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What am I doing here? Ensign Sito Jaxa asked herself, not for the first time. And probably not the last, she sighed inwardly.
Her life had become an oddity even to herself. The events that drove her into the Cardassian/Federation Demilitarised Zone weren’t of her own creation and still had a surreal air about them. The DMZ possessed a reputation for being a prison for refugees, criminals and Maquis terrorists. Some of the sparsely populated worlds certainly deserved the rep, but most housed some of the hardiest settlers she’d ever encountered.
Negotiated away by the Federation during the throes of the 2nd Cardassian War, the worlds of the DMZ had learned to live without the Federation and now struggled under the heel of their Cardassian administrators. The settlers either accepted the prejudiced policies of the new Cardassian regimes or rebelled against the Governors foisted off on them by an unwanted government. The rebels took their name, the Maquis, from the French Resistance groups of Earth’s 2nd World War. Like those freedom fighters of old, the Maquis fought a desperate guerrilla war against a vast, mechanised army.
Sito came, as so many before her, seeking to elude others pursuing her. Months travelling across Cardassian space had finally profited her the co-ordinates of the world she now lived upon. Even if she’d not wormed the nav data out of the smuggler, she would have jumped to another world. Three weeks on Cardassia Prime had been three too many. She was beginning to see why Cardassians were such hardheaded peilyo herders. Every noise had made her think she was about to be captured and her role as a licensed freighter pilot revealed as a sham.
Her jaw clenched as she thought about her long ago mission. After finishing her extra year at Starfleet Academy for lying about the death of her quadmate in a training exercise, Sito had been assigned the USS Enterprise. It was an unexpected reward for the work and dedication she’d thrown into all five of her years at the Academy. Lt. Worf, the Enterprise’s Chief Tactical Officer had other ideas and personally put Sito through a gruelling training program and back to back duty shifts. After finally earning Worf’s respect, Admiral Alynna Nechayev’s orders to send Sito into Cardassian space arrived.
The mission had been a disaster. The Cardassian and Sito travelled across the border with had been targeted for investigation by the Obsidian Order. Sito was led away in binders and delivered to Gul Madred. Madred’s brutal interrogations were famous across the Quadrant.
As the gruelling days spilled into months, Sito cracked and information spilled out of her. When she’d been there a year, as close as her befuddled mind could calculate, she began to hear rumours of a new Starfleet prisoner. Madred began visiting her demanding information about her former captain, Jean-Luc Picard. Her hopes rose as alarms sounded and the Cardassians scurried about. Then the ruckus dimmed and she was not whisked away by a rescue team.
After that, Sito never thought to leave Madred’s hellish hole of a prison but he granted her a reprieve. Sito was given to a rival Gul Madred owed a favour to. In an effort to upstage Gul Dukat’s infamous Bajoran bordello on Terok Nor, Gul Evek took Sito into his house as a scullery maid and as a whore euphemistically labelled a “comfort woman”.
Sito waited two years, years wasted on hope of a Starfleet rescue, wasted on hoping Evek would die in battle during the war, wasted on hoping at all. Her opportunity arrived when Evek was posted to patrol the DMZ. Rumours of rebels attacking their new Cardassian overlords trickled through the markets and the house. Evek’s wife ignored Sito; grateful that she wouldn’t have to pretend she knew the Bajoran’s true role in the house. Sito used this lack of observation to spend time at the shuttle pads and to eventually contact a smuggler and blackmail a way into a ride of the planet. With Evek gone, his wife never bothered to report the disappearance of the unwanted sexual rival.
She sighed as she passed by a tapcafe on her way home. The skies of Terrescu were perpetually grey and cloudy, but never more so then at dusk. The clouds seemed to consume the planet at night. The flip side was that the rare clear night sky contained the most amazing view of the galaxy’s stars she’d ever seen. One advantage to being on this world, I guess, she mused, or least when the sky isn’t clouded over.
She trudged on towards the flat she rented. It wasn’t much, but then she didn’t need much. Everything she owned had been aboard the small freighter she’d used to get here. She’d sold that to give her a stake with which to secure lodgings and meals until she’d found employment. As usual, the first offers had come from the brothel parlous. She’d given them the same wintry smile she’d used across the DMZ and told them to find the most direct route to whatever hell they claimed and to use it.
Eventually she’d found a job with a small shipping company. It was the same company that had purchased her poor runabout. She’d been aghast to learn they thought her battered ship was quite a prize. After reviewing her flight logs, they asked her to work for them as a dispatcher.
Her job was painfully simple. Try to route as many stops along a run as possible with minimum expenditure of time, fuel, or maintenance as possible. The navigational side of things came easily enough. She still fought with her bosses over how much, or how little, maintenance was acceptable.
The first thing she’d demanded after starting was a training program for the poor souls thrust into the dilapidated ships and hurled into space with almost no knowledge of shiphandling or crisis management. She knew the same was true across Cardassian territory, but at least the idiots there either learned or were vaped in an accident. Here, there weren’t enough people or ships to let that remain a viable business practice. Fortunately her bosses agreed, but unfortunately she had more deep-space experience than most of the locals put together.
After a full shift of scheduling shipping runs for a half dozen archaic tramp freighters, she then put in another six hours trying to hammer the basics of interstellar operations into bored and befuddled minds. She tried to clear her mind of the day’s frustrations as she came around the last corner before her lodgings. She drew her cloak around her as she pressed on. Fortunately, full-length cloaks with hoods were the height of fashion here so she was inconspicuous.
Her flat was an abandoned warehouse. Her rent was affordable because it had been as neglected as long as it had been unused. In exchange for her repair work, her rent was free. In darker moments, Sito wondered how many decades the building had lain unattended.
Her landlord had expressed some curiosity as to why she’d wanted lodgings with so much open area. She’d floundered a bit while she concocted a story of an interest in sculpture. The landlord merely scowled at her but did not challenge the obvious lie. She probably suspected some illicit vices were being indulged and Sito assumed such activities would be tolerated here better than the truth.
She stopped before the large double doors that comprised her front door. She punched her access code into the locking mechanism. It reported that only fifteen incorrect codes ha