“What did I say?”

“Just sounds. I couldn’t make it out.”

“It’s gone now,” she lied. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

She rolled over to face the bulkhead, her back to him. Vulnerable, perhaps, but effectively terminating the conversation. She heard him grunt and roll over as well, but not before she realized: It was not Tuvok she needed to be careful of, but Sisko. Perhaps Selar as well—that concentrated Vulcan silence could disguise many things—but definitely Sisko. Winning his trust was now more important than ever.

Tenjin V was a mostly humanoid world whose position unfortunately placed it sometimes in Federation space, sometimes within the Zone. Settled during one of the Federation’s more ambitious expansionist phases by colonists from a nearby system whose sun was failing, it had the advantages of being a fortified outpost on the fringes of the Neutral Zone, a trading hub for several nearby worlds, and was a good source of borite and high-grade gadolinium. However, there were also disadvantages.

“When the maps were drawn at the end of the Romulan War, nobody took the orbital apogee into account,” their contact, one of Uhura’s Listeners, informed them when they met her at the rendezvous point, blending in with the crowd in a bustling public square. “For roughly a third of their year, the Tenji are inside the Zone, and for the first few days their in-system traffic is gridlocked with ships heading in one direction or the other.”

“We did notice considerable local activity on the way in,” Tuvok acknowledged.

“In two days we’ll cross into the Zone and the madness begins,” the Listener went on. The Tenji came in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and there was no way for her guests to know if she was a native or a human whose hair had been replaced with iridescent feathers. “You’ll want to be gone before then.”

“We plan to mingle with the outgoing traffic and slip into the Zone that way,” Sisko said.

The Listener thought this over. “Then we haven’t much time to get you the information you need. As if they didn’t already have reason to be jumpy, this time of year makes the Tenji even jumpier. They don’t like either side and, for obvious reasons, they feel more than a little vulnerable out here. But this is their world, and they make the best of it.”

The “obvious reasons” lay beyond the habitat domes of the planet’s enclosed cities. Tenjin’s axis was pointed toward its sun, leaving it a sharply divided world of barren lunar landscape, of pocked and pitted waterless wasteland, one hemisphere constantly fried by a merciless sun, the other facing the frozen void of open space. The Tenji lived entirely in enclosed habitats.

“Like so many huge glass paperweights,” Sisko had remarked as the Albatrossjuddered into her assigned berth in synchronous orbit above the night side.

“Indeed,” Tuvok had concurred.

Inside the habitats, night and day were internally regulated to keep the inhabitants from going mad with constant exposure to either light or dark. Outside the safety of the habitats, there was atmosphere to breathe but, depending on which side of the planet one lived on, the temperature was a constant of either desert heat or arctic cold, and dust storms or storms of needle-sharp ice crystals often obscured the stars. If they were ever attacked and their habitat domes damaged, the Tenji would not survive for long.

Still, within the tenuous safety of their domes, they had developed a rich and varied culture based primarily on trade. As one of the last free ports on the Federation side of the Zone, Tenjin flourished. Over a dozen species speaking as many languages strolled past the landing party amid a maze of kiosks and shops and restaurants exuding enticing sights, sounds, and smells; displaying clothing in more colors than the eye could see and the flashing lights of the latest personal technology; offering samples of everything from Risan massage to domjotgames to freshly made chorizo.The Tenji themselves strutted and preened like so many peacocks.

“Market day in New Orleans meets Tokyo’s Ginza,” Sisko said, inhaling deeply. His educated sense of smell told him that someone somewhere in this place was preparing an eggplant ratatouille, and he intended to find out who and where. “Ever been to New Orleans, Tuvok?”

“I cannot say that I have,” Tuvok replied. He and Selar were enacting their Vulcan personae on Tenjin. As they moved with the crowds, Selar was surreptitiously scanning each passing shopper with a medscanner equipped with an added long-range filter to record every cough or sneeze occurring within this particular dome. Tuvok would as unobtrusively collect atmosphere samples, dust samples, even samples of the soil in the potted plants displayed everywhere, whereas Zetha—

“How do they live?” she blurted out, and Sisko realized she must be practically dizzy with sudden sensory overload. “Where does all this food come from?”

“My sister’s eldest,” Selar told the slightly startled Listener, absolutely deadpan, slipping the still-scanning medscanner into a pocket. “It is her first offworld journey.”

“And so naturally she is curious about everything,” the Listener said, playing along. “There is a narrow greenbelt along the north-to-south border where sun meets void,” she explained, as if Zetha were in fact simply an inquisitive young Vulcan. “The inhabitants long ago decided to reserve those areas for agriculture rather than living space, and to live instead inside these domes. Even so, most of their food needs to be imported from offworld.”

“Thank you,” Zetha said, lowering her eyes much as Sisko had seen Tuvok and Selar do. It was a good performance.

“Your sister’s eldest?” Sisko challenged Selar as the Listener left them and went off to arrange passage on one of the interdome tubes.

Selar quirked an eyebrow at him. “My sister has three offspring, therefore logically one must be the eldest.”

“But you said Zetha was—”

“I did not. I said ‘my sister’s eldest.’ I did not say ‘She is my sister’s eldest.’ That the Listener chose to interpret my statement—”

“I see,” Sisko said, shaking his head in amazement. “So that’s how it’s done!”

McCoy looked up from the screen and rubbed his bleary eyes, which by now were more red than blue. It was nearly dawn. Behind him the computer voice droned on, tirelessly reciting the data on telomerases he had sent it in search of while he scanned every paper on cytokine engineering in the UFP medical database. He’d thought multitasking would speed the process, but the computer’s voice was getting to him.

“Shut the hell up, will you?” he growled. “I’m trying to concentrate here!” The computer, not hearing the proper command, droned on. “Goddamn literal-minded machine. Computer, mute!”

He cursed himself for being old and absent-minded. Forty, fifty, a hundred years ago he’d been up on all the journal entries and known who was working on what, and the rumor mill would have told him who among that elite group of scientists whose talents lay with gene splicing might have gone bad. Now he had to go through reams of data comparing the ever-mutating viruses not only with each other, but with similar archived bugs, looking for a common denominator. While he searched, people were dying. He could hear the agonal final beating of their hearts, hear their labored breathing ratcheting down like so many broken clocks.

“What’s the rush?” he chided himself. “It’s not up to you to find a cure, just the perpetrator. You keep charging ahead, you might miss something important. Slow down!”

In the private lake at the back of his property, he could almost hear the trout taunting him, leaping and splashing with complete impunity, knowing he was too busy to get at them now.

“Motivation…” he muttered. “What’s his motivation? Why would someone create a killer like this? Is he psychotic? Trying to control the galaxy? Distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the natives so he can claim their land for his own? Or is it revenge? On whom, for what? Figure out his game, and you’ll find him…”