FALLEN HEROES (ST:DS9 - Pocket Books #5)
Daffydd ab Hugh


About the Author
Dafydd (pronounced DAH-veth) ab Hugh seemed perfectly normal until one day in 1987 when, on his way to meet DA Jim Garrison with vital evidence on the Kennedy assassination, he was abducted by a “long, cigar-shaped” craft piloted by Men In Black (MIBs).
Since then, Mr. ab Hugh and his puppet friends have written both science fiction and fantasy, including the Arthur Warlord saga, about a British SAS agent pursuing an IRA operative back in time to the days of King Arthur (Time’s Fell Hand and Far Beyond the Wave), and the Jiana series (Heroing and Warriorwards). His novelette “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk” (Azimov’s, August 1990) was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Mr. ab Hugh privately insists he is really Volteron from the planet Volteria.


CHAPTER 
1
MAJOR KIRA NERYS WAS AMAZED that the unknown ship had made it through the wormhole at all.
Every instrument display in Ops maxed out, Kira felt a tingle creep along her flesh, and Lieutenant Jadzia Dax announced “Ship coming through,” all simultaneously.
Kira stared at the main viewscreen through bloodshot eyes. Ordinarily, she enjoyed watching the wormhole flower into existence, disgorge a ship, then disappear as if swallowing itself. At the moment, she cared only that whatever chose to happen did so quietly and did not increase the pounding in her head.
The day in Operations was slow, fitting Kira’s mood. Dax sat at her science console, looking impeccable as usual. Every strand of hair pulled back into the omnipresent ponytail, face freshly scrubbed, uniform glittering, neck spots sharply defined.
In contrast, Kira’s hair clung to her scalp oddly, despite her shower, and her reflection in the morning mirror had looked more glowering than usual, matching her morning-after mood. At her insistence, the lights were dimmer than usual.
Commander Benjamin Sisko had been in his office since Kira came on duty, and she had not seen him through the entire watch.
From her vantage point, all she could see of Chief Miles O’Brien was the top of his head as he rummaged in the systems core beneath the main viewer.
The peculiar ship that had just come through caught Kira’s attention even through her haze as it limped out of the wormhole. Dax gracefully tapped at her console, increased the magnification before Kira even asked.
The ship’s hull was breached at a dozen points. One bubble-shaped warp pod was damaged, leaking a thin stream of coolant behind the ship; the other was sheared off entirely. In places, the metal hull was peeled away from the ship like the dangling skin of an accident victim.
Chief O’Brien looked up from repairing the Ops air-recycling duct long enough to say “Jesus”; then he lost interest and returned his attention to the circuitry. His hair was more scruffy than usual, and sweat beaded his forehead: the interior of the duct was hot and humid.
“Is anybody even alive on that—thing?” asked Kira, standing behind the lieutenant. Quiet as she tried to make her voice, her head still pounded so hard she winced.
The major raged silently to herself. Damn that saucer-eared Quark and his Ferengi wine! She had gone into Quark’s Place the night before for a few innocent drinks of synthehol; but the Ferengi, in a typically disgusting attempt to get her drunk enough to say yes, slipped some vile, Ferengi wine into her glass instead of synth.
Real wine . . . with real alcohol. Fortunately, Odo had noticed that Kira was sloshed and hauled her back to her quarters before she began dancing on tables or offering to fight any man in the joint.
The downside was that Odo (and apparently everybody else)
refused to believe it was Quark’s idea, not Kira’s, for her to swill Ferengi wine all night . . . or at least, they all pretended not to believe her protests; she could not be sure.
“You wouldn’t think so, would you?” Dax relied brightly. She seemed to Kira to take special delight in being even more cheery than usual, as if somehow sensing that Kira was hungover. “But the pilot seems alive and unhurt. And no dead bodies aboard. Either he was alone or he threw them all out the airlock before passing through the wormhole. He’s hailing us.”
Dax precisely stabbed the comm-link button with her fingernail. Kira jumped at the noise.
“Lonatian freighter Square Deal,” croaked the voice; “come to dicker, eat a meal. Captain Square-Deal Djonreel; for docking rights I do appeal.” Audio only; Dax was still trying to resolve the video.
The major stared at Dax, who could barely contain her smile. Kira turned back to the screen. “Major Kira. Deep Space Nine.” Her throat was raw, and her voice croaked almost as badly as the captain’s.
“Docking here with us is fine,” added Dax unnecessarily.
O’Brien jumped into the act, not even looking up from the transporter circuitry. “Long as you don’t moan and whine.”
Kira glared first at one, then the other. “Would you two stay off this official line?” Then she winced, silently swore a Bajoran blasphemy. She had meant to say “official communication.”
“Doesn’t scan,” said Dax.
The voice replied, surprised. “Such wit, such grace, from all of you. I just came through. What do I do?”
Finally, Dax synched in the visual display. Square-Deal Djonreel, if that was in fact his name, looked like a Bajoran festival lamp with eyes: onion-shaped head so brightly lit by his interior lights that it
hurt Kira to look at it; big, round hole at the top, probably his nose; mouth obscured by two flaps of “onionskin” flesh dangling from just below two bright pink target circles, which might have been eyes. Kira had never seen his race before.
Another damned Federation weirdo. Why can’t everyone just look normal, like a Bajoran?
Kira spoke carefully, making sure none of her words rhymed. “Take docking pylon five, Captain Sq—Captain Djonreel. Just take your—your manipulating digits off the controls; Lieutenant Dax will tractor you to the pylon.” It was the safest course of action; from the look of Square-Deal Djonreel’s ship, it could lurch out of control at any moment.
Should I disturb Sisko? Kira debated. Should I swallow my pride and ask Bashir to fix up my hangover? Should I run gleefully down the Promenade with a carving knife, killing every Ferengi I see? At last, she said “Dax, keep an eye on the wormhole. Whoever shot him up might come after him.”
Major Kira finished her stroll around the operations table, glancing at each station. Everything was working, amazingly enough. Then she returned her console, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples, dreaming up ingenious punishments for Quark and whoever invented doggerel.

The object of Kira’s fury sat blissfully unaware that his life hung by the thread of Kira’s civility. Quark, the Ferengi owner of the social “hot spot” on DS9, Quark’s Place, stared into the ornate, antique Ferengi treasure chest that contained his hoard of gold-pressed latinum, carefully gathered over many years selling drinks and—other things.
Since it was a slow business day, Quark had decided to take an
uncharacteristic but much-needed three-hour holiday away from business. He initiated a very special program in one of the holosuites, a program to which only he knew the code key, and sat now in a dank, moldy dungeon that smelled of centuries, gloating over his latinum.
Quark felt safer opening his treasure chest in such an environment.
Unexpectedly, a crack of light appeared in the midst of the ancient, stone wall. Quark stared. The crack widened, opening into some sort of secret door.
“That’s not in the program,” Quark puzzled, then realized to his horror that someone was opening the holosuite door, ignoring the OCCUPIED sign, and in a moment would actually see Quark’s treasure!
The Ferengi frantically scooped the bars of gold-pressed latinum into the chest, carelessly dropping one on the ground. Before he could pick it up, Quark’s timid older brother Rom poked his impossibly ugly face through the unexpected door, leering at Quark and his latinum. Quark slammed the lid on the chest, then hopped up on the wooden plank table, sitting to block Rom’s view of the Ferengi artifact.
“Ah. Quark. I thought I might find you here.”
“What an amazing deduction, Rom. And the only clue you had was that I told you I’d be in holosuite two. I also told you not to disturb me.”
“Oh. Am I disturbing you?”
Quark rolled his eyes. Thank cash that Rom’s son Nog showed rather more intelligence and promise than his father. “What is it, you irritating, earless little philanthropist?”
Rom gasped at the obscenity; flustered, he reached behind him
and dragged yet another person into Quark’s private fantasy: a strange, brightly lit onion with legs. “Th-th-this is Captain Square-Deal Djonreel. Says he must speak to you. Urgent. I-I-I . . . ”
“Should get back to the bar,” finished Quark, barely containing his rage at the interruption of his holiday.
“I should get back to the bar,” suggested Rom, skulking back out of view with an obsequious Ferengi cringe (number four—the “relative’s cringe”).
“What do you want?” demanded Quark, then realized it could be an important client. “Sir.” He made a halfhearted cringe (number one—I cringe on general principles; now what do you want?), still irritated by Rom.
“Box,” said Captain Square-Deal Djonreel. “Locks. Offer deal—a real steal.”
His chest burst open and a limb stretched forth, holding a large box marked with the seal of the Cardassian empire. Despite long years serving all the disgusting races that frequented Quark’s Place, particularly the Cardassians, Quark’s stomach churned as the captain’s other limbs twitched and writhed in bright, orange goo. Square-Deal Djonreel was only the second Lonat that Quark had ever seen; the first time, he actually fainted, ruining one of his father’s perfectly devious business deals. Quark unconsciously rubbed his bottom, remembering his father’s subsequent “discussion.”
Why can’t everybody just look normal, like Ferengi? he thought.
Quark reached out, not leaving his perch, and took the box. It was definitely Cardassian, even older than his Ferengi treasure chest. The seal was from the Uta Dul dynasty, more than a century old, and unbroken.
The Ferengi stared greedily at the box, itself worth more than
Quark’s entire personal fortune, and tried to bore his vision straight through the Kuluk-metal sides to peer at the mysterious, enticing contents.
Unfortunately, a Cardassian seal was not something one could hammer open or pick with a swizzle stick. The Cardassians used “force shield” seals for their most important possessions; the seals required a precise sequence of radio-wave frequencies broadcast into them. A wrong frequency would cause the seal to detonate, destroying the box contents and possibly the face and hands of the unskilled locksmith.
Few Ferengi knew how to pick a Cardassian seal; Quark was one of those few. At least, it had seemed straightforward enough the last time he had done it.
The box was heavy. Quark gingerly shook it, hearing a satisfactory rattle of stuff. “What’s in the box?” he asked, trying (without success) to sound bored and uninterested. “Um . . . um . . . I hope not rocks,” added Quark belatedly, realizing the rhyme was forced (and lame).
Lonats always spoken rhyme for some insane reason. They claimed that their poetry was subtle, supple, and graceful in their native language; but the Universal Translator turned it all into nursery verse. If you rhymed back at them, you often got better deals.
“Don’t know. Didn’t show. Sold it to me sight unseen; must be something pretty keen.”
Quark looked up from the Cardassian box and noticed that the captain was staring down at the bar of gold-pressed latinum that fell when Quark scooped up the rest. “Ah . . . ah, Square-Deal Djonreel,” said the Ferengi, trying to distract the captain from the shiny bar. “I really can’t be—philanthropic. Don’t you even know the topic?”
The Lonat glowed, finally figured out what Quark meant.
“Ancient alien artifact. Probing more would lack in tact.”
“I haven’t much, and that’s a fact. But I can offer, ah, the princely sum of two bright bars of latinum”
“Two? You villain! What a laugh. Fifty wouldn’t equal half!”
“Fifty! I mean, you can’t believe I’d offer fifty; you know Ferengi must be thrifty.” Quark reached up, rubbed his ears while thinking. “I’ll give this deal my best refinement. I’ll try to sell it on consignment.”
Square-Deal Djonreel pondered, alternately glowing and dimming, flapping his onionskin mouth. “Despite the pain it is to sever, I cannot dicker here forever. Consignment you shall have consent . . . if we settle on percent.”
Quark licked his lips, beginning to enjoy the game. “I run the risks in such a sortie. I say we split it sixty-forty.”
“Forty percent? That’s my cut? You take me for some kind of nut?” The captain moved closer, menacingly.
Not good, thought Quark. Djonreel would insist upon at least fifty percent.
The saving grace was that Lonats were not very good at lightning calculations . . . a fact that any good Ferengi considered a perfectly acceptable bargaining tool. “All right!” said Quark. “All right! Don’t start to pound. How does sixty-fifty sound?”
Square-Deal Djonreel dimmed to merely bright. Something seemed fishy, but he could not quite tell what. But even more than humans, Lonats hated more than anything to seem hesitant or uncertain in a deal.
He did the best he could. “More Ferengi bunko tricks, the . . . bottom price is sixty-sixty.”
Quark grinned crookedly, feeling his pointed teeth with his tongue. Tricks-the with sixty? When a Lonat resorted to such a feeble
rhyme, he was severely rattled. Bracing himself, he stuck out his hand, took the captain’s appendage. “Your cut of the sale will be recorded. Till you return it will be hoarded.” Quark intended to take sixty percent of any sale, then give the rest to Djonreel; as the agreed split—sixty percent to each partner—was clearly impossible, any Ferengi court in the sector would consider Quark’s interpretation close enough to pass muster.
Square-Deal Djonreel dimmed almost to the luminescence of a normal being. He was not happy with his own performance in the complicated dance of the deal. Probably expected at least some up-front latinum, thought Quark.
“And now I must depart this place,” said the captain, “and head out into deepest space.” He took a last, longing look at the bar of latinum beneath Quark’s dangling feet, sighed a deep amber, and turned around. He stared in confusion at the dungeon wall where a door had been when he came in.
“End program,” gloated Quark. No sooner had the words escaped than he found himself sitting on air instead of a fine, Ferengi jailwood table. He flailed his arms and fell heavily to the deck.
As Square-Deal Djonreel squelched through the door, Quark again rubbed his aching bottom, wondering what the mystical connection was between Lonats and that portion of his anatomy.

Constable Odo stared in utter amazement at the wall display. The wretched little Ferengi has finally done it, he thought; he’s driven himself mad with his debaucheries.
Odo sat in his security office, behind the heavy but utilitarian desk, watching one of several wall displays that continuously showed parts of Deep Space 9. Odo had a standing rule: no matter who or what else was displayed, at least one screen must always be
following the station’s public enemy number one—Quark.
At this moment, Quark was huddled in one of his own holosex suites, running some ghastly prison program and talking with the pumpkin-headed Lonat in the most bizarre fashion.
As the conversation proceeded, Odo briefly wondered whether he could use the weird, nursery rhyme negotiation to persuade Dr. Julian Bashir to transport Quark to a psychiatric facility on Bajor for his own protection.
Odo had just awakened from his bucket, and his brain was still a bit fuzzy as the pieces fell slowly into place.
Still, the event was weird enough, even for the disgusting Quark, that it warranted investigation. Odo stood, made sure none of his features or clothing had run, and boiled out the glass door of his office toward Quark’s Place.
Unless the little hood is having me on. Was it possible the Ferengi had discovered Odo’s hidden “spy-eye” in the holosuite and was trying to trick Odo into making a fool of himself?
The constable had installed the bugs when Dr. Bashir, who would not tell him why, asked him to. Before the doctor’s request, Odo was so repulsed by the thought of what went on in the suites that it never occurred to him to watch.
But Bashir insisted that they be installed, muttering something paradoxical about Lieutenant Dax and Major Kira being eternally grateful, even if they never found out about it. That way, Odo could “keep an eye on things” even when not physically present, disguised as an article of furniture, a rug, or a bottle of Quark’s vile spirits.
No, thought the constable; Quark may be clever, but even he wouldn’t routinely sweep private holosuites for hidden bugs. After all, he was not a Cardassian.
Odo pushed into the Promenade, then turned sideways to swim
through a mob lined up to play The Gokto Lottery. The constable scowled: he could not remember seeing an application from the Bajorans to run a game of chance. Have to talk to the commander about it. Or better yet, Kira.
The station was full to overflowing from the latest wave of tourist ships to the wormhole. With the tourists had come a yammer of merchants, a mummer of missionaries (all faiths), a fraud of mountebanks—and of course a lift of pickpockets, a shiv of muggers, and a deviant of flashers, Ferengi, and other perverts.
The political turmoils sweeping Bajor had crashlanded on DS9. Every other step, Odo had to duck under a banner or dodge a sign-waving, chanting crowd of Bajoran fundamentalist or antifundamentalist (tolerationist?) protesters. The current fashion for the orthodox “Bajor for Bajorans” was dark blue, gray, and black, while the progressive faction preferred light and sky blue.
For some reason, none of the Bajorans these days liked red, but it was still a popular color among the hordes of tourists, come to gawk at both the wormhole and the riots.
The sea of sentiency made Odo squirm, longing even for the days of Cardassian rule: at least then, there was a sense of decorum, decency, and above all occasional silence.
The holding cells were jammed so full of “detainees” awaiting either trial or a one-way ticket off Deep Space 9 that three of Odo’s men had a full-time job just keeping them from killing each other. The constable had already converted a cargo bay to an emergency jail, getting Chief O’Brien to divide it up with portable force shields.
Growing annoyed at the sea of intelligent and nearly intelligent beings that washed against him, Odo put his arms together and shifted them into a wedge like a “cowcatcher” on an old-fashioned
Earth loco-motive, a wheeled engine that pulled cargo along a railed track. He ploughed toward Quark’s, brushing the people aside.
When Odo reached the den of iniquity, he was amused to discover that Quark was not benefiting from the mobs. There were now so many merchants selling out of inexpensive pushcarts on the Promenade, with virtually no overhead, that they easily undercut Quark’s prices for everything from synthehol to legal gambling. In fact, the Ferengi had recently become quite the moralist, demanding that Odo, Kira, or Sisko himself “do something” about such disgusting, wide-open marketeering on the Promenade.
Even Quark’s notorious holosex suites ran mostly empty, since most of the worlds represented on DS9 these days had sexual needs so pedestrian and boring that they would never dream of paying for an elaborate, sexual holodeck program.
Quark’s Place was a huge, three-story facility, the largest private operation on DS9. Where the “exterior” of the Promenade was banners and bunting, the constant rumble of the rabble, beggars, miners, and assorted nuts inside Quark’s was a completely different universe: the casino had fewer of the dregs of the sector but was, if anything, more sleazy, dangerous, and illicit than the Promenade itself.
The bar was stuffed floor to ceiling with glitzy, flashing lights, the well-dressed, and thousands of kilos of ersatz jewels—though Quark would have hotly disputed the adjective.
Any of the hoi polloi who wandered in were subtly steered toward a Dabo table in the corner, away from the “pressed and groomed” crowd in the rest of the club. There were so many colors visible at any one time, it often hurt Odo’s eyes, used as he was to more spartan ways. The most exotic colors, of course, were the syntheholic (and supposedly alcoholic, though Odo had never caught
the Ferengi) drinks mixed by Quark himself, with occasional help from Rom.
Quark bragged that anybody could get anything in Quark’s Place; the gnomelike Ferengi was not amused when Odo agreed, naming a number of exotic, sexually transmitted diseases. “My holosex suites are the cleanest in this sector!” raged Quark, growing redder by the second.
Odo entered Quark’s place just in time to see the Ferengi scuttle from the holosuite, down the stairs, toward his safe, the Cardassian box tucked securely under one arm.
“Good evening, Quark,” said Odo, making himself curl his mouth up in what he hoped was a menacing smile. “What have you got there? More bars of latinum? Brekkian narcotics? Stolen cultural artifacts?”
Quark started and glared suspiciously at Odo. “Never mind what I have here. My business is my own. Something I can do for you, Odo? Would you like a nice holosex session with a Ferengi harem?” His own grin was more of a leer.
Odo straightened, then increased the effect by making himself several centimeters taller. “I’ve no interest in your disgusting perversions, Quark. But I do have a legitimate interest in sealed, Cardassian boxes that might contain anything—such as a new plague virus or explosive device.”
Quark twisted his body around to conceal the box. “What makes you think it’s a sealed, Cardassian box?” he demanded, suspicious.
“The Cardassian seal around it.”
Quark peeked down at it. “Oh. So I see. Well, I’ll be sure to tell you what was in it. Now goodbye.”
“Quark, I understand you caring nothing for your own continued existence, since nobody else does. But we do care about the safety of
this station . . . and you are not going to open that box without complete scans first. Conducted by Chief O’Brien and Dr. Bashir.”
“But—but then everybody will know what’s in it!”
“Oh dear, you mean you might have to actually sell it honestly, with full disclosure? Yes, I do see where that would be a problem.”
“Odo, thank goodness. Don’t scare me like that! For a moment, I thought—”
Quicker than even the greedy Ferengi could move, Odo stretched his arms out like grappling hooks, seized the box, and wrenched it from Quark’s hands.
“Thief! I’ll have you arrested and locked in your own cells, Odo!”
“Stop whining, Quark. You’ll get your precious box back, just as soon as O’Brien and Bashir assure me it poses no danger to the station.” He turned toward the door, took three steps, and felt the Ferengi breathing on his back.
Odo stopped suddenly, and Quark ran into him. “And where are you going?”
“If you think I’m going to allow a shapeshifter to handle my property without watching him every step of the way, then you must think I’m a credulous cretin.” Odo opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Quark interrupted. “Don’t even think it! You’re in enough trouble, lifting other people’s perfectly legitimate property, without adding slander to your crimes.”
Rolling his eyes, Odo strode off toward the infirmary. Try as he might, he could not shake the stubborn Ferengi, who stuck closer to him than his own shadow.
CHAPTER 
2
ODO STOOD IN the Ops system core, hands clasped behind his back, scowling down at Chief of Operations Miles O’Brien.
The constable was in a bad mood. First, Dr. Bashir had scanned the Cardassian box, declaring it free of any known dangerous contaminants. Now O’Brien insisted that it appeared to be nothing more menacing than a box of old junk.
There were a couple of potentially dangerous (because unknown) devices, but nothing was set to explode or do anything significant when the box was opened.
“Are you certain, Chief?” Without some plausible reason, Odo would have to simply hand the box back to Quark to open at his leisure.
O’Brien bristled, but hid his offense behind an Irish smile. “Oh, I think I’ve been around a tricorder or two in my time,” he said. “Nothing dangerous about the box, though I can’t say much about the contents until I can examine them independently.”
“Can’t you tell what they are?”
“There are a couple of unknown items. I think one is an ancient Cardassian directed-energy weapon—”
“A weapon!”
“—completely drained of power. It’s been sitting in there for over a hundred years. The other is from a culture I’ve never seen before. But I don’t think it’s dangerous; it has hardly any power reading at all.”
“An unknown artifact?” Odo’s eyes gleamed. This might be sufficient to pique Commander Sisko’s interest.
“You heard the chief,” grumbled Quark; “it’s not dangerous. Thank you very much for your opinion, Chief O’Brien. Now, if you don’t mind . . . ”
This time, Quark was the faster. Odo reached for the box, but a reddish pink blur licked out, seized it, and left Odo to grab a handful of air.
Quark charged up to Ops proper and took three steps toward the turbolift before he felt the constable practically stepping in his footprints. “Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Quark.
“I should take you into custody for illegal receipt of, alien cultural artifacts.”
“There’s no crime in a simple, honest business deal.”
“Honest? With a Ferengi involved?”
“I’ll let that pass this time, shapeshifter. Now you let me pass, and—”
Odo padded after Quark. “Alas, you are right. I don’t have enough evidence to take the box from you. But I will be present when you open it, if you can defeat the Cardassian seal. And if anything even looks iffy, I’m bringing it right back here and bother Chief O’Brien again.”
Without glancing up from his diagnostic display, O’Brien said, “Oh, no bother. No bother at all. That’s what I’m here for, day and night. And while I’m at it, I can dust your furniture, clean your windows, and mop your lobby.”
“Dust? Mop? Chief, what are you talking about? Surely you’re not telling me the cleaning servos are down again?”
O’Brien sighed deeply. “No, Odo. Never mind. Go away.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, and Quark stepped into the turbolift, followed by his shadow.

Quark and Odo argued for fifteen minutes about whether Quark could open his box in private. They stood in Quark’s office, small but comfortable by Ferengi standards, though Odo seemed to find the gilt-and-bejeweled columns garish.
Finally, Quark decided it was hopeless. Actually, he found the situation neither so incomprehensible nor outrageous as he pretended; even the Ferengi was a little nervous about an artifact from the Gamma quadrant so alien that Chief O’Brien did not have a clue as to what it did.
But of course, Quark still defended his unabridged right to absolute privacy with the ringing tones of moral dudgeon worthy of a Ferengi Supreme Contract Arbitration barrister.
At last he subsided, panting in exhaustion. He opened a drawer in his ornate, white-and-silver Louis XIV desk from Earth (replicated, of course), and extracted an “ear-pricker,” a miniature, tricorder-like Ferengi device for springing locks—used only for perfectly legitimate locksmithing purposes, naturally. He inspected the Cardassian seal.
The seal wrapped entirely around the box, exerting a force shield designed to interact unpredictably with force manipulators, energy beams, or brute, physical tools. Theoretically, only the matching Cardassian key ring could open it; but since Garak, the only Cardassian left on DS9, was not extraordinarily likely to help a Ferengi
open a Cardassian strongbox, Quark had to rely on his own initiative.
“Give it up, Quark,” said Odo. “You can’t break a Cardassian seal without destroying the box, and you know it.”
“Nonsense, Odo. Where’s your spirit of adventure?”
“Adventure is for children and those with undeveloped minds.” I accept the world as it is.”
The Ferengi tool glowed satisfactorily blue in the room dimly lit by ersatz candlelight as Quark traced the complex geometry of the field. He did not trust the readings, however, since the seal was specifically engineered to thwart lock picking. Quark preferred to depend upon his own experience and native Ferengi cleverness.
He adjusted the frequency of the ear-pricker to half a phase ahead of the frequency cycle it read and gently probed the force vortex that corresponded to the “keyhole.” Even before the ear-pricker beeped a warning, Quark felt that something was wrong and let go of the contact button. He stepped quickly back, but his probe had been deft and fast enough that the seal did not react.
Quark rolled the phase shift back a quarter cycle to plus-ninety degrees and tried again. This time, he felt the ear-pricker catch hold of the field the way it should. He gently rotated the vortex until the ear-pricker flashed amber, warning of imminent field breakdown, then stopped.
“First tumbler,” announced Quark. Odo stared, his mouth slightly open.
Suddenly, Quark felt, rather than heard, a stealthy presence at his office door. He had left strict instructions that no one was to disturb him for any reason.
Without moving from his position, he called out “Rom—unless DS-Nine is falling into the wormhole, you had better vanish before
I count to one. One . . . ” Footsteps rapidly pounded up the hall and down the stairs.
Quark picked up his tensor and activated it to match the ear-pricker’s beam, holding the first tumbler in place. “Must work quickly now,” he said, half to himself and half to Odo, “only have a few moments before the field realizes it’s being picked.”
He thought back to his early years, working for his father, gathering vital information about the content of locked boxes before an auction. How else was an honest Ferengi to know what to bid on? He had once before worked on a Cardassian seal.
In that case, the second through fifth tumblers all corresponded to the notes of an obscure Cardassian musical chord . . . probably the mnemonic used by the owner to remember the combination.
Quickly but carefully, Quark spoke into his desk console: “Computer, display most popular Cardassian chords containing the frequency”—he looked at the ear-pricker readout—“four-forty-eight cycles per second in increasing order of popularity.” Quark’s throat clenched; he risked his beautiful Ferengi face on the unknown contents of a Cardassian strongbox. But it was simply the merchant-prince’s burden.
Instantly, six chords appeared on the display.
The six most popular chords containing the Cardassian musical note Divak, 448 cycles per second. Only one was named after Divak itself: Divak eight and two.
I get one shot at this, he thought, wiping sweat from his ears. “Here goes nothing, I hope,” said Quark.
He set the ear-pricker to 672 cycles, the next dominant note in Divak eight and two (Daka-nan, the eighth note of the nine-tone Cardassian scale, as Divak was the fourth). Quark grimaced, averted his eyes, and pressed the contact button. He felt the field flicker,
and his heart almost stopped. Then the beam caught, allowing the Ferengi to twist the second layer of the field negatively.
The next note, Daka-tul high, was 576 cycles “sharped” up to 588. This was the critical test, because Divak eight and two was the only chord that contained Daka-tul high. If the field held, then Quark had picked the seal, unless it was based on a chord so obscure the computer could not find it.
He set the second tensor tone to hold layer two in position, and was just about to probe with the ear-pricker at 588 cycles when he suddenly remembered that a century ago the Cardassian scale was based on a larger spread than the current scale. The Emperor Somebody-or-other had shortened it to force his own barbaric musical tastes on everybody else.
As a result, chords had changed slightly.
Sweat dripping onto his shoulders, a dry-mouthed Quark gasped a second query. “Computer—what Cardassian musical chords a hundred years ago contained the two frequencies four-forty-eight and six-seventy-two cycles per second?”
This time, only one chord displayed, an obsolete chord called Divak four and five high. The note at 588 cycles did not appear; had Quark continued, the seal would have realized it was being picked and self-destructed.
It was only the sheerest luck that Quark’s second frequency, 672 cycles, did not cause the same result.
Swallowing hard, the Ferengi reset his ear-pricker to the next frequency in the century-old chord; the third force-shield layer slid forward smoothly.
The last two frequencies were easy, and the seal retracted into itself, sliding off the box onto Quark’s desk.
“I don’t believe it,” snapped Odo, clearly annoyed that the Ferengi
Ferengi had succeeded. Quark opened the box.
“Here, now,” said Odo, finding a new objection. “Is that box your property?”
Quark gazed speculatively at Odo, trying to figure out whether the constable actually had inside information, or had just taken a lucky guess. “No, but it’s in my care. I’m selling it on consignment. I have to know about what it should bring . . . it’s only fair to my client.”
Odo grunted, but could not press the question further without revealing his knowledge, thus revealing his spy-eye.
He discarded the outdated Cardassian disruptor immediately. Its only value was as scrap material to be shoved into a replicator for “mass credit.”
There were three squatty statues, each more grotesque than the last: two were Cardassian religious icons, the third of unknown origin but having some similarities. “Might get some Cardassian anthropologist interested,” mumbled Quark unhappily. Together, he could not imagine them fetching even 400 grams GPL after splitting with Square-Deal Djonreel.
The box and its seal were valuable in themselves, of course; but Quark preferred to buy them himself, setting a fair price (then paying the Lonat captain his forty-percent share, as agreed).
Only the final item showed real promise, more in its mystery than any intrinsic value.
The unknown, alien device was larger than a phaser, smaller than a tricorder. It was roughly shaped like a hand-sized belt buckle, sharply, almost brutally angled, more like Cardassian than Federation design. But it had none of the studied crudity that had been the style in the Cardassian empire for two hundred years.
Instead, the device was intricate and subtle. Tiny sucker-pads
made it stick to the box, to Quark’s hand, to the table when he yanked his paw away. It was made out of a dark gray material, an alchemical marriage between metal and plastic, light and strong, but malleable.
But it had a memory: Quark pressed hard on one surface, indented it. After a few moments, it slowly undented itself, returning to its original shape.
There were no obvious physical buttons, but Quark’s ear hair stood up straight in the force aura surrounding the device.
“Well, Odo, what do you think it could be?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea, and I have no more time to waste on you. I have a station full of less successful criminals than you to jail. Hand it over.”
“It’s mine!”
“For testing,” explained the constable, wearily.
“But what if that oaf O’Brien accidentally destroys it while testing it?”
“Then you can pay that pirate captain half of the nothing you’ll get for it.”
“You were listening!” Quark leaped up, the device in hand, glaring about his office. “What were you disguised as this time? Where were you, you shifty—wait! We didn’t do the deal here . . . we did the deal in the holosuite.”
Quark turned incredulously toward Odo. “Why, Constable,” he purred, “you dirty old shapeshifter!”
“I was not spying on your holodeck sexcapades!” Odo shouted.
Quark whirled around, back to Odo. When he turned back, he held the alien device in one hand, the ear-pricker poised dramatically over it in the other.
“Stand by to be dazzled,” he whined in the typical Ferengi mix
of pomposity and terror of the unknown.
“No!” commanded Odo. “Put it down! I will not allow you to jeopardize this station just to make a few measly bars of—”
Quark pressed the contact button, probed the force vortex. The ear-pricker matched frequencies immediately at 914 cycles per second; there were no locking mechanisms at all. The vortex was a switch, not a keyhole.
Deep Space 9 lurched beneath the Ferengi’s feet until he thought he must be standing sideways on a vertical bulkhead, rather than the deck. The lights flickered twice, then vanished into a soupy blackness surrounding a rippling bubble of relative normality.
Quark stood at the center of the bubble, but it extended barely far enough to include Constable Odo.
The Ferengi went west, but his stomach lurched south. Squealing like a stuck Greeka pup, he dropped both ear-pricker and alien device, and felt his body rolled flat like cookie dough. He blinked his eyes, found himself lying on the deck in eerie silence. A dim, blue glow lit the office: it was the emergency lighting he had installed in Quark’s Place after the big poker-game fiasco.
The emergency lighting was dim, as if it had been on for days. It should have been as bright as normal.
He climbed shakily to his knees, rubbing his aching ears. A puddle quivered on the floor, filling the Ferengi with a nameless dread, to which he instantly attached a name: Odo. The puddle drew into itself, foamed up into a column of constable, solidifying into the familiar, featureless face of the shapeshifter.
Odo glowered, as if to say I meant to do that.
Something was terribly wrong, but for a moment, Quark could not identify the problem. Then he noticed his sensitive ears were sending an urgent message: silence, silence, silence.
The normal noises of the station had vanished. The confused babble of clients shouting, laughing, bellowing, and singing drunken space chanties had shut off like a light switch. Even the normal, low grumble of Deep Space 9’s fusion reactors was missing.
He stared at the constable, a horrific thought growing in his head. “Odo!” he gasped. “I’ve gone deaf! Call Dr. Bashir, hurry!”
Odo sighed in relief and slumped against the desk. “Thank goodness,” he said. “For a moment, I thought I’d forgotten how to form ears.”
Quark edged toward the office door, listened to the noiselessness. “Um . . . if we’re not deaf, Odo, then—what happened to everyone else? What happened to the whole rest of the station?”
He turned back. Odo stared at him with his unblinking, remorseless eyes. “Maybe you made them all go away,” he said, so softly the Ferengi almost did not hear him . . . and wished he had not.
Quark stooped and picked up the alien device instead of his beloved ear-pricker. He could not have said why. As he stood, he felt a metal band clamp around his bicep; it was Odo’s hand, which he had shifted into a manacle.
The constable touched his communicator. “Odo to Ops.” Silence. “Odo to Ops. Major Kira, are you available?” More silence. “Anybody? Ops, Engineering, Security? Chief O’Brien, can you get the lights on in Quark’s Place?”
He looked down at the communicator, frowned. “Blast. Yet another equipment failure. At least the Cardassians kept this place in fine fettle. All right, let’s take a little stroll,” said the constable, voice tight.
“Do we have to?”
Odo propelled Quark out the office door and down the stairs. The brilliantly colored lights of Quark’s Place were dim and flickering
; even the rotating lasergraphic dome that the Ferengi was convinced made patrons gamble harder was still, its hypnotizing beams of laser light unseen.
Something was on the floor, a bundle. A blanket. Irrationally fearful, Quark averted his eyes; but Odo dragged him toward it, stopped and stared.
“I think you’d better look at this,” said Odo.
Compelled now by morbid curiosity, yet still as reluctant as before, Quark slowly bent his neck to bring the bundle into view. It was a man. A Ferengi. It was Rom.
Rom was dead, covered with dried blood from a dozen wounds. Quark felt clammy sweat on his ears, blood rush to his face. Guilt percolated through him as if he had actually killed Rom himself.
Maybe I did . . . 
No! I am a Ferengi, he thought, not a human. We don’t panic. We only cringe as rational beings. Get ahold of the deal, Quark, you miserable mark!
He bent slowly, faced Odo across his brother’s body. “This isn’t my fault, you know. I had nothing to do with this. You’re my witness!”
“I didn’t see a thing, Quark. Don’t count on me for your alibi; I was a puddle of liquid, remember?”
There were fourteen circular puncture-holes in Rom’s back, two of which had been fatal.
“These were made with considerable force,” said Odo. He made a pair of long fingers and gently probed one of the holes.
Quark pressed his lips together, fought down a rising gorge, and felt faint.
“Here we are,” said the constable, his voice professionally neutral. He pulled his fingers out, shrank them to normal. They gripped a
flattened cylinder of soft metal, approximately ten millimeters in diameter. Odo stared in amazement. “Do you recognize this, Quark?”
“It’s not mine!” whined the Ferengi, cringing back in the approved fashion, hands over face (number eight: You caught me with my fingers in the biscuit tin, but society’s to blame).
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, do you recognize what kind of weapon this is?”
Quark peeked between his fingers. “Chemically propelled rifle bullet,” he squeaked. “Probably a full-automatic, considering the number of bullet wounds.”
“That’s what I thought. Now, Quark, how did you happen to become an expert on historical weaponry?”
The Ferengi stopped cringing. In a huffy voice, he said, “People pay good money for ancient guns. If I can’t price a Klingon Chordat-77 or an Earth 30-06, how can I fix a profit margin?”
Odo dropped the bullet at Quark’s feet. “All right. Price that.”
His terror and anguish dispelled for the moment by the magic words, Quark gingerly picked up the deformed bullet, plucked a jeweler’s eye from his pocket, and examined the evidence. After a moment, he shook his head. “It’s an odd caliber. Never seen it before. Four point eleven millimeters, expanding to about nine and a half on impact. Nose is hard, remains intact; this thing is supposed to penetrate armor, Odo.”
“Now, why would someone use it on a shopkeeper?”
Reminded of where the bullet had been taken from, Quark instantly dropped it as if it were a live, poisonous insect. “Rom,” he whispered, stroking his brother’s cheek. “What did you do? I told you there was no percentage in resisting a robbery.”
He looked up at Odo to ask whether Rom had had a phaser, but
the constable was staring across the room. “There are more bodies over there,” he said in a quiet voice.
They found four other bodies, all shot by the same sort of chemically propelled bullets. Quark recognized three of them as customers, and the fourth he thought he had seen at the Dabo table, but could not be certain.
“Is there anything missing, Quark?” Odo asked.
“Missing?”
“Taken. Was anything taken by the killers?”
“Taken?” Quark still stared across the room at his brother, not understanding the question. “Taken? Oh, you mean stolen?” Suddenly reminded of Ferengi priorities, he ran to the safe, punched the combination. Inside, and untouched, were the six bars of gold-pressed latinum and thousands of chips he kept as the house “bank.” He checked the shelf behind the bar, his expert eye told him that not a single bottle of expensive, imported synthehol and quasilegal alcohol was missing. The automatic transaction machine had not been tampered with.
Even the kylarghian fire gems on the Dabo table were untouched. Not a Single item of value was taken.
“How peculiar,” announced Odo in typical understatement.
Quark was aghast. “You mean—they did all this for some reason other than loot?” His scandalized tone indicated that he might have forgiven them otherwise.
Odo tried his communicator again, to no effect. “I don’t like this,” he said; “somebody should surely have heard the weapons discharge. Where is everybody?” Once again, he changed his hand into a flat band, wrapped it all the way around Quark’s arm, and melded the fingers, making a closed manacle. “Come on, let’s put you in custody and figure out what happened here.”
“Custody!” Quark was too shocked to protest further as Odo dragged him out the door onto the Promenade.
Both cop and Ferengi stopped in confusion: the Promenade was as devoid of life as Quark’s Place had been. Dozens of dead bodies were piled in heaps along the bulkheads.
Even with his arm held in Odo’s rigid grasp, Quark managed to cringe—a remarkable display of contortionism. “It’s not my fault! I didn’t do it! It’s you—you did it!”

Odo stared at the carnage that used to be the main floor of the Promenade. Shopwindows were shattered, a section of the bulkhead blown inward and another peeled back, as if someone were looking for something and not too particular about cleaning up afterward. The lighting flickered and sputtered, and some places were not lit at all.
Why hasn’t Security done something about these bodies? Who would simply stack them like cargo? Isn’t anybody left alive on this station?
He stood quietly, shushing the gibbering Ferengi. Aside from what they made themselves, there was no noise that he could hear . . . not even the air recirculators.
If they’re out, we have only five days before the oxygen content falls below human and Bajoran tolerances. If the heat doesn’t fry them first.
As a matter of fact, it did feel hotter than normal. Since temperature variation made little difference to Odo until it got extraordinarily high or low, he had not noticed.
Odo’s pocket security pack was still functional. It informed him that the air temperature was 50 degrees Celsius, 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
They walked slowly across a cracked and buckled floor, wary of
tripping. He checked his chronometer, the time seemed correct, about one hour since he had left Chief O’Brien.
The constable shook his head. “Something’s—stop whining, Quark—something’s not right about the time.” He dragged the Ferengi over to a pile of ten or twelve bodies, stooped, and examined them.
He pulled a corpse back, laid it on the broken deck. It was hard to see in the dim, flickering light. Little as Odo knew about human biochemistry, bodies should not putrefy that quickly, even at the current temperature. If he had to guess, he would estimate the bodies to be at least two or three days dead.
“Oh no,” he said, quiet tones cutting through Quark’s guilt with a stronger emotion: fear.
“Oh no? Oh no what, Odo?”
“Quark, do you have a chronometer that isn’t tied in to the station computer?” The Ferengi began feeling in his pockets. “No, no,” amended Odo, “I mean somewhere in your tavern. Not in your pocket.”
“Uk. Well, yes. I have an antique Klingon clock in my office. Battery-powered.”
“Let’s go.” As soon as they reentered Quark’s Place, Odo stopped the Ferengi. “And a torch.”
“Torch? Why not a flashlight?”
“That’s what I said,” said Odo, “an electric torch. A flash. Do you have one?”
“Are you kidding? After the lighting went out when I was trying to hold the big game, I—”
“Yes or no?”
Quark glared. “Behind the bar.”
Odo walked him over, and the Ferengi retrieved his beautiful,
expensive new hand torch. The constable immediately confiscated it.
“Hey! That’s my property!”
“I may need it for the investigation.”
“What investigation?”
Odo looked down at Quark from a height; the constable’s lips were pressed together tightly. “Whether I can raise anybody or not, even if we’re the only people left alive on this station, I am still the constable. And I will conduct an investigation. Any questions?”
Quark shrank back, blinking. “No. No questions.”
“Klingon clock. I have a terrible feeling I know what’s happened.”
Quark pointed up, back toward his office. Odo took the stairs four at a time, Quark stumbling behind, hand still in Odo’s handcuff-grip. In the Ferengi’s office, Odo found the clock and studied it, trying to remember the native Klingon time and date system.
“Quark . . . will you please confirm what this piece of machinery displays?”
“Can’t you even read a clock? It says—no, that’s wrong. The batteries must be low.”
“What does it show?”
“It says it’s, um, ten thirty-five, stardate 47237.8. But that’s wrong . . . that’s three days from now.”
It all fit: the temperature, the decomposition of the bodies, the lack of response to the communicator signal, the Klingon chronometer.
“No, Quark,” said Odo; if the shapeshifter had had a stomach, it would have turned. “It’s not wrong. Your blasted device locked us into a static-time bubble for three days! And somehow, during that time, something or someone attacked and destroyed Deep Space Nine.”
He shoved his face close to the Ferengi, beyond fury. “We’re it,
Quark! We are all that survives! And if no one has come to help by now, I suspect they aren’t coming at all.”

Kira sat at her console in Ops, humming softly to herself. She felt so much better than she had yesterday that she almost forgot herself entirely and sang a verse of “The Dear, Green Place.” Sisko was in his office, and all was right with the station.
Quark had done such an effective job at hiding out that no one had even seen him for more than a day. Oddly enough, Kira had not been able to find Constable Odo, either.
“Wormhole,” said Dax for the sixth time in as many hours. The wormhole was much busier these days than when Bajor had first taken over the Cardassian station.
“Cardassian?” guessed Kira.
“Nope.”
“Borg?”
“Not this time.”
“The prophets have come out of their holy realm to guide us in our endeavors?”
“No such luck.” The Trill poked at her control pad causing the ship to materialize on-screen.
It was truly an interstellar ship, completely unstable anywhere but the zero-g of space. Eight small, black, rectangular solids, each no bigger than a runabout, were connected by spaghetti-like strands of tubing that looped among them in a complicated dance. Some swirls were large enough for a humanoid; others were undoubtedly power conduits.
Several of the tubes poked out into space and ended with wide-open mouths or muzzles. Kira felt a premonition of danger; her combat experience told her those were weapons—of a sort she had
never seen before. They were not the round, solid-state contacts she saw on the business ends of phasers or disruptors.
“Don’t recognize them,” Dax said. “Major, they might be visitors from the Gamma quadrant, rather than returnees from here.”
“Really?” Major Kira thumbed her communicator. “Commander.”
Sisko’s voice responded immediately. “Yes, Major?”
“Monitor three. Check it out.”
A slight pause. “Who are they, Major?”
“Dax thinks they’re from the Gamma quadrant.”
“I’ll be right down.”
High above them, Sisko’s office door dilated and disgorged the commander of Deep Space 9. Kira wondered, not for the first time, how he always managed to have a uniform so crisp you could cut bread with the creases and boots so shiny you could bounce a laser off them.
She tried not to watch him too obviously as he elegantly descended the stairs, lithe as a festival dancer. Good thing his nose is so disgustingly smooth, she thought; otherwise there might be a certain temptation. . . .
“What makes you think it’s a Gamma ship, old man?” Sisko asked Dax upon reaching the operations table.
“First,” she answered, ticking points off on her fingers, “it doesn’t match any Federation, Cardassian, Romulan, Borg, or Bajoran ship designs. Second, it’s using a refined particle-accelerator drive, rather than impulse or fusion. And third,” she concluded, “it reached the wormhole, so it must have warp-speed capability; but there is no antimatter on that ship. So they must use something we’ve never developed ourselves.”
“No antimatter?” repeated Chief O’Brien, popping up from behind his engineering console.
“Hail them,” ordered Sisko.
Dax did so, then stared at her display. “I think they’re running through every possible radio and subspace frequency, trying to contact us. Ah, they found our communications bandwidth. Audio only, there’s no visual.”
“Put it on—” Before Sisko could say “screen,” Dax piped the audio signal through the Ops intercom.
“You will surrender your prisoner or be destroyed,” said a flat, emotionless voice.
“Shields up!” commanded Kira. O’Brien did it himself from engineering.
“They’re speaking Cardassian,” said Dax, “but they’re not Cardassians.”
“Open a channel, Lieutenant. This is Commander Sisko of the Bajoran and Federation station Deep Space Nine. We are holding no prisoners from the Gamma quadrant.”
The aliens’ response was quick and to the point. “Prepare to be boarded,” they announced.
CHAPTER 
3
FOR AN INSTANT everybody in Ops paused, holding his breath. Then they all began talking at once. 
“Dax—get us some help,” ordered Sisko. At the same moment, Kira tapped her communicator: “Odo! Odo, answer me!” 
Nobody responded to either Dax’s subspace message or Kira’s emergency call. 
“They’ve put a shield around the station,” exclaimed O’Brien; “it’s stopping subspace communications.” 
“Can you break through it, Chief?” asked Dax. 
“Security! Kira here, priority one!” 
“Chief,” asked Sisko, “are our own shields holding?”
“No, sir; yes, sir,” said the chief, responding first to Dax, then Sisko. “We can’t break out, but they can’t break in, so far.” 
“Kira,” said the commander, “this constitutes an attack. Fire phasers. Burn their noses a bit.” 
Kira’s fingers ripped across her console almost too fast to see. She was unable to lock the phasers on, so she directed the fire visually, using the computer to triangulate on the alien ship from several views. 
She fired two short phaser bursts, one at each propulsion pod of
the alien ship. The ship apparently had no shields, and the blue phaser streams struck their targets. 
Incredibly, the phaser blasts reflected like lasers off a mirror. 
“Commander,” said Kira, barely controlling her amazement, “did you see—?” 
“I saw,” said Sisko. His calm voice cut through her tension, relaxed her just enough to fire an immediate barrage along the entire length of the alien hull, again sighting visually, since the phasers refused to lock on target. 
Wherever the phasers struck, they reflected; one shot actually returned directly at DS9. 
Kira ducked involuntarily, but the reflected shot missed Ops by a hair. “O’Brien!” she shouted. 
“Incoming!” announced Dax. “Large, metallic—Kira, it’s a torpedo of some sort.” 
Kira tried to lock on to the torpedo but was as unsuccessful as before. She took a few potshots at the torpedo, but it was too small to hit. “Sisko!” she exclaimed. “I can’t hit the damned thing!” 
O’Brien shouted from his own station. “Don’t worry, it’ll just hit the shields and . . . ” 
They all stared; the torpedo flared blue-green for a moment, as if passing through a pane of colored glass. Then it continued, as if it did not even notice the station shields. 
Sisko leaned over his console. “Batter up,” he said, smiling grimly. 
“What are you—” Kira started to ask, then saw on her own instruments that the commander had activated the tractor beam. Instead of trying to lock on to the missile, he simply swept the tractor beam through a plane that intersected with the torpedo. 
The device rebounded from the tractor-bat, spun off above the station. “Damn,” said Sisko, “foul ball!”
“What in blue hell is that thing?” demanded Chief O’Brien, staring at his sensor array. “A chemical explosive . . . and it went right through our shields like they weren’t there. Thank God the commander knocked it aw—” 
A white light flared on the screen, brightening until the automatic filters blocked it out. At the same time, every electronic display in Ops blinked off, then flickered back on again. 
“Security here—Major Kira, are you all right?” 
“Hunh? Oh, sorry.” Kira realized that security had responded several times to her call, but she was so occupied by the battle she had not heard. “Find Odo immediately. Urgent.” 
“Aye, sir.” 
Sisko frowned, still apparently the calmest one in Ops. “How could a torpedo slide right through our shields?” 
He looked to O’Brien, Dax, and Kira, but each stared blankly. 
“Sir,” said the chief, “I think we may have a worse problem than that.” 
“Incoming, number two!” shouted Kira. This time, she did not wait for the commander, she used the tractor herself. She did not have Sisko’s years of practice with a baseball bat, but she had sufficient time to use the computer to help her aim. She struck the next torpedo cleanly, and knocked it far away before it exploded. 
“What do you mean, Chief?” asked Sisko. 
“Sir, when that thing exploded, it knocked our shields down for a half second. During that moment, I picked up an energy transfer.”
“What happened?” 
“Sir—I think they beamed some people aboard.” 
“Where?” 
“Promenade.” 
“Incoming three!” Kira was kept busy for several minutes as the
alien ship fired missile after missile. Each cut through the shields as if they did not exist, but Kira batted each missile away. 
“Somebody’s got to go hunt them down,” said the commander, “round them up and hold them until we can figure out what they want. Where’s Odo?” 
“Gone,” said Kira, unable to take her eyes off her console. She barely nicked one missile, and it exploded close enough to actually rock the station. “He doesn’t answer his call. I’ve got security out looking—” 
“I need somebody experienced with in-station disturbances . . . either you or O’Brien.” 
Sisko looked from one to the other, debating which he could least spare from Ops. Kira, however, knew that if she so much as stepped away from her console, she might miss the next “station buster” bomb the invaders fired. 
On the other hand, Dax could temporarily take over engineering, if necessary. Thus, O’Brien was the most expendable at that moment. 
Kira looked at Sisko, shook her head. 
“O’Brien,” snapped the commander, “beam directly to the Security office and find those invaders.” Sisko tapped his communicator. “Security! The station has been invaded by hostile forces; Chief O’Brien is beaming over to you . . . he’ll locate the invaders, and you take them out. And find Odo! Out. 
“Sisko to Bashir.” 
“Bashir here, sir,” said the doctor’s eager-to-please voice. 
“We’re under attack.” 
“Attack? Is that what that was?” 
“Casualties might be coming your way. It could get heavy, Doctor
Doctor—we’ve been boarded by what might be a strike team. They’re on the Promenade.” 
A pause. “I understand, sir. I’ll prepare.” 
“If you want to relocate to a safer location, I’ll understand.” 
This time there was no hesitation. “No, sir. Everything is here, and I really can’t move it. I’ll be all right.” 
“It’s your decision. Sisko out.” 
While the commander spoke, Dax transferred all the engineering functions to her own console. O’Brien ran to the transporter pad, veering past his console long enough to activate the enegizing touchpad. He vanished in a swirl of transporter sparkles. 
Sisko’s voice cut above the tumult. “Dax, try the photon torpedoes. Kira, see if you can knock one of their own bombs at them—then Dax will hit them with a photon torpedo right after their own explosion. Two can play this game.” 
Sweat dripped down Kira’s face, but she could not remove her hands from the tractor trackball even long enough to wipe her sleeve across her forehead. She blinked stinging sweat from her eyes. “Three, two, one, shoot ‘em, Dax.” 
Kira knocked the bomb back toward the alien ship just as Dax fired a full spread. A strange tube projected out from the alien ship and fired a steady stream of tiny pellets at the bomb, spraying them so quickly it looked like a fire hose. 
The stream missed, but was quickly swerved to intersect the bomb’s new trajectory. The missile vanished in a hail of pellets. 
But in the confusion, Dax’s photon torpedoes slipped right past. They exploded, yawing the ship. 
“Got ‘em!” shouted Dax. “Did some damage, too. Incoming, Kira.” 
The new missile was not well aimed, probably thrown off course when the ship changed position while still controlling it. Kira did
not catch a big enough piece of it to knock it completely away. It exploded, much too close, and again DS9 shuddered under the impact. The shields fluttered, failed again momentarily. 
“Second failure,” said Dax; she looked up, unhappy. “Another team beamed aboard.” 
Sisko tapped his communicator, informed O’Brien and Security of the new invasion. “Dax,” he added, “have you found a way to break through the communications shield?” 
“Sorry,” she said; “I tried every channel of subspace and even regular radio and microwave. Nothing.” 
The commander turned to Kira. “Major, program a probe to eject from the station and contact Bajor as soon as it clears the shield.” 
She raised her brows, annoyed that she had not thought of it herself. It took her thirty seconds to program the probe with the unusual instructions; she nervously watched her instruments, dreading another bomb attack while she was occupied. But the alien ship was quiet, possibly as a result of their last attack. 
“Ready,” she announced. 
“Launch.” 
Kira launched the probe. It streaked directly away from the alien ship, on the other side of DS9. She hoped the station itself would shield the probe from the ship. 
The invaders were merely playing dead. They fired a barrage of six bombs at the station. Frantically, Kira swung the tractor beam wildly, knocking back the four most direct shots. Two looked wild, and she was forced to ignore them. 
They were not wild. The other two shots exploded on two sides of the probe, crushing it between them like a hammer striking an anvil. The probe was obliterated long before it breached the communications shield.
Dax fired another photon-torpedo spread, two of which struck the ship, battering it. 
For a long moment, nothing happened; both DS9 and the alien ship paused, took stock of the situation. Then the ship began to back slowly away from the station. 
“Hold your fire,” ordered Sisko, “they’re withdrawing.”
Kira finally wiped her dripping brow. “What about the strike team inside the station?” 
“You stay here,” he answered. “Let’s see what O’Brien and Security can do. And find that blasted constable!” Sisko looked at her and grinned. “I can’t spare you from the batter’s box, Major.” 
“What?” 
“Never mind. Just stay where you are. Dax, get damage reports and send maintenance crews. Kira, patch me stationwide.” 
“Aye, sir.” She opened the stationwide channel, then nodded at the commander. 
“This is Commander Sisko,” he said, voice still professionally calm. “I regret to inform you that Deep Space Nine has been attacked by an unidentified hostile force. For the moment, the battle has broken off. But there are invaders inside the station. Everybody must evacuate the Promenade immediately. Return to the habitat ring. Above all else, do not hamper Security. Return to the habitat ring—that is a direct order. Sisko out.” He turned to Kira. “Major, get me a continuous feed from O’Brien; I want to know everything that happens before it happens.” 

Chief Miles O’Brien’s heart pounded like a fusion pulse-wave; he wondered if it meant he was about to explode, as it would in a fusion reactor. 
O’Brien had become an engineer because after his experiences in
the Cardassian war, he could not bear the thought of killing another living being . . . even a Cardassian. 
He was a friendly man, a family man; he wanted nothing more than a wife to love, a child to take care of, and a steady job working with his hands—well, perhaps a wee, tiny bit of adventure, he admitted. But not this; not something that endangered Keiko and Molly. 
He walked as quickly as he could past the operations table to the transporter pad, resisting the temptation to run. As he passed his engineering console, he typed the coordinates of the security office and flicked the switch to Energize. 
He stepped aboard the pad and felt the familiar, comforting vibration as his body was torn apart, molecule by molecule, stored, broadcast, and reassembled in the middle of a large room. 
The Spartan room that adjoined Odo’s office was packed with grim, determined security forces. Desks were shoved to the side to make room on the floor for a weapons inventory. A Bajoran rushed past with an armful of phaser rifles, another with a box of hand phasers. 
God help me, thought O’Brien. I’m a lover, not a fighter! Husband, father, engineer, amateur magician, raconteur, and three-fisted drinker . . . never a warrior! 
Lieutenant Moru, number two officer in Security after Odo, covered the vulnerable glass doors by lowering the interior blast shields, heavy plates of metal that would theoretically protect the security office from attack. 
“O’Brien?” she asked. He nodded. “Here.” Moru tossed him a tricorder. “Find the raping bastards.” 
“Yes, sir.” 
Just then, Commander Sisko spoke to the station, told everyone
to evacuate the Promenade toward the habitat ring. O’Brien laid the tricorder on a desk and took a moment to program it to search for anomalous alien genetic patterns. 
He slowly rotated through 360 degrees, sneaking a glance at the Bajoran lieutenant. She looked harder than Kira, even tougher than the old security officer on the Enterprise, Tasha Yar. She could probably have given Lursa and Bator, the sisters of the Klingon Duras, a run for their money. 
“There’s twelve of ‘em, sir,” he said, pointing toward the side bulkhead. “I think they’re near Quark’s Place.” 
The school! For a moment, he looked in the other direction, toward Keiko’s schoolroom. Then he decided that the best way to protect his wife and daughter would be to confront the aliens where they were now, before they had a chance to wander around to the other side of the Promenade. 
“Move out,” commanded Moru, cradling a huge phaser rifle in her bare arms. 
They dashed out the security office door, leaving half the garrison behind to defend it, if necessary, and double-timed toward Quark’s. 
The Promenade was in an uproar. Civilians walked or ran toward the connecting tunnels to the habitat ring. Banners were trampled underfoot, but some of the Bajoran religious protesters could not even let off their verbal sniping long enough to cooperate in the evacuation. 
Shopkeepers were shooing tardy customers out and locking their doors; some carried irreplaceable “treasures” in their arms or on floating pads. 
Moru took point, O’Brien right behind her, followed by the other twenty members of the security platoon. “Wait—wait,” said the chief. Moru held up her hand, halting the column.
“Just around the curve,” O’Brien whispered. “Now there’s fifteen of them bunched up in the middle of the deck, twenty meters ahead.”
Moru nodded, put her finger to her lips. She made a complicated set of hand gestures, and the platoon fanned out into half a chevron, swept forward slowly. 
There was no mistaking the invaders. They looked as if they had stepped out of a holoplay about extragalactic storm troopers. 
They wore gray-and-black armored suits with shiny black “bubble” helmets and carried a strange-looking weapon that O’Brien had never seen before. Moru reached back, pushed O’Brien behind the line; he was only too happy to comply. 
Lieutenant Moru spoke through a Universal Translator PA system in her own helmet: “Don’t you move! Anybody who hears this voice, don’t move or you will be shot.” Half the civilians froze; the rest either dropped to the ground, hands over heads, or fled screaming. 
The platoon strode forward in step, phaser rifles leveled at the invaders. 
The aliens did not bother responding verbally; they leveled their own guns. 
Moru’s security platoon fired first. Phaser beams lanced out, and every shot hit its target. 
The bright red phaser light cut the air and struck the invaders’ armor. The beams reflected off in a kaleidoscopic swirl of high-intensity energy bursts. 
The reflected phaser blasts fired in every direction, depending on the angle of the piece of armor they struck. Holes burst through bulkheads; store windows disintegrated in a shower of glass. One of the security women was caught in her midsection by a blast on the highest setting; she collapsed, dead instantly.
The invaders were not even affected. 
They returned fire, and Miles O’Brien thought the gates of hell had opened wide. Their guns used some sort of chemical explosive to propel projectiles, like the gunpowder firearms that humans had used centuries ago on earth, and they were loud. He covered his ears and crouched down behind the security team for cover. 
The invaders’ firearms kept shooting, and shooting, and shooting, firing rounds so quickly that they functioned almost like directed-energy weapons. 
“Computer!” shouted Moru. “Force shield nine-one up!”
Between the security force and the invaders, a shield popped up, shimmered protectively. 
“Retreat, regroup,” ordered Moru. O’Brien stayed behind the lieutenant, watching the invaders intently to see how they would react. “Force shield nine-three up,” added Moru; another shield popped up behind the invaders, trapping them. 
The invaders calmly walked toward the security platoon. Their leader carried only a small, hand-sized firearm, rather than one of the big rifles carried by the others. 
They reached the force shield, stood immobile for a moment. “Inspecting it,” said Moru; “next they’ll try it, then try to shoot through it.” She turned back to O’Brien, grinned. “Then, all of a sudden, they’ll become great believers in diplomacy.” 
“I hope you’re right, sir,” said the chief; privately, he had a very bad feeling about the attack. 
As Moru predicted, the invader leader strode forward, directly into the force shield. The shield crackled, and electricity discharged all around the invader’s armor, outlining it. The invader continued walking, unimpeded by the shield; its comrades followed, jogging toward the platoon.
Moru stared, astonished. “Fire!” he shouted. “Hit’em with everything!” 
The platoon fired phaser shot after shot, but they reflected from the invaders’ armor. The invaders shouldered their rifles as they advanced, raked the security team with automatic fire. Security personnel dropped to O’Brien’s left, ripped open by the high-velocity projectiles. 
One of the invaders at the center of the group, using its companions as concealment, raised a different weapon over their heads, and fired a large projectile into the platoon. 
In sudden epiphany, Miles O’Brien, a former soldier in the Cardassian war, understood it was explosive. He rolled to his knees, then feet, and just before the invader fired, he pelted back around the curve of the Promenade bulkhead. 
The concussion knocked him off his feet from ten meters away, sent him sliding along the deck, stunned but uninjured. 
The security platoon fared less gloriously. O’Brien snuck a quick peek back, saw three of them in full flight, badly injured and shooting wildly. 
Then he turned and ran back toward the security office—hearing another explosive concussion behind him as he ran. He felt like a coward for not staying and getting killed, even though he knew it was much more important that someone survive and warn the commander. 
He burst through the security office door, was caught by two burly security men. “Gone,” he gasped; “killed them—all of them!” 
“Who killed whom?” demanded a security chief. 
O’Brien sucked air into his burning lungs, wincing as his bruised ribs complained bitterly. “They—they got us. All of us. No survivors except me.” He looked the security chief in the eye. His nametag
read C EWIN. “We’re in big trouble, Ewin. They’ve got some kind of armor . . . phasers don’t affect them.” 
“Not at all?” asked Ewin, having trouble with the concept. 
“It doesn’t shield from a phaser blast . . . it reflects it perfectly. Phasers, phaser rifles, probably not even the station’s entire phaser array would affect a single one of them. We need something more powerful, something with a brute-force kick like Irish whisky.”
“Christ on a crutch,” snarled Chief Ewin. “Toborhan! Find us a big hammer in the weapons lockup—we’ve got to hold them here on the Promenade . . . if they get into Ops or the habitat ring, we may as well abandon the whole station!” 
O’Brien tapped his communicator. “Sisko.” 
“Sisko here,” said the voice. 
“They’ve got—” 
“I heard,” said the commander; “I’ve been listening. Chief, can you make a phaser overload on cue?” 
“I . . . a phaser grenade?” He thought for a moment, phaser schematics flashing like holovision in his head. “Sure, I guess.” 
“Get up here and make us some phaser grenades. Security . . . who’s in command down there, now?” 
“Cory Ewin, sir,” said the burly, black-haired Welshman.
“Find something harder to hit them with and hold them on the Promenade, Ewin. O’Brien will be back as soon as possible with that phaser-grenade hammer you’re looking for.” 
“Aye, sir,” said Ewin, staring dubiously at a hand phaser. “O’Brien,” he asked quietly, “can you really make these things explode?” 
“Sure, and it’s easy,” said Miles O’Brien; “you readjust the—” 
“Don’t tell me,” said Ewin, holding up his hand; “I don’t want to know.” Shuddering, he put the phaser back on the table.
The dead station was utterly silent. The complete absence of the normal tumult still shocked Odo. The constable would never have believed he could actually miss the hurly-burly of miners, tourists, religious fanatics, and boisterous Federation crew members that normally inhabited Deep Space 9. 
Three days later. How could three days have suddenly “gone missing”? And what could have happened to DS9 during that time to kill so many? 
And where was Security? Where were the command crew?
Odo had almost gotten used to the blue-white, flickering lights on the Promenade. At least, it was sufficient to let him avoid the worst of the glass and metal shards on the floor. 
He squatted near a body that was stiff from rigor mortis. He stared at what used to be his second-in-command. She, too, had been killed approximately two days ago, when Quark and Odo had been in the “time bubble” for about a day, with two to go before they woke up. 
It’s maddening, thought Odo; worse than being in jail. At least in jail you have some idea of the passage of time.
“Your wounds are all in the front, Lieutenant Moru,” he said; “I just wanted you to know I noticed that.” He reached down, tried to shut her eyelids; but they were dried open and would not move. She had been dead for two days, and in that time, no one had closed her eyes. 
The disrespect bothered Odo nearly as much as Moru’s death itself. 
She had left her right arm and a lot of blood back up the lightning-lit corridor, just outside Quark’s Place. But she had still managed to scramble backward, firing all the way. Her phaser rifle was
drained of power, whether by repeated firing or by her assailants, the constable could not tell. She died a hero, defending DS9 against . . . against what? Who had attacked, and why? 
The attack made no sense, the sort of exuberant injustice that literally made Odo’s flesh creep, for he grew so agitated that he almost lost control of his shape. 
Nothing of value appeared to be missing; no invaders seemed to remain aboard; and after three days (if the Klingon clock could be believed), no one had come in response to a distress call that would have sounded automatically, even if everyone in Ops had died. 
Odo slowly walked back to where he had left the Ferengi. The curve of the Promenade was invisible in the flickering gloom, giving the illusion of infinite distance. 
Quark had been busy; all the bodies were arranged neatly with sheets drawn over them. The little pink bartender and petty villain sat on his haunches, staring up the corridor toward what was once Quark’s Place, the finest gambling and holosex hall in the sector. 
“I did it,” he whispered, “didn’t I?” 
“I’m sorry? What did you say?” Odo bent close. 
Quark stared at the deck. “That’s what you want, right? A confession? Well, surprise, Odo; you heard right . . . I confess.” 
The constable was so amazed he could find no words. Quark continued. “It—it had to be the device. What else could . . . oh, gods of commerce, Odo, I must have killed them all!” 
The Ferengi wrapped his arms around his ears. It was not a standard Ferengi cringe; Odo realized to his shock that it was good, old-fashioned, honest guilt. A real emotion. “If you had told me yesterday,” he began, “that I would ever hear a Ferengi—” 
“Is there anybody left alive? Sisko, Kira . . . Dax? Is Jadzia Dax
left alive, or has that loveliness been ripped apart by high-velocity projectiles?” 
“I don’t know, Quark.” 
“Bashir? Rom? Garak? N-Nog?” 
“I don’t know.” Strangely, the taste of triumph at obtaining Quark’s confession turned to ashes on Odo’s lips. It was no longer of any importance that the Ferengi admit his guilt. “Rom is dead, Quark.” 
“I forgot.” 
The constable watched the Ferengi, felt a very unaccustomed emotion: pity. In all his days since waking up in the med lab, Odo could not remember feeling sorry for a criminal, until today. And for Quark, possibly a mass murderer, yet! 
“I must be losing my mind,” he marveled. “Or my nerve.”
“I—I . . . ” Quark stared furiously, helplessly at the deck. “I—I take—full responsibility for my actions, Odo.” 
Odo stared in amazement. Hesitantly, he touched Quark on the shoulder, tried clumsily to pat it. 
“Odo, I demand that you arrest me for—for murder.” The Ferengi looked straight at Odo, eyes sunken, ears flushed and pulled back until they were nearly parallel to his head. 
“At most, negligent homicide, Quark. Perhaps not even that.” 
“You saw what happened. I switched the field, then suddenly all this!” The Ferengi looked pointedly at the pile of shrouded bodies, the ruined stores, the collapsed overheads. 
Odo found himself in the odd position of defending Quark’s innocence to Quark himself. “But how could you know what was going to happen? Quark, I work for justice, not the law of an eye for an eye! Besides, if I put you in storage, who’s going to help me
explore what’s left of this station, figure out what happened and what to do next?” 
“Odo, if it’s really been three days, why hasn’t a ship come? How long does it take to respond to a distress call?” 
“See?” said Odo. “There are too many unanswered questions to pick a suspect just yet. Make you a deal, Quark; a plea bargain. You plead no contest for the moment, and I’ll release you on—um—one bar of gold-pressed latinum bail. All right? A deal?” Odo extended his hand.
Quark stared at it as if he had never seen one before. “Bail?” 
“Yes, it means you’re free to move about the station.” 
“I know what bail is, you shifty Cardassian relic! How much did you say, one bar?” 
“One bar.” 
“That’s—that’s wildly excessive! Bail is supposed to keep criminals from running away; where would I go? No, Odo . . . oh no, I should be released on my own recognizance!” Quark pounded the deck as he made his application. He yelped, subsided into silence, rubbing his wrist. 
“Well, it looks like the old, familiar Quark has decided to rejoin us,” said Odo. 
“Yes, well . . . ” The Ferengi glanced at the stacked bodies, then quickly away. “Let’s get moving, see what we can find. Maybe some of this ruined junk will be salable, at least.” 
They rose and started their first exploratory trip around the Promenade. 
“You know,” said Quark, speaking pro forma, without any real conviction, “if we’re really the only two left on DS-Nine, we could claim salvage rights. All we need is a Ferengi barrister who can convince the judge. . . . ”
CHAPTER 
4
O’Brien staggered as the station rolled again. After a long slumber, the invading ship had apparently awakened. Nearly thirty minutes had passed since the invaders attacked DS9 without provocation.
He looked at his tricorder, saw the angle that indicated invader-direction begin to bend.
“They’re moving again!” announced Chief O’Brien. He watched the readout, mentally tracking the invaders’ progress around the Promenade. “Jesus and Mary,” he breathed, “they’re heading away from us—toward the school.” He looked up at Ewin. “Keiko!” he explained, face drained of blood.
The chief heard distant thunder, the force of an explosion striking some faraway part of the station.
“Keiko? The schoolmarm? What about—”
“She’s my wife.”
Ewin stared for a moment, puzzled. Then the words sank in. “You’re that O’Brien?” he exclaimed. “All right, steady on. She’s probably already evacuated. Which way should we go, left or right?”
For a terrible instant, O’Brien could not even call to mind the station diagram. Then he shook his head, dispelling the cobwebs of fear. “Neither,” he said. “They’ve sent scouts out in both directions
around the main Promenade level. But if we go up to level nine, we can cut directly across through the emergency power conduit. Ah, if it’s not in use.”
“Lead on, Macduff,” said Chief Ewin.
O’Brien jogged across the corridor to the access ladder, the turbolifts were too close to the alien advance line in either direction. It’s LAY on, Macduff, you illiterate Welshman, he thought; and Macduff was Scottish, not Irish. In fact, Miles O’Brien had made the same mistake only a week before, and Keiko had corrected him, more or less hilariously. She took great amusement from the discovery that she knew Shakespeare better than her Irish husband did.
That was one of the times he gritted his teeth and loved her.
The station rocked and rolled under another impact. “Commander,” asked O’Brien, “what’s going on up there?”
Kira answered instead. “We’re busy,” she said tersely; “carry on, I’m monitoring you as best I can—”
A boom sounded over the communicator, so loud that the chief jumped. The explosions from their own photon torpedoes sent an earsplitting crack of white noise through the communicator channel.
Despite his chubby frame, O’Brien shimmied up the ladder so fast he outdistanced the more physically fit but less agile security platoon. He opened an access panel, then waited long enough that Ewin could watch as he crawled through the opening.
Inside was a narrow, white tunnel. Running down the middle was a roughly cylindrical lattice of ferrotite bars, the magnetic containment grid that channeled and directed the flow of microwaves that powered the station.
Even outside the grid, in the narrow space between bulkhead and the conduit itself, he could feel the surge of the microwaves (which Starfleet engineering regulations insisted could not be felt by
humans). They caused the hair on his hands and neck to flutter. He pulled a spanner from his belt, hesitated for a moment in front of the circuit pad. The security platoon squeezed through the access hole after him.
“They’re using the emergency conduit,” he explained to Ewin. “Must be running shields, phasers, and something else big, like tractors, all at the same time.”
“Would it fry us if we stepped inside?”
“Probably. And don’t touch the grid, either,”
He took a deep breath, continued. “I can reroute the power flow, but . . . ” He thought of the station suddenly losing power for a few moments, while the power couplings realigned. He thought of Keiko, Molly, the school.
“Commander?” he said.
“I’ve been following off and on,” said Sisko’s voice out of the air, crackling with static from proximity to megajoules of broadcast power.
“If I transfer power, you’re going to lose it for a couple of seconds while the couplings retune and align to the new flow.”
“Negative,” said Major Kira’s voice, fainter, she was shouting across Ops, not having hands free to slap her own comm badge. “The invader ship has fired fifteen torpedoes at us so far, we need shields, phasers, and tractor beams continuously.”
“Dax,” said Sisko’s disembodied voice, “is the schoolroom evacuated?”
During the slight pause, not a single security officer breathed.
“No, sir,” said the lieutenant. “Mrs. O’Brien informs me she has not been able to get out yet, and several of the children are with her. Including Jake.”
“And Molly?” asked O’Brien.
“Proceed with the power shift in twenty seconds,” ordered Sisko. “Lieutenant, fire a full battery of photon torpedoes, set to detonate in eighteen seconds directly in the line of sight between the invader’s sensor array and the station. Maybe we can make them blink.”
Behind him, Chief O’Brien heard Ewin softly counting: “One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus . . . ” O’Brien looked at his wrist chronometer; the security chief was as accurate as a metronome.
At ten hippopotami, O’Brien cracked the panel cover and removed it, careful not to touch the “hot” grid.
At fifteen hippopotami, he inserted the spanner into the upper isolinear deck, snagged the routing packet junction node.
At sixteen hippos, Dax’s voice announced “torpedoes away.”
Two seconds later, multiple peals of thunder echoed through the comm link, forcing everyone to clap hands over ears. Ewin continued his count, unperturbed.
The instant that Ewin ate his twentieth hippopotamus, O’Brien thumbed the contact on his spanner, reversing the node. Almost immediately, he felt the power slack, die.
“Down,” he advised. The security platoon began to stir, but O’Brien held his hand up for them to wait.
“Up!” shouted Kira. O’Brien let his breath out; if the power had not come back on-line, he would have had to re-reroute it back through the emergency conduit again.
He slipped very carefully between the ferrotite bars of the containment grid into the conduit itself, being very careful not to so much as brush against them. Even with the flow shut down, the grid still maintained a static electrical charge “hot” enough to kill a
man instantly if he was not wearing the proper protective clothing—which none of them were.
When the platoon saw that he did not appear to fry, they quickly followed, being equally careful around the grid. The luck gods were smiling, and nobody stumbled.
“Come on,” said O’Brien, sprinting along the catwalk with new urgency, now that he knew Keiko was definitely in the war zone.
They had to crouch as they ran to avoid brushing the ferrotite, which slowed them considerably. Even so, they reached the opposite of the Promenade much more quickly than they would have circumnavigating the perimeter.
Just as they reached the other side, another near miss caused the entire station to swerve violently to their left. O’Brien staggered, fell to the deck. He clutched at the catwalk, teetered precariously for a moment, then recovered facedown on the walkway.
Petty Officer Dahnu slipped, fell against the side of the conduit. The explosion of electrical discharge nearly deafened the chief. He stared in horror at the dead Bajoran man he had never met. Dahnu’s face was contorted in a silent scream of agony.
Ewin pushed insistently at O’Brien’s shoulder blade. “Come on, man. Move it, move it! Time enough later, right?”
Shaking, the chief slipped out between the ferrotite bars of the grid, careful to the point of paranoia not to touch the metal. As the other men and women exited, O’Brien padded softly to the corresponding access panel, and peered through the grille without removing it.
His stomach contracted; below them, a knot of ten invaders milled arrogantly in the promenade, guns in hand, while two pairs of their comrades dragged shopkeepers who had been slow to evacuate out of their stores to the habitat ring.
The Promenade was eerily deserted except for the tableau below them. The invaders used an odd sort of Universal Translator, it translated the words well enough, but the tone came across as harsh and mechanical—not like the Borg, but like an executioner’s song.
Of each Promenade merchant, they asked the same question, which sounded like a declarative statement through their translator “Where is the other one like us.”
As O’Brien watched, frozen in horror, the interrogator casually executed each merchant who had no answer to the question, which meant all of them, since nobody even knew what the inquisitor was talking about.
O’Brien watched three executions: the first was a Ferengi spice trader, who cringed, bowed, and scraped before being murdered.
The second was a Bajoran woman who looked like a somewhat older and fatter version of Kira. A relation? he wondered. She was defiant, refusing to give in to the fear she must have felt. A brave woman. The grand inquisitor put a bullet in her head without a second thought.
The shot echoed around O’Brien’s skull as a third person was hauled to the question. “Where is the other one like us,” asked the inquisitor, voice as harsh and discordant as the previous two times.
Suddenly, Miles O’Brien recognized the man, another Bajoran: he was the gruff matie who sold the everpopular “glop” on a stick,” a Bajoran favorite that O’Brien had learned to like. What was his name? Doran. Loran, something like that.
“You’re looking for the other one, the one that looks like you, right?” The inquisitor said nothing, waited for Doran to continue. “I saw him . . . they’ve—he’s hidden. They took him off the station.” Doran looked from rifle to armor to shiny, black helmet.
O’Brien could tell from Doran’s face that he was lying through his teeth.
“He’s not here,” continued the Bajoran, licking his lips nervously; “and if you don’t immediately stop killing us, you’ll never find out where he is.”
Still the inquisitor stood silent; but he also had not shot the man yet. He waited, patiently.
“Odo took him,” said Doran. “Took him off the station.”
Come to think of it, where is Odo? O’Brien wondered whether the Bajoran glop-merchant might be telling the truth. Maybe Odo did take the “other one” away.
In any case, the story was good enough that the rest of the invaders had also stopped interrogating and executing the mall merchants.
Slowly, the inquisitor raised his hand-held firearm, pressed it against Doran’s throat, pointed upward toward his brain.
Doran licked his lips. His voice sounded dry, scratchy. “O—Odo, the c-constable. He’s got your friend. Got him—took him off the station. Not to Bajor! No, the . . . the other way.” Doran’s face suddenly brightened. “Through the wormhole. Yes, took him through the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant. That’s where he is.”
No! O’Brien pressed his lips together hard to stop himself from shouting No, you idiot, don’t tell them that! That’s where they come from!
Doran continued, oblivious of his miscalculation. “A couple of days ago, two days ago, Odo took your friend through the wormhole to—”
The explosion from the inquisitor’s gun sounded louder than all the rest, probably because it was both unanticipated and thoroughly expected. Miles O’Brien jumped, slumped back away from the panel.
“It’s hopeless,” he said. “They don’t care. They don’t feel. We’re flies to them.” He nodded to Chief Ewin, handed him three “phaser grenades” he had assembled, keeping the last two for himself. “Lay on, Macduff,” whispered O’Brien, “and damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough.’”
But in fact, a different quotation ran through his brain, from King Lear, the one Keiko disliked the most. It stuck in O’Brien’s memory for days:
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
“Odo!” cried Quark. “Here, look at this.”
The constable straightened, quickly strode to where the Ferengi peered around the Promenade bend. There was clearly no danger, the self-protective Quark would not have been idiot enough to shout at Odo after finding a living enemy.
Whatever happened, it had begun two days ago and was all over a day before Quark and Odo came out of time-freeze.
The shapeshifter walked past Quark and around the curve of the inner bulkhead. Then he stopped short, speechless. Even in the darkest days of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, he had never seen such casual carnage.
At least thirty bodies of Promenade merchants lay where they had fallen or been thoughtlessly tossed aside. Each had a single bullet wound in the head, causing instant death.
The stores themselves were ripped apart, much worse than Quark’s Place had been, as if a lunatic with an asteroid-mining phaser had carved bizarre, geometric patterns in the walls, floors,
even ceilings of DS9’s Promenade. Somebody was looking for something . . . or someone.
In the midst of the floor were the remains of yet another security platoon.
Odo lost his shape for a moment, so stunned at the sight. He started to shrink into himself before realizing, concentrated on restoring the “Odo” shape. Quark, unable to tear his gaze from the morbid fascination of annihilation, did not even notice.
Odo dropped to hands and knees and examined the battle scene from line-of-fire level.
Casualties were one hundred percent; but there were a lot more missed bullets around the men and women, indicating they had taken the enemy by some surprise, perhaps wounded some. Looking back in the apparent direction of the platoon’s fire, Odo saw deep phaser burns in every surface, but fewer in direct line of fire.
“Quark, use your analytical skills. What does this suggest to you?”
The Ferengi, looking distinctly bluish white, stared from the butchered security platoon to the other side of the battle, his brows lowered in confusion. Suddenly he gasped. “There are almost no phaser burns behind where the bad guys were standing.”
“Which suggests?” Odo knew very well what it meant, but he wanted to hear another person express the same viewpoint; Quark, apparently being the only other living entity on DS9, was elected.
Quark looked back at the constable. “That—they were wearing some sort of personal shields that deflected phaser blasts?”

Odo nodded; it was the same conclusion he had drawn. “Even the station shields absorb and reemit phaser energy as microwaves. They don’t perfectly reflect it.”
“What’s the difference?”
Odo answered impatiently. “Absorbing such energy uses energy;
every blast weakens our shields, and eventually they fail, letting a shot through.
“But if these—assassins—can reflect phaser fire without having to absorb it, they’re . . . ”
“Invulnerable?”
Odo stood, shaking his head. “I don’t believe in invulnerability. But there are stories.”
“Stories? Of invulnerable assassins?”
“The Cardassians tell stories, tall tales about . . . no, forget it. They’re just a myth. Bogeymen to frighten Cardassian children into obedience.”
“Who are?”
Odo turned the bodies over. The highest-ranking petty officer present was Chief Ewin, along with the only senior chief left after two had died in the first engagement. With Ewin and Moru both dead, that left Lieutenant (j.g.) Turnan in command, Ensign Turnan-Dai as XO, and no enlisted personnel above the rank of CPO.
In two short battles, probably fought within a few minutes of each other, judging by their proximity, Odo’s security squadron had lost its executive officer, all but one department head, and the four senior noncoms. They had been devastated.
Quark wandered slowly among the bodies of the merchants. “I know these people,” he said, voice shaky. “I didn’t like them; they were always complaining about the casino—said it brought a bad element to DS-Nine. But I—I told them that it just sucked up the bad element that would be here anyway, kept it from polluting their dainty emporiums.
“I didn’t like them, but . . . but I knew them all. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I understand. You must know, Quark, that there were not many
people on this station that I would call friend either, or who would call me friend. I haven’t found their bodies yet, except Lieutenant Moru; she and I understood each other very well. But I must assume that the rest are dead as well, or they would have cleaned this place up, gotten it back in working order.”
“Even if you didn’t like them, you knew them,” said Quark, not sure if he were talking to Odo as much as to himself. “You wouldn’t want to see this happen to them.”
“To anyone. But I understand what you mean. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Despite what Major Kira may tell you, the Cardassians did not generally mow down their Bajoran prisoners like they were so much wheat.”
Constable Odo pressed his lips together grimly, continued examining the crime scene—battle scene.
“Concussion marks,” he said, running his fingers over the deep indentations in the outer bulkhead. “I was not aware we had any explosive devices on this station; but these were obviously projected at the enemy from our security team.”
“Didn’t work,” Quark pointed out unnecessarily.
“Maybe they did. It might have killed an enemy, and the rest of them might have taken the body along or transported it off the station.”
Odo crouched, crawled along the ground near the impact crater. Finally, he found what he sought: tiny fragments, presumably from the bomb. When he had collected a dozen or more, he sifted them in his hand, mentally trying to piece them together.
At once it clicked. “Clever human,” he breathed, impressed. “Quark, do you know what this was?” The Ferengi shook his head, and Odo answered his own question. “This used to be a hand phaser. Somebody hot-wired it into a bomb, a grenade.”
“One of the security officers?”
Odo shook his head this time. “The only person who could do it is Chief O’Brien. Well, perhaps Lieutenant Dax as well. They must have realized the invaders or mutineers had reflecting armor, decided to try a brute-force explosion.”
Silence; Odo looked up. Quark was not listening, staring down the corridor instead. The constable followed his gaze, saw what had caught his eye.
The schoolroom set up by Chief O’Brien’s wife, Keiko, had been attacked. It was torn apart worse than it had been when Vedek Winn’s terrorist faction had bombed it.
“Nog!” cried Quark. He sprinted down the corridor toward the ruined schoolroom, and Odo pelted after him.
A dangling beam blocked the upper part of the doorway, delaying Odo. The shorter Ferengi was not impeded. Odo ducked underneath, shrinking himself by thirty centimeters. Searching through the rubble, they found the bodies of two Bajoran children, but no Nog or Jake Sisko.
The schoolroom resembled the toybox of a very destructive child: it was a perfect square filled with rubble that surrounded a blast site where something had exploded very powerfully. But among the broken bulkheads and shattered desks, there were odd discrepancies of chance . . . such as the three computer terminals against the back bulkhead, which were completely unscathed.
“Maybe he wasn’t here,” suggested Odo. “You know he often plays hooky.”
Quark looked back at Odo; they both knew that Keiko had recently given Rom a stern lecture about the commercial advantages of school, and Quark’s older, more gullible brother had practically kicked the boy’s behind all the way to the schoolroom.
Jake, of course, rarely skipped school.
Quark found a debris tunnel, squirmed along it to investigate the rear of the classroom. Odo found a clear spot and grew until his head brushed the ceiling, looking down from above.
The expensive Federation computers that the children used were untouched and untaken, another clue that piracy had not motivated the attack. One display was still on, but it was almost too dim to see.
That’s odd, thought Odo; he looked back at the Promenade itself, realized the exterior lights were dimmer than they should be, as well.
If the fusion plants were operating normally, everything should be as bright as normal. They must be off-line, somehow, he deduced. But even on battery power, normal station operations would not drain the power for years.
Something must be pulling a lot of juice, enough to burn out the batteries after only three days. Offhand, the only system Odo could think of that drew that much power was the station shield. But if the shield was on, how did the invaders get aboard? Were they already aboard, an in-house mutiny?
He turned his head, looked down, and saw her.
At first, all Odo could see was a pair of feet, too small for a man, too large for a child. He stepped over a fallen support beam with his still-giant legs, then shrank to normal size.
A woman was definitely pinned beneath a collapsed bulkhead. She was not moving or making noise.
“Quark,” Odo shouted, “give me a hand.”
The two of them managed to struggle the bulkhead off of her body. Tossing it aside, Odo knelt to examine her.
It was definitely Keiko O’Brien, recognizable by her raven black
hair and Japanese features despite the gaping bullet wound in her forehead. One glassy eye stared at them, an accusing glare: Where were you? Why didn’t you protect me and the children? The other eye was swollen shut.
“I’m sorry,” said Odo. Quark looked away. “I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Brien. I failed. I wasn’t here.” He pulled her out of the rubble, causing a mini-cave-in. He laid her body flat.
Wordlessly, Quark handed him a cloth wall-hanging, a painting of both the inside and outside of DS9, created by the younger children; Odo spread it over Keiko’s body. It was too short to cover her completely, so he left her legs exposed.
“Failed?” asked the Ferengi. “And what would you have done if you’d been here, Odo? Died with the rest of them?”
“If necessary. If that were all I could do.”
“Then who would be left to warn the Bajorans and the Federation about the attack?”
Odo snorted. Typical Ferengi reasoning, justifying failure. “I wasn’t here, where I should have been, to defend the station.” He glared a long time at the Ferengi, as if daring him to contradict.
“Keiko was killed by a bullet,” continued the constable; “other than her swollen left eye, she has no other injuries. The bullet was fired from a short distance away, I would guess, since the wound is surrounded by embedded grains of powder, which are probably the remnants of the propellant.
“This raises an interesting question: Why is the schoolroom torn apart by multiple bomb blasts?”
Quark shrugged. “Somebody trying to fight back?”
“It would have to be after she died,” Odo pointed at a gaping wound in Keiko’s thigh. “She took bad shrapnel here, but there’s no evidence of scabbing, or even leg convulsions.”
“Revenge, then,” suggested Quark.
“Of course. But who? Security is decimated; if the civilians had any sense, they’d withdraw down the connecting tunnels to defend the habitat ring.”
The constable frowned. “Quark, this was no ordinary attack or terrorist rampage. These invaders destroyed practically the entire security force. Without them, Deep Space Nine itself would be in imminent danger of being lost.”
“Destroyed? Or taken over?”
“Somebody jumped them, jumped them hard. It wasn’t the Cardassians, the Romulans, or the Borg. Quark, somebody came through the wormhole from the Gamma quadrant and destroyed this station.”

Despite his fear, Chief O’Brien was about to follow the security platoon as they boiled out of the emergency-power conduit, but Ewin stopped him. “You ain’t a soldier anymore; you don’t even have a rifle,” he pointed out. “Besides, we need you to make more of these phaser grenades.” He pushed O’Brien firmly back toward the grid.
Cory Ewin’s action saved O’Brien’s life.
The plan worked; the security platoon caught the invaders by surprise, fired into their ranks at will.
Dozens of blasts erupted from the security team’s phaser rifles, striking the invaders unimpeded at the highest setting; but every shot reflected off the invader armor, whirling and splitting into multiple beams of intense red light, deadly to everyone except their intended targets.
O’Brien ducked his head, the acrid smell of ozone burning his sensitive nostrils. Aghast, he saw the invading aliens turn casually
into the full brunt of phaser fire and raise their chemically propelled projectile rifles.
He fell to his stomach as they opened fire. Thunder reverberated in the corridor, drowning out the screams of agony as security men and women were torn apart by the bullets.
Blood sprayed as O’Brien had never seen before, covering everything and everybody. He gasped as a stream of fluid struck him in the face. Nothing even in the terrible Cardassian war had prepared Miles O’Brien for such raw carnage.
In addition to people, the invaders’ guns shredded bulkheads, control pads, and anything else in the line of fire. The soft, indirect lighting of the Promenade, designed to maximize civilian comfort, turned into the harsh glare of exposed filaments and yellow-sparking electrical discharges. O’Brien’s ears rang so he could barely hear the cries of the dying; a blessing, he decided.
Ewin survived the first assault, lobbed an “O’Brien surprise” into the middle of the invaders. It exploded with a roar that hurt even O’Brien’s bruised eardrums and a flash that would have blinded any unshielded eyes that saw it. The chief covered his eyes, and the platoon wore flash-suppressors.
Three of the invaders were knocked down, one apparently dead or severely wounded, the other two shaken but still functional. Miles O’Brien silently cheered from his vantage point; it was the first casualty inflicted on the enemy by station personnel.
Then he watched, sickened but fascinated, unable to turn away, as the remaining invaders loosed volley after volley until the entire platoon was dead. Not a man or woman escaped, and Ewin was not able to throw any more grenades.
As far as O’Brien knew, the entire Promenade security force had been killed. “Commander Sisko,” he whispered.
After a moment, Sisko’s voice responded, the gain turned so low O’Brien could barely hear the commander.
“They got us,” said O’Brien. “There’s nobody left. There’s no security! The core section is now completely undefended.”
The invaders conferred, too far away for the chief engineer to overhear them. Then they split up, half heading upsection, the rest downsection.
Suddenly struck by a thought, O’Brien whispered, “Sir? Commander?”
“Sisko,” said the voice.
“Can’t you lock on, transport them into the brig?”
“Sorry, Chief. Kira tried. We can’t get a lock on them—they’re jamming us.”
“Keiko! Get a lock on Keiko and the kids, beam them to Ops!”
“Some sort of electromagnetic disruption field,” said the commander, “we can’t lock on anything.”
“For God’s sake, Commander, do something—they’re headed toward the school!”
Suddenly Kira’s voice cut through the conversation. “O’Brien, I’ve almost got a lock on you. Is there anything around you that could be blocking their ECM?”
He looked around, suddenly realized what it was. “The magnetic containment grid! The static charge must block out their electronic countermeasures.”
“Get in the grid,” ordered Kira. O’Brien barely slipped through before she continued. “Locked—beaming you to the schoolroom—energizing.”
His gut wrenched as he materialized in a corner of the room, holding the last two phaser grenades, one in each hand.
The worst problem with combat use of transporter technology is
that dematerialization and materialization both take time. While they continue, you exist in a state halfway between dream and daylight, more myth than reality.
As the world of Keiko’s schoolroom slowly phased into existence around him, Chief Miles O’Brien could only watch, impotent, as the inquisitor slowly raised his gun. Time seemed to slow; O’Brien’s brain could not propel his sluggish body to coalesce any faster.
The inquisitor’s finger tightened on the trigger. Nearly solid, O’Brien tensed the muscles he would need to charge across the room and catch the invader in a flying tackle, simultaneously shoving Keiko toward a small, open access hatch he noticed at the back of the room.
She could fit; the invaders in their bulky, armored suits could not.
Almost . . . almost solid . . . 
CHAPTER 
5
KEIKO O’BRIEN heard the evacuation order in the middle of a lesson on the Federation Prime Directive. Unsure what was going on, she began hustling the children out the door, making them leave all their personal effects behind—computers, book data clips, antiques for show-and-tell. 
The older children left immediately except for Jake Sisko, son of the commander, and Nog, Rom’s son and Quark’s nephew; the former stayed because his father would have, the latter because Jake stayed.
Molly O’Brien was also still present; at three years old, the daughter of Keiko and Miles O’Brien was too young to find her way back to the habitat ring by herself. She was being a very brave girl, not crying at all.
Jake paced nervously, running his hand over his very short, black hair. Unlike his Ferengi friend Nog, Jake had actually lived through a brutal attack by the Borg . . . the attack that had killed his mother, Jennifer, Commander Sisko’s wife.
Keiko felt a flash of guilt as she remembered; Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Enterprise had led that attack as “Locutus,” while controlled by the Borg.
The younger children became frightened, and Keiko had to hug them, calm them down. She had managed to get all but two little Bajoran girls out the door when two soldiers in some sort of black and gray armor walked into the classroom.
One stepped to the side, covered the room with his weapon. The other walked up to Keiko. “Where is the other one like us,” it asked in a voice so neutral that Keiko could not even tell whether it was male or female.
Holding Molly behind her, Keiko stared in astonishment at the inquisitor. “I . . . I don’t understand the question,” she said.
“Where is the other one like us,” it repeated.
Keiko thought she caught a movement in the corner of her vision. She resisted the impulse to look in that direction, which would have drawn the inquisitor’s attention.
“Is there another one like you on board?” she asked.
The soldier paused a long moment. Letting her eyes roam, Keiko suddenly realized she could see a reflection in one of the display terminals. Jake Sisko had crawled across the floor on his belly, shielded from the inquisitor’s view by a line of desks. Somehow, he had silently worked free an access hatch where the floor met a bulkhead.
It was small—too small for the armored figure before her; but big enough for the children and possibly herself.
“There is another on this facility who looks like us,” stated the inquisitor in its flat tone. “The other signaled twenty-eight hours ago. Where is the other being held.”
Keiko felt rather than saw Molly crouch down. She could not see Jake either, but she presumed—she prayed—that he was urging Molly to crawl under the desk with him.
Keiko hoped the Bajoran girls found the escape route; she could not see them, or Nog, for that matter. But at that moment, only one
person mattered to her: Molly O’Brien.
“If the other is being held prisoner, it—I mean he will be held in a Security holding cell.”
The inquisitor raised its hand weapon, pointed it at Keiko’s head. “You will take me to the Security holding cell,” it said. It moved forward, grabbed hold of her shirt.
Keiko realized an instant too late that she should have walked forward herself; from its new position, the inquisitor could now see the access hatch.
It looked over her shoulder, saw the escape in progress. The inquisitor chittered a word that was not translated by its Universal Translator, followed by “small animals escaping—kill them.”
This time she did not hesitate. Keiko launched herself at the inquisitor with such unexpected force that she bore it to the deck with her.
Oh God, I never thought it would end like this! She surged forward, covering the inquisitor’s helmet with her body as it tried to wrench her free.
Keiko looked up, screamed. Her beloved Miles was just materializing in the schoolroom. “Run!” she screamed. “Run, run, run!”
The inquisitor managed to grab her hair, yank her head back. She saw the enormous barrel of his gun point directly at her face.
Thunder reverberated in her head, echoing round and round before finally dying out.
Keiko O’Brien had a few, confusing glimpses of light, vision, pieces broken apart, the shattered remains of her brain unable to mentally process the stimulus sent by her visual cortex, still intact in her occipital lobe.
Oh God . . . 
The light slowly faded, died completely. A voice spoke, possibly her own.
“Miles—”

Miles O’Brien saw his wife’s head jerked forward into the invader’s gunshot She fell backward across the desk behind her—her desk.
As if in a horrible nightmare, he was paralyzed, unable to move, unable even to scream.
Keiko was unambiguously dead. No human being could survive a wound like that. Keiko, his only beloved, his fair colleen, the one who made life alive, would never again smile, laugh, love, or even spat with him.
O’Brien stared dully, entire body numb. His brain was already exploding when he thumbed both contacts on his phaser grenades simultaneously, threw one at the feet of each invader. He made no effort to get out of the way of the blast.
Keiko called to him. I’m coming, he told his wife. She was always calling him; she loved him.
The inquisitor rose, turned toward O’Brien. At that moment, the grenades detonated.
The invader’s armored body slammed into the chief, driving him back into a bulkhead and blackness.
Blackness.
Gray twilight. Dawn—
O’Brien blinked, came to consciousness. The schoolroom was wrecked, worse than it had been after the terrorist bombing a while back. One of the invaders was helping the other limp out the door.
O’Brien tried to rise. He would have jumped them from behind,
tried to break a neck, if they even had necks. But his body would not respond.
How funny, he thought; the bastard saved my life by walking between me and the grenade.
Then he remembered Keiko. For many minutes, he could only listen to distant shots and explosions, screams of the dying, while tears ran down his face. He could not move to wipe them away.
At last, O’Brien managed to get some feeling back into his limbs, get them to respond feebly. He wriggled on his belly toward the open access hatch.
Now’s not the time to die, he thought. Now’s the time to live, to pay the buggers back for me own, fair, sweet colleen.

Quark caught Odo’s arm. He silently pointed at an open access hatch behind Keiko’s body. In the explosion’s dust and rubble, they both saw the clear track of something heavy being dragged or dragging itself through the hatch, the trail still clearly visible even after two days in grisly company.
“Maybe we should . . . follow it,” said Quark, swallowing.
Odo nodded. “Stay behind me,” he counseled.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Odo stepped over the remains of a school desk, dropped to all fours in front of the hatch. He wriggled into it, followed closely by Quark. As soon as the constable saw that the hatch led to a tunnel that went on for some distance, he shrank his limbs into lizard legs for easier travel.
Quark let out a short scream, instantly stifled. “Damn it, Odo—you could at least warn a person before you turn yourself into a monster!”
Enjoying the jest, Odo let his head flow into his neck, caused it
to bulge out again where his rear end had been, stretching the new neck behind him until his face practically touched the Ferengi’s. “Perhaps your own monstrous soul would be more comfortable in a body like this,” he suggested.
Quark recoiled so panic-stricken that he banged his huge head on the tunnel ceiling. He stared, eyes as big as saucers, revulsion written so plainly on his face that Odo almost felt sorry for an instant.
He reversed the metamorphosis, continued down the tunnel with his head facing forward.
They crawled for what seemed like hours through the black tunnel, guided only by their two hand torches, before finally stopping.
Quark gasped for breath. “I’m a businessman, not a miner!” he declared angrily.
“I thought all gnomes liked caves,” said Odo.
The tunnel terminated at a junction: corridors branched left and right, while a ladder led up. The ladder was blocked by an emergency hatch.
“Unless we’re completely turned around,” continued the constable, “that ladder leads up to the upper core and Ops.” He restored his normal shape, stood and mounted the ladder.
When he reached the hatch, he said, “Security override, Constable Odo. Verify.” There was no response. “Blast, I forgot the computer’s down.”
Odo reached up to the control pad, which glowed a dim green. He looked back down at Quark. “Avert your eyes,” he ordered.
“Why?”
“Because I’m about to type my private access code, and I don’t want you to see it.”
“What possible difference could it make now?” demanded Quark, peevishly.
Odo scowled down at him; with a Ferengi curse, Quark turned his head and stared at the opposite wall. The constable quickly typed the code, then pressed the emergency open relay. As the hatch slowly rolled back, he watched a message flash on the display.
“That’s odd,” he said; “there was an attempted illegal access two days ago.”
“Who?”
“Jake Sisko. He was denied entry by the computer.”
Quark bolted up the ladder so fast he almost dislodged Odo. “Nog? Jake and Nog were here? Then he must have gotten out of the schoolroom!”
“We don’t know about Nog. Evidently Jake tried to access Ops, presumably to join Commander Sisko, but the computer turned him away.”
“Where did they go after that?”
“Left or right, I suppose. I would have to use a tricorder to follow the DNA spoor. But we’re going up now.”
Quark gazed down the ladder at the junction below. “Maybe you should go up to Ops, and I’ll—”
“Don’t even think it,” said Odo. “There are a hundred twists and turns in these conduits and access tubes. It would be like trying to follow a rabbit down a rabbit hole.” The hatch finished opening. “Besides,” added Odo, “we have a better chance of finding them both using the station sensors . . . if we can get the computer back on line, that is.”
Quark sighed. “I guess you’re right, much as it pains me to admit it. Lead on, Macduff.”
Mk’doff? Some obscure Ferengi reference? Odo continued up the ladder, mildly perplexed.
Ops was nowhere near as badly torn up as Quark had expected. It was riddled with bullets in places, almost at random; but there was no machinery smashed, there were no displays burst open, and Commander Sisko’s office was not bombed.
Odo walked around the operations table, staring curiously at the controls and instruments and trying to assess damage. As many times as he had been there, the constable seemed to know virtually nothing about how it all worked . . . but of course, that was Odo all over, totally unconcerned about anything except station security and harassing Quark.
Quark walked to the main-sensor-array display at Lieutenant Dax’s science console. Dax! Was the belle of DS9 still alive? He shook his head; evidence indicated that nobody had survived.
Not even Nog, else he would eventually have returned to Quark’s Place, the most familiar spot on the station.
Quark blinked rapidly, shoved the thought far back in his hindbrain, where the higher cortical centers of profit and loss could not access it. Time for a full accounting later.
Ops was three stories high, as tall as Quark’s Place, from the systems core well, where O’Brien spent much of his time, up to Commander Sisko’s office high above the main floor. In between heaven and hell sat the huge operations table, around which Dax, Kira, another engineering officer, and even Sisko himself would sometimes sit, fooling around with their consoles.
Several of the consoles had bullet damage, including Dax’s science console, where the main sensor controls were located.
First, are there any bad guys still out there? He slid his finger back and forth on the touchscreen, sweeping the sensors around the complete globe surrounding the station. They were alone, unless somebody had a cloaking device of some sort.
“Hey, don’t touch that,” snarled Odo. “This equipment belongs to the Federation and Bajor. Don’t monkey with anything, you might break it.”
“I’m not going to break it, you officious little policeman.”
“Well, just leave it alone.”
“Oh? And who’s going to locate the boys? You?”
Odo looked worried somehow, even though his sculpted face did not reflect any more emotion than usual. “I’m sure I can learn enough about the instruments to—”
Quark ignored the rest of Odo’s remarks, quickly performed a level one diagnostic check. “Shields are still up, but the sensors indicate there’s nothing out there. So I’m shutting them off. That’ll stop the battery drain.
“There’s damage to most of the secondary systems, including sensors; I can’t say exactly what or how much, though.

“Logs indicate that twenty-three million messages were sent to Starfleet, obviously on automatic, but no response was ever received. I think there’s some sort of force shield around the station that blocks all communications.”
Odo stared in openmouthed astonishment. “How do you know how to work this equipment?” His tone of voice implied that he would be less amazed if Molly O’Brien, Keiko’s toddler, had done it.
Quark smiled nastily. “Why Odo, surely you remember I once commanded DS-Nine.”
“Oh. That.”
“In any case, I had a life before I opened Quark’s Place, you know. I shipped with my uncle Rank—”
“How appropriate.”
“I shipped with my uncle Rank,” he continued, “on a Ferengi Nondisclosure-class merchant ship called the Margin. Where do you
think I got the money to buy the place in the first place?”
“Burglary and extortion?”
Quark continued quickly, ears flushing. “Ferengi instrumentation, while superior, is basically the same as Federation, Cardassian, and Romulan, since the same laws of physics apply.”
“Hm.” Odo crossed his arms, watched the Ferengi narrowly as he fooled around on each console. Quark frantically tried to remember anything beyond the first-year apprentice basics of Instrument Class.
Despite his brave talk, he knew he did not know enough to get them off the station or even refine the sensors enough to locate a particular person on DS9 . . . particularly with the main computer off-line.
Quark discovered with delight that Dax had set up a number of macros to automatically perform the routine tasks, one of which was to open channels with Bajor, the Federation, or the nearest starship. After some fumbling, he activated the macro, stood back, and watched the subspace call.
tx 28827.33.4123.A bajor HiCoun -> open
wait handshake........................
The dots slowly crawled across the screen. At last, when they reached the right side, the display changed.
tx 28827.33.4123.A bajor HiCoun -> terminate
NOR
contact not established -> diagnose?:Y
Quark touched the Accept touchpad; after an instant, the words “unable to diagnose problem” appeared below the display. Of
course. The computer is down, you fool.
If there had been a mechanical problem with communications, Quark realized, the level-one diagnostic, which used hardwired circuits rather than the computer, would have detected it. Thus, either there was a logic fault in the communications system, or more likely, the force shield set up by whoever destroyed the station was still up. If he knew more about the sensors, he could probably detect it; but it was not worth the time it would take to learn.
He had a more important task.
Just for thoroughness, while he was trying to remember everything he knew about sensor tuning, he activated Dax’s communications macro two more times.
tx 28827.33.4123.A bajor HiCoun -> terminate
NOR
contact not established -> diagnose?:N

tx 28911.05.1001.A FedStarSixCom -> terminate
NOR
contact not established?diagnose?:N

tx 99401.99.7***.* StarFleet anyship -> terminate
NOR
contact not established -> diagnose?:N
The sensors, as with all Federation equipment, were designed to be easy to operate. But “easy” was a relative term. The Cardassians undoubtedly thought their computer was easy to operate; but Quark had listened to at least a thousand complaints by Chief O’Brien over glasses of synth that it was rigid, recalcitrant, and
reluctant . . . and O’Brien was a trained engineer.
At least the Federation believes in “help” screens, thought the Ferengi. Thank Tariff for small favors.
Most of the allegedly helpful explanations of sensor functions were so much gibberish to Quark, who had never attended Starfleet Academy. The laws of physics might be the same for Ferengi and Federation, he thought, but the laws of product design were radically different.
Quark’s Ferengi heritage ultimately served him well: by persistent, relentless poking into areas he was not supposed to go into, he finally managed to shift the sensors from mass-detection to biological systems. 
He initiated a shipwide scan—a necessity, since he still had no idea how to narrow the scope.
Quark stared at the display, at first not comprehending what he saw. Then he shouted as if he had just spun a Cluster on a doubled and redoubled Dabo wheel.
“What? What is it?” demanded Odo.
Quark jumped, whirled around. For a few peaceful moments, lost in the intricacies of instrumentation, he had actually forgotten that the annoying constable was still with him.
“The display!” he croaked, jabbed a finger at the screen.
Odo stared. “Oh, ah,” he said, obviously in a total fog.
Quark explained. “Biological—I set the sensors to biological scan and scanned the station. Look.” He pointed at hundreds of crisp, sharp spikes. “There are people still alive here! Dozens of them!”
Then the screen flickered, and the spikes disappeared. “Uh-oh,” said the Ferengi; now the screen clearly showed there was no one alive on DS9 . . . not even themselves.
Then the spikes reappeared, but they were inverted, indicating
some kind of weird “anti-life.” They began to march across the screen from right to left.
“What does that indicate?” asked Odo.
“That the sensors don’t work,” squeaked Quark. He felt his face flush bright pink with embarrassment, remembering the diagnostic check that warned of sensor problems and seeing the bullet holes.
A terrible thought occurred to him: Suppose the mass-detection sensors were also malfunctioning, and there was an invader ship out there?
Quark had just dropped the shields!
He decided that in this case, silence was certainly the better part of disclosure. What Odo did not know might still kill them both; but if Odo did find out the danger Quark had put them in, the Ferengi might be the only one to die.
“So,” said Odo, with his customary and uncanny knack for knowing precisely the most embarrassing questions to ask, “all you can say for sure is that the invaders’ ship has left the vicinity, right?”
“Ah—ah—n-no, I can’t say anything else for certain. For sure. I mean, absolutely.”
“Hm, probably returned to report victory and bring reinforcements for a general invasion. How lovely . . . and all because your loathsome device kept me from being here to . . . ”
“To what? What incredible feat could you have pulled off if you’d been here?”
“To arrest them,” he finished lamely.
Quark leaned forward eagerly. “Look—we know Nog and Jake escaped the schoolroom—”
“No, we know Jake escaped.”
“Yes, yes, but isn’t Nog always with him, much as I used to chide the child for hanging around a human? So surely we can conclude
that they, at least, found a hole to survive attack, right?”
“Quark, that was two days ago. A lot can happen in two days.” He looked around the empty Operations Center.
A world can crumble in two days, he thought.
“Well,” said Quark, “I guess there’s not much else we can do here. Wait, did you check the ship’s chronometer?”
Odo nodded. “It basically matches your Klingon clock, though your clock is eleven minutes fast.”
“Yes. I’ve apparently neglected to reset it for the past three days.”
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Back to the junction where Jake couldn’t get into Ops.”
“I thought you said it was useless, like following a rabbit down rabbit hole!”
The constable shrugged. “Fortunately, I happen to have a tricorder to follow the DNA spoor.”
The Ferengi stared in amazement. “You lied!”
Odo regarded Quark with a reptilian calmness. “I said I would need a tricorder to follow Jake’s trail; I never said I didn’t have one.”
“You—!” Quark bit off the rest of the sentence; in his present predicament, it would be contraeconomic to finish.

Chief O’Brien stared at his chronometer, incredulous. It read 1607. Four hours? How could only four hours have passed since the invaders attacked?
Subjectively, it was less than one; he had been out for some time.
Emotionally, it felt more like forty.
He scuttled brokenly along the conduit crawlway, climbed the cold and sticky emergency-access ladder, and identified himself to the computer for the Ops access hatch.
He scaled ten more levels of DS9, grateful for the first time that the ladder on each level was staggered from those above and below—otherwise, the temptation to simply let himself fall all the way back and join Keiko might have been irresistible.
The lights flickered. Must have shot up some junction nodes, he thought. Ordinarily, this would have infuriated the chief; today, it did not matter. Nothing mattered anymore except killing the invaders.
As O’Brien poked his head up into Ops, Kira was speaking. She sounded hesitant, as if broaching a subject so strange she was afraid it might anger Commander Sisko. “Sir?”
“Yes, Major?”
“Do you know what a militia is?”
The commander rubbed his chin. “Of course; classically, a paramilitary force of indigenous residents, banding together to repel invasion.”
“Well, there are a lot of Bajorans on the station, sir.”
“Yes?”
“And lots of us have experience fighting the Cardassians during the occupation.”
“Yes?” Sisko was beginning to get annoyed. “Major, if you have a suggestion, just spit it out.”
She chewed on a lip. “Experience fighting with impromptu weaponry and command structures or even as individuals.”
“Major Kira, are you suggesting I order the civilians on this station to defend themselves because we can’t protect them?”
“No, sir,” she said; “just some of the civilians. You know that Colonel Bata Huri lives here now?”
Kira breathed the name with such reverence that O’Brien knew Bata must have been a great hero of the Bajoran underground.
Sisko nodded, apparently knowing about Colonel Bata. “How long would it take Colonel Huri to pull a militia together?”
Kira smiled. “I’ll contact her; you can talk to her yourself.”
“Major . . . ” Sisko said. “This Colonel Bata; is she—good?”
Kira snapped back at him. “The Cardassians put a bounty on her, sir: ten million bars of gold-pressed latinum.”
O’Brien leaned over, one foot on the ladder, and hopped onto the deck in Ops.
“Anyone ever try to collect?” Sisko asked.
“Sure,