Chapter 18 is done! (Patreon)

Talk about cutting it close!  Wow.  Chapter 18 is done my friends, but it needs some quality polishing when I'm not falling asleep at my keyboard.  A key member of my staff at work has unexpectedly been out on medical leave for weeks now, which has meant I've been doing the work of two full time people and I only vaguely knew how to do her job before.  As a lawyer its like knowing how to draft the pleading, but having no clue how to actually file it or send it to all the interested parties, or how to make a binder for it, etc.

I should be able to finish polishing it and get it to you guys by tomorrow night, the 1st, or on the 2nd at the latest.  In the meantime, enjoy this little teaser from the beginning of the new chapter :-)

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At the moment, Kira and I were on Verex III, which in centuries past had been a world inhabited mostly by slaves and those who sold them, to buy more weapons to supply the voracious needs of the Resistance in their struggle against the Cardassians. Recent victories against the Cardassians on Bajor, many of which I had been largely responsible for, had seen a huge uptick in recruiting and those new members needed weapons to kill Cardassians with. It was a vicious circle, I thought with a laugh.

Contact with Section 31 had been sporadic at best during my mission on Bajor, the Cardassians and the Obsidian Order being exceedingly skilled at counter-intelligence, but the war with the Federation had taken its toll and more and more information had started to trickle down to Bajor from off planet. The irony was that while the Cardassians had redirected resources and their attention away from Bajor due to the war, which had made many of our victories possible, it had also severely limited the amount of Cardassian weapons and technology being sent to resupply the planet, supplies which the Resistance often stole or captured to continue their operations.

So, more weapons were needed to keep the momentum up. Section 31 could have easily supplied the whole planet, but reports from Section 31 had indicated that the Cardassians were getting awfully suspicious of late and had made clandestine investigations into the source of the weapons showing up on Bajor in increasing numbers, even if they’d already determined conclusively that all of them were just very good copies. 31 had put down multiple fake trails for the Cardassians to follow in this case, ones that led nowhere near to them, but the fact that they were looking and not accepting the most likely conclusion…was troubling. Even a wrong conclusion could lead to trouble for the Federation and its allies.