She removed her helmet and gloves and took a deep breath, but the heat in the facility quickly made her feel sluggish. She stuffed the gloves into the helmet and tucked it under her arm, looking around for a computer console and fingering the datarod in the pocket of her heavy suit. She found a console not far inside the building, and, trying to be as stealthy as she could in her clunky attire, she quickly began to hack into the system. She had to hunt and peck at the Cardassian characters on the keyboard. She could read Cardassian letters somewhat, but only piecemeal, one at a time, and she struggled to hurry as she murmured the phonetic sounds under her breath.

She jammed the datarod into a port and waited while the download ran. She entered a code to shield the activity from anyone else who might be in the compound, but stopped tapping as she became aware of a sound. Voices.

She plucked the datarod from its port and crouched down below the console, peering just over the edge to see what was going on. She was shocked to see a Cardassian emerge from a doorway built into the floor, and he was talking to someone below him. How could that be? Mace had said that there was only one soldier awake right now, and he was in the other wing of the building. How had he overlooked these two? Could there be a shield that protected them from scans, maybe an underground bunker where they could not be detected? Laren hunkered down further below the console, wondering if she should contact Bram or just try to slip out on her own. The Cardassians had not been wearing armor, he should be easy enough to shoot, if she had to…

She peered over the edge of the console again, and what she saw next stopped her heart in her throat. The second man who had come from below looked…different from most of the Cardassians she had seen in her life. It was his hair. It was not the same tarry black that the vast majority of spoonheads had been endowed with; no, by some quirk of natural selection, this man’s slick hair was a dusty, golden color. A color that Laren had seen on a Cardassian only one other time in all her life. She checked again to ensure that it was true. Of course, it was possible that there was more than one blond Cardassian in the galaxy…but no, this was the one. This was the man who had killed her father.

“Varc,” the dark-haired one said to him, to the murderer. “Come here and look at this. The backup security loop is doing something odd.”

“What do you mean, odd?” The light-haired soldier peered at his companion’s console.

“It looks like there’s a breach out there.”

Laren clutched at her phaser. Four soldiers she had killed since joining the resistance. She was about to make it six. She squeezed her eyes shut, took a breath—and then she sprang up from her hiding place, phaser at the ready. The resultant flash was blinding, and the first man caught it full in the chest. He flew back, crashing into the light-haired one and pinning him to the console behind him. Ro rushed forward without quite realizing what she was doing, to jam the weapon directly in the face of the man who had taken so much from her.

“You!” she shouted, her voice shaking.

The blond Cardassian was shaking off the blast. “What?” he said blearily, but he could say no more, for Laren squeezed the trigger, and then she turned and ran for her life.

Dukat was in ops, looking over the security logs, when Basso approached him. He gave the Bajoran a look that conveyed it was a bad time, but Basso was impatient to speak, and he did so despite the prefect’s unspoken command.

“Sir, it’s about the Kira family…”

Dukat quickly gestured Basso up the short platform to his office, herding him inside. When the door was closed, he turned to him.

“What can possibly be so important that you would bring up such a topic in the center of operations?”

“My sincere apologies, sir, but you see, this is the time when I normally bring the extra allotment of supplies to the Kira family, and I thought that perhaps—” He stopped, expecting Dukat to quickly catch on to where he was going with this, but the prefect said nothing, only looked even more annoyed than before.

“Do you still need me to make that delivery?” Basso finally asked.

Dukat’s eyes narrowed. “How dare you,” he said, his voice eerily low.

“Sir, I apologize, again—please, understand—I only want to know what’s expected of me, considering the…new circumstances.”

Dukat looked at a spot on the wall, and then raised his head, his deeply pensive gaze traveling up to the ceiling. “Let me explain something to you, Basso. I loved Meru with all my heart, and promised her—I gave my word—that I would look after them for the rest of their lives. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir, of course.” Basso inclined his head, in part to keep the prefect from seeing how florid his complexion had suddenly become. He was deeply frustrated, but there was nothing he could do; if Dukat wanted to alleviate his guilt for having Meru put to death, then Basso was going to have to comply. It was that, or work in the mines with the herd animals, and he’d long ago decided that he was not a man who could live without comforts. Food and a warm bed went a long way toward clearing his conscience. If the rest of them didn’t want to cooperate, they could stay in the mines, where they belonged.

He went to see to his duty, cursing the dead Meru.

Lenaris’s mother could not be consoled, not by the reminders of her impending status as a new grandmother, not by her surviving son’s constant reassurances that he was working practically around the clock to find out what had become of Jau. It was a hollow promise, that he would find Jau alive, and he knew it. He had exhausted every means of locating his brother; none had panned out to anything at all.

It was the week after he’d given up, the week that he was distracted by the baby’s quickly approaching due date, when he received word from the Kintaura resistance cell over in Rakantha province that wreckage had been found, not far from the Meiku forest.

“An old raider?” Lenaris asked the woman on the other end of the comm.

“Not exactly,”she told him, her voice tinny. “The ship seemed to have been…modified. It was like a raider, but the wings were—”

“Longer?” Lenaris asked, his heart seeming to stop.

“Yes, that’s right.”

Lenaris let out the breath he had been holding. So it was true. Jau’s raider had gone down. “Was there…Did you find…any remains?” he asked quietly.

“No, there weren’t. In fact, it wasn’t so much wreckage as…the ship came down hard, but a person could have walked away from it.”

“Really?” Lenaris felt his heart start to beat again. “You think…the pilot survived, then?”

“I do, yes. We’ve hauled in the raider, we’ll be refurbishing it—it hardly sustained any damage at all. We’ve been keeping an eye out for the pilot, but—I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there was a recent sweep between Rakantha and Dahkur—anyone found wandering outside Cardassian-imposed boundaries was picked up and taken to…a particular work camp.”

Lenaris let out another hard breath. “A camp on the surface?” he asked. Maybe he could stage a rescue effort.

“Yes, but…it’s Gallitep.”

“Gallitep!” He didn’t have a prayer of getting Jau out. Lenaris clenched his fists, thinking of the stories he’d heard. Severe rationing, death by starvation and exhaustion…medical experiments. Jau was just a boy, he wouldn’t last a week in a place like that.

“I’m very sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s possible he’s still hiding in the woods somewhere, if he has survival skills…”

Lenaris wiped his eyes. In fact, Jau was new to the resistance movement, had lived his entire childhood in the relative safety of the refugee camp. Lenaris had been planning on teaching him a few things, after he really started to get the hang of flying…