Loyalty

Disclaimer: Star Trek is the property of Paramount and CBS. This is merely a humble fanwork, standing on the shoulders of the wonderous universe they created.

"Come on, Talia," Aunt Aradne said, tugging me towards the box office. "We don't want to miss the show."

Reluctantly, I let her pull me away from the place where I had stopped to stare at the newly-restored building. Its off-white stonework and impossibly high arches looked just the way Marnah had described them to me when I was a little girl. Back then, Bajor had felt like a mysterious and magical place, but it was untouchable while the Cardassian Union occupied it. The Melar's Yavalla, or the House of Dramatic Arts, had once been a centerpiece of Ashalla and the entire planet of Bajor. Standing before the landmark left me with a mild sense of unreality. It also reminded me of how worried I was about Marnah.

And thinking about Marnah just reminded me of how badly I wanted to go home.

As Aradne and I stepped into the bright lights in front of the theater's entry, I became painfully aware of just how many fleeters were in line for the grand re-opening of one of Bajor's most famous landmarks. I tried not to let myself be too upset; they deserved to be there even more than I did. They helped to rebuild the damn place. But me? I was the adult daughter of a woman who fled the city at age twenty. I had never seen Bajor before moving there just a few weeks prior. My entire life was spent on starships, stations, and bases halfway across the quadrant; I had a stronger personal connection to Federation-designed holodecks than to this historic Bajoran theater.

Yet, there I was on opening night, waiting to see the show and smarting over a bunch of fleeters doing the same.

When the Kardasi invaded Bajor, they didn't just slaughter Bajor's ruling class. They also decimated her capital city. For forty years afterward, Ashalla was all but left in ruins. Kardasi used Bajoran slave labor to clear rubble from its streets and rebuild some of its structures for the Bajoran puppet-government to use, but the heart of Bajor's once-rich culture had been crushed and burned to ash.

Then came the armistice, when the Cardassian Union finally grew tired of the guerrilla warfare of the Bajoran Resistance and left the planet for other, less troublesome, conquests— plundered, broken, and nearly barren, but free. Immediately, the United Federation of Planets stepped in, offering aid in the rebuilding efforts and planetary defenses that Bajor couldn't have dreamed of mustering on its own. It wasn't exactly an offer the provisional government could afford to turn down, especially after Bajor's religious leader declared a Terran Starfleet commander to be the Emissary of the Prophets.

Thanks to the Federation's generosity, Bajor rose from the ashes left behind by Cardassia. Naturally, most of the assistance had been directed towards basic needs— restoring the worn-out soil of Bajor's farm districts, cleaning up our planet's freshwater sources, reuniting families, building homes, rebuilding the government and economy. But art had been of upmost value to the Bajoran people, and reasserting our cultural identity was just as important as growing crops. And so, hordes of people in black uniforms accented with red, yellow, or blue came down to help Bajoran work crews restore the planet's most significant sites and buildings, including Melar's Yavalla.

Just a few weeks ago, I had worn one of those uniforms in science blue.

I grew up on a Federation starship, and I worked hard to earn that uniform, but beneath Starfleet's exterior of goodwill had been a heartless and paranoid burocracy that drove me away from the only life I had ever known. I left Earth and made my way to Bajor only to find more of those uniforms shuffling through the very streets Marnah fled forty years before. I benefitted from the aid they provided and registered my services as a counselor with the database they helped Bajoran officials create.

Even beyond the Federation's borders, I couldn't escape them.

It was ironic, really. My Terran father and half-Terran older brother still served the fleet and still considered San Francisco their home. My younger sister still slept in hotels and hostels all over Earth as she toured the planet with her three-person band of musicians. None of them seemed to get the same pressure I did from Federation officials once Starfleet got word of Marnah's rebellious activities. Was it because I was her first-born daughter, rightful heir to what little was left of her family's legacy?

Or had the rest of my family simply refused to let the pressure send them running like scared animals?

"Some tahl'ral," I muttered under my breath.

"I beg your pardon?" said a Trill man behind me.

I flinched and leveled my wary gaze on him. He wore nice-looking civvies, indicating that he was one probably with one of the non-Starfleet volunteer groups helping to restore the city, and the innocent confusion on his face told me that he had no idea who I was. I forced myself to relax and soften my gaze. "Nothing. Just thinking aloud."

The man smiled. "I do that frequently. Looking forward to the show?"

"I am," I said, returning a polite smile. "I hope you enjoy it. Talin Sera is a classic."

"So I've heard. Enjoy the show."

With a nod, I turned back towards the front, though it wasn't long before I found myself scanning the crowd once more. Soon enough, we reached the front of the line.

"Two please," my aunt told the box office clerk.

"Names?" the boy asked.

"Eelo Aradne and Eelo Talia."

I dragged my attention away from the faces and uniforms of the fleeters, satisfied that I didn't know any of them and hoping they wouldn't recognize me. When I met the wide eyes of the Bajoran adolescent at the box office, I knew I had been made.

Damn.

"Y-you're... related to—"

Aradne put up a hand. "Just our seat assignments will be fine."

"Y-yes, ma'am. Right away, ma'am."

I never could decide which was worse— being recognized by fleeters as the daughter of Admiral Peters, or being recognized by Bajorans as the daughter of Eelo Fayeni. Still, either one of those was preferable to being recognized by feds as heir to a traitor, so I counted my blessings and followed Aradne inside.

Talin Sera, or The Strong Heart, was essentially a fictionalized version of Marnah's family's origin story. Although it was set during a great war that had been fought between several of Bajor's nations just before the unification, it was actually a love story. To end the stalemated hundred-years war, a tin-haired prince named Nelyn from an Eastern nation decided to shed his royal garments and go undercover to seek out Bajor's greatest warrior, a copper-haired woman from the Western Alliance named Hava. He had intended to assassinate her, but they ended up falling in love. It was their union that ended the war and ushered in an era of international peace and prosperity that would last for a thousand years.

Noticeably, the new production cut all references to the d'jarra, a caste system that had been the primary tool used to unify Bajor under one government. It was probably for the best, considering that the Federation disapproved of such oppressive systems and Bajor wanted to cozy up to the feds. The play also grossly overlooked the mass cultural genocide that had accompanied the new unified government, although that had always been an oversight of the story. It was, in a sense, pro-unification propaganda, not that there were many detractors left after a thousand years of peace and nearly half a century of alien brutality.

Still, that night's rendition of the play captured the theme at the heart of the story— that love, family, and forgiveness were more powerful than armies and weapons could ever be. For all the play's flaws and political trappings, it was hard to hate such a universally-good message. Besides, Hava and Nelyn always made me think of my parents— not exactly enemies, but certainly a pair of unlikely lovers whose union did much to bring two very different peoples together.

"If it is still your will to kill your enemy," said Nelyn, "then cut me down where I stand. I will not harm you, nor will I stop you."

Hava slid her knife from its sheath and gripped it in her hand. For a tense moment, she looked as if she might actually murder her enemy-turned-lover. "To cut you down would be to cut out my own heart. Yet, how else can this end? My soul was forged by the Prophets to fight, and yours was forged to rule."

"When I shed my royal attire and took on these clothes of deceit, I embraced the enmity of East and West. Now, I see the truth." He held out his hands. "We both fight, and we both rule. Our souls are one and the same. Enmity brought us together, but love will conquer this war."

Aradne and I were seated so close to the stage that I could see Hava tremble. "Your words are a fire of hope in my soul, but I fear to trust in them. All I have known is battle and blood. Tonight we have love, but war wakes with the dawn. How can we stand against it?"

One by one, Nelyn began unfastening the buttons of his shirt. "We will turn away from our enmity and shed every barrier between us. There will be no more East or West. We will guide each other throughout our days, and together guide our people, just as the sun guides Bajor through hers. If we might, then we must." He shrugged his shirt off, letting it slide to the floor, then began to untie his pants.

Tossing aside her knife, Hava reached for her own garments as she echoed the old saying. "If we might, then we must."

"In conflict and joy shall we take care of one another. From this day until the end of our days, may we share in the blessings of the Prophets together from one table." Nelyn stepped out of his pants and towards his beloved, naked and completely surrendered to her.

"Abrem," she replied as her clothes pooled at her feet. Let it be as you have said. "Our paths are one."

The curtain fell as the two took each other's hands, and the stage was reset for the final climactic act— a battle scene subverted by love, and a war ended by marriage. When the show was over, Bajorans, off-worlders, and Starfleet alike rose to their feet as they applauded, all with tears in their eyes. This had once been the benchmark of Bajor. Some worlds were known for science, some for technology, some for wisdom, and some for sights and wonders. Before the occupation, Bajor's legacy was art... and soon it would be again.

Although I clapped with the crowd at the play's end, I couldn't help but feel the emptiness in my pagh. Somewhere, Marnah was out there stirring the pot of war, uniting small factions against the Cardassian Union. Somewhere, Hava reborn was building up an army independent of both Bajor and the Federation whose name would soon be notorious across two quadrants— the Maquis.

Word among those connected to remnants of the Bajoran Resistance was that Marnah had disappeared, and that none of the Bajoran refugee settlements or ex-Federation colonies had seen or heard from her in weeks. Some said that she had gone rogue, rejecting the Maquis leadership's wishes just as she had rejected Starfleet. There were even whispers that she was dead, although most refused to believe that. To Bajorans, Eelo Fayeni was almost as legendary as Hava herself. The two women even looked the same— copper red hair, turquoise eyes, fair skin, strong build. It was the reason I got so many wide-eyed stares every time I went out in public; I looked just like my mother. Most of the local residents had learned not to bother Aunt Aradne with questions about her older sister, but every day someone asked me when Eelo Fayeni would return to her people. After all, I was her first-born daughter and heir to the Eelo family legacy.

I would have given anything to know the answer.

It was almost a month before Marnah made her grand return to Ashalla. By the time she got there, she already had a hundred Bajorans from several other provinces at her back, calling her Kav'Eelo— General Eelo— and eager to follow her to the still-forming Maquis alliance. Apparently, she hadn't actually gone rogue, although that was the rumor she and her allies had secretly encouraged. Only the highest levels of Maquis leadership knew what she planned to do, and they had approved it.

The Maquis needed to build up more forces to fight back against the increasing pressure their small Federation settlements were getting from the Cardassian military. Although there was technically a peace treaty between the Cardassian Union and the United Federation of Planets, there was still the tiny unresolved issue of a few hundred borderworlds that neither the Federation Council nor the Cardassian government could agree on how to fairly divide between the two of them.

While the Federation continued using diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue peacefully, so as to not restart the war, the Cardassian Union simply employed bully tactics to get their way. Living on borderworlds was hard enough without Kardasi troops randomly dropping in and harassing the colonists, trying to get them to move elsewhere. It was a dirty game, picking fistfights with civilians or burning shops and farms, but the Kardasi were dirty people, and they hated outsiders.

After surviving forty years of occupation, Bajorans knew better than anyone how the Kardasi operated. This was why Marnah resigned her Starfleet commission, traveled all the way to the edge of Federation space, and took up the cause of bringing together the remnants of Bajoran Resistance and Federation rebel factions. She had already united these two movements under the umbrella of the Maquis alliance, but it was still far too weak to win.

So, she used her dual citizenship and mythical status to her advantage, and she went recruiting.

Most of the Bajoran ministers wanted to ingratiate themselves to the Federation, and they knew that the Federation wanted my mother. Once she arrived in the city, they sent their militia to arrest her, but the militia refused. On Deep Space Nine, the Federation outpost in Bajoran space, Marnah's supporters had sabotaged the station's com systems. That way, the Bajoran Council of Ministers couldn't get Federation back-up to help capture her.

The provisional government may have been willing to sacrifice a legend, but the people were not. Even the Bajoran Militia refused to follow orders, the vast majority of them having been members of the Bajoran Resistance before the armistice. Who was the Federation to traipse in and tell them that Eelo Fayeni was a criminal? No, she was a hero.

So the militia became her personal guard on Bajor.

Marnah spent as much time as she could meeting people in the city. She told them how nearly one million Bajorans still lived in ramshackle camps on endangered borderworlds of the Valo system, too poor and weary to journey back to Bajor. She told them of how the Kardasi mistreated these Bajorans and prevented them from leaving. She revealed that neither the Bajoran government nor the Federation Council were willing to risk conflict with the Cardassian Union to help these innocent people. Then, she told them about the Maquis alliance— brave Federation off-worlders who endured the same persecution as the Valo Bajorans did, and who had united with the Bajoran Resistance to fight their common enemy.

For forty years, Marnah served the Federation that had given refuge to her and her sister, sheltering them from the many horrors of the occupation. She became one of Starfleet's most distinguished officers. She was an expert in politics, strategy, and combat. She spent most of her career on the frontlines of maintaining the tenuous peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. How many times had she scraped by fate as a security officer, sent subordinates to their deaths as a commander, or drilled cadets at the academy as an instructor?

That was not the woman who found me at Ashalla. The cause of liberation had lit a fire in her pagh that I had never seen before. It was both terrifying and awe-inspiring.

Yet, my chest ached with the weight of her loneliness. She hid it expertly, but I could feel it coming off of her in waves. I saw the sadness in those turquoise eyes— eyes that I knew even better than I knew my own. To Bajorans, family was everything, and women were the head of the house. It was a woman's job to rule and protect her family; it must have felt like betrayal for Marnah to abandon that role for the sake of Bajor. She missed me deeply, as she missed my father, brother, and sister.

I also knew, right then, that I had no choice but to go with her. If I didn't— if I let her leave while I stayed on Bajor and kept myself out of trouble— the weight on my chest would get heavier every day until it crushed me to death.

That night, I kissed Aradne goodbye for the last time. Then, I followed Marnah and one hundred fifty other Bajorans into the Badlands.