Lonnic’s mouth went dry. The Golana settlement was a legacy of Jas’s parents, established nearly two decades earlier by the clan’s mining pioneers. Even then, it had been a gamble. It was a verdant, Bajor-analogous planet, ideal for an outpost site; but it was distant from the homeworld, well outside the span of closer colonies like Prophet’s Landing and Valo II. After the initial rush to colonize, it had been difficult to induce new homesteaders to make the long voyage; but she never dreamed that there were problems out there. “What happened?”

“The storm season last year was particularly harsh. A large percentage of the crops failed. There were deaths. Several of the families resident there broke their contracts and left. The population count is currently too low to maintain criticality.”

She nodded, understanding the pattern. Without a crucial number of people to keep the colony running, the Golana settlement would eventually collapse and be abandoned. All the millions of litas invested in the planet by the Jas clan would be wasted.

“I’ve been sending ships and supplies, trying to shore up the outpost.” Jas frowned. “It hasn’t gone well.”

“That’s the reason for the closed-link communications? That’s why you went to Batal?”

Jas eyed Kubus. “Yes. I was meeting with one of my scoutship captains. What they had to tell me was not encouraging.” The minister folded his arms and looked at the other man. “How did you learn of it?”

Kubus shrugged. “I have my methods. Rest assured that First Minister Verin knows nothing of the matter. Frankly, if something does not occur within sight of Ashalla, he has little interest in it.”

“What do you intend to do with this information?” Lonnic demanded.

“Nothing,” said the minister. “But I bring it up now to illustrate a point. If we had faster, better starships, Golana would be brought closer and this issue would not even be a concern. But as it stands, you run the risk of wasting your clan’s fortune on a colony you cannot hope to support.”

“And if I close the settlement down,” murmured Jas, “I give Verin another stick to beat me with.”

Kubus nodded. “All the more reason to make an alliance with the Cardassians. A single one of their freighters would solve all your problems.”

“Perhaps.”

Lonnic heard the turn in Jas’s voice and fixed him with a hard stare. “We should not be so quick to trust the aliens,” she broke in. “Yes, in the short term we may be able to reap the benefits, but what do we open ourselves up for in the days that follow? Cardassian starships moving freely through our space? New economic pressures placed on our worlds by the Union’s demands? Suppose, after a while, they decide they want to take from us instead of trading? Once we open these gates, we won’t be able to close them again.”

“The Cardassians would never have been allowed to enter our system if there was the slightest chance they were here on a military footing,” Kubus retorted. “Li, Jaro, and all the rest of the Militia, they would never permit it!” He grunted, shaking his head. “The fact is, the Cardassians simply don’t have the capacity to mount an invasion of Bajor! Why expend soldiers and matériel when they can follow a peaceful path? Cardassia Prime is too concerned with their own internal problems, and their naval forces are tied up in border skirmishes with that Talarian rabble.” He leaned forward. “Let’s not forget, theycame to us.We have the home advantage here, Holza. If we let the prospect for a pact pass Bajor by, then perhaps your gloomy adjutant here will be proven right, and they will come back with battle cruisers instead of priests!”

Jas was silent for a while, and Lonnic could see him weighing the arguments in his thoughts. “If we did advocate an agreement, Verin would never accept it. Even together, Kubus, you and I and what allies we have would not be enough to sway the Chamber of Ministers. Without another impetus to propel it, the First Minister will block any petition and we will be left looking foolish.”

Kubus smiled. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll have all the support we need.”

“What do you mean?” Lonnic asked.

The other minister glanced at her. “The Prophets will provide.”

The door hissed open and Kell crossed the threshold into the Kornaire’s primary laboratory module, casting around until he spotted the woman Ico at a console in the far corner of the room. He was glad to be back on his ship; the towering ceilings of the Bajoran castle had made him feel uncomfortable, and he had forced himself to resist the urge to look up over and over, as if his senses were warning him of something threatening overhead. Kell preferred the close, controlled spaces of his vessel, the decks and corridors he knew as well as the ridges on his own neck.

He studied the faces of the civilian contingent as he passed them by. Only one or two of the half-dozen scientists dared to look him in the eye. Most of them hadn’t even left the lab decks to venture into other parts of the ship. He imagined they were simply marking time, waiting for the mission to be over so they could return to whatever interminable research projects they had been plucked from. He saw one of the younger men, the one called Pa’Dar. Kell had seen him in conversation with Dukat about the vessel. It would behoove me to place a closer watch on that one,he mused. Unlike the others, Pa’Dar had willingly taken meals in the mess hall and seemed interested in the running of the ship. Such behavior left Kell suspicious; there was no doubt in his mind that the secretive forces of the Obsidian Order had an operative on board the Kornaire—it was standard practice to put a spy on every line starship, so the rumors went—and with these scientists foisted upon him it was likely they had used the group to insert another. But then again, Pa’Dar is the obvious choice,he told himself. Too obvious for the Order; then again, it wouldn’t be beyond them to attempt a double-bluff…

He shook the thought away. This trying mission was playing on his mind.

“Gul,” said Ico. “Thank you for coming. I felt it would be simpler to display my findings here rather than on the bridge.”

“I appreciate the need for containment of information,” he replied. “Show me.”

Ico manipulated the arc of control tabs on the panel before her, and a large screen on the wall opened into a virtual display of the star system, each of the fourteen worlds in the ecliptic appearing with designations and data tags that streamed with information. A curved red line showed the course that the Kornairehad taken from the outer edge of the system in toward Bajor. Kell noted how the Bajorans had done their best to ensure that the Cardassian ship had traveled on a circuitous route that kept it as far from the other worlds as possible. If anything, such an action showed how little they knew about the capacity of Cardassian sensor technology. Coupled with long-range scans from other ships and the reports of covert probe drones, the Kornairehad a good spread of information about the Bajor system to draw upon.

“Our initial estimates were incorrect,” said the woman.

Kell eyed her. “In what way?”

Ico didn’t look at him. “If anything, we were far too conservative in our approximations. There’s a reason these aliens have never ventured far from home, Gul. They have everything they need close by.” She altered the image to bring up a series of models of the planets, which scrolled past one by one, each bringing up ovals of text showing mineralogical determinations. “Stocks of feldomite, dilithium, iron, kelbonite…”

“What about Bajor itself?” he insisted.

She nodded and worked the console to show the planet that they now orbited. “We’ve used our time carefully. To ensure the aliens were not aware of the operation, I had my team adopt a rotating scan frequency modulation combined with a shift matrix in the Kornaire’s sensor pallets—”