“Where are you going?” she snapped.

He deliberately ignored the pleading tone in her words.

“To get something to eat.”

Darrah hopped a near-empty tram at the foot of the road and took it to the night market at the base of the hill. Hunger always made him terse and short-tempered. He found the first street vendor he came across and handed her a couple of lita coins, getting some savory porlistrips in a rough mapabread roll. He wolfed it down and then got another, along with a cup of ice water. Licking grease from his fingertips, Mace caught sight of himself in the polished chrome of the vendor’s food wagon. His face was set hard in a grimace, jaw locked and eyes narrow. The echo of his anger with Karys was still resonating in his bones. Walk it off,he told himself.

He wandered into the alleys of the market, between the narrow walls of the stalls selling clothing and trinkets, hot and cold foodstuffs, entertainment software or old books. When they saw him coming, some of the sellers rather indiscreetly used cloths to cover parts of their stalls to hide their wares. He didn’t doubt that some of the vendors were trading pirated isolinear disks; there was a strong trade in illegally copied holo-programs from the United Federation of Planets that the City Watch was continually trying to stamp out, which kept rising again no matter how hard they worked to eradicate it. Others kept their stock discreetly hidden, like the men who traded in programs of a more questionable kind. Although it didn’t fall directly in his jurisdiction anymore, Darrah was aware that sales of that kind of material had spiked in Korto and other cities where there were enclaves. It appeared that some Cardassians had an interest in Bajorans that went beyond the cultural; and the trade wasn’t just one way, either. The idea that Bajorans wanted such intimate information about the reptilian aliens made his gut twist. He made a mental note of faces and resolved to pass the information on to Myda at the precinct in the morning.

Darrah looked up at the ornate chronometer that towered over the night market. It was a little after twenty-three-bells. In the past, the stallholders would have been tearing down their pitches by now, rolling up their stock, and dismantling the stalls before calling it a night, but if anything the bazaar was running at a good clip. There were customers in every alley, and Darrah noted that the majority of them were Cardassian. They like the warm nights,he recalled, thinking of something that Lonnic had told him. The vendors were staying open later in order to service their new patrons. They come into the city at dusk during the summer months.

The offworlders fell into two groups. There were knots of Oralians, who were never in anything less than a group of three or four, hooded figures shrouded by pastel robes of dusky pink and sky blue. The pilgrims dallied mostly around the stalls selling used paper books or tourist trinkets depicting items of local interest like the bantacaspire and the keep. Small resin models of the Kendra Monastery and laser-cut crystals in the shape of an Orb ark were the most popular purchases, or so it seemed.

The other Cardassians were the soldiers in their beetle-black armor, men from the escort warships in orbit or the so-called “support staff” out at the enclave. Darrah never saw any signs of weapons on them, but he imagined that the carapace plates of dark metal could easily conceal small blades or beam guns. These aliens walked either in a tight group, with the same watchful motions as a recon unit in enemy territory, or else they were alone, loping from stall to stall, talking in low tones to the dealers.

In accordance with council ordinances, colored ribbons on the stall frames denoted the permissions and contents of a given booth, but most of the stands also had banners dangling alongside them with Cardassian text written in a sketchy, poor hand. Darrah couldn’t read them, but he knew the food vendors had banners explaining that their cooking was compatible with Cardassian digestive tracts, or that offworlders and “friends of Oralius” were welcome. He frowned at the signs and walked on, crossing under the clock tower, finishing his water and discarding the cup.

It wasn’t just the aliens themselves that showed their influence on things in the city. At the toy stands there were little kits one could purchase that would make a model of a Selek-class starship from paper and glue. He saw commemorative PeldorFestival plates from the year the Eledacrew had been returned, disks of white porcelain with montage images of the funeral at the Naghai Keep. There were clothes on sale, knockoffs of the fashionable items worn by the higher D’jarras that resembled the cut of Cardassian tunics and Oralian robes; and there were more subtle things, like the way the traditional icons of hearth and home were being supplanted by symbols of space and new horizons. Once it had been a rarity for Darrah to cross paths with an alien, and now that he did it every day, it seemed so natural. He glanced up as a flyer hummed past overhead. He knew immediately that the vehicle had a Cardassian engine—the tone of the drive was dull and tight, unlike the grumbling throb from less powerful Bajoran-made craft.

“Ho, Mace!” The voice cut through his musings, and he turned to see Gar Osen beckoning him from the steps of the marketside temple.

“Ranjen,” he said, coming over. “What are you doing here?”

Gar indicated the small temple. “Just a small bit of church business about tomorrow’s new arrivals. It went on a little longer than I thought it would.”

Darrah nodded. There was another boatload of Oralians arriving at Cemba Station the next day, and both he and the priest had to be there.

Gar gave a wan smile. “You know how it is, Inspector. The higher up the wheel you turn, the more things you have to deal with.” The flyer was settling on the road nearby. “I was just leaving. Do you need to go somewhere? I could have my driver give you a lift…” He trailed off, and Darrah knew that his old friend was reading him. “What’s bothering you, Mace?”

“I haven’t even opened my mouth yet. What makes you think there’s something bothering me?”

Osen frowned. “I’m your friend and I’m your priest. If I can’t tell when something is wrong with you, I’d be failing on both those counts.” He gave the man in the flyer a shake of the head and gestured back into the temple. “Come on. Unburden yourself.”

Darrah resisted. “I have no burdens, Ranjen.”

“No? Well, how about two men just talking, then? I’ll ask the Prophets to turn a deaf ear to anything sacrilegious you might say.”

A day later, and they were in orbit. Gar paused to smooth down the front of his robes and glanced down the length of the commerce platform’s reception area. It was a wide space, dominated by a large horizontal window that looked out into the void. He always found the station to have a slightly shabby, down-at-heel atmosphere to it, and if the option had been his he would have preferred to meet the Oralians on Bajor rather than up here. It wasn’t as if the place was decrepit or anything like that; it was just a bit too industrial. It lacked grace, and it was hardly the best first impression to give new arrivals. But there had been raised voices in the Chamber of Ministers about allowing Cardassians, Oralian or not, unfettered passage. It was largely down to the agitation of Keeve Falor that they were here on Cemba instead of holding a reception at the Naghai Keep. The priest sighed. Here, on the outer decks of Cemba Station’s main structure, the hemispherical shape of the orbital platform’s main hull joined a spider-web of thin gantries, extending out to tend to arriving and departing starships. Sunlight reflected from the Derna and Jeraddo moons illuminated the vessels in dock; the priest didn’t know the makes and models of the ships, but he did know the difference between Bajoran designs and Cardassian ones, and there were none of the latter in evidence. He had heard Darrah say that the Union military liked to keep their ships untethered, and indeed he could discern the shapes of a couple of craft farther out in higher orbits. Yellow-amber hulls glittered, reminding him of the mantas that swarmed in the Dakeeni shallows.