Rom suddenly materialized from somewhere in the back. “Brother!” he said urgently.

“What is it, Rom?”

“Brother—the Lurian—he’s still here!”

The massive Lurian turned, fully capable of hearing Rom’s warning, though the alien had almost nothing in the way of ears. Quark waved his hands. “Not now, Rom. We’ve got bigger things to worry about at the moment than Lurians.” He turned to the hulk at the end of the bar. “No offense,” he told him, and the Lurian shrugged.

Quark coughed and turned back to the Cardassian, hoping to trip him up somehow, for he was still working the angle that this was a ruse meant to make him look foolish, that there wasn’t really any shape-shifter, and that Thrax would come walking through the door at any moment, the Cardassians in security all having a little laugh at Quark’s expense. He could hope, anyway. But he had a bad feeling. The Lurian in the bar, the bizarre actions of the red-haired Bajoran woman, and the unconfirmed rumor of a new security chief—all seemed to mark the presence of some unhappy portent. Or, at the very least, the makings of somekind of change on the horizon. Things had been going quite well lately; a change could only be for the worse.

Quark scowled. The nerve of Thrax, resigning his post without even saying good-bye. It was enough to drive an honest man to drink.

Doctor Moset was excited. Kalisi could see it in the brightness of his eyes, the quick, efficient way in which he laid out their equipment, checked the hypos she’d prepared. Funny, how she’d stopped thinking of him as Crell, somewhere along the line. They continued to sleep together, but much of the passion had fled on her end, replaced with a kind of fearful awe. If he knew that she was less than present at their physical meetings, he didn’t seem to mind. Nor did she, particularly. Moset had been given a free rein by Central Command, a license to do whatever he deemed relevant to achieving new medical breakthroughs. A man with that kind of power was not to be denied, not if she still hoped to salvage a name for herself.

He leaned forward now, the two of them waiting for the first Bajorans to file in. They were at a medical center outside the Jalanda manufacturing camp, to give the required annual Fostossa booster to the workers and their families. Moset had wanted them both to be here. A day they could reflect upon with pride, he’d said.

“Are you ready to make history?” Moset asked, touching her shoulder. The lab was overbright, accentuating his pallor.

Kalisi nodded. He knew what interested her, understood her motivations well enough; she sometimes wondered if he was manipulating her, reminding her of the things she most wanted those times she felt less than committed to his agenda.

A dozen, fifteen Bajoran children filed into the room, led by a pair of soldiers and a middle-aged Bajoran woman, her face pinched and fearful. The children, all young, were subdued, staring at the smiling doctor with the hypo in his hand. The oldest was perhaps in her early teens; the youngest still possessed the rounded cheek and jaw of a child half that age, his eyes wide with anxiety.

“Where are their parents?” Kalisi asked. The soldiers shuffled the children forward.

“Working,” Moset said. “But they’ll be in to get theirs soon enough; the gul is excusing them from the lines early.”

Kalisi nodded at the older woman. “Who is that?”

Moset blinked at Kalisi, a vague smile forming. “Whoever watches them, I suppose. Really, how could I possibly know?”

Kalisi watched as the children lined up to receive their inoculations, their small faces drawn with fear. The first two were boys, who submitted to Moset’s quick hands and gentle smile without flinching. The third was a girl, perhaps eight or nine, with a beautiful head of thick black hair, arranged in curls. Kalisi didn’t generally find the Bajorans to have much physical appeal, but the child was quite lovely. She was crying, and as the Bajoran chaperone tried to coax her to approach Moset, the little girl fixed her tearful gaze on Kalisi.

“Is it going to hurt?” she asked, her voice quavering.

Yes, but not today, she thought.

“No,” she said calmly. “It won’t hurt a bit. I promise.”

The little girl stepped forward, her terror barely under control.

“Listen to Doctor Reyar, she knows what she’s talking about,” Moset said, exposing his small white teeth, and reached for the child, who gave Kalisi a pleading look, a silent appeal for there to be no pain…and then he applied the hypospray, pressing it to her too-thin upper arm. A faint, brief hiss and it was over.

“All done,” Moset said, smiling again, releasing her.

The child rubbed at her arm, dawning relief breaking across her face. She turned a beatific smile to Kalisi.

“It didn’t hurt,” she said.

Kalisi could not return the smile. She looked away, wondering where this girl would be the day she learned that there would be no children for her, ever.

Less suffering, she told herself. A mercy.

“You be sure to tell all your little friends,” Moset said. “Inoculations don’t hurt a bit. Nothing to fear.”

The girl nodded happily, and Kalisi felt such a profound discomfort that she made an excuse about having forgotten the work code reader at the back of the lab, so that she might escape for a moment, to collect herself. To remember what was important.

It preoccupied much of her attention over the next few weeks, remembering those things which had once defined her ambitions. She found a way to avoid Moset’s embrace for much of that time. Luckily, it wasn’t difficult. He was busy, running more tests, working pathology, preoccupied with refining his new formula. When they did meet, it was often in the course of work; she continued to handle the machinery, smooth over programming snags, set the systems to collate the results he wanted.

It was late, the night he signaled at her door, a look of hunger in his sharp gaze. He seemed pleased, as well.

“Crell,” she said, stepping back to admit him. “Has something happened?”

“I’ve just gone through preliminaries on the cultures I’ve been running,” he said, smiling widely as the door closed behind him. “Concomitant to the vaccines we gave, thirty-six days ago. There are no indicators of malignant cell formation.”

Kalisi nodded, understanding the relevance. One of his early sterilization formulas had filled the wombs of twenty Bajoran women with cancerous cysts and tumors. They had all died very shortly afterward. The formula was supposed to make better workers out of them, while sparing them the burden of children, but death was hardly conducive to productivity.

“That’s excellent,” she said. “What about the component isolation? You’ve found a way to replicate it?” There was a problem with mass-producing one element of the formula, a hormonal inhibitor. Thus far, he’d only been able to generate small amounts. Until he could make more, planetwide inoculation was unattainable.

“I believe so,” he said. He stepped toward her, reached out to stroke her neck, touching the ridges there in a way he knew she liked.

“But I didn’t come here to talk, Kali,” he said softly.

Kalisi let him pull her closer, not sure she had a choice anymore. Not sure if she had ever had…but fairly certain that she’d lost her grasp of what had once been important to her, after all, and that she couldn’t seem to get it back.

Lieutenant Commander Elias Vaughn did not immediately recognize the turning in his stomach as he walked from the ship’s bridge to his quarters, but it wasn’t troublesome enough to warrant much consideration. Today had been mostly the usual—various reports from contacts, along with his observations for his superiors in special ops—but then there had been something new, something unexpected. An alleged dissident from the Cardassian Union had contacted his ship’s CO today, apparently from the Bajoran system. Vaughn could not imagine where this Cardassian had found the means to get in touch with any member of the Federation; he only knew that it was information that should be passed along. Alynna would want to know.