Star Trek: Terok Nor 02: Night of the Wolves (32 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Y-yes, Doctor Yopal.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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