In answer to Tal’s question, he said: “We wait.”

“For what?” Tal asked incisively.

He got no answer.

On Okinawa’s bridge, Captain Leyton had just asked his helmsman for an ETA at Renaga.

“Approximately 2.5 hours, sir,” the helm reported not a little nervously. “Barring interception by a Romulan patrol.”

“They won’t intercept us, Ensign,” Leyton said confidently. “Ambassador Dax assures me they want us to get there.”

This earned him puzzled looks from some of the bridge crew. Leyton was not about to resolve their puzzlement; he wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing on this mission himself. Beside him, Curzon Dax was as opaque as stone.

Unbeknownst to Uhura, Dax had been following as much of Albatross’s progress as he could by way of his special diplomatic access to intelligence matters. When the C-in-C informed him there was reason to believe a Romulan warbird was heading toward Renaga, reason or reasons unknown, but in the first overt violation of the Zone in a very, very long time, Curzon’s logical conclusion was that it had something to do with Albatross.

Curzon knew that Tuvok had reported there were Romulans on Renaga sending transmissions back to the homeworld. Once he was given access to the decoded transmissions, he could extrapolate from their very existence and the excitement they had generated at Starfleet Command that the Romulans were interested in something other than crop yields and weather reports on this backward little world. Curzon knew, as perhaps not everyone on Okinawadid, that by the time they arrived at Renaga, they would find themselves nose to nose with a decloaking Romulan warbird.

Back on Earth, Admiral Uhura was having words with the C-in-C.

“Never mind how I found out Okinawawas en route to Renaga. I want you to tell me why. Sir.”

She didn’t expect anything but the usual obfuscative need-to-know speech. She was floored when the C-in-C told her there was reason to believe a Romulan warbird was also moving toward Renaga. Had someone else fielded that while she was out of commission last night? If so, why hadn’t she been informed?

“Has Captain Leyton been briefed on the presence of my away team?” she wanted to know, grateful it was Okinawa,with Curzon on board, that was on its way. But on its way to do what? “I don’t want them getting caught in the crossfire.”

Assured that Captain Leyton and Ambassador Dax knew as much as anybody did about the situation, Uhura signed off, not a little perturbed. If there was a warbird about, it was essential to have a starship there for balance, but she’d rather Albatrosshad been well away before that. Albatrosshad not responded to her hails for over an hour now. It could mean nothing. It could mean a great deal. There was nothing to do but wait.

“There is a story about a river,” the woman who had thrown the knife said, her voice echoing off the walls of the cave. She stood in the long narrow passage that led perhaps a thousand meters downward from the entrance to the cave, her hands limp at her sides. Her eyes were glazed and she wore a fixed and eerie smile. Selar, surreptitiously running her medscanner, noted the presence of strong hallucinogens in her bloodstream.

“The river fed all the farms in the valley where it ran, and the people in the valley were content,” the woman said dreamily. “But a greedy man bought the land high in the mountains where the river rose as a small spring between the rocks. And the man dammed up the river and diverted it so that only his farm benefited from it.”

“It’s an interesting story, ma’am,” Sisko said cautiously. He’d made note that, having thrown the one knife in her possession, really more of a meat cleaver, with remarkable accuracy, she was otherwise unarmed. “How does it end?”

“One would think,” the woman said, “the way such stories usually go, that the other farmers would rise up against the greedy man and destroy the dam, or kill him so they could have their water again, but no. Instead, it was the river itself, meaning his own greed, that rose up in time of flood and drowned him.”

“A parable,” Sisko said, still humoring her. “Who are you?”

“I am the river, of course,” she replied, her manic smile widening. “I am also Boralesh, widow of the man Cinchona, who was killed by greed. A vision led me here. When he rose from my bed tonight, I took the dreaming drugs, and they led me here.

“No one man can control the river. No one man can claim the riches of our world for strangers. We do not want you here. You must leave.”

“That’s our intention, ma’am,” Sisko said. “But the vaccine your husband spoke about—”

“You mean the potions he was always concocting in my kitchen?” Boralesh’s voice was laced with sarcasm. “None of them ever improved upon what the gods have already given us. Hiloponis our mothersoil, our life’s blood. It cannot be made better. And it will not be taken away from us.”

“But you wouldn’t mind if we took one of—Cinchona, did you say?—one of the potions with us?”

The woman shrugged. “These things are nothing to me.” Something seemed to penetrate her drug-induced fog, and she frowned. “The children…I must not leave them alone for long….”

With that she drifted out of the cave, and they let her go.

“We should follow her,” Sisko said after she had gone. His anxiety was not feigned now. “If Thamnos was right, if we’re all infected, we do need to get ahold of whatever it was he was working on, however crude.”

“I submit we have more urgent things to deal with now, Lieutenant,” Tuvok said tautly, preparing to take the case full of datachips with them, indicating the dead Thamnos crumpled against one wall. “Speed is of the essence. If we are discovered here…”

“Agreed,” Sisko said. He was already disengaging the Romulan transmitter, and selecting which Rigelian artifacts he would take with him. The more evidence they had of the connection between Thamnos and the Romulans, the better. “But it might not hurt to see what Boralesh has in her kitchen.”

“I doubt it is anything more than what we have found here,” Selar suggested, gathering several jars of hiloponjust in case. “And if the vaccine is indicative of its ‘creator,’ it may be as ineffectual as the raw materials it is derived from. Further, something Zetha and I were working on just before we came here…”

It wasn’t as if the others had forgotten Zetha, but in the wake of Thamnos’s bizarre revelations, the suddenness of his death, and the eerie apparition that was Boralesh, their focus had been elsewhere. At the mention of her name, Zetha whimpered quietly. All eyes turned to her, and those eyes held questions.

She had sunk to the floor in the half-dark, and huddled there as if she didn’t know what else to do. She looked up at Tuvok, tears streaming down her face.

“When you asked if I was Tal Shiar, I told you no. It was the truth. They took me off the streets, threatened to kill Godmother if I didn’t go with them. I was trained, but I never took the oath. All ghilikhave to take the oath before they’re sent on their mission. I had made up my mind I would not take the oath, but I could find no means to escape. If Cretak hadn’t taken me away from them, they would have had to kill me.”

Tuvok was solemn. “Is this, now, the entire truth?”

“Yes!”

“You might have told us this from the beginning.”

“Would you have trusted me if I had? I wanted—I needed you to trust me. The only way I could think of was to tell you only part of the truth.”

Concerned with getting back to the ship before the sun rose, Tuvok said: “We will speak further on this later.”

“No,” Zetha whimpered. “There can be no ‘later.’ I have killed all of you. Leave me here! Seal up the cave when you go. Leave me with this…murderer, this eater of souls! I will not be the cause of any more death!”