The message of the recurring dreams had continued to unfold for her, although the images remained cryptic, violent, and strange. But she’d come to believe that the discovery of one of the Bajoran Orbs by a Cardassian would mean the end of their civilization—had come to believe it with all her heart, and that belief finally allowed her to embrace her insanity. She had no husband, no children. Her parents lived well outside the city, and she didn’t see them often. Her job was interesting to her, but not especially fulfilling…

And if I’m right about this—if this is a vision, a reality that will come to pass—then I have a responsibility.

She had spent many hours reading through the texts she could find on Oralius, on the Oralian Way—and while many were simple propaganda smears, she’d seen glimmers of a strange but interesting philosophy here and there. From what she could tell, the Oralians were simply spiritual seekers, not the decadent cult she’d always believed them to be.

The brief recorded message from Natima Lang had provided the final push. It had been waiting in her transmissions only the day before, and had confirmed Miras’s information about Gar Osen and the death of the kai—not directly, but clearly enough. Natima had been uncharacteristically grim, her expression solemn as she’d cautioned Miras not to continue concerning herself with affairs on Bajor. She’d added that going public with unapproved information was a punishable offense. When Miras had tried to return the call, she’d found that Natima was unavailable.

With clear evidence that there might actually be something to it all, Miras had acted. She’d packed a bag, made a few calls—and had then managed to scramble the Orb’s access code in the ministry’s database, making it impossible for anyone to retrieve the item without manually opening every single shipping container in the warehouse. All those years studying the ministry’s filing system, preparing for her life’s work, she’d learned a trick or two. There was a chance that nobody would learn of what she had done until someone actually attempted to find the Orb—but Miras wasn’t about to take the chance that she’d be so lucky. She had stepped across a line, a step she couldn’t take back.

The man seated beside her looked out the window of the transport shuttle, at the flat, endless desert stretching all around them, beautiful in the early morning light. “Have you seen the Hebitian ruins before, Astraea?”

“Not for many years,” said Miras, remembering that she was no longer Miras. She had taken the name of the woman from her dreams, whose face had become her own. She was Astraea now, and after what she had done—traveling under a false name, deliberately misfiling the Orb—she could never go home. She hoped that she would find her confirmation, out here in the desert. She hoped she hadn’t just thrown away her career, her life,for no reason at all. “I look forward to revisiting them.”

In the fairly spacious control cabin of the Bajoran carrier, Lenaris and Halpas were having a look at some of the old ship’s navigational systems. While Halpas confirmed that he had never flown this particular model, he was still familiar with most of her instruments. He pointed to a few components, explained their significance to Lenaris, who was feeling slightly overwhelmed with all the information he was quickly absorbing. This was different from studying old schematics—the knowledge Halpas carried included a great deal of information that never would have appeared in any manual.

“Those filter systems there are notoriously touchy,” Halpas pointed out. “While these gauges over here can be sluggish at first, once you warp up they get a lot more loose.” Lenaris nodded, taking it all in.

“The thing to remember is that a lot of the Cardassian ships have blind spots in their sensor grids, like their planet-based systems,” Halpas said. He spoke this in confidential tones, almost as though he expected someone to be listening. “I can show you what I mean once we get out there—” Lenaris felt a thrill at this kind of talk, Halpas’s confidence making it clear that this was really going to happen. “—and even more important than that, Cardassian ships have a tendency to require a power surge in order to arm their forward disruptors. As soon as they transfer power, everything else gets sapped—their navigational systems, their shields—and more importantly for us, their sensors.”

Lenaris nodded vigorously. He tensed as a faint whirring sound went up on the bridge. The lights across the navigational array flickered once, and then settled into a constant glow. The auxiliary systems had already gone online half an hour before, but it was looking more and more like this mission was going to happen. He was actually going to travel at warp—he was going to leave the B’hava’el system. And he was going to rescue his friend.

Halpas walked him around some more of the ship’s controls, quizzing him, pointing out subtle nuances he could remember from the sensor arrays. A few minutes later, Lenaris looked up as Taryl joined them in the cockpit, her expression bright and slightly anxious.

“The warp reactor is online!” she said. “Tiven said it was barely damaged at all—the biggest problems were the antigrav and the thrusters, but he thinks he’s fixed those well enough for a decent takeoff.”

“A takeoff!” Lenaris exclaimed. “I had no idea we’d be there already. We need to get a better idea of how we’re going to mask this thing’s signature before we can even think about it, or else—”

“Or else we just go for it,” Halpas said.

Lenaris looked at the old man, expecting him to be either joking or ranting on one of his notoriously reckless plans—like the Valerian freighter, only this time, with him aboard instead of Darin. “If we do that, they’ll target us before we’re even out of the atmosphere,” he said.

Halpas laughed. “You’re thinking in terms of how a raider flies,” he told the younger man. “A ship like this can break through the atmosphere in the time it takes a raider to power up its thrusters. We’ll be halfway to Jeraddo before the spoonheads have even noticed us. And by then—”

“But once they have noticed us, we’re as good as dead,” Lenaris argued. “Their ships could outrun this thing even if it was operating at full capacity, brand-new. The trick is to stay beneaththeir notice.”

Halpas shook his head. “We’ll lose them,” he told Lenaris. “You just leave that to me.” He turned to Taryl. “So, just how many of these balon ships do you folks have?”

Taryl frowned. “Seefa took one, and then the other three who left must have taken at least two…we’ve got about twenty of them now.”

“Twenty! We won’t be needing quite that many. Let’s get back to the village and bring a few of them here…and while we’re at it, I suggest we find some more volunteers. I’m not sure the four of us are up to storming a Cardassian prison camp on our own, no matter how remote the location.”

Aro Seefa had successfully hidden the raider in one of the old drainage conduits, organized a modest food supply for himself, and made his bed. He’d slept, and woken with no idea of what to do next. The concept of leisure time was not one with which he was intimately familiar. In his experience, when there wasn’t something to be fixed or retrieved or altered or built, you slept or ate. And neither of those options was feasible when his stomach was so twisted, knotted with a growing certainty that he’d done the wrong thing, leaving the Ornathias.

Seefa had explored these drainage tunnels and ditches many times when he was young, though his aunt and uncle, who had raised him after the death of his parents, had repeatedly warned him not to. The tunnels were ancient, whole sections caving each spring, and they still flooded in the rainy season. But they ran throughout the farms and vineyards of the Tilar peninsula, holding endless fascination for most of the children that had grown up here. Seefa’s guardians had so many other children to look after—in all, they’d taken in fourteen occupation orphans who’d needed a home—Seefa had managed to explore the tunnels regularly, often using them to return to his family’s lands, where he would hide in the shadows and daydream about being grown and in the resistance, dealing out harsh justice to the Cardassians.