“Get out of here!” she whispered, but the corpselike figure made no move, only stared at her with confused, dead-seeming eyes.
“It’s too bright,” the woman complained, her voice husked and raw. “Shut the door.”
“You’re free, you have to go,” Kira insisted, but she could not afford the time it would take to help her, for Tahna’s strangled cries had begun again.
At the next door, Kira found her target—but there were three Cardassians in the dark, hot room, not the two she’d expected. She aimed the line of her phaser fire at the restraints that held Tahna to the ceiling, and as he fell to the ground she wasted no time in swinging the beam around to hit one of the two Cardassians who had been administering Tahna’s torture. The first one fell, but not before the other two Cardassians in the room could react. The nearest of them, the one she had not anticipated, managed to grab her, and the other relieved her of her phaser, though she kicked and screamed with all of her might.
“Tahna!” she cried. “Los!” But he lay completely still on the floor where he had fallen, apparently dead.
“You killed him,” one of the soldiers said cruelly. “He was connected to a life support system, and you put him into shock.”
“No!” she screamed.
“I told you she’d come after him,” the other Cardassian laughed to his companion. “You owe me twenty leks.” Kira could feel his groping fingers beginning to travel to places where she could not tolerate them. She screamed louder, but Tahna still did not move, and Kira bit her tongue as the Cardassians continued to hatefully explore her with their hands, tugging at her clothes. Through their sick laughter, she tasted hot salt in her mouth, unsure if it was blood or tears.
The lights flickered before they went out entirely, the Cardassians loudly expressing their angry confusion, and Kira managed to kick one of her assailants hard enough to make him lose his grip on her. The other Cardassian only held her tighter in the blind darkness—until a burst of blue light suddenly filled the chamber, and there was a loud thunkas the soldier who still held her fell to the floor, dragging Kira with him and pinning her to the floor. She struggled to free herself from the weight of his body while she heard some crashing and struggling, the other Cardassian shouting before more phaser fire lit up the room, and then, as suddenly as they had gone out, the lights were powered back up. They were dimmer than before, humming noisily, apparently driven by a crude backup system—but at least Kira could see again.
Breathless, Kira looked around the room to see that Tahna had weakly crawled to his knees. Near the doorway stood the emaciated woman Kira had freed just a few moments before, a crazed, haunted expression lighting up her eyes, and a smoking phaser—presumably Kira’s, snatched from the table where the Cardassians had left it—clutched tightly in her hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kira said, and helped Tahna to his feet. He leaned on her heavily, barely able to stand. The other woman reached out one terribly thin and dirty arm to steady him, and together, the two women dragged him up the spiral staircase, and outside toward freedom.
Odo could find no words. He watched his forensic analyst go over the scene of the explosion for the third time, apparently trying to find any extraneous evidence that would point to a conclusion other than what they were all thinking—that Odo had condemned the wrong men to death for the attempt on Dukat’s life. Not that it would have mattered much to the Cardassians—Bajorans were all guilty of something. Odo had found this assumption to be almost universally held by his Cardassian cohorts. But the shape-shifter had always done his best to refute this prejudice, and he worried now that he had failed.
This new explosion, which had taken place on the Promenade earlier today, had missed Dukat and his entourage by such a narrow margin that the sleeve of Dukat’s uniform had been singed, his hand badly burned; but his life had been spared yet again, thanks to one of his soldiers, who had managed to get the prefect out of the way just before the device was detonated. It was, curiously, the same soldier who had saved the prefect during the last assassination crisis, but Odo quickly surmised that it was because Dukat had specifically chosen this man to accompany him on an almost daily basis. At least, that was the conclusion that Odo wanted to be true.
“Can you give me a preliminary picture of what the evidence is suggesting to you, Dal Kaer?” Odo solemnly inquired of the analyst.
Kaer’s mouth was an unmoving line as he faced the security chief, and then he spoke. “Whoever committed this crime was apparently in league with our three suspects from earlier in the week,” he said without emotion.
Odo nodded. “A fair conclusion,” he allowed, though he was thinking something very different. “It is a shame then,” he added, “that our three suspects have been executed already. Otherwise they could perhaps help us with this investigation.”
Kaer looked taken aback. Odo had not intended to let so much apparent bitterness show in his voice, and he modified his tone. “But there is no reason to speculate on lost opportunities,” he said. “We must make the most of the evidence that we have access to.”
“Indeed. I’ll have Gil Letra round up a sampling of our usual troublemakers from the Bajoran sector and he can begin questioning them right away.”
Odo nodded, as he normally did to such a suggestion, but an overwhelming possibility had him deeply troubled—the possibility that Dukat’s current Cardassian adjutant somehow knew about the bombings, for it was simply too uncanny, in Odo’s mind, that the soldier would have known to push Dukat out of the way just before the explosion erupted. Dukat would reject the hypothesis immediately; Odo knew there was little point in even suggesting such a thing. After all, several identical bombings had occurred in Musilla Province recently, and Dukat would be sure to point out that his assistant could hardly be associated with those incidents. But Odo also knew that it was not unheard of for Cardassians to occasionally assist in Bajoran mischief, for a large enough bribe, or for their own political gain.
Odo wondered if perhaps this soldier had caught wind of a terrorist plot, agreed to help carry it out in exchange for some favor or bribe, and then saved his prefect at the last moment so he would appear to be a hero. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. However, Dukat would never accept the idea. This case would likely remain open, just like that of the Bajoran chemist who had been killed. Dukat didn’t care about justice so much as he cared about making an appropriate display of punishment to keep his workers in line, and though Odo wanted to deny that truth, it was in cases such as this one that it became impossible to ignore. That he was an instrument in carrying out Dukat’s draconian policies was troubling, to say the least.
The shape-shifter returned to his office to log the evidence into the security database, for all the good it would do anyone. He planned to regenerate immediately after his business with this case was completed, but as soon as he entered his office, he saw that it would be impossible. The Ferengi child was waiting for him.
“Chief,” Nog implored him, rising to his feet. “My uncle says to tell you that he’s dropping the charges against my father. Please—you’ve got to let him out.”
“Then why isn’t your uncle here?” Odo said, brushing past the small alien.
“He’s too busy tending his bar. He tried to contact you, but you were unavailable—”
“I’m in the middle of a high-profile investigation,” Odo said. “I don’t have time to resolve these petty family squabbles right now. Tell your uncle that if he wants his brother released, he’ll have to come to my office and fill out the paperwork himself.”
“But…chief…there’s nobody to tend the bar, and I thought you might—”
“Quark might have thought of that inconvenience when he had your father arrested,” Odo said irritably. Of course, it was all utter foolishness. Once again, the Ferengi were having a pointless tiff, and once again, Odo had been dragged into it. This time, Quark was accusing his brother of attacking a customer, a claim Odo found to be unlikely, but the Kobheerian freight officer substantiated the claims, and Odo had no choice but to put Rom in a holding cell until he could be processed and fined.