“I don’t think this is only about AR-558,” she said, shaking her head. “At least not directly. I think it’s really about Taran’atar.”

Nog looked blank. “I don’t follow you.”

“Ever since Taran’atar came aboard DS9, you’ve been forced to share space with a Jem’Hadar soldier.”

“Oh. And it was Jem’Hadar who shot my leg off at AR-558.”

Ezri winced at that image. “Sounds like you’ve already done the math.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Nog said, his mouth a grim slash. “And I’ve concluded that the less I have to see of anyJem’Hadar soldier, the better I like it.”

Ezri was taken aback by Nog’s vehemence. “Why?”

The young Ferengi appeared to consider carefully just how much he wanted to reveal before replying. Ezri was about to try to change the subject to something less threatening when he said, “Right before we left for the Gamma Quadrant, I had a little run-in with Taran’atar that convinced me I’ve been right about him all along.”

Ezri’s counselor instincts went into overdrive once again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that all Jem’Hadar are cold-hearted killers, and nothing can change that. Not even a direct order from Odo.” Nog turned away, apparently concentrating intensely on an instrument panel.

They finished stowing the Saganin silence. After Ezri advised Commander Vaughn that they were coming up to the bridge to make a preliminary report about the alien artifact, she and Nog disembarked into the narrow shuttlebay, entered the adjoining corridor, and made their way to the turbolift.

“Bridge,” Nog said, his voice hushed.

“Taran’atar isn’t responsible for what happened to you at AR-558,” Ezri said, trying to keep her tones even and nonjudgmental.

“No. But he won’t let me forget it, either. Just by being on the station. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad to come on this mission—no unnecessary reminders.”

Ouch,Ezri thought. I deserve that for trying to play counselor as well as first officer.Still, she hated to leave emotional loose ends hanging. Aloud, she said, “I don’t want to see you let an old resentment like this fester. It won’t do you any good in the long term.”

Just as the turbolift reached the bridge, Nog told the computer to halt it. She noticed that sweat had broken out on his hairless brow. “Ezri, I appreciate your help, but I’m fine. I can put up with having a Jem’Hadar on the station because I’m trained to follow orders. But nobody can order me to like it. Or to forgive the Jem’Hadar for taking my leg.”

Ezri nodded and told the computer to release the turbolift doors, which whooshed open a moment later. Stonily silent, Nog preceded her onto the bridge.

No, I can’t order you to forgive anyone, Nog. Onlyyou can do that.

The twelve aliens Commander Vaughn had beamed to the medical bay had suffered injuries ranging from third-degree burns to fractures to blunt-force trauma to punctures. The two who were conscious spoke a few words that the universal translator evidently found as unintelligible as Bashir did. Their long, willowy forms, awkwardly arranged on the too-short biobeds, were equally alien, their black, chitinous exoskeletons reminding him of a cross between hardwood saplings and giant versions of the crustaceans his father sometimes caught on Invernia II. Their almost perfectly round heads bore black-whiskered faces that were oddly evocative of both praying mantises and sea lions.

And there was something very familiar—weirdly comforting, in fact—about their deep, dark eyes.

As Bashir, Ensign Krissten Richter, and a pair of corpsmen tended to the messy details of improvisational trauma surgery, all of them elbow-deep in alien gore, Bashir quietly entered the mental room in which he stored his childhood memories and took his first patient down from a high shelf at the back of a little-visited closet. The first surgical procedure he had ever performed had been sewing up the torn leg of Kukalaka, his favorite plush bear, at the age of five.

Seeing the eyes of his childhood companion writ large on these alien faces tempted him to dub his patients “Kukalakans.”

Nurse Juarez’s temporary absence had never been felt more accutely. But Edgardo was still on bed rest in his quarters, waiting for his leg to finish healing after an EVA mishap two days ago.

Three of the aliens had expired during the time it took the Saganto return, and it had since taken nearly thirty minutes of extremely messy surgery before Bashir felt confident that no more of them were in imminent danger. Eight of the aliens were now curled up on biobeds or on the floor. Although they were all unconscious and weak, they appeared stable for the moment, and comfortable enough in the Defiant’s class-M atmospheric mix.

Bashir wiped his gloved hands across the front of his amber- and umber-splattered surgical smock. Just as he was about to order Ensign Richter to transport the healthiest five of the lot back to the alien ship, the vital signs of the ninth creature took an abrupt turn for the worse.

The being lying on the biobed before Bashir would have stood nearly two and a half meters in height—were it capable of standing. Below its elongated, bulbous head were two upper limbs; farther down jutted three equally long lower extremities—none of which seemed sturdy enough to bear the being’s weight. But at the moment Bashir was far more concerned with the thick yellow ichor that had once again begun bubbling up through the brutal diagonal tear in the creature’s blue-black abdomen. The first round of protoplaser suturing on the wound had evidently not held.

Bashir placed the dermal regenerator on a higher setting and quickly stanched the worst of the bleeding. Satisfied that his makeshift suturing job would remain in place this time, Bashir slowly moved his tricorder across the creature’s belly to scan for evidence of internal bleeding. But it was damned difficult to interpret tricorder readings on creatures one had never before encountered, or even read about.

Bashir glanced up at Richter, who looked on with concern etched into her sharp features. One of the corpsmen, the youthful-looking Lieutenant John Candlewood, watched impassively for a moment before moving on to check the vital signs of some of the other unconscious aliens.

Krissten appeared to need a little encouragement. “You and the corpsmen did some fine work here, Krissten,” Bashir said.

Tears welled up in the young med-tech’s large, blue-green eyes. “Not fine enough for three of them.”

Bashir spoke in a tone he usually reserved for his most grievously ill patients. “Some patients are beyond saving, Krissten. Even the ones we know how to treat.”

Closing her eyes, she nodded slowly. No one ever gets used to death,he thought. And nobody ever should.

Bashir glanced down at the tricorder display. One of the creature’s large thoracic vascular channels was leaking fluid into its body cavity. A humanoid with an internal injury like that would probably have bled to death within a minute or two.

“I’m going to have to go in there again and patch up that blood vessel,” Bashir said. Assuming that itis a blood vessel,he thought as he picked up a laser exoscalpel from the instrument tray beside the biobed.

“Initiating sterile field,” Krissten said, her training evidently overcoming her emotional distress.

Bashir’s brow furrowed as the field’s faint blue glow arced across the alien’s wounded thorax. Four minutes later, Bashir had neatly cauterized the ruptured vessel without disturbing any of the surrounding—and still mysterious—organs and tissues. It appeared he had succeeded in stopping the creature’s internal bleeding.

So why was the alien’s breathing suddenly becoming so labored?

Krissten was clearly troubled by the same thing. “I don’t understand why he’s starting to have respiratory trouble now,” she said with a shake of her head. “If our atmosphere were poisonous to them, we would have known about it the moment they came aboard.”