Sisko set the ship down where the Sliwoni authorities instructed him to. A party of officials met Albatrossat the designated landing area, scanned a few of the containers, issued travel permits good for three days and maps to the nearest town, then went on their way. Fascinated by their traditional use of archery, Tuvok set about gathering native materials to construct a longbow.

Once again Sisko suggested the landing party work in teams.

“I don’t want to leave the ship unattended. Even sealed up she’s vulnerable, no matter how many reassurances the Sliwoni authorities give us. We should either pair up, or at least Tuvok and I should take turns remaining behind.”

“Agreed,” Tuvok said.

More than a little surprised that this time he’d gotten no argument, Sisko organized his thoughts.

“Right now my main concern is getting that environmental adapter back online. Apparently it’s the one thing Heisenberg overlooked in the refit, and he didn’t leave me a spare. I can gather air and soil samples in the vicinity of the ship while the rest of you go into town. Then tomorrow I can go with Selar and Zetha while you stay with the ship.”

This seemed to sit well with Tuvok, who nodded in agreement, then returned to sanding the riser on the longbow, deep in concentration.

Zetha found him testing the tensile strength of the completed bow.

“Must I go with you this time?” she asked quietly.

Tuvok unstrung the bow and considered. She had been inordinately calm and quick to react when the Quirinians were on board. Had the event taken more of a toll on her than was evident?

“Do you wish to remain here?”

Still unable to ask directly for anything, she shrugged.

“Selar and I will be employing our Vulcan cover,” Tuvok said. “There is no necessity for you to accompany us. You may remain here with Lieutenant Sisko if you wish.”

“I’ll speak to him,” she said, and was gone.

Sisko was up to his elbows in machine parts. Assuming he was alone, he was cursing in all the languages he knew.

“Not going well, is it?” Zetha asked over his shoulder.

She was sitting cross-legged in the doorway, looking like nothing so much as a mischievous elf. That was another thing about her that got under his skin. She was never outright disrespectful, but she didn’t go out of her way to be anything more than civil, either. Sisko found himself glowering at her. “Thought I told you to stay out of the engine room?”

“I’m not in the engine room,” she pointed out. “I’m sitting on the floor of the gangway looking into the engine room.”

“It’s not a ‘floor,’ it’s a deck,” Sisko said crossly, then realized how petty he sounded.

“Something’s wrong with that thing,” Zetha observed. “You’ve been fussing with it for days. Is it dangerous?”

“Not at the moment,” Sisko said, turning his back on her, tinkering. “But it’s failing. If it fails altogether while we’re in space, it could affect the air we breathe.”

“Enough to kill us?”

“Probably not.”

“But it might?”

She’s a kid,Sisko reminded himself. She’s concerned about her welfare, that’s all.He gave her his complete attention.

“Remote possibility. If I can’t fix the adapter. Which I can. Or jury-rig a bypass. Or, worst case scenario, go into town and see if the Sliwoni have something similar I can trade for.”

“Is that likely?”

Sisko returned to his tinkering. “According to Starfleet records, they trade with humans. Their tech is a little behind ours and, given the age of some of Albatross’s original components, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“So they’d use it in their offworld ships?”

Sisko sighed. Even Jake didn’t ask so many questions when he knew his dad was busy.

“It’s a universal adapter. Could be used in a transport vehicle, a hovercraft, anything motorized.”

“What does it look like?” Zetha asked.

Sisko gave her an odd look and pulled the adapter out of the manifold, holding it up and motioning her to cross the invisible line that separated the engine room from the gangway. “Like this. Composite polymer single-walled carbon nanotube. Semi-conductor nanowires. Titanium casing. Only without the points worn through here and here. That help you any?”

She took it from him, hefting it in her hand and examining it from all sides before giving it back, wiping her hand on her trousers.

“It might,” she said cryptically.

“Mind if I go back to work now?” Sisko asked.

Zetha shrugged and disappeared back the way she’d come.

Sliwon had an extensive public transit system. One merely had to stand at designated positions along any of its vast network of highways in order to be retrieved by a pneumobus that joined the endless trucking convoys bringing produce to and from its multitude of small communal cities strung along the road system like beads on a necklace.

There was no currency, only barter, one commune’s grain traded for another’s sugar beets for another’s wild fowl for another’s tubers, all on an endless convoy of hover-vehicles whose hydrogen-powered engines only slightly disturbed the otherwise tranquil air of a truly beautiful climate.

Selar’s tricorder was active from the moment she and Tuvok climbed aboard the bus; the hum of the engines and the chatter of Sliwoni going to market masked its sounds. She shook her head imperceptibly when Tuvok raised an inquiring eyebrow. No sign of unusual illness so far. She continued scanning as they strolled through the marketplace.

“Nothing,” she reported. “The occasional cold virus, a few cases of eczema, and the sausage vendor has a precancerous condition.”

Tuvok read what she was thinking. “You will not mention this to him, of course.”

Selar gave him a studied look. “Not directly. But I see no harm in recommending he take antioxidants.”

They had not gone far before they heard the disturbance. Wending their way among the fish and poultry stalls and past the herb sellers, they rounded a corner to find an angry knot of Sliwoni, most of them chatting into the headsets affixed as if permanently to the left sides of their faces, but also gathered around to listen to a sidewalk orator.

“…and it is because we are too open a society that these things happen!” he was shouting hoarsely. “We let anyone and everyone land here, and look what it gets us! This disease didn’t come from one of us. It came from outside!”

Murmurs of both agreement and disagreement greeted him from the crowd. Selar’s tricorder was busy. Her eyebrows told Tuvok more than anything she might have said.

“Affirmative,” she said anyway. “Perhaps a dozen individuals in the crowd, including the speaker, are running a low-grade fever.” She closed the tricorder. “Superficial scan suggests an organism bearing the Catalyst signature, but without specimens—”

“I submit this is neither the time nor the place to gather specimens,” Tuvok suggested, taking her arm in an uncharacteristic gesture and moving toward an opening in the crowd through which to return the way they had come.

“Those two!” the orator shouted, pointing directly at them. “Do we know who they are? Do we know where they came from? Do we know the documents they carry are legitimate?” Some of the crowd were turning to stare at the Vulcans now, not quite menacingly, but with purpose. “We all know Romulans have been guilty of biological warfare in the past. How do we know that’s not the case again?”

His voice faded as the Vulcans retreated down yet another busy market street where the crowd swallowed them up temporarily, out of reach of the restless mob.

“I believe we have gathered enough evidence,” Tuvok said. “The sooner we return to the ship—”

“Evidence that the disease is here, but no indication of how it got here,” Selar said with a trace of stubbornness. “We need to ascertain the source, the delivery system. Perhaps another ‘stranger’ such as the one you found on Quirinus. Further, Admiral Uhura’s instructions—”