There had been new elements this time, he thought-a flash of vegetation he hadn’t noticed in previous bouts, the sound of a female voice screaming his name, something about a crash.

  Once a strange and even mystical experience for him, especially the first few times, the dream had mostly become little more than an occasional and occasionally unpleasant puzzle, cut into billions of obscure pieces of which he only had access to portions at a time.

  He would solve it one day, he knew. In fact he knew considerably more about the puzzle and its solution than he usually admitted even to himself. But one daywas not today.

  And, of course, the dream was also a kind of promise, one he’d tested over time and found to be true.

  He’d been here before and would come again he knew, but each time he returned from the dream, whether he remembered every detail or not, he was forced to take moments to remind himself who he was, where he was and that, so far at least, he was still alive.

  One day that would not be true. One day there would be no waking and no reassurances. One day the dream would not be a dream.

  But that day was also not today.

  It wasn’t until after he’d stumbled to the wash basin and splashed cool water on his face (sonic showers would never do for something like this) that he felt almost like himself again. Almost, but not quite. The dream, even the sparse fragments of it that he could usually remember, was always unsettling in a way that he had yet to find words to describe.

  Looking in the mirror he studied the details of his face and found them just very slightly alien. The eyes were the right color gray; the ridges across his nose were properly deep and defined; his skin was the same brown and the few flecks of gray that had begun to appear in the black of his hair had not multiplied, and yet there was something unrecognizable about the man staring back at him. It was as if he was looking into the face of some acquaintance, a colleague he might see occasionally in passing or a classmate from long ago. Not quite a stranger but not a face he found entirely familiar.

  “You’re Najem,” he told himself. “You’re Jaza Najem.”

  The computer told him that he was about an hour ahead of his duty shift; his subordinates would wonder why he had shown up so early and perhaps consider it a negative mark against their own abilities. So he decided to dress, get a snack, and take a short walk before heading up.

  The galley wasn’t quite empty when he arrived. Little clusters of chatting people had gathered at a few of the tables, while others had chosen quiet solitude in the hall’s more secluded corners.

  “Greetings, Mr. Jaza,” said Chordys, the Bolian who ran the place from the closing hours of gamma shift through most of alpha. She was a cheery little thing whose round blue body seemed to be little more than life support for her smile. “You’re up early. Getting a jump on the day?”

  He managed a smile of his own, nowhere near as bright, mumbled something that she pretended was coherent as he pointed to the pitcher of protolact on the shelf behind her.

  “Upset stomach?” she intuited. He nodded. It was close enough to how he felt though not truly accurate. Upset soul, perhaps? What was the cure for that?

  “Dr. Ree usually comes along in the next half an hour or so,” said Chordys, going on without him. “He’s on the coldblood cycle, you know. Only up during the ‘day.’ You can probably catch a word with him before his shift begins.”

  “No,” said Jaza, as she reached for the jar of blue liquid. “It’s just bad sleep. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

  She beamed back at him good-naturedly and handed off the protolact. He drank as he walked, taking swigs between steps and feeling progressively more like himself. He decided to swing by the forward observation area and collect his thoughts there before going up to the pod.

  The odd clusters of darklings did obscure most of normal space, making Occultus Ora an almost totally black void, but, sometimes, the light from a nearby star could cut through.

  As much as he loved plumbing the secrets of this region-just thinking of it sent a thrill through him-it was nice to see the stars from time to time. It settled his mind to see them out there, perhaps not as eternal as they had seemed to him as a child but permanent enough for all practical purposes. As much as he loved pushing the edges, there was something to be said for that stability, even if it was only an illusion supported by his limited perceptions.

  Bajor was out there somewhere, far beyond the range of even Titan’s sensors. It was strange how little he actually thought of home these days. There was always so much to see and do that the day-to-day life of Bajor, how his father was, what his children were up to, only floated like buoys on the vast surface of his mind.

  Somehow, whenever the dream resurfaced, his mind swam home as fast as it could. It wasn’t really homesickness, he had reasons for not spending too much time there, but whenever the dream recurred, there was always that strange hollow ache afterward.

  He made a mental note to record a message to his family as soon as this business with Occultus Ora was complete.

   Hello to all. Yes, we’re all still fine out here. Still alive. Only a few more years to go…

  The message would take weeks to arrive and be necessarily brief but they expected that from him by now. He’d never been good at verbally expressing the amazing things he’d witnessed in his travels and so had forced himself to become adept at holography. The actual image of a dying pulsar spoke it with far more eloquence than any words he might put around it. Of course, there would be no pictures of Occultus Ora, none that a lay person would find interesting at any rate. Only black, black, black.

  Still, on this occasion, he would be forced to try to put it all into words and he would certainly have the time to do it. There was no way to get a signal out now. The darklings’ gravity wells and particle discharges made normal communications dicey at best.

  He tried to recall a few sonnets to go along with his descriptions of this place; perhaps a line or two from Erish Elo’s Flames of Darknesswould be apropos.

  The observation deck was even more devoid of people than the galley had been. With only two stars visible through the massive plexi wall the only available illumination came from the light strips that ran the length of the ceiling, kept intentionally dimmer than the norm to facilitate tranquility of thought. There was always a somber, contemplative feel to the place and that was precisely what he needed on mornings after the dream’s reappearance.

  Aside from himself only two other beings, two female ensigns, shared the space. They were both essentially humanoid. One was an Antaran, you could tell by the massive V-shaped cranial ridge dominating her forehead. The other was a member of some species he couldn’t readily identify. She was tallish, slender, longer of limb than the average human or Bajoran with a coating on her skin that glinted vaguely metallic in the low light.

  Her hair, a thicket of long, ropelike braids, extended to the small of her back, where it was held in a loose bunch by a single regulation blue band.

  They nodded professionally at his arrival but, when it was clear he meant to keep to himself, went back to their previous conversation, speaking in intentionally hushed tones so as not to be overheard.

  He did his best not to listen, he had no wish to intrude, but the unfortunate acoustics of the place made eavesdropping inevitable.

  There was something about a coworker being unreasonable, another about the unreliability of that person’s work and the general consensus that, were it not for their commander’s personal affection for the buffoon, he would spend the bulk of his on-duty time scrubbing plasma conduits. It soon became clear that the subject of their discussion had been romantically involved with the Antaran and now was very much not.