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Kleya had never been to Bajor before.
At first sight, the dilapidated streets of the city she walked through were just like those of any other planet – crumbling buildings and scared eyes peering from behind corners, the sound of Imperial soldiers marching in the distance. Just another planet under Imperial occupation, its natural resources stripped to feed the Imperial war machine and its people ground to dust beneath their boots.
The story seemed the same as it always was. Once, Bajor had been a prospering planet, a center of art and culture. Now, all that had been taken from it. But Bajor was not exactly like any other planet, and the Bajorans were not exactly like many other subjects of Imperial rule. Despite this planet’s position in the Outer Rim, many people in the galaxy knew the name Bajor. The people here were not so beaten down as they seemed.
Kleya was supposedly here on “legitimate” business. She was an antiques dealer inquiring about a valuable Bajoran artifact – just another Imperial plunderer coming to steal the last remnants of Bajor’s cultural history. Still, it was best to avoid the Imperial soldiers. Kleya ducked into an alleyway and took a different street to avoid the patrol a device strapped to her wrist informed her was approaching.
In reality, Kleya was here to strengthen ties with the Bajoran resistance. She and Luthen had agreed it was a good idea. Of all the planets in the galaxy most likely to rise up in a sudden and dramatic show of force against the Empire, Bajor was an excellent candidate.
It only took a second look into the eyes of the Bajorans Kleya passed on the street to see that fear was not the only emotion there. Beneath that fear, simmering just beneath the surface, was a deep and powerful rage that Kleya recognized. It echoed the rage she kept buried deep inside her. The Bajorans were angry – angry enough to fight and die in an attempt to drive the invaders off their planet. They’d done it before.
Long before the Empire existed, Bajor had been occupied by a different power. A nearby planet, Cardassia, had attacked and occupied Bajor, extracting its resources and enslaving its people. The Republic had taken little action to stop this. Bajor and Cardassia were in the Outer Rim, after all, so why should anyone from the Core care what happened to Bajor?
The Bajorans cared. They fought back bitterly. The Bajoran resistance grew to be a formidable force despite the Cardassians’ superior ships and weapons, and in the end the Cardassians had retreated. The Bajorans celebrated their freedom, but that freedom only lasted for a few years before the Imperial army arrived.
Now Bajor and Cardassia were both under Imperial occupation. Kleya suspected the Cardassian streets looked just as these did, only there would be no burning fire of determination to resist in the Cardassians’ eyes. It was the Bajorans who were willing to fight for their freedom.
Kleya turned down another street and spotted the establishment she was heading for. Quark’s Bar was well known in these parts. It had a disreputable air, but inside it was quite crowded with various aliens drinking and gambling and talking loudly. There were two Imperial soldiers in the corner, Kleya noted, off-duty but still in partial uniform. A scantily clad Bajoran woman was leaning against the wall beside them, a strained smile on her face. Other women dressed like her were dotted throughout the room. All of them were Bajoran, yet almost none of the bar’s customers were.
Kleya moved purposefully but unhurriedly to the bar where a Ferengi was serving drinks.
“Welcome to Quark’s,” he said when she approached. “What can I get you?”
“Are you Quark?” Kleya asked, not bothering to mask the dislike in her voice. It was clear from a glance around this establishment what kind of man he was.
“That’s right. Do you want a drink or not? We only want paying customers here.”
“I’ll have a raktajino,” Kleya said.
She was a little early for her meeting. She wasn’t sure if her contact would be here yet.
She slouched at the bar while Quark poured her drink, pretending to be uninterested in her surroundings. Quark brought the drink over and Kleya handed him a handful of credits. He froze for a moment, staring down at the credits she’d dropped into his hand – many times the price of the drink. Warily, he glanced back up at her.
“I’m a buyer here to meet a seller,” Kleya murmured, convenient shouting from a nearby gambling table ensuring no one nearby could overhear.
Quark’s eyes widened briefly. Kleya had been told he’d know to expect her. Then he nodded, and his expression turned decidedly more friendly. He’d been paid a substantial sum of money on her behalf.
“Your holosuite is waiting for you,” he told her. “Room three, up the stairs and down the hall.”
Kleya nodded, finished her drink in a couple sips, and stood, turning away from the bar and avoiding looking toward the Imperials in the corner.
The holosuites were located discreetly in the back, but were designed to be easy to find. They were one of the main attractions of Quark’s bar, after all.
Anyone who spotted Kleya heading in this direction would assume she’d come here for sex, which was what most people came to holosuites for. Anyone paying a little more attention might guess she was a dealer meeting a potential business associate. Most likely, she was a drug dealer. That was what Quark presumably believed.
Kleya entered holosuite three and found herself in a forest filled with tall trees, sunlight filtering through the leaves. On a nearby bench sat a Bajoran woman with short hair wearing nondescript clothing. The woman barely glanced at Kleya as she entered, expression appearing disinterested.
“Are you the seller?” Kleya asked, approaching the bench.
“That’s right,” the Bajoran woman said.
Her name was Kira. That was all Kleya really knew about her. Her voice was familiar though. Kira and Kleya had been communicating by radio for nearly a year now. Kleya had helped the Bajoran rebels coordinate a raid on an Imperial mining facility, and Kleya had procured a few devices that would help the Bajorans detect Imperial patrols. For months, Kleya had listened to the sound of Kira’s voice, low and urgent, just another voice in a sea of them. They’d never talked about anything beyond the practical details of their collaboration, but still, irrational though it was since they didn’t truly know each other, Kira felt familiar.
“Do you have it with you?” Kleya asked.
“I have a holo-recording.”
Kleya sat down on the bench beside Kira and took the holo-recorder Kira held out to her. She flicked it on and a hologram of the artifact appeared – a small stone tablet engraved with Bajoran writing.
“It’s original?” Kleya asked.
“Three thousand years old. A religious text. It should fetch quite a price on Coruscant. I hear they’re absolutely fascinated by Bajoran spirituality there.”
Kira’s tone dripped with disgust and anger. She evidently wasn’t especially adept at hiding her emotions. But then again, she wasn’t a spy. She was a fighter. Kleya had yearned to be like her once – to openly charge at the Empire and stab at its heart instead of lurking in the shadows.
“They’re fascinated by the quaint little cultures of so many planets they’ve conquered,” Kleya said.
She let her own disgust seep into her tone, a calculated move. Kira’s eyebrows lifted and she gazed at Kleya consideringly.
“I wonder what they’d pay for a Bajoran Orb,” Kira said.
The Orbs of the Prophets were at the center of the Bajoran religion. The legend was that the Orbs had magical properties. Kleya put little stock in such legends, but it hardly mattered. The Bajoran Orbs were beautiful, and their story was fantastical. That was all collectors cared about.
“Those have sold for a fortune,” Kleya said. “A collector on Corellia owns four of them and has been trying to track down and purchase the rest. He’s willing to pay practically any price, from what I understand.”
Kira’s expression turned murderous, and Kleya allowed herself to imagine what Kira would like to do to the collector on Corellia if she ever got her hands on him.
Slowly, Kira’s expression cleared to blankness.
“This room is secured,” she said, almost coldly.
“Good,” Kleya said, having confirmed as such with the device on her wrist. “We have a lot to discuss. I’m assuming the Ferengi barkeeper can’t be trusted?”
“Quark can be trusted to do whatever he’s paid to do.”
Kleya nodded. As she’d assumed. They were safe as long as Quark believed they were dealing in drugs rather than in rebellion.
“Since you agreed to meet me, I assume that means you can do more to help us,” Kira said bluntly. “We need weapons.”
“That’s problematic. Smuggling a couple blasters in would be simple enough, but a couple blasters won’t help much.”
“Five thousand blasters,” Kira said, her voice lowering even further until it was nothing but a harsh whisper. “That’s what we need. The Imperials don’t realize it, but we have enough willing fighters to storm every one of their bases on this planet at once. If we took them by surprise and acted simultaneously, we could cut off their communications in a few minutes. We could kill all of them.”
Kleya had known to expect something different from the Bajorans than the overwhelming passive acceptance she’d found on most other planets, but still she was surprised.
Above them, a holographic bird twittered pleasantly in ironically gentle contrast to the violence Kira spoke of. Yet the bird was nothing more than a projection of light. There was no gentleness left on Bajor. The Empire had squeezed out any the Cardassians had left behind.
“You have five thousand people?” Kleya asked.
“We have six thousand at least. We have blasters for about a thousand of them at this point, though half are so old they’re almost useless. If we had another five thousand blasters, we could do it. We could take back our planet.”
Kleya recognized the trust Kira was placing in her by telling her of this extremely ambitious plan. Was it possible to pull off? She thought of the number of Imperial bases on Bajor. With six thousand Bajorans, many of whom she understood had substantial combat experience, it might be. There was only one problem.
“Even if we had access to five thousand blasters, which we don’t,” Kleya said, “smuggling them to the surface would be impossible. I could potentially get you about a hundred, and that would take weeks.”
Kira gritted her teeth in frustration.
“Why did you bother coming here if you won’t do anything to help us?” she asked.
“I had no idea your people were planning anything so ambitious. What you’re describing has never been done before. Not against the Empire.”
“That’s because no one has tried. You on the Core Worlds, you’re all too scared. You see those ranks of stormtroopers and you curl into a ball and wait for them to kill you. My people? We’ve been fighting for freedom with everything we have for generations. I killed my first Cardassian as a child, and I killed my first Imperial soldier with the same blaster. I was born into this fight.”
Kleya felt a curl of indignant anger at Kira’s assumption that Kleya was part of those frightened masses in the Core. Briefly, unwisely she knew, Kleya’s mask dropped just a little and she let her true feelings out.
“So was I,” she said. “I was a child when they took everything from me. My family. My planet. Everything I ever knew.”
Kira looked sharply at her, staring into her eyes for a long uncomfortable moment.
“And you’ve been fighting since then,” Kira said softly. “I guess we’re the same then, you and I.”
Kleya forced her emotions back under control. She needed to maintain control at all times. She couldn’t let it slip.
“I share your determination to destroy the Empire,” Kleya said, her tone cold once again. “I share your willingness to fight and die for that goal. But dying in a small blaze of glory to throw a pebble against the Empire’s walls is pointless. Attempting to get thousands of weapons to Bajor’s surface would alert the Empire’s troops. They’d be ready for you, and it wouldn’t matter how many fighters you had.”
In the end, it probably wouldn’t matter regardless. The Bajorans stood no chance against the full might of the Empire.
Yet what Kira was describing, the full defeat of Imperial troops on an occupied planet, even if the defeat would inherently be temporary, was exactly the kind of spark Luthen was looking for – a burning flame to ignite the passion of the galaxy, to convince them that fighting back was necessary no matter the cost.
“There has to be a way,” Kira said. “Cargo ships arrive and leave all the time, passing through the Imperial checkpoints. Surely it’s possible to smuggle in weapons through them, even if it took months.”
It wasn’t possible, not with the resources Kleya and Luthen had. But they had other contacts, people with more access to weapons and ships. It was ridiculous. It was inconceivable. But Kleya had the sinking feeling that when she told Luthen of the Bajoran rebels’ plan, she’d see that dangerous light come into his eyes.
Before Kleya could answer Kira, the device on her wrist buzzed. All thoughts of nebulous future plans evaporated from her mind as she focused on the present.
“There’s an Imperial patrol right outside this building,” she informed Kira.
“A full patrol?” Kira said, eyes widening. “They shouldn’t be here. They never bother Quark.”
“Could he have sold us out?”
Kira’s expression darkened as she briefly considered it, but she shook her head.
“I don’t think so. He thinks I come here to deal drugs and he gets a portion of the earnings. He’d never give up business that lucrative. Technically the two of us aren’t doing anything wrong in here. I’ve got my identification, and you told me your identity card as an antiques dealer is legitimate. If the Imperials search the place, they have no reason to arrest us.”
Kleya’s visit was technically legitimate, but being caught by an Imperial patrol was never a good idea. They didn’t always need a reason to arrest people. Kira would know that as well as she did.
“Is there an alternate exit to this bar?” Kleya asked.
Kira nodded.
“In the back.”
“The patrol is entering the building now,” Kleya said. “If we move fast, we can reach the back exit first.”
They moved fast. They left behind the holographic forest and ducked into the hallway. Down in the bar below, a loud voice was demanding that the bar’s patrons produce their identification cards.
Kleya followed Kira who pushed through a door labelled “Staff Only”. They hurried down a dingy hallway to a narrow flight of stairs, then exited into the dusty lot behind Quark’s Bar, baking under the bright sun.
The lot was thankfully empty of Imperial soldiers, which meant the patrol hadn’t been looking for Kleya or Kira and their arrival really had been random. Hopefully.
“This way,” Kira hissed.
Kleya darted after her to a shadowy alleyway. They turned down several streets until they were far enough from the bar for Kleya’s shoulders to relax a fraction.
“I still need to get you that tablet,” Kira murmured. “It’s just down this way.”
She meant the ancient Bajoran tablet she’d shown Kleya a hologram of. It was the payment for a delivery of supplies Kleya had sent to Kira’s people a few days before. As long as Kleya brought Bajoran artifacts back to the shop on Coruscant, no one would think it was odd that she traveled to Bajor.
They turned down another alley and stopped before a nondescript door. Kira knocked on it in a complex pattern and after a few moments the door clicked open. Kira gestured Kleya inside. Warily, Kleya followed her in.
The room beyond was shabby and dark. An older Bajoran woman held the door open and shut it quickly behind them before looking Kleya up and down.
“So this is her,” she said, unimpressed.
“This is her,” Kira said. “I told her about the plan. She’s skeptical.”
“Hmm. I’m not surprised. You trust her?”
“I brought her here, didn’t I?” Kira said.
So Kira trusted Kleya. Well, Kleya supposed she trusted Kira too after their long correspondence. As close as she ever came to trusting anyone, anyway.
The older woman held out her hand to Kleya.
“Lupaza,” she said.
Kleya hesitated briefly before shaking her hand.
“Kleya Marki.”
There was no point keeping that name secret when it was on the identity card she’d brought here.
“We need the artifact,” Kira said.
Lupaza grimaced and gestured to a box on a table at the back of the room. Kleya went to the box and carefully opened it, examining the tablet inside. It seemed authentic. She’d ensure it really was back in Coruscant.
“I don’t like this business, Nerys,” Lupaza said. “I know you claim this woman’s an ally of ours, but she’s taking our past just like the Empire.”
“She’s going to give us the weapons we need to fight them,” Kira said.
Kleya couldn’t justify the trade she and Luthen used as cover, so she didn’t try.
“I don’t know if getting the weapons you need is possible,” she said. “But if you can pull off what you’ve described to me, trying to do the impossible might be worth it. I just need to know – are you and your people willing to go all the way? The Empire won’t give up. They’ll come back with more soldiers. They’ll keep coming back.”
Luthen wouldn’t have wanted her to remind them of this. He’d see the Bajorans as a necessary sacrifice to save the galaxy. But Kleya knew what it meant to lose her people.
“Of course they’ll come back,” Kira said. “And we’ll keep fighting them. We’ll never stop fighting, not even if we stand alone against the entire galaxy.”
Kleya nodded.
“Then I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
She took the box with the tablet. She nodded to Kira and Lupaza, then turned and left through the small door.
She made her way toward the edge of the city, walking at a steady but unhurried pace. Around her, Bajorans passed by, hard eyes full of anger. Kleya imagined the people of this planet rising up, a tide to sweep away the foundations the Empire had built into its soil, a growing wave that might build to other planets and wash across the entire galaxy.
Bajor would not be standing alone. Not if Kleya had anything to say about it.