“Tiven Cohr is in the Halpas cell,” Lac said matter-of-factly. “At least, he was a year ago. I heard you were, as well.”

Lenaris wasn’t sure how to respond.

“It’s all right, Holem. I’m fighting against them, too. At least, trying to. Some friends and relatives of mine are trying to scrape together a resistance cell. But Tiven Cohr—I just wanted to contact him regarding another matter.”

Lenaris thought he knew. Tiven Cohr was an engineer whose reputation far preceded him. “The warp ship?”

“I heard that he was the best. He worked on warp vessels before the occupation, didn’t he?”

Lenaris nodded. “Yes, he did,” he said. “But it’s like I told you—I haven’t seen him in some time.”

“Well, you’re the first lead on him I’ve found in months,” Lac said. “You know more than I do, and that’s got to be worth something.”

They curved past the stand of dead and dying trees, thin shadows in the darkness. Lac led them into the woods, taking a trail that Lenaris could barely see by the glow of Bajor’s distant moons.

“It’s right up here.” Lac gestured to something beyond a tangle of brittle tree limbs. Holem could not quite make out what it was as they approached the small clearing; he could only see a dark, angular heap of something that appeared to be covered with old leaves.

Lac began to tug at a corner of a tarpaulin that had been tossed over the ship, woven with strips of canvas and covered over with foliage.

“I don’t believe it,” Lenaris marveled, as the little ship was revealed underneath the covering. It was an old Militia raider, the kind that had been fairly common twenty years ago…when there had still beena Militia.

Lac stepped inside the ship, ignoring the question. “Do you want to fly her, Holem?”

“Really?” he said eagerly. “You’d trust me to—”

“Sure,” Lac said. “I’m not much of a pilot, myself. You’re the Va’telo,after all.”

Lenaris stepped inside, looking at the name painted on the side of her hull. The Lupus,named after the crafty animals that roamed Bajoran forests, sometimes picking off farmers’ livestock. “Where did you get this thing?” he asked.

A smile played around the corner of Lac’s mouth, and Lenaris had already determined that Lac was the sort of person who did not smile without significant provocation. He was obviously pleased with his ship, as every pilot was. “This one belonged to my grandfather,” he explained. “We have others, mostly built from the cannibalized parts of other ships, and even a few built from scratch. But this one is the template.”

“But…you said you come from farmers. Was your grandfather…?”

“It was a hobby for him. He wasn’t allowed a master’s license, of course. He never made it out of the atmosphere. But he loved to fly, when he could, and he was quite good at it, too.” He tapped the ship affectionately. “He managed to hide it from the Cardassians when they started putting restrictions on possession and operation of flyers and spacecraft. It wasn’t that difficult—it didn’t occur to them that a farmer would have an old Militia raider stored in his barn.”

Lenaris hesitated. “How do you keep the Cardassians from tracking your fuel emissions? For that matter, how are we going to stay under the security grids? Do you have some kind of…shielding device?”

Lac smiled again. “Nothing that sophisticated. I’ve studied some of the flight patterns of the delivery vessels that go back and forth across the channel, and I try to stick to their schedules. The Cardassians don’t pay much attention to back-and-forth travel around here. Anyway, if it ever came down to a chase, their flyers have proven to be pretty wobbly in the atmosphere. I think there’s a good chance I could give them a run for their money—and an even better chance that you could.”

Lenaris supposed this was a satisfactory answer, and he was flattered that Lac had already put so much faith in his abilities. He strapped into his seat, feeling a rush of real joy as he prepared to lift off. He adjusted the ship’s thrusters to bring the craft straight upward, out of the trees, enjoying the familiar pull of gravity, the sensation of leaving it behind. He kept the vessel low, learning the console as he piloted them toward the peninsula. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, when he was nearly to Tilar, that he remembered the other part of his question—the one that Lac hadn’t answered.

“How doyou keep the spoonheads from tracing your fuel signature?” he asked.

“Balon,” Lac said, without missing a beat, and Lenaris’s hands tightened on the flight yoke. He could feel the blood draining from his face.

“Balon!” he exclaimed. “You’re joking!” Balon was a highly unstable fuel, out of use for over a century before the Cardassians had come, due to an unfortunate tendency toward spontaneous combustion.

Lac waved a reassuring hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Some friends of mine have figured out how to isolate the most unstable components of it, in its liquid form. We’ve been converting it to a safe fuel source for quite some time now. The Cardies don’t bother to scan for it, since it’s been out of use for such a long time.”

Lenaris relaxed, but only slightly. He felt as though he’d just been told he was strapped to a “safe” bomb. And if Lac was overestimating his friends’ expertise, then he could expect to walk with the Prophets somewhere around touchdown time—Lenaris hadn’t landed a flyer of any sort in well over a year, and without knowing the terrain, he was likely to make a rough reunion with the ground.

Lac leaned forward to the ship’s sensor display, an old-fashioned model with blinking, geometric glyphs showing the other craft in the region. A large, green triangle came into view, and Lac tapped it with his finger. “That’s the landing point,” he declared. “I programmed it in myself,” he added proudly.

“I hope your friends know what they’re doing…with the, uh…” Lenaris trailed off, not wanting to be insulting, but still—the balon mishaps of yesteryear were well remembered by anyone in the Va’telocaste.

“Don’t worry, Holem. I’ve done this at least a hundred times, and I’m sure you’re far better at it than I am.”

Lenaris couldn’t help but squeeze his eyes shut when the raider came into gentle contact with the ground, a perfect landing if he’d ever made one. He opened his eyes slowly and let out a hard breath. “All in a night’s work,” he said, his voice trembling ever so slightly. His hands still clenched the flight yoke.

Lac wasted no time in pushing back the raider’s glacis plate. “Well, come on then. I’ll take you to the settlement, and then tomorrow we can have a look at the warp ship, weather permitting.”

On rubbery legs, Lenaris followed the farmer, wondering for the hundredth time what he was getting himself into.

In the dark, he could see the uneven outlines of the buildings up ahead. Lac led him toward the center of a ramshackle town, and Lenaris got a clearer picture of where the farmer lived. The buildings were mostly comprised of scrap, piled up on the foundations of crumbling houses from long ago. This was a town that had been destroyed by Cardassians, he deduced, at least a decade ago, and then rebuilt with whatever pieces of debris the surviving Bajorans could find.

“We haven’t always lived like this,” Lac explained. “My family’s farm is some distance from here. I resettled in this area with my cousins just about eight years ago. We’ve had a few more stragglers join us since then, adding more dwellings as we were able to come by building materials.”

Lac’s definition of “building materials” was loose. Uneven bits of stone were plastered into place with dry mud on some of the more substantial houses, but many were thrown together from old sheets of metal and smartplastic that were clearly salvaged from Cardassian refuse.

Lac came upon one such improvised structure, bigger than most of the others, and pulled back the door, made of several thin tree branches stripped of bark and twigs and crookedly lashed together. “Hello?” he spoke into the darkness, and after a moment, a half circle of light appeared underneath the crack of what must have been another door. The half circle widened as a door was thrown back, and out stepped the most beautiful woman Lenaris had ever seen, shaking sleep from her almond-shaped green eyes. She smoothed a thick, black curl behind her ear. “You’re finally back,” she said.