Tahna kept his views to himself as they moved in. The building was only a hecapate away, but before they could come close enough to detonate their explosives, a white sheet of blinding fire rose up from beyond the gates of the facility. Tahna threw his body backward to avoid the fallout of shrapnel, and the blast of heat washed over them. But after a moment, he saw that they had been far enough away to avoid contact with any flying debris. He sheepishly rose.
“Someone beat us to it,” Jouvirna said, his voice tinged with awe.
“Someone else blew up the orphanage,” Tahna said, stating the obvious, finding some measure of relief in the revelation. This wasn’t the first time his cell had conspired to kill Cardassian children, or even the children of Bajoran collaborators. He found some reassurance in the discovery that other cells were capable of such an act.
Shouting had followed the explosion—shouts of Bajoran men, at least two of whom seemed to be headed in Tahna’s direction. A beat later, a middle-aged man stepped out of the smoke, approaching Tahna and the others.
“Ho there,” Tahna called. The man wore the garb of a farmer, dun-colored coveralls that were permanently grassy-green at the knees from kneeling for the harvest. As he came closer, Tahna saw that he was missing three teeth on the left side of his mouth, probably a result of poor nutrition. “What cell are you?”
“Cell?” The man called out. “None! We live in Petrita village, that way.” He gestured to the east as a second man joined him. “We have been planning to destroy this site for over a week. It’s the only place around here the spoonheads haven’t abandoned.”
“Are you sure?” Biran called out.
“Positive,” answered the second man. He wore a stained leather vest over his tunic. “We’ve been scoping out all the local Cardassian sites. The only place they had anyone left was here at the orphanage. But don’t worry, the children were all gone.”
“Gone?” Biran said. “But the Cardassians don’t claim the children of others…?”
“The young ones were taken in by Bajoran families,” he said. “They’re too little to know any different. If they’re lucky, they can just forget they were ever Cardassian.”
“The young ones?” Tahna asked. “So…who was left?”
“There were three teenage boys in there who fancied themselves heroes,” the farmer said. “They barricaded themselves inside and started taking potshots at us when we came near, though I couldn’t tell you where they got their weapons—probably stolen from dead bodies around here somewhere. We figured we’d have to bomb them out—and so we did.” He gestured back to the smoking rubble that had been the squat building as the other man raised his fist in victory.
Tahna felt strange as he considered the Cardassian teenagers. Abandoned here on an unfamiliar world, fighting for the very people who had left them behind. He briefly wished he hadn’t asked. It was easier just to look on the remains of a building and feel triumphant.
“Are you all right, mister?” One of the farmers directed his question toward Tahna, who realized that he must be wearing his uncertainty. He forced a laugh, just before the bulky comm unit he carried alerted him with a squawk.
“This is six-one-six calling kejal-three-two…”It was Kira, back at the caves.
“This is kejalthree-two, six-one-six, go ahead.”
“Kejal three-two, reports of attack ships sighted in the Musilla region, headed toward Dahkur Province, estimated arrival one half-hour. Best to take cover, over.”
Tahna’s heart sank. “Copy that,” he responded, looking to the others in his cell. Judging by their grave expressions, they had all heard it. The two farmers had heard it, as well, and did not hesitate to scurry back in the direction from which they had come.
“Helpful chaps,” Biran remarked sourly.
“More spoonheads,” Tahna lamented. “We had them all but wiped out in this province…”
“Forget it, Tahna, we’ve got to go,” Jouvirna said, gesturing to the others as he broke into a jog. “We’ve got just enough time to make it back to the tunnels.”
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.