“The fleet,” she replied. “Those scoutships represent an important part of the Jas clan’s holdings. Someone should be with Colonel Li’s flotilla to oversee our interests.” And perhaps,she thought, I can prevent a shooting war.

“No,” said Jas. “It’s too risky. Send someone else.”

“It would communicate an important message,” Kubus offered. “Lonnic Tomo, a ranking member of the Korto District governmental body. It would show the seriousness of our intent.” The minister was clearly content with the idea of having Lonnic and her dissenting voice out of the way.

Jas shook his head. “No,” he repeated, and there was an element of dread in his voice. “You’ll be going directly in harm’s way, and I won’t have that. What if something happened to you? I don’t…I don’t want you to be hurt.” The minister trailed off, embarrassed by his own reaction.

She picked up the padd and drew herself up to her full height, for the moment ignoring the fact that Kubus was in the room with them. “I’m doing this, Holza,” Tomo told him. “I need to do some good.” She turned and glanced at Kubus before walking out of the room. “I can’t do it here.”

Bennek looked up at the knock on his door. The evening had become a blur; he was still caught in the emotional backwash of the funeral ceremony, and even the ride back to the enclave outside the city had swept past him in a haze of sadness. He held pages from his copy of the Hebitian Records in his hands, his fingers tracing the careworn edges of the aged brangwa-hide scrolls, but his eyes were unfocused, not really reading the words in the tight old script of his ancestors. He knew the texts so well that he had no need to look at them—he could speak them by heart—but to hold the pages gave him some degree of peace, of connection to his faith.

The cleric wanted that so desperately now, but it did not come. He felt adrift, unable to voice his feelings to the others; and Pasir seemed to always be elsewhere, off to the embassy in Dahkur or back in orbit on errands.

The knock came again. It was hesitant. With a bone-deep sigh, Bennek climbed out of his wicker chair, crossed the warm confines of his room in the blockhouse, and opened the door.

Outside there was a Bajoran woman, cast slightly in shadow by the setting rays of B’hava’el. He saw immediately from her posture that she was cheerless; there was a kind of gentle vulnerability that radiated from her in waves. “Bennek?” She spoke his name with reverence.

The voice sparked recognition in him. “Tima?”

“Can I come in?” she asked. “I came out from Korto…I wanted to see you.”

“Of course.” He opened the door wider and allowed the woman inside. “Can I get you something?” Bennek gestured to a chair and she sat.

“Water?”

He nodded and poured them both glasses from the seal-jug on his desk. The cleric was hesitant. Bennek was unprepared for the girl’s unannounced arrival. She ran a hand through her blond hair and blinked. He could see her better now, and he noticed the shimmer in her striking green eyes. She’d been crying, and he felt a stab of guilt, as if he had been the cause of it.

“Are you well?” he asked. There was the slightest tracery of a scar just below her hairline on her temple, where she had been injured on board the Cemba platform.

Tima nodded. “The doctors told me there will be no lasting damage.” She gave a shallow sigh. “I never really thanked you for what you did on the station,” she began.

She had been terrified; Bennek had offered her words of comfort. He shook his head. “I did only what Oralius asks of all of us, to care for our fellow beings.”

She looked at the floor. “I was so scared, and I…I didn’t want to say anything in front of Vedek Arin…. I couldn’t…”

She confided in me because I am an alien,he thought. Because she knew I would not judge her for being afraid.

“You are a good man,” she continued. “I wanted to tell you that.”

Her words made him hesitate. “I…Thank you, Tima.” Bennek watched the Bajoran girl, drawn to her face. She was so delicate, the straw-colored hair about her head falling in golden lines, the blush on her flawless cheeks like a piece of living artwork. He recalled his first impressions of the Bajoran females he had seen years ago in the Naghai Keep. Like the desert nymphs of mythology.

“What you said today, in the gardens.” She swallowed.

“Bennek, your words moved me in a way that I’ve never felt before. You were so honest, so truthful.” Her hand fell upon his, and it was warm. “But you’re so lonely.”

“I…” He tried to find a response, but her statement disarmed him with its simple directness.

“I can see it in you.” Tima nodded. “Even across the gulf of our species, I can see it. You’re vulnerable and alone. You are surrounded by companions, but there’s not one of them you can confide in. I feel so sorry for you. I want to help.”

How can she know me so well?It was a shock for the cleric to realize the woman could intuit his thoughts and feelings. And she’s right. Hadlo is far from here, and his mind is ranging still further. Pasir and the others, they are so earnest but so distant from me. But this one…She is here with me now. In all ways.

“I want to learn from you,” Tima said carefully. “Tell me of Oralius and the Way, tell me how she touches the path of the Prophets.”

He nodded. “I will, if that is what you wish.” He reached for the scrolls, but Tima stopped him.

“But not now. Will you let me give you something first?”

“Yes.” His throat turned to sand.

Tima’s hands came to his cheeks and his to hers. She was warm, warm all over, her body like the orange sunlight of his homeworld. Bennek’s eyes closed, and he tasted cool water on her lips.

13

The sky above the port was unusually clear. Launch platforms that normally echoed with liftoffs and landings were quiet, with almost every ship in service in operation offplanet. The only activity was from the ground crews, working at fuel stations or maintenance carts, waiting for the return of the civilian ships that the emergency bureau had pressed into disaster management duties. They had to work at keeping turnaround times to a minimum, so that low-duration ships could spend as little time as possible on the ground and the maximum in orbit clearing the debris. The shock wave from the explosion of the Lhemorhad ripped parts of Cemba Station and the other ships at dock into a cloud of hull fragments and wreckage; for the past few nights everyone on Bajor’s northern continent had been treated to skies streaked with shooting stars as the smaller sections burned up in the atmosphere. But there were larger, more lethal pieces up there, some leaking toxic material, some dense enough that they would strike down a city if they fell on a populated area. The crews in orbit were working around the clock to neutralize the threats. Darrah looked up into the blue sky, wondering where Syjin was at that moment, what the itinerant pilot was doing to keep his planet safe.

Darrah had managed to catch a few words with the captain of a cargo lighter down from the lunar colony on Derna. Darrah wasn’t there to ask after the progress of the cleanup; he wanted to know about the Lhemor.

Since the funeral ceremony, sleep had become harder to find. While Karys dozed fitfully beside him, Mace stared at the ceiling, trying to distill the churn of thoughts in his mind into some kind of order. Kubus’s rhetoric and the circumstances of the explosion lay on him like a lead weight. Every moment his thoughts drifted from what was at hand, and he found himself thinking back through the desperate hours on Cemba. He struggled to recall every moment of his time up there on the docking platform. Had he seen something that hadn’t registered at the time? Someone suspicious? Something that rang a wrong note? Like all the other survivors, he had given a detailed statement to the Space Guard, but he couldn’t shake a sense that what he’d told them was somehow incomplete.