Daul found the Cardassian to be very unlike any other he had encountered, his expression difficult to read. Of course, Daul couldn’t purport to have a very broad understanding of the Cardassian psyche in general, but at least most of them seemed to be motivated by the same things. Marritza seemed somewhat more…complicated.

As the two men traveled up the corridor, Daul was made very aware of the intense droning of the mining equipment outside: drills, ore-processing conveyors, smelters, and the rushing water from the great concentrator that delivered slurry to a tailings pond many kellipates away from the site.

But beneath the tremendous grinding, echoing din, there was another sound, one that Marritza seemed to be taking great pains to ignore. To Daul at first it sounded like the faint cries of a tyrfox, or perhaps a pack of faraway cadge lupus; but Daul immediately knew what he was hearing—the cries of the prisoners here, the moans of the dying workers, suffering as they were from Kalla-Nohra. Daul cleared his throat. “Doesn’t Darhe’el see to it that the workers who are ill are properly treated for their condition?”

Marritza gave a quick nod, almost frantic. “Oh yes,” he said. “Productivity is of the utmost importance here. Darhe’el is adamant about the treatment of all victims of the disease—Bajoran…and Cardassian…alike.” In the inflection of his voice, which sounded very much as though Marritza repeated a long-rehearsed falsehood, Daul thought he detected a single truth—that Marritza himself was infected with the disease. Without meaning to, he gave the other man a look of sympathy. Marritza looked away, and Daul decided to avoid further mention of the subject.

They reached the end of the passage and Marritza keyed open a door. Suddenly the narrow, neat corridor was enveloped in a roar of sound; the floor beneath their feet gave way to a trembling catwalk, which opened up over a yawning chasm. The wind whipped fiercely overhead, the narrow footbridge swinging gently, though it was protected from the relentless gale by the walls of the open-pit mine, which shot up at a kellipatefrom where they stood. This bridge had been constructed at what was once near the very bottom of the mine, but the hole had plunged far beneath this point in more recent years, and the spindly catwalk was suspended hundreds of linnipates above firm ground.

Daul glanced up, where the burning sun hung motionless in the cloudless sky, beating down heavily on the workers in the massive pit beneath them. Marritza handed him a headset, which would drown out the noise and allow them to talk to each other. Daul stepped gingerly onto the footbridge that spanned the mine.

The vast pit had been gradually but efficiently excavated over the course of many years, crisscrossed with scaffolds and enormous systems of conveyors to remove the chunks of rock and minerals from the ground. This had once been a massive hillside, likely covered over with trees and foliage and wildlife; now it was a bare, steaming crater, surrounded by many tessipates of complete desolation; it was the closest thing Daul could imagine to the myths about the Fire Caves. Before Terok Nor had been constructed, Gallitep was the center of ore processing in the B’hava’el system. Daul thought that Bajorans could never have conceived of a thing so unsightly and terrible as this place.

The steep, spiraling gravel roads that were cut into the sides of the pit were dotted here and there with workers, some of them disappearing into tunnels that had been dug randomly all around the perimeter of the mine. Though Daul could not see clearly most of the workers from where he stood, those nearest to him staggered on thin, bandy legs, their bare chests and backs covered in open sores and blistering sunburns. They wielded traditional shovels and spades and truncheons, hacking away at the exposed rock, slowly but persistently widening and deepening the abyss beneath them to get at the valuable minerals embedded in the ground. Also visible were a number of Cardassian guards, swaggering between the hapless miners and occasionally stopping to shout criticisms or reprimands. Most of the guards did not venture far into the pit, apparently preferring to remain close to their respective stations, well-built corridors like the one from which Daul and Marritza had just come.

Daul followed Marritza a quarter of the way across the diameter of the pit, until he came to a little building which abutted the swaying catwalk. Here was the center of the system, the brain of this entire operation—the primary server. The artificial intelligence program, which drove the core mining drills, was located here; those drills sought out the richest veins and pointed the scavenging miners in that direction, to pick out and process the precious metals by hand.

Daul began the reprogramming sequence that would eventually shut down the entire system. It was a complicated process, but the clerk waited patiently as he tapped in code. Beneath them, workers groaned and labored, guards shouted, and the machinery ground relentlessly on. As Daul neared the end of the first-stage closure, he found himself compelled to ask his unusual escort a question.

“What will happen to all of them when this camp is closed?” Daul finally asked, looking down into the enormous cavern below him.

Marritza did not immediately answer. “Darhe’el will take care of them,” he said in a low voice.

Daul was not sure if he should inquire further, though he did not know what the other man meant. “Oh—I see,” he stammered, and went back to his task.

“Do you?” Marritza asked him. He gestured out to the open space that surrounded them. “For Gul Darhe’el—for Cardassia—these workers are valued only for their productivity. You yourself, Doctor Daul, are valued only for your particular expertise here. Is that how it was on your world, in your culture, before we came here?”

Daul considered. Bajor valued its people as more than what they were capable of producing—they were valued as individuals, as relatives, as friends—as Bajorans. Daul slowly shook his head.

“When the camp shuts down,” Marritza went on, not looking at Daul, “these workers will lose their value. That value has already begun to decline, because of their illness. Do you understand?”

Daul thought perhaps he understood what Marritza was trying to tell him, but he didn’t understand the logic—nor did he understand why the Cardassian was telling him, either. “Yes,” he croaked, and finished his work.

“Good,” Marritza said. “Are you finished?”

“For now,” Daul replied. “I’ll have to come back to finish the job.”

Marritza attempted to smile as he guided Daul back toward the footbridge outside the little building, and again Daul thought he detected bitterness. “I’m sure Gul Darhe’el will be very pleased with your work.” He removed his headset as he ushered Daul back inside the cool, stainless chrome corridor, the echoing voices of crying men and women somehow louder now, and Daul was transported quickly and efficiently back to the institute.

Ro was to meet with Bis near the Lunar V base on Jeraddo, a place where another cell had begun stashing ships years ago. Since that time, other cells had begun bringing their own ships here, or using the base as an offworld meeting point to coordinate large-scale attacks that required the cooperation of more than one group.

In addition to her anxious curiosity about why Bis wanted to see her, she could not deny that she was nervous to see him again. In the years since she had been to Valo II, she had never met another boy who had turned her head the way he had, and she had built up a bit of mythology about him in that time. She wasn’t sure whether he would be able to live up to it.

Ro docked her little raider, the Lahnest,near where she knew the underground base was. What had once been jungle had been partially cleared away to create a suitable landing field, but much of the canopy and brush had to be left behind so as to obscure the Bajoran presence here. In fact, the landing area was smaller than even the poorest farmer’s field, and it apparently hadn’t been used in a few weeks; the fast-growing vegetation of this moon was already starting to fill in again.