There was a moment of silence before Daul softly spoke again. “Are you curious to know what I saw there? Why he wanted me to go?”

Mora cleared his throat again. “Not really,” he said.

“No, I’m sure it’s easier for you not to think about it, as it would be for me, if I wasn’t forced to. It seems that our benevolent Cardassian benefactors have elected to shut down the mining camp. They’ve finally managed to strip it clean of anything they deem useful. That means the workers there will have to be properly disposed of, since so many of them are suffering from Kalla-Nohra syndrome and aren’t worth the effort of transporting elsewhere. As for the others, those who are still healthy—well, my understanding is that it would be inefficient to try and weed out who is sick and who isn’t, so…” Daul shrugged. “I’m to disable the artificial intelligence program before the…genocide begins in earnest.”

Mora felt sick. “I—I’m sorry, Mirosha. It’s not pleasant, I know, but…it’s what we must do, to stay alive.”

“That’s right,” Daul said. “And I’ve heard you’re to be paired up with Doctor Reyar. I wonder if you know what she’s working on. It’s an anti-aircraft system, to shoot down Bajoran raiders as they attempt to leave the atmosphere. I’m told it’s a brilliant concept.”

“Is that right?” Mora kept inflection from his voice.

“Doesn’t this bother you, Mora? Doesn’t your conscience trouble you? For you have to know that we are collaborators here. Nothing less than traitors to our own people.”

Mora shook his head. “I don’t know if I see it that way,” he said, his voice still low and careful. “We’re following orders, Mirosha. If we tried to do anything differently, we’d be killed, and replaced by someone else.”

Daul stared at him a long moment before answering. “That’s one way to look at it,” he said finally.

Mora continued on with his equipment as Daul left the room, and wondered if it was true, about the anti-aircraft system. Well,he reasoned, everyone knows the rebels are all as good as dead. It’s inevitable that they will eventually be killed, or caught and executed. Perhaps I’d be doing them a kindness, helping to speed up the process of putting a stop to the rebellion. They’re fools, doing what they do, and for what?

“For what?” he repeated out loud. For freedom?It seemed preposterous. The Bajorans would never be free, not with the hold the Cardassians had on this world. Compliance was the best alternative. At least it was a better alternative than death.

Valo II looked exactly as Ro had remembered it, only somehow even more depressing. Clearly there had been a bit of a population explosion since she had seen it last, for the clusters of shanty structures and tents near the landing field had trickled back farther into the scrubby brush, and the shabby town where Bis’s father lived was even more crowded than she remembered it. There were people everywhere, and they all looked unhealthy. Rheumy eyes; hacking, persistent coughs; open sores; drawn, emaciated faces. People were walking through the worn corridors between the tightly packed houses, carrying baskets of soiled rags, dried alien-looking fruits, or headless porlifowl. Lean and rawboned women walked surrounded by their dirty children. Old men sat on the ground in scattered hopeless groups, talking reservedly and smoking hiunaleaf—a cheap, unhealthy crop that helped to stave off hunger but shortened the life span significantly with its resulting ailments.

In fact, Ro thought, everyone here was slowly dying in one way or another: respiratory afflictions, starvation, communicable disease, or exposure. It sickened Ro to acknowledge to herself that at least the Bajorans back on their homeworld had the Cardassians to feed them—in exchange for slavery. She wondered if, despite its terrible appearance, Valo II might be preferable to Bajor for that reason.

Bis spoke to her as they walked. “In three days,” he told her, “the Ferengi captain—DaiMon Gart, he’s called—will be docking at the moon of a gas giant not far from this system. That will be his last stop before Terok Nor, and that’s where you’ll take the device to his ship.”

“That simple, is it?” Ro replied, trying not to stare at a woman with an especially prominent neck goiter.

“For you it will be,” Bis said confidently.

“But what if I can’t do it?” Ro said softly. “I don’t know the first thing about Ferengi security systems.”

“We can have a look at the freighter,” Bis said. “That should give you some ideas, shouldn’t it?”

Ro sighed. “It might,” she said, but she still felt doubtful.

“Look, if all else fails, you can just bribe him to get on the ship.”

“Why would he agree to that?”

“The same reason he agreed to take on such an incredibly dangerous cargo in the first place.”

“What am I supposed to bribe him with?”

Bis frowned. “That’s one part of the plan that might not work quite so well,” he confessed. “You see, we have a stolen Cardassian padd, and we might be able to convince him that he can access Cardassian passcodes with the device…but we’re not sure if he’d believe it—”

“I thought you had this all figured out.”

“Well,” Bis said, “there is one other solution.”

“What’s that?” Ro said sourly.

“Seduce him.”

Ro stared at him in disbelief before she broke out in rueful laughter.

“What’s so funny about that?” Bis protested. They had come to his father’s house, and Ro followed him inside.

“Right. Me, seduce an alien. Me, seduce…anyone,” she snorted.

The house was dark, and Bis lit a candle on the mantelpiece of a crumbling fireplace. It was likely this house had been built here long before the Cardassians came to Bajor, when the world was still considered an exciting new frontier land, a promising place to settle. Ro looked around the room and saw how those auspicious hopes had eroded. The room, with stone walls and a cracked and deteriorating wood floor, was blackened with the smoke from cooking fires and smelled strongly of ash and dirt. There was almost no furniture, aside from three sleeping pallets that were arranged around the fireplace.

“This is where you sleep?” She gestured to the pallets.

“No,” he said. “My cousin’s children sleep there. He had no room for them in his own house—he lives with his sister-in-law. His wife is dead, and we took in the children when his sister-in-law’s house got too crowded.” Bis took the candle and gestured to a corridor that led them to the back of the square house, and Ro followed him before he stopped.

“Why would you say that?” he asked softly.

“Say what?”

“About you…seducing anyone?” He looked embarrassed.

“Because it’s absurd,” she told him sharply.

“Haven’t you ever—” He stopped, and she was forced to look away. She considered what he was asking before she replied.

“No,” she finally said. “I haven’t.”

The candle flickering between them, Ro was aware of the sudden awkwardness there, too, standing in the corridor between the tiny rooms of this desolate house.

Bis stepped into one of the small rooms, revealing a bare pallet, a heap of worn clothing. He set the candle on a small, rough chest, the light casting long shadows across their faces, and turned to face her. He put his arms around her then, the feeling strange and terrifying and electric. As she had been on Jeraddo, she was clumsy in his embrace, not sure how to respond. But her body knew, and after a long, warm moment, she felt herself soften to his touch. Nobody had ever approached her this way, and as he drew back to kiss her, his face moving toward hers, she realized, for the first time, how much she had wished that someone would.

Kira pulled a knot of something unpleasant out of her mouth. A bone, perhaps? She hoped it was a bone, for something about the shape of it suggested a tiny little beak. She examined it, decided it was just a bone splinter, and laid it down on the long wooden table where the members of the cell took their meals together. “Ugh,” she exclaimed. “Who made this food? Furel?”