0

PRELUDE

THIRTY YEARS AGO

"MY LORD, what may I bring you from our Proph-
ets?" Sister Winn asked, as Gul Ragat and his
Cardassian friends and colleagues roared with
laughter at her impishness.
    "From your Prophets?" echoed another young
Cardassian, a gul in the Cardassian land forces.
The boy--Akkat, Sister Winn remembered--wore
a sneer that he obviously practiced before a mirror.
His voice held a nasal quality found to a lesser
extent in most Cardassians--probably a species
trait--but grating to Bajoran ears nevertheless.
    "Yes, Lord Akkat," said the priestess, bowing
low to the boy who was only a little more than half
her age. "The Prophets offer peace and hope to all,
even Cardassians."
    The council room was dim and cool, with harsh
dark-wood chairs surrounding a severe table. Com-
munications equipment, viewers, touch pads
adorned the place settings, along with a chalice of
Kanar for each man.
    There were four other Cardassian lords and
overlords around the table, including Winn's own
master, Gul Ragat. They all laughed at her last
statement, and Gul Dukat, master of Terok Nor
and one of the governors of Bajor Province, proba-
bly in line to succeed Legate Migar as prefect of all
Bajor, nudged the young colonel. "Are you going to
allow a Bajoran priestess to speak to you that way?
Offering you leftover blessings from her gods--
after the Bajorans take what they want?"
    If Akkat was haughty before, he was positively
livid now. He leapt to his feet, knocking over the
heavy Cardassian-style chair. His facial ridges
stood out stark and white... an ominous omen.
    Sister Winn was used to such Cardassian out-
bursts, and she knew what she had to do. She had
survived most of her adult life under Cardassian
occupation, and she was no fool. Winn fell to her
knees, bowing until her face was pressed against
the floor. "Please, My Lord! I meant nothing by it.
I spoke in error, and I beg your indulgence."
    Akkat pushed his way around the table, teeth
clenched; he even shoved Gul Ragat out of his way
in his rage--a bad move, as the gul, though just as
young, outranked him by quite a margin of social
status. "Wretched beast! Get up off the floor and
accept your correction like a--like a Cardassian
child would!"
    But the priestess's own master rose, now an-
noyed at Akkat for pushing him. "Akkat!" he
shouted, deliberately ignoring the lesser soul's title
(a serious insult in Cardassia). "Don't touch my
servants! Take your hands away; if you want to
damage property, damage your own! I still have use
for mine."
    Ignoring the warning, Akkat swung his open
hand at Winn's face. She did not try to shield
herself from the blow; she was too canny froin
years of experience. Instead, the priestess twisted
her head in time with the blow to minimize impact,
then allowed herself to fall in the same direction,
exaggerating the force. Then she covered her face
with her arm and again begged forbearance.
    Gul Akkat looked uncertainly at his colleagues,
aware he had just struck a woman--a Bajoran
woman, to be sure, but even so. When Gul Dukat
himself turned an angry gaze at the young gul and
said, "A Cardassian does not lose his temper
around Bajorans," Akkat slunk back to his seat, his
face flushed with embarassment.
    Still stretched out on the floor, Sister Winn felt
several moments of triumph that she had finally
goaded the weakest Cardassian into humiliating
himself. She had subtly taunted him for several
minutes: nothing overt enough to truly give him
cause to strike her (in which case, the others would
have ignored the incident), but sufficient needling
that he lost control at the most innocuous of
statements. Then Winn felt a twinge of her own
conscience; she tried to tell herself that it was a
"strategic" maneuver, trying to make the lords and
overlords lose confidence in one of their own. But
that was a lie: it was a petty, vindictive act and not
in keeping with the teaching of the Prophets.
    She rose to her knees, bowed again to Lord
Akkat, and said, "I humbly beseech your pardon
for the disrespect I have shown." But she was not
talking to the young pup ofa Cardassian; in Winn's
heart, the words were directed skyward, to those
who heard even the quietest heartfelt prayer.
    The rest of the meeting proceeded routinely.
There were no secrets discussed, and the lords took
no precautions against any of the servants, includ-
ing Sister Winn, listening in. The matters were run-
of-the~mill administrative reports and the issuance
of standing orders that were already available over
the subspace newsmitters anyway. It was more a
formal event, held so that four guls and the legate
could set themselves aside as the administrative
(and military) leaders of the subcontinent.
    In fact, it was quite an honor that Gul Ragat was
even allowed to attend, as he excitedly told Winn
during a break, walking alone in Legate Migar's
garden with only a "personal priestess" in attend-
ance. "Winn, you have no idea how extraordinary
it is for a mere provincial subgovernor to be
invited to Legate Migar's for the monthly bulletin-
tea!"
    "I know it is a very great honor for your lord-
ship," said the priestess.
    "A great honor, indeed." The young gul turned
serious for a moment. "I'm afraid it's too great an
honor, Sister Winn."
 "Oh, surely not, My Lord!"
    "Relax, Winn. We're alone now." The boy
turned an astute face to the priestess, who felt the
most absurd impulse to comfort the lad. "I'm not
disparaging my family; my lineage is if anything
even grander than that of Legate Migar himself...
and the old man knows it. But since when does the
provincial subgovernor of Shakarri and Belshakar-
ri rate an invitation to the bulletin-tea?"
    Winn thought for a moment; the child had a
point, not that she particularly cared much about
Cardassian rules of protocol. "Perhaps they are
grooming M'Lord for a promotion?"
    Gul Ragat grinned and chuckled, shaking his
head. "It's called a grant of honors, not a promo-
tion! Silly girl. But I understood what you meant,
and I confess that I've been thinking the same
thought myself... and damning myself for being
an ambitious man even for thinking it."
    Sister Winn said nothing. The garden was too
tight, too martial, as were most Cardassian arti-
facts. The trees were planted too close together, like
soldiers in ranks, and the paths were straight as
Cardassian roads, intersecting with each other at
precisely defined angles that one could see for
many steps ahead. Sister Winn preferred either the
soothingly planned garden of the Kai, which she
had seen only once in person but had walked often
in her dreams, or the rambling, meandering foot-
paths of the woods outside her native village.
    Gul Ragat stopped and sat upon a stone bench,
watching the Fountain of Discipline: the spigots
fired in bursts like a weapon, launching a cylinder
of water into the air, arching over the hexagonal
plaza to land squarely in a small catch-basin on the
other side. Sister Winn did not, of course, sit
beside the gul; it would have surprised him and
made him uncomfortable... though he would
not have punished her for it.
    He might also have taken the wrong idea. One
night, he had somewhat drunkenly explored his
options with Sister Winn, but she made it clear (by
"failing to understand" his advances) that she may
be his servant, but she was not his toy. She much
preferred somewhat an air of formality, to ensure
the two did not get too close; Sister Winn had no
illusions about their relationship, the conquered to
the victor.
    "Winn, I'm..." The gul trailed off; Sister Winn
did not prompt him--it wasn't her place, and she
hoped he wouldn't decide to confide in her anyway.
"Winn," he said again, "I'm afraid." "Afraid, My Lord?"
    "Afraid of the added responsibility. Afraid of
what we're doingre" Gul Ragat froze in midsen-
tence, looking around himself in an almost comical
paranoia. "Sister Winn, do the Prophets truly
exist?"
    "I have spoken with them frequently, My Lord."
Ragat did not ask whether they answered her when
she spoke.
    "Winn, I'm--afraid for the soul of Cardassia,
what this occupation is doing to us. I know Akkat;
we go way back."
    He g going to tell me what a good person he is,
thought the priestess with amusement.
    "Winn, Akkat is such a good man! I know you
feel hurt and humiliated by what he did, striking
you like that for no reason. You're confused, and
you're angry--furious at us! No, don't deny it; I
know how you Bajorans feel about this occupation.
And to tell the truth, I even understand it. There's
no heavenly reason why Cardassians are any better
or superior to you people. I understand you com-
pletely."
    Sister Winn said nothing, not trusting her self-
control. She decided it was politic to bow her head;
she also put her sleeves together and savagely
gripped one hand in the other to prevent them
moving of their own accord where they wanted to
go. Oh, Prophets of Bajor, please forgive and take
from me my violent impulsest
    "But it's this damned military thing," continued
the young gul, little aware of the emotions he was
stirring in the normally placid Sister Winn. "It
warps us, makes us the sort who--who strike an
old woman because she reminds us of how uncom-
fortable we feel, trying to civilize the Bajorans by
force... trying to force our civilization upon the
Bajoran civilization, I should say."
    Winn seized upon the phrase "old woman,"
successfully translating her homicidal feelings into
mere indignation that a woman in her thirties
would be called "old" by this young aristocratic
snot. She thanked the Prophets for their gift from
the mouth of Gul Ragat.
    "Oh, I'm blathering. Let's return; Legate Migar
probably wants to start the meeting again, and I
don't want to be the last man back." He flashed her
a boyish grin. "Could give him second thoughts
about my promotion, what?"

PRESENT DAY

Kai Winn awoke in her bed, thirty years after the
dream that had seemed so strong, so real. Am I that
old, she asked herself, that I live in ancient memory
instead of the present? Tomorrow is an important
day, and I must rest.
    The Kai rolled over, and was, thank the Proph-
ets, dreamless for the rest of the night.

0

CHAPTER
        1

CAPTAIN BENJAMIN SISKO stood in room 77A of the
All Prophets Council chambers on Bajor, facing
Kai Winn and surrounded by sixty-six vedeks and
conciliators and priests and rotaries and even an
audience circumnavigating the viewing stage above
the council floor. The crowd mobbed in from the
left, circled the viewing stage, and exited on the
opposite side, where their prayer tokens were col-
lected. Major Kira Nerys stood next to the captain.
As they had arranged, Kira spoke first.
    "Most Gracious Kai," said Kira, "the Federa-
tion offers an... assignment of Deep Space Nine
on a temporary basis, to Bajoran command."
    Kai Winn frowned in the virtual council cham-
bers, smoothing her plain frock. She pulled at one
finger, carefully framing her reply in the most
diplomatic terms possible. Although it was Kira
who had spoken, she addressed her reply to Cap-
tain Sisko. "If the station remains under Federa-
tion control, Emissary, yet Shakar or some other
member of the council becomes its governor,
doesn't that mean we have accepted the authority
of the Federation over Bajor?"
    Damn her. Sisko--the "Emissary of the
Prophets"---was careful to keep his poker face, but
the Kai had a point. Tricky diplomacy was re.-
quired not to offend the Bajorans. "The United
Federation of Planets most certainly does not claim
hegemony over Bajor, the councit~ or any vedek or
political leader who might assume temporary con-
trol of the stafford."
    Kai Wi~m shook her head; "more in sorrow than
anger," quoted Sisko silently to himsetfi "Emis-
sary," she sa~d, "if we control the station only
subject to approval of our actions by the Federa-
tion Council, then we are nothing but puppets of
the Federation." She put her hand over her mouth
as if she had accidentally let slip an indiscretion.
Good acting job, thought Sisko glumly. Kai Winn
never did artything by accident. "I beg your par~
don .... Perhaps it would be better to say we
would be nothing but--political subsidiaries of the
Federation. Rather like a colony or a protectorate."
    Sisko took a deep breath. Winn had negotiated
his back right up against a wall: he was authorized
by the Federation Council to offer one further
step... then that was it; if Kai Winn and the other
vedeks didn't accept that offer, negotiations were at
an end.
    "The Federation is prepared to forgo the normal
review process for turnovers of this sort in lieu of
an explicit timeline of events, culminating with a
final evaluation."
    "You won't be looking over our shoulders? Emis-
saw, how kind of you to make such an offer."
    "No reviews until the final evaluation, Kai,"
added IGra, bobbing her head rapidly~
    "But does the Emissary have the diplomatic
authority to make such an offer?"
    "I do," Sisko said. "And the Federation feels that
with tensions between us and the Cardassians in
abeyance for the mortlent, this would be an excel-
lent time for such an experimenW'
    "How pleasant to carry on such productive nego-
tiations." Kai Winn smiled broadly. She~ going to
take it, thought Sisko. And he was right: "I, too, am
authorized by a vote of the leading vedeks of each
party in the council to agree to the Federation
offer~on a temporary basis, of course, subject to
our own evaluation of the ongoing process."
    Fancy footwork on first base to confuse the pitch-
er, thought Sisko with a simile. But the extra escape
clause allowing Bajor to terminate the agreement
early would not substantially alter the final propo-
sal; the captain was certain the Federation Council
would approve. "Then we have agreement, Kai
Winn, Members of the Council. In nine days, you
will send up a governor to assume control of Deep
Space Nine for a period of sixty days... which
may be extended indefinitely, provided both par-
ties agree."
    The Kai's eyes flickered toward First Minister
Shakar when Sisko mentioned "governor." An ex-
cellent choice, thought the captain. Major Kira's
only fear had been that Winn would try to take the
position herself. For obvious reasons having little
to do with the future of Bajor, Kira was quite
pleased with the prospect of once again working
under her old Resistance commander... and cur-
rent romantic interest.
    Before the final ceremony could begin, they were
interrupted by the a chime of a cornbadge. Sisko
tapped his combadge as discreetly as possible.
    "Captain," Worf said, "My apologies for inter-
rupting. But there is an urgent message for you
from Starfleet. You are needed on Deep Space Nine
at once."
    "This had better be good," Sisko said to Worf
under his breath. He was not looking forward to
the explanations and apologies he'd have to give
the council.

    Back on the station, Kira was in no way pleased
with the interruption from Starfleet. "Captain,
couldn't whatever this message is have waited until
we finished the negotiations or at least--"
    "Let's see what Starfleet wants, Major. If it
wasn't worth it, we'll soon know," Sisko said. As he
spoke, he read down the text of the message on the
padd that had been handed to him the moment he
stepped into Ops.
    "Sir, Kai Winn and the vedeks are going to be
very upset. We walked right out on a meeting of the
Council of All Prophets .... That's likere"
    "Apparently a group of renegade Cardassians
have invaded a star system on the edge of the
Federation," Sisko said bluntly. "I think even Kai
Winn and the vedeks will understand the urgency
of the situation."
    Kira froze in midsentence as the implication
sank through her annoyance and humiliation and
crash-landed on her comprehension circuits. If the
Cardassians, any Cardassians, were starting a ma-
jor offensive, the Federation was in grave danger,
indeed--as was Bajor, needless to say. The Cardas-
sians had never forgotten the embarrassment of
Shakar and his compatriots forcing them off the
only planet they never quite managed to subdue.
  "How close?" she asked.
    "Not very close, Major," said Worf, hovering
nearby--as usual when the subject is war, thought
Kira. "The Cardassians have invaded the system
around Sierra-Bravo 112, the active half of the
binary star system that includes the neutron star
Stirnis."
    The captain shook his head. "I was afraid of
something like this; that's why I fought like the
devil against this turnover of DS9 ....At least
right at this moment."
    "Oh? And why is that?" She didn't mean it to
sound quite so frosty; it was almost an autonomic
reaction.
  "I mean no slur against Bajor, Kira."
    "I'm only concerned," he continued, "about the
timing. While Starfleet is claiming that these Car-
dassians are renegades, disavowed by their central
command, there could well be more to this. At the
moment, I think it's a terrible idea to remove the
Federation presence here."
    "Radiation readings," said Dax, stepping for-
ward from her science station, "in the vicinity of
Sierra-Bravo 112 indicate a technological civiliza-
tion on the second planet from the star, but the
Federation long-range survey ship didn't pick up
any subspace transmissions or warp signatures."
  "Prime Directive, Old Man?" asked Sisko.
    "Yes, Benjamin, I'm sure the Prime Directive
would apply."
    "Benjamin," continued Dax, "There are no ene-
my ships anywhere near here and a quarter of the
Klingon fleet is on standby in case anything nasty
comes out of the wormhole. Now is as good a time
as any for the turnover--much as I hate to leave."
    "Perhaps you're right," allowed Captain Sisko.
"But in any case it's not an option: gentlemen, we
have been ordered by Admiral Baang to at least
investigate SB- 112 .... Investigate, not necessarily
to act upon what we see. That, at least, Starfleet
leaves to my discretion."
 KJra's blood leapt in response to the simple
announcement--stop! It's just another mission, it's
nothing! But her pulse raced regardless. The admir-
al had downplayed the potential for fighting, but
Kira somehow knew the rumor would turn out to
be true, and they would have no choice but to
intervene. And by the Prophets, I want to be on that
job. She tr/ed to tell herself it was only to avoid
tedious duty during the turnover... or even (a
dark thought) to avoid the inevitable deep, mean-
ingful discussion with Shakar about where they
were headed--they, as in They.
    But she was too honest to deny what she knew:
she had killed Cardassians for so long--her whole
adult life and much of her youth--that she had
become accustomed to blood. She fought the
dreams every waking moment and gave in to them
at night... slinking once again through the black
dark with disruptor rifle in arms, approaching the
Cardassian sentry as quiet as a meurik, and "taking
him out" (such euphemisms for perverse joy) with
a k-bar knife.
    Kira smiled, remembering grim and glorious
days in the Shakaar resistance cell. "I can see where
you're going to need someone like me, Captain."
To go to battle again--against Cardassian aggres-
sion-was surely enough to overcome her con-
flicted desire to be with Shakar during his moment
of triumph. Besides, she thought, putting a pious
spin, he'll be proud of my role in a mission like this.
It would mark the first time she went to war with
Cardassian slavers on her own, without Shakar.
    Sisko stopped, turning to gaze in seeming sereni-
ty upon the assembled senior crew, Kira in particu-
lar. "And that is why I am disappointed to have to
leave you behind, Major."
  "What?" She blinked, not understanding.
    "You are of course a very good choice for this
type of job, but you are the only person who can
smooth the inevitably choppy waters of the turn-
over of Deep Space Nine to the Bajoran govern-
ment."
  "But I--"
    "Major Kira, when First Minister Shakar ar-
rives-or whoever is sent by the council--I cannot
give him an executive officer who is a member of
Starfleet; Kai Winn would never allow it. She's
already as nervous as a cat that this is a conspir-
acy to take away Bajor's independence. There are
only two people on the station she almost
trusts... and one of us, Major, has to command
the Defiant."
    Captain Sisko turned and ascended to his imper-
ial roost, leaving behind a Bajoran major with her
mouth opening and closing wordlessly. But... I
shouM be in charge of the Cardassian operation!
Who else could Alas, when Kira turned for moral
support to the rest of the Ops crew, they had all
returned to their ongoing task to ready the station
for the turnover.
    Kira blew a breath through her clenched teeth.
"Aye, sir," she said belatedly and angrily sat at her
station. Don't be such a whiner, she berated herself;
perhaps it's a hidden blessing from the Prophets.
Leaving Kira as executive officer of the station not
only provided stability, it would mean sixty days of
face-to-face contact in a relationship that already
appeared to be drifting toward the shoals of ne-
glect. She smiled, wondering what it would be like
to once again take orders from the most brilliant
leader she had ever known.

0

CHAPTER  2

Two DAYS flickered past in the wink of an eye, but
not without terrible yet vague foreshadowings of
doom in Odo's imagination. The thought that he
would probably be kept on by the Bajorans for a
week or two, to facilitate in the turnover, before
ultimately being let go, didn't calm him; just the
reverse: if he couldn't stay on Deep Space Nine with
Major Kira--and Kai Winn would never agree to
any but a security officer who was Bajoran in
descent as well as in name--Odo would much
rather leave with Captain Sisko and these other
people he had come to care for; far better a strange
posting with my friends.
    Odo would not admit it to himself except in the
darkest moments of contemplation in his bucket,
but he was frightened. Despite the physical appear-
ance of a fully grown man, Odo was, in the long
and short, less than fifteen years old; insecurity
seized him, just as it had eight years earlier, when
the Cardassians left and handed the station over to
the unknown quantity of "The Federation." Odo
felt as if he were learning the basic shapes all over
again: cube, tetrahedron, pyramid, cylinder.
    There was terribly much to do... so many
things that could only be taken care of by Odo
himself--and others requiring the personal atten-
tion of the captain or Dax or Worf--that departure
on the Defiant to investigate the reports of Cardas-
sian boojums was delayed for two days.
    When at last everyone who was anyone (except
for Kira) boarded the ship and prepared to cast off,
leaving the rest of the packing-up and shipping-off
to enlisted crew and sundry ensigns and "jaygees,"
Odo found himself staring out the window of the
Defiant at the cold, silent station outside, as if it
might be the last time he would ever see it again. As
well it might, he told himself. Now stop dithering
and pull yourself together. They would probably be
returning, not to Deep Space Nine, but to another
starbase and a detailing officer for new assign-
ments... unless, against all odds, the Bajorans
decided they didn't want the station after all, and
they gave it back in sixty days. (If the Federation
took it back, over Bajoran wishes, Odo decided
glumly, it would cause a quadrantwide diplomatic
incident.)
    In the four years Odo had known the captain, he
had learned to read the man, and Sisko was, if
anything, even more agitated than the constable.
Captain Sisko paced on the bridge, something he
never did, and he snarled at Dax when the lieuten-
ant commander tried to tell him what a great job
he'd done as CO on the station. "You're already
writing my obituary," said the captain quietlyre
not quietly enough. He sat in his command chair
with a loud thump.
    Dax took the drastic events with more equanimi-
ty, which didn't surprise Odo in the least; in all her
lifetimes, she must have been uprooted and sent to
Outer Nowhere more times than she could count.
She probably no longer even felt nervous or lonely
in new places. Or perhaps she~ just better at hiding
her feelings, he thought. But Dr. Bashir sat white-
faced and white-knuckled in the supernumerary
jump seat; Deep Space Nine, Odo knew, had been
Bashir's very first posting after leaving Starfleet
Academy--his first and only Starfleet home. He
was as nervous as a Ferengi on trial about what
might lie ahead--not on Sierra-Bravo, not for
Deep Space Nine, but in his own life and career.
Worf and Chief O'Brien were stoical; but then, they
had only recently arrived from some Starfleet ship,
and Worf would never show his nervousness any-
way. The chief will at least bring his family along,
the constable realized.
    Curiously enough, Odo decided he would even
miss Quark. Well... perhaps a little; I'll miss the
relentless games and contests--games I always
won. But Odo sighed, realizing he was only fooling
himself; over many years and too many near-death
experiences to count, he had come to hold a
grudging respect for that one particular Ferengi.
And he suspected that Quark, who would be even
more reluctant to admit it to himself, would miss
Odo every bit as much.
    Commander Dax ran through the departure
checklist: "Check balast .... Nay systems on-line
and operational .... Weapons and shields within
operational capacities .... Level-three diagnostics
nominal .... Doctor? Doctor Bashir? Defiant
bridge to Doctor Bashir." The doctor jumped up
with a strangled noise and darted to the nearest
console. "Infirmary--I mean, sickbay diagnostics
nominal; no problems detected."
    Odo listened to the pulse of departure, all the
routine tasks that junior officers struggled over, but
which the senior crew now aboard could do in their
sleep. The sounds were familiar, not quite as com-
forting as reading the daily incident reports in his
security office, but better than standing and staring
out the porthole.
    "Dax," began the captain, "what have you found
out about Sierra-Bravo 112 from the planetary
database?"
    "Hm? Oh, it's a six-planet system, but only 112-
II is of any real interest. The inner planet is a
burned-out hulk of nickle-iron; the outer four are
gas giants.
    "112-II has a technological civilization at least
capable of broad-spectrum EM transmission ....
No warp signatures detected in the three sweeps on
ultra-long-range scanners, but that was eighty years
ago. Spectroscopic analysis indicates it's extraordi-
narily rich in latinum, selenium, and trilithium-
disulphite."
    Odo interrupted. "Which cannot be easily sepa-
rated into dilithium, as I recall."
    "On the nose, Constable." Dax continued.
"There are atmospheric traces of cyanide, so
there's probably some cyanide compound in the
local life-forms."
    "Doctor Bashir," queried the captain, "should
we have to beam down, can you protect the away
team from the level of cyanide in the atmosphere?
And can we eat the local food?"
    Odo watched the doctor poke at his console,
transferring Dax's data entry to his own station.
"Well, yes and no, sir: yes, a simple hypospray can
counter the level of poison residue on the atmos-
pheric dust, but no, we surely cannot eat the local
food."
    "Then it's com-rations all the way," said Sisko
with a smile.
    There was a sudden and urgent pounding on the
airlock door; everybody on the bridge jumped and
stared except for the captain. Sisko closed his eyes
and let his head fall back on his command chair.
"Who is that rapping at my chamber door?" He
did not sound pleased that his final departure from
the station had been marred by such an unseemly
occurrence.
    Worf looked back and forth, twice, between
Sisko and the door; the infernal racket started up
again, sounding to Odo as if some persistent neigh-
bor were beating on the airlock with a battering
ram. Odo moved to the airlock and cycled it open.
    Standing before him was an aggrieved and very
noisy Quark. "Don't tell me you simply forgot to
let me in on the departure time," whined the
Ferengi.
    "Forgot? Quark, I never forget anything. Let me
assure you, the snub was quite deliberate."
    "Captain--I appeal to you in the name of... of
kindly benevolence. These people who are taking
the station over are absolutely impossible. They
haven't the first idea of how a free market should
work--believe me, I know. I've tried to open a
franchise on Bajor for the past--"
    "You mean," interrupted Constable Odo, inter-
preting for the captain, "you've been trying to
palm off your stolen merchandise, but the Bajorans
are too moral and ethical to deal in contraband."
Odo crouched low to stare directly into Quark's
eyes; he was gratified to see the felonious Ferengi
lose his train of thought.
    But Quark quickly rallied. "Not in the least,
Captain Sisko. I have legitimate business interests
in the sector you're headed toward .... "
    Odo was on a roll; Quark couldn't seem to open
his mouth without convicting himself. "Really,
 Quark? And just how do you know where we're
 headed? That information is classified."
    The Ferengi managed to look innocently sur-
prised. "Aren't you going to the binary pair of the
neutron star Stirnis? I heard through the grape-
vine--"
    "There is no grapevine, Quark; the information
was classified. And I suppose you're going to deny
tapping into the station computers?"
    "Odo! That would be illegal." Quark grinned,
exposing a full, snaggly set of freshly sharpened
teeth. "Captain, I just want to come along with
you. I can't stand all this... religion." He shud-
dered, glancing back over his shoulder.
    Odo stretched both hands out and gripped the
sides of the airlock door, expanding his arms into a
nice imitation of a thorny thicket. "Captain, I
strongly advise against allowing this... unin-
dicted co-conspirator to accompany us."
    Dax wormed her way past an exasperated Worf
and stood next to the constable. "Oh, come now,
Odo. Would you rather leave this unindicted co-
conspirator alone on the station to work his magic
while you're gone for at least two weeks?"
    Odo said nothing at first; then the full horror of
the lieutenant commander's point became clear to
him. Quark, alone on the station, with nothing but
Bajoran religious figures to control him ....Quark
running amok.
 "I believe Dax has you there, Constable," said
the captain; he almost sounded as though he were
smirking. "The real question is, are you selfish
enough to wish Quark on the rest of the station just
so you, personally, won't have to deal with him?"
    The blow slid home like the well-aimed thrust of
a Klingon d'k tahg. "No, I... I suppose I'm not,"
mumbled Odo, feeling thrice a fool, three times
over. Glumly, he retracted his thickets; after a
moment spent in a glaring contest with Quark, Odo
stepped aside and allowed the Ferengi to enter.
    "Thank you," said Quark, with a shirty sort of
exaggerated politeness; he rolled his eyes as he
passed the constable. "Really, imagine trying to
hog all that latinum for yourselves."
    It took a moment to sink in. "Latinurn? Quark,
how did you know about the latinum? You did
break into the Federation planetary database!
That's a class-two felony ....Captain, I must
insist--"
    "Odo, Odo, Odo," said Quark, shaking his head
sadly. "I'm shocked, shocked that you have never
heard the Ferengi legends of, ah, the Grand Planet
of Latinum, fabled in Ferengi lore. Have you?"
    "No, Quark," said the constable, curling his lip,
so close, he could almost taste the charge... and
the Ferengi was in danger of slithering away again.
"I've never heard of a 'Grand Planet of Latinum,'
and neither have you! There is no such legend."
    The Ferengi made a grand theatrical gesture.
"Why, every Ferengi knows it lies in, why, right
 there in Sierra-Bravo 112. When I heard where you
 were going, I just knew I had to explore... for
 Ferenginar--for the Grand Nagus, not for myself."
     "Every Ferengi?' demanded Odo, making him-
 self bigger. "So if I were to ask, say, Nog--"
    "Ah, youth! Young Ferengi are so poorly edu-
cated these days, and I'm afraid my ignorant neph-
ew is even less assiduous about it than most."
    Odo opened and closed his mouth, feeling as a
starving solid must feel when food is dangled, then
snatched cruelly away. But once again, Quark had
beaten the charge. The constable snorted and
turned away, frustrated.
    "All aboard," sang out Chief O'Brien; it was
evidently some obscure Federation reference, and
Odo didn't catch it. Snorting heavily, Worf poked
at the door panel with a meaty forefinger, and the
airlock slid shut.
    "Are we all done now?" inquired Captain Sisko,
looking directly at the constable.
    "I, uh, don't think there will be any more inter-
ruptions," muttered Odo, still struggling to find the
flaw in Quark's ridiculous fabrication. Great Plan-
et of Latinum!
    "Thank you. Cast off, Old Man; let's really wring
out this beautiful piece of machinery. Who knows?
It may be our last time."
    With a wistful-sounding "aye, aye," Dax ran the
final launch checklist, detached the Defiant from
her moorings, turned a sharp 130 degrees, and
headed off toward the star system known onty as
Sierra-Bravo 112. Odo watched Quark as if the
Ferengi might shoplift a warp coil.

    The days crawled with exaggerated slowness for
Major Kira Nerys as she nervously awaited Sha-
kar's arrival. She paced the long, crowded corridors
in the habitat ring, sidestepping the hundreds of
boxes and antigray dollies, dancing around civilian
and Starfleet movers, and occasionally studying
some transitioning resident's requisition without
really seeing what she saw. She really had too much
to do herself to waste time wandering the rest of
the station; every security code and classified pro-
gram in Ops had to be either changed to Bajoran
standards or encrypted and hidden away, in case
the "temporary" turnover really did turn out to be
temporary.
    Secretly, in her heart, Kira suspected that was
the most likely outcome. I guess I really don't think
we're quite ready yet, she thought, feeling strangely
ambivalent where she ought to feel either patriotic
pride in Bajor's accomplishments or burning
shame at the places where they fell short. But
having sat through more than her share of Bajoran
council meetings and seen, firsthand, the astonish-
ing acrimony over the slightest miscommunication
or dispute, she was sure the Federation had been
wise to slip in the sixty-day escape clause.
    Am I just being an unpatriotic snob? What,
Bajor's not "good enough" because we're not the
wonderous, omnipotent FEDERATION? The
thought truly bothered her, as did what it implied
about her lack of confidence in Shakar, but there it
was with all its humiliating consequences: I truly
believe we're just not ready and this whole turnover
is going to be a fiasco.
    What was worse, Kira was ninety percent certain
that Kai Winn was setting Shakar up to fail; and
the Kai would use his so-called "failure" as a
hammer to bludgeon him out of his post as First
Minister. "Beware, Shakar; Winn has always
wanted exclusive power in the hands of the ve~
deks," spoke Kira into a letter log she planned to
send down to Shakar before he departed for the
station.
    But she knew it was to no avail; if Winn offered
the governorship to Shakar, there was no way he
could refuse it without appearing weak and losing
face. That, too, might cost him his ministerial rank.
Shakar would just have to take his chances; maybe,
against all the odds, he could succeed so well that
the turnover would become permanent.
    Kira finished the letter log and encrypted it using
the special, one-way key code she and Shakar used.
(It was definitely the sort of undiplomatic missive
one didn't want falling into the "wrong hands,"
especially the Council of Vedeks.) Then she sent it
with a request for receipt confirmation. The major
waited for fifteen minutes near the console, but
there was no friendly double beep; evidently, Sha-
kar was not available to hear it right away.
 Odo's office was immaculate, of course; he had
not packed up anything, since there was still a
reasonable chance that the Bajorans would keep
him on as internal security officer, or "constable."
Kira had made a persuasive case that Odo could
enforce Bajoran social-religious law as easily as he
could Federation law... or for that matter, the
harsh Cardassian legislative code of Terek Nor,
though she still wasn't quite sure he appreciated
her efforts. Still, because it was a good time to do
it--Captain Sisko would need a full legal account-
ing for his final outprocessing report--Kira
wanted to perform a complete inventory of all
cases handled, their dispositions, active and on-
going investigations, informant lists, and profiles
of "suspicious characters," as Odo termed them
(by whatever arcane methods he used to arrive at
that determination). Odo would have done it him-
self, of course; it was just the sort of nitpicky thing
that Odo loved and the major detested. But he was
away on the Defiant, and the task fell to her.
    She started setting up the query criteria for the
computer, similar to an engineering diagnostic
scan but for security office actions rather than
computer responses. She yawned several times...
and then blinked her eyes, confused, feeling the
warm, smooth press of Odo's desk against her
cheek. It took Kira several seconds to realize she
had actually fallen asleep at her task, and more
than an hour had passed.
    Jumping up with a confused start, she stared
wildly around; the computer beeped, and Kira
 realized that was what had awakened her in the first
 place. "Attention Major Kira," said the smooth
 female voice, "runabout from Bajor docking at
 Docking Bay Four, carrying the new governor of
 Deep Space Nine."
    "Shakar!" So that~ why he never acknowledged
my message; he was already en route. Kira headed
for the door but had to stop halfway and squat onto
her hams to avoid passing out. When her blood
pressure climbed back to "awake" level, she jogged
to the nearest turbolift, which hauled her out to the
habitat ring, up the pylon, and into the docking
bay. She straightened her uniform and only belat-
edly realized that she was the only person in the
reception area not in dress uniform. When the huge
airlock door rolled aside on its geared teeth, she felt
a flush of embarrassment creep up her neck to her
cheeks and nose ridges. If only she hadn't stupidly
fallen asleep, she could have greeted the First
Minister with the proper ritual. Her cheek still felt
creased from Odo's desk.
    The inner airlock and the door of the runabout
rolled back simultaneously in opposite directions,
and a mob of diplomatic-looking Bajorans shuffled
out, murmuring ritualized greetings and well-
wishes.
    Then the mob parted, and a large gentteman--a
vedek Kira didn't knowmstepped up to her. "Ma-
jor? May I present the credentials of the new
governor of Deep Space Nine, now called Emis-
sary's Sanctuary."

    The vedek stepped aside, and a small, plump and
frumpy woman stepped forward with grave dignity
and a phony, ingratiating smile. "Hello, my child,"
said Kai Winn, beaming. "May the peace of the
Prophets be with you always."
    Kira forgot every word of the wonderful speech
she had prepared. She stared in horror at her new
boss for the next sixty days... or maybe forever.
"I... !... hi, Kai." Then she flushed even hard-
er. "The, ah, station greets you, my Kai; may the
peace of the Prophets be on you. Be with you. This
is so... so--"
    "Unexpected?" suggested Kai Winn with a
toothy smile. It wasn't exactly the word Major Kira
had in mind.

0

CHAPTER
       3

THIS IS a bad dream, thought Major Kira. Any
minute now, I'll wake up and--
    Kira sat up suddenly in bed, head spinning like a
gyroscopic stabilizing unit. She had been having a
nightmare: Kai Winn fired everybody in Deep
Space Nine, even the Bajorans, and replaced them
with corpses and monsters reanimated by black
magic.
    The reality wasn't much different, except instead
of the walking dead, the Kai was in the process of
replacing all the longtime administrative personnel
on the station with her own cadre... what Kira
insisted upon thinking of as the Kai's "toadies."
Although the top officers of Deep Space Nine were
all Starfleet (hence, leaving anyway), the women
and men who did much of the day-to-day "real"
work were civilians: the janitors, dockwallopers,
communications and traffic controllers, ship in-
spectors, security personnel, jailers, tour guides,
lawyers and paralegals, maintenance workers, as-
tronomers, fuel handlers, painters, and polishers.
None of these people was actually required by
Starfleet to leave when the Federation pulled off the
station, and since most of them were Bajorans,
Kira had simply assumed that Kai Winn would
keep them in their jobs.
    No such luck. The Kai arrived in the airlock with
sixteen bags of personal effects and a forty-screen
list of patrons who had supported her bid to jump
from vedek to Kai. Kira stood next to Kai Winn,
still blinking pieces of sleep out of her eyes and
desperately wishing for another coffee, and high-
lighted names on the list as they showed up at the
station. The docking pylons had become huge
traffic snarls, jammed with resentful members of
the newly disemployed shuffling out and down, to
be replaced by smug and fervent boosters of Kai
Winn cycling up and in.
    The major's only consolation, as she broke up
the third fight that morning--a laid-off gardener
with two children tried to plant a geranium in the
skull of a childless, unmarried lay pastor who had
just taken his job--was that Kai Winn was setting
herself up for a spectacular failure .... After
which, with Winn disgraced, surely the Council of
Vedeks would reconsider the only other obvious
candidate for governor... First Minister Shakar.
    The lay pastor's head turned out to be much
harder than his attacker anticipated; Constable
Odo was away on the mission to Sierra-Bravo; Kai
Winn was far too busy to worry about minor
details like assault and battery; the holding cells
were already full to overflowing; and to tell the
truth, Major Kira's sympathies lay entirely with
the gardener. There was nothing to do but scream
at the attacker for several minutes and send him on
his way.
    The major was just pushing the subdued family
man onto the runabout, which would take him
down to Bajor and a long stint in the Office of
Labor Resource Allocation, waiting for another job
opening, when the stupidity of what Kira had been
doing for the past few days hit her square in the
conscience. She turned away, mumbling a long
string of blasphemies against the Kai through
clenched teeth, and discovered herself nose to nose
with Kai Winn.
    The Kai smiled ingratiatingly. "Child, what
troubles you? Do you worry about the justice of
removing so many people, even Bajorans, from
their jobs?"
    "Kai!" Kira stared, dithering between keeping
her job and keeping her sanity; sanity won.
"Well... now that you mention it, yes. Why are
you doing this? What have these people ever done
to deserve..." Kira groped for the word. "To
deserve exile?"
    "Exile? No one is being exiled, child. They are all
welcome to stay." Kai Winn gestured expansively,
evidently including the entire station. "If these
Bajorans wish to begin taking more seriously the
traditions and spiritual beliefs of our people, they
may even be given new jobs here on the Emissary's
Sanctuary."
    "Big of you." Kira struggled in vain to keep the
sarcasm out of her voice.
    Kai Winn shook her head sadly. "They have
made their choices, child; those who choose to live
by the secular law alone, not according to the
ancient wisdom of the Prophets, have only those
rights protected by the law: which means, my child,
l can let them go whenever I decide others should
take their places."
    Isn't there anyplace in the heart of a Kai for
compassion? Kira thought, and for a moment won-
dered if she had spoken aloud. But if Kai Winn
heard anything, she chose not to take offense; she
merely smiled and repeated the justification that
those being "let go" were the purely secular work-
ers who were either not devoted enough to the
Prophets... or at least not public enough in their
devotions and rituals.
    "Fine. Just fine--my Kai." Then I should be the
first one fired, Kira thought as she squeezed her
fists, fingernails stabbing painfully into her palms;
and where the hell were YOU when we 'geculars"
were fighting Cardassia to ,give you back your bloody
world? Fortunately, the major left the latter unsaid.
    "No, Major Kira," said the Kai with the same
smug, irritating smile, "you are still needed. For
reasons i cannot discuss, I must retain you in your
position as executive officer of Emissaryg Sanc-
tuary."
    Kai Winn put her hand on Kira's head, murmur-
ing a blessing; then she walked away, already
having forgotten the major's outburst... and the
very real concerns that sparked it.
    She doesn't understand that the turnover is just a
temporary measure, thought Kira, amazed; does
she really think it~' going to be PERMANENT? The
major's next thought was even more chilling: What
if she has a plan I don't know about?
    The Federation ordered the turnover to see how
well the Bajorans could adapt to running a full-
sized starbase, a "coming-of-age" test to see how
mature Bajor was after decades of Cardassian
occupation. Kira had always told herself that after
the sixty days, everything would revert to normal.
But Kai Winn was a Very Imporant Life-Form in
the Federation recently... and if the Kai abso-
lutely insisted on keeping the station, would Star-
fleet risk an interstellar incident by insisting on
taking it back? In fact, who was to say the Kai
hadn't already worked it out (at a level far above
Captain Sisko) that Bajor would keep the station,
no matter what the agreement read?

    For the first five days of Kai Winn's tenure (of
either sixty days or forever), Kira's anger and
jumpiness increased exponentially. She followed
the Kai around like a pet dakthara, taking dictated
orders and being sent to tell families that their fates
were now in limbo: they were being removed from
positions they had held, quite literally, since Deep
Space Nine had been Terek Nor. By the end of the
transition period, as the last of Kai Winn's "toad-
ies" was ensconced in a job that used to be consid-
ered critical but now was just patronage, Kira had
developed a burning itch to beam the Kai into
empty space. The major had just begun to envision
the infuriating old woman gasping for a lungful of
nonexistent air when she realized what a blasphe-
my even such a thought was. Kira forcibly erased
all violent thoughts from her mind; she was more
religious than she generally liked to let on, even to
herself.
    She sat in her normal chair up in Ops, all alone,
feeling as if she were the one who had moved to a
new duty station; instead, it had been quite literally
everyone else who had abandoned her. The patrons
of the Kai who had been placed on Ops duty
rotation--every one a brother, sister, or an or-
dained sub-vedek--were far too busy "adminis-
trating," whatever that meant, actually to stand
their watches; they never showed up, leaving Kira
to do the work of four people.
    It hardly mattered. The stationwide com-
channel chimed, catching Kira's attention. The
Kai's beaming visage appeared on the main
screen--a prerecorded message, Kira guessed.
"Good day, my children. I know how hard it must
be for you to adjust to your new duties. The ears of
Bajor have heard your heartfelt pleas .... Until
this trying turnover is complete, Bajor, in my
person, hereby bars all ships' traffic with Emis-
sary~ Sanctuary. For the moment, until we stand
aright again, we Bajorans must concern ourselves
only with Bajor; the outside world must wait."
    "Excellent idea," muttered Kira, making sure no
"ears of Bajor" were stretched nearby. "Who needs
the sector, the quadrant, the entire Federation
when we can stick our heads in a hole instead?"
Surely we couldn't be invaded TWICE.t but she
kept the last thought silent.
    "In keeping with this new focus," continued the
smug smile of Bajor, "each must concentrate him
or herself on the inner soul. There are a number of
old customs and laws from the bright days before
the Occupation that must be restored, if Bajor is to
be once again Bajoran. A complete list shall be
available on the main computers and will also be
posted on bulkheads in the Promenade, in accord-
ance with the ancient custom."
    "By All the Prophets," breathed a stunned Kira,
"are we going to revive the old laws?" She stared at
her hands, hands that had about as much chance of
becoming great sculptors as Kai Winn had of
winning a Ferengi beauty contest.
    Frantic, the major poked at the panel before her,
calling up the file. It took a moment to find; she
finally tried "Code of the Prophets," and the list
appeared.
    It wasn't as long as she'd thought it would
be... and it did not include certain archaic pro-
visions that she had feared--praise the Prophets
and the Kai~ mercy/But as Kira read each law,
most of which she had never seen before, her
mouth opened in astonishment. "Rank? Seniority?
Etiquette between boys and girls? This is a military
code." When she reached the detailed passages
about food preparation, incense burning, hair
length--she fingered her own too-short hair, won-
dering whether the executive officer of Emissary's
Sanctuary would be forced to grow locks down to
her shoulders--she sat back, more amused than
angry. "Yeah, good luck, my Kai."
    Kira met Kai Winn on the Promenade. "Child,"
said the Kai, "there is one den of iniquity that I'm
sure you'll be pleased to see converted to more,
shall we say, appropriate uses?"
    Kira thought for a moment, but really, the refer-
ence was clear. "You mean Quark's Place?"
    Winn leaned close. "It's not just that it serves
liquor," she whispered, glancing left and right
conspiratorially; Kira followed suit automatically.
"Child, you cannot be aware of what dreadful
debauchery lurks in the upper chambers."
  "Oh, you mean the..." Kira stopped; if the Kai
thought she hadn't known about the holosuites,
why disabuse her? "You mean the other Dabo
tables?"
    Kai Winn shuddered, marking the sign of the
Prophets upon her ample belly. She took Kira's
arm, clumsily wrenching the major's elbow pain-
fully. "You don't want to know, child; truly, thank
the Prophets you were in ignorance! But now that
the--Ferengi--will be leaving, we must decide
what to do with the space. And we must inspect the
premises now, painful as that may be.
    "Let your moral code guide you," prayed the
Kai, "and walk hand in hand with the Prophets."
    Rom, who was looking after the bar while Quark
himself was mercifully away with the Defiant, in-
stantly busied himself monkeying around with the
glassware. His hands shook, and he clinked the
glasses hard enough to break one, leading Major
Kira to the conclusion Rom was very much aware
that almost everything about Quark's was a viola-
tion of the Code. The Ferengi didn't even glance up
as Kira and the Kai entered, clinching the case, but
Kira decided to keep her mouth shut, hoping the
Kai was too preoccupied to notice.
    "Rom/" shouted Kira, trying to alert him. "Two
root beers. Kai Winn, you have to try this drink/"
    The Kai declined and headed out quickly. Kira
hurried on behind the blithely indifferent Winn as
she bustled out of the erstwhile bar and headed
into the Promenade; the Kai set a straight line for
the turbolift, ignoring the swarms of the devout
who parted around her like waves before a ship.
Kai Winn enunciated a firm "Operations" to the
computer, and the lift obediently began to rise.
    Dog's breakfast, that's what Chief O'Brien wouM
have said,' this whole experiment is turning into a
real dog's breakfast. Kira should have exulted: the
station in an uproar, positions filled by incompe-
tent political hacks, ancient religious codes forced
upon reluctant residents... surely all this non-
sense would lead to the complete disgrace of Kai
Winn and her entire faction.
    The major almost smiled, but she didn't feel like
smiling; instead, she felt a great sadness that Bajor
had been given a chance and was throwing it away
in a futile effort to recapture the glory days of the
Prophets instead of moving into the modern cen-
tury.
 "Dog's breakfast," said Kira with conviction.
 "I'm sorry, my child, I don't understand."
 "It's something Chief O'Brien says."
"Oh, yes. Colorful man. What does it mean?"
Kira shrugged. "Oh, I can't really say." Not
QUITE a lie, she told herselfi The turbolift
hummed for Ops, carrying the Kai to the very
office once occupied by the Emissary, and before
him, by Gul Dukat, as he oversaw the enslavement
of the world.

    "A pig's breakfast," said Chief O'Brien, reading
the scanners over Dax's shoulder. "A real pig's
break fast."
    The Trill science officer looked back at the chief.
"What exactly do pigs eat for breakfast?"
    The chief didn't answer the question, at least not
literally.
    "Seven Cardassian warships, Captain," he
added. "Couple of heavies, GM-class, a cruiser,
and the other four are speeder-destroyers. Identifi-
cation shows they were all reported stolen over the
last two years."
    "So they may well be renegades," Sisko said, "or
perhaps Cardassian Central Command is looking
for plausible deniability. Chief, what odds would
you give us?"
    "If we popped off the cloak and opened fire?
Well, we might cripple one of the GMs in the first
volley, then the other would engage us, and the
destroyers would nibble us to death."
  "Wouldn't advise it?"
    "No, sir. Not if you're wanting to make it away
in one piece. And frankly, sir, I wouldn't advise
revealing our presence for any reason... not even
to send a diplomatic message for them to bug out."
    The captain stroked his beard; "I don't like this,"
he said to Dax. "I don't like sitting here doing
nothing."
    "Then we'd better get down to the planet our-
selves, Benjamin," she replied. Amen to that,
thought O'Brien .... Then he remembered the
odds: seven Cardassian warships could mean as
many as fifteen hundred soldiers on the ground.
Odo stepped off the turbolift onto the bridge,
fresh after several hours spent in his bucket.
    O'Brien watched the constable narrowly; Odo
frowned and scowled, clasped his hands behind his
back, and made other fidgety signs that he wasn't
satisfied. The chief decided information was more
important than secrecy. "Captain, I'd like to make
a full level-three scan of the entire system."
 "Chief, wait," said Jadzia Dax, "the Cardassians
can detect level three ....Maybe we'd better make
it level two."
    "That won't tell us enough, Commander." As
usual, O'Brien found himself annoyed when he had
to argue with a commissioned officer; he always
had the sneaking suspicion that he was starting
several points down already. "Level three will show
us any technology hidden on the second planet. We
can't rely on the lack of ships."
 "And the Cardassians?" asked Sisko.
    "I'm hoping they're too preoccupied with sup-
pressing the planet to pay that much attention to
their passive sensors."
    Sisko nodded absently; surprised at winning so
easily, O'Brien quickly completed the scan before
the captain could change his mind. The systems
chief stared at the viewer as the readout slowly
crawled across the screen; his mouth opened wider
with every pass.
    Dax, crowding the screen, said, "What are
you . . . oh. Wow."
    "Well?" demanded the constable. "Is there any
hidden technology on the planet?"
  "Well, Odo, I really can't say," said O'Brien.
    "And why not?" The changeling looked even
more annoyed than usual.
    The chief snorted. "Because I can't read a sundi-
al under a spotlight."
    Everyone on the bridge except for Dax stared at
the chief. "You're going to have to explain that last
one," said the captain.
    If he g upset now, just wait until he sees the report.
"I mean, sir, I'm not sure whether we're going to
rescue the life-forms on this planet... or vice
versa," said O'Brien.
    "Thank you, Chief," Odo said, "now perhaps
you'd care to explain your explanation?"
    "In short, simple sentences," added Sisko, artic-
ulating each word distinctly.
    "What he means, Benjamin," Dax put in, "is
that there's so much technology on that planet--
technology far beyond anything the Cardassians
have, or us either--that there's no possible way to
tell if there's anything unusual; it would be lost in
the glare."
    "And that, "said O'Brien in triumph, pointing at
the viewer, "is what a pig eats for breakfast."

0

CHAPTER
       4

JAOZIA DAX hunched down at her console so every-
body could peer over her head at the viewer. "Yes,"
she said, "I'd say this qualifies as a porcine meal,
Chief."
    Sisko voiced the thought on everyone's mind...
certainly on Dax's. "I don't think I've ever seen so
much technology in one place. And what technolo-
gy! I can't even begin to guess what half of it
does .... But why haven't they warned away the
Cardassians yet?"
    Dax noticed something and moved to shift the
scan frequencies, but Bashir's elbow was in the
way. "Julian J. Bashir, do you mind?"
    He jumped away from her instruments. "J?
What does the J stand for?"
    "You don't want to know," muttered the Trill,
readjusting to scan for life-forms. "Um... well,
looks like there's life on that planet, all right."
  "How many species?" interrupted Bashir.
  "Hm." Jadzia Dax ran a quick subroutine.
  "About three million, Julian. Mostly insects, I'd
  guess."
    Bashir gave her a look. "I mean how many
sentient species, as if you didn't know."
    "One. Wait, I take that back: there are actually
three .... Cardassian, Drek'la, and an unknown--
presumably the natives of the planet. There are
about a dozen Cardassians, a thousand Drek'la,
and eleven million natives."
"Drek'la?" Sisko asked. "Never heard of them."
"Me neither," Dax said, "let me check the re-
cords. Here they are. They're a space-living race,
very small in numbers. That thousand of them
must be a good percentage of their entire species.
They're like hermit crabs, stealing and/or recover-
ing old spaceships and using them as home."
    "Interesting. Are they working for the Cardassi-
ans, or did they capture the Cardassians along with
their ships? And just eleven million of the natives
on the entire planet?"
    "Yes, pretty sparse. There are quite a few cities,
but they're mostly deserted, except Cardassians
occupy two of them. The indigenous population is
sticking to the countryside. No subspace or radio
communications, no space presence."

    "But that's it. "The chief suddenly stood, staring
at the forward viewer; he paced right up to it, so
close he was probably looking at individual pixels.
Dax waited patiently; Chief O'Brien continued.
"Captain, that's the explanation for everything:
these eleven million creatures must be the degener-
ated remnants of the mighty civilization that built
all this technology. They probably don't even know
how to use it anymore."
    "I hate to say it," said Quark from across the
room, "but the chief's got a pretty good explana-
tion."
    "When did he sneak in here?" demanded Odo,
but no one answered.
    "It would explain why they don't just zap the
Cardassians--or Drek'la or whoever--out of or-
bit," concluded Quark.
    "Let's not jump to conclusions. Dax, is there any
sign of resistance? Weapons discharge, explosions,
fires, battle lines?"
    Dax scanned from pole to pole, letting the planet
revolve beneath the Defiant, whose orbit was high
enough, forty-two thousand kilometers, that they
were only moving at half the angular velocity of the
planetary rotation. "Nope; nothing on this side.
The Drek'la and a few Cardassians are filling up
the cities, the natives are going about their business
in the countryside."
    "As if they weren't even aware they'd been
invaded," mused the captain. "All right, Dax;
throw an away team together. Starfleet Command
and I want to know what's going on down there."
    Dax stood, slipping out from the knot of players
to decide who would accompany her downstairs.
Worf obviously; O'Brien to evaluate their technolo-
gy; hm... oh, of course: Odo for infiltrations.
"You, you, you--volunteers. Meet me in trans-
porter room three in ten. Oh, Worf, where do you
keep the planetary exploration-survival gear? And
weapons; there are enemies about."
    Quark spoke up unexpectedly. "Commander
Dax, if you don't have any objection, I'd like to be
on the away team."  Quark? QUARK?
    "Well, Dax may have no objection," snarled
Odo, "but I certainly do."
    Quark shook his head sadly and spoke to Dax. "I
suppose he just has a problem dealing with any
authority but his own. Especially female authority,
poor fellow. If you choose to have me--I mean,
have me along--I don't see how it's any decision of
his; after all, the captain did put you in charge."
    Dax chuckled; she knew exactly what Quark was
doing. He made the same mistake everyone did:
assuming Jadzia Dax was as young and easily
charmed as Jadzia might have been (though in
truth, Dax didn't think even the prejoined Jadzia
had been all that innocent and naive a girl). On the
other hand, Dax did not have quite the same knee-
jerk reaction against Ferengi capitalists as did most
Starfleet officers, who believed that the Federation
had long since "transcended" such "destructive
competition." As an alliance of traders, the Ferengi
would deal with everyone... which meant they
had to learn to deal with anyone. Necessity had
given them an uncanny ability to penetrate right to
the heart of unknown cultures and civilizations--
and figure out what they could be talked into
buying.
    "Thanks for volunteering, Quark; glad to have
you aboard." Odo opened his mouth, but Dax
interrupted before he could say a word. "Get down
to the transporter and try not to kill Quark before
we make planetfall."
    Less than ten minutes later, everyone stood on
the transporter pads wearing backpacks with
enough equipment to climb Mount Traxanaxanos
on Betazed (a task which Torias Dax had actually
tried three times before giving up in disgust). A
transporter chief waited patiently for the order to
energize.
    Bashir went to each away team member in turn
and hyposprayed him in the neck. "There are trace
particulates in the air that are poisonous," he
explained. "This should protect you. But you'd
better perform a complete microbioscan of any-
thing local you want to eat or drink; a single
hypospray can't protect you from large doses."
    "Hit us," said Dax, pointing at the woman; after
a moment's hesitation, the transporter chief ran
her fingers down the transporter touchplate. The
next thing Dax saw was the side of a mountain,
appropriately enough; they were standing on the
slope, looking down into a verdant valley dotted
with small hamlets.
    She turned and did a slow scan with her tricorder.
"Well, one direction's as good as another, I sup-
pose," said the Trill. "Let's head down that way."
She set out toward the nearest hamlet, setting a
brisk pace that would get them to their destination
in just over half an hour. The Cardassians were a
hundred klicks away, not moving at the moment.
    The plant life was lush, but everything had a
peculiar bluish tint; Dax scanned the vegetation
carefully as she passed it: in addition to a form of
chlorophyll, the plants also contained peculiar
trace elements. "Cynanine," she reported, "and a
lot of radical cyanogens."
 "What does that mean?" asked Worf.
    "It means the doctor was right: please don't eat
the grass. We'll have to pack our lunch."
    "The food is poisonous? To Cardassians and
Drek'la as well?"
    "Well, I'm sure the Natives enjoy the spice. Yes,
Worf, poisonous to Cardassians and Drek'la too."
    O'Brien spoke up. "So what would they be
wanting with the planet, then? They can't live here;
they can't colonize the place."
    Quark was on hands and knees; at first Dax
thought he had stumbled, but he was examining
something on the ground. "That's an excellent
question, Chief," she said. "It's been noted and
logged. But at the moment, I don't have a clue
why."
    "Well, I think I do," muttered Quark; he began
to slither on the ground, sniffing at the dirt. "Looks
like that Starfleet database--I mean the Ferengi
legends were actually right." He continued rooting
along the soil like a worm.
    "Oh, please," said Odo, rolling his eyes in dis-
gust. "I've half a mind to change into a verlak bird
and swallow you whole."
     Quark looked up at the constable. "Well, you're
definitely right about one thing."
  "Oh? And what's that?"
  "You have half a mind."
    "Gentlemen, please. Now what did you just say,
Quark?"
    The Ferengi stood up, brushing off his painfully
colorful knickers and vest. "Oh, nothing. Never
mind."
    But Dax was wise to the ways of Ferengi. She
pointed her tricorder at the dirt. "Interesting," she
exclaimed. "The soil is saturated with latinum
drops."
    Quark stared mesmerized at the ground. "There
must be... thousands of bars, just waiting to be
siphoned up .... "
    Quark's nose was right; but latinum was the least
of the riches: tiny dilithium crystals were also
liberally scattered through the soil, as were eleven
other rare minerals. "The Ferengi Alliance would
die for the mining rights," remarked Dax.
    "Hey, I saw it first," wailed Quark. He dropped
to his knees and spread his arms protectively over
the ground. "I claim this dirt in the name of
Quark's Mining and Mineral Processing Facility."
    Odo snorted and pointed an accusing finger,
stretching it a full meter to wag directly in the
Ferengi's face. "You have no mining and mineral-
processing facility."
  "I do now," responded Quark defensively.
    "It belongs to the Federation, not to you and
your Nagus."
    "Look, I don't mean to interrupt," said Chief
O'Brien, "but this planet already has eleven mil-
lion owners. If anyone owns it, they do."
    Dax smiled. "Anyone who wants the mining
rights will have to find something the Natives want
more and negotiate for it."
    "That can be arranged," added Quark, still sul-
len at being denied his claim. "If necessary," he
added under his breath.
    "But at least," continued the Trill, "we have a
pretty good idea why the Cardassians and Drek'la
are here. And that means they're not likely to just
pack up and leave." Dax, she imagined Benjamin
saying, if you say "this place is a goM mine," your
away team is going to mutiny. She wrinkled her
nose--even she could smell the metallic tang of
latinurn.
    While everyone else mulled over the fortune they
were standing on, Dax decided to change the
subject. She recalibrated the field variables on her
tricorder and did another sweep. "I really, really
don't like being surrounded by tons of technology,
and I mean literally tons, that I don't have a clue
about. The stuff is just lying around, unattended."
Even worse was wondering how much of it the
Natives knew how to operate. At least there are no
Cardassians or Drek'la around, she thought with
relief; they would almost certainly figure out some-
thing quite nasty to do with the stuff.
    The away team headed into the village, still
spotting no one. "Big clump of Natives about two
hundred meters that direction," said Dax, point-
ing; she held up her hand, and everyone came to a
halt upwind of the mob. "The Natives are having
an intense discussion."
    "Must be some kind of a town meeting," guessed
the chief.
    Dax scanned. "Well, everyone's over there for
sure. The houses and stores are all empty."
    Odo glared at Quark for several seconds. "Well?"
he demanded. "I know you can hear them with
those big ears you're always boasting about. What
are they saying?"
    Quark glared needles, but turned in the direction
Dax pointed; he closed his eyes and started to
mumble inaudibly.
  "Out loud, Quark," snarled Constable Odo.
    "Give me a break. There's more than one of
them talking." He continued his mumble act for a
solid minute, then opened his eyes. "Everybody's
talking at once, and they're all saying things like
'what's she doing now,' 'did she find one yet,' 'is
she getting out,' 'she doesn't have much time,' 'isn't
she out of the well yet,' 'maybe she's just too
young,' 'too bad, she seemed like such a bright
child.' Lots of other things, but that's pretty much
the consensus."
    "Out of the well, Quark?" demanded the consta-
ble, incredulous. "With all this technology around
us, you're saying they get their water from a well?"
    "I don't interpret, Odo; I don't translate; I only
repeat."
    "Perhaps it is merely a rustic decoration," grum-
bled Worf. "I have seen such things in holodeck
programs."
    "Surely they would just turn a tap, or at least use
a modern, sealed well."
    "Maybe it's abandoned?" suggested Dax. She
noticed that Chief O'Brien appeared anxious, look-
ing back and forth from the group to the direction
of the mob. Dax looked at him and gestured for
him to spit it out.
    "Pardon me, sirs, but can't we save the philo-
sophical gobbledygook for later? There's a little girl
stuck in a well over there."
    Whoops. "Chief's right: double time, let's rescue
a kid." And maybe ingratiate ourselves just a wee
bit with the Natives .... Dax led the charge, weav-
ing through the buildingsmplastic houses and
storefronts molded into asymmetrical geometric
shapes made of triangles and hexagons, like pieces
of a honeycomb.
    She stumbled over nothing, dropping tricorder
and phaser; picking them up and rubbing her shin,
Dax stared back at the faint, shimmering beam
along the ground, ankle high. "Watch out for the
force beam," she warned.
    O'Brien stepped carefully over the beam, follow-
ing it left and right with his gaze. "You know, I
think it's a bench."
"So? As you said, we have a damsel in distress."
"But Commander... if they can manipulate
force beams like that, why can't they use them to
levitate the little gift out of the well? For God's
sake, even we can't make a park bench out of a
mobile force beam."
    Shrugging, Dax continued threading the houses
toward the congregation. But he does raise an
interesting science question, she conceded.
    When they reached the last building facing on a
large clearing, she finally saw the Natives. Human-
oid, fortunately, and not too different from the
Alpha Quadrant norm. The shape of their noses
was remarkably Bajoran, enought to make Dax
wonder if the ancient Bajorans, who used a type of
solar sail to ply the starwinds, might be related to
these natives in some way. Dax held up a hand,
halting the away team at the edge of the clearing.
At Dax's command, Odo, the least vulnerable
officer, led the away team forward, followed closely
by Worf, then Dax and O'Brien, with the gnomish
Quark hiding in the back. As they crossed the
clearing toward the mob of nearly seventy people,
the murmurs from the crowd gradually faded to
silence and everyone turned to look at the new-
comers.
    "Greetings," said Odo, making no gestures; the
universal translator would turn his words into the
Natives' speech, but there was no telling what a
raised hand might mean on this planet. "We come
from... another village a few days' journey from
here."
    "Another village?" said a gamine, nearly androg-
ynous woman; the others deferred to her as if she
were the local hetman. She looked the away team
up and down. "Are you sure you don't come from
another planet?"
"A-another planet?" said Dax, surprised.
"Those who occupy the cities came from another
planet, so I figured you might've. You look strange
enough, especially the short one with the cooling
flaps."
"Cooling flaps!" shouted Quark, enraged.
"Shh," soothed Jadzia. "Quiet, Quark, or you'll
never close the deal. My name is, ah, Dax. Whom
have I the honor of addressing?"
 "I am Asta-ha. I speak for these Tiffnaks."
    Just then, a shrill burst of profanity emerged
from the center of the mob, complete with reverb
and echo effect. If it was the child, she seemed to
be in reasonably good health; kid has breath enough
for some powerful screaming, in any event. "Asta-
ha, it sounds as if there's a little girl trapped in that
well there. Do you need help getting her out?"
    Asta-ha's face brightened at the suggestion. "Can
you find the tool? We can't help her, of course, the
poor child."
    "May we take a look?" Dax dodged her way up to
the lip of the well and peered over; the sun was in
later afternoon, and the slanty rays didn't quite
reach all the way down to where the little girl
waited, presumably stuck. Still, the well walls had a
high enough albedo that Dax could just pick her
out in the dim, reflected sunlight. "Hold on, little
girl; we'll find something to haul you up."
     Jadzia Dax was answered by another long chaw
 from the profanity plug, which the universal trans-
 lator thankfully failed to translate; the meaning
 was nevertheless as clear as an unstressed dilithium
 crystal, connecting the little girl's desire to be
 about ten meters higher than she was with her
 annoyance that she had no means to levitate her-
 self.
     O'Brien pushed his way through the crowd to
 join Dax at the well. "Ah, anybody have a rope?"
 he asked hopefully.
     "And some wood," added the Trill, thinking of a
 painter's chair. "A chunk at least this wide and this
 thick."
    The crowd oohed and ahhed in amazement.
Asta-ha clutched at Dax's elbow. "You can raise
her with such simple tech? How?"
    The lieutenant commander stared for a moment,
nonplussed. She opened her mouth to say some-
thing, then decided it would be unkind. Poor
woman probably got stuck with a bad set of chromo-
somes. "Well, get us the rope and the wood, and
we'll show you."

0

CHAPTER
        5

FINDING A SIMPLE ROPE and hunk of wood proved
harder than Miles O'Brien had anticipated. You'd
think they'd have a hardware store back in the
village, he complained silently. Or even just a
clothesline. But at last, a couple of nameless
Natives--what did they call themselves? Tiff-
naks?--returned with the implements.
    Commanders Dax and Worf busied themselves
hacking the wood down to manageable size (using
hands and feet, not phasers), while the chief un-
coiled the rope and began tying loops for the little
girl's legs to fit through; it wouldn't do to haul her
halfway up, then have her tumble off the seat back
down the well. The shrieks from the child lent him
a sense of urgency ....He could just imagine that
was Molly down there.
    "Sir, I've got the rope ready," he cried. Dax
handed him the wooden seat, and O'Brien set
about carefully tying the rope to it so the loops
would dangle on either side. All the while, the
crowd pressed closer and closer, seemingly aston-
ished anew by each phase of the operation; they
pointed at the rope, the seat, and the knots and
whispered amazed explanations to their neighbors.
[ can't believe they've never even heard of a rope
rescue, thought the chief, even more amazed at the
crowd's amazement. Everything he was doing was
just plain common sense.
    At last, they had a workable "painter's chair," on
which artisans used to sit so they could decorate
the sides of buildings, back in the ancient days
before antigravs or even scaffolding. Worf dangled
it over the mouth of the well and began to lower it,
while O'Brien shone his hand torch down the shaft;
curiously, the same crowd that had stood aston-
ished at the painter's chair took the flashlight
without a second glance, as if they'd seen hundreds
of them, trading a score for a strip oflatinum. Worf
lowered the chair, swiftly but well controlled.
    After a moment's silence, there was a loud
thump, followed by a renewed string of cries from
the innocent child. "I think we made contact," said
the chief.
    "Sit on the chair, honey," he shouted clown the
shaft. The child seemed as utterly confused as the
crowd was amazed. "Little girl, sit on the chair,
and we'll haul you up here." At the words "up
here," the little girl's brownish face brightened into
a smile. She tugged the chair down into the ankle-
deep water at the bottom of the well and obediently
straddled it.
    The pose was all wrong; they wouldn't have
made it even a meter without losing her over the
side. "No no, honey; not that way ....Just like it
was a swing."
    "Swing'?" she queried--the first words that the
universal translator had deigned to translate.
    "You know, like the swings on your playground."
Blank stare. "Urn... well, put both legs on the
same side of the wooden seat--yes, now the other
leg, my wee tiny colleen. That's good, honey.
What's your name? Can you stick your legs through
those two dangly loops, dear?"
  "I'm Tivva-ma, and I'm seven."
    "That's wonderful, my heart. Now Tivva-ma,
can you put your legs through the little loops?"
    After several minutes of begging and pleading,
O'Brien, with Commander Dax's help, managed to
talk Tivva-ma into the proper way to seat herself
on a painter's chair. As she held on tightly, Worf
pulled up the rope hand over hand; within a few
seconds, Tivva-ma's dark face and bluish yellow
hair appeared over the well. O'Brien made a diving
catch, grabbing the girl in a strong bear hug and
depositing her on dry land.
  "You made it, honey. You're safe." Then he held
 her back at arm's length, inspecting her with great
 concern. "Are you all right, Tivva-ma? Is your
 mommy here?"
 "Yes, of course," said Asta-ha, "I haven't left."
 The entire away team stared at the plump wom-
 an. "You're Tivva-ma's mother?" demanded an
 incredulous Dax.
    Asta-ha seemed oblivious to the tone of shame in
the commander's voice. "Why yes; she's the crown
mayor, my heir."
    "Does this count, Madam Mayor?" asked Tivva-
ma in great trepidation.
    "It was rather an unorthodox solution," mused
Mayor Asta-ha, "but I suppose you could call this
ingenious rope thing new tech of a sort." The lady
mayor looked around the crowd. "Anyone want to
dispute the mark?"
    There was a low rumble of voices as everyone
glanced back and forth at his neighbor; the hubbub
gradually turned into a chorus of negative re-
sponses. "Yes, precious one," said Asta-ha, leaning
hands on knees, "it counts. Congratulations on
attaining the first mark."
    Tivva-ma whooped and began to march around
the clearing like a band leader; O'Brien stared back
and forth in confusion and mounting anger. "Do
you mean tae tell me," he shouted furiously, "that
this whole thing was a coming-of-age ritual?
Throwing a little girl down a well, your own
daughter?"
 Again, Asta-ha blinked in confusion. "We didn't
throw her down the well. What do you take us
for--monsters from another planet? We lowered
her quite carefully."
    Something was wrong; something smelled fishy
to the chief. He wrinkled his nose, savoring the
taste of the lady mayor's last remark. "Wait...
you lowered her? But--you were all shaken by the
rope rescue we just did .... You'd never seen such
a thing before. I don't understand."
    "Truly, we haven't. ! never realized you could do
such complicated tricks with such a simple piece of
new tech."
    Commander Dax butted her way back into the
dialogue. "Then if you don't mind us prying,
Madam Mayor, how did you lower her down?"
    Asta-ha answered slowly, as if fearing it was a
trick question. "With old tech, of course. Like
this .... "
    The mayor fished a tiny piece of equipment out
of her sporran; it looked like one of Dr. Bashir's
hyposprays; she pointed it at Worf and depressed a
button.
    As Asta-ha raised the tool, the gigantic Klingon
floated into the air; he began to bellow and thrash
his limbs. "Put me down. At once/" The lady mayor
held Worf dangling over their heads for a few
moments, then carefully lowered him back to the
ground, landing him with a gentle thump. The
Klingon didn't actually attack Asta-ha, but O'Brien
could tell it was only by the most extraordinary
forbearance on his friend's part. If steam could
 erupt from a Klingon's ears, Worf would have
 resembled a teakettle just then.
     Smoothly interceding before Worf could ex-
 plode, Commander Dax said, "We would abso-
 lutely love to see your village, if you have no
 objection?"
     "Objection? Tiffnak is open to all, unlike the
 angry villages across the big water."
     "Can someone show us around?" persisted the
 Trill.
    "I shall do it myself," said the mayor proudly.
"Tivva~ma, the crown mayor, must be paraded
through the streets anyway for her great success."
    ttER great success? snorted the chief to himself.
"Excuse me," he interjected, "but did you say the
town is called Tiffnak?"
  "Yes. Isn't it a wonderful name?"
    "What does it mean?" inquired Odo, looking
around curiously at the mix of high-tech buildings
and force beams and low-tech, rustic touches like
the wishing well.
    "It doesn't mean anything," said Asta-ha. "I
thought it perfectly expressed our emotion this
less-moon. As a people."
    O'Brien was trying to get at something. "So
when you say you people are the Tiffnaks, Mayor
Asta~ha, you mean you people here in this town,
this--ah, less-moon?"
    "Don't you like the name?" asked the mayor,
blinking her blue green speckled eyes at the chief;
he was almost overpowered by the urge to reach
out and pat her head.
    "It's a lovely name," said Dax, smiling. "But I
think what O'Brien is asking is whether you will
still be the Tiffnaks in, say, another couple of less-
moons... or what people a day's journey from
here would be called."
    "Two less-moons? Oh, I'm sure the mood will
have changed by then. We'll have lots more new
tech, since we have nine ceremonies of various
sorts scheduled before then. Our mood always
changes with each new tech; in fact, after seeing
what you gave us with rope and wood, I'd have to
say that maybe Tiffnaki would be better now."
Asta-ha brightened, and her nose ridges paled.
"That's it! We shall have another meeting, and I'll
suggest Tiffnaki. I'm sure it'll be approved."
    O'Brien mulled this answer. He edged closer to
the commander and spoke quietly; Asta-ha made
no effort not to listen .... Evidently, the Tiffnaks
or Tiffnakis had little concern for other people's
privacy. "Commander, I'm starting to get the im-
pression that these people didn't create all this
technologyrathe force beams and such."  
"They use it," she pointed out.
    "I think they find it, but maybe they don't build
it."
    Dax stared at the chief, lowering her dark brows.
Her spots were pale, always a bad sign.
  O'Brien tried again: "What I mean is, I think
somebody else built all this stuff, and these peo-
ple--Tiffnaks, or whatever they call themselves--
use what they find. I think they have coming-of-age
rituals where they put someone in a weird predica-
ment, like down a well, and see if she can find some
piece of 'new tech' that gets her out."
    Dax whipped up her tricorder and scanned all
around her, not only at the Tiffnakis but the plants
surrounding them. "Well," she said, "their DNA is
obviously related to that of every other living thing
within tricorder range. I think they did evolve here,
Chief."
    Now that he listened, Chief O'Brien heard click-
ings and rustlings in the wide-bladed, grasslike
flora at his feet; stooping low for a moment, he saw
large four-legged "insects" with bodies three or
four centimeters long and a pair of leg tufts at each
end; he saw what looked like a worm; and in a
fenced-in area near one building, he saw a furry,
tinned animal that looked like a cross between a
wolverine and a Bajoran whipbeast sunning itself.
While he watched, the animal rolled on its back
and writhed, just like a dog scratching its back
against the lawn. What a cozy, domestic scene, he
thought, almost enviously.
    He leaned even closer to the commander.
"Well... maybe their ancestors invented the stuff,
and somehow their civilization has degenerated?
How old are these buildings?"
    Dax scanned again, looked puzzled, and recali-
brated. She repeated the scan. "Well, according to
the decay rate of trace radioactive elements, I'd
guess these buildings are at least two million years
old."
 "Two million? Are you sure, ma'am?"
    Dax raised one eyebrow in a look she must have
learned from some Vulcan she knew in a previous
life. "I'm sure; I checked for carbon 14 in the
wooden squares encased inside the plastic, but it
was entirely gone. That was my first clue; I had to
switch to elements with a longer half-life to get a
preliminary estimate .... It's between two and
seven million years, which makes these structures
among the oldest still standing in the Alpha Quad-
rant."
    Well, ask a stupid question. O'Brien accepted his
lumps for having questioned the science officer's
science. "Well, that fits in with the thesis, doesn't
it, Commander? I mean, if they still had the
technological know-how, they'd have torn down
these old houses, or at least built new ones."
    "There's not a building here that was built
within the past two thousand millennia," said the
commander. "They're not just using old wood
chips, if that's what you're thinking, because if they
were that old, they'd have long since rotted away--
unless they were enclosed in the plastic, which I
presume happened only during construction."
    O'Brien blinked, wondering whether he was go-
ing to be tested. "All right, all right; I believe you,
Commander."
  Mayor Asta-ha (and her daughter, the crown
mayor) took them on a Cook's tour of the village; it
looked pretty much like any other village on any
planet in the Federation, except for the extraordi-
nary level of technology .... And the trivial uses to
which the Tiffnakis put it: they used antientropic
heat generators to dry themselves after bathing;
they used transporter technology to beam repli-
cated groceries from one end of the town to the
other; the children played on force-beam jungle
gyms.
    Worf sidled up to the chief while the hereditary
mayor explained the use of a self-mobile tractor
beam to sweep up rubbish after a picnic. "This is
like the Federation gone mad," he complained
bitterly. "If we are not careful, this is where we
shall end up."
    The tour was broken by a celebratory luncheon
that was actually for Tivva-ma, having passed her
first ceremony; but the Tiffnakis turned it into a
welcoming for the newcomers "from another plan-
et" as well. Tivva-ma was not exactly thrilled at
sharing her day; but she was only the crown mayor,
not the mayor.
    Luncheon was somewhat a misnomer; because of
the high cyanogen content of the food, which broke
down into cyanide, among other chemicals poison-
ous to Federation and Ferengi personnel, the entire
away team had to beg off the local delicacies. The
chief was uncertain how to do so, but Dax ex-
plained the rudeness by resorting to the religion
dodge: they were on a special diet ordained "by the
tech" and could only eat the food they brought
with them. Odo simply claimed not to be hungry.
    Most of the food looked like exotically prepared
fungus, and Chief O'Brien felt a great sense of relief
that he could eat none of it; Dax, however, being
more culinarily adventurous, seemed disap-
pointed. When the Tiffnakis had bloated them-
selves on a magnificent fungal feast (and the away
team had shoveled down some miserable combat
rations, "com-rats"), the postprandial interroga-
tion commenced.
    "Mayor Asta-ha," asked Commander Dax pleas-
antly at luncheon, after Tavvi-ma had given a
"commencement" speech that O'Brien found si-
multaneously charming and frightening, "you
spoke of the Cardassians and Drek'la earlier. How
do you know about them?"
    "Oh, it's all across the bush," said the mayor.
"They have overwhelmed several villages not far
from here. They live in the abandoned centers and
strike outward, trying to conquer all the different
people, I suppose."
    "Ah, gravy please," said the chief, pointing at the
away team gravy boat being monopolized by
Quark. "Thank you, your... mayorship. Doesn't
that concern you, aliens having conquered and
destroyed whole villages?" demanded O'Brien, in-
credulous that she could be so blas~ about the
obliteration of her own people.
    "Yes, it might pose some risk to the Tiffnakis,
but we have a great deal of new tech, surely much
 more than did the worthless and unsuccessful
 villages that fell to the invaders. You're sure you
 wouldn't like some succulent fungus?"
    "No... no thank you." Chief O'Brien stared
around the table, seeing only mirrors of Asta-ha's
own mask of unconcern. Sensor readings now
indicated Cardassian life signs within seventy
klicks, but nobody appeared to care. "Look," he
added, "maybe you're not aware of what some
aliens can do to the people they conquer. Odo?
Explain, will you?"
    "Yes," admitted the constable reluctantly, "I'm
afraid I do know a bit about it." He proceeded to
regale the mayor and her contingent for several
minutes on the atrocities visited upon the Bajorans
by their Cardassian masters, the scars still left
behind.
    "But that's terrible," cried Asta-ha, her mouth
dropping open.
    The mayor shook her head, clucking in sympa-
thy. But still, she didn't seem to connect the stories
and the pillaging of the other villages with immi-
nent danger to her own townful of Tiffnakis.
    "If you don't mind my asking," tried O'Brien,
starting to feel frustrated, "how did the other
villages fall? I mean, you have enough tech here,
new and old, even just what little bit I can figure
out, to send the Cardassians packing. How could
the other Natives--the other villages lose?"
 Asta-ha took on a dreamy aspect. "They must
not have found favor in the tech's eyes," she
opined. Looking heavenward, she added, "We Tiff-
naksmI mean Tiffnakismare beloved in the eye of
the tech."
 "Um, how do you know?"
    Blinking her way back to the here and now, the
mayor said, "Isn't it obvious? Were we not so
favored, would this marvelous and exciting new
tech have been given us? Imagine, a rope and a
stick that has the power of an antigray." She looked
so excited that O'Brien hadn't the heart to contin-
ue the inquisition.
    Later, after luncheon and after the away team
had been shown every point of interest in the
town--no churches or temples, O'Brien noticed,
not even one to "the tech"; replicators but no fields
or stockyards; technology for entertainment put
upon the same level of importance as that for
survivalsthe team huddled to voice their observa-
tions. At first, Asta-ha stood right next to them,
listening in a polite but somewhat uninterested
fashion, until Commander Dax asked if she could
leave; the mayor toddled off without apparently
taking offense.
    "All right, people," said the commander, "I want
to pull everything together before we contact the
ship; I want to give the captain answers, not
questions."
    "Frankly," said the chief, kicking off the discus-
sion (which he considered his right whenever the
subject was engineering and technology), "I don't
think they have anything to worry about. I don't
know the half of how these weapons work"--he
gestured at a haphazard pile of devices that the
Tiffnakis said they used to defend against other
villages' tech-raiding parties--"I mean, they might
be excavation tools, for all I know. But they make
damned good weapons; I saw Asta-ha's little
daughter Tivva-ma, no older than Molly, carve a
furrow in a hillside with that thing over there that
looks like a magic wand."
    "I concur with the chief," said Worf, his deep
basso vibrating O'Brien's teeth in their sockets.
"There is much here that Starfleet should investi-
gate."
    "Such as, besides the earth-moving equipment?"
Dax seemed considerably brighter at the news that
they had good stock to work with in defending the
planet from the Cardassians.
    "There is a personalized force shield that some-
what resembles those used by the Borg," said Worf.
    "And a projection device that I'd swear can
drain power from a phaser or disruptor at a dis-
tance," added O'Brien, remembering a fast demon-
stration by one of the other Tiffnakis, a tall man
with one blue-speckled eye and one red-speckled.
"I couldn't actually try it out because I wasn't sure
whether we should allow them to see our phasers."
    Quark spoke up. "By the Divine Treasury, do
you people even realize what we're sitting on here?
This is the greatest technological treasure trove
since--since I found the wormhole ....Or even
since the first Grand Nagus invented warp drive."
    "Ah," sneered Odo, "the new toys have driven
all thoughts of strip-mining the landscape out of
the tiny lump of latinum that stands in for Quark's
brain."
    The Ferengi glared at his old nemesis; not for the
first time, O'Brien found it somewhat surreal that
the animosity/friendship between the constable
and the Ferengi smuggler went back much farther
than the discovery of the wormhole (by Captain
Sisko, not by Quark), or the liberation of Bajor ....
In fact, the pair had known and hated each other
with passion since long before the Federation even
knew of the existence of Deep Space Nine, then
called Terek Nor. The marriage of hatred between
Quark and Odo predated O'Brien's marriage of
love with Keiko, which seemed to have been
around forever; Sisko was probably still a lieuten-
ant commander without even his own ship yet
when Quark and Odo met and discovered revul-
sion at first sight, and Major Kira was probably
rankless and hiding in a cave. With a connection of
hatred going back so far into the mists of antiquity,
how could Quark and Odo not be the closest of
enemies?
    "Constable Odo," said the Ferengi, with a deep
undertone of "talking to the idiot child" rippling
behind his words, "any fool would realize that
brand-new technology, especially weapons in time
of war, would be far more lucrative than mere
minerals. Any fool would jump at the chance to
profiteer--I mean profit--from such a discovery."
    "Yes, Quark," said the constable, smirking
slightly, "any fool."
    "Time's up," chirped Dax. "That was your one
exchange for the day. Now let's get back to
business .... Quark, your zeal to exploit the re-
sources and technology of these people is duly
noted; it will be greatly to your credit when you
reach the Divine Treasury."
    "Well, all right then," he mumbled, but contin-
ued working his mouth--as if trying to weigh the
whole planet on a latinurn scale, the chief thought.
    O'Brien took a deep breath and broached the
subject that had started nagging at him while they
discussed what they had seen. "Commander, I'm a
bit concerned about the Prime Directive ....How
do we apply it in this case?"
    Worf had an opinion on that subject, too. "Sure-
ly it does not apply to cultures this technologically
advanced."
    "But these people are not spacefarers," pro-
tested the chief. "They only barely know they live
on a planet. They don't even have a one-world
government .... How could they be considered an
advanced civilization?"
    "They use warp technology," insisted the Kling-
on, gesturing angrily at the pile of stuff on the table.
"Several of these devices are offshoots of warp
technology, including the power-draining device
and the personal shields. Chief O'Brien will con-
firm my observation."
    "Well, technically that's true," admitted the
chief; he was reluctant to interject his position in
between that of two lieutenant commanders and a
security chief, which must be a rank at least equal
to full, three-pip commander.
    "The planet's already been invaded, so any vio-
lations have already been committed; the Natives
are already fighting--and we want to keep our
presence here secret in any event," said Dax.
    O'Brien, satisfed that the officers had arrived at
a consensus that he, the lone enlisted man, could
definitely live with, tried to steer the meeting to a
close so he could get back to something important:
playing with the new toys to see what he could
learn. "I think we can report to the captain that the
Natives are mobilizing against the Drek'la and
the spoon-heads--I'm sorry, been hanging around
the major too long--the Cardassians."
    Worf suddenly sniffed the air; he looked around,
wetting his finger and raising it as high as he could.
He looked like a man who had a strong suspicion
about something.
    Plucking Commander Dax's tricorder from her
belt, he poked at it and then made a sweep. When
Worf realized everyone was staring at him, he
cleared his throat. "Well, we are about to find out
whether the chief's observation about the--the
planetary natives is accurate."
    "Why, Commander?" asked O'Brien, already
feeling the familiar tightening in his belly and
urgent desire to find a handy tree that he always felt
just before combat.
    Dax looked over Worf's shoulder down at the
tricorder. "Because we're about to have extraplane-
tary visitors," she said; "the Drek'la are com-
ing .... They're about forty kilometers distant and
moving fast."

0

CHAPTER
        6

ASTA-~IA came scurrying up to the away team,
proving that the Tiffnakis, at least, had as good an
early-warning system as did the Federation. "Ene-
mies coming, like you were talking about. Can you
fight?"
    "We can fight," said Worf; then remembering
what Jadzia had ordered, he added, "You must arm
US."
    "Spoken no faster than undertaken," said a short
man at Worf's elbow; his blue-and-red hair crest
was elaborately curled alternating left and right,
grooming that doubtless took hours to perfect. The
man handed Worf a tiny toy that looked and felt
like a finger torch, a child's flashlight operated by
squeezing the plastic sides together. Worf scowled
down at it, wondering whether he was being made
light of.... But he had enough respect for the
technology of the Natives not to point it at anyone
he liked.
    O'Brien was handed a man-sized rifle with sights
and a trigger, adding to the humiliation; the Kling..
on almost offered to trade with the chief, but he
reflected that it would be dishonorable.
    Jadzia received the excavating tool that Chief
O'Brien referred to as a "faerie wand," while
Quark and Odo were each given tubes with tiny
bumps. "Urn... um... what do I do with this?"
demanded the panicky Ferengi.
    "I don't know every function yet," said Hair
Crest, "but I've discovered that if you point this
end at the enemy and press this yellow nodule, his
skin cracks, causing intense pain."
    "But--but what do the blue-and-gray nodules
do?" demanded Quark, staring in horror at the
innocuous-looking tube. Hair Crest shrugged, un-
concerned, and the Ferengi staggered away mutter-
ing curses befitting his cowardly shopkeeper's
personality.
    Constable Odo seemed quite happy with his
tube. Worf edged close enough that no one would
overhear. "Perhaps you should shapeshift into
one of the planetary natives, to further confuse
the Cardassians. We do not want to be discov-
ered."
 "I think it might upset the Natives, as you call
them, if they saw me changing shape before their
eyes... don't you think?"
    Worf frowned; much as he tried to avoid it, the
psychology of the individual kept cropping up. "A
warrior does not concern himself with such fears,"
he muttered, retreating to the front line.
    Such as it was... there was no military organi-
zation, not even any attempt on the part of the
Natives to find cover or concealment. Jadzia and
the rest of the away team had found outlying
buildings to hide behind, and Worf joined them,
but the mayor, Asta-ha, and the other Natives
simply stood in a clump, monkeying with their
weapons and waiting for the Cardassians to slaugh-
ter them.
    "What are they doing?" urgently demanded the
Klingon in Jadzia's ear.
    "Best guess? To them, technology is warfare.
They don't have any idea what to do but stand in
the middle of the road and fire their tech at
anything unfriendly that approaches."
 "Have they never fought in any wars?"
    Jadzia shrugged. "Why don't you ask them?
Maybe you can get them to hide behind something,
at least."
  "How long until contact?"
    "The advance has stopped. It looks like our
friends are waiting for something. Interesting. I'm
showing a force of Drek'la led by a solitary Cardas-
sian."
    "Perhaps the Cardassians ~lied with the Drek'la
when their ships were captured." Worf rose, snuck
a quick peek in the direction where the Cardassian
invaders waited, then trotted to Asta-ha. He was
shocked to see that she had her daughter Tivva-ma
with her... and the young girl also carried a
weapon.
    Is this the honor of a young warrior? he won-
dered, or is it complete ignorance of the danger?
"Mayor Asta-ha... have your people, the, ah,
Tiffnakis, ever fought a war before?"
    "War?" She pronounced the word as if it had not
been translated by the universal translator... per-
haps because the natives had no word for war in
their language.
 "Do you have--enemies?"
    Asta-ha's puzzled look turned to sudden under-
standing. "Oh, enemies all around! There are the
Day who live over the hill toward the needle; we
aren't very friendly with the Tiffnakis, either."
    Now it was WorPs turn to be puzzled. "But...
you are the Tiffnakis."
  "Yes. Do you like the name?"
    "How can you be on unfriendly terms with the
Tiffnakis if---"
    "What? No, we're the Tiffnakis; it's the Tiffnakis
we have to worry about. They live to the left hand
of the needle."
    Worf snorted loudly; clearly, there was a nuance
of pronunciation that he could not hear. "Very
well. But should you not get to cover to more
effectively kill your enemies?"
 Asta-ha looked blank. "Cover?"
    "It is--you use..." Worf had what O'Brien
would call a "brainstorm." "It is another piece of
our new tech: you use the buildings as a... new-
tech shield against disruptors. As we are doing,
see?"
    The female's astonishment was painful for Worf
to see. Clearly, no such thing had ever occurred to
her in all her life; it was, truly, new "technology" to
her--the simplest, most rudimentary of tactics.
Without bothering to thank the Klingon--why
not? did not "new tech" fall from the trees every
day?--she bustled to her comrades to demonstrate
the gift from the tech.
    Satisfied for the moment, Worf returned to the
away team, still feeling a vague disquiet. "There is
something very wrong with these people," he com-
plained.
     "Well, we're about to see whether it affects their
ability to defend themselves." "Our friends are moving."
    "They paused for five minutes, then started to
roll again." Dax stood, called loud enough for her
own troops to hear: "Stand ready, men."
    Worf crouched, holding his weapon at arm's
length to get a better sight picture; he felt the thrill
of battle surge though him .... I am alive, a Kling-
on, a WARRIOR! He could barely contain his glee
when he saw the dust kicked up from the Cardassi-
an skimmers darken the eastern horizon--"the
right hand of the needle," the natives would proba-
bly say, assuming their needles pointed to magnetic
north.
    Worf held his fire until the first blast came from
the enemy. Then he squeezed his flashlight. Noth-
ing .... He tried again and again, but the weapon
was dead.
    "Blast," he snarled. "Somebody give me a weap-
on; mine has malfunctioned."
    In front of the Klingon, Jadzia threw her "faerie
wand" to the ground in disgust and drew her
phaser, but Worf swiftly grabbed her hand and
pointed the weapon towards the dirt. "No, Jadzia.
We must not let them know Starfleet is here."
    Snarling like a true Klingon woman (to Worf's
marveling eyes), Jadzia stood and spoke in com-
mand tones: "Does anyone have a working Tiffnaki
weapon?"
    From O'Brien's passionate, rich, Irish cursing,
Quark's temper tantrum, and Odo's look of dis-
gust, Worf understood the answer even without
anyone answering. Running across the gap to the
natives, who now milled about in total shock and
confusion, he discovered that their weapons, too,
had simply ceased working. There was not a man
or woman in the entire village whose tech would
operate .... Somehow, the Cardassians had
turned it all off.

    Jadzia leapt up and gave the hardest order for any
warrior to give: "Retreat!" she shouted, waving to
the Natives; they stared in confusion--evidently, it
was yet another piece of "new tech" they had never
seen. "Run away," she tried, to no avail. "Are you
deaf?." she shouted, pointed rearwards. "Point your-
selves in that direction and run like the wind.t"
    A few of the natives understood, including Asta-
ha and the mayor's daughter; they turned and ran,
slowly at first, then in panic as the Drek'la leisurely
opened fire with their disruptors on the clumped
group. Worf caught a glimpse of Natives being torn
to shreds by the Cardassian weapons, then he, too,
was forced into the ignominy of running away like
a dubbop being chased by a hunter.
    It was easy to escape; the Drek'la were in no
hurry. The away team and approximately two
hundred of the Tiffnakis kept running until they
had put five kilometers between themselves and the
village; the Drek'la stopped in the settlement and
settled in, at least for the night. The first pitched
battle between the Drek'la and the Federation for
the tiny mud ball Sierra-Bravo 112-II was a rout.
    Worf grabbed Jadzia by the arm as she limped
past, trailing blood. She refused to rest until after
she made sure O'Brien, Quark, and Odo were
safely stowed, as a Klingon would. Her eyes were
the color of violets with flames around their edges,
or the Klingon Sea of the Stand when the sun was
nearly set in the distant waters. Her face burned
with shame, and the Trill spots were dark against
her bone white skin. She looked like the goddess of
death.
    "It was not your fault," Worf said, offering a
warrior's comfort. "It was a system failure that you
could not anticipate."

    Major Kira sat in Ops, sipping tea and musing
on the wild workings of chance and fate. She closed
her eyes and listened to the hum of the station ....
What had been Deep Space Nine was now Ernissa-
ry~ Sanctuary--and it was running like a Bajoran
children's prayer top.
    To Kira's immense frustration and annoyance
beyond her (political) ability to say, every senseless
move Kai Winn had made had turned out per-
fectly: the vedeks and flatterers she had placed in
charge of every aspect of station operations, tossing
out men and women who had done their jobs with
~clat for years, turned out, each and every one, to
be brilliant bureaucrats; and contrary to everything
the major had always believed, good bureaucrats
were exactly what the station truly needed all this
time.
    The vedeks managed to bring out the best and
most selfless devotion in the workers, and jobs that
were done only haphazardly at best under Captain
Sisko sparkled under Governor Kai Winn. The
infrastructure of the station, which Miles had spent
every waking hour complaining about, was syste-
matically replaced with fine Bajoran craftsman-
ship; it could have been done under the Federation,
but it would have taken every hand working triple-
overtime shifts around the clock for a week...
which was exactly what the new Bajoran workers
did at a word from the Kai.
    Devotions at the temple had never been better
attended; even the replicators seemed to work
better; the food tasted like the devices were being
overhauled every other day--which they probably
are, thought Kira in mingled awe and bitterness.
    At this rate, far from replacing the Kai as gover-
nor of the station, Shakar would be lucky to keep
his post as First Minister. "Oh, Prophets,"
breathed Kira, eyes still tightly shut and head back,
"if only she could face a small crisis or two. Just a
little one--it's all I ask."
    Immediately, Kira felt a chill run along her
spine. "Be careful what you wish, for you may get
it" was as common a saying on Bajor as it was in
the Federation. She had the most terrible feeling
that such prayers, especially this close to the worm-
hole, the lair of the Prophets, were far too easily
heard: something was surely about to go terribly
wrong.

0

CHAPTER
        7

ThE FroSt disruptor blast took Major Kira com-
pletely by surprise. There'd been no warning.
    There they were, eleven ships, to be precise.
They'd plowed out of the wormhole in minutes.
Not one of them showed up on Deep Space Nine's
deep-imaging sensors, none tripped the early-
warning alerts. There was nothing.
    When the pounding began, the first thing Kira
did was raise the shields; while they were still rising
in intensity, she scanned for enemies. At last, she
switched to straight visible-light viewing--"look-
ing out the window," as O'Brien called it--and
that was when she finally saw the eleven ships.
According to the scanners, they weren't even
present.
    "Dominion," said Kira to no one, since the last
time she checked, she was alone on the Ops floor;
Kai Winn's patronage appointees still refused to
show up for their watches, though she had to admit
they had done a good job with the routine aspects
of running Deep Space Nine.... No, it's Emis-
sary's Sanctuary now, she thought, smiling at the
grim joke. Some sanctuary.
    "Are you sure, child?" said Kai Winn from
directly behind the major. Kira jumped and spun
around. How could such an out-of-shape woman as
the Kai move so quickly and quietly, on a station
that was heaving with every hammer blow?
  "Kai! Sure about what?"
  "That it's the Dominion."
    Kira returned to her threat board. "I can't aim
the damned phasers .... The sensors don't even
see them." Kira tried a couple of line-of-sight
shots, but the attackers were moving too quickly,
making random evasive turns. "Who else would it
be? They came through the wormhole, and they
don't show up on the sensor array." But she didn't
even recognize the ship design--they were like no
Dominion ships she had ever seen.
    The Kai seemed remarkably cool, enough so that
Kira noticed in the heat of battle. "Isn't there any
other weapon you can bring to bear against them?"
she asked.
    "Yes, of course. The quantum torpedos--they
don't have to be precise hits." Kira snapped the
guards off the arming touchplates and proceeded to
arm the thousand torpedoes that Captain Sisko
had installed against just such an eventuality. Her
hands were working so quickly, she had already
moved to key in the launch sequence before realiz-
ing that the board had not caught up with her.

  PLEASE ENTER AUTHORIZATION PASSWORD.'
    Kira blinked, staring at the message. The com-
puter's mellifluous voice repeated it out loud.
    "Child, what are you waiting for?" asked the
Kai, leaning over Kira's shoulder. "Enter the pass-
word."
    "There is no password," blurted Major Kira,
shocked.
  "But Kira, it asks for one."
    "It never has before." Kira half rose, forcing Kai
Winn to stand quickly to avoid contact. "Damn it!
Ah... ah--Kira Nerys, authorization Bravo-
Alpha-Bravo-Echo ....Unlock the damned torpe-
does!"
    "I'm sorry," said the computer with detached
efficiency, "but that is not an authorization pass-
word. Please enter authorization password."
  There it was, staring her in the face ....
 PLEASE ENTER AUTHORIZATION PASSWORD'
 "Blood of the Prophets!"
 "Child?"
    "Sorry--urn, Sisko, Benjamin, authoriza-
tion..." She struggled to remember what she once
had overheard the captain say to unlock a personal
message from Starfleet Command; she had never
used the code herself, of course, and it took her a
second to remember... a second during which the
attackers fired two more salvos, jerking the station
noticeably, even right through the shields. "Au-
thorization Hugo-Uniform-November-Kilo."
    "I'm sorry, but that is not an authorization
password. Please enter authorization password."
    Kira felt a flush of horrified understanding creep
up her neck and across her face. She hadn't ex-
pected the code to work, since the computer would
realize she was not Captain Sisko, but it gave the
wrong error message. She had expected the com-
puter to respond, "Invalid use of authorization
password," which would mean she had to tear into
the circuits and cross her voice patterns in the
main database clip with those of the captain. But
the response had been the same as to her own
normal authorization code.
    Kira turned and discovered to her astonishment
that the Kai had vanished; but a moment later, the
turbolift arrived carrying six mean-looking Bajor-
ans, four men and two women; they hustled to the
Ops battle stations without sparing a glance at
Kira: two at Dax's console, one at Worfs, and the
other two with heavy phaser rifles scanning the
room with low-intensity phaser beams to flush out
any changelings who might have infiltrated as seat
cushions or pieces of equipment.
    The Kai reappeared on Sisko's balcony. "My
flock, the Emissary's Sanctuary is under attack by
 unknown enemies from the Gamma Quadrant;
 they may be Dominion or may not... but we must
 defend ourselves and our planet, regardless."
    The combat team looked at the Kai with such
reverence that Kira felt outnumbered and uncom-
fortable. Then they turned their attention to the
phasers.
    She had no complaints about their competence;
they were a professional phaser crew either from
a Bajoran patrol ship or from the planetary de-
fense forces themselves. "Sensors out--visual
track, follow my tracer .... One-mark, two-mark,
three-mark--pattern analysis .... Are they re-
peating?--bracketing shots... clipped one, no
telemetry.
    Kira found herself excluded from the fight. No-
body told her to leave, but she quickly lost track of
what the combat crew were saying--they spoke in
the code word staccato of a squad that had lived,
eaten, slept, trained, and fought together for
months or years. Realizing that she was about as
necessary as a piloting stick on a runabout, Kira
stood down from her console and joined the Kai on
the balcony.
    Kai Winn followed the battle with hard, calculat-
ing eyes; she betrayed no emotions and even of-
fered intelligent and workable suggestions to the
team (which accepted them gratefully). "They're
trying to get close enough to launch boarding
parties," warned one of the two women at Dax's
console.
 "Seal the station," ordered the Kai.
    "Kai Winn," said Kira in great urgency, "I have
to contact the Federation and get the authorization
codes for those torpedoes."
    Without looking away from Ops, which had
become a de facto CIC, a combat information
center, the Kai responded forcefully: "I'm sorry,
child, I absolutely forbid it."
"But without the torpedoes, we'll never--"
"This is a test sent by the Prophets, Major; we
must survive without the help of your Federation. I
have already sent for Bajoran destroyers."
    Kira's mouth was dry; she tried to lick her lips,
but there was no moisture. The station was struck
by a particularly close hit, and the deck yawed left,
nearly dropping Kira over the railing to the floor
below. The Kai crouched, clutching the rail tightly;
the combat crew didn't react.
    "Bajoran destroyers won't stand up against these
disruptor blasts," warned Kira. "The most they
can do is distract the ships long enough for us to get
a clean shot."
    "Then they will distract the enemy ships, child,"
said the Kai, still following the performance in Ops
rather than the conversation she wasn't quite hav-
ing with Major Kira.
    Gritting her teeth, the major spoke in a hoarse
whisper. "Kai, the Federation will release the tor-
pedoes-this is an emergency. With the quantum
torpedoes, we can blow these jerks to hell and back,
right back through the wormhole to the Gamma
 Quadrant. Don't you understand? We need those
 codes."
    For the first time since the assault began, the Kai
looked directly at Kira. "I am in command of
Emissary~ Sanctuary, child. You are my executive
officer. The decision is mine to make, and I will not
run to the Federation for help." She closed her
eyes, tilting her head back. "We are all in the hands
of the Prophets now."
    Kira waited a long moment, searching her heart
for what she should do, for Bajor, for Sisko, for her
friends and enemies still aboard the station: for
Jake, for Keiko, for Rom... even for that lousy
excuse for a Cardassian, Garak. "Yes... my Kai,"
she said at last. Winn was right; there was no other
way out for Bajormand the future of Bajor
trumped everything else.
    "Hadn't you better begin organizing the de-
fenses, Major?"
    "But your combat crew is handling it perfectly
well. I couldn't do any better."
    Kai -Winn looked directly at Kira again, and this
time, the major saw in the old woman's eyes the
same granite she had seen in the captain's when he
stood on the same balcony, overlooking a team
much like the one in the CIC below (a team that
always included Major Kira). "You had better
prepare the internal defenses, child; call out the
station militia." Winn handed Kira a data clip.
"This fight is not going to be easy or quick, I
believe; I've been here before. Prepare for forcible
boarding."
    Kira stared at the viewers; she had a good look at
the ships every time they passed one of the camera
eyes while shooting and dodging return fire: she
had definitely never seen the design before. "Who
the hell are these guys?" she asked, but the Kai had
already returned full attention to her CIC and the
combat crew running the desperate defense of
Emissary ~ Sanctuary.
    Kira Nerys slid down the ladderway, feet and
hands upon the rails, and darted for the turbolift
platform, snatching up her personal phaser en
route; she was almost thrown to the deck by a shot
that set the rotational axis of the station swinging
gently, like a pendulum, for several cycles before
the gyros restabilized Emissary's Sanctuary.
    Sealed by the turbolift after leaving Ops, Kira
tapped her combadge and said, "Computer, scan
all messages from Starfleet to Deep Space Ninem
or, ah, Emissary~ Sanctuary--since the turnover,
in particular any verbal explanation of the message
locking out the quantum torpedoes."
    "There is no record of a transmission locking out
the quantum torpedoes."
    "Headers of all nonroutine message traffic from
the Federation Council to the senior staff of the
station."
    The computer began rattling off a list of message
headers, most having to do with administrative
 elements of the turnover, but then Kira heard,
 "Message thirty-eight of forty-four, weapon exten-
 sion lockout explanatory communiqu6."  
"Stop. Read me that message."
    Another booming pair of assaults testified to the
battle still raging beyond the hull--the station was
holding its own, but it couldn't continue forever.
The damned Bajoran ships better arrive soonest,
thought Kira, gritting her teeth; the brief distraction
might be the only hope we have.
  "Please enter authorization password."
    Oh, Prophets. Here we go again. But when Kira
gave her own code, "Kira Nerys, Bravo-Alpha-
Bravo-Echo," the computer accepted it without
qualm; evidently, the accompanying text was not
as highly secure as the torpedoes themselves.
    "The Federation Council regrets that the new
administration must be informed that certain clas-
sified extensions of the weapons subsystems of the
station formerly known as Deep Space Nine have
been reallocated to a terminated state pending
approval of subsequent demonstrations of success-
ful operation of station service optimization proto-
cols; at time of such approval, normal preoperative
status of the affected subsystems will be reinitial-
ized into a resumptive condition."
    Translation, thought Kira, who really was be-
coming quite an expert at burospeak; after a while,
if you don't blow up the station, we'll send the signal
to unlock your torpedoes. But what was a while?
How 1ong--a week? The Bajorans had run the
station for nearly a week already, and there clearly
had been no reinitialization into a resumptive
condition. A month? The end of the sixty-day trial
period?
    With a chill, Major Kira realized they were
enmeshed in a terrible struggle against unknown
enemies while blind and crippled: they could nei-
ther see the attackers on the sensor array nor use
the only weapon that didn't require precision
aiming.
    And of course, much as it galled the major to
admit it, Kai Winn was right: if Bajor were to go
screaming to the Federation for help now, barely a
week into the turnover, the chances of it being
made permanent were like unto those of finding a
shrine to the Prophets on Cardassia Prime.
    The old--woman--gets another point, she
glumly admitted. The Kai had been full of sur-
prises lately, from her efficiency at running the
station to her startling capacity for command un-
der fire. Add now an insightful analysis of Federa-
tion psychology. Every such success stuck in Kira's
throat like a bone splinter, one more stone in the
pouch of First Minister Shakar, weighing down his
chances; he was already swimming upstream by
trying to force the government to remain secular,
when the Kai and most Bajorans clearly preferred
rule by vedek decree.
  The turbolift jerked to a stop at the Promenade
 level, and Kira pushed into a scene from a mad-
 house: civilians, nearly all Bajoran, were running to
 and fro in a frenzy; some were injured by the
 shaking, though no shot had yet penetrated the
 shields, and with every blow, more civilians fell to
 the ground screaming or ran into each other or
 tried to rush the turbolifts that could take them to
 the habitat rings, the launch bays, and presumed
 "safety" away from the station.
    The Kai's security guards refused to allow the
civvies to storm the lifts, quite properly: they were
needed to transport the security forces (the one
area that Kai Winn had packed but not purged).
"Commander," shouted Kira.
    The acting CO in Odo's absence, Dag Haraia,
ran to Kira and saluted; Kira was nonplussed for a
moment .... No one ever saluted on Deep Space
Nine. Then she remembered that he was now
"militarized" and under arms, which changed
things considerably. "Dag, round up these peo-
ple"--she handed Dag the data clip of names she
had gotten from the Kai--"and arm them; put
men at every port and airlock and shoot anyone
coming through; and get these damned civilians
into the shelters."
    "Yes ma'am!" he shouted; he saluted again and
ran to his lieutenants.
    Kira was surprised to catch herself taking a
moment to pray: Please, 0 Prophets, she said
clearly in her head, don't make me be the one to
have to explain it all to the captain. "The big one
that didn't quite get away," she muttered to herself,
but she was too busy to listen.

    Limping from her wound, which was still bleed-
ing slightly, Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax
led the rest of the away team, plus Asta-ha (the
hereditary mayor of the no-longer-extant village of
the Tiffnakis) and the surviving members of her
entourage, over a pair of hills that she named
Dreary and Black, across a stream that O'Brien
dubbed the Anna Liffey, and through a wood. (The
trees were the same scintillant blue and green as the
Natives' eyes.) They had put fifteen kilometers
between themselves and the Drek'la, who camped
in the ruins of the town after disruptor fire cut the
two-million-year-old buildings to shards; Dax de-
cided they were safe for the moment.
    If the worst came, and the Drek'la struck too
quickly for them to bug out conventionally, the
Trill had already decided they would call for an
emergency beam-out of everyone, and to hell with
the Prime Directlye. "It's too bad we can't move
any faster," she said. "Are you sure none of your
neighbors has any tech for moving quickly along
the ground... say, something with wheels or float-
ing on an antigravity field?"
    Asta-ha shook her head; her daughter Tivva-ma,
who announced she was still seven, shook her head
at exactly the same time, causing both Dax and of
course Chief O'Brien to chuckle. "Damn," mut-
tered Dax; she wondered whether she could talk
 Sisko into having the Defiant replicate a vehicle
 and beam it down where they could "stumble"
 across it.
     "Please watch your language, Commander,"
 cautioned the chief. "There are young ones
 present."
    "Um, sorry about that, Chiefi" The Curzon
within her ached to cut loose with a stream of
profanity that would straighten out O'Brien's hair
and turn it white, but Jadzia Dax controlled it.
    Asta~ha sighed. "Yes, too bad. If you really
wanted to get somewhere fast, we could use the
Instantator tech in the village of the Shignavs. But
I'm afraid I have no tech of the kind you seek."
    "The... Instantator?" Dax suddenly had a hor-
rible feeling she knew exactly what they were
talking about... and it could have saved them a
lot of grueling travel.
    "I have seen it in operation," breathed the hered-
itary mayor. "You step into a booth, sparkles
obscure your body, and you disappear--only to
reappear days' and scores of days' travel distant, in
the next booth." She described the obvious trans-
porter with such holy reverence, Dax almost felt
like bowing her head; from the description, Dax
realized that, like the one in the Tiffnaki village for
food, it was a booth-to-booth device, but sophisti-
cated even by Federation standards. Still, she
sighed, it wouM have been useful.
    Quark came limping up to the group, moaning
and trying to massage his calves while still walking;
he was followed closely by his elongated shadow,
Constable Odo, sneering at every Ferengi protesta-
tion of weakness, being done for, and prediction of
dire consequences.
    "Oh, get off it, Quark; you're going to make it,
because no one is going to pick you up and carry
you. Honestly, you're like a spoiled child at an
excessively permissive nursery school."
 "Have a little heart, Odo ....Or better yet, why
don't you make one?"
    "It's too much effort to bother with unnecesary
internal organs, Quark; besides, I'm happy as I am.
Too bad you can't say the same about yourself."
    The Ferengi sneered. "Well, you certainly didn't
put any effort into a brain, now did you?"
    "Oh, very funny. I'm hysterical, ha, ha, ha. Let's
see how your quadrant-famous sense of humor gets
you through your upcoming ordeal: selling your
banned bar and becoming an employee of Kai
Winn."
    Quark shuddered. "I'd tell you to bite your
tongue, if you had one."
    "Gee... I wonder whether Rom has unloaded
the bar to some luckless Bajoran yet?" Quark
simply glared, so Odo won the round.
    "Boys, boys," said Dax halfheartedly; in truth,
she was barely listening to them bicker .... She
was far more concerned about what had happened
back at the village of the Tiffnakis. I blew it. I
screwed it up and nearly got everyone killed. Now
that the immediate danger was past, and they were
far enough away to feel a little safety, Commander
Dax began to get the shakes. The more she thought
about the Cardassian raid, the more like a fiasco it
looked.
    "I think I've figured it out," said O'Brien, plop-
ping down on the dewy teal grass with a disassem-
bled mass of components in his hand; the jumble
used to be a disruptor rifle. He glared at the hunk
of disassembled junk--then turned a sympathetic
gaze on Dax herself. She leapt to an interpretation:
even the chief thinks I completely screwed up the
mission, she raged to herself; it3 only the sheerest
luck that we weren't all butchered back there.
    Dax started to realize that she could have, should
have, evacuated the village; if she had, a hundred
dead Tiffnakis, including a dozen children, would
still be alive. She felt sick.
    "You figured out what happened back at the
defense?" she asked, leaning forward too eagerly,
trying to drive deep inside thoughts of her own
terrible command decisions. "What went wrong
with all the weapons?"
    "Nothing, Commander; nothing at all." O'Brien
sounded bitter, and he looked like he wanted to
spit into the mechanism. "Nothing?"
    "But it looks like it runs on some kind of
broadcast power, of a variety our tricorders
couldn't detect. The Drek'la must've somehow cut
that power before attacking."
 But would Asta-ha have withdrawn anyway?
"You mean, Chief, that there isn't a single backup
power source anywhere around here?"
    "No, Commander"--the chief scanned with his
own tricorder--"I've adjusted my tricorder and
can now get faint readings of the kind of power
being broadcast. The nearest power source I can
detect is four hundred kilometers away."
    While they spoke, Worf, Quark, and Odo had
joined them. "Gentlemen," said Dax, "I've got a
very bad feeling about this whole mission. If all the
enemy has to do is kill the lights and pull the plug,
then we are in giant-sized trouble."
    Worf spoke up, immediately seeing the tactical
situation: "The natives will have to learn to fight on
their own, even without their devices."
    Dax looked at the Klingon and felt a chill; was he
looking at her with a faint trace of charity? Was he?
If he was, she couldn't stand that.
    "Fight and win, "corrected Dax. Her wound was
painful, possibly infected, and the pain was making
it hard to think. Courage and bravado can take me
only so far; there's more than my pride at stake
here. As much as I'd like to finish this mission, it's
time, as Benjamin would say, time to call in a relief
pitcher.
    "People," she said, "I'm kicking this decision
upstairs. And I'm taking myself out of the game."

0

CHAPTER
       8

 CAPTAIN BENJAMIN SISKO materialized in a loose
wood, the trees not quite thick enough for cover or
dense enough for concealment; but there were
enough of them to make any disruptor shot tricky.
As soon as he appeared, he glanced first at Worf,
then Odo, then O'Brien; the three stood alert but
not tense, and the captain relaxed a bit.
    He had just completed a very unsatisfactory and
alarming conversation with Dax. She had filled
him in somewhat but wanted the captain to make
his own assessment before she made her full re-
port... so his tactical judgment wouldn't be "in-
fluenced by expectation." He had reassured her
that there was little she could have done differently
without psychic abilities... but she was still furl-
ous at herself for not foreseeing the future and
preventing the deaths of the villagers.
    The away team stood by themselves on a small
rise; water welled from underground at the base of
the rise, trickling down to form a meandering,
sluggish stream that cut mostly northeast, eventu-
ally becoming a tributary to the largish river that
Dax reported crossing (which the chief called the
Anna Liffey, after the river that bisected old Dub-
lin, fabled in song and legend). The rest of the
escapees, two hundred and twenty of them, hud-
dled across the ministream, fire-shocked and shak-
en not only by the suddenness of their loss--many
of their friends, enemies, and neighbors had died,
including children--but, if Dax was right, as much
by the sudden loss of their tech from heaven: they
had nothing, for nothing worked. They didn't even
know enough to build shelters or campfires against
the coming cold night.
    "Fill me in," said Sisko to his away team. They
did so. "All right"--Sisko looked toward the alien
threat to the eastm"let's hear some strategic team
thinking: what are we going to do about the situa-
tion?"
    This time, Worf was first to speak; he was on
familiar, rehearsed ground. "We must set up an
immediate military training facility," he advised,
"and forge these people into an effective fighting
force against the invaders."
    "And what do you expect them to fight with?"
demanded O'Brien. "Spears? Bows and arrows?"
  "If necessary."
     "But they don't even know the first thing about
 even that level of technology, Worf. They don't
 have any math, any physics or engineering, no
 materials science, nothing of chemistry or field
 flow, no plasma technology .... Nothing that
 could possibly discommode the enemy or even
 slow them up. They would roll over the Natives
 tike--like Klingon warriors across a Boy Scout
 troop."
    Worf growled deep in his throat, but he said
nothing in response to the chief. Odo, standing
unnaturally straight--like a changeling, not like a
solid, who had to balance on muscles and bone--
cleared his throat. "Sir, perhaps it would be better
to begin at the beginning."
      "Teach them basic math, engineering, and chem-
istry?" asked the captain skeptically.  
"As Worf said, 'if necessary.'"
    "Necessary it may be, Constable, but is it work-
able? Chief O'Brien, how long would it take you to
teach a crash course in the fundamentals of weap-
ons engineering, just concentrating on what they
need to build bombs, guns, and other destructive
devices?"
    The chief squatted on his haunches, dipping his
knees in the moist ground; he tapped away at his
tricorder, presumably figuring out what he would
need to teach. Then he stood, shaking his head.
"It's hopeless, sir. Unless the Natives are engineer-
ing supergeniuses, it'll take months of' academic
work, and we don't have that much time."
    "And there is more to it than that," said Worf
glumly, obviously realizing he was shooting down
his own idea. "It takes more than weapons to make
an army, as we have just seen demonstrated. It
takes organization and leadership, as well as an
understanding of long-range strategy and short-
term tactics."
    "Aren't these Natives organized at all?" Sisko
couldn't believe that the planer's people, with ac-
cess to such sophisticated technology, weren't at
least curious about each other.
    Quark answered for the team, startling everyone
except the captain. "Why do you think we call
them 'Natives"? It's because they don't even have a
generic name for themselves. Everything is just
village this and village that .... "Quark leaned
forward and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper,
glancing at the disheartened villagers as if afraid
they would overhear and cut off his lobes. "And
they don't even have intervillage trade. Can you
believe it? it's the basis for mercantilism, which
must precede capitalism--they don't even have the
concept of money!"
     "Money isn't everything, Quark," said Odo,
 curling his lip in disgust.
     "But indeed it is something, Constable," said the
 captain. "Quark has an unhappy point. On Earth,
 it was merchants following trade routes who even-
tually converted isolated city-states into great na-
tions."
    Quark picked up the thread, surprising even
Captain Sisko with his sudden earnestness; the
subject was clearly dear to his Ferengi heart.
"These Natives are living in a posteconomic
society .... Everything they need, they literally
find scattered on the ground like dead leaves.
They've never had to trade for anything in their
lives.
    "They don't understand the concept of making
things or the division of labor or the accumulation
of capital to finance large-scale projects. How do
you expect them to learn it all in an eye blink? And
if they don't, what makes you think they won't just
wander off in the middle of one of Chief O'Brien's
engineering lectures?"
    "And if the enemy just repeats their sneak at-
tack," said the chief, "clicking off the broadcast
power to a village, then attacking it, over and over,
then the Natives will panic, and their villages are
going to fall, one by one, until the Cardassians
control every Native settlement on the planet. I
don't have to tell you what that means."
    Indeed he didn't; Sisko thought of all he had
learned about the brutal occupation of Bajormand
that was when the natural cruelty of the occupiers
was tempered by the frequent revolts and rebel-
lions of the Bajorans. With such helpless slaves, the
captain shuddered to think of the depths of deprav-
ity that might occur.
    "Perhaps we ought to send a subspace message
calling for backup," suggested Odo.
    Couldn't the Defiant simply call for help, for
some Starfleet ships to drive away this Drek'la-
Cardassian alliance? Dax had asked exactly the
same question. This time, the answer from Cap-
tain Sisko was an abrupt "No, Constable. Think of
the technology that must be in the hands of the
Cardassians and Drek'la by now. We don't know
what they've learned to use or mounted on their
ships. At the very least, we have to learn that much
before we call in Starfleet. So for now, we're on
our own."
    "Then it looks like we don't have any other
option," the chief said. "We have to find a way to
start training them to fight, however long it takes."
    Sisko looked from O'Brien to Worf to Odo and
even to Quark; each man's unhappy, resigned look
told him what he didn't want to know. The chief
had stated the consensus; he was sure that when he
got Dax's full report, it would contain the same
recommendation.
    "We need to start by forcing them to see their
own need for training," said Worf.
    "My thoughts precisely. It's time, I believe, for a
shakedown hike." The away team looked blank,
not understanding what Sisko meant. "Get the
troops in line, Mr. Worf," said the captain, survey-
ing the tricorder topographic map he had down-
loaded; he studied the contour lines, trying to chart
a reasonably efficient route westward .... Better
than the pell-mell dash away from the victorious
enemy--a route rather than a rout, he thought
somewhat uncharitably. "We're about to organize
the Native Scouts of Sierra-Bravo."

0

CHAPTER
       9

THREE DAYS OF BO? Scout hell. Chief Miles O'Brien
moaned as he massaged his aching calves; he had
never quite managed to become involved in Scout-
ing--never seen the urgency behind forty-
kilometer forced marches, slogging through
swamps (enthusiastically labeled "wetlands" on
the tricotder map) and steamy jungles, up and
down precipitous slopes, all the while trying to beat
into the Natives' heads that they didn't need all
that technology manna falling from heaven--they
could do it themselves with lower-level but sustain-
able technology.
    Worf was exhilarated, and the captain seemed
chipper enough, but O'Brien found himself siding
more and more with Quark; the two grumpy old
men of the group didn't see anything stimulating
about a huge gorge to cross or a marsh to wade
through. The chief was amused, however, to watch
Captain Sisko's best laid schemes gang aft a-gley.
    The countryside was rugged and forbidding. The
mineral composition of the soil meant the ground
was spongier than on other planets, and since they
were in a very moist climatic band above the
planet's equator, they were inundated by water
from all directions: rain, seepage, and rivers, slug-
gish and meandering on the plains, rushing white
water in the hills. The combination of the spongy
soil and seepage meant quicksand, of course, and
the mineral content made it more like cement
sand. Just walking was hazardous. Though the
brilliant blues and greens, in trees and rocks alike,
punctuated by streaks of brilliant orange-and-red
algae and fungi, made for a colorful (if deadly,
draining, and inedible) hike.
    The planetary axis tilted alarmingly toward the
sun, so the sun rose not so much in the east as the
northeast, hooking around the sky in a great cres-
cent, then setting in the northwest. Masses of
clouds (more particulate precipitants in the air)
acted as heat transfer engines, warming the air to
an unbearable mugginess in the daytime, then
dissipating to allow rapid cooling close to zero
degrees Celsius at night. A real garden spot.
    The overt purpose of the hike, as Sisko explained
it to the Natives, was to trek across seventy-five
kilometers of wilderness to reach a certain village
far enough away from the enemy that the Tiffnakis
(and the away team) would stay out of the invaders'
way--until they were ready to return and fight.
Unsurprisingly, Asta-ha and her Tiffnaki comrades
were spoiling for a rematch.
    "I want to immobilize them with my motion
constrictor," she said, fixing the chief with a mad,
rigid stare, "and slowly rip their limbs off with the
lift pull, the murderers." The motion constrictor,
O'Brien discovered after they got far enough away
to begin picking up power broadcast from another
relay, was a small, one-handed neural-impulse in-
hibitor; the lift pull was a phaser-sized tractor
beam that required an anchor point. O'Brien had
never seen either one of those two pieces of tech-
nology before in his life.
    The covert reason for the march was to put the
Tiffnakis into a position where they had to rely on
themselves and their own ingenuity. It was Captain
Sisko's idea to march them across the most forbid-
ding landscape imaginable so they would be forced,
willy-nilly, to discover three of the four basic
engines of antiquity: the lever, the pulley, and the
inclined plane (neither the captain nor Chief
O'Brien could think of a way to introduce the
Tiffnakis to the water screw). At the least, the away
team expected the Natives to finally understand
ropes, especially after rappelling down a cliff face.
Alas, as the Scottish poet Bobbie Burns wrote, a
verse that came back to O'Brien again and again:
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o'mice an' men,
   Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea 'e us naught but grief an' pain,
   For promis'd joy/

--And the trip did not work out quite the way
the captain planned.
    The first tiny glitch occurred late the first full day
of travel, when they came to the precipitous cliff
face (marked on the tricorder map by an incredibly
tight convergence of sixteen contour lines) down
which Sisko intended them to rappel.
    Looking over the face of that monstrous cliff,
even O'Brien felt his gut tighten, and a chill passed
from tailbone to cervical vertibrae. "We're, ah,
going to rappel down that... sir?"
    But the captain beamed, happy as a proverb. "I
always feel so exhilarated when I drop down a
mountain," he exclaimed. He walked away from
the milling Tiffnakis, whom Worf struggled to keep
from pressing close to the cliff like penguins trying
to chivvy one of their number off the edge to see if
it was safe. The chief watched Captain Sisko tap his
combadge and speak in low tone~ for a moment; a
few minutes later--long enough to get to the De-
fiant's replicators and back, thought O'Brien--
eight harnesses, ropes, and anchor stakes materi-
alized on the ground nearbywalong with more
edible combat rations, "com-rats," for the Feder-
ation members, who could not, of course, live off
the poisonous wasteland.
    Sisko returned. "The constable and Quark will
demonstrate the technique... won't you, gentle-
men?" Odo didn't look too worried; he can shape-
shift into a bird or something if he starts to fall,
thought the chief. But the Ferengi was first con-
fused, then shocked, then horrified as Worf took
Quark by the elbow and hustled him over to the
rigs and ropes.
    "Think of the harness as a sort of chair made of
nylochite webbing," said the captain, flashing a
face-splitting grin. "You basically sit in it, as Quark
is demonstrating."
    "What?" demanded the Ferengi, turning dis-
tinctly pink. "You were serious? You expect me to
trust my precious life to that pile of primitive
junk?" His eyes grew nearly as huge as his ears, and
he tried to back away--only to back directly into
an immovable Chief O'Brien, who had casually
shifted behind the Ferengi, trapping him.
    Worf steamed; he did not like the humidity one
bit. "You will put on this harness," he snarled, "or
I will put it on for you."
    Quark breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh, would you?
There's a good Klingon. You'd make a much better
test subject than I."
    With a howl of frustration, the Klingon surged
forward, webbed harness in hand, and struggled
with the Ferengi; a moment later, a yoked and
harnessed Quark cringed before the mighty-thewed
Klingon warrior. "Your years of sitting behind a
bar have made you fat and sluggish," said Worf.
    "I don't sit, I stand," mustered the Ferengi with
some dignity. Constable Odo, meanwhile, had
pulled on his own harness with no fuss.
    "Now observe carefully," said the captain to the
fascinated Tiffnakis. He found a solid rock without
difficulty and pressed the anchor pins to the rock
surface, one by one; they phased partially out of
existence, dropping deep into the rock with hardly
any resistance; then they phased back to solid with
a bang .... They were embedded into place much
more strongly than could ever be the old-fashioned
kind that one pounded into a crack.
    Running one end of each rope through the an-
chor pins, Sisko showed Asta-ha and another gag-
gle of Tiffnakis designated the "second group" how
to run the rope through the carabiners attached to
the front of the harnesses. Then Odo backed to the
edge of the cliff and began to jump, letting out rope
as he fell... rapidly enough for a quick descent,
but not so fast as to lose control. Quark took some
prodding by Worf; he fell jerkily, shouting and
cursing all the way until his voice faded from
earshot.
    Fearless, the Tiffnakis crowded the edge of the
cliff, craning their necks to follow the progress of
the two "volunteers." 'Such tech," breathed Tivva-
ma, Asta-ha's daughter.
    Odo landed on the ground and quickly shed the
harness, which Chief O'Brien hauled back up. A
few seconds later, Quark lighted, but the Ferengi
just stood there shaking. "Come on, you coward!"
shouted the chief. "Strip that thing off so the next
batch can go." Quark stared up at the chief, silently
mouthing something obscene in Ferengi. Then he
pulled off the webbing (fighting off some unwanted
help from Odo), and O'Brien hauled up that har-
ness as well.
    "All right, then," said Captain Sisko, striding
forward with more harnesses in hand. "Where's
my next batch of Scouts?"
    O'Brien looked around for Asta-ha. "Well, she
was right here," he said, puzzling over the disap-
pearance. "Maybe she got frightened and ran ot~."
Suddenly, Worf shouted in surprise, pointing down
the cliff face. O'Brien jumped, so startled he almost
fell off. Heart pounding, he leaned over and saw
Asta-ha and about twenty of her Tiffnaki villagers
slowly floating down the cliff in perfect com-
fort... wearing nothing but their clothes.
    Sisko, O'Brien, and Worf stared openmouthed,
no one saying a word, as the Natives drifted down
at a constant velocity, finally landing at the bottom
with a tiny bump. Cupping her hands, Asta-ha
shouted up to the Scout troop still waiting above:
"Perfect. Send down the next group, Captain
Sisko."
    Another group was already stepping toward the
cliff edge when Sisko waved them back. "How the
hell did they do that?" he bellowed.
  Fighting back a grin, Chief O'Brien told the
captain about the antigrav device Asta-ha had
demonstrated back at the well the first time they
saw her. Sisko leaned close to the chief. "This was
supposed to be a learning experience," he said,
patiently but with much menace behind the words.
"We're supposed to be teaching the Natives how to
survive without their technology. Confiscate all
antigray devices right now."
    "Yes, sir," the chief said, "I thought we had.
They must have had more."
    The Tiffnakis remaining at the top of the cliff
looked startled as the chief relayed the order;
reluctantly, thirteen of them handed over devices
ranging in size from a medical scanner to a phaser.
The chief put them in a bag and handed them to
the captain, who quietly had the Defiant beam
them up. "Much better," he concluded. "Now let's
get them down the cliff."
    O'Brien and Worf returned to the cliff edge, but
something was wrong: most of the Tiffnakis were
gone--disappeared. Struck with a sudden suspi-
cion, the chief went immediately to the cliff edge
and looked over; now the Tiffnakis were descend-
ing on a slant, as if sliding down a gigantic
slide .... But there was nothing there.
    For an instant, O'Brien felt a surge of panic; he
had never longed for a bottle of Tullamore Dew as
much as he did just then. Then, with a sigh of
relief, he recalled the force beam benches in the
village; evidently, some enterprising Tiffnaki had
set up a device to project such a force beam
slantwise down the cliff, and the rest were simply
sliding down it to the ground.
    By the time the three away team members on top
of the cliff located the device, all but three of the
Tiffnakis were already on the beam slide. Worf and
O'Brien stopped the last three, but of course they
couldn't shut off the beam until the last person
touched ground (not wanting to drop the sliding
Tiffnakis to their deaths). Sisko confiscated the
force beam generator; up it went to the ship.
    "Any more force beams?" demanded the cap-
tain, his teeth grinding and fists clenching and
unclenching. The remaining three Tiffnakis shook
their heads. "Antigray devices? Aircars? Para-
chutes?"
    "What's a parachute?" asked one of the remain-
ing three.
    O'Brien jumped in to explain, while the captain
cooled off for a moment. "A piece of material
shaped like, um, a dome or hemisphere, which
catches the air and lowers you gently when you
fall."
    A Tiffnaki brightened. "Oh. That's right, I al-
most forgot." Before anyone could stop him, he
walked to the edge and stepped off. Sure enough,
when O'Brien stared downward, there was the
telltale blue billow as the native wafted gently
down the cliff, like a dead leaf falling from an
autumn branch.
    Sisko lunged forward, grabbing each of the re-
maining two Tiffnakis by the scruff of his collar.
One was Owena-da, the man who had handed out
the weapons before the disastrous fight against the
Cardassians; O'Brien didn't know the other one.
"Get-in-the-harnesses," enunciated Captain Sisko,
hands shaking with suppressed emotion.
    Confused by the captain's obvious rage, the two
Tiffnakis quickly complied, stepping into the
webbed affairs alongside Worf, O'Brien, and the
captain himself. The chief swiftly planted three
more anchor pins for a total of five, one for each of
them.
    "Walk to the edge backwards," said Sisko, back
in control of himself, "and step off."
    O'Brien turned around and demonstrated, as did
Worf on the other side of the Tiffnakis. O'Brien
tried to keep his right hand clear, in case he had to
reach out and grab a Whatsit, should one panic and
lose control of the rope.
    The captain was still giving helpful advice:
"Lean back against the rope and let it play out ....
Slowly, there's nora" Sisko froze in midsentence,
as both Tiffnakis had simply backed off the cliff
with no hands and begun to plummet.
    Leaping wildly, O'Brien struggled to catch up
with the Natives, who were simply falling at nor-
mal gravitational acceleration, their ropes slack;
then the chief pulled up short as he abruptly caught
up with them: they had come to a sudden halt--
but their ropes were still slack. They started to
descend once more, lowering at a constant speed
while still not holding their ropes; it was as if they
were being lowered by an invisible fishing line
attached to a reel on top of the cliff. The chief
bounced closer, straining to see if there was a wire;
what he saw instead was that each Whatsit had his
hands cupped, as if holding something.
    At that moment, O'Brien remembered the hand-
held "tractor beam" toy that Owena-da had shown
him. He sighed deeply and bounced the remaining
distance to the ground in one mighty leap.
    When the captain touched ground minutes later,
he may as well have been wearing a sign that said
"Abandon hope all ye who talk to me." O'Brien
touched his combadge and quietly said, "O'Brien
to anchor pins: release." The ropes went suddenly
slack, and the freed anchor pins dropped to the
ground, bouncing a couple of times on the hard,
mineral-rich surface.
    Wordlessly, Captain Sisko stormed off along his
preplanned route, not even bothering to collect the
handheld tractor beams .... The commander and
the chief took it upon themselves to confiscate the
cheat-tools and send them upstairs.
    "Well, sir," said O'Brien cheerfully, five kilome-
ters later, "what's next on the outdoorsman's test?"
    Captain Sisko had cooled off his own temper by
leading the Scout mob on a fast march: five klicks
at six and a half kilometers per hour. It would have
been a fast walk along a paved road; in the wilder-
ness, it was more like an overland run. Fortunately
for O'Brien (and the only point that kept poor
Quark alive), the planet had a gravitational acceler-
ation only 0.79 that of Federation standard .... It
was like the chief had dropped sixteen kilograms,
or more than two stone. The Tiffnakis were huffing
and blowing so much, it sounded like a balloon-
inflating contest. Neither Worf nor the captain was
even sweating heavily; nor Odo, of course, but he
didn't count.
    Sisko consulted his tricorder map, smiling
faintly in a way that raised snakes in O'Brien's
stomach. "Dead ahead is a marsh that preliminary
tricotder readings put at about a meter deep, with
the approximate consistency of tar."
    "Oh, lovely. This is a really... challenging
course you've laid in for us, Captain." The chief
didn't mind physical exercise, when it was fun, like
stretching himself against Dr. Bashir at springball.
But slogging through a sticking bog, with tendrils
of goo that clung to every step like the vengeful
dead resenting the footsteps of the living, was
decidedly not Miles Edward O'Brien's idea of a
grand time.
    "Scout troop, halt," ordered the captain; Worf
relayed the order up and down the line of two
hundred in a series of bellows that could probably
be heard by Dax up in orbit. O'Brien stared at the
vast expanse of nothingness ahead of them. The
marsh (bog, fen, swamp, mud hole) stretched as far
as his eye could see... a blue black sea of frozen
waves and humps that were probably sandbars of
relative solidity. Then again, knowing the captain,
they might be bottomless dust bowls, thought
O'Brien; he decided to give leadership its privilege
of going first.
    "Well, troops," addressed the captain, "I will
leave it up to your ingenuity to get yourselves
across this mess. You're going to have to know how
to traverse such terrain if you want to fight a
guerrilla war against the--against your invaders."
Sisko turned back to the mob, jabbing his finger at
Asta-ha, then rotating to include all the Tiffnakis in
the admonition: "And there shall be no use of force
beams, parachutes, paragliders, or antigravita-
tional devices of any sort. Is that understood?"
    "Why not?" asked the hereditary mayor in puz-
zlement. "If the tech gives us the means to cross
this smelly and unpalatable fen, why shouldn't we
use it?"
    O'Brien responded for the captain. "Don't you
remember what happened in the battle? The invad-
ers have the capability to make all your lovely tech
stop working. What are you going to do when your
antigrays fail, and you're a hundred meters in the
sky?"
    Asta-ha nodded sagely; her little girl Tivva-ma
imitated her with tremendous gravity. "Yes, I see
your point," admitted the mother. "No antigravs,
or anything else that could injure or kill us if the
tech suddenly chose to take itself away."
    The Tiffnakis called a town meeting to discuss
the new, perplexing rules, and Sisko gestured the
away team away to allow the villagers to work out
their own problem. The captain sucked in a lung-
ful, looking upon the slough of despair as if it were
a rolling line of modest hills under a soft carpet of
Bajoran dushti grass. "This takes me back," he
said. "One thing I find I miss as commanding
officer is the opportunity to lead an away team: just
me and my command against the elements. It's
invigorating."
    Odo was staring at the mob of Scouts. "It also
appears to be exfoliating," he said.
    "What?" asked Sisko. "Constable, if you could
be a bit more..." The captain trailed off, and
O'Brien followed Sisko's gaze.
    The Tiffnakis, led by Asta-ha, were just finishing
burning a path arrow-straight through the swamp,
using a projection device that strongly resembled
an old-fashioned coffee grinder, including the hand
crank. The mayor was using the crank as the away
team watched, playing an orange beam up and
down the new path... a rock-hard rut with per-
manent sides that appeared to be--
  "Obsidian," breathed the chief.
    "Volcanic glass," responded Constable Odo au-
tomatically. Probably wondering if he can shape-
shift into it, thought O'Brien.
    "This is completely unacceptable!" shouted the
Klingon, but the captain merely sighed and shook
his head.
    "I can see this just isn't going to work," he said
sadly; "I have a very bad feeling about this."
    Asta-ha put the finishing touches on her creation,
and with a wave, the Tiffnakis began marching
normal-pace along the hardened furrow she had
dug; at the rate they were trucking, O'Brien figured
they would be at the other side of the bog in thirty
minutes... without a spoiled shoe or muddied
pant leg in the lot.
    Chief O'Brien heard an abrupt cry for help from
twenty meters away in the opposite direction; it
was Quark, who seemed to be the only person
floundering in the swamp for some peculiar reason.
In the SWAMP? puzzled the chiefi
    Odo led the pack over to his old sparring part-
ner. "What's the matter, Quark? Did you go swim-
ming too soon after stuffing your face?"
    "Get--memOUT/" shrieked the Ferengi, pan-
icked.
    For some reason, everyone turned and looked at
O'Brien. "Well, how come I have to dive in and get
covered with that foul-smelling mud?" Nobody
answered, but nobody else volunteered, either.
"Oh, all right. Why not? Clearly it's the job of the
senior chief to wade into the mud hole to rescue
any random bartenders we happen to find."
  "Chief, HELP.t I'm dying, I'm dying!"
    O'Brien scanned with his tricorder. "Oh for
God's sake, Quark, it's only a meter deep--just
stand up."
  "I can't. I'm--my coat is too heavy!"
    The chief waited a few moments, expecting
Quark to stop whining and get up, but it became
obvious that the Ferengi was struggling against a
heavy weight, like a huge pair of hands rising from
the mud to suck him down. "Chief," said the
captain, "I think you ought to see to your team-
mate."
    O'Brien rolled his eyes, but Sisko had a point:
having accepted Quark onto the away team, they
had to treat him like a normal member. Sighing in
exasperation, Chief O'Brien waded into the goo,
stepping gingerly to avoid slipping and falling. He
struggled his way to Quark. "How the hell did you
get out here?" he demanded, trying to get a grip on
the Ferengi's mud-soaked jacket.
    "I slipped and kept sliding," snarled Quark.
"What did you think, that I was swimming to the
opposite shore?"
    "What have you been eating? You weigh a ton,
Quark."
    The Ferengi looked simultaneously smug and
put-upon. "I'11 thank you to keep your personal
comments to yourself," he sniffed.
    Something felt strangewwrong. "In fact,"
mused the chief, "it's not you what's so heavy...
it's your damned jacket!"
    "W-w-what do you mean? How could a jacket be
heavy?"
    Quark tried so hard to look casual that O'Brien
instantly grew suspicious. Reaching around Quark
from behind, the chief yanked the jacket off the
Ferengi with a swift move. Sure enough, the gar-
ment weighed nearly twenty kilos.
    Quark popped up immediately, now jacketless
and no longer mired. "Give it back!" he shrieked,
snatching for the coat. "You have no right--itg
mine!"
    "There's something in here," announced the
chief, holding the jacket aloft with one hand, just
out of Quark's reach.
 "It's mine. I found it."
    "Now now, Quark," said Odo, striding into the
mud to intercede between the struggling pair; he
removed the jacket from O'Brien's hand and held
it aloft himself.... Three meters aloft. "You
wanted to be part of the away team? Well, now you
are .... So whatever you found belongs to the
Federation."
    O'Brien quickly looked at the Tiffnakis, but they
were long out of sight; Odo had been careful not to
let them see him shapeshifting ...."One shock at
a time," the constable explained.
    "Why don't you bring that coat out here," sug-
gested Captain Sisko. "We can all take a look and
see what wonderful thing Mr. Quark has found."
    Constable Odo slooshed his way onto the bank;
O'Brien let go the Ferengi and followed, leaving
Quark to struggle his way out unassisted. The chief
stared at Odo; naturally, the changeling's "trou-
sers" were still sparkling clean, since they weren't
cloth at all but Odo's own body cells. O'Brien and
especially Quark looked as though they had been
dunked in an inkwell.
  Laying the jacket out on the ground, Odo began
searching each pocket. "Hey," shouted Quark, ral-
lying for one last defense of his privacy, "don't you
need a search warrant?"
    The constable smiled condescendingly at him.
"Not to safety-check the equipment of a member
of the away team, surely." Odo pulled packet after
packet out of Quark's pockets, laying them on the
ground at the Ferengi's feet.
    O'Brien bent and studied them. "Dirt," he pro-
nounced, pouring it into his hand and sifting it
through his fingers; it felt cool, crumbly, and faintly
metallic. "Quark, why in God's name did you fill
your pockets with dozens of bags of dirt?"
    The Ferengi said nothing, but Odo rolled his eyes
disgustedly. "He didn't fill his pockets with
dirt .... He lined his pockets with latinum--
latinurn drops."
    Quark snarled at the ground, saying nothing lest
it be taken down in evidence and used against him.
Worf snarled and edged closer to the Ferengi;
O'Brien thought the Klingon looked like he was
hoping to get in one good shot before Captain Sisko
could stop him.
    "So, Mr. Quark," said the captain, defusing the
situation with a smile, "I see you've been collecting
geological samples. Not a bad idea. Let's send them
up to the Defiant for analysis." He touched his
combadge: "Sisko to Defiant."
    Silence. The captain tried a hail again, then
added, "Dax, are you there?" There was no re-
sponse.

    Feeling suddenly apprehensive and very much
alone, O'Brien slapped his own badge. "O'Brien to
DaxmCommander, can you hear us?" The re-
sponse was the same: nothing. Worf, Odo, and even
Quark tried with no better luck.
    O'Brien whipped up his tricorder, dialed the
scan range out to maximum, and swept the sky.
"Captain," he said slowly, hardly believing his own
words as they came out his mouth, "it's gone."
  "Gone?" Sisko didn't seem to understand.
    "Gone. The Defiant, it's gone--it's no longer in
orbit."
    "Dax," said Worf, with a sudden and very per-
sonal apprehension; he got hold of himself imme-
diately, turning to the captain. "Perhaps the
Cardassian ships discovered the Defiant, and Com-
mander Dax took it out of orbit."
    O'Brien checked again. "No, there's no warp
signature; nobody has used warp engines around
here since we arrived. She's just..."mhe looked
up--"gone, Captain." Taking our future luncheons
and suppers with her, he thought.
    A pensive Captain Sisko absently rubbed his
beard and stared after the Tiffnakis. "Gentlemen,"
he said at last, "this is no longer a Scouting hike.
This is now a military action. And like it or not,
those"--he gestured at the trail burned through the
mud~"are our only forces." Then he turned back
to the team and grinned. "Let's see just how much
hell we can give," he said, grinning like a Klingon
general.
    I should be scared out of my wits, thought the
chief, but he didn't feel frightened: he felt the most
curious sense of liberation. At last, a chance to
scratch the itch that had bothered him ever since
the Cardassians had defected from the war to join
the Dominion; a real hullabaloo, and no holds
barred. "Too bad we don't have any Tullamore
Dew," he muttered, but nobody heard him.

0

CHAPTER
      lO

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER Jadzia Dax sat in the
Defiant's lonely command chair--lonely not only
because all her comrades were down on the planet
below, but because she felt she should be with
them. Julian said her wound was healing nicely,
and that she'd be ready to fight in another day or
two, but that meant nothing now.
    Stupid, she berated herself, fretting won't help
them. She tried to keep a poker face for the duty
shift on the bridge, Ensigns Weymouth and
N'Kduk-Thag (with a glottal stop; Dax couldn't
quite pronounce it) and Lieutenant junior grade
Joson Wabak, a good-looking Bajoran man that
made Jadzia think fondly of her wilder days. Cur-
zon had had lots of "relationships" that he'd given
little long-term thought to, but in her female years
Dax had rarely been quite that frivolous.
    Suddenly, Lieutenant Wabak at Ops jumped in
startlement and stared intensely at his threat
board. "Commander," he said hesitantly, "we were
just scanned."
    Dax considered. "Random sweeps by the Car-
dassian ships. Right?"
    "No, ma'am." Wabak looked up nervously.
"We're being scanned by the planet."
    "By the planet?" Dax half rose. "By the Natives?
Or is it a Cardassian probe?"
  "I mean scanned by the planetary defense sys-
tem in orbit ....Not the Cardassian ship, ma'am."
Uh oh .... Dax almost sprinted to the threat
board. Looking over the lieutenant's shoulder, she
double-checked his read. He was absolutely right:
the scan came from orbit, and it wasn't a Cardassi-
an signal-processing system.
    Dax uttered a single Klingon oath before she
remembered she was in charge: raw ensigns (and
jaygees) did not want to hear their commanding
officer get upset. "All right, so we've been detected
by the planetary defense systems; they're not firing
on the Cardassians ....Any reason to think they'll
fire on us?"
    "Well," hedged Wabak, "we are a lot closer than
they are."
    "Mr. Wabak, how much higher in orbit are the
Cardassians?"
    "We're at half-synchronous, about forty-three
thousand. The Cardassians are all somewhere
around a hundred thousand kilometers."
    Ensign N'Kduk-Thag cleared his throat; it
sounded like sandpaper across a washboard. "The
Cardassians would doubtless prefer to be at a much
closer orbit to support their troops," he said,
speaking perfectly correctly but without inflection.
    "Or even at the one percent atmospheric level, to
cover the entire planet more quickly," added
Wabak, "like a low orbit with a one- or two-hour
period." Ensign Weymouth said nothing; she sort
of contracted within herself--earning a possible
"down" on her OOD watch, whenever Dax got
around to doing the CDO log.
    "In either case," continued the monotone of
Ensign N'Kduk-Thag, "the Cardassian ships would
not be so far away from the planet's surface unless
they were afraid of being detected and classified as
an unfriendly object by something--presumably
the planetary defenses."
    The opening salvo of something struck them at
just that moment. "Incoming," shouted Lieutenant
Wabak, somewhat belatedly.
    There was no shock; the Defiant didn't rock or
shudder. The beam that struck them was nonde-
structive, fortunately--since of course they had no
shields. They were "silent running," as the Trill
recalled submariners used to call it centuries ago;
the cloak was incompatible with shields.
  "Shields up," said Wabak.
    Without a perceptible pause, Commander Dax
responded, "Belay that. Ensign Weymouth,
diagnostics .... What the hell is the beam doing to
us? Anything? Is it a scan?"
    The brunette--whose hair was shaved into some
improbable design that was probably a religious
symbol (otherwise Starfleet wouldn't allow it)-
squeaked nervously, but her hands flew across the
console. Once you kick her in the butt, she~ not too
bad, thought Dax abstractly, editing the log entry
in her head. "It's, um, not doing anything. I mean,
I don't see any problems."  "Try a level-three."
  "I did, levels two through five. No damage, sir."
    "Wabak? N'Kduk-Thag? Sorry if I mangled your
name .... Can I call you Nick?"
    "You may call me Nick. Commander, I can
detect no effect from the beam."
    "Neither can ..." Wabak trailed off, staring at
his threat board with eyes so bright blue, Dax idly
wondered whether they would shine in the dark. A
pity he hadn't come aboard Deep Space Nine a year
earlier ....
 "What is it, Wabak?"
    "The Cardassians are scanning us--and they're
heading right toward us."
    Dax was up and out of the command chair again,
looking over Wabak's shoulder, vaguely aware it
probably wasn't a good idea--it might make him
think she lacked confidence in him. "Now what?
How are they... Weymouth, fire a probe, oppo-
site direction from the Cardassians."
    The ensign poked at her board, Dax heard a faint
hiss. "Probe away."
    "Point it backwards and take a look at us on
sensors; put it on the main viewer."
    Five pairs of eyes on the bridge, counting the
silent security chief by the turbolift, stared up at
the main viewer. Dax saw a star field, with a pair of
dots moving slowly closer; each dot was accompa-
nied by a bright green box full of information
about the type and specs of Cardassian warship it
was. But the centerpiece of the screen was a giant-
sized picture of the Defiant, accompanied by its
own bright green box... and the ship was radiat-
ing on all frequencies.
    "So much for the cloak," said Dax, more disap-
pointed than incredulous. "No wonder we're at-
tracting attention. We're lit up like a courting
lantern."
    "Well," said Lieutenant Wabak weakly, "at least
now we know what the planetary-defense beam
does, Commander."
    "Belay that last belay, Lieutenant. Shields,
quickly--before the Cardassians get close enough
to take a clean shot."
    "Incoming torpedo from the cruiser," said
Wabak, raising shields, but the shot was far wide,
of course .... They were only barely in range.
  "Ensign Weymouth, evasive maneuvers."
  "Which--which pattern should I use, sir?"
  "Pattern four."
    The Defiant began to bob and weave, maneuver-
ing to keep the planet in between herself and the
Cardassians... an impossible task, Dax quickly
realized, as the seven ships fanned out: the two
GM-class heavy cruisers, either of which could
probably handle the Defiant by itself, backed away,
waiting for the cruiser and the four destroyers to
harass and chivvy the Federation vessel, which had
probably been identified by then, into the open.
Dax felt herself begin to sweat, feeling like a
burglar when someone suddenly turned on all the
lights.
    "Commander--should we contact the away
team?"
    "Negative. The Cardassians will just follow the
signal--"
    "And they will locate the away team," finished
the unpronounceable Ensign Nick.
    Please Benjamin, she prayed silently, whatever
you do, DON'T call me right now.
    The Defiant lurched with another disruptor tor-
pedo, fired this time by one of the destroyers; it was
only a small charge, and not a direct shot in any
event, but Dax realized it was the harbinger of
more, many more, to come.
    "Commander!" shouted Wabak. "Should we re-
turn fire?"
 "Don't bother," she said, glumly.
 "What?"
 "Don't bother returning fire, we're out of effec-
tive range. Weymouth, continue evasive maneu-
vers .... Do it randomly--use the computer,
that's what it's there for." Dax paced nervously,
aware she was showing her stress, hoping it would
just appear as battle lust. It would make sense; over
the last few centuries, they know I've been a berserk-
er warrior more than once.
    "Incoming," said the jaygee. "Torpedo, two dis-
ruptor blasts--took us on... the disruptors took
us on the for'ard left flank, shields holding."
    "Sort of," added Dax, noticing the bridge lights
flicker... a subtle sign of power strain as the
computer instantly compensated.  "Return fire?"
    "We're not close enough, Lieutenant; just vamp
until ready."
  "What?"
  "Sorry ....Just fly in circles, try to keep the
planet between us and the heavies." Centuries ago,
on ancient Earth, when the vaudeville acts weren't
quite ready but the audience were restive, the MC
would "vamp until ready"--come out, tell jokes,
sing songs, insult the audience, and in general make
a turnreel, literally a noise, until the first juggler or
dance act felt the psychic moment was perfect to
make an appearance (or was paid the extortion
money they demanded not to walk off the show). At
the moment, against two heavy dreadnoughts and
five smaller ships, that was about all the Defiant
could do--and Dax knew it. The junior officers
 should have known it too, but Jadzia Dax was more
 willing to forgive the sins of youth than her youth-
 ful prot6g6, Benjamin Sisko.
     Suddenly, Lieutenant Wabak jumped half out of
 his chair and his skin. "Incoming missiles/" he
 nearly screamed; then without bothering to ask
 permission, he fired a pair of photon torpedoes.
 The explosion literally spun the ship, sending it
 tumbling in its orbit until Ensign Weymouth cor-
 rected and regained control.
     "What the hell was that?" demanded the com-
 mander.
     "Planetary defenses," bellowed Wabak, trying to
 regain control of himself. "Prophets, more mis-
 siles."
  "Get us out of this orbit, Mister."
    Discussion ceased as the bridge crew poured on
the impulse engines, increasing momentum in the
direction of their orbit; in accordance with gravita-
tional laws that not even the Joint Federation,
Klingon, and Cardassian Peace Negotiations Dis-
cussion Subcommittee could yet repeal, the Defiant
drifted farther and farther from the center of the
planet. "Take out any missiles aimed at us," or-
dered Dax retroactively, for the record. The lieu-
tenant junior grade repeated his earlier actions,
though this time one of the missiles got too close,
and the explosion tore right through the shields
and shredded the external packet of one of the
nacelles.
 "Dax to Bashir. Casualties on decks, ah, nine and
ten." The battle continued, forces conjoined, and
Dax forgot everything, even the casualties, in her
mad zeal somehow to keep the rest of them alive
for at least a few more minutes.

    Dr. Bashir, running down a corridor in the
increasingly damaged Defiant, staggered and fell
against the bulkhead as the damned ship heaved
and shook under the bombardment. He barely
avoided actually sprawling on the deck and drop-
ping everything.
    A nurse behind him unnecessarily grabbed him
under the arms and helped him up. "I'm all right,
Aaastaak," he snapped, testy under the strain.
    Julian Bashir sighed as he continued down the
corridor, slower this time. Well this IS what I
signed up for, isn't it? "A lesser man would crum-
ble," he muttered, but Virjaaj Aaastaak didn't
hear, of course: Toorjaani were known throughout
the quadrant for their lousy hearing, made up for
by an almost psychic empathy with the injured,
nearly as good as the Betazoids'. Taking a break
from bumpy noses, evolution had equipped the
Toorjaani with noses that bent at a right angle,
pointing left (the dominant caste) or right (ser-
vants, doormen, boot polishers, so on); the Federa-
tion had debated their admission for years.
     And here I am, mentally babbling again, thought
 the doctor angrily. Bashir pushed through an emer-
 gency door that was flashing red; had it been
 flashing blue, it would have indicated hull breach
 beyond it, and Dr. Bashir would have needed a
 pressure suit to treat the casualties--assuming
 they managed to survive a close encounter with the
 Void.
    And casualties there were. Sixteen crewmen were
scattered about the room, bloodstains painted the
floor an eerie red with streaks of green (Vulcan) and
silver and black (any of several different species;
Bashir would worry about identifcation after tri-
age). '~,taastaak!" shouted the doctor, catching the
Toorjaani's attention. "Her and her, emergency
transport to sickbay. The ones I'm marking get your
immediate attention." The ship rocked again,
throwing Bashir to his knees. What the hell is going
on up there?he wondered, climbing back to his feet.
    As the two most injured crewwomen disap-
peared into sparkles, Bashir drew a device from his
bag and spray-painted the faces of seven other
crewmen: they all had broken bones, multiple
contusions, and serious but not life-threatening
lacerations and abrasions; one was bleeding badly
enough that the doctor staunched the flow before
spraying him. "Leave the rest until later. They can
wait."
    Bashir slapped his cornbadge. "Marge. Start..."
Realizing he was still shrieking like a banshee,
Bashir cleared his aching throat and started over.
"Marge, prep the two patients for immediate sur-
gery, then start with an alpha wave inducer and start
isolating the most serious internals with an exoscal-
peL I'll be down in three or four minutes." He was
holding tight to a hatch-access handle; nevertheless,
he was almost knocked off his feet anyway when the
ship first lurched forward, like a boat sliding down a
particularly grim wave, then jumped backwards, as
if it had slammed into something solid (like a
planet).
    Leaving Aaastaak in charge of the first serious
casualty site, Julian Bashir picked up his tricorder
and medical bag and literally ran to the next
chamber. He found only four more casualties, none
as seriously injured as the ensign and the patient he
had already sent to surgery. "People, listen up," he
said. "You can all make it next door except you,
Ensign. The rest of you go into that room there"--
Bashir pointedm"and the nurse will take care of
you after he squares away some other, more seri-
ously wounded patients."
    Bashir pressed his lips together, playing his por-
table plasma infusion unit across the chest of the
far more seriously injured Ensign Yamada, who
had lost a significant amount of blood. The ship
seemed to roll; at least Julian Bashir was pressed
against the floor with nearly three times the normal
gravitation allowed by the inertial dampers.
    "Ensign Jones," he gasped when he could
breathe again, "I checked you out: your pulse,
respiration, and blood pressure are all normal.
Whatever you're feeling is entirely in your mind;
your body is all right, except for some minor
scratches." Dr. Bashir looked up at the sweating,
shaky starman. "It's all right to be searedmI'm
 scared to death. You're going to be fine .... trust
 me. I am a doctor." He smiled at the man, who
 looked terribly embarrassed at his outburst.
    When Bashir had stopped Yamada's blood flow
with his hypotourniquet, despite being knocked to
his rear twice because of torpedoes or disruptors
pounding against the fading shields, the doctor had
the computer transport himself directly to sickbay.
Just as he arrived, the ship rolled so severely that
the inertial dampers couldn't quite keep up; Bashir
found himself hanging from the edge of the opera-
ting table, while the bulkhead separating the sur-
gery from his office abruptly became the "floor."
Then normal gravity reasserted itself, and he fell to
the deck.
    He stood, holding his stomach and trying to find
the breath that had been knocked away by the
blow. "Oh, Marge... this is going to be a relaxing
session." He shook his numbed arm. "I can just
feel it in my bones."
    The nurse looked at Bashir and shook her head,
as if ruing the day she had ever been assigned to Dr.
Julian Bashir.

    Jadzia Dax was far too busy to be sick to her
stomach; after the third time thrown to the deck,
she sat in the command chair and ordered every-
one, herself included, to strap in. It was the most
lopsided battle she had fought in more than a
century: the Defiant had been so busy dodging, she
had gotten off only a few, poorly aimed shots at the
Cardassian attackers... and those had done
barely any damage at all.
    "Weymouth, continue evasive maneuvers.
Wabak, shoot anything you see, keep us outside the
planetary defenses--last thing we need is to be
dodging their impulse missiles in addition to torpe-
does and disruptors." She tapped her cornbadge;
"Dax to Ensign Nick, private channel."
    She started to correct herself and use his actual
name; surprisingly, N'Kduk-Thag responded
instantly .... The computer must have been listen-
ing to us, mused the Trill.
    "Nick, you're the only one not engaged in keep-
ing us alive: I need input. We're being
pounded .... Got any suggestions?" She spoke
quietly into the ether, not wanting to distract either
of the other two bridge officers; they had their
hands full dodging Cardassians.
    "We nmst exit the vicinity," suggested the emo-
tionless, or at least uninflected, Ensign Nick.
     "Yes, but how do we disengage when we're
 surrounded by Cardassians? Before we made a
 move in any direction, the minute their sensors
 picked up the impulse engine run-up, they'd be all
 over us like--well, never mind." She wrinkled her
 nose at the image she had been about to invoke.
     "Then there is only one course. We must surren-
 der the ship," concluded the rational but not
 exactly morale-boosting ensign. "Surely the Car-
 dassians are more interested in capturing and
 studying the Defiant than blowing her to pieces."
     Dax thought for a moment: something as yet
 inchoate floated in her stomach, reaching pale
 tendrils of cognition up her throat toward her
brain. Something... something there ....Sud-
denly she knew what to do. "Ensign Nick," she
called sharply, "open a channel to the lead ship--
well, either of the ships. Use the Cardassian guard
frequency, ah"--Dax closed her eyes for a moment
and felt the nausea she had fought off so far--
"twenty-seven, thirteen, thirteen, thirty, three-
niner."
"Channel open, Commander."
"This is Lieutenant Commander Dax, com-
manding officer of the United Federation of Plan-
ets vessel Defiant. I hereby surrender my ship and
crew and demand you cease fire in accordance with
the Uniform Rules of Warfare Treaty."
The rest of the bridge crew fell silent, nearly
forgetting to dodge the final incoming hammer
blows.

CHAPTER
      11

THE DEFIANT took six more hits to the shields, then
the Cardassian ships grew silent; everyone drifted
along his previous course, eyeballing each other.
"Shields down to eleven percent," said Ensign
Nick, science duty officer, doing the analysis that
really should have been performed by Ensign Wey-
mouth, "extensive hull and bioelectrical damage
on most decks, atmospheric containment still oper-
able, thirty-seven casualties--two fatal, six critical.
Doctor Bashir has commenced medical treatment
reports."
    Weymouth and Wabak stared back at the Trill,
and Joson Wabak's mouth was open in astonish-
ment. "We're surrendering?" he demanded, incred-
ulous.
     "Sure sounded like it, didn't it?" Dax wasn't
 being intentionally cryptic; she sometimes con-
 ceived a plan and concealed it even from her own
 conscious mind.
     A cautious voice responded over the comm link.
 "I am Captain Maqak. The New Cardassia accepts
 your surrender."
    The New Cardassia? That wasn't a name Dax
had ever heard before. "We await further instruc-
tions, Captain Maqak," said the commander. She
caught Ensign Nick's eye and drew her finger across
her throat; he understood and severed the connec-
tion. "Lieutenant," Dax said, leaning forward con-
spiratorally, "cut the shields, but let them kind of
flicker out, like they were failing."
    "That won't be hard," Wabak responded, eyes
cold and dark.
    Damn Bajorans, thought Dax, always so emo-
tional about everything.
    Wabak's hands were shaking with suppressed
anger, frustration, humiliation, as he killed the
shields.
    "Are the Cardassians surrounding us?" asked
Dax.
"Pretty much, ma ~m, "he said, rolling his eyes.
"Perfect. Weymouth, listen close: just tap the
impulse engines a tad, just enough to nudge us so
that we pass very close on the lee side of this
dreadnought here." Dax unbuckled and strode to
the ensign's console, pointing at the nearest of the
two larger ships.
    "The--lee side, Commander?" She looked puz-
zled; the term was too ancient to be familiar to
her,... a problem a multi-lived Trill had more
often than one might think.
    "Just get that dreadnought between us and the
source of that discovery beam from the planetary
defenses, Ensign .... You follow? I want us in
Maqak's shadow, far as the beam is concerned."
    Jadzia Dax glanced over at Wabak, the cute but
hotheaded young Bajoran. The look of growing
comprehension on his face was music.
    Ensign Weymouth seemed to get it as well. She
expertly maneuvered the crippled Defiant into po-
sition, even allowing her to tilt alarmingly, as if she
had lost control of her attitude stabilizers.
    "Let me know when the discovery beam is
blocked," said Dax to Wabak, who stared intently
at his threat board.
    "But Commander," queried the greenish blue
Ensign Nick, whose literality seemed to slow him
down at times, "even if we restore the cloaking
device will not the beam simply find us again and
strip it away?"
     "Out here? We're obviously beyond the trigger-
 ing distance, or else they'd be shooting at the
 Cardassians."
     "Commander, the beam is blocked," shouted
 Wabak.
     "Joson, ready to cloak? Do it now." Dax waited
 a couple of seconds for the cloak to take full effect.
 "All right, Tina, now. Point zero seven five im-
 pulse, dive and to the right, get out from between
 'em."
     The engines hummed and rattled, obviously
 damaged. Come on, babies, just a little more. We'll
 have plenty of time for repairs and coddling later--
 just GET US OUT OF HERE. Unwilling to leave
 navigation, Dax hovered over Ensign Weymouth,
 gripping the chair and feeling excitement build in
 her gut like a nova. Dax's mouth was dry and her
 lips stuck together; she tried to lick them, but she
 had no saliva. As the Deftant dodged around the
 Cardassian hedge and broke free, she alternately
 clenched and unclenched her fingers on the back of
 Weymouth's chair.
     "Nick! Are we trailing any debris, ionized triti-
 um or gallium arsenide, anything like that?"
     The ensign checked. "Yes, Commander, we are
 leaving a trail of tritium plasma. I will attempt to
 correct."
"No, leave it .... We want them to track us."
Wabak shot Dax a suspicious glance; Weymouth
was too busy driving and Nick obeyed without
question.
      "Turn and head directly for the planet, maintain
point zero seven five."  "What orbit?"
    "No orbit. I said, directly for the planet." Oh boy,
she thought, if this doesn't work... well, at least !
won't ever have to see Benjamin staring reproach-
fully at me ever again.
  The Defiant turned and dove directly for the
planet, as Dax ordered. "Cardassians," shouted the
commander.
    Joson Wabak checked his threat board; for an
untrained crew of junior officers, they actually
weren't doing half bad, Dax realized .... At the
back of her mind, she was already writing the log
entry: Competent and dutiful but somewhat unorig-
inal. "Hope I get a chance to log it," she said under
her breath.
     "They're--ah--they're kind of milling around;
they're sweeping the area for a warp signature."
  "Hah. Well, we're not running."
    "Now they're fanning out--they're heading low-
er. I think we're..."
    "What? We're what?" Dax caught hold of herself;
someone had to remain levelheaded. She back into
her command chair and buckled up again.
    Wabak looked back at her, eyes wide. "Com-
mander-they've spotted the ionized tritium trail.
They are tracking us. They're following us down.
They'll see right where we're going!"
    Dax grinned like the Cheshire Cat in that old
Earth book Jake Sisko had insisted she read. "I'm
counting on it. That's why we're going slow enough
they can follow. Tina, set speed to one hundred
kilometers per second but wait to engage for my
mark."
     The Defiant plunged closer and closer to the
 planet; Dax ordered Ensign Nick to count off every
 ten thousand kilometers, which he did a little faster
 than one beat per second. When they hit forty
 thousand kilometers from the planet, Dax said,
 "Tina, engage. Hang on, kids; Wabak, take over
 emergency helm--hands off, Tina--Joson, be pre-
 pared to dodge any accidental missile intercepts."
     Wabak was impressed. "Oh... Commander,
 that's brilliant! Cold, but brilliant." Not surpris-
 ingly, the Bajoran seemed less than concerned
 about Dax's coldness toward their Cardassian at-
 tackers.
    A few moments later, the pursuing Cardassians,
having forgotten their lesson, also passed below
forty thousand kilometers, and the planetary de-
fenses engaged. Missiles began to launch so quickly
that, even though none was fired directly at the
Defiant, it was all Joson could do to dodge the ones
headed for the targets behind.
    "A hit," he shouted; since Dax hadn't felt any
shudder in their own ship, she concluded he was
talking about hits on the Cardassians. "Another
hit .... Two--correct--three more; Cardassian
destroyer down/" he whooped in triumph.
    His triumph was short-lived, alas. "Prophets
take us," he snarled, "the damned discovery beam
is back."
 "Found us again?"
 "Yes. Now they're shooting at us."
 "Ten thousand," called out Ensign Nick.
    "Slow up again, Wabak. Ten kilometers per
second. We don't want to swat the ocean like a
bullet." As they approached the great northern
ocean, Dax had them slow again, and again, until
finally they approached the water at a stately five
hundred meters per second. Wabak continued to
dodge missiles, which became tougher every time
the speed dropped.
    Dax touched her combadge. "Dax to crew: crash
positions. Repeat, crash positions--everyone
strapped in or down on the deck. Julian, put a
stasis around the patients and get down."  
"Aye, aye, Commander."
    "How close, Commander?" Joson asked ner-
vously.
  "Stay the course, Wabak."
  "We're headed right for the water."
    "Stay the course, Lieutenant. We're headed right
into the water. Hang on, everybody. Count it,
Nick."
     "Five seconds until impact..." He paused; Dax
 held her breath, gripping the arms of the command
 chair, wondering for a moment whether it wasn't
 all just a mirage.
     It struck--hard. The inertial dampers couldn't
 cushion the entire blow, and Dax felt a tremendous
 impact against the restraint webbing, which almost
 jerked her eyeballs out of her head. Her head
 snapped forward savagely, and her arms and legs
 splayed out in front of her.
     When she blinked back to full consciousness, she
 made the mistake of shaking her head to clear her
 vision; the pain in her neck was so severe, she
 almost cried out. But she gritted her teeth, playing
 Klingon, and made no noise.
    Still, with every movement of her body, espe-
cially her head and neck, Dax lurched just slightly
off balance, her brain compensating for too much
motion. A frightening feeling: not quite the spin-
ning room of vertigo or the inability to stand still
of dizziness, but the imbalance frightened her
enough that her heart pounded. Within a few
minutes, the horrible sensation coalesced into an
angry pain in her neck, and she realized it was
caused by the sudden jolt of the ship's impact
against the sea surface.
    The Defiant rolled and pitched far beneath the
ocean waves, caught by deep underwater currents.
Out the forward viewer, all the commander saw
was a swirl of gradually dimming silvery blue and
millions of green-glowing bubbles. "Computer,"
she gasped, "color correct for water transparency."
    Now she jumped in vertigo, causing her head to
throb as if someone were kicking her brainpan with
an iron-shod boot: the ship was headed straight for
an immense rock wall. She blinked, and realized it
was the ocean floor; they were still pointed directly
downward, though their speed was tremendously
diminished--the impulse engines ran at the same
power level as if they were in vacuum, but the
enormous drag of seawater slowed their progress to
a crawl.
  Well, good, she thought; otherwise, we might're
smacked into the dirt before we even recovered from
crashing the surface.
 "Ensign Nickmwhat's our depth?"
    "We are at one thousand one hundred meters
below the surface; the pressure against the hull is
one hundred and ten atmospheres, still descending;
ocean floor in five hundred meters." 
"Is the hull going to cave?"
"The hull is not built for high external pressure."
"Wabak, full power to the hull integrity
shields .... In fact, overcrank it; I better head
down to engineering to pump it up a bit. Tina, land
us on the ocean floor and maintain the cloak." She
unbuckled and stood. "Good job, crew; we made
it. We're safe." She didn't add the caveat she
thought silently to herself: Safe FOR NOW~ How
long "now" would be was open to considera-
tion .... depending on whether she could goose
the hull-integrity field to withstand an eventual
hundred and sixty atmospheres of pressure from
the surrounding seawater longer than a few min-
utes.
    Otherwise... Dax left the bridge for the turbo-
lift with visions of a fist crushing an egg, splattering
the contents across the deckplates and the over-
head.

    Quark squatted on the frigid ground, trying not
to think of hundreds, thousands of bars worth of
raw latinum buried beneath his feet. Focus, he
ordered himself; greed is eternal; even a blind man
 can recognize the glow of latinurn; home is where
 the heart is... but the stars are made of latinum.
 The Ferengi couldn't help smiling, though his stu-
 dents couldn't possibly see him in the dark, despite
 the moons; when the immortal Seventy-Fifth Rule
 of Acquisition was writ, who could know how
 literal it would turn out to be?
    Quark popped a glowtube. He and his twelve
students were away in a dark part of the plain, not
near one of the fires that dotted the heath; the fires
were warmer, of course, but the Federations tended
to circulate among them--and Quark's plans did
not include the away team, and especially not Odo.
    "Now these," he said, letting a pile of torn paper
bits fall to the ground, "are called money. Chits,
credits, whatever you want. Each chit represents--
oh, call it twenty bars of gold-pressed latinum." If
we're going to go for it, let~ go for it.
    Asta-ha, the female leader, nodded as if she
understood.
      "Do you know what gold-pressed latinurn is?"
asked Quark.  "Neg."
    He sighed deeply. All right, let's start back a little
farther. Suppose you wanted something you didn't
have... say a piece of new tech; this glowtube, for
instance. Now, I have a bunch in my pocket, and
you want some. What do you do?"
    Asta-ha puzzled for a moment; then she asked,
"Could I have one of your glowtube techs, Quark?"
"Certainly, Asta-ha, but I want something in
return. What will you offer me?"
    Without a thought, the female extracted her
force beam projector. "No. That's totally ridicu-
lous," snarled the Ferengi, pocketing the projector.
I thought Sisko confiscated all that, he idly won-
dered, feeling virtuous in removing another Tiff-
naki cheating tool. "This glowtube gives you light
for four hours, then it stops... but the force
beam projector works forever. You gave up some-
thing much more useful for something of limited
value .... That's uneconomic."
    "But what should I offer?" she asked, still trying
to work it out.
    "Just something equally valueless and tempo-
rary, like--" Quark struggled for an example; the
problem was, all the technology on this priceless
gem of a world was seemingly perfect and eternal.
"Like a sandwich, or some other foodstuff. Yes,
that's perfect. A meal gives you about four or five
hours of sustenance; the glowtube gives you four
hours of light .... A perfect trade. See why?"
    "I guess so," said Asta-ha; she didn't look sure at
all. "But what if you just ate?"
    Quark beamed; the perfect straight line. "That's
where this money comes in. It's a placeholder for
the value. I give you the glowtube and you give me
one of your chits; I hang onto the chit until I get
hungry again .... Then I trade you back your chit,
and you give me a sandwich. Get it?"
  "Yeah... yeah."
     "And suppose," continued the Ferengi, on a roll,
 "! get hungry and you're not around. Do I starve?
 No. I can trade the chit you gave me to anyone else
 who has food, and he'll give me an equivalent
 amount of food. Then he keeps the chit I gave him,
 and eventually, when he needs something from
 somebody else, he trades the chit for it."
    In reality, Quark thought darkly, a Sierra-Bravo
sandwich was just the ticket if he ever ended up
destitute and an employee, and he decided to end it
all; the local food was deadly poison to Ferengi and
hu-man digestion.
    Which raises an interesting question, he thought:
what ARE we going to eat when we run out of the
despicable Federation corn-rats? There didn't seem
to be an edible beetle in sight.
    Rimtha-da, a burly man who didn't know his
own strength, interrupted. "Money tech. This is an
amazing discovery, Quark. You nmst show your
friends, too."
    The Ferengi sighed again. "No, it's not new tech,
it's old tech... and anyone can use it. It's not
like, ah, the antigray, which is controlled by one
person at a time; this tech only works if everyone
uses it."
    Quark worked with the Tiffnakis for more than
an hour, all the while looking apprehensively over
his shoulder for the omnipresent constable; some-
how, Quark was certain, Odo would find a way to
harass Quark for giving so generously of his knowl-
edge of profitable capitalism. No good deed ever
goes unpunished, he quoted to himself; it was the
very last Rule of Acquisition, number 285, to be
exact, and truer words were never spoken.
    He made the Tiffnakis work with him, construct-
ing several hundred pieces of "money" from the
paper he had borrowed from Drukulu-da, the Tiff-
nakis' bard or recorder or historian--Quark
wasn't sure which description fit the man best.
After some false starts, the Ferengi had the Natives
buying and selling all their possessions from one
another, using the chits to mark the value .... It
was truly a remarkable accomplishment, Quark
thought, teaching these innumerate barbarians the
principles of capitalism in just one hour.
    Then Quark began to notice something odd. By
the light of his fading glowtube, he examined one
of the chits: he was sure he had seen that exact chit
just a few moments before, and there were so
many, they shouldn't be recycling so quickly. He
shrugged it off, too busy to worry about the strange
coincidence; he was involved in a difficult negotia-
tion with Asta-ha for her mineral separator, which
she had acquired by the Profits only knew what
bizarre series of trades from someone else in the
group.
     A cynic, such as Odo, might have thought that
 Quark concocted the whole lesson just to get his
 greedy hands on the device, which would allow
 him to separate all the latinurn from the soil
 compound. The Ferengi grinned. Well, cynicism is
 an ugly emotion... but the universe is sometimes
 an ugly place.
    Then, trading away the useless (to Quark) anti-
gray device, which could be found aplenty on Deep
Space Nine, he received from Tivva-ma, Asta-ha's
daughter, a handful of chits, among which were
three exact duplicates of the chit Quark had just
puzzled over. He stared at the four: they were
identical, right down to the irregular tear along one
edge, the exact style of numbering in the Tiffnakis'
complex and inefficient duodecimal system, and
even a stray charcoal mark on the back of each one
of the papers.
    Somebody, he realized with a terrible shock, is
counterfeiting chit markers. Fingers counting auto-
matically, Quark's mind raced: the only way to
perfectly counterfeit the little slips of paper would
be to use a tiny, handheld replicator... but the
replicators on the ship and the station were huge,
bulky affairs, run by the entirety of the ship's
computer system. Quark felt dizzy at the prospect;
imagine, a replicator he could carry in his pocket
while out on a stroll--I'll be a millionaire/shrieked
the vital greed center of his brain. The image of a
million bars of gold-pressed latinurn made him
actually lose count of the "money" Tivva-ma was
handing him.

0

CHAPTER
      12

SNAKING FROM DESmE, Quark initiated inquiries.
"Asta-ha, have you ever seen a piece of tech--I
don't know whether it's new or old--that lets you,
ah, duplicate objects? Like if I had, oh I don't
know, one of these chits, I could use the tech to
make an exact copy?" Quark shrugged his shoul-
ders, trying to look and sound casual; in the dim,
green light from the glowtube, it occurred to him
that no one could see him anyway.
    "Never heard, never seen," said the female,
shrugging right back at the Ferengi. She pointed to
a female Quark had never met. "Jokka-ha keeps
better track of tech than I. Try her."
    Quark sidled up to Jokka-ha, a huge, strapping
female who looked like she could roll the Ferengi
 into a ball and boot him into the Cardassian
 encampment. She, too, claimed never to have
 heard of such tech.
    Jokka-ha sent him to Manna-ha, who sent him to
Drukus-da, who sent him to Alba-ha, who sent him
to Iniyard-da, who directed him to little
Veelishdeiey-ma, and so on through a progression
of more then forty Tiffnakis, until Quark was
certain he was being given the royal runaround by
the Hereditary Female Mayoress. But abruptly, the
shuck stopped there with Tivva-ma herself. Quark
cast a dirty look at the little girl's mother, but Asta-
ha was obliviously involved in her own elaborate
arms negotiation with Owena-da.
    Tivva-ma solemnly nodded when Quark asked
the by now ritual question about the "duplicating
tech." "Yes, I have," she said, holding up an object
the size of a hypospray.
    "Can you show me?" asked Quark, tingling with
excitement; he fished in the pocket of his once
beautiful, now mud-ruined coat for something to
test and found only a plastic-wrapped treat he had
taken along and promptly forgotten. He extracted
it cleverly, laying it on the ground in front of
Tivva-ma: "Want some Huypyrian bee candy,
little girl?" It was a sad but useful fact of biology,
according to Dax's original analysis, that Ferengi
food was not poisonous to Natives--though it did
lack essential nutrients like cyanide, and they
couldn't live on it.
 The negotiation took another hour. During the
course of teaching the essentials of profit, many of
the chits had somehow stuck to Quark's fingers. He
fished them all out now, along with the force beam
projector he took from Asta-ha as punishment, and
several other pieces of tech he had accidentally
acquired in the course of the away team mission.
The girl drove a brutally hard bargain, but at last,
the Ferengi brought together exactly the right com-
bination of tech, promises, Federation technology,
and chits. Tivva-ma handed over the minirepli-
cator.
    Gleefully, Quark hopped to his feet, stopped to
pat the little girl on the head (which indignity she
took gracefully), and pranced away, dancing in
little circles... directly into a solid, massive ob-
ject that felt like a ship's bulkhead but turned out
to be the dreaded Constable Odo's immovable
chest.
    "Well, well, Quark... what have we here?"
Darting his hand faster than the Ferengi's eye
could follow, Odo seized hold of Quark's wrist and
twisted his hand palm-side up; Quark clenched his
hand into a tight fist around his new acquisition.
     Odo hummed happily; maintaining the death
 grip on Quark's wrist, Odo slowly began to meta-
 morphose his other hand into a nightmarish en-
 trenching tool, with huge, jagged, metal shards
 instead of fingers. The metal claw snapped open
 and closed a few times; then it began to move
 inexorably toward Quark's clenched fist with terri-
 ble purpose.
     Quark screamed and opened his hand by reflex,
 as quickly as he would have jerked his fingers from
 a red-hot hunk of metal. Odo's hand contraption
 expertly plucked the minireplicator from Quark's
 trembling paw.
     "That's mine!" shouted Quark. "You can't have
 it!"
  "Oh? And how, exactly, did you get it?"
    "I bought it legitimately," said the Ferengi
stuffily.
  "From whom?"
  "From Tivva-ma."
    "You bought it legitimately by tricking a child
out of it?"
    "I didn't trick her! I paid very handsomely for
it."
  "And you paid what, exactly, Quark?"
    The Ferengi licked his lips, wondering just how
much of the truth to tell. '2, uh, gave her a force
beam projector and an antigray device." Best not
tell him about the Tiffnaki death ray, Quark de-
cided.
    Odo arched his eyebrows. "Correct me if I'm
wrong, Quark, but didn't those devices belong to
the Tiffnakis already?"
  "Well... I bought them earlier."
  "With what?"
    "With these." Inspired, Quark dug into his pock-
ets and coughed up another handful of chits.
    "You bought three devices from credulous Na-
tives with little pieces of paper marked in your own
handwriting .... Is that your story, Quark?" The
constable curled his lip.
    Quark scowled; as usual, the witless Constable
Odo, unable to win a fair battle of the minds, was
resorting to sarcasm and mockery. "Well, earlier I
traded them some of my glowtubes, and a ph..."
    "A ffffJ~. What's a fffff?" Odo tilted his head,
almost smirking. "Were you about to say a phaser?
So in addition to theft and fraud upon a child, you
also engaged in culture contamination. You've had
a busy day, haven't you, Quark?"
    "Odo, for profit's sake. I was teaching them
something about money and the market."
    Constable Odo perked up. "Well, perhaps they'd
enjoy a lesson about jurisprudence, then. I'll have
the chief confiscate the phaser; I have more enjoy-
able duties regarding you."
    Turning about, Odo stalked toward the fire where
the rest of the away team sat; the constable's hand
around Quark's wrist shapeshifted into an iron
manacle, and the Ferengi was dragged, willy-nilly,
toward disgrace, dishonor, and the probable loss of
the single greatest treasure trove ever discovered by
any Ferengi since Grand Nagus Zek first realized
the potential of the wormhole to the Gamma
Quadrant.
  This has not been my day, sighed Quark.

    The Defiant settled at approximately a fifteen
degree angle to the seafloor, according to the sen-
sors. Julian Bashir checked once more on his
 surgery patients; they were all recovering nicely,
 sleeping soundly with the help of an alpha rhythm
 inducer. Nurses Marge and Aaastaak monitored
 the patients carefully; really, there was no reason
 for Bashir to stay in sickbay.
     He took the turbolift to the bridge, but Dax
 wasn't there. "Computer," he said, "locate Lieu-
 tenant Commander Dax." A few minutes later, he
 knocked on her quarters door.
     "Enter," she said glumly, and the door hissed
 open.
"Jadzia! Why are you sitting here in the dark?"
She rubbed her temples. "A, I'm trying to get
rid of this headache, and B, I'm trying to figure
out how the hell we're going to contact the away
team. There are so many ionized minerals in the
water, I can't get a subspace communication
out... and we can't beam through this stuff,
either; the reflection scrambles the beam pattern."
    "You have a headache?" asked Bashir, picking
up on the one problem where he could at least have
some positive impact. He played his tricorder
across her skull, probing for the problem. Hyper-
tensive, he thought .... Perfectly normal, consider-
ing the circumstances. "Let me give you a mild
analgesic, if you don't mind."
    "Will it make me slow and stupid?" She stared at
him with hard, dry eyes. "Because I just can't
afford that right now."
 "I'm not giving you a sedative." Julian smiled,
and Jadzia couldn't suppress a tiny smile herself.
He injected it below the skin of her scalp using the
hypospray, and she started feeling better after a few
moments.
    "Here's the predicament," she said, lying back
on top of her rack. "We're stuck on the ocean floor
at 1,640 meters below the surface. We can't beam
through the water, it's too heaviliy ionized. We
can't send a message to the away team, same
reason. And we can't rise out of the surface because
the four remaining Cardassians in orbit will spot
our leaky impulse thrusters, as will the planetary
defenses, and the two of them will bomb us into
constituent atoms. Any suggestions from the medi-
cal staff?."
    "Take your vitamins," said Julian. But it was
only a pro forma witticism; inside, he was trying to
arrange the situation into a logical, coherent pat-
tern so his superior brain could analyze it. Hiding
his advanced genetics from his friends was vital,
but not more vital than Jadzia's and everyone
else's life.
     "Obviously there's no logical engineering fix,"
 said the doctor, "or you'd have already thought of
 it."
  "Thank you."
     Julian continued, unsure whether she was being
 sincere or sarcastic. "So what we're looking for is a
 solution resulting from thinking sideways."
  Jadzia rolled onto her side. "All right, think
 sideways. With the Cardassians on the surface, I'll
 bet Benjamin has his hands full... and we must
 find a way to communicate with him to find out
 whether he can hold out long enough for us to run
 to the fleet and get a couple of escorts--assuming
 they're not heavily engaged themselves on the
 Cardassian border."
     Bashit completed the thought: "Or whether the
 captain and the team need immediate extraction,
 no matter what."
    "So how do we exchange pleasantries with Ben-
jamin and the away team?"
    Julian sat down in Jadzia's desk chair, putting
his chin in his hands to ponder the problem; then,
remembering his own analogy, he stretched out on
his side on the floor, facing her. He closed his eyes,
trying to envision every crazy method of distance
communication he had ever read about, from sub-
space bouncing to the old radio days of ancient
Earth, to semaphor, bagpipes, signal fires, two
paper cups connected by a string.
    He decided to think out loud, hoping to stimu-
late the brainy Trill. "I've heard that the old sub--
what are they called?--submarines used to extend
a wire on a float to the surface so they could send
and receive message traffic without surfacing."
    "Subspace communications require line of sight;
they don't bounce around like electromagnetic
waves. The team would have to be within a few
kilometers of our antenna... and they're not."
"All right, then; how about electromagnetic
waves? Old-fashioned radio, I mean."
    "But how would we send to the captain?" ob-
jected Jadzia. "He doesn't have a radio receiver to
pick up the signal."
    "Can't you rebuild a cornbadge so it receives
radio frequency?"
    "Of course. But why would he think to do it? We
didn't arrange anything like this before they left."
    Julian Bashir thought long, hard, hot, heavy,
cool, sneaky. He envisioned himself and Jadzia
somehow rising from the sea as gods or water
sprites. He wondered whether they could replicate
a bullhorn on a seventeen-hundred-meter pole,
raise it up, and shout for the captain.
    Julian gasped; he half sat--he had it! but where
had the answer gone?--then it poured back into his
consciousness. "Jadzia," he shouted, startling her
so that she sat bolt upright; she clutched her head,
swearing lustily ....Evidently, the headache was
not utterly gone.
     "You'd better have something after shouting me
 up like that," she declared, making a threatening
 fist.
     "Jadzia, why merely communicate with the cap-
 tain when we can have a face-to-face meeting
 instead?"
     She considered him for a moment, scanning
 right to left across his prone body, head to boots;
 she turned to the empty air next to him.
 "Deranged," she said to the man who wasn't there.
 "Totally deranged."
     "No, really. If we transport ourselves to the
 surface, can't we find the captain?"
     "Julian," she explained patiently, "I already told
 you we can't beam through this water."
    "Who said anything about beaming? What about
using the runabout?"
    Jadzia blinked, startled by the suggestion. "I
never even thought of that," she admitted. "It's a
nice idea, but the pressure would crush the run-
about like a paper lantern. It's not built for that."
    "what if we pressurized the inside to match the
outside?"
    Smiling, the commander said, "That would save
the runabout, but we'd die from oxygen poison-
ing.... At that pressure, the partial pressure of
oxygen is enough to be toxic."
    "Put a force shield around the runabout, like the
ship has?"
    Jadzia considered. "That would delay the crush-
ing, but I still think we wouldn't make it to the
surface."
  "Replicate armor plating for the hull?"
  "We'd need the industrial-sized replicators they
have at the shipyards ....Ours are much too
small."
    "All right then," said the good doctor, "one last
suggestion: we put a force shield around the run-
about to delay the crush, and we replicate deep-sea
scuba diving gear and wear it on the way up; when
the runabout is about to blow, we let the seawater
in ourselves, stick the regulators in our mouths,
and swim the rest of the way."
    Dax stared at Julian, her expression utterly un-
readable until the doctor realized she was doing the
math in her head--she probably didn't even see
him. "You know," she said, "this is going to sound
crazy... but your crazy scheme might just possi-
bly work." She blinked back to the same space-
time coordinates occupied by her body. "Give me a
couple of hours to run some simulations, and in the
meanwhile, can you set up a scuba holosuite pro-
gram?"
    "Yes, I think so. The experimental holosuite is
still on board. Why?"
    "Because I need the practice. I've never dived
below thirty meters in my life."
     Julian Bashir bowed his head. "Your wish, as
 always, is my command, Jadzia."

    Captain Sisko deferred any judgment about
Quark and his alleged nefarious activities "until
such time as we're not in imminent danger of being
blown to small bits"; neither Odo nor Quark was
happy about the delay, but it was the fastest way to
quench the fire. Sisko was far more concerned with
supervising the division of his troops, the Tiff-
nakis, into a semicoherent military organization.
  Though they fought frequent wars with their
 neighbors--"oh, enemies all around!" repeated
 the mayor, Asta-ha--the skirmishes, near as Sisko
 could sort them out, consisted of two ragtag armies
 standing in lines, facing each other, and activating
 various pieces of found technology until one side
 cut and ran. They had no sense of strategy, tactics,
 supply lines, military hierarchy, reserves, or any-
 thing else routine to armies everywhere else in the
 quadrant.
    He consulted with his two most experienced
battlefield commanders: Lieutenant Commander
Worf and Master Chief Petty Officer O'Brien. "The
first step," rumbled the Klingon, truly in his ele-
ment leading an army against Cardassians, "is to
train an elite corps of commandos. They can train
the rest of the troops of the village, and even travel
to other villages to train the Natives there."
    "Worfs right," said the chief, "but there's noth-
ing in any manual I've ever seen telling how to
train a people who don't even know how to use a
rope. Without all their fancy tech, they're help-
less."
    Worf took a long, hard look at O'Brien. "I can
think of another great people with that same
problem."
    "You're not on about Risa again, are you, Worf?"
The chief sighed in exasperation. "I tom you, it's
totally different. The natives never even--"
    "Gentlemen," said the captain, holding out both
hands for silence. "I like the idea of training an
elite commando unit; both of you, start picking out
who you want to be in it. When you start the
training, I want to see both the constable and
Quark heavily involved... together."
    While Worf and O'Brien conducted the planet's
first military draft, and Quark and Odo continued
to try the Ferengi's case before it got so far as a
formal complaint, Captain Sisko paced in the dark-
ness, trying to calm his mind and think clearly,
logically. He kept coming back to his ill-fated
Scouting trip with the Tiffnakis. Fundamentally, he
told himself, I had the right idea: put them in a
situation where they CAN'T use their tech and force
them to start improvising.
    Genetically, the Tiffnakis and their fellow
planeteers--the captain had little experience with
worlds that were not unified into a single planetary
government .... What did one call them, other
than Natives? Genetically, they were exactly the
same as they were when they created all that fancy
technology; they were obviously intelligent enough
to improvise real solutions to their problems. If
only their culture weren't so blasted fixated on
techno manna falling from Heaven.
    According to Asta-ha, every one of their rites of
passage, at every stage of life, followed the same
pattern: put the candidate into a difficult, or at
older ages dangerous, situtation, surrounded by
various disguised pieces of old tech and new tech;
then stand back and wait for the candidate to
discover the right piece and use it to solve the
problem. But wasn't that in essence the way all
science worked? "Finding a smoother pebble or a
prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean
of truth lay all undiscovered before me," as Isaac
Newton wrote more than six centuries before.
    Without realizing it, the Natives might have
prepared themselves for their true renascence, as
they were ripped from their womb of sleep and
thrust into the adult world once again. Sisko chuck-
led, amazed at his own melodramatic nature; he
felt like Captain Ahab, not Captain Sisko, standing
one-legged on the deck of the Pequod, spouting
jeremiads at the great white whale.
    But fundamentally, I was RIGHT. He clung to
that thought like a shipwrecked sailor to a floating
spar. "I just didn't go far enough," he said aloud.
    "Beg pardon, sir?" said O'Brien from directly
behind the captain.
    Suppressing the urge to spin about, Sisko kept
his back to the chief, contemplating the horizon.
"Fundamentally, I was right," he said, "on the idea
of the Scouting trip. I just didn't go far enough ....
I should have strip-searched the damned Natives
before we set out."
    Sisko turned; the chief was uncharacteristically
silent for a moment before speaking. "I'm, ah, not
sure what Keiko would think about me strip-
searching females, sir."
 The captain snorted. "I think we can trust the
women to search the women and the men to search
the men; I don't think we should be involved at all.
But we must impress upon them the urgency of
keeping nothing technological Nothing." 
"Um, how about rope, sir?"
    "No. Nothing but their clothes... and run a
tricorder over the clothing to make sure there's
nothing hidden. We'll teach them how to weave
rope."
 "Food?"
 "We'll pick it, pluck it, or catch it."
    "All right. Does that apply to the instructors as
well?" Sisko chuckled. Not unless we have a
death wish, he thought. "Aye, aye, sir," said
O'Brien. "Then what? Where are we going?"
    "The commandos, led by the away team, are
going to watch the Cardassians conquer another
village. I want Asta-ha and her raiders to see how
an enemy strikes--and how their own people fall
apart when their little toys are taken away."
    "I... don't know that I could just stand my
ground and watch women and kids being killed,
Captain."
    Sisko felt his own gut tighten, but he had long
ago learned the primary Law of Command: some-
times, you simply have to let some people die to
save a larger or more important group. "You won't
have to, Chief. But these people, they're asleep. We
have to shock them to wake them up, and this is the
only way to do it."
    O'Brien turned to stare at the same horizon that
the captain had found so fascinating a few mo-
ments before; was he seeing the same visions, or his
own, private, Boschian hell? "Aye, aye, Cap'n. I'll
tell Worf."
    "Muster the troops and the away team in one
hour and we'll begin stripping away their manna."

0

CHAPTER
      13

NEVER, in more than twenty years of hard service in
Starfleet, training scores--hundreds--of young
enlisted men and even a few officers, never had
Chief Miles Edward O'Brien had to nanny such a
whiny group of complainers as were these Natives.
Everything was all wrong. The hike was too long;
the slope was too steep; the ground was too hard;
the sun was too hot; the wind was too windy; the
rocks were too rocky. By the time the nonchalant
Captain Sisko had led them but thirteen kilometers
"into the wild," Chief O'Brien was wishing he had
palmed one of those force beam projectors to
whack a few of his squad members over the head.
    "Sure," grumbled the chief to Worf, "what does
he care about all the complaining?" He nodded his
head at the captain, as if Worf might not under-
stand who he was. "He doesn't have to hear it. He's
up there at the front, gawking at blue trees and
birds with metallic feathers .... We're the ones
back here having to stomach all this junk."
    Worf growled deep in his throat. "Chief O'Brien,
you are making as much noise as they." Miles
raised his eyebrows; whenever Worf resorted to
calling him Chief O'Brien, it meant the huge Kling-
on was at the end of his rope. "Can you not just be
silent except when correction is called for?" Sud-
denly, Worf pointed at Owena-da, who had
stopped by the side of the road and was staring at
the ground as if looking for something. "You! Get
back in line--"
    Owena-da looked back at Worf, blinking in con-
fusion. "Neg, fellow--I mean, no sir, I thought I
saw the sparkle of new tech among the weeds here.
In fact..."
    Owena-da reached for a small box, the size of a
tricorder, but Worf was quicker. He flashed past
Chief O'Brien before the latter even registered
what Owena-da was doing, and tramped down on
the "new tech" with Federation-standard footgear
that somehow looked more like an iron-shod jack-
boot when Worf wore it. "I see no new tech," said
the Klingon.
 "It's right there, under your foot."
    Worf crouched down to look the frightened Tiff-
naki in the eyes. "I see no new tech," he repeated,
his voice taking on an unmistakable tone of menace.
    Owena-da swallowed hard. "You're, ah, right; I
must've been mistaken, sir. There's no new tech
beneath your boot."
     "Get--in--LINE.t"
    The Tiffnaki didn't waste any time; he shot past
O'Brien faster even than Worf had, but in the other
direction. By the time the chief swiveled his head,
Owena-da was back at his assigned row and file,
matching steps with the other Tiffnakis in the
march. "Well," remarked O'Brien to his friend
when the Klingon returned, "I suppose that's one
way of stopping them from whining. Now are you
going to scare the rest of them half to death?"
    Worf shot O'Brien a look, and the chief grinned.
He allowed his stride to shorten as he moved
outside, and the column marched past him; when
he was even with Odo and Quark, the rear guards,
O'Brien tried his complaint again, this time to
more receptive ears.
    "I know exactly what you mean," sympathized
Quark, shooting a venomous sideways glance at the
constable. "Being around people who spend all
day, every day complaining about this or that tiny
little infraction of the most insignificant regulation,
makes me want to pack it all up and move some-
where."
    "Oh, really, Quark?" said Odo, his lip curling.
"Well, who's stopping you?"
    "You know," mused the Ferengi, "maybe it is
time I made some lifestyle changes. All that hustle
and bustle on the station--Quark, fetch me anoth-
er drink. Quark, the Rigelian bloodwine is too
cold. Quark, the gagh is too sluggish?
    "Oh, my heart just bleeds for you; when did you
say you were leaving?"
    "And the help!" Quark smacked his forehead
and stared skyward, as if appealing to the Final
Accountant. "Rom was bad enough, but those
Bajorans that Kai Winn brought over with her.
You'd think their Prophets had something against
alcohol, synthehol, and Dabo girls."  
"Why, I can't imagine what."
    Quark and Odo were on such a roll that O'Brien
felt himself jollied right out of his mood just
listening to the pair.
    "So I thought that maybe..." Quark leaned
close to O'Brien to speak in a conspiratorial whis-
per; Constable Odo made no effort to move closer,
but the chief noticed that Odo's ears grew dis-
tinctly larger. The advantages of a shapeshifting
eavesdropper, thought O'Brien. "Perhaps," contin-
ued Quark, "the captain wouldn't be averse to my
moving to some nice, quiet, out-of-the-way planet
more or less permanently."
  "Such as here," suggested O'Brien.
    Quark shrugged. "If you like. Someplace where I
could settle down, grow some roots--"
    "Mine a little latinurn," added the constable
without missing a beat.
    "And so what if I do? Is there some law against
honest labor, a day's pay for a good day's toil?"
 "If there is, Quark," smirked Odo, "that's proba-
bly the only law you're in no danger of breaking."
  Before Quark could respond to the latest out-
  rage, a whisper traveled along the column: "Silence
  behind--on the signal, break ranks, find cover in
  the woods."
    O'Brien watched Captain Sisko, way at the front
of the regiment-sized column; without further
warning, the captain raised his left hand fiat and
touched his right fist to the left palm, the signal for
"Attention." Then he gestured to the right with his
now-opened right hand ...."Scatter; cover," the
signal meant.
    O'Brien raced for the silver blue woods, leaping
over a thicket of purple berry plants; this time,
most of the regiment actually beat him to the tree
line, though it still took them too long to fall fiat
behind something solid. Sisko waited in front of
the trees until he could see no one; then he melded
into the forest himself and vanished. Even knowing
where the captain was, O'Brien could barely pick
him out from among the trunks, now bluish gray in
the waning sunlight, under the first moon. Even
Odo awkwardly hid behind a tree, though the chief
could tell he would have been happier becoming, a
tree.
    Chief O'Brien listened closely but heard only the
faintest of rustlings as somebody squirmed to a
more comfortable position. At least no one shushed
him this time, laughed the chief silently to himself.
The last time, the chorus of shushes were so loud,
they totally drowned out the squirming unfortu-
nate.
    O'Brien heard the tramping of boots. From
around a bend ahead of them came a troop of
Natives .... Probably enemies of the Tiffnakis,
thought the chief nervously; he had not forgotten
Asta-ha's insistance that "enemies are all around."
They were, on the whole, taller than the Tiffnakis,
and all had silvery hair. Either it~ a dye job,
thought O'Brien, or there ~ REALLY no interbreed-
ing between the villages. They all dressed similarly
in togalike wrapping garments, unlike the Tiff-
nakis, who dressed like a roomful of color-blind
Ferengis, grabbing jackets and pantaloons at ran-
dom from a bin, no two alike.
    The ghostly parade shuffled silently down the
road; they sported a guidon carrying a guidon: a
white, triangular pennant that flapped in the
breeze, seemingly glued to a curved, sectioned pole
that looked as if it would expand and contract like
a pointer. Glancing neither left nor right, the fifty
or so Natives marched on past.
    O'Brien held his breath; the last encounter had
not gone well. Despite nearly a whole day working
with the Tiffnakis on the principle of conceal-
ment--"such a powerful new tech that requires no
device... better even than rope tech," insisted
Asta-hamthey had made so much noise, each
person trying to shuffle to a more comfy position or
better concealment, or loudly shushing the other
noisemakers, that the previous troop the Tiffnakis
passed had easily heard them.
    That group, who looked like a contingent of
Highland Scots with kilts and feathered blouses,
had stopped and stared at the hedgerow behind
which the Tiffnakis attempted to conceal them-
selves; then one of them pointed a device at the
semihidden mob, and the hedges flattened like
they'd been blown over by gale-force winds. O'Brien
had felt the push from the probing force beam, but
he refused to react; alas, the Tiffnakis evidently
decided the game was up, and they stood up,
waving to the kilt wearers, who turned out to be
friends of theirs (one of the few other Natives who
weren't Tiffnaki enemies, again according to Asta-
ha--who evidently thought her hereditary position
largely required keeping lists of who around them
was naughty and nice).
    It was a fiasco, of course; it took Worf and
O'Brien fully fifteen minutes to restore some sense
of order and get the two mobs of friendly Natives
separated again. Quark and Odo were no help
whatsoever, especially after Quark accused Odo of
shapeshifting, a direct violation of the captain's
orders; the ensuing argument, pursued in loud
whispers to keep it from the ears of the curious
Tiffnakis, occupied both the constable and the
Ferengi. Captain Sisko ignored the scene, observ-
ing the ruddy sun sinking toward the horizon. The
chief had to admit the sky turned a beautiful shade
of amber, then purple, then dark blue, due to the
metallic dust in the atmosphere; the Whatsit planet
boasted three moons, but only two were visible
from the surface .... The two shining together cast
about half the light of Earth's gigantic moon, Luna.
But annoyed as the chief was, hc knew that Sisko
was only exercising the CO's prerogative of leaving
all the headaches to his XO... Lieutenant Com-
mander Worf, in this case.
    As the new group passed by, Chief O'Brien tried
to lick his lips with a tongue as dry as the dust he
lay in; the silent phantoms scuffed along the trail,
holding some wicked-looking devices at port arms.
From the hang and the care the women took with
them--only the women carried the devices--the
chief knew they were hefty weapons of unknown
technology... and on Sierra-Bravo 112-1I, un-
known technology was a deadly term.
    I!e turned his head slowly to the left, careful not
to make any moves sudden enough to catch a
glance, or to rustle any leaves. Owena-da was
nearby, and from the tension with which the weap-
on master of the Tiffnakis clenched his fists and his
jaw, O'Brien knew these Natives were no friends of
the Tiffnakis.
    Abruptly, everything was real; this was no longer
a Scouting hike into the Big Woods; the exercise fell
into focus for what it was: a military excursion into
enemy territory, where a single dumb mistake
could cost people their lives. Possibly even mem-
bers of the away team.

    The chief had only one hole card; he had held
back a small hand phaser, concealed in his boot,
when the captain ordered everyone stripped. "He
only means the men," insisted the chief to Worf,
nodding at the Tiffnakis, but he didn't check with
the captain, not wanting to find out he was wrong.
Worf seemed skeptical; but O'Brien would bet his
last replicator ration that the Klingon had not
completely disarmed himself, either.
    O'Brien watched the toga-wearing Natives shuf-
fle past... and realized to his amazement that
they hadn't noticed a thing. In only the second test
of the Tiffnaki ability to grasp the brand-new
concept of hiding, they looked to have scored a
bull's-eye.
    He felt like half a man as Sisko resumed the
march; but he wasn't too self-absorbed to notice
that time and patience had proved the captain
right: the Tiffnakis, hence Natives in general, were
trainable. The war for Sierra-Bravo 112-II no long-
er looked quite so bleak.

    After several hours of annoying bandying with
the Ferengi bartender, Odo reached his limit of
tolerance. He knew the next stupid insult, the next
clumsy attempt to stake a claim on the topsoil of
the planet, even the next arrogant sneer directed at
anyone motivated by any principle loftier than
profit, and orders or no, Odo would change his fist
into a sledgehammer and pound Quark right into
the ground he so coveted. To spare everyone the
pain and heartache, the constable turned about
and strode into the blackness of night.
    Seeing was no problem; away from prying eyes,
he risked a little bit of shapeshifting to give himself
owl eyes .... In fact, he had been working on the
entire bird, but the eye-morph was as far as he was
willing to push the captain's strict prohibition. Odo
stared around the bleak landscape, realizing that
anyone with infrared sensors or light-amp goggles
could see the Tiffnakis as plainly as if the sun were
up. Well, Captain $isko has the tricorder, and he's
convinced we're alone out here. Of course, if one of
the Natives--ridiculous name, so typical of Com-
mander Dax--if one of the Natives had a sensor
shield, the regiment could be in for a rude shock.
    He stared up at the sky, feeling a terrible sense of
1onliness and--anxiety. Something was dreadfully
wrong with the scenario, but Odo simply couldn't
put his fist on it.
    Without even noticing, he found his feet directed
him toward the captain's circle of firelight as if they
had a mind of their own. Well, technically they do, I
guess, he realized; Founders--changelings--didn't
have a distinct central nervous system or brain, of
course, else they could never transform into any-
thing flat; the Founders' mental activity occurred
everywhere and nowhere... which only meant
that the language of "solids"--terrible term--
simply wasn't equipped to handle the biomorpho-
genic concepts.
    "Good evening, Odo," said the captain without
turning around. "Sit down, take a load off your
mind."
    Had Odo been the gasping sort, this would have
been a good time: how did Captain Sisko always
seem to know what he was thinking? "I've been
thinking about the Defiant, "he said, nervous at the
lie. "I'm very concerned about Commander Dax
and our transportation back home."
    "As are we all, Odo." Odo's eyes were good
enough to see the captain's tense jaw and shoulder
muscles. Yes, you especially must be fi'antic, thought
the constable.
    "Even if we win this war, and I'm not admitting
the probability yet, how would we even let anyone
know we're here?"
    Captain Sisko smiled mysteriously. "Actually,
I've been playing with one or two of the toys we
removed from our pack rat troops," he said, "and
I'm more than ever convinced that their ancestors
did have warp field technology."
"They did? You're sure about that, Captain?"
"Some of these components look so damned
familiar, but just different enough. Given a few
months, I'm sure that Chief O'Brien and I could
build a workable subspace communicator powerful
enough to reach to the nearest Federation out-
post."
    Odo frowned, wishing he could imitate more
subtle emotions. "If they had warp technology,
then why didn't they leave the planet?"
    "Maybe they did, Odo." The captain gestured
Odo toward the fire, perhaps forgetting that a
changeling didn't get cold. Quickly morphing his
eyes back to normal, the constable sat where he was
directed.
    "You think they did leave this planet, sir? Could
you elaborate?"
    The captain shrugged. "There are simply too
few, ah, Natives for a technology this advanced.
The traces of warp technology, the advanced
tech--more advanced in many ways than ours--
make me suspicious. How can a culture develop
antigravity, force beams, and all those other things
and not develop warp drive?"
    "So... they were here and they left? But where?
Why?"
    "Who can say? The first thing I would check is
whether the Natives and all the other plant and
animal life here share the same DNA; this might
have been a forgotten colony."
  "I believe Dax did so; they evolved here."
    "In any event, for some reason, the ancestors of
the Natives stripped all warp technology from the
planet before they left: they wanted these people to
stay."
    Odo had a disturbing thought; he mulled it over
for a moment, then offered it. "Captain, could this
planet have been a penal colony or medical-
quarantine planet? Or a--what did your planet use
to call it?--a lunatic asylum?"
 "Unless we locate central records of some sort,
we'll never know." Captain Sisko leaned forward
to milk the fire of all the heat he could. "Well,
unless we can help these people throw out the
Cardassians and the Drek'la, it's going to become a
slave colony, just like Bajor was."
    Odo heard the crunch of hurrying footsteps long
before the captain, with merely solid ears, could do
so. "Sounds like Commander Worf is on his way
here, double time," he warned.
    Captain Sisko stood to receive his executive
officer.
    Worf spoke quickly in a low tone, not to be
overheard. Of course, Odo heard perfectly: "Cap-
tain, tricorder readings of fuel cell emissions indi-
cate the Cardassians are on the move again.
Asta-ha believes they are headed toward a city of
people called Druvats-nasas that is only fifteen
kilometers away. If we hurry, we can reach a bluff
that overlooks the city before the Cardassians
arrive in force."
     The captain nodded. "Rouse the troops for a
 night march, Commander; get them moving in ten
 minutes."
     "Aye, aye, sir," said the Klingon with a vengeful
 grin that made the constable shudder.

      0
CHAPTER
      14

ODO FELT very uncomfortable with the military
turn of events, aware he knew absolutely nothing
about military discipline and strategy. His only
duty, he decided, was to obey orders and to keep
Quark in line: the creeping Ferengi had already
tried to sabotage the development of the planetary
natives once by corrupting them with the concepts
of money, capitalism, and profit, before they were
ready to develop them on their own; and Quark
had also made several serious attempts (worthy of
formal charges upon return to the station) to ex-
ploit the planetary resources without authorization
from the planetary ruling body.
    But what IS the planetary ruling body? wondered
the constable. He had never before dealt with a
situation of such anarchy, where there was no
world government. How can anybody ever decide to
do anything .... Who supplies the authority to--to
buiM a village, dam a river, or even plough a field?
After all, virtually anything one could do would
affect people all around .... Plough a field and you
change the local ecosystem for your neighbors,
driving away roaming animals and attracting insec-
tal (and insectivorous) pests. Irrigation would alter
the water table; even the very air could be affected.
    As the unruly mob of Tiffnakis were whipped
into a semblance of order by Commander Worf
with his bellows and Chief O'Brien with angry
gestures and "butt-chewing" (a solid term Odo
found distasteful in the extreme), the constable
threw his entire energies into rousing the practi-
cally somnambulant Quark and prodding him into
shouldering his pack and falling in at the rear of the
column. Still he fretted: how was it possible for an
individual Tiffnaki to make even the simplest deci-
sion without a single controlling legal authority to
set the rules? Odo shook his head; it was yet
another mystery of solids... worth a long conver-
sation with Nerys--with Major Kira--when I get
back.
    Something else nagged at the constable. It had
been nearly fourteen hours since he had last been
able to slip away during the night and revert to
liquid form, and now they were headed out on a
march that surely would take Odo "past his bed-
time," as Commander Dax would probably put it.
Feeling apprehension, Constable Odo scanned the
bleak surrounding countryside for someplace to
hide; he found nothing.
    But then, sentient solids generally had very poor
night vision, sacrificed in evolution's blind drive
toward the larger brain. The darkness itself was
Odo's friend.
    Still, he needed that controlling legal authority.
Leaving the half-asleep Quark, Odo hurried his
pace and caught up with the captain just as the
latter gave the order to "head 'em up and move 'em
out."
  "Sir, may I speak to you privately?"
    "Certainly, Odo. I'm always happy to talk to
you."
  "Captain, it's getting to be about that time."
  "Time?"
  "For me to regenerate."
    Captain Sisko raised his eyebrows; he often
forgot the needs of his shapechanging constable,
especially after Odo's lengthy interregnum as a
solid himself. "Odo, I cannot possibly delay the
march."
    "No, and I wouldn't ask you. All I ask..." Odo
simulated a deep breath, a habit he had picked up
during the interregnum; strangely, it still worked to
calm him down and center him. "All I ask," he said
quietly, "is for you to leave me behind; let me
liquefy for a few hours .... Then when I'm myself
again, let me shapechange to a hawk and rejoin
you."

    The captain frowned. "I'm reluctant to allow you
to do any shapechanging here. We've already
pushed the limit of the Prime Directive."
    "I won't let anyone see me ifI can help it. I'll add
a bluish tint to my feathers, and perhaps I'll be
mistaken for a local avian even if I am spotted."
    Captain Sisko struggled with his first inclination
for a moment, then relaxed. "All right, Constable;
Worf will show you where we're headed and give
you the approximate time of arrival: but I want you
there when the battle commences. I need your eyes,
Odo."
  'Tll be there," the constable promised.
    He consulted Worf, then ieft the outraged Chief
O'Brien in charge of Quark. Then Odo let himself
slip farther and farther behind the march as "rear
guard," finally stopping, shapechanging into a
hawk for practice, and flying far enough aside that
even a sharp-eyed Klingon shouldn't be able to see
him in the one-mooned gloom. He found a vaguely
cup-shaped indentation in a rock; with a deep sigh
of relaxation, Odo squatted in it and allowed his
form to break down into the sensuous, liquid pool.
    He slept and he dreamed, something unusual:
Odo remembered his brief interlude in the memo-
ry pool of the Founders, on his homeworld, the
embracing peace of being part of the whole, in his
proper order, surrounded by and filled with his
own kind. Odo dreamed of touching minds, being
At One--a concept frequently enunciated but nev-
er truly understood by any solid creature, forever
 locked away from its fellows by walls of flesh and
 bone.
    When he jerked awake, many hours later, at first
he couldn't remember which "one" he was sup-
posed to be. It was a delicious feeling at first; then
he remembered he was supposed to do something,
something urgent--and he panicked until, by force
of habit, he rose as Constable Odo again. The task
jumped back into his consciousness.
    Settle, settle, he commanded himself to little
avail. The horizon was lightening; it was later than
he planned.
    It was three forty-one. Odo was shocked to dis-
cover he had overslept. Nervously, he tapped the
combadge: "Odo to Captain Sisko." No reply, so
he tried again.
    Odo was stumped. No response from the Defiant
he could understand: they had left orbit. But until
this moment, the combadges had been working
person to person among the away team. Something
(or someone) was jamming the signal ....Well, if
it's the Cardassians, I'd better get aloft.
    Furious at himself, and dreading the captain's
animadversions almost more than the possibility
of mission failure, Odo burst into the form of the
hawk again and flapped aloft, only remembering
the color-tinting minutes later.
    Once at cruising altitude, carrying the combadge
safely tucked inside his abdomenal cavity, the
constable was surprised anew, as he was every
time, at the freedom he felt from earthly restraint.
He soared, feeling almost as if he could flap harder
and harder and fly right into orbit. He circled for a
few moments, finding his bearings; Odo had to
compare the two-dimensional line rendering of the
terrain with its topographic symbols and contour
lines to the living, pulsing, three-dimensional, full-
color image hawk eyes sent to hawk brain.
    At half a kilometer in altitude, the sun had
already dawned, though it wasn't yet five o'clock
local time; remembering the tilt and rotation of the
planet, Odo oriented himself the correct direction,
and of a sudden, the map and the territory merged
and he saw his route. He pushed his head and neck
forward and pumped powerful wings to eat up the
kilometers. Odo saw no Cardassian vehicles along
the route; evidently, they were not the ones jam-
ming the combadge's subspace transmission. Could
there be some sort of planetwide defenses? mused
the constable. Surely Cardassians had no subspace
countermeasures strong enough to jam a combadge
from orbit.
    Even as the hawk flies, fifteen kilometers is no
negligible distance; by the time Odo could see the
lights of the city, and the bluffs overlooking
them--filled, as he squinted his eyes, with creep-
ing, spreading Tiffnakis and the away team--the
terminator line, with the brightness of daylight
right behind, was already crawling across the city of
the Druvats-nasas and headed toward Captain
Sisko's regiment at their position in the heights.
Odo couldn't help being astonished at the blue gray
beauty of Sierra-Bravo 112-11 in dawn's light: the
high metal content highlighted every color with
shimmers and sparkles, while the dust in the at-
mosphere drew out the reds and yellows ofthe sun,
forming an inverse of the holosuite program of
Earth's Bryce Canyon .... On Sierra-Bravo, it was
the iron-latinum cliffs that were Magritte blue and
the sky that was rust red.
    From his height, Odo saw another sight to freeze
him solid: an advancing line of Cardassian planet-
skimmers headed toward the town, then pulled up
short, freezing in place... except for one, solitary
skimmer that set out at an oblique angle for the
captain's position.
    At first, the hawk's spirit leapt; they were discov-
ered. Then the Cardassian stopped, and Odo real-
ized the true destination: a small, rounded building
that resembled an oversized mushroom cap. The
Cardassian in the single skimmer fired his disrup-
tor at the building, evidently blowing the lock; then
he stepped inside.
    An instant later, the lights of Druvats-nasas town
flashed bright and faded instantly, and the consta-
ble understood. The rest of the column resumed its
drive; the attack was underway.
    For a moment, Odo hesitated, making long, lazy
circles in the air, catching the hot, rising currents
off the already day-lit bluffs. What is my duty here?
Must I rejoin the captain immediately, or should I
act as his eyes? From the regiment's vantage point,
they couldn't have seen the Cardassian skim to the
powerhouse and cut off the broadcast power~so
in a sense, Odo's tardiness already had paid a
dividend.
    Well, that's one way to rationalize it, he thought
bitterly; it sounded just like one of Quark's post
hoc "explanations." Regardless, however, the con-
stable continued to circle above the battle, alternat-
ing between using his hawk eyes to view individual
actions with telescopic precision or pulling back to
more normal eyes to view the larger picture.
    The battle was as devastating as the one in the
Tiffnaki village: without the power broadcast to
animate the tech they had come to depend upon,
the Druvats-nasas were helpless before the on-
slaught. The invaders used no particular finesse or
grand strategy; after cutting the local power relay,
they simply disembarked from their skimmers and
walked forward in a straight line, sweeping disrup-
tors back and forth across the defenseless mob.
    There was of course nothing the Druvats-nasas
could do; there was nothing that Commander Dax
could have done--and Odo made a mental note to
tell her that, next time he saw her. IF I see her
again, he added with a chill. With the Defiant
missing in action and Dax nonresponsive on the
nonexistent subspace corem link, it was beginning
to look doubtful that Odo would see anything
familiar again .... Not even his wonderful, old
bucket, or the bucket-of-bolts station that con-
tained it.
  The villagers fell back, more orderly at first than
the Tiffnakis had been; but it made no difference in
the long run--when the Druvats-nasas line broke,
it broke suddenly, like a dam collapsing outward
from a single crack at the center. Watching as a
hawk, Odo had already picked out the obvious
leader of the village, the hereditary mayor, or
whatever they called the post; he was a man with
immensely long, reddish blue hair hanging across
his naked torso to his waist, where he had tucked it
into a green sash he wore. A powerful man with
corded neck muscles reminding Odo of a bull's,
and supplying the constable with ideas for future
shapeshifting experiments.
    When the leader suddenly threw down his use-
less rifle and bolted for the rear of the central
company of defenders, his nearest comrades-at-
arms panicked first; the rout spread from the center
out, as more and more Druvats-nasas realized the
futility of their position, and then saw their own
leader running like a thief in the night. The one-
sided firefight was over in nine minutes.
    The line comprised no more than twenty Drek'la
and the two commanding Cardassians, but they
overran the village and seized the four core build-
ings, which outlined a large village green (or village
blue, actually) filled with booths. Odo swept a little
closer and saw that the booths contained grab bags
full of tech; at the back of each booth were a
number of targets and trinkets for testing the new
toys as people acquired them. The Drek'la began
burning the targets with their disruptors, for no
other reason that Odo could see but sheer devilry.
    The other Cardassian, the one who cut the
power, rejoined his compatriots. He climbed out of
his skimmer with little of the usual Cardassian
strut; he stood, hands clasped behind his back,
viewing the pillaging.
    Something struck Constable Odo about the man,
something wrong and out of place; but he couldn't
quite put his talon on it. He continued to circle, to
watch, knowing his instinct was trying to tell him
something--but not yet what it was. I'd better have
something worthwhile for the captain, considering
how angry he~ going to be anyway.
    The Cardassian observed for a while; then he
slipped into a shadowy recess to gather some of the
devices that had fallen over when other invaders
destroyed the stall. At once, the incongruity struck
Odo full force: Cardassians were arrogant, strut-
ting, condescending figures, each of whom thought
himself more than the equal of all the other Car-
dassians; they thought of themselves as the elder
race, civilized long before most of the others, and
they observed the "young" races much as one
would observe a monkey or a Thoractian curl-
tail .... But this one was turning the same clinical
gaze on the Drek'la--and the other Cardassian.
     There was no trace of the swagger of Gul Dukat
 in the lone Cardassian's stride; there wasn't even the
 overly self-effacing preening of Garak, back on the
 station. There was the cold, clinical gaze of a
 zookeeper.
    While he watched, circling around and around,
Odo thought he saw something else. In reaching for
one of the fallen pieces of tech, cdo could almost
have sworn that he saw the Cardassian's arm
lengthen to the ground, grab the gun, then return to
its normal length.
    He was so stunned, he almost forgot how to fly.
Founders? A Founder is with the invaders? He
thought for a moment, turning his loops into figure
eights. Or perhaps, he admitted, a Founder is lead-
ing the invaders.
    Then the questionable soldier looked up, fixing
Odo with a piercing glare of his own. Feeling
suddenly terribly vulnerable himself, Odo decided
on a bold approach: he picked from the air a spot
where many Druvats-nasas defenders had died.
Swooping down on the spot, Odo walked behind a
body, flaring his wings, and pecked at the ground
behind the corpse. Odo fervently hoped that the
Cardassian, whether Founder or not, would be
fooled by the perspective into thinking that the
hawk was actually eating the dead flesh.
    It seemed to work; when Odo looked up a
moment later, the lone Cardassian was gone. But
the constable was shaken. I don't know for sure
what I saw, he told himself, but it's hard to deceive
the eyes I'm currently wearing.
 Odo continued pretending to peck at dead bod-
ies, waiting for an opportunity to lift off and return
to Captain Sisko's vista point. At least now, Con-
stable Odo reflected, he certainly had enough new
intelligence that the captain would probably for-
give him the minor indiscretion of oversleeping his
watch.

    As it happened, Chief O'Brien was the first to
spot the spectral hawk circling far above the car-
nage. "Commander," he said, nudging the Klingon
and pointing at the bird.
    "What about it?" answered Worf in an irritated
voice.
    "Five days of replicator rations says it's Odo,
spying for us."
    "Hm," said Worf; then he said it again and rose
to crawl toward the captain.
    O'Brien continued to watch the hawk, seeing it
circle, circle: the prodigal bird returned, and lo, it
was Constable Odo. He stood tall, a tempting
target were he not far enough back from the edge of
the cliff to avoid detection. O'Brien saw Worf and
the captain slithering toward Odo, and he quickly
joined them; Quark, meanwhile, had also noticed
Odo but was moving away from his ancient foe.
    "I think I saw something," said the constable
gravely. "If so, it's grave news indeed, Captain."
     "What is it?" asked Sisko, in a voice indicating
 he really didn't need any more grave surprises.
     "I think one of the Cardassians isn't a Cardassi-
 an," said the constable. "Captain... I believe at
least one of the Cardassian overseers leading the
Drek'la is a Founder. And the other Cardassians
don't know it."
    It was Worf who made the intuitive leap: "If that
is true, Captain, then I believe we are dealing with
a renegade contingent of Cardassians. If they were
with the main force, the Founder would not be
hiding his presence from the rest of them."
    "My God, Worf," said O'Brien, "you've hit it on
the head. These aren't Cardassian invaders ....
They're Cardassian fugitives."

0

CHAPTER
      15

Ar rnE darkest crystal of night, when the world is at
its stillest, comes first the faint tinkle of morning,
heraMing the light that will shatter the blackness
like hammer against glass. Captain Benjamin Sisko
lay at the top of the bluff, stating down at the
smouldering ruins of the Druvats-nasas village,
raked by disruptor fire in a profligate waste of life
and property; and when did Cardassians ever care
for another's life, somebody else's property?
    But spread to either side of the captain, his own
Tiffnaki commandos radiated their own burning
light of revenge and anger. When their own village
was destroyed, they were too demoralized, fright-
ened, ashamed, and stunned to nurse the feelings
of injustice and rage necessary to spark a rebellion
 against overwhelming odds: Fiat justitia, ruat
 caelum--Let justice be done, though heaven fall.
    Perspective, thought Sisko, that's what's needed.
It was not the slaves directly under the whip who
rebelled against early Earth slavery; it was a slave
who had escaped slavery, Frederick Douglass, who
was the movement's most gifted orator. And closer
to home, he thought, the Cardassians were driven
off Bajor not by those who were most directly
controlled, such as Kai Winn, but by the fieedom
fighters in Shakar's and other groups who had
momentarily escaped the lash. Perspective: his Tiff-
nakis needed the perspective of seeing the pain,
blood, and humiliation of other Natives to awaken
the burning flames of justice in themselves ....
And that was no distorted reflection on them; it
was a universal truth.
    Benjamin Sisko looked left and right; the Car-
dassians had long since won, and there was little
reason to fear they would scan the overlooking
cliffs for observers. But the Tiffnaki commandos
were silent with hatred and bitter resolve, to a man
and woman of them. The flesh of the once chipper,
voluble Asta-ha was pale blue, and Owena-da
clenched his fists so hard, Sisko heard the bones
crack from three meters away.
    Sisko knew what the scene would look like back
at the main encampment, where they had left the
rest of the villagers, once they had all been told the
evidence that only a handful had seen this day: the
men would stop chattering, the women would dress
for camouflage. Both would begin finding metal (in
abundance on Sierra-Bravo), crystal, anything that
would take an edge. Even the little children left
behind at the river, even Tivva-ma, would take to
crying silently--not with a wail, as a child wanting
attention uses (how well he remembered Jake as a
child), but simply letting the tears roll unheeded
down their grimy cheeks, neither demanding nor
even expecting a grown-up to do anything about
their pain.
    Captain Sisko had seen wars; he had seen war
with the Cardassians. He even remembered him-
self, if it really was himself, in the years just after
the Borg killed Jennifer, his wife and Jake's moth-
er. I've set them on the road to a terrible future, he
thought in leaden silence, but what else couM I do?
We MUST believe that death is better than subjuga-
tion and slavery--or why would anyone EVER
resist the tyrant?
     With a gesture, Sisko drew his freedom fighters
 back from the brink. They crawled slowly back-
 wards until the village was no longer visible--
 hence they were no longer visible to the Druvats-
 nasas village. Then they stood, and flanked by the
 reassembled away team, they beat a cold, quiet
 retreat. Nobody spoke but Asta-ha, hereditary
 mayor, and all she said was, "We will learn the new
 tech, Sisko; neg, we are not fools." She said it as if
 Sisko had implied they were.
     Well, perhaps I did, thought the captain sadly;
 he'd tried not to let his annoyance and disappoint-
merit show, but it probably came across despite
best intentions. Sisko felt a gigantic presence loom
behind him and heard the crunch of boots that had
never even attempted to sneak quietly. "Com-
mander Worf," he acknowledged without turning
around.
"Captain, what is the destination of our march?"
Wordlessly, Sisko turned and walked at a right
angle to the rest of the troop, followed by the
Klingon; when Asta-ha looked questioningly at
him, he said, "Carry on, Mayor." The Tiffnakis
continued their slow, beaten march.
    "Worf," said the captain quietly, "we must re-
join the main force. I suspect you will see a
gratifying seriousness of purpose among the com-
mandos now."
    The Klingon curled his lip. "Then they were
tweaking our beards. I knew they must have
been .... Nobody is so witless as to think it per-
fectly fine to--"
    "Commander," said the captain, so low that
Worf had to pause and cock his ear to hear, "they
were born into a culture where 'found tech' was the
only way they had to solve problems. Don't be too
harsh." Sisko smiled faintly and whispered, "Who
but a Klingon could follow Kahless?" in Worfs
native tongue.
    The Klingon calmed down, breathing slower and
deeper, and the captain continued. "We've turned
them, Worf; they finally understand the stakes.
Let's wait and see what happens over the next few
days, on the way back." Captain Sisko grinned like
a grim Ferengi: "I've mapped out another Scouting
trail for the return trip."

    How on God's blue Sierra-Bravo does he expect to
do anything with this lot? Chief O'Brien sighed;
nothing that Captain Sisko had done should have
had any effect whatsoever. And when the column
came to another cliff, and Sisko ordered yet anoth-
er rappelling "evolution," O'Brien expected ex-
actly the same shenanigans as the last time.
    But something seemed to have seeped into their
heads. Something! O'Brien set the phasing stakes,
grunted the anchors into place, and hurled the
ropes over the edge. One didn't clear the base of
the cliff, snarling on a teal scrub line with branches
shaped just like grappling hooks; the chief labored
to haul it back up again for another cast.
    "You know, Worf," he said, "there's a wide
difference between the officer who says, 'set those
anchors,' and the working man who has to sweat
them into place."
    The Klingon, who had been studiously ignoring
the drama with the rope, turned a scowling face
toward O'Brien. "If you are incapable of casting
the line far enough, I will do it for you."
    "I can throw a damned line! I was just comment-
ing on..." O'Brien returned to his task, grum-
bling. It wasn't that setting the lines was
particularly heavy labor. It's the sheer futility of it
all/O'Brien was already fuming that after all this
work, the Tiffnakis were just going to make a
mockery of it again.
    But when the lines were properly set, and the
Natives began to rappel down the cliff, the chief's
mouth dropped and stayed open until the first
wave hit the ground. The Tiffnakis carried out
the entire evolution exactly as taught at Starfleet
Academy.
    No cheating. No magic. No teleportation or
flying earpets or pocket elevators. Mayor General
Asta-ha dropped in the first wave; she squirmed
into a harness, hooked her carabiner into the line,
and stepped backwards over the edge. The cara-
biners, being safety equipment, were among the
only pieces of technology that the captain had
allowed the Tiffnakis from the well-stocked back-
packs the away team still carried from the first
Scouting trip.
    The chief winced a bit, watching her make that
first step into thin, thin air, suspended only by a
string, dangling a hundred meters above the
ground. But Asta-ha seemed not even to notice the
drop beneath her feet. It ~ like she never developed
the normal fear of falling, he decided, since the
damned "new teeh" has always been there to save
her. The rest of the Tiffnaki commandos followed
three by three, each showing the same lack of fear
about the height as their mayor general.
    Drukulu-da, the "historian" of the mob, if
O'Brien's universal translator was doing its job, got
into trouble going down the cliff; he let himself
go too fast, burned his hands, and in a panic,
yanked himself to a halt halfway down the cliff
face. When Worf shouted for Drukulu.-da to con-
tinue, the historian yelled back that the rope had
slipped along the carabiner and was trapped
against the "Swiss seat" harness he sat in.
    Drukulu-da had only made the commando cut at
the last minute when another Tiffnaki was elimi-
nated making a rude gesture behind Sisko's back,
and now Worf complained bitterly that O'Brien
had talked him into accepting the writer. But
without prompting, Asta-ha at the bottom already
put her fingers into her mouth and blew two short,
sharp whistles, followed by a longer third.
    Owena-da, supervising the drop from the top,
sent another man, Rimtha-da, down the parallel
rope. Rimtha-da was the largest of the Tiffnakis,
and he slid perhaps a little too slowly but steadily
down his own rope until he was next to Drukulu-
da.
    Rimtha-da hooked himself to the trapped man
with one loose carabiner, then got Drukulu-da to
put his weight on Rimtha-da while the latter un-
jammed the rope. Then both men untethered and
slid down their respective ropes to a chorus of
undulating whistles, which Chief O'Brien decided
was the Whatsit version of applause.
     Nobody lost his cool, and what was most aston-
 ishing, they cooperated on an innovative solution to
 a sudden problem. "My God," said O'Brien some-
what sarcastically to his Klingon friend, "there's an
improvement already: they didn't even start check-
ing the cliff face for new tech." Worf merely
grunted in response; but it was his all-right-so-
maybe-I-was-wrong-for-once-in-my-life grunt, and
O'Brien understood.
    When the Tiffnakis came to the bog, they had a
slight setback. Someone found another force beam
projector carelessly left on the ground, and Owena-
da started to use it. But when Sisko strode up
angrily, the weapons master shuffled his feet like
Molly caught with her hand in Keiko's mochi jar,
and he handed over the device.
    "Target practice, Worf," shouted the captain,
throwing the projector high in the air over the
swamp. For the first time on this planet, the
Klingon drew his service phaser and fired a short
blast, all in one fluid motion. The device exploded
noisily, making the point more brutally than any
number of words could have: when the Natives ran
up against the Cardassians, the invaders could
make all the tech, new or old, vanish as quickly if
not as dramatically as Worf had just "vanished"
the force beam projector.
    O'Brien was fascinated to see what low-tech
method the Tiffnaki commandos would invent to
get across the swamp; the final technique, master-
minded by Owena-da and Asta-ha, but with input
from virtually everyone in the platoon, was im-
pressive enough that Chief Miles Edward O'Brien
awarded it his "Croix des Cerveaux" with cukoo-
nut clusters: the Tiffnakis retreated a kilometer to a
forest they had bypassed; using knives they impro-
vised out of the sharp pieces of shale that seemed
to be everywhere on Sierra-Bravo 112-I1, they
hacked down a number of small saplings.
    They spent two hours tying the saplings together
and covering them with wide, palmlike fronds of
some local fern; when they finished, they had a pair
of long, flat "minibridges" with half a dozen stubby
legs about a meter long on either side. Each mini-
bridge was long enough that the entire platoon,
including the away team "officers" (counting Odo,
Quark, and O'Brien as officers for the sake of discus-
sion), could stand along it without much crowding.
    Then they returned to the bog. Placing the first
minibridge down into the muck, Asta-ha led the
way onto it. The plank sank into the mud, but
nowhere near as deeply as an individual person
would; the muddy water that slooshed across the
top was easily waded.
    Once the entire platoon was onto the minibridge,
they passed the second across the tops of their
heads to drop it into the muck in front of the first.
Once everybody had traversed onto the second
plank, the team--they were truly working as a
team now--drew up the first by means of twisted-
vine ropes. Passing it along overhead, they re-
peated the process all the way across the swamp,
arriving in half the time it would have taken to
wade, and with perhaps a tenth of the mud clinging
to their legs and torsos as Quark had when he had
played Diving for Latinum a few days earlier, on
the first, abortive Scouting trip.
    Even Captain Sisko admitted it was a brilliant
improvisation... but he said he would reserve
judgment until they returned to the main regiment
of Tiffnakis. But Chief O'Brien was already start-
ing to feel the swell of pride that he always got
when "his" recruits began to shine.
    Owena-da got the award for Conspicuous Obvi-
ousness when, after long minutes of silent thought
on the part of all the commandos, he was the one to
figure out how to ford the rushing river: they put
their best rope thrower up in a tree with a vine
rope, and he lassoed the opposite tree.
    Alas, when they tried to shimmy from one to the
other, the vine rope stretched enough that every-
one got a thorough dunking in the angry river...
as O'Brien had secretly suspected would happen.
Fortunately, the chief insisted that everyone tether
to the tightrope using the carabiners, so no one was
washed away. Chief O'Brien sighed and took his
dunking when his turn came. "Well, at least it's
washed away the rest of that muck," he told Odo
on the other bank. Odo was most annoyed at
having to get wet. Probably wishes he couM've just
turned back into a hawk and flown over, thought
O'Brien, smiling to himself.
    The biggest obstacle faced by the commandos
was the lake, which the captain added as an after-
thought after seeing how well they did on the bog.
Chief O'Brien paced to and from the shoreline,
watching the Natives spread along the lakeshore,
pointing to the other side and talking excitedly.
Whenever they used the newly discovered "tech"
of exerting their brains for innovation and problem-
solving, they tended to yell at each other in excited
tones and flutter their hands up and down directly
in front of their chests... either a cultural or
evolutionary characteristic, the chief wasn't sure.
    The patrician but still good-looking Asta-ha,
with her straight, bluish blond hair and small,
boyish figure, wrapped her cloak around herself
and said nothing, staring directly across the water
with an unwavering gaze and mumbling to herself.
Owena-da drew figures in the wet sand of various
"weapon techs" he had seen or heard about, won-
dering if any of them would help them across. The
other Tiffnakis offered exaggerated and increas-
ingly fantastical suggestions, ineluctably reminding
O'Brien of the scene in the holoplay Cyrano de
Bergerac, where the seventeenth-century courtier-
swordsman extemporizes twelve methods of flying
from Earth to the moon (including a sedan chair
drawn by geese and a hot-air balloon).
    "Keiko made me go see that play," he nmttered
to himself... going insane trying to stop himself
suggesting the obvious solution: a raft. "And I'm
glad she did."
    "I beg your pardon?" asked Odo, standing di-
rectly behind the chief. O'Brien jumped guiltily; he
hadn't heard the constable come up behind him.
But then, no one ever does, he consoled himself.
    "Sorry, Odo; I was remembering a holoplay that
Keiko made us attend. Actually, I wanted to go; but
sometimes it's a good thing"--he leaned forward
and gave the constable a winkm"to be reluctantly
dragged away and then gush about how much you
enjoyed it. Good for the marriage, I mean."
    Odo shook his head in puzzlement. "I'm afraid I
still can't understand why you play so many games
with your relationships. Isn't it enough simply to
enjoy common interests, without having to trick
your wife into believing she convinced you against
your will?"
    O'Brien shrugged, so very paradoxicalma preg-
nant Irish bull, he half remembered from some-
where. "What could be more fun than playing silly
games with the woman you love?" But thinking of
Keiko made him long for her, and Molly. O'Brien
grinned a somewhat goofy, cockeyed smile. "I
really miss them, Odo. I miss them both; I miss the
station. Damn it, why do we have to leave? Even if
Kai Winn is in charge, all right, I can accept that;
but why do we have to leave?"
    "I hate to say it, but I miss the station whenever
I'm away," said the constable, surprising O'Brien.
"I'11... probably be asked to depart permanently
as well. Somehow, I can't picture the Kai using any
security officers but her own. And I must admit,
there are several Bajoran deputies on my staff who
would make reasonably adequate constables." The
constable pulled a long face, literally. "I wonder
whether I can accompany Captain Sisko to his next
billet?"
    "I wonder how they're doing," mused the chief.
"I'11 bet Keiko really has her hands full, trying to
pack and take care of Molly." He sighed, thinking
of Deep Space Nine, his home for the last four
years .... the home he probably would never see
again after returning and immediately departing.
    O'Brien continued to pace and grumble to him-
self for another hour before the struggling Tiffnakis
finally hit on the idea of a raft. They had a hard
time with the concept of buoyancy at first; Asta-ha
(an early raft convert) required every gram of
persuasion at her command to convince the rest of
the commandos that Dalvda-ha's "floating bridge"
would actually float: "You know Tivva-ma, you
know she is strong in the tech. My Tivva-ma has
floated such toys herself on the Electromagnetic
River southeast of the village .... Some of your
own children have done so with Tivva-ma; and
you, Owena-da, have even seen the sticks she
floats."
    "But those are sticks, Mayor Asta-ha. How can
you compare a stick to a bridge? The bridge is far
larger, hence it will sink. A great rock sinks faster
than a tiny pebble, doesn't it?"
    O'Brien listened, fascinated in an abstract sort of
way. Knowing the answer so deeply--Archime-
des' principle was still one of the first engineering
concepts taught at school, even three thousand
years after its discovery on Earth (and thirty thou-
sand years after the Vulcans figured it out)--it was
incredibly hard for the chief to put himself in the
position of someone who literally had never heard
of a boat. The principle was actually not as self-
evident as it seemed from his perspective. I mean,
he thought, why SHOULD a big, heavy object float
on top of the water?
    But finally, the girls, Asta-ha and Dalvda-ha,
persuaded the rest of the commandos to give it a
try. After a number of false starts, occupying the
better part of a day, they put together a passable
raft that passed inspection with the captain. It
carried them across the lake and within five kilo-
meters of the place along the tributary river where
the rest of the Tiffnakis waited (they hoped). But by
the time they arrived, it was well into night, and the
greater moon had already set; Sisko decreed they
would start out in the morning. "Tonight," said the
captain, "when the troops have gone to sleep, I
shall see the away team in my tent."
    Two hours passed uneventfully. The Natives,
after some instruction and training sessions, man-
aged to get a fire started using a bowstring to rotate
a stick in a hole. It was an ancient military tech-
nique, but Chief O'Brien hadn't learned it in
Starfleet .... He'd picked it up watching old Amer-
ican Western holoplays. Oddly enough, it worked;
other Tiffnakis were experimenting with a hastily
woven gill net, and fish aplenty (with legs!) were
caught for dinner. The away team ate more corn-rats
in silence; O'Brien found his nearly as inedible as
Native food would be.
    As O'Brien saw Worf stealing through the night
toward the commanding officer's tent, and just
before the chief himself was to leave, Odo sidled
up. "I've just had the most disturbing conversation
with that female," said Odo, looking stuffier than
usual.
    O'Brien shrugged. "Should're taken my advice;
women like a little mystery."
    "Oh, get your mind off such nonsense. That--
that lady mayoress just came up to me and asked if
I..." He looked sideways, left, right; O'Brien
found himself doing the same, though he had no
idea what he was looking for. "She asked me if I
was going to turn into jelly again anytime soon."
  "Well? Are you?"
    "Yes, of course. But that's not the point, you--
that's not the point, Chief O'Brien." Odo sucked in
his lower lip and glared back at the Tiffnakis, who
were beginning to snore (they made an irritating
hissing noise, less like sawing logs than frying
bacon). "The point is, Chief, that she saw me
shapechange." He lowered his voice to a conspira-
torial whisper. "Despite all my precautions. They
must have excellent eyesight. But she and who else?
Do they all know I'm a shapechanger?"
    "Odo, ! don't know what to say. I know the
captain ordered you not to shapechange, but he
knows you can't hold your form longer than sixteen
hours."
    As O'Brien led the way; Odo said nothing more
about the incident... and the chief was amused to
notice that the constable said nothing to Captain
Sisko, either; evidently, Odo had been paying at-
tention after all to O'Brien's oratory about the
games solids play.

0

CHAPTER
      16

THE ENTIRE AWAY TEAM was at the meeting, of
course, and it was the first time O'Brien could
remember in days that they had all gotten together
as a team, without anyone but themselves in at-
tendance. Just us, he thought; just us alien invaders.
Sisko sat at the far end of his inflatable tent, the fire
burned down to embers between him and the open
door. The rest of the team filed in one at a time and
found a seat. O'Brien sat cross-legged, closest to the
tent flap, so he could keep an eye behind them, at
the commandos huddled on the open ground,
without tent or blanket: he still didn't quite trust
this planet.
    "We are in danger of allowing this mission to
run away with us," said the captain gravely, his
thoughts seeming to echo the chiefs. "We've
allowed ourselves--/ have allowed us--to inte-
grate more thoroughly into this planet's culture
than I intended. From now on, I mean to be the
captain of the Defiant away team... not the gen-
eral of the Sierra-Bravo defense force."
    O'Brien spoke up. "It was a good plan, sir, if I do
say so. But it's done; we've set them on the
road .... Isn't this their fight from now on?"
    "You are missing the point," objected Worf. "We
are not helping one side in an internal power
struggle. The Cardassians, not we, have interfered
in the planet's development."
    "Worf is right," Sisko adjudicated. "This is still
our fight, Chief, but I don't want us leading the
Native charge, if you can see the distinction."
    "Perhaps," said Odo, "we should confront the
Cardassians personally, ourselves, not surrounded
by a mob of native life-forms."
    "But how?" demanded the chiefi It was a great
speech on the captain's part, but vague on the
details. "How are we five to stop the Cardassians
and a thousand Drek'la foot soldiers, or even slow
them down? Perhaps the best we can do is stay here
and lead the troops into battle."
    "No, Chief; that's too close an involvement. We
should face them directly .... Somehow." O'Brien
swallowed, and neither Quark nor Odo looked
particularly happy.
 Worf, however, showed a terrible, frightening
Klingon grin of battle joy. "Yes ....Perhaps to-
morrow will be a good day to die."
    Here we go again, thought Chief O'Brien, but the
captain was surprisingly on Worfs side. "Yes,
Commander, perhaps it will. But in the meanwhile,
I'd rather stay alive a while longer and burn the
Cardassians rather more than we have so far."
    Quark, who had remained silent throughout the
exchange, could no longer contain himself. He
burst forth with a cynical yet truthful observation:
"More than we have? We haven't burned them at
all." Snarling and muttering darkly, the little Fer-
engi paced up and down. "I can see where this is
going .... Nowhere. None of you has a clue how to
handle the situation."
"Oh," jeered Odo, "and I suppose you do?"
Quark sighed, shaking his head as if speaking to
a six-year-old; O'Brien fought the impulse to wind
up and kick the barkeeper into the next campfire.
"Of course I, personally, would have plenty of
better ideas, because I, personally, have a code of
life to live by."
    "Oh, of course. The Federation Code of Criminal
Offenses. How shortsighted of me."
    "I'm talking about the Rules of Acquisition, you
runny-faced bucket-sitter." O'Brien noticed that
when Quark got really piqued, his face turned
almost bright pink, the color of the flowers of the
deep Glen Tsismusk on Bajor.
    Sisko interrupted smoothly, trying to keep the
argument on some productive track. "Do you have
a particular Rule of Acquisition in mind, Mr.
Quark?"
    The Ferengi paused, taking a long glare at Odo
before saying, "Yes, Captain; as a matter of fact,
one has been lodged in my planet-sized brain ever
since we saw the Cardassian attack on Brew--on
Druvis-miss-niss-whatever the heck it is."
  Quark paused as if finished.
    "Well?" demanded O'Brien; Worf glowered and
Odo snorted; only Captain Sisko seemed to have
enough patience to outwait the melodramatic Fer-
engi.
    "I've been almost obsessed with the two hundred
and eighty-fourth Rule," said Quark.
    Sisko spoke up instantly: "Deep down, every-
one's a Ferengi."
    Quark's eyes widened. "Very good, Captain!
Better than Rom, as I'm sure you're not surprised
to hear."
    Odo snorted again, even more loudly. "Typical
Ferengi arrogance. All right, Quark, how is every-
one deep down a Ferengi, and how does that help
US?"
    "It means that when you push anyone hard
enough, he'll manage to find a core of ingenuity
somewhere within him .... Though I admit, the
rule does seem to have one or two exceptions--
Odo."
    "All right; so how do we push them hard
enough?" prompted the captain.
    "My next thought was of Rule Forty-Four ....
Do you know that one, Captain?"
    Sisko smiled. "1 memorized them all; it's not
that difficult, and good mental discipline. Never
confuse wisdom with luck."
    O'Brien was starting to catch the Ferengi's drift.
"The Cardassians, right? They've won every battle,
and they probably think it's because of their bril-
liant tactics. But it's really just their luck that they
landed here, where the power-cutting trick works
such magic."
    "You see, Odo? If only the hu-mans would start
to teach the Rules of Acquisition in Starfleet Acad-
emy, they could rule the... wait. Forget I said
anything."
    "All right. So the Cardassians have been winning
because of their luck, that the Natives never
learned how to respond to the loss of all their toys;
but if you scratch them hard enough, like we've
seen here, all that inborn ingenuity comes back,
and suddenly they're a formidable enemy. So
what's the key, Quark? What's the magic bullet to
connect Forty-Four with Two Hundred and Eighty-
Four?"
    Quark smiled, then curled his lip in a snarl of
triumph in Odo's direction. "The Rule that keeps
me alive on Deep Space Nine, or Terek Nor, or
whatever it ends up being called tomorrow: It's
always good business to know about new customers
before they walk in your door."
"One Hundred and Ninety-Four," muttered
Sisko.
    "Or in this case," concluded the Ferengi, "it's
good strategy to know all about a new Cardassian
tactic before they use it on you."
    Sisko stared at Quark. In the wink of an eye, the
mad scheme had become crystal clear. "Quark...
you're suggesting we cut the power over the entire
planet at once."
    "Cut the power on the whole planet?" asked
Worf, not following the logic.
    "Worf, it's brilliant!" Chief O'Brien felt more
alive, excited than he had since transporting down
to the forsaken, senseless planet. "What's the one
big advantage the invaders have in every battle?"
    "They cut the power broadcast and render the
Native weapons useless. But I do not see how
this--"
    "But it's not that the toys stop working, Worf;
it's that they stop working just before the fight. And
the Natives are so shaken by the sudden loss of
everything that they can't even mount a defense at
the level of spears and swords."
    "Slings," said the captain, "arrows, traps--
everything that a poorly armed and equipped band
of freedom fighters ever used to bring a superpower
to a grinding halt."
    "So we cut the powerfirst"--O'Brien was in his
element, explaining something--"and by the time
the Cardassians get to the next village, the Na-
tives'11 have already had days or even weeks to get
used to the new way of things."
    Sisko nodded. "I must admit, Quark, it's a
plan."
    "It's a ridiculous plan," objected Odo, "and it's
totally illegal. We can't go around cutting the
power of people who depend upon technology for
their very survival. How are they to eat? How will
they defend themselves against each other?"
    Sisko grinned. "Constable, you have hit the nail
square on the head. That's it exactly: they will find
a way to eat, to defend themselves against other
Natives--and to defend themselves against the
Cardassians."
    Chief O'Brien blinked. Well. Constable, there g
yet another example .for you. The chief chuckled.
"Beats me why they don't just accept reality and
repeal the bloody thing," he said. Nobody paid
attention.
    The captain rose, his head just brushing the
ceiling of the tent. "Gentlemen, we have our plan:
we will find the central power generators for the
whole planet and kick them off-line .... Tem-
porarily, at least. Chief, put together an action plan
for finding them, and work with Worf to profile
what sort of generators the planet would need and
how we might sabotage them. Odo... be prepared
to infiltrate the Cardassian camp; we must find out
whether the chief was right, and they're fugitives
from the empire--or whether this truly is a front in
a new war ....And whether there is a Founder
among them."
    Chief Miles Edward O'Brien rose first, followed
by the rest. Full plate, he thought, happy for the
first time since arriving in orbit and looking over
Dax's shoulder at the technology readout; at last,
there was something positive to do.
    But how humiliating that it was Quark who had
to think of the key. The only point that made the
embarrassment bearable was when O'Brien
thought of poor Odo... stuck with a Ferengi who
would never forget or allow the constable to do
so .... For years and years, if the chief were a good
judge of character.
  That is, assuming they all lived that long.

    Major Kira Nerys stood in the Kai's private
audience chamber, what once had been Captain
Sisko's office, overlooking Ops and the fatigued,
frustrated, but still utterly professional defense
team. The station shuddered regularly now with
the pounding from alien invaders attached to the
hull, as they tried to bore their way by hand
through the containment field and the station's
outer skin. The enemy worked its way at every
joint and join, and still Kira had no idea in the
world who the bloody attackers were!
    She paced back and forth, parallel to Kai Winn's
desk, mumbling inaudibly to herself. The Kai
seemed perfectly calm, adding to Kira's fury; "se-
rene" is the word that popped into the major's
head: That blasted woman is always so damned
SERENE. I can't take any more of it.
    Kira turned her back on the Kai, so the woman
wouldn't see the tears of a chained attack dog. "I
should be out there. People ~re dying!" 
"Your place is here, child?'
    "I should be fighting! I'm a warrior--I fought in
the underground, I should be fighting now to
defend this--this little piece of Bajor from the
Prophets know what is trying to worm under our
skin." Kira whirled to face Kai Winn. "Can't you
understand that?"
    Stunned, Kira stared again at the sensors, the
viewers; both showed the same tragic scene: four
Bajoran cruisers sliced open like dissected animals,
their guts streaming into space. The invaders
hadn't even bothered either to rescue or to kill the
survivors of the ill-fated effort to relieve the sta-
tion. There might be another expedition, but not
soon. The rest of the Bajoran navy was desperately
needed to defend the planet... assuming the pi-
rates from the Gamma Quadrant next turned their
attention thither. There was no help from the
homeworld, no help from home.
    The Kai shook her head. "You are the one who
does not understand, child," she said sadly. "The
senior officer's place is not at the head of the
troops, where he could be slain by a single lucky
shot. His place is behind the lines, at the nerve
center, where he can control his followers."
  Kira shook her head, astonished. "You talk as if
you know what you're talking about," she said; the
words began in respect but ended in a scream of
fury. "What do you know about fighting?"
    It was an unfair charge; the Kai had done re-
markably well so far. The enemy (whoever they
were) had not yet penetrated the station itself; they
had managed to slither inside the defensive screen
of DS9--rather, the Emissaryk Sanctuary; but
there, they had so far stalemated: they crawled all
along the skin of the station in bulky black pressure
suits, hacking and chopping and trying to drill
their way inside. But in another sense, it was
something Kira had to clear from her conscience.
"Kai Winn, with the deepest, most profound
respect, I must say that I know a lot more about
this sort of fighting than you... and I should be
there in the thick, leading the troops--Bajoran
troops--to victory."
    Behind the words, inside her head, Major Kira
came to a decision at that very moment that made
the tragedy complete: orders or no, Kira Nerys
decided that she had no choice but to broadcast a
Priority One distress call to the nearest Federation
ship, begging for assistance from Starfleet. It meant
the end of her dream ofa Bajoran Deep Space Nine,
but not to do so would strike the final gong for the
station and everyone inside, and perhaps for Bajor
itself. I have no choice/she screamed silently.
    She would do it the next time she was able to
leave Ops, which if the Kai had her way, would be
never. But Kira would find a way to deliver the
message; she always did.
    In the meanwhile, Kira stood rigidly opposite
her Kai, the people's Kai, the freely elected (in a
sense) leader of the government of Bajor--the self-
selected governor of Emissaryk Sanctuary. Kira
had to talk about something, make conversation;
there was nothing else to do for the moment. The
alien attackers controlled everything from the skin
of the station outward; the Bajorans owned the
flesh, blood, heart, and brains beneath. Unless
there was a breakthrough--Prophetsforbid!--Kira
was a helpless, caged animal, useful only to wait,
and wait, for penetration.
    But the Kai was taking this all calmly, as if she'd
been through it all before. "Kai Winn," Kira asked,
"I know a Bajoran doesn't ask another this ques-
tion, and if you don't want to answer, I'll under-
stand."
    "Why child, what could I possibly want to con-
ceal?"
    Yeah, right. "Kai... what did you do during the
Occupation?" The reason it was considered terri-
bly impolite to ask such a thing was the huge
numbers of Bajorans who were forced by necessity
and empty stomachs to cooperate with the puppet
government established and run by Gul Dukat,
who ruled from his iron fist in orbit, from the
dreaded Terek Nor. Why drag through the mud the
last shreds of dignity an old, frightened woman
might still possess? Even if she was the Kai.
    "During the Occupation?" The Kai seemed
quite genuinely suprised. "I'd... just as soon not
discuss it."
    Stunned by the sudden turn of events--the Kai
had actually accepted the challenge--Kira relaxed
slowly into a chair, staring at the seemingly stub-
born, old woman. Kai Winn began to speak, her
voice so soft, it caressed Kira's cheek like the wind
through the trees of Glen Tsismusk.
    "But if you have to know... the Occupation
began before I was born, but by the time I turned
twenty-one, before you were born, child, I was the
primary house slave to a young Cardassian gul--a
gentle man, as far as that went." The Kai smiled
disarmingly, winking at Kira. "But that's not all I
was, my child; you freedom fighters were not the
only enemies of Cardassia."
    Kira waited, breathlessly... but that was all the
answer she got.
    The (fake) walls of the (ersatz) runabout cracked
under the (pretended) pressure of the hulking sea.
Jadzia Dax licked dry lips inside her scuba hel-
met-the holo-simulation was so real, too real!--
and spoke through a (faintly) cracking larynx over
the comm link. "How... how much pressure,
Julian?"
    Bashir looked at the gauge as the runabout
lurched in the current. "I read it as seventy-three
standard atmospheres."
 "No, I don't mean in the simulation. I mean for

real. How much pressure as soon as we exit the
Defiant?"
    The puzzled doctor stared sideways at Dax,
turning his whole body, since his head and neck
were constrained by his own helmet. "Jadzia, you
know the answer to that better than I. The ship
currently sits at approximately one hundred and
seventy atmospheres."
     "Enough," she said, almost to herself, "enough
to crush a runabout like a..."  "An egg?"
    She smiled wanly. "We already used that one.
Crush us like some... small, crushable thing."
    Bashir reached across, piercing her with his
limpid, brown eyes, seen through the faceplate,
putting a heavily gloved hand on her arm. "Steady,
Commander. We'll be all right. It was your own
calculations." He gestured with his head at the
seawater beyond the (holo) hull of the (holo) run-
about. "It appears to be working, you see? Your
calculations are correct. Shields down to forty
percent. We should rupture and lose pressurization
in about six minutes."
"Computer," said Dax quietly, "end program."
The two of them stood, still absurdly attired in
deep-ocean scuba gear. Dax cracked her seals and
removed her helmet, just in time to be berated by
her aqua-comrade.
    "Jadzia, why did you do that?" Bashir stared in
open-mouthed irritation.
    She shook her head. "It's no good, Julian. It's not
the real thing... but it's too real. If I do this now,
I might not be able to do it for real, when the time
comes."
    The doctor pressed his lips together, stared at the
walls, floor, and ceiling of criss-crossing lines of
holoemitters. "You don't want to rehearse?"
  "Not my death, Julian."
    Bashir sighed. "It was the one thing keeping me
from screaming in terror." He snorted. "All right,
we'll split the difference. We've already practiced
the first ninety meters; I suppose we'll just wing it
the rest of the way."
    Shrugging in apology, Jadzia turned and left the
holodeck, leaving Dr. Bashir behind. Pride held
her rigid through the passageway, down the turbo-
lift, and into her quarters.
    Only then did she allow herself to collapse on the
bed, shaking like an out-of-balance turbine. She fell
into a thrashing, fitful sleep and dreamt of trillions
of tons of poisoned water crushing host and sym-
biote alike into undifferentiated constituent atoms.

"But what did you do during the Occupation,
Kai?" persisted Major Kira.
    "I kept myself occupied, child." Kai Winn fidg-
eted; she was determined not to fall into the sin of
living in the past, as did so many others who
suffered through the decades of brutal occupation.
It was such a common failing! So many people,
decent people who loved the Prophets and tried to
live as kind and good a life as possible, too many
began nearly every sentence with a sigh, a glance
flickered over the shoulder--as if there might be a
Cardassian informer in the next booth--and
words like, "Back during the Troubles, I--" or
"It's not like it was during the Bad Times, when
I . . ?'
    I will NOT be one of those people, Kai Winn
firmly told herself. She despised such people. No,
that~ not fair; I despise that evasion, but I pity such
people. Pity was a very unpopular emotion, but it
was one of the most decent (when it wasn't used as
a euphemism for "look down upon").
    "I resisted, child." Finally, the Kai's young
protfig~e--sureiy Kira didn't know she was a pro-
t~g~e!--took the hint and sat down, still trembling
like a racing beast waiting for the gong. The Kai felt
a terrible sympathy; Kai Winn had been through so
much, so muc?, more than anyone realized, that
this small attack could not pierce her shield. She
knew she was not fated to die at the hands of
unknown aliens in the Emissaryrs own sanctuary;
she had looked into the Orb and seen herself older,
seen struggles ahead. She didn't know just when
she would die (thank the Prophets!), but she knew
it was not now, not here.
    There is a great comfort in knowing one will
survive one's present difficulties; Kira had no such
certainty, the poor dear. Just as I had no certainty
during the Occupation that Nerys so obsesses upon,'
I knew not what Gul Ragat wouM take it into his
head to do next.
    Stop! The Kai wrenched her mind out of the
indulgent groove and returned to the present time.
She could see that the past could not be suppressed
utterly; it would out now and again. But she would
control it, at least awaiting a more opportune
moment. Perhaps during the night; Kira, who just
arrived on duty after a fitful five hours of supposed
rest, would take command while Kai Winn re-
turned to her own quarters in the back of what had
been the Emissary's ready room.
    Then will be the time; then I will allow the
demons of the past to engulf me... for a little
while.
    In the meanwhile, she had to manage the battle.
"Child, there has been no new assault while you
slept. The Gamma Quadrant aliens are maintain-
ing their siege positions, but I'm sure they're plan-
ning something."
    "I don't think they're just going to give up, my
Kai. They've invested too much--and they've
killed people on the Bajoran destroyers. They must
know we won't let them simply leave!" Kira's skin
darkened as the blood rushed to her face. She was
desperately suppressing an emotion that could
overwhelm her senses if she allowed it.
    Don't slip the floodgates, warned the Kai silently.
"They know," agreed Winn. "They're planning to
breech the station manually. They've been scan-
ning us continually, very high-level scans."
  "Looking for a crack?"
  Kai Winn nodded.
  "Is there a crack, my Kai?"
    The Kai shrugged. "Probably. It's in the hands of
the Prophets; we can only do what we can do,
imperfect beings that we are."
    Nerys seemed glumly dissatisfied with this re-
sponse as well. She stood and slid down the ladder-
way to the main level of Operations; there she
paced around the central control panels, probably
distracting the Kai's personal defense squad, who
manned the battle stations.
    Kai Winn sighed, wishing she could as easily give
vent to her anxieties as her young prot6g6e. But the
Prophets were strict: they required self-control and
discipline. The Kai smiled, imagining what Major
Kira of the Shakaar resistance cell would think if
Kai Winn were to tell her the destiny she envi-
sioned for Nerys' that someday, and not too far
into the future, Nerys would herself hear the call of
the Prophets .... and would take holy orders,
eventually succeeding Winn as Kai.
    She'd probably laugh in my face, then turn bright
red with horror! Kai Winn smiled at the thought.
She hoped someday to see confirmation of her
vision in the Orb; until then, it was a mere possibil-
ity, nothing more.
  Nerys, thought the Kai, forgive me, but you would
make an excellent priestess,' if only you could believe
it!
    The last hour of the Kai's shift passed unevent-
fully. When she felt the fatigue of her aging body
overtake her brain, she knew it was time to hand
over the reins. "Nerys," she said, catching the
young officer's attention; Kira looked up, surprised
at the familiarity of her given name. "Take com-
mand. I must rest; remember my authority,
Major .... Do nothing to undermine it."
    Kira's face burned red again, and she couldn't
look the Kai in the face. "I--I will, my Kai. I mean
I won't." Kai Winn smiled as she turned away to
the ready room. She~ going to betray me, she
thinks; she~ going to call the Federation for help
against the invaders. But of course, it was all part of
the Prophets' plan... whatever Kira chose to do.
    Yawning fiercely, Kai Winn took stately, mea-
sured steps into her new office, overlooking Ops,
and ordered the door shut. Then she relaxed and
became an older woman once more. A few hours of
just being Winn--not Kai nor vedek nor interpret-
er of the Prophets--was what she urgently needed.
    Just being Winn, like the young girl who found
herself, a newly minted sister, assigned to tend the
spiritual needs of Gul Ragat's Bajoran slaves...
and a slave herself, of course. Sister Winn was not a
warrior. What did you do in the Resistance? I may
not have carried a gun and planted bombs, but child,
I surely resisted.t And how much harder it always
was to resist without weapons .... Something the
soldiers never seemed to appreciate.
    Remaining appropriately dressed, in case she
was summoned from sleep by an emergency, Kai
Winn lay carefully on the bed that once was the
Emissary's emergency cot, feeling a small, girlish
thrill at being so close to the man so personally
blessed by the Prophets--who spoke to them di-
rectly! She barely closed her eyes, giving herself
final permission to let the dead past rise, when she
found herself dreaming of days gone by .... She
was back in Governor Legate Migar's mansion
attending the young and dashing Gul Ragat, sub-
governor of the Bajoran provinces of Shakarri and
Belshakarri ....

  TO BE CONTINUED IN
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rebels
      Book Two
    The Courageous