A violent shift of shadow, and the haralet 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 tyrfoxJaxa had ever seen—and she had seen plenty of them around the porlipens 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.
10
The 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 haraaway from me. What was it? Where did it go?”