“Both forms are mine,” she said. “I am as I am.”

  She had pulled farther ahead of him while ascending another of the steep little hills and now disappeared completely behind a particularly thick clump of the giant fronds dominating the summit.

  “Modan, wait,” he said, wincing at the strain on his battered skeleton. “Let me catch up.”

  She said something that was eaten by the noise of animals chattering in the brush all around. The smell was different here somehow; the normal all-pervasive musk of decaying organic matter and flowers in heat had given way to something unpleasantly acrid and metallic.

  Smoke.

  Something had burned here recently and might still be burning. With all the explosions from the incendiaries being employed by the Orishans in their battle, it stood to reason that there would be many burnt or burning areas to navigate.

  This sort of destruction was also, unhappily, familiar to him. As he climbed the last few meters, the smell of soot and metal triggered yet another memory from his days fighting on Bajor.

  He was running through the streets of Ilvia, desperately pushing his way between bodies in the flood of his people going in the opposite direction. The bomb he’d set had gone off hours too early. A problem with the timer? A faulty circuit? He never found out but, just at that moment, didn’t much care. The cause wasn’t a priority.

  His father was in there, tending to patients in a makeshift clinic only a hundred meters from the ordnance storage facility that had been his target.

  He had hinted, obliquely of course, that it might be best, for that day at least, not to see patients or to see them elsewhere, but his father either didn’t or wouldn’t understand the soft warning.

  “Someone in this family has to do the Prophets’ will, Najem,” Jaza Chakrys had told him.

  It was a familiar refrain and produced a familiar effect. The two of them had spent the next few minutes screaming at each other. What have the Prophets ever done for us, Father? If you have to ask, then you’ve strayed too far from your path, Najem. I don’t stray from my path, Father, I reject it-But by then his father had had enough and had left him there alone, seething in the dusty street.

  Had the bomb gone off as programmed, his father and the patients would all have been long gone, back to their homes and hovels, far away from the town center. But it hadn’t and they hadn’t and he had to find his father.

  “Jaza Chakrys,” he called out to anyone in the stampede of people. “Has anyone seen Jaza Chakrys?”

  It was no use. The plume of ugly smoke spewing up behind them from the ordnance depot coupled with the noise of the Cardassian civil alert system- Culprits and their families will be found and punished!-had transformed these people into a herd of fleeing beasts.

  He’d fought his way through them, almost literally in a few instances, until he managed to break through only a few meters from the empty shrine that his father used as his hospital.

  He remembered being thrilled that the temple’s front faзade, a long stone wall with a large stone ring with a sculpture of an Orb at the crown, was only scorched a bit, its windows only shattered by the force of the nearby explosion.

  He’d burst in, kicking the remains of the destroyed front door away and screaming for his father to show himself if he was present. Jaza Chakrys was not there. No one was. Aside from Najem, the shrine was empty. Under its new covering of shattered wood and glass there was hardly a sign that anyone had been there at all. He had allowed himself to think that maybe his father had actually listened to him for once.

  It was then that he had heard that strange sound, like wind chimes in chorus, and his head had begun to ache.

  “Najem,” said Modan, gently shifting him from the place where he’d fallen unconscious. “Are you all right? Can you continue?”

  “Fine for now,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  “No,” she said softly, an incongruous gentleness from something that looked so fierce. “I’m sorry. For you.”

  She helped him rise again and this time let him lean on her as they made their way back to the top of the hill. She shoved the leaves away or cut them with her talons as they pushed through and then, as they emerged in the open again, he saw the reason for her sadness.

  “Caves of fire,” he said, incredulous.

  There before them, lying in a billion smoldering pieces at the end of the deep gash its impact had cut in the terrain, was a starship. Or what was left of one anyway.

  Though nearly none of the bits were intact enough to identify, the ones that were told the story. There was one of the nacelles, sticking up out of the dirt, still glowing faintly. There was the long sloping arc of a saucer disk, oddly pristine among the charred and burning wreck, the remains of the saucer section. The wreckage was spread over kilometers, the groove it had dug even longer.

  There were bodies in there as well. Hundreds of broken sentients peppered the destroyed machine’s carcass, each bent or shredded or contorted horribly and all of them burnt to charcoal by what had obviously been a hideous explosion. It wasn’t hard to ferret the source of the conflagration. The ship’s warp core, still dangerously intact despite its scorched and battered state, continued to belch plasma and to radiate so much energy that he could feel the warmth from where he stood tens of meters away.

  “That’s not good,” he said after a time.

  “No,” she said. “I’m worried about it too. If it blows…”

  He nodded. These words, the simple clinical assessment, were the best he had right now.

   Titan. This was Titan.

  He had lost friends before, fighting the Cardassians, on away missions for Starfleet, even a few since joining this most recent crew. But he had never lost so many so quickly and never ever in this horrible way.

  Bralik. Ree. Melora. Dakal. All of them. Dead. Dead. Dead. And, of course, he had survived it. His blessing from the Prophets had protected him again, though, just now, it felt a little bit more like a curse.

  He fell silent again as the enormity of it all went through him.

  Modan let him stare at the scene for another full minute before urging him on.

  They came upon the shuttle as the sun dipped low behind them and, had he not known exactly what to look for, he would have missed it, which was the point.

  The providence that had protected him and Modan thus far had also left the Ellington’s stealth field projector mercifully intact. It too had smacked into the surface of this unknown world but had found a better resting place than Titan.

  The slight ripple in the air, like a breeze drifting along an invisible curtain between what looked like a closely clustered stand of the viney trees and a massive crystal formation, was the only sign that the shuttle was present at all.

  It wasn’t a cloak really, as it only bent visible light around the ship and couldn’t block even cursory sensor scans, but for missions like this one was meant to be, where secret observation of the new culture was part of the brief, the stealth field was ideal.

  As long as it lasted, they would be safe from premature discovery here.

  “Come on,” she said, helping him over the natural ditch that ran between them and it.

  Modan had done a good job getting the primary systems back online, though her success was due less to her engineering skills than to the fact that the bulk of the damage was cosmetic. The shuttle’s guts had exploded all over the interior, making it look well past ready for the scrap heap, but very little of it had sustained any truly catastrophic damage.

  The systems that had been most compromised were those that had shorted during the first hit from the Orishan warp cannon.