She had adopted an almost hunched posture that forced her face forward and down in the way he had noticed in many lower forms of predator on several worlds. She still looked like a golden sculpture, but now, instead of some sort of idealized version of a humanoid female, Modan looked like something out of one of the fables he used to read his children when he wanted to give them a healthy scare.

  He couldn’t let himself think of them now.

  It was one thing to take these long missions of exploration away from home and family and something else to think that he might never see them again. No.

  He froze the images his mind had tried to form and forced them back into the dark recesses. Plenty of time for that sort of grief later.

   “There’s something wrong with the sky,”he thought, looking up at it. It wasn’t the color-a kind of copper and gold-or the complete absence of clouds or that the shape of the sun was somehow refracted into an oval by this planet’s atmosphere. There was just something wrongwith it as far as he was concerned, and something familiar too, though he couldn’t exactly say what that something was.

  “Can you move?” asked Modan, suddenly beside him. It was odd hearing her mellifluous voice coming from that spiny animalistic face, but it helped reassure him that, despite appearances, she was still herself. “The battle is moving this way.”

  He still hurt all over, especially where his ribs were obviously broken, but he knew from experience what skirting the edge of a pitched firefight could do. He could move and told her so.

  As she helped him to his feet, he realized the sounds of battle-familiar shouts, explosions, and weapons fire-had shifted toward what he had arbitrarily named east.

  “Where are we going?” he said. He had no clear idea how long he’d been in his delirium, but from the thin appearance of new hair on his jaws and chin, he presumed at least a day had passed since the computer had beamed them here.

  “The shuttle,” she said.

  “It’s intact?”

  She nodded, one of her head quills stabbing lightly into his cheek. “Mostly. I fixed what I could. You can do the rest.”

  “Why didn’t we go there straightaway?” he said, marveling at her confidence in his abilities. He wasn’t an engineer, after all.

  “The way was blocked by the Orishan fighters,” she said, helping him navigate what looked like a small forest of enormous lavender palm fronds that grew straight up from the soil. “They’re all over this area, Najem.”

  “Orishans?” he said, surprised. “What makes you think these are Orishans?” The last he knew, they were crashing down on someplace entirely new that was a good half million kilometers from Orisha.

  “Didn’t you ever look at the visual signals we harvested?” she said, slashing at the snakelike vines with the serrated edge of her forearm. Jaza realized he hadn’t. He had been so busy getting the shuttle ready for the trip, he hadn’t actually gone back to look at the visuals that Modan and the rest had sifted out of the signal chaff. “Well, these are them. I don’t know where this war came from. This is supposed to be a rigidly stable society. They don’t even have nation states.”

  As if to punctuate their confused state, a series of large explosions sounded somewhere behind them, close enough to shake the ground and the nearby foliage. They might not have nations, thought Jaza. But they’ve certainly got the conflict part down.

  For a moment he was again transported back to those awful bloody days on Bajor when he spent every waking moment figuring and implementing ways to kill as many Cardassians as he could as efficiently as possible. Those days were long gone, thank the Prophets, but the memories were sometimes as fresh and immediate as the thought of his mother’s smile.

  “Maybe this is a colony,” he said, stumbling over a small but hidden cluster of stones. “We thought they didn’t have space travel and we were wrong. What else could we have missed?”

  “It seems as though we missed a lot,” said Modan, helping him stay upright. “But these are definitely Orishans. How they got here, wherever we are, I can’t say.”

  “A broken colony of some kind,” he mused aloud. “That would explain some of this. The Federation has had a few of them. They’re often conflict engines.”

  She stopped abruptly, motioning for him to be quiet and still. He nodded, resting his weight against the base of a massive vine that was as thick as one of the smaller sequoias he’d seen on his first visit to Earth four years ago, shortly after he’d transitioned from the Bajoran Militia to Starfleet. Huge as the vines were, they were all still relatively close to the ground, never rising higher than ten or fifteen meters. One day he envisioned there would be towering versions of these things, stretching high into the sky.

  Modan disappeared briefly into the brush, only to return looking as agitated as her golden armored skin would allow.

  She motioned for him to stay absolutely mum and still, as if he had enough energy to do more than nod. As they huddled there in the crook of the great vine, something moved past them in the jungle beyond.

  Though he couldn’t see it directly for all the leaves and vines, he did catch a glimpse of what looked like one massive segmented eye and maybe a set of feathery scales running along the creature’s side. It was enormous, whatever it was, and he was happy Modan had chosen to give it a wide berth. The jungle seemed to hold its breath as the thing went by; the sound of insects and the larger creatures that fed on them died to a whisper until the monster had passed.

  After what felt like a collective exhalation, Modan said very softly, “It’s a predator. I saw it kill one of the big avians yesterday. I’m sorry, but we will have to go the long way around.”

  “It’s okay, Modan,” said Jaza. “I can make it.”

  She looked at him then; her large blue-green eyes seemed filled with sadness and, despite her changed appearance, served, as did her voice, to remind him that she was still the same young woman he’d been flirting with for the last few days on Titan.

  “No,” she said sadly. “It’s not okay and I am sorry for what you’ll have to see. Come.”

  So he followed her lead as they trudged in silence through the lush and occasionally hostile alien jungle. He asked her at one interval about her fierce metamorphosis, and she said that once the Seleneans had all looked as she did now but that, since joining the Federation, they had taken to breeding crиche siblings to mirror as best they could the dominant races of the UFP. Rather than an effort to blend in with those societies-the golden metallic skin prevented this in any case-it was an attempt on behalf of the Pod Mothers to put their new neighbors at ease.

  However, the Mothers did not want their children to be defenseless in the wider galaxy and so allowed the primary DNA, that which accounted for this more durable and lethal form, to remain. In cases of imminent physical attack, a Selenean would revert to her feral aspect until the danger had passed.

  “It’s not as if we keep our nature secret, Najem,” she said as they fought their way through yet another hyper-dense thicket of ten-meter leaves and six-meter blades of ochre grass. “All this is in the Starfleet medical database.”

  “Good thing your minds don’t go feral along with your bodies,” he remarked, thinking how dire his current situation might be had that been the case. “I wouldn’t want to have to fight you like this.”

  “The Mothers are wise,” said Modan in the sort of reverent tone that Jaza had only heard in the voices of Bajoran vedeks when talking of the Prophets. “And, no, you wouldn’t want to fight me.”

  “Which is your natural form?” he asked her, wondering if he could manage to shove this vision far enough away to remain attracted to her. The banter was only a cover in any case, something to keep his mind off the fates of his friends both on the away team and Titan. Plenty of time for the worst news later.