Star Trek: Terok Nor 02: Night of the Wolves (11 page)

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 Cardassian 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.

O
paka 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 title 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
grass 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 Cardassians, 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 pass 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 cluster 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 nobody 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 Cardassian 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 Cardassian 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 Cardassian 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
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
and
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 massive 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 cocoon 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 Basso 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 Cardassian, 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.

“Hello, sweet Meru.” The deep tone of his voice was like a heavy stone over fine gravel, but his languorous pronunciation 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 Cardassia 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.

“Hello, 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 massive bed and patted the space 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 anticipation. 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.”