Tahna wasn’t so sure that they did have time, but he sprinted alongside the others, pushing himself into the state of dogged numbness that was usually required for long-distance running. The four men crashed through brush, ambled up hills and back down them again, weaving through trees and over creeks. Tahna had once known all these routes by heart, but they had grown dimmer since the grid had gone up, every outside errand or mission turning into a carefully formulated and executed plan. It had been exhilarating to think that the grid was down for good—though a new onslaught of Cardassians in the area might mean that these days of freedom were coming to an end.
They made it back to their hideout in record time. Crawling through the tunnels gave Tahna the opportunity to catch his breath, though his mouth tasted like metal from the ragged heaving of the smoky air. He coughed as he shimmied after the Kohn brothers, and the sound echoed eerily throughout the connected caverns and passageways.
Nerys was waiting for him in the larger passageway that connected the Shakaar and Kohn-Ma burrows. She followed them into their cavern, not wasting any time with what she had to say, a bright urgency in her voice. “Jaro Essa just issued a statement over the comm.”
Kohn Weir replied. “Jaro himself, or—?”
“It was Jaro,” Kira confirmed. “He says that someone from the Valo system is bringing a massive shipment of weapons into Dahkur tomorrow—modern phasers, raw materials for explosives, and—”
“Who is bringing it?” Jouvirna inquired.
“What difference does it make?” Kira exclaimed. “They’ve already smuggled a shipment to Kendra. Prophets willing, the pilot will be here tomorrow with even more. Jaro said they’ll be bringing shoulder-mounted missile launchers that can be fired from kellipatesaway, and long-range particle cannons for the raiders! We can take out heavy weapons emplacements, flyers, mechanized infantry units—all of it!”
The Kohn-Ma members looked at one another with skepticism and bewilderment.
“If what you say is true,” Biran finally spoke up, “then this is really going to be the end of it.”
“I know,” Kira said evenly, and suddenly, Tahna knew it, too. It was really going to be over.
LIBERATED BAJOR, YEAR ONE
2369 (Terran Calendar)
25
“Finally, I feel like the Prophets are listening,” Shakaar said, taking a sip from his mug of copalcider. “I’ve been writing the same thing on my renewal scrolls since I learned how to write, and this time—”
“You aren’t supposed to tell anyone what you write on your scroll,” Kira reminded him, as she leaned up against the bare trunk of a dead nyawood tree. The sky above them was striped with a deep-cast orange, the moons beginning to rise over the farthest mountain ranges. The air was thick with smoke from burning Cardassian wreckage—and from the traditional fires of the Gratitude Festival, currently being celebrated all over the planet. It could not have come at a more opportune time in the calendar.
Shakaar laughed and took another pull at his cider. “Could there be any question what I wrote on my scroll? What we all wrote?”
“It’s not my place to speculate what anyone else wrote,” Kira said primly, and took the mug from Shakaar’s hands to take a draught of her own.
Shakaar smiled at her, amusement shining in his eyes.
Both turned their heads to the sky as five more Cardassian troop carriers went up, bringing the day’s total up to somewhere in the low hundreds. All day long, the Shakaar cell had been watching the ships leave atmosphere. All were backlit by an eerie halo in the lower portion of the sky, a clinging, stinking haze of acrid chemical smoke—not from the bonfires and braziers that had begun to smolder just after the sun dipped in the horizon, but from the remains of Cardassian factories, mining camps, and military bases. Some of the larger facilities had been burning for weeks. The Cardassians had stopped trying to put them out more than a month past, retaliating instead with fires of their own—scorching and poisoning the fields of thousands of farmers, setting the forests ablaze, ensuring that although they were finally leaving, their presence would not soon be forgotten.
The resistance had pushed as hard as they could, just as Jaro Essa had advised, following the massacre in the Kendra Valley. At first, it had not seemed that would be enough—the soldiers just kept coming, and Bajoran casualties were heavy. The targets seemed too numerous and too distant to effectively remove by people on foot. But the tide had turned two weeks ago—no small thanks to the massive distribution of contraband weapons that had found its way to Bajor from the Valo system.
Kira squinted up into the darkening sky as the winking ship lights became too distant to see, and her face split into a wide smile. Her head felt light. Though she continually warned herself not to get her hopes up, she truly believed the occupation was coming to a close.
Shakaar shook his head, as if to illustrate his own wary disbelief, and then he smiled back at her.
“This seems as good a way to celebrate the Gratitude Festival as any,” Kira said.
“It’s a new year,” Shakaar murmured, taking the nearly empty mug away from her.
“A new era,” Kira said.
“ Peldor joi,Nerys,” Shakaar said.
“Peldor joi.”She repeated the traditional salutation of the Gratitude Festival. It seemed funny to her now, the old Bajoran words having become nearly meaningless in these past years. Her family had still celebrated the festival when she was a child, lighting a small metal brazier and burning the renewal scrolls along with an uncharacteristically large dinner. Many friends and neighbors would come to the Kira residence to take part in the feast, and there would even be some kind of small treat afterward, for the children. But in the years since she had joined the resistance, the festival had been almost forgotten—a nod to the Prophets, but the modest indulgences of Kira’s childhood seemed so far in the past as to have been imagined.
“I think they might really be leaving for good,” Shakaar observed, putting voice to the thing that all Bajorans had come to believe, but had mostly been afraid to say out loud.
“Time will tell,” Kira said carefully. “We need more cider.”
“And I need to write my scroll,” Shakaar said. “Shall we go back to camp?”
“I’ll be along,” Kira said, continuing to stare out at the sky, creeping over with dark. She turned for a moment to watch Shakaar amble back to the place where the cell had lit a bonfire of their own, swigging cider and gorging themselves on some makeshift approximation of hasperat. She admired him as he moved—she had always liked something about the way he moved—though of course there was nothing romantic about it; he was just a good-looking man, that was all. She turned away from him as the very notion of her old cell leader in amorous terms seized her, and she was overcome by a short burst of self-conscious laughter. Another carrier went up.
“Peldor joi,”she told it, gazing after the transport until she couldn’t see it anymore, and then turned to go back to camp; the hasperatwas calling.
“The civilian leaders’ decision was nearly unanimous,”Kell said. His face, almost filling the holoframe, was devoid of any expression.
Dukat cut him off with a barely suppressed snort.
“Have I amused you?”
Dukat shook his head, aware of the smile that refused to budge from his lips. There was nothing remotely amusing here, but if he stopped smiling, he was unsure of what would ultimately happen. His frustration rode so close to the surface of his bearings, he kept the reins tight as he carefully chose his words.
“I did all I could do.”