Eventually, they released him. By that time, most of the other Cardassians in the pursuit group were gone anyway, summoned away by their commander. Dukat,Darrah told himself. It was him.The gul appeared to have problems of his own, nursing his own fury at being denied the Starfleet women. Dukat ignored Darrah and let his junior officers supervise the interrogation. He could feel the disdain oozing from the Cardassian. He didn’t even recognize me. I was just another Bajoran, just another impediment.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked Myda.

He glanced up, coming back to the present. “I’m okay.” Darrah had returned to the precinct to find the usual controlled chaos of the place strangely absent. The station house was almost empty, with desks left untidy and monitors still ticking over. “Where is everyone?”

“Gone,” she said wearily. “We had to activate every officer in the city. You saw it on the streets. It’s out of control.”

Darrah nodded grimly. Korto was slipping into lawlessness and anarchy. The roads were choked with terrified people trying to flee, angry people looking for a fight, and criminals using the cover of unrest to loot and pillage. “You contacted the command precinct in Ashalla?” She nodded. “You told them what’s happening here?”

“I sent a priority alert,” she explained, sitting down on the desk next to him. “Asked for emergency support units. But they told me there was no one to send.” Myda sighed.

“This is happening all over Bajor, sir. We’re on our own.”

“Kosst,”Darrah swore quietly. “How are we supposed to keep this together?”

“It gets worse,” said the woman. “Our people are dropping off the grid. No answer on comms.”

Darrah sagged in the chair and listened to the odd quiet of the precinct house, the faint clicks and beeps of the unattended computers. A law officer not responding to signals from home base was usually a sign that they were incapacitated, or worse—but he had a creeping feeling that a lot of the men going dark were abandoning their posts. Can I blame them? If you knew how widespread this was, what man wouldn’t want to look to the safety of his own instead of protecting strangers?A bleak smile touched his lips in a moment of self-recognition.

He looked at the woman. “Why are you still here, Myda?”

She understood the question. “My family will be okay, sir. I have a job to do.”

Darrah let out a bleak chuckle. “I used to think that.” He waved her away. “Go on, get going. Make sure they’re safe.”

Myda shook her head. “I won’t. I’ll make them safe by keeping a lid on this. Out there I’m just one more person. In here, I can make a difference.”

Darrah got to his feet. “For the sake of the Prophets, I hope so.”

She followed him to the dispatch console. “It’s a pity you didn’t get to the port in time to stop those fugitives,” said Myda. “Maybe they had something to do with all this.”

“Maybe,” he said flatly. On some level, he was still trying to assimilate what the women had told him. He grimaced as he realized he didn’t even know their names. The lawman took the tricorder from his belt and studied the data string the operative had entered there. The Cardassian who had held him hadn’t recognized what it represented.

“You have something there, sir?” asked Myda.

“Damned if I know,” he admitted. Something else was bothering him, along with the hundreds of other issues pressing into his thoughts: How had the Cardassians known that they would be at the port, at that hangar?He felt a cold sensation creep through his gut. Is that why they let me go? Because Dukat or one of the others is monitoring the precinct? That must be it…

“Mace!” They both turned toward the sound of his name, and the lawman’s face clouded as he recognized a familiar figure scrambling over the duty officer’s desk. He was dragging a heavy pack with him.

“Syjin? What are you doing back here?”

The pilot came over, his usual breezy manner gone. “Never mind that,” he snapped. “I have to talk to you, right now.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Bajor’s falling apart all around us,” Myda retorted. “And this area is off-limits to civilians.”

Darrah waved her away. “It’s okay, Myda.” He shot Syjin a look. “You said you were getting out. It’s a mistake coming back to Bajor. People are taking any ship they can find to get offworld.”

“I didn’t land at the port,” the pilot explained, speaking rapidly. “My bird is still in low orbit. I beamed down.” He held up the pack. “You need to see this, Mace, and right now.” Syjin shot Myda a look. “In private, I’d say.”

Darrah frowned and beckoned his friend toward his office. “In here, then.”

Syjin closed the door and dropped the bag on his desk. “Take a look.”

Inside was a battered cylindrical data module, the kind the Space Guard fitted as a redundant memory core aboard their ships. Darrah leaned in and read the identity plate fused to the dense metal. One word made his breath catch in his throat. “Clarion?That was the ship—”

The pilot nodded. “The ship that Lonnic Tomo was aboard. One of the lost reprisal fleet.”

The lawman ran his hands over the surface. It was undamaged. He started looking for output ports. “Where did you find this?”

“The Ajir system, a clump of dead planets off the main trade lanes. Look, that’s not important. What is important is that this thing is still in one piece. Whatever happened to the Clarionand the rest of those ships, it’s in here.” He tapped it with a finger. “I tried to connect it up to my bird’s mainframe, but I couldn’t get into the logs. I need a more powerful machine and someone with the clearance to get access…” He looked at Darrah and trailed off.

“And you figured a police officer would be just right?” Darrah studied the unit. The Starfleet woman’s words echoed again. You already know the answer.He thought about the attack, about Lonnic and the ships that had never come home. “The truth is in here,” he breathed. “Fire’s sake, Syjin. Do you understand what you’ve found?”

He shook his head. “Not really, Mace. That’s why I brought it to you, because you’re smarter than me. You always know the right thing to do.”

Darrah reached for a connector cable and then halted. “If the Cardassians are monitoring the precinct’s datastreams, they’ll know the moment I hook this up.”

“What do they have to do with this?” Syjin asked.

Darrah ignored the question and studied the device for a long moment; then he got to his feet and put it back in the pack. “Come on. We can’t do this here. We have to use an isolated system, one with no connection to the planetary data network.”

“Where are we going to find something like that?”

Darrah grabbed his coat and weapon. “I know where.”

The image was blurred slightly by the motion of movement in the second it was captured, but light-intensification subroutines built into the viewscreen had cleaned up the sillhouette enough for any observer to be certain of what they were seeing. “A Janad-class tank,” said Nechayev. “All it was missing was a crew and the will to use it.”

Across the Gettysburg’s briefing room, at the far end of the conference table, the young lieutenant with the serious expression gave a low gasp. “Oy. They’re loaded for bear.”

The Vulcan woman to Nechayev’s right nodded. “An accurate estimation, Lieutenant Gold, if overly colloquial.” She glanced at Nechayev. “You are certain that the vehicles were ready for deployment?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind, Commander. And let’s not forget, my report covers only one enclave location. There’s a dozen on Bajor, each potentially concealing similar weapons stores.” She paused and winced, rubbing her eyes.

Captain Jameson, who had remained largely silent during her debriefing, leaned in. “Lieutenant, are you all right?”