“Hello, Doctor Mora, Doctor Reyar.” It was the institute’s director. Kalisi supposed she had come in to deliver a smug good-bye, but Yopal scarcely acknowledged Kalisi and instead began to speak to Mora regarding his next project. Kalisi kept her back turned as before, pretending not to listen, but smiling slightly when she heard what the director had to say.

“You’re to begin work immediately on improving anti-grav efficiency for the transports that go back and forth from Terok Nor. This is going to be a very time-consuming project, as Dukat wishes for this to be done within a very tight window. I don’t anticipate your having any extra time to work with Odo.”

“But…Doctor Yopal, I know I don’t have to remind you, Odo is sentient. It doesn’t do him good to simply sit in his tank with no interaction. I need to be able to see him—to speak to him—even if it is only a few times a week—”

“We’ll do the best we can,” she said crisply.

There was nothing Mora could say except to mumble a response.

“Very well, then. Oh, and Doctor Reyar?”

Kalisi turned, concealing her smile. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Your transport is here. You probably don’t want to keep it waiting.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Kalisi was finished anyway. She had only remained in the lab to listen to what the director had to say to Mora. She took her things and walked out, uninterested in further pleasantries. She stepped outside into the cold damp, wondering what the hospital would be like. Well. She’d know shortly.

Kalisi had very few things to be loaded into the shuttle’s cargo compartment, only a small valise with her work clothes, a few document and padd cases. The vanity she’d possessed as a younger woman was all but gone now. She’d had no time for a personal life here on Bajor, a fact that hadn’t troubled her when she’d believed her work would propel her to glory within the Union. Lately, though, she was starting to experience real pangs of regret for her decision to trade a family on Cardassia Prime for a career on Bajor. This transport seemed to symbolize her defeat, the certainty that she would never experience the notoriety in the scientific community that she had hoped for. She could expect to live out her twilight years calibrating biobeds on an occupied world. The thought was anything but welcome.

She was the only passenger on the tiny vessel, and she tried to strike up a conversation with the pilot regarding her destination, but quickly found him to be less than garrulous. She satisfied her boredom by looking over some reading material on her padd, but the novelty of her uncertain situation made it difficult to concentrate.

After what seemed like only a very short time, Kalisi looked up to see that the transport had continued to rise, as though the pilot meant to break out of the atmosphere. But that couldn’t be right, could it? His authoritarian silence unnerved her to the point where she did not feel comfortable asking questions, but when the shuttle did not drop, she dismissed her awkwardness.

“Where are you taking me?” she demanded, just before the shuttle broke through the very highest clouds in the Bajoran sky, swiftly and calmly riding the turbulence out into the dark of open space. “I thought I was just going to the hospital at Huvara Province! Why have we taken this…unlikely route?”

The pilot, seated behind a security compartment, spoke to her through a comm system, his eerily disembodied voice no more talkative than it had been before. “We are making a required stopover.”

“A stopover!” she exclaimed. “Offworld? Why was I not informed of this before I boarded?”

The pilot had nothing more to say, and Kalisi had no recourse but to ride in angry, terrified silence while the little skimmer took her not only from Bajor, but out of the B’hava’el system altogether. Her mind raced with questions, but there was no one to answer them. She clasped her hands together and waited.

4

He was too close. No Cardassian had ever come this close to the Shakaar cell’s hideout before, at least, not anytime before last week. He wasn’t close enough to guess where the hideout was, necessarily, and his scanning equipment couldn’t possibly reveal its location, for the hillside surrounding the caves was riddled with kelbonite. But he was still too close. Kira Nerys would have to get him before he got even a linnipate closer, just as she had gotten his two companions. The bulky Cardassian rifle she had lifted from one of the slain soldiers was slowing her down, and Kira knew that she was going to have to ditch it. She could come back for it later, she decided, even though Shakaar had been insisting for over a week that nobody leave base camp until they could confirm or deny the rumors they had been hearing. She was sure to get an earful from him when she returned to camp, especially when she told him that she didn’t know where Bestram was.

She pitched the stolen rifle at the base of a tree with distinctive branches. She had been to this spot many times in her life, countless times, and she would be back again, to get that rifle, just as soon as she finished her job here.

She set off again, lighter now, clutching her phaser pistol in one hand and walking the way she’d learned years ago, the way that kept the needles and leaves and bits of bark and the papery seed hulls of the blackwood trees silent beneath the soles of her soft old boots. She could hear his footsteps, though they were a ways off; she would hear him long before he would hear her, and no matter how precise his scanning equipment, she would be the one to shoot first.

She stopped walking as she heard a subtle shift in the echoing crunch of the soldier’s footfalls, edging for a large tree. He was headed vaguely in her direction, and although he probably knew exactly where she was, if she held completely still, she could still manage the element of surprise. He would approach as quietly as he knew how, but it would not be quiet enough. He would get within striking range, but she would be well protected behind the trunk of a wide tree. Before he even had a chance to aim, she would charge; he’d be dead before he realized she was coming.

She let her breath out in tiny increments, held her body as still as stone. His footsteps drew closer…and when she heard the telltale whisper of dry brush less than a body length away, she sprang out from behind the tree, already firing.

She did not miss. His body jerked as it staggered backward, his phaser falling, and he let out a single dying groan before he landed, and then he was silent and motionless on the floor of the forest. The birds chirped overhead, and Kira scrambled forward, phaser still trained on the dead soldier, to strip him of his weapons and comcuff. She stopped for a moment to listen, but she heard nothing more. Her companion, Bestram, was nowhere in sight, and neither were the Cardassians who had chased him off in a different direction.

Loaded down with equipment, she made for the tree where she had stowed the other phaser rifle, and then beat it back to the Shakaar cell’s hideout in the nearby mountain, a mountain so low it was scarcely more than a hill, nearly invisible behind the grand, old-growth trees that surrounded it.

She took the chance that there were no more soldiers around and ducked for the entrance, a tiny, camouflaged opening in the rock that led to a system of tunnels, some of them natural, some of them blasted out by the network of resistance cells that operated in this region. She had to squat down on her haunches to avoid bumping her head on the low ceiling of this passageway, one that had been carved out a little at a time by another cell, the nearby Kohn-Ma. She shimmied along, grunting with the weight of all the equipment she pushed ahead of her, wishing that she had walked around to the more accessible west entrance, but then she remembered that the Cardassians had come from that direction—there could have been more of them, waiting for her. She swallowed her doubts regarding Bestram. He must have gone around, she told herself, though she doubted very much that it was true.