“Laren!”Bram grabbed her by the shoulder, his fingers digging painfully into her flesh. “I’ve had enough of your blasphemy, your disrespect!” He took a swipe at her, caught her earring in his hand, and flung it to the ground. “You aren’t fit to wear that,” he told her, snarling.

Keeve waved his hands. “She has to make her own peace with the Prophets,” he told Bram. “You can’t do it for her.”

Bram released her, and she rubbed her shoulder where he’d grabbed her, feeling angry, but mostly surprised. Bram had never put his hands on her like that before. She bent down to pick up her earring. The fleshy part of her ear burned where the ornament had been torn away, and she looked at the chained bits of metal in her hand. It was an old and silly tradition, but this was something of her father’s. She put the earring back in her pocket, not looking at anyone.

“We need to do this,” Darrah said, clearly uncomfortable.

Bram nodded. “Come on, Laren,” he said gruffly, as much an apology as Ro could ever expect to get.

It was a short trip in the high-powered ship Mace flew. Bram and Laren spent most of it getting acclimated to the cumbersome suits they would have to wear. They were old and smelled thickly of the dust of Valo II, having been in a storage locker somewhere at the planet’s shipyards. Finding one that could be easily adjusted to Laren’s small frame was a challenge. Laren had been impatient to get started, but once they were actually in orbit of the tiny, irregularly shaped planet, her confidence began to ebb, not for the job itself, but for the unsettling novelty of the transporter beam. To her, it was the worst part of the mission, and she was eager to get it over and done with.

Darrah explained the properties of the transporter and gave her a little communications device that could be tapped to hail him back on the ship so that he could transport her back to safety again, but once she was beneath the beam-shield, the transporter beam would not reach her, and she would have nothing but her own senses to rely on. Of course, this would normally be nothing new to Laren, but on an unfamiliar asteroid in a musty-smelling environmental suit that inhibited her freedom of movement, the rules seemed to have changed a bit.

Darrah had said he would do his best to transport them within walking distance of the facility, but when Laren found herself crouched in the middle of unfamiliar terrain, her visibility limited behind the mask of her environmental suit, she at first thought Mace must have made a terrible mistake. There was nothing anywhere in her line of sight, just rocks and misty blackness, but after a half-second of disoriented searching, she found Bram somewhere off to her side, and he gestured to something behind them.

Behind me.The facility was only a few paces away, in the opposite direction of where she had been facing. She followed Bram as he scouted around the perimeter of the glinting shield. The shield was dome-shaped, translucent in the misty atmosphere. The buildings beneath it appeared as sprawling, squat boxes. She could not see any feasible way to get inside, until Bram pointed out to her an innocuous passageway with a simple keypad device to admit travelers.

A voice crackled in Laren’s head and she started at the odd effect of the radio inside her environmental helmet; it was Darrah, back on the ship. “Laren? Bram?”

“We’re here,” Laren said, almost in unison with Bram.

“Good,”Darrah replied. “Do you see the facility?”

“Yes,” Laren said. “There’s just the one passageway, like you said.”

“Can you bypass it?”

“Yup,” Laren said without hesitation.

“Good. Now, remember. There are usually only two or three Cardassians in there at a time, according to our scans. They have minimum security detail, and only one soldier patrols while the others sleep. There is one soldier awake in there right now, according to the schedule we’ve logged. He should be in the back part of the building, where we think the center of operations must be. You will have to find a console to hack the system. If you can reconnect the security loop quickly enough, you can just slip out, we’ll take off, and they’ll never even know we were here.”

“You think you can handle it, Laren?”Bram was sounding much friendlier now than he had back on Valo II, probably out of guilt for being so mean, or maybe because he was about to let her go straight into a nest of grass vipers.

“Of course I can,” she said stoutly.

“Well, you’ve never lacked confidence,”Bram said, his voice hollow in her earpiece, and the figure in the suit next to her drew its phaser. “I’ll cover you. The minute anything goes wrong—”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she assured him, her own voice echoing oddly inside the curved plastic of her visor. “This is the easiest job I’ve ever seen. I could do this with my eyes closed.”

“Well, then…”

Laren knew about thirty Cardassian override codes by heart, but she didn’t want to take the chance that this system would shut down once two or more incorrect codes were entered consecutively. She’d do better to just hack her way straight inside, and that would also probably disable any security systems that alerted the inhabitants of the facility that anyone was here. Her hands clumsy in the imprecise gloves of her environmental suit, she used the edge of a spanner to pry open the security panel. With the same spanner, she separated a thick wire from the bundle that revealed itself behind the panel. From a pocket in her suit, she retrieved a pair of spring-loaded snips and clipped a few specific wires. The door opened obediently, and she stepped inside. As soon as she crossed the threshold, it closed behind her, and she headed down the short, glassy corridor, sealing her in from the strange terrain outside. Her breathing inside the helmet sounded noisy and labored.

As she approached a second door, she found another panel imprinted with a Cardassian insignia—the same sort of inverted-teardrop sigil she had seen on many pieces of Cardassian equipment. It mimicked the shape of some of their ships, a fan tapering down into a two-pronged blunt spade at the bottom. This one, however, was a bit different. The bottom looked not so much like a spade as a tail, the whole thing appearing as some kind of ugly, poisonous sea creature. Usually she had seen only the outline of this sigil, but this one was filled in with a pale green, drifting to purple at the top. It looked ominous, and her thoughts wandered to things supernatural—the Fire Caves, Pah-wraiths, and angry borhyas.She pushed that foolishness away and went about her business.

With the spanner, she punched in a universal encryption sequence at the keypad, and then punched in another, and another. Cardassian passcodes never had more than seven characters, at least none that she had seen. But this one—it was different. She began to feel the finest sliver of worry as she tried another sequence. What was different about this facility? She looked again at the colorful insignia near the door and began to wonder if she wasn’t dealing with something a little different from the Cardassian soldiers who tromped around Bajor like automatons.

It was then that she noticed it—faint through the sounds of her own echoed breathing in the spacesuit, but it was there—a discernible clicking noise in her earpiece, as though she were being timed. Shaken, she began to move faster. She had encountered this type of alarm before. If she failed to enter the correct code before the countdown concluded, the system would shut down. She didn’t know how much time she had, but she should probably assume that it wasn’t much.

After a few feverish moments, she thought she had it. She separated another wire and used her snips to clip a few strands. An arc of electricity spit menacingly before fizzling out, and she released a breath. The door slid noiselessly open, and she stepped inside.