She was the only passenger on the tiny vessel, and she tried to strike up a conversation with the pilot regarding her destination, but quickly found him to be less than garrulous. She satisfied her boredom by looking over some reading material on her padd, but the novelty of her uncertain situation made it difficult to concentrate.
After what seemed like only a very short time, Kalisi looked up to see that the transport had continued to rise, as though the pilot meant to break out of the atmosphere. But that couldn’t be right, could it? His authoritarian silence unnerved her to the point where she did not feel comfortable asking questions, but when the shuttle did not drop, she dismissed her awkwardness.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded, just before the shuttle broke through the very highest clouds in the Bajoran sky, swiftly and calmly riding the turbulence out into the dark of open space. “I thought I was just going to the hospital at Huvara Province! Why have we taken this…unlikely route?”
The pilot, seated behind a security compartment, spoke to her through a comm system, his eerily disembodied voice no more talkative than it had been before. “We are making a required stopover.”
“A stopover!” she exclaimed. “Offworld? Why was I not informed of this before I boarded?”
The pilot had nothing more to say, and Kalisi had no recourse but to ride in angry, terrified silence while the little skimmer took her not only from Bajor, but out of the B’hava’el system altogether. Her mind raced with questions, but there was no one to answer them. She clasped her hands together and waited.
4
He was too close. No Cardassian had ever come this close to the Shakaar cell’s hideout before, at least, not anytime before last week. He wasn’t close enough to guess where the hideout was, necessarily, and his scanning equipment couldn’t possibly reveal its location, for the hillside surrounding the caves was riddled with kelbonite. But he was still too close. Kira Nerys would have to get him before he got even a linnipate closer, just as she had gotten his two companions. The bulky Cardassian rifle she had lifted from one of the slain soldiers was slowing her down, and Kira knew that she was going to have to ditch it. She could come back for it later, she decided, even though Shakaar had been insisting for over a week that nobody leave base camp until they could confirm or deny the rumors they had been hearing. She was sure to get an earful from him when she returned to camp, especially when she told him that she didn’t know where Bestram was.
She pitched the stolen rifle at the base of a tree with distinctive branches. She had been to this spot many times in her life, countless times, and she would be back again, to get that rifle, just as soon as she finished her job here.
She set off again, lighter now, clutching her phaser pistol in one hand and walking the way she’d learned years ago, the way that kept the needles and leaves and bits of bark and the papery seed hulls of the blackwood trees silent beneath the soles of her soft old boots. She could hear his footsteps, though they were a ways off; she would hear him long before he would hear her, and no matter how precise his scanning equipment, she would be the one to shoot first.
She stopped walking as she heard a subtle shift in the echoing crunch of the soldier’s footfalls, edging for a large tree. He was headed vaguely in her direction, and although he probably knew exactly where she was, if she held completely still, she could still manage the element of surprise. He would approach as quietly as he knew how, but it would not be quiet enough. He would get within striking range, but she would be well protected behind the trunk of a wide tree. Before he even had a chance to aim, she would charge; he’d be dead before he realized she was coming.
She let her breath out in tiny increments, held her body as still as stone. His footsteps drew closer…and when she heard the telltale whisper of dry brush less than a body length away, she sprang out from behind the tree, already firing.
She did not miss. His body jerked as it staggered backward, his phaser falling, and he let out a single dying groan before he landed, and then he was silent and motionless on the floor of the forest. The birds chirped overhead, and Kira scrambled forward, phaser still trained on the dead soldier, to strip him of his weapons and comcuff. She stopped for a moment to listen, but she heard nothing more. Her companion, Bestram, was nowhere in sight, and neither were the Cardassians who had chased him off in a different direction.
Loaded down with equipment, she made for the tree where she had stowed the other phaser rifle, and then beat it back to the Shakaar cell’s hideout in the nearby mountain, a mountain so low it was scarcely more than a hill, nearly invisible behind the grand, old-growth trees that surrounded it.
She took the chance that there were no more soldiers around and ducked for the entrance, a tiny, camouflaged opening in the rock that led to a system of tunnels, some of them natural, some of them blasted out by the network of resistance cells that operated in this region. She had to squat down on her haunches to avoid bumping her head on the low ceiling of this passageway, one that had been carved out a little at a time by another cell, the nearby Kohn-Ma. She shimmied along, grunting with the weight of all the equipment she pushed ahead of her, wishing that she had walked around to the more accessible west entrance, but then she remembered that the Cardassians had come from that direction—there could have been more of them, waiting for her. She swallowed her doubts regarding Bestram. He must have gone around, she told herself, though she doubted very much that it was true.
After a long time, she turned a blind corner where the passageway widened and she was able to walk upright at last, her knees and spine creaking a little as she rose to her full height. Kira was small in stature, probably the smallest person of any who used these burrows, but the northwest entrance tunnel still felt claustrophobic to her. She had often wondered how some of the larger men managed to tolerate the press of rock all around them—to say nothing of the darkness. She was nearly to her cell’s main hideout now, the place where they lived, ate, slept, bathed, and plotted together. Kira had always thought of it as a warren or a den; it was rough and sometimes depressing, but it was home. For now, anyway.
“Shakaar!” She called out to the leader of her cell as she came into the primary chamber of the Shakaar cell’s camp. “Has Bestram checked in?”
Mobara was the only member of the cell in the primary chamber, working on a piece of equipment at a table in the main tunnel, near where the cell’s comm system was usually kept. Lupaza and Furel were back in Dahkur, where they had been visiting some friends, and nobody had heard from them in days; it was part of the reason Kira had wanted to go back into Dahkur with Bestram, to ensure that they were all right. Mobara put down his tools and began to relieve Kira of the equipment she carried, stopping to examine a tricorder. “Shakaar told you not to go out, Nerys,” Mobara said absently, turning the tricorder over in his hands, already laying out a plan for how he would put it to use.
“I know, but—”
Shakaar emerged from another of the tunnels, with Gantt just behind him. “Nerys—I told you not to go out!”
“I know, but—Bestram, have you heard from him?” She was too anxious about the missing young cell member to argue with Shakaar about going out.
Shakaar looked tired. “I haven’t heard anything,” he said, wiping his face with one of his rawboned hands. He had been awake for at least two days and nights, manning the long-range comm system, fielding the reports that were coming in from all over the planet. He looked to Mobara, who had been attending to the shortwave system. “Did you hear from him?”
“I didn’t,” Mobara said, and turned to Kira once more. “Do you think he could have been behind you?”
Kira shook her head. “No, I’m sure he wasn’t. He took off in another direction. Three soldiers came after me, the rest followed him.” She took a breath. “I think he was making for the ravine, so maybe he’ll come in by the western route.”