A flashing amber light on the companel signaled that her subspace signal wasn’t getting through. Carefully, she repeated the signal initiation procedure, trying once again to establish contact with Taulin Cyl’s office.

Again, nothing. Muttering one of Curzon’s preferred Klingon curses under her breath, Dax made two more fruitless attempts. After the fifth try got her through to the Defense Ministry’s general reception area—netting her a two-minute conversation with a junior information officer, who then transferred her to an even more junior-looking adjutant or assistant instead of to the evidently extremely busy General Cyl—she decided that she was getting precisely nowhere. Cyl evidently had his hands full, no doubt at least in part because of the Trill Senate’s upcoming public hearings into the parasite affair.

Rising from her chair, she walked straight back to the Rio Grande’s aft compartment. When the hatch hissed open before her, she found Julian staring into the display at the computer station, studying a quickly scrolling text with an intensity that made her wonder if he even remembered that he was aboard a space vessel flying at many multiples of light speed—or that the rest of the universe even existed.

Or thatI exist,she thought, smiling to herself. But wasn’t that single-mindedness, that all-encompassing enthusiasm for knowledge one of the qualities that drew her to him?

“Hi, Julian,” she said gently as she walked up behind his chair and placed a hand on its back. She was beginning to feel guilty about having driven him into solitude, though he hadn’t seemed to mind much at the time. “Lieutenant Dax to Doctor Bashir,” she added several beats after he failed to respond to her.

It took him another moment or two to react to her presence. When he paused the display and turned to face her, she wondered if he was going to ask if they had arrived at Trill yet.

Instead he smiled up at her and took her hand. His hands always felt warmer than any Trill’s, and the sensation was almost electric. “Sorry. I thought I’d get started on a little research.”

She gently squeezed his hand and returned his smile, and then he went back to his task. For Julian, doing “a little quick research” was often like having “a short conversation” with Morn while drinking at Quark’s—in other words, it would most likely become an all-encompassing, completely attention-devouring endeavor. Over his shoulder, she could see odd images and snippets of text from the database he was so quickly scrolling through. Her brow furrowed briefly in puzzlement.

“When did you become so interested in exoarchaeology?”

Julian paused the display once more on a vaguely familiar-looking image. “Right after you made that rather odd discovery on Minos Korva.”

She suddenly remembered that she hadn’t given a thought to the ceramic shard since just after she’d picked it up from the cave floor. A momentary panic gripped her; she withdrew her hand from his and patted her uniform jacket in a futile search for the item.

Then she looked back at Julian, who was grinning and holding up the small pottery fragment. He gently placed it into her hand.

Her face reddened as she accepted it. She felt foolish for having forgotten that she’d given it to him. “Thanks for taking charge of this, Julian.”

“I was more than happy to. You seemed to have a lot of other things on your mind at the time.”

Dax decided to head off that particular conversational thread by discussing the artifact. “So, has your research told you anything important about this thing so far?”

“It’s hard to say. The first thing I determined was that it’s about twelve thousand years old. It didn’t appear to be Bajoran, so I thought it was doubtful that Shakaar left it in those caves. There’s absolutely no possibility that the piece is native to Minos Korva, and it seems rather unlikely that any of the other humanoid hosts taken by the parasites would have carried any such thing prior to their being attacked. So I started to wonder if the fragment might have had some significance to the parasites themselves. Then my tricorder detected this.” He keyed a new image onto his screen, which Dax recognized as a layered molecular scan, presumably of the fragment, with its different constituent materials broken out by color. The dark outer glaze was represented in reds and purples; the inner ceramics by a bright blue.

In between was a small patch of green lines. A glyph?

Julian isolated the image and enlarged it. It looked like no language Ezri had ever seen before.

“From this, I’ve been able to determine that this object came from the planet Kurl.”

“Kurl. That’s the site of a long-dead civilization, isn’t it?”

Julian nodded. “It is. What little we know of it is mostly by way of artifacts like that one, but our best guess has been that the Kurlan civilization was at least tens of thousands of years old before it died out, five thousand years ago. And the planet is located hundreds of light-years from Minos Korva, well outside Federation territory. However this fragment ended up in that cave, it’s gotten itself quite a long way from home.”

Dax smiled, understanding his fascination. “Sounds like quite a mystery.”

“A very nearly irresistible one.” Julian returned her smile with a mischievous grin. “In fact, I can think of only one other thing I’d rather do to pass the time until we reach Trill.”

As much as she enjoyed their infrequent intimate time together, Dax had to admit that not even Emony had ever whiled away three entire days doing that.

“Down, boy,” she said with a grin as she examined the ancient and gracefully curved shard closely. Despite its great age, the fragment retained a smooth glaze. She wondered how anyone, even someone with a mind as brilliant as Julian’s, could satisfactorily explain the thing. “I know how much you love puzzles, Julian. But I’m afraid you don’t have very much to go on here.”

He shrugged. “Neither did the Trill paleontologists who worked out the carnivorous habits of the extinct Eomreker.All they had to guide them was a fossilized rear claw and a single incisor tooth. But I’m quite a determined fellow, and I have three whole days to tease out some answers.”

She looked once again into his brown, knowledge-hungry eyes and marveled at how easily he could transform himself from bantering adolescent to determined problem solver. It struck her then that it was at times like this that he was most attractive.

“I just had a thought,” she said, taking his hand and squeezing it gently. “We dohave three days. There’s no need to wear yourself out.” She grinned. “Studying, I mean.”

Later, Dax watched Julian as he dozed beside her on the narrow bunk. His breathing made a gentle, repetitive susurrus, and his olive-tinted features looked slack and childlike.

Rolling onto her back, she stared up at the gray curvature of the ceiling molding, wishing she could feel half as relaxed as Julian obviously did.

After another few minutes, she rose quietly, gathering the pieces of her uniform as she withdrew from the sleeping compartment. Except for her boots, she was dressed by the time she reached the cockpit. All the instruments showed nominal; the Rio Granderemained on its heading for Trill, which now lay somewhat less than three days away. Leaning back in the pilot’s seat, she suddenly realized that she was clutching the ceramic fragment tightly in her left hand; she had evidently grabbed it instead of her boots.

She set the fragment down on the panel and activated the communications system, hoping to reach General Cyl. Her luck was no better this time than on her first attempt shortly after leaving Minos Korva.

Rather than continue figuratively beating her head against the bulkhead, she entered another series of commands into the companel. A few moments later the rounded, stylized symbol of one of Trill’s civilian newsnets appeared on her screen.