Title: The Sons of Kolopak
Author: BEKi mytalimander@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Codes: C
SUMMARY: A story regarding Chakotay's past and his relationships with family members.

Chakotay hesitated in the tavern doorway, unsure even now if this was what he wanted to do. They would be waiting for him inside. Once he went in, the odds were better than even that he wouldn't be coming back out again. Squaring his shoulders defiantly, Chakotay stepped inside.

Conversation stopped. Not the fall-off of a dozen voices at a time, but rather a precipice met and exceeded, two hundred or more men suddenly run afoul of absolutely nothing to say.

Their eyes were cold on his uniform, derogatory in the way they assessed him as a fool to come as a lone Starfleet to the thickest den of Maquis in the quadrant. Ignoring the overt threat of their hostile gazes, Chakotay strode to the bar and ordered, "Pajuta, hot."

"All out," the bartender said calmly. "Just poured the last glass down the crapper."

"Beer, then. Whatever you have on tap."

"Out of that, too."

"Are you out of everything?"

"I have mule piss."

Chakotay smiled from the teeth out. "Then give me a glass of mule piss."

The tavern flexed with tension. The barkeep glanced to a gathering of shadows in the corner as if looking for guidance in addressing a scenario he hadn't anticipated.

"If he wants mule piss," a calm, quiet, familiar voice allowed from the darkness, "then give the man mule piss."

Mutters fluctuated the silence. The barkeep nodded, drawing a mug of yellow liquid from the closest tap and setting it on the bar.

"Mule piss on tap," Chakotay noted, lifting the mug to his lips. "Place is going to the dogs, Topaiza." He drank deeply, then set the half-empty mug aside.

"Better the dogs than the Cardies," the voice answered. A man stepped from the shadows, slightly taller then Chakotay, but as angular of feature and as rich of skin tone. He moved slowly, deliberately. Black eyes like ebony embers burned in sockets set deep under the ledge of an angry brow. The geometric tattoo engraved into the flesh of his left temple was the mark of the Rubber Tree People: a symbol of unity that linked him with the ancestral lineage of his people. "It's been a long time," he noted calmly.

"Yes," Chakotay agreed, turning to face him. "It has."

"I didn't expect you to come."

"You've never expected much of me."

"You've never given me reason to expect much of you."

Chakotay's features flexed. He started to say something more, but changed his mind. Looking away, he deferred to the tavern owner's obvious dominance within the environment, leaning more fully into the bar to reflect indifference with the way his elbows found purchase on polished wood as his eyes ran covert reconnaissance on the tavern's deeper shadows and silhouettes.

"I didn't know you served his kind here, Topaiza," someone challenged from across the tavern. "I'm not much for the idea of drinking with Fleeters."

"Neither am I, Siumora," Topaiza returned without taking his eyes off Chakotay. "But I suppose I have to make an exception in this case."

"With Fleeters, there are no exceptions," Black Powder announced firmly.

"There is with this one," Topaiza answered. His eyes were dark, bitter. "You see, this one is here at my personal invitation--an invitation I probably wouldn't have extended had I realized he would accept it; but an invitation I did, nonetheless, extend."

Chakotay drank sparingly of the remnants of his beer. He looked up after a three-beat of indifference, re-engaging Topaiza's gaze as if words meant to maim were nothing more than passing wind.

"He's here for the funeral?" Siumora demanded. "For Kolopak's funeral?"

"Yes."

A murmur rippled through the tavern. A dozen, two dozen resentful Maquis shifted from postures of restless ire to those of active rancor.

"He isn't worthy to smell Kolopak's bones, let alone honor them," Siumora announced acidly.

"Yet honor them, he will," Topaiza allowed. "Or at least, as close to honor as he comes."

Chakotay continued to watch the other man, his calm comportment a study in restraint, his features as devoid of _expression as a deathmask shroud.

"You see, my friends," Topaiza went on, his voice a calm, cold, deadly acid, "Lieutenant Commander Chakotay has come to lay to rest the bones of his father. He is here now, when the need for him to be here is past. He has come to pay his long-withheld respects to a man who no longer has need of his respect. Or his loyalty. Or even his love."

"Chakotay?" The name whispered through the bar, a wind of insurrection that stirred men from antagonism to outrage. "Chakotay? Kolopak's son, Chakotay?"

"So let me be the first, little brother," Topaiza finished, gesturing widely to the congregation of glowering Maquis. "Let me be the first to welcome you home. Bring on the fatted calf, boys, and let the party begin."

Chakotay snorted, shaking his head. "You haven't changed, Topaiza," he noted drily.

"I have changed, Chakotay," Topaiza corrected. "We've all changed." He stepped closer, the ungainly structure of his movements more evident, the stiff way his legs maneuvered themselves a decree of devastating deformity. He leaned into the bar, his features creasing themselves with a well-tolerated agony that lent depth to the hatred layered through the ugly, accusatory tone of his voice. "Everything and everyone has changed," he said. "Everyone except you."

Chakotay stared into the eyes of his brother, and in their bitter black depths, saw a stranger staring back.

"I told you he would come."

Johona looked up from the image on the surveillance monitor to study the youngest son of his closest friend. "Yes," he agreed gently. "You told us he would come."

Dakob nodded, vindicated in the eyes of the only man whose approval he still solicited. "He loved Kolopak as much as any of us. In some ways, he may have loved him more."

"He didn't love him enough to stay," Little Feet noted.

Dakob took the comment as a challenge. His body tensed, his dark eyes grew darker. "Kolopak never asked him to stay," he reminded the bigger man.

"He asked him to come home."

"No." Dakob's head twisted once on his neck: definitively, authoritatively. "Topaiza asked. I asked. But Kolopak never asked. If he had, Chakotay would have come."

"Then why didn't he ask?"

"Because if he had asked, Chakotay would have come."

"Surely Chakotay knew Kolopak wanted him here, at his side?" Red Ribbons ventured.

Dakob's eyes swung back to the surveillance monitor. "Kolopak never asked," he repeated.

"He shouldn't have had to ask," Little Feet announced. "Chakotay was his son. He should have come because he was Kolopak's son."

"Chakotay still is Kolopak's son," Dakob countered quietly.

"He should have come," Little Feet repeated.

"Yes," Red Ribbons agreed. "He should have come."

Because they had unified against him, and because he was right; Johona, who spoke quietly and seldom, but whose words carried the most weight of any man alive on Dorvan, said in defense of Dakob's defense: "If Chakotay had come, Kolopak would have sent him away."

Silence greeted the pronouncement. Red Ribbons and Little Feet exchanged a glance of questioning. In the defiant pride of his fiercely Maquis profile, Dakob allowed himself the luxury of a moment's satisfaction.

"Why?" Little Feet asked finally.

"Because Kolopak loved Chakotay," Johona informed them. "He wouldn't have outlawed him in the eyes of the Federation."

Again silence. Again questioning. Again satisfaction.

And again, it was Little Feet who disagreed. "You're wrong," he told the collective elder respectfully. "Kolopak would have welcomed Chakotay home to defend the land of his ancestors."

"Chakotay's home is Starfleet," Dakob said. "My father understood that."

"Chakotay's home is Dorvan," Red Ribbons countered. "He was born here. He was raised here."

"He was caged here," Johona said quietly. "Kolopak set him free."

"He set him free in hopes that he would see the universe for what it was and return home," Red Ribbons insisted.

"He set him free because he loved him," Johona returned. "He knew Chakotay would never return from Starfleet Academy, and he accepted that because he accepted Chakotay for who he was, not for who he would have wished him to be."

"Chakotay betrayed Kolopak," Little Feet announced. "He betrayed us all."

"Chakotay betrayed no one," Dakob snapped. His eyes were angry now, showing disrespect in the way they glared at a venerated elder whose place on the Dorvanian Ruling Council was within the triad of ultimate authority. "It is we who betray him. We betray him for the sin of loving his father, of respecting the memory of the man who gave him life."

"Caution, Dakob," Red Ribbons soothed. "Remember your place."

"My place is to speak my heart," Dakob told her sharply. "If you require less of me, then tell me now and I'll go."

Red Ribbons smiled at him, tolerant of his presumptions because she revered him, as she had revered his father. He accepted her leniency by stepping back from the temerity to which she objected, softening the challenge of his address to Little Feet with the aversion of eyes that reflected contempt for any man who would call Chakotay traitor.

"I fought with Kolopak for a dozen years," Little Feet announced. "If he were alive, he would tell us to use the leverages at our disposal. He was a warrior in his heart, and he understood the necessity of sacrifice."

"He was a pacifist in his heart," Johona corrected. "A warrior only as a necessity of sacrifice."

"If he were alive," Dakob agreed tersely, "he wouldn't allow this to happen."

Little Feet frowned. "You're the one who suggested it," he reminded Dakob.

"Yes," Dakob agreed.

"And it was you who convinced Topaiza," he pressed.

"Yes."

Little Feet glanced to Red Ribbons, and then to Johona. "Then I don't understand," he admitted. "If Kolopak would oppose this plan, why do you champion it with such unrelenting fervor?"

Dakob smiled a bitter, haunting smile. Still watching the surveillance monitor, his eyes fierce as they followed the Starfleet officer braving the Maquis rapids of the hostile tavern, he told them then what they already knew, addressing himself to those who spoke for Dorvan but did not decide her fate.

"I brought Chakotay here," he said, his voice as bitter as his smile, "and I will keep Chakotay here because I am not my father."

The house hadn't changed in the years that he'd been gone. It still reflected his mother's gentle moods; her sensitivity to color and her gift for welcoming even the stranger into the tender embrace of her merciful presence. This house of her, this tangible memory of who she had been, was a solace to him as he grew from boyhood to manhood. It had been a solace to them all.

Chakotay set his travel duffle in a chair and crossed the small central room to the stone fireplace that predominated the far wall. This fireplace was a monument to their family. It was a work of sweat and unity, a testimonial to their strength and their love and their solidarity. Kolopak had laid each stone by hand, assisted in his task by a trio of sons ranging from nine to sixteen. It was to be the centerpiece of their new home: a centerpiece fashioned in loving tribute for the centerpiece of their family, for a woman whom they each loved, in their own way, more than they loved any other.

She was taken from them the next summer, and they mourned her by fracturing to singularities from the family they had been.

Chakotay ran a hand along the weathered mantle Kolopak had sanded to a satin finish before affixing it to the fireplace with three iron stakes. His fingers spoke to a scattering of knickknacks, articulating tactile greetings in the light-fingered caress of familiar touch-points established in his youth.

A three-dimensional hologram, box-framed in a walnut and transparent aluminum case, held court over the smattering of memories on the mantle. Chakotay touched it as if, by pressing his fingertips to cold, flat aluminum, he could somehow access the feel of his mother's skin, the smell of her favorite perfume, the whisper of her dress as she moved.

She smiled at him from the holographic matrix, her features forever compassionate, forever understanding of his isolation from the father who'd sired him and the brothers who shared their father's passions as he never would. Beside her in the frozen image stood Kolopak. Proud. Traditional. Not yet bearing the mark of the Rubber Tree People engraved into his flesh, but bearing the mark of their ancestry in every line of his body.

Topaiza stood near their father, comfortable with the companionable gesture of Kolopak's hand on his shoulder. Even at sixteen, he was the image of Kolopak, a legacy in flesh that assured the continuation of the Rubber Tree Peoples' bloodline.

Barely nine, Dakob stood in front of his father and brother, yet between them as well, protected to either shoulder by the sheltering influence of men who would raise him in their own image. His smile was his mother's, as was the mischievous glint in laughing eyes; but in every other detail, he was as Topaiza: the image of his father.

Chakotay stood alone, close only to his mother and already showing signs of the isolation that would consume him upon her death. His eyes were angry, his _expression set into hard lines of rebellion and dissatisfaction. This was how he remembered himself: angry, alone, restless under the stifling yoke of traditions bearing no relevancy to who he was or who he intended to become.

"You're the ugly one," a voice noted from behind him.

Chakotay turned, his eyes sharp with a caution he'd learned over a dozen years of hostile environments. The man behind him was young, tall, slender with the tensile strength of tempered duranium. His face defined itself as planes, a sculptural anomaly in the biological world of organic curves; and he wore the mark of the Rubber Tree People engraved into the flesh of his left temple and forehead. The mark identified him; but had it not, the laughing eyes of Chakotay's mother would have.

"I always thought Topaiza was the ugly one," Chakotay noted.

Dakob smiled, an _expression that broke his face from Maquis to younger brother. "Topaiza's the mean one," he corrected. "You're the ugly one; and I, of course, am perfect."

Chakotay smiled in return, allowing a posture of embattlement to soften to one of guarded repose. "If you're the perfect one, then you must be Clay Bucket's intended, fresh out of the colonial marines and due in any day."

Dakob laughed. "Her intended turned out to be fat, bald and a coward," he announced. "And she never did marry him. It's good to see you, Chakotay. I knew that you'd come."

The smile bled from Chakotay's features. His eyes broke contact and wandered the room. "Kolopak was my father," he noted quietly.

"He still is your father," Dakob announced. "And you are still his son."

"You may be the only man on Dorvan who sees it that way."

Dakob took a step forward. "Does anyone else matter?" he asked.

Chakotay looked up, met his brother's eyes. In them, he saw his mother; but he saw his father as well. "No," he said finally. "No one else matters." He extended a hand, opening himself to the possibility of rejection by acknowledging the need for acceptance.

Dakob stepped past the hand and embraced a brother he hadn't seen for many years. The gesture was defiant, a harsh-edged refusal to accept the ambivalent distance offered as a compromise between risk and affection. "Welcome home, Chakotay," he murmured, his voice loud enough to damage the fierce isolation of a man in Starfleet red.

"Thank you, Dakob."

In the home of his childhood and the arms of a man who had been little more than a boy the last time they'd spoken, Chakotay felt a shift within himself. For the first time in his life, he heard the voices of his ancestors, and they told him that he had come home.

The funeral was quiet, respectful, devastating. The small chapel was full to overflowing. Of those who came, a vast predominance were known Maquis. They spoke to Topaiza, and to Dakob, in great detail and with loving remembrance; but to Chakotay, they only nodded with the barest of civilities, acknowledging his existence but little more.

He escaped when he could, fleeing the smell of conflagration and Cardassian carnage that suffused his father's bones.

Though he had known this day would come, though he had prepared himself for it and steeled himself against it, he found that he was far less equipped to handle it than he had thought he would be. The sense of loss was overwhelming. It engulfed him, numbing the details of the world around him to dull smears of color on the black tapestry of his soul.

"You all right, Chakotay?" a voice asked in quiet concern.

Dakob.

Only Dakob.

He'd thought himself alone, isolated from the communal mourning of Dorvan and the Maquis, but he was wrong. Even here, in a quiet glen a dozen kilometers from the chapel, Dakob found him.

"I'm fine," Chakotay lied.

"You don't look fine."

Dakob sank to the ground cross-legged at his brother's side. He studied Chakotay in the dappled light of a midday sun filtered by the sheltering canopy of foliage. Leaf shadows made a leprosy of Chakotay's flesh, but they couldn't hide the agony stained into his averted eyes, or the weight of grief bowing his shoulders to the posture of a venerated elder.

"Father died quickly," he noted after a long, strained silence. "He felt no pain, and would have harbored no regrets."

Chakotay gathered his composure before looking up to face his younger brother. "How did it happen?"

"Cardy strafing run. They bombed the council chambers."

"Did he die alone?"

"Yes."

Chakotay nodded, and looked away. A small beetle crawled the rich earth near his knee. He watched the insect navigate seemingly insurmountable barriers with nothing more than tenacity and an instinctive urge to survive to drive it.

"Topaiza's communique said he died," Chakotay noted finally. "Nothing more."

"Topaiza didn't think you'd come."

"But you did." It was a statement, not a question.

Dakob shrugged. "I know you better than he does."

"You were twelve when I left for the Academy. You barely know me at all."

Dakob countered the statement with a question, smiling their mother's smile: "Do you remember Chambata Lake?"

Chakotay glanced up. His eyes narrowed, but he didn't answer.

"I remember it," Dakob said. "And Hiawatha Fields and Shasheebe Point and Minatonka Ridge. Do you remember that cocoa bear that raided our camp at Silver Trout Falls? I was sure he was going to have me for a midnight snack, but you convinced him to take the fish instead."

"That was a long time ago."

"Not so long, Chakotay."

The beetle had reached a tree. It climbed the vertical slope, toeholds in rough bark all that stood between it and a chitin-breaking fall.

"So you knew I'd come because I took you camping when we were children?" Chakotay allowed finally.

"Cocoa bear not withstanding," Dakob answered, "I think I remember the trip to Minatonka Ridge most clearly. I remember how angry Father was when we came home with the holo-recorder in shards. He grounded you for a month."

Chakotay smiled in spite of himself. "Father was always grounding me," he noted wryly. "I think it was his way of giving me nothing but traditional studies to occupy my mind in hopes that something would eventually stick."

Dakob wasn't smiling. "You never told him it was the camera or me," he said quietly. "He never knew how close he came to having two sons, instead of three."

Chakotay shrugged. "I probably shouldn't have dared you to climb out on that limb," he said. "You were too young to understand the difference between the will of the Sky Spirits and the laws of gravity."

"It was a mere hundred-meter drop to the rocks below," Dakob countered, "and at seven, I was still immortal." He produced a small bundle from beneath his decorative tunic. "I have something for you. It's a gift from Father. He gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday with instructions to hold it for you until you returned to Dorvan for his funeral."

Chakotay stared at the offering in his brother's hands. Wrapped in a section of wolf hide, the bundle's contents may have been a mystery, but its purpose was not.

"Take it, Chakotay," Dakob advised quietly. "He wanted you to have it."

Chakotay accepted the gift and laid it on the ground before him. Fingers unsteady with the emotion of the moment, he peeled away layers of striated wolf fur to reveal what he expected inside.

The akoona was new, unused. It was the latest model with the newest technological advances. When Dakob was eighteen, it would have been a prototype not yet in general production.

The touchstone was a relic from Earth: a stone his father had found on their pilgrimage to the land of the Rubber Tree People the summer Chakotay turned fourteen. Engraved with a cartouche meaning "home," it had been his father's most sacred possession.

The raven's wing was the tragedy of his childhood; it represented the only failing of a man who had never failed him. When he was six, Chakotay killed the bird with a carelessly thrown stone. Overcome with remorse at finding himself the delivering agent of senseless death, he'd brought his victim to Kolopak, laying it reverently in his father's hands with the expectation that Kolopak would do the impossible, that he would rectify his son's transgression by bringing the dead raven back to life. He'd wept bitterly as Kolopak explained that the bird's spirit had already taken flight, and that it would be unfair to call it back to a lesser world. His father offered him the raven's wing in remembrance and to honor the bird's departed spirit. He'd refused it, never again turning to the traditions of ancestors who had betrayed a child's simple faith.

Chakotay stared at the medicine bundle's contents in silence, his mind and his heart warring within the confines of his soul.

"It was his gift to you," Dakob said quietly. "His hope that you would find peace with your past as well as with your future." He reached forward, touching the akoona, bringing it to life. "He asked me to give this to you, Chakotay; along with the wisdom of our ancestors that you never allowed him to teach you. He asked me to teach you to speak with your Spirit Guide, to teach you to seek the spirit plane and the voice of our ancestors that eludes the warrior who denies his heritage." He stared at his brother, reading his averted features, reading his harsh-spined posture. "I want to teach you, Chakotay. All you need do is ask."

Chakotay closed his eyes, barely breathing, listening to the voice of his father speaking through the words of his younger brother. For a moment, he was somewhere else, somewhen else. It was Kolopak speaking, offering spiritual guidance to a boy still crushed beneath the grief of his mother's death though she was three years gone and buried.

Let me teach you, Chakotay. All you need do is ask.

"Yes, Father," Chakotay whispered, his voice a crumbling of emotion in his throat. "Teach me."

"Did he accept it?"

"Yes."

"Did he seek his Spirit Guide?"

"Yes."

"Then it's time."

"Yes. It's time."

He faced her calmly, and she knew why he had come. "You're leaving," she said.

"Yes."

"Then it's begun."

"Yes."

Her hands on his face. His hands on the gentle swell of her otherwise hollow-dish belly.

"We'll miss you," she whispered.

"And I, you."

Her finger traced the mark engraved into his flesh. "Fight well," she whispered. "Be safe."

He smiled. "Oyka hey."

And then he left her, and she watched him go.

His fingers were magician's fingers, skimming the strike ship's console with an instinctive virtuosity that wove the small vessel through deadly plasma storms without incurring the lethal consequences of his casual familiarities.

The Badlands were his home. They challenged him as Dorvan never had, requiring his every skill and concentration to survive. He honored them in return by his willingness to engage in battle, to demonstrate to them his bravery and his honor that they might speak of him to all who passed through their treacherous space in the years to come.

His trial by fire was the deadly caress of pure energy against shields. It seemed unfair somehow, this technological cushion between destiny and fate; so he disengaged the shields, baring his flesh and that of his vessel to the divine judgment of the Sky Spirits' sacred wisdom.

They would choose for him the path that he was to follow.

The Badlands raged around the unprotected vessel. Like the forked tongues of venomous serpents, plasma strands licked the small ship's well-scarred hull, leaving behind long streaks of oxidized char to mark him a man of courage and worthy to sit on the council of warriors.

He venerated their homage by flying closer to the roiling cores of the storms, showing them his boldness, counting coupe on that which would see him dead for the impudence of his challenge.

The Sky Spirits approved. They let him pass unscathed through the tumultuous stew of space and energy. He emerged into Cardassian territory with a sense of invincibility.

His path had been chosen, and he would follow it to whatever end lay in wait.

Smiling a predatory smile, his eyes alight with the ancient thrill of the hunt, Dakob encroached deeper into Cardassian space on the silent wings of a Maquis bird of prey.

Chakotay slept fitfully, the distant howl of a keening wolf a disturbance to the recuperative rest his exhausted body craved. The house was cold and silent. It seemed to listen to the wolf, and Chakotay found himself listening as well in the familiar dark of a room that had once been his own.

His feet swung out of bed, and he followed them to a window that overlooked the eastern pasture. The skies were clear tonight, the stars sharp and brilliant in their pinpoints of light. The grass swayed soothingly in the dark night breeze.

Chakotay.

The whisper of his name was a sigh in the wind. He cocked his head to one side, listening, but his ears found nothing but silence.

Chakotay.

The ambiguous perimeter between tall grass pasture and deeply wooded forest birthed a shadow that stood apart from the shadows of the night. It lingered, neither showing itself fully nor retreating to the darkness from which it had come. Eyes glinted yellow in the half-light. Teeth gleamed in a stray reflection of moonlight.

Chakotay. Come to me.

Chakotay stepped through the adobe wall of his ancestral home and into the thigh-high grass that undulated like an ocean of green beneath the illumination of a full harvest moon. The earth was warm to his bare feet. It welcomed his step as he made his way to the shadow.

She waited for him at the tree line, her gaze perceptively intelligent, her posture an expectation. Kneeling at her side, he extended a hand in invitation. She came to him, her striated fur starkly beautiful in the wash of moonlight that defined her to his eyes.

The wolf.

She spoke to him in the voice of his mother.

Chakotay.

She had not touched him, so he ventured the risk it was to touch her. His fingers ran through the lushness of her ruff, disturbing the black-tipped fur of her pelt to expose silver-gray beneath. She tolerated the caress, weathering his gentle curiosity as a mother might weather the gentle curiosities of her child.

Chakotay.

The voice was in his head. He realized that only now, only when he saw her clearly as she gazed at him with yellow eyes but did not move of muzzle or mouth. Her eyes were unrelenting. They disturbed him with the intensity of their focus and the unblinking clarity of their scrutiny.

Dakob.

Chakotay frowned. His hand dropped away from the wolf, hanging limply at his side.

Dakob, the voice of the wolf repeated in his head.

Chakotay thrust to his feet. He stepped away, filled with an intangible sense of anxiety. The dark wind of the night stilled. The gentle rocking of the tall grass dissipated to nothing. All around him, silence held its breath in anticipation.

Dakob.

Chakotay woke with the cold dash of reality against his awareness. He stood barefoot and half-naked in the field behind his parents' home. The grass was tall and wet and it clung to the legs of his sleep clothes like leaches. Beneath the soles of his feet, the soil was chill and rocky.

Chakotay looked up on a moonless sky. The clouds of an impending storm cloaked the multitudes of stars in darkness, sharing the light of only a smattering of agile holdouts.

Chakotay shivered. Alone in the night, he spoke to himself in a voice that shattered the stillness with foreboding: "Dakob."

They did not expect him to surrender. That, in itself, would work to his advantage. Stepping into the armed encampment with both hands held wide to the sides, Dakob stared into the surprised eyes of the first Cardassian he encountered and said in a clear, strong voice, "I surrender."

The Cardassian blinked. He scrambled for a casually laid-aside weapon and pointed it in Dakob's direction.

"I surrender," Dakob repeated calmly. "I have no weapons."

A second Cardassian joined the first, and then a third and a fourth. One of them stepped forward and clubbed him with the butt of a phaser rifle. Dakob fell obediently to his knees, blood streaming from a gash in his forehead.

"I surrender," he said a third time. "My vessel crashed. I have no weapons. I'm hurt, and I'm alone. I surrender."

They began to understand then, and they celebrated the prize they would bring to their Gul.

Unsteady on his knees, blood hot in his eyes and salty on his lips, Dakob smiled.

Too late or too early, the tavern wasn't open. The windows were dark and the door was closed; but like most buildings on Dorvan, the locks were for outworlder show and gave easily to a hand understanding of the ancestral tenet of the land owning itself.

Chakotay pushed through the door and stepped inside. As he expected, a dozen or more Maquis had clustered themselves into a single corner.

"Fleeter on deck," a voice warned.

Discussion stopped. The Maquis parted in a Red Sea cleave, clearing a path to the man in the corner.

The apex of the clandestine gathering, Topaiza sat at a small table and addressed them as a king addressing the nobles of his private court. Glancing up in insolent disinterest, he regarded Chakotay with a lazy apathy that made it clear he considered his uniformed brother unworthy of the effort.

"What do you want, Chakotay?"

"Where's Dakob?" Chakotay demanded.

A dozen whispers ruffled the small cluster of Maquis. Animosity burning in Dorvanian eyes mutated to suspicion.

"I don't know," Topaiza said. "Why don't you try Clay Bucket's?"

Chakotay's eyes flashed. He strode the gauntlet corridor laid between the door and his brother's table, oblivious to the threat of Dorvanian rebels closing the corridor in his wake.

"Where is he, Topaiza?" Chakotay repeated tersely.

Topaiza's eyes narrowed. He studied Chakotay for a long beat, then asked, "Why do you want to know?"

It was a move they didn't expect--for Chakotay to attack with the odds so heavily stacked against him--but attack, nonetheless, he did. His hand shot out like a striking rattler, catching Topaiza by the collar and hauling him to his feet. Kneeing the table out from between them, he slammed Topaiza against the mahogany bar that ran the length of the tavern's long wall.

A dozen men flexed with the intention of violence.

"Tell them to back off, or I'll break your fucking back," Chakotay hissed.

The threat alone was enough to balk hands already reaching for him.

Chakotay increased the leverage of his hold, pressing the momentary advantage by forcing Topaiza's spine harder against the brass railing that rimmed the bar's exterior edge. His face only centimeters from Topaiza's, he warned, "I mean it, Paiza. Tell them to back off."

Topaiza nodded, and the circle of rebels poised to attack loosened the throttle of a garotte to the menacing pressure of a hangman's noose.

"Now, where is he?" Chakotay demanded.

Topaiza stood awkwardly, lame leg splayed to one side, holding his balance by accepting the knuckle pressure that bruised color into his throat as an inducement to disclosure.

"He's gone," Topaiza said. "Now let go of me."

Chakotay tightened his grip on Topaiza's shirt. "Gone where?"

"On a mission."

"A mission where?"

"Kill me if you want to, Chakotay," Topaiza returned quietly, "or let me go."

"Don't tempt me, Topaiza. Tell me where you sent him."

"No."

Lifting Topaiza's weight slightly, Chakotay slammed it back to the brass rail with bruising force. Topaiza went white with pain.

"Tell me," Chakotay ordered grimly.

"No."

The response was a rattle in Topaiza's throat. His breathing had gone harsh and irregular, his angular features cut with an escalation of the agony normally resident to the deeply-etched lines and valleys that defined them. The defiance in hostile eyes tried to compensate for the biological betrayal of trembling extremities and failed.

Surprise flickered through Chakotay's features. He released Topaiza and stepped away. A dozen Maquis hands grabbed him, gripped him, restrained him.

Straightening from his graceless sprawl across the mahogany bar, Topaiza nearly fell. Several rebels twitched, but none offered the insult of assistance. Topaiza regained his balance, regained his composure. Still sallow and unsteady, he nodded to the men holding Chakotay, and they released him, grudgingly but without argument.

Topaiza stepped forward, his limp more pronounced, the structure of his _expression more fierce with its determination to maintain neutrality. He faced a younger brother who stood his ground with equal determination.

"Tell me," Chakotay demanded.

The blow he backhanded to Chakotay's jaw would have decked a lesser man; but Chakotay held his feet with a two-step stagger. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth; his flesh reflected the force of the blow with the speed of its discoloration; but he ceded no victory to the man who'd struck him and no fear that he would be struck again.

"Tell me," he said.

"I sent him to Shalla Nor," Topaiza answered.

"Something's happened."

Topaiza's _expression didn't so much as flicker. "We received a distress signal twenty minutes ago," he allowed. "His ship took heavy damage. It went down. We're trying to ascertain his status now."

Chakotay stumbled. He would have fallen if not for an unexpected assist from one of the men who had moments ago held him in anticipation of retaliation.

"Damn you, Topaiza," Chakotay whispered.

"Admiral Topaiza," a voice hailed over the tavern comm system.

Topaiza's eyes stayed with Chakotay. "What?" he responded as Chakotay shook off Maquis support to lean against the bar.

"We have a transmission from Minoko Three. They intercepted a Cardy zip-sig originating from Shalla Nor. They think it may be an ID clarify."

"Put it up, monitor two."

The blank screen suspended in the far corner of the tavern flickered to life. Every set of Maquis eyes turned to watch the sea of white noise solidify into the transcomm logo of the listening post on Minoko III. Standing in their midst, Chakotay's hands went white on the bar's brass stumble rail as his focus held itself grimly to mahogany wood. The logo vanished, and in its place, a Cardassian zip-sig descrambled to an image of a boneless man supported to either side by Cardassian guards.

He'd been beaten, his legs no longer willing to carry their own weight let alone that of his torso and upper body. His head hung limp and bloody in a way that obscured his features from the visual comm's pickup port.

A voice muttered in guttural Cardassian, and one of the guards grabbed the prisoner by the hair. Jerking his head back cruelly, the guard exposed the battered features of a man that each Maquis in the tavern knew.

As did the Starfleet officer who only now looked up to see what he knew he would see.

"Dakob," someone whispered.

As if in response to the hail, Dakob's eyelids fluttered. They opened to narrow slits, and his split lips formed a phrase each of them knew, although the Cardassians would not.

"Oyka hey," Dakob's voice husked over the grainy audio interpolation.

It is a good day to die.

The Cardassian spoke again, and the zip-sig ended. Silence fell over the tavern. It pulsed, alive, waiting. For several minutes, no one spoke.

"Once they ID him, he's dead," Water's Edge said finally.

"He's already dead," Nujami countered dully. "He was dead the moment they took him."

"He won't tell them anything," Black Powder announced.

"In the end," Walks With Silence murmured, "he'll tell them anything they want to know."

"This is your doing, Topaiza," Chakotay said.

Hunched over the bar, his back to Topaiza, he spoke quietly but with a razor's intent. The tavern fell silent at the sound of his voice.

Water's Edge stepped forward, but Running Bear stopped him with a simple hand on his arm.

"Dakob is Maquis," Topaiza said calmly. "He knows the risks and the consequences of a demolition run on Shalla Nor."

Chakotay looked up, met his brother's eyes. "Dakob believes the Sky Spirits will protect him."

"Then Dakob is a fool," Topaiza returned.

Chakotay straightened. He stared at his brother for a full minute before he spoke again: "You're right, Topaiza. You have changed." Without another word, he turned and walked away.

The ruling triad of the Dorvanian Ruling Council stared at the frozen image displayed on the council monitor in dull disbelief.

"Something must have gone wrong," Little Feet said finally.

"Nothing went wrong," Topaiza snapped. "He surrendered. He gave himself up to them, knowing they would send a zip-sig to Cardassia Prime to identify him, and that we would intercept the zip-sig and decode it."

"That wasn't the plan," Red Ribbons protested.

Topaiza snorted. He began to pace the small chamber, his stride awkward and lilting. "That wasn't our plan," he muttered, "but it was always his. I was a fool not to see it...a fool to let him convince me he would play by the rules when he has never played by the rules before."

"This doesn't make sense. Why would he--"

"Because he knows Chakotay," Topaiza interrupted. "There was a question of participation in the plan we discussed, so he designed a strategy to eliminate the question of participation."

A thin sheen of perspiration waxed Topaiza's flesh. He stopped behind Johona's chair, one hand seeking support from molded plasticine as he stared at the image on the council monitor.

Dakob's face, bloody and battered, stared back. The sharp glint of victory reflected from his eyes.

"He knew Chakotay would come if he saw this," Topaiza said. Pain, a familiar companion in the day-to-day of his existence, etched his face with a latticework of fine lines. "He knew that even loyalty to Starfleet wouldn't be enough to keep him away."

"This isn't a strategy," Red Ribbons murmured. "It's a sacrifice."

"Chakotay's right," Topaiza allowed dully. "He thinks the Sky Spirits will protect him."

Little Feet shook his head. "Dakob is smarter than that. He knows the Cardassians as well as any of us. He knows their brutality, their capacity to decimate the spirit in ruthless pursuit of information." The Iroquois national looked up, fixing Topaiza with an unblinking gaze. "He, of all people, knows the cost of courage within the confines of a Cardassian interrogation chamber."

Topaiza's features flexed bitterly. "He knows it," he agreed, reaching past Johona to erase the image of his brother's blood from the desktop monitor. "He just doesn't think it can happen to him."

"He believes himself worthy of a grace that you were not?" Johona asked gently.

Topaiza snorted. "Dakob embraces the mythology of our ancestors," he said. "The mythology of the Native Collective itself. He counts coupe in battle, tests himself against plasma storms in the Badlands. His determination to supplicate to the will of the Sky Spirits forced me to issue him a solitaire strike ship as an alternative to allowing him to risk the lives of every man in his crew." A twist of pain knotted Topaiza's _expression. He stepped away from Johona, taking a seat between the old man and Red Ribbons in an ungainly settle of stilted limbs. "Kolopak spent his life trying to connect Chakotay and I to our heritage," he went on after a beat, "but Dakob, he counselled on caution, on reason, on the difference between the world of our ancestors and the world in which we exist." Topaiza's eyes were dark, haunted. "He understood that Dakob would martyr himself to the will of the Sky Spirits," he murmured. "It's my failing that I was not as wise."

"Your father was such a man in his youth," Johona allowed. "It was only your mother who tamed the angry warrior he had become, giving him peace that he might choose to live and teach the ways of his ancestors."

"Dakob's faith in the Sky Spirits is his strength," Red Ribbons offered gently. "It will protect him as it always has."

"Faith won't protect him from the Cardassians," Topaiza returned. "Nothing will protect him but death." He looked to Johona now as he had always looked to Kolopak in the past. "I have to go," he said. "If we're to have any hope of saving him, I have to go now."

Johona nodded. "Go in the hands of the Spirits, my brother's son," he said. "And if it's true that the Sky Spirits protect heroes and fools, then I will pray that They have yet to grow weary of our Dakob's dependence upon Their magnanimity."

"I've grown weary of his dependence, Johona," Topaiza said, pushing to his feet. "His blind faith will get him killed."

"Or save us all," Red Ribbons noted.

Topaiza glanced to the matriarch of Dorvan with flash-anger in his eyes. She returned his anger with quiet grace, taking no offense to the insurrection that rose bitter in his features.

"I'll settle for him," Topaiza said finally, holding his enmity in check out of respect. "If Dakob's faith is of any value at all, I will settle for it saving him."

Dakob woke in pain and isolation, his senses stolen from him by the cold black texture of the air he breathed. They were giving him time to think, time to enjoy the multitude of small agonies they'd inflicted on his flesh and bones as a precursor to serious interrogation.

They were of a belief that the beating would soften his spirit; that it would teach him a fear of what was yet to come.

Dakob muttered a simple prayer of thanks to the Sky Spirits for granting him an enemy who understood so little of what it would take to break him.

He rolled in the darkness, judging the passing of time by the pain that remained in battered flesh. It had been a dozen hours, maybe more. The request for identification would have been sent. It would have been intercepted and decoded. Chakotay would know, and he would come.

Dakob listened to the rattle of his own breathing. It bounced like bat radar off stone walls occluded by darkness, the reflection of it telling him the approximate size of his cell, and that he was underground--probably within the confines of the irridium mine itself. He smiled. The Cardassians were ill-equipped to fight this war they'd begun over lands that were not theirs. Ruthless militants bred to aggression and domination, they had not the spirit of a single Dorvanian between them. It was their strongest weakness: the incapacity to understand a warrior who would die for his beliefs, or for his people.

Twisting carefully on the vertical axis of his spine, Dakob shrugged out of the tattered remains of a jacket they should have stripped from him upon his capture. It was a simple stratagem, and, as such, one that nearly always worked. Most Cardassians searched for weapons or technological threats, but it was rare to find one who understood that a mere biscuit could kill as effectively as a bromide bomb.

Or a jacket.

The C-6 was woven into the fabric itself: two dozen small threads of silver devastation capable of incinerating the mine to ashes with a single ignition. Without sulfitic oxidate to catalyst the detonation, it was a stable explosive, one more than capable of withstanding the beating he'd taken and more; but once exposed to the gaseous sulfidate...

Had they given him run of the compound, he couldn't have found a more opportune ground zero than this holding cell injudiciously constructed deep within the irridium-laced bowels of the Cardy outpost.

Hands badly swollen, at least three fingers broken, Dakob rumpled the jacket and shoved it, as if by happenstance, into a corner where it would be taken as refuse. Within thirty to forty hours, the low-grade radiant properties of C-6 would melt the wax sheath that protected stitching steeped in sulfitic oxide. The room's oxygen content would bond with the oxide, forming oxidate; and the Cardassian mining operation on Shalla Nor would once again be reduced to rubble.

But until then, there was interrogation.

Shivering in the darkness, Dakob rolled away from the corner and curled into himself, conserving what body heat had not yet defected to the chill, damp floor. His mind wandered, perusing the time frame and calculating the available window of opportunity. Certainly twelve hours--perhaps as much as twenty. If the Sky Spirits favored him, he'd be gone by then. If not, the Cardies would identify him and their interrogations would turn specific and ugly.

The blast would be a welcome mercy to such an eventuality. It would free him to join his father in whatever life lay beyond this one.

The spectre of torture didn't frighten him--pain was a path to ascendence, an opportunity to honor himself in the eyes of his enemy--but neither did he relish the mutilation it would undoubtedly entail. The Cardassians had changed Topaiza in the short time they'd had him. They hadn't broken him, hadn't vanquished his mind or his spirit; but they had changed him.

Irrevocably.

Irreparably.

Changed him.

And of that change, Dakob was afraid. He considered it in the cold silence of his waiting, a whisper of fear that skated his bones and caroused his thoughts, speaking to him of a thousand agonies, reminding him of Topaiza and how a man of strength and vigor could so quickly be reduced to a crippled shell of bitterness, lacking the capacity to walk without technological assistance, lacking the capacity to stand without agony.

Lacking the faith to believe in that which had once sustained him.

The smell of Clay Bucket's flesh reminded itself to Dakob's senses. The motion of her body under his, the quiet moan of her silk voice near his ear. He remembered her in the darkness, knowing that the simple intimacies they shared would be the first price the Cardassians exacted.

Panic shimmered in his chest. It twisted through his belly and intensified the pain of his many wounds.

Dakob closed his eyes. Knowing that to deny his fear was to empower it, he opened himself to the acid wash of escalating panic, embracing it as a father embraced a prodigal son, allowing it to become as one with his strength and his courage and his faith. Even without the akoona, he could feel his existence changing, shifting. The chill darkness gave way to the welcoming warmth of the spirit plane.

His ancestors were with him today. He could hear them in the gentle winds of Dorvan that fingered through his hair.

Alone in darkness, his bones broken and his flesh bloodied and bruised, Dakob waited for death or for life, his spirit at peace within the confines of his own soul.

He didn't join them until they'd reached the strike ship and were prepping to disembark. Dressed in Dorvanian garb for the first time since appearing in Topaiza's tavern, Chakotay strode up the gangplank and entered the small vessel with the confidence of a commander addressing himself to ensigns.

"I'll take the helm," he announced without preamble. "The Badlands can be a gauntlet, and I've always had better instincts than you do."

Shouldering past Topaiza, he took a seat in the pilot's chair and began running a series of comprehensive pre-launch sequences.

"No one invited you, Starfleet," Siumora said, his body terse in its stance behind the weapon's console.

"I didn't ask if I was invited," Chakotay returned. He continued running pre-flights, his fingers agile in their manipulations of the complex console.

"Topaiza?" Running Bear demanded.

Topaiza didn't answer. He was watching Chakotay work, noting the ease with which his younger brother adapted to an unfamiliar flight matrix, to an unfamiliar navigational board. The engines were on-line and the cartography interactives were meshed into helm navigation within four minutes. The most current reconnaissances were overlaid on the display, notating a handful of Cardy patrols and three newly-established sensor posts between Dorvan and Shalla Nor. The process was a complex one, requiring a dozen access codes and at least one high-level clearance Chakotay shouldn't possess, but obviously did.

"You aren't welcome here, Chakotay," Topaiza stated finally.

"Tough luck. Initiating final flight sequence. Anybody planning to de-board better do it now."

The barrel of a Bajoran disruptor pressed itself coldly against the base of Chakotay's skull. "You're the only one de-boarding, Starfleet," Running Bear said grimly. "Get out. Now."

Chakotay initiated the final flight sequence, retracted the gangplank and sealed the portal entrance. "Are you really going to slag my head, Running Bear?" he asked calmly. "After all those years of running interference for me on the playing field?"

"We were on the same team then," Running Bear returned. "We aren't now." He increased the pressure of the weapon against Chakotay's neck. "And if you remember anything about me at all, you'll remember that I'll do whatever it takes to win."

"As a matter of fact," Chakotay allowed, "I do remember that about you. And because I remember it, I zip-sigged a transcomm to Gul Potken on Shalla Nor, telling him we're on our way, and on what trajectory to expect us to arrive." He said it calmly, neither looking up nor pausing in his preparations for take-off. "Right now, that message is cached in a Starfleet comm satellite under my personal access code," he went on, "but unless I enter a delete sequence in two hours and six minutes--or was it one hour and forty-two minutes?--Gul Potken should have plenty of time to set up a nice little reception in honor of our arrival."

Running Bear's eyes narrowed. Siumora growled. Topaiza's _expression didn't change one iota.

In the far corner, Hopache looked up from the mine schematic spread before him. "What kind of refreshments do you suppose Cardies serve?" he asked curiously.

"Tell me the delete sequence," Running Bear ordered coldly.

"Alpha six two one Zeta three," Chakotay answered without hesitation. "Or was it Zeta six one two Lambda six? Or it could have been three three three Beta--but it doesn't really matter, does it? Because you have no idea which Starfleet comm satellite it's cached in or what my personal access code is."

"Don't screw with me, Chakotay," Running Bear growled.

Chakotay grinned. His features sharpened with predatory aggression. "You're already screwed, Running Bear," he told the huge Apache in the quietly confident tone of a man holding an ace-high flush.

Stepping past his larger compatriot, Siumora dragged Chakotay out of the pilot's chair and threw him against a bulkhead. The disruptor in his hand was Cardassian, and the light in his eyes was the fact that he wanted to use it.

"Running Bear may not kill you, Starfleet," Siumora hissed, leveling the weapon at Chakotay's chest. "But I think you know that I will. Now tell me how to block that zip-sig."

"Kiss my Starfleet ass," Chakotay returned.

Siumora's disruptor arced a quick response, jolting hard against Chakotay's left cheek, jarring his head back into the bulkhead.

Chakotay took the blow like it was nothing more than an insulted woman's open-handed slap. He smiled at Siumora, his eyes baiting. "Kiss my big, hairy Starfleet ass," he said.

Hopache laughed and returned to his schematic.

"Siumora," Topaiza said as a second blow was coiling itself to strike.

Siumora's eyes narrowed. He resisted the calm directive of his commander's voice with a glance, but complied when Topaiza gave no quarter in his _expression. Stalking angrily away, Siumora cleared room for Topaiza to face his younger brother.

"Using Starfleet assets to facilitate Maquis insurrection is treason, isn't it, Chakotay?" Topaiza asked. "Doesn't that clash with your precious Starfleet directives?"

"Technically," Chakotay countered, "I'm using Starfleet assets to protect Starfleet assets--specifically me. And I consider this a rescue mission, which falls under the heading of humanitarian, not insurrection."

"Our primary objective is the destruction of Shalla Nor."

"My only objective is Dakob. Whatever you do to Shalla Nor is none of my concern."

"They'll court-martial you for participating in terrorist activities."

"I'll worry about that when we have Dakob."

"Dakob may already be dead."

Chakotay's eyes glittered. "If he is," he noted quietly, "I'll give the Cardies something to remember him by."

Shouldering past Topaiza, he resumed his seat at the helm. His hands resumed their preparatory manipulations of the flight console, and his posture resumed its intention to ignore the deadly animosity snaking the air like an antimatter flush in open space.

Running Bear glanced to Topaiza. Topaiza nodded.

"You talk big, Starfleet," Siumora snapped from his station at tactical. "But don't expect us to trust our backs to a traitor who buys berth on a mission by divulging classified strike parameters to the enemy."

"He didn't divulge them," Hopache noted. "He threatened to divulge them. There's a difference."

"There's no difference," Siumora retorted harshly. "The threat makes him a traitor."

Hopache shrugged. "If it works," he allowed, "the threat makes him a Maquis."

Chakotay glanced up from his pre-flights. He studied the man in the corner, recognizing him from their childhood as the son of a tribal elder. As he was younger than Chakotay by several years, they'd known each other only passingly; but he'd been a companion of Dakob's from the time they could walk.

"You told Father this wasn't your fight," Topaiza said.

Chakotay returned his attention to the helm. "It wasn't," he allowed grimly. "Now it is."

"And once we have Dakob?"

"Then it won't be again."

Silence lay heavy in the small strike ship's cabin. Though Topaiza's eyes never left Chakotay, he seemed to have said all he intended to say.

Running Bear replaced his weapon in his belt. Siumora wasn't so easily placated.

"How do we know we can trust him, Topaiza?" he demanded. "How do we know he won't betray us to Starfleet, or to the Cardassians?"

"Because I say I won't," Chakotay answered without looking up. He finished the pre-flight sequences and began igniting engines to their launch stages as if he'd been given clearance to proceed.

"Your word means nothing to me, Starfleet," Siumora sneered.

"It means something to Topaiza," Chakotay countered.

"And to me," Hopache noted.

Siumora swung on the Maquis in the corner. "He isn't Dakob, Hopache," he snapped.

"No," Hopache agreed quietly. "But he is Dakob's brother." His eyes lifted, met Siumora's gaze. "And Kolopak's son."

"He's Starfleet," Siumora insisted.

Hopache shrugged. "No one's perfect."

"What do you say, Topaiza?" Running Bear asked quietly.

Topaiza answered by sliding awkwardly into the co-pilot's chair to Chakotay's immediate right. "Secure for launch," he ordered levelly. "Chakotay, take us up."

The spirit plane was a welcome sanctuary: a warm, gentle place that structured itself after the open fields of Dorvan. Waist-high grass rolled lazily in the breeze as small animals scavenged the black soil for nuts and seeds. Rich with the bouquet of ripening fruit and pollinating flowers, the smell of summer was thick in the air. It lay heavy on his flesh and dense in his appreciative senses, reminding him of the endless days of his childhood and youth. Above him, a red-tailed hawk circled the resplendent azure skies, looking for unwary prey.

"Her nature disturbs you," Kolopak noted, his eyes valuative of his youngest son. "And that it disturbs you, disturbs you as well."

"She's been my constant companion since you taught me to seek her wisdom in the summer of my seventh year," Dakob returned.

Kolopak smiled. "You were always spiritual beyond your age, my son," he said. "That was a source of pride to me, as well as a source of anxiety."

"Why anxiety, Father?"

"Because your faith blinded you in so many ways. As your father, I learned to fear that the Sky Spirits would re-claim you before your time was over."

"I don't fear death."

"You should fear death," Kolopak informed him. "Fear is the Sky Spirits' gift to us, that we may use it to survive."

"The Sky Spirits will protect me."

"The Sky Spirits cannot protect you if you don't protect yourself."

Dakob smiled, comfortable where he lay, cradled by the warm earth, mesmerized by the repetitive patterns of his Spirit Guide's graceful circles. "They will protect me," he repeated. "I follow Their path; and in return, They watch over me that I may witness the manifestation of Their will."

"And what is the Sky Spirits' will, my son?" Kolopak asked gently.

"It is Their will that Chakotay join us." Dakob drew a deep breath, relishing the scent of damp grass that steeped itself deeply into the folds of his every awareness. "Chakotay has come home, Father," he murmured. "He has returned to Dorvan to take his rightful place in the Maquis."

"Chakotay follows his own path," Kolopak responded. "He must be allowed to find his own way."

"I've shown him the way, Father. I've brought him back to the fold."

In the azure skies above them, the balance of the spirit plane shifted. The red-tailed hawk dove without warning, her wings folding close to her body and her talons extending as she swooped toward a small rabbit unwisely inattentive to shadows disguising themselves as nonexistent clouds. She struck, and the rabbit screamed, mortally wounded.

"Chakotay must choose his own path," Kolopak repeated.

The rabbit twitched in the hawk's grip as she bore her prize into open skies. Eviscerated but not yet dead, it bled piteous rivers across tall Dorvanian grass. She would return him to her nest and feed his living flesh to her young. Nourished by the sacrifice of his warm blood and beating heart, they would grow strong and thrive.

"I have chosen his path, Father," Dakob murmured. "I have brought Chakotay home."

They cleared the Badlands without incident and entered Cardassian territory like thieves in the night. In the handful of hours that passed, neither of Kolopak's sons addressed himself to the other.

"Tholian ale," Chakotay said to Hopache as the younger man passed in a circuit of the raider to stretch his legs. "And small sausages wrapped in sweet sourdough."

Hopache smiled. "It might have been a party to behold," he allowed. "Do you suppose Cardy blood would have clashed with the decor?"

Chakotay met the Maquis rebel's eyes. "Thank you for speaking for me," he said.

"Thank you for breaking Selena Katerra's heart," Hopache returned. "Consoling her turned out to be an adventure I'll never forget."

"Selena Katerra," Chakotay repeated. A smile shadowed the recesses of his _expression. "I haven't thought of her for years."

"She hasn't thought of you for years, either," Hopache allowed.

Chakotay's smile deepened. "How is she?" he asked.

"She's pregnant," Hopache answered. "With our third child. Don't tell her I spoke for you, or it will be our last."

"I won't tell her," Chakotay agreed.

Nodding, Hopache turned back toward his seat.

"Even as a boy," Chakotay noted, "Dakob chose his friends well."

It was a quiet statement, one that required no response; but Hopache did respond, turning to face the brother of the only man important enough to him to risk jeopardizing the father of his children and the husband of his wife.

"Dakob didn't choose me," he said quietly. "I chose him. My Spirit Guide told me, as a child, that we were of common destiny."

"Then he's a lucky man," Chakotay allowed.

"It's I who am lucky," Hopache corrected. "As are all those who share Dakob's destiny. He speaks with the Sky Spirits. He sees the future of Dorvan, and the future of Dorvan sees him."

"I remember Dakob in diapers," Chakotay said calmly.

"And I remember him in battle," Hopache countered. "The Sky Spirits protect him, Chakotay. They protect him as They protect no other."

"I hope They're protecting him now."

"If it's the Sky Spirits' will that Dakob live," Hopache stated grimly, "then he will live. Even the plasma storms in the Badlands have come to understand that."

"Cardassians aren't plasma storms, Hopache," Chakotay said quietly. "And they have the capacity to leave a man alive in a way that even the Sky Spirits would grieve."

"They'll protect him," Hopache maintained, his tone tainted with dogmatic intractability. "As They always have, and as They always will."

Hopache returned to his seat, and Chakotay turned back to the helm. Checking the veracity of a dozen navigational markers, he ignored the weight of Topaiza's gaze on his skin until it became an aggravation to the integrity of his concentration.

He looked up.

Topaiza looked away.

Neither of them spoke, and neither of them answered.

His Spirit Guide warned him they were coming, and he prepared himself to meet them on a battleground of wills. The guards didn't speak as they dragged him from his cell. They didn't speak as they prodded him down the narrow stone corridor, their phaser rifles quick with reprimand should he stumble or lag.

The Gul's office was lush by Cardassian standards. Tapestries hung in luxuriant splendor on the walls. The furniture was Bajoran, waxed and oiled and finely-detailed by the hands of craftsmen no doubt executed when their job was done. Very near the center of the room, duranium shackles hung indolently from the low-slung ceiling.

It was to the shackles that they took him.

The guards didn't speak as they chained him like a marionette left to hang across a door. His feet touched the floor, but nothing more. When they finished securing him, they left him, his shoulders strained by the weight of his own body, his senses strained by the silence of the empty room.

Dakob waited. Holding his own weight on the balls of his feet, aware that soon enough he would lose the capacity to do so, he set his mind against the chaffing pressure on his wrists, against the pulsing ache of broken bones and battered flesh. Blood began to drain from his hands, but his heart worked diligently to replace it.

In his mind, he spoke to the animal spirit who advised him. She gave him counsel as she had always given him counsel, translating for him the will of the Sky Spirits and reassuring him that within Their eyes, he was a favored son.

Dakob listened, his body afraid, but his spirit strong.

"He's Starfleet," Siumora observed acidly, his voice low and privileged and full of poison as he spoke to Topaiza in the aft reaches of the small ship. "Do you expect him to return to his Federation and tell them nothing of our tactics, our equipment, our membership?"

"Chakotay's known the Dorvanian membership of the Maquis for longer than he's been a Starfleet officer," Topaiza returned calmly. "If he was going to compromise his people, he would have done it before now."

"He has compromised his people," Siumora snapped. "He's betrayed us all in allying himself with a governmental structure that would sacrifice Dorvan to a treaty with the Cardassians."

"Chakotay was in Starfleet long before the Federation made the Demilitarized Zone an issue," Topaiza countered.

"He should have returned home when the treaty was signed."

"He didn't," Topaiza said coldly.

"That tells us where his loyalties lie. What makes you think he didn't send the message he threatened us with? The Cardies and the Fleeters could be laying a trap for us on Shalla Nor even now."

"There was no message," Topaiza assured the agitated rebel patiently.

"You don't know that," Siumora snapped.

"I do know it. Justifications aside, Chakotay wouldn't use Starfleet facilities in any capacity that related to Maquis aggression--humanitarian, military or otherwise. And he's sent no delete sequence since we left Dorvan. If there had been a message, there would have had to be a delete sequence."

"Proof that he's planning a trap," Siumora insisted.

"Proof that you'd lose your shirt if you sat down with him at poker."

Angry and frustrated, Siumora glared at his friend and commanding officer. "What if there was a message, but he hasn't deleted it?" he demanded. "Did you think of that, Topaiza?"

"If there'd really been a message, he wouldn't have told us about it. It was a bluff, Siumora. A simple, transparent bluff; one that worked for those very reasons."

"If you knew it was a bluff," Siumora challenged, "why'd you let him come?"

"Because I want him here."

Siumora blinked. "You what?"

"I want him here."

"Why?"

"Because he belongs here. And because without him, we stand less of a chance of getting Dakob back alive."

Siumora shook his head as if trying to dislodge an unwelcome response. "He doesn't belong here," he argued. "He's Starfleet."

"He's Dorvanian," Topaiza countered. "As he always has been."

"He's Starfleet," Siumora insisted.

"He's my brother, Siumora." Topaiza met the other man's gaze squarely. "And if you think that doesn't matter to either him or to me, then you're wrong."

Siumora glanced back to the front of the raider. "For as long as I've known you," he muttered, "you've spoken of Chakotay with hatred."

"He's still my brother."

Topaiza walked away then, limping badly as he negotiated the small maze it was to reach the front of the ship. He settled into the navigator's chair, grunting quietly with a flash of pain not entirely suppressed by the iron confines of determination.

Chakotay looked up.

Topaiza looked away.

Neither of them spoke, and neither of them answered.

They'd beaten him badly, never speaking, never offering the opportunity to show them that he would not answer the questions they did not ask. His blood ran freely from a dozen wounds. Inside his body, a handful of damaged organs worked overtime to keep him conscious to face the questions they did not ask.

The questions they did not ask.

The questions they did not ask.

The door to the Gul's office opened with a squeal of unoiled hinges. The Cardassian who approached did so with a smile. Dakob faced him without _expression, but he flinched when the Cardassian reached out to take his chin in one hand, to turn his head from side to side, to examine the tracks of brackish blood that defined the topography of his features like the grid of a holographic matrix.

"Interesting mark," the Cardassian commented, indicating Dakob's tattoo with a light fingertap to his battered left cheek. "I've never seen one like it before." He released Dakob and stepped back. His smile was slick, rehearsed; but his eyes were the black ice of open space. "It's the mark of the Rubber Tree People, isn't it? South America? Ancient Earth?"

Dakob didn't answer.

The Cardassian smiled, needing no answer for the time being. "Very interesting," he repeated. "And very helpful. It didn't take long to identify you with such a unique feature for reference." He wandered to the desk, consulted a sheaf of papers laid there by a guard earlier in the day. "Probably not a good idea, though," he observed casually. "For a terrorist, I mean. Actually engraving such a uncommon symbol into your skin?" He shook his head. "Seems ill-advised for a man who depends on his anonymity to be effective, don't you think?" He looked up, as if waiting for a reply.

Dakob didn't answer.

"But then again," the Cardassian went on after a beat, "you Dorvanians do have an odd propriety system. You're much less motivated by the threat of death than the Bajorans were." He smiled again. "Honor does seem to be an effective weapon, though. And deformity. Do you realize I've broken more Dorvanians by deforming them and leaving them alive than I did Bajorans by slaughtering their children while they watched? Interesting, isn't it? From a sociological standpoint, of course."

The Cardassian took a seat on the edge of his desk. He studied Dakob for a long moment.

"I think it's a challenge," he announced suddenly. "I think you marked yourself as a challenge to the Cardassian empire. This is who I am: stop me if you can. Am I right?"

Again, he waited.

Again, Dakob didn't answer.

"I think I am," the Cardassian decided. "I think you're a Dorvanian warrior who prides himself on challenging his enemy. I think you count coupe on your enemy's vessels, and you take a personal pride in spilling your enemy's blood."

Dakob didn't answer.

The Cardassian sighed. "Well, regardless of the reason behind it, I have to admit that your mark worked for you in this particular instance. We might have killed you otherwise, thinking you nothing more than another bothersome Maquis buzzing around our irridium mine, hoping for a window of opportunity; but your mark saved you. It told us you weren't just any Maquis, but rather a very special Maquis; one we have a great interest in talking to, one I personally have wanted to meet for a very long time."

Dakob didn't answer.

"My name is Gul Potken," the Cardassian said, his smile deepening to a self-satisfied grin. "And you, I would assume, are one of the sons of Kolopak."

It was Chakotay who broke the silence between them by asking the question preying on his mind since Topaiza had stepped from the shadow corners of the tavern on Dorvan V.

"How did it happen?"

Topaiza glanced up, his eyes cold within the context of his _expression. "Does it matter?" he asked.

"It matters to me."

Topaiza grunted. He posted navigational updates, then ran a quick sensor scan of the surrounding space. Nothing required their attention, nothing spoke dangers to him that could justify the evasion of a conversation already broached.

"He was in the council chambers when the Cardies hit it," Topaiza allowed as if it were a concession to do so. "They leveled the place, and he died."

Chakotay studied his brother without comment for almost a full minute. "Dakob told me how Father died," he said finally. "I was asking about your legs."

Topaiza's features flexed. He ran another sensor scan, and re-posted navigational updates already posted.

"That's none of your business."

"Tell me anyway."

Topaiza looked up again, met his brother's eyes again. "Someone left a hoverboard in the hall," he said. "I tripped over it and fell."

Chakotay smiled. "It was an atrium," he pointed out, "and it was a full five meters squared. Anyone with eyes could have seen an orange hoverboard docked against a white wall. It's the universal color sign for `watch where you're going.'"

They sat in silence for almost a minute, neither offering sustenance to a momentary compatibility that eroded second-by-second back to the posturings of a terse detente.

"Are you going to tell me?" Chakotay asked finally.

"Cardies," Topaiza answered.

Chakotay's eyes narrowed. "I'd figured that much out."

"Then you can figure the rest out, too."

Chakotay waited for a softening of his brother's stance that didn't come. Sitting at Chakotay's side, his spine stiff despite the agony such a posture spawned in the lines of his fiercely-constructed _expression, Topaiza busied himself with a dozen evasions, a dozen deflections, a dozen excuses to avoid the gaze of his younger brother.

"A flying accident," Chakotay said finally.

"No."

"A Cardy strafing run."

"No."

"A mission that--"

"Interrogation," Topaiza interrupted coldly.

Chakotay looked away, studied his hands. "How long did they have you?" he asked.

"Long enough."

Before Chakotay could pursue the answer, Topaiza thrust to his feet. Awkward and in pain, he manipulated himself out of the close quarters between chair and console, and strode with a stilted limp to the back of the vessel. His hands shook as he drew pajuta from the replication slot inset into the aft bulkhead. He drank it too fast, downing the steaming liquid like a shot of Irish whiskey, then programming the slot for more.

"Three days," Running Bear said quietly.

Chakotay closed his eyes. His memory screamed within the confines of his skull, an echo of the shrill wafer screams of a Bajoran child the Durant had rescued from Cardassians interrogating her about subversive activities. They'd done the child no favor, letting her live. The Cardassians were masters of Humanoid physiology; they understood the subtle destructions that couldn't be repaired.

"I didn't know," Chakotay whispered.

"You weren't here," Siumora stated flatly.

A Cardassian patrol showed up on long-range sensors. Chakotay re-programmed the navigational parameters to give them a wide berth, then notated the patrol's location in the mission reconnaissance log.

Topaiza resumed his seat at Chakotay's side.

Chakotay looked up.

Topaiza looked away.

Neither of them spoke, and neither of them answered.

"I knew your father," Gul Potken told Dakob congenially. "I was sorry to hear of his untimely demise."

Staring into cold Cardassian eyes, Dakob listened to the voices of his ancestors. They spoke to him in soothing mantras, reminding him of what he already knew: response was victory.

He would not respond.

"It's always tragic to lose a man of wisdom," the Gul went on. "He was a spiritual man, wasn't he? I hope it gives you comfort to think of him in a better place."

He would not respond.

"Would you like something to drink, Chakotay? You look thirsty. Perhaps a little wine? Or would you prefer water?"

Dakob's mind raced. A dozen thoughts vied for attention in the pain-dulled cocoon his brain had become. Lips, cracked and bloody, worked the surface of his teeth as Potken extended a crystal goblet of water to a distance that seduced him with the smell.

"No?" Shrugging, Potken set the goblet on the corner of his desk. "Perhaps later then. Now where were we? Oh yes, your father. It must have been difficult to lose him while you were away. I empathize with your situation; I, too, am absent from the ones I love." He shook his head, sighing deeply. "I don't know what I'd do if I lost my father while away from Cardassia, fighting this damnable war. I don't know that I could ever reconcile my grief; my guilt at having left him alone in his final days. You see, my father and I are very close. He has always been there for me when I needed him. I'm not sure I could live with it to be away from him the one time he needed me." Potken folded his hands in his lap and leaned forward slightly. "You and your father were close, weren't you, Chakotay?"

Dakob swallowed with difficulty, his mind consumed by the overpowering smell of water. The voices of his ancestors were muddled, now. Unclear. They seemed distant as they had never seemed distant before.

"Before you joined Starfleet, of course," Potken went on. "I understand he disowned you for that. How difficult it must have been to choose between your duty and your father. But I admire you for making the choice you made, Chakotay. It shows great strength of character. I don't think I could do the same. I'd like to think that I could, but I just don't think it's true. I don't think I could choose anything above my father. I don't think I could disrespect him that way; that I could stand the disappointment in his eyes." Potken shook his head again. "I envy you, Chakotay. I envy you the strength of your convictions."

"I am not Chakotay," Dakob whispered.

Gul Potken smiled.

"Be careful, Chakotay. The gaps in the sensor net don't have much clearance."

Chakotay worked the pilot's console with proficient ease. The small strike ship was agile and responsive. If the recon template of the sensor grid was accurate, the Cardassians would never know they landed.

"Relax, Topaiza," he advised. "It was you who couldn't thread the eye of Devil's Needle without shields, not me."

"This isn't Devil's Needle," Topaiza snapped. "And if you miscalculate even so much as a micron, it isn't just you who'll suffer."

Chakotay shot his brother a glance out of the corner of one eye. "Just out of curiosity," he asked, "when did you turn into old lady Deer Ass?"

Running Bear and Siumora snorted. Hopache laughed aloud.

A commonality of experience to all Dorvanian boys, Deer Tail had been the keeper of community records for as long as anyone could remember, and the temperament of sour vinegar for twice that long. Overly protective of her precious records and underly appreciative of the nature of small boys, her name had been an epithet among them for decades, adjusted with a boy's wit to more accurately reflect the insult intended.

Topaiza glared at his younger brother for a full ten seconds before a twitch of amusement cornered his mouth despite his best intentions. "Fine, then," he said. "Fly in blind, if that's what you want to do. Twenty credits says you get us all killed."

Chakotay smiled. Adjusting the flight plane's angle of declination to accommodate a sensor gap insufficient in width but more than adequate in height, he noted, "Never wise to give a man monetary incentive to get you killed, Paiza. Not unless you're really sure he likes you."

Again, chuckles circled the Maquis fighter. This time, Topaiza allowed himself the indiscretion of a small smile.

The spirit plane was chaos. Wind whipped dangerously through long-limbed trees. Clouds gathered in blooded contusions of black and blue, obscuring the sun and darkening the sky to the consistency of night. The smell of death lay all around him. Decaying ground cover formed a compost for his head. Beetles crawled through his hair, and maggots burrowed deep into flesh not yet dead.

"Father," Dakob whispered.

Kolopak was dead. His bones rotted on the spirit plane, shards of calcified fossils jutting from ground. He was alone in his agony, stripped of the voices of his ancestors, left for dead in the moldering disintegration of his soul.

Only his Spirit Guide remained. Sleek feathers disarrayed by the brutality of turbulent weather, she perched close to his head and held her ground. Yellow eyes watched him in the dank light. They studied him fiercely, unwilling to leave him to isolation for even the micron it took to blink.

"Father," Dakob whispered again.

"I am here, my son."

Dakob twisted in his aloneness. He searched the trees for Kolopak and found him less than a meter away. Standing unruffled amid the escalating storm, Kolopak smiled at his youngest son with a familiar warmth. "I am here, Dakob," he said gently. "You are not alone." He extended a hand in invitation, and Dakob reached for it.

His Spirit Guide attacked savagely and without warning. Her razor-edged beak drew blood to his eyes as her wings pummelled his face like fists. He cried out, recoiling sharply, both hands instinctive in their urge to defend. She rose from the attack in a dusting of feathers and returned to her perch near his head.

Kolopak smiled at him, benevolent, compassionate, once again extending an open hand. Through the blood that filled his eyes, Dakob saw the mark of the Rubber Tree People engraved into ash-gray flesh, distorted only by the plated scales of a Cardassian temple ridge.

Slowly, Dakob's hands closed to fists.

"Father," the young rebel whispered.

Gul Potken leaned closer, his voice a gentle murmur in the darkened room's silence. "I am here, my son."

The rebel's eyes opened. He stared at Potken, his gaze a dull lethargy of pain and psychotropic drugs.

"I am here, Dakob," Potken murmured. "You are not alone." He extended a hand in invitation, and the rebel shifted in his shackles to reach for it.

Something happened. The rebel recoiled as if struck. Capillaries burst in his eyes, turning the whites to red. He blinked, and for the barest of moments, lucidity returned to him in the form of clarified vision.

Slowly, the rebel's hands closed to fists.

Potken sighed. He stepped away from the prisoner and returned to his desk.

"Take him back to his cell," he instructed, notating the tactics that had succeeded and those that had failed. "We'll try again in a few hours."

The guard posted near the door moved quickly to obey. Prepared for Maquis treachery, he unlocked the shackles that held the rebel upright and let him fall to the floor. He put a boot to the Human's ribs, somewhat surprised by the heaviness of muscles utterly unresponsive to the induction of pain.

Potken glanced up from his notes. "He isn't faking, Dorat. Take him back to his cell." His eyes flicked over the bloody residue the rebel left on both shackles and floor. "And give him some water. Dehydration is always an issue with these mammals, and I don't want to lose this one until I've cracked him."

The guard nodded and dragged Dakob to his feet.

"I said," Chakotay repeated, impervious to the acid of his brother's tone, "maybe you'd better stay with the ship. Coming in hot with no time for pre-flights and a squad of Cardies up our ass is one hell of a time to wish we'd left the engines running and a qualified pilot with his foot on the clutch."

Topaiza held his temper with an effort. "If you're that worried about it, Chakotay," he allowed tersely, "feel free to stay here. Hopache, I want planetary defenses taken out and defensive shielding negated. They may have a tractor system, so look for it. Siumora, you and Running Bear are on demolitions. It's possible Dakob had time to plant his C-6 before they took him, but we can't depend on that, so set charges where they'll do the most damage and get back here by oh-four-twenty. Any questions?"

Hopache shook his head, as did Running Bear and Siumora behind him.

"I have a question," Chakotay offered quietly.

Topaiza's eye twitched. "What?"

"Can you run on those sticks, or am I going to have to carry you?"

Topaiza looked to Hopache. "If I don't have Dakob back here by dust-off, leave without us. All right, people. You have your assignments, let's move out."

Chakotay sidestepped into his brother's path. "You didn't answer my question, Paiza," he said quietly.

"Fuck your question," Topaiza snapped.

"I think my question was relevant. You can barely stand, and it takes you half a minute to work your way out of a chair. Where does that leave me if we run into a Cardy patrol?"

"I may not be much for agility," Topaiza allowed darkly, "but I can hold my own in the home stretch."

"Covert operations are about agility. You were taken out of the field and put on the advisory council for a reason."

"I was put on the council because I was the most qualified man for the job."

"You were put on the council because you're a cripple, Topaiza." The declaration was harsh, unrelenting. It drew blood between brothers, widening the breach between them to a chasm.

"They crippled you, Paiza," Chakotay said finally, his tone a half-apology that ceded no ground for its contrition. "Accept that and let me go alone."

Topaiza didn't answer. He didn't need to answer. His _expression said everything he had to say.

"How much neural sedation is it taking to level out the pain?" Chakotay pressed. "Enough to slow your reflexes by a factor of three? A factor of seven? Enough to get me killed if I run into Cardies, and you've dozed off in a corner?"

"Worry about yourself, Chakotay."

"I'm worried about you," Chakotay snapped. "And about Dakob. I can't drag both of your asses back to the ship."

"If I fall behind, leave me."

"I won't leave you any more than I would leave him."

"That's an order, Chakotay."

"Shove your orders, Topaiza. I didn't come here to trade one brother to the Cardies for the other."

"If you can't do what has to be done, then stay here."

Shouldering Chakotay aside, Topaiza stepped to the door of the strike ship. It opened for him, and he vanished into the thick darkness that lay beyond. Hopache, Running Bear and Siumora followed close behind. Chakotay hesitated a moment longer, then, given no other choice, he stepped to the door and followed the path his brothers had laid.

He was alone.

The darkness around him was silence. The chill stone of his cell was isolation. The spirit plane was closed to his battered mind, a sanctuary he could no longer access. His senses betrayed him, flickering on and off like console lights with faulty fuses. Pain was his constant companion, and his only source of hope.

Blood pooled in his throat like mucus. Bones ground upon bones in the utter desolation of his body. The voices of his ancestors were dim memories; the thought of rescue, a joke.

Something moved in the darkness--a rat, or a bug--and Dakob listened with the desperation of a man peeled to the neural core. It moved again, settling near his face with a flutter of dank, moldering air.

The cool, smooth caress of bone against his cheek was a comfort. It opened to him a multitude of sensory minutiae--elusive subtleties heretofore lost to the inundation of a thousand neural desecrations:

...the crescent-hook pressure of a cruel beak capable of sheering flesh from bone...the whisper of paper-thin flesh over the wet corneal surface of an eye...a brush of a wing feather against his neck...

In the darkness, the slightest shimmer of color.

Yellow eyes.

Watching.

He was not alone.

The Cardy died without a sound. He was the fourth to meet such a fate in the span of twenty minutes, but the only one to meet it at the hands of a Starfleet officer. Chakotay withdrew the knife from his victim's pleural cavity and wiped it clean on the leg of his pants.

"I wasn't sure you could do it," Topaiza noted quietly.

Chakotay looked up, met his brother's eyes. "Starfleet isn't a monastery," he said. "And this isn't the first Cardy I've had to take down."

"But the first one you've taken down with your bare hands," Topaiza pressed.

Chakotay hazarded a quick glance around the corridor corner, then a longer one to study the narrow, empty passage in greater detail. He shifted into motion, his feet mice on the uneven stone flooring as he slid past Topaiza to take the lead.

"Sometime I'll tell you the details of my rank progression," he said quietly. "But I don't think this is really the time, do you? I'm seeing something just past the first juncture that might be cells. Cover me."

Chakotay didn't give his brother a chance to object. With a stealth not unlike the shadow agility of a wolf breaking the treeline to cross an open field, Chakotay moved down the corridor to the first juncture. Topaiza followed, moving quickly but with an awkward, lilting gait that gave more indication of his presence than he would have surrendered in the untrained ineptitude of his ungainly youth.

Winded but doing his best not to appear so, Topaiza settled to an unwieldy balance against the corridor wall. He nodded, and Chakotay moved on to the cell door. The lock was manual and corroded. Chakotay manipulated the closure mechanism for a handful of minutes, and it surrendered to him its secrets, parting metal from metal in appreciation of his masterful touch.

The cell was wet and dark and cold. It smelled vaguely of rotting eggs and, more strongly, of Human misery. The shadow sprawled on the cell floor recoiled from the dim caress of the corridor's ambient light as Chakotay slipped inside. A misshapen hand rose to fend for the blooded whites of feral eyes. Beneath the scarification of blood and bruises, battered features framed themselves to a derisive insolence in a vain attempt to mask the terror constricting his limbs to an instinctively fetalistic posture.

"Hey, Dakkie," Chakotay whispered. "Time to stir your stumps, little man. Coffee's on and the cakes are getting cold."

Dakob blinked. A slow smile infected his features, and fear gave way to relief. He reached out, one hand clamping itself around Chakotay's wrist.

"I knew you'd come," he whispered, the words emerging as blood on his lips.

Topaiza entered the cell, moved to Dakob's side. He ran a quick inventory of the younger man's injuries, then said, "We have to move. The sulfitic oxide is starting to oxygenate."

Chakotay's gaze jumped to Topaiza. "C-6?" he demanded, startled.

Topaiza nodded. "In the corner, enough to level the whole compound. From the smell of things, I'd say we have thirty minutes--maybe less--before the concentration's thick enough to catalyst a detonation."

"I knew you'd come," Dakob repeated.

"Of course we came," Topaiza growled. "What better things would we have to do than pull your stupid ass out of a self-constructed fire?"

"It was the only way," Dakob murmured.

"You're a stupid, reckless, arrogant bastard," Topaiza returned. "And if you ever pull a stunt like this again, I'll leave you to the Cardies."

Dakob laughed, paying for it in a twist of agony that corkscrewed through his body. "I missed you, too, Paiza," he breathed, trembling with pain, his hands a palsy on the ends of his arms.

"Bicker later, boys," Chakotay advised, shifting his grip to slide under Dakob's arm. "Right now, we've got an LZ to make."

Dakob cried out when they tried to lift him. He twisted in their grip, his fingers clenching to thorns in their clothing, his legs turning to ballast on his body. A raw nerve exposed to corrosive acid, his body betrayed him, seizing in convulsive paroxysms of blood and mucus as he dragged them back to the floor.

"Dakob," Topaiza whispered.

Chakotay leaned close, holding his brother until the seizure passed, speaking to him in the same calming tones he'd used on a six-year-old frozen in his sleep sack as a cocoa bear ransacked their night-black camp. "I know it hurts, Dakob," he whispered. "But we have to move. That C-6 is going to blow, and I'm not exactly on kissing terms with the Sky Spirits these days."

"Too late," Dakob whispered. "I can't make it."

"You can make it," Chakotay corrected. "You don't have any other choice."

Dakob's eyes rolled in their sockets. His hand tightened where it held to Chakotay's arm. "I knew you'd come, Chakotay," he repeated in a voice that barely cleared his lips.

"I'm going to move you," Chakotay informed him gently. "Are you ready?"

Dakob's gaze slipped to Topaiza. "Oyka hey," he whispered.

Every muscle in Topaiza's body clenched. "No, Dakob," he hissed, lurching forward. "Don't!"

But it was already too late.

The distinctive pop of splintering polymer cracked the darkness. A white foam welled in Dakob's mouth, trickling from one corner of his battered lips to vanish as it mixed with blood already thick and rich on his skin.

"Damn you," Topaiza whispered, turning away.

Chakotay blinked. He stared at his brother, stunned to silence. Dakob smiled as the chemical cocktail in his mouth absorbed itself into his bloodstream. His eyes dulled from black fire to obsidian glass. His flesh waxed grayish-white.

"Avenge me, Chakotay," he breathed. "Avenge Father."

And then he was gone, borne away with the whispering hiss of hawk wings on a cool Dorvanian breeze.

As the echo of Dakob's voice died in the endless abyss of black silence, it rang a fitting epitaph to everything Chakotay had ever believed. Blood warm on his hands, the stench of sulphur permeating his every sense, he began to tremble. A rage that had begun on the Durant with notification of his father's death found fuel to burn within the tinderbox refuse of his decimated spirit. It flared out of control, rising through his bones to consume him, boiling his blood in his veins and turning his sanity to ash. It drove him to his feet and to the cell door.

"Chakotay." Topaiza caught him by the arm, dragged him back. Chakotay turned like an animal in a trap. He couldn't speak, couldn't breathe. For a long moment, he could do nothing at all except stare at Topaiza in blind outrage.

"...to Dorvan," Topaiza was saying. He shook Chakotay slightly, studied his eyes for signs of awareness. "Do you understand, Chakotay? Can you hear me?"

Chakotay fell. He didn't know how, didn't know why, only that he had and that he didn't care. Knees against stone, he found himself staring at Dakob's body, unwilling to expend the effort to rise, to answer, to merely think.

"Dammit, Chakotay. Listen to me..."

Topaiza spoke of Dakob's bones. He spoke of the importance of their final resting place and of Chakotay's duty to see his brother's spirit home. He spoke of honor and tradition and sacrifice and obligation.

Chakotay heard nothing but the rush of blood through his own veins.

"Fuck you then, Chakotay." Turning alone to his brother's body, Topaiza struggled Dakob off the cell floor and onto one shoulder. Awkwardly inflexible, he balanced the weight as best he could before making a bid to stand.

The strain on artificial joints proved too much. They gave, and Topaiza staggered. He fell against a wall, his features a mask of agony, and Dakob slipped back to the cell floor.

Still, Chakotay didn't move.

Silence fell across the small cell. It permeated the walls, mocking them with the reverberation of nothing left to say.

Topaiza's breathing rattled through the silence like a faulty corselator exposed to exigent current. "Help me, Chakotay," he murmured. "I need you."

Chakotay didn't move.

"I need you, Chakotay."

Silence fell again. It broke itself with the implication of approaching footfalls. A Cardassian expletive, and the cell door swung open.

Chakotay moved.

The first Cardy guard died out of instinct. The second died from revenge. Twisting the knife cruelly beneath a corded neck ridge, Chakotay severed the man's carotid, staring into alien eyes as they bled from panic to lethargy to death.

"Oyka hey," he hissed, releasing his grip and letting the Cardy fall.

Stepping over the blood-soaked corpse, he headed for the cell door.

"Don't leave me, Chakotay."

Bloody knife still clenched in one bloody fist, Chakotay stepped into the corridor and vanished.

Topaiza closed his eyes. The smell of fresh Cardassian blood was a repulsion to his senses; the growing stench of sulphur, a warning. His body trembled, taxed well beyond its capacity to endure. Deep beneath the deadening respite of low-level systemic sedation, the unbearable agonies of a dozen Cardassian interrogation protocols cauterized his neural net to a web of white fire.

But the pain was nothing compared to the inescapable truth of failure that was Dakob's boneless weight against his hands. Testimony that--although he still possessed the will to take his brother from this place--he no longer possessed the strength nor the facility.

Testimony that he was, as Chakotay claimed, a cripple.

He had failed. In their tangled confederation of betrayal, he had failed.

Topaiza's hands closed to fists in his brother's tattered tunic. He bowed his head, offering a prayer to the spirits of their common ancestors to ask in his silence for forgiveness, and for a grace of protection to accompany the wolf they'd set free from the man whom Kolopak had loved perhaps more dearly than he had loved any other.

In the darkness of Topaiza's desolation, Dakob moved. His weight shifted in Topaiza's hands, and he rose from them, a withdrawal that opened Topaiza's eyes in stunned disbelief.

Chakotay stood in the darkness, a spectre of blood and rage and shadow. He held Dakob's body like that of a child.

"Come on," he said. "The corridor's clear. We have to hurry." Shifting Dakob easily to one shoulder, he extended the hand freed by the maneuver in a gesture of invitation.

"You were right, Chakotay," Topaiza murmured. "I shouldn't have come. Leave me."

"No."

He hauled Topaiza to his feet. Topaiza staggered, fell again to a wall. His legs began to buckle, the fire in his spine a reminder of questions he would not answer.

Chakotay's hand tightened through material into flesh. He latched onto Topaiza's arm, a grip of unity from elbow to wrist. "They had you for three days and you didn't break," he reminded his brother grimly. "Don't break now."

"I'm sorry, Chakotay," Topaiza whispered. "Go."

"No."

"Leave me."

"No."

Chakotay dragged him from the sanctuary of the stone wall. He dragged him into motion and out of the cell that now reeked of sulfitic oxidate. Topaiza stumbled--would have fallen but for the unrelenting grip Chakotay maintained on his arm.

"Chakotay..." he breathed.

"I'm here, Paiza."

Buttressing Topaiza's imbalance, Chakotay stood in the narrow corridor as an oak tree planted deep in fertile soil. Bearing the weight of one brother across his shoulder and the other on his arm, he stood beneath the burden as easily as Kolopak had stood beneath the burden of the Dorvanian people.

Topaiza looked up, tried to find his brother's eyes to share with him the truth that would have broken them apart.

The light of the corridor was dim and muddied, but it was more than the cell and enough to light the planes of Chakotay's face in an ambient chiaroscuro. Topaiza stared, his confession silenced by what he saw now that he had not seen then.

Cardassian blood, wet and sticky and black in the dim illumination, lay in garish streaks along Chakotay's left temple and forehead. Drawn to the flesh with a warrior's hand, it described in lines and geometrics the mark of the Rubber Tree People and the path Chakotay had chosen.

"I'm here," Chakotay repeated.

Topaiza closed his eyes. Held on his feet by a brother who'd betrayed him by denying their father's legacy, consumed by the agony of penance paid for reckless bids to prove himself worthy of a destiny never rightfully his, Topaiza found a balance and a way to go on.

The rebel ship left in the same silence it had arrived. But for a handful of dead Cardassian guards, the invasion went unnoticed until sulfitic oxide catalyzed C-6, and irridium ignited itself to a fiery conflagration.

"There she goes," Siumora noted quietly, his eyes fixed to the viewscreen in anticipation of the sharp bursts of color only now beginning to torch the nightscape of Shalla Nor.

Topaiza and Running Bear watched as well, their eyes taking small pleasure from the destruction of a target so fervently pursued. In the aft quarter, near Dakob's motionless body, Hopache sat in silent commune, grieving the loss of his closest friend within the private sanctuary of the spirit plane.

Alone behind the pilot's console, Chakotay flew the small strike ship without comment or _expression. Cardassian blood, dry and flaking on his face and hands, still marked him with the consequences of his brother's death.

"Dakob would be pleased," Siumora offered to the penitent silence. "He said more than once that he'd give his life to see Shalla Nor destroyed once and for all."

"They'll rebuild," Running Bear murmured. "They always do."

"Then we'll destroy it again," Chakotay said.

Siumora snorted derisively. "Easy for you to say, Starfleet."

Topaiza rose so quickly he stumbled with the motion, falling into Running Bear as he grabbed Siumora's shirtfront. "His name is Chakotay," he hissed, his voice slurred with the escalated effects of increased systemic sedation.

Siumora blinked.

"Chakotay," Topaiza repeated, shaking Siumora slightly.

"Chakotay," Siumora agreed cautiously.

Topaiza swayed, devastatingly precarious with his balance. Running Bear laid a hand on Topaiza's wrist, part support, part restraint. "Sit down, Topaiza," he advised gently.

Topaiza sank back to his chair. "His name is Chakotay," he repeated, his voice a lethargic whisper in the suddenly-still raider.

Indifferent behind the helm, Chakotay held the ship to its course, taking them home to Dorvan.

Hopache started. His eyes opened, and he turned to stare at Topaiza in a cabin dimly lit in deference to the dead and the sleeping.

Exhausted, Topaiza's eyes had fallen shut. Leaning badly in the precisely erect chair, his features were etched with a pain beyond the reach of simple sedation.

Siumora and Running Bear were sprawled in their respective chairs as well, harvesting the rare opportunity for rest that a long return trip afforded. Distant and separate, Chakotay flew the ship in inert silence, rage a tangible presence on his skin in the form of Cardassian blood.

Hopache stared at Topaiza until the Maquis admiral stirred. Shifting in his half-sleep, Topaiza opened his eyes.

The question between them didn't need to be spoken. It asked itself in Hopache's gaze and answered itself in Topaiza's simple nod.

Hopache began to tremble. He stared at Topaiza for a moment longer, as disbelieving of the Maquis leader as he had been of his own Spirit Guide, and then turned to Dakob.

Silent and still, Dakob's body lay in structured repose, the evidence of Cardassian interrogation stark on bloodless flesh. Battered and misshapen, his features were nonetheless at peace. Were it not for the rage of his brother's silent grieving, he might have been merely sleeping.

Hopache looked last to Chakotay, watching the pilot who'd spoken but once since he returned to the strike ship painted with the blood of Cardassians.

The mark of the Rubber Tree People was a stain in Chakotay's flesh. Though the matter of the blood had dried and flaked away; it left behind in his flesh a mark, a scar. The distinctive geometrics were clearly visible, a declaration to those with the spirit to see it.

Hopache turned away. Unable to bear witness to the sacrifices of the sons of Kolopak, he sought escape from them by closing his eyes. His mind was fire; his spirit, chaos. It consumed him to know the truth; but in his heart, it also freed him. For the first time since the war had begun, he felt the warming genesis of hope; and in the desolate wasteland that had once been the limitless faith of a child, Hopache once again believed, for himself, in the will of the Sky Spirits and Their divine guardianship of the Dorvanian people.

"We'll need you on the Cardassian front," Johona said, his eyes studious of the man seated across from them at the large council table. "That's where your skills will be the most effective."

Chakotay nodded, his _expression implacable with the distance it maintained. He wore the mark of the Rubber Tree People now, engraved deeply into his flesh as it had been engraved into the flesh of his father, and into that of each of his brothers. His eyes divulged no secrets in their reflections, holding council with his own thoughts in a way that implied the dark serenity of his angular features defined him in a way that it did not.

"Wherever I'm most needed," he agreed.

To Johona's left, Little Feet leaned forward. "Starfleet vessels patrol the Cardassian border," he announced. "You may find yourself facing old comrades."

A beat of silence passed without a response. When it became obvious they were waiting, Chakotay asked, "Are you asking me if that's a problem?"

"Yes," Red Ribbons agreed. "We're asking you if that's a problem."

"I've resigned my commission from Starfleet," he answered calmly. "My loyalties are to Dorvan and the Maquis."

"We aren't asking about your loyalties, Chakotay," Johona said. "We're asking about your spirit."

"My spirit resigned from Starfleet along with my body."

Johona smiled. Recognizing for the first time in this stoic, angry man who'd returned from Shalla Nor, the brightly inquisitive child who'd borne his mother's soul to the delight of his doting father, the Maquis leader nodded his approval. "Your Starfleet training will give us a tactical advantage in planning raids," he noted. "As well as a strategic depth in protecting Dorvan herself. Perhaps it was the Sky Spirits' will that you leave us when you were young so that you might return to us now, bearing the fruits of your labors."

"Perhaps it was," Chakotay agreed without inflection.

"Will it bother you to be stationed so far from Dorvan?" Red Ribbons asked. "So far from the bones of your father, and those of your brother?"

"I am never far from the bones of my ancestors," Chakotay returned.

"What of Topaiza?" Red Ribbons pressed gently.

"Topaiza serves in his way. I will serve in mine."

"You realize that the strike teams working the Cardassian front have very little contact with the Maquis political structure," Red Ribbons surmised, "or with other strike teams working other fronts. The segregation is necessary to minimize the probability of significant compromise resulting from capture and interrogation, but it will mean you are very much alone."

"I intend to seek Cardassian consolation."

Little Feet tensed visibly. "You're not being assigned to the Cardassian front to assuage your need for personal vengeance," he cautioned.

"I understand why I'm being assigned to the Cardassian front," Chakotay assured the big man calmly. "And I agree that my Starfleet training will make me an effective weapon in an aggression predicated on strategic invasion and annihilation."

"Then you also understand that any vengeance you seek must not interfere with your obligations to the Cause."

Chakotay smiled. It was an ugly, menacing smile. "I feel confident that the Maquis agenda will satisfy my need for personal vengeance," he said.

"Your anger serves you, Chakotay," Red Ribbons noted. "Be vigilant that it does not consume you."

"My anger serves the Maquis," Chakotay told her. "As do I."

Red Ribbons nodded, satisfied.

To her left, Little Feet also seemed to take the answer as an acceptable pledge of intent. "Your father would be proud of you, Chakotay," the Iroquois national noted. "He would have rejoiced to see you take your place in the Maquis."

"My father was always proud of me, Little Feet," Chakotay returned calmly.

"Yes," Johona agreed. "He always was."

"As he should have been," Red Ribbons added.

"It's settled, then," Little Feet announced. "You'll leave after Dakob's funeral."

Chakotay pushed to his feet. "I'll leave today," he said.

The statement surprised both Little Feet and Red Ribbons, if not Johona.

"The war will still be there tomorrow, Chakotay," Little Feet said after a beat.

"The war is there today," Chakotay returned, "and I have mourned the blood of my family long enough. It's time to avenge them: time to shed blood for blood."

Red Ribbons nodded. "I hear in you the spirit of Dakob," she observed. "It's good that you share his thirst for the battle. He was a hero to our people, and a man who will be missed by all who knew him."

"I will miss him," Chakotay agreed.

She smiled at him, sad but understanding. "Leave today then, brother of Dakob," she murmured in the sacrosanct tone of a benediction, "and know that the people of Dorvan will sing of him for generations to come."

"Yes," Johona agreed. "Leave today."

Chakotay nodded and turned away.

"I bear your brother's child, Chakotay," she told him. "And as he would have me do, I will name him for you when he is born."

Chakotay stood in silent stun, his mind and body struggling to accept the changes of a world that had carried on throughout the duration of his absence.

Clay Bucket was as beautiful as she'd always been. As arrogant. As condescending. She studied him with a cold eye that denigrated him now as it had throughout the civil animosities of their shared adolescence. Her willow-thin body showed no evidence of the claim she staked, but it was in her eyes that she told him the truth.

"Did he know?" Chakotay asked finally.

"He knows," Clay Bucket agreed. She hesitated, as if unwilling to share the thoughts on her tongue, then added, "It was his choice to name the child for you, if you stayed."

"He knew I would stay, then."

"He knew." Her lips flexed, still struggling, then once again chose to speak words that defied her better judgment: "Dakob loved you. He trusted you above all others. He told me once, in the intimacy of our bed, that there was nothing he would not do to bring you home."

"He died to bring me home," Chakotay said.

"He believed that was the Sky Spirits' will."

"He was wrong."

"He believed it."

"And what do you believe, Clay Bucket?"

Her chin lifted slightly. "It doesn't matter what I believe."

"You carry his child. It should matter what you believe."

Defiant pride glittered in Clay Bucket's eyes, reflecting veneration off unshed tears. "Dakob placed his faith above all else," she said in the voice of an upbraiding reproach. "He followed his Spirit Guide in defiance of logic, of reason, of sanity. For him, nothing superseded the will of the Sky Spirits. Not his life. Not my life. Not the life of our unborn child."

"Then he was a fool."

"Fool or not," she snapped, her words ice as they fell from tightly recriminatory lips, "he sacrificed himself to bring you home because he believed it was the Sky Spirits' will that you be the one to take Kolopak's place."

"No one can take my father's place."

"He believed you could." Her eyes were unflinching. She stood tall and unbending, the fierce conviction in her eyes a tangible reminder of Dakob. "He asked me to tell you that, Chakotay. To tell you of his faith in you, and in the will of the Sky Spirits."

"You've told me," Chakotay agreed quietly.

"Kolopak believed it as well," she added. "Though he chose not to dictate your destiny, he spoke of it often to Dakob, and he mourned your choice to follow another path."

"I'm here now."

Clay Bucket nodded. "Yes," she agreed. "You are here now." A single tear broke the confines of her intractable eyes. It trickled down her face, a scar of grieving cut through otherwise emotionless features. "Dakob would be pleased," she said.

And then she walked away, and he watched her go.

They drank together for the first time and for the last time, silent amid the bustling crowd of an early-evening tavern.

"I'll miss you," Topaiza offered.

Chakotay nodded, reciprocating the sentiment with the evasions of a gaze suddenly intent upon the indifferent decor of the tavern walls.

"I'm glad you came," Topaiza added.

Chakotay nodded again. He finished his drink, watching the empty glass as he placed it to the table with a tiny click.

"Was it for me, Topaiza?" he asked suddenly, his voice a quiet vein of raw emotion against the discord of the tavern buzz.

"Was what for you?"

"Did he die to bring me back to Dorvan?"

Topaiza's eyes narrowed. "I'm not sure what you mean...."

Chakotay lifted his gaze, met his brother's eyes. "Did Dakob die to bring me back to Dorvan?" he repeated. "Did he surrender himself to the Cardassians, knowing I'd come for him if he did?"

Topaiza met Chakotay's gaze unflinchingly. "No," he said.

Chakotay began to tremble. He looked away, his fingers going white around the empty glass they clenched. "Damn you, Topaiza," he whispered. "Damn you both."

Topaiza looked away as well. For a long moment, he said nothing.

"This wasn't the way it was supposed to happen," he allowed finally, the confession in his heart much deeper than the one he allowed to reach his lips. "He was supposed to land on Shalla Nor and wait for rescue. We figured you'd join the mission if you thought he'd gone down, and participating in the destruction of Shalla Nor would make it impossible for you to return to Starfleet. It was never the plan for him to surrender himself to the Cardassians. It was never the plan for him to die."

"That wasn't your plan," Chakotay corrected. "It was always his."

"I know that now."

Chakotay shook his head. He stared into the empty glass, trying to find in it some meaning to the empty hull his life had become.

"Dakob believed in the Sky Spirits," Topaiza said finally. "He thought that They would protect him."

"He believed in us," Chakotay countered. "And we failed him." Silence, and then quietly, recriminatorily, "I failed him."

"You didn't fail him, Chakotay. And neither did I. We did what we could--all we could."

"It wasn't enough."

Topaiza studied his hands for several seconds in silence. "He talked about you all the time," he said finally. "From the time he was twelve, your name was a reverence on his lips." He smiled, watching the memory unfold in his mind. "I used to think his life's ambition would be to build a shrine in your honor. The Chakotay Temple. It was a joke among the Ruling Council: that the youngest son of Kolopak so revered a Starfleet officer that he would build a shrine on consecrated ground." Topaiza shook his head. "He was a fierce child--more so after you left. I taught him to fly, the way I taught you, and he took to it like a man with spirit wings. He was better than you were...better than either of us were. He hunted the canyons and arroyos like a hawk hunting rabbits. When the war broke out, he tried to convince Father to ask you to come home, but Father wouldn't do it. He said you'd chosen your path and that we had to respect that choice. He said he wouldn't ask you to return home to follow a path your spirit could not follow."

"He shouldn't have had to ask," Chakotay murmured. "I should have come on my own."

"It doesn't matter," Topaiza returned. "You're here now; that's all that matters."

"If I'd come home," Chakotay said quietly, "Dakob wouldn't have had to die to bring me here."

"Dakob didn't--" Topaiza's response broke itself, as if his voice had failed him. The severity of the break drew Chakotay's gaze back to that of his brother.

"Dakob didn't die because you stayed in Starfleet," Topaiza said after a long three-beat of silence. "He died because he chose to die. He died for what he believed in, and it was his right to choose to do so."

"He died to bring me home," Chakotay whispered.

"That was the path he chose."

"He chose it because of me."

"You're home, Chakotay. Dakob would be happy."

"Dakob's dead." Chakotay struggled for composure. The empty glass in his hand shattered. He released it quickly, but glass shards nonetheless scored his fingers with long lines of blood. "Dakob's dead," he repeated. He looked up, stared at his brother for a long moment. His eyes spoke fire. "I'll avenge him, Topaiza," he murmured. "I will avenge him." Then, abruptly, he stood. "I have to go. The transport leaves at nineteen hundred." He extended a hand in farewell. "Goodbye, Topaiza. Fight well. Be safe."

Topaiza stood too, his body less definitive with a posture that cost him more to maintain. "Fight well," he returned, echoing the Maquis traditions of departure as he took Chakotay's hand. "Be safe."

There was blood between them: Chakotay's blood on Topaiza's hands. Topaiza chose not to address it. He chose not to look so that he would not see.

Chakotay released him and stepped back.

They studied each other for a moment, then Chakotay turned away.

"Little brother," Topaiza added as Chakotay worked his way through the tavern crowded with drinking Maquis.

Chakotay stopped. For a moment, he didn't move. He stood silent in the busy tavern, his back turned, his posture eloquent. He nodded finally, an acceptance of sorts, then made his way to the door.

"I told you he'd figure it out," he said. "Father always said Chakotay could see both the trees and the forest, and that he understood the spirits of both."

"Father was right," Topaiza allowed. He stood in silent agony, one hand flat against the cool window pane, the other supporting his weight with the simple ledge of a narrow window sill. The grass of the eastern pasture undulated a slow, rhythmic dance in the light of a crescent moon. Beyond it, the shadowed treeline stretched like a barrier to the end of the world.

"And so was I."

"Yes," Topaiza murmured. "You were right."

"Then you understand why I did what I had to do?"

"I understand."

"But you're still angry."

Topaiza stared into the shadows of the trees. "We had a plan," he said quietly. "A plan ratified by the Ruling Council. You chose not to follow that plan."

"Your plan wouldn't have worked. Mine did."

"You risked yourself. You risked the Cause."

"It wasn't a risk. It was the will of the Sky Spirits."

"And if it had been the will of the Sky Spirits that you die?"

"Then I would have died."

Topaiza snorted. "You would have died," he repeated quietly.

"But I didn't die. The Sky Spirits saved me."

Turning, Topaiza faced the pale man stretched in the bed he'd slept in as a child and said, "The Sky Spirits didn't save you, Dakob. Chakotay saved you."

Dakob smiled. His skin was the color of fresh milk, marred by the predominantly-healed shadow evidences of Cardassian brutality that ran the bones and ridges of his face. "I knew that he would, if we gave him the chance."

"We betrayed him."

"Yes," Dakob agreed. "We betrayed him. But we betrayed him to bring him home."

"We were wrong."

Dakob's eyes narrowed. Sitting up with an effort, he balanced himself on one elbow. "Isn't it a little late to worry about that now?" he asked. "You knew the plan, Paiza. You understood the game before we took the field."

"This wasn't the plan, Dakob. This was never the plan."

"This was the plan," Dakob snapped. "We brought Chakotay home. We brought him home the way we said we would, and he is with us now in the fight."

Topaiza turned away again, shaking his head. "He wasn't supposed to see you die," he whispered. His eyes sought solace in the night wind that worked the endless vista of tall Dorvanian grass. "He was never supposed to see you die."

"Killing me was always an option."

"No, it wasn't."

"I told you he wouldn't stay unless I died."

"And we told you that your death would be a tactical nightmare. We'll have to keep you separated, now...keep him isolated on the Cardassian front...keep you restricted to Federation incursions and away from anyone who might recognize you for who you are."

"The war is a big place. It won't be difficult for Clay Bucket and I to avoid--"

"That isn't the point," Topaiza interrupted.

"Then what is the point? Why are you so angry that we succeeded?"

"I'm angry because you made him watch you die."

"He had to see me die and you know it." Dakob's tone was sharp, impatient. He spoke with tenebrous aggression despite the brittle fragility of a voice worn thin by the strain of Cardassian interrogation. "You can deny it now, Topaiza, but you knew my intentions when you approved the dental implant. Tetraontoxin simulates death: heart, respiration, neuro-muscular....Did you think I took it along for the Cardies' benefit?"

"I didn't think you would surrender yourself to the Cardies. If I had, I wouldn't have let you go."

"You couldn't have stopped me," Dakob informed him coldly. "I did what I had to do." Exhausted by the small effort required to remain propped on one elbow, he eased himself back into plush down of an overstuffed pillow.

"What you had to do," Topaiza murmured softly. He shook his head, disbelieving. "You know what they did to me," he said, "and still, you surrendered yourself to them. Why, Dakob? Did you think it wouldn't happen to you? Did you think they wouldn't destroy you?"

"It didn't matter."

"How could it not matter?"

"It didn't. I had to be sure he'd come."

"What if they'd broken you?"

"They didn't break me."

"What if they had?"

"They didn't."

"You risked the Cause, Dakob. If they'd broken you, you would have compromised us all."

"They didn't break me."

"What if they had?"

Dakob stared at his brother for several long seconds. "If they had," he said finally, "then I would have died for them, as I died for Chakotay."

"You were too badly injured to take a systemic paralytic," Topaiza pointed out. "It could have killed you."

"It didn't."

"You were lucky."

"It wasn't luck, Paiza. It was the will of the Sky Spirits. Just as it is the will of the Sky Spirits that Chakotay return to us, that he join us in the fight and that we prevail."

"The will of the Sky Spirits," Topaiza repeated. His voice twisted bitter as he spoke. "Tell me, Dakob, do They speak to you in visions, or do They come to you at night in your dreams? Do They whisper inside your head, or do They speak in a resonating voice that descends from a cloudless sky? Does Clay Bucket hear Their voices as They explain Their will to you, or is it a sacred testament that only you can hear, that only you can interpret, that only you can pass along to the Dorvanian people less spiritual than yourself?"

Dakob tensed. "Don't mock me, Topaiza," he warned.

"I'm not mocking you, Dakob. I'm merely asking. How do They speak to you, these Sky Spirits whose will you know so well?"

Cut by the ridicule of his brother's tone, Dakob answered in a voice growing coldly distant, "They speak to me as they've always spoken to me: through my Spirit Guide, and through the voices of our ancestors."

"And did They tell you to martyr yourself to bring Chakotay home?" Topaiza pressed. "Did They tell you to ingest a systemic paralytic when you were too weak to survive injuries already incurred? Did They tell you to place your life in the hands of a man driven mad with grief and a cripple incapable of supporting his own weight, let alone yours?"

Dakob's eyes were ice. "They told me They would protect me," he said. "And They did."

"The Sky Spirits didn't protect you, Dakob. They left you to die."

"I'm alive," Dakob said simply.

"You're alive because we rescued you," Topaiza snapped. "The Sky Spirits had nothing to do with it."

"I'm alive," Dakob repeated.

"Damn you, Dakob," Topaiza swore. "Are you so blind that you can't see what's right before your eyes?" He crossed to Dakob's bed. Leaning in close, he spoke to his brother in a low voice full of savage rage. "Do you remember the interrogation at all, Dakob? Do you remember the pain? The agony? Do you remember the invasion of it as they found your weaknesses? As they found your fears? Do you remember the terror of realizing that you were not the man you thought you were? Of understanding that you would answer them eventually? Of knowing that they would break you, and that you would betray yourself and everything you hold sacred?"

"I remember knowing that if I broke," Dakob said calmly, "it would be because the Sky Spirits willed it."

Topaiza laughed bitterly. "Your Sky Spirits abandoned you, Dakob," he spat. "Just as They abandoned me. You believed in Them, and They left you to die...to be desecrated by your enemy...to desecrate yourself by betraying everyone and everything you believe in."

"I didn't die," Dakob countered quietly. "And I didn't desecrate myself or the things I believe in."

"You would have," Topaiza assured him.

"I didn't," Dakob repeated. "Just as you didn't."

"I would have." Topaiza's eyes were stark with memory. "One more day, and I would have."

"But you didn't," Dakob repeated firmly. "The Sky Spirits gave you stren--"

"The Sky Spirits gave me nothing!" Topaiza's voice was cold. Bitter. Profane. "They abandoned me. I prayed for death, and They abandoned me." He gestured to his legs. "They left me like this to remind me how little regard They have for Those who serve Them."

"They left you like this because it was not Their will that you die," Dakob countered. "Dorvan needs you. The Maquis needs you."

"I needed Them," Topaiza countered bitterly. "And They were not there."

"You've lost your faith, Topaiza," Dakob said. "The Sky Spirits cannot protect those who have no faith."

"They didn't protect me when I had faith," Topaiza returned. "What possible use could I have for Their protection now?"

"Their protection is all that stands between Dorvan and the Cardassian empire. They protect us as a people, and They protect us in our own hearts. Your faith is all you have, Topaiza. It is all you need."

"Your faith will destroy you, Dakob," Topaiza returned flatly. "As my faith destroyed me. And as Chakotay's faith--his faith in us--has destroyed him."

"You're wrong. Chakotay's faith has saved him."

Topaiza shook his head. He found himself once again at the window, staring up at the cloudless night sky. "Chakotay blames himself for your death," he said quietly. "He will avenge you at the cost of his soul. We have destroyed him, Dakob. Your faith and my weakness have destroyed him."

"We've saved him," Dakob insisted. "We've brought him back to his heritage, back to his spirit, back to his home. He is where he belongs now...where he should have always been."

"He doesn't belong here. Father understood that."

"Father understood that it was the will of the Sky Spirits for Chakotay to learn the ways of our enemies from our enemies. He understood that Chakotay's knowledge would serve Dorvan, just as he understood that eventually, Chakotay would come back to us."

"Does Father speak to you, too, Dakob?" Topaiza murmured.

"Yes," Dakob said firmly. "He does."

"Does he speak of me, or only of Chakotay?"

"He doesn't speak of you, Topaiza; he speaks to you. Just as he speaks to me, and as he will one day speak to Chakotay. But you don't listen. You're as deaf to the voices of your ancestors as you are blind to the will of the Sky Spirits."

But Topaiza wasn't listening. He was staring, thinking, remembering. The glitter of cold rage in the eyes of a man who had once embodied their mother's gentle spirit haunted him. The stark lines of Cardassian blood defining the mark of the Rubber Tree People on that man's face were a blasphemy to the memory of their father.

"We were wrong, Dakob," he murmured. "We've changed him."

"We brought him home."

"He is our brother, and we betrayed him."

"Then tell him I'm alive."

Topaiza looked up. Dakob met his gaze unflinchingly. "Tell him I'm alive," he repeated. "If you truly believe that what we've done will destroy him, then tell him I'm alive."

Topaiza shook his head. "I can't," he murmured. "You paid too high a price. If I tell him now, it will have been for nothing."

"But he will be free," Dakob countered. "He can return to Starfleet. His life will be what it was."

"We need him," Topaiza whispered. "The Maquis needs him."

"Dorvan needs him," Dakob said.

"Yes," Topaiza agreed. "Dorvan needs him."

"And he needs Dorvan." Dakob's eyes bored into his brother. "Chakotay is home, Topaiza. He is home."

Topaiza nodded. "Yes," he agreed dully, remembering the warmth of his brother's blood on his hands. "Chakotay is home."

Chakotay sat silently on the Maquis transport, his mind a wax canvas resistant to the staining pigment of thought. Within him raged a voracious storm, consuming his spirit, consuming his soul.

"You're the son of Kolopak," a Bajoran rebel beside him surmised. "The one who resigned his Starfleet commission."

"Yes," Chakotay agreed.

The Bajoran nodded. "We've heard of you," he said. "Commander Ro speaks highly of you, and Admiral Timikot is looking forward to applying your strategic skills to the Cardassian offensive."

Chakotay didn't answer.

"I was sorry to hear the Cardies got your father," the man went on when Chakotay didn't respond. "He was a great man. The Maquis will miss him."

"Yes," Chakotay agreed dully. "They will."

"We've heard you're who the Dorvanian Ruling Council is going to name to replace him."

"If it's the will of the Sky Spirits," Chakotay allowed.

The Bajoran smiled. "Sky Spirits, huh?" he prodded. "We have some of those, too. We call 'em Prophets." His smile deepened. "Handy little gadgets to have around when you get your pickle in a pinch," he noted.

"Yes," Chakotay agreed. "I suppose they are."

"So you're a believer then?" the Bajoran pressed. "I mean, not just a holiday scroll-burner, but a real vedek, right?"

"The Sky Spirits have changed my life," Chakotay said.

"Glad to hear it. I always like having a believer on the team. Stacks the deck in our favor, you know what I mean?"

"Yes," Chakotay murmured. "I know what you mean."

"My name is Neva Yale. And you're Chakotay, right?"

"Yes."

"Well, good to have you aboard, Chakotay. And like the Prophets say, `Serelin moker tamiday.' That means victory to the righteous, or something like that."

"Oyka hey," Chakotay responded quietly.

"Which means?" Neva Yale prompted.

"It's a good day," Chakotay answered.

"A good day for what?"

"Just a good day."

Neva Yale snorted. "Not much of a war cry for a Dorvanian," he noted. "I thought you guys were supposed to be the quintessential warriors or something."

Deep inside the rage that consumed him, Chakotay of Dorvan smiled.
 

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