed to intersect, and yet still contradict. As an outsider, Odo should have been in the perfect position, as Russol had said, from which to judge what was truly just. But it was becoming clearer to him all the time—he was not really an outsider at all.