Dukat felt his face darken in resentment as he remembered the sob caught in her throat. “My husband,”she’d said. After all the years he’d spent with her, everything he’d done to make her happy…and at the back of her mind, always it was him.

Dukat looked up at Basso, who was waiting to be told what to do next, for like all Bajorans, he scarcely had a mind of his own. “I will see what I can do to visit her,” Dukat said.

“It is understandable if you can’t make it down to see her,” Basso said. “You are a busy man, an important man. You can’t be expected to keep constant vigil by her bedside while she wastes away—”

“That’s enough,” Dukat snapped. “You’ve done your job, now get out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” Basso said obediently, and left the office.

Dukat sat down heavily in his chair. He wanted to unburden himself from thoughts of Meru, but it was proving difficult.

Difficult decisions have to be made every day,he reminded himself. Being prefect of Bajor was not an easy job; it required great strength of character. It required a man who did not allow his personal feelings to distract him from those things that must be done, discomfiting as they might sometimes be.

Lenaris’s raider entered Bajor’s atmosphere like a dart. He clung to the yoke, the thrusters propelling him at dizzying half-impulse speed, too high a speed for even the best Cardassian pilots to keep their ships underneath the atmosphere without losing control. The little raider tore through the air, the proximity sensors clicking madly as he came closer to the target, and he reduced his speed, keeping his attention divided between his ship’s course and the transponder signals that told him whether the rest of his team was still with him. They all were, though the Legans were predictably straggling a bit, but not so much as to compromise their formation. Lenaris prepared to descend.

The blood rushed to his face as his ship looped and fell, a straight plummeting nosedive toward the surface of the planet, the hills and glens of Musilla province rushing at him. There was a Cardassian naval base directly below, a “secret” installation that the Ornathias had learned of through contact with another cell operating in this region.

Lenaris kept his direction steady, correcting for sideslip and watching his altimeter fervently. He dropped closer and closer to the surface, trying to remind himself not to glance away from his instrument panel for even a second. The temptation to do so was nearly irresistible, as he had no guarantee that the base was really down there, aside from the testimony of another Bajoran he’d never actually met in person. But if the resistance was to work on a global scale, it was imperative that he trust his faceless contacts. The base was below him. It had to be.

He got his confirmation in the form of an automated missile, showing up first as a hot blip on his transponder and then streaking across his viewscreen. He expertly maneuvered around it, though he felt panic overtake him for an instant when he saw his brother’s craft yawing dangerously on his proximity sensors. Jau corrected and the missile went straight for the Legans, who were flying too close together, as usual.

“Come on…” Lenaris held his breath. Duravit managed to pull up in time to avoid it, but the blinking light that represented Fin’s ship did not come back on again.

No!He didn’t even have time to cry out, another missile was coming. This time, Lenaris took it out with his phaser banks before it came close enough to be in dodging range.

The formation was broken now, with only Nerissa still pulling straight down in a determined line. “Good girl,” Lenaris muttered, and hoped she’d have the wherewithal to take out any more missiles by herself.

He set his ship back into a nosedive, and another missile came after Sten’s ship, which had veered far off to the side, swooping back almost into its original course. Sten managed to steer the missile away from the others, and Jau took it out before it got too close.

Nerissa dropped her explosives pack and a cloud of fiery orange debris came billowing up from the base below them, her raider riding the wake of it. Lenaris pulled up to avoid the blast front, trying to tap in a code to the other ships— proceed with formation.But only Sten seemed to have gotten the transmission, for the others were still flying in erratic confusion.

Lenaris decided he could pay them no mind, and continued on with the task at hand, plummeting toward the surface and ejecting the load of explosives just a few kellipates above the military ships that he could now see, lined up in neat rows. He pulled his flight yoke abruptly to his chest and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach as the force of the movement pinned him to his seat. The blast erupted behind him, and his ship twisted violently in the sky before he could straighten it out again. Another blast followed, and he knew that one of the others had dropped his load as well. Three out of six wasn’t bad, though he hoped at least one more could manage to let loose its ordnance

He set his course back for Jeraddo, aiming at a sharp, upward angle, getting plenty of distance between his ship and the base before checking his transponder to see who was still with him. Three shuttles limped behind him, the fourth having straggled somewhere out of atmospheric range. Legan Duravit, Ornathia Nerissa, and Ornathia Sten. Jau’s signal was gone.

Numb, Lenaris started to turn back, but his transponder indicated another ship in the vicinity—a skimmer. In fact, two skimmers. No, he checked again, and now there were four, and they were headed straight for him. He increased his speed to sub-impulse and straightened out his trajectory. He would not be leaving the atmosphere just yet, not until after he’d worn these spoonheads out. He checked his transponder one more time for Jau, but his brother’s raider was still nowhere within range, and Holem didn’t have time to consider it.

“Follow the leader,” Lenaris breathed, and dove suddenly back down toward the trees.

17

Laren walked at a rapid pace, her legs working to keep up with the longer strides of the men. Keeve was escorting Darrah Mace to his ship, and Bram was close behind. Darrah was giving out the particulars as they walked.

“You’re going to need environmental suits,” Darrah said.

“Suits!” Bram said, looking flustered. “I thought this was a simple job!”

Laren was thinking much the same thing.

Mace nodded. “It is simple,” he said tersely. “Once we get her into the facility, it’ll be a simple in-and-out. But Valo VI has no breathable atmosphere—”

“Valo VI?” Bram interrupted. “I always thought there were only five planets in this system.”

“Valo VI is barely a planet,” Mace replied. “It’s somewhere between a dwarf planet and an asteroid.”

“The facility is on an asteroid?” Bram looked flabbergasted.

“It will be fine,” Laren said quickly, looking to Mace for confirmation.

Darrah nodded. “The facility is underneath a beam-shield. You can’t be transported directly inside. That’s why you’ll need the suits.”

“What are the Cardassians doing there?” Laren inquired.

“Well, we don’t know, of course,” Darrah replied. “But we’re hoping to catch them at something that will bring in the Federation.”

“Why don’t you just kill them?” Laren said. “Who cares what they’re doing?”

“Laren!” Bram said sharply.

“It’s all right,” Keeve said to Bram. He addressed Laren, his tone shifting toward condescension. “I understand why you might feel that way. But you have to remember that everything is interconnected. It’s like Torasia’s sixteenth prophecy: ‘You can cut down the tree, but the roots still hold fast to the rain.’”

Laren made a face. “What does that have to do with anything?” she said. “Those prophecies are all a lot of gibberish.”