The Resistance

 

Night falls on the Dahkur Province mountains several years before the Cardassian forces abandoned their hold on Bajoran soil.

The countryside vista is mostly quiet except for the sounds of a few nocturnal creatures, predators and prey.

Inside a hidden cave near the foothills, a band of two-legged hunters prepares for another evening’s pursuit.

Across a small rough-hewed room, a Bajoran man carrying a disruptor rifle runs past a wounded woman, her face contorted in pain. People grab firearms off of a nearby rack. Somebody accidentally kicks over a glass of water, its contents slowly spreading toward an empty bed in a makeshift barracks. A medic comes to the aid of the ailing woman, moving her out of the room to an impromptu field hospital.

Two Bajorans enter from outside, carrying an injured man in their arms. In his fifties, dressed in simple farmers’ clothes, the elder Bajoran lies quietly as he suffers the pain of a terrible phaser burn across his midsection.

One of the Bajorans, a robust man named Furel, calls for a fellow member of the Shakaar Resistance cell.

Rushing in, Kira Nerys looks down at the bed’s occupant.

"Father?" she asks in anguish. "Father, can you hear me?"

But the wounded man, Kira Taban, only thrashes around in agony, lost in his own pain.

"Medic! I need a medic!" his daughter yells, frantically trying to get medical attention. "What the hell's taking them so long?"

Nerys stands to look for a medic, but Taban suddenly opens his eyes wide.

"Nerys!" the farmer, who had fought alongside Shakaar members against the Cardassians in the past, gasps as he clutches at her. "Nerys... don't leave me."

Eyes wild, the family man is a pitiful sight. He's obvious furious at what happened to him, and even more furious at himself for letting it happen.

"I was such a fool," he says. "When the Cardassians started setting fire to the village, I tried to talk to them. Tried to reason with them. Look what they've done to me."

Fire in her eyes, Nerys responds to the revelation. "I'll make them pay for this, I promise," she tells her father.

But the pain and the horror of his situation are too much for Taban, who rambles in shock.

"They burned my garden," he says. "Set everything on fire. I worked for years... planting it, caring for it, and now it's gone..."

 

A Time of Violence

Life was not easy for the freedom fighters, whose existence flowed between the deadly excitement of a raid against Cardassian soldiers and the dreary monotony of weeks spent on the run with little to eat, poor shelter and absolutely no luxuries.

Either way, the experiences were something a person could never forget. A year after the Cardassian withdrawal, Shakaar-cell member Kira Nerys said she still perfectly remembered the events from a decade earlier.

"I know exactly where I was," she said. "I spent that whole winter with my Resistance group in the Dahkur Hills. We had no power cells for our phasers, almost no food, and we spent most of our time in caves hiding from Cardassian sensor sweeps. Believe me, it was very memorable."

Guerilla warfare combined with a loose, decentralized structure was the key to being effective against the Cardassian juggernaut, Kira explained.

"A Resistance organization is structured into cells – autonomous groups of 10 to 20 people," she said. "That way if anyone gets captured, their ability to compromise the organization is limited. They can't be forced to name names they don't know.

"Having all your men in one place is too risky. If you stay in one place, they could wipe out your entire Resistance movement in one attack. Smaller groups are safer – they're harder to track down."

Along with attacking planetary targets, spacefaring freedom fighters often found tempting targets in the voids between the worlds – such as the Cardassian deuterium-fueling operations which had been established around the Bajor system’s gas giants.

Having a space-worthy vessel was also useful for ferrying supplies, meeting contacts and occasionally finding a good hiding place. One trick used to try to evade pursuing craft was by hiding in "The Badlands," a region of space near the Cardassian border populated with dangerous plasma storms that made the area extremely dangerous for travel, particularly with large ships. Sensor range was limited, so freedom fighters learned to use an old active-scan system to navigate. Working with echo location, they would send out a modulated tetrion pulse which, if reflected off the hull of a ship, could approximate its location.

Resistance members also learned to camouflage subspace messages with quantum interference, so that if anyone intercepted the signal all they read was a slight elevation in background radiation.

Being a Resistance fighter required mastering a variety of unique skills, such as being able to use certain codes on a Cardassian PADD to override nearby force field generators. Many also carried subdermal implants of tritonium isotopes with the idea that, if they were captured, they could activate the implant so they could be tracked and rescued.

Resistance fighters acquired a healthy respect for Cardassian weapons, and therefore tried to capture as many of them as possible for their own use. One common weapon of Occupation soldiers and freedom fighters alike was the Cardassian disruptor rifle, standard issue with a 4.7 megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge and two beam settings.

"This is a good weapon, solid and simple," Kira said while holding one of the rifles in her hands. "You can drag it through the mud and it'll still fire."

During the Occupation, some Bajoran-modified firearms were fitted with target discriminators to ensure that Bajorans using coded biogenic transponders would, at least in theory, not be hit by friendly fire.

It was not always easy for freedom fighters to acquire such high-quality weapons – or high-quality anything. Often, they had to make due with anything but the best materials, noted Kira. "You have to make use of what you have," she said. "If you need a hammer and you don't have one, use a pipe.

The life expectancy of a Resistance fighter was often short. And many who managed to survive to the end of the Occupation served at least some time experiencing at least one of the various forms of Cardassian incarceration.

Lorit Akrem, the Bajoran man who recruited Kira into the Shakaar Cell, was taken prisoner by the Cardassians and shipped aboard the Ravinok in the Terran year 2366 to an off-world prison camp.

He never made it. Six years after the ship’s departure, it was discovered that the Ravinok was, after a fierce firefight, shot down enroute and crash landed on the planet Dozaria. Out of 18 crewmembers and 32 prisoners, 12 died in the crash and the rest were forced by the Breen to perform slave labor on the sandy, desolate planet where they had set down. Although Lorit survived the landing, he reportedly died in a cave-in four years later.

 

Heroes of Freedom

The most famous and possibly the greatest of the Resistance leaders was Li Nalas. According to reports during the Occupation, Li grew to prominence after defeating Gul Zarale, a Cardassian responsible for the massacre of a half-dozen Bajoran villages, in the mountains surrounding the Sahving valley. After being ambushed by Cardassian troops, only Li and two other members of his cell managed to escape before hiding in the hills for two days. Finally the lack of food and water forced them down into the Valley, where they made their way to a ridge above a small lake. Li bravely went on ahead by himself to scout the area, and by the time his companions finally caught up with him, they found Li had defeated the Gul by himself in savage hand-to-hand combat.

Stories of his courage, brilliance and daring grew, and soon it seemed every victory won by the Resistance was attributed to his leadership.

Orta, another Resistance Cell leader, was able to be a painful thorn in the side of the Cardassian oppressors despite being severely outgunned and outclassed when it came to weaponry and ships. Majestic ships of the line were kept stationed in Cardassian territory only a few tens of thousands of kilometers from Orta's base, but he managed to elude them for years using old, obsolete ships limited to a maximum speed of half-impulse.

The leader of a cell based on the third moon of Valo One, Orta was a grim statistic resulting from cruelty of the occupation force. His face mutilated and his vocal cords cut by Cardassians, he often shrouded his face and spoke through a voice box implanted in the side of his neck.

Orta openly admitted responsibility for dozens of attacks against Cardassians, leading the leaders of the occupation force to vainly use every means at their disposal to track down the location of the freedom fighter and his followers.

The exploits of other freedom fighters served as banners through the decades of oppression to boost the spirits of Bajorans everywhere. Filling their ranks were women and men such as Lenaris Holem from the Ornathia Resistance cell, which executed the first offworld raid against the Cardassians at Pullock V.

He was by no means the last Bajoran Resistance fighter to take the battle into space. Prior to the Cardassian retreat, a few Resistance cells had even established crew-tended outposts and hidden, automated monitoring stations on selected uninhabited planets and moons within the solar system.

Nearby space provided opportunities as well. Resistance fighters were quick to organize a cell on Terok Nor, the ore-processing station in orbit around Bajor. In the Terran year 2346, while Terok Nor was still under construction, Halb Daier used his job there as a food line servant to contact and recruit other Bajorans to aid the cause – which included attempts on the station commander’s life.

Not all members of the Resistance relied on objects of violence to fulfill their goals. Some, like Dekon Elig, used tools of science. Dekon, a geneticist and a member of the Higa Metar Resistance cell, invented the aphasia virus for use as a terrorist weapon against the Cardassians. Resistance fighters created a device to distribute the virus into the food replicators of Terok Nor. Eventually, the virus would have left the food and become airborne. Members of the underground planted the device on the station during its construction in 2351. Before it could be used, however, Dekon was captured and sentenced by the Cardassians to the brutal Velos VII Internment Camp, where he died in 2360 while attempting escape.

The aphasia virus was intended to cause its victims to experience a perceptual disfunction in which audio and visual stimuli are misinterpreted by their brain, making it so they could not understand or be understood by other people. Within a few days, the virus would begin attacking the recipient’s autonomic nervous system, leading to death about 12 hours later.

Surmak Ren, a Bajoran scientist and fellow member of the Higa Metar Underground, worked as a medical assistant to Dekon to help create the virus. After only serving in the Resistance for six months, Surmak was captured and spent the last 18 years of the Occupation in the Velos VII camp.

Ironically, Dekon’s virus was accidentally released on Terok Nor – now Deep Space Nine – during repairs to a replicator on board a few months after the Occupation. The virus spread like wildfire, endangering the lives of the Bajorans and Terrans serving there.

In 2369, while serving as chief administrator of the Ilvian Medical Complex, Surmak was contacted when the virus began spreading throughout the space station. He claimed to know little about the virus and refused to cooperate, resulting in his being kidnapped by Kira Nerys, forcing him to successfully help develop a cure.

Another dagger in the side of the Cardassians were the members of the Kohn-Ma terrorist group. Little is known about this organization, which was even more secretive than most Resistance cells. Considered an extremist group by many Bajorans, the Kohn-Ma advocated a no-tolerance policy toward Bajoran independence and a total hatred for all things Cardassian. While most Resistance cells fighters would occasionally have to kill Cardassian civilians or fellow Bajorans who were exposed as collaborators, members of the Kohn-Ma seemed to perform such duties with relish.

Even after the Cardassian withdrawal, the Kohn-Ma remained active in their pursuit of a totally free Bajor. And without any Cardassians left to vent their anger, some members turned their contempt toward their fellow Bajorans, whom they considered to be betraying their planet's hard-won independence by seeking entry into the United Federation of Planets. A few months after the Cardassian retreat, the Kohn-Ma claim responsibility for the assassination of a Bajoran First Minister.

Not everybody was so eager to hold a grudge, however, and a few Bajorans even turned with open arms toward their former captors after the Withdrawal. One such person was Deela, who fought against the Cardassians as a Resistance fighter, then turned to helping care for Cardassian war orphans at the Tozhat Resettlement Center after the Occupation’s end.

 

The Shakaar Resistance Cell

Lenaris and many other Bajorans were very thankful to the members of another group of freedom fighters: the Shakaar Resistance cell. Lenaris's brother and scores of other prisoners at Gallitep, the most horrible example of Cardassian cruelty to exist on Bajor, found their prayers to the Prophets answered by the Shakaar cell in the Terran year 2357 when the group’s daring actions resulted in the total liberation of the prison camp.

The skill and intelligence of the cell’s members remained strong in the minds of Cardassian leaders even after the Withdrawal.

"Ah, the infamous Shakaar Resistance," said Gul S. G. Dukat, who served the Cardassian military after the Withdrawal as commander of the Second Order, security identification ADL-40. "We never could eliminate that group. And it wasn't from lack of trying, I assure you."

The leader of the cell, Shakaar Edon, was a handsome, solidly built man was known for his piercing intelligent gaze and an expression that made him always seem to be thinking. He was held in very high esteem by his followers.

He "saved my life on about a hundred occasions," said Kira, who served with the cell on numerous missions in and around the Dahkur Province. "I know Shakaar, and he's one of the most selfless people I ever met."

He was not the best orator, however.

"He used to mumble his way through mission briefings," Kira added. "Everyone in our Resistance cell had to learn to lip read."

Despite his outstanding successes as a military leader, Shakaar was reportedly very shy and insecure in his personal life, and it was clear to those who knew him that he never desired a life of violence. Nonetheless, he spent 25 years of his life fighting the Cardassian Occupation force. Throughout the Occupation, he repeatedly told his friends and followers that his plan was someday to become a farmer – a goal that was fulfilled in the Dahkur Province after the Bajoran people finally regained their planet.

Originally a lush agricultural region, the province served as the home territory for the Shakaar cell, whose members used the mountainous terrain to the fullest in their efforts to hide from Cardassian patrols and search teams.

Along with being the site of the Gallitep Labor Camp, the Dahkur Province was the location for a Cardassian records office. There, Shakaar-member Trentin Fala cleaned floors while quietly serving as an informant for the Resistance.

Klin and Ornak were two of the other freedom fighters who battled alongside Shakaar and lived to see their efforts come to fruition.

As with any group of soldiers, some of the members of the Shakaar cell found enjoyment in being surrounded by violent situations. Latha Mabrin, for example, made money as a smuggler and arms dealer when he was not fighting for Bajor freedom. But anybody can change their path, and Latha turned his back on his past and gave his life to the Prophets, serving as a Vedek after the Withdrawal.

As in most Resistance cells, many of the people serving under Shakaar had certain specialties that made them uniquely useful in combating the Cardassians.

Lupaza, one of the Shakaar cell members, was known for her skill in bypassing transporter scramblers and was considered quite an asset by her fellow fighters.

"They haven't invented the security system that Lupaza can't beat," Furel, another respected Shakaar member, said about his longtime friend.

Their friendships were forged with bonds that lasted for a lifetime, as evidenced by a conversation between Furel, Lupaza and Kira when they joined Shakaar for dinner at his farm home in the Dahkur Province several years after the Withdrawal.

Although the mood during the conversation was obviously warm and convivial, underlying everything was the fact that these people shared a grim and arduous experience. The fight against the Cardassians shaped and molded each of them and that shared background served to temper their gaiety even in the best of times.

"You never would've found your way out of there if I hadn't left that marker on the rock," Lupaza told Furel.

"I have a fine sense of direction," he responded. "I knew exactly where I was the whole night."

Kira countered to him, "I found your tracks the next day. You were walking in circles."

With dignity, Furel answered back, "I was throwing the Cardassians off my trail."

His explanation was met with outright laughter, but it was all in fun and even Furel smiled, showing he has a sense of humor about himself.

Kira noted the humorous irony when she heard that former Shakaar cell member Mobara had decided to study engineering after the Withdrawal and wound up living at the Bajoran university in the Musilla Province.

"That's perfect," she said. "Now he can build bridges and then blow them up!"

But despite the fond memories, underlying the conversation was the reality that being a Resistance fighter was anything but fun and games.

"Every once in a while the Cardassians would get too close and we'd turn around and give them a bloody nose," Lupaza said.

"Sometimes it was our nose that got bloodied," Shakaar quietly added.

Although Furel lived to talk about his time as a Resistance Fighter, like many such survivors he did not come out of the experience in one piece – one of his arms was destroyed and never was replaced. Yet as terrible as the permanent loss of the limb may seem today, Furel said it was a small price to pay in exchange for his own life and the lives of three other freedom fighters.

"Before I went into that interrogation center, I asked the Prophets to give me the strength to get the rest of (them) out of there, and in return I said I'd give up my life," he said. "As it turned out, I not only rescued (Kira) and Shakaar and Lupaza, it only cost me an arm. I felt like the Prophets were generous. Somehow replacing the arm seems ungrateful."

 

Kira Nerys – From Child to Warrior

Although there was no such thing as a "typical" Resistance fighter, Kira’s background in many ways represented the type of life experienced by many who would rise up to fight against the Cardassian overlords.

Born in the year 2343, Kira entered a life that was difficult from the start.

"I've known nothing but violence since I was child," Kira said after the Cardassian retreat. "I lived with them (Cardassians) for twenty-six years before liberation came. Every Bajoran lived with them in constant fear."

Kira’s mother, Meru, was forced by Cardassian officials at age 32 to become a comfort woman – a job she performed for seven years, until she died in 2353. Kira was three at the time and suddenly found herself in the position of helping take care of her two younger brothers – Pohl, who was a year younger than his sister, and Reon.

Life with Nerys’s remaining family was harsh in the Cardassian-controlled Singha Refugee Center. Nonetheless, she had the chance to occasionally play springball with her brothers, as well as learn crafts, such as finger-painting at age 4 in the camp school. Although she later claimed to have no artistic aptitude, she ironically would have been a member of the artist J'barra of Ih'valla had the ancient Bajoran caste system survived the Occupation.

After working in the mines as a child, Kira struck out on her own to join the Resistance.

"I was 12 when I started fighting, but I know of some who started even younger than that," Kira recalled. "I regret a lot of what I had to do. We had no choice. We were fighting for survival!"

Within a year she had met Lorit Akrem, a freedom fighter who introduced the young girl to the members of the Shakaar cell. Eventually, after one of the cell’s members went missing, Kira was offered the chance to take up arms in the struggle.

"I'd been hanging around the Shakaar base camp for a few weeks, running errands, cleaning weapons, that kind of thing," she said. "One night they had an ambush planned, but they were a man short. I volunteered to go, but everyone said I was too young, too small. But Lupaza stuck up for me... said I had the heart of a sinoraptor and this was no time to be choosy.

"Furel made some joke... I don't remember what it was, but I remember Lupaza hitting him – she always did that. They loved each other in a way. But it was up to Shakaar, and he stared at me for a long time before deciding that maybe I was big enough to carry a phaser rifle after all.

"So that night, we set up an ambush on the ridgeline and waited. It was cold and my hands kept shaking. I was so afraid that the others would see me and think I was nervous, that I kept biting my fingers to keep the blood flowing.

"We must've been out there for three, four hours before the skimmer appeared and set down right where Furel said it would. And when the hatch opened and that first Cardassian stepped out, I just started firing. And I didn't stop until I'd discharged the entire power cell.

"When it was over, I was so relieved that I didn't let anyone down that I was almost giddy. Furel kept telling me to stop grinning, that it made me look even younger, but I couldn't help it. I was one of them – I was in the Resistance."

As a souvenir of her first battle, Kira said, Lupaza made for her an earring out of some metal from that skimmer she helped destroy.

At age 14 she helped the Shakaar Cell to temporarily liberate the Cardassians' notorious Gallitepp labor camp.

Eventually, she even learned to fly an outdated Raider craft against her oppressors.

Anything that could fly, no matter how ancient, was prized and lovingly maintained. With materials and cockpit space at a minimum, sometimes the smallest helmsmen were the best.

Not that Bajor had a surplus of short pilots, Kira once explained with a laugh.

"No, just short engineers," she said. "They were always building these things without thinking."

During the 10 years prior to the Withdrawal, the Skakaar cell hid from Cardassian forces inside the caves of Kola Mountain in the Dahkur Province. During the winter of 2361, the 18-year-old Kira joined other cell members in spending the entire season there, perpetually hounded by Cardassian troops while fighting to keep alive in the bleak, freezing cold.

Occasionally, wildlife found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once while on patrol in the Bestri Woods, Kira killed a hara cat because she mistakenly thought it was a Cardassian soldier, she said.

Kira herself once described her actions as those of a terrorist. And in committing acts of terrorism, sometimes civilians were killed.

Although the death of Cardassian civilians was not often the goal of an attack, apparently few Resistance fighters shed any tears when it occurred.

"None of you should've been on Bajor! It wasn't your world," Kira told a disfigured Cardassian during an informal debate four years after the Withdrawal. "For fifty years you raped our planet and killed our people. You lived on our land and took the food from our mouths, so I don't care if you held a phaser in your hand or ironed shirts for a living. You were all guilty and you were all legitimate targets!"

In the Terran year 2363, the 20-year-old Kira joined other cell members in an attack on the home of Gul Pirak. Commander of a weapons depot outside Hathon, he had executed 15 Bajoran farmers because they refused to display the Cardassian banner outside their homes.

The goal of the attack was to assassinate Pirak by placing a plasma charge outside his bedroom window in the middle of the night. It succeeded better than they likely intended. The blast vaporized the entire east wing of the house, killing 12 Cardassians, including Gul Pirak's entire family. Cardassian reports indicate that the explosion also crippled 23 other occupants of the building.

During a different attack against the Golar Province Administration building, as many as 25 innocent Cardassians died in the explosion, according to Cardassian authorities.

But possibly the most unpleasant memories for Resistance fighters is the fact that Cardassians weren't the only people to die as a result of the their actions.

"During the Occupation, I didn't want to attack facilities where Bajorans were working," Kira said. "But I did. Because they were collaborators – they were working with the enemy."

Such attitudes had to be maintained, she said, because once the Cardassians realized a Resistance cell was hesitant to kill their own people, Bajorans would be stationed at bases wherever possible to serve as both a labor pool and as living shields.

Because of her harsh feelings toward collaborators, Kira was not hesitant to kill other Bajorans face-to-face if she felt it was justified – such as in the Terran year 2365, when the 22-year-old freedom fighter shot a chemist named Vaatrik on Terok Nor while searching for a list of his fellow traitors.

The trip to the orbital space station, which lasted several weeks, almost resulted in Kira being arrested for a different crime – the sabotage of the Terok Nor’s ore-processing equipment, which had been perpetrated by another member of her cell.

Despite all the violence she performed against the Cardassians, Kira never served time in Cardassian prison, and she was apparently better at keeping a low profile than she thought. Her official file, logged by Prefect Dukat, only listed her as "A minor operative whose activities are limited to running errands for the terrorist leaders" – a description that infuriated the former rebel when she read it after the Withdrawal.

Although being a noble Resistance fighter may seem to some fiction writers to be a glorious, wonderful life of adventure, usually it was in reality anything but that.

"I don't enjoy fighting," Kira said after the Withdrawal. "Yes, I've spent my life fighting for a good cause, our independence, our freedom. But it was brutal and ugly and I had to be. I'm afraid the Prophets will never forgive me."

One of her worst memories involves her actions during an attack on the Haru Outpost, a Cardassian military facility.

"I've done some things I'm not proud of. I still have nightmares about the raids on the Haru outposts," she said a few years after the Cardassian retreat. "But at least I was sure of what I was doing then."

Later in the day, Shakaar cell members returned from a scouting mission with news about Kira Tobin’s attackers.

"We found them," Furel tells the father and daughter. "Cardassian Heavy Weapons Unit, Third Assault Group, Ninth Order."

"How far?," responds Nerys.

"Just outside of Tempasa."

The young woman looks back at her father, who is being attended by another cell member, a young soldier named Gantt. Taban's a whimpering mess, painful to look at.

.

Forever On the Run

Along with being alert for Cardassian patrols, Resistance fighters also had to be wary of threats from within the group. Records show that very few cell members willingly betrayed their comrades, but the Obsidian Order – the covert intelligence branch of the Cardassian government – had other means of uncovering secrets.

"They're the ever-vigilant eyes and ears of the Cardassian Empire," said Odo, the changling who served for five year as constable on the Cardassian’s orbital mining station. "It's said that a Cardassian citizen can't sit down to a meal without each dish being duly noted and recorded by the Order. Whether you agree with their goals or not, you can't help but admire their efficiency. Even the Romulan Tal Shiar can't compete with them when it comes to intelligence gathering and covert operations."

About nine years before the end of the occupation, a female field operative of the Obsidian Order named Iliana Ghemor – daughter of Legate Tekeny Ghemor – took part in an undercover assignment on Bajor. According to information obtained after the withdrawal, Obsidian Order agents kidnapped a Bajoran terrorist, gave Iliana her memories and appearance, and placed the Cardassian woman back on Bajor to infiltrate the Resistance. Whether her mission was successful is unknown.

After the Cardassians left the planet, some Resistance fighters found they were still not safe from retribution from their planet’s former conquerors.

Out of fear of reprisal, Trentin Fala kept her involvement with the Shakaar cell a strict secret both during and after the liberation.

"Even after the occupation was over, Fala never wanted anyone to know she was secretly helping us," Kira remembered. "She was worried that someone might come looking for her for revenge."

Soft spoken and petite, Trentin spent the Occupation cleaning floors in the Cardassian records office in Dahkur Province.

"She passed us information for years without anyone catching on," Kira said. "She was always so afraid... afraid that she'd be caught and executed. But she never stopped. I once told her I thought she was braver than the rest of us, because she had to live with fear every day. We planned dozens of attacks based on Fala's information."

Trentin’s fears turned out to be justified. In 2373, while attempting to beam to a Federation runabout, she was killed by a remat detonator – a weapon programed to scramble a transporter signal during materialization.

Remat detonators could be as small as two cubic millimeters in size and could be hidden in clothing or even injected under the skin. Typically used by the Romulans, they were also sold on the black market. Cardassians used similar pattern scramblers to prevent non-Cardassians from gaining unauthoized entry into space stations and other high-security areas. Although there is no record of such devices being used on Terok Nor, possibly because of the high volume of non-Cardassian workers, pattern scramblers were known to exist on another Cardassian station known as Empok Nor, located in the Trivas planetary system.

Within days of her murder, Mobara, another former cell member, was killed by an explosive device implanted behind his ear, possibly in his earring. Furel and Lupaza were killed on Deep Space Nine by a bomb placed on a window looking into space. And Latha was killed by a disrupter blast from small hunter probe hidden in a ceremonial candle.

"All the firefights and bombings he'd lived through, and then to get killed during a religious ceremony," Kira said after hearing of Latha’s death.

The murderer was eventually revealed to be a Cardassian named Silaran Prin, one of the civilian victims of the Shakaar cell attack on the house of Gul Pirak. A household servant who cleaned the Gul’s uniforms during the Occupation, the explosion 10 years earlier had left his face and half of his body horribly disfigured and twisted, despite the reconstructive work of Cardassian doctors.

Prin apparently chose his victims based on their involvement in the original attack. Trentin reportedly figured out how to defeat the security systems, Latha built the plasma charge and, while Furel and Lupaza stood lookout, Kira crept up to the house and planted the bomb. After an investigation into the murders, Kira attempted to apprehend Prin but had to kill him in self defense.

 

 

The following day, Kira Nerys, Furel and two other fighters of the Shakaar Resistance cell approach the entrance to their base. Furel looks tired, but excited. Things couldn't have gone better.

"All four mortar rounds right in the central compound," he says with obvious satisfaction. "And the way they ran, it was like kicking over a mound of barrowbugs."

Kira, however, is more subdued. She was exhausted before she went on the raid, and now it's all she can do to keep moving.

"What was the count?," she asks, turning toward Furel.

"Five skimmers destroyed," he responds. "At least 15 Cardassians dead. Not a bad day's work. We should celebrate."

But Kira doesn't share Furel's enthusiasm.

"They kill us... we kill them," she says coldly. "It's nothing worth celebrating."

Upon her return, Kira is immediately told that her father died, calling her name while she was gone. Seeing her father’s lifeless body, his warrior daughter stoically removes his earring, refusing to let herself feel the pain of his loss. Instead, she focuses on revenge.

"Get another raiding party together," she barks out to anyone who can hear. "I want to hit those Cardassians again as soon as we have a chance."

Then, without a tear of sorrow, Kira almost casually takes a shovel from a supply shelf, exits the cave and begins digging a hole near a shriveled tree not far from the base entrance.

Following her, Furel tries to comfort his comrade.

"Do you want me to get everyone together?" he gently asks. "Have Prylar Quen say a few words?"

But Kira doesn't want his sympathy.

"There's nothing left to say," is her only response.

 

 

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