The problem was that, though he had the necessary expertise to neutralize the core, the rad levels around the crash site were too high for him to get close. Modan’s Selenean physiology would allow her to survive the effects long enough to get the job done, but she was not an engineer.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “I’ll talk you through it, and then we will take this shuttle somewhere else where there are no sentients to corrupt with our presence.”

  “This will work?” she said again, still dubious about the role he had set for her.

  “It will,” he assured her. The isolation suit, one of two left when the others had vanished (along with a good portion of their emergency supplies) was set in rest mode, but it was working. She would be essentially imperceptible in the visible spectrum and well into the infra and the ultra as well.

  “I’m not sure I have the skill set to do my part,” she said. “I’m just a code breaker, Najem.”

  “Modan,” he said, a strange intensity in his voice that she had not heard before now. “The Prophets have put us together here for just this purpose.”

  “The Prophets.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The beings who exist in Bajor’s stable wormhole.”

  “Yes, Modan,” he said. “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “You believe your Prophets are controlling your actions, your life?”

  “I believe,” he said, “that the Prophets guide my steps and shape my fate. Or, in this case, ours.”

  “That’s perverse,” said Modan. “Selene doesn’t have deities. We know the universe is a mechanism.”

  “It’s that,” Jaza acknowledged with a smile. “That simply isn’t allit is.”

  “We are rational beings, Najem,” she said. “You are a scientist. You cannot seriously believe what you say.”

  “I can,” he said. “I do.”

  “I cannot process how this can be.”

  He smiled. It was the first real smile he’d managed during this ordeal, and she was strangely glad of it.

  “I was like you,” he said. “I was worse. But a mind that rejects new data, even if the data contradicts what the mind thinks it knows, is not functioning at peak.”

  “And you have received this data?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  She stared at him then, the turquoise orbs of her eyes seeming to bore straight through his being. He could only remember being scrutinized that closely once before in his life.

  “The Mother has made me to think, as you say, at peak,” she said at last. “Present your data. If I agree with its rationality, I’ll obey your orders. If not, we must find an alternate plan.”

  “I am the senior officer here, Ensign,” he said, not unkindly.

  “There is no Starfleet now, Najem.” She wasn’t making an argument, she was stating a fact. Starfleet and any authority over her it granted him were a thousand years in the future. “There is no Federation. I can’t risk my life for an irrational notion.”

  “Modan,” he said. “We’ve already wasted enough time. You don’t need to believe as I believe to get this done.”

  She sat. She stared. She said nothing, and somewhere not far off, the dangerous substances inside Titan’s warp core continued their unregulated ebb and flow.

  “All right,” he said. “All right, listen.”

  The shrine was an old one, the kind that was usually built near the founding days of a settlement. It harkened back to those times before Bajor had developed space travel.

  The hands of the founders of Ilvia had surely excavated the stones, seeded and cultivated the garden. Some local artisan had surely carved the image of a Tear that dominated the faзade.

  It was exactly the sort of place the Cardassians usually destroyed under some pretext or another in their bid to separate the Bajoran people from their backward spiritual past.

  Somehow this one had survived, even doing duty as a makeshift hospital where Jaza Chakrys tended to those deemed undesirable or unacceptable by their Cardassian occupiers.

  He stood there, thanking the Prophets that his father wasn’t present after all and that at least one of the charges he had set, the one at the secondary target near the data processing station, had failed to blow.

  Then it did.

  He felt the explosion before he heard it and, in fact, never actually heard it at all. The shock wave flung him forward like a rag doll, smashing him against the broken stone courtyard of what once had been the first interior garden,

  He felt he should have lapsed into unconsciousness-that was normal for this sort of bone-crushing injury-but instead, he heard the chimes.

  “Hello, love,” said a voice that was enough like Sumari’s to send a hot electric thrill rippling through his body.

  “Hello, Jem,” said another familiar female voice.

  “Mother?” he said, knowing it couldn’t possibly be, and yet longing to believe it anyway.

  He rose and found that the shrine around him had transformed. There was no damage now, not from the bomb or anything else.

  A strange preternatural glow suffused every visible space and, within that halo, people. There was his wife, Sumari, alive again. There was his mother alive as well. There was his first teacher, Donal Leez, still sporting that perfectly trimmed goatee and the sparkling bright eyes. Leez was also long dead, of the same Orkett’s epidemic that had taken his mother, and yet, here he was. Here they were.

  “You’re confused,” said his mother.

  “You’re broken, Najem,” said Leez. “Shattered into splinters.”

  “What is this?” he said, forcing himself to his feet. His body felt just as insubstantial as everything else around him yet this was no dream. He was alert, lucid, thinking as clearly as he ever had in his life. And there was the pain in his neck and spine where he somehow knew he’d taken shrapnel though there seemed to be no wounds.

  “Pain is a ghost,” said Sumari. “Only the Prophets are forever.”

  Even here, even in this weird dream that was not a dream, Sumari would invoke those laissez faire deities who did nothing but watch and wait in their damned Celestial Temple.

  Suddenly he was filled with a rage that he had never felt before. It was like fire inside him, hollowing, cleansing, ripping the chaff from his mind and leaving behind the only thing that mattered: the question.

  “Why don’t they help us, Su,” he said, his body literally vibrating with anger. “We’ve worshipped them for thousands of years. We’ve done everything to honor them and they still let the Cardassians come! They let them come and kill us and torture us and destroy what we’ve built.”

  “You can’t solve everything with a hammer, Najem,” said his mother. “You can’t answer violence with more violence.”

  “They haven’t left us anything else,” he said, whirling on her. Years of anger over everything, the occupation, his mother’s death, his estrangement from his father, the loss of so many friends, all of it fairly erupted out of him, spewing his hot wrath on these ghosts or whatever they were. “They won’t help us. They won’t stop the spoon-heads. People pray and pray and they do nothing.”

  “There is a purpose to everything, Jem,” said Leez. “You have to trust the Prophets.”

  “You can’t keep saying that, over and over,” said Jaza. “Don’t you understand; it doesn’t mean anything. We pray to them. They do nothing. We still die. All we do is die.”

  “The Prophets are outside life and death, Jem,” said his mother softly. “You have to try to see things the way they do.”

  “How can I?” he said and suddenly became aware of the tears that had been pouring out of him the whole time. “I’m just a man.”

  He was just a man, just one little soul, doing what it could, anything it could, to free his people from oppression. Fighting, dying, killing, whittling away bits of himself every day when, with a wave, they could end all this.