What You Leave Behind by Diane Carey

Author:Diane Carey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek

CHAPTER

7

On Cardassia Prime, everything had changed in an instant. Weyoun’s blunder had rocketed around the planet like shockwaves rushing from pole to pole and back again stronger. Whole regiments of Cardassian troops were finding their way through the secret channels to the resistance. Ekoor had opened a hundred veins of communication that yesterday would have been suicide. Now they were filled with eager voices, soldier and civilian alike. The planet had had enough of the Dominion, its Founders, its hive-headed Jem’Hadar, and its ethereal spook Vorta.

Damar huddled with Kira and Ekoor around last-minute preparations for their assault on Dominion Headquarters. Their forces had swelled mightily in the last two hours. Just in this cellar were five more Cardassians, including two soldiers and three civilians, armed and ready.

Ekoor troubled over the schematic Damar had drawn of the Headquarters’ interior.

“According to this map,” he said, “it’s a long way from the cargo door to the briefing room.”

“That could be a problem,” Kira agreed. “The explosion’s going to alert everyone in the building.”

“If I know Weyoun,” Damar told them, “there’ll only be a handful of Jem’Hadar on duty. He’ll have sent the rest to hunt down Cardassians—”

The rest of his sentence was stripped away in the sound of an explosion, a resonant boom that came down through the walls. The floor trembled.

Kira tensed. “What the hell—?”

Garak rushed down the stairs and nearly fell. “The Jem’Hadar! They’re leveling the city, building by building!”

“We have to go,” Kira said, “right now!”

Damar stayed any action with a temperate hand. “Once we get inside Dominion Headquarters, we stop for nothing and no one until we capture the Changeling. For Cardassia!”

“For Cardassia!”

Kira Nerys watched as all the Cardassians dodged from the cellar, fired by the opportunity to take back their planetary pride, led by the rogue officer who had become a legend.

Damar? A legend? How things could change.

She waited until they were all out of the room. She wanted to make sure nothing had been forgotten which they could use. They wouldn’t be coming back to this place.

As she put her foot on the bottom step, she cast one gaze to the least likely and most disturbing corner, the place where Mila’s body had been tucked, wrapped in a tarp.

There, she paused. In the shadow, Garak stood mute over Mila’s clumpy form.

Kira thought he’d gone up with the others. When Mila had been killed, Garak had shown only one moment of horror before returning to his typical self, casting off trouble like shedding rain from his shoulders. Now Kira could see the lie. And the truth.

“Garak?” she began gently.

“I’m coming, Commander,” he said, as if expecting her to speak up. “I’m just saying goodbye.”

Though she tried to leave, assuming he would want to be alone, Kira responded instead to an inner alarm that told her he needed something other than solitude. They’d known each other a very long time, had never really been friends, but had fought side by side long enough to have a certain bond of understanding that she felt very powerfully now.

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