The Courageous: Rebels Trilogy, Book 2

by

Daffyd Ab Hugh





CHAPTER



THIRTY YEARS AGO



THE BULLETIN-TEA in Legate Migar's headquarters droned on and on,

stretching into its fourth tedious hour.  Sister Winn and the other

Bajoran servantsmShimpur Arian, who served Gul Feesat; Lisea Nerys and

Alahata-something, who were brought down to the planet by Gul Dukat;

and the six servants of Legate Migar who cooked and served the food

(one was a true collaborator, Winn was certain)--were at last allowed

to eat their own lunch in the kitchen... after they had waited upon the

high-ranking Cardassians, served, fetched, and cleared away.



Alone with themselves now, the Bajorans let their bitterness erupt;

like a baby spitting up, thought Sister Winn, surprising herself with

her own cynicism.  Alahata spoke of his anger at servitude.  He was

nearly as young as Gul Ragat, but he had grown up in a village not far

from Winn's, Riesentaka on the Heavenly Blue River.  Winn tried to calm

him with homilies from the Prophets, but the boy would not be placated.

He'll learn, she thought in sadness, noting the interest of two of

Legate Migar's valets, one of whom was probably the snitch.



The others spoke of domestic issues.  Nerys was worried about the

rains, which had come too soon for her father's farm.  But even in the

simplest conversation, Sister Winn could practically cut the tension

with a knifetif Bajorans in service to a gul had been allowed knives.

They each knew who and what they were, and how precarious was the

thread by which their world dangled.



The Bajorans fell silent as Winn blessed the food, and they ate; the

food was too rich for the priestess, not the simple, country fare she

had grown up with, but the elaborate, spicy meats the Cardassians

preferred among Bajoran foods food from the Northern Islands, Winn said

to herseld Her mother had come from there, but her father had forbidden

spice in the family meals, as he had a weak stomach.



The kitchen was gigantic but cozy.  Legate Migar had not built his own

house, but taken over the house of the original governor of the

subcontinent, Riasha Lyas.  Riasha had disappeared thirteen years ago

and was rumored to have been sent up to Terok Nor," but no one who

returned from the station orbiting Bajor had ever reported seeing him.

A stained-glass window facing northwest allowed in much natural light

in the afternoon, but Winn could not see outside.  A smaller, plain

window set above the stained glass afforded an abbreviated view...

assuming the priestess were to stand on a chair.  The men used the

plain window to look out for arriving VIPs.



Red and blue shadows crossed the kitchen table as Winn pushed her food

from one side of the plate to the other, hoping to fool the cook into

thinking she had enjoyed the meal.  She answered automatically whenever

one of the other Bajorans would ask her religious advice, or beg for a

prayer or benediction for the weather, the crops, a sick cousin, the

soul of Bajor.  But she smiled and turned her face full on whoever was

speaking, seeming to give undivided attention; inside, Sister Winn was

thinking dark thoughts and wondering how she could pull off her mission

without ending up the Headless Sister of Shakarri.



At last, the table was cleared by the probable collaborator, whose name

she learned at last: Revosa Anan.  She filed away the information for

future use.  Sister Winn rose, gave a final blessing and thanks to the

Prophets, and bowed her way out of the kitchen, saying she had to

return and see if her master needed anything.



She stepped lightly toward the conference room but paused in the

courtyard; no one appeared to be watching; the house felt heavy, sleepy

after the midday meal.  Bowing her head and walking with a firm step,

Sister Winn turned to the right and cut across the short angle of the

courtyard toward a small, forbidden door she had observed from its

other side when she first arrived at Legate Migar's palace.  The door

opened to her firm touch; she entered, smiling and readying an

obsequious apology if she ran into an overly dutiful Cardassian guard.

Not that an apology would matter.  If the door turned out to lead where

she prayed it did, and she were caught inside, then the next stop would

surely be Terok Nor... and GUl Dukat's tender ministry.



Sister Winn entered the small antechamber that led to the formal

reception room, and in the other direction, to the entrance hall.  The

walls were done in blood wood paneling, very dark, and the only light

came from two "electric candle" light fixtures at opposite sides of the

outer wall.  Between the fixtures was another door, this one

soundproofed and sealed with a push-button combination lock popular

among the erstwhile Bajoran military missions... like the house of

Governor Riasha.



Swallowing hard, the priestess approached the lock.  Her steps

faltered.  If she were caught in the next few seconds, no amount of

bowing and scraping could save her from interrogation, followed by

execution--and disgrace and exile for Gul Ragat; but quite frankly,

Sister Winn could not have cared less what happened to her Cardassian

"master."  His own conscience was in the hands of the Prophets; either

he would see and save himself, or he would remain in ignorance and be

forever barred from their embrace.



The strangest thing about Cardassians, Winn pondered, is how thoroughly

they believe their rules of conquered and conquerer.t They had won the

battle; they had won the war.  Simple honor among soldiers required

that the Bajorans accept their status and work to achieve full

recognition as eventual citizens of the Cardassian Empire.



It certainly never occurred to Legate Migar to run around replacing all

the locks in his house.  It never penetrated his bony Cardassian skull

that although poor Governor Riasha was probably in the arms of the

Prophets a decade since, and the officers of the Bajoran Army were all

executed or imprisoned in penal colonies or mines around the planet and

even on Terok Nor, that many of the governor's former civilian

engineers had also worked in the palace... and some had frequent

occasion to work in the communications room.  And the legate, who had

never been any kind of an engineer, civilian or military, was evidently

unaware of the disdain with which such people treat security

precautions.



In particular, Legate Migar had never heard of a lock having a "back

door," used by the engineers if the military men changed the lock and

neglected to tell the civilian contractors.  He had ordered the

combination altered, of course; but he never realized that there was

more than one combination.



Licking her dry lips, Sister Winn took a deep breath, stepped up to the

lock, and punched in the back-door code she had received from her cell

leader.  The lock clicked twice, and the red lights on the side turned

green.  Sister Winn pressed firmly on the door, and it pushed

noiselessly open, exposing a dark room whose walls were lined with

communications equipment.  In front of the six chairs were lists of

common frequencies, map displays, and miracle of the Prophets, a

current code booM



Please protect me, she begged; then she stepped into the room, pushing

the door nearly shut, and felt in the heel of her knee boot for the

tiny, digital holocam she had carried for four months, waiting for just

such an opportunity.  The bright displays beckoned, but Sister Winn

knew her first goal; she activated the code book and began to click

through it, snapping pictures of every screen.



When Sister Winn finally finished holocamming the book, a wave of

relief flooded her brain.  She wasn't "off the mountain," as her

villagers used to say; she still had to exit without losing the holocam

and get the images to her cell--or some cell, at least.  But at least,

even if she got nothing else, her mission was successful.



But in a lapse of security that would be incredible to anyone who

hadn't lived with the Cardassians for years and didn't know the depth

of their disdain for the "lesser races," the communications room

remained unattended for another ten minutes.  During that time, Winn

took holopictures of every screen and all the frequency settings; she

even dared project different maps on the coder's viewer and holocammed

them as well; though her mouth was so dry, she was having trouble

breathing.  If there were a history file, somebody was going to be

awfully suspicious... and if there were security viewers, she could be

under fatal observation as she brought up map after map, caught and

convicted by her own hand.



Then Winn heard what she had expected to hear minutes earlier: the boot

steps of the Cardassian guard returning on his rounds.  With a lot less

coolness than she would have liked, she rested her boot on the console

and rotated the heel outward with trembling fingers.  She replaced the

holocam and swung the heel shut, hearing it lock into place.  She

exited the room just as the guard turned the corner, but she didn't

dare pull the door shut... the guard would hear the click of the lock

and be alerted.



He paused when he saw her standing with her back to the communications

room door, staring with a vacant expression as if she were in a trance.

"Bajoran slave!  What are you doing here?"  he demanded.



Winn turned toward the guard, blinking as if she had never seen a

Cardassian before in her life and wasn't quite sure whether it was

alive or not.  "Sir?"  she asked, striving for an intelligence level

somewhere above imbecile but well below normal.



The Cardassian was only too happy to oblige, seeing her as a conquered

"animal."  He spoke very slowly, enunciating every word in Bajoran (but

with a barbarous accent).  "Whymare--you-here?"



Winn brightened.  "Oh!  Can you help me?  My master needs the activity

reports on Resistance action for the last month.  He's very

important."



"Activity reports?  I don't know anything about that!  I have received

no word.  Who is your master?"  He paused, and Winn stared at him

uncomprehendingly.  "Who--ism your--MASTER?"  shouted the impatient

guard, raising his clenched fist.



The priestess cringed away from the man, burying her face in her hands

and falling heavily to her knees.  "Please don't hurt me!  My master is

Gul Ragat, sub governor of Shakarri and Belshakarri!  He is here to

meet with their lordships Legate Migar and Gul Dukat for the

bulletin-tea."



The guard, wearing the uniform of a sergeant major and carrying only a

hand disruptor at his belt, paused to ponder the new information.  He

was evidently aware of the bulletin-teas, but didn't seem to know for

sure which guls were on the invitation list.  "Well," he snarled,

"where are you supposed to find this report?  You're not allowed to be

in this part of the building!"



"Please, sir!  My master told me to report to the duty officer of the

communications room."



The sergeant's gaze strayed immediately to the door, still open a

crack.  His eyes widened.  "What--!"  Rushing to the door, he threw it

open, seeing only the dark room with a few illuminated controls and the

main viewer showing the Cardassian insignia, the neutral "background"

image when nothing else was displayed.



A moment later, he returned to the hall, staring down at Sister Winn

with a new light of crafty intelligence.  "Did you enter this room,

Bajoran?"



"I wanted to," she blurted out, "but I was too afraid!  I don't know

what the report looks like, and--and I was afraid to go poking around

where I wasn't--I didn't know what to do, so I just waited until..."

Winn began to sniffle, making hem elf cry real tears and sneeze; it was

a talent she had learned as a child, always good for eliciting sympathy

from sympathetic adults.  It didn't work quite as well against

Cardassian conquerers; but still, it was the only weapon she had.  Her

knees hurt, which helped the deception.



"Look, stop that sniveling!  Did--youmenter-this--room?  Just answer

the question!"  Winn shook her head vigorously.  "No, sir, but



I .. 9,



"Yes?"



"I didn't, but I..."



"You WHAT?"  The sergeant major was rapidly losing what tiny bit of

patience he had.



"I--I--I touched the door Oh Prophets preserve me, I pushed it, and it

swung a little, and I--I looked inside for a minute"



The guard sighed and seemed to slump a little.  He looked away,

starting to be embarassed by the sight of a but still somewhat pretty,

young woman sobbing hysterically on the floor.  The priestess peeked

through her fingers and saw the man chewing his lip and staring at the

door, probably wondering whether he's going to get in trouble over the

open door, she understood.



"Stupid civilian com-techies," he muttered in Cardassian.  Then he

looked back over his own shoulder, reached out, and pulled the door

shut tightly.  "Look, you couldn't get the report thing you wanted

because there wasn't anyone in the room.  You got that?

Do--you--underSTAND?"  The sergeant major nodded his head

affirmatively.



"There wasn't... I couldn't get the report?"  Winn put on a look of

bewilderment.



"Therewwasn'tmanyone--here!  Oh, for goodness sake, it's sommeasy!"  He

used an obscenity Winn had heard before, but only from lower-class

Cardassian soldiers.



"Oh!  I couldn't get the report because... because..."  Winn paused,

tapping her forehead as if thinking through the scheme.  "... there was

nobody in the room!"



"Yes!"  he exclaimed, pushing her back against the wall.  "Open your

foolish Bajoran ears next time!  And"--he leaned close to snarl

directly in the priestess's face."  don't you ever push open a door

like that again!  Never/ You understand me?"  For emphasis, he put his

metal-shod boot on Sister Winn's back; she made no move to push it

away, merely drawing back in terror, and the sergeant major didn't put

his weight on it, either.  "Yes, sir!  I understand, sir!  Thank you,

sir!"  He let her up but made no move to help; Winn rose shakily to her

feet, bowed and cringed in the most servile manner she could manage,

and backed away instill bowing and thanking him for correcting her.  As

soon as she rounded the same corner whence the guard had come, she

turned and bus tied as fast as she could manage to the "allowed"

section of Legate Migar's house.  She didn't meet any more Cardassian

guards along the way; this deep inside the pale, the gul had no fear of

Resistance action, and he seemed to take an austere pride in living

virtually alone with his family and only a skeleton force of soldiers.

She had already returned to the conference room, where her master was

desperately trying not to nod off during an interminable supply report

by Gul Feesat before the reality struck her full, starting her

trembling all over again: I did it she screamed inside her mind; I

actually did it and got away



But another voice answered back, the voice she usually used to correct

her behavior when she violated the word or spirit of the Prophets:

You've not gotten away yet, child; or haven't you noticed whose house

this still is?



She couldn't help smiling, praying that the worst was over.  But her

inner nag warned that the worst had just begun.  Sister Winn was now

officially han gable



The young Gul Ragat was still brooding over his possible elevation, and

annoyed that nobody mentioned anything at the bulletin-tea about it:

Legate Migar and Gul Dukat simply spoke to him as they normally did,

with no special winks or nods, nothing to indicate it was other than

ordinary that Ragat be invited to such an un ordinary meeting.  He

complained--or hinted at his irritation, actually-to Sister Winn in a

long soliloquy in the garden that evening, while Winn did her best to

appear sympathetic and hopeful.



Her own agenda was somewhat different.  "My Lord," she said soothingly,

"I'm sure you were right in your original thought, that you are being

groomed for the higher grant of honors.  Surely you see the hand of the

Prophets in this?"



"The Prophets?"  Gul Ragat blinked at Winn.  "I don't quite follow. How

do the Bajoran Prophets figure into my elevation?"



"They know what a compassionate man m'lord is; they must know that of

all the Cardassians, Gul Ragat is most concerned about the physical and

spiritual ills of the Bajoran people!  Surely they have brought your

qualities to the attention of Legate Migar for a reason."



Ragat paced agitatedly.  "A reason?  Because I will be a more

compassionate master than, say, Gul



Dukat, with his iron fist and heart of stone?"



"Oh, you most certainly would be."  She wondered whether he would catch

the significance of the reference to the spiritual ills; Winn had heard

that somewhere in the Cardassian Empire, scattered and powerless but

there, was a group of Cardassians who argued bitterly against the

occupation of Bajor, and indeed all the other planets forcibly

"civilized" into the empire.  She knew Gul Ragat was not a member of

that outlawed group-he certainly wouldn't be given even a sub

governorship if there were the slightest hint in his background

check!--but if Winn had heard of them, then Ragat had heard of them...

and she would not give up hope that the Prophets would in time lead

those Cardassians with even the slightest hint of decency to the moral

position.



"Yes," he mused, "I suppose I could do much to alleviate the needless

suffering of your people, were I to be granted a higher position in the

administration of Bajor."



"My Lord," said Sister Winn, bowing her head and looking intently at

her feet, "may I speak frankly?"



"Of course, of course!  I allow all my servants the freedom to say what

is truly on their minds, in private."



"My Lord, if your people continue along this path they have chosen,

there will certainly be bloody resistance against Cardassian rule.  My

Bajorans are a proud people, and we do not take well to the leash."



"Winn, you are a priestess!  A spiritual leader!  How can you threaten

such a terrible thing?"



You young fool.t "My Lord, I do not threaten; I predict.  I know my

own.  And I know that a few hundred thousand Cardassian troops will not

hold against an entire planetful of bitter, determined freedom

fighters.  I shudder at the images my mind conjures, fantastic

scenarios of mass destruction.  But I cannot turn my face from the

inevitable."



Gul Ragat turned his back to Sister Winn.  "I cannot listen to a

prediction of such betrayal!  Sister, I'm surprised at you, giving

credence to the juvenile boasting of that Resistance rabble.  You know

what would happen: those who revolted would be wiped out, as well as

their family and probably their friends, even if innocent."



The garden was dark and cool, but Winn saw it full of menace and

unfriendly, grasping tree branches--though it was the same, friendly

garden as in the days of Riasha Lyas.  Evil had escaped from the

Cardassian garrison inside the house and permeated the trimmed paths

and hedgerows of the pastoral arboretum.  "And it would be such a waste

of resources," sighed the young sub governor almost to himself.



Winn was glad the garden was dark, so Gul



Ragat could not see her rolling her eyes in disgust.



She quickly and silently apologized to Those who did see, because They

saw all.  Then her young "master" made one more offhand remark that

electrified the priestess: "Perhaps it would secure my advancement and

serve the true interests of your people both," he mused, "if I were to

bring in a few of these rabble-rousers myself... the ones who incite

peaceful Bajorans to bloody revolution and cause us no end of

trouble."



There was nothing, nothing that Sister Winn wanted more desperately

than to get away from Legate Migar's palace and relocate somewhere she

could pass along the priceless content of her holocam.  But Bajoran

servants--slaves, she corrected herself unemotionally--simply did not

travel alone without travel documents issued by the Cardassian

Planetary Authority... not even priestesses on a religious mission.

There were only two ways for Winn to remove herself from Migar's estate

without exciting attention: get her gul or another, higher-ranking gul

to send her on an errand; or else, get Gul Ragat to travel with her.



The first was virtually impossible; anything important enough to go get

was by and large too important for a Cardassian to leave to a Bajoran.

The invaders had skimmers; they had shuttles; they had starships with

beaming facilities.  If Gul Ragat really wanted something physical, an

artisan's vase or a barrel of sun berry wine, he would either transport

it to him or transport himself to it; he would not send Sister Winn.



But if Ragat wanted to personally capture some antiCardassian

Resistance leaders--especially without alerting other guls who might

want to elbow into the credit--he was pretty much restricted to moving

by skimmer, as he came... and moving his entire entourage in the

direction of home.  Anything less, or moving in any other direction,

and the Planetary Authority would demand his travel documents!  Since

he didn't have enough skimmers for everyone, he and his household would

ride, while everyone else, Cardassian honor guard and Bajoran

domestics, would go as they had come, on foot, as befit their station

as a subject race.



It's amazing how many opportunities a lengthy walk presents, thought

the priestess craftily.  But before she could plan an escape or

rendezvous, she first had to start the wheels in motion: Winn had to

persuade Gul Ragat to take the trip in the first place.



"My Lord, I..."  Winn trailed off, then tried to look as though she had

said nothing.



"Yes, Sister Winn?"  Gul Ragat waited; Winn could feel the tension in

his body, and she realized she had struck just the right tone: I've got

a terrible secret, but I don't know whether I can tell you!



She fidgeted.  She opened her mouth and sucked in a breath, then let it

out without saying anything.  "You can tell me anything when we're

alone," soothed the gul, deliberately standing far enough away from her

that she wouldn't feel crowded.  Again, the priestess almost spoke and

didn't.



Finally, she pretended to come to a resolution.



She sat slowly on the bench, despite the fact that her gul was

standing... a terrible breach of protocol!  "My Lord, I know of a rise

that's planned for a few days from now--but I cannot tell, I cannot!



Not even to secure your advancement."



Now, Gul Ragat couldn't contain himself.  He spun to face her and asked

breathlessly, "You do?  You know?  You have?  You will?"



"I cannot violate the trust of my people, even if it means your grant

of honors, Gul Ragat.  I just can't!"  Come along, chiM..  . convince

met



The gul stepped back, seeming to stop himself by brute force from

grabbing Winn's shoulders and shaking her vigorously.  "But,

Winn--Sister Winn... you wouldn't be doing it for me; you'd be doing it

to help your own people!"



"My own people?  How do you mean?"  She allowed a note of hope to creep

into her voice.



"Your own people, whom you would save from the brutal retaliation sure

to be inflicted upon them by the harsh and stern military leaders of

the Empire!  Imagine what will happen to the Bajorans living in that

province or prefecture if you allow this insane rebellion to proceed!"

Sister Winn gasped.  "I never thought of that."  "You must!  You must

think on it, and you will see that the only thing to do is to tell me

now, quickly, so I can stop the troubles from ever starting by

arresting the callous, uncaring leaders."



"Must I?"



Ragat shook his head sadly, sorrowing with her, not at her.  "There is

no other honorable course for you to take.  You are a leader, the voice

of the Prophets.  You must look after your--your flock; yes, that's the

word.  They look to you for guidance!  Exercise your moral leadership

to lead them to acceptance of the inevitable, and think of how much

happier they will be."



Sister Winn suddenly jumped to her feet, pretending guilt at suddenly

realizing she was sitting while her "master" stood.  "Forgive me, My

Lord!"  she cried; Gul Ragat waved away the infraction, intent upon the

information she might give him.  Winn felt like a fisherman reeling in

her catch.



The problem, Winn realized nervously, was that she actually had the

information to give.  In her position as spiritual leader for all the

Bajorans who lived at Ragat's compound and many in the village of

Vir-Hakar, in the county of Belshakarri, she always heard rumors of

Resistance activity... often well-founded.  She knew, for instance,

that there was a planned meeting in precious Riis, a meeting that would

probably lead to action against the spaceport ten kilometers away--a

facility now used by the Cardassians to transport high-ranking members

of the military and important visitors to and from the planet.  A

bombing was likely, and a full-scale assault was not out of the

question.



It was the only such action that she knew of; if she wanted to give

Ragat something he could substantiatemand it was clear he would check

it out through his own intelligence network--there was nothing else for

her to give.  The attack could probably be postponed without much

danger, if she got word to the Resistance in time!  If not... then

Sister Winn would have just committed a real, honest-to-Prophets act of

collaboration which would surely result in the violent deaths of many

Bajoran freedom fighters.  It was a terrible choice!



But really, she thought anxiously, I have no choice.  With the

information digitized in her holocam, such blows could be struck as to

completely eclipse the strike at the Riis Spaceport, called the Palm of

Bajor.  If she could get the holocam to her cell leader; as always,



IF!



"My Lord," she whispered, "I have heard that there is to be a rising

very near to here."  "Yes?"  "Between here and our own home, in fact."

"Yes?"  Gul Ragat's excitement was palpable; Winn fought hard to keep

her expression neutral, her eyes cast respectfully downward, and to

sniffle a bit.



"It will be in--in Riis.  That is what I heard."



"Riis?  On the Shakiristi River?"



"That is what I heard, M'Lord."



Now Ragat sat suddenly, wearing a goofy grin and staring into space...

staring at his grant of honors, thought the priestess bitterly.  After

a moment, he remembered himself and grew solemn.  "You have done a

noble and brave thing, Sister Winn.  You have saved many of your people

from a terrible fate.  The Prophets would be proud of you... I'm

certain of it."



Oh Prophets, she prayed, please grant me that same certainty!  But the

Prophets, as was often the case, remained as mute as the stones on the

issue.



Once more, Kai Winn woke in the night, the tendrils of the past wrapped

around her.  Now, at least, she knew there was some reason--that the

Prophets were sending her a message, something that she must, must, be

clever enough to grasp.



CHAPTER



"LISTEN UP, away team," said Captain Sisko, standing before his away

team on a dark red bluff overlooking a shady, indigo valley; Worf came

to attention, awaiting the new orders.  A hundred meters below them,

"Mayor-General" Asta-ha and her commandos--the Terrors of Tiffnaki, the

name suggested by the hereditary mayor's daughter Tivva-ma--ran the

rest of the Tiffnakis through a heavy set of drills, trying to beat

into their post economic heads some sense of the danger they were in.

Worf had designed the drills himself, and he was pleased at how quickly

the Natives were learning how to fight as a unit.



"All right," asked the captain, "what's it going to be, then?  We

cannot reach the main planetary power stations and destroy them on

foot; they're thousands of kilometers away.  We need transporation, and

the Defiant seems to have left orbit.  So, do we try to overwhelm a

small patrol by force or by stealth?"



Days earlier, the away team had finally left the natives of

Sierra-Bravo to continue training themselves, for all the good that

would do.  Worf had few doubts what he would find upon his return:

ragged, threadbare, unarmed, frightened, cowering, starving refugees

crouching in the bushes like animals.  But what could he do, stay

forever with Asta-ha and her "Terrors" of Tiffnaki?  The captain was

right: it was time the Starfleet team took direct action against the

Cardassians who had invaded this world and routed them the

inhabitants.



The handful of Cardassians and their Drek'la footsoldiers had struck

upon the perfect tactic... The Natives, though not technological

themselves, somehow had access to bucketsful of technological toys left

over from a previous higher civilization.  But everything worked off of

broadcast power from central power plants relayed by local stations.

The Cardassian-led assault teams simply blew up the relay stations,

obliterating all power to a given region; and all the deadly toys used

by the Natives instantly ceased operation, leaving them utterly

defenseless, stunned, confused, ready to be harvested like scything

wheat.



The captain's plan is bold, thought Worf; it is Klingonlike.  No other

Starfleet officer would have dared!  Sisko had decided, after much

agonizing, to take his team to the central power plants and knock them

off-line himself, plunging the whole planet into darkness.  The

Natives, forced to react to the loss of power for weeks or months

before the invaders got to them, would be over the shock and better

able to resist conquest.



The only problem, however, was that the power plants were thousands of

kilometers away... and the away team was on foot.  They would need to

find an enemy camp, somewhere, and liberate a skimmer to have any

chance at all.



Worf, as usual, was first to express his opinion on the purely military

question of tactics once they located the Cardassians.  "I have nothing

against stealth, Captain; as you know, Kahless himself often used

stealth against a superior enemy--it is entirely honorable."



"For once," said Quark, "I totally agree with the wise commander."



"However," continued Worf, glaring at the Ferengi, "in this case, I do

not think we can manage to steal a skimmer without being detected.  We

do not look anything like Cardassians or Drek'la."



"Oh, I don't know, Worf."  The Klingon turned and immediately fell into

a defensive posture: the speaker was a very mean-looking Cardassian

wearing a face mask and the uniform of a gul.  Worf grabbed the

Cardassian infiltrator with one hand while he drew his d'k tahg knife

with the other, but his brain finally caught up with his warrior's

body, and he realized he was about to plunge a knife into the absent

heart of Security Chief Odo.



"Odo!"  he snarled.  "You fool, I could have killed you!"



"Not unless your d'k tahg can penetrate a centimeter of titanium,"

replied the changeling laconically, tapping his breastplate.



"Odo makes a pretty compelling argument, if you ask me," said Chief

O'Brien.



Taking a deep breath and calming his violent impulse, Worf decided it

was honorable to admit when one was in error, despite the merriment

that might give to the wretched Ferengi.  A glare from the Klingon

following the admission silenced Quark.



The captain smiled.  "Odo has given us the seeds of an excellent plan.

Now let's see if we can't make them grow into something tactically

usable."



Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax quickly ran through a pro forma

departure checklist with Julian Bashif; most of her mind was busy

living anywhere but the present, crammed into a tight and

motion-constricting dry suit, an air tank backpack, mask, and flippers

within easy reach.  The Nylex gloves made her palms itch, and the

rolled up hood pressed uncomfortably against the back of her neck. I'll

bet Julian is as comfortable in Nylex as he is in a uniform, she griped

inwardly.



Her mind ranged ahead and behind, worrying about everything in the

quadrant.  She worried about Joson Wabak, the jay gee now in command of

the submerged Defiant; she had issued final orders for him to follow

another suggestion from the strangely helpful Julian Bashir: the

seventeen hundred-meter-tall antenna that would poke into the air.



Subspace communications between the ship and the surface had been

swallowed up as soon as the planetary defenses spotted them; but

perhaps they could still transmit along the surface.  If not, both

Julian and Jadzia had modified their com badges to send and receive in

the radio frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum... just in case.

In either event, she would probably need line-of-sight with the raised

antenna, unless they could bounce the radio signal off the cloud

cover.



Jadzia fretted about the hull integrity of the ship, even though she

herself had supervised the containment field modifications; if the hull

began to buckle, Wabak would have to order them to up ship and face

Cardassian pounding again.  She nervously wondered how long the

runabout hull would withstand the ocean pressure; she was terrified of

the possibility of having to scuba to the surface, despite two run-th

roughs in the holodecks with the good Dr.  Bashir.  And she still fumed

about her performance in the battle, poor enough by her own standards

that she had relieved herself of command.



Get a grip, girl, she commanded herself; your mind is everywhere but

here and now.  Julian finished the departure checklist and segued

immediately into the launch checklist; Jadzia absently responded.



She touched all the right touch plates slooshing with every flex of her

dry suit, and got the engines spun up to speed; then she said, "Off the

checklist, Julian; let's flood the launch bay."



She glanced at the doctor--always too cute by half to attract her; she

liked her men rugged and perhaps a little cruel 1ookingmand both of

them took deep breaths as Jadzia pressed the transmit touch plate

"Amazon II to Defiant; open the floodgates, Joson."



"Aye, aye, Commander," said the Bajoran jay gee Dax heard a loud bang,

followed by a prolonged clanking; she imagined an immense anchor chain

winding up somewhere, pulling open the locks to let the seawater rush

into the bay.  Looking out the front viewscreen, she rotated the

fish-eye lens to show the hastily improvised "floodgate"; a stream of

blue green water shot through the small holes, kicking up a turquoise

froth as it poured across the deckplates and began to fill up the

launch bay.



"I guess around here," said Julian, tugging at his own hood, rolled and

circling his neck, "the Natives go blue-water rafting."  Jadzia debated

making a witty comeback, but decided the doctor's joke was feeble

enough not to warrant response.  It's just his way of warding off

anxiety, she told herself.



Soon, the water was crashing around the runabout's legs, and in a few

moments, climbing up high enough to start filling the viewscreen. After

four minutes of flooding, Joson Wabak said, "Flooding complete; you're

clear to launch.  Good luck, Commander."



"Don't forget about the giant antenna," said Dax, "and don't hesitate

to take off if you have to.  You can probably leave orbit before the

Cardassians spot you."



"Come on, Jadzia," said Bashir, "he knows what to do."



"And Joson.  Listen on both subspace and radio frequencies for our

signal ... we might need you in a hurry."  "Aye, aye, Commander," said

the Bajoran.  "Goodbye, Lieutenant," shouted Dr.  Bashit, killing the

com-link.  "Jadzia, are you going to release the docking clamps?  Or

are we taking the Defiant with us?"



Jadzia Dax sighed and touched the release light.  The ship shuddered

and immediately began drifting towards the overhead; though she'd been

somewhat expecting it--the ship was essentially an air bubble rathe

rapid movement still took her by surprise.  By the time Dax corrected

for the drift and brought the Amazon II under control, they were

dangerously close to the ceiling.



"Dax to Wabak; open the launch bay doors."  The doors slid open with a

grinding noise, much louder than normal because the seawater conducted

sound so well.  The commander piloted the Amazon H perfectly through

the dilated aperture and shot into the open ocean.  Behind her, she

knew, the doors were slowly contracting and the seawater being pumped

out of the bilge.  For good or ill, they were committed to their ocean

adventure.



Ensign Joson Wabak tried desperately not to tremble under the crushing

weight of sixteen hundred meters of seawater above him and a crew of

seventy-eight below.  In command!  He was twenty three years old, a

newly minted ensign in Starfleet, and in command of the US.  Defiant.

It was an awesome and shudder some thought.  Command might have been

intoxicating were they in orbit, instead of scuppered at the bottom of

a purple sea.



"Containment shields down to forty-six percent," announced his

erstwhile classmate, Ensign N'Kduk-Thag, or Ensign Nick, as Commander

Dax had dubbed it, in its uninflected voice; unlike Vulcans, who

experienced emotions but suppressed them (Joson had been told), the

Erd'k'teedak literally did not experience emotions the way Bajorans

like Ensign Wabak did.  Under extreme stress, their rational centers

might shut down, and they could begin acting what would be called mad

were it any other race: Joson had personally seen N'Kduk-Thag marching

naked in a circle around the flagpole at the Academy, chanting

Starfleet general orders at the top of its lungs, in the middle of

finals week one year.  Joson steered his friend inside before the other

cadets could see and misunderstand.



"Measurement of hull distortion up to one point three percent water

seepage detected on outer hull behind containment shield alongside

decks four through nine suggest ship is in danger of collapse."



Joson's mouth was dry.  How wonderful... my first command, and I to

preside over the Defiant being crushed like an egg in a clenched fist!

1,640 meters of seawater above them translated to about a hundred and

sixty atmospheres of pressure on a hull never designed for more than

one!  Normally, the Defiant drifted through mostly empty space, bumping

into only the tiniest wisps of hydrogen or the occasional micro meteor

In a pinch, the ship was also designed to plough its way into the

atmosphere of a relatively Bajorlike planet, dealing with air pressure

of perhaps as much as two atmospheres.



But the water pressure outside was more, than e'~hty times that maximum

rating.  The only reason the ship wasn't already smashed to a mangled

hulk of metal was that Commander Dax had personally modified the

shields to strengthen the external containment surrounding the hull.



But not enough, thought Joson glumly.  "Ensign Weymouth," he said,

catching the attention of the third commissioned officer on the bridge;

everyone else was a chief petty officer or below, and refused to make

command decisions--though they often were overeager with advice.



"Yeah, Joss?"



Joson waited, frowning down at her from the command chair.



"I mean,--yes, sir?"



"Instrument check?"  She was supposed to follow with a readout of all

the pertinent instruments as soon as N'Kduk-Thag finished its readout

of engineering diagnostics.



"Oh, sorry!"  Stung from her contemplation of the forward viewer, whose

image of the seafloor (color-corrected for water transparency) seemed

to mesmerize her, Tina fluttered her hands over the combined navigation

and science console.  "Uh, uh, cloak is holding fine; nobody's detected

us, I think--at least they haven't scanned us.  Scanning around the

ship; no, nothing but a big..."  Weymouth's voice trailed off, and she

stared bug-eyed at the scanner display.



"Ensign, what is it?"  demanded Joson, feeling tentacles of fear wrap

around his own head.  Just what I need, more trouble!  Now what?  But

Weymouth merely sputtered.  Blood of the Prophets, it's just like at

the Academy/ Cadet Weymouth barely graduated at the bottom of the

class; in fact, she had to repeat her first Academy cruise, because she

"downed" it--received a failing mark from the instructor for freezing a

several critical junctures.  "Tina, snap out of it!  What the hell do

you see?"



"It's... it's huge!  And it's coming this way!"



"What's huge?  What's coming this way?"



Weymouth turned completely around in her seat to stare at

acting-Captain Wabak.  "Joss... it's a sea monster!"



Both Wabak and N'Kduk-Thag stared at the girl.  "By a sea monster do

you mean a large aquatic creature?"  asked Ensign N'Kduk-Thag.



"By a sea monster," snarled Weymouth, "I mean this" She touched a light

on her console and put the short-range scanner image on the forward

viewer.



Joson Wabak stared at the shadowy, fluctuating image of a creature more

than two kilometers in length, with thousands of hundred-meter

tentacles waving about, and a gaping maw that was doubtless the thing's

mouth.  The "aquatic creature" was fifteen klicks away but moving fast

enough to arrive within the half hour.



"N'Kduk-Thag," said Joson weakly, "could you please do a computer

search through the Starfleet first-contact manual for any references

to--ah-sea monsters?"  The ensign-in-command was only half joking.



CHAPTER



"READ ME OUT the hull pressure and containment integrity, Julian;

thirty second intervals."



"Aye, aye, Jadzia."  The doctor unbuckled from his seat and slooshed to

the midsection of the runabout, reading the strain gauges directly

rather than trusting to the helm instruments; high pressure and strange

minerals in the water might mess up the electronics, but the strain

gauges themselves were so simple as to be virtually foolproof.  "One

hundred and sixty-two atmospheres on the outer hull," he said,

"containment field integrity is... well, call it ninety-six percent.

Looking good so far, Dax."



She checked her own instruments, and they differed from the gauges by

only three or four percent, within expected tolerance at this depth.

For the first time, she breathed a sigh of relief; we might just make

this without having to put our flippers on.



With every ten meters they rose in the runabout submarine they bled off

another atmosphere of pressure on the hull.  Soon Julian was calling

out "a hundred and fifty... hundred forty-nine..."  Dax realized she

was sweating; it~ just the suit, she told herself.  But the suit

wouldn't explain her pounding heart and the fact that she caught

herself clenching and unclenching her fist so much, her forearm started

to ache.



"Pressure one forty," said the doctor, "containment integrity is--"



The suspense became unbearable.  "Yes?  Is what?"  "Well, I don't like

the looks of this, Jadzia."  "What?  What don't you like?"  Dax started

to breathe too quickly, to shallowly; she took a deep breath, forcibly

calmed herself down.



"Well, it was holding nicely at ninety, ninety-one percent, but it just

dropped to eighty-five in the last minute.  Whoops, eighty; it's

dropping fast, Jadzia.  Can we ascend any faster?"



Dax pointed the Amazon II virtually nose-up and increased the thrusters

as much as she dared; the ship was never intended to "fly" through

water, just a single atmosphere or the vacuum of space.  She couldn't

push the engines any faster than the fraction necessary to move at ten

meters per second.



"Wait," shouted Bashit; "pull back, slow down!"



Shaking, Dax cut engine power to nearly zero; vertical motion slowed to

a crawl, one meter for every three seconds... same speed a diver is

supposed to ascend, she remembered from the doctor's scuba

instructions.  "Julian, talk to me.  What's going on?"



"It's the speed.  The water drag is sapping the containment field; it's

down to sixty percent... but the drop-off has slowed.  We might still

make it.  Pressure one hundred atmospheres and falling."



Briefly, Jadzia Dax wished she were a Bajoran, so she could pray to the

Prophets.  Dry-mouthed, she increased the rate of ascent to balance

field collapse with reduction of hull pressure.



Julian continued to call the numbers: "Hull ninety, field fifty-four

percent; hull eighty, field fifty; hull seventy, field forty-five...

we're going to make it, Dax."



"Yes we are, yes we're going to make it," she mumbled.  Then she felt a

drop of water on her forehead.  Her breath caught in her throat; it's

just sweat, she said, as it rolled down her face and into her mouth. It

tasted of saltwater... but of course, sweat was saltwater.  She spat it

out, suddenly remembering the high cyanide content in the local

flora.



But after several more seconds, she felt another drop, then a steady

trickle of them.  "Julian," she croaked, "we're leaking."



"Yes, here too," he confirmed.  Jadzia risked a glance back; the thin,

dapper doctor was actually holding his hand against the skin of the

runabout, swiveling his head back and forth between the two main

gauges.  "Fifty atmospheres, thirty percent.  Jadzia, pull your hood on

and don mask and backpack; I'm going to start a controlled flooding of

the cabin."



"You said we were going to make it," she said, trying to make light by

clicking her tongue.



"We will," said Julian, with equally false bonhomie "but I didn't say

the Amazon H would."



Dax said nothing more, just pulled on the rest of her scuba gear as

quickly and efficiently as she could.  By the time she finished, water

was spraying into the cabin from every seam, and several of the

instruments on her panel were giving obviously fractured readouts.



She pulled up her regulator, blew a few experimental blasts to clear

it, and clamped her teeth around it.  By the time she was ready, the

water was above her waist.  She looked at Bashir, and he gave her the

scuba diver's "okay" circle of thumb and finger; Dax returned it,

feeling nowhere near as okay as she put on.



Julian removed his regulator long enough to say, "It's going to be

colder than the holodeck.  Don't panic; just do it exactly as we

practiced.  I'll stay with you every meter, and I'm an expert diver, so

don't worry."



Dax could barely hear him, and she felt a sharp pain in her ears.  Of

course, she realized; the air pressure inside the Amazon II was

climbing.  She held her nose and blew gently but firmly, clearing first

one ear, then the other with a sharp pop.



The icy water touched her exposed chin; Julian was right... it was

freezing.  The rest of her body was comfortable in the insulated,

electro heated suit, but she gasped at the coldness on her face and

forgot to breathe for a moment.  The water quickly filled the rest of

the air pocket, and the runabout was entirely full of dark, turgid

seawater.



Without worrying about her buoyancy compensator vest, she joined Julian

at the emergency door crank; he opened the door slowly.  Dax felt her

ears plug up again; she checked her depth gauge, and realized that they

were actually sinking.  Engines must've died, she understood.  Then

Julian tugged at her arm, and she followed him out the partially opened

door into the darkly luminescent, alien ocean.



The doctor reached across and pressed a button on Jadzia's chest; she

seemed to shoot away from the runabout... but checking her gauge (which

she could barely see, though it was lit) it was the other way around:

she had come to a halt, while the Amazon H sank rapidly back toward the

oblivion of the ocean floor.  That's it, she thought; we're on our own,

for good or ill.  After several seconds, the lights from the runabout

faded into the dark, murky depths.



She cleared her ears again, twisting her neck to stretch the Eustachian

tubes.  Then Bashir caught her attention and gave a thumbs-up--which in

scuba signalling, she remembered, meant "Let's go up."



Dax felt another wave of panic: they were fifty five meters deep.  That

was much deeper than even expert divers usually went, and Jadzia Dax

was a rank amateur.  She started to bolt for the surface, but Julian

anticipated her misstep, and he caught her by the weight belt.  She

tried to kick him away, but she was hampered by the dry suit and the

fluid water, and the doctor was a lithe and wily wrestler in any event.

After several moments, she calmed down somewhat, though her pulse still

pounded so loud, it shook her entire body with every beat.



Julian held up three fingers: "Three," he seemed to say, "three seconds

per meter when ascending... no faster."



He started off in a thoroughly improbable direction-he was going the

wrong way.  Then Jadzia noticed the air bubbles expended from her

regulator with every strangled exhalation went the same direction as

Dr.  Bashir.  Well, I might be confused, but I'm sure the damned

bubbles know which way is up.  She followed the doctor, laboring to

make each flipper stroke slow and cautious.



The darkness terrified her for some reason; she had never been afraid

of the dark before.  But this wasn't just the absence of light; it was

palpable, it reached out and enveloped her.  She saw flashes of bio

luminescent fish (or plants; she couldn't quite tell), but that only

made the surrounding darkness seem lonelier and more solid.  Her

buoyancy compensator (BC) vented air automatically to maintain neutral

buoyancy.



She continued to breathe, in and out.  "If you hold your breath when

you ascend," the good doctor had told her, "the compressed air can

expand inside your lungs and force bubbles through your alveoli and

capillaries into your bloodstream."  Additionally, ascending too

quickly caused the nitrogen gas in the diver's blood to come out of

solution and form more bubbles.  He went on to describe the symptoms of

"the bends" (rather gleefully, thought Dax), and pointed out that the

only known cure--putting the victim in a hyperbaric pressure tank and

taking him "down" to the point where the gas bubbles dissolve into the

bloodstream again, would be impossible on the surface of Sierra-Bravo

112-1I (which did not, as far as they could tell, have any local

hospital facilities).



Dax watched both her chronometer and pressure gauge.  After a minute,

they were still thirty-five meters deep, but the light was growing

steadily stronger.  Things were looking up.  Then something brushed her

leg... something enormous.



She didn't want to look down and see what it was, but the image drew

her eyes against her will.  She saw the dim outline of something

vaguely turtlelike, but at least twenty meters long: there was a hard

shell, and dozens of flipper like legs sticking out along the sides.



The monster swam into the darkness, and Jadzia gave a startled yelp

into her regulator.  She grabbed Bashir, pointing the direction it had

vanished, but he evidently hadn't seen anything.  He shook his head,

pointing up.



They began to ascend again, but Jadzia Dax kept looking in every

direction, hoping to spot it before it was too late.  So big deal, what

good is that going to do?  You don't want to be eaten without being

instantly aware of it, eh?



The monster turtle loomed out of the gloomy water directly in front of

the pair, and this time there was no mistaking it by either party.  The

head suddenly filled Dax's entire field of view; or rather,

heads--there were four of them, each with its own neck poking out from

under the carapace.



First one then another head pressed close, opened its mouth, and

unrolled a snakelike tongue with its own eyeball and set of needle

teeth at the end.  The tongue-mouths prodded at Dax and Bashit, feeling

them, probably tasting them.  Neither officer dared move.  A pair of

tongues wrapped around Jadzia and began pulling her closer to the

mouth.



She reacted without thinking, reaching down to draw her dive knife and

slashing at the only tongue she could reach.  Julian saw what was

happening and joined her, hacking at the same tongue as she; he grabbed

it and began sawing back and forth.



Reacting sluggishly, the head the tongue was connected to finally

uncoiled and jerked back; the head squirmed left and right, banging

into the heads on either side: they appeared to forget their prey and

turn on each other, and Dax immediately guessed that rather than being

one monster turtle with four heads, she was looking at four turtles

that shared the same shell.



As soon as it--they--let go, she almost bolted toward the surface, but

she maintained adamantine control.  They continued their slow ascent,

and the monster turtles swam away, still bickering among themselves. By

the time they faded from view, Jadzia Dax was shaking like a Trill

pacheepa rat that had just escaped an owl.



A minute and a half later, the light suddenly got brighter and bluer;

she saw the surface of the ocean above her head like a shimmering,

undulating glass ceiling.  Giant Sierra-Bravo kelp loomed in the

distance to one side, and Dax guessed that was the direction of the

ocean shelf they had mapped from the Defiant; after all, the kelp had

to attach to something, and the trench into which the ship had settled

was much too deep for such large plant life--not enough sunlight.



It was harder than ever for Jadzia to restrain herself and not drive

for the surface, glittering just fifteen meters above them; such a

panicky dash could easily kill her in the absence of effective medical

care.  Gritting her teeth (and feeling phantom tongues nipping at her

flippers), Jadzia ascended, if anything, even more slowly for the glass

ceiling.



Jadzia Dax spit out her regulator, letting it fall back down by her

side, but before she could get the snorkel into her mouth, a swell

washed over her head, choking her.  She bit down hard on the snorkel

and did all her coughing into the mouthpiece; after a few moments, she

was breathing without obstruction... her heart pounded, and she made a

mental note for the doctor to examine her for cyanide poisoning.



Julian tapped her on the shoulder and removed his own snorkel for a

moment.  "Are you all right?"



She nodded, then shook her head, not wanting to talk.



"Ready to head for shore?  It's that direction."  He pointed toward the

kelp, now visible as thin stalks that looked almost like celery rising

two meters out of the ocean.  Dax nodded again.



Julian unreeled a thin cord and connected them together; then he rolled

onto his back, making sure Jadzia did the same, and activated the jets

on their backpacks.  They began to chug toward the shore at the stately

pace of one kilometer per hour.



Jadzia just kept breathing in and out, with deep, slow breaths, trying

to dispel the last remnants of her anxiety.  Julian hooked his arm in

hers to keep them close enough not to snag the tether on the alien

kelp.  By the time she began to see lots of bright-blue, four-legged

fish swirling around her wake, she felt a bump against her feet; then

realized it was a rock near the shore.  Within a few more seconds, her

heels were dragging in the silt, and she cut her motor at the same time

Julian cut his.



"Well, Jadzia," he said brightly, "we seem to have arrived."



She smiled weakly, stripping off the dry-suit and submitting to a

medical exam; the hard part was over... now all they had to do was find

Benjamin and the away team somewhere in hundreds of square kilometers

of trackless wasteland.



Julian Bashir hunched protectively over his friend, his comrade,

his--professionalism, professionalism.  Jadzia Dax was curled into a

fetal ball, clenching her arms around her throbbing, aching belly.  She

had evidently swallowed a mouthful of the poisonous seawater at some

point; probably while on the surface, thought the doctor, The seawater

contained relatively high traces of cyanogene and radical cyanogens,

which changed within the human (and Trill) body to a substance

uncomfortably close to deadly cyanide.  That she had only partially

recovered from the battle wound she had recieved only days ago wouldn't

help her condition.



Dax had evaded Cardassian ships and the planet's own automated defenses

to plunge the Defiant deep into the deadly ocean waters. Communications

with the away team were impossible through the electrolyte-laden water,

and too dangerous to boot: if either Cardassian attackers or electronic

planetary defenders intercepted the signal--well, it would take only a

single concussion bomb to tip the balance, tear away the containment

field, and allow the ship to be crushed beneath hundreds of atmospheres

of pressure.



It was Dax's idea to replicate a long wire and send old-fashioned radio

waves to communicate, but of course, there was no way for the away team

to know what was required.  So Dax, accompanied by the obvious

candidate, the dashingly brilliant and resourceful chief medical

officer, made a break for the surface in a runabout.  They barely made

it alive--one more alive than the other, thought Dr.  Bashir, looking

sadly at his patient, wondering whether she would make it.  Now,

dressed in replicated clothing similar to that of the native "Natives,"

they sat on the surface, grounded, one struggling to live, the other

struggling against despair at his own helplessness to help.



From his emergency medikit, Bashir extracted his hypospray and reloaded

another dose of the supposedly all-purpose anti poison supplied by the

Federation--and modified slightly by Dr.  Bashir back aboard Deep Space

Nine.  He injected the anti poison and another muscle relaxant near her

lungs (biggest concern) and her stomach (where most of the pain came

from), and Jadzia relaxed as her pain eased.  She was still unconscious

from the sedative he had given her earlier; there was no reason for her

to be awake to fight this mild poisoning.



"Correction," said the doctor aloud; "it's not Deep Space Nine any

longer.  It's..."  What did the Kai say she was going to call it?  Oh

yes, Emissary's Sanctuary.  Stupid name!  But Bashir shrugged, trying

to make the best of a life that always seemed balanced on one precipice

or another.  If he wasn't dreading possible exposure as a

DNA-resequenced freak of un nature he was being uprooted and probably

split from all his friends and colleagues and sent to some forsaken

hellhole--possibly to serve as the doctor on a Rigelian penal colony,

perhaps, or worse, as personal physician to some pompous, overstuffed

admiral nearing retirement.



What he really wanted, if he could no longer have his home on DS9-Yes.t

Deep Space Nine, by no other name.t--would be a berth on a Galaxyclass

starship, like the Enterprise that Miles had left to join the station

(and Worf, too, remembered Bashir with a touch of a grimace, looking

down at Jadzia).



"Modern medicine!"  he derided; all he could do was ease her pain a bit

and help her own body fight off the invasion of a toxic foreign

substance.  If she were going to survive--and he was now sure she

would--it wouldn't be because of Dr.  Julian Bashir, dashing lieutenant

of Starfleet in the United Federation of Planets.  Whether she lived or

died had actually been determined however many years ago it was that

Jadzia was conceived, when egg and sperm combined with a set of

chromosomes that decided Jadzia's future resistance to infection,

poison, and injury.



Though come to think on it, the symbiont Dax might also be helping

against the poison.  Not even the Trill themselves knew everything

about the complex interactions between host body and symbiont.



Julian sighed.  Modern medicine!  Now he had much more precise and less

invasive methods... so he could monitor his patient's own body

desperately fighting off cyanide poisoning.  Such progress!  With a

full laboratory, he might actually have been able to do something



But sitting on the sands of an alien seashore, staring at the deep,

deadly ocean of violet waters full of poisons and four-headed monster

turtles, lost on a planet already under invasion by Cardassian-led

forces, caught in the gaze of who knew-how-many dangerous native

life-forms, helpless in the shadow of technology so vast, it

practically dwarfed the Federation--but so fragile, the Cardassians

could turn it off like a light panel on the Defiantre Julian Bashir

felt like a child lost in a zoo in blackest night, knowing that all the

cage doors were left open for the beasts to feed.



CHAPTER



JULIAN BASHIR jerked awake, groping wildly for his medikit.  He had

been dreaming that Dax was convulsing herself to death, dreaming he was

asleep and dreaming, but unable to rouse himself from the dream (in the

dream) to save her.  He finally shouted himself awake and grabbed his

kit... but Jadzia was nowhere about.



He stumbled this- and that-a-way, performing the "drunkard's walk" of a

man just risen, thinking he had a terribly important task to perform

but not remembering what.  Gods, what I wouldn'tpay for a coffee just

now, he thought through a bleary cerebrum.



The first evidence of the missing lieutenant commander that Dr.  Bashir

found was a pair of boots that looked suspiciously like Dax's.  Toiling

up a nearby hilltop in the direction pointed by the shoes, dropped one

then the other, he discovered her hooded robe.  Shirt, pantaloons, and

undergarments followed.



"What now, O mighty one?"  the doctor asked Jadzia.



She shook her head.  "The only obvious course is to head toward the

original landing site.  The away team doesn't have a vehicle, so they

can't have got too far."  She looked pensive.  "Unless they

commandeered something."  "From the Natives?"



"Natives?  No, so far as we could tell, they'd never even heard of

vehicles."



Bashir stared skeptically at the landscape, impossibly rich-blue

mountains, brittle clouds, chill, white sun struggling up a ver million

sky.  "This whole planet smacks of..."  "What?"



The word wouldn't come for a moment, elusively dancing just out of

reach of the doctor's cerebrum, like the sweet odor that enticed his

nostrils, or the metallic taste of lat inurn and other minerals and

salts on his tongue.  Suddenly, the word he sought ventured too close,

and he reached out and snared it.  "Artificiality.  The way you

described it, they have massive amounts of technology but no underlying

infrastructure, and no scientific understanding whatsoever.  Does that

strike you as likely?"



Julian was thinking of the implausibility of stone age humans with hypo

sprays and medical scanners but without even the germ theory of

disease.



"Well, I was thinking about that myself.  If they're the degenerated

descendants of an earlier, technological world re



"Then there would be broken pieces of technological infrastructure all

over the planet," finished Julian.  "Roadways or launching ports or

massive industrial structures.  Not a bunch of high-tech stone huts and

a random scattering of useful tools and weapons."



Dax sat down, chin in hand; her neck spots were dark, almost

iridescentmpossibly a sign of intense thought, figured Julian.  "There

would also be vehicles," said Dax, "either operative or crashed, and

warp drivemyou knew that some of the toys we found used elements of

warp field technology, didn't you?"



"They did?"  The doctor was surprised; he had been too busy with

casualties to read all the reports the team sent up seemingly every few

minutes.  "Well, that's all the more reason the whole situation seems

artificial!"



Dax looked up.  "You're right, Julian.  I think these people were put

here by someone... and the entire planetary ecology was transplanted to

feed them.  The keepers, whoever they were, sprinkled the rock with

enough toys that the Natives could play whatever games they wanted, but

not enough for them to leave... or even travel around their own planet

much."



"But there was never any struggle for survival," said Bashir quietly,

finding the whole idea creepy to the point of being frightening, "and

without that struggle..."



"They never developed a culture, a civilization, or any consciousness

of groups larger than those who lived in the villages."



"The planned communities."



Dax chuckled.  "So does that mean the experiment or whatever it was

succeeded or failed?"



Bashir felt a shiver slowly crawl along his spine like a frozen

centipede.  "I wonder whether the Tiffnakis--is that what the villagers

you met called themselves?--are even the same species as the rest of

the Natives?  Could they interbreed?  Or have they been separated so

long, they're no longer a single people?"  The question seemed a

natural to the doctor.



She shrugged, dismissing the speculation before Bashit could finish

chewing on it.  "Well, no matter.  That makes the case stronger: the

only way the away team could have a skimmer is if they borrowed one

from the Cardassians.  And my friend, dear Doctor Bashit, that is

exactly what we are going to have to do."



Julian smirked--to hide his increasing nervousness, he realized.  "You

think they're going to be in a generous mood, our Cardassian friends?

Or was one of your hosts a Drek'la and you remember the secret

password?"



"No, but I'm sure if we ask them correctly, they won't even miss it.

Come on, Julian, start a slow, careful, long-range scan to find the

nearest Cardassian military unit.  I'll scan for ion trails left by the

skimmers.  Let's see just how far we're going to have to walk."



The sea monster--we're all calling it that now, thought Joson Wabak

with a gulp--continued to approach the Defiant directly.  There was now

no question, as N'Kduk-Thag unemotionally informed him, that the

monster had detected them somehow and was coming to investigate... or

feed.



Heedless of how it would look to his "troops," who after all, were

barely less-senior ensigns than he himself, Joson paced in front of the

command chair, feeling anxiety creep on kitty feet around his stomach.

He hadn't fought in the Resistance; he was too young when the

Cardassians pulled out, and his mother wouldn't even entertain the idea

of him trucking with the freedom fighters before then.  Joson was

uncomfortably aware that he had never been tested; the sword smith had

never struck him against the anvil to see which broke.



Well, neither has any other officer he rat he thought defiantly--a

thought that didn't comfort him, the more he considered it.  "Ten

minutes to contact do you have any orders," reported and asked

N'Kduk-Thag, "Ensign Nick," as the beautiful but hard Commander Dax had

nicknamed the sexless Erd'k'teedak, only the fourth of its species to

graduate from the Academy (and only barely; its academics were not

exactly stellar).



Well, Wabak, you'd better say something!  "How the containment

shielding, Tina?"



Her own voice was nearly as uninflected as Ensign Nick's, but in her

case, it was probably because she had resigned herself to death,

thought the Bajoran.  "Shields down to thirty-four percent and not

holding."  "You diverted power from the enginesw" "From everything not

necessary for life support," she reported gloomily.  "We've got maybe

thirty more minutes before we're crushed to death.  So maybe we'll have

time to be eaten alive by the sea monster first."



"That will be enough of that talk, Ensign Weymouth."  Joson was pleased

that he sounded more confident than he felt.  "Prepare to launch from

the ocean floor and head for the surface."



Weymouth turned to stare at him.  "Joson!  The structural stress of

movement will crush the ship immediately!"



He stared back.  "Better to die trying, Ensign



Weymouth, than huddle here and wait for death to hunt us.  "As he said

the words, Joson Wabak felt an amazing sensation flood his senses: fear

was stamped out like an old campfire; he felt the surge of excitement

that his brother must have felt when he undertook his first mission for

the Resistance... the one that got him captured by the



Cardassians.



But Jaras SURVIVED!  shouted a triumphant voice in Joson's head, and

the mission was a success, the entire Occupation Ministry of Justice

was destroyed by three packed-photon bombs smuggled inside, and Jaras

was one of the smugglers The thrill of being a Bajoran who had lived

under the Occupation and seen it thrown off by his own people, the

passion of knowing what he was doing was right, the certainty of

command flooded the veins and arteries of Ensign Joson Wabak, and he

knew then why he, not Tina and not N'Kduk-Thag, was chosen to command

in Dax's absence.



"Launch the Defiant, Ensign," he commanded calmly.  "Let's meet our

giant friend face to face.  If we're going to die, we'll die like

Starfleet officers, not like a shell claw being cracked open by a

sivass worm!"



The command tone shocked Weymouth out of her torpor; shaking, she

jumped to touch the lit squares on her panel and ramp the engines up to

a hundred and four percent.  The Defiant began to shudder as the

landing pods shook loose from the silt into which they had sunk.



"May I suggest dropping cloak and powering up the shields?  Better to

take the chance of being detected by the Cardassian ships and defend

ourselves in case the sea monster launches an attack."



"Excellent suggestion, Mr.  N'Kduk-Thag."  Joson waited, but the ensign

didn't object to being called "mister," evidently not truly caring what

gender was arbitrarily assigned.  N'Kduk-Thag took the praise as

authorization to proceed; the shields wouldn't protect against the

horrendous pressure from the water, of course, but if the sea monster

used electromagnetic or other means of attack, or even tried to ram

them, it might save their hides.  Sure hope the spoon-heads have

stopped looking for us, thought Joson; strangely, he felt more nervous

about the Cardassians than about the more immediate dangers of sea

pressure and the monster.  He shrugged; tradition, I suppose.



The Defiant rolled peculiarly as they cruised forward, and Ensign

Weymouth expressed repeated frustration at her lack of full helm

control.  "We are in the water one should expect a certain loss of

attitude control," remarked Nick; Tina didn't seem pleased at the

unasked for lecture.



"Can you search ahead with the sensors, N'Kduk-Thag?"  asked Joson;

"look for strong currents that might push us into an underwater

mountain."



"Aye, aye sir."



"Tina, tie your helm viewer into Nick's sensors; set it up so the

currents are color-coded by intensity."  When the junior ensigns

carried out their task, the ship's motion smoothed out; Weymouth was

able to dodge the strongest currents as if navigating down a bickett

warren.  Still, Joson Wabak felt a peculiar, hollow feeling in his

stomach, and his mouth grew dry; it took him several moments to

diagnose himself: Seasickness!  I'm getting seas ida How wonderful.  He

had known he was subject to the nausea and dizziness ever since he and

his brother went out fishing in choppy waters one day, but it had never

occurred to him that he would suffer from motion sickness in a

modern-day starship.  The inertial dampers were doing their job...

Joson was being nauseated by the visuals through the forward viewer.



"Creature constant bearing decreasing distance contact in three

minutes," reported N'Kduk-Thag.  The ensign helpfully called out every

thirty seconds, then counted down the final thirty.  "Is it stopping,

Nick?"



"No, sir.  Should we halt engines?"



"Not until it does?



Tina gritted her teeth.  "Oh m'God," she breathed, "we're playing

chicken with a sea monster?"



The Bajoran ensign had no idea why Weymouth was talking about chickens,

so he ignored the question.  "Hold your course and speed."



"Thirty seconds twenty-nine eight seven six..."



"Sir!"



"Hold course."



"Twenty nineteen eighteen--"



"Joson, for God's sake.t"



"Eleven ten nine..."  Ensign Nick suddenly stopped speaking.  "The

creature has stopped contact in twenty-two seconds beep at current rate

of closure."



Twenty-two seconds aqorn the beep, I suppose.  "Weymouth, wait ten

seconds, then all stop."  YES!  Wabak grinned, pleased to have won the

first round.  But only the first round, warned a little voice in his

head.



The Defiant pulled to a stop, much more quickly than it would have in

empty space, of course, because of water friction.  The two entities

faced each other: the Federation starship, fully armed but crippled

under the pressure of more than a thousand meters of water still above

them--and the amoeboid sea monster two kilometers long with thousands

of vicious-looking tentacles just waiting to scoop up the bite-sized

morsel and shove it into the creature's mouth.



"Let's get a good look at the thing, shall we?"  said Joson, without

the shakiness he actually felt.  "N'Kduk-Thag, launch a probe across

the monster's bow, have it circle around and get a good holo from every

angle."



"Aye aye sir."  Nick reached across to the empty science officer's

console and touched a few lit squares; in the main viewer, Wabak

watched the tiny probe streak away from the ship.  The hundreds of

tentacles nearby rippled with the probe's bow wave, and the ripple

passed along the creature's body as the probe circumnavigated it, but

there was no other reaction from the monster, which continued to regard

the Defiant motionlessly.  The ripples created a gentle, pink current,

which the viewer still obligingly displayed.  "I don't think it can see

something as small as the probe," ventured Ensign Wabak.



Just as he finished the observation, and the probe rounded the back of

the sea monster and headed back toward the ship, a pair of the

tentacles uncoiled and lashed out, grabbing the probe as it streaked

past.  The force of the probe's momentum actually tore off one

tentacle, but the other held fast, dragging the probe, despite its

impulse engines, into the maw of the monster.



Fascinated, the three officers and two security petty officers on the

bridge stared at the probe's visual transmission: they watched in awe

as the probe was caught by hundreds of thousands of headless serpents

or worms; Joson realized with a shock that they were tongues, each the

size of a tree trunk!  The tongues acted like teeth, pulling the probe

apart and forcing the pieces down the gullet.  After three minutes of

wormy mastication, one of the tongues got hold of some vital piece of

electronics, and the probe ceased to transmit.



"Tell me about the biology of the monster," said the ensign-in-command,

trying to wrench everyone's attention back to the crisis.  "Oh, and

Weymouth--how's the hull integrity holding out?"



"Hull integrity not dropping as fast," said Tina, cutting off

N'Kduk-Thag.  "It's down to thirty percent, dropping one point every

minute and a half, now that we're not so deep."



Silence.  "Defiant to Nick, hello?"  asked Joson.



"If you are ready to hear my report."



"Yes, N'Kduk-Thag; we are ready to hear your report."  For all that

Erd'k'teedak insisted they experienced no emotions whatsoever, they

were well known to get miffed now and then... in a distant,

intellectual sort of way.  Weymouth's report had been the more

important, but Nick was still irritated that she had cut him off.



"The probe sensors detected meter-thick muscle striations coiled with

veins filled with lat inurn--" "Latinum!"  "--that would doubtless

impede photon torpedo penetration and of course the heavy mineral and

electrolyte concentration in the seawater would interfere with the

phasers in my judgment we have little chance of damaging the sea

monster in combat."



"Thank you, Nick," said Tiny angrily, "that was worth waiting for."



Joson abruptly stood again, but stopped himself from pacing.  Think,

think, think What would Sisko do?  "I need options, people.  How about

a tractor beam?  Can we push it away?  Or push ourselves away from

it?"



Nick played with his console.  "No, sir.  The seawater disrupts the

beam as it would a phaser."



"Joson--I mean, sir, why don't we start ascending very slowly?  Maybe

we can at least reduce the pressure on the ship so we don't drown while

this thing is making up its mind whether to eat us."



Damn/ I should have thought of that "Do it, Weymouth."



The internal com-system chirped.  "Engineering to bridge," said a

disembodied voice that Joson vaguely recognized from the watches he had

stood down there.



"Wabak," he said absently.



"Sir, Lieutenant Abdaba here.  We finished replicating that float able

antenna the commander ordered.  Deploy?"



And may the Prophets ensure that neither the planetary sensors nor the

spoon-heads will think to check the electromagnetic spectrum for

low-tech radio broadcasts, breathed Joson Wabak silently.  The ionized

salts and heavy metals suspended in the deadly ocean waters would

prevent sensors from picking up the Defiant, especially at such a

depth, but the tip of the antenna would necessarily have to be "hot,"

and in a radio-source scan, would stand out like a magnesium flare in a

midnight marsh.



Licking his lips, the Bajoran ensign continued.  "Nick, as soon as the

antenna clears the shields, I want you to start transmitting on the

radio frequencies of the EM spectrum--get me in contact with Commander

Dax!"  "Aye, aye, sir."



"Sir, we're ascending at one meter per second; I'm hoping that's so

slow we won't attract the monster's attention."



"Excellent, Tina.  Keep a weather eye peeled."  It was one of the few

human expressions he had learned, but he couldn't tell whether Weymouth

understood it.  Maybe she's from a different village on Earth, he

thought.



Three tense minutes ticked slowly by on the ship's chronometer; the

Defiant had risen slightly less than two hundred meters, and now they

were even with the center of the sea monster's squirming mass of

tongues.  Several flicked out to touchm taste2?  the ship, but didn't

get through the shields.  Then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever,

more than thirty tentacles lashed out and wrapped themselves around the

ship, wrenching it to a halt and hurling Wabak to his hands and knees

before the gravi tic stabilizers could adjust.



"Damn it!"  he blurted, then caught hold of himself and stood, lowering

himself with dignity back into his command chair.  "Damage report,

Nick?"



"There is no damage.  We have been brought to a halt.  All upward

motion terminated.  The impulse engines are unable to break us free of

the creature's grip.  I am still transmitting but there has been no

response from the secondary away team."



"Okay, this is it," said Joson, feeling a horrible sense of peace and

calm permeate his body.  "If that thing pulls us toward its mouth, we

open fire with everything, and to hell with latinum muscles and

electrolytes in the barbarous water."



Just then, Tina gasped.  She half stood, staring down at her sensor

display.  "Joson!"  "Ensign, what is it?"



She stared wildly back and forth from Wabak to N'Kduk-Thag.  "Nick's

wrong, sir; there is a response to our transmission."  "Dax?  You have

Commander Dax?  Patch her through!"



"No sir," said Ensign Weymouth, turning distinctly pale, "the response

isn't from the commander."



"Then who's responding?"  asked Joson, feeling his preternatural calm

vanish in a rush of adrenaline.  He knew what her answer would be a

fraction of a second before she said it.



"She is," said Tina, pointing at the cavernous, serpent-toothed mouth

that filled the entire forward viewer.  "She wants to know where our

mother is."



I wouldn't mind knowing that myself, thought Joson at first; his next

thought was, by the Prophets, I wonder how they're going to write THIS

one up in my fitness report?



CHAPTER



WITH GREAT MISGIVINGS, Captain Benjamin Sisko had left the Tiffnakis

four days behind.  I want to stay and train them, train them some more,

keep training them until they can overwhelm the invaders like fire ants

pulling down a sunbathing lizard But he knew it would be an

unconscionable waste of his time: Asta-ha--the hereditary mayor who had

misunderstood the military ranks that Worf had taught her and had

dubbed herself "MayorGeneraI'mwas capable all on her own of turning the

remaining two hundred Tiffnakis into soldiers; she had the help of her

commando squad, the "Terrors of Tiffnaki," whom Sisko and his away team

had finally shocked into recognizing reality... and into recovering

their lost legacy of intelligence, creativity, and tactical thinking.



She wouldn't do as good a job as the captain and Worf could, and it

would take longer.  But there was a more urgent task for the away team:

they had to knock every power generator on the planet off-line.  Only

in this way could the rest of the Natives on Sierra-Bravo be forced to

confront real life... life without the toys that had been their source

for everything they needed.  Otherwise, the invaders would continue

moving from village to village, cutting the local power and

overwhelming the Natives while they were still in shock from the loss

of their entire, "new tech"-driven world.



With one stroke, we can shatter their dream, thought the captain; they

will wake up--because they HAVE TO wake up.  By the time the

Cardassians meet them, weeks will have passed for them to get used to

life without the Power.  Visions of bow and spear-armed Natives

ambushing Cardassians, who shot back with disruptors and concussion

bombs, polluted Sisko's thoughts; it was a horrible, ugly sight... but

not as ugly as the vision he had seen in reality: Cardassians mowing

down abruptly un-armed Tiffnakis like a farmer scything wheat.



Sisko closed his eyes against the burning, orange sun: Please, he

prayedmperhaps to the Prophets, since he was still the

Emissary--please, this time, let me be right.t The other possibility,

as Chief O'Brien had cheerfully pointed out, was that knocking all the

power off-line would result in mass starvation, death by exposure, and

a quick and craven surrender to the Cardassians by the few remaining

survivors.  Well, somebody has to find the dark lining, I suppose, and

it always seemed to be the chief, for some reason.



For four days, the away team had made excellent time.  The toys that

Sisko had forbidden to the Tiffnaki commandos and confiscated off their

persons came in handy to smooth out the trail the Federation crew

followed: the force beam flattened a path through scrub; the antigravs

got them up and down cliffs; and the death rays worked wonders in

cutting down small blue trees for bridges across rushing,

metal-sparkling rivers whose waters were deadly to anybody but the

Natives.



But in four days, despite the advantages, the team had made only sixty

kilometers, a remarkable showing but not enough, not nearly fast

enough!  At the moment, they sat atop a bluff overlooking a deathly hot

valley of bright, latinum-laced sand they would have to cross--all

sixty klicks of it-and they were already running lower in com-rats than

Sisko had estimated.



O'Brien sat on the edge of the cliff, dangling his legs over and

staring bleakly at the wasteland below.  Quark paced round and round a

circle, mumbling to himself something that sounded suspiciously like

"latinum, lat inurn everywhere, nor any strip to spend."  If Coleridge

were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave, thought the captain

mirthlessly.



Odo was a puddle, far away and secluded from the rest of the team; they

had stopped ostensibly because the changeling had stayed too long in a

solid state and was desperate to collapse and liquify.  But Sisko knew

the rest of the away team, himself included, were grateful for the

chance to rest a complete day, sleeping as they could in the bright

sunlight, readying themselves for the three night trek across the

desert.



The captain himself sat cross-legged on the bluff, by choice too far

from the edge to see the sands below, squinting against the sun as it

crawled in the direction they had arbitrarily labeled west.  "Worf," he

said, his first word in an hour.



The sleeping Klingon rose grunting, looking about to see who had called

him from dreams of siege and liege.  Sisko repeated the soft command,

and Commander Worf struggled to his feet, joining the captain.  "Yes,

sir?"



"Worf, we are still a hundred and forty kilometers from the Cardassian

landing spot, and sixty of those kilometers are across that."  Sisko

nodded past O'Brien toward the cliff and the sands below.  "Yes, I am

aware of that fact, sir."



"You are quartermaster.  How many days rations do we have left?"



Wolf worked his face, reluctant to answer.  "Four days if we stretch

it, Captain."  "And how long would you estimate it will take us to

reach the launch facility?"



Worf said nothing; Sisko continued the narrative himself, wishing he

had another answer.  "Three days across the desert, if we're lucky;

then Kahless knows how long to cross that mountain range.  At this

rate, Commander, we're not going to make it, are we?"



Worf stopped figiting.  "No.  We are not."



"And the damned invaders are going to win."  Worf didn't speak; Sisko

waited a beat, then turned to his real purpose.  "Worf, you know all

the legends and histories of the ancient Klingon wars, don't you?"



"I would not say all, sir; I do know a great many."



"We need that expertise now, Worf.  Think, think!  How would Kahless

have gotten us to the enemy before our food ran out?"



Lieutenant Commander Worf stood, folding his arms sternly, staring at

the horizon, the distant mountains they eventually would have to cross.

"Even the Emperor Kahless had mechanized armor," mumbled the Klingon

petulantly.



"Then think back farther!  Think of the age of heroes, before any of

the technology we take so much for granted.  How the hell did they move

armies around in those days?"



Worf turned back to Captain Sisko.  "We used pack animals, of course.

Riding beasts, and beasts to carry the gear."



Sisko nodded; it was the germ of a thought that had been scratching at

his own forebrain for days... Worf had pulled it into the open so Sisko

could finally examine it.  "Yes... yes!  That's it, that's what we're

missing.  If we were a cavalry unit, we might actually be able to make

a hundred and twenty kilometers in four days... especially since we

could feed and water the horses on native grass and native water!"



O'Brien had turned around during the conversation; now he said in

excitement, "Captain!  I think I've seen creatures here that might make

almost adequate horses!"  "Which animals are you talking about?" 

O'Brien stretched his arms to indicate great size.  "They're huge

beasties, they've got six legs and I think some kind of fur, unless

it's needles. Their heads are kind of split down the middle, so they

look like a double-barreled phaser?"



"Those giant six-leggers?"  asked the captain, picturing the terrifying

beasts in his mind.  "Can they be domesticated?"



"Beggin' your pardon, sir, but do we have any choice?"



The Ferengi abruptly ceased his pacing and stared back and forth among

the other participants in the conversation.  "Have you people lost your

minds?  You expect me to ride on top of some hideous, two-headed,

six-legged monster for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers?  You're

insane!  Forget it!"  His fear was so palpable that Sisko almost felt

sorry for the little fellow.



Almost.  But there really was no other option.  "Quark, you're just

going to have to deal with it!"  snapped O'Brien, saying essentially

what the captain had been about to say--but a lot less

diplomatically.



Worf grinned wolfishly.  "I am sure the captain would allow you to stay

behind--and leave your combat rations to the rest of us."  Quark

snorted indignantly and turned his back on the Klingon... something he

never would have done had the two of them been alone in a dark corner

of the station.



"Gentlemen," said Captain Sisko, "I believe we have a plan: Chief,

you'd better get busy."



"Me?  Doing what?"



"You've got a couple more hours before Odo rejoins us... and I want you

to become an expert in lassoing wild monsters."



The explosion from the chief was enough to keep the captain amused for

more than half an hour, by the end of which O'Brien was furiously

hurling a loop of rope from the survival packs the Defiant beamed down;

he hurled the loop at a tree trunk that Worf held aloft with the

antigravity device-the method the pair had settled upon for lassoing

the local "horses."  Next couple hours of training is going to be

absolutely RIVETING, decided Benjamin Sisko.  qc ~



Kai Winn woke suddenly in the night.  She sat bolt upright in bed,

listening for the noise that had shaken her from her memories; but it

was elusively absent.  Her heart raced... at first, it was all she

could concentrate upon, for the doctors had warned her that she very

much needed to keep herself calm if she didn't want another "coronary

incident," as they euphemistically put it.  No, no~ she warned herself;

that's not the way to do it!



Instead, the Kai commenced a prayer to the Prophets, a child's

exercise, actually; she recited the first syllable, then the first two,

then the first three, and so forth, finally reciting the prayer song in

its entirety on the thirty-third repetition... then repeated.  It

worked to slow her heart, but her nerves still jangled like an iron

bell suspended in a stiff breeze.  "Kai Winn to Major Kira," she said.

"Kira--Kai, either come take command or leave me alone!  We're in the

middle of a fire fight here!"  In the background, Winn heard the shout

of orders, damage reports, too indistinct to make out over the

com-link.  She briefly considered rising, but she was dead tired... and

if the station were in imminent danger of being lost, Kira would have

awakened her.



"Are we holding our own, child?"



"Yes, damn it!  I sent out the militia in pressure suits and it's hand

to hand, Well, phaser to disruptor between DS-Nine--I mean, Emissary ~

Sanctuary and the alien ships.  We still don't know who they are.  Now

please, my Kai, clear the line so I can direct the fight!"



"I trust you, child.  Awaken me in two hours or immediately if there is

a breach."



"Aye, aye, Kai.  Kira out."  The major rudely cut the link herself, but

Winn forgave her young protege; Nerys had much to learn... and she was

learning even now.  Calm patience was the priceless gift of the

Prophets.



The Kai rose, pushing her pudgy feet firmly into the slippers she had

owned since--well, since she was a sister in service to her "master,"

Gul Ragat.  She walked to the shelf that used to contain a stack of

Starfleet manuals on data clips when the Kai's quarters used to be the

Emissary's office.  Now the shelf had an infinitely higher purpose: it

supported a large, nondescript box with a split front, a front the Kai

touched reverently.



I must never turn to Them for trivial or personal matters, she thought

to herself, as if once again lecturing in a religious school, a task

she had not performed for many, many years.  This is not a personal

matter, she told herself firmly, and this is no trivial question.  The

survival of Bajor may be at stake!



Nervously, fearing that she may have everything all wrong and could be

offending the Prophets, Kai Winn took a deep breath and opened the

doors wide.  The Orb was so brilliant, it burned right through her

eyes, searing the back of her skull.  She grimaced; she was, after all,

a middle-aged woman-no longer in her physical prime, and not the

Emissary.  But she was the Kai; and the Prophets, though they burned

and battered, had never failed their people.



"Show me," she whispered against the light, "show me Your will.  Show

me what I must know!"



Shocked, Winn found herself not looking into the minds or hearts of the

enemies still attacking the station, not at the Federation or the

Dominion, not even in her own time; she found herself back in the

selfsame dream from which she had lately escaped by a panicked leap

into consciousness.  The Prophets wanted her to remember; the Prophets

wanted her past.  I will give it to Them, she yielded.



It made no sense to Kai Winn.  But then, did it need to?



CHAPTER



THIRTY YEARS AGO



THE CARAVN of Gul Ragat assembled in the courtyard outside the keep of

the palace that once belonged to the town of Shiistir and served as the

home of ex-Governor Riasha Lyas; now, the same building of light and

color sheltered the conscience and the ears of Legate Migar from the

lamentations of Sister Winn's people.  What a shock, thought the

priestess, that the stone walls of this bloody place don't tumble to

the earth in horror at what they've seen!  They looked as solid as

ever, ready to stand for centuries of tyranny or freedom, uncaring,

pink and cold as stone.



The outer wall was retained, but it was largely ceremonial; the

protective function was taken by a force shield the Cardassians had

erected, since they (unlike poor Lyas) had much to fear from assassins

and saboteurs.  The interior wall was shaped like a pair of octagons

connected by a wide, rectangular circus maximus used for the bloody

sports of the current masters--blood games that remained barbaric, no

matter how refined and decadent the rules.  I cannot understand why the

Prophets have not crushed this place she screamed to herself I



Sister Winn was the only cleric among the Bajoran mass of Gul Ragat's

household; she had no idea whether she had a religious counterpart

among the Cardassians... in fact, she wasn't even sure whether they

even had a religion beyond worship of the state.  If there were a

Cardassian holy man or woman, he had not seen fit to knock elbows with

the Bajorans.  Among the gul's Cardassian retinue were two majors and

his captain of the guard (one Colonel Back); sixteen sergeants and

soldiers astride individual skimmers; Neemak Counselor, the gul's

personal secretary and attorney; a brutish Cardassian valet,

Gavak-Gavak Das, who oversaw the Bajoran servants (Sister Winn's

immediate boss, except that Gul Ragat had taken a liking to her, and

she generally reported directly to the gul himself); Ragat's skimmer

pilot; and a pair of mechanics/secretaries operating under the command

of Neemak Counselor.



Gul Ragat also traveled with his household staff of Bajorans, numbering

forty-two, including Sister Winn... who should have been considered the

"slave overseer," since she was the nearest thing to an authority

figure; but she eschewed the job, claiming a complete lack of "command

presence," and Hersaaka Toos, a luckless impulse engine repair-crew

foreman was given the task.



No command presence!  The reality was that Sister Winn was already

looking ahead to the days when Cardassia would be expelled from Bajor;

she had seen the vision in her dreams, the coming of the Emissary, the

intervention of the Prophets-and very frankly, she wanted a place

guiding the destiny of her people when they were free.  Politically,

Sister Winn could never allow even a hint that she might have

collaborated with the Cardassians; it would spell the death of her

personal ambitions.



Winn was supposed to report with the others at zero-eight hundred

(Cardassians were enamored of military time), but she had a guess how

long it would take old Gavak-Gavak and Hersaaka Toos to muster

sixty-five people in some semblance of order to satisfy the farewell

inspection by Legate Migar and Gul Dukat; she wandered onto the scene a

half hour late and stepped into her place, and she was not the last.



The contrast between the twenty-five Cardassians and the forty-two

Bajorans was remarkable, though hardly worth remarking: Cardassians

mustered at attention because they were a proud race of lordly

conquerers who had yet to suffer any significant defeat in their drive

to expand the Empire to Hell and back; the Bajorans stood glumly still

in the cold wind because they didn't want to be lashed by Gavak-Gavak

Das, who enjoyed his work all too thoroughly.



Still, even when squat Gavak-Gavak expertly flicked his whip end to

graze the priestess's cheek, stinging but not drawing blood this time,

she found herself hating him far less than she hated and despised the

kindly, thoughtful Gul Ragat!  "At least Das is an honest racist," she

had told a divinity student three years earlier, when he passed briefly

through Ragat's household.  "Das is a brutal beast and he expects us to

hate him for it.  But the gul wants not just our obedience but our

love."



"That's worse?"



"He oppresses us, child, but he bears false witness against himself,

absolving himself of the charge of slavery by being a nice old slave

master His is infinitely the greater evil in the eyes of the Prophets."

The student never quite got it; Sister Winn was saddened to hear that

he was caught raiding the next year and was hanged.



When Gul Ragat and sixty-five lesser mortals were finally mustered

under the chilly, gray sky, Old Migar and cold-eyed Dukat inspected

them.  Migar cared only for the ritual; it was power hungry Dukat, the

master of Terok Nor, orbiting Bajor like the grim hand of contagion

(for wherever its shadow fell was death), who pulled Cardassians and

Bajorans alike out of line and set them to perform brutal physical

exercise in the frozen, muddy courtyard for such heinous crimes as

unpolished boots, misaligned buttons, or "a surly attitude."  The gul

had one eye on the prefecture of all Bajor and the other on the

advancing age and retirement (or sudden death) of Legate Migar, which

still left him the eyes in the back of his head to spot treacherous

malingerers and slackers.  Even Gul Dukat, however, passed lightly over

Sister Winn; he knew her to be her "master's" favorite, and as the

saying went, Rank Hath Its Privileges.



Eventually, even Dukat was satisfied with the shininess of the

glittering, silver filligree across the doublets of deepest military

purple, with the velvet-red uniforms of the servants, and with the

polish on the personal skimmers and armaments of the soldiery, little

though they could shine on such a gloom day; and he passed in quick

review one more time before vanishing back inside the house--to the

banquet and open bar that Winn knew awaited him there.  Migar sighed

and followed Dukat, who technically outranked the governor, and at

last, Gul Ragat could breathe in relief again and order Gavak-Gavak to

get the splendid column moving--theoretically toward the village of

Vir-Hakar in Belshakarri, their home... but in reality, on the road to

Riis--where all threads of this tapestry shall join, thought Sister

Winn.



CHAPTER



WINN THOUGHT she knew the route that Gul Ragat would follow; there was

one obvious road from the palace to the river and Riis: along Surface

92, as the Cardassians called it.  The Bajorans had a more colorful

name: the Way of Wallows, because of the soft, marshy ground

surrounding the road that in ancient times had been used to wallow

tiraks being driven to the slaughter pens in Riis; there were slaughter

pens no longer in peaceful Riis, but the road to the city founded three

millennia ago by the holy man Kilikarri remained.  Sister Winn had

followed the road many times, though usually at many kilometers per

hour skimming two or twenty meters above the ground, and she visualized

the entire road in her mind, trying to figure the best place to

desert.



She knew her ho los were much more important than a single action in

Riis, a few cell leaders who could not betray the Resistance even if

they wanted--and the Cardassians could, of course, make them

want--because of the elaborate organization of cutouts and false

fronts; for all that, Winn found herself unable to condemn her fellow

freedom fighters to capture, torture, and death, no matter what the

cause. There were others, even other priests--Vedek Opaka sprang to

mind--who were much more ruthless than she, and she knew,

intellectually, it was a failing.  But I just can't do it!  she railed.

 She had to find a way to warn the Riis cell to call off the raid.



Her best chance would come during the second half of the march; Surface

92, which the Cardassians had straightened, now ran directly over the

wallows across a series of high, arched bridges, some rising fifty

meters above the surface.  But there were places where the drop was

only ten meters into soft mud, and Sister Winn decided that even she,

not the most athletic of women, could survive that.



But then what?  she pondered; getting off the road without being

spotted was the easy part; traversing kilometers of slick, deep mud and

swampy, stagnant lakes on foot would be the real test.  She knew of a

swamper, Velda Reeks, who was friendly to the Resistance; the woman had

hidden fugitives before.  But she lived four kilometers from the

road... and those would be four kilometers of ghastly effort and

terrible risk: if Gul Ragat missed her and thought to scan the

surrounding swamp before she made it to Velda's shielded cabin, he

would spot her in an instant and send soldiers to pick her up.  She

would be searched, the ho los found... and not only would she be

executed, but the cell at Riis would be thoroughly compromised, and

perhaps even elda Reeks to boot!



Sister Winn would have to be over the wall, into the mud, and away for

several hours before anyone noticed she was missing; that meant a night

escape, of course... but where would the gul decide to camp?  He was

restricted to the foot speed of the Bajorans, since no Cardassian in

his right mind would leave his servants behind and rush on ahead; thus,

it would take three days to get to Riis, which waited like an open hand

upon the Shakiristi and its tributaries.  But would they camp near

enough to Velda's cabin that Winn could make it, assuming everything

else went well?



She thought of one more stratagem: if she somehow could get into a

skimmer, she might be able to program it to head out over the swamp in

some other direction; then, when she turned up absent, the Cardassians

would assume she had stolen the vehicle and would waste time following

it.  That might confuse them enough that they would never institute a

thorough search that might uncover Velda's cabin.



The road to Riis was painful; there was no grassy median, as had been

the case when it was a small Bajoran road, because Cardassians never

traveled by foot; Surface 92 was constructed of a specially hardened

plastic that could withstand the wheeled and tracked vehicles the

Cardassians used for trucking heavy military equipment where anti grays

were unavailable or not powerful enough.  Winn wore only household

shoes, and her feet were rubbed raw within the first few kilometers.



She had never walked so far without a rest.  The gul was anxious to get

to Riis before the uprising that only he knew about, and he drove his

household mercilessly.  Coming to the bulletin-tea was much easier;

there was no rush, and they made only eight or nine kilometers per day,

with plenty of time to sit and eat, sip refreshments, and otherwise

"bathe their toes," as the saying went.  Now, Gul Ragat pushed for

twice that pace, and Sister Winn grimaced with every step.



Others were hardened to the pace, having lived rougher lives than the

priestess; she didn't allow herself to complain, since she only

suffered because she hadn't suffered as much as the others!  But the

blisters were real, and her pain was hard to bear.  Only Winn's

incessant prayers to the Prophets allowed her to endure that first

day.



In the first of the two nights they would spend on the road, she showed

her feet to Hersaaka Toos, and he sucked in a breath through clenched

teeth; they did look ghastly.  He sent her to the healer, Daana, who

prescribed balms and a foot wrap that soothed much of the pain and

allowed the priestess to walk relatively normally again.  Already,

however, the whole "survival-evasion-resistance-escape" scenario was

smelling less exciting and more implausible.



While the Bajorans set up the gul's camp, Sister Winn cased the field

in the guise of hearing confessions and administering prayer and

penance.  Cardassian camps were uniform, and it was a matter of pride

within Gul Ragat that his camp would break not the slightest letter of

the law or breath of tradition.  The night's camp centered around the

manor of an unfortunate Bajoran farmer, who had stupidly chosen to live

alongside a trade route and foolishly built up a successful farm: Mr.

Farmer and his family were temporarily exiled to a small inn thirty

kilometers away, driven in the gul's personal skimmer, while the

entourage of Gul Ragat began pitching tents on one of the farmer's

fields.



In an effort to be nice about it, the gul ignorantly picked a field

that looked empty, but in reality, it was newly planted, a fact not

brought to Gul Ragat's attention for half an hour and the significance

of which took him another half hour to understand.  By the time he

moved the camp, the newly planted seeds were trampled and scattered; if

they grew at all, they would grow haphazardly, not in rows, and be

almost impossible to weed and water properly.  Winn spent the time

wincing and desperately praying to the Prophets that the farmer

wouldn't be completely ruined, as so many others had been.



Gul Ragat situated himself in the main house, of course, and his

soldiers pitched tents in orderly rows upon a field that had been

ploughed but not yet planted; it would have to be re ploughed but that

was only a matter of a few extra days work for the owner.  The Bajoran

servants were a special concern of Gul Ragat's; he worried constantly

that they, too, were well weeded and watered.  In consequence, he

ordered Gavak-Gavak Das to house the Bajorans in the livestock barns...

which the overseer promptly did by turning out all the stock and

chasing it away.



"Ah, they'll come back, you whining priestess!"  snarled Gavak-Gavak to

Sister Winn when she protested.  Winn stared after the departing rumps

and hooves; true, the farmer would probably be able to get most of his

dairy herd back again, but at what cost?  It would probably take weeks

to round them all up and truck them back to the farm!



The farmer's land--Winn never did find out the man's name--was at the

edge of the mud flats, the Wallows; for the next two days, Surface 92

traversed a causeway... and the cabin of Velda Reeks was just about

halfway between the farmer's hold and Riis.  Please, please, prayed the

priestess fervently, let us stop tomorrow night near enough that I can

at least try!



Winn slept fitfully that night.  Not only was she unused to camping

out--she hadn't slept well on the road to Legate Migar's palace

either--and not only could she not tolerate the dirty smell of animals,

which permeated every cranny and crevice of the barn like a miasma,

along with much animal by-product; but worst of all, she felt more

strongly than usual the restless ghosts of Bajorans slain by evil

Cardassians, by faceless bureaucracy, and especially by well-meaning

apologists like Gul Ragat.  She felt surrounded by the indifferent

efficiency of the Cardassian soldiers, who joked about the inhumanity

of the Bajorans without the least concern for the Bajorans at their

backs, who outnumbered them almost three to one!  And of course, no

Bajoran servant dared even raise an angry glance at a Cardassian, lest

he be made an example for the rest.



Hersaaka Toos, the Bajoran foreman, seemed the most oppressed by the

burden of serving his planet's tyrants, and Sister Winn felt a terrible

twinge of guilt that she had refused the job herself, thus forcing

Hersaaka to be the hated emissary between Bajor and Cardassia, in the

person of GavakGavak.  The stink of collaboration was already starting

to follow Hersaaka about as the odor of animals now adhered to the

priestess... and it was entirely unjustified, since Hersaaka had no

real choice in the matter.  Winn prayed for guidance: Should I have

accepted the stain upon myself and to blazes with the consequences for

Bajor when we're finally free of the Cardassian blot?  The Prophets

enigmatically remained silent.



Sister Winn had heard of the Orbs, of course; every priest knew of

them.  Perhaps someday, I'll look into one and let the light of the

Prophets shine fully on me... and then I'll know, once and for all.

"For all" was right: if the Prophets found the gazing eye wanting, they

were rumored to burn it out, along with the brain of the unworthy

owner.



She shook her head, sweeping out the cobwebs of guilt and self-doubt;

she couldn't afford those now!  Sister Winn had a job, a job that would

have been impossible were she as closely monitored as was poor Hersaaka

Toos.  On her peregrination, she paid especial attention to the

movements of the sentries.  Like virtually everything else Cardassian,

the sentries had ritualized their task to the point of predictability:

she watched for only a few minutes and was able to predict where every

guard would be at any moment.



In any task that became routine to that extent, there were gaps where

nobody was looking in a particular direction at a precise moment; there

were several, in fact.  Winn knew the pattern would be repeated exactly

at the next camp--they were Cardassians, after allmsubject only to the

limitations of the terrain (no farmhouses in that section of Surface

92, for example; Gul Ragat would be in his own pavillion, which was

still carefully stowed at the moment).



By the time she finished her circuit of the camp, talking to each

Bajoran, as was her primary duty, Resistance or no Resistance, Sister

Winn had constructed what she hoped was a good escape plan.  Because

Ragat was so "benevolent" a master by Cardassian standards, escapes

from his plantation were quite rare; Bajorans knew the penalty for

running away from Gul Ragat's honor farm was either execution, or if

the slave escaped that fate, transportation up to Terok Nor... which

might actually be worse: Gul Dukat's cruelty was legendary across all

five points of the globe.  But the consequence had lulled Gul Ragat's

sentries to the point of somnambulation, and she hoped any slop in her

plan would fall unnoticed.



When she returned to her own tent, which she shared with two other

women, she collapsed suddenly onto her sleeping mat, so exhausted she

surprised even herself.  As she lay on her back feeling her legs and

especially feet throb with every beat of her pulse, she tried to

understand her fatigue: she was always tired after a long march, but

not this tired!  And she had been fine a few moments before,

circumnavigating the camp.  It~fear, she realized at last; my body is

starting to understand just how deadly a game I'm planning.  But there

was nothing she could do about that; a priestess could not allow fear

of physical death to interfere with a duty of the soul--as she was

convinced the fight for Bajor's independence truly was.  I think I know

how the holy martyrs felt, thought Winn bitterly, and she knew the

thought was not even blasphemous.



Sister Winn had one more duty that evening, to lead the Bajorans in

their prayers over supper.  She roused herself at the proper time and

led the prayer, then forced her eyes to remain open long enough to eat

some food and engage, somewhat incoherently, in a little light banter.

She always believed in the necessity of keeping up appearances;

appearances were more important than a lot of people admitted: morale

was based almost entirely upon the most superficial aspects of one's

spiritual leaders, for example.  Then as soon as she could reasonably

excuse herself, she stumbled back to her tent and fell instantly into a

deep sleep, at least two hours before the others.



She woke with a start, heart racing and breath coming quick and heavy,

an hour before dawn--a time she rarely saw on a normal day.  She could

hear only the Bajoran cooks stirring, banging pots, and of course the

ever present, clockwork plodding of the Cardassian sentries.  She rose

too quickly and had to wait for a wash of dizziness to depart as her

blood pressure increased.  Then, for decency's sake, she wrapped a

morning cloak about her already too warm body and walked into the

middle of the camp to begin the morning prayers... rather earlier than

was usual for her.



One of the Cardassian sentries noticed; he was new, and his shift

always ended before Sister Winn normally bestirred herself, so he had

never seen her move through her rituals.  He approached, scowling.



"What d'you think you're doing?"



"I think I'm praying, most gracious sir."



"Why?"



Winn looked up at the boy, no more than twenty, his face stamped with

the permanent, ugly sneer of the bully.  I'll bet you tried to join the

Obsidian Order and were rejected because of a low IQ, she thought--then

instantly apologized to the Prophets for the un charity  "Sir, I am

praying because I am the sister, the priestess you would say, to all

these Bajorans.  It is my duty to pray to the Prophets at certain times

of the day, morning being one of those times.  Overseer Gavak-Gavak Das

will vouch for my duties, most benevolent corporal."



She waited politely a moment or two for response, but the boy was still

thinking; she returned to her prayers, but he interrupted her once

more.  "All right, then... but get to it!  Stop 1ollygagging, or I'll

have you reassigned to hauling luggage."  He could do no such thing, of

course; Gul Ragat would never allow it.  But Winn knew how to handle

such bullies as this young corporal: she bowed deeply to the boy and

thanked him profusely, promising to speed up the prayers if he so

commanded.  Then she took exactly as long as she always did, of course;

how was he to know?  The corporal of the guard stalked off, seemingly

pleased that he had pushed around another Bajoran.



Winn started to worry; if the same guard were on duty tomorrow night

when she was to make her escape, he might be especially alert; he was

young and only recently transferred to the service of Gul Ragat from...

from where?  Sister Winn remembered with a sinking heart: the corporal

was just transferred from the orbital station, Terok Nor; he had

received his training in the security forces of Gul Dukat!  Yes, this

angry chiM is definitely one to avoid, she told herself.



The second day's march was so much easier than the first that Sister

Winn almost considered commencing an exercise program at the gymnasium

at Gul Ragat's; I must be terribly out of shape!  She had noticed a lot

of her clothes getting rather tight in recent months, but she had

assumed they were shrinking for some reason.



Healer Daana's foot wraps worked wonders.  Winn's feet stopped hurting

entirely after the first few kilometers, when the circulation really

started reaching her toes; Daana had added pads to strategic points in

the priestess's shoes as well as wraps to prevent her toes from sliding

against each other.  By the time Gul Ragat called a halt for the midday

meal, Winn felt her excitement growing: I'm really going to do it she

nearly said aloud.  The horizon seemed so close in the still, chilly

air, she thought she might be able to reach out and touch its line.



Surface 92 was so straight and level, it was virtually impossible not

to become hypnotized by the steady tramping.  The air was too cold for

heat mirages, so Winn was denied even that slight solace of illusory

motion.  But she kept track of their progress by the distance markers.

She spent some time mentally calculating where was the closest point to

the cabin of Velda Reeks... she wasn't sure of the numbers--math was

never the priestess's highest subject rebut it didn't appear as though

they would get quite that far before camping for the night.



Sister Winn felt an expletive without even quite vocalizing it to

herself, so well-trained was her mind.  It meant quite a bit of extra

travel through the thigh-deep mud, and more of a chance of misjudging

the direction and missing the cabin entirely.  It was shielded against

Cardassian sensors, after all, so the best she could do was head in

approximately the right direction while beaming a tight, low-amplitude

message saying who she was, hoping that Velda Reeks found her.



IF, she thought, I can steal a sensor communicator from the

Cardassians, that is.  That made two overt acts before she could

escape: break into a skimmer and send it along a false trail and

liberate some communications gear.  But with her feet feeling so good,

Sister Winn was convinced she could do anything!



An idea occurred to her; she increased her pace, passing several ranks

of Bajorans and then the gul's Cardassian honor guard.  No one moved to

stop her; she was well-known among all the gul's intimates.



"My Lord," she said, hurrying to catch up with Ragat's open-top skimmer

limousine, "M'Lord, I must speak to you!  It is urgent."



Gul Ragat looked about in surprise; seeing Sister Winn walking beside

his car, he automatically tapped the code to open the bird wing door.

His bodyguard and Neemak Counselor each grabbed an arm and hoisted the

priestess into the car with them.



The guard was just another Cardassian soldier, one of the commissioned

officers selected for the honor that day.  But Neemak always made

Winn's flesh creep: his face was too smooth for a Cardassian, for one

point, and he had the faintest suggestion of nose ridges, giving Winn

the disturbing impression that he might actually be a cross between

Cardassian and Bajoran.  His eyes were set too far apart, and his mouth

a slight bit too wide; Neemak Counselor had a tendency to look to the

left of the person he was addressing, and when he wet his lips, which

was frequently, his tongue darted in and out like a reptile.



He didn't dress like a Cardassian, either; he wore a simple red smock

with no markings, nothing even to indicate planet of origin.  Winn had

no idea how good an attorney he was, but he was reputed to "know

everyone," which in Cardassian courts probably made him very successful

indeed.  Neemak stared to the left of Sister Winn while she addressed

the gul... she knew he was watching her.



"Now, now," said Gul Ragat, making calming gestures as though she were

a frightened child.  "What is so important, Sister Winn?  Come now,

speak up!"



"My Lord, I--" Well, smart-shoes, what IS so important?  At once,

Winn's mind went totally blank.  She had thought of something, and it

was such a good idea!



"My Lord Gul," said Neemak, his mouth twitching as he stared out the

window of the skimmer, "surely your benevolence toward these servants

knows no bounds.  For I am unaware of any other personage of your

exalted rank who would take one of them into his own skimmer.  Perhaps

we should inquire whether another Bajoran's feet hurt?"



"Yes, ah, yes," mumbled Gul Ragat, tugging at his collar, "I'm sure

there's no need to discuss this with anyone... is there?"  The sudden

revelation that the gul was afraid of his counselor startled Sister

Winn's memory back.  "Winn!"  snapped Ragat, "what is the urgent news

you need to deliver to me?  Quick, now!  Then you must alight and

continue on foot, as is proper."



"My Lord, I have had a most disturbing vision regarding... ah, the

matter we discussed earlier."  She pointedly did not look at Neemak

Counselor; Gul Ragat stifle ned and licked his lips nervously.  So he

didn't even tell his personal secretary!  That clinched the matter;

Neemak was connected.  Despite the hideous possibility that he was a

crossbreed between Cardassian and Bajoran, somebody in the high

command--probably either Legate Migar or Gul Dukat--was using Neemak as

eyes and ears upon Gul Ragat... and Ragat knew it well.



"What about the matter, Winn?"



"I had in for I mean, I had a vision that things might happen sooner

than we thought; as soon as tomorrow morning."



"Morning?  You said morning?"



"Yes, My Lord.  Late morning.  Or so said my-my vision."



"Heh heh her heh," chuckled the gul, quite unconvincingly, "these

superstitious, simple people and their visions!"  He leaned close to

Neemak and stage-whispered, "She seems to think my palace is going to

burn down."



Neemak raised his brows and stared to the left of Gul Ragat.  "Indeed,

My Lord?  Does she not know of the sprinkler system and the fire

suppressors?"  He turned his head to almost look at Winn.  "I pity the

poor Bajoran terrorist who might plot arson against a gul of the

Cardassian Empire.  So treasonous; so pathetically ineffective."



"Actually," muttered Winn, "my vision was of a lightning strike, Lord

Counselor."



Neemak gazed placidly out the window at the bright blue sky; a single,

small cumulus cloud drifted lazily across the dome like a seed pod

blown from a Prophet's Breath flower.  "I recommend," he said, "in my

official capacity as my lord's counselor that we consider long and hard

before replacing Cardassian meteorology with Bajoran visions of the

supernatural, My Lord Gul."



"Yes, quite.  Quite so.  Yes, quite so."  Ragat nodded vigorously.  He

gestured at the door; without waiting to be ordered, Sister Winn opened

it and stepped out, having to jog a bit as the gul's driver sped up

slightly... probably on purpose, thought the priestess in annoyance;

again, she quickly apologized to the Prophets for her uncharitable

thought.  She slowed to a walk and dropped back to her proper place in

the processional, wondering whether the seed she had planted would

germinate.  I'll know soon enough, she thought; the sun was starting to

sink, and ordinarily, the "kindhearted" Gul Ragat would call a halt

early to give his servants on foot more time to rest.  But this day,

they continued on into the bone-chilly night.



Four hours later, deep into a black-dark, moonless night, Gavak-Gavak

Das finally stopped the column.  The grumbling, footsore Bajorans sank

in their tracks, massaging calves and wetting their aching, throbbing

feet.  Beneath the starry canopy of brilliant, pinprick jewels, most

yellow white, but a few red giants or blue dwarfs among them, Sister

Winn rubbed her own sore feet and tried not to feel guilty for putting

her flock to such extra tramping.  Sometimes it is necessary, she

remembered, to sacrifice a finger to save the hand," it was a saying

attributed to the greatest of all the Prophets... but in reality, it

could have been said by any doctor, freedom fighter, or tyrant on any

planet in the galaxy.



The gul had bought her ruse; he was pushing to reach Riis by early to

midmorning, rather than afternoon.  In reality, Sister Winn was taking

a terrible gamble: arriving earlier, the Cardassians had a greater

chance to catch the Resistance cell unaware, if Winn weren't able to

warn them in time.  But the extra four hours put the night's camp much

closer to the sensor-shielded shack of Velda Reeks, and actually gave

Winn a fighting chance of finding the woman and alerting her, so she

could communicate with the cell and call off the strike on the

spaceport.



It felt like a fifty-fifty proposition to Sister Winn, but it was the

best she could do.  All that remained were three impossible feats:

liberating a communicator from the Cardassians, reprogramming one of

the guard's skimmers, and escaping across four kilometers of

foot-sucking mud to find an invisible cabin in a trackless wasteland.



Sister Winn felt a great peace settle upon her; it's all in the hands

of the Prophets now, she thought... but my faith would certainly be

strengthened by a personal cloaking device.



CHAPTER



SISTER WINN'S greatest fear, she was ashamed to admit to anyone but

Those she served, was that she would fall asleep for real and sleep

right through her own escape.  She had to feign sleep--closed eyes,

rhythmic breath, inert body, sneaking not even a scratch of the side of

her nose or wiping the thin trail of drool that trickled down her

chin.



Her roommates were several girls from the village and one, Mali, from

the palace itself; and Winn suspected that at least one of the girls

was a Cardassian informant: her cell leader, whose name she never

heard, told her it was "SOP"--standard operating procedure--for the

Cardassians to constantly monitor all Bajoran leaders... even down to

the village mayor level.  Surely a full, ordained sister priestess, one

of the youngest ever invested, would qualify for such surveillance!



She kept awake by running through all seventy seven prayers of the Book

of Amakira, a test she had passed as a young girl while studying for

holy orders; each prayer comprised sixteen syllables, so it took quite

some time to pass through the entire book, especially while fully

comprehending the meaning of each verse: Sister Winn had great need for

the heart-comforting revelations of Amakira.  When she finished, the

camp was silent, save for the omnipresent tramp of the guards; same

rhythm as last night, thank the Prophets.



Winn had made sure she took the sleeping mat closest to the tent flap.

She rose so excruciatingly slowly and quietly, she was actually

startled when her elbow joint cracked.  Winn rolled to her knees, then

pressed back to the balls of her feet.  Technically, it was forbidden

for a Bajoran to leave his tent during the night; but Gul Ragat, though

terribly young reno more than twenty-one years old!m was aware that

many older folk had only half-a-night bladders, and he never strictly

enforced the rule, so long as the trek was straight to the relief

station and straight back to the tent.  If challenged, or even if

spotted, Winn was prepared to abort her plans and head straight for the

privy.



She gingerly plucked her shoes from beneath the pile of other girls'

footgear and ghosted through the tent flap before putting them on.

Outside, she stepped into the shadow of the tent and surveyed the

scene.



She had picked a good night for an escape.  The moon was new, and they

were far enough along Surface 92 that no city lights illuminated the

clear, star-spattered sky.  The road itself occupied the central strip

of the causeway; there was a parade ground or picnic area (Winn wasn't

SUre why the Cardassians had built it) extending like an apron on

either side of the actual road, widening every so often, and it was on

the eastern side of the apron that GUl Ragat's entourage was encamped.

The parade ground was paved with a plastic-polymer that was somewhat

springy to the foot, and it was colored green... a creepy, Cardassian

imitation of a grassy sward, Winn supposed.  In any event, her soft

shoes made no noise as she slid from one end of the tent to the other,

peeking around the edges at the guards.



Her heart pounded so hard, her chest actually hurt.  She stared

hungrily at the parked skimmer cycles of the guards; probably have a

communications wand on one of the skimmers, she told herself... though

it was really just a guess.  If the Prophets were with her, it was an

educated one.



Timing her movements to the disappearance of all three guards behind

various tents, Winn hunched over and ran as quickly as she could manage

to the cycles.  She was already huffing and blowing by the time she

covered the short distance, wishing she had paid more attention to such

fleshy matters as her weight and physical conditioning.



There's such a thing as being too spiritual, I guess, she decided.



The cycles loomed much larger up close than they had when they hummed

past her on the march; Cardassians tended to be larger than

Bajorans--or taller, anywaymand Sister Winn was somewhat on the short

side even for her sex and species.  She stole in between the first two:

If I'm caught now, she realized, there is no possible way to explain...

nobody ~ going to believe I got lost on the way to the privy!  The

machines hulked black and menacing in the moonless dark, but the metal

was actually shiny enough that if she raised her head and looked at the

top of the stabilizer wings, she saw the constellations dimly

reflected.  She smelled ozone as the fuel cells recharged the batteries

in preparation for another day of travel.



She heard the tramp of boots; a sentry approached along his normal

route.  Winn couldn't move; it would only attract his attention.  She

wasn't fully in shadow, but she stilled her body and held her breath.



The sentry strode into view; he was close enough that she could have

hit him with a stone.  If he turned his head just slightly to the

right, he couldn't help seeing her!



Winn looked down, superstitiously worrying about "catching his eye" by

staring at him herself.  She envisioned herself shrinking inside

herself, like a snake swallowing its own tail until there was nothing

left but a faint puff of displaced air.



The measured crunching of boot steps continued unwavering past the

priestess and into the night.  The sentry had passed her by unnoticed.

She had several minutes before he returned, and Sister Winn had every

intention of taking full advantage.



She had seen the Cardassians using their communication wands, and it

was an article of faith for the priestess that anything a Cardassian

could learn to operate would be child's play for a Bajoran.  But would

they leave them on the cycles or take them inside their own tents?



She found no wand on the first two cycles, though she was somewhat

hampered in her search by not being able to rise up and lean over to

look at the other side of the first skimmer; taking a deep breath and

gritting her teeth, as if she were diving into the ocean, she slipped

around cycle number two and explored its left side and the right side

of cycle three.



At last, the priestess struck a vein of pure ore: she found not one but

two communication wands stuck into the left saddlebag of cycle number

seven.



But then she heard the tramp of the sentry, now coming in the opposite

direction.  Again, she didn't move, didn't breathe, and visualized

herself shrinking to a dust mote, smaller and smaller to the vanishing

point.  Evidently, the sentry was either asleep on his feet or else he

simply had no reason to look at the parked skimmer cycles; once again,

he walked past her, almost close enough for Winn to reach out and untie

his bootlaces (were he wearing any).



When her heart returned to only a moderately fast beat, she slipped one

of the com-wands into her voluminous sleeve pocket.  Then, licking her

dry lips, she commenced the second part of her adventure.



The program controls on the cycles were easy to comprehend... assuming

one understood Cardassian.  Winn had made a point of it when she

studied for her holy orders; all official communications to the

Cardassian High Command for anything or about anything had to be

written in High Cardassianmand the only alternative to learning the

language herself was to hire someone to translate every time she had

some important request to make, which was not only expensive but

dangerous, considering her "night job."  The seventh cycle was locked,

but the eighth still had a key card in the active slot--a common enough

lapse of security for which one of the Cardassian soldiers was going to

pay dearly!



She slid the card out and in again, and the console cover slid open

with a noise that was probably tiny, but which sounded to the

priestess's ears like a dozen pots and pans rattling down a chimney.

She scanned the instructions on the inside of the cover, then

programmed the cycle on a course that would take it due east for a

while, then veer off course in several erratic directions, climbing and

diving, finally (if all went well) burying itself in the mud at peak

velocity hundreds of kilometers from Surface 92... followed, she hoped,

by a parade of frantic Cardassians, desperate to stop the Amazing

Escaping Priestess.



In fact, the A.E.P. would be heading on foot the opposite direction,

equally desperately trying to locate the Amazing Invisible Cabin of

elda Reeks.  Winn had only to set the timer, then cut across the road

without being run over by the occasional truck or troop transport, and

jump off the western edge without killing herself in the fall.

Simplicity itself, she thought, clenching her teeth to keep them from

chattering with fear.



She calculated the distance across the eastern apron, the

road--assuming she didn't become roadkill--and the opposite apron, then

over the side to the mud, and came up with a ludicrous figure that

sounded more like the time required by the Bajoran sprint champion. She

doubled the time, then on second thought tripled it, and programmed it

into the cycle's control panel.  She was about to activate the timer

when she realized she would run smack into the sentries if she didn't

time the run exactly right.



Winn waited, following the sentries' position by the sound of their

boot heels on the springy surface of the parade ground... she wouldn't

have heard them at all except for the metal heel-and-toe

protectorsmCardassian soldiers disdained the idea of stealth, though

the priestess was fairly sure the spies of the Obsidian Order didn't

wear steel-shod boots.  When she judged they had reached about halfway

between the nearest point (where she would have to run directly past

them) and the farthest point (where they turned around and would be

looking right at her as she fled), she punched the button and took

off.



Halfway to the edge of the apron, Winn realized she had severely

underestimated the time it would take for her to run that distance! She

felt her heart pound and she was gasping for air, so she slowed to a

trot, too frightened even to appeal to the Prophets for assistance.

When she passed the last row of tents and could see the backs of the

two sentries receding, she panicked; spurred by terror, she stepped up

the pace to a sprint again... but after only a dozen steps, she

stumbled and fell to her face.



The soft, springy surface prevented her from scraping herself or making

much sound, but she landed on her belly and knocked the wind from her

lungs.  She tried to stagger to her feet, while her bruised diaphragm

fluttered, unable to expand to suck in a lungful of air.  She felt

dizzy, so she remained on hands and knees and crawled toward the center

road section of Surface 92.



Just as she reached it, she heard a roar; looking to her left, she saw

the lights of an onrushing truck, skimming a mere hand's breadth above

the road surface; it was almost as wide as the road itself.  Winn

mentally cursed her luck--if the truck were going south instead of

north, it would have been traveling high enough to clear the northbound

trucks, and the priestess could have run directly beneath it!  Instead,

she was delayed precious seconds while the truck lumbered past at half

the speed of a passenger skimmer.  Ironically, it had doubtless slowed

down because the sensors detected the encampment, and the polite driver

(who was probably Bajoran) didn't want to wake them up with loud engine

noise.



Winn waited, lying on her belly; though the delay surely meant the

skimmer cycle would take off before she was off the opposite side, it

did give her a chance to catch her breath.  With the help of the

Prophets, the sentries might not even notice the cycle launching.

Sister Winn prayed earnestly for just such a stroke of good fortune.



Evidently, the Prophets were unmoved by her prayers.  Just as the truck

cleared her path, Winn heard an awful racket back at the camp: the

cycle was taking off just as she programmed, with one slight addition:

it had automatically activated its flashing lights and warning siren.

With a sinking heart, she realized she must have picked, by sheer bad

luck, the lead cycle of the procession.



Winn stared back in horror as the riderless cycle rose into the air,

screaming bloody, blue murder like a hysterical child and lighting up

the entire camp with its red-and-green strobe lights.  Within seconds,

every Cardassian soldier was stumbling out of his tent more or less

dressed, each with a weapon in hand; the Bajorans rushed out, too,

adding to the chaos.  Everyone stared at the ghostly apparition... and

that meant that no one would mistakenly believe Sister Winn had stolen

the skimmer when she turned up missing.



She hesitated at the edge of the road, not knowing what to do.  Then,

hoping that she wouldn't be missed for quite some time in the

hullabaloo, she resumed course for the opposite side of Surface 92,

this time walking quickly and keeping her heart rate down.



She crossed the road and the western apron and stared over the opposite

side; it was a drop of ten meters, a hard fall but not likely to

permanently damage her, if she landed well.  She felt no fear; she had

totally drained whatever glandular secretion caused it.  She turned

about and lowered herself over the side, dangling by her hands.



It was a posture she couldn't hold for more than a few seconds; she had

only time enough to take one last look back at the cavorting, screaming

mob.  It was an unfortunate whim: just as she looked, one of the

sentries, her old friend, the young, bullying corporal, turned on a

whim of his own toward the priestess.  Their eyes locked for a moment;

before he could react, the strength gave out in Winn's hands, and she

dropped heavily into the mud.  Her only thought as she fell was, Oh

dear, I really have made a mess of the whole thing.



She landed on her back in the mud and again knocked the wind from her

sails.  She remained perfectly still, waiting for the dizziness to stop

and staring at the lip of the road above her, wondering whether she

would be able to move before the demoted corporal peered over the edge

and saw her.  She was so shaken, the possibility of being seen again

didn't rouse her to any greater effort.



What shook her awake at last was the cry of a child--a child!  Instinct

took over, both as a woman and as a representative of the Prophets, and

the priestess struggled up to her feet.  She walked under the road, the

mud sucking at her feet with every step, threatening to pull her under

like tar; the child could be no more than a few years old, judging by

the sound... but Winn could tell nothing more about it.



She looked but saw nothing; there was one large support pillar big

enough to hide a small person, and Winn headed for it.  The child was

crouching behind, the only place it could be.  Mud was caked so heavily

on its face that Winn couldn't even tell whether it was a boy or

girl... not that it would have been easy in any event, since the child

(like Gul Ragat's counselor) was another abomination: half Cardassian,

half Bajoran.



For some reason, however, this mixture aroused only pity in the

priestess's soul, rather than the revulsion she usually experienced.

Because it~ only a child, she thought to herself, but it was more, and

she knew it.  Unlike Neemak Counselor, this child's face showed only

fear and shame, not the cynical cruelty stamped on the face of the

other crossbreeds she had seen... a cruelty incubated by the way such

mongrels were treated--by both sides, thought Winn with a very large

thrust of guilt.



"It's all right, honey, I've got you," she said soothingly.  The child

only cried the harder; slightly cleaner channels ran down its cheeks

where streams of tears had partially washed away the mud.  "You're

going to be all right, child; I promise."  Winn smiled.  "I know !

don't look it, but under all this mud, I'm a sister, a voice of the

Prophets.  I'm not going to hurt you."



"Going to turn me over," said the child... and Sister Winn decided it

was probably a girl.  "To whom, little one?"



The gift looked away.  Above, Winn heard shouts and the engines of

several skimmers; the corporal had obviously reported what he saw to

the captain of the guard, and the Cardassians were coming over the edge

of the road to hunt for her.



"I won't lie to you, child.  The Cardassians are about to come down

here hunting for me, and they're going to use sensors, and they're

going to find you, too.  There's nothing either one of us can do about

that."



"Why're they after you?"  asked the little gift, eyes wide; she

sniffled, but she seemed to have forgotten about crying.  She could be

no more than four years old.



Winn shrugged, deciding on the truth--as much as the gift could handle.

The Prophets obviously brought us together," there must still be a task

for me ahead.  "I ran away, child.  I'm a slave.  I wanted to leave,

and now they're going to bring me back."



The little gift smiled sadly.  "I guess they're going to send me back

to father.  But you're a nice lady."



"Thank you."



The girl looked at Winn; her eyes held the priestess in a gaze so

intelligent, so intense, that Winn suddenly realized the Prophets

themselves were about to speak through the child's lips.  She had heard

of such things but never seen it directly.  All sound seemed to cease;

she could hear nothing but the words from the little gift: "Tell them

you heard me crying and jumped down here to help me, Mother Mud.  Then

you won't get in trouble.  My father is very important."  "Who is your

father?"



"He lives in the sky," she said, pointing upward.  "He's very

important, and they'll be happy you found me."  Her face took on a look

of urgency.  "Tell them!  Promise me you'll tell them you jumped down

to help me!"



Sister Winn bowed her head.  "I promise, child."  A moment later, the

fist skimmer roared up to her, followed by three others.  One was

ridden by Gavak-Gavak Das himself, and Winn braced for a lashing with

the electro whip the overseer always carded.



"I heard the cries of this child," said the priestess.  "I jumped off

the road and followed the cries to this little girl."



"She found me," added the girl.  "I want to go home."  Winn knew that

both of them were liars, but perhaps it was in a good cause.



Gavak-Gavak paused astride his cycle, his mouth open and his hand

already having drawn the painful whip.  Struck by sudden concern, he

replaced the electro whip and drew a scanner instead.  Playing it

across the girl, he gasped and spoke urgently but softly into his

communications wand; Winn couldn't hear a word he said.



Then the overseer grinned, and Winn recognized the expression: pure,

unadulterated greed.  There must be a reward out for the little girl,

thought the priestess sadly.



"Excellent work, Sister Winn!"  said GavakGavak unexpectedly.  "I'll

see that you're commended to the gul for this!"  "You'll tell Gul Ragat

what happened?"  "Ragat?"  The overseer looked startled.  "Oh!  Yes,

that's what I meant... I'll see that you're commended to Gul Ragat for

your diligence in finding--ah, this little girl here.  I'm sure her

master is terribly anxious to get her back, ah, whoever he is."



Nobody ever accused Sister Winn of mental sluggishness.  She noticed

the quick change of subject; Gavak-Gavak had originally meant another

gul, but he preferred she think he was talking about her own.  And she

noticed another strange anomaly: Gavak-Gavak referred to the girl's

master, but the girl said that her father was very important.  We are

not given to understand all the ways of the Prophets, thought the

priestess; we are bound only to obey them.  She said nothing else, only

climbed aboard the back of one of the other skimmers to be carried back

to servitude, back to the road to Riis.



CHAPTER



THE BLUFF from which O'Brien and the away team had looked out across

the Desert of Death (as the chief had cheerfully named it) sloped

backward a dozen kilometers to a grassy sward; the team had to

backtrack several hours before Odo, flying above as a hawk, caught

sight of a herd of the creatures... split-heads, Chief O'Brien dubbed

them.  The constable circled overhead while the rest of the team caught

up; Odo landed, and the away team remained behind an outcropping of

blue black rocks to observe the nine split-heads.



Two different families, guessed the chief; that is, if they followed

the pattern of Earth horses, or the other horselike creatures O'Brien

had read about.  There were two larger split-heads with short, tube

like tails, and each was surrounded by three smaller monsters with no

tails. One of the groups included what looked like a foal: tiny, with

overly long, skinny legs that followed around one of the smaller

split-heads. Captain Sisko began speaking of the larger as male and the

smaller as female, and the nomenclature stuck, though they had no real

idea about the beasties' gender traits.



Their coats ranged from sky blue to teal, and they could bristle their

spiney fur, possibly for cooling or defense or both.  O'Brien hadn't

seen any of them jump, but he suspected they could deliver a vicious

kick if you got behind one; he had once been kicked in a sensitive spot

by an ordinarily placid mare back home, and he still squirmed when he

remembered the experience.  "Sir, are you sure this rope will hold

those things?"  he asked nervously.



"Chief, you know the tensile strength of the poly fiber better than I!

It could hoist a runabout without breaking."  Captain Sisko seemed

quite irritated... possibly because the chief had been hedging and

hesitating for several minutes.  The truth was, even the sight of the

horrible beasties terrified him: Quark was right; the split down the

center of their skulls really did make them look two-headed.  And the

six bowlegs that seemed to be as common on the planet as four (the

Natives were four limbed, of course) still made the chief squirm; it

looked a little too insectoid for his taste.



"All right," said the chief, straining to keep his voice steady and his

teeth from chattering, "let's do it.  Commander?"



Worf stared at the herd.  "I recommend we try for the male with the

dark hindquarters; it is smaller than the other."



"Sure, whichever; go ahead, sir."



They had necessarily opted against using phasers because of the danger

of being spotted by Cardassians in orbit.  O'Brien fidgeted, fingering

the lasso, while the Klingon waited until the target wandered away from

the other split-heads; then Worf activated the anti gray and levitated

the great beast into the air.



Miles O'Brien stood and jogged into the clearing, keeping an eye on the

other creatures.  He was just about to fling the loop of rope, when he

stopped dead: he heard voices, and they seemed to come from the

split-heads surrounding him: "Arrk fly!"



"Fly!  Fly in the air!"



"Look at Arrk!  He flies in the air!"



With horror creeping along his skin like a fungus, Chief O'Brien

realized that the universal translator was automatically translating

what the animals were saying... and that meant they were talking.  Arrk

himself, from his position about three or four meters in the air, began

screaming; the universal translator left most of it inarticulate, but

did translate "help" and "get Arrk down."



O'Brien backed slowly away from the herd, which totally ignored his

presence, so focused were they on their compatriot's sudden levity. The

chief finally stumbled backwards over a rock, falling onto his rear

where the rest of the away team waited.



"Well?"  demanded Worf; "what is the problem?"



Sisko was even more irritated.  "Chief, you had better have a damned

good explanation for this!"



O'Brien turned to the captain.  "They're intelligent!  They were

talking... words, not just growling or barking or some such



Sisko tightened his lips and stroked his beard; everybody else stared

at O'Brien as if he were addle pated  "Of all the idiotic excuses!"

snapped Quark; "don't be afraid of them... just get out there and rope

a few!"  Nevertheless, the chief noted that Quark made no offer to do

the job himself.



"I'm telling you, those things are talking!  They're out there

screaming about how "Arrk' is flying around in the sky.  If you don't

believe me," he added huffily, "just wander closer and you'll hear them

yourself."



Sisko frowned.  "This changes everything, Worf.  Put the creature

down."



With a sigh of complete exasperation, Worf lowered Arrk to the ground.

The bull split-head ran around in circles for a few minutes, followed

by the others; then they all seemed to calm down and return to

grazing... seeming to have forgotten the incident.  If they are

sentient, thought O'Brien, it's only just barely.



"Wait here," said the captain; O'Brien was only too happy to oblige:

the only thing worse than a two-headed, six-legged horse was one that

talked.  Sisko stepped forward, gesturing to Worf to follow.  The pair

crept closer to the herd; when they got within twenty meters, the

split-heads looked up one by one.  Then they returned to their grazing,

paying no attention to the two Federation interlopers.



The captain and Worf returned, the former pensive and the latter

frowning.  "Chief, I owe you an apology," said Captain Sisko.  "I

should have believed you, no matter how crazy it sounded."  Worf merely

grunted, but O'Brien took it as the closest to an apology he was likely

to get from his Klingon colleague.



"What did they say, sirs?"



Worf took up the tale.  "When we approached, they queried each other

whether we were four legged or six-legged.  After some discussion, they

settled that we were four-legged; after that, they ignored us

completely."



"I would guess," chimed in Odo, "that all their natural predators have

six legs, as they themselves do."



"So," mused Quark, "not only can they talk-they can count..."  His eyes

rolled up, and O'Brien imagined he could see stacks of gold pressed lat

inurn whirling around, like the spin of a Dabo wheel.  "I wonder,"

continued the Ferengi, "whether any of these split-heads has any

interest in a small exhibition we might--"



"Quark!"  snarled the constable.  "We have more important

considerations at hand, if you don't mind!"



"Exactly," said the captain, sitting on a rock in plain view of the

herd.  "I'm afraid these creatures pass the thresh hold of sentience...

we cannot simply yoke them to a wagon and force them to carry us across

the desert."



"So now what?"  asked the chief.  "Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't

we only have three or four days of rations left?  If we don't get to a

Cardassian outpost by then, we can kiss both the mission and our own,

lovely selves goodbye."  It was a simple conclusion: as disgusting as

it was, Cardassian food was the only thing on Sierra-Bravo 112-II that

any of them could eat and remain alive.



"Time," said Captain Sisko with a twinkle and a half smile, "to open

negotiations."



"Negotiations?"  demanded both the chief and Commander Worf in

astonishment.



"And to send in our chief negotiator," concluded the captain.

"Ambassador Quark, front and center!"



"Ambassador Quark?"  sputtered Constable Odo, with even greater

astonishment.



Sisko clapped the Ferengi on his shoulder.  "You wanted to come along

on this expedition," he said; "it's time you earned your keep: start

bargaining, and don't come back without an agreement to convey us to

that outpost!"



Quark said nothing.  His mouth opened as he stared at the monstrous

creatures.  Better thee than me, thought Chief O'Brien with a smile.



The Ferengi had never felt tinier and more helpless as he crept toward

the enormous, two headed monsters.  Among Ferengi, Quark was actually

rather on the tall side, and even among the giants on Deep Space Nine,

under whatever name they chose to operate it, past or future, he always

knew he was in control: the man at the helm of his own destiny never

feels small!



But these creatures, Quark was convinced, were too stupid to recognize

their own self-interest... and they could very well trample him to

death before he could even finish making his opening bid.  Quark looked

back at the sheltering rocks; the other members of the away team were

gesturing him forward impatiently.  Sure.t Of course... THEY'RE not the

ones facing death by hoof stomping.t



He felt a faint movement from behind him and whipped his head back so

quickly, his neck bones cracked, and he felt a sharp pain.  The

split-heads, as Chief O'Brien so quaintly called them, were staring

directly at Quark.



Centimeter by centimeter, the Ferengi snuck forward across the blue

gray grass, feeling his legs weakening with every quasi step.  He

raised his hand, only belatedly worrying that the monsters might

consider that an attack.  So far, they hadn't said anything... if

indeed they really did talk; he hadn't quite ruled out the possibility

that the whole thing was an elaborate and pointless practical joke

played upon him by the Federation goons.



"How--how--how do you d-do?"  The horrible looking monsters stared

uncomprehendingly at him.  "I am Quark," he added, "I... come in

peace."  No response.  "Shall we, ah, open negotiations?"



Suddenly feeling utterly stupid, Quark realized he was, in essence,

talking to a herd of barnyard animals.  His face turned bright pink,

and he began to yell.  "Say something, damn it!  I'm feeling like an

idiot here!"



One of the large split-heads, a male, Quark supposed, turned to the

other.  "It is Quark the Idiot!"



"Yes~ yes," bleated the other male; "Quark the Idiot!  What is an

Idiot?"



The females took up the refrain, repeating "Idiot!  Idiot!"  over and

over.  They seemed positively fascinated by the concept... if the

universal translator were doing its job, it might be the first time the

thought had ever occurred to them.



"A small-head," suggested the first male, who seemed to be the leader.

"That's what an Idiot is."



"Yes, yes!  An Idiot is a small-head!  Look, it's head is small.  Look

how small its head is!  And look, look... no horn st



The animals proceeded to make a series of gronklike noises that Quark

rather stuffily took to be untranslated laughter.



"Does it have four legs or does it have six legs?"  asked the junior

male.



"I will count the legs," responded the alpha.  "One leg, two legs,

three legs, four legs.  It's a four leg  A four-legged, small-headed

Idiot called Quark."



"Four legs," sighed the beta male that O'Brien claimed they had called

Arrk; once he realized Quark had only four limbs, Arrk immediately lost

interest.  The steel-blue grass beckoned the rest of the split-heads;

the alpha watched the Ferengi for a few moments, then joined the rest

of the herd in grazing.  One of the presumed females--who had a smaller

head than the other monsters--began to trot round and round the herd,

chanting, "Smallhead!  Idiot!  Small-head!  Idiot!"  The others ignored

her.



"Oh, this is going just perfectly," muttered Quark to himself.  His

annoyance battled against fear and won; he walked a little closer, but

the split heads still ignored him.  "Listen!"  commanded the Ferengi.



One by one, the monsters stopped grazing and raised their heads to look

down their split noses at Quark.  "We want a deal," he enunciated

clearly, wondering whether the word would even translate.  Evidently

not; the creatures all looked to the alpha, who stared at Quark in

puzzlement.



"We want to go... past the sand," said the Ferengi, pointing upslope.



"It wants sand," said the alpha male to Arrk.



"It eats sand," suggested the latter.



The alpha said, "Yes, yes!  It eats sand so its head is small!  It

should eat grass."



"I don't eat sand!"  shouted Quark, stamping his foot.  That, he

realized, was a bad move; the alpha lowered its head and snarled.



"Challenging, challenging, challenging!"  it said.  "Small-head is

challenging Ruut!"



Uh-oh... Staring up at the huge, many-toothed, horned monster that

looked as if it could tear his (tiny) head off in a single bite or

crush his rib cage with a kick, Quark's Ferengi instincts took over: he

dropped immediately into an approved cringe, almost a grovel, as if he

stood naked before the Grand Nagus himself with a highly negative

balance sheet.  Quark did it quicker than conscious thought, but if he

had had time to plan, it was exactly what he would have done anyway.



The posture worked; the alpha--Ruut--instantly relaxed, muttering,

"Small-head loses, Ruut wins."



The female began to trot again, repeating her chant of "Small-head!

Idiot!"



"Small-head wants a favor from Ruut," said Quark, wrinkling his nose at

the name he seemed to have acquired.



"What does small-head want?"  asked Ruut, surprised.  Evidently, a

favor was not unheard of--probably has to do with not killing an

annoying female, thought Quark.  But it seemed uncommon.



"Small-head and, uh, small-head's herd want to get to the grass on the

other side of the sand."



"The grass is better?"  asked Arrk; Ruut didn't seem put out by the

interruption.



"Well... it's bluer," improvised Quark.



"The grass is bluer!"  shouted Ruut.



"Where?  Where?"  bleated the females; Arrk took up the chant,

evidently not quite following the conversation as well as the alpha.



"In the meadow on the other side of the big sand!"  exclaimed Ruut.

"Across the sand, bluer, tastier grass!  Small-head knows!"  "But

small-head is an Idiot," objected Arrk.  Ruut thought a moment, then

extended his face until his mouth was pressed practically against

Quark's nose.  The Ferengi was too terrified to move or even speak; he

smelled a sweet odor with a faint whiff of what he could swear was lat

inurn and the trace braced him.  "How does small-head know the blueness

of the grass?"  asked Ruut.



"A wise question," said Quark, his voice shaking.  "I--uh--I was--told

about it," he finished, lamely.



"Who told small-head about the grass?"  persisted the ever suspicious

Ruut.



A brilliant idea whispered into the Ferengi's lobes.  "I was told," he

said, "by a BIG-head!  A great, big head... head the size of Ruut's

whole body!"



This information was suitably relayed by Ruut to the rest of the herd,

who needed some explanation before they all got it.  The trotting

female changed her chant to "Small-head!  Big-head!  Small-head!

Big-head!"  and Quark wasn't quite sure she understood the fine point

he had made.  But the others seemed satisfied.



"But small-head has a problem," said the Ferengi.  He waited, having

learnt that one couldn't rush the monsters' sluggish brains.



"Small-head wants to go to the grass on the other side of the Big

Sands," said Ruut.



"But small-head is too slow," said Quark, "and Ruut's herd is much

faster.  Small-head's herd wants to sit on Ruut's herd while Ruut's

herd runs across the Big Sands."  The complexity of the suggestion took

many minutes to negotiate, but Quark was starting to catch the rhythm.

Experimentally, Ruut allowed Quark to sit on Arrk's back while the

split-head walked, then trotted, then ran around the meadow.  Quark

clutched the spiny fur on the monster's back, closed his eyes, and

prayed to the Final Accountant not to kill the deal by letting Quark

fall off and be trampled to death.  The creature had a peculiar,

rolling gait not unlike an Earth camel that Quark was once obliged to

ride in a customer's holosuite program, but when it got up to speed,

the wind whistled past the Ferengi's lobes... the split-heads were fast

when they wanted.



Ruut and Arrk had a long conversation afterward, the slow pace of which

frustrated the Ferengi no end; he consoled himself by thinking, The

riskier the road, the greater the profit, and other gems from the Rules

of Acquisition.  At last, Arrk convinced Ruut that he had barely felt

the small head on his back, and there was no reason not to carry the

small-head's herd across the Big Sands.



Shaking with exhaustion and the remnants of fear, Quark concluded the

deal.  As he structured it in his mind, in exchange for the knowledge

that there was much bluer grass across the desert, Ruut and his herd

would carry Quark and his herd across said desert as quickly as

possible.  The only snag, of course, was that the grass might not be

bluer on the other side; Quark shrugged... the thought that a customer

might not be satisfied with his end of the bargain concerned a Ferengi

not at all (in fact, it was Rule of Acquisition Number Nineteen). Quark

would let Captain Sisko deal with possible future customer

complaints.



Ruut figured they would start immediately--did he even have the concept

of time or waiting?--and Quark didn't want to tip the precarious deal;

he assumed the split-heads' attention span was limited, and he was

afraid that any delay would cause Ruut to forget everything.  Quark

frantically waved Sisko, O'Brien, Worf, and Odo to approach.



A new problem erupted: Ruut and Arrk balked at allowing the away team

to ride the females.  Smallhead's herd huddled to solve the last-minute

dilemma.



Odo sighed.  "I suppose I could change into one of these creatures

myself," he suggested.  "That eliminates one of us needing a ride."



"Two of us," corrected Captain Sisko.  "I hate to say it, Constable,

but you'll have to carry one of us on your back."



Odo shrugged.  "I can do that... so long as it isn't him!"  He glared

at Quark.



"Captain!  I object to the continual calumnies and unfriendly

insinuations cast by Odo against me!"  He folded his arms and turned

half away, making sure everyone saw how his feelings were wounded. "And

after all I've done for this team, tOO."



"You've 'done' at least four serious felonies on this expedition so

far," snarled Odo, "and the mission has barely begun!  I'm keeping an

arrest report," concluded the constable, ominously pushing his

malleable face close to Quark's.



"Gentlemen, settle it later," said Sisko.  "Quark, you'll double up

with me on one of the males, while Worf, who weighs as much as the two

of us combined, will ride the other male.  That leaves O'Brien for Odo,

and you two will be our guides: the chief with his tricorder, the

constable by changing into a bird as necessary and finding the fastest

route across the desert.  Any questions?"



Worf looked at Ruut, the alpha, and Quark would have sworn he saw

nervousness in the Klingon's mouth; of course, the Ferengi said

nothing-Klingons were generally not appreciative for haying such facts

pointed out to them.  "I have no questions, Captain," said Worf in a

tougher-than usual voice.  Good, thought Quark, at least I'm not the

only one who's scared to death!  O'Brien made no attempt to hide his

relief at drawing Odo instead of Ruut or Arrk, but the captain was as

enigmatic as usual.



Quark was trembling as he climbed back aboard Arrk, and the addition of

Captain Sisko seated behind him did not sweeten the deal: the Ferengi

suspected it made the whole arrangement even more top-heavy and subject

to collapse than when Quark alone had ridden the monster!



Worf mounted Ruut.  The constable wandered away behind a tree, then

returned as a split-head; neither Ruut nor any of his herd seemed to

care much or wonder at the transformation.  O'Brien climbed aboard Odo,

and the caravan set out.  They traveled not up the bluff, of course,

since that would have required leaping off a hundred-meter cliff, but

around it to the left; Ruut seemed to know the way to the Big Sands.



By the time the double herd reached a downward slope, where the grass

became sparser and interspersed with sand and the occasional boulder,

they were fairly flying; Quark forgot everything except hanging on for

dear life and dearer profit.  He stopped screaming when his voice

became so hoarse, even his sensitive lobes couldn't hear it.



The mob of monsters hit the desert sands and kept going, their

monstrous, splay hooves barely sinking into the dunes.  They ran

tirelessly for hours, then stopped so abruptly, they almost unseated

their riders.  Odo ran on a few paces before realizing Ruut had called

a rest stop.



After a drink at a stream and a short rest, the caravan continued its

break-your-neck pace across the sand dunes... and after many more

hours, Quark discovered that when a Ferengi is exhausted enough, he can

doze off anywhere.



CHAPTER



lO



LIEUTENANT COMMANDER Jadzia Dax was very, very, very tired of walking,

but they still had a few more kilometers to go until they reached the

spot where Bashir had detected a crossing of ion trails from Cardassian

skimmers of various sizes.  A crossing means a depot, Dax told

herself... the wild promise being the only way she could will her

exhausted feet to keep moving.  Julian, of course, seemed as fresh as a

teenaged boy on a prom date.



The road they followed was obviously not built by the Cardassians; it

wound around hills where the Cardassians would simply have burnt right

through them with excavating tools.  In places, the road was little

more than a footpath, zigzagging steeply up a hill and dropping equally

suddenly down the far slope.  The up and down burned through Dax's

energy far more than a simple, level path would have; she couldn't help

a sidelong glance or two at the doctor.  Oddly, the good doctor seemed

much less fatigued than she would have expected from the hike.



They were currently on a section of the road where the trail had

virtually disappeared, visible only as a slightly trampled line of

steel blue among the rest of the knee-high grass; but at least it was

still heading roughly the right direction.  Gnarled trees surrounded

them, black in the gathering dusk; under the bright, noon sun, they had

appeared more ver million  The long shadows reached toward Dax and

Bashir from behind, like clutching fingers; the commander shivered,

wishing she hadn't thought of the image: they still had little idea

what dangerous fauna (or even flora!) existed on Sierra-Bravo 112-I1.



A large set of hills blocked their path, and Dax sighed audibly.  They

rested before beginning the climb.  Bashir insisted, claiming he was

"fatigued," but he didn't look it.  Then she led the way, setting her

sights grimly on the summit and trudging up the twenty-degree slope.



As she neared the top, she slowed; they were close enough that if there

were no intervening hills, they might be able to see the

intersection... the "depot."  At the peak of the trail, she found a

grove of trees; slipping within them, she worked her way forward,

Bashir at her elbow, until she looked out across a plain crossed with

natural orchards and watered by a sluggish, winding river.



Most of the valley was already in shadows from the hill Dax and Bashir

stood upon.  Two strings of bright, artificial lights crossed near the

center, lighting the darkness, and a contingent of four Cardassians

stood guard at the crossroads: they had found their depot.



"Any skimmers?"  asked the doctor, trying to peer past Dax's head.



"I see a couple, one single-seater and a large car, but there's a

couple pairs of goons guarding them."  Damn, she thought, I'd give a

lot for a good, oldfashioned spyglass



On a hunch, Dax pulled up her tricorder and performed a passive scan

for broadcast power sources of the frequency used by the Natives. "Yep,

I suspected as much," she announced.  "They cut the power from the

nearest two transmitters... none of the native technology will work

anywhere within a dozen kilometers or more."



"So they think they're totally secure," said Bashir, seeing the point

at once.



Dax looked back at him.  "Would you say Cardassians are apt to be

overconfident under any circumstances?"



"I'd say," said the doctor with a smile, "that the guards are probably

asleep on their feet from boredom."



"How good a shot are you with your phaser, Julian?"



"Using a sweep, I can pick off a Cardassian or a Drek'la at about two

hundred meters, I would expect."



"Two hundred?  That's a little ambitious.  Let's get a little closer

than that," she decided.  "We'll take them at a hundred.  One clean

sweep apiece, phasers on stun, nobody left standing."



Dax considered for a moment.  "But we have to make sure they don't wake

up any time soon."



That is, unless we leave our fingerprints somewhere--like here.  Jadzia

pondered for a moment; what would the Cardassian commander believe?

"Maybe we can make it look like they got drunk and deserted?  What have

you got in that little black bag of yours that might do the trick?"



Julian thought for a moment.  "I could inject them with a stasis

sedative that will keep them out for about eight hours."



"What will they remember?"



"Nothing; micro amnesia will almost certainly wipe out any memory they

have of events for the last three or four hours before they're

injected."



"That'll be perfect.  If we find any Cardassian ale in the depot

storehouse, we'll pour it all over them; if we're lucky, they won't

bother with a medical scan.  Then we'll stick them in the big skimmer

and program it to head out over the hills, landing about three hundred

klicks away."  Dax grinned at the thought.  "Let's see them try to

explain that to the



CO!"



The pair of double shots from a hundred meters required only

coordination between Jadzia and



Julian; Dax gave a countdown from five with her fingers, then depressed

the trigger.  She was wide by about a half meter--not bad, she

thought--and she swept the phaser beam sideways to brush both her

targets before either could draw a weapon or get off a communication to

the planetary command.  She made sure that she fired at a slight

downward angle, striking the Cardassians about knee high... both to

avoid the battle armor on their torsos and to make sure the phaser beam

grounded into the dirt rather than flashed across the sky like a

beacon.



She didn't look over at Julian's targets until her own were down, so

she didn't know how precise he had been, but all four Cardassians were

stunned into unconsciousness.  Jadzia cautiously led the doctor the

last hundred meters; while she scanned for approaching enemies, Julian

examined the Cardassians, gave medical treatment to one who had injured

himself falling, and then injected all four with the stasis sedative.

"Its purpose," he explained, as he worked the hypospray, "is to

stabilize an injured patient for transport to a medical facility; I'm

sure they'll be all right."  His voice didn't sound as certain as his

words, but frankly, Dax cared little about how safe the Cardassians

might be: she had seen them mow down women, children, and old folks

without a second thought in the battle of Tiffnaki.



Nobody showed up.  Dax and the doctor bundled the Cardassians into the

large skimmer, splashed liquor all over the soldiers and the interior

of the vehicle, and sent it on a wild ride across the fruited plain at

maximum speed, veering wildly and careening up and over hills and

through passes.  As the driverless car took off and accelerated, Jadzia

Dax couldn't help throwing them a salute; the program was set to erase

itself shortly before landing... not a trace would remain of two

Federation agents on Sierra-Bravo.



They stocked up on Cardassian food, unpleasant tasting but edible, and

hopped aboard the remaining skimmer, a cycle that normally seated only

one.  Dax insisted upon driving, with a dubious and nervous Julian

hanging on behind.  "Point me in the right direction and look out," she

yelled, firing up the noisy engines.  "I was born to ride!"



Joson Wabak tried not to let it show, but his frustration was rising

like a core breach; having a conversation by radio waves, of all the

primitive things, with a sea monster was like... It's not like anything

he concluded; they never taught us anything about this sort of

situation at the Academy.  In a dark recess of his mind, Joson was

already composing the strongly worded letter to the Chief of Starfleet

Education and Training, Captain Bruchenheimer, about the need for more

sea monster simulation training for upperclassmen.



"Weymouth, give me a rundown."



"Nothing's changed since last time, sir."



"Just the rundown, Ensign--not an editorial aside?



Tina cringed a little, but Joson was getting tired of her attitude.

"The, ah, sea monster doesn't have a name; it thinks we're an egg from

another like itself; it thinks we're about to hatch--something about

the way we taste, from what little the not-so universal translator can

translate--and it wants to help us.  We've convinced it to hold off,

that cracking us open would prevent our character growth or something,

and we're currently trying to make it understand that we need to get to

the surface--but it doesn't get it."



"That is to be expected," said Ensign N'KdukThag.  "If this creature

were to ascend to the surface it probably could not survive the light

and low pressure.  Perhaps it thinks we are confused and wants to

protect us."



"Well, we'd better do something quick, Joson."  Tina hunched over her

console, staring at a gauge.  "We're down to a containment-field

strength of seventeen percent.  The hull could rupture any

moment--Below twenty percent, there's a measurable chance every minute

of a sudden, catastrophic collapse of the containment field, the hull,

and all the contents... what they kind of quaintly refer to as a

'phase-change singularity' in the manual."



"The ensign is quite correct," confirmed Ensign Nick.  "We must ascend

immediately at least five hundred meters."



"Open the channel again," said Joson, rubbing his tired eyes.  At least

it's an audio-only broadcast, he thought; I'm not sure she could deal

with creatures that look like us actually talking to her in her own

language.



Weymouth hissed to get his attention, then nodded; Joson Wabak began to

speak.



"Defiant, speaking to our friend.  You must release us and allow us to

continue toward the surface.  We will not be harmed!  Our... mother

lives near the surface; it's where we come from."



He waited, but the monster didn't respond; one of the frusta ting

things about the conversation was the long lag time between their

transmission and the response... evidently, the sheer size of the sea

monster's nervous system made for slow, deep, sluggish thoughts.



"Let us ascend," added Joson.  "Our--shell is too fragile to survive at

this depth.  We need a lower pressure, or our shell will crack, um,

prematurely."  Great, I wonder whether she's getting ANY of this?  It

seemed unlikely; Joson wasn't an engineer and didn't exactly know how

the universal translator worked, but he knew all it could do was form

"word pictures" that would be translated by the receiver's own brain

into language... assuming the two brains weren't too dissimilar.  It

was hard to imagine two more dissimilar brains than his own and that of

a two-kilometer-wide sea monster who lived a thousand meters deep in an

inky-black ocean.  The vast majority of concepts that a surface dweller

such as himself took for granted--sunlight, color, the sky, air!--would

be so utterly alien to her, how could she possibly understand a word he

said?



We might just be fooling ourselves.  He caught Ensign Weymouth's eye

and ran his finger across his throat; she closed the transmission

channel... all they could do now was wait for the Old Girl to

respond.



And she was old, too.  N'Kduk-Thag occupied himself scanning the

creature, integrating the holoscan information from the abortive probe

they had launched earlier.  "I believe this creature is at least thirty

thousand years old," he announced out of the blue.



"Why?"  asked Joson.  "What makes you say that?"



"I carbon-dated deposits found on the inside of the entity's

intestines."



"Maybe she ate some old rocks."



"Joson," said Tina with a smile, "thirty thousand years would be

incredibly young for a rock."



"I believe the deposits were produced by organic material ingested by

the creature.  There are deposits of every age up to approximately

thirty thousand years but none older than that age."



Joson shrugged, watching the maw of the sea monster open and close on

the forward viewer.  "Well, no wonder she takes so long to answer."



"Sir... Joson, we haven't got much time."



He settled back, closing his eyes.  "We haven't got much we can do,

either, Tina."



"A full barrage of photon torpedoes will at least get the creature's

attention.  It might be surprised into letting us go."



"Or it might get mad and crush us!  Nick, no torpedoes... not unless I

order it."  Ensign Joson Wabak, acting captain, opened his eyes and sat

up straight again.  "Look, Dax left me in charge, and unless things

change drastically--"



The ship lurched abruptly, knocking the enlisted security crew to the

deck.  The three officers managed to keep their seats, but only barely.

Weymouth grabbed the edge of her console to steady herself until the

stabilizers could catch up with the unexpected movement.  "Jesus,

Joson!  She's dragging us into her mouth.t"



Ensign N'Kduk-Thag emotionlessly played his fingers across his own

station.  "Photon torpedoes armed and ready for your command, sir."



"Belay those torpedoes!"  hollered Wabak, staring at the forward

viewer.  Something was strange, different, something he couldn't

quite... "The tongues!"  he exclaimed.  "Look at the tongues!"



"What?  What?"  Tina sounded confused, panicky.  "What about the

tongues?  They're not doing anything!"



"Exactly... they're not doing anything!"  Nobody responded; Ensigns

Nick and Weymouth stared at him without comprehension.  "Don't you get

it, guys?  It's swallowing us whole... it's not chewing us!"



"This is your last opportunity to fire the torpedoes.  After this point

we shall be too close for safe operation."



"Stand down the torpedoes, Nick.  That's an order."



Unemotional to the end, N'Kduk-Thag turned back to his weapons board

and disarmed the torpedoes.  The maw loomed closer, soon filling the

entire viewer.  Behind Joson, the enlisted man with the mustache

started shouting: "Sir, do something!  It~ swallowing us"



"Shut him up, now!"  snapped Wabak; he heard the chief hushing her

terrified third-class, then he tuned the pair of them out.  "Tina! Hull

integrity?"  "Dropping, down to fifteen percent, but--"



"Hull pressure?"  Please, he begged the Prophets, hoping they could

hear his prayer so far away, so deep beneath the waves, please let my

hunch be right[



"Hull pressure is..."  Ensign Weymouth faded into silence, then cleared

her throat and continued.  "Hull pressure is dropping," she said in a

small voice, "down to sixty atmospheres... fifty-five."



Ensign N'Kduk-Thag slid across to the science console and began a

level-two scan.  "The creature has closed its mouth and is expanding

its alimentary cavity.  The increased volume is resulting in a drop in

the atmospheric pressure on the hull."



Joson breathed a sigh of relief.  "She's not eating us.  She's...

carrying us."  Ensign Wabak was struck by a sudden worry.  "Nick,

what's happening to the antenna?"



"The antenna is trailing behind us but I cannot determine whether it

extends outside the creature's mouth or has been severed.  In any event

it should still be usable though it may not be long enough to reach the

surface of the ocean."  "Can we still talk to her?"



"The radio channel is still open," said Tina, seeming to have recovered

her wits.  "The carrier signal sounds the same; I suppose it still

works."



Weymouth continued to call the numbers; the atmospheric pressure of the

seawater surrounding the Defiant continued to drop, finally leveling

out at approximately fifteen atmospheres.  The crew proceeded with

emergency repairs to the containment field, which they were able to

turn off: the hull itself could withstand that much pressure for a

brief period without significant damage.



"Sir, we appear to be ascending," said N'KdukThag, still seated at the

panel usually occupied by Commander Dax, the science officer, when the

ship had a full crew complement.  "We have risen to a depth of seven

hundred twenty meters we are ascending approximate twenty meters per

minute."



Suddenly, Joson Wabak felt a terrible fatigue.  He collapsed back in

the captain's chair, shivering from the suddenly chilly air on his

sweat-drenched uniform.  Ensign Weymouth interrupted his relief:

"Joson, it's the sea monster.  She's asking if we're feeling

better--and asking where we want her to take us.  At least, I think

that's what she's saying... the translation isn't particularly

clear."



"Nick, can you track the runabout that Commander Dax and Doctor Bashir

took up?"



After a moment, N'Kduk-Thag responded.  "The crushed debris from the

runabout lie at the bottom of the ocean approximately ten kilometers on

a bearing of two-thirteen.  There is no evidence of human or Trill

remains."



Prophets guide them... I hope they made it safely!  "They were heading

toward the land mass.  Tina, open the channel."  Joson waited for her

nod.  "Defiant to sea monster.  Our health is improving.  We are

grateful to you.  We wish to be placed near the shoreline, but if you

cannot ascend that high, let us go at as shallow a depth as you can

tolerate." He gestured, and Weymouth cut the jury-rigged radio

transmitter.



"We should remain somewhat underwater for cover," suggested Ensign

Nick.  Joson nodded, distracted by his own thoughts rathe watery grave

they had almost shared with the Amazon.



There was no further communication from the sea monster.  Twenty

minutes later, she gently disgorged the "egg" at a depth of somewhat

less than four hundred meters.  The pressure increased slowly as she

contracted her "stomach," rising to a high but manageable thirty-eight

atmospheres of pressure.  The patched containment field rode steadily

at seventy-four percent, and the Defiant continued her climb up the

underwater slope until she rested only seventy meters deep at the edge

of the continental shelf, which towered above them to within ten meters

of the surface.  A runabout trip from their present position to the

shore itself would be simple and safe... that is, thought the ensign,

unless the Cardies catch us.



"Extend what's left of the floating antenna, N'Kduk-Thag.  We'll sit

here and wait for the commander to call us.  I don't want to take any

chances with the spoon--with the Cardassians.  In the meantime..."

Joson gestured vaguely.  "Go get some sleep, everyone.  I'll be in the

captain's ready room."



Exhausted, the bridge crew stumbled toward the turbolift, while Joson

Wabak wondered whether he would make it all the way to the bed before

collapsing into a deep and dream-troubled sleep.



CHAPTER



MAJOR Ki~ NERYS walked unsteadily toward the turbolift; the last sight

she saw before the platform disappeared below the deck of the Ops level

was Kai Winn on her "widow's walk" balcony overlooking the prime-team

of combat technicians.  The middle-aged woman, far from looking

haggard, was serene, as if she had taken a full night's sleep instead

of the four hours of Kira's watch as CDO, Command Duty Officer.  Then

the turbolift picked up speed, rushing Kira down to the Promenade, then

along one of the crossover tunnels to her own quarters.



The aliens had shifted to a waiting game.  Their ships still surrounded

the Emissary's Sanctuary, what once had been called Deep Space Nine

(and Terok Nor before that), but the shattered ruins of eight Bajoran

cruisers testified to the inability of Bajor to come to the station's

aid.  Kai Winn had issued orders, with First Minister Shakar's

concurrence, that the heavier ships still in dry dock be completed with

all deliberate speed... but that would take at least two weeks, and

Kira personally doubted the station could withstand a siege of that

length.  Sooner or later, the aliens-whoever they were--would find a

weak point and burst inside.



Maybe they'll run when they see the new Freedom-class starships, the

major consoled herself, walking around the habitat ring to her door.

Maybe they'll just get tired and go away.  She smiled.  Maybe the

Prophets will put in an appearance and smite them with lightning from

the wormhole.  The possibilities seemed equally unlikely.



Shaking from fatigue and too much watchfulness, Kira lay faceup on her

rack, dimming the lights but not killing them entirely.  Then she

remembered the message she had gotten out... despite the Kai's orders,

again seconded by Shakar (to Kira's dismay), not to ask the Federation

for help, Kira had fired off a heavily encrypted subspace message to a

Bajoran friend of hers in Starfleet, a former Resistance fighter in

another cell she trusted utterly.  Two days had passed, long enough for

the fleet to receive the forwarded subspace message and reply.



She rose painfully and limped to her computer console.  Working

entirely by touch, saying nothing aloud--she wasn't sure why, but it

seemed appropriatewKira found the incoming message and displayed it

with the sound muted.



She saw her friend, Bel Anar, and he looked terrible.  Probably as bad

as I looked, she thought grimly.  He had clearly been in combat for

several hours.  His lips moved, and Kira read the subtitles supplied by

the computer in the absence of audio.



Got your message, Nerys.  The Kai, may the Prophets bless her, has

officially told the Council that she doesn't want any help.  Hang on...

don't let them kill you!  Fleet Intel says they're not Cardassians and

nobody's ever seen that ship design--probably not Dominion, but who

knows.  Starfleet will be keeping an eye on the situation.  Prophets

bless you, my sister-in-arms.  Good luck.



With downcast eyes, Anar terminated the message.



Shaking her head in frustration, Kira deleted the message using a

security override that she was pretty sure the Kai couldn't break.

Since her attempt at circumventing Kai Winn's isolationism had failed,

she sure as hell didn't want the Kai to find out she had tried.



Kira had just padded back to the bed and laid herself down to sleep

when the door chirped.  "Computer, who is it?"  she asked.



"Jake Sisko," said the melodious voice.



"Come," she said, rising up to a seated position.  She heard the door

hiss open and footsteps enter; there was a bang, followed by soft

cursing.  "Lights three-quarters normal," said Kira belatedly.



Blinking in the sudden illumination, Kira walked into the living room

of her two-room suite.  Jake was rubbing his shin and staring

disgustedly at the Bajoran "primitive period" tea table.  "Where did

you get that stupid thing?"  he demanded.



"It was a gift from Shakar," said Kira, actually enjoying seeing the

young man squirm in embarrassment.



"Uh... sorry.  It's, urn, really nice."



"I'm trying to sleep, Jake."



"Oh!  I can come back in a couple of hours if you'rew"



"Just tell me what you want?"



Jake stood as tall as his father, but probably carried only two thirds

the muscle mass; Kira couldn't help seeing him as she had the first day

they arrived at the station, newly liberated from the Cardassians: the

superimposition of a young boy over a young man's figure was eerie. I'm

just tired, she decided.



"I..."  Jake paused, collecting his thoughts.  "I want to join the

defense militia."



Kira raised her eyebrows; for more than a year, Jake had been acting

strangely~ sometimes taking wild, unnecessary chances, then seemingly

afraid of his own shadow.  "So?  Why come to me?  Kai Winn organized

the militia herself?"



"That's just the point!"  exclaimed Jake.  "She's only allowing

Bajorans to fight!"



Ah, the sting of offering to help and being ignored.  Get used to it,

kid; welcome to the universe.  "Jake, it's her station and her militia.

Why do you want to join anyway?  You're not a soldier."



"They won't let Garak join, either!"



"Hah!  Well, what a shock.  Kai Winn doesn't want a Cardassian in the

Bajoran militia?  Outrageous!"



"Well, you don't have to get sarcastic about it."  Jake sat sullenly on

Kira's couch.



She felt bad; Jake, at least, seemed sincere in his desire to protect

the station.  (She was never so sure about Garak, tailor to the

Obsidian Order.) "Look, I'm tired; I shouldn't have made fun.  Jake,

there are two problems here: first, like it or not, this is a Bajoran

station now.  The captain's not in charge anymore... and I don't have a

lot of influence over the Kai, no matter that she seems to like me for

some strange reason."



"I just thought maybe you could re



"And second, you are the Emissary's son!  Even if Kai Winn were

accepting nonBajorans, she'd probably invite Garak before she would

invite you... you still don't realize what your father means to us! 

The Kai would never take the slightest chance of angering him by

putting you in harm's way."



"But--but how can I look Dad in the eye if I don't do my part?"  His

voice sounded hollow, defeated, as if he saw a chance to prove, well,

something slipping away like a spring deer into the woods.  "How can I

look at myself in the mirror?"



"You can't look either of you in the eye if you're dead, Jake."



Jake's face fell; it was finally sinking in that whatever he needed to

prove to himself, he wasn't going to be given the chance.  Not this

time.  Jake rose and left with a mumbled goodbye.



Kira felt terrible; she had been younger than Jake when she began

fighting for the Resistance.  She knew exactly what he felt... the

burning need to do something, to stand up for what was right.  But

Bajor was desperate and needed anyone who could hold a gun or plant a

bomb; at this point, thank the Prophets, Emissary's Sanctuary was still

holding its own against the unknown raiders; traditional rules that

were broken during the Occupation would be more rigidly enforced.



Kira drifted back to her rack, wondering who would be next to disturb

her five hours of alleged rest.



It was, surprisingly, Garak the alleged tailor.  This time, Kira had

not so much as closed her eyes before the door chirped, sounding

somehow polite and imperious at once.  "Why not?"  asked the major

aloud; the computer did not recognize that as an answer and chirped

again; this time, Major Kira said the customary.



"Garak," she said through clenched teeth, "what do you want now?" 

"Now? My dear Major Kira, I have asked for nothing, nothing, during

this entire dreadful siege!"  The Cardassian tried to look blameless

but succeeded only in a smug, condescending expression.



"But you have something now.  Right?"  Kira was beyond weariness,

painfully aware that Garak was allowed to remain on the Bajoran station

only because there literally was nowhere else for him to go, but the

Cardassian, not surprisingly, had been the target of countless curses,

epithets, and even a few violent assaults since the turnover.  He had

some claim to victimhood... a LITTLE claim, she amended, thinking of

who he had once been.



"I understand," said Garak with a smile, "that the tiny, inadequate

Bajoran fleet floats in ruins near the station and that the Federation

will not send aid so long as Kai Winn refuses to ask for it."



Kira could not help staring.  "How the hell did you know that?"



Garak fluttered his hands, a dismissive gesture.  "Oh, I like to keep

in touch.  The point is, the raiders haven't left... which means they,

too, know that they are in no immediate danger."



Kira said nothing, merely stared coldly, waiting for the former member

of the Cardassian Obsidian Order to get to the point.



"And the fact that they've stopped their ineffectual shooting," he

said, "implies that they're working on something more significant, a

siege engine, to use an ancient term.  Do you understand what I'm

saying?"  "You haven't said anything worth hearing yet."  Garak shook

his head.  "So impatient.  No wonder you were so easy to conquer."  The

major resisted the temptation to push her fist through Garak's smug

teeth.  "Major Kira, there comes a time when the best defense is to

fold up one's tent and steal away."



Kira was tired, but not too tired to catch the drift.  "You're

suggesting that we surrender the station to these scum?"



"To these very enterprising scum who hold for the moment a decisive

military advantage."



"They're just sitting out there!  They're not doing anything."



"They are sitting out there... but I would be willing to bet my

auto-hemmer that they are doing something.  Major Kira, if we wait

until their next attack, we may not be given the option of surrender.

They have not made any attempt to communicate with you or respond to

your own communications, is that not so?"



"You seem unusually well informed about our secrets.  You tell me."



"I don't think it's because they can't hear you; it's far more likely

they don't care to listen.  But if you offer them something worthwhile

to listen to..."



"Terms of surrender?"



Garak shrugged.  "If you will.  Perhaps that will catch their

attention.  You could evacuate the station, and all our lives would be

spared."



"You mean your life would be spared.  I doubt you care much about the

rest of us .... "



"Kira!  You malign me.  Think instead of the Bajorans on the station.

Have you thought, perhaps, that only your own stubbornness and pride

are preventing you from saving all those Bajoran lives?"



"And handing over the station to raiders from the Gamma Quadrant, for

them to launch attacks on Bajor itselfl No thank you, Garak.  Good

night."



The tailor spread his hands, shaking his head.  "Major, Major, who but

you and the Kai would be in a better position to sabotage every system

on Deep Space Nine?  Oh, I beg your pardon... Emissary's Sanctuary," or

is it back to being Terok Nor?  I never can keep those names

straight."



"Sabotage the station?"



"Bajor would lose the high ground, but at least these raiders would

have nothing to show for their audacity.  We should never think of

rewarding criminal actions."



Kira stood.  "Good night, Garak.  This station will never be

surrendered."



"You will at least discuss my suggestion with your superior?"



"Good-bye!"  Major Kira thumbed the door open and firmly pointed at the

corridor beyond.  Garak sighed deeply, as a man much misjudged and

chivvied by the entire universe; then he skulked through the doorway

and strode away, probably to plant more seeds of doubt in the minds of

frightened, vulnerable Bajoran civilians.  Well, he won't find us so

easy to manipulate, she thought decisivelymwondering whether it were

true or merely a salving boast.



At last, she was left alone, but she could not fall asleep.  One thing

only that Garak had said stuck with her: no one currently on board knew

as much about the station systems and subsystems as Kira Nerys... and

if the worst came to pass, and the station lost the siege and was

conquered (she did not think for a moment it would ever be

surrendered), could she allow these faceless raiders to get hold of

such a powerful weapon?  On the other hand, surely Kai Winn would never

allow Kira to sabotage the station in advance!  That would be seen as

defeatist, and possibly undermining their defense.



Kira made a decision: she would set in motion a series of computer

programsmviruses, actually-that could be activated in a few minutes and

would shut down everything that could be shut down... permanently.  And

she would not tell the Kai; it would be Kira's own little secret.



But what if Kira herself died in the defense, as was likely?  Better

yet, she amended, the viruses will require a code word from me NOT to

activate automatically.  It was popularly called a de adman switch";

unless Kira spoke her code word at regular intervals, the sabotage

would proceed all by itself, and the raiders would never know what hit

them.  It was a dangerous move: if Kira died or became incapacitated

before the station surrendered, the auto sabotage would end any prayer

the Emissary's Sanctuary had of surviving.  But the

alternative--quantum torpedoes raining down upon Bajoran cities--was

too horrible to contemplate.



Nervous, unable to stop her mind from racing, Kira rolled and thrashed

on her bed, readjusting the temperature and calling for soothing music

and ocean noises in a fruitless attempt to get some sleep.  At some

point, she drifted off into a nightmare-filled doze, but it was not

restful.  When the alarm sounded, alerting her to her next shift, she

felt as if she had spent the night wrestling with a particularly

slippery vole in the pay of the Obsidian Order.  She wasn't sure which

of them had won the match.



"Good afternoon, child," said Kai Winn as her young protegee rose on

the turbolift; Nerys looked haggard and bitter; is that how she looked

during the Occupation?  wondered the Kai.  It's almost funny... one of

my DUTIES was to look as fresh as the morning dew.  My flock wanted to

look at their Sister and see hope, not despair.  The hardbitten

Resistance fighters may never have realized how much easier a job they

had than the secret spies, the deep-cover operatives, who had no

infrastructure, no weapons but their wits, no bolt-hole for flight if

everything went wrong.  And WE had to do it with a smile.



Kai Winn smiled now, just as she had so many years ago, lending hope in

an even more hopeless situation.  It wouldn't be fair to deprive Major

Kira of the security she so desperately needed, the reassurance that

everything was going to be all right.  She needs serenity; I must be

serene, no matter what I feel.  I must be the wings of peace enfolding

her--and the rest of my flock on this station.



"What's so good about it?"  snapped Nerys, glowering all the harder at

the Kai's smile; but Winn knew that deep inside, Nerys was grateful as

a child reassured by her mother.



"We are alive, child, and we still walk with the Prophets.  What could

be better?"  "We may be about to die!"



"Everyone dies, Nerys.  Be thankful you've lived as long as you have

and played such a role in the great events of history."



Major Kira said nothing, her mouth contorting in an effort to remain

grumpy.  She took a cup of ratageena from the replicator and hovered

over the shoulders of the Kai's combat team, checking the situation

(and obviously snubbing Winn upon her balcony).  "I will retire now,"

said the Kai.  Nerys looked up then, her face vulnerable, frightened

for a moment; then she hardened into Major Kira again, nodding

curtly.



Kai Winn stepped inside her quarters, what once had been the Emissary's

office--it still smelled of His Holiness; she stepped more lightly and

gracefully than her heavy heart truly felt... perhaps a lie, but a

necessary lie.  She knew and dreaded what awaited her: for reasons

known only to Themselves, the Prophets had chosen this moment for Kai

Winn to relive her days under the Occupation in her dreams, and she

could not deny those dreams.  She must face them and try to learn from

them what lessons the Prophets taught.



She thought of delaying her sleep, returning to Ops and telling Nerys

in detail everything that hadn't happened while the poor girl had been

trying to sleep, but it would just be an evasion of the inevitable. The

major would read the log; she would note that the unknown raiders had

crept slowly closer, perhaps believing their movement was not detected.

Nerys was a good leader, even at such a tender age, on all such

routine matters... though she knew nothing as yet of the subtle

interplay between personality and policy that she would learn, over

time, from the mentor she didn't even know she had.  It will be a

blessing on her to teach her the art of politics, thought Winn with a

smile.  How else will she howl her own with her chosen, First Minister

$hakar?



Sighing, her heart already starting to pound and her forehead already

damp, Winn lay on her rack and tried to wet her lips.  She was afraid

her old body might not cooperate, keeping her awake despite her

resolve, but the Prophets knew what They wanted.  She blinked twice,

and found herself standing again on Surface 92, the long, straight,

Cardassian road leading from one world to the next.



The dream started again ....



CHAPTER



THIRTY YEARS AGO



Rlis!  thought Sister Winn, as the column crested the last rise of

Surface 92 before descending into the river valley that held the

town.



Riis, the mighty "hand" on the rolling Shakiristi River, where four

other tributaries joined and swelled the Shakiristi to a

three-kilometers-wide forearm thrusting between the Granite Prayers and

Lakastor mountain ranges to the Cold Sea.  Riis extended its fingers up

each of the four tributaries and the thick Shakiristi itself, and

downstream an additional kilometer, the wrist of Riis.



The Riis docks handled more cargo than any other city west of the

Granite Prayers, its spaceport often called the Palm of Bajor.  But for

all that activity, it was still a quiet, quaint old city com pared to

other industrial giants.  There were suburbs but no urban centers, not

as Sister Winn understood the term; jobs were plentiful, and the crime

rate was noticeably lower than in the wild mining cities near where

Winn had grown up.  By a trick of the weather, a gentle breeze blew

often across Riis, not only cooling the city but blowing away (into

nearby North Riisil) the inevitable byproducts of an industrial

civilization: smog and soot.  (Once every few months, there was instead

a stiff back-breeze from the north, sending the pollutants back where

they came from redoubled; natives of Riis called such a wind "Riisil's

Revenge.")



Riis, Winn remembered, was said to have been founded three thousand

years earlier, when a holy man named Kilikarri went fishing in the

Shakiristi, cast his net, and miraculously caught not only a hundred

fish but the third Scroll of Prophecy, written in jet-black letters on

a golden parchment.  The scroll was supposed to be on display in the

vault of the Temple of the Emissary Kilikarri, but a newly minted

sister was not likely to be admitted by the temple preceptors or the

father vedek.



As Gul Ragat's household descended into Riis, the sun was newly risen,

bathing the slumbering city in a golden red glow through the cloud

cover.  A permanent rainbow arced across the Palm of Bajor as a gentle

mist rose from the rapids; the mist fell as a drizzle, and when the

corner of water reached the column, Sister Winn said a grateful prayer

to the Prophets for their cooling touch--which she chose to interpret

as a sign that she wasn't straying from her duty, that all would work

out well, that she wouldn't end up accidentally betraying the

Resistance and getting a whole cell captured.



Surface 92 led directly into the outskirts of Riis, but there it ended

abruptly where the jurisdiction of the Cardassian civil engineers had

run into the military jurisdiction of the governor of the prefecture.

The caravan had made excellent time; it was barely two hours past

sunrisemand still many hours before the actual planned time of the

strike at the spaceport, which would come at sundown, just before the

changing of the Cardassian sentries.  The Prophets, thought Sister

Winn, I hope will forgive me my lie to Gul Ragat.



The Shakiristi River was so important to Riis (and Riis to the river)

that the city extended itself right into the water; many "streets" in

Riis were waterways, plied by motorboats and even a few that were

rowed.  "Sidewalks" floated upon the water, making a journey by foot

perilous through parts of the city, especially for priestesses who had

never spent time on boats or at sea.



The Cardassians on their skimmers (one pair riding double) were

unaffected by the rocking, heaving sidewalks, of course, and even Gul

Ragat seemed oblivious to the difficulty his Bajoran servants had; the

household had to trot briskly to keep up with the impatient gul, and a

maid and a skimmer mechanic slipped on the supposedly nonskid surface

of a floating sidewalk and took an unexpected swim together.  Hersaaka

Toos, the Bajoran overseer, fished them out; Winn made sure neither was

hurt before hurrying after her "master."



The Heavenward Prayer Spaceport--now charmingly renamed Collection

Point Onemstood not in the center of Riis but on the outskirts, dating

from a time when space travel was unfamiliar and frightening to many

Bajorans and the farmers demanded that rocket-based ships not fly over

their land.  Gul Ragat decided his mob would lurk in the town until

close to the moment of the expected raid, so they wouldn't scare the

"rebels" away.



He stopped his limousine skimmer and stepped out to speak to Sister

Winn.  "You said the attack would come this morning... late morning.

Before noon, surely?"  The eagerness shone from his eyes; Gul Ragat was

dazzled by visions of his own glory, his ascension to the full

governorship--the youngest governor on Bajor!--and perhaps an early

promotion to legate.  Young though Winn felt, she knew she was older

than the gul, and not just chronologically.



"I said it may come as early as this morning, My Lord.  They could

easily hold off until the afternoon if there were problems, or even

until nightfall, to take best advantage of the darkness."  In fact, the

raid was meticulously planned.  "But please, My Lord... are you sure

I'm doing the right thing?  I feel so very like a--a betrayer!"



She stared anxiously at Gul Ragat and allowed him to reassure her that

ratting out her own people was in fact the very best thing she could

do.  Can't appear too eager, she warned herself.  The gul didn't look

at her as he spoke; he stared around him at the people walking across

the huge, floating merchants' square, probably wondering which of them

was an agent of the Resistance.  Sister Winn wondered the same; she was

not from Riis, had been to Riis only twice, and knew none of the cell

members or protocols--of course!  The whole point of a cell structure

was to minimize the damage if one should turn or be captured and

tortured: what you didn't know, you couldn't spill, no matter what the

reason.



Gul Ragat was a child in a sweetshop, staring at everything with big

round eyes.  He had never before involved himself in the

counter-Resistance, never felt the quickening of his pulse, the

dizziness of anxiety, wondering whether he would give himself away and

frighten the rebels away... or even be assassinated.  Winn watched him

openly, since he was not looking at her; he shrank suddenly into the

shadows, drawing his coat closer about his shoulders, though the day

was heating up with the rising sun.  Gul Ragat had abruptly realized

how vulnerable he was... a young gul with only sixteen guards in a city

admittedly crawling with Resistance fighters!



Winn felt a malignant presence behind her; turning, she saw Neemak

Counselor.  He pushed past her without a glance and approached the gul,

speaking in low tones that she could not hear.  She didn't need to; she

knew what he was saying: he grew suspicious at the gul's behavior; the

counselor desperately wanted to figure out what Ragat planned so Neemak

could report it to his true superior.  But the gul knew the game, at

least in theory, and would keep his own counsel, even from his

counselor.  In Gul Ragat's fantasy, when the smoke cleared, who was to

say that he hadn't simply been in the right place at the right time and

shown proper, Cardassian initiative to thwart a damaging rebel

attack?



Winn, however, had her own designs.  She eyeballed the square, watching

citizens step aboard, conduct their business, and step off.  She, the

gul, and Neemak hovered in the shadow of a teahouse that also served

food, and the smell was almost holy after two days of traveler's

rations.  But Ragat was much too excited to think of eating, and it was

not Winn's place to suggest it.  In any event, she was intent upon

finding someone she recognized and getting a message out somehow; the

smell and the sizzle of breakfast was just a distraction.



The Prophets finally heard the priestess's prayer.  A young man--still

a boy, actually--stepped across the gap between the floating sidewalk

and the merchants' square; she recognized him as Barada Vai, whose

older sister, Barada Mirina, was a prospect for Winn's own Resistance

cell some months back.  "Prospect" was probably too lofty a term; the

priestess's ears reddened at the thought that the gift was more than

likely an "anybody's," passed around from man to man in the cell.  In

any event, Sister Winn had met the Barada family, and ai might well

remember her; a visit from a sister or brother was an important social

event in a traditional Bajoran family.



But how can I talk to him without Ragat panicking?  She stared hungrily

at the boy, aware that she had only a few moments before he finished

purchasing whatever he came to buy and hopped across to the sidewalk

again.  Thinkfast./she commanded.  There is your brother, within an

easy shout or a couple of long steps... do something



It was as if the Prophets Themselves suddenly whispered into Winn's

ear, so swiftly did the plan form.  She gasped with the wonder of it,

and the gul heard her, but that was fine, it fit well with the

scheme.



"My Lord," she whispered, "this is... this is dreadful!"



"What is?  What's happened?"  The gul was already jumpy; now he grew

quite agitated, worried that his opportunity might slip through his

fingers.



"That boy there... he's my brother!"



"Your brother?  Your real brother?"



"My half brother on my father's side," said the priestess in agony,

"and--and he must be working at the spaceport!"



"The spaceport?  Wait, didn't you know?"



She turned to the gul, trying as hard as she could to blanch.  "No, no!

How could I have known?  I haven't seen him for three years!  But he

wrote to my father and told him he had gotten a job at a spaceport, for

he's always wanted to be a pilot... but I didn't know where.  But if

he's here, at Riis, then he's--My Lord, he'll be directly in the line

of fire!  He may be killed!  Oh master, I beg of you, spare this boy's

life--he's no Resistance fight eft



"Hush!"  ordered Ragat, aghast at her indiscretion.  "Keep your voice

down, I order you!"  He looked fearfully where Neemak had been but a

moment before, but the shifty counselor had slithered away, as he often

did without asking leave.  This time, as with many others, the gul

looked relieved rather than affronted.



"Please, My Lord, let me warn the boy... let him be away from that

place when your lordship springs his surprise."



"Sister Winn, you can't warn him of my trap!  What can you be thinking?

He'll run straight to the rebels, whether he's in the Resistance or

not."



"He won't!"



Gul Ragat rolled his eyes.  "Any Bajoran boy would."  He considered a

long moment; he liked to think of himself as a compassionate man, and

Sister Winn was one of his favorites.  "This far will I let you: you

may tell some plausible lie to keep him away from his job for today,

but we will work it out now, and you will not deviate from the script."

He lowered his brows and tried to look menacing, a task quite easy for

a Cardassian; his scowl shook Winn and scared her.  "I would not like

to have to arrest you on a charge of aiding the rebellion against

rightful authority."



She inclined her head submissively.  "My Lord," she agreed.  "Shall

I... tell him you need him to take ho los of some event you're

sponsoring?  A banquet, perhaps?"



"Yes, that might--wait, a party; my birthday party."



"Is it your birthday, My Lord?"



"No, there's no birthday, but there's no party, either!  A perfect

match.  Yes, that will do.  Let's go to him and get it over with; I

don't like standing in the middle of the square attracting

attention."



Winn had hoped to get a chance to talk to the boy alone, but that was a

silly thought.  For all that Gul Ragat thought of himself as a kind,

gentle master, he was still a Cardassian untroubled by the thought of

owning slaves.  With so much at stake, he would not allow one slave to

conspire with another outside his hearing!



The pair approached Barada ai, and Sister Winn attempted to feel as

serene as she looked; like all priests, she had learned to wear the

mask: it was necessary when comforting the dying, for example.  But

sometimes, the mask crept inward, and this was one of those times. With

every step, Winn's certainty increased that the lad would not blow the

game.



"Barada Vai," said Ragat, "you recognize this woman, do you not?"



Vai looked at Winn's habit, recognizing its clerical significance but

no more.  "A sister," he said uncertainly.



Winn smiled broadly.  "Has it been so long, my brother?  You were so

much younger when I left home, but I'm your sister, Winn.  Didn't

mother tell you I was to take holy orders?"



Barada Vai froze for a moment; then the natural guile of youth took

over, and he fell very naturally into the game, swiftly aware that they

were playing a joke on a hated Cardassian.  "Sis!"  he cried, his

entire face suddenly breaking into a grin.  "I didn't recognize

you..."



"Vai-lak, you may trust this fine lord completely.  He is truly a

prince among Cardassians, a natural master, and he treats well those of

us marked by nature to be subservient.  He has an important task for

you." Winn worried she might be laying it on a bit thick, but Ragat was

too busy preening to realize what any other Bajoran would understand,

that Winn was really saying: "Don't believe a word the son of a

bachelor says!"



She was about to explain about the ho los but Gul Ragat seized control

of the conversation.  "Lad, I have an important task for you.  Your

sister says you are handy with a holocam; I need ho los taken of my

birthday celebration today.  You will return home and get your holocam,

then run to..."  The gul trailed off, evidently not familiar enough

with the floating city of Riis to suggest a location.



"To the Hall of the Legion of Prophets," supplied Sister Winn smoothly;

every large Bajoran city had one.



"I'm sorry," added Ragat, "but you can't go to the spaceport today."



"The--spaceport?"  asked Barada ai, suddenly puzzled.



Winn interjected smoothly, confident the Prophets would whisper into

the boy's ear.  "Your job there is important, I know, but you cannot be

there today.  There is something much more important to do: the ho los

are important; the ho los are very, very important.  Much more

important than whatever trivial task you perform at your job at the

spaceport." She snuck a glance at Ragat to see if he had noticed the

special emphasis she placed on the ho los he seemed thoughtful, and she

felt a tendril of fear.  But she pressed on; a priestess could not

allow fear to override duty.



Ragat took control of the conversation again; his tone indicated some

distress, perhaps the intimation that something had been passed... but

he could not place his bony, Cardassian finger on it.  "Be at the, ah,

Hall of the Legion of Prophets within the hour, and wait there until I

or my men arrive.  Do you understand the order?"



"Yes, My Lord," said Barada ai, all earnest eyes and nodding chin.

Dismissed, he sped away, carrying Sister Winn's hopes with him.



She had confidence that he would figure out at least the overt part of

the warning: Don't go to the spaceport was clear enough.  If the boy

had maintained his connections to the Resistance, he would promptly

report the unusual command, even if he had no knowledge of the raid.

But will he comprehend the second, deeper message?  wondered the

priestess.  The words that had fretted at Gul Ragat, "the ho los are

very, very important," were the heart of Winn's own mission... which

indeed was more important than a trivial raid on a spaceport.  Sister

Winn's ho los still lodged semi securely in her trick boot heel,

contained the key to Cardassian military codes, plans, and bases that

would lend solid effectiveness to the Resistance for years to come, if

used cautiously.  And everything now rested in the capricious

understanding of a child barely past puberty whose connection with the

movement was less than savory.



Gul Ragat stepped away from the publicity of the floating market square

toward the landed portion of Riis, there to resume his vigil for

intelligence of the raid.  He did not even glance back to see that Winn

followed... which she did meekly, never having given cause for

Cardassian offense.  He seemed to have left off pondering the weight of

her words about the ho los her cover, she decided, was still intact.



For how much longer?  wondered the priestess, having the first, faint

intimations that she might be on her last mission, even if successful.

If the Obsidian Order ever realized how they had been compromised, an

investigation would commence the likes of which had rarely been seen on

Bajor.  The legate would probably be withdrawn; and chance encounters,

recalled, such as Winn's brush with the guard in the code room.  The

priestess would have little in her future but a tortuous trial and

torturous detention on Terok Nor, in the loving ministration of Gul

Dukat, assuming she were allowed to live that long.



She swallowed, stumbling on the heaving sidewalk behind her "master."

The consolation would be the utter ruin of the young Gul Ragat before

her and of his smug acceptance of his own superiority... and this time,

Sister Winn did not even apologize to the Prophets for her un charity

She still reveled in the image.



PRESENT DAY



Eyes downcast, trying his best to look humbled and shaken, Benjamin

Sisko shuffled forward behind the abrasive and abusing Cardassian

lieutenant, who had Sisko and the others in tow on a long rope.  Not

the usual arrangement, to be sure; there were no handcuffs or

strength-sapping cerebro clamps on their heads.  But still, the

Cardassian sergeants at the gate of the landing zone braced to

attention as the unrecognized but thoroughly Cardassian officer passed

them by, returning their salutes with nothing but an imperious snort.



The sergeants did not look too closely at the motley prisoners-Thank

fortune!  thought Sisko; if they had, they would have wondered what two

humans, a Klingon, and a Ferengi of all people were doing on

Sierra-Bravo.  But the bored sentries saw only a Cardassian lieutenant

dragging behind him four prizes of war, clothed and hooded like many

other Natives.  Why should they be alarmed and alert?  thought the

captain, the Defiant must already have left orbit--there is no reason

to suspect there is anyone here but the Natives... if indeed, they

truly are native.



Ahead of Sisko, Quark began to grumble.  "Did you have to tie our hands

so tight, you sadistic thug?"  he snarled.



Cardassian Odo turned his head back.  "What makes you think I tied

anyone else's hands as tightly as I did yours, Quark?"  Sisko couldn't

see through Quark's hood, but he was sure the Ferengi was flushing pink

with anger.



They were lucky with the clothing.  The hoods had come with the

scouting backpacks, attached to parkas in case of rain.  Chief

O'Brien--now directly behind the captain and grumbling quite

convincingly--cut the hoods off at the shoulders.  Added to the

replicated homespun they had worn since first beaming down to the

surface, the hoods looked no more bizarre than the costumes of many

other Natives, and of course, they hid Klingon, Ferengi, and even human

features from prying eyes.



Odo himself had suggested the ruse: he had been practicing shape

shifting to a Cardassian since DS9 was Terok Nor.  His facial features

hidden behind a mask, he could pass cursory muster as a "generic

Cardassian."  So long as they moved fast and the sentries were not

particularly alert, there should be no alarm, thought Sisko.



"Are we alone?"  he whispered behind him; the column paused while the

chief, shielded by the other "prisoners," scanned with his tricorder.



"Besides the two we just passed and the other, there are eleven Drek'la

in this structure, and I'm picking up electromagnetic leakage of the

frequency used by several models of Cardassian skimmers."  O'Brien put

away the tricorder and nodded appreciatively to the captain.  "You were

right, sir; I think it's a vehicle pool."



The structure was one of nine hastily erected buildings ranging from a

small Quonset hut with sleeping arrangements for four to a large

building emitting a stench that clearly marked it as a Cardassian mess

hall.  Sisko found the structure that was most centrally located.  He

couldn't see any vehicles from the angle they viewed, poking their

heads over the last rocks of the hilly range against which the

split-heads had carried them, but the empty bays he could see looked

like loading docks.  Captain Sisko made the intuitive leap that they

would find skimmers in this building if they found them anywhere.



They left their mounts grazing excitedly on the near side of the hills,

chattering among themselves: evidently, the grass really was bluer on

the other side of the desert, or so the herd decided.  Ruut and Arrk

chomped happily while the females cavorted; within seconds, the entire

herd had utterly forgotten the "small-head Idiot" Quark and his own

herd ... which is just fine with me, thought Sisko.  The split-heads

did not exactly go silent.



Creeping down from the hills and cutting around a quarter circle to

appear to come from the road, Odo, disguised as the Cardassian

lieutenant, led the rest of the away team as prisoners past the

sentries, another guard, and now the garage.  Sisko looked around in

wary satisfaction; the first stage had gone well, and they were in the

building without raising alarm.  "So we're in," he ventured.  "Anybody

have a plan now for getting us out?"



CHAPTER



"WORF, ODO, secure the corridor," said the captain, worrying that at

any moment, some Drek'la might take it into his head to check out a

skimmer and go cruising.  The Klingon and constable parted, each taking

position at the closest intersection in each direction.  Sisko stood

still and quiet in the center, absently stroking his beard--desperately

need a trim, he noted--and pondering the undetected removal of a large

skimmer from the compound.



"Sir," said Chief O'Brien, interrupting Sisko's thought processes,

"wouldn't it be better to leave thievery to a professional?"



"How dare you!"  exclaimed Quark, putting on Innocent Look Number Five.

"Must I continually be insulted, when I've done every task required of

me?  Risen above and beyond the call of profit, even!"



O'Brien smirked.  "But you instantly knew who I meant, Quark.  If the

shoe fits, and all that."



Suddenly realizing his vulnerable position, the Ferengi made a sour

face and lapsed into awkward silence.  He broke it himself after only a

few seconds.  "Well, actually," he muttered, "I do have a thought.  Not

through any experience in--in theft, but simply because Ferengi

businessmen are eternally resourceful and not hampered by useless codes

of altruism or chivalry."



"Or honesty," added the chief.



"There's nothing more dangerous than an honest businessman," quoted

Quark loftily.



"Rule of Acquisition Number Twenty-Seven," said the captain, startling

both disputants.  "Now be quiet, Chief, and let the man have his say."

Sisko nodded at the Ferengi, who snorted in O'Brien's direction and

continued.



"It occurred to me," said Quark, with a bitter glare in the direction

of Odo, still shape shifted into a Cardassian visage, "that the

Cardassians would never believe that the--the Natives would have the

initiative to steal a skimmer.  They've obviously figured out how

passive the Natives are about their technology, which is why the

Cardassians are doing what they're doing."



"True enough," said the captain; so far, Quark's reasoning was sound.



"So if a skimmer, one skimmer, suddenly turned up missing, they might

think first to a Drek'law until they located them all.  And then,

somebody would remember the Defiant and jump to the obvious

conclusion."



"That we had managed to beam an away team down before the ship left,"

said Sisko, seeing where the Ferengi was leading.  '~1 skimmer?"  asked

O'Brien.  "You said if a skimmer, one skimmer went missing."



"Exactly!"  Quark smiled benignly as if complimenting a child on his

first bit of profit earned.  "If a whole batch of skimmers disappeared

simultaneously, they would first suspect a bizarre computer

malfunction."



Sisko grinned broadly, enjoying the image.  "If we were to reprogram

the routing computers here in the hangar to generate spurious requests

for transport and send out all the vehicles, the Cardassians might well

think their problem was faulty electronics, not sabotage."



O'Brien seemed none too pleased that Quark had, in fact, thought of a

brilliant plan before the chief did, but he had to admit it would be

spectacular, if nothing else.  Sisko collected Worf and Odo and called

them into a huddle.  "Worf, you are familiar with Cardassian

military-outpost layouts, aren't you?"



"Of course I am," said the Klingon, sounding faintly offended that the

captain would even have to ask.



"Being Cardassian, I'm sure they follow a preset and unwavering

plan."



"I must admit, the enemy is a model of efficiency and order that the

Federation could do well to study."



"Lead us to the main transportation computer, Commander.  Chief, you'd

better start figuring out exactly what glitch you're going to program

while we're en route; we won't have much time between security

sweeps."



As was usual in a Cardassian military facility, the corridors were

straight, poorly lit by human standards, and scrupulously clean,

smelling of ozone and disinfectant from the automated cleaning robots

that periodically scuttled past.  In case of surveillance, Sisko had

Constable Odo lead the way and the rest of the away team act the part

of despondent prisoners of war.  Worf was directly behind the

"Cardassian lieutenant," quietly giving directions.



The Klingon was competent as always, and the crew came to an interior

door with markings that read "Transportation Communications Only" in

Cardassian.  The door was, of course, locked, but the chief began

immediately to poke at the touch pad next to it.  The door was flimsier

than a permanent structure would be, but it was not so weak that they

could force their way through... everything depended on Chief

O'Brien.



Captain Sisko began to count silent seconds as



O'Brien worked; there was no way they could explain why a supposed

prisoner was being allowed to try to open a locked door!  But the

captain had barely reached sixteen when the door slid open.



"I bypassed the security protocol," said O'Brien casually.  "Don't know

why any of us even bother," muttered the chief, half to himself.

"Everybody in the whole, bloody quadrant seems able to bypass security

codes in half a minute or less."



"It keeps out teenaged joyriders," Sisko couldn't help responding.



The computer room had the best environmental controls of the entire

temporary structure, since Cardassian technology (as Chief O'Brien so

often reminded the captain) was extraordinarily finicky.  The room was

maintained at a constant temperature that felt comfortable to Captain

Sisko, which meant their hosts would probably have found it chilly. The

computers themselves looked far more modern than the systems on Deep

Space Nine-which made sense, as the Cardassians had built the station

many years earlier.



Looking quickly around the room, Sisko saw no permanent sentries, a

stroke of good fortune he had anticipated: there was no reason for the

invaders to expect to be invaded in turn, and sentries wasted watching

an empty room could better serve harrying the population (and grabbing

for themselves whatever technology they could lay their hands on).  But

there might be an occasional roving watchman; best to hurry with their

task.



"Chief," said Sisko, gesturing at the nearest coil sole



"Wait, don't tell me," said O'Brien.  "You want me to bypass the

security protocols?"  "If you have half a minute."



The internal security must have been more complex than the door entry

code; it took Chief O'Brien close to four minutes to find a path around

the fire walls.  But eventually, he announced he was in and began to

enter his virus program.  "Six skimmers," he said.  "Two of them are

the big, ten person troop transports; the rest are personal cycles."

O'Brien continued to work, teasing information out of the console on

the fly; Sisko watched in rapt fascination, barely following the blur

of coded query, response, and instruction.  The man knew his work, no

question!



"The years you've spent on the former Terok Nor seem to have paid off,"

said the captain admiringly.  O'Brien did not respond.



"Worf," O'Brien asked a few moments later, "do you know where the

vehicles are housed?"



"We saw none in the south loading dock," said the commander.  "They

must all be at the north."



"Good, because we've got three minutes to get to our ride."  The chief

stood abruptly, absurdly smoothing his rumpled, homespun disguise.



Worf wasted no time.  "Back out the door and turn right," he said to

Odo, who once more took the actual lead.  The Klingon hesitated only

twice, but each time, Sisko's heart leapt up his throat.  If the three

minutes passed, and the computer ordered every vehicle to shove off on

mysterious errands before the away team could get to the loading dock,

the Federation visitors would be in serious trouble indeed; they might

still make it out in the confusion, but the camp would be aroused.



Left, right, through a doorway... then there was a footfall ahead of

them along a corridor, and the captain grabbed at the nearest door.

They hustled inside, Sisko waiting to be last, and only then did he

realize he was in the pantry.  Ordinarily, he would have waited until

the sentry passed, but they had no time: risking the light from

torches, Sisko silently pointed to the food stores and indicated every

man to stock up.  It was a timely serendipity; they were down to their

last rationed meal of the food they brought with them on the mission.



No, don't stop!  shrieked Sisko inside his skull, as the idiot guard

loitered outside the door to the larder.  Then an even more worrisome

thought occurred: What if he decides he's hungry and opens the door for

an illicit snack?



But the guard grunted, slapped his belly loudly, and moved on down the

corridor.  His footsteps had barely faded when the captain threw open

the door.



There was no one to see them, and they were down to seconds on the time

clock.  "No time for stealth," said Sisko.  "Run for it!  Worf, take

point."



"Aye, aye, sir," said the commander, and set off up the

replicated-steel hallway at a pace halfway between a jog and a sprint.

Odo brought up the rear, still maintaining his Cardassian form--just in

case.



They reached the north loading dock.  "Damn," said the chief, looking

at his tricorder, "we've only got fifteen seconds!"



"Which skimmer did you program for manual control?"  demanded Captain

Sisko, staring at the parked vehicles.



"All, I picked Troop Transport Six," said O'Brien, staring around. "The

others are all set to random courses that--"



"No time!  Find it!"  Even as the captain gave the command, he realized

it was unnecessary; there were only two skimmers large enough to be

troop transports, and one of them was unmarked... probably the personal

property of the gul or legate who was in charge of the invasion, a

household vehicle rather than military issue.  They bolted for the one

with military markings, and Chief O'Brien madly pecked at the touch

plate



"Damn it--damn it--damn it!"  he swore.  "Suddenly, I can't bypass a

bloody door lock!"



Odo pressed past the captain and yanked O'Brien away from the pad, just

as the running lights illuminated and the engines started.  Sisko

stared at the constable's hand: Odo had turned it into a slim rectangle

of plastic with a hook at one end.  "Let me try something," mumbled

Odo, pushing his shape changed hand into the door crack, sliding it up,

and pulling back.  The door opened with a hiss as the troop transport

rose slightly from the dock and began to edge out the open end toward

the other buildings of the compound.



The away team leapt inside the moving vehicle; again, Sisko insisted on

being last... and he found himself running full tilt alongside the

accelerating skimmer, making a final, desperate leap at the portal. Odo

extended his arms like tendrils and caught the captain, reeling him in

like a ship in a tractor beam.



The transport picked up speed, and the roar of wind past the open door

became deafening; O'Brien, up in the cockpit and swearing like a

drunken Klingon, finally found the right command to close it.  At last,

they could breathe easy; in the rear viewscreen, Sisko watched half a

dozen vehicles shoot off in as many directions, followed after a moment

by shouting Cardassians on foot, waving their arms and running after

the skimmers in a futile attempt to make them turn back.



Quark was staring at Odo.  "If I had known you would need a SlikPik,"

grumped the Ferengi, "I would have brought one."



"Oh?"  drawled the constable.  "And just where would you get such

burglar's tools?"



"I use it when I lock myself out of the bar," said Quark austerely.



"Worf," said the captain, cutting off further rejoinder by Constable

Odo, "you're Pilot in Charge.  Chief, I want you to get busy with the

sensors and find us a central power plant.  It's time to put phase two

of this mission into effect... call it Operation Blackout."



Major Kira Nerys was on duty when the demand came, the first verbal

contact they had received from the elusive attackers.  Kira stared at

the cryptic figures that danced across her threat board; until the

computer deciphered them, they had no idea what the aliens were trying

to say--or even who they were.  Still, even an unintelligible message

conveyed information... at the least, the aliens were no longer sure of

being able to overcome the station before help arrived.



The major slapped her com badge  "Kira to Kai Winn," she said.



"Yes, child?"  asked a sleepy voice from the ether; the Kai had just

gone to sleep an hour ago.



"They just sent us a message, probably a demand of some sort."  "I

shall be right down.  Make no response."  Kira shrugged; without

knowing what the attackers asked, how could she make any response?  It

took Kai Winn two minutes to appear in Captain Sisko's "crow's nest,"

as Chief O'Brien sometimes called it; probably struggling to put the

"serenity" mask back on, thought the major.  During that time, the

message from the attackers repeated twice.



Winn said nothing, merely stood behind Kira and looked at the symbols

crawling across the screen.  The universal translator struggled,

swapping out pieces of the message for jumbles of nonsensical words.

The computer took its time, but finally, after an additional six

minutes, it had a translation.  The words began as "idea sets" in small

boxes here and there about the screen, then connector words,

refinements, and corrections; abruptly, having gotten the hang of the

alien language, the entire message flickered then disappeared, the

complete translation replacing it.



We are the Liberated... Survival is the universal right... You are

overmatched and must surrender... You may ultimately keep the enclosed

environment but you must pay for your liberty as we paid for ours... We

require the Portable-FarSeeing-Anomaly as our price to restore your

enclosed environment... You must respond within two hours fourteen

minutes, thirty-eight point nine one nine one seconds.



Why such a bizarre deadline?  thought Kira, momentarily puzzled; she

rolled her eyes in exasperation at herself when she realized it was

obviously the computer's translation of some "round" number in the

aliens' language, probably expressed as vibrations of a helium nucleus

or some equally universal unit.



"The Liberated," mused the Kai.  "Liberated from what, I wonder?"



"They... came from the Gamma Quadrant," suggested Kira.



"Liberated from the Dominion, child?"



Kira shrugged.  "They certainly have some Dominionlike technology, but

they're significant for what they don't have: they haven't beamed

anyone out through shields, and they're not using standard Dominion

disruptors."  Kira winced, eyes dry and painful from staring unblinking

at the viewer; she rubbed them.  "If they are escaped Dominion subjects

who stole vessels, it makes sense that they might not be as well

equipped as the Jem'Hadar warships... thank the Prophets!"



"If they had come from one of the known Dominion fleets," the Kai

pointed out, "they would have come past the Federation-Klingon force in

the Gamma Quadrant."



"Which still fits the theory, my Kai: escaped slaves would go out of

their way to avoid the Jem'Hadar fleets.  So what," she asked, turning

to the practical, "what are they asking for?  What is this

"Portable-Far-Seeing-Anomaly'?"



"I have somewhat of an idea, my child," said Kai Winn softly, "but I

dare not say anything until we know what they know, and what they only

suspect from distant rumor."  She fumbled for her com badge then spoke

sharply: "Computer!  Begin recording response to the... the

Liberated.



"Blessed are you and all others before the Prophets," said Winn.  "We

are a peaceful people.  We too are recently liberated from captors.  We

must understand further what you mean by the Portable

Far-Seeing-Anomaly.  Please clarify.  We thank you for recognizing our

right to survival, and we shall recognize yours.  You may depart in

peace.  We look forward to better communications, understanding, and

trade."  The Kai nodded, and the computer responded that the message

was recorded.  "Translate and send it to the ship," she ordered the

computer.



"That was clever," said Kira grudgingly, "turning around their line

about survival.  The 'enclosed environment' is obviously a reference to

Deep--to Emissary's Sanctuary."



"So I deduced, child.  And I think I know what they want."



The Portable-Far-Seeing-Anomaly?  "You're wiser than I," she

admitted.



"Of course," said Kai Winn offhandedly.  "Nami, while we parley, the

Liberated are going to try another assault on the station."



"We shall be ready," said the captain of the strike team running Ops; a

Resistance cell!  realized Kira in amazement; the remnant of a cell

that Kai Winn had operated during the Occupation?



"Perhaps," said Winn, so quietly that only Kira may have heard her. She

sat calmly, irritatingly, in the chair that still cried for Captain

Sisko; Winn rested prim hands on proper knees and smiled serenely at

the forward viewer, waiting for the reply from the Liberated.  Kira

felt like a fifth leg on a filipis mount.  "Nami, is the package

ready?"



"Not yet, my Kai," said the tall, grim-faced gunner captain.  "It will

be brought to your quarters when it's finished."



Winn nodded, understanding the conversation even if Kira hadn't a clue.

"Major," said the Kai, startling the executive officer from her

reverie, "shouldn't you take personal charge of the militia?  That

seems a fit task for my second-in-command."



Major Kira brightened; roaming the station under arms would be a

welcome distraction from the gears within gears of the Kai's

ambassadorial intrigues.  At least it was clean, and Kira knew just

what to do!  "At once, my Kai," she replied, and mounted the turbolift

before Winn could change her mind.



The village was a char nal house.  Julian Bashir wanted to throw

himself to the ground screaming, cover his eyes, and especially block

out the stench from several hundred dead bodies left unburied under a

hot, white sun... three hundred and forty four dead bodies, to be

precise, he thought in gory detail.  The medical tricorder shook in his

hands, but he suppressed all other reactions; he was a doctor, and this

was a medical situation.  Sort of.



Jadzia had no such rock to cling to; she wrapped her arms around

herself and stared at mass homicide, face pale and neck-spots bone

white.  Gone was the easy banter; three hundred and forty-four

massacred innocents shocked even her ancient memory.  "They're all

dead?"  she asked, voice trembling slightly.



"By now, there are no survivors," he answered, professionally

reassuring without even thinking about it.



"By now?  You mean ... there were survivors, but they starved or bled

to death?"



Julian didn't answer.  Having found no higher life-forms, he searched

for genetic scrapings of Cardassians and Drek'la, finding them in

abundance.



"Julian.  Don't you see what this is?  They're slaughtering the Natives

all over the planet, just like the Tiffnaki village!"  Her voice turned

icy.  "You forget.  I watched this once."  She stared so hard at

Julian, he actually felt her eyes on his flushed cheeks; he was drawn

to look at her even against his will.  ""A time to kill,"" she quoted,

"'and a time to heal."  It's time to fight back, Julian.  For doctors

as well as soldiers."  He swallowed, recognizing the chime of truth.



Still, Julian Bashir, man of adventure, was still a man of medicine,

and it took much, much to turn him into a man of war.  "I have fought

before," he said guardedly.



Jadzia stared at him with a cold gaze he recognized with a shock as

being more of Worf than Dax; he bit his lip painfully, then recalled

that she was blood brother to several Klingon warriors of the old

school when "she" was a he, Curzon Dax.  Jadzia did not see that tie as

dissolved, even a death and another life later; there was good reason

that Commander Worf accepted her as his equal in matters Klingon.



She spoke almost too softly for him to hear; she sounded reverent, as

if she were in a temple instead of an abattoir.  "Think of it as

triage, Julian.  The only way to stop the slaughter is to seize the

Cardassians's attention.  And I know only one way for sure to do

that."



The doctor closed his eyes, but the smell was even more powerful than

the sight: the corpses had lain for some time in the sun with no

stasis, no refrigeration.  Triage; letting some die that others might

live.  It was always the most horrific part of being a doctor,

especially a frontier doctor; it was a task he had flied many times,

and he still had nightmares about it.



"All right, Jadzia; you win.  You want to attack the Cardassians and

get them searching for saboteurs instead of slaughtering Natives...

you're right.  I'll do it."  He swallowed, feeling a lump where his

gorge had risen.



Dax smiled disturbingly and said something in Klingon, which Julian's

universal translator implant rendered as, "We shall drink of his blood

and sup on his brains."  It sounded like a typical Klingon aphorism.

"There's a weapon storage on the skimmer," she added.  "I already

checked.  Four fully powered disruptors.  We'll head back toward the

Tiffnaki village, then track the away team's scent using our

tricorders.  But the first Cardassian encampment we find..."  She

looked to the bodies at her feet, curling her lip in revulsion.



"Aye, aye, sir," said Bashir coldly, leaving no doubt on whose head the

responsibility would lie.



CHAPTER



CHIEF MILES EDWARD O'BRIEN shifted his attention between two types of

Cardassian sensors, both tuned to detect power broadcasts across the

entire electromagnetic spectrum, as well as any subspace transmissions

below the communications spectrum.  Neither sensor gave very accurate

readings; they had already overflown two false alarms, and Worf was

beginning to grumble about "incompetence."  O'Brien wasn't quite sure

whether the Klingon pilot meant Cardassian incompetence or O'Brien's.



"Are you certain this time that you have located a power generator?"

demanded the commander.  "I do not wish to see yet another relay

station."



"No, Worf, I'm not certain!  I didn't design this bloody planet, or

these piles of rubbish the Cardassians use for sensors."



Worf spoke through clenched teeth, manifestly refusing to look at the

chief as he spoke.  "Must I remind you that the longer we stay aloft

hunting for the generators, the more chance we will be spotted and shot

down."



"You don't have to remind me, sir.  What do you want me to do, rebuild

the bloody things?"



NOW he turns to look at me "Yes said the Klingon, "that is an excellent

idea."



Sighing in exasperation, Chief O'Brien dropped to hands and knees and

pried open the circuit system cover.  The design was a mess, as usual,

no better than the spaghetti wiring of Deep Space Ninerebut no worse,

either.  Given time, O'Brien decided he could probably rebuild the

Cardassian sensor into something closer to the Federation standard.



The question was mooted, however, when a deep voice behind the cockpit

pair exclaimed, "There it is, gentlemen.  I will stake my command that

that is a full power generator."  O'Brien looked back over his shoulder

at the captain, then turned to see what Sisko was looking at; the chief

saw a huge, domed structure lying low to the ground, flat blackmnot the

black of paint or natural stone but the luminous abyss of a powerful

force shield.



O'Brien stared, open mouthed; the generator, if that's what it was, was

ten times the size of the main Federation shipyards in Earth orbit!

"We're not cutting through that," he breathed, watching the shield

strength indicator slide off the scale.



Then he brightened.  "On the other hand, we may not have to... there

are two-score power relays surrounding the central plant, and that

means there might be power conduits connecting them."  He pointed to a

number of smaller structures, each boasting a monstrous, black antenna,

each a microwave "hot point" beaming tight bursts of electromagnetic

energy toward distant relays en route to blanketing some portion of

Sierra-Bravo.



"Captain," said Worf preempt orally "where should we put down?"



If Captain Sisko was about to answer, he never got the chance.  Every

instrument on the control panel lit up like a supernova, and before

O'Brien could shout a warning, the skimmer screamed like a terrified

child, the metal rending apart under assault from some terror weapon

that behaved nothing like a clean disruptor or phaser!



O'Brien felt the impact like a blow to the back of his neck, and he

fell from his chair, stunned and dizzy.  Everyone else was thrown to

the deck, yet somehow Worf managed to keep his seat.  The chief's arms

still buzzed with the angry bees of severe electrical shock, and he saw

Worf's hands shaking violently... but the Klingon drew upon reserves

deep within his case-hardened DNA to fight through floccillation for

control of the ship.



Worf howled like a savage, as if he had forgotten the use of

speech--but not how to control a Cardassian skimmer!  The commander

shook and jerked spasmotically, and the ship rolled and yawed, dipping

in sudden, nauseating drops, but it remained intact and crept ever

closer to the ground.  Thank God for lousy Cardassian technology!

prayed the chiefi a so-sophisticated Federation runabout would probably

have splintered into a hundred shards, the delicate electro colloidal

field systems melted into slag by the focused electromagnetic beam that

(O'Brien was convinced) had just slugged the skimmer... must've just

passed through one of the damned microwave power relays, he

guessed--the analytic portion of his mind still working through the

terror at the impending crash.



"Grabmsomethingmsolid!"  Worf managed to articulate; the chief tried to

respond, but the words would not come; he could only moan in

frustration and wrap his arms around a cargo net built into the

bulkhead.  Sick to his stomach, head spinning, he closed his eyes and

just wished everything would be over, one way as good as another. Death

was preferable to the way he felt at that moment!



The shock of the "landing," if one could use the term for a partially

controlled crash, was nearly as bad as the shock that had damaged their

skimmer.  Worf ploughed a long furrow in the dirt, kicking up twin

rooster tails behind the vehicle as it skidded to a long-delayed halt

against one of the power relay stations.  Exhausted, Worf finally

succumbed to the electrocution; he half rose, then fell to the deck,

clutching his stomach.



After an indeterminate time interval, someone helped the semiconscious

chief to a sitting position, back against one bulkhead.  It was

Constable Odo, who had pulled himself together quicker than anyone

else.  O'Brien looked around the cabin, blinking at the terrifically

bright light that slowly dimmed as his dilated pupils contracted to

their normal diameter.  Quark was holding his ears and complaining

volubly to no one, since no one was listening; Captain Sisko was

sitting quietly, observing without speaking; and Worf was already

climbing painfully to unsteady feet.  Chief O'Brien was the last to

recover speech, but thereafter he recovered quickly.



"Here would be fine for a landing, Worf," said the captain dryly.  The

Klingon let out an exasperated sigh and shook his head.  "Is anybody

injured?"  asked Sisko.



A small, terrified voice spoke up: "By thereby the Great Accountant...

I've lost the will to turn a profit!"  Quark's eyes were nearly as huge

as his lobes.



"Well," said Odo, "it seems even the darkest cloud has its latinum

lining."



"I'm serious?  wailed the Ferengi; "I must have received a head

injury... I feel overwhelmed by gratitude merely to be alive--I feel

like giving away all my possessions to the nearest beggar in grateful

thanksgiving!"



"Feel his head," suggested Worf.



"So our Ferengi felon has converted to a Bajoran saint," said the

constable in disgust.  "Do you expect us to believe that, Quark?"



"I don't care what you believe," grumbled the Ferengi, struggling to

his feet and massaging his lobes.  "I'm seriously injured.  I need

medical attention,"



O'Brien stood, shaking each limb in succession; nothing felt broken. "I

think I'm all right," he said.  Captain Sisko nodded in a distracted

fashion, which annoyed the chief.  "If you don't mind," he said

stiffly, "I'll pop out and check the damage on the skimmer."  Sisko

waved without looking round, still intent upon the navigational panels,

which were sparking like a Bajoran fireworks show.



O'Brien pressed the recessing door button, and the door ground slowly

open, shrieking horribly but still working.  He blinked in the

brightness, shielding his eyes from the glare off the power relay;

wishing he had polarizing lenses, he shaded his eyes and did a fast

walk-around.  The skimmer was in better shape than he had imagined; the

hull could take some repairs, but it looked like it would hold

together... though a micro scan with a tricorder was in order to look

for stress fractures invisible to the naked eye.  The nose array was

snapped off, but Chief O'Brien found it a few meters away; it could be

reattached.  His biggest fret was the starboard engine, which had a

split turbine; the turbine was not strictly necessary for operation,

but without it, the engine would overheat.  We'll have to be careful,

not take too long a fright; O'Brien made a mental note to move some of

the heat sensors to the broken engine for constant monitoring.



He returned to the cabin.  "Overall, it's still flyable on the outside,

sir," the chief reported.  "Will you let me take a look at the forward

panel, if you're all through playing with it?"



"Do you smell something sweet?"  asked Quark, sniffing and looking

around the cabin.  "The panel is nonoperational," rumbled Worf.  "If

you don't mind?"  Not waiting for an answer, the chief pushed past the

Klingon and stuck his head into the access port.  He saw the problem

immediately: the control transports had shorted against the fire wall

on impact... it happened often enough on Deep Space Nine after minor

shocks from weapons fire or even a hard docking.



Gingerly, he pulled the metallic wires from the metal wall.  "You just

have to get used to the primitive circuitry," he explained, not sure

whether anyone could even hear him.  "The Cardassians don't always use

fiber optics sometimes they use copper wiring.  There, that should do

it," he said, climbing back out from the hood.



Nothing happened; the board remained dark.  The stench of ozone filled

O'Brien's nostrils.  Frowning, he kicked the front panel sharply, and

the nav lights flickered once, then came back on.  "There."



"Impressive," said Sisko, leaning close; Odo and Worf stared at the

operational control panel in puzzlement and annoyance, respectively.

The chief looked around.  "Say, where's Quark got to?"



That woke up the constable, who swiveled his head around like a bird,

then darted out the open door.  "Miserable little miscreant always

disa--!"



"Leave the panel hot," said the captain.  "Let's follow Quark and his

keeper and see how, exactly, we can get inside this power plant."



Outside, O'Brien squinted against the brightness, turning until he saw

the silhouette of Constable Odo.  Approaching, the chief saw Odo

squatting down, yanking on some large object that appeared bolted or

otherwise stuck to the ground.  Nearer, he could hear the object

bellowing with a Ferengi voice he knew far too well.



"I can smell it!  I can smell it!  Can't you?"  Quark had attached

himself by hands and feet both to a metal trap in the earth; try as he

might, the constable could not wrench him away.



"Odo, Quark, please!"  commanded Captain Sisko; Odo stood and shifted

away, looking surly, though it could have been the glare in O'Brien's

eyes.  "Now, Quark," continued Sisko, "what are you doing down

there?"



Quark turned back to the rest of the team, insane, staring eyes burning

like the top of the power relay tower.  "There's LATINUM here!"  he

shouted, like a Bajoran enthusiast praying to the Prophets for

deliverance from the world.  "I can feel it."



"Well," said Odo, "that heartfelt conversion didn't last long."



"Glad to see you're feeling better," said the captain with a straight

face.  He turned to O'Brien.  "Chief, am I mistaken?  Or does latinum

make a damned good insulator?  I mean for am"



"A power conduit," finished Chief O'Brien, grinning.  "Yes, sir.  I

mean, no sir, you're not wrong.  What say we pop the lid and see what

our friend has been smelling?"



The lid was a metallic grating, oval, solid, and very, very massive.

None of the team could get a grip on it except Constable Odo, who

turned his hands into suction cups; but even he couldn't lift it, not

even with Worf tugging on one arm and Sisko and O'Brien on the other.

They pondered the dilemma; the damned thing must weigh a couple of ton

st calculated the chief.



Then he rolled his eyes in exasperation at his own stupidity.  "Oh, for

the love of... !"  He dug into his pocket and extracted the small

handful of toys that he had taken off the Terrors of Tiffnaki at the

captain's orders; sifting through, he found the one he wanted and slid

the rest back to their pocket.  "Allow me," he said, and with a

flourish, pointed the antigravity beam at the gigantic manhole.  He

raised it with ease, placing it gently onto the ground nearby... a much

more satisfactory conclusion than the last time they had used anti gray

to levitate Arrk the split-head.



Quark was first to the pit, folding himself double to stuff his head

inside the tunnel.  The Ferengi started shouting so excitedly and

waving his arms that he toppled over the lip before anyone could grab

him.  The captain tilted his head at the open hole.  "O'Brien," was all

he said.



The chief of operations sat on the hole, looked down, and lightly

dropped inside.  Quark was on his hands and knees, trembling like a

young Irish lad peeping through the bedroom window of the colleen next

door.  The Ferengi spoke slowly and huskily: "The walls--and floor--and

ceiling are lined--with pure lat inurn  Quark turned to look back at

O'Brien, and his beady, Ferengi eyes were glazed over.  "Not

gold-pressed latinum.  Not lat inurn plated.  Pure--latinum contained

in vein like wires!"  Then Quark giggled.



Chief O'Brien unslung his tricorder and swept the long, tube like

corridor.  "The power potential is off the scale," he called up to the

captain.  "If this were an EM field instead of a Pauli potential field,

we'd both be fried to a crisp."  He shut off the tricorder, nervous

that the probing sensor beam might accidentally collapse a state vector

and bring the potential field into incinerating reality.  "I'd say we

found what we were looking for, sir."



Captain Sisko followed his two team members, then Constable Odo

(unhappy at Quark being out of sight for even a moment), finally Worf

bringing up rear guard.  Everyone but the Ferengi had to crouch in the

low conduit; Worf worked himself around so he was facing backwards,

away from the main power plant, where the conduit extended an

additional fifty meters, for "kinetic-resonance echoing," according to

O'Brien--whatever the hell THAT is!  The Klingon would have to walk

backward to keep up with them, but it allowed him to cover their

exit.



This whole thing is spooky, thought the captain as they scrunched along

the conduit toward the heart of a reactor big enough, according to

O'Brien's tricorder, to power six stations the size of Deep Space

Nine... or Emissary's Sanctuary, as it was now, and probably would

remain being, called.  The cold echoes of boot steps on the latinum

flooring did indeed resonate up and down the power conduit, rattling

Sisko's skull and shaking loose stray thoughts and random memories: he

felt a terrible pang of unexpected regret leaving the station behind;

if--when!--the Defiant returned and the crew drove away the Cardassians

from Sierra-Bravo, Benjamin Sisko would be taken back not to the

station that had been his home for five years, but to a new command, a

new assignment.  Probably a ship tour, he thought, since the station

counts as an out-of sequence shore tour.



But that was only speculation; for all the captain knew, he could end

up chief administrator of another starbase, or teaching classes at the

Academy, or even serving four years in the hallowed halls of Starfleet

Command, trailing after some old admiral, wiping the man's chin when he

drooled.  In the grand scheme of Starfleet, a low-seniority captain was

not a very high rank at all.  No one except Sisko's detailer would even

ask his preference, and the "needs of the service" would take

precedence anyway.  As they did five years ago, after Jennifer died, he

recalled; the only thing he had wanted after that Borg attack was to

resign and spend the rest of his life in morbid self-pity.



Trouble--Quark looked almost mesmerized by all the pure latinum

surrounding him... though on Sierra-Bravo, lat inurn was as commonplace

as iron on Earth.  But the greedy, little Ferengi was trembling like a

fevered patient, plucking at the bulkheads, the overhead, a man caught

in a dream that was rapidly turning nightmarish: there was nothing

Quark could do!  He had to close his eyes to profit like no Ferengi had

ever seen and forget all about Sierra-Bravo.  Whatever he saw, whether

raw resources or prime technology, belonged to the Natives... not to

the Cardassians, the Federation, or to Quark.



But every membrane in his lobes must have been screaming at him to

plot, scheme, do anything to get his hands on that profit!  Quark could

be near to breaking; more than religion, the Ferengi pursuit of profit

was close to a biological compulsion.  Quark fought it with as much

agony as Odo fighting to remain solid day after day: sooner or later,

realized Sisko, he'll break again... as he had twice before on the

mission.



And Odo isn't helping, thought the captain, frowning; the constable was

being particularly obtuse, riding Quark harder, if anything, than he

did back on the station.  Perhaps a candid talk was in order, but

Captain Sisko did not look forward to that duty.  The shapeshifter

could be remarkably touchy and adamant in his administration of

"justice."



Sisko banged his head, only then noticing that the conduit was

narrowing as they approached the reactor.  "Worf, duck lower," he

called back over his shoulder.  The only light was the sharp, bluish

glow from Quark's chemical glow tubes and the shaky beams from the hand

torches carried by the rest of the team.  Sisko felt a sudden, horrible

sensation of claustrophobia; the walls were merely narrowing, but his

mind insisted they were squeezing tight as he watched them!  A

clutching compulsion to turn around and claw madly back the way he had

come swept through the captain; only the even stronger fear of

humiliation and loss of command respect stopped him... that and the

fact that he probably couldn't turn around now even if he wanted; the

conduit was too narrow.



The feeling subsided but didn't abate entirely.  Captain Sisko gave no

outward sign; if command had taught him one great lesson, it was that

life imitates artifice: pretend courage and confidence, and soon you

feel them for real.  Past Quark and O'Brien, Sisko saw a grating that

incorporated both latinum mesh and some sort of energy cobweb.  "It's

behind that," said the chief, nodding at the grate.



"And if we opened a hole in that mesh?"



"It would be like opening up a window into the core of a star," was the

crisp and very visual reply.



CHAPTER



SISKO STARED for a long moment.  One by one, though no command was

given, the teammates turned off their lights, leaving only the cobalt

blue of Quark's chemical light and the yellow glow of the lat inurn

energy mesh.  Bizarre, curved lines of bright light played across the

faces of the away team as Sisko looked at each one in turn: ionized

plasma trails from subatomic particles fleeing the horrific maelstrom

of creation-destruction within the power generator, Shiva and Krishna

waltzing to quantum pipes.  "If we blew a sudden hole," he mused, "I

wonder whether they'd see the flare all the way to the Cardassian

camp?"



"I'd say," responded O'Brien, "it would light up the sky, for certain.

A disruptor set to overload, do you think?"



Sisko stared at the grating, visualizing what it held back on the other

side.  "Doubtful.  A disruptor overload would be a drop in the

proverbial bucket."



"You're probably right, sir."  O'Brien closed his eyes, thinking out

loud.  "The grating must convert actual energy to quantum potential; no

physical cable or energy field could transport that much energy without

melting.  Then the relays convert it back to broadcast power, stepping

it down enough that all those pretty toys can use it."



"And were does all this analysis get us, Chief?"



O'Brien shrugged, still at a loss.



Quark softly cleared his throat; when the captain and operations chief

fell silent to look at the green tinted Ferengi, he looked almost

embarrassed.  "I, ah, notice there's an access hatch in the center of

the lat inurn grating."



"It can't be opened while the reactor is hot," explained O'Brien.  "It

was used when the reactor was designed--probably seven million years

ago, assuming the planet was powered up when the buildings were built,

if Commander Dax got it right."  "Why can't we open it?"  Quark

persisted.  "Because it's designed that way!"  snapped the chief.

"There's no reason to open it then... unless you're planning to blow it

up."  He looked at Captain Sisko.



"That is a problem," admitted Sisko.  "Ideally, we don't want to

destroy it, just shut it down for a while."



"Well, if we blow this reactor the power surge will trip the equivalent

of circuit breakers throughout the planetary grid.  We'd have to turn

the power back on manually, but that's simple enough.  Even the Natives

could do it."



"If you two are through interrupting," said Quark, "I do have an

idea."



Behind them, Odo snorted.  "If Quark wants to contribute an idea, I'd

recommend the rest of us sit on him until the feeling passes."



"I'll ignore the comments from the small-head seats.  Are you

interested in blowing this reactor or not?"



Sisko considered.  "Well, let's hear your idea at least," he

reluctantly decreed.



Quark grinned, as if closing a deal to bankrupt an enemy, and rubbed

his hands gleefully; he appeared to be enjoying his new role as

saboteur.  His face looked almost demonic in the hellish, green glow

from his chemical light.  "They designed this panel to resist all the

force and pressure on the other side.  So it seems to me," he drawled,

"that exerting a tremendous force on this side might blow the hatch

inward."



"We've already thought about a disruptor on overload, Quark," said the

captain, wondering what the Ferengi was driving at.  "It wouldn't be

enough force."



"No, probably not."  Quark showed his needle sharp uneven, snaggly

teeth.  "But how about the force beam projector?  It was powerful

enough to flatten a kilometer of swamp.  If we braced it at the back of

the tunnel there, pointing toward the hatch--"



O'Brien interrupted derisively.  "And are you volunteering to stay here

and operate it while the reactor blows?"



"Captain Sisko, I'm sure the chief here can rig up a remote control to

operate the thumb slide



Odo weighed in: "I hate to admit it, but this is basically an exercise

in safe cracking  Our felonious team member is in his element; he might

have something here."



Sisko thought for a long moment; he couldn't delude himself about the

enormity of what he contemplated.  But he had time; it would take

O'Brien an hour or more to rig the remote control, even with Quark's

help.  Especially with Quark's interfering help, thought the captain

gratefully.  "Chief, begin to construct the trigger; Quark, it's your

idea... be the chiefs assistant."



"But Captain!"  protested both simultaneously; each paused and glared

suspiciously at the other.



"Go, both of you.  I must meditate for a while.  Odo, Commander, come

with me."  Sisko began to back away from the pair up front; looking

back over his shoulder, he saw that Odo had contrived to turn

aroundmeasier when one is a shapeshifter!m leaving the captain as the

only person creeping backward toward the shaft leading up.  There, the

mouth widened, and Sisko was able to squirm around in the cramped,

tomb-smelling tunnel.  In the light from the open hole above them, they

once again turned off their hand torches.



The sun was sinking, and the giddy, copper glow painted all three an

unpleasant, sickly yellow.  Odo and Worf waited patiently for the

captain to begin.  "What we contemplate," commenced Sisko, "is nothing

short of a complete abandonment of the Prime Directive."



"Fighting the Cardassians is perfectly proper," countered Worf.  "They

don't belong here either."



"But now we're talking about taking down the main power reactors for

the entire planet?  Odo said.



Sisko held up his hand, and both men fell silent, recognizing that the

captain would make the decision.  There would be no vote; Benjamin

Sisko wanted to hear both arguments framed, but he was the only judge.

He, alone, would bear responsibility before a general court-martial, if

it came to that; in a survival situation such as this, Starfleet would

agree that the only course for his subordinates was to obey orders

without demur.



A survival situation... A tiny candle flame of an idea flickered in

Sisko's mind; he closed his eyes, tried to think of nothing, allowing

it to catch and burn bright enough to be seen and felt.  When there is

no moral option, he thought, then there is no truly immoral choice. The

spirit of the Prime Directire would be violated just as surely by doing

nothing and allowing the Cardassians to take over; may as well be

hanged for a cow as a sheep, thought the captain with a sardonic smile.

And James Kirk had faced this choice many times in his career, and had

done what was necessary.



"We will continue and destroy the reactor," said Sisko.  Odo said

nothing; he looked as though he had expected the decision would go

against his position.



"I will stand and fight with you before the admiralty," pledged Worf

without a hint of amusement.



"I'm sure they'll be duly impressed, Commander."  The captain allowed

no trace of sarcasm to taint his own words.  "But perhaps it will be

better, when it comes to that, if you let me do my own talking."



When Chief O'Brien had done with the remote switchmand a fine job it

is, too, he thought to himself--he backed up until he reached the shaft

of light, turned around, and squeezed past the captain to the opposite

end of the tunnel.  There, O'Brien wedged the force beam projector into

a shallow groove that would hold it steady.  He turned it on, to the

lowest setting.  "Quark!"  he called, "get back down the tunnel and

plant yourself directly in front of the hatch."



"What?  Why?"  The Ferengi sounded nervous... as well he might,

considering what maelstrom was behind the mesh wall.



"Just do it!  I need to align this thing, or we won't get anything but

a dented wall."



"But why do I have to..."  Quark's voice trailed off as light suddenly

dawned in his devious, Ferengi brain.  "You want to align it on me?

You're insane!  I won't do it!"



"It's perfectly safe, Quark; it's on the lowest setting.  It's not

going to blow the door prematurely."



"I'm not standing next to that hatch while you point that thing at

it!"



O'Brien made the obvious point.  "You really think you'd be any less

dead if you stay where you are, and the hatch blows?"



Quark scowled, considering the violence of the expected explosion.  "I

think I'll take a stroll topside, stretch my legs a bit."



Odo had his own observation: "You might have a hard time getting past

me, Quark, and if you did, you'd only have to get past Commander Worf,

as well.  Now why don't you do what you're told, for once in your

life?"



Sullenly, Quark hunched low and began to wriggle down the tunnel,

grumbling every step of the way.  The Ferengi reached the hatch; he

turned and sat gingerly.  He looked pale and greenish, but it might

have been from the chemical glow tube he still carried, which was

starting to dim as the reaction died down.



"Tell me when you feel a force right on your chest," said the chief,

turning the force beam projector agonizingly slowly.  It took a solid

ten minutes to get it set exactly where Chief O'Brien wanted it:

directly over the keyhole latch, the weakest spot on the hatch.  "I'm

giving us fifteen minutes," said O'Brien dearly.



He set the timer to nine hundred seconds and pressed the arm switch,

then the activate countdown thumb pad.  He watched it count down to

899, 898, and 897, then rose and suggested, "Let's get the hell out of

here, if you don't mind."



Worf was nearest the ladder, and he climbed swiftly but without

apparent haste.  Odo went next, then Quark.



Captain Sisko had stepped to the ladder to shout at Worf, so O'Brien

pushed up behind him; the chief had won the honor of being last man

out.  Sisko scurried up the ladder, still too slow for the frantic

Chief O'Brien.  Fifteen minutes!  Why not a half hour, or two hours?



Odo spun his head around backward disconcertingly  "Why did you set the

timer for only fifteen minutes?"  demanded the constable, eerily

echoing O'Brien's own thoughts.



They bolted to the skimmer, where Worf yanked the door open so hard

that O'Brien was momentarily worried the commander would rip it off its

hinges.  They piled in like a slapstick holoplay.  The chief tried to

push to the front to fire up the engines, but first Quark, then Odo,

then Sisko himself got in the way.  By the time O'Brien reached the

front panel, he was swearing like a drunken Academy scrub on first

liberty.



The navigation and engine-start panel, which they had left hot, was off

again.  His running commentary of oaths dissolving into half formulated

slurs against Cardassians, O'Brien kicked it again; this time, there

was no effect.  A second, harder kick also failed to shake loose

whatever short circuit had killed the power.



"Perhaps I should try," said Worf with barely concealed animosity.



"No, no!"  shouted O'Brien, holding up his hands; the Klingon was still

brooding about getting stuck and almost killing everyone.  He'd

probably kick a ragged hole right through the forward hull



A tiny shape pushed up beside the chief, ducking under O'Brien's

groping arms like an annoying child.  "Allow me, Chief," said Quark. He

was probably trying to be soothing, but his Ferengi sarcasm dribbled

through, and O'Brien felt a momentary urge to give Quark's gigantic,

pink, hairless skull a left hook that would send the Ferengi reeling

into an already furious Worf.  The chief mastered his impulse.



"Quark!  Get out of there!  What the hell do you know about Cardassian

engineering or--"



The navigation lights lit up all at once, the power-start switch

blinking temptingly.  Chief O'Brien fell silent, feeling his face flush

with humiliation.



"Nothing," said Quark, "but I do know somewhat about Cardassian

security systems.  They must have unscrambled the computer back at the

depot and sent a general recall order to all the skimmers we stole."

The Ferengi pulled a piece of equipment from under the hood of the

console, where he'd been fiddling, and dropped it into O'Brien's

outstretched hand; it was a logic circuit with a receiver attached...

the chief himself made use of the same devices on the station to

manipulate control systems directly on the numerous occasions when the

station's Cardassian autonomic computer would go off-line.  "Since we

had the parking brake set, the skimmer shut off instead."



"Can we get started now, Chief O'Brien?"  snapped Worf; he sounded

somewhat mollified, now that Quark had taken the focus off of the

Klingon.  Irked and chagrined, O'Brien tapped rapidly on the console,

initiating the electron flow and the positronic counterflow, adjusting

the contour map, and finally starting the engines.  The repairs they

needed could certainly wait until they got away from Ground Zero.



"It's all yours, sir," he said to Worf.  Without a word, the Klingon

boosted the power to maximum and lifted the shaky, hard-to-control

skimmer a few meters off the ground and started it moving-slowly at

first, so that O'Brien writhed in his chair, looking back over his

shoulder as if his eyes could bore through the rear hull and watch the

power plant (though it would be a terrible idea even if it were

possible; anybody watching the plant with naked eyes from nearby when

it exploded would be blinded, perhaps permanently).



Now Odo crowded the nose of the skimmer, leaving only the captain back

in the troop seats.  "Commander, can't you get this thing any higher?"

demanded the constable.



"It is better to stay low," said Worf.  "The blast will be directed

primarily upward.  Now please return to your seats, both of you!  I am

tired of having to compensate for your unbalanced weights in the hand

controls."  Reluctantly, they slithered away back to rejoin Captain

Sisko.



"Better strap yourselves in," warned O'Brien, glancing at his

chronometer; we've got about twenty seconds before all hell busts

loose."  He reached across and buckled in the Klingon pilot, who needed

both hands on the stick and collective; Worf did not object.  O'Brien

barely had time to slip into his own harness when every electronic

instrument on the console flashed red, then dropped to zero.



At the same time, the landscape forward of the skimmer flared bright

white, a searchlight on hard packed snow.  The chief shut his eyes

tight, and still the light hurt; as he blinked them open painfully, he

saw the afterimage of the veins in his own eyelids as ghostly,

pulsating lines, rivers of phantom blood.  Tears leaked down his

cheeks, and he tried to blink his vision back.



The shock wave struck almost twelve seconds later; O'Brien estimated

that they had managed to make about four kilometers from Ground Zero.

Judging from the force of the wave at that distance, if they had been

any closer, they would have made a smoking crater in the dirt.



The skimmer skewed fiercely, the stern yawing to the left nearly ninety

degrees and sinking.  Worfhad been right; the majority of the shock

wave was propelled upward, missing the skimmer entirely.  A second

later, just as Worf got the ship back under control, they were struck

from below by another invisible fist as the wave reflected off the

ground; this one was not so severe.  The sealed airlocks kept some of

the noise out, but the low vibrations shook right through the hull and

broadcast a low rumbling inside that was loud enough to make O'Brien

shout in pain and clap his hands over his ears.



Then the main shock was over; the electronics rebooted after the

electromagnetic pulse, and the rear viewer showed an enormous mushroom

cloud rising above the reactor explosion, as, of course, happened in

every high-temperature detonation-chemical, thermonuclear, or

matter-antimatter.



The ringing in O'Brien's ears quieted, and he thought he heard his name

called.  Unbuckling shakily, he returned to the central cabin.  Quark

was unconscious, curled in a fetal position with his arms wrapped

around his lobes; Odo was caught unguarded, staring with concern at the

man he would never in a thousand years call his friend... but who was

doubtless his closest companion on the station.



The captain sat unperturbed on one of the seats, his legs crossed, the

portrait of composure.  "Chief O'Brien," he began.  "Sir?"



"Next time, let's give ourselves a good thirty minutes--relax a

little."



"Aye, aye, sir," said the chief, not entirely displeased.  All in all,

it had been a pretty full day, as such things went.



CHAPTER



FOUR UOURS INTO Major Kira Nerys's tour as commander of the militia,

the doors of Hell opened wide, and the False Prophet of Hateful Lies

burst through.  The enemy had not been idle; while Kira and Kai Winn

waited, watched, slept, the escaped captives (if that's what they truly

were!) slithered across the abyss between their ships and the station.

They used no boarding craft or shuttles or rockets; they jumped across,

by ones and twos, softly touching the skin of Emissary's Sanctuary and

sticking fast with some adhesive or suction tool.  Their ships went

undetected, their cloaking devices far advanced over the Federation's.

The individual invaders were each too small to trigger the station's

sensors.  Before the first alarm sounded, there were more than a

hundred and fifty soldiers crawling across the outer hull!



Steering well clear of the airlock doors, the unsuspected assassins

used handheld cutting torches to burn holes through the skin large

enough for them to wiggle through in full battle array.  The first

inkling Kira had was a hastily shouted warning over the com-link,

severed before the militiaman could even shout his location.



"Computer!"  demanded Kira.  "Where did that last transmission come

from?"



"Level nineteen, sector thirty-eight," responded the cheerful,

dumb-as-dirt contralto.



"Damn it, we're scattered on those lower levels."  Closing her eyes to

think better, the major tapped her com badge again and summoned three

companies to the breakthrough, but before they could reach the right

level, beetle-armored invaders were bursting through the hull all over

the station.



She ran to her own nearest break and found herself in an instant gun

battle with black, featureless aliens shooting a rapid-fire energy

pulse weapon that carved through bulkheads like a hot knife through

frozen yogurt.  She lost Willi and Fienda in the first volley and

nearly lost the left side of her face as a bolt cut through the corner

of the Klingon restaurant when she peeked around.



"Fall back!  Fall back!"  The command wasn't quick enough, and her

friend Gerti, who was a Dabo girl before Kai Winn took control, took a

shot to her stomach; the gift crumbled into a still, white form,

clearly dead before her face struck the deck.



The militia retreated, firing back over their shoulders; a lucky shot

from Kira took one of the invaders in his leg, bringing him down, but

there were no other casualties on the aggressor's side.  Their armor

was good enough to require a direct and sustained phaser blast to do

any damage.



Four hours and twenty-three minutes into Kira's tour, she was a

commander without a command, her militia army wracked and scattered,

casualties high, walls and shielding chewed like a dog bone.  The major

was shell-shocked, ordering her steadily diminishing forces in a leaden

voice, trying to turn a tide that relentlessly filled the station: the

invaders were still swarming across the gap between their undetectable

ships and the ruptured Emissary's Sanctuary.  Ten more minutes of

retreat, and Kira was desperate enough to call Winn and beg the Kai to

get reinforcements from Bajor.



"What could they do, child?"  asked Kai Winn, serene as always.  In

Kira's present state of mind, the major wanted to reach through the

com-link and throttle the old... the venerable, middle-aged Kai.

Instead, she sagged against the corridor wall outside the hydroponics

lab and breathed deeply.



"They could distract the invaders while we-while were"



"While we launch more futile attacks that stand no greater chance of

success than we've had so far?"



Kira closed her eyes, exhaustion wrapping her like a burial shroud. "My

Kai, we must do something.  We stand to lose the station if we

don't!"



"Nerys, what makes you think sitting quietly is doing nothing?"  While

Kira pondered the seemingly nonsensical reply, Kai Winn added a

peremptory order disbanding the militia and recalling the major to Ops,

relieving her of an impossible command.  Kira felt the burning shame of

failure, despite knowing there was nothing anybody could have done.

Sometimes the battle is over before it begins, sighed Shakar once,

during the Resistance, when the cell had to abandon a perfect cave to

the superior intel and lightning strike of the Cardassians.  It made no

difference: loss and failure burned her cheeks as they had back when

she was a young girl testing herself for the first time.



Wisdom; I pray for the wisdom to see that loss is as inevitable as

gain, if you fight long enough.  The last weren't the words of Shakar

or any other Resistance leader; the quotation came from the first

services Kai Winn led as Kai.  The Emissary knows, Kira thought;

Captain Sisko had gleefully told her once of a baseball pitcher who

held the alltime record for strike outs... and at the very same time,

the all-time record for walks, for games won, and for games lost!  Not

surprisingly, she also held the record for most number of games

pitched, the real pillar that underlaid all Katsio Bando's other

baseball records.



"I am on my way," said Kira, striving to sound as calm and contained as

her new commander; she achieved only the sound of weariness and regret.

Sharply, Kira ordered her few remaining militia members to disperse and

hide their weapons, a drill every Bajoran above a certain age knew all

too well.  The station was already lost; no sense losing all their

lives into the bargain.  The only hope now for Bajor was that the

invaders would make good their offer to allow the station personnel to

live.



Kira had her own, private hope, however.  Much as it would horrify the

Kai, Major Kira still held out hopes that the mighty Federation would

indulgently liberate the station, even if it meant another ten years

before Bajor could again petition for sovereignty.  The wormhole, where

the Prophets dwelt, was far more important than the pride of Bajor--or

so Kira told herself convincingly.



She kept her own phaser rifle, for her uniform already identified her

as military, and ran with her two personal bodygnards back to the

turbolift.  The shaft was billowing smoke, and the lift was nowhere to

be seen; they would have to climb many levels on the ladder ways a

prospect Kira viewed with resignation.



As her last task, the erstwhile commander of the militia forces decided

to speak with the four bombardment shelters scattered on the Quark's

Place side of the Promenade; her lieutenant, Maranu Vann, would be

doing the same on the other side.



She climbed up to the ninth level, rifle slung over her shoulder.  Kira

and her guards crept around the rim of the Promenade, scanning for

invaders.  They were swarming all over the station, their biological

peculiarities easy to track, but they had largely abandoned the

shattered Promenade with its broken shops and deserted walkway and

catwalks.  Kira slipped around the perimeter until she came to the

first sealed vault.



Then the major, slight as a will o'-the-wisp, slung the rifle back over

her shoulder and strode through a security door toward the next shelter

on her list.  "At least, thank the Prophets, the captain and away team

are safe and away from here."  Nobody heard her grumble; nobody was

meant to.



The demolition squad had got it down to a science.  Chief O'Brien had

buried most of his qualms; so long as he had a great chain of

commissioned officers up top, he didn't have to worry about covering

the bottom.  But he couldn't quite extinguish the moral reservations:

after all, we're basically throwing these Natives back into the Stone

Age.t



All in a "good cause," as Quark kept saying.  The Ferengi was the only

team member who seemed completely at ease with what they were doing,

nuking every power plant on the planet.  When O'Brien planted the third

modified force beam projector and watched the third generator detonate

with an earth-shattering convulsion, he realized his hands were shaking

so hard he almost couldn't operate the navigational controls.



He felt nauseated.  No, it's not nausea... it's a physical PAIN in my

gut, like a big fist punched me in the solar plexus.  Worf was tense at

the stick; years on the Enterprise with the Klingon gave O'Brien a

read.  And Sisko had said nothing for several hours, just absently

stroked his beard and stared at the horizon.



"Do you need me for anything?"  asked Odo.  Without waiting longer than

two seconds for an answer, he liquified and poured himself up and over

the lip of a luggage rack.



"Well, Chief," said the ever smarmy Quark, "looks like it's just you

and me.  Have I ever told you about the time I played Tongo with Dax?"

O'Brien tuned out the Ferengi as he droned on.



At least, thank God, Keiko's warm and safe back on Bajor, he thought;

they're not living through this hell



Thirty minutes later, Captain Sisko abruptly spoke, causing O'Brien to

jump in his chair.  "Commander Worf, set a course for the Tiffnaki

village.  I think it's about time we see how our commandos and their

comrades are taking the sudden change in lifestyle."



CHAPTER



TIlE STATELY Cardassian-Drek'la convoy crawled across the desert.

Cardassians move swiftly from Point A to Point B, thought Commander

Jadzia Dax; they don't dawdle without a reason.  In this case, she

decided, they were out hunting... not hunting Natives; they wouldn't

consider the defenseless, dazed Natives worth being pursued as game.

More likely, she decided, the Cardassian column was out hunting the

local cross between a horse and an ocant, which Julian had dubbed

"cleft-heads" for the deep groove running down their faces from crown

to nose.



Observing the captured cleft-heads, Dax realized, to her shock, that

they were semi intelligent it was an open question whether they could

talk, but it seemed likely.  Evidently, the Cardassians had figured out

that much as well: they had recently gone on several hunts in as many

days, observed by herself and Julian Bashir.  But so far, there had

been no good opportunity for an ambush.



"Julian," she asked, speaking softly even though the column was more

than a kilometer away, down in the desert valley below the hills where

the Federation scouts crouched, "how many species on this planet do you

suppose are intelligent?"



"Define intelligent," countered the good doctor.  "What about the blue,

six-legged lizards?"



Dax shuddered at the memory: a dozen of the reptilian beasts, almost a

meter long each, were arrayed in a semicircle around a larger version,

who was making a number of faint squeaks by expanding his throat and

expelling air through gill like slits on the back of his throat.  It

was too far away for the universal translators to make out any

words--if there were any words--but the lizard audience dipped their

heads in unison, as if responding to a lecture, or worse, an aria.



"Jadzia," said Bashir, "we may have stumbled onto a planet where

intelligence evolved early on, and virtually every creature advanced

enough to be mobile developed some."



"Alternatively," she ventured, "whoever put the Natives and the tech

here also liked to play gruesome games with genetic engineering."

Julian grunted, acknowledging the possibility.  "In any case, changing

the subject, I believe we've finally got a winner in the Target

Lottery.  All the signs are good: no two-headed snakes or fiery clouds

on the horizon."



"Aye, aye, ma'am."  Somehow, the tragic figure managed to convey his

deep regret and sorrowful acceptance of the cruel necessities in a mere

three words.  Bashir raised his disruptor rifle; Dax sited along hers,

picking out the lead skimmer full of soldiers.



"I've got the front; you take the second vehicle.  The first shot has

to be simultaneous, Julian, or they'll dive into cover; ready?"  "In my

sites."



"Three, two, one, fire."  She depressed the trigger button, and nothing

happened.  "Damn it!"  she snarled, clicking off the safety and

fingering the button again.  Julian's disruptor shot first, of course,

but Dax followed on quickly enough that the lead Cardassians weren't

even aware yet that their comrades had been attacked.



Bashir and Dax were too far away to hear any immediate screams or

explosions as the beams ignited power cells on the skimmers.  About

three seconds later, when the sound waves traversed the thousand meters

from target to attacker, the Federation snipers heard the first, faint

noise from the assault: a loud boom, followed by faint cries of agony

from those singed but not killed outright by the beams.



They returned fire, of course; their shots swept across the rock

escarpment, but it was no difficulty for Dax and Bashir to duck back.

The invaders had no chance: they couldn't even see where the ambush

came from, and with every shot, the Federation insurgents whittled away

at the Cardassian numbers.



Dax heard a steady beep.  "We're being scanned," she said

offhandedly.



Finally, a few soldiers got smart and tried to take cover behind the

skimmers, but it was too little, and far too late: Dax and Bashit

picked all but one of them off before they made cover, and the last

lost his composure and stood in plain view for a last-chance shot...

like he's committing suicide, thought Dax; or better, perhaps,

hara-kiri.



The smoke from the burning skimmers drifted skyward, bending to the

right in the close breeze.  The titanium frames finally caught fire,

which meant there would be nothing left of the vehicles by the time the

flames burned out, for virtually nothing could stop the incredibly

exothermic burning of titanium.



As Julian Bashit and Jadzia Dax approached, scanning the horizon with

Dax's tricorder to watch for the enemy (who surely would come to

investigate the battle), the commander thought she saw something

moving.  Squinting, she caught sight of a lone figure crawling away

from the wreckage, behind which he had been hiding.



It took the two away team members twenty-five minutes to reach the

carnage, but in that time, the lone survivor hadn't gotten very far. He

lay sprawled on the sandy, desert floor, his mouth stuffed with a gul's

ransom of rare minerals, coughing up smoke and blood.



Dax stood over the man, who was dressed as a high-ranking officer,

though she couldn't see his rank so long as he lay face down.  She

slowly raised her disruptor, her thumb on the trigger button.  The

Cardassian stiffened, evidently feeling her behind him, feeling the

finger of death brush his heart.



Instinctively, Dax pulled her scarf up to cover her mouth and nose and

saw Julian do the same.  Their hoods already obscured the rest of their

faces, except for their eyes, and they were dressed in clothing that

could well be Native styles.  They held disruptors obviously taken from

other Cardassians... there was nothing to tell the man--a gul, Dax

noted--that they were anything but local resistance fighters.



"Don'tmkillwme," he said, wheezing, his lungs bruised by breathing the

smoke from the burning skimmers.  "Worth money... worthwtrade."



Dax said nothing in response, and Bashit followed her lead; there was

no telling what the Cardassian equivalent of the universal-translator

implant would tell him about the language it was translating; if it

alerted him they were speaking Federation standard, they would lose the

advantage that their presence was still unsuspected.



But he knew what they waited for; beaten and sick, he offered what

little he had left: his name.  "Gul," he coughed; "Gul... Ragat. 

Ragat, them the Banished."



The name meant nothing to Jadzia Dax, and she could think of no reason

why it should.



Kira climbed through the emergency trap into Ops, followed by her two

lieutenants... now little more than personal bodyguards.  Captain

Virgat Maav and second Lieutenant Amo--Kira never knew the woman's

given name--took station on either side of the turbolift shaft.  The

Kai's defense cell had already sealed the shaft by phaser-welding

hull-material grillwork across it; the barrier would probably last two

seconds after the beetle aliens turned their concentrated fire upon it,

Kira decided.  But it was a nice gesture.



"All right, I'm here, my Kai," she said.  Kai Winn stood in front of

the Ops consoles staring at the forward viewer, which showed only the

shadowy outlines of invader ships when they passed between the station

and some known constellation.  Even the ships look like armored

insects, thought Kira morbidly; she decided she had developed a morbid

coleopterophobia lately.



Kai Winn said nothing; she gazed at the viewer, and not coincidentally,

at the wormhole... though nothing was to be seen unless a ship would

come through.  Kira shifted uncomfortably from one to the other foot,

wishing she were anywhere but where she was, not for fear, but for

embarrassment; the major couldn't decide whether she was shamed by the

Kai, humiliated by the situation, or condemned by her own conscience.

She had failed, the station fallen, her command obliterated, the dream

of Bajoran independence torn away like the wings off a sparkle fly.



No one could have done better, she tried to tell herself.  Her guilt

answered, but none could do any worse.



"Kai Winn, what do we do now?"



Kira jumped; for a moment, she thought she, herself, had asked the

unaskable.  But it was Captain Maav, a middle-aged middle manager who

looked like what he had been before the turnover: an architect

designing shrines and temples, the occasional secular public building.

Before that, she recalled, he was a captain in the Freedom Brigade

Reserves--hence the rank.  And before that, Kira vaguely recalled

meeting him at an all-cells gathering during the Resistance, a face

partially obscured in the crowd who was introduced (no names, of

course) as something-or-other critical to some cell she'd never heard

of before.



Captain Maav was not the man to sit stolidly doing his job and awaiting

orders.  He ran his own firm.  He was used to giving orders and

couldn't quite break the habit of bluntness even when speaking to the

Kai.



She turned and smiled sweetly at his question; Kira felt a twinge

ofmProphets, could it be jealousy?--that the Kai had responded

instantly to Virgat Maav but not at all to Kira Nerys.  "Do?  Is there

anything else to do?"  Kai Winn squared her shoulders and cleared her

throat.  "Computer, please broadcast this message station-wide."



At first, Kira's eyes widened.  Please?  She's asking the computer g

pardon?  Then an inkling of what the Kai must be about to say

penetrated, and Major Kira felt tiny insects tumble inside her stomach.

She shivered, feeling her knees weaken.  I know what she's going to

say.t screamed Kira's intuition.  A moment of crystal precognition,

premonitory trembling at what was to come momentarily.



"Children of the Prophets," began the Kai reasonably enough, "followers

of the Word, free citizens of Bajor'Maybe she's going to exort us to

fight to the last man.t wished Kira, but she could not wish away what

she already knew.  --"and visitors from beyond the realm of the

Prophets, what you must call the wormhole.  I bid you peace, welcome,

and the blessings of the Prophets."



Bile erupted up Kira's throat, singeing her esophagus.  Her forehead

began to drip.  She felt a flicker of dizziness.



"I sorrow that we have met in such inauspicious and unpleasant

circumstances.  But the meeting need not be disastrous, nor

catastrophic.  There need be no more shedding of blood or loss of

life."  Decades of Resistance.... only to sink to this!



"We take you at your word that you have no designs upon the inhabitants

of Emissary's Sanctuary.  We grieve for your captive status, so

recently alleviated.  We share that bond; we, too, have recently

purchased our own freedom from oppression with our blood, our sweat,

and our faith."



Kira could no longer stand.  She fell heavily into the seat usually

occupied by the sensor-intercept officer, a position the Kai had

decided she didn't need.  Not that it would have made any difference

with these invaders, thought Kira; their cloaking devices were too

good.  The major slumped in her seat, feeling faint.  None of the other

warriors of the Kai's inner circle could look at their leader.  Even

the Kai's personal defense cell studied their consoles as if they would

find the secret of the Final Prophecies written there, plain for all to

see.



"We have no wish," continued the Kai, unperturbed, "to prolong this

mistaken struggle.  Clearly, we have both of us failed to communicate

with each other.  We have no enemies in this quadrant, and we are sure

you want only to open diplomatic contact with us.  And--" The Kai

paused dramatically; Kira held her breath.  "And, perhaps to consult,

however briefly, with what you call the Portable-Far-Seeing-Anomaly...

what we Bajorans call the Orb."



Kira closed her eyes, surprised to feel tears on her cheeks.  She

leaned back.  The Orb.  Of course.  What else?  Sure, just hand it

over; give them our heart, my Kai.t



"We wish no more conflict," said Kai Winn softly, chillingly.  Each

word was a pinprick in the back of Kira's tongue, where it joined with

the throat.  "We offer no more resistance.  We will stand and fight no

more."



The Kai paused; Kira felt the woman's eyes upon her, and the major

opened hers to confront Kai Winn, despair confronting acceptance.  "On

behalf of the united government of the system of Bajor, I, Kai Winn,

hereby surrender this station, Emissary's Sanctuary.  Unconditionally,

and without secret reservation.  Treat us kindly, even as you would be

treated yourselves, when you come to the Prophets in the fullness of

time."



Kai Winn touched a console, and the computer ceased transmitting.

"Lower all shields," she said.  "Power down all weapons.  Transporter

room... lock onto all of us here in Ops and transport us to the

Promenade.  We will meet our fate with heads unbowed.  Kira?"



Kai Winn reached out and took her reluctant first officer's hand as

they dematerialized.



Lieutenant Commmander Worf stood on a small rise, what Captain Sisko

had called a "pitcher's mound," evidently a reference to the ancient

human game of baseball that obsessed the man.  Worf tried not to allow

his amazement to show as he surveyed the Terrors of Tiffnaki--the

commando squad still commanded by "Mayor-General" Astaha.



For a moment, Worf thought he was looking at a sub brigade of Klingon

warriors that had somehow snuck onto the planet.  Their faces were cold

and hard, with a faint snarl as they anticipated the coming battle with

the Cardassians.  They stood in a somewhat ragged line, but they stood

proudly... both true of typical Klingon warrior groups, who were never

known for discipline but rather for ferocity.



"I am proud to serve as your commanding officer," said Worf.  He had

planned to say it anyway, even if they had turned out to be a ragtag

batch of knee-quaking farmers; the Klingon was prepared to swallow his

bile and put on "the face."  But he was startled to realize that it

came out entirely sincere.  Worf's own battle lust began to tickle his

stomach, and he clenched his fists in anticipation of the first clash,

the brittle flicker of battle lines meeting in the red dance.



"We are honored to serve under your command," said Tivva-ma, the young

daughter of Astaha, who had been selected as the Mouth of Tiffnaki.

Every soldier--there were now four hundred, and the mayor-general was

away recruiting still more troops--carried a hunk of metal, a wooden

club, a sharp stick... all the weapons that they had, now that the

power grid was off-line across the entire hemisphere.  But Worf beamed

with pride that they had taken up the weapons themselves when their

toys abruptly ceased working.



"We thought it was the enemy coming," said Tivva-ma in her charming,

brave-little-girl voice.  "When all the stuff stopped working, it was

just like when they came before, and the village was attacked, and all

those people died, like my daddy.  But this time we were gonna use

sticks'n'stuff and hurt the bad Cardassians.  And we all got the sticks

and other stuff.  And the Cardassians didn't come, so we came here, and

Mommand Mayor-General Asta-ha started gathering all the other people,

and... and..."  She trailed off, as children w'fil when they run out of

thoughts.



She saluted, and Worf returned the salute.  It was the Klingon salute

he had taught them in the initial stages of training, but now the

Tiffnakis had earned the privilege of using it.  Though we shall have

to adjust Asta-has rank downward, he appended.



"It was not the enemy who turned off all the devices.  We did that

ourselves--so no more of your fellow defenders will be taken unaware by

the Cardassian sabotage."



"We thank you for your, um, new tech of turning off all the tech.  But

you said there was, urn, some other kinds of things we can use to fight

the Cardassians.  Where are they?"



Where had Jadzia and the Defiant gone?  Now would be a good time for

her to return, thought Worf; they could beam down a few thousand

replicated disruptors with internal power supplies.  For the moment,

however, Chief O'Brien and the captain were trying to manufacture small

cannon out of scrap metal, melting the materials with hand phasers that

would not last long at the rate they were using them.  "For now, we

shall learn the art of fighting with sword and bat'telh and the

manufacture of bows and the retching of arrows.  We will learn to make

spears and javelins."  Worf looked over the heads of his audience,

seeing not a small sub brigade but a vast army of the future that would

defend the planet against any invasion and, ultimately, bring the

Natives back to the course of their own natural development.  Would

Worf of the House of Mogh be hailed as the father of their entire

civilization?



Worf foresaw a stockpile of preindustrial weapons for the immediate

future, followed by replicated weapons or even manufactured guns, if

need be; surely O'Brien could set up a machine shop.  After all, in the

mists of antiquity, pre technological Klingon guerrilla warriors from

mud hut villages had gunsmithed cheap knockoffs of the machine guns

used by their more advanced neighbors during the Wars of First

Expansion.



The memory sparked another thought for Commander Worf.  "We must begin

designing and constructing spring traps and death pits against the

invaders.  Owena-da will work with O'Brien.  You have already learned

to forage food in the forests, is that correct?"



"Yes, Commander Worf."  Tivva-ma made a strange gesture that Worf

thought must be a Sierra Bravo version of a reverence or curtsy.



"Then you must learn now how to hunt, how to take fish from the rivers,

how to grow grain in the fields.  You must look not just to winning a

battle or two but to winning the war."  Remembering a line he had used

before, he added, "You must feed the army and also the civilians... our

battle is to plant crops, and the enemy is time."



Worf began to tremble; whether it was in anticipation of glorious

victory or the heady awareness of his own growing political importance,

he could not say.  But Captain Sisko had silently joined the group and

stood now gazing cryptically at the commander from a tree shadow on

Worf's right flank.  Worf made a mental note: O'Brien will have to

develop a method of extracting the poisons from the planetary food; our

own enemy is time as well, time until the Defiant returns to orbit and

can beam down more supplies.



"We fight for victory," said Worf, his voice growing naturally quieter.

Though a Klingon, he knew his men needed to hear quiet confidence now,

not loud boasts.  "We fight for honor.  We fight--for survival.  We

cannot go back to the old way of life.  There will be no more tech, new

or old, but what we make ourselves.  There will be no attack or defense

but what comes from our own sweat and takes from us our own blood.



"But we shall survive... and not as children, but as men and women,

warriors and growers, builders, not merely finders and players.  We

will make our lives.  We will slaughter our enemies and pile their

skulls to the sky for a memorial, but we will build upon that pyramid a

world of civilization and progress.  And we will touch the stars, my

warriors.  We will join with the stars."



The silence beat at Worfs ears like a drum.  Chief O'Brien, Quark, and

Constable Odo had joined Captain Sisko in the shadows.  Only Worf stood

in the sunlight near the camouflaged Cardassian skimmer, addressing his

troops with as much sense of history, he believed, as ever did the

first Kahless.



Feeling an unexpected shiver of premonition and hubris, Worf stepped

down from the pitcher's mound and joined his comrades under the

spreading, blue tree...



