“Li!” called Mart, squatting at the edge of a nearby bluff. The two were concluding the day’s surveillance, even though the Cardassians had not been sighted in this valley for decades. Mart’s panicked expression as he hurried to join Li suggested that the time had come. “There’re flyers coming in this way!”

Li instinctively hunkered down with his back to the steep hillside behind him, though it did him no real good. What did they want over here? As far as they knew, this was deserted outback. His cell usually camped here in the summertime, moving toward the cities in the winter, when resistance activity went up.

“Looking for us, maybe,” Mart said. His voice was steady, but his eyes, glassy and green, reflected deep fear—and changed to beseeching as he turned to look at Li. He really believed that Li could keep him safe, that Li Nalas was the folk hero everyone made him out to be.

Li figured he’d do his best, though that probably wouldn’t be worth much. “Come on, Mart, we’ve got to take cover. It looks like we’ll be spending the night here. If we can get to the wooded area above the bluff before the sun goes down, we’ll be okay.” The flyers were coming from the direction just beyond their camp. Li turned just before he noted that the thrum of the Cardassian engines had changed; the ships were landing.

“What are they doing?”

“Probably putting down ground troops,” Li said. This was unusual. The Cardassians usually sent their patrol ships out to the same clearings over and over, where they disgorged confused soldiers with clumsy handheld scanners. This was different. Those flyers seemed to know exactly where they were going, and where they were going was uncomfortably close to home camp. Li reached for his comm, to send a clipped warning back to the others, but the ships were so close to the encampment, there was no way they didn’t already know. Li squinted at the faraway Cardassian craft, no larger than children’s toys at this distance, the burn from their engines causing a blurry haze all around their thrusters. They hadn’t landed at all, Li could see now. They were hovering.

There was a sudden, brilliant gust of firepower, like a light show from the gratitude festival, eerily silent before the sound waves had a chance to travel across the valley. Mart gasped and Li cried out, the sounds lost to the quick, drumlike bursts that followed the explosive visual display. The flyers shot straight up into the air, having completed their mission, black plumes of smoke rising in their wake.

Mart looked ill. “That was…”

“That was our camp,” Li confirmed, his voice strained in its softness. “But…maybe they weren’t all there. Some of them were probably patrolling…”

“We’re the only ones still out on patrol, you said so yourself half an hour ago!” Mart cried. “They were all there, and you know it!”

Li silenced him with an upheld hand, for he could hear more aircraft activity overhead.

“Come on!” Li snapped, all too aware that there was nowhere to run. The bluff stretched on narrowly for kellipateafter kellipatebefore there was a suitable place to climb down, and after that it was only the openness of the valley, a place they had come to think of as safe through the years.

We all should have known better. Mirel, Orthew, Baj, Tel…They all would have been at camp, making dinner, making plans. His friends.

The flyer was practically over their heads already. Li pulled Mart along into the low-growing shrubbery that clambered up and down the sides of the steep bluff, but the flyer’s sensors had apparently picked them up, and Li wrapped his arms tightly around himself, anticipating the fiery blow, expecting to see the Prophets at any moment.

To his surprise, the sudden, noiseless blast actually felt quite cool.

When he regained control of his senses, he found himself in a dark, cramped chamber, surrounded by painfully bright blinking lights, yellow and turquoise. Mart heaved raggedly at his side, looking as bewildered as Li felt. Li tried to shake off the muddled feeling that had come with the sudden transport, but he was lucid enough to know that they were inside the Cardassian ship. He and Mart were behind some kind of translucent curtain, and Li scrambled to his feet, glimpsing a uniformed soldier just outside the shimmering field that separated them. “Hey!” he shouted, doing his best to pound against the nebulous surface of the containment wall, his fists springing back oddly from the impact.

The soldier turned, impassive.

“Where are you taking us?” Li demanded fiercely.

“Quiet!” The Cardassian snarled. “Save that energy for the labor camps!”

Li turned to regard Mart, whose face was a mask of disbelief and fear. Li looked away from him before he registered the disappointment in the youth’s expression. Of course, the legend of Li Nalas was a fraud—Gul Zarale’s death had been an accident—but despite his protests, he’d been assigned the role of hero. Mart would have come to see it for what it was, eventually. Everyone had to grow up, sometime. It was just too bad it had to be like this.

Kalisi Reyar avoided the gaze of her lab partner. She knew that he was secretly taking pleasure from the news she had just received: she was to leave the Bajoran Institute of Science immediately, reassigned to a medical facility on the other side of the planet. She had argued with Yopal, the institute’s director, though it made her feel frustrated and embarrassed for the Bajoran to overhear her protests. Despite the great success of the new detection grid, Kalisi was unable to glean any enjoyment from it. Her name had been barely a footnote in the comnet reports, all the glory going to the director of the institute, a woman who barely had anything to do with it.

Kalisi knew that Yopal was silently scornful of her inability to re-create the corrupted research from memory. The director had also mentioned to Kalisi, more than once, that it had been negligent and foolish not to keep more backups that were separate from the institute computer system. Reyar had kept only a single isolinear rod, stolen during the sabotage. It was a tack Kalisi had employed to safeguard her work from theft by her rivals. It had not yet occurred to her, being new to Bajor at the time, that terrorists might be bold enough to attempt to destroy her work. Add to it the ongoing humiliation Kalisi had suffered at taking such an unprecedented amount of time to reconstruct her data—her memory had never been as well-developed as her colleagues’, and that truth was readily apparent to her coworkers, though Kalisi had always taken pains in the past to conceal her handicap. Yopal didn’t want a researcher impaired with such a weakness to work on her staff, and now that Kalisi had finished her assignment for Dukat, the director was all too eager to dump her off somewhere else.

In a way, she should have been glad. She had often felt cursed, having to work alongside a Bajoran—a male scientist, no less—and she had labored to make his existence as unhappy as possible without resorting to overt torture. If Mora Pol was an accurate representation of his species, it was a wonder they’d ever crawled out of their caves. Yopal seemed to like him, though for what reason, Kalisi couldn’t imagine. Perhaps as a reminder of what they strove toward. At least at the medical facility she would be working exclusively with Cardassians. The hospital was presided over by the illustrious Doctor Crell Moset, a man whose name had begun to carry weight back home on Cardassia Prime, from what little Kalisi had gathered on him. But still, it was an indignity to be sent away to a hospital when her particular line of expertise was better suited to the facility here.

While Kalisi gathered up her things in the lab, Mora was pretending to fool around with the shape-shifter in the tank while it “regenerated.” He poked at it with some kind of electrical probe, but Kalisi knew he was watching her, and she kept her back to him, even when she heard someone else enter the room.