Ro stood up sharply, throwing back her chair. It crashed loudly against a console behind her. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but I am notrequired to put up with this.”
“Go on, then, leave. Again,”Cenn said as she started to turn away. His accusatory tone stopped her, held her against her will. “That’s what you do best, isn’t it? I’m sure, now that half the Militia is following your example, you must feel vindicated for giving up on Bajor during the Occupation.”
“Major Cenn!”
Cenn snapped to his feet and came to attention. Ro stared at him blankly, scarcely aware that General Lenaris was standing in the open doorway that led outside.
Lenaris’s steely voice cut through the sudden silence. “Report to Colonel Heku, Major. Tell him I said you’re to assist in sweeping the western slope for additional evidence.”
“Yes, sir,” Cenn said, and headed immediately toward the exit. Lenaris moved aside to let him pass, then closed the door behind him.
The general turned to Ro, who still hadn’t moved. “I’m sorry about that. Do you want to file a complaint?”
“No,” Ro said.
Lenaris seemed to relax and started walking toward her. “Any luck yet in your investigation?” he asked.
Ro shook her head, having barely heard Lenaris’s question. Anger and embarrassment mixed with confusion as she realized how completely she’d allowed Cenn to get under her skin. I’ve endured people judging me before. Why did I let it rattle me this time?
Lenaris, to his credit, didn’t press her on the matter. He seemed content to wait and see if she wanted to talk. Well, he would be waiting a long time, then. She was done talking. Screw this and screw these people. She never needed them before, and she sure as hell didn’t need them now….
“Do you—” she said quietly, suddenly unable to keep the words from forcing their way out of her mouth. “Do you think he’s right about me?”
Lenaris sighed, then settled into a chair at the workstation next to Ro’s. A thick silence settled between them.
“You know,” he said at length, “I remember the day you testified publicly before the Chamber of Ministers about your activities after you turned Maquis. Fighting the Cardassians, fighting the Dominion. You gave that testimony right before you received your honorary commission in the Militia.”
“I didn’t realize you were there,” she said, sitting back down and wondering why he was bringing thatup.
Lenaris shrugged. “No reason you would. I was just one member of the Militia brass among many in the back of the room, and I was only a colonel then. Still, your testimony made an impression on me.”
Curious in spite of herself, Ro asked, “Any particular part?”
“Everything you didn’t say.”
Ro frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Let’s just say I’ve found that sometimes you can form a clearer picture about someone from what they don’t say than what they do,” Lenaris told her. “That day, the things I didn’t hear made me throw my support behind your appointment to the Militia.”
Ro found it hard to conceal her surprise. “I…I didn’t know that. Thank you.”
Lenaris waved the matter aside. “No need for that, although I admit it was an uphill fight. I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to learn that there were a lot of senior officers who didn’t want you there. It was difficult to get enough votes in the command council just to keep them from letting Starfleet arrest you, much less give you a job. As far as they were concerned, you were undependable and unpredictable. You were a complication in our relationship with the Federation. Worst of all, in a lot of eyes, you’d turned your back on Bajor when it needed you most.”
“Maybe they were right,” she said.
“I didn’t think so.”
She looked at him again. “Why not?”
“Because of everything you didn’t say,” Lenaris said with a smile. “You never really explained why you came home.”
Ro shrugged. “What’s to explain?”
“Maybe nothing,” Lenaris conceded. “But maybe the lack of an explanation is more telling than anything you could have said out loud. I think deep down in your paghyou regret leaving Bajor when it needed every fighter it had, and you’ve carried that guilt ever since. It’s why you kept looking for a new fight. You hoped to find one in Starfleet, but that ended badly, not once, but twice.”
Ro kept her expression neutral as the ghosts of Garon II paraded across her vision. She blinked them away. She wondered if she would ever stop seeing them.
“Then the DMZ conflict flared up,” Lenaris went on, “and it gave you the first real opportunity to do what you didn’t do for your own world. When the Dominion wiped out the Maquis, you just shifted the fight over to them. I’m guessing you didn’t even expect to survive. But you did…and once you ran out of fights, and thought you had finally atoned for giving up on Bajor, you came home.
“That’s what I heard that day in the Chamber of Ministers. That was what you didn’t say. And I thought you were right. Whatever sin you feel you committed against Bajor, Laren, you’ve long since atoned for it.”
Ro said nothing.
“For what it’s worth,” Lenaris said, “Major Cenn isn’t usually such an ass. He’s actually a good man. That outburst was out of character. It’s just that…to some people in the Militia, the transfer of so many personnel to Starfleet is a shock to the system, one that they need time to work through.”
Ro glared at him. “And I suppose my being here at such a time, with my past, back in a Starfleet uniform, just pushed him too far, is that what you’re telling me?”
“You know that isn’t what I meant.”
“Then what are you saying, General?”
Lenaris leaned forward, and Ro could tell he was making an effort not to lose his temper. “I’m asking you to try to understand what some of us in the Militia are experiencing, now that the reality of the changeover has settled in. We’re not stupid, Laren. We know Bajorans need to be in Starfleet, to have a voice in its operations and its policies, and to share responsibility for shaping and implementing them. But there still need to be Bajorans who will put Bajor first, and their voice needs to be heard, too. The more of us who put on a Starfleet uniform, the more the rest of us fear that Bajor’s voice will be lost in the multitude.”
Lenaris stood up and walked out of the MCC without another word. Ro watched him leave and, alone again, realized that the general had painted a picture she hadn’t stopped to consider.
Every Federation planet had its own domestic peacekeeping force. Starfleet dealt with matters of interstellar scope, but every world still needed a home guard to deal with local security issues according to local law. Bajor was no exception, and the Bajoran Militia wasn’t dispensable. Contrary to Major Cenn’s earlier rant, nowhere near half the Militia was transferring to Starfleet. The real percentage was actually minor for a global military, and would disappear as the Militia stepped up its own recruitment efforts to replenish its lost numbers .
On the other hand, Ro could easily see how a period of doubt and uncertainty would accompany such changes—at least in the beginning, as the new order took hold. She imagined that every world found its own way of dealing with the transition. And again Bajor would be no exception.
Maybe…maybe I can even help it along.
Straightening in her chair, Ro tapped her workstation’s interface. “Computer, access the Bajoran Central Archives and search alldatabases for allreferences to the Sidau village in Hendrikspool Province. Then establish an uplink with the mainframe on Starbase Deep Space 9 and conduct the same search. Authorization: Ro, phi-delta-seven. Execute.”
Having spent her early years in Jo’kala and the camps closest to it, Ro hadn’t been to Ashalla in her youth. It wasn’t until after the Dominion War that she’d gotten to see other parts of her homeworld for the first time, including the capital. What had struck her on those occasions was how old a city Ashalla really was; its elegantly designed buildings and ornate thoroughfares of red-brown granite and sand-colored fusionstone were built millennia before anyone had ever heard the word “Cardassian.” It was sobering to see how much of her people’s heritage—how much memory—the city still held, and more sobering still to learn that most of civilized Bajor was just like this, even after everything the Cardassians had wrought. After she’d returned to the planet of her birth, she realized with a profound sense of sadness that she no longer knew this world, had never known it at all.