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“Comra to Damar.”

“Now what,” Damar muttered, then activated the comm. “Go ahead, Glinn.”

“Sir, Garak is missing. He’s neither in his quarters nor in his shop. We’re in the process of an, ah-intense search of the shop, but he’s nowhere to be found.”

“Find him, Glinn. I want him in a holding cell by the time your shift ends, am I understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Damar took another gulp of kanar. He was playing a dangerous game here-slapping down a gul, showing up Kalec, and now challenging a former Order agent who was probably smarter than he was, and certainly smarter than all his deputies combined-all on the basis of his interpretation of Dukat’s orders. Damar wasn’t too worried about Jasad. Whatever friends the gul had-and he couldn’t be the shipmaster of a Galor-class vessel without having some influential friends and/or family-he doubted they would be able to override Dukat.

Always assuming I’ve interpreted Dukat’s wishes correctly. But the very installation of the antiproton scanner seemed to be indication enough-at least to Damar.

As for Kalec and Garak-well, there was nothing to be done about the former, as that decision had been Dukat’s. Damar and Kalec were both just going to have to live with it. And Garak was a bit of self-indulgence on Damar’s part, but he was well and truly sick of the man. He’d been running rings around Damar for months now while he tried to find out what happened to Odo. Damar wanted Garak in a holding cell where he could keep an eye on him.

By the end of the shift, Damar had had three carafes of kanar, had received a report from one of his deputies that Jasad had created a disturbance at Rom’s (and was now sleeping it off in his quarters), a report from Comra that Garak had yet to be found, and a report from Kalec that Karris had successfully brought the antiproton scanner online. Damar’s final order of his first day as prefect of Terok Nor was to commence antiproton scans of the entire B’hava’el system every half hour.

Then he went to his cabin and fell right to sleep, the stress and the kanar catching up with him. He didn’t even bother removing his uniform, but simply fell onto his bed.

One of the things Damar had liked about being assigned here was that Bajor’s twenty-six-hour day usually meant he got more sleep. Tonight, however, although he went to bed earlier than usual, he got less sleep than expected, due to an interruption by Dal Bokri, who was in charge of the night shift.

“I’m sorry to wake you, Prefect Damar,” Bokri said, pronouncing his title with the same disdain Kalec had shown. Damar supposed that she preferred to use the title rather than report to someone of a lower rank.

“What is it?” he asked as he tried to clear his mind. The words actually came out with fewer consonants than that, but he figured Bokri would be able to work out what he said.

“The antiproton scan just detected a cloaked vessel entering the system.”

19

Koval’s Private Retreat Kor Thon, Romulus Romulan Star Empire

Kira Nerys was really starting to grow irritated with Starfleet. Whether it was Sisko and his arrogant possessiveness regarding the Defiant, or Eddington’s security people and their tiresome doubts that any of this was real, or Eddington himself, who didn’t want Kira along on the mission.

Picard and Worf were the exceptions. They were willing to accept the evidence before their own eyes, and didn’t get bogged down in trivia. Picard’s plan was, frankly, an audacious and risky one, and not something Kira would have expected from an officer of so hidebound an entity as the Federation. The captain himself had confessed to Kira before she went off to the Defiant that under normal circumstances, he would never have proposed such an endeavor.

But these were not normal circumstances. The Dominion needed to be stopped. They were already halfway to conquering the quadrant, with only a handful of people on this side of the wormhole even aware that they existed.

Kira shuddered at the thought of the wormhole. There were many who suggested that the stable wormhole was more than