"Yes, Professor Mendar, I"ll be right there." Miras switched the comm over to contact Kalisi, who was slow to answer, her eyes bleary.
"Wake up!" she teased her friend. "Professor Mendar found a way for me to get a soil sample. She"s sending a Bajoran artifact over to the lab right now, and I"m going to brush the soil off it for a.n.a.lysis."
"What kind of artifact?" Kalisi, who had undoubtedly been dozing over a textbook, rubbed her eyes. Kalisi, who had undoubtedly been dozing over a textbook, rubbed her eyes.
"I don"t know," Miras told her. "But if you want to see it, you should come along."
Kalisi shrugged. "I guess I could use a break," "I guess I could use a break," she said. she said. "I"ll meet you outside the transport in five minutes." "I"ll meet you outside the transport in five minutes."
Miras and Kalisi arrived at the east facility in time to see Professor Mendar speaking with someone who apparently worked in the ministry"s storage facility. She was affixing her thumbprint to an inventory padd when she saw the girls approaching, and her usually saturnine features turned to a pleasant smile. "h.e.l.lo, Miss Vara, Miss Reyar. The container will be transported up to the main laboratory on floor two." She offered the padd to Miras. "If you put your thumbscan here, you will be able to open the shipping container." Miras did as she was told.
Kalisi was excited. "Where did it come from? How did the ministry come to have it?"
Professor Mendar bent forward as if she were telling a secret, an uncharacteristically girlish expression suddenly coming over her face. "I was told that the ministry acquired it at an auction of repossessed goods," she confided, "but there was a rumor-and of course, it"s only a rumor-that the item was on loan from none other than the Obsidian Order." She stood back and waited for the girls" reaction.
"The Obsidian Order!" Kalisi exclaimed. "That can"t be. They don"t loan out their inventory." She said these things with an authoritative air, and Miras wondered how her friend even came to have an opinion on the matter. Miras had an inkling that Kalisi"s father was involved in some confidential faction of the government, but so were a lot of people.
"As I said," Professor Mendar replied, "it"s only a rumor. I had understood that the Order underwent some sort of political upheaval over a decade ago, and certain...priorities changed. The ministry acquired the object not long afterward."
Kalisi said nothing more until the professor had excused herself, leaving them to find the laboratory on their own. "She"s talking about Enabran Tain," she finally told Miras in confidential tones. "When he took over the Order, a lot of things changed."
Miras could only nod, wondering if her friend really knew what she was talking about. It was interesting in the context of the object they were about to look at, but Miras had never been one to concern herself with the potboiler gossip that often surrounded the Order.
Miras and Kalisi took the lift to the upper level and found the main lab. The cylindrical shipping container, sitting atop a stainless metal work surface, was quite a bit larger than what Miras had expected. It was as wide as the breadth of a man"s shoulders, and half as tall as Miras herself. She put her thumbscan on the shipping container"s security panel, and peered inside as the side of the container flipped open. It was indeed full of dirt-reddish Bajoran soil that was as fine as ash. Miras quickly set about capturing several samples in a vial, and calibrated a handheld scanner to break down the soil"s composition.
"Let"s see the artifact," Kalisi suggested as Miras tapped out the results. Absently, Miras stepped back so her friend could look inside the container.
"I can"t really see it," Kalisi complained. "Let"s take it out and have a better look."
Miras balked. "It"s enormous," she pointed out, though it wasn"t so much big as c.u.mbersome.
"Come on, aren"t you interested in history?"
"What does a Bajoran artifact have to do with history?"
Kalisi laughed. "We aren"t the only civilization in the universe, you know. Here, help me. I like looking at old things."
Miras helped her friend heft the artifact from the container, and the two managed to remove a four-sided object with exotic designs incised on each section. There were numerous polished stones set into the panels, hidden beneath the dirt.
Kalisi ran her fingers over the raised design on one panel, and then inspected the ruddy dust left behind on her pale fingertips. "The dirt isn"t really embedded in it. This must not have been buried. Maybe it was windy when they put it in the container." She brushed her hands together. "Is there a database with ancient Bajoran characters in it?"
Miras shrugged. "I"m sure this thing has already been catalogued and examined," she said. "If you look in the university database, they"re sure to have some information on it."
Kalisi was already tapping away at her padd, connecting to the university mainframe. "I don"t see anything here," she said. "Maybe they just inventoried it and then never scanned it. How long ago did Professor Mendar say it had come in?"
"Over a decade, I thought she said."
Kalisi continued to run her fingers over the surfaces of the object. "Hmm. Look at this corner. It looks to me like it"s meant to open up. Maybe this is really just a case for something." She knocked on it with a closed fist, and it answered with a dull clang. "I think it"s hollow!"
Miras was doubtful. "I don"t see how this thing could open," she muttered, and slipped her finger along the edge. She was a bit surprised to find something like a seam there. The object was not comprised of a single piece of...whatever it was made of-wood, apparently, though there was no indication of how it was held together. Miras tried to insert her fingers in the crack, and Kalisi joined in, prying at the edges, but it would not budge.
"Maybe you"re right," Kalisi said, and glanced up at the clock. "I don"t know about you, but I haven"t eaten all day. I"m going to find a replicator."
"I"m not hungry," Miras told her. "I think I"m going to scan this thing and see if I can"t find out anything about these characters."
"So! You"re interested in history after all!" Kalisi walked away on a note of triumph.
Miras smiled after her. "Linguistics, actually," she called, as Kalisi left the room. Miras used her own padd to record the object"s written characters. She flipped on a nearby viewscreen while she downloaded the scan to the computer"s database. The machine made a barely audible whirring sound as the processors worked to recognize the writing, but nothing came up. Miras turned once again to the artifact, touched the corner where Kalisi had been so sure that she felt a seam. She ran her fingers down the side. This time there was a clicking noise, and the crack on the corner of the object widened noticeably.
Miras was overcome with an unexplained sense of dread, but as she put her hand on the object, it gave way to an even more unprecedented feeling of calm. She found that she did not want to take her hands away from the object, which felt warm where she was certain that it had been cool before. It did not occur to her to be curious about the change, which was curious in itself, but she felt so tranquil, she did not mind. She sighed out loud, and then gently pushed open the edges of the object with her hands.
The artifact was indeed a case, as Kalisi had imagined, and inside was a very unusually shaped piece of stone, an oblong rock with a slender middle that widened at the top and bottom. The color was nothing like the Bajoran soil, which had been a reddish brown. This rock was a blue-gray color, a little more like common Carda.s.sian rocks, but still alien in texture.
Excited at this new development, she quickly changed the sensor setting and scanned the piece of stone to add to the soil sample database. She punched in a code on the computer to compare the readouts to the dirt she had already examined. What she saw bemused her profoundly, for there was nothing even remotely like it in any of the other recorded data regarding Bajoran soil and geologic formations. The database showed this rock to be a complete anomaly.
Miras stared at the piece of stone for a moment, full of questions that she knew could not be answered. She put out her hand to touch it, and for a moment she seemed to drift away from where she stood, forgetting herself...but she was jolted from her temporary daze when a comm voice piped into the room. It was Professor Mendar.
"Miss Vara, are you there? We have to return the object to the storeroom now, or sign it out for an additional period. Is it ready for transport?"
Miras reluctantly closed the case. "In a moment, Professor." She wished Kalisi were here to help her put it back in the container. She wondered if she was supposed to have removed the item at all. She couldn"t remember what the professor had said about it, and she struggled for a moment to hoist the object back into the cylindrical container. She clicked it closed and brushed the leftover dirt from her hands. Dirt that should serve to make her project a success, she remembered. She gathered up the vial with her soil sample, the reason she had come.
"It"s ready to go, Professor Mendar."
Miras watched as the container was transported back into the cavernous storage facility, and as it shimmered into nothingness, she recalled that mysterious sense of calm she had experienced when she had touched the artifact. She wondered what, exactly, she had just been looking at.
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 t.i.tle 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 salam salam gra.s.s 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. gra.s.s 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 Carda.s.sians, 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 pa.s.s 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 n.o.body 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 Carda.s.sian 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 Carda.s.sian 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 Carda.s.sian 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 not not her, but she knew that nothing was that simple anymore. She had to accept that this was her life now. her, 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 before before and and now, 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 ma.s.sive 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 coc.o.o.n of alien elegance, where her natural reactions had no appropriate place. 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 ma.s.sive 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 coc.o.o.n 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 Ba.s.so 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 Carda.s.sian, 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.
"h.e.l.lo, sweet Meru." The deep tone of his voice was like a heavy stone over fine gravel, but his languorous p.r.o.nunciation 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 Carda.s.sia 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.
"h.e.l.lo, 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 ma.s.sive bed and patted the s.p.a.ce 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 antic.i.p.ation. 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 compa.s.sionate 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 Carda.s.sians, Meru knew it was no use trying to explain it to him. He was unusual, but he was still a Carda.s.sian.
"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 pa.s.sed quickly, lost to the myriad small ch.o.r.es 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 fiance, 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.