Laren lost her attitude in no time at all. “Yes!” she said. She stole a glance at Bis to see if he was watching, and sure enough, he was staring right at her. Her eyes met his for a moment, but she was too excited to be embarrassed. This was the perfect opportunity to impress him, and maybe she’d even get to kill a spoonhead or two.

16

Lenaris could not resist flicking out his hands to steady the flight yoke. His little brother turned to him, burning with annoyance, to judge from his expression. “I know how to do this, Holem.”

“I know you do, Jau. But I keep thinking that you might want to wait until afterwe exit the atmosphere before you—”

“Leave him alone, Lenaris.” Ornathia Sten spoke from where he crouched in the back of the raider. It was a tight fit with the three of them in the little ship, but since most of the cell’s raiders had been taken to the Lunar V base, they generally had to commute in cramped quarters.

“I’m going to be flying on my own for this raid,” Jau said firmly.

“Of course,” Lenaris said, meaning to be reassuring, aware that he probably sounded condescending. As always, according to Jau.

Jau shook his head, and Lenaris decided it would be best to keep silent. Jau was sixteen, and though it was true he was as good a pilot as any of the grown men, Lenaris still couldn’t help but regard him as a baby. The age gap was enough that Lenaris wasn’t entirely sure how it was that Jau had come to be the gawky near-adult he was now; Lenaris had already left home to join the resistance before Jau had even learned his first words. But this mission called for every available pilot, and he could not argue that Jau was capable. It was only…Lenaris wasn’t sure what his mother would do if anything happened to Jau. He wasn’t sure what hewould do.

It was a long way to Jeraddo in a sub-impulse raider, the moon where the Ornathia cell had managed to store most of their raiders, since Pullock V. They couldn’t keep all of their ships in Relliketh, where the cell was currently headquartered—as quickly as Taryl came up with new fuels, new ways to mask them, the Cardassians found ways to detect them, and the fleet was too large now to keep together.

The Ornathia fleet had regrown in recent years, as more people joined the cell. Some of Taryl’s cousins who had originally fled back to their families’ farms had returned to the cell after the Pullock V report had gained notoriety. Some of the raiders could still be stored in the Berain mountains, where the natural kelbonite in the rock shielded them from overhead scans, but the constant lifting off from the same location was risky, and Lenaris had suggested moving some of the shuttles to Derna, but Taryl had insisted that it would not be wise to keep the communications links and the shuttles in the same place. Halpas had been the first to suggest Jeraddo; the sparsely populated moon was of little interest to the Cardassians, their presence there minimal. It was the perfect place to hide their ships.

Lenaris tried to make conversation to pass the time. It never hurt to remind everyone of the basics, either. “So, we’ll go in with a typical kiendafan formation, with me and Sten in the lead. Jau, you and Nerissa will flank, and—”

“I know,” Jau said wearily. “And the Legans will be at the tail. We pull down until we’re just about fifty linnipates above the base, and then we drop our ordnance in the center of four parked skimmers, and pull up. The blast should take out at least sixteen skimmers, if we position our explosives in the correct place, so make each hit count.”

“Yeah,” Lenaris said lamely. From the back, Sten chuckled.

Lenearis said little else until they reached the site, where they cruised over the forests of Jeraddo and quickly found the cave they had dubbed Lunar V. There were twelve raiders in all here, many of them engineered entirely from scrap, mostly by Taryl. These improvised ships lacked the comprehensive sensors that some of the older raiders were equipped with, though Taryl hoped to change that eventually.

It was one of these “newer” birds that Jau would be flying, since he was considered an apt enough pilot to compensate for the lack of equipment. The Legan brothers were barely competent fliers, and Lenaris would have been happy to have left them behind entirely, but they were short on pilots just now. Taryl was pregnant, and Lenaris wouldn’t have dreamed of putting her in harm’s way. She was safely back at Tilar, working on the communications upgrades. Halpas and a few of the others were on Derna right now, calibrating new relay towers to keep the cells on Bajor connected. And there had been an accident recently. The warp carrier had been taken out to try and make contact with some of the Bajorans outside the B’hava’el system, and it had never returned. Seven people were on that freighter, seven members of the extended cell, seven friends, brothers, sisters, parents, children—seven pilots. Lenaris had to make do with what was left.

The Legan brothers were coming in with Ornathia Nerissa, and Lenaris didn’t trust them to take one of the scrap raiders. No, it was better to put them in the idiot-proof ships, though he didn’t feel especially confident they wouldn’t find some way of getting themselves lost—or, more likely, killed.

Lenaris quickly claimed his own shuttle, and they set to work. The little vessels had to be pushed manually from the cave, and the three men worked to move their vessels out into a more reasonable takeoff position, stomping through the heavy foliage and sidestepping the unusually large insects that patrolled the moon. The second of their transport shuttles docked while they were struggling, and Nerissa and the Legans emerged to help them. They managed to get each ship into position, each one loaded with appropriate ammunition, each double-checked according to Taryl’s extensive list.

There were a few backslaps and encouraging words, and it was time. Each man or woman climbed into his or her vessel, all looking deferentially to Lenaris. It had never been said—at least, not within his earshot—but he knew they considered him the leader. It wasn’t a job he’d lobbied for, but he couldn’t deny the responsibility.

“Good fighting, everyone,” Lenaris said, and pulled the glacis plate of his raider closed. He tapped in a few commands and lifted his shuttle into Jeraddo’s mild sky, pushing through the sound barrier and out of the atmosphere in almost no time at all. There was little in the way of shock absorption. The inertial dampers did their best to keep up, but Lenaris was still rocked crazily about his cockpit before the shuttle broke into the openness of space.

He immediately tested the new sensor array that Taryl had come up with. He could see where the others were, and he tapped a command to each of them in code. Jau was the first to respond, and Lenaris felt a tightening pride in his chest, surpassed only by the residual traces of fear for his little brother’s safety that still lingered.

Prophets, keep him safe.

Dukat’s duties on this day had not permitted him to visit Meru as soon as he would have liked. For Dukat, there was no love that would ever transcend that which he shared with his wife, but between his few and far-between visits to Cardassia Prime, he grew lonely for female companionship. Most of his Bajoran dalliances had failed to hold his attention for long, but Meru was different. It could truthfully be said that he loved her. He may have been distracted lately by the birth of his new daughter, but his consideration of Meru had not faltered, only been put aside while he enjoyed the heady experience of having such close access to the newborn in his life. His children on Cardassia Prime had mostly been born while he was away on assignment, and he had been permitted to spend only brief stints of time with each of them while they were infants. His new half-Bajoran daughter represented a risky situation for him, but the cautious nature of the experience was easily displaced by the intense joy at her beautiful presence.