Star Trek: Terok Nor 02: Night of the Wolves (43 page)

The man nodded. “I think we can handle that,” he said.

Daul started to remark on the second part of the task, but then he remembered something. “I almost forgot,” he said. “You’ll need these.”

The three Bajorans looked curiously at the four little comm devices he produced, relics he’d stolen from a vault at the institute, where examples of Bajoran technology were stored for later study. “These are old, but they still work. They’ll be necessary for you to project a signal that can be locked on to by the transporter. You can also use them to communicate with each other, even over great distances. And they operate on frequencies the Cardassians haven’t monitored since the Militia was disbanded.”

“I know what a combadge is,” the man said, a little curtly. He took the devices and pocketed them.

Daul went on. “I suppose your leader told you that I am asking for a favor, in return for this information?”

The woman cleared her throat. “What is this favor, exactly?”

“I would do this myself,” Daul explained, “but I won’t have the opportunity before I leave, and I have no plans to return to the institute after I’m transported to Gallitep.” He hesitated, sensing impatience from the three nameless rebels, and he went on, “Do you have the ability to hack into a computer system, including high-security files?”

“I can hack into any system,” the woman assured him.

“Good. The rod will give you more detail. There are specific data files on the institute’s computer, and the data in question must be irreparably corrupted. No one can access it ever again. I assume that will not be a problem?”

The woman almost looked amused, which Daul took to be an affirmative reply.

The man raised his eyebrows. “That bad, is it?” he remarked.

Daul thought of the system Mora Pol would soon be implementing, thought of the cold, hard smile of Kalisi Reyar. “You’ve no idea,” he said.

R
o was not immediately as adept at handling Bis’s warp shuttle as she had hoped. She wasn’t certain if she could successfully land the vessel, but the other alternative was to transport herself down to the surface of the gas giant’s lonely moon, with the expectation that she would have to transport herself back up when her task was completed. The prospect was a bit frightening, as she had never handled a transporter on her own, but she decided it was necessary. She could not afford to damage her vessel; warp ships were few and far between for Bajorans, after all.

With a brief recollection of the encouragement Bis had whispered before kissing her good-bye, Ro beamed herself directly to the moon’s surface near a cluster of life signs that she knew to be the tavern where she was to meet her mark. Her molecules having satisfactorily reassembled themselves, she squared her shoulders and entered the little building, advising herself not to come off like an inexperienced, gawking young girl; she had long heard tales of the Orion Syndicate, whose henchmen would kidnap women to be sold as slaves. They sounded no worse than the Cardassians to Ro, but she still wasn’t about to take any chances.

Still, she found it difficult not to stare at some of the people she encountered inside the dimly lit bar—people with brightly colored clothing, not to mention their skin and hair; people with appendages that seemed too long or too short; people with extra sensory equipment, or in some cases, not quite enough; people whose faces looked too smooth, or too lumpy. Ro had never dreamed there were so many different types of people in the galaxy. She knew there were more than just Bajorans and Cardassians, of course, but to be confronted with the reality of it was dizzying. While Bajor struggled, day after day, year after year, the rest of the universe continued to move, everyone carrying on with his or her own business, unaffected by what happened in the B’hava’el system.

Ro had taken a seat behind the bar, a long, black slab with rows and rows of tall colored bottles behind it. A man—Ro supposed it was a man—with bright blue skin and a ridge bisecting his hairless face approached her. “What’ll it be, girlie?”

Ro cleared her throat, looking around for Cardassians. She saw none, but she still wanted to keep as low a profile as she could. She wasn’t sure what to order.
“Copal?”
she said uncertainly.

“What’s that?” He turned an ear in her direction.

“I said
copal—copal
cider? Do you have it?”

The man wrinkled his nose. “Where you from, Miss?”

Ro looked around again, before she answered, quietly. “Bajor,” she muttered.

“Speak up!” the bartender told her.

Ro’s gaze froze when she saw someone in the back corner of the room, bald as the bartender, but with a swollen, misshapen head. His skin was an unfortunate shade of orange, his mouth full of teeth so sharp and crooked he could not close it all the way. He wore a strange headband with a couple of flaps that concealed the back part of his head, along with a dark-colored uniform trimmed with fur. He was picking at a plate of ghastly-looking food, and frequently using some kind of tool to remove bits of it from between the varied nooks and crannies of his teeth. But it was his ears that caught Ro’s attention; they were round, and cavernous, and gigantic. Bis had expressly instructed her to look for the person with the most prominent ears. This man’s ears were nothing if not prominent. She felt certain she’d just found DaiMon Gart.

“Excuse me,” Ro told the blue bartender.

“Oh, no you don’t,” the man said. “You’d better order something if you want to sit in here. Only paying customers cool their heels on my chairs, you got it?”

“Tell you what,” Ro whispered. “I have thirty
lek
s that’re all yours, and you don’t even need to pour me a drink.”

The bartender glared at her with suspicion. “What’s the catch?”

Ro leaned in closer. “I want a look at the Ferengi’s tab.” The bartender hesitated, perhaps trying to convince himself that the request was harmless. “I just want to see it,” Ro assured him. “Nothing else.”

“Let’s see the money,” the bartender said.

Ro held up the brown metal hexagon she’d been clutching since she entered the bar, something she’d taken off the body of a dead Cardassian soldier months ago. Union currency was ugly, but it had considerable value in this part of space. Ro was glad she had decided to save it. “Do we have a deal?”

The bartender glanced past her, as if to make sure the Ferengi wasn’t listening. Then he reached toward the counter behind him and produced a padd, which he held facedown on the bar. Ro gave him the coin, and the blue hand flipped the padd over.

Ro found what she was looking for immediately. Gart’s food and drink order didn’t interest her, but the two strings of numbers in the upper right corner of the screen gave her an immediate surge of adrenaline: the transponder code for the daimon’s ship, and the number of its docking bay—both of which would be essential to pay for anything in a place like this, in lieu of hard currency. Ro had just enough time to commit the numbers to memory before the bartender said, “That’s enough,” and took back his padd.

Ro thanked the bartender and made for the exit, past the table where Gart was sitting. She hesitated to listen to what he was saying to the person seated opposite him, an alien woman with her scarlet hair in a complicated topknot.

“What a lot of clothing you’re wearing!” he exclaimed. “You know, I like that in a girl. Clothing. Especially the part where the clothing all comes off.” He laughed, and bits of what appeared to be
worm
violently dislodged themselves from his mouth as he did so. Ro shuddered.

“If my cook weren’t trying to poison me,” she overheard him say as she left the bar, “I’d never pay this much for a plate of
gree
worms. I tell you, he’s had it in for me since he left Ferenginar, but it’s his own fault for getting into the mess with the sub-nagus’s sister—”

Ro could no longer hear him as she found her way outside in the thin, cold atmosphere of the moon. It was dark here; apparently this part of the moon never entirely faced the sun, and the only light right now was from artificial sources posted between the shabby and sparse buildings that spread out from the spaceport. This moon’s sole purpose was as a stopover for travelers…especially those interested in conducting illicit business.

Ro made her way toward the spaceport’s secure hangar facility, constructed of enormous steel girders and smart-plastic dividers backed with force fields to separate the ships. Her first objective would be to break in and find the correct hangar where the Ferengi vessel was docked.

Minutes later, she found it, the massive, awkward vessel looking very much like the one she’d tried to steal years ago, the one that currently lay in pieces at the hangar on Valo II. Ro wasted no time in disabling the force field that would allow her access to the bay. Her next problem would be getting past the Ferengi ship’s security features, and while she knew the DaiMon was preoccupied, she knew nothing of the rest of the ship’s crew—he’d mentioned a cook, and Ro was nervous at the thought that there could be more than one or two other Ferengi aboard. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she’d have to deal with anyone other than Gart. Well, she only needed to get as far as the cargo bay.

She hitched up the satchel around her waist; it held her phaser, comm unit, and the small electrical device that she would soon be leaving inside the vessel.
This is it,
she told herself, and began working at overriding the controls to the drop ramp.

The minutes ticked by. Ro’s forehead was slippery with perspiration, but she could not spare a moment to wipe her eyes. How much longer would Gart be preoccupied? If he was successful in his pursuit of the alien woman at the bar, would he bring her back to the ship? It seemed to take forever before the drop ramp began to slowly descend, and Ro scampered inside, finding a shuttlebay much like the one where she had once docked her own raider. She’d walked the remnants of that long-ago ship several times with Bis only yesterday, memorizing its layout. In seconds, she was in the cargo bay, surrounded by massive nonmetallic containers filled with unprocessed uridium. She shivered as she removed the electrical discharge device from her satchel and programmed it to react directly with the impact of the locking clamps at Terok Nor. Then she aimed the bomb’s makeshift conducting spike at one of the containers, raised it over her head, and stabbed it through the casing.

She thought she heard voices coming from somewhere to the rear left of the cargo bay, and she quickly scuttled out the way she had come, not stopping to put the drop ramp back up as she ran, removing the comm device from her satchel and placing it in the pocket of her tunic. Once clear of the shipyards, she squeezed the device once, and, like magic, found herself once again on the transporter platform of the little warp ship.

I did it,
she thought, and knew that Bis would be happy.

Odo usually had very little control of his senses while he regenerated, though certain external stimuli could rouse him from his state of near slumber. And as it was, something had forced him out of stasis on this particular night. Something was not right in the laboratory, though Odo had no concept of what it might be; he only knew that there was a sound coming from somewhere outside the door of Doctor Mora’s laboratory, and at this time of night, there should be no sounds at all. He remained a liquid, but he poised himself to be ready to morph into something else if he needed to, though he wasn’t sure what that thing might be.

Someone had entered the laboratory. Though the lights were still off, Odo could make out the shape of a humanoid—a Bajoran, he thought. This person looked more like Doctor Mora than like Doctor Yopal and the others, but there was something different about him. Odo wasn’t sure what it was right away, but then it somehow dawned on him. This person was a female. This was a Bajoran female, something he’d not seen before. The female was touching Mora’s computer. Odo wanted very much to get out of the tank and have a closer look, but he had the distinct sense that she was not supposed to be in here. He wondered what to do, and wished Mora would come, but it was nighttime; Mora would not return until the morning.

“Gantt!” the person said, and Odo wondered who she was talking to. The sound of her voice was like nothing he’d ever heard before. She did not sound like the Cardassian women, and she certainly didn’t sound like Doctor Mora.

“Mobara found it, down the hall,” said another voice, coming from somewhere outside. “It’s done. We need to get to the transporter—it’s in the lower level.”

“Come in here and look at this,” the female in Doctor Mora’s laboratory called. “I think this is a Bajoran’s laboratory.”

“Never mind that,” the other person said. “We need to get out of here.”

“Yes, but—”

“Kira, we have to go, now!”

“I’m coming,” she said, and left the room.

Odo felt relieved that the intruders were going, but he also felt something else, too. He felt an oddly placed regret, for the female had made him terrifically curious—curious in a way he wasn’t entirely familiar with. He wanted to know why they had been here, what they were doing. He was too restless to go back into his resting state now, and he contemplated his feelings. He considered that some part of him wished the female hadn’t gone quite so soon. He regretted not emerging from the tank to speak to her, though he knew he shouldn’t have done that, and it was certainly best that he hadn’t. But there was something about her, the novelty of her appearance, her voice—if he couldn’t have spoken to her, he wished he could at least have looked at her just a little while longer.

Daul had been seated inside the cramped little outbuilding, situated along the vast, stretching footbridge strung across the center of the open-pit duranium mine, for well over three hours now. That was almost twice as long as it should have taken him to complete his task, but the Cardassians didn’t know that—at least, Daul hoped they didn’t.

The odd file clerk had accompanied him for most of the day, but just under an hour ago, Marritza had explained that he had to get back to his office, and had placed a much less agreeable Cardassian guard in charge of looking after him. The guard had made it abundantly clear that he resented the assignment, glaring at Daul from the only other seat in the little room where the massive computer was housed. But Daul was relieved at the changing of his guard, for he felt confident that this sentry would give him far less trouble than the more observant file clerk would have.

From time to time, the guard shifted impatiently in his seat and inquired as to how much longer Daul was going to take, and Daul’s reply was always the same: “I’m not sure, but I don’t think much longer.”

Finally, the surly Cardassian made an attempt at conversation. “Just what is it that you’re doing here, anyway?”

“I’m reassessing the mine’s reserve, and reprogramming the system’s algorithm to ignore any veins of duridium with inferior percentage extraction. Eventually, the AI will cease drilling when viable duridium reaches 10 percent or less.”

“Oh,” the guard said, his expression confirming that he didn’t know what Daul was talking about. This guard apparently had little understanding of how the mine operated; he was only here to force the Bajorans to work. To Daul’s great relief, the guard removed the headset he was wearing—the set which enabled him to hear what Daul was saying. He rubbed his head, and held the set idly in his lap.