The other woman looked at him. “You leaked him the documents about the enclave.”

Darrah blinked, suddenly caught off guard. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“How do you think we got in there?” she retorted.

“Jekko used the intelligence you gave him.”

In all the turmoil, the thought hadn’t even occurred to Darrah, but now it did and he didn’t know how to respond. I just left some files open, that was all. Jekko said it would help. It would help them keep an eye on the Cardassians.But nothing more had been said of it; time had passed, and Darrah had thought no more about it. I gave him the way in. Prophets, amI partly to blame for his death?

The blond woman saw the train of thought on his face. “What did you think he was going to do with the files, Chief Inspector? Frame them and put them on a wall? He was trying to stop the Cardassian Union from engulfing your planet.”

Her words snapped him out of his reverie. “‘Your planet’?” he repeated. “Don’t you mean ourplanet?” Darrah grabbed his police-issue tricorder from his belt and toggled the device to a scene-of-crime forensic scan mode. Taking the woman’s chin in his hand again, he ran the sensor head over her skull. The DNA scan was in the green, but the bone structure readings were off. He released her. “You’ve been surgically altered.”

Both of them remained silent. He put the tricorder away and crossed to the canopy, shooting a look toward the hangar’s open doors. There was no sign of movement out in the predawn light.

“Who are you working for?” Darrah sat in a chair and studied the pair. “You’re not Bajoran. You’re not Tzenkethi, that’s a certainty.”

The blonde sniffed. “The Tzenkethi Coalition doesn’t have any interest in Bajor. They never have.”

“There’s a memorial at the City Oval with four hundred and ninety-two names on it that says different,” he retorted.

“What would you say if I told you the government on Ab-Tzenketh was as shocked by that attack as you were?”

Darrah’s lip curled. “I’d say you were misinformed.”

She smiled without humor. “The…people I work for, they’ve fought the Tzenkethi on overt and covert battlefields. And what happened on that day, that’s not what the Tzenkethi do.”

He shook his head. “You can’t know that for sure.”

“We do,” she told him, leaning forward with an absolute certainty in her eyes. “We know because we’ve broken one of the key Tzenkethi code ciphers. And let me tell you, on that day they were panicking like all hell had broken loose.”

“The Cardassians told us—” Darrah started to explain, but then the words he said registered with him and he fell silent.

“Now you’re getting it.” She nodded. “The Tzenkethi didn’t order that attack. They lost contact with that ship hours before it happened. I’ve seen the communications transcripts.”

He wanted to ask the question that burned in his mind, but he pushed it aside. “You’re Federation, aren’t you?” He got no reply. “If that’s true, if you knew that, why didn’t your Starfleet tell us?”

“If that information became public knowledge, what would happen? The marauder was totally obliterated by the Cardassians, wasn’t it? Nothing left there that could be used as proof either way. And all it would mean was that the Tzenkethi would know their communications had been compromised, and my people would lose that advantage.”

“Then who did it?” he snarled, his cheeks hot with anger.

The blond woman gave him a level look. “You already know the answer.”

Syjin set the transporter to beam him down to a point at the edge of the debris field, and he felt the shift in gravity instantly. The small moon curved away from him in every direction, and where the surface was a mottled white stone to his right and left, in front of him it was churned up into a blue-gray powder. He glanced up into a sky dominated by the cloudy orange mass of Ajir IX, trying to visualize the final moments of the craft that had come to rest here. It would have had to have been close to the moon,he reasoned. It suffered some kind of damage, got snared by the lunar gravity, and augured straight into the surface, shedding pieces of itself all the way down.The angle of the collision had been a steep one. Bits of hull metal were deposited all around a giant divot cut from the surface.

He walked on in a loping bounce, the sound of his own breathing resonating around the inside of his helmet. Without an atmosphere to act on the wreckage, there was no corrosion or weathering. All the pieces were perfectly preserved in the hard vacuum. At the edge of his vision, Syjin thought he saw something that could have been a corpse and he shuddered. He’d seen more than enough vacuum-desiccated cadavers in his life as it was.

A large slab of duranium that appeared to be a piece of outer hull was lying half buried in the sand. On an impulse he couldn’t really explain, Syjin tucked his fingers under it and turned it over. In the moon’s low gravity it was easy for him to shift the door-sized piece of metal, and it fell lazily back to the ground. There was pennant etched into the duranium in blue paint, a symbol like an inverted fork with circular tines. Syjin knew it well; many times he had been forced to make a quick getaway from ships bearing the sigil of the Bajoran Space Guard.

The shiver down his spine returned. I’m disturbing the dead.Suddenly, the idea of looting the wreck made him feel sick inside. This was a Bajoran grave, not the remains of some nondescript alien from a world he’d never even heard of. This place is probably teeming with angryboryhas.

Shadows moved up ahead and he jumped, startled; but these were not vengeful phantoms. Three figures with the wide-faced helmets characteristic of Ferengi spacesuits approached him, and through the glass bowl of his headgear Syjin saw Grek’s sneering, snaggletoothed expression.

“What are you doing down here?”demanded the trader. “You got a good deal out of me, isn’t that enough? Take your ship and go!”

“Did you know this was here?”

The Ferengi shook his head. “Of course not. If I knew there was salvage in this system, do you think I’d have brought you anywhere near it?”He grunted. “I picked this place at random.”

“Grek, this is a Bajoran naval starship,” Syjin retorted, gesturing around. The moment he said the words aloud, something registered in his thoughts. Lost Space Guard ships…

“No,”insisted the alien, “this ismine.” He clapped his gloved hands together. “Under the auspices of the Ferengi Salvage Code, I’m claiming this wreckage as my own. I don’t think you’re in any position to contest that.”Grek nodded left and right to the other crewmen with him, who each had disruptor pistols holstered at their waists.

But Syjin wasn’t listening. He looked around. The reprisal fleet from five years ago…Could this be one of those vessels?His thoughts raced. The final fate of the Clarion,the Glyhrond,and the scouts had never been determined, and ships sent to search for their remains had come up empty. Syjin recalled the announcement by First Minister Lale, stating that even with the help of Jagul Kell’s cruisers, the four lost starships had not been recovered.

“What do you think you’re going to do, anyway?”Grek swaggered forward, his boots crunching on pieces of bridge console half-covered by the sand. The sound drew Syjin’s attention to something buried there and his eyes widened.

“Even if you dumped that load you just took off me, you still wouldn’t have room for any of this!”The Ferengi grinned.

“I’m gonna take it all!”

“No,” said Syjin, “you’re not.” He flicked his hand and the palm phaser he kept concealed in the suit’s wrist pocket dropped into his grip.