“I’m beginning to,” Jarquin said grumpily, so absorbed in Leval’s explanation that he didn’t notice the human had slipped quietly away.

“I will be honest with you,” Tuvok was saying. “I am not good at deception. It doesn’t sit well with me. But if my partner cuts me off without funding, I would lose everything. I thought by deceiving you, I could keep you clear of it. Now you’ve asked too many questions, and you’re implicated along with me. If anyone from the homeworld comes asking questions…”

“We never had this conversation!” Jarquin said abruptly. “I am here only to examine your cargo to make sure you’re not running arms or any other illicit goods.”

He waved an imperious hand toward the container behind Leval, who yawned once more and, in a very leisurely gesture, began keying in the code to open it.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sisko demanded, seeing Zetha in his chair at the controls. Selar’s voice in his ear, as much as his inability to listen to much more of “Leval’s” explanation with a straight face, had led him back here with all due alacrity.

“Your job, if I had the skills!” the girl snapped, leaping out of the chair. “Selar’s signaling. What do we do now?”

“You get out of my way and let me do my job,” Sisko said, locking onto Selar’s signal. He supposed he could keep her in the pattern buffer until the Quirinians left, a risky move if they stayed too long, and what if they wanted to talk to her? “Then you go back to the living quarters and figure out another diversion in case our guests go looking for your ‘aunt.’ ”

There was blood on Selar’s hazmat suit, and other stains Sisko didn’t dare examine too closely. Even after she stepped out of the decon beam he hesitated before taking the sample case from her, as if the exterior might somehow still be contaminated, stashing it under the control console where he hoped Jarquin wouldn’t notice it.

“I would have signaled sooner, had the patrols not been in the vicinity,” Selar explained as she disposed of the suit. Something in Sisko’s manner cautioned her to speak softly. “Is something wrong?”

He explained. “…and either I’m going to have to conceal you somewhere until they’re gone or, ideally, figure out a way to get you back to the living quarters without their seeing you. And since there’s only one gangway leading the length of the ship—”

Selar gestured toward the transporter.

“I’m not sure this transporter is safe for intraship beaming,” Sisko objected, reading her mind.

Selar retrieved her sample case and Tuvok’s before stepping back onto the pad. “We are about to find out, Lieutenant.”

Citizen Jarquin was bored. There were only so many cases of silk one could examine. Now it was he who was yawning as he gestured to Leval to reseal the third of the three containers he had asked to examine.

“Your cooperation is appreciated,” he told Leval. “And your rather creative approach to accounting is safe with me.”

Gesturing to his guards, he headed for the gangway, only to find his way obstructed by Zetha. The girl was on her knees picking up glass shards one by one. Apparently absorbed in her task, she didn’t look up until she realized one piece was directly under Citizen Jarquin’s boot.

“Give it up, girl. It’s probably beyond salvaging,” he suggested not unkindly.

“My aunt is going to kill me!” Zetha muttered. “It was her favorite.”

“Has your aunt truly slept through all this uproar?” Jarquin wondered, looking down at the girl with a smile. Skinny little thing, he thought, but those eyes—!

As if in answer to his question, the door to the sleeping quarters opened partway, and a tousled-looking Selar appeared, wearing a sleeping robe of the most luxurious Tholian silk drawn directly from their inventory. The neckline was cut invitingly low, and she held it halfway closed with one enervated hand.

“Citizen Jarquin? What are you doing here?” she asked with a bewildered smile, as if she might be dreaming and he, realizing at last that this really was beyond the bounds of propriety, merely nodded and hurried toward the transporter pads, his guards in tow. If he heard Selar’s reaction to the discovery that her “niece” had broken her favorite vase, he paid it no mind. Romulans, after all, were noted for their tempers. Everything was as it should be.

Albatrosswas light-years out of Quirinian space before Sisko trusted himself to laugh out loud. “I’m beginning to think that, all your rationalizations notwithstanding, Vulcans are more adept at lying than humans! I heard you back there. You lie like a rug!”

His laughter masked the sense of futility they all felt. The stains on Selar’s clothing were the closest Sisko had come to the reality of this thing so far, and he wondered if there was any point in going on, deeper and deeper into the Zone, increasing the odds of being challenged by friend or foe. Didn’t they have enough evidence by now to connect this disease to the Romulans? And so what if they did, if there was no cure?

He couldn’t get the thought of all those dead out of his mind, and naturally any such threat turned his thoughts toward Jake and Jennifer. The concept of anything so awful even touching his family filled him with such despair he wanted to hit something. So he joked instead.

Tuvok, perhaps sensing his gloom, managed to look properly indignant.

“ ‘Lying’, Mr. Sisko? Having done as much research as is possible into Romulan tax structures, given the silence between us, I assure you that the fictional merchant Leval certainly could encounter precisely such adversities in his effort to support himself and his family.”

“Oh, so you’re writing fiction now! Maybe you should submit it to a publisher. Or write a holodrama. You and Zetha scuffling with that honor blade was one of the best performances I’ve seen in my life. Come to think of it, Selar did a damn fine job of looking like she’d just rolled out of bed, too. I’m surrounded by talent! Which reminds me…”

He went looking for Zetha, who was as usual in the lab assisting Selar. He didn’t say anything, merely stood there with his hands out, palms upward.

Zetha, gauging his mood, fished in a pocket and handed him the master control device without a word. Selar, restored to her prim and proper self, was testing monocyte chemotactic peptide recruitment in the specimens gathered on Quirinus, but found time to watch what was going on.

“I’m not going to ask you where you learned to pick pockets like that,” Sisko said. “I’d probably only embarrass myself for letting you get away with it.” He sighed; his features softened. “But I did want to thank you. You saved our lives.”

Zetha shrugged. “My own primarily. If Citizen Jarquin had seen through our ruse, it would have meant my life as much as yours.”

Sisko cleared his throat, started to say something, wondered what it was. Compliments rolled off her as readily as criticism. Was there any way to get through her shields? To his surprise, she greeted him with one of her rare smiles.

“Does this mean I’m allowed to watch the stars on the forward screen without your permission?”

His eyes narrowed. “All right. But keep your hands out of my pockets!”

“I should thank you as well,” Selar said quietly when Sisko was gone. Zetha gave her a puzzled look. “For destroying the vase.”

“I thought you’d be angry.”

“It was aesthetically pleasing,” Selar said ruefully. “However, it was foolish of me to acquire any object which might connect us with Tenjin.”

Zetha hadn’t thought of that. They’d been following an erratic course through the Zone for just that reason, to make it difficult for anyone who might be tracking them to determine their point of origin or where they’d been before.