“A pilot without a ship,” Holem reminded him. This conversation seemed mired in depressing topics.

“You won’t need a ship,” Lac told him. “I have one.”

Lenaris’s eyebrows shot up, but Lac went on as if he hadn’t just said the unlikeliest thing one could have expected from a farmer.

“I do recognize your name,” Lac said, his voice taking on a confidential tone. “You know Tiven Cohr, don’t you?”

Lenaris was no less surprised. “I…” He wasn’t sure whether to confess to it or not. Tiven Cohr was involved with Lenaris’s old resistance cell, a group he hadn’t associated with for the better part of a year. This was not the sort of thing one was generally eager to discuss with a stranger.

“Look, Lenaris,” Lac said, suddenly sounding a bit urgent. “I know we just met, but…you seem reasonably trustworthy. And if I’m right about that…” He lowered his voice. “I have something to show you that, as a pilot, you might find interesting.” He glanced at the overcast sky. “That is, if we ever come to the end of this line.”

As if on cue, it began to rain, at first the slightest suggestion of cold drops prickling the back of Lenaris’s neck, and then an out-and-out downpour. He crossed his arms tightly across his chest, sniffling as the water soaked his hair and rolled down the tip of his nose.

“What kind of thing?” he asked Lac, who had assumed a similar posture.

Lac smiled mysteriously through the sheets of rain, and leaned closer, to speak to Lenaris over the plunking and splashing all around them. “It’s a warp ship,” he whispered. “A Bajoranwarp ship.”

Lenaris stared in disbelief. “Where?” he asked.

“I’ll show it to you,” Lac told him, wiping the water out of his eyes. “But first, I want you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?” Lenaris said uncertainly, shivering in the rain.

“Take me to Tiven Cohr.”

“I can’t,” Lenaris said, feeling slightly relieved. He didn’t want to get mixed up in whatever this fellow was proposing, especially if it involved Tiven Cohr. “I don’t know where he is.”

Lac looked disappointed. “But…could you find out?”

Lenaris frowned, poking his toes in the edges of the deep puddles that were suddenly emerging. “I don’t know,” he said.

The rain was beginning to let up, as quickly as it had started. Lac gave it another try. “You couldn’t even maybe tell me where you last saw him? Anything like that?”

Lenaris grimaced. They were coming closer to the front of the line, where they would soon be within earshot of the collaborating Bajorans who ran the ration checkpoints. “I suppose…there are a few things I could tell you,” he said.

Lac grinned. “Then it’s settled,” he said. “I can take you to my shuttle tomorrow.”

“Your shuttle?” Holem said. He hadn’t intended to sign on for whatever it was Lac was offering, but the farmer only nodded. Holem was bursting with questions, but as the line edged closer to the ration station, he could not ask them. He would have to be satisfied with finding out after he’d received his rations, and with the way his stomach was churning, he hoped the food would taste better than it smelled.

Professor Mendar cleared her throat loudly, and several of her students sat up a little straighter in their chairs. Miras Vara absentmindedly tapped a stylus against the surface of her padd, trying not to think about lunch. This class, a required postgrad overview of the Cardassian territories, was always difficult for Miras because of its unfortunate time slot. She was sure that many of the students, if not most, had the same problem. It didn’t help that the content of the course was mostly irrelevant to Miras’s primary concentration, homeworld agriculture. She’d spent six years studying ponics and soil components, and enjoying every minute of it; a quartile of politics and geography, treaties and borders, and she was bored stiff.

“Today, we begin our study of Bajor,” the professor said, her hair a sleek black helmet on her rather mannish head. “I have prepared a brief presentation. I hope it will illustrate the importance of the development of new weapons for the future of our world, and open a discourse on ways in which we might better incorporate alien cultures.”

Miras stifled a yawn and programmed her padd to download the images from the mainframe.

“I have to warn you that some of this material may be disturbing,” the professor continued, and Miras sat up straighter, glancing over at Kalisi. Her classmate arched one delicate ridge, smiling slightly. The other students murmured to one another.

“Quiet, please. These are uncensored images, given to us by a correspondent for the Cardassian Information Service. She has risked her life many times to bring the truth about the Bajoran annexation to the Cardassian people. Normally, these images would not be displayed for the general public to view, as there are those who would manipulate this kind of material as ammunition for dissent. However, I am confident that my graduate students know better.”

“There was a man in my sector who was a dissenter,” Kalisi whispered across the aisle. Kalisi Reyar was one of Miras’s closest friends. “I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

“He was foolish to make his opinions known,” Miras whispered back.

Kalisi’s gaze flicked to the front of the room before she replied. The professor was wrangling with her console. “He couldn’t help himself. People with beliefs like that usually have a disorder that prevents them from understanding loyalty to anything but their own desires. A defect in their lateral cortex makes them abnormally egocentric, and the same disorder keeps them from having any impulse control. I learned about it in socio-deviance.”

Miras turned forward as an image on the teacher’s display lit up the darkened room. There was a long, slow pan of a massive pile of rubble, smoking composite materials spilling from the front of a large building. Soldiers in deflect suits were using displacers to shift through the wreckage.

“This ruined building is located at one of the older Cardassian settlements,” Professor Mendar explained. “You can see that it has sustained considerable damage in an attack by rebel Bajorans. Of course, the vast majority of Cardassian structures remain unharmed. But for the soldiers who were garrisoned in this building, for the men and women who worked here…”

Miras leaned toward Kalisi. “My cousin was stationed on Bajor for a little while, before being sent to the border colonies.”

“My father says the border colony skirmishes are a waste of Cardassia’s resources,” Kalisi said promptly. “We should be putting more focus on Bajor.”

Miras did not answer. Her own parents had often expressed the opposite belief. Many Cardassians had strong feelings about the conflict with the Federation over the border colonies, but Miras felt it wasn’t appropriate for a woman to make her political opinions known. Anyway, it was not the function of a scientist to question military affairs, only to answer the call for improved technologies, to better the Cardassian quality of life. She had often thought to herself that Kalisi was too outspoken for a woman, but she adored her friend just the same. Miras had no illusions about her own future—she would work at the ministry, part of a team developing agrochemicals, or studying soil–plant microbe interaction; she would marry and bear children, as expected by her family and by the Union, and while it was all quite dull, she supposed, she was content with her prospects. Kalisi, though, beautiful and ambitious, an engineer and a programmer…Miras couldn’t imagine such a plain, quiet life for someone like Kalisi.

“This is one of our most productive mining facilities on Bajor,” Professor Mendar went on, images of tunnels and rocks flashing up, a number of the soft-faced Bajorans moving carts of rough-hewn stone across the screen. Without ridges, their faces seemed vulnerable and bland, their coloring quite sickly. Not an attractive people. “We have found a dizzying array of geological resources on the planet, and our latest estimation suggests that through their acquisition, we will extend Cardassian mineral productivity for decades, perhaps centuries.”