How did they dare do nothing? How did they dare to call themselves gods?

  Suddenly he was elsewhere, somehow transported to a new locale with a foreign landscape and an unknown sun in the unfamiliar sky. Or was it the sun? He could see something that looked like what he understood to be a sun setting near the distant horizon. This other object, this weirdly glowing and oscillating orb hanging in the sky above him, was something completely new.

  Eight turquoise crystals grew in the moist dark soil, clustered by chance or design into the shape of an Orb of the Prophets, and behind him something made by sentient hands, a vehicle or a structure, loomed, casting a long dark shadow. There was a charge in the air as if there had been a recent lightning strike or maybe a ground quake.

  “What is this place?” he said, more to himself than to the others who had somehow followed him here.

  “The end,” said Leez, bending to inspect the stones. “And the beginning.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said as he took in the sight of the alien landscape, imprinting it on his mind.

  “That’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said,” said Sumari, smiling her beautiful wicked smile. How he missed her even after all this time.

  “But what is this place?” he said. “Why do you show it to me?”

  “The end,” she said. “It’s the end for you, Najem.”

  “The end?” he said, trying to follow. “You mean-you mean this is where I die?”

  “Only at the end can you see as the Prophets see, Najem,” said Leez. “Only then will you know.”

  “A hallucination,” said Modan when he had finished.

  “No,” he said. “A vision.”

  “You were injured,” she said. “The explosion.”

  “Yes, I considered that,” he said. “When I woke up the shrine was in bits around me. I wasn’t scratched. I wasn’t even concussed. The Prophets protected me.”

  “This is irrational, Najem,” she said thoughtfully. “Many survivors of disaster tell such stories. Have your Prophets protected them all?”

  He laughed. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. But I know what they did for me.”

  “And this visionyou saw,” she said. The word twisted in her mouth, but he let it go. “You know its meaning?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know my death, Modan. Until I’m in that place and in that moment, nothing can kill me. That’s why I survived the bomb and the occupation and everything we’ve been through. Until that moment, nothing can touch me.”

  She protested again, citing simple coincidence and the need in primates like himself to see patterns in everything even when no such pattern was present.

  “Modan,” he said. “How many coincidences will convince you of the pattern? Don’t you find it the least bit odd that we have been sent back to this moment and place with precisely the right skills between us to prevent Titan’s warp core from blowing a continent-sized hole in Orisha? This defies coincidence, Modan. There are hands at work here, and they’re not ours.”

  Modan was silent. She had heard everything he had to say, but it was not clear she understood. Around their hidden shuttle, the Orishans continued to bomb and shoot each other with zeal.

  Whatever fuel had sparked this fighting, there was no sign of its running dry in the near future. Yet he knew that, as a result of this conflict or something that came after, the Orishans not only put aside their differences but became peaceful enough and unified enough to build a stable, aesthetic culture on a par with many in the Federation. They had to be allowed their chance to survive this dark moment in their history.

  “All right,” said Modan at last. “I do not share your conclusion, but your reasoning is sound. I will do as you say.”

  Things went more smoothly than he had anticipated. Despite the confidence he’d shown Modan, the Prophets’ protection was not always as clear-cut as he’d led her to believe. He still carried deep and painful ambivalence about his wife Sumari’s death from a disruptor blast that could have been meant for him.

  He had never known for sure at which of them the Cardassian gunner had been aiming, but the possibility that her life had been sacrificed to protect his had tormented him for years. He’d put their children in his father’s care after that rather than risk their lives as he had their mother’s.

  Indeed it was with Sumari’s death that he knew he must eventually leave Bajor. So, first the Militia and then, when the opportunity came, Starfleet, adventure, and discovery and so many friends.

  He didn’t want Modan to be another sacrifice to the Prophets’ will, but there was no other way.

  “Almost there,” came her whispered words over the comlink. “Only a few more meters.”

  The Orishan war zone had expanded in their direction while he had related the story of his epiphany, so she was obliged, even with her holographic invisibility, to skirt the farthest edge of the battle rather than take a direct route to the core.

  “Acknowledged,” he said as he kept one eye on the sensor scans of the battle. Titanhadn’t yet been discovered by the Orishans; there was too much blasting going on in the region for even that awful crash to have been noticed by more than a few. The readings of the warp core, if they could be trusted, were stable enough. If they held, Modan would easily shut the thing down, lift out the flux regulators, and return. They could be off the planet inside two hours.

   “Done,”she said softly. There had been a tense moment when the primkeys had jammed instead of opening the manual shutdown plates, but he had talked her through the use of the link glove to get them open. After that it was a simple matter to perform a manual shutdown.

  Jaza talked her through it, step-by-step, and she did precisely as she was told.

  The entire process took ten minutes. After another ten, she was a good way toward pulling the first of the flux regulators free of its housing. As she worked in silence, he continued to scan periodically for signs that the deuterium suspension was still becoming solid or that the antimatter was not securely held by the thickening plasma.

  Eventually the entire core would cool and go essentially dormant. Nothing short of a solar flare at close proximity might restart it. Such a flare would also wipe all life from Orisha, so the subsequent matter/antimatter explosion would be redundant.

   “Najem,”she said, almost too softly for him to hear. “There’s a problem.”

  “What is it?”

  “ I think my suit is failing,”she said. “I’m becoming visible.”

  Jaza swore. It was so obvious he should never have missed it. The rad levels around the core were high enough to kill a humanoid in short order, so it wasn’t unlikely they would play hob with an energetic system as delicate as the stealth field.

  “You have the flux regulator?” he said, trying to keep the tension out of his voice.

   “One,”she said. “But not the backup.”

  “Good enough,” he told her. “Get back here, now.”

  “ Najem,”she said in a voice so small he was surprised the badge was able to broadcast it. “Two Orishan soldiers have entered the crash site.”

  He had a vague image of her position in his head. To get at the manual step-down controls she would have had to climb to the top of the core, some ten meters above the ground. If she was still there, the Orishans might walk beneath without ever looking up.

  “Be still,” he said. “Let them pass.”

  There was silence for longer than he liked, enough time for him to mouth a silent prayer that the boon the Prophets had provided him might extend to Modan for just a bit longer.

  The clock ticked in his mind. The Ellington’s sensors and defensive systems hummed dispassionately around him. If he didn’t look out the forward viewport, if he ignored the aches that remained from his recently healed injuries, he might be back in Titan’s shuttlebay running an odd but simple survival scenario.