Star Trek: Terok Nor 02: Night of the Wolves (3 page)

“Have you ever flown a warp vessel?” Lac suddenly asked.

Lenaris laughed sharply. He’d been barely a boy when the Cardassians started to restrict warp travel. “How old do I look to you?” he said, then instantly regretted what might be perceived as unkindness in his tone. “No,” he said. “I haven’t. My father, of course—but he’s long gone.”

“Did your father ever tell you anything about flying a warp vessel?”

Lenaris swallowed. “A few things,” he said. He looked down at his feet as he thought of his father, who had died from a simple untreated infection when Lenaris had still been in his teens. The Cardassians had placed a week-long block on travel between provinces after a terrorist strike, with no exceptions. Hemmed into a particularly remote area in Relliketh, Lenaris Pendan had died before a medic could get to him. Another indirect casualty of the occupation.

Lac nodded. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” he offered.

“No—it’s all right, it’s just—I don’t particularly care to think about my father.”

“Oh,” Lac said. “Was it…Cardies?”

Lenaris shrugged slightly. “More or less.”

Lac looked apologetic. “I don’t mean to sound so…forward. It’s just that…well, I think I’ve heard your name before—and then when you said you’re a pilot—”

“A pilot without a ship,” Holem reminded him. This conversation seemed mired in depressing topics.

“You won’t need a ship,” Lac told him. “I have one.”

Lenaris’s eyebrows shot up, but Lac went on as if he hadn’t just said the unlikeliest thing one could have expected from a farmer.

“I do recognize your name,” Lac said, his voice taking on a confidential tone. “You know Tiven Cohr, don’t you?”

Lenaris was no less surprised. “I…” He wasn’t sure whether to confess to it or not. Tiven Cohr was involved with Lenaris’s old resistance cell, a group he hadn’t associated with for the better part of a year. This was not the sort of thing one was generally eager to discuss with a stranger.

“Look, Lenaris,” Lac said, suddenly sounding a bit urgent. “I know we just met, but…you seem reasonably trustworthy. And if I’m right about that…” He lowered his voice. “I have something to show you that, as a pilot, you might find interesting.” He glanced at the overcast sky. “That is, if we ever come to the end of this line.”

As if on cue, it began to rain, at first the slightest suggestion of cold drops prickling the back of Lenaris’s neck, and then an out-and-out downpour. He crossed his arms tightly across his chest, sniffling as the water soaked his hair and rolled down the tip of his nose.

“What kind of thing?” he asked Lac, who had assumed a similar posture.

Lac smiled mysteriously through the sheets of rain, and leaned closer, to speak to Lenaris over the plunking and splashing all around them. “It’s a warp ship,” he whispered. “A
Bajoran
warp ship.”

Lenaris stared in disbelief. “Where?” he asked.

“I’ll show it to you,” Lac told him, wiping the water out of his eyes. “But first, I want you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?” Lenaris said uncertainly, shivering in the rain.

“Take me to Tiven Cohr.”

“I can’t,” Lenaris said, feeling slightly relieved. He didn’t want to get mixed up in whatever this fellow was proposing, especially if it involved Tiven Cohr. “I don’t know where he is.”

Lac looked disappointed. “But…could you find out?”

Lenaris frowned, poking his toes in the edges of the deep puddles that were suddenly emerging. “I don’t know,” he said.

The rain was beginning to let up, as quickly as it had started. Lac gave it another try. “You couldn’t even maybe tell me where you last saw him? Anything like that?”

Lenaris grimaced. They were coming closer to the front of the line, where they would soon be within earshot of the collaborating Bajorans who ran the ration checkpoints. “I suppose…there are a few things I could tell you,” he said.

Lac grinned. “Then it’s settled,” he said. “I can take you to my shuttle tomorrow.”

“Your shuttle?” Holem said. He hadn’t intended to sign on for whatever it was Lac was offering, but the farmer only nodded. Holem was bursting with questions, but as the line edged closer to the ration station, he could not ask them. He would have to be satisfied with finding out after he’d received his rations, and with the way his stomach was churning, he hoped the food would taste better than it smelled.

Professor Mendar cleared her throat loudly, and several of her students sat up a little straighter in their chairs. Miras Vara absentmindedly tapped a stylus against the surface of her padd, trying not to think about lunch. This class, a required postgrad overview of the Cardassian territories, was always difficult for Miras because of its unfortunate time slot. She was sure that many of the students, if not most, had the same problem. It didn’t help that the content of the course was mostly irrelevant to Miras’s primary concentration, homeworld agriculture. She’d spent six years studying ponics and soil components, and enjoying every minute of it; a quartile of politics and geography, treaties and borders, and she was bored stiff.

“Today, we begin our study of Bajor,” the professor said, her hair a sleek black helmet on her rather mannish head. “I have prepared a brief presentation. I hope it will illustrate the importance of the development of new weapons for the future of our world, and open a discourse on ways in which we might better incorporate alien cultures.”

Miras stifled a yawn and programmed her padd to download the images from the mainframe.

“I have to warn you that some of this material may be disturbing,” the professor continued, and Miras sat up straighter, glancing over at Kalisi. Her classmate arched one delicate ridge, smiling slightly. The other students murmured to one another.

“Quiet, please. These are uncensored images, given to us by a correspondent for the Cardassian Information Service. She has risked her life many times to bring the truth about the Bajoran annexation to the Cardassian people. Normally, these images would not be displayed for the general public to view, as there are those who would manipulate this kind of material as ammunition for dissent. However, I am confident that my graduate students know better.”

“There was a man in my sector who was a dissenter,” Kalisi whispered across the aisle. Kalisi Reyar was one of Miras’s closest friends. “I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

“He was foolish to make his opinions known,” Miras whispered back.

Kalisi’s gaze flicked to the front of the room before she replied. The professor was wrangling with her console. “He couldn’t help himself. People with beliefs like that usually have a disorder that prevents them from understanding loyalty to anything but their own desires. A defect in their lateral cortex makes them abnormally egocentric, and the same disorder keeps them from having any impulse control. I learned about it in socio-deviance.”

Miras turned forward as an image on the teacher’s display lit up the darkened room. There was a long, slow pan of a massive pile of rubble, smoking composite materials spilling from the front of a large building. Soldiers in deflect suits were using displacers to shift through the wreckage.

“This ruined building is located at one of the older Cardassian settlements,” Professor Mendar explained. “You can see that it has sustained considerable damage in an attack by rebel Bajorans. Of course, the vast majority of Cardassian structures remain unharmed. But for the soldiers who were garrisoned in this building, for the men and women who worked here…”

Miras leaned toward Kalisi. “My cousin was stationed on Bajor for a little while, before being sent to the border colonies.”

“My father says the border colony skirmishes are a waste of Cardassia’s resources,” Kalisi said promptly. “We should be putting more focus on Bajor.”

Miras did not answer. Her own parents had often expressed the opposite belief. Many Cardassians had strong feelings about the conflict with the Federation over the border colonies, but Miras felt it wasn’t appropriate for a woman to make her political opinions known. Anyway, it was not the function of a scientist to question military affairs, only to answer the call for improved technologies, to better the Cardassian quality of life. She had often thought to herself that Kalisi was too outspoken for a woman, but she adored her friend just the same. Miras had no illusions about her own future—she would work at the ministry, part of a team developing agrochemicals, or studying soil–plant microbe interaction; she would marry and bear children, as expected by her family and by the Union, and while it was all quite dull, she supposed, she was content with her prospects. Kalisi, though, beautiful and ambitious, an engineer and a programmer…Miras couldn’t imagine such a plain, quiet life for someone like Kalisi.

“This is one of our most productive mining facilities on Bajor,” Professor Mendar went on, images of tunnels and rocks flashing up, a number of the soft-faced Bajorans moving carts of rough-hewn stone across the screen. Without ridges, their faces seemed vulnerable and bland, their coloring quite sickly. Not an attractive people. “We have found a dizzying array of geological resources on the planet, and our latest estimation suggests that through their acquisition, we will extend Cardassian mineral productivity for decades, perhaps centuries.”

The next image was of a crashed vehicle in a forest, a skimmer perhaps, its broken metal body half hidden by the deep green of the surrounding plants and trees. Miras felt a spark of real interest, looking at the tall woods, the lush undergrowth. She leaned back to her friend again. “This is giving me an idea for my thesis project.”

“Me, too.” Kalisi’s whisper was no less excited.

“Beyond the usefulness of the topsoil analysis, just think of all the undiscovered flora and fauna…” Miras marveled at the possibilities. Xenoecology was her current favorite “tangent,” a class that was also taught by Professor Mendar. “What would it be like to be part of a research team stationed on Bajor?”

“If I were to go, it would be to study how to make Cardassian weapons more effective there. I hear the climate is nearly intolerable.”

Miras started to reply, but the latest image on the teacher’s display caught her eye, and she gasped in horror.

Professor Mendar continued her narration. “I know that what you are seeing is very disturbing. But I think it’s important that you understand who will be the true beneficiaries of better Cardassian technology.”

Miras looked away. The picture was too much. Half-starved Cardassian children, their eyes hollow and black beneath their cranial ridges, stood miserably in a hut made of reeds. Their faces were smeared with reddish Bajoran soil, their black hair tangled, their clothing barely more than rags.

“These are the children of families who were once stationed on Bajor—families who were killed, or who simply disappeared. They have no place in Cardassian society now.”

“But where will they…what will they do?” Miras was so flustered that she spoke out of turn.

“Please raise your hand, Miss Vara. When they’re of age, they’ll be offered placement in the military, perhaps trained for some menial labor. They’ll be transported wherever the Union needs them most.”

Miras studied the hopeless, unsmiling faces. “But isn’t there something we can do for them now?”

There was a murmur of disapproval among some of the other students, and the instructor hesitated before speaking. “We can ensure that there are no more like them in the future.”

Miras wanted to say more, to plead their case, but she knew better. The integrity of the family structure was the very core of Cardassian society. To take on a child of another’s blood, to give them resources meant for one’s own children…It simply wasn’t done. In leaner times—and not so long ago—orphans had been cast into the streets to live like animals. Euthanasia, while not common, had neither been rare. It had only been in the past few generations that any subsidy had been made for them by the government. Orphans were better taken care of now than at any other point in Cardassian history, but it was still a sensitive topic. Seeing their small faces, though, she’d been unable to keep silent.

The film jumped to reveal another shot of the makeshift orphanage, and what Miras saw next disturbed her even more. This time, she remembered to raise her hand before asking. “Those alien children in the back of the room—are they also…?”

“Yes. The Bajoran insurgents are truly so ruthless that they will even kill their own kind, if they suspect that they might be assisting the Union. Those children are probably the sons and daughters of Bajorans who cooperated with the Cardassian government and were subsequently killed by heartless terrorists. We must understand that we are dealing with an enemy whose ideals are very different from our own. We must not make the mistake of trying to sympathize with their position, for the Bajorans are not like us.”

“Kalisi,” Miras whispered. “We
have
to focus our thesis projects on Bajor.”

Kalisi nodded vigorously. “I already know what mine will be,” she told her friend. “What do you think of ‘Weapons for Peace’ as a title?”

A look from Professor Mendar, and the two students fell silent, turning their attention back to the presentation.

As the class came to an end, Miras approached her professor eagerly, with Kalisi close behind her. “Professor Mendar, where can I find the latest datafiles from Bajor? Kalisi and I would like to research the annexation for our final thesis projects.”