“She was going to come along to the praykogame tonight,” said the constable. “I always thought she was a bit stuck-up, but—” He stopped and swallowed hard. “Right.Keep the civilians calm. Got it, sir.”

Darrah left him and picked his way between the survivors. His nose wrinkled at the mingled smells of blood, burnt skin, and the ozone from sparking short circuits. The corridor, normally square-shaped, was deformed and bent. He imagined it was like walking down the inside of a piece of bent pipe. He navigated around junctions and areas where support frames had collapsed. He was grateful he hadn’t lost his phaser in the confusion; setting the weapon to a tight-beam, high-energy setting, he cut through a girder that blocked his way. With care, he stepped around the still-glowing metal edge and found the decking angled away from him, turning into a steep slope. The detonation— and what in fire’s name had it been?—had apparently hit Cemba Station with such force that the platform had twisted under the impact. The realization made Darrah’s throat go dry. The survivors in the corridor were probably alive only by some random chance, a freak interaction of the platform’s structural integrity fields forming a temporary bubble in the middle of the spaceframe. He thought about the rooms they had been unable to get into, the way the hatches were distorted and jammed in place. Anything organic inside there that was hit by the concussion wave would be unrecognizable now, just a paste of meat and bone. The lawman’s stomach turned over at the thought, and along with the roil of adrenaline shock still coursing through his system, Darrah felt hot acid bile coming up his throat.

He sank back on the decking and panted, forcing himself to calm down. “Focus, Mace,” he said aloud. “Don’t puke. That would be embarrassing for everyone.”

After a moment, he came up into a crouch and went forward in a ducking walk, bending to get under a half-open blast door that had locked in place. His skin tingled with an electric discharge in the air, and Darrah caught the sound of a resonant humming. Beyond the blast door was the boarding tunnel to the shuttle. He laid eyes on it and spat out a string of particularly choice gutter epithets.

A short distance from where he stood, using improvised handholds to keep himself up on the tilted floor, the corridor was blocked by a wavering green force field that prevented him from advancing any farther. He glanced around and saw the glowing emitter heads set in the ceiling and the walls. He knew that blasts from his pistol would destroy them and kill the field immediately; but what had made him curse with such venom was what lay on the other side of the energy barrier.

He could see the boarding tunnel clearly, and in fact he could see the shuttle too, still attached to the severed length of the corridor. It was drifting less than a linnipate from the station’s hull, with nothing but airless space and a cloud of metallic debris between them, severed cleanly. In any other circumstance, Darrah could have covered the distance in a few moments, but with no environmental suit, no way to stop the rest of the corridor outgassing what atmosphere remained the moment the barrier went down, the damned thing might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy for all the good it would do. He swore again, and then turned back to retrace his steps.

Gar blinked, and it hurt like blades scraping the inside of his skull. There was a hand on his chest and a hazy shape hovering over him. “Careful, careful, brother. Try not to get up too quickly. You may have a concussion.”

The ranjen nodded, and that made his head hurt even more. He felt as if a heavy weight had been attached to the back of his neck, and each time he moved it pulled on him. “Ah,” he managed. “I…I’m all right. Comparatively speaking.”

The dimness around him resolved into a smoky corridor full of injured and fearful faces, and the shapes that spoke became a pair of Cardassians. “Ranjen Gar, thank the Way,” said Bennek. “I feared you might not wake again.”

“Don’t move too fast,” said Pasir. “You took a nasty blow to the head, and there are burns down your back.”

“I feel them,” Gar admitted, wincing at new pain.

“That’s the Prophets telling me I’m not dead.” He got into a sitting position and looked around. “Where…where is everyone else? The vedek?”

Arin appeared out of the shadows, lit by a flickering illuminator strip. “I am here, Osen. By the Temple’s Grace, we have lost none of our number.” He sighed. “I wish I could say the same for our Cardassian cousins.”

Gar looked at Bennek and the alien gave a solemn nod. He listened as the cleric explained what had taken place—the detonation, the shock wave, the loss of life. “But how could this happen?” he asked when the priest had finished. “Was it some kind of accident on board your vessel?”

“The Lhemorwas elderly,” noted Pasir. “And in that statement, I am being generous.”

“Perhaps,” said Bennek, “but would not any critical failure have been more likely to happen while we were at warp, when the ship was under the greatest stresses?”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow.” The law officer Proka added his voice. “Ships coming in to dock are more accident-prone than ones at sail.”

“That’s if it was an accident at all,” returned Bennek.

“You can stow that kind of chatter right now.” Gar heard footsteps, and Darrah Mace came into sight, his face grim and smeared with soot. “What matters is getting everyone here to safety. Air’s running thin and our time’s going with it.”

“Inspector, perhaps it would be best if we remain here,” suggested Arin. “The Militia know we are aboard Cemba. They won’t abandon us.”

Darrah shot the vedek a look. “That’s true, but with all due respect, it’s been my estimation that those who sit and wait for a rescue are usually the ones who don’t live to see it.”

His words sent a ripple of concern through the survivors. Gar shifted, ignoring his pain. “Mace, what about the shuttle?”

“Not an option,” he replied, in a manner that brooked no argument. “We need to come together, find a different way off this wreck.”

Gar had Pasir help him to his feet. “What else is on this level? Does anyone here know?” he called out, choking back a guttural cough.

“I do,” said a voice. The ranjen limped to a man in a technician’s oversuit. The girl Tima was bandaging his arm with strips torn from her robes. “Working this tier. Consumables maintenance.” The man’s cheek was bloody where he had taken a lick of flame from the explosion, and his earlobe and D’jarraearring were a mess of flash-burned metal and livid, liquid scarring.

“What’s your name?”

“Lirro,” he slurred.

“Lirro, tell us what’s on this deck,” said Darrah, coming to Gar’s side.

The man ran through a series of descriptions, shock making his voice dead and mechanical. After a moment, Gar stopped him. “Wait. You said cargo bays.”

Lirro nodded. “Small ones. For temporary storage.”

Gar glanced at Darrah. “Mace, a cargo bay means a cargo transporter. If there’s still power to that compartment, we could beam off!”

“Ifthere’s still power,” said Proka.

The inspector hesitated. “The thought occurred to me. But there’s another problem. Cargo transporters are optimized for inert materials. They’re fine for noncomplex structures, but the pattern buffers don’t have the density to handle organic life-forms. You put a person through one of those and you’re likely to lose a good percentage of the original molecular configuration.”

Proka nodded. “You’ll come out the other end a drooling moron… ifyou’re lucky.”

Bennek raised a hand. “All true, unless you have an operator who can compensate for the signal degradation.”

Gar glanced at the Cardassian. “You know how to do that?”