Dukat shivered as he took his final sip of hot fish juice, juice that could scarcely be called hot anymore. He clutched at the cup, trying to draw the last of its heat into his hands; he felt as though his fingers were coated in ice. The failure of the environmental controls had his entire staff operating in a kind of frozen lethargy.

“Will you be having a refill, Gul Dukat?” Quark’s grinning face slid in front of his own. Perhaps he’d finally tired of chattering with the Lurian freighter captain who had made such a fixture of himself at the other end of the bar.

“No,” Dukat muttered to the Ferengi. “Not at what you charge. I’d have been better off going to the Replimat. At least their juice is hot.”

“So hot it will sear the flesh off the inside of your mouth!” Quark said indignantly. “You can’t eat food from a machine—it’s unnatural. The food and beverages I serve here are made with care. I personally ensure that the ingredients are only of the finest—”

“Save it,” Dukat said, and stood to go.

“Wait!” the Ferengi cried. “I’ll…offer you another glass…on the house!”

Dukat waited for the inevitable second half of the offer, but Quark only continued to smile helplessly.

“ Whywould you do that?”

“Well…because you’re Gul Dukat! It’s good for business to have the prefect seen in here…of course!” Quark said.

Dukat supposed it made sense, but the Ferengi was obviously up to something. He sighed and gestured his acceptance. “Fine, I’ll have another drink. But I do plan to mention to Odo that you’re acting suspiciously.”

“Gul!” Quark said, pretending to be hurt. “Is generosity really so out of character for me that you would—”

“Yes,” Dukat interrupted, and changed the subject. “How can you tolerate this cold?” he asked the gruesome little man as he heated another drink. “Is it as miserable as this on your homeworld?”

Quark spread his unnervingly toothy smile as wide as it would go. “It’s miserabler,” he said, and laughed at his own joke. “I rather like the new temperature setting, really. But then, it’s not my station.”

“No, it is not,” Dukat said, and accepted the hot glass. He had to admit, the juice here wasmore palatable than what could be gotten from the replicators, but he could hardly enjoy it with the persistent chill in the air.

“Remember to savor that, now,” Quark advised.

“If it weren’t for Odo,” Dukat complained, “I wouldn’t be sitting here freezing half to death, talking to you.”

“Well, then, I suppose I have Odo to thank for the pleasant conversation,” Quark said.

Dukat ignored him and continued to air his grievances. “Our constable put the chief of engineering on the first penal ship back to Cardassia Prime, before we’d called in for a replacement.”

“Odo is nothing if not overly efficient,” Quark said. “I’d say he’s pretty rigid, for a shape-shifter.”

“And then the environmental controls would have to go down, on the one day I’m short an engineering chief! I’ve just been informed that I’m not to get another one for at least forty-two hours, which means the problem’s got to be attended to by an engineering team without its leader. If you had any idea what fools Kedat surrounded himself with…”

“You know, we have a saying on Ferenginar. ‘When it rains, it rains extremely hard, reducing the entirety of your surroundings to muck.’”

Dukat made a face. “Did I ask to hear your homespun folk wisdom?” he said sourly. “At any rate,” he went on, “I reprimanded him for sending away the chief of engineering without my approval, but it isn’t as though he could possibly appreciate what the loss of environmental control means for the rest of us.”

“Odo isn’t known for his empathy,” Quark agreed.

Dukat was tired of listening to the Ferengi’s acquiescence, and deliberately set his gaze elsewhere until Quark moved on to ingratiate himself to someone else. It seemed to take an excruciatingly long time before the Ferengi finally lost interest in furthering the conversation. Dukat briefly remembered a time when he’d had people on the station he’d thought he could trust. There had been Damar—the young, but wise-beyond-his-years garresh—and there had been Kira Meru. Beautiful Meru, so sensible—for a Bajoran, that was—but both had betrayed him. And then Basso Tromac. The Bajoran had been such a loyal servant before he’d disappeared, never returning from his errand to collect Kira Nerys. Dukat was left to wonder if Basso hadn’t betrayed him as well.

He looked up to see Quark making his usual small talk with a group of security officers in the corner, the insincerity all but dripping from his words. It was certainly indicative of Dukat’s isolation that he would be forced to seek companionship from the shape-shifter—or worse, from the Ferengi. He could trust no one, he recognized now.

He hurried back to his office, warming himself slightly by the brisk walk, feeling strangely melancholy. Why was it so hard to find people he could depend upon? How could he be expected to function when there was no one to whom he could speak?

He found a message from Legate Kell waiting for him in his cold office. He reviewed it without enthusiasm, an ambiguous request for an immediate callback, and Dukat reluctantly put in a return call. Perhaps it was related to his new engineering chief…

“Dukat,” the legate said shortly. “I’ve given it much thought, and I believe my plan to reorganize the Bajoran government is best for all concerned.”

Dukat gritted his teeth. Why did Kell continue to concern himself with details of the annexation? Dukat felt smothered.

“We need to discuss the particulars of the transition, as I would like to see the alteration occur as soon as possible,”Kell went on. “But first, I feel it would be best to appoint a committee among some of your more trusted advisers, in order—”

A red light flashed on the console to Dukat’s right, accompanied by an audible alarm. Kell broke off speaking, his expression parodying surprise. “What is that?”

Dukat was already reacting, having swiveled to regard the console at his right-hand side. There had been a failure of the program managing the sensor towers on the surface, guiding the sweeps and returning the data to Terok Nor.

“I must go, Legate,” he said, ending the transmission without another word. He immediately alerted engineering, then called for his communications officer to start contacting surface bases for reports.

He spent a moment trying to call up more information on the nature of the failure, but the computer was giving him nothing. Frustrated, he stepped out into Ops, looking over his shivering skeleton crew as they went to task, working diagnostics and gathering information. The initial reports were bad—there was nothing coming up from the grid, no data being recorded at all, on any continent. Dukat sent them to double-check, his best hope right now was that the Bajorans on the surface would not learn of the failure.

He thought of the Ferengi, that ridiculous idiom repeating itself: When it rains, it rains extremely hard…

“Get me a diagnostic of the most vulnerable sites on the surface,” he barked. “I need troops in place anywhere that is susceptible to insurgent attacks.”

The dalin at communications spoke up. “There are literally hundreds of them, sir—could you be more specific?”

The female glinn working the sciences station spoke up, confirming the desolate news. “Sir. The entire detection grid has gone dark, sir.”

Dukat took a breath, reminding himself that this was not yet cause for panic. If the Bajorans were not aware that the grid was off line, then unrest on the surface was unlikely—at least, for now. He made a quick mental list of the precautions that must be taken, before the same female glinn spoke with urgency in her voice.

“A report, sir, forwarded from a manufacturing facility in Dahkur—it suggests that insurgents have attacked, but the signal was only partial, they can’t confirm…”