The object belongs to the Bajorans.
Ignoring the voice in his head, he put his hand gingerly on the case and waited to be overcome, as Esad had described himself. But the case was cold, and Thrax felt nothing. He smiled to himself, in part with relief to have been released from the worry that Esad had planted in his mind. He pictured how pleased Astraea would be when she learned that his efforts had finally produced this happy result, and then he left the shrine, reassuring himself once again that it was the safest place for the item, at least for now.
It was dark and still in this part of the city. Kira Nerys checked her scanner as she approached the improvised holding facility, and it quickly confirmed what she already suspected: there was a Bajoran life sign behind those walls, but it was fading fast. Tahna would not hold out much longer.
Kira had come here following a tip given to her by Tahna’s nephew, who lived in Dahkur. Tahna had returned to his family’s home for a quick visit over two weeks ago, but when he had not returned to the Kohn-Ma cell’s hideout, Biran put word out to his family to inquire after him. His family insisted that they didn’t know where he was, but Kira was unconvinced, and contacted them again, asking if there was anything they recalled about the route he had taken that might help him to be found. After a great deal of coaxing and questioning, Tahna’s teenage nephew finally confessed to Kira that the Cardassians had taken Tahna from his uncle’s house in the middle of the night. The soldiers had threatened the rest of the family, telling them they were lucky they weren’t all being taken—and that if they told anyone what had happened to Tahna, it was likely they would be.
Kira knew that Tahna’s abduction wasn’t some random security sweep, nor were the soldiers likely to take a single man from a Bajoran home if they were merely looking for workers. Tahna had been targeted specifically, most likely in connection with the resistance. He was being questioned somewhere, which meant that he was certainly still alive—and Kira knew she had to save him, not only to preserve his life, but to preserve all of their lives. Tahna was strong-willed, but he couldn’t hold out against Cardassian torture without eventually spilling secrets of the Shakaar and Kohn-Ma cells’ whereabouts. Nobody could.
Shakaar had managed to gather enough intelligence to suggest that Tahna would have been taken here, a makeshift interrogation center in a crumbling, abandoned section of Dahkur City, where they were questioned and decontaminated before being taken to their final destinations—usually prison camps, or in some cases, public execution. Kira could only hope that if it had been the latter, Shakaar would have heard something about it. There had been no reports of Cardassian executions since Tahna’s disappearance.
Kira was supposed to be staking out this place. She was deliberately chosen for most long-range reconnaissance because it had been determined that she was just small enough not to trip the Cardassian detection grid—she didn’t need a shielding device to go out, though she carried one, just the same. The others had planned on coming tomorrow, after Kira devised a plan of action for the most effective means of attack. But as she read the life sign on her handheld scanner, she knew that Tahna probably could not wait until tomorrow. She had already anticipated this possibility. Shakaar had firmly instructed her not to try anything on her own, but Kira didn’t see that she had a choice.
The facility had only a single guard, the Cardassians’ assumption that the detection grids would keep out unwelcome intruders acting as its own security device. Kira wasted little time in strategizing the best way to take out the guard without arousing the attention of anyone inside. She waited, squatting on the deteriorating cobblestone street between two sagging buildings where she could not be seen. Picking up a piece of the broken road in her hands, she threw the chunk of stone somewhere off to her left. The soldier reacted immediately, drawing his phaser and looking to the place where the stone had landed.
Kira drew back into the shadows, listening carefully to the sound of the sentry’s approaching footsteps, and then she sprang out noiselessly, praying that she would cast no shadows. But the soldier did not turn around when she approached. He bent down, examining the ground with his palm torch. “Voles,” he mumbled to himself. Kira took a wide step forward, just before he rose to his feet. He scarcely even made a sound when she leapt upon him, twisting his neck with all her might. A crack, a thud, his palmlight clattering on the uneven ground, and it was over.
She kept her phaser at the ready, trying to keep her senses balanced as she carefully approached the entrance of the facility. The more carefully she listened, the more she was certain she could hear someone crying. The sound was faint, fainter than her own heartbeat, but Kira knew that it was Tahna. Her resolve hardened as she crept through the unblocked doors.
It was here that she finally encountered a seated guard, but she was ready for him. She swung her leg up and around to connect with his ear before he could react—best not to use her phaser until absolutely necessary. He staggered from the blow, drawing his weapon. He was shaken, but not especially hurt. With Cardassians it was necessary to strike at just the right place, where the brittle cartilage on their faces was the most vulnerable. In the instant before he brought up his weapon, Kira leaned in and drove the heel of her hand into his mouth. She felt and heard the satisfactory crunch just above his upper lip. The Cardassian lost his disruptor as he fell, but Kira did not stop to pick it up. She scurried past him and kept going into a darkened corridor, following Tahna’s echoed groans and cries.
She walked as silently as she knew how, slipped around a corner—there, a Cardassian standing behind a computer console, and before he could even look up, she shot him in the chest with her phaser on its highest setting. He fell backward and seemed to take a very long time to hit the ground. Kira looked to see what he had been doing at the console and was immediately greeted with a grisly scene. Displayed across his viewscreen, Tahna Los hung from the ceiling of a dank corridor that must have been somewhere below her, judging from the sound of his screams, while two expressionless Cardassians were taking turns peeling back slices of flesh from his naked back. Tahna screamed in agony, and Kira threw her hands over her face, but not before she saw that the same Cardassians were carefully, painfully cauterizing the flesh back into place with a crude dermal regenerator, presumably so they could begin to cut once again, after his tender skin had artificially healed back into lumpy scar tissue.
Kira frantically pecked at the computer to try and assess Tahna’s location, but after an agonizingly long moment with no success, she decided instead to simply follow the sound of his terrible cries. She found a spiral staircase and quickly descended, discovering a dim and sweltering underground corridor with a line of three doors. Her ears were full of the sound of it now, and the echoing sound of the questions the Cardassians were putting to the hapless Tahna:
Kira Nerys—you know her. Where is she?
Had she really heard her own name? Or was her imagination just trying to amplify her own terror? It must be the latter, for their voices were muffled, in part by Tahna’s groans. He began to scream again, either determined not to tell them anything, or simply in so much pain that he couldn’t speak.
Thinking with some uncertainty that she had found the right door, she took out the lock with a quick burst of her phaser and let herself inside—to find that Tahna was not in this room at all. A nearly emaciated woman was chained to the wall by her wrists. For an instant, Kira thought she was dead, and almost turned to leave her—but the woman suddenly coughed up a bilious spew of green all down the front of the rags she was dressed in, and shuddered with the resultant coughing fit that followed. Appalled, Kira rushed to her, using her weapon to burn away the chains that bound her to the wall.