Grek’s faceplate fogged as he shouted. “You’re pulling a gun on me? What? After all we’ve been through together?”He shook his head ruefully. “Oh, Syjin. And I said such nice things about you to the boys here, didn’t I?”

The heads of the other two crewmen bobbed in agreement, hands hovering over their holsters.

“Syjin, I said, Syjin almost has the lobes to be a Ferengi, I said! As close to one of us as a Bajoran could get! And this is what comes in return?”He sighed theatrically. “I thought we were friends!”

The statement brought a sneer to the Bajoran’s lips. “What’s the twenty-first Rule of Acquisition?”

“Never place friendship above profit,”said one of the other Ferengi, with rote diction.

“All right, not friends, then, but fellow businessmen,”Grek admitted. “Look, put down the weapon. There’s enough here for everyone.”

“I only want one thing,” Syjin replied, “and you’re standing on it.”

Grek jerked back in shock and glanced down. Gingerly, he dragged a cylindrical object out of the sand. “What is this? Looks like a memory core…”

“Log recorder,” said Syjin. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about, but the pilot had earned the money to buy his own ship by working the recovery docks on Andros, and he knew a flight recorder when he saw one. Those days still came back to him on dark, lonely nights, scrapping dead ships and stripping them for parts. “Give it to me.”

“Give?”Grek said the word like a curse. “And what doI get?”

“I won’t put a hole in your e-suit.”

“Oh. Well. That’s a fair trade.”The Ferengi tossed the device toward him and it sailed slowly to land at his feet.

Syjin gathered it up with his free hand and backed away.

“Look”—Grek took a step toward him— “let’s not let this minor difference of opinion sour things between us, eh? I’ve got a line on a consignment of liveporwiggie s coming into the sector next month, and you know they’re good eating.”

The Bajoran shook his head. “I think we’re done, you and I. And if there’s an iota of empathy in you, Grek, you’ll light out of here and leave the dead to rest.”

The Ferengi snorted. “Yeah, sure. I’ll get right on that.”The other crewmen laughed nasally.

For a moment, Syjin thought about shooting Grek anyway, but what good would it have done him? He was only one man, and Grek had a crew of ten on his scow. He couldn’t stop them from looting the crash site, but the recorder—that would be important. Without another word, he tapped the recall key on his glove and the transporter took hold of him.

Aboard his ship, Syjin secured the memory core and programmed a speed course for Bajor.

The flames had taken hold by the time Proka got there. Emergency flyers were hovering around the roof of the night market temple, shooting puffs of fire retardants into the plume of black smoke, but they were barely keeping the inferno contained. He pushed through the people flooding outside over the steps—merchants and civilians, women and men, monks and ranjens. They were dirty with soot and were coughing. Green-uniformed medical techs moved among them with breather cylinders and hypo-sprays.

He grabbed the arm of a passing constable. “Casualties?”

“Eight dead,” she replied. “There’s a dozen or so more unaccounted for.”

Proka swore under his breath. “You were here? You saw what happened?”

The woman nodded gravely. Her face was pallid beneath the patina of smoke dirt on her cheeks. “My shift just finished and I was coming up to the temple for the dawn mass…” She stifled a cough and spat out a blob of black spittle. “They get a lot of folks here for that.” Behind them, the burning building gave a cracking thud, and a jet of orange fire shot out into the sky as something collapsed inside.

“They only just finished rebuilding this place…” Proka said to himself.

The constable nodded. “I was coming up the street and I heard shouting. There were a bunch of people calling out, making noise. I picked up the pace, and when I got there I saw what the fuss was all about. There were Oralians, three of them in those funny robes they wear.”

“What were they doing?”

“Shouting out slogans, chanting. They were deliberately goading the people coming to worship, sir. Disrespecting the Prophets.”

Proka glared at the burning church and the injured people streaming away from it. “How did that turn into this?” He stabbed a finger at the building.

“Firebombs,” said the woman. “Just as I thought someone was going to start trading punches, they all pulled out these little glass balls and threw them.” She mimed a fireball with her hands. “I don’t know what they had in them. They went up like lightning. Everyone panicked and broke. I got pinned in the crowd and the temple went up like tinder.”

“What happened to the Oralians?” he demanded.

She led him toward an alley between some of the shuttered market stalls. “They went down there.” The constable gestured around. “You see? There’s no security monitor coverage in this area. They must have known that.”

Proka shone a torch down the alley. It was a dead end, terminating in a sheer wall with no other means of exit.

“They kept yelling about Bajor,” she said. “They said that the Prophets were phantoms, that Oralius was the only true way.”

Shouting drew the attention of the law officers. A man with ash all over his clothes was bellowing at the top of his voice. “You! You there!” he screamed. “How could you let this happen? Those Oralian freaks, they did this! Aren’t you going to do something? Round them up!” A chorus of angry agreement joined him from several of the other people. “Make them pay for this!”

“We’re going to do all we can—” Proka began, but no one was listening. A mob was forming right in front of him, jeering for rough justice.

Ico studied the active map of Bajor and considered the implementation of the endgame. Assets that she had spent the last decade cultivating and positioning were being called into action all across the world, triggered like an avalanche started by a handful of pebbles. In a small way, she had been loath to move to the active phase of the destabilization. The intricate construct of influence and subterfuge she had made was one of her finest pieces of work; she sat back and admired it in the same way one might consider a delicate piece of glass sculpture, so elegant but at the same time so fragile. It was music written and ready to be played, a great piece of theater waiting for one single shattering performance.

That was part of what thrilled Rhan so much about the work: the danger inherent in it, the challenge of keeping so many shifting alliances on the field of play, the insight and totality of dedication required to bring a world to the brink of collapse.

She recalled the words of a Terran—perhaps one of their philosophers or a strategist, she couldn’t recall which—who had said that all civilizations existed on the brink of barbarism, only a few days away from brutality and violence. Cardassia Prime had balanced on that knife edge for so long it had become a way of life for them, but fat and complacent Bajor knew nothing of that; it amused Ico to think that her work had taken these aliens to the same place. And now we’ll see how the play unfolds. The set is dressed, the actors in their roles. The curtain rises.

She examined the map. In Relliketh, a woman whose gambling debts made her vulnerable had closed a sensor window over the Bajoran polar ice cap; a priest in Jo’Kala was taking poison rather than have the identity of his lover revealed to the world; churches were on fire in Hathon, Ashalla, and Korto; the minister for Qui’al was turning a blind eye to troop movements outside his city; unmarked containers were being unloaded from a Son’a transport ship in Tempasa; a Militia commander in Janir had come home to find his wife in the arms of another man.