Star Trek: Terok Nor 02: Night of the Wolves (33 page)

“Laren,”
came a transmission; it was Bram, calling from his own raider.
“Is that you I see docking? Wait up on that. It could be booby-trapped.”

Laren considered, and decided Bram was being overly cautious. She didn’t want to wait for him—he probably only wanted to be the first on the ship, anyway. She went ahead and docked, her tiny craft thumping crazily inside the bay of the hulking scow. It came to a rest inside a chamber flooded with blackness, and she put on her night visor. “My sensors say breathable atmosphere, and gravity,” she reported back. “There must still be some kind of auxiliary power system intact, because the drop ramp came up behind me, so—”

“Laren, do not—I repeat—
do not
exit your vessel! Stay inside it until I can get there. Sadakita’s coming around, and I have to cover her before I can get to you.”

Again, Laren scoffed at Bram’s typical stodginess. He was always telling her what to do, and his advice was often wrong, anyway. She pushed back the glacis plate of her ship and took a deep breath. Her lungs did not collapse; she did not immediately begin choking on poison gases. Bram was afraid to take risks.

She hopped out of the raider, the night visor providing only a scant glow. She produced a palmlight and began to wave it about the bay. She could see nothing that interested her, only the most alien construction techniques she had ever seen.

Laren found an airlock and worked its thick double portals to gain access to the rest of the ship. Passing into the adjoining corridor, she spotted a bizarrely configured control console next to the airlock. It powered up when she touched it, and though it was mostly indecipherable to her, she managed to find the proper key that reopened the cargo bay for Bram. With that accomplished, she continued down the corridor; Bram was only going to scold her, and she wasn’t in any hurry to listen to it.

She aimed her palmlight at a computer terminal she saw in one of the open rooms, and wondered if she might be able to hack into such an alien system. The challenge interested her, and she entered the room.

“What the
kosst
?” said a man’s voice from somewhere back the way she had come. Laren stopped, confused. The accent, the timbre of the voice—it did not belong to Bram. Someone else was here. Someone Bajoran, apparently, for the curse was not one that a Cardassian would ever use. Laren considered her options. Should she go back to the bay and investigate? Did this person mean to harm her? She drew her phaser, more excited than afraid.

“Who are you?” she shouted.

“Who am I?” the voice answered. “Who are
you
? This heap is mine—we claimed it over a week ago.”

A man emerged in the corridor then, a gray-haired Bajoran that Laren didn’t recognize.

She lifted her phaser. “Don’t make me ask again,” she said coolly.

He slitted his eyes at her, his heavily lined face crinkling with the expression. He looked worried for an instant, but then smiled. “My name is Darrah Mace,” he told her. “I’ve come here from Valo II. Now, how about you tell me who you are?”

“Valo II?” Laren repeated, shaking her head. “My cell found this ship two days ago,” she told him, her phaser still trained on the stranger. “I was here first.”

The man laughed. “Just how old are you? Twelve? You still haven’t told me your name, by the way.”

There was a low vibration beneath their feet, the sort Laren might expect from the closing of the cargo doors. Bram must have docked.

“I’m Ro,” she said firmly. “And that will be Bram, the leader of my cell. It’s two against one now, so you’d better shove off. This ship is ours.” Laren stood her ground, her phaser still pointed directly at Mace’s head.

“And just what do you propose to do with that?” The man smirked, folding his arms in a self-satisfied expression that infuriated her.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said shove
off.
” She indicated her phaser. “This thing’s stun setting is broken, but the rest of it works just fine.” Laren could hear Bram coming through the airlock. “Bram!” she shouted. “Draw your weapon! We’ve got company in here, and he’s trying to steal our ship!”

Bram appeared behind Darrah Mace, hand phaser raised. The stranger turned a little, and finally seemed to accept the seriousness of the situation; he raised his hands above his shoulders.

Twelve!
She’d been fourteen for better than two months.

“Who are you?” Bram demanded.

“Call me Mace,” he said, his tone a bit more hesitant. “This ship is mine, and I’m going to take it. I’ve already been here three times, set up a signal scrambler so the Cardassians wouldn’t find her. Why do you think the patrol ships haven’t hauled her in yet?”

“Because the spoonheads don’t do salvage,” Bram said, but he sounded doubtful.

The other man scowled, though whether it was because of Bram’s use of the racial slur or his defiance, Laren wasn’t sure. “Look, you two. I’m taking this ship back to Valo II. I’ve already done some repairs on her—she’s got air and AG, doesn’t she? You think that’s just luck? I’m willing to guess that neither one of you has ever set foot on a vessel like this before, let alone flown one.”

Bram watched the man, his gaze scrutinizing. “We’ll see about that,” he muttered, and gestured Mace toward the bridge. Laren led the way with her palm beacon, looking back to Bram for an indication that she was going the right way. He nodded once, and made a point of loudly telling her that the “rest” of the cell members were standing by for his signal, still on their raiders outside. Laren nodded, pleased that Bram hadn’t given their numbers away.

They came upon the cramped bridge. Whoever designed this ship could not have been much taller than Laren, for both Bram and Mace had to duck through the doorways, which were thankfully jammed open. Ro managed to squeeze to the front, interested in spite of herself.

“Let’s see you get her online,” Bram said gruffly.

Mace emitted a short sigh, clearly exasperated, and gestured for Laren to highlight a particular panel with her palm beacon. The wide circle of light fell on his hands, and he threw back a couple of switches, dancing his fingers over the keypad. There was a flicker of light, and then a ragged thrumming noise. The ship’s power was back online, or at least, partially so—the lights behind Laren continued to flicker hypnotically, and the sound of the power core seemed an uneven chugging, like the throttle noise of a raider that was pushed into too low a gear for its speed.

“You can’t possibly get this thing going…can you?” Bram seemed a bit awestruck.

“Of course I can,” Mace said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. If you’d like to come along to Valo II, you can stay aboard, but otherwise, you might want to get into your raiders and get off my ship, because we’re going to have to go to warp.”

Bram kept the phaser pointed at Mace, apparently trying to decide what to do. Laren knew that Bram was not about to kill another Bajoran, and neither was she. There were collaborators, of course, but this man clearly did not fall into that category. Still, Bram and Laren had an advantage with the phasers, and they weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Order him to take it back to Bajor? Where would they dock such a thing, how would it behave in Bajor’s atmosphere? She had no idea, and she knew Bram didn’t, either. But warp ships were in notoriously short supply, and too badly needed to walk away from one—even a derelict.

“Oh, for fire’s sake,” Mace swore. “I knew this would happen.”

“What?” Laren asked fearfully, for Mace seemed genuinely afraid.

“Look at this,” he said, pointing to the alien ship’s sensor screen. “That’s a Cardassian patrol. The scrambler can’t mask the energy emissions of an active warp reactor. It’s time to go, now.”

“Wait,” Bram said, but then shook his head. “All right,” he agreed. He finally lowered his phaser, probably realizing how ridiculous it was to be squabbling with another Bajoran when the real enemy loomed within striking distance. He put a call in to Sadakita, ordering the pilot to return to Bajor.

Mace didn’t waste any time. He entered commands into the ship’s internal computer system with startling efficiency, and the ship was trembling from its warp engines in almost no time at all. Laren expected to feel a discernible
whoosh,
something to indicate that she was traveling at warp, but there was nothing except the vibrations in the soles of her feet.

“Will they catch us?” Laren wanted to know. She was not often afraid, not since she was a child, but the thought of being captured alive was something that particularly frightened her. She was not usually concerned about it, so long as she was driving her own ship, for she had the utmost confidence in her abilities to dodge even the fastest Cardassian vessels at sublight. But this Mace fellow—well, she hoped that if the Cardassians came after them, they would just blow them up. Being taken prisoner was a possibility she could not even bring herself to consider.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Mace assured her. “It’s possible they haven’t even spotted us yet. If they have, they won’t necessarily take an interest if we’re headed out of the system. It’s no crime for a Ferengi vessel to be in Cardassian-controlled space, if they have legitimate business. If worse comes to worst, we talk to them—pretend to be a damaged Ferengi ship on our way home.”

Laren nodded, but her throat still felt tight.

Mace smiled at her. “Cheer up,” he said. “I won’t let anything happen to us.”

Laren nodded again, thinking that maybe Mace wasn’t such a bad person after all.

“You know, Ro,” he added, “I think you’re going to like Valo II.”

K
ubus Oak was in mid-sentence when the doors to Dukat’s office abruptly slid open. “…which certainly makes the best economic sense. As always, your wisdom is—” Kubus stopped short, turning to see the highlighted silhouette of Kira Meru, flanked by a frantic Basso Tromac.

“I tried to stop her, Gul Dukat,” Basso said. “But she wouldn’t—”

“Thank you, Basso, that will be all. Kubus, we will continue this conversation at another time.”

Kubus rose, barely acknowledging Meru as he swept from the room. Dukat gestured to his mistress. “Sit down, please.”

She remained standing for a moment before finally sinking down into the seat that faced him. Now that she was here, she was not quite sure how to begin. She looked around, considering that she had never been inside his office before. So this was where he spent most of his time—or had, anyway, before meeting his new mistress…what was her name? Meru couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t important. She decided to get straight to the point.

“Skrain…you…you…have been spending a great deal of time away from the station of late, and I thought…perhaps…you had no more use for me.” She took a breath, her gaze trained on the place where his heavy desk met the floor.

Dukat appeared shocked. “Meru! I can’t imagine what could possibly give you such an idea. I love you, and you ought to know that by now. It isn’t as though I think of you as a mere object, to be used and then discarded.”

He went on, but Meru was not listening. She wanted desperately to convey to him that if he meant to be done with her, it would not hurt her feelings in the least, but she wanted to do it delicately, for she didn’t want to give him the impression that she was eager to leave him. But in truth, she
was
eager. Since she had learned of his new mistress from Basso, she had finally begun to visit those forbidden thoughts that she had mostly learned to suppress many years ago—mostly. Sometimes she forgot herself, especially after a dream; dreams were a difficult matter, for she could not control them. Often, when she began to wake, she would feel as though she were desperately clawing her way back to her slumber, to go back to Taban and the children, even if it was not real.

But perhaps now she had a chance to do it in earnest. Much time had passed, and she wondered if her children would even recognize her, or she, them. Basso had stopped bringing isolinear recordings from the surface a very long time ago, and Meru’s heart ached even to try and imagine what her children looked like now. Nerys, with her huge, expressive eyes and her bright, coppery hair—she would be ten years old now. Reon and Pohl, little men, not the babies she had left behind. And Taban…perhaps Taban had even remarried. The idea of it filled her with a nearly unendurable sensation of sorrow, worse even than the idea that he might be dead. It was selfish of her, hypocritical—but the thought of him having found love with another woman was nearly too much to bear.

Would any of them accept her back? Most likely they believed her to be dead, for Taban had originally sent word that he felt it would be better if they didn’t know what her true fate had been. Could she tell the truth, and would they be willing to forgive her? She didn’t know, but she felt it was worth the risk, if only to see them again, if only to return to her homeworld.

Dukat had stopped speaking, and was waiting for her reply. She cleared her throat. “Skrain, I love you as well. I always will, and I will always appreciate all you have done for me. But if ever there comes a time when you feel you would prefer to…to move on from me…from our relationship…”

Dukat’s puzzlement looked different now, and Meru hoped that he had at last begun to understand what she was trying to say. He gave her a terse nod, and stood from his desk, reaching out for one of her hands. “You’ve given me much to consider,” he told her, his voice sounding oddly strained. “But perhaps this is not the most appropriate time for us to have this discussion. I will see you later this evening, if you will consent to have dinner with me.”

“Of course,” Meru answered. His question was a bit strange, as it had been many years since he had put on the pretense of “asking” her to dinner. Over time, he had dropped most of his formality when the two were together, speaking as plainly and honestly to her as Taban once had. Meru feared she had hurt him, and she squeezed his hand before she let it go. She would never deliberately hurt this man, but the idea of freedom—it was worth almost any price to her.

Doctor Yopal often insisted on observing Mora’s research sessions with Odo—as he had taken to calling the “unknown sample”—but the frequency of her visits did almost nothing to ease the discomfort that resulted from her presence. Mora set a wide display screen in front of the tank, and then plugged an isolinear recording into his computer port. The display lit up with an illuminated diagram of a Bajoran vocal configuration.

“You see, Odo?” Mora said to the tank. “You understand this, don’t you?”

Yopal snorted audibly, and Mora’s face burned. He took up an electrostatic device from his work surface, a long-handled object with a probe at one end. He inserted the probe into the tank and set the cytoplasmic charge on a medium setting. The liquid in the tank immediately began to quiver, and in a steady motion the substance swept and twisted itself into a humanoid form, standing oddly erect in the center of the transparent tank. Odo opened his “mouth” and began making sounds, a rough, guttural sort of noise, akin to a clearing of the throat.

“Ah!” Yopal said, clearly impressed. “So, you have taught it to make noises, have you?”

“Yes, I have, Doctor Yopal,” Mora said nervously. Odo had done better in the session last night, but increasing the charge actually had an adverse effect on his progress; he had to hold it steady at its current rate.

“
M-m-m,”
Mora said, trying to get Odo to imitate him, as he had done the night before. “Mora.”

“Uhmmmm,” Odo replied. “Memmm. Memdoooo…”

Mora smiled. “There, you see?”

Yopal nodded vigorously. “Very impressive, Mora. I must say, I always assumed from the creature’s…expression that it was indifferent to what we were trying to glean from it.”

“I made that mistake as well,” Mora admitted. “Though I knew his face was only an approximation of my own…it is hard to see past the impassivity written in his eyes.”

Yopal kept her ever-present smile, but her tone was less than commending. “I must say, I am surprised you never before considered the possibility that this substance could have some level of awareness.”

Mora was annoyed; in fact he
had
considered it, and had said as much. He imagined she was probably galled that he had inadvertently implied that she had made a “mistake.”

“This is a perfect example of why women are better suited to the sciences,” Yopal said. “Men simply don’t explore all the possibilities. They tend to become stalled on a single facet of an equation, never knowing quite when to move on and branch out.”

“Of course,” Mora said, nodding deferentially.

“Well, Mora, I’ll take my leave of you now. I look forward to reading your latest report on this matter.”

“Indeed,” he murmured, nodding to her as she left. He switched off the viewscreen. He reminded himself, as he put the electrostatic device away, that being condescended to by Yopal was still a welcome alternative to doing what Daul had been forced to do.

“Mmmm…memdo-mage,” Odo said.

“Yes, Odo, that’s quite enough,” Mora said, and obediently, the pale “person” turned into a shimmering, twisting mass of fluid. Mora watched as he did so, for though he had seen it happen hundreds of times, it never failed to fascinate him.

Laren stayed close to Bram as they followed their guide from the freighter’s resting place on an old landing field to the meager residences nearby. Mace explained that Valo II had once been a popular resort destination for many well-to-do Bajorans, but the colony quickly went into decline as more and more refugees fled here during the early years of the occupation. Now the primary continent—the only truly hospitable landmass on the planet—was dotted with slums, shantytowns, and nomadic encampments. They meandered through the outskirts of the village, strewn with a few tents and buildings constructed of transitory scrap, the dwellings becoming thicker and more numerous as they made their way into the heart of what passed for a city here. Laren was astonished; even Jo’kala proper was not so shabby as this. There were structures made of some kind of imported stone that looked to have come from Bajor, but the stone appeared too porous to bear up to the harsh winds of the current season; it was chipped and eroded on all the buildings that featured it. Most of the windows she saw were broken, with improvised covers of worn fabric or strips of old smartplastic, but some were simply left gaping open, the bits of jagged leftover glass coated with blowing dust. Everything smelled, like root broth and dirt and despair.

“My family lives here,” Mace told them, gesturing to some kind of a heap of wood in front of him. “I’d offer you accommodations, but it’s already a bit crowded. My son and his family live with us. His wife is pregnant, and her time is coming soon…” he trailed off.

“We’re accustomed to sleeping outside,” Bram told him. “You needn’t worry about where to put us. We’re a bit more concerned with getting back to Bajor, if we can.”

Mace laughed sharply. “You’re better off staying here, if you want my advice,” he told them. “Anyway, I don’t know if it can be arranged. The Cardassians mostly leave us alone here. Between trying to maintain their hold on Bajor and their ongoing border troubles with the Federation, they don’t see us as being much of a threat to them. We’re just eking out a living here; Valo II has nothing that they want.”

“But you do go into Bajoran space, from time to time,” Laren pointed out. “Like after the freighter—”

“Yes, and we still take in refugees,” Mace admitted, “but we follow a strict procedure in doing so. There might be some way to get you back, but it will most likely be a few days, at least. We’ll have to discuss it with Keeve and Akhere.”

“Are they in your cell?” Laren asked him.

“Cell?” Mace repeated. “What do you mean?”

She wrinkled her nose. “The resistance,” she said. “You are a resistance fighter, right?”

Bram held up a hand. “That’s enough, Laren, don’t interrogate the man.” He turned to Mace. “She’s just a kid,” he said dismissively. “Smart for her age, but—you know.”

“Just a kid, eh? Flying a raider, all by herself, out there in space just swarming with Cardassians…” Mace grinned at Laren, and she scowled ferociously back. She did not appreciate anyone’s attempt at being overtly friendly; she found it suspicious. Still, a long-buried part of her visited the man’s kindness with an infuriating sort of longing. She did her best to suppress it.

Mace looked up just then. “Ah,” he exclaimed. “Here’s the man I’ve been looking for.”

“Darrah,” greeted the other man, nodding at Mace. He was an older fellow, not much beyond Mace in years, but with a completely bald head and a rather ornate earring. It was one of the old
D’jarra
ones, denoting him as
Te’nari
. Not everyone wore the jewelry of their caste anymore, though of course everyone still wore some kind of adornment. It would have been as absurd as going without trousers to be seen without an earring.

Following at the man’s heels was a tall boy, a teenager, with the greenest eyes Laren had ever seen. The two were clearly father and son, with a resemblance that went beyond their similar earrings: a kind of similarity about their noses and mouths, though the father’s head shone with its hairlessness, and the son had a shock of very thick brown hair that hung nearly in his eyes.

Mace clapped his hand against the other man’s forearm. “Juk,” he said, “I brought back a couple of stowaways with me.”

The bald man turned to regard Laren and Bram. “Where’d you find them?” he asked Mace, as if they could not hear him.

Bram answered. “Your friend here claimed a derelict vessel that we had our eye on.” He extended his hand, which the other man looked at for a moment before taking it. “I’m Bram Adir, and this is Ro Laren. We’re from Jo’kala.”

“Jo’kala!” he exclaimed. “You mean—Bajor?”

“That’s right,” Laren answered him, unable to take her eyes off the boy who stood mutely behind his father. He did not appear to be much older than Laren herself. She hadn’t had much interaction with people her own age since joining the resistance.

“I’m Akhere Juk,” the man finally said. “I’ve been on Valo II almost my whole life, long before the Cardassians came, though my people were originally from Mylea.”

“You’re a
Te’nari,
” Bram observed.

Juk shrugged. “We don’t pay much attention to those designations anymore,” he said, but Laren had a feeling that it might not be entirely true. She fingered her own earring, an old one of her father’s that her mother had allowed her to take.
Sern’apa.
Caste was so unimportant that she paid it almost no mind—it was little more than a word. Its only significance for her lay in the fact that it was something of her father’s.

“Neither do we,” Bram said, “other than to find things to reminisce about. My mother’s people were
Te’nari,
also.”

“Ah,” Juk said, and Laren detected a new light in the other man’s eyes. It had always puzzled her, the old
D’jarra
system. The very idea that the adults would still pay any sort of homage to it was laughable. Just like most of the old ways. Foolish. Bram and Juk continued to jaw about their castes, and Laren shifted her weight from foot to foot, bored and impatient for something to happen. She looked over Juk’s shoulder at his son, and their eyes met for a paralyzing moment. Laren quickly looked away, realizing that her face had been plastered with a sneer. She rearranged her features to look unreadable, benign, but still durable—a person to be reckoned with. It was the truth, after all.