The young Ferengi left the office, clearly upset and concerned for his father, and Odo began the process of entering the latest data into the files on the explosion from this afternoon. But something was troubling him—something more than the obvious discrepancies regarding the apparent assassination attempt. He was bothered by the false claims Quark and the Kobheerian captain were laying against Rom. Though it was the sort of thing he usually paid the very least amount of attention to, his thoughts persisted in suggesting that Quark was up to something. There was a pattern in these arrests of Rom, and while Odo might be naïve, he was not an idiot.
Odo was tired, and his body was practically quavering with the desire to liquefy, but he decided his hunch was worth a second look. He made his way back to the holding cells, where several imprisoned Bajorans called out to him from behind the force fields. He disabled the field that held the Ferengi, who was sitting silently by himself in the corner, apparently trying to avoid any interaction with the angry Bajorans in the vicinity. He did not immediately realize that the force field had been deactivated, and Odo was forced to call to him.
“Rom,” Odo addressed the other man. “Come into my office, please. I have a few questions for you.”
“Uh. Okay,” the Ferengi replied. “But I already told you. I didn’t hit anyone.”
“Yes, I heard you the first time. But I’m curious to know—why are you lying for your brother again?”
Rom looked simultaneously astonished and terrified, his mouth falling open to expose his jagged teeth. “That’s not true, Odo!” he cried. “I don’t know anything—just ask Quark!”
“Yes, so he’s told me, on more than one occasion,” Odo said, folding his arms and tapping his fingers restlessly against his elbow. The urge to regenerate was becoming a need.
The Ferengi continued to jabber, but Odo already knew what the truth was, for it had happened twice before. Odo would not play along this time. “Your brother and the Kobheerian were conducting some sort of transaction.”
“No!” Rom said stoutly.
“The Kobheerian is gone now. Did your brother have you arrested so you couldn’t interfere? Or was it because he simply wanted to divert attention away from himself?”
“I don’t know anything about any transaction,” Rom insisted. “I don’t know why he had me arrested. I was just—”
“Yes, how could you have known what your brother was up to, when you were locked in here?”
“That’s right,” Rom said hopefully, though he didn’t seem to understand where Odo’s logic was going. Odo knew he had hit on the correct scenario, though there wasn’t any way to prove it. He wasn’t sure if he was quite so concerned with proving anything anymore, at least, not today.
“It worked the first time he did it, which was shortly after you accidentally implicated him with that business that got him fined for dealing in illegal Jibetian goods. It worked the second time he did it, last month, when the Boslic freighter captain was spending so much time in the bar. But this is the last time he tries it. I want you to be sure and tell him that, Rom. I’m dismissing your case. You’re free to go.”
The Ferengi did not even stop to thank him; he only scurried out onto the Promenade and back to his brother’s crooked establishment. It had occurred to Odo numerous times that if Quark’s bar were eliminated from the station, an exceptional percentage of the petty complaints that clogged his arrest roster would simply cease to exist. But then, he considered, the station’s residents would find some other means of causing trouble, and anyway, Odo did not have the authority to make such a suggestion.
In fact, how much authority did he really have here? He could release an unfairly accused Ferengi waiter, but beyond that, he was simply adhering to a rigid set of rules laid out by the prefect—rigid for anyone but Dukat himself. And within the rigidity of those laws, Odo had begun to discover that there were many curious instances in which following Cardassian policy to the letter resulted in the conviction of innocent men—as in the case of Rom’s frequent incarcerations at the behest of his brother…or the case of the three executed Bajorans.
He pushed away the latter thought yet again, for there was nothing he could do to resolve it. It was time for him to regenerate, and he went to retrieve the vessel where he could be safely contained in his natural state. But before he could be lulled into comfortable senselessness, he recalled some of the incidents from his days on Bajor—days when he had decided that what the Cardassians were doing on this world was wrong in its entirety. Odo had believed it until he had come to Terok Nor, and had met several Cardassians whom he thought he could relate to, on some level. Their laws had seemed sensible to him at the time—comfortably well-defined, unlike the Bajorans, for whom just about anything could fall under the definition of “good.” But now he was forced to rethink his assessment of the Cardassians once again, and he was revisiting his previous ideas of the so-called annexation more often than he wanted to.
If it was true that the occupation was wrong, then could any of the Cardassians’ actions, their laws, their decisions—could any of it possibly be right? Or must it all be rejected as further extension of their evil? Odo had to acknowledge that he didn’t know anymore, that the definition of what was right as it was given by a Bajoran terrorist, or his friend Russol, or the prefect, or the Ferengi bartender, all definitions seemed to intersect, and yet still contradict. As an outsider, Odo should have been in the perfect position, as Russol had said, from which to judge what was truly just. But it was becoming clearer to him all the time—he was not really an outsider at all.
OCCUPATION YEAR FORTY-ONE
2368 (Terran Calendar)
19
Tahna Los always appreciated a good excuse to shimmy through the tunnels and speak to Nerys, though Shakaar was usually hovering over them while they talked. The cell leader was ever trying to project his “brotherly” vibe, but Tahna knew better. Edon was a notorious womanizer, and though he hadn’t made any advances toward Nerys that Tahna knew about, it was only a matter of time. Anyway, Edon had been bickering with Biran and Jouvirna more than usual lately—trifling over “ethics” as always. Tahna was thankful that on this day, Edon was off in another cavern with Mobara, looking over some piece of equipment or other.
“What do you want now, Tahna?” Nerys griped. She hadn’t been doing anything in particular, as far as Tahna could tell. She held a padd in one hand—she had probably been reading something. But she always had to make a show of being annoyed by him. In truth, Tahna welcomed it. After the last time he had been captured by the Cardassians, Kira had been awkward with him for a while, apparently out of guilt—or pity. But now that time had passed, Nerys’s manner with him was starting to drift back toward the familiar, and Tahna couldn’t have been happier that she was short with him today. “Don’t tell me the grid is already back online,” she said.
The cells had made numerous attempts to permanently knock out the sensor towers, but the Cardassians were always quick to repair them. Every time they went back online, Kira and Tahna began a wager to see which cell would be first to take them out again. It was unfair, since the Shakaar cell had twice the members of the Kohn-Ma, and pointless, since the two cells were practically converged at this point, but Tahna felt it was useful to have the incentive—especially since he had grown so familiar with what could happen when you got caught.
“They are,” Tahna told her, “but there’s more to it than that, this time. I’ve just gotten my hands on a schematic.” He pulled an isolinear rod out of his jerkin. “Trentin Fala brought it to us, stolen from the Cardassian records office in Tempasa. Blueprints.”