Star Trek: Terok Nor 03: Dawn of the Eagles (17 page)

Another, nearer rustle, and she thought she saw one of the shadows moving, thought she heard the sound of padding feet. A soldier? She tried her best not to breathe, holding herself in a small, tight ball, knowing it would do no good. If a soldier had come, he would have equipment that would tell him exactly where she was. She heard a sound, then, that she could not at first identify. A low, rhythmic grumbling.

It’s a
hara
cat.

The fear changed. The animal didn’t need sensors, it could smell her plainly. She could only hope that it had already eaten, that it hadn’t been stalking her, as
haras
had been known to do when food was scarce. Jaxa’s breathing grew tight with quickly mounting dread. Would it hurt when the
hara
pounced and dragged her from beneath the tree? Or would she simply go into shock, numb to the animal’s inevitable attack? The animal growled, and Jaxa froze in fear.

But now she heard another sound. Something was running, crashing through the underbrush. Something very, very large, larger definitely than the
hara
. Jaxa began to cry, and then she screamed when she heard the terrible sound of the
hara
as it howled in furious pain. Something was attacking it. A cadge lupus? She could hear the thrashing of the foliage around her as the animals struggled, and she covered her face with her hands. The sounds were coming closer, close enough that she could see them now, two shadowy forms locked together in the moonlight.

A violent shift of shadow, and the
hara
let out a strangled, plaintive caterwaul, disengaging from the attacker. The other animal allowed it to run off, its crash through the brush quickly fading.

Jaxa stared at the watching shadow, frightened. She didn’t know what it was. It was massive, somewhat doglike, but it was not a cadge lupus and certainly not a
tyrfox,
unless it was the biggest
tyrfox
Jaxa had ever seen—and she had seen plenty of them around the
porli
pens back at Ikreimi.

The unknown animal slowly approached, and she pulled her legs as tightly to her chest as she possibly could, but she knew it was no use. It was heading straight for her, a big shadow that seemed to be…

Changing? Jaxa rubbed her eyes. Probably it was just the starlight, but suddenly there was no animal before her. There was a person. A man.

“Jaxa,” the man said, and she thought she recognized the strange pitch and quality of that voice. He came closer, and she confirmed it. The alien visitor. The man who had brought her father the code.

“Odo!” She exclaimed, so grateful to see him that she scrambled out from under the tree, leaping to her feet and throwing her arms around his neck. “How did you find me?”

He pulled away, seeming to recoil from her, as though he was slightly afraid of the physical contact. She held him tight anyway, and he finally let her.

“I looked around,” he said simply. “It’s time to go back now. Your parents are waiting.”

Jaxa was only too happy to agree.

Until Doctor Cul finally showed up, the institute had been in chaos. Doctor Yopal had left abruptly, her only good-bye a hardcopy of the transfer orders, sitting atop her empty desk. Kalisi Reyar had never been replaced, which left only three Cardassian scientists, a handful of techs, and Mora Pol. Nobody seemed to have an idea of when Yopal’s replacement would be coming—if there was a replacement at all. Mora could not leave, so he didn’t, but the other three scientists seemed not to know if it was still prudent to show up every day. No one told him anything.

For five days after Yopal’s sudden departure, Mora had been slowly but obediently continuing the research into the project to which he had been assigned. Engineering had never been his forte, but redesigning hydraulic systems wasn’t so terrible—dull, but not a reach—which had given him time to implement a small plan. Alone at night, with no director to look over his shoulder, he had found his way into the institute’s long-term records—in particular, those of Kalisi Reyar. Mora had worked with Reyar long enough to have learned most of her passcodes and datastrings, and now, with no direct supervision, with the other scientists bordering on insubordination by missing shifts and not bothering with their security measures, he was able to make a genuine mess of what was left of Reyar’s research in the institute’s mainframe. A little more time, and he might be able to delete all of it permanently.

He’d been thinking, since Odo had left. It had occurred to him that Odo might not have been successful in delivering the message to his cousin, and even then, the resistance might never be able to disable the systems. But those systems were going to need maintenance someday, and when they did, nobody would be able to find the original schematics. If he could ever hack his way out to the mainframe’s relay, he’d make it so they wouldn’t be able to find Reyar at her new assignment, either. It was a small thing, his plan, but it distracted him from his unhappiness over Odo’s departure.

It was on the fifth day after Yopal had left that the institute was finally introduced to its new director, a man this time. Mora could tell immediately that the three Cardassian scientists left at the institute deeply resented being put to work under a man. It was apparent to Mora that things here were about to get a lot less efficient than they had once been—not least because of his own efforts to sabotage the record-keeping.

Mora quickly found Cul to be surprisingly friendly, even kind. One of the first issues the slightly built Cardassian man addressed when he greeted Mora was whether the Bajoran might prefer to go home.

“I would like to see my family,” Mora admitted cautiously. “But then, I would require a permit to find my way back to the institute.”

“Oh, no, Doctor Mora,” Cul said cheerfully, “I meant that perhaps you would prefer to return home permanently. This situation is less than ideal for you, being the only one of your kind here. There must be something you would prefer to do in the city of Dahkur, which would not require you to travel.”

“Oh,” Mora said, and felt a brief burst of something like fever, hot and dizzying, but wonderful, too. And then he thought of Odo. Mora still felt half certain the shape-shifter would return to the institute once he had learned how difficult it was going to be for him to get along in the outside world, and Mora could not let him come home to a Cardassian stranger.

“If it makes no difference to you,” he said, “I…would prefer to remain here, if I could.”

Cul was surprised, but he nodded. “Certainly, Doctor Mora. I didn’t realize you were so committed. I admire you for your allegiance to the Cardassian cause.”

“Yes, sir,” Mora said, ashamed.

“If only there were more Bajorans like you,” Cul went on, and started to speak of his future plans for the institute, but Mora had stopped listening. It occurred to him then that he’d finally been offered the chance to leave, to stop collaborating—the thing he had wanted for so long—and he hadn’t taken it. His heart sank, realizing that he had probably made a mistake, but it was too late to change it. He had a feeling that Cul would be unlikely to offer again.

And Odo left me
, he thought, but then thought of his small plan, his project, and felt some measure of reassurance. He remembered Daul Mirosha, the last Bajoran who had worked here, and how he had given up his life to liberate the Gallitep mining camp. Mora knew he could never do anything so heroic and dangerous as that, but perhaps, with less supervision, with more freedom under the new director…perhaps he could make a few more changes, implement a few more small plans. Perhaps it was time to set his fear aside and take advantage of his position at the institute. He’d earned it, after all.

T
he little girl tried to make conversation as Odo made his way back to where he remembered the village to be, but Odo did not seem to know the right things to say to her, and he knew that she thought him odd. It made him anxious to return to the village, to hand her off to her parents and escape the curious nature of her comments.

“If only I hadn’t lost my way,” she said wistfully, looking out at the tops of the trees, outlined in the misty blue of the approaching morning.

“But you did lose your way,” Odo told her matter-of-factly.

The girl seemed annoyed. “Now who is going to take this message to the resistance?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” Odo said, “but your father was very afraid for your safety. Someone else will have to do it.”

“Why don’t the sensors detect you?”

“They probably do. But they don’t react to me, because I’m not Bajoran.”

She scrutinized him. “You look kind of like a Bajoran.”

Odo cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You should not have taken such a risk,” he told her.

Jaxa snorted angrily. “Sometimes risks are worth taking,” she told him.

Odo had no reply. He supposed she might be right. The idea was often implied, in the Cardassian histories he’d read, but he had no personal experience in the matter.

The sun was casting its brilliance across the day, and Jaxa seemed to grow even bolder in her queries now that it was not quite so dark. She changed the subject. “That big animal in the forest. The thing that chased the
hara
away from me. What was it? Where did it go?”

“It was me,” Odo said, wishing she hadn’t asked. While he hadn’t made any effort to explain or demonstrate his nature to the people he’d met, he had no plans to hide it, either; he’d simply hoped to avoid the conversation. But she had asked.

“I knew it!” Jaxa said, excited. “How did you do that?”

“My unique nature allows for it.” It was his standard reply, the one he and Mora had given to the various Cardassians who had come to view him at the institute.

“Oh,” Jaxa said, seeming puzzled by the answer. “Well…what kind of animal was it?”

“A riding hound, native to Cardassia Prime.” He replied as promptly as he would have to any question from Doctor Mora. “I learned it from studying three-dimensional motion images in the database at the Bajoran Institute of Science.”

Jaxa frowned. “Could you be other animals, too?” she wondered.

“Yes,” Odo said, again wishing she hadn’t asked. He did not like the idea of changing his form on demand for her, or anyone else. It made him feel uncomfortable, especially since he wasn’t sure how to go about refusing. It had only just begun to occur to him that he
could
refuse, if he wanted to, but he had never done so before, and he didn’t know what kind of reaction a refusal would produce. He preferred an atmosphere of agreeable serenity, if it was possible to maintain it.

Jaxa tripped on a piece of root jutting above the surface of the dirt path, and Odo quickly caught her by the elbow before she stumbled. As she regained her footing, her face tilted to the sky. “Look!” she exclaimed, and Odo raised his head to see a crooked line, soaring through the clouds. “It’s a sinoraptor,” she said.

“A sinoraptor,” Odo repeated, watching the thing in the sky.

“A bird,” Jaxa said.

Odo knew what birds were; egg-laying animals that could fly—or at least, some of them could. He recognized that he had seen birds go by as he was coming through the forest to the Ikreimi village from the institute, but he hadn’t paid them much attention.

“Could you be a bird?” Jaxa asked him.

“I don’t know,” Odo said. “I’ve never tried it before.”

“If you can be anything you want,” Jaxa asked, “how come you’re a person all the time? I only saw you be a person at the village.”

Odo grunted before he replied. “I suppose it’s because I have the most practice being a humanoid,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s what Doctor Mora wanted me to be more than anything else.”

“Oh,” Jaxa said. “But…what do
you
want to be more than anything else?”

He looked up at the sky, watching the sinoraptor as it came closer, considering her question. “I don’t know yet,” he finally answered. “What do you want to be more than anything else?”

Jaxa already knew the answer. “A soldier,” she said. “To fight the Cardassians and make them go away.”

Odo was curious and surprised, but not terribly. He knew there was conflict between the Bajorans and the Cardassians, though he did not fully understand how it had come about. It did interest him, however, to recognize that a child would already know to be angry at the Cardassians. He supposed the conflict might have run deeper than he originally suspected, and acknowledged to himself that Doctor Mora may have been right—he still had a great deal to learn before he could ever truly “fit in.”

It’s not that I don’t trust her,
Quark reassured himself as he struggled with the locking mechanism behind the door panel.
It’s just that if Thrax has been listening to her transmissions, and if she already knew that I was selling black-market goods…
Everyone made mistakes, it was a fact. An innocent slip of the tongue, and he could lose all that he’d worked for.

The door slid open, allowing him to ignore the meandering, unpleasant train of thought that had been plaguing him since his affair with Natima had begun, that had induced him to visit her empty quarters. She was on Bajor for the day, on business, visiting some grand high muckity-muck, so there was no reason for him to be ashamed of his minor break-and-sweep; she’d never even know that he’d been in her rooms.

Her quarters were quiet and spare, generic, lifeless without her. Quark produced a device from the pocket of his waistcoat and began to sweep for listening devices, but the readout quickly confirmed that her rooms were clean. He went through her desk, found hard copies of statistics and a box of isolinear rods labeled with boring, work-related titles. Nothing with his name on it, anywhere.

She said it had nothing to do with me
, he told himself, and felt that flicker of unpleasantness once more, which he’d positively identified as guilt. But then, when he’d asked her about it, the night after Thrax had interrogated her, it seemed to Quark that perhaps she had protested just a little too much. She was hiding something. Quark had decided he’d better hack into her computer, just to be sure.

He settled in front of her console, bringing up the datastrings of her last several transmissions, looking for any visible markers to suggest that they had been monitored. He was shocked to discover that Thrax had been listening to all of them, and he played back the recordings, carefully reading the transcripts as he went.

There was nothing there to implicate Quark, he was certain, but he was disturbed that Thrax had been listening in. What did the security officer want with her? Something to do with her job, maybe? Quark hoped that whatever it was, she would be safe. On the other hand, he considered, maybe Thrax just listened to everyone’s transmissions. Quark was sure that the security chief had tried, numerous times, to eavesdrop on his own communications, but Quark didn’t skimp on tech; he had the very best—well, close to the best—modules and wire blocks, to keep his private business private. He decided that when Natima got back, he’d talk with her about upgrading her hardware.

He was ready to leave, but there was a padd next to Natima’s console, open to a page with a particular line of characters, and he couldn’t help but take a peek. It was in plain sight, after all. It was an acquisition code; Quark knew it immediately—he received similar sequences constantly from the military personnel who came through the bar and put their orders on their government-issued accounts. This one was probably from Natima’s place of employment, the…Information people, whatever-it-was. She must have been ordering something just before she left. But this sequence included something extra to make it stand out from those that Quark dealt with every other day of his life. This one was complete with a passcode.

Quark drummed his fingers on her desk, frowning, thinking. With the passcode that was now in front of him, he had the means to access Natima’s company acquisition accounts. If Quark was careful with it, he might be able to manipulate the sequence so that any purchases he made with it would not be attributed to Natima. Cardassians were notoriously sloppy with matters of finance. Quark knew that well enough; there were several customers that he regularly skimmed from, and they had never even suspected it.

No.
He couldn’t betray her. Although…he could certainly help a lot of Bajorans with this information. She hadn’t said as much outright, but he knew how she felt about the occupation, knew that she sympathized with the Bajorans. If she had the know-how, she would certainly be using her account to help them. He could use the code to order goods under an assumed Cardassian persona, or maybe…just skim
enough
that nobody would even notice. She would never even have to know—and if she did, would she necessarily disapprove, considering all the good the code could do for the Bajoran people?

He let out a breath, chiding himself for his weak rationalizations. He was a Ferengi, and Ferengi lived to make profit. If he didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, why, it would almost be immoral. He’d answer to the Blessed Exchequer if he ignored this code—and for what? The sake of some Cardassian female? He wasn’t about to let a woman wreck his chance at success again, not after what had happened with Gera on Ferenginar.

“Right,” he said, and fished another padd from the pocket on his waistcoat to copy the characters, quickly, before he changed his mind. Guilt was for hew-mons, not Ferengi, but still, he couldn’t help but remind himself that just because he
had
the code didn’t mean he had to
use
it. And if he did use it, he’d use it for good. If he made a little profit from doing good, where was the harm?

Upon returning Jaxa to her parents, Odo was immediately insistent that he be the one to deliver the message to the resistance cell in the mountains. The man named Keral was grateful, but wary. His wife seemed especially afraid while Keral was drawing Odo a sort of map. Using a little stick, he had scratched out a picture on a slice of parchment, and Odo had done his best to commit it all to memory.

These people, Odo was beginning to deduce, were very afraid of the Cardassians. Odo wondered if Doctor Mora had also been so afraid of them. He knew that there was something unspoken between Mora and Reyar, but he had never quite placed it as fear. He did not understand why anyone would be deliberately unkind to another person, but he felt more aware of his own differences than he ever had before.

Odo had finally found an appropriate surface for regeneration: a wide rock with a slight depression. It was flat enough that he could spread himself out, but the raised edges were high enough to keep him from trickling to the forest floor in his liquid state. He was exhausted, having traveled for most of the day, and although he was very close to the mountain pass, he needed time to rest before he could go any further.

He had spent the day experimenting, taking on the appearance of various flora and fauna, some of the inert forms he encountered along the way, as well as animals he remembered from the laboratory database. The question of the child Jaxa had resonated with him:
What do you want to be more than anything else?
Odo had never considered it before, but now, as he settled into the shallow, concave well in the rock, he decided he did not care to be in solid form; being a liquid was relaxing, and felt the most natural.

The only trouble was that being a liquid didn’t lend itself to interacting with humanoids, and for some reason that he could not explain, he found humanoid interaction to be deeply compelling, to be preferable to being on his own. How he had hated the long hours and days he remained in the laboratory with no interaction from Doctor Mora! He craved the company of others, though he was not sure why; he only knew that he disliked the sensation of going for such lengthy, bleak stretches without it.

So, despite his preference for being in his natural state, while in the company of others, he would have to remain as a humanoid, as long as he could stand it. He did not want to give anyone reason to emphasize his differences, for it seemed that the Bajorans and Cardassians hated one another solely because of the contrasts between them. Odo was far more dissimilar to either race then they were even to each other—they were both humanoid; they were both solid—and yet, they clearly despised one another. For that reason, Odo knew he must remain as a humanoid if he wanted to avoid being similarly despised.

He had not been regenerating long before he was stirred from his state of pleasantly senseless liquidity. Something was moving through the forest. Odo manifested a few sensory organs in order to investigate comfortably.

It was a humanoid, coming through the forest. The clomping of approaching boots was accompanied by a series of chirps and clicks, indicating that the traveler carried several pieces of noisy equipment. Odo held completely still while the intruder passed him. It was a Cardassian male, dressed as a soldier.