“In here!” Tokiah yelled. He and two others had found the compound’s armory, in a room with flickering lights—a stray phaser shot seemed to have hit the environmental controls, for the lights were winking out all over, and the tinny humming of the building’s heat monitoring system had gone silent. Entering the room, Ro immediately saw the force field that protected a long wall of weapons—stacked three and four deep, the aisle as long as three tall men lying end-to-end. There were more weapons than they could carry in one trip, but they couldn’t risk coming back for more. Laren quickly found a console, and tapped her way into the mainframe, searching for the correct Cardassian words and phrases among the jumble of foreign text.

“Hurry!” Kanore said.

“When you learn to do this, you can hurry,” Ro shot back.

She finally found the right command, and the translucent force field skittered out. Kanore took a step forward before Ro shouted at him to stop. “There may be a secondary security measure,” she reminded him, and he obediently froze in place. Ro entered another command, and the lights went out completely, Sadakita and Faon quickly switching on their palmlights to compensate for the close darkness.

“Everyone grab four weapons,” Tokiah instructed, as the rest of the cell found their way to the armory. From the farthest end of the line of weapons, Ro promptly selected six rifles and two pistols, to which Kanore wasted no time in rebuking her.

“You can’t carry all that, it will slow you down!”

“Maybe it would slow you down,” Ro countered.

“Tokiah said—”

Ro bumped his shoulder as she walked past him, heavily weighted down with the massive weapons slung over both shoulders.

“Laren,” Tokiah said, and Ro shot him a look. Just because he was older, because he’d been close to Bram, he thought he could get away with using her given name, as though they were friends. They weren’t friends. None of these people were her friends, and the look she gave Tokiah said as much. He didn’t bother to finish his thought as she left the compound, and she set off into the forest ahead of the others.

It was not long before she was beginning to think that maybe Kanore had been right. To keep the cumbersome weapons from clanking together, she had to carry them close to her body, across the front of her chest, which was putting a tremendous burden on her neck and shoulders. The obvious solution occurred to her, and she set down her weapons some distance into the forest. With another thought, she turned back for more.

“Where are you going?” Sadakita asked her as she passed, heading back toward camp.

“I cached my weapons in the brush back there,” Ro explained. “I’m going back for more.”

“That’s a bad idea, Ro,” the older woman admonished her. “I don’t have to tell you the facility will be swarming with spoonheads in a matter of minutes. We need to get as deep into the forest as we can.”

“What’s going on?” Tokiah demanded, coming up with the rest of the cell.

Sadakita looked to Ro, apparently unwilling to directly implicate her. “I’m getting more weapons,” Ro said stubbornly.

“Don’t be stupid, Laren,” Tokiah said sternly. “Let’s get going. There’s no time to lose.”

“I’m going back,” Ro said firmly, and continued in the same direction she was headed.

Kanore started to call after her, but she could hear Tokiah telling him to let her go. She drew her phaser—the one she’d taken from the sentry—and jogged back to the facility. How sorry they’d all be when they saw how many weapons she’d lifted from the armory! It would be satisfying to hear Kanore say he’d been wrong.

She was still a considerable distance from the building when she realized that, in fact, the others hadn’t been wrong. She could hear the sound of flyers coming in over the tops of the trees, shining lights down into the forest. She clung to the trunk of a blackwood tree for a moment, looking up at the sky until she was satisfied that the patrol’s spotlights weren’t really very effective at penetrating the tree cover. She felt foolish, realizing that if she wasn’t careful, she could lead the Cardassians straight back to her cell’s encampment. Defeated, she turned back around and picked her way through the dark forest, eventually stopping to find the place where she’d left the pinched rifles.

Convinced she was safely out of range of where the flyers were searching, she slung all six of the rifles back up across her chest and stuffed the pistols into her waist satchel. She sourly noted to herself that if she’d been smart, she would have just distributed a few of them among the others in her cell, when they were still here to assist her. She could have just admitted she was wrong and asked for help. She sighed as she clanked along laboriously, wondering exactly what it was about her that made her so stubborn.

It was daylight by the time she made it back to camp, and Ro was tired, but there was no time for sleep. After a fairly unpleasant morning during which her actions were soundly denounced by nearly every member of her cell, she went to eat her breakfast by herself on a severed tree stump away from the others, grumbling to herself about the poor quality of food this autumn. The cell had been forced to make do with a soup made from a lichen that grew on the bark of the older nyawoods, and though it prevented starvation, it did little to satisfy the belly—or the palate. Ro knew that the food situation would only get worse this winter. Though Jo’kala’s winters were notoriously mild, this had been a lean year around the entire planet. The Cardassians’ constant overfarming—not to mention the industrial pollutants from their mining operations toxifying once-fertile soil—were beginning to have noticeable consequences in the quality and quantity of the already minimal harvest.

Tokiah emerged from a shelter made from a piece of canvas stretched around a circle of poles and topped with a conical roof of brush. It was semipermanent, like most of the buildings that dotted the camp—easy to take down, carry, and reconstruct anywhere else in the forest, if push came to shove. It always did, eventually.

“Ro,” he said, and she did not look up or answer him, expecting to be scolded again.

“Hey! Ro, I’m talking to you!”

“I hear you,” she said in a low voice.

“There’s a subspace transmission on the comm!”

Ro finally looked at him. “And?” she said, annoyed. She had no business with the comm system. That wasn’t her place in the cell—she bypassed security loops and killed spoonheads. The comm was Tokiah’s responsibility.

“They’re making reference to you. Someone is looking for you—someone on Valo II.”

Ro hesitated only a second before she leapt to her feet and scrambled past Tokiah into the common building.

“It’s Ro Laren!” she said breathlessly. “Who am I speaking to?”

The transmission was heavy with interference, and she could barely make it out. Between clicks and squawks she was sure she discerned the words Jeraddo, meeting,and Bis.

“Akhere Bis! Is it you? Is that who I’m speaking to?”

“…ear me?…aren…This is…khere Bis. I’m…ping…t…Jeraddo.”

After a few more back-and-forth relays with Ro shouting and the comm spitting back more broken transmissions, Ro felt some measure of certainty that Bis was requesting that she meet him on Jeraddo, Bajor’s fifth moon, in two days. She couldn’t get more than that out of him, for the comm started to fail in earnest before he could get further, but her mind was made up before his last crackling word. Anything to get her out of here for a while was reason enough to agree to the trip.

“Tokiah,” she announced to the cell leader, waiting outside the common building, “I’m taking a raider to Jeraddo in two days.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Tokiah informed her. “Those ships belong to the cell, Laren. If you want to take a shuttle, it had better be part of an approved mission—for the cell.”