Spirit Walk_ Old Wounds (Book 1) - Christie Golden [18]
Paraphrasing Gilbert and Sullivan, she played and hummed, “A secret agent’s lot is not a happy one, happy one.”
Chapter
5
THE GROUND TREMBLED as if it were in pain.
Gradak’s eyes snapped open as his bed shuddered. He briefly wondered if it was an earthquake. Months of running and hiding had taught him how to awaken fully in an instant, and he was out of bed and on his feet when the second blast came. It knocked him to the floor.
No earthquake, this. This was something different, something more dangerous.
This was phaser fire.
Gradak always slept in his clothes, another habit born of necessity, and now he seized his weapons and his communicator. The minute he tapped the device, though, he realized that the enemy had put up a dampening field.
“Bastards!” he cried. Apparently it wasn’t enough to launch what was, by the sound of it, a full-scale attack on a moon that was host to hundreds of families. They had to make sure no one could coordinate escape efforts as well. Still cursing, Gradak raced outside into a nightmare of flame and terror.
The night sky was lit up with fire. Even as he ran out of his home it was struck by screaming phaser blasts and burst into flames. Shrieks of terror assaulted his ears, and by the glow of the orange, crackling flames he saw figures racing to and fro. Some were running with purpose, as he was; others were just fleeing in panic.
I told them we needed to drill for this! Gradak thought in anguish. But the three thousand who called this base home wanted to believe it would never be discovered. Wanted to believe they could leave the danger, the risk, the death out there, out in space. Gradak desperately wished they had listened to his warnings, but by their very nature the Maquis were idealists. And this time, their idealism was going to cost them everything.
There were several dozen small vessels on Tevlik’s moon, all designed for speed and maneuverability as well as attack. On an ordinary base, they would be clustered together. Everyone would know where to go. But here, they were scattered; they made more difficult targets that way, but they also made it harder for anyone to escape.
More phaser fire. More screaming. The air grew thick with smoke, and Gradak choked on the stomach-turning stench of burning flesh. There were people he loved on this Maquis base. But because of the Jem’Hadar dampening field—it had to be the Cardassians and their new-found allies; the Federation would arrest them and confiscate their ships, but they would never authorize this kind of massacre—Gradak could not contact any of those he loved. He could only hope they knew where to find his ship and would meet him there.
The Cardassians continued their attack. Gradak watched, sickened, as a long sheet of deadly phaser fire sliced across the soil. There were sounds of explosions; the blasts had struck ships. But the dreadful sounds came from the west, and Gradak’s little ship was to the north.
Tears stung his eyes—a physical reaction to the smoke, an emotional reaction to the horror that greeted him everywhere he looked. He blinked hard, refusing to acknowledge the pathetic cries for help, refusing to stop to offer assistance, feeling a dreadful ache as he did so. Anyone who wasn’t on a ship within the next few minutes would be either dead or, if lucky, captured. His only hope to save himself and however many souls he could cram onto his small vessel would be to reach Vallia’s Revenge as soon as possible.
Before it was destroyed. Before everything was destroyed.
How had this happened? How had the Cardassians discovered the base? It had been operating since the very beginning of the resistance movement, safe and undiscovered. It was the one sanctuary, the one refuge, that no Maquis would reveal. Not even under torture. It was one thing to gasp out military plans and strategies and locations of weapons while being “interrogated” by the Cardassians, but to breathe a word of this place, with the children and the families at risk, to expose it