The Bajoran looked down at the burden Bennek placed in his hands. Outside, he could hear the approach of Cardassian boots across the wooden floors of the keep. Bennek felt tears blurring his vision. “In the name of your Prophets, swear it!”
And then Gar Osen did something odd. He smiled. Not in the warm manner of a friend greeting another friend, or the comradeship of distaff cousins, but in the cold way a victor would take pleasure from the groveling surrender of an enemy.
The door to the chamber shattered under a heavy boot and banged open. Bennek reeled back into the room and fell against a chair. His eyes darted around, seeking another exit, but there was only a barred window and they were eight stories high.
A glinn and a pair of low-ranked garresh entered. The enlisted troopers were bored and annoyed with the detail they had drawn, but the glinn looked confused. He was waving a combat tricorder about and frowning.
“Is there a problem, Glinn?” asked Gar, without even a hint of fear.
“We’re tasked to recover all Oralian dissidents for processing,” said the officer. He pointed at Bennek. “This is one of them. But my readings are wrong.”
“How so?” Gar made it sound like this was some parlor puzzle game. Bennek was frozen at his side, too afraid to speak or to move. The two garresh had their guns aimed squarely at his chest.
The glinn pointed the tricorder at the Bajoran. “I’m getting five Cardassian biosigns in this room, not four.” The young officer blinked. “You’re not—”
“Lubak Five. Tul One. Karda Nine.” Gar said the words with a flat, slightly irritated sigh, moving the mask and the scrolls to his right hand. “Authenticate.”
The officer was so surprised to hear a Cardassian code issue from the mouth of the cleric that he input the string into his tricorder without really thinking about it. He read something off the screen and his gray skin whitened. “Forgive me, Agent,” he began. “We were not aware that the Order was operating in this zone.”
Bennek finally regained control of himself, enough to turn and face the other man. “Agent?” he repeated.
He turned to meet the straight-edged push-dagger that had appeared in Gar’s left hand. The blade went right through the gap between his ventral ribs and into his heart muscle. Bennek attempted to speak, but all that emerged was a choking rattle. He fell to the floor, hard, first to his knees and then into an untidy heap. His breath came in wheezing, razor-edged gulps. “Osen…” He forced the word from his lips in bubbles of bloody foam.
The priest bent and spoke quietly, so only Bennek could hear him. “Osen? He’s dead, Bennek. Nothing is left of him. Do you remember the storm, Bennek? The storm?”
He nodded. It was painful.
“He died then. I’ve been him ever since.”
“Who…”
The priest smiled again. The man’s voice shifted slightly, the pitch rising. “Don’t you know me? I’m so upset.”
“Pasir!”
The agent smiled and showed him the mask and the scrolls; then, with a callous toss, he threw them into the fire pit. The ancient wood and brangwahide crackled and popped as the flames bit into them. “Oralius is dead, Bennek. Like you.”
“No. No.” Each word was agony to speak. “Oralius…will live. She will…return!” He coughed up thick, coppery bile, the darkness clouding in around him. “One day.”
But the other man had walked away. “Glinn,” he heard the voice say, a voice that sounded exactly like Gar Osen’s, “dispose of that.”
When the men had gone, he made a face at the patch of dark blood on the wooden floor. He cleaned it with a hand towel, then threw that into the fire along with the ashen remains of the mask and the ridiculous scrolls. The burning animal hide had given the room a musty air, and he opened the window to let it clear.
With care, he recovered a slim black rod from the spine of an old book, which bent in two to reveal a microcommunicator device. He activated it and spoke a code phrase. In a few moments, it vibrated once to show that the connection was secure.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he began, “I know you have a lot to deal with at this juncture.”
“Make it quick,”said Ico.
First, he gave her the names of the glinn and the two troopers. They had become aware of his deep-cover assignment, and at this stage there could be no possibility of compromise. Ico assured him the men would be dead before nightfall. Then, as he rubbed the pink, dull skin of his face, he told her about the tricorder. “I’m seeing a marked recession in my biometric masking. This will need to be addressed immediately. If it goes on too long, elements of my original physiology will start to reassert themselves.”
He heard her sigh. “That was an expected side effect. The swiftness of the xenoplasty we performed on you had its disadvantages. But it’s a minor problem, and it can be corrected. I’ll see to it.”
He thought about that night in the storm, when Pasir Letin became a ghost. The face he now owned was on Gar Osen as the flyer dove toward the lake, carrying the priest to a watery grave. He remembered the transporter beam snatching him away, depositing him in the operating theater, and Ico there, smiling at him. Promising him that all the pain would be worth it. Normally, the process of biometric alteration was lengthy and arduous, but they had accompished it in hours. He recalled one of the Obsidian Order clinicians telling him how his heart had stopped three times during the process, from the sheer agony of having his body remade. “How?” he asked. “How will you see to it?”
“I’ll arrange for you to come to us. We’ll spread the treatments over a longer period this time.”She paused. “Was that all?”
He was looking out the window again. “It’s really happening today, isn’t it?” He felt a twinge of excitement, like a child presented with an ascension gift. “After so long.”
“Indeed.”He detected the slightest hint of pride in her voice. “And we have you to thank for setting us on our way. We have begun tracking down the rest of the Orbs. In time we’ll have them all, alongside the gift you sent me from Kendra.”
“The information about the memory core, the Ferengi…”
“Those issues are being addressed at this moment. Don’t concern yourself over them.”
“And the next phase of my assignment?”
“All in good time.”
He switched off the device, placed it back in its place of concealment, and then returned to the business of being Gar Osen, vedek of the Temple of the Prophets.
Dukat advanced along the corridors of the Derna outpost, scowling at any man who got in his way, scowling at the walls and the low ceilings, at the rodent-warren of prefabricated tunnels. The facility had Danig Kell’s stamp on it—all brute force and bluntness, without a single measure of grace or intelligence. The jagul imagined himself in the mold of the Bajoran city-lords of history, watching from the high castle keep over the people he ruled; and the Derna moon was the highest castle of them all, a pale disk visible in Bajor’s sky in the weak morning light. Kell waited up there, impotent and disconnected from the rabble below, from the real potential of Bajor, waiting for the day when Cardassia Prime would name him Prefect, and governor of the planet.