“Yes, Darya,” Tyvan began, but then there was a soft ding as their session time ran out, and his heart sank.

Bat-Levi heard the sound, too. “That’s it.” She jerked herself from her chair, pushing back on the cushions until she tottered to her feet, her prosthetics protesting. She stood, swayed, pulled her body around for the door. “I’m done, I’m out of here.”

“Darya.” Tyvan was on his feet, cursing himself for his timing which was rotten, rotten, he should have paid closer attention to the time, what an idiot! “Darya, wait, I don’t want you to leave like this…”

“But I do.” Bat-Levi glanced back, her face contorted into a mask of rage and grief. “I do, and I will. It’s my life, Doctor, and I will do with it as I please. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be back, but when it’s my time and not a second before. For now, write whatever you have to, say whatever you want, but I’ve put in my time, and there’s no regulation in the universe that says I have to sit here one second more.”

“Darya, please,”Tyvan said, but she had turned aside and was through the door. Her servos squealed, the door hissed, and then she was gone.

Tyvan let out his breath in an explosive sigh. “Great,” he said to the air, to no one in particular. Sinking back into his chair, he propped the points of his elbows upon his knees and held his forehead with both hands. “Good job, Tyvan, you idiot, bravo. That was perfect timing, just perfect.”

He sat then and listened to the ticking of his clock and thought long and hard about life and cycles and time.

Chapter 3

Perfect timing.Commander Samir al-Halak dragged his forearm across his face, mopping away sweat with the sleeve of a camel-colored tunic that was open at his throat and showed off the olive color of his skin. Just perfect. Somebody, please, tell me, whatwas I thinking when I detoured to Farius Prime? I could’ve been swimming in Lake Cataria. Ani and I could be making love, right now, in the grass under a cool night sky. So what in God’s name was I thinking?

Halak hadn’t wanted to come to Farius Prime at all. His plan had been to spend his R and R with his lover, Anisar Batra; their plan had been to leave Enterprisetogether and go to Betazed. He and Batra had planned the trip for weeks; she’d coordinated her leave with Enterprise’s other paleogeneticist, and he’d gone to Garrett with his request for R and R a good month before. Their plan had notincluded a detour to the Maltabra City bazaar on Farius Prime, and the plan most certainly had not involved coming to Maltabra in high summer, when the weather was more miserable than usual and the air so humid Halak felt as if he were pushing through soggy gauze curtains. That the plan had changed—that he’d snuck off the ship early and that Batra had, somehow,tracked him to Farius Prime and was dogging his heels at this very moment—just made Halak hate everything about Farius Prime more than he already did.

The central bazaar of Maltabra City stretched for two kilometers in every direction, so there was no way around it: precisely what the city’s planners had in mind. The bazaar was always packed, and the air heavy with the mingled aromas of sweat, mint tea, rancid broiled kabobs that had sat for so long under a hot afternoon sun that the vendor had more bluebottle flies and Terellian swarmmogs than customers. An occasional breeze carried a metallic odor of salt and wet aluminum from the Galldean Sea, six kilometers due east. There was the overlapping babble of humans and humanoids and assorted aliens all shouting in different languages and at the top of their lungs; the whispered exchanges of drug dealers looking to score; the pleas of their clientele, desperate for a hit of that planet’s prime commodity, red ice. And there were colors: the brilliant turquoise sky and the searing white of sand and stone so bright Halak blinked back tears, and the customers, who ran the gamut of the “naturals”—Orions in their native green and the sky-blue of the Andorians—to more ambitious (and audacious) body dyes, fur, or scales.

Halak dodged around a Katangan merchant haggling with a jade-green Orion man about the cost of a liter of alpha-currant nectar— “But at that price, you’re asking me to take food from my children’s mouths, no, no, what do you take me for?”—and planted his right foot squarely into a stack of beaten copper pans spread on an indigo blanket. The pans belonged to a wizened Bilanan woman (from the northern continent, so she had seven facial knobs, not four) wrapped in a blood-red caftan with gold embroidery. The stack collapsed with a resounding crash, and Halak staggered, felt his ankle twist, and then a bolt of pain rocket to his knee.

“Herenow!” the Bilanan said, outraged. Even her facial knobs quivered. “There’s people trying to make an honest living!”

“Sorry,” said Halak, not really meaning it but just wanting to make the woman be quiet. Digging into a leather pouch he wore around his waist, he tossed the Bilanan a few coins. “That covers it, right?”

“Don’t you think that makes everything all rosy,” said the woman, snatching up the coins. Reeling in a leather cord that dangled around her neck, she dragged a pouch from some nether region of her caftan, dropped in the coins, closed the purse tight by tugging at the cord with her teeth, and let the pouch fall back into the folds of her garment—and so quickly the money was gone before Halak blinked. “Don’t you go thinking…”

Halak didn’t stay to hear the rest. Hobbling away from the woman, he elbowed his way deeper into the crowd, his right ankle complaining with every step.

Behind, he heard Batra say, “Samir, you’re limping.”

“It’s nothing.”

“But don’t you think you ought to take it easy?”

“No,” said Halak, throwing the word over his shoulder. “I don’tthink. And right now I don’t want to know what youthink either.”

Instantly, he was overcome with remorse. He stopped, turned, and looked down at his companion. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t ask you to come, I didn’t want…”

“Well, that’s just too bad,” said Batra, her voice sounding a little watery. “That’s just too damned bad. How dareyou treat me that way? Only cowards bully.”

Halak bit back a reply. She was right, and, not for the first time, he marveled that she was the only woman he knew who could make him feel as if he were about ten years old. It wasn’t that she was very imposing. Anisar Batra was a tiny woman, with a long shock of shimmering raven-black hair that she wore up when she was aboard ship, and almond-shaped eyes the color of chocolate. Normally, those eyes held nothing but love. (Sometimes she got a little annoyed with him, and then they seemed to shoot phaser beams, set to kill. All right, maybe that was when she was a lot annoyed. What she saw in him was anyone’s guess. Halak knew he wasn’t particularly handsome or tall. In fact, he had the compact build of a well-muscled wrestler, something that came in handy when a man had a temper, and Halak hada temper. On the other hand, they’d been lovers for six months, and Halak didn’t intimidate her in the slightest. It was one of the things he loved about her.)

But he didn’t want to fight with her, and Halak saw that her eyes were liquid with unshed tears of surprise and hurt. But she was good and blistered, too; her copper-colored skin was turning a shade the near side of maroon.