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“They won’t intercept us, Ensign,” Leyton said confidently. “Ambassador Dax assures me they want us to get there.”

This earned him puzzled looks from some of the bridge crew. Leyton was not about to resolve their puzzlement; he wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing on this mission himself. Beside him, Curzon Dax was as opaque as stone.

Unbeknownst to Uhura, Dax had been following as much of Albatross’s progress as he could by way of his special diplomatic access to intelligence matters. When the C-in-C informed him there was reason to believe a Romulan warbird was heading toward Renaga, reason or reasons unknown, but in the first overt violation of the Zone in a very, very long time, Curzon’s logical conclusion was that it had something to do with Albatross.

Curzon knew that Tuvok had reported there were Romulans on Renaga sending transmissions back to the homeworld. Once he was given access to the decoded transmissions, he could extrapolate from their very existence and the excitement they had generated at Starfleet Command that the Romulans were interested in something other than crop yields and weather reports on this backward little world. Curzon knew, as perhaps not everyone on Okinawa did, that by the time they arrived at Renaga, they would find themselves nose to nose with a decloaking Romulan warbird.

Back on Earth, Admiral Uhura was having words with the C-in-C.

“Never mind how I found out Okinawa was en route to Renaga. I want you to tell me why. Sir.”

She didn’t expect anything but the usual obfuscative need-to-know speech. She was floored when the C-in-C told her there was reason to believe a Romulan warbird was also moving toward Renaga. Had someone else fielded that while she was out of commission last night? If so, why hadn’t she been informed?

“Has Captain Leyton been briefed on the presence of my away team?” she wanted to know, grateful it was Okinawa, with Curzon on board, that was on its way. But on its way to do what? “I don’t want them getting caught in the crossfire.”

Assured that Captain Leyton and Ambassador Dax knew as much as anybody did about the situation, Uhura signed off, not a little perturbed. If there was a warbird about, it was essential to have a starship there for balance, but she’d rather Albatross had been well away before that. Albatross had not responded to her hails for over an hour now. It could mean nothing. It could mean a great deal. There was nothing to do but wait.

“There is a story about a river,” the woman who had thrown the knife said, her voice echoing off the walls of the cave. She stood in the long narrow passage that led perhaps a thousand meters downward from the entrance to the cave, her hands limp at her sides. Her eyes were glazed and she wore a fixed and eerie smile. Selar, surreptitiously running her medscanner, noted the presence of strong hallucinogens in her bloodstream.

“The river fed all the farms in the valley where it ran, and the people in the valley were content,” the woman said dreamily. “But a greedy man bought the land high in the mountains where the river rose as a small spring between the rocks. And the man dammed up the river and diverted it so that only his farm benefited from it.”

“It’s an interesting story, ma’am,” Sisko said cautiously. He’d made note that, having thrown the one knife in her possession, really more of a meat cleaver, with remarkable accuracy, she was otherwise unarmed. “How does it end?”

“One would think,” the woman said, “the way such stories usually go, that the other farmers would rise up against the greedy man and destroy the dam, or kill him so they could have their water again, but no. Instead, it was the river itself, meaning his own greed, that rose up in time of flood and drowned him.”

“A parable,” Sisko said, still humoring her. “Who are you?”

“I am the river, of course,” she replied, her manic smile widening. “I am also Boralesh, widow of the man Cinchona, who was killed by greed. A vision led me here. When he rose from my bed tonight, I took the dreaming