“I…apologize,” he stammered, and turned back to his work, slowly pecking at his keypad. He knew Cardassian characters well enough now, but his fluency would always be stilted. It might have been different if he had learned the language as a child instead of as an adult—pointless to even think of it; he suffered enough for not being Cardassian. And there was the matter of the Cardassians’ eidetic memory, though Mora had long since learned that it was less developed in some than in others—and Reyar fell into the category of those who struggled. He felt reasonably certain that her intelligence and ability at rote memorization were somewhat on a par with his own, but that did not still his fear of her. Of all of them.

Mora helped her develop the recognition software that would process telemetry from each of the scanning stations that had been built on Bajor’s surface. Erected by labor crews of Bajorans that had been recruited from the hill territories of each continent, the towers would transmit constant scans of Bajoran airspace, searching for non-Cardassian flyers. If the system detected an unauthorized craft, particle beam weapons would lock onto the transgressor and blow it out of the sky. The system would go online at the end of this week, but Mora had an idea to get word to the resistance before then. It was a long shot, and it was dangerous, but Mora felt that he had to take the chance. His cousin, a farmer in the village of Ikreimi, had always claimed to know someone who was affiliated with the freedom fighters. If Mora could send word to his parents, asking to have his cousin come and visit him at the institute, he might be able to pass on some valuable information before it was too late…

“Stand up, Mora,” Reyar instructed him. Puzzled, he did as he was told. She took out a small scanning device and began to wave it up and down the length of his body.

He cleared his throat. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

She smiled to herself, clearly pleased. “I suppose you thought I brought you up here for your expertise, hm?”

He cleared his throat again. “I’m your…lab partner, Doctor Reyar. You needed an assistant…”

“I needed a cooperative Bajoran, to enter your biospecs into the new system’s recognition software.”

Mora was puzzled. “But it’s an anti-aircraft system. Why—?”

“There’s another aspect to it that perhaps you weren’t aware of, Doctor Mora.” He could tell by the delightedly smug expression on her face that she was about to tell him what it was, though she’d obviously taken some pains to conceal it from him. How like her, to seek pleasure by making him uncomfortable.

“I recently decided to add another function to the sensor sweeps,” she went on. “As you know, it took me a long time to fine-tune the targeting sensors so that we will avoid accidents involving Cardassian aircraft, to compensate for the effects of Bajor’s highly variable atmosphere…”

“A great many tests,” Mora said.

“Yes, Mora, more tests than I had anticipated. How odd, that every time I thought I had adjusted it perfectly, it seemed even more misaligned than it had been before.” She gave him a hard look.

Mora felt sick. He shouldn’t have been so obvious in sabotaging her calibrations, though he’d done his best to make each change appropriately subtle. Of course, Reyar had her suspicions, but Mora knew that Yopal wouldn’t listen to a word of it—the director of the institute had never cared for Reyar. “Oh?” he finally croaked.

“Yes, well, never mind that. I confess, part of what took me so long to perfect this system was my own distraction. Halfway toward completion I had the idea to combine this project with another that I envisioned, and I shifted much of my focus to that. Yopal barely knows anything of it—I cleared it with the prefect, of course, no thanks to our esteemed director.” She smiled now, her self-satisfaction back in full force.

“Are you going to tell me about it?” he said, as politely as he knew how.

“It will target moving objects on the surface,” Reyar said, obviously pleased with herself.

“Moving objects? Like…”

“That’s right. Not just aircraft leaving the atmosphere, but smaller objects. An object as small as a person. In fact, it’s designed to locate people who attempt to cross proscribed boundaries. Bajoran people.” She smiled. “That’s part of why we’ve come to the station, Mora, and why I abandoned the idea of deploying a satellite network in favor of a ground-based detection grid. You see, those signal towers will alert officials here on Terok Nor any time an aircraft has been shot down. But it will also alert personnel here when unauthorized Bajoran travelers have been detected in the regions that are known to be frequented by terrorists. That way, Dukat can deploy troops to investigate a particular region, instead of just having them wander aimlessly around in the hills and forests as they’ve been doing all this time, using less reliable sweeps from their aircraft—or even handheld tricorders. This system is simple, really. So simple, I don’t know why anyone hadn’t thought of it before.”

Mora caught his breath. “Not everyone can be as brilliant as you are, Doctor Reyar.” He could not look at her in the eye, knowing that she was waiting for his reaction, and in truth, he was finding it difficult to conceal his horror. He had not counted on something like this…

“So,” he said carefully, “it will work on the same principles as a tricorder?”

Reyar frowned. “No,” she said. “The targets are too broad. In the future, I plan to remedy the imprecision of this system, but for now, these physical sweeps should be more than sufficient to help pinpoint the locations of terrorists.”

“Terrorists,” Mora said. “But if innocent civilians were to trip the system…”

Reyar’s frown went deeper. “If a civilian remains within the boundaries designated for Bajorans, he has nothing to worry about. It is designed to target terrorists. If a Bajoran is carrying proper identification and a permit when he is picked up, he will, of course, be set free.”

“But,” Mora said, “people make mistakes. Children sometimes run off into the forests—”

“The system will not target children,” Reyar said firmly. “I saw to that. You are the template, Mora, an adult male. We are going after the resistance, Doctor, not children. Weare not terrorists.”

She went on, explaining that Cardassian-sanctioned Bajoran ships would continue to function unmolested, and Mora bit his lip, bursting with questions. The system would be unaffected by children, but at what age did Reyar assume that Bajorans suddenly became dangerous? Was it based on physical sweeps, on DNA, or on some other property? And might the resistance simply begin to rely on children to run their errands for them? That wasn’t unheard of, though Mora actually knew very little about the resistance. He had never met anyone in the resistance as far as he knew, only heard rumors about them. His heart sank further in his chest as he realized that the plan he had worked on for so long would not be feasible with such a sensor system in place. He doubted very much that the Cardassians would allow his cousin to obtain a travel permit—possibly his parents wouldn’t be eligible, either. There was nothing he could do while sequestered at the institute, which, while not entirely remote, was a small distance away from the villages. As a probable target for terrorist activity, it would likely be placed beyond the perimeters of Reyar’s no-travel zones.

He kept his expression flat, desperately considering alternative possibilities as he turned back to his work. He felt the hot, eager flicker of hope slipping away from him. He put his head down and tapped at his padd, trying to formulate some kind of a plan, immediately talking himself out of anything he could think of. He would have to be clever if he meant to do something, and he wasn’t sure if it was the sort of cleverness he could deliver. These systems were going to go online, and there was nothing he could do to warn the resistance about it. He was no spy, no rebel. He was just an invisible man in a lab coat, without much of a soul left.