He placed his hands, such cool, bloodless gray hands, on the curve of her neck and stroked it with the back of his fingers. She shivered, not entirely from the coldness of his flesh. “I’ve just come from a meeting,” he murmured.

“I’m sure you were wonderful,” she said, meaning it.

His face broke into a smile. She had quickly come to appreciate his smile. “I wish you had been there,” he said. “I could have used the support.”

Meru only smiled back in return, knowing that it was all he needed from her until he was finished speaking.

“Legate Kell does not understand what I am trying to do. He thinks I’m a fool for abolishing child labor in the camps. He thinks my plan to bring in better medical facilities is costly and unnecessary. None of them understand that a drop of prevention is worth an ocean of cure.”

“You’re too compassionate for them to understand you.” She brushed a strand of wiry black hair away from his face.

“It’s the resistance,” he told her. “Why must they continue to fight me? Can’t they see that I have their best interests at heart? You experienced yourself what kinds of things they do—the recent attempt on my life, you would have been killed, too. They would kill a Bajoran woman in cold blood just to make a self-serving political statement.”

Meru worked not to tense, as she always did when Dukat mentioned the resistance. While she did not agree with every action taken by the resistance fighters, she understood why they fought. She knew firsthand what it was like to go for days without any food, to watch your children suffer from cuts that wouldn’t heal, their bodies too starved for what they needed to thrive. She could not honestly denounce those who chose to resist. And though Dukat was an unusual man among Cardassians, Meru knew it was no use trying to explain it to him. He was unusual, but he was still a Cardassian.

“What’s on your mind, Meru?” Dukat tipped her chin up toward his face with his index finger. Meru smiled as brilliantly as she knew how.

“Only pleasing you after a difficult day,” she told him. After all, she thought to herself, that’s what she was here for. To provide comfort. She was a comfort woman, and it did her no good to think of herself in any other context.

Dukat smiled in turn, and pulled her close.

“Holem, didn’t you hear me? I said, hand me that hyperspanner.” Taryl’s voice echoed through the corridor from where only her feet were visible in the light of Lenaris’s palm beacon. She had been lying on her back for hours inside the cramped opening of the maintenance conduit of the old warp ship.

Lenaris’s palmlight wobbled clumsily around the pile of equipment spread across the floor of the ship’s engine room. He was no novice when it came to tools, but Taryl had things he’d never heard of before. “Is this it?” He handed her a cylindrical object.

She made an exasperated noise. “No, this is a magna-spanner. The hyperspanner is—oh, never mind, I’ll get it.” She hoisted herself from the tube with some difficulty, her movements casting oversized shadows across the convex shine of the inner hull. Lenaris, feeling useless, got out of her way.

The derelict vessel still rested in the same position as it had when Lenaris had first seen it, over a year ago, and it was likely no closer to being fixed now than it had been when he had initially inspected it with Taryl and Lac. Since he’d come to live with the Ornathia clan, the days had passed quickly, lost to the myriad small chores and errands needed to ensure survival. There wasn’t much time to come out to where the vessel lay, and the only one of the three who had any inkling whatsoever of how the engines might be made to work again seemed to be Taryl, and she was also the one with the least opportunity to actually work on it. Seefa, her fiancé, still felt that the business with the ship could come to no good.

But Lenaris and Lac grew ever more determined to see the thing airborne—or at least, grew ever more determined to spend time in the foothills with the ship, tinkering with her instruments and comparing her schematics with the information they managed to gather from various contacts between Tilar and Relliketh. It was a minor obsession for Lenaris, one that he wasn’t sure he ever expected to be fulfilled, but one that took up a great deal of his time nonetheless, whether it was gathering information, looking for an engineer, or poking around in the ship itself.

Of course, time with the ship was limited to the interims between the small operations that the Ornathia cell was beginning to plan and carry out. The cell was still in its infancy, and full-scale attacks were ill-advised at this point. The cell was comprised mainly of the Ornathia cousins and their spouses, none of whom had any real combat experience. But many of them were surprisingly resourceful when it came to refurbishing pieces of useful equipment. The latest venture was a plan to build a long-range communications tower, which would have to be erected on one of Bajor’s moons, probably Derna. Missions planned outside the atmosphere had been very few and far between, however, and took months of careful planning. The tower would probably not be completed for another six months or so—and Seefa was once again vocally opposed to the whole thing, being of the general opinion that offworld travel was simply a bad idea.

Taryl continued to clang around inside the maintenance conduit while Lenaris held the palmlight, waiting for her next order and letting his mind wander. “Holem,” she said, jerking him out of his daydream, “I need you to hold this guide wire while I solder.”

Uncertainly, Lenaris stuck his head and shoulders inside the opening of the maintenance conduit. Taryl was forced to straddle his torso, the conduit much too small for the two of them. He took the wire from her fingers while she soldered the exposed portion in place, holding a small sylus-sized light in her teeth. He could feel his heart pounding as she worked, all too aware of her thighs encircling his waist, and he willed his pulse to quiet itself; he did not want her to know just how much it thrilled him to be in such close proximity to her…

“What the kosstis going on here?”

Lenaris dropped his palmlight and quickly ducked out of the conduit; the voice belonged to none other than Aro Seefa.

“Seefa!” Lenaris exclaimed. “I didn’t even hear you.”

Seefa ignored him. “I’ve told you and told you how dangerous this is. I knew your fool brother was still committed to wasting his time with this heap, but you?”

Taryl hopped smoothly out of the conduit. “Calm down, Seefa,” she said. “I’m only having a look around.” She lowered her voice. “I’m humoring my brother a little. This thing’s a lost cause, of course.”

“You shouldn’t even be here,” Seefa growled, but much of the anger had gone from his voice.

Taryl stroked his arm. “I know,” she sighed. “But you know how persuasive Lac can be…”

Lenaris wished he were invisible, and to a degree, it seemed as though he was, to Taryl and Seefa. They often seemed to forget his presence—or that of anyone else—when they were together. He found it increasingly difficult not to resent it a little, especially since he secretly felt that his rapport with Taryl transcended her superficial relationship with her fiancé. But he couldn’t let himself think like that. It would only cause trouble.

In very little time, Taryl seemed to have Seefa almost thoroughly appeased, though he still demanded that she come back to the settlement with him. “If you’ve got any sense,” Seefa said to Lenaris, “you’ll come along with us. And make sure you don’t leave any tools behind. It’s bad enough to leave evidence of our presence here, but I guess if the Cardies think we’re stripping the ship for useful materials, that’s one thing. It’s another thing to let them get the idea that you might be trying to get it airborne.”