“I can’t explain it, Odo. Just understand that this matter is of the utmost significance.”

“I’m sure I can retrieve it for you,” Odo said, and something occurred to him then—something vaguely related to the idea of profit. An exchange…of goods—or services. He spoke slowly. “But I will need you to help me with something, as well.”

“Anything I can do for you, Odo, I will do it. Just get me that recording by the end of the day.”

“I will get it for you now, if you like. But there is a Bajoran woman who needs to get off the station,” Odo said. “Do you think you could assist her?”

Russol looked surprised for a brief moment before he nodded. “That’s almost too easy,” he replied. He looked sidelong at Odo. “A Bajoran woman, eh? Why, may I ask, is this particular Bajoran important to you?”

Odo frowned. He was unsure of the answer himself. “It seems to me…if you are unwilling to share more information about your isolinear recording, then perhaps we can agree to keep our motives to ourselves.”

Russol nodded, a smile spreading across his face. “Agreed.”

Dukat was ready to see her, or rather, believed that Kira Nerys might finally be ready to see him. He’d watched the feeds from the processing levels off and on since her arrival, watched her shoulders begin to slump as she saw her future unfolding, grit and grease and no way out. Whatever rebellious spirit had dared her to come to Terok Nor, it had certainly been diminished. He didn’t want her broken, just receptive.

He summoned Basso Tromac to his office, considering how the meeting might unfold: young Nerys, frightened and alone, brought before the prefect, a man she’d been raised to fear and even hate, who’d loved her mother in secret, taken care of her as she had taken care of him. Nerys would never know that part of it, of course. That would be…counter-productive, in any case. But he saw a real opportunity here, to act as a father figure to the girl. Perhaps his could be the firm, guiding hand that would lead her away from her vain struggles, lead her to accept a better life for herself. Surely, it was what Meru would have wanted.

He sighed, wishing that was his only interest. In truth, he also sought distraction from the steady decline in Bajor’s export quotas. Until Kell and the Council finally relented, sending what was needed to keep Bajor profitable—surveyors, geologists, researchers to study pharmaceutical possibilities in the flora; the list of possibilities were endless—there would be no respite from the dropping figures. Bajor would serve Cardassia well for at least another generation, but until the Union was willing to invest, the statistics would tell a different story; would show, in fact, that the planet was beginning to run out of nonrenewable resources.

And the blame would be laid on me. He disliked the thought of how it might read in the story of the Union, the one dutifully memorized by schoolchildren. He could see how it would look, where the implications would fall…

A signal at his door, and then Basso Tromac walked in. “You wanted to see me, Gul?”

Dukat smiled, his thoughts returning to Nerys. “Yes. I think our Bajoran guest has squirmed long enough. I want you to bring her to me.”

“Here?” Basso asked, his expression giving the rest of his thought away— and not your quarters?Puerile of mind.

“Where else?” Dukat asked, his smile sharp.

Basso nodded. “Of course. Right away.”

He left the office and Dukat sat at his desk again. But perhaps he should be standing when Nerys was shown in. Which would be least threatening to her? It was his attention to detail that often won him the things he sought, and disarming the Bajoran girl of lifelong prejudices would be no easy task. This would only be the first session of many, he was sure, but first impressions were often the strongest.

He turned to his computer, calling up her file—calling up both of her files, after a moment’s thought, the original and the one he’d personally edited. Perhaps presenting her with evidence of his sincerity would be a good beginning. A handful of internal memos popped up—authorization requests, mostly—and he quickly answered them, only pausing over one. A waste processor needed replacement, a costly and time-intensive task, and while it needed to be done, he thought it might be put off awhile—

There was a noise, close behind him. Dukat turned, stylus in hand, the briefest pulse of instinctive fear clenching his gut—

— assassination—

—and he saw a vole, fat and sleek and holding something in its jaws, disappearing into the air conduit by the door. Another refugee from the storage bays, an ever-present nuisance that continued to thrive in spite of maintenance’s best efforts. The voles arrived in cargo containers from home, lived on the refuse left out by the Bajorans, by careless shopkeepers. Terok Nor represented the very pinnacle of Cardassian technology; that they couldn’t rid themselves of a few voles was an utter embarrassment.

Overcome by disgust, Dukat threw his stylus after it. He picked up a padd from his desk and threw that, too, but the gesture was a futile one. The vole was gone.

His lanky, leaning form, his thin blade of a smile, his strange precision in even the smallest of tasks…Crell Moset was gone, packed and returned to Cardassia Prime. It hadn’t taken long, once the gears had ground into motion, moving the science ministry’s complicated transfer process along. There had been a formal reassignment of staff, a small, private dinner attended by a handful of colleagues, and a final, inevitable night of passion with Kalisi. She had enjoyed the sex. His efforts were sincere and practiced, making it easy to forget the rest of it—what she’d read recently about his experiments with polytrinic acid, for example, on living Bajorans. Or the radiation tests, or the additive to the Fostossa vaccine, or a dozen other things she’d learned since first submitting to his caresses. Her body responded in spite of her thoughts and, she had to admit, because of them, the darker feelings adding a flavor to their coupling that had frightened her, afterwards, but had, at the time, been extremely stimulating.

Only hours after their final, lingering kiss, the very morning his shuttle left atmosphere, she set to work. She destroyed every existing variation of the sterilization component and spent several hours wiping its formulation from the records before she set the machines to work up a new synthesis. Or, rather, the old one. The one that lacked Moset’s additive. On the chance that someone might later try to recover his work at the facility, she altered the lists of chemicals taken from inventory over the past year. Finally, she replicated the original masters and issued the commands necessary to begin full facility batch fermentation. The Bajorans would receive the Fostossa vaccine, nothing more.

It didn’t take long to tear it all down, his brilliant solution to the Bajoran question; she’d managed it in only a few hours. With Moset gone, much of the research facility that adjoined the hospital had been shut down. Another doctor would reopen in a few weeks, someone doing a study on botanical medicine or something equally uninteresting. Kalisi was not bothered by anyone as she worked. Anyway, she had higher clearance than any wandering aide who might wonder what she was doing, running the entire system and every outlet from the computer room, searching each database for particular files that might have been cached away. By midafternoon, she was certain that there was no trace of Moset’s recent work left anywhere in the system. She could do nothing about his personal hardware—he’d taken his work padds with him, of course—but she had reason to hope he wouldn’t be around to use them for very much longer.

She sat in his private office, looking around at the empty spaces where the doctor had kept his eccentric memorabilia: an anatomical model of a Cardassian heart; a holo of his mother and grandmother, sharing a single stern expression; a complete set of the works of Iloja; and his prize, an extensive collection of beetles from different worlds. The room still felt like him, though perhaps that was because parts of her still ached from his heartfelt farewell, and she could still smell his breath in her hair, feel his hands on her body…