“They’re targeting something to the east,” said Proka.

“Not the enclave…”

Darrah’s voice caught in his throat. “The Kendra Shrine.”

The cloisters of the monastery were filled with prayers and panic in equal measure. Built high into the hillside, the ancient campus commanded an excellent view of the provinces to the west. It was with silent terror that the novices, prylars, and ranjens assembled for dawn mass on the square were witness to the streaks of sunfire falling from the sky to strike the distant blur of Korto’s conurbation. The sounds of the detonations were only now reaching them, the shock wave rumbles rattling the ornamental stainedglass windows in the halls.

Then the first blast fell on Kendra, hitting the compound of service sheds and habitats for the visiting penitents at the base of the hill. The concussion turned the ancient glass to molten bullets, the plume of hellish flame behind it erasing the cluster of stone buildings in a heartbeat. The next shot came and tore the tallest towers from the high levels of the monastery. A construction that had stood on the surface of Bajor for thousands of years, that had weathered wars and famines and storms beyond counting, now cracked and crumbled under its own weight, stone breaking with a mournful cry that carried down the valley. No more strikes followed; there were other targets scattered across Bajor’s dayside to be prosecuted. No more were needed at Kendra. The damage was done, fires and collapse spreading with roaring, snarling fury.

The sound made Vedek Arin freeze where he stood, halfway down the length of the grand corridor toward the shrine. The polished floor beneath his feet shook as if wracked by an earthquake. His calling as a servant of the Prophets warred with his instinct for self-preservation. The Orb…Dare he leave it to whatever fate was to come, trusting in his gods to preserve it so that he might flee—or should he enter the shrine and carry out the ark holding the Tear, risking his life to venture inside and perhaps be buried alive? A way behind him, a huge chandelier made of brass and crystal tore free of the ceiling and struck the ground with a colossal crash. Arin’s terror leapt a hundredfold and he gaped in panic, rooted to the spot by his fear. He took a hesitant step toward the shrine; he registered that the doors were hanging open. The priest staggered forward, and his foot touched a rent in the floor where a stone tile should have been. He pitched forward, crying out, and he struck the stonework hard. The impact dizzied him, pain blurring his sight. “Prophets…” he called out. “Aid me…”

Strong hands dragged him to his feet, and the vedek blinked. There was blood in his eyes from a streaming cut on his forehead that sang with pain. Cascades of dust and falling tiles were impacting all around him. “The cloister…”

“It’s coming down, Vedek!” He recognized the voice, saw the man who was holding him up.

“Osen?” He staggered. “What…Were you inside the shrine?”

“I came after you!” insisted the ranjen. “We have to get out!”

“But the Tear of the Prophets is still in there!” cried Arin. “We can’t leave the Orb of Truth!”

Gar was dragging him away. “The Prophets will protect it,” he shouted over the grind of stone on stone, “and we must protect ourselves!”

Great chunks of the walls and the pillars supporting them were impacting all around them now, and finally Arin surrendered to his fear, letting the young priest drag him away, out of the building.

Outside, the vedek stumbled and fell to his knees, turning in time to see the monastery groan like a dying man and collapse in on itself in a final tide of noise and gray-brown dust. The clouds of powdered stone and ash washed up and engulfed the monks, coating them in the cloying powder, painting them the color of ghosts. Arin looked up into the sky and saw white fire falling toward the horizon, in the direction of Janir and Ashalla.

In Dahkur, dawn had still to break across the city, but the streets were choked with people and vehicles desperate to flee the conurbation. Streetscreens were showing live broadcasts from the destruction wrought in Korto, and the citizenry was panicked.

In the halls of the embassy of the Cardassian Union there was a skeleton crew on duty on the upper levels, soldiers guarding the doors to keep the place secure, but no staff members at the checkpoints or on the office tiers. All of them were a dozen levels below, in the emergency bunker along with the command staff and Jagul Kell himself. All of them but Rhan Ico.

The embassy was replete with protected chambers, a monument to the Cardassian obsession with paranoia and security, but the room that Ico stood in was the most secure of them all, constructed to tolerances and designs that were so secret no living being had a hand in fabricating them. It existed on no plans for the building; there was no door, so access was only via a hidden transporter; it had nothing to connect it to the outside world. The machine-manufactured room was a module that, like the rest of the building, had been made whole on Cardassia and shipped to Bajor to be beamed into place. The walls were laced with complex circuits that could defeat a million kinds of listening devices and sensors. Ico had even heard rumors that the panels contained a bio-neural matrix based on cultured Vulcan brain tissue, which could fog penetration by telepaths. She was confident that no one on the planet could know what was going on in here.

The folded-space transporter unit before her completed its phase-shift cycle with a hiss of displaced molecules and commenced the reintegration process. Inside the sealed receptor capsule a shape began to take form, and she pressed her hand to the transparent wall of the pod. A cool smile unfolded on Ico’s lips. It was a genuine emotion on her part, a rare thing for the woman. Certainly, it was not something she would have exhibited in the presence of anyone else. But here, in the room, she was utterly alone, and so she could drop her pretense for a short time. It was, in its way, refreshing.

The transporter completed its work, and the capsule opened to her. Ico reached in and ran a hand over the careworn wooden case that lay inside. Intricate scrollwork in an ancient Bajoran ideogram script framed the planes of the box, looping around convex oval lenses set in the sides of the container. The carved wood was warm to the touch. For long moments Ico’s fingers dithered over the small iron latch on the front of the container. The glow of the object inside the ark cast a honeyed illumination that scintillated, compelling her to open it.

“And this is what drove Hadlo to his folly,” she said to the air. Ico smirked and pushed aside any thoughts forming in her mind that she might actually give in to the same curiosity. Instead, she gathered up the box and placed it inside a padded cargo container, pausing only to seal it with a beam tool and tag it with an encrypted transporter locater. “The first of many,” Ico said to herself.

A faint rumble made her look up at the ceiling. The bombardment of Dahkur had started. She returned to her work, secure in the knowledge that she was in no danger.

The Cardassian warships dropped out of warp inside the orbit of Jeraddo, shedding velocity in flares of rainbow radiation. The maneuver, like every other event in the sequence, was a precisely timed, perfectly choreographed display to present the right image to the Bajoran ships still drifting damaged inside visual range. Their firing grids pulsing, the Kashaiand the Daikonfell toward the Tzenkethi marauder like swooping raptors. Disruptor bursts arced through the vacuum around the teardrop starship, flashing off the force shields.