The man looked around the cottage. “How can you live like this, Pasir? It’s so…primitive! Not to mention the cold.” The man shivered to illustrate, and then laughed.

Gar was incensed. The other man acted very inappropriately for an agent of the Obsidian Order. “Why are you here?” He didn’t really need to ask, for the use of his real name was enough to make it quite plain. “Where is Rhan Ico? She is supposed to be my contact—I’ve not heard from her in twenty years, at least!”

“I don’t know where she is, I’ve never heard of her,” the man answered, his voice reflecting disinterest. “Most likely, she is dead. Enabran Tain saw fit to clean house when he took over the Order.”

Enabran Tain?The name was only vaguely familiar, and Pasir realized that things must have changed drastically since he’d lost contact with the Order. It was finally becoming plain to him now, why he’d been left to dangle alone in the dark all this time. “What do you want?”

“Well,” the man said. “You probably haven’t heard that the military sometimes tries to make use of the Order, since they’ve had so little luck with their own clumsy interrogations. They requested my assistance for what turned out to be a fool’s errand, an absolute mockery of an interview in Dahkur.” The man rolled his eyes for emphasis. “The military is frightened of its own shadow these days. But so long as I was here anyway, Enabran Tain had an idea of a means by which I might take care of a problem for him.”

“A…problem?”

“Indeed, for it would appear that your purpose here has—shall we say—expired?”

“What do you mean? I still have a great deal of influence here! I—have a plan, you see. It was I who disposed of the old kai. And I have swung the general opinion of Bajor around to the abandonment of the castes. I will soon be the kai, and then—”

The other man sighed as he interrupted. “I must tell you that Tain was never entirely sure how he meant to use you, Pasir. You were simply a holdover from the days of his predecessor. And yet, he felt that having an operative in the field might prove useful to him in some small way. But if it’s true what they are saying about Dukat’s new edicts—and it is true—then what good could you possibly be to the Order when you are sent to a work camp with the rest of these Bajoran wretches? No, it is my understanding that although Tain had initially hoped for you to become the next religious leader here, this outcome is rather unlikely to occur, considering the current circumstances. And then there is the matter of the girl at the Ministry of Science…”

“What girl? What do you mean?”

“Your cover, Pasir. It has been blown, I’m afraid.”

“Impossible!”

“It’s true. Tain has considered the situation carefully, and decided that you have become more of a risk than an asset. Your mission is officially over.”

“But…Dukat! He knows I am here, you must speak to him regarding these new policies of his. I know he does not mean to put me in harm’s way—”

The agent laughed. “Dukat! Tain has no business with that fool they call the prefect. Oh, Pasir. You have been alone here for too long. It’s a shame I don’t have time to explain it all to you. It’s rather a good story, actually.”

Pasir began to feel desperate, taking a step toward the man. “Have you come to take me home, then?”

The man smiled. “I’m afraid not, my friend.”

“Friend?” Pasir spat. “You are no friend of mine. If this isn’t an extraction…”

It was quite before Pasir knew what was happening that the other man had moved so near to him, so near that a Cardassian phaser—those used by the Order, set to disintegrate—could effectively do its job. He had time to register disbelief, but that was all.

The agent stepped away and holstered his weapon. Pity, to destroy such a miracle of medicine. He’d heard that the process was considered something of an art. He let himself out of the cottage and headed back toward his skimmer without another thought, making so little noise as he moved that he might as well have been floating.

13

Lenaris woke up early the next morning, his body protesting against the effects of the night spent sleeping on the ground. Even after all the years spent in the resistance, he had never gottten especially used to sleeping out in the open.

He rolled up his things and observed the sky in the not-quite dawn, the stars still visible in the pale sky. Terok Nor winked as if it were chiding him, and he looked back down at the ground, feeling the impact of all that had happened.

He had been right about the Valerian freighter, but he had been wrong about this. The Pullock V raid had been a disaster, and now the cell had broken apart. Lenaris didn’t know when he’d felt so thoroughly despondent; it had been bad after he’d left the Halpas cell, but this was different. This was worse.

The others were waking as well, but as he wandered the vicinity of the mostly empty field in front of him, he realized that Taryl was nowhere to be found. After circling the area in a panic and questioning the others, he ran back toward the village, calling her name the whole time.

The village was deserted. It had always been rough, but without any people in it—chattering, eating, working, or even sleeping—it looked positively eerie. “Taryl?” Lenaris called. “Are you here? Please, answer me!” He thought he saw a light on in her cottage, but maybe it was just wishful thinking. He headed for the little house, and drew back the door.

She was there, sitting at the corner worktable with a single light burning above her, her shoulders hunched. Lenaris thought she was crying, and took an uncertain step toward her. But when she turned, he saw with momentary shock that she was not crying at all—in fact, she was smiling.

“Holem!” she exclaimed, leaping to her feet. “I have to show you what I found!”

She gestured to the table, where a rudimentary com-link was set up on a tiny viewscreen. Taryl had been sifting through Cardassian comm traffic. Lenaris sat down and perused the small screen with the improvised keypad, using a clumsy translation program so that he could read the Cardassian characters. It was difficult to make out, but from what he could gather, the Cardassian comnet had run a story about Pullock V—but this was no ordinary Cardassian newsfeed, churning out propaganda about manufactured Cardassian victories. The casualties, the damage to the facility—it was all here, in plain language—at least as plain as could be interpreted by Taryl’s translation software.

“Why…would they do this?” he wondered.

“I don’t know!” Taryl said, delighted. “But I’ve already copied it and posted it on a buried channel of the Bajoran ’net where the Cardies can’t delete it! Do you see, Holem? We’ll be heroes!” She giggled, and then sniffed. Through her jubilance, she had still been crying intermittently, that much was plain by the pink blotches underneath her eyes.

“This is great!” Lenaris said. “If other Bajorans know that we staged an attack offworld—”

“A successful attack,” Taryl added.

“It could help to fuel the resistance all over the planet!”

Taryl laughed again, wiping new tears away.

Lenaris kept reading past the point that Taryl had highlighted, and then he came to a part that he knew she was not going to react to quite so triumphantly. “Taryl,” he said carefully. “Have you read this entire thing?”

She shook her head. “No, just the first part—it told me all I needed to know. I was looking for the article Harta was talking about, the one about Lac, and I found this.”

“There’s more to it,” Lenaris said. “I think…” He pointed to the screen. She leaned over him to read it.

A Bajoran man apprehended two Cardassian women in a drainage ditch outside the vineyards in Tilar province. The women, including this reporter, were safely recovered, but the Bajoran did not survive.