Nightlife of the Gods

by G.Dunbar

Salvation a la mode. Lies, love, blood, mud, and mutants...2nd book in a series

2. Default Chapter Title

CHAPTER SIX

Dax joined Kira and her coffee, making herself comfortable on the floor of the commissary area, leaving Bashir the available stool despite his liberal protests, self-admitted to be chauvinistic in nature and content; Dax had no idea what he meant. The stool was uncomfortable and hard. A kidney shaped seat of rigid, unyielding foam durable enough to be used as a structural alloy. Her legs were too long to rest comfortably on the supporting foot rest, not quite long enough to reach the floor. Kira didn't even bother with the foot rest other than as a point of reference, the toes of her boots curled around the stool's front legs, her elbows propped on the island as she drank her coffee. Julian, Dax knew, would make do with the stool.

The floor was of a structural alloy not interested in pretending to be a stool. There was also room for Dax to stretch out her legs and rest against the wall. Her conversation with Kira and Bashir stretched on for fifteen minutes, the three of them tossing out initial ideas on what should be the order of things once arriving on Dyaan IX before her eyes and attention started to droop. She remembered Kira saying something about two hours. The next voice she heard was Julian's bending over her.

Kira's mentioning two hours was a reminder to Dax of her scheduled time to return to duty aboard the bridge, where Worf had apparently already returned, aborting his recess, leaving Kira free to spend her four hour break roaming the Defiant's silent corridors. They were all poised for something to happen. Either en route or once there. Anticipatory if they weren't nervous, difficult for any of them to relax.

"I was going to continue with some preliminary analyses for a short while; insure the data systems are working," Bashir answered Kira's notification the chronometer was ticking.

"Fine," Kira said, leaving Bashir in the interesting predicament of rousing Dax to send her home to Worf only presumed to be aboard the bridge, or leaving her to fall asleep on the floor. He sat there thinking about it at the island for a short while, his conscience eventually getting the better of him.

"Come on," Bashir crouched beside Dax slumped awkwardly against the wall.

"No," she refused, more asleep than awake.

"What do you mean no? You're half asleep. You're certainly not going to sit here sulking over some ridiculous argument with Worf. That's not only absurd, it's childish; on both your parts. Surely Captain Sisko is confident the risks are minimal, even if he doesn't believe the miraculous claims, or we wouldn't be here."

"Worf's annoyed that we are here," she mumbled.

Bashir was silent for a moment. "That's also absurd, isn't it? You're a science officer; our science officer. The expedition's not only your duty, it's the whole point of your career."

He made an interesting point. Dax frowned. "You think that's it?"

"Do I think what's it? That Worf sounds rather like the Chief complaining about Keiko putting her career ahead of doting on him? Apparently so."

Dax shook her head. "That Worf's annoyed about the expedition."

Bashir believed that was what he just said. She really was half asleep, innocent looking with her hair hanging, almost fragile. He smiled, feeling stronger than he had felt around her in quite a while, simply not quite strong enough to pick her up. His head bent close to hers again. "I'd carry you except for apart from how we can apparently borrow each other's jacket in a pinch, we probably stand less of a chance of getting hurt if you were to carry me."

He said something about getting hurt, odd because Dax was thinking the same thing. "Worf's annoyed about you."

Bashir would remember those words for the rest of his life, like a threat hanging over her. "I beg your pardon?" he said, an edge to his tone.

Dax sat up straight, her groggy eyes opening to look at him.

"Me?" Bashir said, wanting an answer, an explanation, demanding one almost.

Dax nodded. "You're right, he sounds like the Chief." She got to her feet.

Bashir helped her. "He sounds like the Chief until the part where he starts handing out black eyes to go along with his insecurities. I repeat, I beg your pardon? I'll give him a reason to threaten anyone."

Dax was awake and Bashir had more than an edge to his tone. "What?" she said.

"Least of all you," he assured. "Excuse me but we've been friends for years and quite frankly if Worf doesn't like it, it really is too bad."

Dax thought about that. "You're right," she decided with a pat of his chest, turned away to turn back after a step and return his jacket before she left the shuttle.

For God knew what if Worf really was that upset for whatever reason. Suspicious, with or without just cause; there was no cause. "Jadzia!" Bashir sprang to life to catch her as she exited through the hatch.

Dax stopped. Whatever he was thinking; she wasn't quite sure what he was thinking; not quite sure if she wanted to know. But whatever he was thinking, she was thinking with less than two hours and counting it really was absurd to return to the crew quarters aboard the Defiant when there was an available cabin not ten feet away.

"You're right," she said again and turned on her heel for the cabin, the door closing behind her. Any feared and imaginary disaster coming by way of Worf momentarily averted, Bashir stared at the cabin door, from the cabin back to the hatch.

"Everything's a-okay," Rom supported at his elbow.

"What?" Bashir said.

"The, um, life support?" Rom pointed to the jacket in his hand.

"Yes, of course, you mean the temperature," Bashir said.

"Yup, the equipment," Rom agreed.

"The devil with the equipment," Bashir headed for what should be the weapons locker and was empty, "everything's fine until he gets it into his head that collaborating on a medical study somehow constitutes a willful desire to spend the night together -- where are the damn phaser rifles? What are we supposed to use in defense? Hyposprays? Carrying one's Hippocratic oath just a bit too far, isn't it? Excuse me, but I don't care whose family cuff they don't wear, they are Maquis."

"The Defiant?" Rom hazarded a guess.

"Yes, of course, the Defiant," Bashir leaned back against the wall with a nervous run of his fingers through his hair. "As in the Defiant's weapons locker. No sense being premature, you're right. We are three days from the outer colonies…in the meantime mere hours from the Cardassian border. They'll be upon us before we know it."

"Um…" Rom said.

"Aboard," Bashir clarified. "They'll be aboard before we know it; I'm overtired."

"You look it," Rom nodded.

"Probably something to do with a week without adequate sleep, never mind the past day or two," Bashir stared down on Dax asleep moments after she stretched out on the bunk. "Excluding your husband, for I'm not quite sure how much of an effect sleep deprivation has on the general mood of a Klingon, if it has any measurable effect, or if anyone can even tell. I do know however there's a direct correlation to the physical, mental, and emotional performance of the remaining majority of us, even the Borg."

He sat down on the floor to activate his com badge and extend Kira's idea of a recess an additional two hours under doctor's orders, ones that could not be overruled unless they went to Red Alert, they didn't.

Dax didn't realize Bashir was there and in the dark almost stepped on him when she woke up close to four hours later to find him stretched out on the floor, her duffel stuffed under his head like a pillow. She caught her unsteady balance to sit down and eye him briefly before she slipped off the bunk and onto to her knees to push him out of the way so she could find her boots and jacket; she found them and he barely stirred. The lights came up low, the computer announcing the time to be 1507 just as her hand touched his chin to turn his head her direction, expressing her curiosity with the reasonable inquiry, "What are you doing?"

Bashir's eyes opened with his grin. "Morning already?"

"1507," Dax nodded.

"Oh," he said. "Well, that's what happens when you don't go to bed until tomorrow, it all starts to catch up."

She was still waiting for an answer. He had one, sitting up to stretch. "Actually, I remember I came in to find my duffel, apparently this is as far as I got."

"It's my duffel," Dax revealed.

"Is it?" he looked. "So it is. Quite all right. Worked out just as well. Coffee? Tea?" He left out the or me portion of the ancient adage in his invitation for breakfast.

"You have a beard," she apparently considered that to be significant as she collected her belongings in preparation of making her getaway.

"Do I?" Bashir's hand went to his face, pausing to check his dulled reflection in the shuttle's transparent forward bow when they exited into the cargo hold. "Soon," he agreed when what felt reasonably smooth showed early signs of a developing splotchy shadow. "Admittedly haven't had too much time to pay attention to the cosmetic the last few days…" he heard the door to the cargo hold open and close and hurried after Dax before she escaped in the turbolift. "Fair enough. We'll forego breakfast until after and race each other to the shower."

"We're late enough," she nodded.

"To the contrary," Bashir disputed, "I'm not late at all -- neither are you. I allowed for thirty minutes wake-up time when I adjusted duty call to a more reasonable six hour recess. Somewhat absurd to expect you to pull on your boots and shirt…" his attention trailed over her jacket and the conspicuously absent mock-turtle neck that should be there and wasn't. "And be on the bridge in five minutes…where's your shirt? You didn't bring another one, did you? Quite all right, you can borrow mine."

"They're in my duffel," Dax promised. "I didn't want to wake you."

"Along with your hair clips," he smiled at her unkempt locks. "Also all right. We're both awake now. So what will it be? Breakfast or the shower? I think you know what my recommendation is if you really want to give Worf cause for his consternation."

She looked at him, his smile widened to a grin. "Breakfast. There's no reason for either of us to commit suicide just to prove a point. Particularly when technically anyway we did just spend the night together and shall continue to for the next two weeks."

"Maybe some tea," Dax entered the turbolift with instructions for it to take a detour by way of the Defiant's commissary.

Kira was in the commissary, drinking the last of her first cup of raktajino. "You're late," she greeted Dax. Bashir she gave a nod.

"It does seem like we just did this, doesn't it?" Dax countered, setting her duffel down on an adjacent chair with a friendly smile.

Kira shrugged, it mattering most to her that she wasn't too late to welcome the Shakaars aboard. "We're still two hours from the border; I never even heard the computer."

"Imagine that," Dax's smile floated its way over Bashir as she crossed for the replicator. "Coffee?"

"Must have been a widespread failure," he agreed, moving her duffel to the floor so he could have a seat. "Yes, coffee, please."

"I'll say," Dax handed him a mug. "It even affected the system aboard the Ark."

"So it did," Bashir admitted to Kira as Dax sat down next to him and across from Kira, not that she didn't have a choice, she did, and that was her choice. "What Jadzia's attempting to insinuate is I'm the culprit behind everyone oversleeping -- you didn't oversleep. I intentionally extended your break by two hours. Something to do with everyone's general and good health -- what?" he said to Dax for some bizarre reason suddenly picking now to quite literally fling herself at him, or over him, she was attempting to do one of the two.

"My duffel," she said.

"It's right there," he agreed.

"I know. May I have it, please?"

"Oh," Bashir grinned. "I knew you wanted something. Simply a matter of what… hair clips and T-shirt I suspect?" he took it upon himself to dig them out of her duffel for her. Not too difficult to do. There wasn't too much in there other than a spare jumpsuit, one or two additional shirts and few other articles of clothing she probably would prefer he not wave around the public atmosphere of the commissary even though no one else was there except for Kira and him.

"Thank you," Dax accepted her shirt and her clips, pulling her jacket off to pull on her T-shirt.

Bashir grinned again for Kira. "And, of course, the reason for Jadzia's initial impression she was pressed for time -- my adjusting duty call?" he prompted her. "If not the reason behind why Jadzia's dressing in the middle of the commissary?"

"Next time I'll just wake you up," Dax threatened.

"Next time please do." He took her clips away from her, wanting to touch her almost desperately. More desperately than he could ever recall wanting to touch her before in their association, if only touch her hair. "No, it's all right, drink your coffee. I can do it. I am a surgeon. I think I can manage to braid someone's hair. Hardly anything esoteric; simple matter of manual dexterity…"

"How do you stand him?" Kira succumbed at that point to rolling her eyes.

"He's better than the average holo program," Dax disclosed.

"Much better," Bashir cracked with a critical eye over his artistic endeavor that looked slightly lopsided until he cocked his head and then it looked straight. "Not that I mean to suggest either of you two lovely and charming ladies ever have to make do with Quark's idea of entertainment; there." He clipped one of her clips in place on the tail end of the braid to hold it all in place. The others he stuffed in her jacket pocket for safekeeping.

"Dare I ask?" Dax asked, not about the latest imported addition to Quark's extensive and ever-expanding library of adult entertainment until their ever vigilant Chief Constable Odo got wind of it and then it was into the solid waste disposal along with the rest of the trash; Federation rules.

"What?" Bashir said. "It's not perfect. But I've been accused far more often than I care to count of being perfect and therefore obnoxious."

"Or just obnoxious," Kira agreed. "What's with the beard?"

"I wouldn't exactly call it a beard, barely a shadow. Why? Actually I was thinking of keeping it."

"Think again." Kira picked up her coffee with the suggestion to Dax, "Let's go."

Dax obligingly rose with a reach for her duffel, Julian right there to beat her to it with a wry comment about Benjamin's devilish looking beard. "Do you think she said the same thing to Captain Sisko when he decided to give his a go?"

"I would doubt it."

"So would I," he grinned. "It's all right. I have it."

"Julian…" she tried not to have it come out as a sigh but enough was enough, and it was very close to being enough.

"What?" he said innocently.

Which he either was or he wasn't. He wasn't, not to that extent, and she hadn't helped matters with her own near shameless flirtation. It was shameless. She remained uncertain exactly as to why. Perhaps she was continuing to test him while unwilling to admit while Worf may not have cause to be concerned, but he did have cause to be annoyed.

"Nothing," she shook her head, taking her duffel away from him to drop it on the chair from where she would collect it later, either on her way to her and Worf's quarters, or on her way to somewhere else. Something to do with her being entitled to being annoyed over Worf's being annoyed with her choice to ignore Julian rather than correct and chastise him every ten minutes.

"Oh, look what the cat decided to drag in," the Chief applauded the bedraggled trio with their respective mugs of coffee, beards and askew hairdos. He shook his head. Two hours late they couldn't have taken another ten minutes?

Worf, in the meantime, was startled in the moment before his face set, focused on Dax's hair. That did not escape Bashir's attention and he was glad, he was so glad. "Or has yet to drag out," he countered on his saunter for O'Brien and the Ops console. "You look as bad as I feel."

"Or vice versa," O'Brien assured. "What's the matter? Forget to wash your face?"

"Actually I've been told I look distinguished."

"By whom? The one trying to pry her eyes open or the one with them still shut?"

"I'll never tell," Bashir smiled over his coffee, down on the intricate display. "Which button do I push first?"

"Right there," O'Brien assured.

"The transporter? Why?"

"Eh, heh," O'Brien snickered. "Three guesses, and don't call us, we'll call you."

"Clever…" Bashir wandered his way over toward Dax busy reestablishing control over navigation from the Chief at Ops. He cocked his head again to view her braid giving it a tug in an effort to set it straight. Worf bristled, stiff in his maintained station at the helm. Dax slapped lightly at Bashir's hand. "It's slightly crooked," he confessed.

"Only slightly?" she replied, having an idea Kira was the Chief's one trying to pry her eyes opened and she was the one with them still closed, apparent by the unkempt state of her hair.

Bashir smiled, perching on the edge of her console to finish his coffee and find her com badge resting somewhere between her left hand and his left hip. He picked the badge up, fingering it with a glance over the unspoiled left breast of her jacket before he extended it to her. "Yours?"

"Yes," Dax took her badge, fastening it in place. It wasn't where she left it, but she didn't tell him that. Worf apparently had gone looking for her after tiring of her refusal to answer him and found the badge where she had flung it, down the corridor of one of the decks. Why Worf didn't then just order the computer to conduct a dermal scan to locate her instead of returning with her badge to the bridge, she didn't know; he probably did. The computer revealing she was aboard the Ark where Rom was, and for a short while, Kira, after Worf had returned to the bridge to relieve Kira of her duty at the helm. Julian maintained himself on lockout if Worf attempted to find him, something Worf couldn't overrule unless he was willing to issue a false alarm; a class offense.

Dax thought back to Risa almost two years ago and Worf's willingness to sabotage the resort's weather grid. Steadfastly determined to abort their vacation and return home if he had to destroy the planet to do so; all because he was jealous, nothing to do with Julian at all.

All Klingons were jealous. Domineering, possessive, controlling. Worf was Klingon and no exception. Struggling to keep his expression deadpan and her from hearing his low, muttering, teeth-gnashing growls. She was wrong in thinking Worf really was annoyed about Julian, or even had a reason to be annoyed about Julian. Julian was right in his immediate and initial presumption Worf was the Chief sputtering about what he deemed to be Keiko's obsession with her career in botany. Worf was the Chief, simply using Julian as a convenient excuse. Dax could feel her annoyance return just at the point she was willing to forgive and forget.

She'd be damned if she forgave or forgot. She yanked the clip and Julian's cock-eyed version of a braid out of her hair, combing it as best as she could with her fingers and working to twist it back into reasonable shape. Bashir was running with O'Brien's joke about the transporter, running on about them needing to use the transporter eventually anyway to transport Anar and Sian. Worf was quickly forgetting about her to huff and puff and spar with Kira about where to intern the Shakaar outcasts.

The Chief was lying stretched out and face down on the Ops console moaning about his bloodshot eyes bleeding if he had to look at the display, any display, for ten minutes more never mind two hours. Reminding them all he had just beaten an undeserved attempted murder rap by the skin of his teeth less than thirty hours ago and if anyone needed and hadn't had any sleep over the past few days it was him, never mind any of them.

"Where are my clips?" Dax interrupted.

"What?" Bashir said. "Oh. I put them in your pocket, didn't I? They're in your pocket…wait a minute," he patted his breast pocket just to be sure. "Yes, they're in your pocket…" he paused just as he was about to reach and show her.

"So you did," Dax finished for him, producing them with a smile to work them into the twists of her hair; she did that deliberately.

Bashir stared at her. To where he intimated they may have crossed each other's path during the past six hours, she came right out and said as much in so many words. The disclosure wasn't received well. It was received silently, but not well. Not by Worf, and also not by him. Damn Worf being annoyed, or not being annoyed with him for whatever reason. He cared little what Worf thought, said, or felt about him. It was an entirely separate matter when it came to Worf's opinion, belief, and certainly his treatment of her. There the rules of the game became strikingly different. She was always innocent, occasionally witty. He, Julian, was always at fault. Her decision to offer Worf a revelation to the contrary wasn't wise. She knew it wasn't wise and if she didn't, Bashir did. To stress a point impossible of being belabored, Klingons were known to kill their mates during acts of love. It went without saying what they were capable of when it came to fits of rage.

Bashir aborted his pause to straighten up, silently resuming drinking his coffee, maintaining his position perched on the console at her side.

"What about the Ark?" Dax offered into the conversation, personally agreeing with Kira that Anar and his son weren't prisoners and therefore it wasn't technically appropriate to render them to the brig.

"The Ark?" Kira hadn't thought of that. Now that she did…

"They are Maquis," Worf insisted.

"Technically," Dax smiled. "As technically," she shrugged to Kira, "there are no Maquis. What about Rom? Couldn't we leave him in supervision? The transporter is disabled. The Ark is confined in the shuttlebay…"

"What about our equipment?" Bashir suddenly said.

"What about it?" Dax looked at him.

"Just that. It's aboard the Ark -- the cargo hold of the Ark," he hopped down off the console to stride toward the Chief. He wasn't quite sure why he did that, simply needing to get away from her for a moment or two. "What's to stop them from destroying the equipment?"

"Why would they destroy the equipment?" Kira sneered.

"Especially when it's by their invitation we're even here," Dax reminded.

"For a needed ride home," Bashir emphasized. "No, it's not by their invitation, it's by Captain Sisko's orders."

"They didn't need a ride here," Dax said to Kira. "And I'm not sure exactly how much weight Benjamin's orders do carry -- "

"They don't," Kira assured. Not with Shakaar Adon, the elder, and not with his son Sian. "All right, it's the Ark, it's the Ark."

"All right, it's the Ark," Bashir answered for the silent minority, Worf. "Bit ridiculous everything has to be a project, anyway. I guess if he touches my equipment …I'll just touch his," he nodded firmly to the Chief. "Yes? No?"

"Eh, heh," O'Brien chuckled. "Maybe you should try rephrasing that."

On the contrary, Bashir wasn't rephrasing anything. To the contrary, he was striding for the helm. To assume station at the helm, should Worf take it upon himself to relinquish his possessive hold on the seat. Bashir encouraged him to do so. "Come on. Let's go. We need you alert, and all of that…'Better dead than Red' is one of our antiquated mottoes, not yours…something, something…" He couldn't remember the beginning of another classic, only the part about that being the day when they'd pry the phaser rifle out of his cold dead hand.

It didn't matter. Worf was already moving to turn his back on him in disgust. "I have no idea what you are talking about…"

"It's intentional, I assure you."

Worf looked at him. He knew when he looked at him he was looking at a rival, his rival for Jadzia, not only her attention, and Bashir knew he knew. Still caring little what Worf knew, believed he also might know, and that was Jadzia's undying, unwavering devotion, loyalty, and love. How confident he was Jadzia would never dream of stepping out on him. How smug.

Worf was not as confident as he might prefer to be. A glance over Bashir in the direction of Dax, he rose from his seat to his full height, towering over the puny Human frame of the slender doctor, dwarfing Bashir with his massive Klingon chest and powerful arms. A flicker of apprehension crossed Dax's eyes that Bashir could not see with his back to her.

A flicker of apprehension immediately replaced by a clear and penetrating silent warning to Worf that he better not dare put his hands on him. Good reasons, bad, or indifferent.

"Are you sure…" Kira was asking if Bashir really thought he could manage the helm.

"He can manage," O'Brien was answering with a departing wave. "He can manage …if he can't, here's hoping you find out before he rams them in their rear impulse engines," he paused in his, "Yo, let's go," to Worf to chuckle.

"Actually, they just cut their engines to impulse power," Dax smiled with a reach across for the helm in response to the Tir suddenly streaking into view 15,000 meters off the forward bow by the time the Defiant slowed to a comparable pace.

"There, you see?" O'Brien snorted to Worf. "What did I tell you? They're stretching it out as far and as long as they can stretch it; two hours? Give me a break. Eighteen hours we'll still be creeping the last dozen meters to the border. We'd be gone and back twice by that time -- and maybe you are, but I'm not sticking around to find out if I'm right; eighteen hours? Eighteen more hours? I won't be blind by that time, I'll be dead."

"All right, go ahead," Kira waved permission to Bashir as Worf reluctantly relinquished the helm to follow the Chief's advice: "Come on. Give it to him. Just give it up to him; trust me, we'll know if he runs us up their rear -- " The door to the turbolift closed.

"Impulse engines," Dax smiled to Bashir sitting down. "I'm sure you can manage."

"Yes," so was Bashir. He logged on, Dax locking him into her console at Kira's added, precautionary direction.

"Co-pilot," Dax explained pleasantly when several of Bashir's panels suddenly went dark and several panels at her station suddenly lit up.

"Yes," Bashir said, his voice and tone even, quiet, focused on the console and viewer. "I'll want to talk to you…I'm quite serious. I'll want to talk to you. Not here, now; later."

Dax shrugged after several seconds spent being thoughtful about what he might want to talk about. "He was asking for it -- "

"That's not the damn point!" Bashir interrupted, his fist striking the console, suddenly, angrily, loud.

Kira's head snapped up. Her expression contorted, incredulous, wondering what was wrong with him now; he didn't care about Kira. It was Dax's attention he wanted, and Dax's attention he had. Momentarily startled and now looking at him, her dark brown eyes focused, concentrating, searching his.

Bashir relented, his fingers running nervously across the crown of his hair. His voice dropping once again quiet, soft and low, his words for her ears only. "It's not a question of what he may have been asking for -- what he very well may deserve -- "

Dax smiled suddenly, turning to Kira. "Julian can't help but be concerned about the equipment."

Bashir paused. Dax mentally crossing her fingers he would follow her lead and drop the subject altogether. For now, definitely. Probably later as well. It was her choice if she would meet with him to discuss anything later; she was doubtful if she would.

"No, Julian can't help but be concerned about the equipment," Bashir seconded tightly. "Granted the transporter aboard the Ark has been disabled, as we can secure the cargo hold as best we can. But what about the shuttlebay? And the transporter there as well -- "

"Already disabled," Kira assured, busy at the Ops console taking care of all the dangling loose ends in preparation.

"What?" Bashir stared at her.

"Julian…" Dax began.

"She can't disable the whole system," Bashir insisted.

"It's inoperable?" Dax nodded in encouraging reminder. With shields engaged and the Defiant's Romulan cloak as well? Simply put, the transporter simply did not work. An ongoing aggravation the Federation engineers continued to work on trying to resolve.

"I know the transporter is inoperable," Bashir assured coldly. "Inoperable is a far cry from disabling the system. I'm talking about what happens in the instance of an emergency -- who the devil is going to have the time to start reassembling the damn ship in the event of an emergency?"

"Well…in the event of an emergency…" Dax said to Kira.

CHAPTER SEVEN

"Romulan," Anar announced to Sian upon their transporting to the Defiant's bridge six hours later with a shortened disinterested glance around and a conceited smile for Kira as the lights of the Tir vanished across the boarder into Cardassian space.

"Old news," the Trill Dax rose from her seat at navigation to her impressive stance, her friendly return designed to put his ego down; impossible to do.

"Not to me," Anar maintained he knew nothing of the Federation-Romulan effort that produced the unique offspring called Defiant. Insisting it was his extensive background and abilities that allowed him in moments to see through the classic and misleading clean Federation design to identify and know the Defiant's alien soul.

"Whatever," O'Brien sneered as his regal highness exited with his paling-by-comparison stick of a son with Kira, Dax, and Bashir tagging along for good measure. "That's Shakaar Adon like I'm Shakaar Adon."

"You are correct," Worf agreed from his station back at the helm working at removing the last traces of Bashir's fingerprints.

"Oh, yeah, I'm correct," O'Brien assured. "I'm correct."

"Cargo shuttle type 8…No, type 7C. You made a modification with the addition of the warp engines." Anar continued in his endeavor to glean Kira's admiration when they entered the shuttlebay and he was introduced to the Ark.

"What?" Bashir whispered in response to Dax's muttered observation.

"Oh, yes," she nodded. "Oh, yes." There was a glint in the elder's eye, a distinct strut to his walk.

"Oh," Bashir said. "Well, there's a glint in Kira's eye, and distinct strut to her walk."

Dax looked at him; he nodded. "Standard, you're right."

Yes, she was. She was also right about the elder Shakaar Adon, who, now that she thought about it, really wasn't that old.

"Um, yup," the Ferengi Rom was a true innocent, pulling the sleeve of his jumpsuit down over the heel of his hand and polishing away at the well-worn registry numbers of the shuttle. "That's what she is; 7C. U.S.S…um…" he looked to Dax for a little help.

"Cincinnatus," she offered.

"Yup, that's it," Rom agreed. "We just call her the Ark because it's a lot easier for some of us to say."

"Reliable as well," Bashir stepped in with a smile.

"Oh, yes," Rom gave her a hefty sock in the port side like some high-powered, hard-sell salesman, Dax crossing her fingers nothing fell off. Bashir crossing his fingers everything did and that way they'd have to scrap the whole idea, or at least return to the station for a more reasonable mode of transportation.

"She's solid," Rom swore. "She's real solid. Replicator. You know…um…life support…"

"Solid waste disposal," Bashir smiled.

"Um…" Rom said. "Well, no, that's not working again. But I think I have it figured out what's wrong."

"Age," Anar suspected.

"Yup, that's part of it. That's definitely part of it."
"What about the engines?" Anar inquired of Kira for some bizarre reason.

"They're getting there," she turned away to board the shuttle.

"Getting there…" Anar notified his son.

"It's a joke," Sian agreed, not laughing.

Neither was Anar. It was a joke perhaps, yes, but he was still intrigued.

"Transporter was working really good," Rom hastened to say trotting alongside Anar walking after Kira. "But Major

Kira didn't want it that way. Nope, she didn't. And, bam. She just reached in, took out the isolinear chips and whosh straight out the door. Kind of like Leeta does with the plates when she gets mad."

"Leeta…" Anar paused. The name was Bajoran. One he associated with the Dabo hostess from the Ferengi bar.

"His wife," Kira halted in the hatchway.

"Wife?" Anar repeated, understandably in his opinion. The child was Bajoran, beautiful, no less. The troll talking to him was Ferengi. A scrawny, small man with a gigantic four-lobed head, illiterate-sounding in his speech pattern, beguiling in his gentility and innocence. Accepted apparently by Sisko and his hierarchy as someone of value or Anar highly doubted if Rom would be there, and yet these same people questioned Janice's association with Anon. What was he seeing that they were not?

By the Prophets, what was he seeing that they refused to? He turned around to look back over the Trill, beautiful herself and reportedly married to the Klingon.

"Yes, she's his wife, she's his wife," Kira was dismissing impatiently.

"Yup, she's my wife," Rom nodded. "And you're…um…" he was looking up at Anar from under his bulbous brow. "Wow. You look just like Shakaar Adon, you know that?"

"Perhaps because I am Shakaar Adon," Anar smiled. "You may call me Anar."

"Janice's father," Rom agreed. "The Bajoran one?"

"Does she have another?" Anar asked intrigued.

"Nope," Rom shook his head. "Not that Leeta and I know. She told us about you, Leeta, I mean. She told Leeta. And that's good because Janice is really nice, too. We like her a lot, yes, we do."

"What's wrong with the engines?" Anar finally turned from him to ask Kira.

"They're offline," she finally replied.

"Why don't we see what we can do about that?" he stepped up the hatchway with his smile.

"And the solid waste disposal," Rom nodded. "Yup. Gotta work on that, too."

"And the solid waste disposal," Anar said to Kira.

"Yes, all right," she gave a sharp flick of her head for him to proceed.

"Thank you," he gave a polite gesture for her to proceed as well.

"Well…" Dax said to Bashir as Kira, Anar, Rom and Sian followed each other through the hatch once they decided on the order. "So much for…what exactly are we hoping to do?" she verified.

"Knock him down a peg or two," Bashir agreed. "It was worth a try."

"So it was. Hopeless though, I suspect."

"Yes," so did Bashir.

They were silent after that for several seconds, dallying in the shuttlebay. Neither of them really sure what they were supposed to be doing, or Dax wasn't. Bashir was a free agent. His time his own.

"What did you want to talk to me about?" Dax decided there was no harm in asking although she believed she knew what he was going to say. Something about her deliberately instigating Worf. That was interesting to her because he seemed to have little conscience about deliberately instigating Worf.

"Julian?" she said when he looked away from her. Her head cocking in a teasing, cajoling way, a smile eventually finding its way across his face.

"Nothing really," he said. "Just…"

"Worf was asking for it." She recalled that as being her position.

Bashir shook his head. "That's not the point. No, it isn't. I really don't want there to be any misunderstanding -- "

"There isn't any misunderstanding."

"I'm talking about between you and I," he insisted. "And, yes, I suppose Worf figures in there somewhere."

"You don't mean a word you say," Dax agreed.

"What?" Bashir paused. "I'm sorry but, what?"

"Julian, I know you don't mean a word you say," she assured.

Did she? That was interesting, and certainly disheartening. Bashir looked away from her again; he looked back. "I guess what I'm asking is does Worf know that?"

"I don't know," Dax admitted. A day ago she would have said yes. Today she had to truthfully say she didn't know. "He should."

"But does he," Bashir pressed. "I confess, it never entered my head that Worf would question you about anything. That's absurd. When you said you had an argument I honestly thought, 'oh, he's just acting like the Chief'. Never anything about you or I. Why would I?" He was looking for information. Wanting to know exactly what the argument had been about. How serious it was. The degree of threat hanging over her; he was sure there was a threat.

"Let's put it this way," she confidentially patted his chest. "If Worf doesn't figure it out, he'll be spending an awful lot of nights alone."

He was going to kiss her. Another moment, another breath, he was going to kiss her right there in the shuttlebay, damn Worf and anyone else. As it was he said something extraordinarily provocative even for him. "That's the best news I've heard yet."

She looked at him for a long moment before she smiled with a teasing point of her finger. "See what I mean?"

She turned to leave, presumably to return to the bridge. "Jadzia…" Bashir jumped to catch her by the arm.

"Julian," she groaned. "Worf has to know you aren't serious, he has to know that."

"No, nothing about Worf," Bashir lied in all honesty if that was possible. "I was wondering about my discourse I was telling you about?"

It took her a moment. "Did you finish it?"

"Not yet. But I am working on it. You will look at it? Look it over at least?"

"Just let me know," she promised.

"Quite," Bashir said after she left, blew into his cupped hands for the dual purpose of catching his shortened breath and blowing some life into them feeling cold and rigid and cramped. He sat down on the end of the shuttle's hatchway ramp aware of the sensation of pain in his stomach.

"What was that all about?" Sian remarked to his father resting casually against the wall just inside the hatchway, both of Anar's eyes on Kira forward at the console, waiting for instructions from her as to what she wanted him to do; she was still debating that. Both of his ears listening to the conversation in the shuttlebay.

"I'm not sure," Anar replied. "Something to do with an argument, a Klingon, and a Trill…

"And a medical discourse," his neck circled the corner of the hatch to eye the young doctor sitting on the ramp like he was in some degree of physical pain. "A Human drama perhaps; for him."

He was half tempted to tell Bashir his secret was safe with him but that wasn't necessarily true. It depended upon what the secret was and whether or not Anar was even interested in knowing it. Whatever the cause of the doctor's physical discomfort however, Bashir's sensory perception was working just fine. He knew someone was behind him. He turned around and stood up. An accusation of eavesdropping ready on his pursed lips he was silent and disdainful in his posture.

Anar smiled. "You have some sort of analysis running…"

"Yes, of course I have an analysis running," Bashir walked briskly up the ramp. "Several of them, as a matter of fact, primarily at the moment to test the integrity of the data banks, all of them to do with your miraculous cream. But then it would be rather helpful to have a preliminary idea of what we are looking for, if not at; the point of this expedition I believe. Other than the convenience of a ride home."

He halted, both in his irate speech and in the hatchway. Affording this uncle of Shakaar's the opportunity to either confess or contradict him? Neither, actually. Simply waiting for Anar to step out of the way and allow him the opportunity to take whatever necessary steps to preserve his analyses in the event they had to crash the systems in order to resurrect them; or whatever it was they were planning to do. They were certainly planning and needing to do something if they intended on complying with the request of no transporting. No probes. No surface scans of any kind.

"Greek fire," Anar offered, stepping aside. "Are you familiar with the term? Its common usage?"

"I should be, shouldn't I?" Bashir excused his way past Kira sprawled under the engineering console. "It is Terran, and a misconception the composition of some amazing incendiary device impossible of being extinguished died with its creators; it didn't. Unless they were several centuries old. What it probably did was become too expensive to manufacture…the same as everything else has a tendency to…and really, by 2375, who cares?" he sighed as the display suddenly went blank. "Janice is hardly the first scientist not to have any idea how she arrived at her discovery. However, considering this is 2375 not 726, we really should be able to do something about that…fairly quickly," he glared at the lifeless console. "Given the chance…

"Do you mind?" his face suddenly appeared next to Kira's to chastise her. "I very well can't do anything after you shut us down. I'm not an engineer, but that does make sense to me."

"Well, make it quick," she insisted.

"I am. As quickly as I possibly can."

"I am not sure if I like him," Anar acknowledged to his son.

"Or any of them," Sian nodded curtly.

"Federation," Anar agreed. "The Prophets test our cooperation in ways that are difficult."

"And disturbing," Sian assured.

"Extremely," Anar said. "He gave Janice back her life, I should be in his debt. And yet I find…" he surveyed Bashir with his air of impatience and nervousness. "I'm not so sure I like him. He is not a Guardian I would have picked, no more than the Klingon."

"If they are Guardians." Sian reminded Anar he was basing his belief solely on a presumption. The Prophets silent since his last encounter with the half-bred child Ziyal more than a day past and moments before his timely introduction to four of Sisko's staff. Three to accompany him home, the fourth to remain behind; the Klingon.

Waiting on the fifth one? The Prophets' mystical number five? "They come of their own accord," Anar murmured. It wasn't O'Brien or the Ferengi Rom. Neither of them there of their own accord. The Klingon wanting to be and being told he couldn't be. His place not there, his time not yet come to Anar's great relief and satisfaction. A Klingon truly less his idea of a Guardian than the disconcerting presence of the Federation. Who were the Prophets talking to then if it wasn't him or them? In words they either understood or didn't?

"Kira!" Bashir let out a yell, an angry flash of electricity sending him jumping back from the console his arm tingling, numb from his wrist to his shoulder.

"I told you to make it quick!"

"And I need you to give me half a chance so I can!"

They were Guardians. As oblivious to their roles as he had once been. Anar's look for his son was amused. "Can you think of another purpose for them?"

Sian could think of none and he would leave his father to explain what he perceived to be their purpose to the settlers.

"Settlers," Anar repeated. Never had he dreamt he would ever look upon himself or any of his troop as settlers of any sort of all.

The shuttle set down without incident four days later several hundred kilometers into the interior of the planet's western continent on an expansive area of plains. Possibly a gateway to a valley, or a fertile cradle. Possibly one of the continent's last. Possibly accounting for Anar's protective position. Possibly the reason behind why an inhabitable planet was uninhabited other than due to the Cardassian occupation and its infamous history of strip mines; it was possible they would find out. The scientist in Dax believing the chances of Anar's reputedly once large, now small group of Maquis survivors having landed in the hospitable area were less than them having migrated to the region for that reason.

The planet itself was class M. Unnamed, though charted and numbered. The only recorded class M planet for several light-years on either side of the Bajoran-Cardassian line riddled with pockets of dwarf stars, asteroids, and meteors. Fifteen light-years away a single Federation outpost buried under a pressure dome marked the official barrier between known and unknown space.

Distantly placed, Anar's colony misleadingly called Dyaan IX was centrally located in its spiraling system of twelve worlds, warmed by twin yellow suns slowly on the rise and glowing red through the extensive pollution of the upper atmosphere. Supporting his claim of a world littered with abandoned mines, but also supporting the theory of an old world with cumulative environmental damage spanning several thousand years not the mere Cardassian fifty. The mean temperature of the exterior was a chilly 35, windless, a taste of water in the air. The shuttle's chronometer reset itself to read an average day length of 27.3 hours, less than a third of it estimated to be daylight; it was winter. Dax pulled her gloves out of the pocket of her field jacket to pull them on.

Outside Anar moved toward the welcoming arms of his colony living somewhere between the primitive and the absurd, Julian's words a few short hours from then. Right now Dax counted two children. One a fragile, unhealthy female somewhere around five Bajoran years, the other indistinguishable at its early months, four women and upwards of twenty men. Three of the males visibly deformed with loss of limb, several of the colonists missing one or both exterior ears upon closer scrutiny including the child breaking rank to run toward the Elder.

The striking, startling view lent credence to the words of Klingon attacks and long-term, hard-core Bajoran Resistance/Maquis in a battle to the death rather than a rampant infectious bacteria devouring victims of Rigelian plague until halted by a jar of miracle cream.

Either that or the loss of the exterior ear was an adopted defiant act, severing and separating the Maquis' ties to their family heritage and Bajor Prime and its embraced politics that they denounced. That seemed unlikely given the symbiotic relationship of the Bajoran people and their culture, and the point that the exterior ears of Anar and his son while lacking the traditional earcuff, were intact.

Unless the Elder's desire to steer his people down a different path other than the one previously taken included discouraging unacceptable self-mutilation?

Either way it cast the individual Anar into a far more understandable light. As it cast Doctor Janice Lange and Gul Anon Dukat and his squad from weak, fragile, gullible Human and beastly, cruel Cardassians, to Lange being almost inconceivably courageous to live and endure beside the Bajoran survivors, and Dukat and his men to being inconceivably compassionate, protecting the small township, not adding to their strife.

As regardless of the cause or the cosmetic, unless the colony's membership was infused it would not survive past its second generation.

Dax stood there trying to decide what she believed, never so glad Worf was not there. Julian already backing away to grab a medical field kit, soil and plant samples the farthest thing from his mind. Kira, conspicuously silent.

"Federation, too?" The ethereal looking little girl clamored up into Anar's outstretched arms to throw her head back with a questioning, dubious groan for the notorious Starfleet uniforms emerging from the clumsy, ponderous shuttlecraft.

The scene had Dax flashing back to another Bajoran child, comfortable and unafraid of Anar throughout the short time he had held her captive on the station's Promenade in his flight to escape Benjamin. She bit her smile at this one's loud, bold candor. The clarity of the voice and analytical ability suggesting the child was much older than her petite stature implied.

"Yes, Federation. Hush, child, and greet your father." Anar instructed diplomatically.

She obeyed. Quickly, briefly acknowledging her father, apparently Sian, to return to wondering if they were under arrest, who Kira was, and suddenly, "Where's Janice?"

The child's eyes grew wide with perplexed surprise. Her notice quickly spreading through the group, curious about Kira, shifting to cold disdain with the appearance of Dax and Bashir, and silence upon the realization one of them was missing.

"Father…" The female with the infant in her arms turned from her mate, also apparently Sian, to reach for Anar. She was an average-height woman, a dark shadowing around her eyes. Slender, strength in her angular face emphasized by shoulder-length brown hair pulled back severe and tight. She looked Kira's age, mid-thirties and was probably ten years younger.

"Cardassia Prime," Anar held a Federation data padd in his hand; no explanation as to where he happened to come by one. "She sends her love with promises to visit soon; Anon and Pfrann as well."

The child erupted into a screaming, wailing tantrum of rage and tears, seizing the data padd to violently fling it aside. Wrestling and kicking against Anar's coaxing, consoling efforts ignored and wasted.

"Janice's little Nadya?" Bashir was behind Dax, his field kit slung over his shoulder, attempting to discreetly activate his tricorder and get a general health reading on the group. "If that child's nine years old, she's not only out of control and spoiled, she's dwarfed."

"Possibly…" Dax agreed with a glance down on the tricorder. "Or possibly genetics. Anything serious?"

"Radiation poisoning," Bashir said coarsely. "She's a chronic leukemic. Someone was far too close to someone's warp core gone awry at far too young an age. As far as the rest of them…reasonable, I suppose, excluding our Mister Anar who's as healthy as a horse; this is madness. These people need assistance, help. Not some transitory -- "

"Miracle?" Dax said. Bashir looked at her. She smiled slightly in apology. "Sorry. I could be wrong but I think they're gathered to welcome not only Anar and Sian, but also Janice home, and she's upset?"

"She's nine," Bashir repeated.

"So?" Kira said at his side.

"All right, fine," Bashir slapped his tricorder closed. "They're your people, you're culture, you're right, I'm wrong, and the situation is still madness. That diagnosis stands."

"I have to agree with that," Dax said to Kira.

She nodded around. "Benjamin should see this."
Yes, Benjamin should. Not to inflame him, he was angry enough. In the meantime they were there and seeing it. "What do you want to do?" Dax asked Bashir.

"Do? Examine them, of course. Treat them. That child is suffering with an utterly curable condition. Chronic adolescent leukemia doesn't even exist in our world, hasn't for centuries. I don't care what the cause. The word is chronic. Suffering. Curable -- "

"Julian…" she suggested.

"And countless other therapies to assist her with whatever other genetic mutations her experience may have dealt her," he argued. "In the meantime she's probably being fed some bizarre herbal-berry concoction; this is Bajoran space, they are Bajoran. Not some primal community we risk dazzling like gods from the heavens. We can't be in violation of the Prime Directive, we are the Prime Directive."

And they were former Maquis. Bounties, Dax was sure on all of their heads. It wasn't the Prime Directive they risked violating. "What do you want to do?" she solicited Kira gawking at Julian like he had lost his mind, which he had, simply temporarily.

"Wait a minute," Kira said. "Just…wait a minute." Her resolve was to ask Anar there and now, probably for permission for Julian to set up shop; if she could get a word in over the child's screams.

"Feel better?" Dax smiled at Bashir passing his hand through his hair. He had been doing that a lot the last four days. "You need a vacation."

"No, I don't need a holiday," he said. "I'm sorry, it's just not what I expected to see; men without arms, children without ears. In that way, yes, it's a bit of an optical overload."

"And you're thirty-three," she nodded.

He got what she meant whether or not he agreed with her. "We're not even there yet," he reminded.

That was true. It was a ten mile walk to the township, if it was a town. Dax wasn't sure herself what to expect. She returned to thinking about mysterious, deliberate. Suspicions she should have been able to put down with the understanding the settlers were anticipating Janice, Anar, Sian, not the Federation. Except that Anar had been aboard the Tir prior to boarding the Defiant from where he very easily could have issued a deep space transmission to his colony with instructions to make it look good.

It also didn't explain the shuttle. Dax eyed the Ark. When Anar had been allowed to issue a transmission to the planet surface with his arrival time and location there were no questions from his township as to how he managed to get home. Who provided him with the transportation to the distant world since apparently he did not have his own. The town people either took as much for granted as their leader, about their leader, or there was another answer. They also expected someone else.

"Anon Dukat," Julian was over his emotional breakdown and thinking the same thoughts she was. "They expected the Tir, or whatever Cardassian battle cruiser or transport. It didn't have to be the Tir specifically."

"Oh, well," Dax shrugged because it wasn't the Tir and they were not Anon Dukat.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"I read concern in your face, Elder." Her words cloaked, their meaning clear, Elise stroked her troubled daughter's hair soothing her screams of anger and sobs of pain.

"You read no concern," Anar answered as quietly. "Kira Nerys is Bajoran liaison to the Federation's Deep Space Nine; Terok Nor. The two with her are of the science community, here to investigate Janice's cream. It is everything we have wanted, and everything Janice has dreamed for us."

"Kira Nerys," Elise heard and stopped listening to anything else; Anar knew she would. Kira's smart approach discouraged either of them from saying anything more.

Kira eyed the head with its thin strands of brown hair buried in Anar's chest, the breast of his borrowed jumpsuit twisted in her fists. "Doctor Bashir wants the settlers to have a complete medical screening and physical."

"What?" Anar said, not because he couldn't hear her over his granddaughter's crying. Doctor Bashir had his surprises when he wasn't being troubled by whatever wisdom of the Prophets continued to plague him with his periodic bouts of nervousness and temperament.

"Will you just leave her alone?" Kira impatiently attacked the woman not helping matters in her mind, roughly pushing Elise's hand away. "She's upset."

Dax winced. Kira no better than Julian in his parental instincts, both of them worse than her admittedly awful despite her experience of having been a mother and a father in her past lives. The Bajoran woman stared at Kira. "She's my child."

What could Kira say to that? Dax agreed Kira couldn't say much.

Anar bit back his surprise and amusement for Kira's reaction, wisely settling for introductions to prevent any further misunderstandings. "Elise, my daughter, wife to my son. Their son San. And this is Nadya," he identified the child in his arms, hesitating slightly, aware of what Kira could plainly see for herself. "Nadya has had her trials. It may take a little while for her to understand Janice is not lost. Our numbers not less, but two more with Anon and Pfrann -- "

"Where's Dak'jar?"

Dax could not hear the child's mumble that her mother could.

"Dak'jar?" Elise turned away to look around, realizing another of them was missing, and so their numbers did grow less.

"With the Prophets," Anar did not lie.

Elise's hardened face set. "We pray -- "

"Don't," Anar interrupted.

She stared at him, a hiss of disbelief escaping her lips. "Dak'jar? A betrayer?" Her stare shifted suddenly back to Kira, icy in her review of the Bajoran liaison officer.

"Major Kira Nerys," Kira's head tipped stiffly.

"Bajoran adjunct to the Federation," Elise agreed. "Watch your step among us, Kira Nerys, and watch your back. We will be watching ours."

"Whatever," Kira shrugged. "Well?" she asked Anar again about Bashir.

Who did have his surprises. "That will be fine; generous," Anar extended, unable to resist adding a wry smile. "Unless for some reason you think we might be contagious?"

"You're not," Kira walked away, leaving Elise to gnash her teeth like a Klingon targ.

"Kira Nerys. I would welcome Tora Naprem, whore to Dukat to my home first. My father apparently sees something I do not."

"We'll discuss it," Anar offered before he realized what she had said. "Tora Naprem…" he repeated stunned by the announcement.

"Ziyal's mother," Nadya rubbed her eyes red and swollen.

"Here among you?" Anar insisted. "Tora Naprem?"

"Ziyal," Elise resumed her stroke of her daughter's hair. "In comfort to the child's fears. It's the first time the four -- the three of you have gone away," she corrected that to deny Dak'jar whose name they would never speak again. No more than they spoke of Hawk or Shakaar Adon.

"I don't know," she said slightly impatiently to Anar's scrutiny. "Something the child says. You see Prophets I do not. That doesn't mean they are not there. Janice is with Anon you tell us?"

"For life," Anar replied. "He swears his loyalty, allegiance and protection, Pfrann and all others at his side. Our numbers grow by thirty-six not only two."

"Of course he does," Elise smiled at Nadya trying not to be interested. "We swear ours as well and pray for love, luck…and children," she kissed her daughter's brow.

"It's all in the letter," Anar coaxed. "Do you want your letter?"

"No," Nadya stubbornly refused.

"Not even for later?"

"No," she said but took the padd her father collected to give her, holding it close to her chest.

"Excellent," Bashir sprinted for the shuttle when given the approval by Kira for a group health check. No sooner however than had he opened the outer hatch of the cargo hold for the equipment, he stopped. The townspeople were walking away.

"Where are they going?" he asked.

"Home?" Dax guessed.

"Home? What about…" Bashir stopped again to begin yanking the equipment out. "Never mind, I guess we'll just 'follow them home'. This is ridiculous. It really isn't me. I think; in a straight line, if you will. You can follow my line of thinking from here to there…" he was gesturing with a biofunction sensor, sticking it in Dax's hand and draping a second field kit over her shoulder.

"It's a good thing we brought more than we need," she agreed.

"Rather than have to cart all this stuff back ten miles?"

"We have to carry it back at some point," Kira lent her assistance.

"Key being at some point," Bashir started out, "not twice a day."

"Maybe," Dax cracked wickedly in his ear, referencing that neuro kit he so generously misplaced.

"That's our secret," Bashir reminded. "There's nothing to say I couldn't have just lent it to a colleague -- Starfleet, I might add, not simply Federation."

"With an established practice on Bajor Prime."

"Assignment, anyway," Bashir grinned. "There's no saying the Sorges will return, is there? They just might decide to chuck it all. Cardassia Prime turning out to be the retirement hovel they've always dreamed of; Dukat making them an offer they can't refuse."

"Along the lines of my wife is Human," Dax nodded.

"Quite," Bashir said. "And you are the only two on the planet qualified to treat her whether it's for a hangnail, or what it's for. The Cardassian medical society has enough to do working to reestablish itself since the Civilian revolt, Klingon conflict, never mind the Federation-Dominion war, without choosing now to broaden its horizons to include Human anatomy and physiology, at least as an elective; which eventually they will if they want to compete. They're proclaimed xenophobics, after all, not isolationists; clearly not isolationists plundering the galaxy every chance they get. Admittedly somewhat of a psychological contradiction from our perspective, but apparently not theirs…

"How's your neck, by the way?" he threw in at random. "Would have thought you'd at least be in need of a therapeutic massage by this time."

"My neck?" Dax presumed he meant her, he was talking to her.

Bashir grinned again. "Just asking. You and Worf have managed to patch up whatever differences, haven't you?"

"I think I'll ignore that," Dax decided after giving it some thought.

"No, don't. I'm interested, really. After all we did just sort of leave everything hanging, didn't we? Worf willing and able to be coerced into seeing the light…or not being able to?" he tried to keep the desperation out of the claimed interest, presuming things had worked out after four days and not wanting them to have. "I wouldn't know, I haven't heard. Obviously laboring under the impression I would have heard, at least from you. Rather than simply be left wondering, for that matter left to stumble over you in the dark…in the event things hadn't worked themselves out between the two of you?"

That wasn't exactly the way Dax remembered they left it, but that was all right. She heard him pushing for information he waited four days to push for. Four days hardly suggested desperation of any sort for any reason. Worf continued to be jealous, wrong, and sleep alone. She continued to be annoyed, right, and barely able to sleep at all – honestly obsessed with being right and deeply troubled by four plus centuries of accumulated wisdom that sided with Worf in spite of herself.

Julian continued to be Julian, safe and removed. She eyed him. "My neck is fine," she assured.

Bashir laughed. "Discounting the notoriously cramped conditions. In regard to quartering its crew, the Defiant's little better than the Ark…

"And then there are those who should be so lucky that a narrow, hard bunk is the extent of their complaints." His mood turned bitter three hours later when they ended their cardiovascular workout in the mud-soaked center of a classic example of Bajoran stagnation.

Bashir couldn't tell if the town was a hundred years old, much of it spent under Cardassian duress, or a thousand years old and therefore simply old and deteriorating underneath its occupants with its scarred, vacant buildings framing the Town Center and Temple like long-dead sentries still at a post. The community square defaced as the rest of the landscape with its ring of drainage ditches dug to relieve the saturated foundations and earth.

"This is absurd. These people are living somewhere between the primitive and the absurd."

He spoke those words louder, the distinct sounds of silence around them supporting his critique. He didn't need his tricorder to tell him their power sources were limited, if in existence at all, he could see they were.

"Either that or their purpose is for irrigation," Dax proposed they just might find fields beyond the cold horizon of houses and unkempt woodlands of brown leafless saplings and vines.

"Actually the furrows are for both." Anar directed them toward the Town Center where it was bitterly cold once inside the heavy walls of its welcome hall cast in shadows of daylight. The conjoining lengths of corridors sinking deeper and deeper into darkness as they moved away from the available natural light, until one's eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and realized they were approaching a door, not the rim of a black hole.

"When it rains, it has a tendency to rain; this year's harvest anyway," Anar strolled along the broad, stone passageway with familiarity and ease. "Last year we were in drought conditions for much of the year. We suspect it's commonly somewhere in between. The land is generally dry and rocky, particularly in the highlands; the mines," he winked at Kira. "Ideal for water run off and flash flooding. In all we stay reasonably entertained."

"There are ways around that, aren't there?" Bashir answered indignant for them. "Without attempting to pit your strength against Nature?"

"Are there?" Anar set Nadya down on her feet for the first time in their ten mile hike together; she still clung to him. Her face buried in his thigh, quieted to sullen anger as he pit his strength against the seam of the corridor's doors to force them open. They were once again in the bright cold light of the outside, perched on a ledge overlooking a massive ragged pit, torn into the earth and half-filled with frozen water and architectural debris.

"I have it," the Trill volunteered, effortlessly holding the door open for the town's people to silently file past following their leader as they had fallen into step following him from the shuttle's landing site.

"The last person we saw do that was Cardassian," Anar purposefully mentioned, taking Nadya by the hand for their short walk along the ledge.

"Anon," Nadya spoke with a nod of her head.

Anar smiled. "Yes, it was Anon, wasn't it? Tired of taking the long way around."

"And Pfrann," she said not to suggest a favorite between the brothers.

"Pfrann as well," Anar agreed.

"Yes," Nadya eyed the pit and Janice's letter in her hand.

"Do you really want to do that?" Anar cautioned, visions of having to repel into the abyss and retrieve the padd for her.

"Maybe," Nadya settled for now glaring back at Kira walking just a little too closely to them for her liking. "Move, Federation," she warned her, "in our direction and we'll put you in the pit with the Klingons."

"Bajoran," her grandfather muttered in correction, identifying Kira's brown uniform, drab by comparison to the sleek Starfleet design.

"Same thing," Nadya dropped his hand to run toward a second door, Janice's clinic and laboratory beyond where her Bajoran mummy continued to lie in her preserved and tranquil state.

"She's upset," Kira replied to Anar's cautious look.

"Yes," he said.

She shrugged. "I'd be, too."

He smiled. "Kind of you to understand, nevertheless."

It was something more than that. Bashir dallied in the first doorway with Dax. "Do you think it's intentional?"

"Well…" she looked over the frozen cauldron of rubble, above to the ravaged floors of the Town Center. "I would say the bombardment was direct, though weakened, probably well out of range of most standard planetary defense systems…Or did you mean everything?" she smiled at his perplexed expression.

"Yes, of course it's intentional," Bashir decided with disgust, making his way across the ledge in time to hear Janice's precious Nadya threaten to heave Kira over the side into the chasm with the Klingons. "Klingons?" he stared down into the gruesome mangle of rock.

"They make great fill," Dax whispered wickedly over his shoulder; he stared at her.

"You're joking."

She was. She wasn't so sure about the child.

"This is too much," Bashir decided again, that time with a snap. "Excuse me, but we're hardly invaders, we've been invited for God's sake…"

He walked through the door into Janice's lab to stop short at the sight of the Bajoran mummy suspended in stasis. Annoyance forgotten, everything forgotten, he dashed for the cadaver uttering, "This is fantastic…"

Kira was as startled, gawking, not necessarily as impressed as Bashir by what she deemed irreverent mishandling of the dead.

"Dolores," Anar introduced them.

"Dolores?" Kira echoed, further incredulous and incensed.

Anar's cool, blue eyes twinkled in reassurance. "She doesn't seem to mind."

"She doesn't have much of a choice," Dax agreed with Kira's flushed face as Anar turned from them to rescue Julian from Nadya if the need be, not only the mummy from any potential mistreatment by the Federation.

"What do you want to know?" Nadya snatched Bashir's medical tricorder from his hand.

"Janice has been particularly meticulous in her examination," Anar explained.

"So am I," Bashir smiled down on Nadya. Agreeing with Dax to the extent that the child was only nine and therefore a reasonable degree of apprehension was to be expected. "And, yes, all right. I suppose we can begin with you…"

He followed her to what looked like some sort of sacrificial table positioned off center in the large room dominated by a Cardassian replicator and an extensive piece-meal assortment of integrated technologies, not excluding Klingon.

That included the examining table that to Dax looked very much like a table pried free from its Klingon commissary.

"We were rather limited in our choice insofar as what to use for beds. If it was a platform…" Anar said.

"It became a bed," Dax nodded. "What works, works." What apparently did work, here anyway, was the lighting, the doors, the extensive assortment of consoles and displays. Nadya hopped up to sit on the edge of the table, busily examining herself with Julian's tricorder that she either knew how to use or was quickly figuring out. Julian continued smiling, comfortable and competent in his role as pediatrician.

"And, well…" he was saying with an encouraging point of his finger, "why don't we start with your ear?"

"The Klingons took it." Nadya proudly displayed her ability with the Federation tricorder to her hovering mother.

Bashir managed not to seek Dax's reaction to the grim exposure, though he wanted it. Wanted to know if she heard what the child said, which Dax did. Wanting to know if it penetrated, which he believed it did. His smile remained fixed and in place, his attention on the child. "That wasn't very nice of them, was it?" he agreed.

Nadya shrugged. "They didn't get very far."

Perhaps they hadn't personally but others had apparently gotten quite far along their blood-drenched path of madness and mayhem with 1800 original Maquis dwindled down to thirty-five. Bashir reached for his tricorder with a sigh, quickly retreating in horror when the child's teeth sank suddenly, deeply, and painfully into the flesh of his hand to everyone's entertainment except for his.

"What do you think you're doing?" he insisted angrily as Dax tried not to laugh along with the child's parents and the rest of her motley group.

"Put you in the pit," Nadya reminded him.

"Damn you and your pit; put you in the damn pit," Bashir muttered, submitting to Dax's soothing, antiseptic intervention, gently calming and clearing the angry red scrapes made by her vile little teeth.

Dax's approach to the incident was somewhat different than his. "She's cute," she agreed, trying to encourage him see the humor in the child's unprovoked and unwarranted attack.

"Cute?" Bashir echoed. "She's a little monster. What atrocity she hasn't threatened she's attempted."

"Well…maybe she thought you were going to hurt her."

"Hurt her," he said. "I'm a doctor, not a Klingon, why would I hurt her? For God's sake, Dax, she bit me!"

So she had and a moment later he was fine. Not so could the same be said for the child after her encounter with the Klingons. Dax was also thinking about the 1750 plus colonists who hadn't survived and really not wanting to think about them. "Maybe in warning for you not to try?"

"Don't tempt me," he threatened, not meaning a word. "Remind me to remind you of that in the morning; if we're here come morning to remind each other of anything." Of that he meant every word.

Dax smiled. "Where else would we be?"

Where Bashir certainly wasn't going to be was there. He didn't care if it was a hundred miles back to the shuttle. He'd be out of his mind to spend any more time with the de-evolving group of savages than he had to, especially overnight. Not that it wasn't pitch dark when they finally left, it was. Later than he wanted to leave, though not as late as it looked. Cold, moonless, and misting light frosty rain. In the meantime though he had this idea of wanting to conduct a physical examination of the survivors. Why, he couldn't really remember other than it was his chosen path in life. Saving lives, not endangering them, particularly children.

"How do you want to handle this?" Dax asked, willing and capable of being a medical assistant if he wanted or needed one.

"Yes, well…" What Bashir also couldn't see was the reason and purpose for everyone to be congregated in the room. Not that there was necessarily some other room for them to congregate in while waiting their turn. "Start," he said. "I guess just start…

"And who I'd like to start with are the two children," he informed Elise. "Your two children, I take it?"

"Mine." She offered her son's name and age, her daughter's he already knew. "San is five months."

And whole, Bashir noticed with both exterior ears intact. "Some point after the Klingon visit, apparently…" he scanned the curious infant intrigued by the tricorder, not poised to attack.

"Two months after the plague," Elise assured.

"Yes," Bashir was reading her son's levels of ryetalyn to be significantly lower than hers. "But then yours are quite sufficiently high enough to protect both of you throughout gestation. My question would be the birth was normal to your understanding?"

"And what's your understanding, Federation?" she retorted. "Of my species?"

Bashir grinned at Kira. "Beyond suspecting Bajoran females are rather the envy of any number of others with their serene, labor-free deliveries? Reasonable. What I didn't know, I did have to learn in a hurry, particularly when not to become involved and that was during the birthing process."

"You have children?" Elise challenged Kira with cold emphasis. The thought a startling one for Anar as well.

"No," Kira fended off the question. She was lying. Bashir's remark made no sense if she wasn't.

"The birth was normal," Elise told Bashir.

"Glad to hear that. And your son is fine; healthy."

Her daughter was another story. Eight hours later Bashir completed the scattered entries into his medical log. Bored in ten minutes the child Nadya was long gone with half the colony deciding they were bored, too. He could have spent eight hours with her rather than cataloging scars and missing body parts that at this point he could do nothing about with the equipment he had available to him, never mind what they had available to them. Obviously the lost limbs and ears could and needed to be replaced with a functional and cosmetic alternative rather than someone learning to work within the restrictions of a handicap they didn't need to work within and for some reason rather like Klingons, they took great pride in their developed thoroughly unnecessary abilities.

The brief screenings he did manage to secure of Janice's Nadya in an effort to determine the extent of damage at the chromosome level revealed excessive distortion to her DNA and genetic patterns, in any event utterly rejecting Elise as her biological mother, Sian hovering in a weak eighty percentile chance of being her father. Dax had a viable explanation ready on the tip of her tongue: DNA inhibitor and/or holographic transmitter-simulator. One similar to Janice's. One, Bashir hadn't been given the opportunity to find. Hesitant about expressing it in mixed company when she returned with Kira and Anar from their guided inspection of the village, really, hardly even a town, and found Bashir alone and packing.

"Done already?" Dax picked up his medical log with a smile, reading what he pointed out for her to read with a nod. "Well, there are ways to determine that."

Yes, Bashir knew. "Ask." Ask and not be given an answer rather like agreeing to an examination and then not sitting still long enough to have one. "I can halt the leukemia right now, restoring her destroyed bone marrow by simple administration of a donation from her mother -- or father."

"If they're her mother or father."

"Compatible at least," Bashir agreed. "Yes, commonly that's a relative, close. Her father's definitely related, I'm just not sure if he's her father."

"Or compatible. Which he may not be," Dax said, thinking of Lange and her extensive background in forensic sciences.

Janice had to do whatever she could to help the child beyond berries and herbal potions. Dax looked around the room with its misleading display of equipment. The reality was they were standing in an engineering compartment, not a science or medical laboratory.

"Precisely," Bashir said. "What she could do. I'll take less than ideal if I have to and make adjustments from there. The point is I can't tell, certainly not from a standard screening. The only thing I can tell you is that child is needlessly ill and in pain."

Dax had heard him the first time he said that. Marveling at how he didn't seem to be able to associate chronic pain with the child's independent and somewhat cantankerous personality. "Maybe Kira can get us the answer," she smiled across the room toward Kira embroiled in an earnest discussion with Anar about something. "Possibly before dinner…If not stand a better chance at getting an answer than in getting Nadya to sit still," she forewarned Bashir. "Determining her parentage won't tell you if they're compatible. For that you do need Nadya's cooperation as well."

"Not really," Bashir slung his field kit over his shoulder. "Like I said, I'll take distant, if I have to. Her chromosome patterns are a mess, to put it bluntly. She's a mutant. Riddled with cancers, sterile, certainly, and generally bald under those wispy top hairs. Hospitalized with those extensive therapies I also mentioned she stands a fairly good chance of leading a fairly normal life. In the meantime what I'd rather not do is infuse her DNA structure with just anyone's, making her just anyone's little clone. In all it does make some mutilation at the hands of some Klingon rather insignificant. Her own people put her in the position she's now in, regardless of who was ultimately responsible for the tragedy. Her own parents; supposedly -- dinner?" he paused.

"Hospitalized," Dax stood there thinking.

"Out of the question," Bashir assured.

"She's Maquis," Dax understood. "It would take a Prophet or two to cut through that much red tape."

"Not really," Bashir wasn't sure what she meant about Prophets and it wasn't really important because he disagreed anyway. "It's called looking the other way. No reason to have to declare a colony legitimate -- "

"Unless you first claim it be illegitimate. It's called a cover-up."

"Yes, well, quite frankly I don't care what it's called."

"No," neither did Dax. "She's a cute little mutant."

Bashir looked away finally from her wide, velvety stare. "Perhaps mutant is a little harsh. I'm angry. Quite angry. To be perfectly honest, I didn't want to be here, and now I know I don't want to be here. We may not be invaders, but we are intruding. I do feel we are intruding."

Dax smiled. "What was that you were saying about dinner?"

He wasn't. He thought she was. Dax nodded. "Those that don't eat, don't work -- it's a way of discouraging self-sacrifice," she explained to Bashir frowning at the philosophy that seemed somewhat backwards.

He scoffed. "Whose philosophy? Our Mister Anar's no doubt. Notice if there was one who refused a medical examination it was Anar. Not that he or we need one to determine his physical prowess, we have the Promenade and the murder of Martok's bridge crew…fair compensation I suppose for the massacre of 1800 plus Bajorans…"

CHAPTER NINE

They followed Kira and Anar for a short distance down a different dimly lit corridor into another surviving wing of the Town Center once again cloaked in aboriginal décor and atmosphere with resin-soaked burning wooden torches serving for both heat and light of what was clearly a communal dining area.

"Meals are taken with the community." Anar explained a habit carried forward from their days as Maquis and a necessity due to that ongoing difficulty with limited energy. Their power sources, he claimed confined to Janice's laboratory/surgical room/engineering suite for conservation and control. Communication between the village residents available via their Bajoran communicators tied into the communication console. Living arrangements cloistered in the immediate housing surrounding the Town Center were somewhat more private, though traditionally conservative with multi-generations residing together, as in the specific case of Anar and his son and his son's family.

This was all general and miscellaneous information relayed to Dax and Kira during their tour. Dax found the daily living arrangements most interesting in that they were extraordinarily peaceable and cooperative on the surface with no apparent problems with greed or jealousy. If that were true, it was remarkable considering the ratio of male to female was nine to one with Sian and Elise mates, as well as the only two with children.

Though who really knew how much other than the numbers involved had changed for this particular troop of Maquis. Raiders, nomads. Living their lives among the stars, aboard their fighters and cruisers. It was feasible the ratio between the sexes had always been unequal with mates, marriages, and children few and far between, birthed more or less by chance. Quite possibly what Julian was thinking behind his frustration in wanting to determine Nadya's genetic background.

Dax had mentioned the surprising social accord to Anar who dismissed anyone having any interest in dividing the lands into properties or lots. Propagation of their clan however was on the villagers' minds since adjusting to their survival, simply uncertain what to do, particularly since they had no intentions of surrendering their independent ways, or for that matter their natural, what Julian called primitive, lifestyle.

Perhaps Anar's vision for his colony included something of it becoming a natural habitat, with Nature, or the natural, being the planet's allure. That was an interesting dream, if it was Anar's dream. Difficult to ensure in the long run when newer generations notoriously had newer and different ideas.

Julian's interest at the moment was getting answers to his questions and escaping to the shelter of the Ark, not in breaking bread.

That was fine with Elise not exactly wanting to sit down with the Federation or Kira Nerys. "Leave us," she instructed Nadya there to help her mother in laying out the table for the evening meal when the Federation walked in.

The child obeyed quickly, already backing away from the table before her mother spoke. Elise turned to Anar.

"Elise…" he began with his coat of diplomacy.

She knew. They would discuss it. Except they had not discussed it, and discuss what? "No disrespect, Elder…"

"Perhaps words you should address to others beyond me," his head tipped.

She eyed him. From him Bashir with his expression of impatience and the Trill with her smile. She began setting out the smooth wooden plates, loudly. Kira's eyes rolled. Dax was more open, diplomatic, but honest.

"Actually, this isn't necessary -- "

"What isn't?" Julian interjected, startled, and of a clearly different opinion.

"Dinner?" Dax said, her look pointed.

"Oh," Bashir said. "Well, no, dinner's hardly necessary…" Certainly not the reason he was standing there at all. "Actually, the only thing I'm interested in is your daughter's actual parentage…" he took a step forward, his padd ready in his hand.

Elise dropped the plates to stare at him. Kira snatched the padd with her own challenging, "What?"

"Excuse me, I am a doctor," Bashir reminded Anar also interested, markedly so. "Not some tribal medicine man. Rather the same as I suspect you people are intelligent, if not educated far beyond…this barbarism," he concluded with a sweep of his hand around what could quite easily be mistaken for a Klingon dining hall, rather than Bajoran. Interesting, for while they claimed to abhor the Klingons, if not use their skeletal remains for landfill, they certainly didn't seem to mind living like Klingons, or for that matter conducting themselves as such. That he didn't say, he didn't have to. They knew very well what he meant, what he was thinking, and why.

"Answer him," Kira ordered Elise, able to decipher why the interest and immediately annoyed herself.

"Thank you," Bashir took his padd from her to extend it to Anar.

"She's our child," Elise said.

"That's a lie," Bashir assured Anar. "Possibly Sian's, who's possibly yours. Wouldn't have the faintest idea. Again, interested only that the child is in needless agony."

"We are aware of Nadya's illness," Anar took the padd.

"If not aware where, how and why," Bashir agreed coldly. "Irrelevant."

So it was. "There's been no deceit," Anar returned the analysis. "Respect for the child only and not wishing to amplify her suffering. Nadya has been ill for six years. Since coming to us Janice has worked tirelessly to stabilize her condition."

"With little success," Bashir snapped.

"Without also ever finding it necessary to attack or accuse," Anar assured. "Elise is Nadya's aunt. Sister to the mother killed in the same accident that injured the child. Your own screenings tell you Nadya is possibly my son's daughter; and she is. Either my son's or my brother Hawk's. My granddaughter or my niece. What you condemn as misplaced pride is an unwillingness to burden the child with a father who abandoned not only his colony to the Klingons, but his daughter, rather than gift her with a father who loves and cherishes her --"

"Explains Dukat," Kira interrupted with venom; Anar stared at her.

Elise reared. "What explains Dukat?"

"Anon," Anar interpreted. "A unity found inexplicable."

"To who?" Elise damned Kira. "Shakaar Adon? Or you his whore? We don't call Anon, Dukat. Nor Pfrann. And they do not call us Shakaar. Adon liberated Gallitep and never knew his blood was there. Our leader was Kai Opaka. It is the Federation who decided what is spiritual cannot be political, and what is political cannot be spiritual, not us…Unless you're Sisko," her fingers clenched for a plate as she inclined forward. "You've been with the Federation too long, Kira Nerys, you need to return to the Prophets. Until then, you want to eat? Eat!" She sent the plate sailing, clattering across the worn, stone floor, the vermin immediately scurrying to investigate it.

"If you think you can do better than Janice with what is available to you to relieve my granddaughter, by all means do so," Anar told Bashir as Elise walked out. "You'll find us at your disposal, not to your vexation -- "

"Does that include you?" the Trill's smile interrupted.

Anar looked at her. "Without unnecessarily involving the child. Nadya is uncomfortable with reminders of my mortality; with reason. None necessary to share." He returned to Bashir. "If, through your analyses you prove conclusively whose child Nadya is, either by interest or necessity, keep it to yourself. We know whose child she is…Excuse me, now," he petitioned Kira, pleasantly, kindly, his hand touching her shoulder. "My daughter's anger, while righteous, is misplaced; unfair, in some ways," he smiled. "Certainly to you, and also in part, Adon. I likewise had no idea Sian was at Gallitep, nor even that I had a child. Something Elise conveniently forgets. Stay. Please. An invitation. A request. A plea."
"Who could resist?" Dax wondered when he left to pursue Elise.

Kira shrugged. "She's no angrier than I probably would be."

"Or have been," Dax agreed. "Still, what probably is a bad idea…"

Kira nodded. "I'll be fine."

"We'll leave the light on," Dax promised with a reach for Bashir's arm.

"What?" he said.

"Tomorrow is another day?" she indicated the field pack that he may as well leave behind with the rest of equipment.

"What, and risk losing my tricorder?" he teased, allowing her to steer him out the door without protest. Much, anyway. "What about the screenings? He said yes. You may be confident he won't change his mind…"

"Tomorrow," Dax nodded. "We'll look over what you have and see if you need to conduct additional analyses…or if you're just nosy."

They were outside in the cold, the dark, and the wet. Bashir fastened his jacket, securing the data log inside the field kit for protection. "Thrilling. Before or after we fight over who gets to take a hot shower and who gets to make dinner?"

"Replicate," Dax said. "I'm sure you'll do just fine."

"Yes. Rather the same as I'm sure I'll find out if the water's hot or cold, or even working by the time I get to use it; as I said, thrilling. Certainly can't think of a better way to spend an evening -- whereupon one of us apparently can," he added slyly. "Unless you're about to suggest Anar's interest in Kira is strictly professional."

No, she wasn't about to suggest that. "She'll be fine."

"If not is a big girl," Bashir hunched deeper into his jacket, his hands stuffed in his pockets for warmth. "So are we. A big boy and a big girl -- how much farther?"

"Well…" Dax calculated, considering the tenth of a mile they had walked? "Ten miles."

"Marvelous," Bashir muttered.

An hour from then Kira was either eating dinner or being fed her head and they still had more than five miles to go. Another hour and Bashir thought he'd never see the end.

"You are the biggest…" Dax said when the shadow of the Ark finally loomed in the close distance some twenty minutes later.

"Pain, yes." Bashir was half-tempted to wrestle her for the shower except he knew he wouldn't win. That was all right he supposed since he was also half-tempted to strip off his wet, muddied clothes, crisp with evening frost and join her with risk of being killed. Which he would probably be killed, as it was almost worth the risk. He settled for a cup of coffee from the replicator and a selection of field rations remarkably identical in taste.

Still, it was better than cranberry borsch. Or whatever it was Kira was being forced to ingest in the warmth of the Bajoran homestead while he slowly froze to death in the Ark's cargo hold where their inventory of equipment was untouched, and the thermostat controls had once again failed, and Dax was deliberately taking an inordinate amount of time in the shower that would probably not be working by the time he got to use it.

"It's all yours," Dax announced just at the point he was about to lose consciousness, her wet hair neatly braided, her breath and face scrubbed clean.

"Consciousness?" she disputed his claim as he crawled out from under the engineering console to hand her an assortment of isolinear chips, all of which looked perfectly fine to her.

"Close enough," Bashir grinned. "I'm afraid the thermostat might be terminal, however."

"Which if it wasn't, I have an idea it is now," Dax agreed.

"Oh," Bashir said. "Well, I made dinner."

She noticed. Not only the petrified food supplement he was diligently attempting to rip into with his incisors, but the one he was extending to her to give it a try.

"And tea," he nodded.

She found it. Sitting in the replicator, dark and cold.

"Whose fault is that?" Bashir vanished into the shower where the frost on the mirror was steam and his teeth finally stopped chattering after the first five minutes or so of blissful warmth.

"Priceless is what you are," Dax replicated herself a fresh cup of tea, flipped open his field pack to insert the data log in the console and begin an analysis of Nadya's limited screening while she sighed at the assortment of isolinear chips in her hand.

"Parameters are invalid." The shuttle's computer rejected the request.

Dax groaned. "No, the parameters aren't invalid…Julian, what have you done?"

To the shuttle's data bank? Nothing. The parameters were invalid. She had the wrong medical log. A quick scan of the contents confirmed the subject of study was her. Dax stared at the display, reading what she couldn't believe she was reading.

"It's completely open for discussion as well," Bashir said quietly at her shoulder several minutes later. Dax had no idea how many, or how long he had been standing there watching her read. "That is the whole idea."

She looked at him. Everything she wanted to say she didn't, couldn't, the words simply wouldn't come out. Ones like betrayal, deception, deceit; invasion. If he ever wanted to hurt her, he had hurt her. She got up from her seat at the console and walked away.

"It's a start," Bashir dallied for a moment before he made that decision, and it was. A start. He removed the data log from the console and followed her.

He was out of his mind to follow her, clearly out of his mind. The rage, fury, anger burning inside of her was overwhelming. Dax moved aft to the midsection with its commissary and stopped. Nowhere to turn, nowhere to move, the interior hatch to the cargo hold behind her, Julian lying in wait in front, the most unbelievable expression of care and concern on his face; she struck him. Before he so much as finished saying another word.

"God!" Bashir gasped as her hand struck his face, sending him pitching into the wall and down on all fours as he struck the door frame. "Oh, quite! That's the damn answer to everything, isn't it!" he screamed after her as he knelt there struggling to right himself into a seated position, blood pouring from his ruptured sinus and torn lip and she stalked off, leaving him to get to his feet the best way he knew how.

"Son of a bitch…" he pulled himself up to an unsteady stand, clinging to the door for a dizzying second or two before heaving himself after her.

"Jadzia!" Bashir half-staggered half-fell through the hatchway of the shuttle, misjudging the slant of the ramp in the darkness, tripping and catching his balance in the frozen mud attempting to undermine him.

"Julian!" Dax whirled around in threatening warning for him to stop only to bring herself up short at the sight of his bloodied face and jumpsuit.

"Quite," Bashir stumbled up to her to heave, his harsh, angry breath shallow, searing with pain. "What are friends for?"

"You deserved it," she said finally, coldly.

"For what?" he insisted. "For having the unmitigated gall to tell you the truth?"

"Truth?" she choked.

"Yes, it's the truth!" he shouted. "The goddamn God's honest truth. And as a doctor I cannot be expected to stand by and just allow it to happen -- anymore than I can be expected to as a friend -- especially when it concerns the woman I am in love with!"

She was gone. She stared at him enraged, aghast, and was gone, back inside the shuttle. Bashir stood there trembling in the frenzied intensity of his own anger, fear, his hand shaking uncontrollably as it passed over his hair. "Quite," he said and went after her.

She was in the cargo hold, looking the part of the caged beast she felt she was. Hampered and hemmed in by the careful arrangement of highly sensitive equipment that she could either destroy, ending their assignment before it began, or somehow gain control of herself. She made it past him, back into the commissary area. Pushed past him, actually, moved quickly without attempt of assault as he stepped back from her in a reflex action of self-preservation.

She went no further than the commissary where she once again stopped. "Love?" Dax's hands clutched at her hair before slamming down on the small center island, her face and neck wet with rage. "What do you know about love -- anything at all about love?"

"On the contrary," Bashir disputed sarcastically, "I know enough about it to know I've made more than just a sorry mess out of everything over the past six years. The same as I know I have my own lengthy list of emotional problems and/or personal characteristics in sore need of being addressed. Notwithstanding the rather predominate feelings of gross physical inadequacy put alongside you…However irrational and vain that belief might be, it's also quite reasonable at the moment."

He snatched up his tricorder to check the state of his septum and see if it was merely deviated, gone missing altogether, imbedded in his frontal lobe, or if it just felt like it was. "All rather longwinded for look who's talking. If I have my Klingonese right, loosely translated this means I love you, Julian, in return…"

She took the tricorder away from him, slamming it down on the island top. His slight smile was sour, his throat congested by that point, his teeth heavily stained with blood threatening to choke him. "Nevertheless if it's all right with you I'd like to go to sleep with the same face I woke up with this morning."

She picked up one of the small, narrow stools to retreat into the cargo hold, dropping it with a bang in front of the makeshift diagnostic console. "Sit down."

"Yes, well, actually…" Bashir said.

"Sit," she directed, "down."

He sighed. "Yes, all right, I'll sit…I think you should know however with a Human it's generally simpler…" he said as he sat gazing up at her glaring down. "Yes, all right, fine. Do it your way. I'm confident you at least know what you're doing -- or at least believe you know what you're doing…And, yes," he agreed as she secured the second stool to kick it up next to him, "one more word and I'll be in stasis."

"That's about the size of it."

"Quite," Bashir closed his eyes, resting back against the console as comfortably as he could, feeling her clip the neural monitor in place, the muscles of his face and throat relaxing, his mind drifting into a state of tranquility.

It was twenty minutes before he could talk again. Ten minutes more he spent examining and reexamining his face, throat, neck and nose from every conceivable angle in the one available wall mirror in the one available toilet, while Dax attempted to sit patiently in the commissary at the center island drinking a cup of Tarkalean tea. Finally she called out to him, "Julian, you look fine."

"I know," his head popped briefly out the door to grin down the short length of corridor. "Just trying to make sure it all works and feels as well as it looks."

He still made her wait five more minutes or so before he meandered over to join her in her cup of tea.

"Julian…" Dax said again, calmly, after a few moments and a deep breath. "I want to talk to you…"

"Yes, all right," he agreed with a sip of the kiosk favorite heavily stained with that telltale replicator taste. "What would you like to talk about? I meant what I said. I am in love with you; deeply. I think you know that."

She looked away, not that she was looking at him, more her teacup. "I understand the premise behind your theory…" she looked back.

"It's not theory. Not how I feel, or Curzon. Both facts. Both intense. One extraordinarily exciting. The other brutally hard and cold -- "

"It's theory!" her fist hit the table, impatience getting the better of her. "And I'm sorry, Julian, but regardless of how much I understand what you are saying, I simply don't see it the same way you do!"

"Of course you don't see it the way I do. You don't see it all; you can't. That's the whole point."

"And I'm sorry," she was shaking her head, "if you don't agree with my choice in Worf."

"I believe you mean hate," he said. "Loathe. Despise. Your choice. The relationship. The man. Wishing him every conceivable ill will including death. If I had the strength or the courage I'd kill him myself -- if I had the violence in me." He picked up their cups to refill them.

"Worf is my husband!" Dax jumped up, the stool toppling over, her hand knocking her cup from his hand. It struck the replicator, shattering and bleeding the last drops of her tea down the replicator's front panels into a small puddle of black on the floor.

"No, he's your mate," Bashir slammed his cup back down. "I beg to differ, but he is your mate. A remarkably prehistoric term, covering a remarkably prehistoric notion and the behavior of a remarkably primitive man -- Jadzia, this is madness. You are ill, desperately ill. Any other time you would be standing here agreeing with me that medical profile incontrovertibly shows no less than alien possession, but you can't see that. You said so yourself, and you can't see it. You are utterly under the control of Curzon, completely at his mercy --

"And for God's sake, darling, let me help you before he kills you, or Worf kills you for him!" he cried as she pushed him out of her way, rounding the island to exit and he fired his cup ahead of her into the wall. It shattered as hers had into pieces and splattering streaks of tea. She turned around, the eyes filled with Curzon, like a demon possessing her. The face, Jadzia's.

"Quite," Bashir stood his ground, his hands gripping the ends of the island. "Either that or we can spend the next hour playing doctor, patient like we just spent the last; first your turn, then my turn -- "

The Ambassador turned on his heel.

"Either way," Bashir shouted after him, "I'm willing to gamble the one thing you hadn't counted on is Jadzia being as much in love with me as I am with her!"

The monster stopped again, that time sober, watching. "You're serious."

"I'm quite serious," Bashir nodded. "Quite serious."

Curzon relaxed, smiling gently in understanding, sympathetic rejection, "Julian…"

"I don't believe you," he interrupted. "Whatever excuse you're going to give, whatever defense you're prepared to make; I know. I know. And I'll stop you anyway I can."

The eyes glistened with the challenge, Bashir half-expecting the demon to speak for himself. He was silent though. Bashir nodded again. "We'll see, you're right, we will see. In the meantime it's Jadzia's attention I want, not yours."

"You have my attention," she agreed quietly.

Did he? He picked up his tricorder. "Call it paranoia, darling," he admitted not that he needed to add any more personal failings to his dossier. He ran a quick screening and comparison analysis of her synoptic patterns; she let him. They were generally the same back through the emergence of Joran Belar, Dax's maniacal, murderous host prior to Curzon. Jadzia's emotional struggle to integrate the previously unknown Belar with her past lives was at a point in time after the issue of her fulfilling Curzon's blood oath to kill the Klingon Albino. Maybe he was blaming the wrong host; he didn't know. If it wasn't for the reality of Jadzia's developed obsessive passion for the Klingon Empire he'd say it was possible. The only thing he knew was Dax was Jadzia Dax this lifetime, given half a chance, which she wasn't being given.

Bashir sat down on the console, the tricorder cradled in his hands. It was like he was attempting to hunt and peck his way through a mind's bizarre ability to turn multiple personalities on and off at will. All taunting, Catch me, if you can. Catch me, if you can. Curzon wasn't even an entity, merely a series of memory engrams.

"It's not…" he tried to think of a way to explain to her exactly what it was he wanted, what he was trying to do, beyond his ardent claim of loving and wanting to help her. "Some bizarre attempt to blame you for my shortcomings, failings. You're hardly to blame for anything at all."

"What is it an attempt to do?" she asked.

"Catharsis, perhaps?" Bashir guessed. "I just can't seem to get the image out of my mind."

"Janice Lange," Dax said. Her battered and beaten body lying on the examining bed. Her neck twisted. Her face and throat blackened from the hemorrhage of strangulation. Her brain, dead.

"You," Bashir slipped down off the console, daring to touch her biceps, feeling the bulging strength and power of the muscle pressing against the cloth of her uniform. "From the fractured ribs to the fractured vertebrae, the cuts, the bruises, yes," he nodded. "It's a consent to mutilation, darling. You are consenting to someone mutilating you, and there's only so much I can do."

"Julian, Worf isn't violent," she shook her head. "I don't know where you get this idea Worf is violent."

He was tempted to record her. He almost kissed her to show her what a kiss of love was supposed to feel like; he did neither.

"Contained violence, darling," he attempted to compromise even though it was a lie. "And if he ever loses control…" he stared at the arm he was touching. It could be five times its swollen size and she could never match the strength of the man who went round after round with one Jem'Hadar soldier after another in that arena on that Dominion asteroid two years ago.

"What about Dax?" he tried reasoning with the supposed meaning to her life. "What about the potential for injury to Dax? How many body punches do you think he can withstand? How many kicks, gouges -- you're not a Klingon, darling, and even if you were, you're still not a man."

"What?" Dax said.

Bashir thought about that. It just sort of slipped out but he thought about it anyway. About her utter grace and beauty she chose to ignore. "You're not a man, darling," he repeated. "I'm a man."

"You're a pompous, arrogant ass," she corrected.

He knew he was. It was everything he was, succinctly put. "And blind," he agreed. "I must have been out of mind. I remember being annoyed about Worf…" he thought back to that. "Not even angry, really. Annoyed; smug. Who was Worf? What did I have to be concerned about? You adored me …Fairly idolized and worshiped me, is what you actually did, and I enjoyed every minute of it."

Dax was glad. "Julian, as much as I hate to shatter your illusions -- "

"They are illusions, aren't they? Particularly the one about believing you would always be there, and you aren't. Haven't been…and I miss you, darling," his hand touched her cheek, aware he was more than simply dangerously close to her. "Oh, how I've missed you. I want to go back. Back to who we were. Should have been…"

He was kissing her. Feeling his heart start to pound harder and his pulse begin to race as his arms tightened around her. His hand treading its way up through her soft sable hair, and he seemed to lose all sense of everything except that he was kissing her.

CHAPTER TEN

Dax was startled. Too startled to do much more than stammer in between breaths. "Julian…we don't have a past…"

"No," he gasped in her ear, "but I think we're about to."

He couldn't be serious; he was serious. What was more, he was Julian. Dax came to her senses. "I can't do this…" she pushed herself away from him to stand there in nervous uncertainty.

"Julian, I can't do this…" her hesitant darting glances for the door were almost frightened. She remained rooted where she stood, awkwardly tugging at her wet braid of hair.

"No, it's all right," Bashir hung onto the console, endeavoring to catch his breath that he seemed to be holding for some reason. "Neither can I, actually. I meant everything I said…"

Dax stiffened; rigid and poised she turned on him in hostile expectation. "But?"

Bashir paused. "But what? I meant everything I said. Somewhat overwhelming that's all to realize how much I mean it…

"Quite a bit overwhelming, actually," he admitted to the anxiety threatening to send him into a spasm of hyperventilation. He took another breath, his hands cupped over his mouth, attempting to dilute the overdose of oxygen.

"Yes, that's much better," he straightened up to smile at her, encouraged by her defensive stance. "Neither can I do this -- not here. All due respect to the idiosyncratic habits of lovers desperately seizing the moment and each other, unmindful of the host of potential ramifications…

"I love you," he stared blindly back into her eyes clinging to his. "Jadzia, I love you. And apart from the point's hardly to attract anyone's attention other than yours, I find such practices to be missing two rather vital components: time and privacy. The idea's to make love to you. I'm not sure that's possible in an hour, or in the middle of a commissary; I know it isn't."

He was mad. In a desperate sort of way, but he was still mad. "What about Worf?" Her voice came close to failing her altogether. Its strength lost in a faltering, strained plea. "Julian, wouldn't I be lying to you as much as I would be to Worf?"

It was an interesting point Bashir supposed. One he really hadn't thought about. "I don't know. Would you?"

Would she. Of course she would. "Julian…" Dax's hand went to her head with a groan. "Don't do this to me. Please, don't do this to me."

"Do what to you? All I'm trying to do is tell you how I feel -- "

"Because I love you!" she suddenly, viciously, lashed out. Damming him, cursing him. "Yes, I love you, Julian!"

Hardly what he expected her to say, he'd admit that. "You love me…" he repeated, suddenly very angry again himself, furious as a matter of fact, and demanding an explanation. "Then I don't understand. What is all of this? Why Worf of all people for God's sake -- " He stopped. The fury charring her Trill spots black clouded her eyes with equally angry tears, triggering a sudden understanding in him of her expressed vulnerability, not violence, that he would have preferred to ignore. "You don't believe me."

"Oh, no, I believe you," Dax shook her head in scornful disgust for herself. "I believe you." And so she stood to lose a lot more than Mister Worf if she was wrong to place such hopes and trust in him, she stood to lose herself, or at least her heart.

"Good God, darling…" Bashir reached out to reassure her.

She knocked his hand away, occupying herself with unnecessarily straightening her hair as she exited into the cargo hold. He stopped her at the diagnostic console, finally succeeding in getting her to look at him.

"Yes, well," Bashir attempted to clear the tightness in his throat, "if I were feeling defensive I might say something like opening my heart to you, don't I stand a similar risk of being made to look an utter fool?"

"If you were feeling defensive?" she said.

"I'm not," he believed. "Apologetic, yes, certainly. About a lot more than simply being deaf, callous and blind. I can't explain what I thought I was doing. Thinking, not thinking; don't I wish I could? For myself as much as for you."

He had his temptations, yes, he certainly did. His youth, his charm. His boyish innocence and dashing good looks. "Julian…" Dax sighed. "Don't you think if there really are things about yourself you would like to try and change you should do it for yourself?"

"Why? I do everything for myself."

"Well, maybe this is something you should," she nodded.

"No, you are what I should do for myself. Jadzia, I want to marry you. This is hardly a lark. I've never been more serious about anything before in my life."

Marry her. "Marry me…" she barely said.

"Yes, marry you. That is my objective…"

She flinched when he touched her chin but she stood there trying to read whatever it was she thought she couldn't read behind his eyes. "Dear God, Jadzia," he asked, "can't we at least go back to that part where I say I love you, and you say yes, I love you, Julian?"

"Yes, I love you, Julian," she said.

It was something similar to relief Bashir believed he felt. "Perfect," his fingers touched her mouth, stopping her from saying anything else. "Absolutely perfect."

It was an extended moment before she relented to kissing him back. Even before she did however, Bashir knew there would be no going back, not for him.

"What about Worf?" she persisted in wondering as they stood there, their foreheads touching, breathing each other's air.

She didn't really want him to answer that. "Damn Mister Worf. I'm not trying to take anyone's wife away from them; I'm trying not to lose mine. It's not an affair I'm asking you to have with me. I want a relationship with you. For us to work on our relationship together. We don't have to be intimate if that's not something you're willing, or ready to be. We'll work it out. Worf, everything. I rather suspect we'll find the number of opportunities and time we are already together to be staggering, waiting only to be realized. You have my word not so much as a sideways glance otherwise."

"What makes you think a relationship isn't intimate?" she asked.

Then Bashir guessed he was asking. To be intimate. For her to spend the night with him. In their quarters, in his arms, in bed.

"If possible?" He wasn't sure it was possible without running a serious risk of inciting those obvious and potential ramifications, otherwise known as the unwanted curious and/or suspicious attention of Kira sure to return at some point, though probably not for some time yet.

"Yes, it's possible," Dax said.

"Come on." Bashir wasn't sure how long he stood there just looking at her before he picked up her hand, dropping it immediately as they exited the cargo hold, and not picking it up again until the door to the cabin swished closed behind them.

It was déjà vu in some ways to the innocent evening a few nights ago, not much above meeting in some secret alley, narrow and cramped with barely enough room for one to stand and move around freely, never mind two. "Still, it's much more my style, quite frankly," Bashir maintained. "Again no offense to lovers everywhere."

"Style?" Dax smiled for the first time, slightly. "Just how many times have you done this?"

"Made love to the woman I love?" He had her hand, drawing it around him and her closer. "Never. But I must say I'm certainly looking forward to it…"

They joined in what he called making love for the next several hours. It was different. Addictive, exciting, hot. Tame by comparison to what Dax was accustomed to with Worf. Bashir was just blind to it being simply incredible leaving him exhausted and starving for food.

"Food?" Dax laughed as he braved the cold floor to pull on his trousers and jacket.

"Neither of us had any dinner," he reminded. "What about just some broth -- actually, I think that's what I'm going to have. That, and another of those gourmet processed food supplements?"

"That sounds fine."

"I'll be right back," he promised as he kissed her and he was right back, handing her a cup of broth and prying her food supplement out from its vacuum packaging for her.

"Kira back yet?" Dax wondered as they lounged next to each other, their backs supported by the wall, eating their midnight snack and sharing an occasional smile.

"I don't know," Bashir admitted. "Didn't notice; not on my mind to notice."

Dax nodded. They fell silent again for a short while until he suddenly reached out, his thumb gently caressing her check. "Have I mentioned I love you?"

"Yes," she smiled.

"Good," he said.

"Have I?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "And it's hardly something I would mind hearing again."

"I love you," she said as they kissed, the kiss quickly becoming serious. They dropped off to sleep eventually on the bunk meant for one. At 0615 approximately Bashir woke up rather rudely when the sensation of falling turned out to be quite valid.

"Are you all right?" Dax joked to him rubbing his bruised shoulder and equally wounded pride.

"Quite," Bashir said. "Apparently Starfleet Command thinks its 'Captains', if you will, all have the libido of a monk."

"Or at least preoccupied with other things," Dax nodded as he worked at resettling himself as comfortably as possible.

"Explains Jake," he pulled her over on top of him.

"Benjamin wasn't a Captain at the time," she laughed.

"Neither am I," he assured. "Kira is; this away mission anyway."

At 0735 he was catching her up in his arms one last time, reiterating his oath not to incur any unwanted attention from Kira's direction, or anyone else's. It was an unnecessary concern. Kira had yet to return from her dinner with Anar. Bashir didn't know that at the time Dax left, thinking more about Curzon who also had the common decency to stay away. Why shouldn't he? Bashir grimly surveyed his shoulder in the small mirror on the toilet wall. What was it to Curzon how many lovers Jadzia felt it necessary to have? He had her by the throat, in near perfect total control. Jadzia no more inclined to turn her back on Worf or his home world that morning than she had been the evening before. Simply polite about it, pleasant, promising to discuss his concerns for her openly and sincerely.

"Damn it all," Bashir perspired with anger, jealousy already burning and eating away at him not five minutes after she left. "Damn what you call love; for that matter damn you." The flat of his hand slapped the mirror hard; it didn't break. He purposely struck it in a manner so that it wouldn't. "Damn it all," he said again, his sweating palm leaving a moist, damp imprint on the glass. "It's not a bloody game of darts. I love her. Perhaps that doesn't mean anything to you, but it does mean something to me."

It meant something. Alone in Kira's cabin with five minutes to collect her thoughts and duffel the hands Dax could still feel touching her throat were Julian's, hardly choking or strangling, though certainly quite emphatic. If he was right and she was under the spell of Curzon then something was wrong. It was very wrong. Obviously something was wrong. "Very wrong," Dax sat down on the neatly made bunk with a sigh. It was a minute or two before she realized there was something else odd and unexplained.

"Kira?" she stood up to have a look out in the corridor, the cargo hold and finally outside.

Nadya darted quickly away from attempting to listen through the door to the conversation in the dining area with the approach of her mother's rapid and impatient footsteps. Elise eyed her child, knowing her and the innocent look.

"Come here," she called Nadya to her. "You listen to none of them, you understand me? None of them. I don't care what they say."

"Federation," Nadya understood.

"And the Bajoran," Elise assured. "Kira Nerys."

Nadya nodded down to Janice's letter she held in her hand. "Ziyal's mother."

"What?" Elise said.

"After Tora Naprem died," Nadya extended her the padd. "It's all in Janice's letter. Kira took Ziyal to live with her on Terok Nor. They were friends."

"The child and Kira Nerys?" Elise took the letter in surprise.

"It's all right," Nadya said, "I'll tell Kira she can eat with us instead of the voles."

She dashed away, past Anar joining them to return to the dining hall. Anar glanced at Janice's letter.

"I know…" Elise accessed the padd. "We will discuss it…My father said nothing of her being mother to Tora Ziyal."

Where Janice had, along with a respectful request they accept Kira into their fold with kindness and trust.

"Who wouldn't Janice request we accept?" Elise rested back against the wall. Her hand tired as it passed over her hair, reading the letter and deeply missing the young woman she called her friend.

"No one," Anar agreed quietly.

Elise handed him the padd shortly. "She has words for us all. Anon and Pfrann, too. With promise of more to come soon. The decryption you'll need is included."

He knew. Anar accepted the padd with a joking smile. "To be installed after dinner; after the Federation leaves. Why invite trouble, when there is no cause for trouble."

"Trouble…" Elise stared back toward the dining hall.

"Not this time," Anar promised. "They are here only to see the grotto and collect samples of Janice's studies."

"Legitimacy," Elise recalled Janice's dream. "Another word for acceptance of what we have fought against for ten years."

"Point," Anar conceded. "But I think we're far enough from the Capitol to be able to maintain our independence."

"And too far to make use of its protection," Elise finally turned back to him, "unless the UFP installs an outpost here, right now, today…. And then the Cardassians will install another on their side. And then the Klingons will come again…No, it's all right," she waved for him to remain silent. "We accept Tora Ziyal, of course we do. Child of the Prophets, who would refuse? Those of us who can see her and those of us who cannot, we accept her mother Kira Nerys as well."

"Guardian," Anar nodded. "Anon's universal translator helps his ears, but not his hand. The words he stumbles over is mother of protection, not blood."

"You are speaking to a mother of protection not blood," Elise reminded him, Anar wishing she had not. Familiar, and yes, grateful for the lowly status of the male among her ancient matriarchal sect, there was still a difference when the mate, the male, the father, was Dukat. "You do not take what you do not want, nor give what you do not wish to."

"For no man, ever," Anar agreed. "Not husband, or father. But for the child always. Mother, village, or male, tool."

"Exactly," Elise said.

"Well," Anar smiled again with a gesture toward the dining hall, "at least Dukat is as insignificant as the rest of us in your prayer."

Elise scoffed. "Dukat. What does Dukat have to do with anything?"

His question. Then, as well as earlier, as well as later. Unanswered and nagging.

"You can eat with us," Nadya announced gaily to Kira's vacant look, bounding into the dining hall to collect the plate from the floor, wiping it clean with her sleeve and setting it neatly in place on the table.

"Okay…" Kira said cautiously, no Prophet hurrying to assist her in what was truly not her field of expertise; children. Finding them chaotic and confusing, morose one moment, crying and screaming the next, and now suddenly gregarious as this one was.

Nadya took care of any needed explanations for herself, scrambling to sit on the table next to the plates where she could look Kira in the eye, grinning all the while. "Ziyal would never forgive us if we put you with the voles."

"Ziyal…" Kira repeated, thinking everything at once, all of which could make sense and still she was stunned. "You knew Ziyal…"

"She's my friend," Nadya's head bounced gaily with her nod. "It's all in the letter …you can read it, too," she promised, to where she would have killed Kira an hour earlier if she had dared express an interest in touching it.

"Ziyal is with the Prophets!" Kira interrupted viciously to put the child in her place whether she was lying or telling the truth. She stared past Nadya to the colonists beginning to file into the room.

Nadya shrugged, happily reintroducing Kira to the haughty and the sullen as Ziyal's mother, not simply some Bajoran puppet of the Federation, the mood of the people changing as abruptly as the child's had. The small group of them almost equally divided between the child's adoration and Elise's watchful acceptance.

"Guardian," Anar corrected his granddaughter's enthusiasm presently, pleasantly at Kira's side, his modern dress of trousers, tunic and boots shed for the traditional robes and sandaled feet. Elise attempted to catch his eye. Wise suddenly to the elder's interest extending beyond the political, or even the divine, suspicious again, more concerned than amused. Anar ignored her.

Kira was oblivious to anything other than distaste and confusion with finding herself an object of the town's attention. Rapt, ardent, intense, it was invasive and inappropriate. She had a headache long before dinner ended, a thousand questions fended off or answered, a thousand more of her own pounding away inside.

Anar had his persistent lingering few. "Conversation?" he couldn't think of another reason or way of inviting Kira to stay, or perhaps he could. He smiled. "Or perhaps a chance to clear one before beginning another?"

"Yes," her answer was blunt, her nod, short.

The night air was cold, the Temple a short walk, warmed in the dark, golden light of her waxy candles and fragrant aromas. They sat in silence for several minutes before Kira finally rose in a huff of impatience to drop to her knees and attempt to begin a meditation; it was worthless. Her eyes opened after five minutes to eye Anar watching her.

"Perhaps conversation was the better of the two ideas," he agreed.

Kira shook her head. "It's late."

Not really. Though with a three-hour walk waiting in front of her it would be that much later, that was true.

"I'm fine," she shook her head again when he suggested a robe for added warmth and company on her stroll.

"Out of the question. Lacking bands of roaming beasts, four-legged or two, the plains are flat, devoid of winter vegetation and without landmarks -- the lights of the township cloaked in mist ten feet in front of you," he insisted when she scoffed.

She still scoffed. "I was twelve when I joined the Resistance."

"I was five," Anar countered. "Fifteen when I grew tired of throwing stones and slurs and offered my services to the Federation in their Cardassian war instead."

She looked at him, his smile as sincere as his offer. "What else do you want to know?"

She didn't know. Everything. Nothing. "All right, fine," she accepted the company, not the cloak.

"Wiser choice than mine," Anar laughed. "For while the robe is comfortable, it is as impractical as the leather thongs for a winter's hike -- I'm freezing. Your understanding and patience, please. No need to disturb Sian or Elise, I have two homes. My son's and the Town Center. One for the comfort of a family, the other for solitude and contemplation…

"Occasional work, study…" he agreed as they entered the silence of the town hall where the light of a single burning torch turned her dark red hair plum, its bristling short crown damp with glistening frost. "Occasionally for other reasons," Anar admitted, enjoying the sight of her hair together with her company. "It should only be a moment."

It should have been. Anar sincerely hoping that it turned out to be longer, it did. The lack of formal furnishings Kira expected, the scattered disarray of various computer components. The Klingon bat'telh on the wall she did not. It transfixed her. Anar hesitated in excusing himself to change his clothes, settling for locating Janice's gift of wine.

"The last of two," he explained when Kira turned around to find him standing there with a glass of Bajoran Spring wine in his hand. "Bottles," he clarified.

"Thank you," she accepted, apparently forgetting or changing her mind about wanting to leave.

"Make yourself comfortable," he invited. Indicating there were a few choices as far as where they could sit. Some table from someone else's ready room or commissary, the floor or the bed made comfortable from an ample collection of thin mats.

"This is fine," she chose the floor, beneath the bat'telh suspended above them on the wall. She continued to eye it for some time as she sipped her wine. Finally she looked at him in unspoken inference and question.

Anar smiled. "I would have expected her to run in panic and fear, nor would I have damned her if she had, except she didn't. Not the first time, and not the last, only to help. Shield the children. Protect them. The wounded. Soothe their screams of fear and pain. We won the first battle. Lost the last, most would probably say. The scattered survivors lying in humiliating silence in the fields of dead."

"Lange," Kira nodded.

"Janice," Anar agreed.

"Whichever," Kira shrugged. "I'm sorry, I just can't accept Dukat…"

"Who can?" he said. She was looking at him again which was fine because he was smiling again. "Prefect Dukat. Emperor. Butcher. Beast. Defiler. None of which Anon is, nor Pfrann. Something you should know even better than I."

"Pfrann I can accept," her hand was marking the air, cutting it, reassuring him even she could see the difference between Dukat and his sons, or at least one of them. "I have no problem with Pfrann…"

"Why not?" Anar interjected, he thought quietly, and not because he had any difficulty accepting Pfrann whatsoever, anymore than Anon.

"He's a child!" her voice rose unnecessarily in defense. Her opinion was reasonable and true. He was perhaps reading far too much into her acceptance of Ziyal. Anar sipped his wine while Kira returned to studying the bat'telh above them.

"What even brought them here?" she asked.

A good question. One Anar might answer for her some day. "The war."

She scoffed. "You're a light-year from the Cardassian border."

Not quite. "The war," he maintained. "The same thing that brought the Jem'Hadar. Anon eventually, and myself initially. Not here to this world, no. But, yes, here to this sector -- its Cardassian side."

"An outpost," Kira nodded.

"You seem surprised," he was amused.

No, she wasn't surprised, only perhaps that they survived at all. First the Jem'Hadar, and then the Klingons, and finally Anon and his Cardassians, Janice Lange somewhere in the middle and inconsequential, it was the latter she could not get beyond, though she tried. For several hours. Possibly would have succeeded if she managed to stay on track, not digressing every other sentence or so into some dissertation about Dukat. Whom she hated, loathed, and knew more about than any number of officially appointed biographers, including his penchant for Bajoran Spring wine.

She was deaf to her own words. Intolerant of the Bajoran whore who birthed the child of blood, and yet with Dukat when word of the long-lost Cardassian transport Ravinok ultimately found them together on a different distant world. Her, in search of some Resistance mentor Lorit Akrem, the former Cardassian Prefect in search of his Bajoran indiscretion Tora Ziyal. A child Kira claimed to know nothing about and yet embraced ardently, immediately, threatening Dukat with loss of his own life if he dared follow through with executing the girl, his goal behind his quest. One abandoned. The force, power, strength of Kira's argument able to guide him into a more reasonable frame of mind.

Anar attempted to assimilate a picture of Kira and Dukat embroiled in a heated debate of Ziyal's life or death on some scorched desert with Kira emerging triumphant rather than finding herself as dead as Tora Naprem and her child Ziyal with one strike of Dukat's hand.

He couldn't assimilate it, who could? He faded into heavy thinking of the Klingons. They had appeared out of nowhere, came from everywhere, like a plague of locusts swarming down. Anar fell with his executioner dead beside him. The Klingon's bat'telh pinned in his chest, the weight of it crushing, his life draining into the mud. Janice's desperate dive to pull Nadya away from her mortally wounded grandfather was momentarily successful in saving the child's throat, not her ear. She came away with the screaming child in her arms and blood on her hands. The Klingon who had swung his sword and missed was unimpressed by his lost comrade, the stumbling pleas of the Human or the crying rage of the child. His bat'telh simply came up again, in preparation of coming down. His comrade's sword caught him from behind, swung by Anar's hand, severing the Klingon's leg at the knee and he was down on his stump in the mud, struggling to right himself, gurgling and gasping for air as he drank the wet earth. Anar pressing his face deeper and deeper into the drowning pool of muck and blood until he was silent and dead. Janice sank back on her haunches, clutching Nadya in disbelief, a moment later dropping the child, the two of them scrambling to help him, determined to get to his feet, supporting himself briefly with the assistance of the Klingon's bat'telh like a crutch.

"Stay with the bodies; it's your only hope," he remembered directing Janice before he dropped to die again, or not die, obviously. The body she chose to stay with was his, stuffing his shirt into his gaping wounds and packing them tightly with mud. Soothing Nadya's sobs into whimpers, cautioning her to silence, attempting to keep the child warm beneath her as she prayed for the winter day to turn night, the cold to turn bitter, which it did. The mud like ice inside of him, staunching the flow of blood, his heart rate slowing and he could feel himself floating in a natural state of stasis.

Anar roused himself from his memory. Guilty of his own mental digression, though not without cause, reason, or point. Janice Lange could not stop a Klingon's bat'telh, their boots from trampling the bones of children. Somehow Kira Nerys managed the impossible with Dukat on a desolate world of Breen mines, whose only witnesses as to how were the sun and the sand. Convincing him instead to murder his career rather than his child, toppling Cardassia's then Chief Military Advisor from his throne and casting him into a state of political exile.

It was an amazing tale of accomplishment Anar could not believe anymore than he could explain it even if the child in question was born of Kira Nerys rather than some Tora Naprem. There was more to the escapade than Kira was wanting to tell and unwilling to say. She knew of the child Ziyal, of course she did. Traveling with Dukat to secure her before what? Truth became common knowledge?

What was the truth? Anar surveyed his nephew's liaison, former member of his Resistance group, former lover, much in the same way as the Obsidian spy Garak had once surveyed Janice. Dukat's total disregard for his political standing unexplained except as simple arrogance. His ability to secure assistance from the ranks of his one-time Bajoran mistresses unlikely as the yarn unless the mistress remained indebted somehow or believed she did.

Kira believed she did. Her hand clutched the wineglass she drank from. Her face contorted with misery and disgust. Wanting to talk of Klingons, the Federation, Nadya's and the colony's hope and plans for the future and rambling on about Dukat, embarrassed by Janice's revelation of her relationship with Ziyal. Dukat taking perverse pleasure in inciting terror over their past association being revealed, dangling the life of some child of some sister, some mother, some friend, their own, over her head. She would have been scarcely more than a child herself if the child was hers.

The child was hers. Fourteen? Anar guessed Kira's age at the time of her daughter's birth, attempting to imagine the sequence of events. Mistress to Dukat's mistress perhaps and then what? Mistress herself? He let her talk. Little of it clear. Much of it contradictory with Janice confused with Ziyal, Anon confused with Dukat. Anger and animosity spread among Shakaar, Damar, and of course, Dukat. Her conversation continuing until they could have walked to the Ark and walked back to the town again.

"I don't know…" Kira finally said for some uncounted time, her head resting back against the wall. The wine was making her tired. The cold creeping in, numbing her stiff bones, encouraging her eyes to close. She opened them after a minute or two to look at him. Comfortable and relaxed, his head resting against the wall next to hers, watching her, smiling as he always seemed to be smiling. Kira's gaze dropped from the face to the loosened robes exposing his suntanned chest marked with a scar formed in almost a perfect circle the size of her fist.

"Klingons," his hand touched her hair lightly, his voice agreeing softly with the story he hadn't told her and words she probably wouldn't have heard if he had. "Eighteen hundred dead, 250 or so alive. The first of us died the following day of the Rigelian plague. Our numbers dwindling down to thirty-five…" he kissed her, his hand around her wrist, pressing it into the flesh of his chest.

"Yes, you can…" he assured when she stiffened in automatic and immediate resistance.

"And, of course," he agreed as her fingers dug into the roots of his hair, the heel of her boot gouging a painful scrape across his knee as she twisted herself in an effort to give him a well-placed kick, "you don't have to."