Odo was silent, but Mora could see that he was just as determined as before. He let out a frustrated breath, feeling sick with defeat. If Odo was gone, there was nothing to keep him from collaborating with the Cardassians, or, rather, to keep him from having to acknowledge that was what he’d been doing all along. Working with Odo, he’d been able to forget the rest of it, at least for a time. He tried a different approach.
“You will find that the Cardassians out there, they will not be nearly so pleasant as those you have met inside.”
Odo was silent for a minute. “Doctor Reyar was not so pleasant,” he said.
Mora laughed sharply. “Doctor Reyar is a harakit compared to the Cardassians you are likely to meet outside the facility.”
Odo seemed to consider this. “I will be careful,” he said firmly. “I can take care of my own needs. I can travel as an animal to avoid them, if it is necessary.”
Mora’s heart sank as he saw that cautionary tales were unlikely to change Odo’s mind. He wondered, then, what the Cardassians’ reaction to him would be. Of course, Odo was not a Bajoran, and he would not register against the detection field that existed outside most of the boundaries. He would likely be able to travel wherever he wanted without stirring up the Cardassian troops…
The code, he thought, and the rest of a plan suddenly came together.
“Odo,” he said, “if you are determined to do this…I would ask that you would do one thing for me.”
Odo did not answer, only appeared wary—at least, Mora thought he looked wary. It was not always easy to tell. He went on.
“I’m not permitted to leave, as you know. I can only contact my family very sporadically, and those exchanges contain nothing of substance. I would like for you to deliver a message to them.”
“Of course, Doctor Mora,” Odo said, seeming relieved, “I would be happy to do it.”
“Thank you. I hope you will stay at least another twenty-six hours, Odo, so that I can get…get all my notes together,” he said, fumbling for an excuse. He felt a deep ache of misery as he said it, revisiting the unhappiness he had been living in almost exclusively since he had been forced to work as a collaborator. Now his most important work—a creature he had come to feel great affection for—was going to leave him. He would have no one, no respite from his loneliness. But if Odo could deliver a message to the Ikreimi village, if Keral’s claims of knowing someone in the resistance had any merit at all, maybe then, some degree of the self-loathing he had come to experience could be dialed back, at least to tolerable levels.
Odo blinked at him, slowly and deliberately, and Mora realized he was looking at a free man, a creature with nothing on his conscience and a limitless future. And for just a moment, Mora resented him so deeply that he could hardly stand to look at him.
Natima had been called to the Information Service’s headquarters in Cardassia City for her latest review with Dalak, the director of her department, and as she shifted in a stiff-backed chair in front of his small metal desk, she could tell by the tone of this encounter that he was probably going to be transferring her. There had been rumors of changes made, and he had that distracted, irritable air he acquired when he was forced to reshuffle assignments. She hoped he’d send her to Cardassia II. She had grown up in an orphanage there, but that wasn’t the reason she wanted to return. She’d made contacts in the past few years, people who had come to seem to her almost like family.
Of course, Natima wasn’t sure what it was like to have a family, so she couldn’t make the comparison with any certainty, but she had become very close to a few of the people within the rough organization that was beginning to take shape. In particular, Gaten Russol, though Natima had no romantic interest in the man. No, he was definitely more like a brother to her—or at least, her estimation of what a brother must be like. A brother that she had come to deeply trust and respect. He currently lived on Cardassia II, along with a handful of others within the nascent dissident movement that Natima was helping to organize.
It seemed that Dalak had other things in mind for Natima, however. It took her a moment to fully grasp what he had said when he uttered the words, “Terok Nor.” It was a name that was immediately familiar—and immediately repugnant.
Natima sat forward in her chair, her hands spread across the surface of the director’s desk. “No, no, Mister Dalak, you promised you would not send me to Bajor again. You said I—”
“I never promised you any such thing,” Dalak said crisply. “In fact, I am certain that I warned you this day might come. Come now, Miss Lang. It’s been years since that incident on Bajor. Decades, even.”
Decades? Could it really have been that long? Natima supposed it had. How had she suddenly come to be so old?
“Besides,” Dalak went on, “I’m not sending you to Bajor, specifically. Terok Nor is a thoroughly modern Cardassian facility, in orbit of the planet, with the strictest of security measures. You will be safe there and uniquely placed to report on the annexation from its command post.”
“Yes, of course,” Natima replied, though it wasn’t so much the issue of safety that made her loath to return to the B’hava’el system. It was the politics, the gross display of manifest destiny that she feared would someday drive her people into ruin. Could she safely keep her opinions silent in such a place? Especially with that degenerate prefect residing in the very same facility?
“It’s a temporary post,” Dalak assured her. “You’ll be there less than a year.”
Natima fell back into her chair, unhappily accepting the inevitable. This was her career, and though it was increasingly coming into conflict with her evolving ideals, there was no other profession she cared to pursue. She would go where the service sent her.
It was late, and the bar was closed for the night, but Quark was still at work, as he often was, tallying his daily receipts at one of the tables. He checked every number at least three times against his earlier totals. He was not a man to make mistakes in his ledgers, because he never failed to check his totals thrice.
Quark heard the footfalls of someone approaching the door long before they entered the bar. One of the Bajoran workers, wiping up a puddle of spilled kanar,flinched as an expressionless garresh jostled past him, as if he was not even there. Quark frowned. He had taken pains to project the image of neutrality, but sometimes it galled him to see the way the Bajorans were treated.
“Quark, you have a call,” the Cardassian told him. “Something appears to be wrong with your comm line—”
“I closed it down for the night,” Quark snapped, and then quickly checked himself. He couldn’t afford to express any attitude. He gave a strained smile. “So I could get a moment’s peace while balancing my account books,” he finished. “Thank you for informing me. I’ll take my call now.”
He watched the blank-faced garresh leave his bar and chased the Bajoran worker off before he activated his comm. The call was from Ferenginar, and Quark felt sure he knew the origin of the communication code—it was his cousin Gaila, doubtless looking for a handout. Now that Quark was beginning to enjoy some monetary success, he could look forward to every leaf and twig of his family tree coming along with their grubby hands outstretched.
His bar on the station had grown from a little gambling post in one of the storefronts on the Promenade to the largest business on the station. Quark’s had quickly overtaken the replimat as the popular place for Cardassians to drink and dine—no great accomplishment, but he wasn’t going to argue with success—and he’d plowed his profits back into his black market business, andcreated a fund to pay off anyone who might venture too close to his fledgling enterprises. Besides the foodstuffs—and the Bajorans were a nut-and-root type of people, mostly cheap vegetables and bird flesh—he oversaw a goods exchange, and he had a line on some utilitarian art from the surface, which he sold on consignment at one of the shops. Carved wooden bowls and tatted shawls were popular with the station soldiers; they liked to send them home to their families. He could get a piece of pottery that would sell for twenty slips on the station in exchange for a half-slip bucket of root soup. He was making money hand over fist, and of course his mother had to brag about it, telling tales that had reached the ears of many less-fortunate relatives and acquaintances. As it was, Quark had already taken in his penniless idiot brother and nephew, after Rom’s marriage had finally failed, and he wasn’t especially interested in showing anyone else the same degree of altruism.