Mornings passed to afternoons, and finally into the eerie satin blue of night. Pain was unfurling in Richard's stomach, heightened by degrees with every coming dawn. The quiet, melancholy resignation in the eyes of his child brought an even greater weight to his shoulders than he'd felt when the boy was crying out and struggling. A heavy, mechanical tread had come to Julian's steps as he followed Larkin's assistants along the same extended passage. As though accepting that the daily cycle of tests and treatments was nothing more than what his life was always to become.

"I'll be back in the morning, Jules."

"All right." Julian spoke with a heavy voice, never meeting his father's eyes. Small fingertips pressed shallowly against the fabric of his brown toy bear - which stared accusingly back at Richard, even while his boy did not.

Evening had arrived, the light of two crescent moons casting long beams over the bed and floor. Rising deliberately, Richard shifted his gaze to peer beyond the largest window. The nocturnal sky deeply black, enough to highlight the glow of both thin satellites. Unclouded - for the first time in two full months, if the stories and superstitions of the hospital orderlies were to be believed.

"Father?" whispered Julian, unexpectedly. "We'll be going home soon. Won't we?"

Richard turned again to face his son. "It's possible," he responded. "But that's really up to Doctor Larkin. Not me."

"Then…" The boy paused, swallowing, to steady the quiet half sob behind his voice. "We can go home when she says it's all right?"

"Of course."

"When will she say…?"

Richard hesitated, feeling that his legs had turned to two stone weights. I don't know. And one despairing moment had banished all others, with his voice turned dumb by the pain of indecision. It had been made so clear, from the very beginning and even before. They could not stop until the doctor declared that the procedure was complete. But what response would not betray this child, who looked to him as a source of safety in his answers?

"Father…?" Julian ventured plaintively. "That place where we go with Doctor Larkin… sometimes…?"

"Yes?" Richard knew what room he had meant.

His son looked away, and back again. "I don't… I - I don't want to go there any more."

"You don't want to be like the other children?"

There was a pause. "I suppose." But Julian's voice was hushed and resigned. He turned to his side and curled into a ball. "Good night, Father."

By some impulse, Richard stopped moving forward and stood by the open doorway. The sounds now coming from the opposite corner had softened to no more than an occasional sniffle, shrouded by the covers pulled up over the youngster's chin. A barrier extended across the floor, dividing Richard Bashir from the farthest corner of this cool, sparse room. Nothing more than air and moonlight - but it held him back, robbing him of the will to cross.

Beneath the surface, his face was hot - and with tears gathered thinly over the surface of his eyes. The salt stung him like a hundred tiny cuts across his skin. Turning away, he set his aching jaw - and left his son alone in the silver-tinted darkness.

They chose a patch of bare land on a broad, shallow slope - where the edge of the capital had given way enough to offer a clear but sheltered place to support the mass of a landing spacecraft. It was not the ship that dodged the tip of each artificial structure. But even the shuttle that Patrick and Sarina had located at the back of their ship was bulkier and heavier than any Starfleet runabout. There was a slight vibration as the hull connected with the ground below it, and settled into silence.

"Well?" demanded Jack. "What are we waiting for?"

"The pressure clamps still have to equalise," Lauren reminded him.

Jack fired her a quick, sharp glare. "I know that."

As the locks disconnected with a long, grating hiss, Bashir abandoned his place nearest to the ascending outer door. Hunched in the cramped interior, he took only two halting steps to venture towards it.

He squinted, met by the glare of a hot orange sun. The distorting atmosphere seemed to have augmented more than it had dimmed the light. Dense, slender clouds, drifted in several layered tiers, each one defined at the edges by filaments of sparkling gold. The atmosphere was oppressive - heavy and wet. A noticeable rise in air pressure pushed its way through the doors, the heat of it instantly causing a fine layer of sweat to glisten upon the Humans' skin.

Long banners hung from several balcony columns, drifting sleepily so that the light blinked through the fabric. With the Adigeon sun glowing steadily from just above them, the jagged shadows of their city were as still as though painted onto the sky. Not even a breeze existed to shift the threads of finely woven tapestries.

A paradox, Julian supposed, that the sticky mist around them had seemed to sap all moisture from his breath.

Surveying the cityscape from his place at the transport's entrance, he saw for the first time how many buildings had been gathered like upright sticks within the borders of this shallow valley. His view of the most distant towers was quickly overlaid with a second, long un-accessed memory. The bright and sunbaked planet had seemed a lot larger in the remembrances of his early childhood.

"You realise this is the first place that others will come looking for us?" he commented, still with his back to the shuttle interior.

"What others?"

Glancing over one shoulder, he noticed the sudden anxiety in Patrick's fretful blue eyes. The older man shied away from the door, each hand nervously squeezing the other. Julian sensed that his own mouth had failed to close - but still with no real answer forthcoming.

Lauren regarded him, her eyes narrowed in direct and thoughtful scrutiny. "He doesn't know."

Julian shut his mouth self-consciously, and looked away, turning to adjust his vision to the intense natural glare. "It should not have been so easy," he muttered. They had met no resistance from planetary officials, been given no hint that their approach was being monitored.

"That's gratitude for you," scoffed Jack. One short drop left him standing on the solid ground, where he whirled around, arms spread grandly asunder. "We've come this far. Haven't we?"

Already tiring from the ache in his joints, Bashir clung tightly to the frame of the doorway, and sighed. Perhaps there really was nothing to fear - no more than the illusion of pursuit that had plagued him until he could hardly imagine what it had been like to feel entirely safe. Jack was right. There was no time for doubt.

Lauren's voice came, with little delay. "At least you can find that woman you've been after."

Unable to think of an effective retort, Bashir tracked the woman's approach until she stood close enough for a clear and musky aroma to reach his nostrils. He glanced sidelong at her, skin tingling with their uncomfortable proximity. There was a touch of subtle mockery in her smile, and in the easy curve of her body as she blocked Julian's egress with an arm across the frame of the open door.

"If you ever get tired of looking for her-" Daylight flashed across Lauren's steel blue eyes, and her breath was warm and moist as she whispered suggestively in Julian's ear.

She turned, glancing back only once to cast an open smile over her left-hand shoulder. Careful to maintain his balance, Bashir followed the others' lead - and tensed his grip as he negotiated the short descent. For the first time since his childhood, he stood on the ground of this far-off world, and found that he was contemplating the urban jumble of Adigeon's largest city.

We're here, he allowed himself to realise - as though it had not been possible before.

Three men had gathered beneath the flickering glow, as a single outdoor lamp hummed sporadically over their heads. The same light had cast its beams down to a little accessed pavement, in an antiquated Terran suburb that even its neighbours had forgotten long ago. But only one now made his final journey to their distant terminus, beyond even the outer boundaries of the Federation. The others would join him, in time, but not until the circumstance was right. At that moment, they were needed more elsewhere.

A high speed monorail connected the uppermost buildings, like a string extended around a cluster of metal posts. It floated so smoothly above the track, that if there had been any jolts or vibrations, no traveller would have felt them except by the power of imagination. But still, the man's fancies supplied what his senses had denied him. An glimpse of movement as he peered the wide, transparent pane, where a multitude of buildings passed rapidly into the transport's wake.

Many of the locals had shut themselves away in their environmentally regulated chambers, keen to avoid the worst of the midday heat. The scene was still, a briefly tantalising vista - deceptively free of outside life.

And there had been Ulix. The Ferengi captain had proven quite useful. It was a bold decision to include them in the group's careful plans, but not unsatisfactory. They had been curious, acquisitive - occasionally even intrusive in their hunger for information. But theirs was a good ship, and as efficiently managed as the owner had promised. A broad, sharp-toothed leer accompanied every one of Ulix's words - but his loyalty was as good as the gold pressed Latinum that had passed into his hands.

"…Cadmus - you getting this?"

A voice deep inside his ear brought the man's quiet reverie to an abrupt halt. He glanced about him, but saw only five others scattered around the nearly empty carriage. They were all natives of this planet - tall and elegant with delicate, elongated limbs. None of their faces suggested any particular attention. The Adigeons' initial interest had faded quickly, since first discovering an alien in their midst. Or perhaps they were merely unwilling to let him catch their stares.

"What?" he demanded with the same hushed impatience as the message now coming through his implant. Neither of his companions were supposed to be reporting in so soon.

"Cadmus, it's Riley. I'm in position just like you asked, and… I see them. They're here."

Making a show of adjusting his weight, the man brought one hand up to his mouth. "Good." He spoke under his breath, careful not to allow his voice to carry. The small transceiver positioned between his thumb and first two fingers would gather more than enough of his voice for his associates to receive hear and understand. "Remember. Let's have no attempts to initiate contact. And in particular, you are not to be seen. As soon as the targets are in place, report back to me."

He had hoped there would be time to rest, before bringing the plan to its inevitable end. But all he had was a moment to lean forward again, and another to rub a tired, dry ache away from his eyes. Certainly this was not a time for fatigue to betray them.

For a man so used to communicating as much as he wanted with never more than a single glance, words were not usually such a necessity. He found that he had become a stranger to the sound of his own low voice - far more so than to the fluent stream of thoughts within his head. But as with the services of Ulix and his crew, the personal communicators had been a no less sound investment.

Their acquisition had come at the end of yet another difficult - and covert - negotiating process. At times, their ultimate goal had been difficult to keep within his sights. But it was as his father had always said. "You've got to look to the rewards - right, boy? Don't lose that, however far away it seems."

Of course, this had not been the reward that his father had intended him to claim. He could see the old man now, a face that filled his memory and solidified his purpose. Father had meant him for a respectable career - a dull routine surrounded by padds and consoles, in some bureaucratic office with ugly sculptures adorning every wall. He heard the echoes of the old man's voice. "Get down to your study now, boy. Or you'll fall behind. You'll regret it if you do."

It might have been the path for him - that safe, unchanging occupation. If the gruelling study his father had demanded of him had not led the man to a far more urgent calling.

With an abrupt movement, he severed the communication.