Star Trek: Terok Nor 03: Dawn of the Eagles by S.D. Perry Page A

would have come to see it for what it was, eventually. Everyone had to grow up, sometime. It was just too bad it had to be like this.

    Kalisi Reyar avoided the gaze of her lab partner. She knew that he was secretly taking pleasure from the news she had just received: she was to leave the Bajoran Institute of Science immediately, reassigned to a medical facility on the other side of the planet. She had argued with Yopal, the institute’s director, though it made her feel frustrated and embarrassed for the Bajoran to overhear her protests. Despite the great success of the new detection grid, Kalisi was unable to glean any enjoyment from it. Her name had been barely a footnote in the comnet reports, all the glory going to the director of the institute, a woman who barely had anything to do with it.
    Kalisi knew that Yopal was silently scornful of her inability to re-create the corrupted research from memory. The director had also mentioned to Kalisi, more than once, that it had been negligent and foolish not to keep more backups that were separate from the institute computer system. Reyar had kept only a single isolinear rod, stolen during the sabotage. It was a tack Kalisi had employed to safeguard her work from theft by her rivals. It had not yet occurred to her, being new to Bajor at the time, that terrorists might be bold enough to attempt to destroy her work. Add to it the ongoing humiliation Kalisi had suffered at taking such an unprecedented amount of time to reconstruct her data—her memory had never been as well-developed as her colleagues’, and that truth was readily apparent to her coworkers, though Kalisi had always taken pains in the past to conceal her handicap. Yopal didn’t want a researcher impaired with such a weakness to work on her staff, and now that Kalisi had finished her assignment for Dukat, the director was all too eager to dump her off somewhere else.
    In a way, she should have been glad. She had often felt cursed, having to work alongside a Bajoran—a male scientist, no less—and she had labored to make his existence as unhappy as possible without resorting to overt torture. If Mora Pol was an accurate representation of his species, it was a wonder they’d ever crawled out of their caves. Yopal seemed to like him, though for what reason, Kalisi couldn’t imagine. Perhaps as a reminder of what they strove toward. At least at the medical facility she would be working exclusively with Cardassians. The hospital was presided over by the illustrious Doctor Crell Moset, a man whose name had begun to carry weight back home on Cardassia Prime, from what little Kalisi had gathered on him. But still, it was an indignity to be sent away to a hospital when her particular line of expertise was better suited to the facility here.
    While Kalisi gathered up her things in the lab, Mora was pretending to fool around with the shape-shifter in the tank while it “regenerated.” He poked at it with some kind of electrical probe, but Kalisi knew he was watching her, and she kept her back to him, even when she heard someone else enter the room.
    “Hello, Doctor Mora, Doctor Reyar.” It was the institute’s director. Kalisi supposed she had come in to deliver a smug good-bye, but Yopal scarcely acknowledged Kalisi and instead began to speak to Mora regarding his next project. Kalisi kept her back turned as before, pretending not to listen, but smiling slightly when she heard what the director had to say.
    “You’re to begin work immediately on improving anti-grav efficiency for the transports that go back and forth from Terok Nor. This is going to be a very time-consuming project, as Dukat wishes for this to be done within a very tight window. I don’t anticipate your having any extra time to work with Odo.”
    “But…Doctor Yopal, I know I don’t have to remind you, Odo is sentient. It doesn’t do him good to simply sit in his tank with no interaction. I need to be able to see him—to speak to