Outside the cell, one of the guards growled and spat on the floor. “I don’t believe that, Commander,” Zweller said. “And I don’t think you do either.”

“I sense no such duplicity among these people, Will,” Troi said. “They follow such a strict code of warrior ethics that I don’t think they have the capacity to mount and maintain a deception of that sort.” She paused to look at one of the guards who stood in the corridor, and a look of surprise lit up her face before she spoke again. “In fact, Grelun’s warriors seem every bit as bound by honor as Klingons.”

Riker appeared to mull the facts over for a moment, then sighed and looked at Zweller. “All right. Maybe we ought to take this story at face value. When did all this begin?”

“Over a decade ago,” Zweller said, “when Ruardh and her council decided that the tribal ethnic minorities were too much of a drain on the planet’s extremely limited natural resources. The government started forcing the tribes farther and farther from the prime habitable zone. That should have been a death sentence. But these people were just too tough and ornery to die.

“More recently, Ruardh started worrying that the exiled tribes might complicate her initiative for Federation membership. So she ordered them liquidated, town by town, village by village. There are new massacres every few weeks, but Ruardh has managed to keep a lid on things so far by jamming whatever long‑range subspace communications capabilities the rebels may have. And since her people control the orbiting transmitter, the Federation knows only what Ruardh wants us to know. If the Federation wins the referendum–and Ruardh hangs onto power–these people can’t hope to hold out for much more than another year or two. Not without help, anyway.”

Riker stroked his beard calmly, giving Zweller the impression of a man about to place a bid in a friendly game of poker. “Commander, the sooner we get back to the Enterprise,the sooner we might be able to provide that help.”

“Grelun has promised to release all of us after the referendum,” Zweller said. “That includes the three of us and my shuttle crew.”

Troi shook her head. “Even if the vote goes the way Grelun wants it to, we’d all still be stuck here for the next three days, unable to help anybody.And if what we saw in the village is any indication, a lot more people could die during that time.”

Excellent point,Zweller thought, taking care to keep his mind opaque to Troi’s empathic senses. He wondered how many more Chiarosan children might have to pay with their lives for his adherence to prearranged mission timetables. After all, if they were all to escape to the Enterprisesooner rather than later, there might be time to expose Ruardh’s crimes to the general populace–and to the Federation Council–before the planet‑wide referendum.

Zweller assumed that the vote would, in any event, still go against the Federation because of its earlier failure to broker peace between Ruardh and Falhain. But that also meant, as Zweller reasoned it, that an early departure could not disrupt the bargain he’d made with Koval on behalf of Section 31. Therefore, his mission objective would still be accomplished even if he and the other prisoners were to leave right now.

Turning away from the guard, Zweller whispered, “Let me see what I can do.”

After the visit to the destroyed village, no one had thought to relieve Zweller of the tricorder Grelun had returned to him. Zweller had maintained possession of it by leaving it attached to his belt, right out in the open. He had, in effect, hidden it in plain sight. The rebels apparently didn’t see the point of confiscating something that he was clearly making no effort whatsoever to conceal.

While Grelun hadn’t exactly given Zweller the run of the Army of Light compound, the rebel leader hadallowed him considerable freedom of movement in exchange for his tactical advice. That, and for helping the Chiarosans use the replicator salvaged from the Archimedesto create weapons and spare components for the freedom fighters’ dozen or so battered fighter craft. Zweller thought of his surviving Slaytoncrewmates, reflecting that Roget would be extremely upset if he ever discovered just how badly maintained the ships that captured the Archimedeshad been; the Starfleet shuttle could easily have held its own against them.

During the eight days or so he had spent among the Chiarosan rebels so far–it was awkward expressing time in terms of days on a world without sunrises and sunsets–Zweller had come to feel that these grim warriors had become at least tolerant of his presence. Many of them now genuinely seemed to like him, and were no doubt grateful for his help.

Thus Zweller was unsupervised when, less than ten minutes after parting company with Riker and Troi, he entered an empty alcove. Here he opened a wallmounted panel through which part of the compound’s optical data network ran. Having been designed for Chiarosans, the panel was quite high, forcing him to stand on tiptoe, his arms stretched uncomfortably above his head. Alert for the sound of approaching Chiarosans, he worked as quickly as possible, patching the tricorder into the microminiaturized ODN terminal node he had installed four days previously; he’d left it there while ostensibly helping one of the rebel engineers run a diagnostic on the base’s communications system. Forcing contemporary Starfleet hardware to work reliably alongside the Chiarosans’ systems–most of which appeared to be analogous to Federation technology from the late twenty‑second century–had been a bit of a challenge, despite his extensive training in obsolete technologies. But core technological principles rarely changed much, even after two centuries.

Using the tricorder’s input pads, Zweller navigated through a complicated series of hierarchical icons. This complex command sequence was intended to surreptitiously isolate this particular comm terminal from the rest of the base’s computer system. At the same time, it would attempt to seize control of a portion of the backup comm system using every possible clearance code, running the code sequences at nearly a billion cycles per second. After each attempt, the program in the tricorder would erase all evidence that it had ever tried to jimmy its way inside the facility’s systems.

A tense minute elapsed while the small display on Zweller’s tricorder repeatedly flashed a single word: WORKING. Two minutes passed. A bead of cold sweat crept down the small of his back, chilling him. Three minutes.

Then the display gave way to a cheerful green: COMMUNICATIONS ARRAY: ACCESS APPROVED.

Yes!

Zweller’s hands were now becoming slick with sweat from the effort of holding his body in such an unnatural posture. As carefully as he could, he entered the next sequence of icons, a grouping even more complex than the previous one. The idea behind this particular command set was to get inside the base’s security grid. Were he actually to try to use the base’s transmitter before doing that, he would more than likely trigger a security alarm.

It would take only a few moments to send the Enterprisea burst of data containing a set of detailed instructions, including the coordinates of each of the holding cells relative to the location of the rebels’ subspace transmitter. Assuming that the transmitter could pierce the local static, Johnny and his crew would trace the signal to its source, establish its location, and then apply his coordinate correction data to calculate the positions of each of the imprisoned Starfleet officers. While Zweller was well aware that the transporters aboard the Enterprisecould not beam anyone directly off the planet– there was far too much atmospheric ionization to permit that–he was reasonably certain that a low‑flying shuttlecraft could pull it off, with a little luck.