At that moment, before the sky was opened, it was all a flurry of this and that and the everyday. But with the Opening, there came a stillness, a pause in the endless avalanche of life, if you will, as if the stars themselves whispered for us to turn away from what troubled us and glimpse what waited at our journey's end. And the truth is, what the stars showed was no different from what we had already suspected: There were many paths to that final destination, and even in the Temple of All That Had Been and Was Still To Come, the place where all answers waited, it was up to us—to us—to choose our own way.

—JAKE SISKO, Anslem

PROLOGUE

In the Hands of the Prophets

"THERE was another time," the Sisko says.

"It is not linear," Jake answers. The twelve-year-old boy dangles his fishing line in the quiet water of the pond, rippling the reflections of towering trees, green fields, and the pure blue sky of Earth. The sun is strong, and the rich scent of the bridge's sun-warmed wood makes uncounted summers happen all at once for the Sisko.

"But it is, was, will be.. .." The Sisko falters with the syntax of eternity. His father plays the upright piano in the restaurant in New Orleans as the Sisko plunges into the depths of the Fire Caves with Gul Dukat and first takes his captain's chair on the bridge of the Starship Defiant, all within a single heartbeat— the same heartbeat.

—The heartbeat of his unborn child, now grown,

now fulfilling a destiny unimaginable to the Sisko, a destiny now known to him, now unknown.

The Sisko laughs at the wonder of it all.

"You're laughing again," Jean-Luc Picard tells him in the ready room of the Enterprise, in orbit of Bajor.

The Sisko looks down at the old uniform he wears at this moment. The texture feels so real to him, even as it dissolves beneath his fingers and he is in his bathing suit on the beach carrying lemonade to the woman who will be/is/was his wife—still at this same moment.

"That is correct," Solok confirms. The young Vulcan walks beside the Sisko on the path leading from Starfleet Academy's zero-G gymnasium to the cadets' residences. "All moments are the same."

"In this time," the Sisko says. He watches Boothby plant fall flowers by the statue of Admiral Chekov. "But there are other times. That's my point." The gardener now prunes bushes for the spring.

"This is not logical" Solok says. His cadet's uniform becomes that of a baseball player, and he tosses a small white ball into the air, then catches it with the same hand an infinite number of times.

"Logic has no place here," the Sisko says. He reaches out and intercepts the ball even as Solok attempts to catch it. "Because logic is linear."

"Some logic is absolute," Sarah Sisko says. She % stands by the viewport in the Sisko's quarters on Deep Space 9, the radiance of the opening doorway to the Celestial Temple filtering through her hair. Wormholes within wormholes. Temples within temples. An infinite regression. Or an eternal one.

"I think I finally know why I'm here," the Sisko says. "Why you . . . had to be certain my mother would marry my father, give birth to me."

"You are the Sisko," Major Kira agrees. She stands at her station in Ops.

"You need me here," the Sisko says.

"You are the Sisko," Curzon Dax agrees, the vast spacedocks of Utopia Planitia orbiting with flawless precision beyond the viewport of his shuttle.

"You need me here to teach you," the Sisko says.

Interruption.

The Sisko finds himself in the light space. Around him Sarah, Jake, Kira, Solok, Curzon, Worf, and Admiral Ross.

"You have much to learn," the admiral says.

"Then shouldn't I already know it? "

"Your language is imperfect for these matters," Solok says.

"You have much to realize that you already know," Worf says.

"That you have always known," Jake says.

The Sisko holds up a finger, and each of his observers watches it, as he knows they will.

The Sisko regards their expectant faces and laughs again. "Look at you all," he exclaims. "You want to know what I'm going to say next. Because you don't know! "

The Prophets are silent

The Sisko thinks of a thing, of a time, of a moment, makes it real.

And they are on the Promenade of Deep Space 9, as it is the day the Sisko first sets foot upon it.

The Sisko can smell stale smoke, hear the clamor of work crews. Feels what the Prophets cannot feel, the . .. anticipation.

He leads them to the entrance of the Bajoran Temple.

"Since you do not know time, how can you know of

other times?" the Sisko asks, so much that is hidden now known to him.

As he knows they will, the Prophets continue their silence.

The Sisko holds out his hand to them. "Welcome, Prophets," the Sisko says with a smile. "Your Emissary awaits you."

All enter the Temple then. Intendant Kira and Jadzia and Ezri, Jake and Kasidy, Weyoun and Damar, Quark and Rom and Nog, Bashir and Garak, Vie and Worf, O'Brien and Keiko and Eddington and Vash. All at the invitation of the Sisko.

It takes hours for them all to pass through, all in a single moment.

The last is the Sisko, poised on the threshold of the Temple.

He remembers his own words the first time he stands here.

"Another time."

An infinity of eternities in just two words. An infinity beyond the understanding of the Prophets.

Until now.

The Sisko enters the Temple.

Not to show them the beginning of things. Because that would be linear.

He enters the Temple to show them the end.

As it was.

As it is.

As it will be....

CHAPTER 1

on this day, like a beast with talons extended to claw through space itself, the Station stalked Bajor one final time.

Viewed from high above, from orbit, the dark, curved docking arms angled sharply downward, as if gouging the planet's surface to leave blood-red wounds of flame. And from each blazing gash of destruction, wave after wave of ships lifted from the conquerors' camps and garrisons, on fiery, untempered columns of full fusion exhaust.

As those ships exploded upward through the planet's smoke-filled atmosphere, the sonic booms of their passing were like the echo of the death-screams of the ravished world they left behind. The jewel-like sparkle of the departing ships' thrusters like the glittering tears of that world's lost gods.

On this day, on this world, sixty years of butchery and brutality had at last come to an end.

But on the dark station that was Terok Nor, with viewports that flashed with phaser bursts and shimmered with the fire of its own inner destruction, there was still far worse to come.

On this day, the Day of Withdrawal, the Cardassians were leaving. But they had not left yet...

Held within the cold and patient silence of space, the Promenade of Terok Nor itself was a tumultuous pocket universe of heat and noise and confusion.

The security gates that had bisected its circular path had by now collapsed, twisted by hammers and wire-cutters and the frantically grasping hands of slaves set free. Glowing restraint conduits that once had bound the gates now cracked and sparked and sent strobing flashes into the dense blue haze that choked the air, still Cardassian-hot.

Hull plates resonated with the violent release of multiple, escaping shuttles and ships. A thrumming wall of sound sprang up as departing soldiers phasered equipment too heavy to steal.

Decks shook as rampaging looters forced internal doors and shattered windows. Among the empty shelves of the Chemist's shop, a Bajoran lay dying, Cardassian blood on his hands, Cardassian bootprints on his back, his collaboration with the enemy no guarantee of safety in the madness of this day.

Turbolifts whined and ladders rattled against their moorings. Officers shouted hoarse commands. Soldiers cursed their victims. In counterpoint, a calm recorded voice recited the orders of the day. "Atten-

tion, all biorganic materials must be disposed of according to regulations. Attention...."

But on this day, the only response to that directive was the desperate, high-pitched shriek of a Ferengi in fear for his life. And in fear for good reason.

Quark the barkeep kicked and fought and shrieked again, as the Cardassian soldiers, safe in their scarred, hard-edged armor, dragged him from his bar, soiling and tearing his snug multicolored jacket.

Quark opened his eyes just long enough to recognize the scowling officer, Datar, a glinn, who waited for him with a coil of ODN cable. In the same quick glimpse, he saw the antigrav lifter from a cargo bay bobbing in the air nearby; he heard the soldiers as they mockingly chanted the last words he would hear before he stood at the doors of the Divine Treasury to give a full accounting of his life—

"Dabo! Dabo! Dabo!"

Yet even as he faced his last minute of existence, Quark still couldn't help automatically tallying the damages each time he heard a crash from his establishment as the Cardassian forces laid waste to it.

A sudden blow slammed Quark to the Promenade deck, and a quick, savage kick from a heavy leather boot forestalled any thought of escape.

But even as he cried out in pain, Quark wondered if his brother and nephew had made it to a shuttle, and if the Cardassians had found his latinum floor vault. He gasped in shock as he felt Glinn Datar's rough hand claw at the sensitive lobes of his right ear, the violation forcing him to his feet. In the same terrible moment, Quark found himself wondering just why it was Cardassians always had such truly disgusting breath.

"Quark!" the glinn growled at him. "You have no idea how it pains me to take my leave of you."

"All good things," Quark muttered as waves of incredible pain radiated from his crushed right ear lobe and across his skull and neck.

Datar's swift, expert punch to the center of his stomach doubled Quark over, his lips gaping in vain for even a mouthful of air.

"Relax, Quark," the glinn hissed, reaching out for Quark's earlobe again. "It's not necessary for you to speak—ever again!"

Quark felt himself hauled up until he stared right into Datar's narrowed eyes. He felt his poor earlobe throb painfully, already starting to swell.

"My men and I are going to make this a real farewell." The glinn nodded once and Quark felt huge hands forcibly secure his shoulders and arms from behind. Datar addressed his soldiers as if reading from a proclamation. "Quark of Terok Nor, you miserable mound of sluk scum: For the crime of rigging your dabo table, for the crime of watering your drinks, short-timing the holosuites, inflating tabs, and... most of all for the crime of being a Ferengi... I sentence you to death!"

Incredulous, Quark tried to plead his innocence, but his rasping exhortations were drowned out by the cheers of the surrounding soldiers. He tried to blurt out the combination of his floor vault, the shuttle access codes Rom and Nog were going to use to escape, even made-up names of resistance fighters, but the sharp cutting pressure of the ODN cable Glin Datar suddenly wrapped around his neck ended any chance he had of saying a word. Even the squeak that escaped him then registered as little more than a soon-to-be-dead man's chocked-off wheeze.

Eyes bulging, each racing heartbeat thundering in bis cavernous ear tunnels, Quark could only watch as two soldiers hooked the other end of the thick cable to the grappler on the cargo antigrav.

Datar slammed his hand on the antigrav's control and the meter-long device bucked up a few centimeters, steadied itself, then rose smoothly and slowly and inexorably, trailing cable until it passed the Promenade's second level.

The cable snapped taut against Quark's neck, yanking him at last from the grip of the soldiers who had held him. Kicking frantically, he felt a boot fly free. He grimaced in embarrassment as he realized his toes were sticking through the holes worn in his foot wrappings. Hadn't his moogie told him to always wear fresh underclothes?

Even Quark knew that was a foolish thought to have, especially at the moment in which he was draw-mg his last breath. His fingers scrabbled at the cable around his neck, but it was too tight and in too many layers for him to change the pressure.

Dimly through the pounding that now filled his bead, Quark could hear the soldiers' laughter and hooting. Even as his vision darkened, he raged at himself for having failed to predict how quickly the end of the Occupation would come.

He had seen the signs, discussed it with his suppliers. Another month, he had concluded, perhaps two. Time enough to profit from the Cardassian soldiers being shipped out, eager to convert their Bajoran "souvenirs" to more easily transportable latinum. He had even already booked his passage on a freighter and—

—Dark stars sparkled at the rapidly shrinking edge of Quark's vision, as he mourned the deposit he had

paid to Captain Yates. Just then the roar of something large approaching—something loud and silent all at the same time—swallowed the jeers of the Cardassians, and Quark felt himself fall, flooded with shock that he was not ascending to the Divine Treasury but apparently on his way to the Debtors' Dungeon. How could that be possible? He had lived a life of greed and self-absorption. How could he not be rewarded with eternal dividends? He wanted to speak to someone in charge. He wanted to renegotiate the deal. He wanted his moogie!

And then the back of the deck of the Promenade smacked into the back of his bulbous head and scrawny neck.

Through starstruck vision, he saw the glow of a phaser emitter node by his chin, felt a searing flash of heat at his neck, and then the constriction of the ODN cable was gone.

"Breathe!" a harsh voice shouted from some distant place.

"Moogie?" Quark whispered. His mother was about the only person he could think of who might have any reason at all for saving him from the Cardassians.

Then Quark was roused from his lethargy by four nerve-sparking slaps across his face.

He wheezed with an enormous intake of breath, then choked as he saw who was saving him from the Cardassians.

Another Cardassian!?

This new Cardassian, gray-skinned and cobra-necked like all the others, was someone Quark had never seen before. He wore an ordinary soldier's uni-4. form but had the bearing and diction of an officer, perhaps even of a gul. All this Quark observed in the split

second it took for the new Cardassian to haul him to Ms feet. As a barkeep, Quark was a firm believer in the 194th Rule, and since he couldn't always know about every new customer before that customer walked through the door, to protect his profits he had been required to become expert at deducing a customer's likely needs and desires from but a moment's quick observation.

This Cardassian, for instance, would order vintage kanar, and would always know if the Saurian brandy was watered. An officer and a gentleman. Quark (bought admiringly. Reflexively he considered the likelihood of the Cardassian also needing wise and seasoned—and not inexpensive—investment help.

But then the gray stranger locked his free arm around Quark's neck to violently spin him around as he fired his phaser at two other Cardassian soldiers across the Promenade at the entrance to the Temple.

Quark flopped like a child's doll in the stranger's grip. He goggled in surprise as he saw the body of Glinn Datar sprawled on the deck nearby, smoke still curling up from the back of his head and adding to the Hue haze that filled the Promenade. Cardassians fighting Cardassians? It made no sense. Especially when it seemed they were fighting over him.

Suddenly Quark's captor crouched down and misted to return fire to the second level. Still held in a stranglehold, Quark squealed as with an ear-bruising thump he was whacked backside-first against the deck. Crackling phaser bursts lanced past him, blackening the Promenade's deck. The scent of burning carpet now warred with the stench of spoiled food wafting along from the ruined freezers in the Cardassian Cafe.

"... I'm going to be sick..." Quark whimpered.

But clearly, the Cardassian stranger didn't hear, or didn't care.

Quark felt his gorge begin to rise. Under other circumstances, he woozily decided, he might wish he were dead rather than feel the way he felt now. But he seemed too close to that alternative already.

"... I have a stomach neutralizer in my bar..." Quark mumbled hoarsely. He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of an area behind his captor. If he could just get back to his bar....

But there was an abrupt lull in the phaser firefight, and the gray stranger jerked Quark to his feet. He pointed spinward toward the jewelry shop—or what was left of the jewelry shop. "That way!" he shouted. "As fast as you can!"

Protectively holding onto both of his oversize ears, Quark peered through the haze at what appeared to be other figures hiding among the debris in front of the gem store. Their silhouettes were unmistakable. More Cardassians.

"Could I ask a question?" Quark whispered.

The Cardassian glared at him, then shoved him down to the floor again and leaped to his feet, slamming both hands together on his phaser as he fired blast after blast at a group of Cardassians suddenly charging him from the other direction.

Quark risked looking up just long enough to see multiple shafts of disruptive energy blast his captor and send him flying across the Promenade. Alone now, Quark acted on pure instinct and did what any Ferengi would do.

He sped for his latinum, all injuries real and imagined forgotten.

Scuttling like a Ferengi banker crab, half crawling,

half running across the deck, he finally reached the door of his bar.

Quark rolled through the door and jumped to his feet once he was securely inside his own domain. "Safe!" he cried out, then cursed as his one bootless foot trod on a piece of shattered glass.

Only after digging the glass out of his sole did he

think of looking over his shoulder. The scene was one of mayhem. The Promenade had become a full-

fledged war zone. Phaser fire streamed back and forth like lightning in the atmosphere of a gas giant. On the

one hand, Quark had no problem with Cardassians killing Cardassians. Especially since it would be a few days before he could get his bar reopened, so a few missing customers wouldn't be noticed. On the other hand, could it be possible they were killing themselves over him?

"Get down, you fool!"

Quark whirled around at the guttural command. He had no idea where it came from, but the rough voice was unmistakable.

"Odo?" Quark asked.

Suddenly, a humanoid hand shot out of a dark corner behind the overturned dabo table, trailing a qua-sitransparent golden shaft of shape-shifter flesh.

For an instant, Quark felt as if he were about to be engulfed by a Terran treefrog's tongue, then the hand slurped around his already bruised neck and snapped him into the shadows.

With the enforced assistance, Quark somersaulted to a sitting position behind a tumble of broken chairs. Automatically, his barkeep mind tabulated the potential cost of the damage. Half of them would have to be replaced, at two slips of latinum each. Three, he could

see, could probably be repaired for half a slip each. He might even be able to get a deal from Morn if he could be persuaded to stay on the station. But the way Morn was always traveling around, never staying put for two days in a row—

"Quark! Get your head down!"

Instantly, Quark flattened out on the floor beside Terok Kor's shape-shifting constable. Odo's half-finished humanoid face, with its disturbingly small ears, stared ahead toward the front of the bar, as if he were expecting an attack any moment.

"How long have you been here?" Quark hissed.

"An hour. Since Gul Dukat left the station."

Quark felt a rush of indignation. If Dukat was already safely evacuated, why were all these other Cardassians still here? "You were hiding here when they dragged me out there?" he said accusingly.

Odo looked at him, nothing to hide. "Yes."

"Aren't you supposed to be the law on this station?"

"I am a duly appointed law-enforcement official."

"Doesn't that mean you're supposed to protect law-abiding citizens?"

"Your point would be?"

"They were going to kill me!"

"Yes," Odo said again.

Quark fairly vibrated with outrage as he tried to find the proper words to express his fury and sense of betrayal. "Then why didn't you try to stop them?!" he finally said, adding sarcastically, "In your capacity, that is, as a duly appointed law-enforcement official."

Odo shrugged as best he could for someone lying on his stomach among a cluster of broken bar chairs.

"A shrug?" Quark said. "That's your answer? The law doesn't apply to people like me? You're not a law-

enforcement official, you're the judge and jury too, is that it?"

As usual, Odo's eerily smooth visage revealed no emotion, only the weary resignation of a teacher forced to repeat a lesson for the hundredth time. "Fifty-two hours ago, Terok Nor ceased to be a protectorate of the Bajoran Cooperative Government. Martial Jaw was declared under the provisions of the Cardassian Uniform Code of Military Justice."

Quark waited ... and waited ... but Odo said nothing more, as if his most unsatisfactory explanation had Been fully complete.

"And?" the Ferengi said in a state approaching apoplexy.

"Quark, I heard the charges the glinn read against you. You have rigged your dabo table. You do water jour drinks. You short-time the holosuites and inflate the tabs you run for customers who have consumed too much alcohol to be able to keep track of their spending. Under military law, the Cardassians were within their legal rights to execute you."

Quark's mouth opened and closed silently as if the ODN cable were wrapped around his neck once more. The only words he managed to utter were, "But they were going to hang me for the crime of... of being a Ferengi!"

Odo shrugged again. "Even the Cardassians are allowed poetic license." Then Odo held a finger to his lips and nodded sharply at the main entrance to the bar.

Quark looked out to the Promenade. The firefight had stopped. It was too much to hope that both sides had killed each other. Which could only mean one side or the other had won. "I hope someone steals your bucket," he snarled at the shape-shifter.

His insolence, however justifiable, earned him a sharp jab in the ribs. Unfortunately in the very location where the brutish Cardassians had kicked him.

Then three figures stepped into the bar.

Quark recognized them at once. They were the same three he had seen silhouetted by the gem store. Which meant the loser in the fight he'd just survived had been the Cardassian who had tried to save him.

One of the three interlopers scanned the bar with a bulky Cardassian tricorder. It took only seconds for him to point to the mound of chairs by the overturned dabo table.

A second of the three stepped forward. "Ferengi. Constable Odo. Step into the open, hands raised."

Quark looked at Odo. The shape-shifter had the expression of an addicted tongo player calculating the odds of calling a successful roll.

"Step out now," the Cardassian threatened, "and you will have a chance to live. Remain where you are, and you will certainly die."

"I'm convinced," Quark said and pushed himself to his feet, in spite of Odo's accusatory glare.

He frowned at the angry shape-shifter. "Oh, turn yourself into a broken chair or something." Then he stepped forward, hands stretched overhead, wincing as his torn jacket sleeve momentarily brushed his injured earlobe.

As Quark limped heavily toward the three Cardassians, he actually heard Odo step out from cover behind him. But then his attention was diverted by another surprising observation that had escaped him on first seeing the three strangers: These Cardassians weren't in uniforms. They were civilians. Three young males clothed in drab shades of blue, brown, and gray,

without even the identity pins that might establish them as members of the Occupation bureaucracy or diplomatic corps. Two of them, though—the ones in blue and brown—carried military-issue phase-disrup-tor pistols, the housing of each weapon segmented like the abdomen of a golden beetle. What is it about Cardassians and bugs? Quark wondered. If he could just understand that about them, he'd know exactly what

would tempt them to buy, and he'd corner yet another market missed by others.

But then Quark's soothing thoughts of profit were displaced by alarm as the gray-clad Cardassian shoved tricorder like a weapon in the barkeep's face. This particular Cardassian was distinct from the others because he was bald. Quark had never seen a bald Car-dassian before. In some ways, the sleekness of the

Carrdassian's skull made the alien look more intelligent. Except, of course, for his pathetically small ears. Not to mention the two secondary spinal cords running up the sides of his wide and flattened neck like cables of a suspension bridge. And the spoon-shaped flap of gray flesh on his forehead that made him look like a—

The light from the tricorder's small screen flashed a different set of colors across the bald Cardassian's face. "This Ferengi's Quark."

The Cardassian in the blue tunic gestured at Quark

with his phaser. Quark noticed that his overgarment

was torn at the shoulder and smudged with black soot, as if its wearer had ripped it on burning debris. "There are two other Ferengi on the station."

The Cardassian in blue didn't have to ask the obvious question for Quark to decide to answer it. There was no profit in withholding information for which they could easily torture him. "My brother and

nephew. They left on a shuttle as soon as we heard what was happening on Bajor." Quark was confident he could carry off the lie. He had been dealing with the Cardassians—and the gelatinous Odo—long enough to have developed a reasonably effective tongo face.

The Cardassian in the torn blue tunic stared at Quark a few moments longer, as if he expected the Ferengi to suddenly break down and confess the real whereabouts of Rom and Nog. But since Quark had no actual knowledge of where his cowardly brother and confused nephew were at this precise moment, it was doubly easy to stare back with an expression of total innocence.

At last, his interrogator turned to the bald Cardassian with the tricorder. "What setting do we need to kill the shape-shifter?"

Quark stared hard at Odo beside him. Let's see how you like it, he thought peevishly.

But maddening as ever, Odo simply stared impassively at the three Cardassians, betraying not even a hint of emotion. The shape-shifter was as annoying, in his way, as a Vulcan.

"Wait." It was the third Cardassian who intervened now. The one in the brown tunic, so blatantly new it still bore the creases from having been folded on some display shelf, probably in Garak's tailor shop. This Cardassian was certainly not bald. His long black hair was drawn back in the same style as some soldiers Quark had seen. The new civilian clothes could mean he was a spy, but they could also mean he was a coward. Which one, however, Quark couldn't yet be sure. But because the brown-suited Cardassian didn't seem eager to kill Odo, Quark was leaning toward the latter.

"Can you take on the appearance of a Ferengi?" the

Cardassian in the suspiciously new civilian clothing asked Odo.

Odo frowned. "If I had to."

Quark scowled at the constable. From the way the shape-shifter answered, it was obvious he'd rather

change himself into a mound of garbage before he'd become a Ferengi.

"Would that work?" The question came from the Cardassian in the torn blue tunic, and was addressed to the bald Cardassian with the tricorder.

"We only have one Ferengi. If we need a backup...."

".All right. We won't kill you. Yet." The imperious pronouncement from the Cardassian in blue made Quark think for the first time that the group had a leader. Whatever that information was worth.

"How generous of you," Odo replied with ill-concealed sarcasm.

Responding immediately, the Cardassian leader smashed his phaser across Odo's face as if to teach him a lesson in obedience.

Though Quark had seen it before, he still cringed as Odo's face rippled into a honey-like jelly at the moment of impact, allowing the phaser to slip Trough his mutable flesh as if passing through smoke.

An instant later, Odo's humanoid face had reformed, his expression still one of vague disinterest.

The Cardassian bared his teeth like a Klingon, as if he were about to attack Odo again and this time with more than a single blow. But the bald Cardassian put his hand on the attacker's shoulder. "We can't keep her

waiting," he said. Her? Quark thought. Now that was something new.

Perhaps there was another leader. But who? And for what reason?

The Cardassian in brown gestured harshly with his phaser. "Turbolift 5's still working."

This time it was Odo who made the first move. He started forward, onto the Promenade, and Quark followed gingerly—with each step he could feel another sliver of glass he'd missed get driven deeper into his exposed foot. "Could I just get my boot?" he asked plaintively.

"Only if you want to die," the bald Cardassian growled.

Quark sighed heavily and gritted his teeth, stepping carefully around the sprawled bodies of the fallen Cardassian soldiers. "Interesting negotiating technique you've got there," he muttered.

"Faster," was the bald Cardassian's only reply.

Quark picked up his pace and followed Odo into the haze.

After they had passed a few empty shopfronts, Quark realized what was different about the Promenade. "Does it seem quiet to you?" he whispered to Odo.

Odo sighed. "Yes, Quark. Too quiet."

Quark snorted as he recognized the line Odo had quoted. "And I thought you didn't like holosuite programs."

"The next one of you who talks dies," a Cardassian snarled from behind them.

This time, Odo smiled nastily at Quark as if to say, Please continue. But Quark walked on in dignified silence.

As they stepped cautiously over the torn-down and sparking security gate leading to the Bajoran half of the station, Quark looked up to see a fourth Cardas-

sian, also in civilian clothes, crouching on the second level. For an instant, their eyes met. It was Garak.

Quark was just about to call out Garak's name when he remembered the Cardassians' two phasers and the order he and Odo had just been given.

But the bald Cardassian had already noticed where he was looking, and now glanced up at the second level as well. Quark held his breath, but the bald Cardassian looked away, having seen no one. Garak had obviously jumped back, out of view.

Quark wasted no time trying to figure out why. No one had any reasonable explanation for why the Cardassians were leaving Bajor after sixty years of the Occupation. They were aliens, so in Quark's view— in the sensible, practical Ferengi view of things— they were obviously going to behave like aliens. As they should be allowed to do. Provided they paid their bills, of course. Alien or not, some laws were universal.

Turbolift 5 was on the Promenade's inner ring, just across from the small Bajoran Infirmary. Though the door to the Infirmary was open, Quark could see there was no sign of damage within. And why would there be? There had never been anything of value in it. All the medical supplies that came aboard Terok Nor were destined for the fully equipped Cardassian Infirmary across from his bar. The Bajoran Infirmary might just as well have been a barber shop for all the medicine that was allowed to be practiced in it.

Against all logic, the turbolift car arrived. Another event that made no sense to Quark. All the main lights on the Promenade were out. Only emergency glow panels were operating. And virtually all other equipment, from automatic firefighting systems to station

communicators and the replicators were off-line. But not, it seemed, Turbolift 5.

The bald Cardassian scanned the waiting car with his tricorder, then stepped inside. The leader in the torn blue tunic waved Quark and Odo in without speaking.

Quark looked out at the Promenade as the lift doors closed. For a moment, he saw Garak again, huddled behind the rolling door of the disabled security gate across the main floor. At least, the figure had looked like Garak. But what would Garak have put on a uniform for... ? Quark couldn't identify the tailor's military-style outfit, other than that he knew it wasn't Cardassian.

Quark looked to Odo to silently inquire if the shape-shifter had seen Garak, but Odo was still pointedly ignoring him.

Quark decided he could play that game every bit as well as Odo, and looked straight ahead as the lift descended. The movement felt unusually rough, as if the power grids were under strain. Quark tried his utmost not to think about that. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped in a turbolift with three surly Cardassians. Unlike Odo, he couldn't count on conveniently escaping by liquefying and slurping out between the doors....

Quark took another look at Odo as a sudden thought struck him. Why was the shape-shifter still here? He himself was trapped, of that there was no question. But Odo had already had at least a dozen opportunities to make his escape.

As Quark pondered the shape-shifter's motives, that portion of his brain that constantly counted and calculated registered that they had descended precisely ten

levels. Almost unconsciously, Quark braced for the turbolift car's change of direction as it would begin to move laterally along one of the station's spokes.

But the direction didn't change. The car kept descending past the level of the docking ring.

Quark began to feel again the clammy touch of panic. Up till now, he had been operating under the assumption that there was something these three Cardassians—and she, whoever she was—wanted him to do. The fact that they wanted anything at all meant, reassuringly, that he was in the middle of a business transaction. And when it came to business, Quark knew he was definitely fighting on home soil.

But now, once again, he was heading into unknown territory. As far as he knew, the lower core of the station was the site of the fusion reactors, the power transfer manifolds and basic utilities, and its few residence levels were little more than prison cells for Bajoran ore workers. It was a realm for engineers, not business people. Even worse, he was not aware of any docking ports off the lower levels. The only way out of the lower core would be back up through the turbolift shafts.

Or through an emergency airlock, he thought queasily.

Quark moaned as he realized the trap he was entering. Then moaned again when he realized he had been so thrown off-balance by the lift car's continued descent that he had actually lost count of the levels they had passed. And every fool knew that a Ferengi who lost count had lost everything.

The two phaser-armed Cardassians continued to stare at him, their weapons held loosely at their sides as if daring him to break the rules and talk. But, finally, Turbolift 5 reached its destination.

The stop was so sudden, Quark felt the car rise back up a few centimeters as if it had overshot the desired deck. Then the doors opened.

The level beyond the open doors was so dark, it looked to Quark like the void of space itself.

But the Cardassian leader in the torn blue tunic pushed him forward anyway, and Odo at his side, even before a welcome pool of light from a palm torch sprang to life ahead of them.

"Straight ahead," the Cardassian leader ordered,

Quark limped on, as told. Adding to his resentful discomfort now was the fact that the deck plates on this lower level weren't covered by any type of carpet. They were just bare hull metal as far as he could tell. And since the station's lower core was terraced like a towering cake built upside down, Quark realized with a sinking feeling it was entirely possible that boundless space was really only a few centimeters below his feet.

But then, why are the deck plates so hot? he wondered.

He decided he absolutely hated Terok Nor. He'd be glad to leave it.

Alive, he added quickly, in case the Blessed Exchequer or any of his Exalted Tellers happened to be listening in.

The long, curving corridor on this level was narrower than others on the station. The ceiling lower. And except for a pale patch of light which Quark was just now beginning to perceive ahead, it seemed that none of the emergency glowpanels was functioning down here.

The spot of light from the palm torch kept skittering ahead, leading the way. On either side it was too

gloomy for Quark to make out the Cardassian directional and warning signs on the bulkheads, but every few meters he passed an inner door. Some of these were open, with total darkness beyond.

If I were Odo, Quark thought darkly, I'd be through one of those doors so fast the light from the palm torch couldn't catch me.

But most inexplicably, the shape-shifter remained at Quark's side, even letting the Ferengi's injured foot set the pace.

Finally, just as Quark feared he would fall to the floor in exhaustion, the Cardassian leader ordered them to turn right at the next intersection. It was a cul-de-sac, where Quark would normally expect to find a turbolift. But instead, he halted before three more Cardassians, all females this time. Two were in soldier's armor, crisp, unmarked, the composite surfaces gleaming in the way Quark had come to recognize only the most elite Cardassian units were able to maintain. And despite the cold level of threat the two uniformed females presented, there was no doubt in Quark as to which female his three captors served.

She was the one in the middle, the only one in a matte-black civilian outfit that clung, Quark appreciatively noted, to the ridges of her spinal cords like a second skin.

"This is the only Ferengi on the station." Surprisingly, it was not the Cardassian in the torn blue tunic who was the first to address the female. It was the bald Cardassian with the tricorder. But in any case, Quark knew they were now in the presence of the real leader of the entire group, male and female—She.

The female leader studied Quark as if he were livestock at an auction. Quark straightened up, smirking

engagingly, but her widely spaced dark eyes turned to Odo. "Why is that here?"

The bald Cardassian's reply was instant. "I thought we could use him as a backup. He can take on the shape of a Ferengi."

Quark's evaluation of the female shot up in value with her skeptical response. "But can he take on the brain of a Ferengi?"

"Terrell," the bald Cardassian said deferentially, "with respect, we are running out of options. Dukat has left. The station will be under Bajoran control in hours."

Terrell frowned as she hunted for something in the engineer's case she wore at the side of her wide belt. "Unlikely. In fifty-three minutes, the station will be a debris field and navigational hazard. Dukat activated the self-destruct." She removed a palm phaser and without a moment's pause shot Odo.

The constable grunted and slumped to his knees, gasping painfully for breath. But to Quark's intense relief, Odo was only lightly stunned.

Terrell lowered her palm phaser and glared at the bald Cardassian. "Atrig, that thing is a shape-shifter. It could have escaped you whenever it chose. The fact that it didn't, suggests it was spying on us."

The bald Cardassian's reaction to his leader's admonition was most revealing to Quark. It was definitely not that of a soldier. The Cardassian in the gray tunic merely clenched his teeth, glanced down, embarrassed more than anything else. Definitely not the response of a soldier. Quark's fuschia-rimmed eyes narrowed in speculation. If these two had come into his bar as customers, Quark would have instantly concluded that Atrig, Terrell's bald subordinate, was desperately in

love with his superior, while Terrell considered Atrig as nothing more than a useful tool she might carry in her case.

"Of course," the bald Cardassian said, in almost a whisper, his head still respectfully lowered.

Terrell dropped the small phaser back into her case. "Just see you keep it stunned in case we do need it." Then she turned her attention to Quark. "You will perform a service for the Cardassian Union. If you succeed, you will have time to reach an escape pod before the station self-destructs. If you fail...." Her smile was cruel.

Quark looked questioningly at Atrig. Atrig understood. "Now you can talk."

"What kind of service?" Quark demanded. Let the negotiations begin, he thought.

"A simple one." Terrell turned her back to him and faced a blank bulkhead. Though he couldn't see exactly what she was doing, Quark could tell she was operating some kind of small device, for the bulkhead began to move to one side, revealing an extension of the corridor.

Quark's first reaction was one of true surprise. His second was of true apprehension. Over the years he had mapped every hidden section of the station, to establish his network of smugglers' tunnels—but here was a corridor extension completely unknown to him. And beyond it, there was a light source, about ten meters past the bulkhead.

Quirk squinted at the light. It appeared to be emanating from a door whose center glowed pale pink.

"What's in there?" Quark asked nervously.

Terrell turned back to him. "Nothing for a Ferengi to fear." Then she nodded, and Quark felt himself

pushed forward, toward the light, a phaser jammed between his shoulder blades.

Halfway to the door, he heard a sudden commotion behind him, then phaser fire. Odo. The constable must have tried to make his escape, and not been fast enough.

Quark chanced glancing over his shoulder and did a relieved double take. Odo was still staggering along behind him, supported by the Cardassian in the torn blue tunic.

But now the two armor-clad female Cardassians held a third stunned captive.

Garak.

The Cardassian tailor was no longer in the strange uniform Quark had been unable to identify, but was back in his usual civilian garb. Quark didn't stop to question the change. He had always suspected that Garak wasn't the plain, simple tailor he made himself out to be. All Cardassians were masters of conspiracy, duplicity, and deviousness. The only remaining mystery for Quark was how the contentious aliens had managed to occupy Bajor as a cohesive force for as long as they had.

Atrig grabbed Quark's shoulder, forcing him to a stop three meters from the glowing door.

Correction, Quark thought. The door wasn't just glowing. It was pulsating. The effect was difficult to define precisely, but to Quark it seemed as if the door alternately bulged out and relaxed in, as if it were the flank of some large creature slowly breathing. The glow intensified with each intake of breath, changing from rose-pink to dark red, and Quark saw now that the light it created wasn't uniform. Instead, the vertical surface rippled outward, like a rock-disturbed pool of water standing on its side.

But that shimmering surface wasn't liquid, Quark knew. It was a solid layer protecting those on the outside from something that these six Cardassians didn't want to face—or couldn't.

Yet for some reason, they believed a Ferengi could.

But why? Quark thought, even now still trying to find an angle to exploit. If whatever was causing the door to ripple and glow was some deadly form of radiation, the Cardassians could have captured anyone to ... to do whatever it was they wanted done. It was a well-known fact to everyone on the station that no Cardassian officer would hesitate to order a fellow Cardassian soldier to face death.

So why do they need a Ferengi? And only a Ferengi?

"Garak," Terrell said with sarcastic condescension. "I don't know which surprises me more. That you haven't left the station already. Or that Dukat left you alive."

Quark looked back to see Terrell standing before Garak. The tailor's sagging body was held upright by the two female soldiers, each holding an arm. Garak shook his head as if to clear it.

"I was merely trying to warn you," the tailor said faintly. "I believe that Gul Dukat may have failed to inform you that for some reason the station's self-destruct system has been inadvertently activated. You should leave as quickly as possible."

Terrell patted the tailor's cheek. "Why, Garak, how noble of you."

'Terrell, my dear, given all that we mean to each other, I feel I owe it to you."

Interesting, Quark thought.

"And I owe you. So much."

Quark shivered at the unpleasant edge to Terrell's cool voice.

Garak merely nodded as he glanced at the glowing door. In the rose-colored light, his gray Cardassian skin took on an almost sickening, raw-meat color. "Well, I can see you're busy. So I'll be on my way."

"You'll leave with me, Garak. Interrogating you will help pass the time on the way back home." Now Terrell's voice was openly menacing.

Garak's careful civility gave way to cold rage. "You know I cannot go back to Cardassia."

"I do know," Terrell said. "That's why I'll execute you myself before we arrive." Then she turned toward the glowing door, her back to the Cardassian tailor as if he no longer existed.

Quark's eyes followed her movement to the door. He alone of the observers gasped at the change. It was as if Terrell now faced a vortex of glowing magma, blazing with light, yet producing no heat. Pulsating coils of red light snaked out from the rapidly deforming surface of the door. Some tendrils seemed almost ready to break free of the surface, as if whatever lay beyond was increasing its efforts to escape confinement.

Quark felt himself pushed forward again by the bald Cardassian.

"Terrell," Quark squeaked, his voice breaking in its urgency. "I'm going to need some information." More than anything else, he longed to run home. But he knew that wasn't possible. Perhaps he'd never see Ferenginar again. "What in the name of all that's profitable is in there?"

"A lab," Terrell said tersely. "What you're seeing is merely a holographic illusion. A new type of holosuite technology."

Quark couldn't be certain of the truth. He couldn't see any holoemitters in this hidden section of corridor. But then, they could be installed behind the illusion. Maybe—

Don't be a fool, Quark told himself.

Whatever was responsible for the phenomenon before him, it wasn't an illusion, and it was dangerous. There was no other reason for him to be here.

"So what do I have to do?" Quark asked.

"Go into the lab—"

Quark couldn't help himself. "Through that thing?! You're crazy!" He flinched as Atrig shoved a phaser into his back. "My mistake," he croaked.

"We will open the door," Terrell continued. "You will go inside the lab, ignoring everything you hear, everything you see, except for the main lab console on the far wall."

"Everything I hear?" Quark asked, his voice trailing off as his imagination got the best of him.

Terrell ignored his apprehension. "On the main console, you'll see a... power unit. A ... type of power crystal. Sixty-eight centimeters tall. Twenty-five wide at its top and bottom. Spindle-shaped. You can't miss it."

The corridor fell into momentary darkness as the door heaved inward.

"And you want me to bring it out," Quark said weakly.

Terrell nodded at him. "Very perceptive. It's in an open housing. Simply disconnect two power leads to detach it from the console, then carry the crystal out. As soon as you do ... you'll be free to go."

Her very unconvincing smile confirmed the situation for Quark. He instantly knew that if he did sue-

ceed in retrieving the crystal from the lab, a minute later he'd be as dead as if he were still dangling at the end of an ODN cable on the Promenade.

Quark's agile mind raced to identify the loopholes in this transaction.

But he had run out of time.

"Open the door," Terrell ordered.

At once, the Cardassian with the torn blue tunic moved to place himself alongside the pulsating door, one arm stretched out before him. With one trembling hand, Quark shielded his eyes from the increasing red glare to see what the Cardassian was trying to do.

At the edge of distortion effect, Quark saw a door control. The Cardassian in blue touched it gingerly.

Incredibly, the door seemed to melt to one side, and Quark squinted as the light level reached an almost painful intensity.

"—YES— "

Startled, Quark looked around, trying to see who had just cried out.

It was Odo.

"YES! YES, I UNDERSTAND!" Odo shouted. He struggled in the grip of the Cardassian in the new brown tunic, the Cardassian who Quark suspected was either a soldier, a coward, a spy. "/ WILL—" Odo screamed. Then the shape-shifter began to reach out his arms, stretching away from his captor toward the blood red light of the lab.

"Stop him!" Terrell commanded.

Instantly, Atrig stunned Odo again and the shape-shifter slumped, as his semiconscious body slowly assumed its humanoid shape once more.

"What happened?" Quark demanded.

"You didn't hear them?" Terrell asked in return. "The voices calling?"

"What voices?"

Terrell's face blazed with reflected crimson light. "You'll do fine," she said. "Go! Now!"

Pushed relentlessly forward by Atrig, Quark swayed before the open doorway. He could see nothing in the lab except a swirl of light, a whirlpool of luminescence.

"Hurry!" Terrell shouted.

And then the light swirls fragmented before Quark, becoming writhing tendrils that seemed to reach out for him and—

"TERRELL!"

This time the outcry came from Atrig, as the bald Cardassian leaped through the air to meet the coil of light heading directly for the woman he loved. The light hit Atrig square in the back, hurling him across the corridor as if a battering ram had struck him.

Atrig's limp form crumpled to the deck, a glowing patch of carmine light flickering over him.

Quark ducked as two more tentacles of flame-red energy snapped out from the doorway. Beneath the crackle of their passage, he heard hideous screams. Saw the Cardassian in blue and the other in brown lifted up from the deck, wrapped in red light.

Their cries became muffled as the scarlet glow spread over them, flowing around them like a hungry wave. Then, horribly, slowly, their wildly flailing arms and legs ceased their struggle, as if the light itself were somehow thick and resistant.

Forgetting for a moment that Atrig no longer was behind him to prevent his escape, Quark stared at the faces of the two trapped Cardassians. Their gaping

mouths were stretched in soundless wails. And then, like a plasma whip being cracked, the two were sucked back into the vortex of light, disappearing in an instant.

Odo—now held by no one—knelt on the deck and looked back at the light. Quark could see him silently mouth a single word, over and over—Yes... yes... yes....

The two female soldiers still held on to Garak, showing no fear, but clearly ready to leave as soon as they were ordered.

Quark turned to flee, but Terrell blocked his way. Her palm phaser was aimed directly at his head. "Hurry!"

Quark stared at Terrell. It was madness to do what she wanted. It was guaranteed suicide. But as much as he hated to admit it, if he didn't do as she ordered, then that fool Odo would be on his feet and stumbling forward in Quark's place, into something that for some unknown reason the Cardassians believed only a Ferengi could survive.

Quark told himself it wasn't respect he felt for Odo. It was just that after so many years of being adversaries, he knew how the shape-shifter thought, knew his strategies. And most importantly, Quark thought, he knew how much he could get away with. And for some inexplicable reason, the shape-shifter had stayed at his side all the way from the Promenade, when he could have escaped and left Quark to his fate—alone.

Quark's chest swelled out as he drew in a deep breath. As the old Ferengi saying had it, Better the Auditor you know, than the Auditor you don't. Sometimes, he told himself, you just have to sign the contract you negotiated.

"Now!" Terrell ordered.

Quark released his breath in a mighty sigh, covered his head with his arms, and ran straight through the doorway into the blinding red light and—

—his cut and bleeding foot suddenly sank into a soft sludge of cooling mud.

It was raining. A soft mist, really.

Quark stood completely still, eyes tightly shut.

The air was sweetly perfumed with the fetid rot of a swamp.

The swamp.

Quark lowered his arms from his head. Opened one eye. Then the other. And then he gasped as through the dark silhouettes of reaching branches and hanging moss, he saw the soft and welcoming lights of the Fer-enginar capital city shining through the distance and the dark of night.

"Home ..." he cried, delighting in the magical way the word created a delicate puff of mist before him.

But Quark was no believer in magic. He needed to know how it was he could see his breath as a delicate puff of mist. There had to be another source of light nearby.

He looked around trying to figure out where the lab had gone, where Terok Nor had gone, if he had finally died.

But all questions were erased as he saw a sparkle of blue-white brilliance approaching through the swamp trees, as if a living diamond were floating toward him.

Quark was completely overcome by the beauty of the spectacle. He stood transfixed until...

"Quark? Is that you, son?"

Quark's mouth dropped open in incredulity. "Moogie?"

"Over here, Quark...."

Quark shifted in the mud of his homeworld, and suddenly the glittering diamond was before him, held in his beloved mother's arms.

"Why didn't you tell me you were coming home," Quark's mother said crankily. "I would have made your favorite mooshk."

Quark's mouth watered at the intense memory of his moogie's mooshk. And to see her right now, glowing as if she were a part of the crystal she held, her completely unclothed skin faceted with light.

"So the only thing I have to give you is this," Quark's mother said. She held out the glittering jewel to him, until it seemed to float by itself, a shining, hourglass-shaped orb of promise and hope and everything anyone could ever want. "Go ahead, Quark. Take it. . . ."

Quark reached for the orb like a child reaching for a toy. Everything was going to be perfect now.

But as his hands closed on the object his mother was giving him, one tiny nagging thought came to him.

Small. Subtle. Barely worth mentioning.

Something that might only occur to a Ferengi.

"Moogie," Quark said. "Can I ask you a question?"

And as Quark's mother began her transformation, Quark shrieked louder than any Ferengi had ever shrieked, as he saw—

CHAPTER 2

—stars flashed before Quark's eyes, and he slapped his hand to his expansive forehead, grimacing with pain.

"Who designed this frinxing bed.. ." he muttered, as he swung his feet over the edge of the narrow Cardassian sleeping ledge and tried once more to sit up, this time without banging his head on the underside of a utility shelf.

Then he looked around at the stark holding cell in Deep Space 9's Security Office and answered his own question.

"Cardassians. Ha!"

Quark had had it with Cardassians. In fact, even though the Cardassian Occupation had ended six long years ago, Quark had had it with this station. "Deep Space 9, Terok Nor ... Federation bureaucrats, Cardassian secret police.... What's the difference? I ask you...."

He stood in front of the holding cell's forcefield and checked to make certain the Security Office beyond was still empty. Though the lighting levels were low, set for DS9's night, the main door was still sealed and Quark remained safely alone. He cleared his throat. "Computer: Release the prisoner."

The security screen flashed with silver scintillations, then shut down. At least, it appeared to shut down. Quark wasn't a Ferengi to take anything for granted. He carefully flicked a finger toward the boundary of the forcefield, until he was certain the screen was off. Only then did he step over the lip of the cell doorway.

Quark trudged across the deck in his nightclothes, scratching where it itched. He came to the replicator, smacked his lips, then punched in his prisoner code for a cup of millipede juice, hold the shells. The cup appeared and Quark gulped the pale green bug squeez-ings down, looking around to check that he was still—

"Bzzzt—you're dead," Odo said, only one meter behind him.

Quark choked, then sprayed a mouthful of millipede juice, forcing Odo to step back out of range.

"Don't do that!" Quark sputtered indignantly, wiping bug juice off his sleep shirt.

Odo shook his head, not impressed. "Would you rather the Andorian sisters did that?"

Quark jammed the cup back into the replicator for recycling. "You're supposed to be protecting me. That's what this is, remember?" Quark waved his hands to include the entire security office. "Protective custody."

Odo pointed to the holding cell. "In there. Behind a forcefield. That's protective custody. Out here, you're fair game."

Quark rubbed at his temples, not knowing where the pain of his impact with the shelf left off, and his tension headache began. Twenty meters away, just across the Promenade, his bar was in the hands of Rom. Engineer Rom. Turned-his-back-on-everything-Fer-engi, work-for-free, use-a-padd-to-total-all-bills, good-for-nothing Rom.

"Are you all right?" Odo asked.

"Do you care?"

Odo crossed his arms. "Not particularly."

Quark muttered a partially satisfying Ferengi epithet under his breath and looked around for a padd.

"Now what?" Odo asked

"I need something to read. Rom's driving me into bankruptcy and there's no way I can sleep."

"Actually, the bar has seldom been busier."

In a sudden wave of apprehension, Quark grabbed Odo's tunic. "He's cut prices, hasn't he? Go ahead, I can take it."

Odo firmly removed Quark's hands from his chest. "Rom is treating the customers fairly. Word must have gotten out, and so business is up. You should be happy."

Quark couldn't believe the foul language Odo was capable of using. " 'Fairly.' I'm ... I'm ruined. I..." And then Quark could see no other way out. "All right, that's it. Protective custody is over. Thank you. I'm going to my—"

Odo didn't let him finish. And didn't let him leave. "It's not that simple, Quark."

Quark had been battling Odo for more than a decade. He knew what that tone meant. "What do you mean, not that simple? Being in here was my idea."

"It was your idea. Now, I'm afraid, it's mine."

Quark rocked back on Ms bare feet, studying Odo more closely in the dim light. "You are worried about me. I'm touched. But, I'm also running behind, so—"

Odo didn't move from Quark's path. "Please return to your cell."

Quark laughed derisively, smiled broadly. "Odo ... you almost make it seem as if you're putting me under arrest."

Odo said nothing. He didn't have to.

"You can't be serious," Quark said. He knew his earlobes were flushing telltale red. "No, I take that back. You're always serious. What I meant was, you're joking. No, you don't do that either. But what you do do is ..." Quark's throat tightened. He couldn't bring himself to say the words.

Odo could. "Put people under arrest."

"For what?!" Quark demanded. His face creased in a disbelieving grin as he said the most outrageous thing he could think of. "Murder?"

But Odo's silence and unchanging expression made the grin fade.

Quark's head throbbed unbearably. "Odo, you know me. How many times do I have to say it? I did not kill Dal Nortron."

"That's right. I do know you, Quark. Which is why I don't believe that you planned and carried out the premeditated cold-blooded murder of your Andorian business partner."

Quark sagged with relief. "Well, at least we can ..." He looked up at Odo with sudden fear. " 'Business partner'?"

"Did you honestly think you could keep it from me?"

"The Andorian sisters did it! They killed him!"

"And they say that you killed him. Imagine that."

"So you're arresting me on their word but you're not arresting them on mine?!"

Odo uncrossed his arms and shook his head. "Quark, we've been over this. If I arrest Satr and Leen while they are on DS9 as representatives of the Andorian government, they will file a diplomatic protest, I will have to release them, and I guarantee they will leave the station and my jurisdiction within the hour."

"Sure! Right! So that's why they can walk around the station free as a greeworm while I'm in here—"

"Where they can't get you."

"No!" Quark exploded. "Where / am under arrest!"

Odo looked away as if preparing to leave. Quark knew that was how the changeling preferred to solve most of his problems. By avoiding confrontation.

But then, Odo looked back at Quark, and there was almost an air of sorrow about him. "Quark, listen carefully. This time, you are in serious trouble. Two nights ago, Dal Nortron won a considerable amount of latinum from you."

"It happens, Odo," Quark said tightly. "That's why they call it gambling."

But Odo did not allow himself to be interrupted. "Two hours later, Dal Nortron died—"

"Of unknown causes!"

"Under mysterious circumstances. The latinum— gone."

"Odo, think about it. How long would I stay in business if I started killing everyone who won at my dabo table? Are you kidding? I give the winners presents! I give them unlimited holosuite sessions—even free drinks!" Quark shuddered at the thought of it. "I do whatever I can to get them to return to that table so I can win my latinum back. I don't kill customers!"

"Satr and Leen say you had an argument with Nortron."

Quark glared at the changeling. "I have arguments with you. And I haven't killed you. Yet."

"Quark—pay attention! If I hadn't put you in protective custody, the Andorians would have killed you for revenge. They see justice in rather more simplistic terms than I do."

Now the sorrow was Quark's, as well. "Justice? So you do think I'm a murderer."

Odo reluctantly confirmed Quark's conclusion. "There is the matter of Kozak—"

"Kozak?! That was almost four years ago. And it was an accident!"

"Exactly," Odo agreed. "As I said, I do not believe you planned to kill Dal Nortron. But accidents do happen. Especially in the heat of an argument between business partners."

Quark swung his hand at Odo as if trying to clear the air. "Why don't you just string me up on the Promenade and be—" He stopped speaking, suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful sense of deja vu.

A few moments of Quark staring blankly into space was apparently all Odo could take. "Quark—?"

"I was ... having a dream. Just before I woke up. Hit my head." Quark rubbed at his forehead again. The pain seemed diminished. He let his fingers trail to his throat and ran them lightly across his larynx, as if expecting to find rope burns there. "They were hanging me...."

Odo frowned. "Guilty conscience?" Quark knew he'd get nowhere arguing this any longer with Odo. He started back for his cell.

"We still have a few things to discuss," Odo said. "I

will need to know the details of your... 'business arrangement' with Dal Nortron."

Quark stepped over the lip of the cell. 'Talk to my lawyer."

"You don't have a lawyer."

Quark shrugged. "Then I guess we have nothing to discuss until I do get one. Computer: Restore security field."

The air between Quark and Odo flashed with silver sparkles.

"Quark, don't make this more difficult than it has to be."

But by this point, Quark didn't care about making anything easier, especially not for Odo. "When is Captain Sisko back?"

'Tomorrow afternoon. If they don't run into any Jem'Hadar patrols." Odo's stern attitude softened. "That captain they were trying to rescue ... she was dead."

"I suppose you think I killed her."

"She had been dead for three years. Apparently, an energy field around the planet she'd crashed on shifted the subspace signals through time."

"Odo, let's get our priorities straight. What does any of this have to do with me?"

"Please forgive me," Odo said icily. "I forgot with whom I was dealing. Pleasant dreams, Quark."

Odo turned like a soldier on parade and marched toward his office.

He had just reached the doorway when Quark called out to him. "Odo, wait."

Odo stopped, but didn't look back.

"Can I ask you something?"

Odo looked over his shoulder. "You can ask."

Quark held his hand to his throat again, trying to recapture the elusive threads of his half-forgotten dream. "Those last few days on the station ..."

"What last few days?"

"The end of the Occupation. When the Cardassians withdrew."

"What about them?"

"The Cardassians never liked me."

Odo turned back to face Quark. "Can you blame them?"

Quark struggled to find the words for what he knew / he had to ask. "They destroyed so many things on the station ... four Bajorans dead ..."

"Your point, Quark?"

"Why didn't they kill me? I mean, that's what happens when governments fall. People like me are lined up and ..."

"Shot?"

Quark saw an image of Ferenginar's capital city. He was there, doing something important in... in a swamp? "Hung," Quark said quietly. "Strung up on ... on the Promenade . .. ?"

"Sounds almost... poetic," Odo said.

Quark stared at Odo, saw the glimmer of recognition in the changeling's eyes. "You've said that before. Or something like that. I can see it. I can remember it."

And then something went dark in Odo. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do," Quark said.

"I'll tell Rom you want a lawyer. When you're willing to talk about your business arrangement with Dal Nortron, we can talk again." Odo turned to leave.

"Where were you on the Day of Withdrawal?"

Quark called after him. "You answer that and I'll tell you everything about Dal Nortron!"

Quark saw Odo hesitate. "Come on, Odo, admit it. There's only one way you can resist an offer like that."

The hesitation ended. Without another word, Odo disappeared through the doorway to his office. He had resisted.

And to Quark, that could mean only one thing.

Odo didn't remember what had happened to him on the Day of Withdrawal, any more than Quark did....

CHAPTER 3

lieutenant commander Jadzia Dax stood on the deck of the Starship Enterprise with her back to the captain's chair. Because it was the first Enterprise, there was only one direction from which the final attack could come.

The turbolift.

Five minutes ago, when she had hurriedly studied the ship's schematics on the desktop viewer in the briefing room, she had found it difficult to believe that the most critical command center on the entire ship was serviced by only one lift. But in the memories of her third host, Emony, she found the explanation. The more than century-old Constitution-class to which the original Enterprise belonged had been designed primarily as a vessel of scientific exploration. The engineers of the twenty-fourth century might perceive its design idiosyncrasies, such as a single turbolift serving

the bridge or fixed-phaser emitters, as design flaws. Dax's third host, however, considered such features to be the last echoes of the twenty-second century's charmingly naive optimism toward space travel, inspired by the end of the Romulan Wars and the resulting birth of the Federation a mere two years later.

As a joined Trill possessing the memories of eight lifetimes, more or less spanning the past two centuries, Jadzia Dax understood she was more attuned than most beings to the similarities of every age. And the truth was that while technology might change, human hearts and minds seldom did. It definitely wasn't the case that life was simpler or human nature less sophisticated in the past.

But in the case of this ship, Jadzia couldn't help thinking, the designers were behind the curve. They really should have known better. After all, the first Enterprise had been launched a full twenty-seven years after the first contact with the Klingon Empire, a disastrous meeting that clearly proved that not everyone in the quadrant shared the Federation's belief in coexistence. And right now, the proof of that was about to face her in a life-or-death confrontation.

Jadzia heard the distant rush of a turbolift car approaching the bridge. She hefted the sword in her hand and with one quick step vaulted over the stairs to the upper deck of die bridge. She reflexively tugged down on the ridiculously short skirt of her blue sciences uniform, changing her balance to be prepared to spring forward the instant the doors opened. If, that is, she could spring forward in the awkward, knee-height, high-heeled black boots that were also part of her uniform.

The turbolift stopped. She held her breath as she

faced the doors with only one thought in her mind . .. Klingons—can't live with them, can't—

The red doors slid open. The lift was empty! Then a sudden crash made her spin to see a violently dislodged wall panel beside the main viewer fly into the center well of the bridge. The wall panel had covered the opening of an emergency-access tunnel, and now from its darkness emerged her enemy, resplendent in the glittering antique uniform of the Imperial Navy, a blood-dripping bat'leth held aloft, ready for use again.

Jadzia straightened up, unimpressed. "Worf, that wasn't on the schematics."

Lieutenant Commander Worf leaped down from the upper deck and moved warily around the central helm console, eyes afire. "I am not Worf. I am Kang, captain of the Thousand-Taloned Death. And you are my prey!"

Worf lunged past the elevated captain's chair, swinging for Jadzia's legs with a savage upsweep of his bat'leth.

Jadzia expertly deflected the ascending crescent blade with her sword as she flipped through the air to land behind the safety railing that ringed the upper deck to her right. Although he had missed his target, Worf's momentum forced him to continue his spin until his bat'leth plunged deep into the captain's chair behind him, shorting the communications relays in its shattered arm and causing a spectacular burst of sparks to shoot into the air.

"Worf, I'm serious," Jadzia complained testily. "I was just in the briefing room. I specifically called up the bridge schematics."

Worf grunted as he struggled to tug his weapon free

of the chair. "You should not be talking. You should be running for your life."

He turned away from her to give the stubborn bat'leth one final pull.

Jadzia saw her opportunity and took it. She leaned over the railing and swatted Worf's backside with the flat of her sword.

Worf wheeled around in shock. "That was not a deathblow!"

"I said, I checked the schematics. There is no emergency tunnel beside the viewscreen. You're cheating."

Worf flashed a triumphant grin at her, his weapon finally free. "If you did not see the tunnel on the deck plans, it means you did not use the proper command codes to access them. To the computer, you might have been an enemy, and so you were not shown the correct configuration."

"What?!"

"Defend yourself!" Worf shouted. He swung down to slice the safety railing in two, directly in front of Jadzia.

But Jadzia lashed out with her boot to slam Worf on the side of his head, at the same time she swung her sword against his bat'leth to send it spinning out of his grip to shatter the holographic viewer on Mr. Spock's science station.

"You never told me about needing command codes!" she protested.

Worf put one huge hand to the side of his head, looked at the pink blood on his fingers, flared his nostrils in what Jadzia, sighing, knew all too well was a sign of intense pleasure. There was nothing a Klingon liked better than a caring, loving mate who knew how to play rough. "You did not ask," he said, breathing

hard, then leaped over the twisted railing to land heavily on the upper deck two meters from Jadzia.

"You're not playing fair," Jadzia told him.

Worf shot a glance upward at the center of the bridge's domed ceiling. "That is not the opinion of the Beta Entity," he growled.

Jadzia risked a sudden look at the ceiling as well. It was maddening to admit, but Worf was right. The amorphous energy beast that fed on the psychic energy of hatred and conflict grew brighter as she watched.

Worf took a step closer. Jadzia took a step back.

"Do not attempt to delay the inevitable. Escape is impossible."

Jadzia stood her ground, raised her sword. "Who said I wanted to escape?"

Worf took another step, arms reaching out to either side, eyes absolutely fixed on his quarry. "Ah, knowing you must lose, you choose to attempt to take your enemy with you. The w'Han Do. A warrior's strategy." Worf threw back his massive head and roared approvingly .

"Even better, I have no intention of losing, either." Then Jadzia slashed her sword back and forth in an intricate display of k'Thatic ritual disembowelment that had taken her past host Audrid more than eight years to master, and finished the motion by unexpectedly launching the sword across the bridge, where it crashed into an auxiliary life-support station.

Worf, who had been transfixed by Jadzia's dazzling swordplay, appeared shocked by what could only have been a careless mistake. He stared at her sword as it twanged back and forth in a shower of sparks from a shattered display screen.

The diversion worked exactly as Jadzia had planned it. As Worf puzzled over the sword, she slammed into him, shoulder first, elbow in the stomach, driving him back until he collided with a station chair and pitched backward, falling flat on his back.

In an instant, Jadzia was astride him, hands raised, fingers scooped in the strike position for a Romulan deeth mok blow to crush the larynx.

Worf fought for breath, the air in his lungs knocked out of him by the violence of his impact. The sweat and blood that covered his face gleamed as the energy beast pulsated above them.

"... You can not defeat a Klingon with a pitiful deeth mok..." Worf wheezed defiantly.

"There's more than one way to skin a Klingon," Jadzia said.

Worf's eyes widened in alarm at the thought—and also, Jadzia thought, more than a touch of anticipatory excitement.

And then she swiftly brought both hands down to the sides of Worf's enormous ribcage and—

Worf howled with laughter. He frantically wriggled under Jadzia, ineffectually trying to slap her hands away as he gasped for breath.

"Give up?" Jadzia asked.

Worf's eyes teared as he snorted, "I will not surrender! I am Kang!"

"Ha! I knew Kang," Jadzia said as she dug in, effortlessly repelling his futile attempts to stop her. "Kang was a friend of mine. And you are no Kang!"

By now, Worf was totally incapable of speech. Any intelligent sound he attempted to make was overwhelmed by convulsive laughter.

Jadzia went for the kill. "Say 'rumtag,' " she

demanded as she drove home her attack, running her fingers over Worf's ribs at warp nine. "Say it!"

The word erupted from Worf like a volcanic explosion. "Rumtag! Rumtag!"

With a whoop of victory, Jadzia rolled off her husband and stretched out on the floor beside him, holding her head up on one elbow as she watched him struggle to catch his breath and regain his dignity.

His pitiful attempt to glare at her as he said, "You tickled me" made even Worf burst out laughing again. After a few more aborted tries, he took a deep breath and blurted out, suddenly deeply serious, "Now we are both in danger."

"Something else you didn't tell me?" Jadzia asked lightly.

She was suddenly aware of the light from the Beta Entity getting brighter, and then the creature was all around them both. She felt a mild electrical tingle over her body and tugged down on her short skirt again. Then the light winked out as the energy creature disappeared.

"What happens next?" she asked, more curious than alarmed.

Worf took an even deeper breath, in an obvious attempt to restore his warrior's concentration. "Nothing. We are both..." He fought to stifle an incipient giggle. "... dead." He snorted again and rubbed his ribcage.

"Say that again."

"The Beta Entity was not pleased with the change in our emotional mood. Thus, it enveloped us and drained us of our life energy."

Jadzia screwed up her face in confusion. "That's not right. I studied this mission at the Academy. The

energy creature that captured Kirk and Kang and made their crews keep fighting to the death on the Enterprise fed on hate. When Kirk convinced everyone to stop fighting and to laugh, to express joyful emotions, the creature didn't kill anyone. It just. .. left."

Worf had finally regained his appropriately stern expression. "This is the Klingon version of the holosimulation. And besides, it was Kang who convinced the others to stop fighting."

Jadzia raised an eyebrow and playfully placed a single finger against Worf's side. "It was who?"

Worf smiled. "It was ... your rumtag!" And then he was on her, running his fingers up and down her sides, until this time it was Jadzia who was reduced to helpless laughter.

Finally, exhausted, breathless, they both collapsed together on the lip of the upper deck, Jadzia sitting up, leaning against Worf's broad chest, Worf's fingers gently untangling the intricate weaving of her twenty-third-century hairstyle.

The bridge of the Enterprise was silent, filled with a soft haze colorfully lit by the shifting display screens that ringed the Trill and the Klingon, a ship out of rime.

"It's almost romantic," Jadzia said softly, sighing. She remembered being on this same bridge—in reality—when she and Captain Sisko had taken a trip into the past. She thought of the legendary Spock again, how close she had actually come to him. She sighed again.

Worf ran a finger along the spots that trailed from her temple. "Perhaps we should return to our quarters."

Jadzia looked up at Worf and smiled teasingly. "Actually, I was thinking that maybe we could slip

down to the captain's quarters. Imagine—James T. Kirk's bedroom. Think of the history."

Worf frowned. "I would rather not. Besides, we only have the holosuite for another five minutes."

Jadzia considered the possibilities of the bridge for a moment, but five minutes was more of a challenge than she was in the mood for right now. She ran a finger along Worf's sexily rippled brow. "There's an arboretum a few decks down. Call Quark and book another hour."

"That is not possible, Jadzia. Odo has requested all the holosuites beginning at oh-seven hundred."

"All of them?" Jadzia sat up, away from Worf. "He's having a party and he didn't invite us?"

"It is for his investigation of the Andorian's murder."

"Ahh," Jadzia said, understanding. Once highly-detailed scans had been made of crime scenes, they could be flawlessly recreated with holotechnology, and the computers could be used to call out various anomalies with great precision. "Does he have any new leads?"

Worf blinked at his wife. "Why would he need new ones?"

It took a moment for Jadzia to realize what Worf was actually saying. "Worf, Quark didn't kill the Andorian."

"All the evidence points to him."

"All the circumstantial evidence."

Worf got to his feet. "It is my understanding that the evidence is more than circumstantial." He adjusted his old-fashioned gold-fabric sash, then turned in the direction of the turbolift.

Jadzia jumped to her feet and grabbed his arm to

stop him. "Not so fast, Kang." She forced her groom to turn to face her. "What evidence does Odo have?"

Worf rolled his eyes, replying like a five-year-old asked to recite logarithmic tables. "The Andorian businessman—"

"Dal Nortron," Jadzia said. "Let's concentrate on the facts."

'The Andorian businessman, Dal Nortron, arrived on DS9 last Sunday afternoon. Sunday evening, he won more than 100 bars of—"

"One hundred twenty-two bars."

Worf glowered at Jadzia. "One-hundred twenty-two bars of gold-pressed latinum—after three consecutive wins at dabo. That fact alone is enough to suggest that Quark had arranged to pay off the Andorian—Dal Nortron—through rigged winnings."

"Dabo's a popular game in this quadrant. There are two documented cases of gamblers winning seven consecutive dabos, which is within the statistical realm of probability."

"Not at Quark's," Worf said.

"Come on, Worf. Odo inspects the table every week. Quark doesn't rig it."

Worf let his opinion be known with a grunt.

Jadzia shrugged. "Go on."

"Two hours after Nortron left Quark's, he was found dead, and the latinum was missing."

"Stop right there. There's no logic to what you're saying." Jadzia waited for Worf to interrupt, surprised when he didn't. "If Quark had arranged to pay off Nortron with rigged dabo winnings, then why would he kill Nortron to get those winnings back?"

Worf shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. "Perhaps Nortron took advantage of the

table once too often. Perhaps Quark wanted people to think he had settled a debt to Nortron and planned, when he had done so, to steal back his latinum. Perhaps he did not like the way Nortron was dressed."

"Oh well, now, that is motivation for murder."

"Jadzia, Quark is a Ferengi. Ferengi do not think the way other civilized beings do."

Even though Worf's sternly delivered pronouncement told Jadzia that her new husband was reaching the limits of his patience, she persisted. "Worf—this is the twenty-fourth century! That kind of stereotype belongs in the dark ages."

"The Andorian was found dead near the reactor cores in the lower levels. Security monitoring is limited there. Who else would know that better than Quark?"

"You, for one. Maybe we should suspect you. That makes about as much sense as suspecting Quark."

Clearly upset by her lack of wifely loyalty, Worf glowered at Jadzia. "I am DS9's strategic operations officer. It is my job to know the station's security weaknesses—just it is in Quark's interest to know them because of his long involvement in smuggling operations."

Jadzia softened her tone and affectionately reached up to straighten Worf's sash. "There's a difference between smuggling and murder, Worf. Especially since some of Quark's smuggling operations benefited the Bajoran resistance as well as the Federation."

Mollified only slightly by her touch, Worf regarded her gravely. "He cares only for profit."

"Granted. But not enough to kill for it."

Worf brushed aside Jadzia's hand. "This conversation is useless. You have not listened to me at all. You

have already made up your mind about the Ferengi's innocence."

"Me? How about you? You've already made up your mind he's guilty."

Worf stared at Jadzia as if he really didn't understand what she was talking about. "Of course I have. Because he is."

"Worf! We don't even know if it was a murder!"

Worf's heavy brow wrinkled, and Jadzia could see he was waging an internal debate. She decided that he knew something she didn't and was wondering if he should tell her. Jadzia decided to help him make the right decision. There were better ways to defeat a Klingon than through combat.

She stepped closer to him, slipping her hand beneath his sash this time. The old Klingon uniforms had no armor, and the thin cloth of his shirt did little to interfere with the contact of her flesh against his. "Worf..." she whispered into his ear, "I'm your wife. We have no secrets from each other, remember?" Then she bit his ear lobe. Hard.

Worf took a quick breath, then spoke quickly, as if he was worried that he would change his mind. "Odo showed me Dr. Bashir's preliminary autopsy report. Dal Nortron was killed by an energy-discharge weapon. Odo believes such a weapon would be too primitive to show up on the station's automatic scanning system."

"How primitive?" Jadzia asked, stilling her hand on his chest.

"Microwave radiation. Extremely intense. It... overheated every cell in his body. A weapon without honor."

Jadzia swiftly reviewed everything she knew about

microwave radiation. In this case, it was her own experiences as a science specialist that took precedence over the memories of Dax's previous hosts.

Microwaves were part of the electromagnetic spectrum, one of at least seven energy spectrums known to exist in normal space-time. In pre-subspace, EM-based civilizations—that converged toward rating C-451-5018-3 on Richter's scale of culture—the primary applications of microwave radiation were line-of-sight radio communications and nonmetallic industrial welding, typically with some half-hearted attempts to create first-generation beamed-energy weapons. On Earth, it had even been used for cooking food. Primitive was not the word for it. Prehistoric was more like it, right alongside stone knives and bearskins.

Jadzia took her hand from Worf's chest, amused in spite of the situation to see her groom only then resume easy breathing. "Be reasonable, Worf. Why would Quark use an old-fashioned microwave weapon when he could have disintegrated Nortron with a phaser?"

Worf glanced over his shoulder at the turbolift doors, as if worried someone was about to join them. He took a step back from her. "Phaser residue can be detected for hours after a disintegration."

But Jadzia curled one finger under his gold sash to gently pull him back to her. "Who would have known he was missing?"

Worf smoothed his sash again, trying to dislodge Jadzia's grip. "Perhaps Quark didn't want to put the latinum at risk."

"So ... stun Nortron, take the latinum, then disintegrate him."

"Just because I believe Quark is a criminal does not mean I believe he is a smart criminal. And would you please stop that!"

Jadzia was about to raise the stakes when she was interrupted by an announcement from hidden speakers.

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and morphs, this simulation will end in thirty seconds. Thank you for choosing Quark's for your entertainment needs. Be sure to inquire about our half-price drink specials for holosuite customers when you turn in your memory rods. Now, please gather your personal belongings and take small children by the appropriate grasping appendage. And remember, Quark's is not responsible for lost or stolen articles or for damage caused by micro-forcefield fluctuations. Five . .. four . . . three . . ."

The bridge of the Enterprise melted from around Jadzia and Worf, retreating back into history. Now they stood in a simple unadorned room, its lower walls studded with the glowing green emitters of a compact holoprojector system.

"Please exit through the doors to the rear of the holosuite, and thank you for visiting Quark's—the happiest place in the Bajoran Sector."

Jadzia and Worf exchanged a look of shared puzzlement.

"That voice sounded like Leeta," Jadzia said.

"I have heard that Rom is introducing new policies during Quark's ... incarceration."

"If Rom is next in line for the bar, I'm surprised you haven't started suspecting him of setting up his brother."

The holosuite door slipped open to reveal Odo and two security officers.

"Commanders ... I trust I'm not interrupting," the constable said.

"We have finished," Worf said brusquely. He started for the door.

"No, we haven't," Jadzia countered.

"I'm sorry," Odo said, "but I do require the holosuites for assembling—"

"That's not what I meant," Jadzia interrupted. "Odo, Worf told me that Dal Nortron died of exposure to microwave radiation."

Odo frowned. "That is privileged information. At least," he added gruffly as he looked at Worf, "it was."

"Worf was conferring with me—security operations officer to science officer."

Odo did not look convinced. But then, he rarely did. "Go on."

"A microwave weapon seems such an unlikely choice to commit a murder, I was wondering if there might be another explanation."

"I am open to suggestions."

"Well, if the body was found near the reactor levels, have you ruled out energy leaks or power modulations coming from the power transfer-conduit linkages?"

Odo blinked. "I was not aware that fusion power-conduits could generate microwave radiation."

Jadzia shrugged. "Not directly. But there's so much other equipment on those levels, a fusion power surge could set up rapid oscillations in various circuits. That's all you'd need to generate an electromagnetic field. And if the field was strong enough or close enough to something that might function as a waveguide, it could reach microwave levels."

Odo looked off to the side as if reprocessing the

data she had just provided. "Could traces of such a field be detected after the fact?"

Jadzia ignored her husband's disapproving frown. "Absolutely. You'd need to examine everything in the area for magnetic realignment, heat damage, even signs of electrical sparking between conductive materials.

"Electrical?" Odo made a sound in the back of his throat, then nodded. "Very well. I'll send a forensics team down at once. If they find evidence of anomalous energy discharges, I'll let you know."

"And if they don't?" Jadzia asked.

Odo gave her a grim smile, as if he had successfully led her on. "Then it will be additional evidence that the murder was committed with a microwave weapon."

Jadzia was surprised when Worf suddenly grunted. "Unless," he said, and Jadzia could sense his reluctance, "the Andorian was killed by an anomalous power discharge somewhere else on the station and his body taken to the lower levels to confuse the investigation."

Jadzia was pleased that Worf had offered some support for her theory, despite his conviction that the guilty party was already in custody.

But Odo rendered Worf's suggestion unnecessary. We can rule that possibility out, Commander. I do have enough security tapes and computer logs to establish that Dal Nortron took a turbolift to the lower levels approximately twenty minutes before he was killed."

"Before he died," Jadzia corrected.

"He was murdered, Commander. Of that I have no doubt."

Jadzia ignored Odo's increasing air of formality.

"Do your security tapes and computer logs show that anyone else was in that area at the same time?" she asked.

Odo's hesitation answered the question for her.

"I didn't think so," Jadzia said.

"There's no such thing as a perfect crime," Odo said bluntly. "I've already connected Quark to Nortron. They were involved in a business dealing together. They had a falling out. Quark killed him. Accidentally, more likely than not. But it is definitely murder."

Jadzia studied Odo closely. She had seldom heard such emotion in the changeling's voice. Almost as if he were personally involved in this case.

"Odo, did you know Dal Nortron?" Jadzia asked.

"Of course not. Why would you even ask such a thing?"

Eight lifetimes of experience told Jadzia she was on to something. "No reason. But I'd find someone who did know him," she said. "Someone who can tell you why he came to DS9, and why he went down to the lower levels."

Now it was Odo who was losing his patience. 'To meet Quark."

"But your own records say Quark wasn't down there."

"Records can be altered, Commander."

Jadzia smiled sweetly. Now she had led him on. "Exactly. Altered to take someone out. Or to put someone in. And if the records can be altered so easily, Quark and Dal Nortron could have met anywhere on the station without you knowing about it. And if they could have met anywhere, why did they choose the lower levels?"

Odo exhaled in frustration, but said nothing.

CHAPTER 4

they were called tiyerta 'nok—literally, the life-flow of iron, or as the current usage had it, the arteries of the machine.

That was the term the Cardassians gave to the engineering access tunnels that riddled their mining station: a complex network of barely passable crawl spaces supporting a web of ODN cables, power conduits, waste-, water-, and replicator-mass plumbing, and air-circulation channels. But as soon as Starfleet had taken control and Terok Nor became Deep Space 9, the tiyerta nok inevitably became known as Jefferies tubes, a term some said had its origins as far back as the very beginnings of Starship design. Others said even further.

But unlike DS9's other Jefferies tubes—most of which by now had been retrofitted with new, Starfleet-standard lighting sources and ODN upgrades—the Jef-

feries tube on this lower level was dark, cramped, and cut off from the station's main air-flow system. Not a whisper of a breeze passed through it, and Jake Sisko blinked as steady drips of sweat rolled into his eyes.

"You're crazy," Nog said. "It'll never work."

Jake was flat on his back at the end of this particular tiyerta nok, lifting his cramped arms directly overhead to work on the panel set into the uncomfortably low, sloping ceiling. The much shorter Nog was crouched at Jake's feet, where the tunnel height was a bit more generous, keeping a palm torch on the panel above Jake and passing along tools as Jake requested them.

"Nog, it's perfect," Jake insisted. He wriggled a multispanner against the flathead mini-tagbolt he had finally loosened, and the second of three U-shaped clasps holding the egress panel in place dropped free, hitting him right between the eyes. "Oww!" It was more a cry of surprise than pain. "These things never used to be so tight."

"Some of the old Cardassian subsystems are self-repairing." Nog spoke with apparent disinterest, though he added with a chuckle, "Did that ever surprise the Chief when he finally figured out why some of his repairs kept reverting to Cardassian configurations. But anyway, the plan can't work, because there's no way you'll ever get past the ambassador's bodyguards."

Jake carefully put the multispanner down beside him and groped for the intergrips. Three more minis to go. "That's what the diversion's for. When the bodyguards go to help the dabo girls, we slip into the ambassador's quarters, take the latinum—"

"What?! You never said anything about stealing latinum!"

Jake moaned and lowered his strained arms to rest

them. "Technically, we're not stealing it, Nog, we're only taking it to confuse Odo about the motive. And even if we were really stealing it, so what? We're murderers, remember? Cold-blooded and remorseless."

Jake squinted as Nog aimed the palm torch directly into his eyes. "Jake, my friend, you have to start getting out more. We 're not murderers."

"Okay, okay. You know what I mean. Quark and Morn are the murderers."

Nog put down the palm torch, but even with the suddenly increased darkness Jake had no trouble sensing how annoyed his friend was. "I thought you said you couldn't use their names."

"You're right. I mean 'Higgs and Fermion.' It's just that I've been thinking about this story for so long, and while you were on patrol Quark let me watch one of his smuggling transactions—"

"Jake!" Nog hissed. "I'm wearing a communicator!" The Ferengi teenager lowered his chin to his chest and spoke loudly and precisely for the benefit of any potential eavesdroppers. "And I'm certain my Uncle Quark would never be involved in smuggling, or any other type of illegal—or even questionable—activity. Perhaps he was just playing a joke on you by pretending that he was."

"Oh, forget it," Jake muttered. Then he went back to attacking the third mini-tagbolt. "No one ever told me writing was such hard work."

"What's so hard about sitting in front of a computer and talking?"

"Shine the light here," Jake said. "And that part's not hard. It's all the work you have to do ahead of time so you can know what to say to the computer. That's the hard—owwh!"

The third mini was much looser than the second, and left a dent in Jake's forehead when it fell.

"We could have used the transporter to get down here," Nog said.

Jake didn't know why he bothered to keep explaining things to Nog, but he tried again. "That would leave a trace in the station security log." He pried at the egress panel with just his fingers now; to his relief, it came out easily. "Huh. I thought that would have been stuck after all these years."

Nog, uncharacteristically, said nothing, and Jake looked back at him with renewed suspicion. "You sure you haven't been back here since the last time?"

Nog looked offended. "Why would I come down here?"

Jake smiled insinuatingly. 'The 'Room,' remember?" Then Jake used his feet to push himself backwards until his head and upper body poked out through the wall-panel opening. A moment later, he had turned his body and swung his legs out and down, hung on to the edge of the opening, and then dropped lightly to the floor of a small stretch of corridor. The corridor was lit only by the reflected light coming in through a panel opening set high near the ceiling in the bulkhead behind him.

"Whoa... it's still not hooked up to the main power grid," Jake said.

Nog's voice echoed in the Jeffries tube before he stuck his head through the wall-panel opening and brought the palm torch up beside him, letting it play around the area. "With the war, the Chief's retrofit schedule lost its priority. Except, of course, when he needed to maintain critical functions."

Jake's eyebrows lifted in surprise. Starfleet had

made the retrofitting of Deep Space 9 a high-profile project, and accordingly Chief O'Brien had been given the authority to set up a renovation-and-repair program that would eventually move through the entire station, from Ops to the lowest level. War or no war, it was hard to believe that after almost six years, no one on any of the retrofitting teams had stumbled upon this ten-meter stretch of corridor that somehow had been sealed off from all the other corridors on the level.

Jake glanced up at Nog. "Aren't you coming down?"

"I thought you said you just wanted to time how long it would take for Quark and—I mean, for 'Higgs and Fermion' to escape through the Jefferies tube."

That was the original reason why Jake had talked Nog into retracing their old routes through the Jefferies tubes. He had decided to put his semiautobiographical novel, Anslem, aside for the time being and try something more commercial. So the new crime novel he was working on, The Ferengi Connection, was going to be set on a fictional Cardassian mining station still in orbit of Bajor. For that reason, he wanted to be completely accurate about how long it would take his crime lords Higgs and Fermion to secretly move from one part of the station to another. When Quark had allowed him to observe the illegal sale of Denevan crystals last Saturday night, Jake had been most interested to learn that the Ferengi used a network of secret passageways different from the Jefferies tubes. That would allow him to move through the station without being observed by Odo. Unfortunately, Nog's uncle wasn't about to give Captain Sisko's son, of all people, any details about the network, so Jake had decided to base

the tunnels in his novel on the engineering ones he and Nog used to play in.

"Well, we're here. You timed it. Let's go back," Nog said impatiently. He held out his hand to haul Jake back up to the panel opening.

"No," Jake said as he looked around. "I can use this in the story. A lost section of the station.... Maybe this is where Quark—Higgs, has his secret headquarters."

"Jake, did you ever stop to think that maybe this section was sealed off for a reason?"

Jake didn't understand why Nog was being so cautious. "Nog, we used to come down here almost every day after school. If there was anything dangerous, we'd already know about it. Now get down here."

Nog mumbled something in an obscure trading tongue that Jake couldn't make out. But the young Ferengi squirmed through the panel opening and dropped with a loud thump to the uncarpeted deck beside his friend. He got up awkwardly, brushed dust from his Starfleet uniform, then aimed his palm torch to one end of the short corridor. The beam of light found only a standard, DS9 bulkhead, a dull, burnished-copper color, ridged and scalloped like the skin of a gigantic reptile. Nog shone the light in the other direction, but his torchlight uncovered only more of the same. "You know, we really have to tell Chief O'Brien about this," he said.

Jake patted Nog on the back. "And what are we going to say when he asks us when we discovered a lost section of corridor?"

"We were children," Nog said. "If we told anyone what we had found back then...." He laughed. "My

father would have served me my lobes on a platter for playing in the tubes."

"And for playing with a 'hew-mon,' " Jake added.

Nog frowned, and Jake knew why. Despite the cannibalism rumors that still refused to die, human-Ferengi relations had come a long way in the past decade; but those relations still weren't so secure that many Ferengi would be comfortable joking about them.

"Would your father have been any more understanding?" Nog asked defiantly.

Jake snorted. "If I had told him about the tunnels back then, I'd still be confined to my room."

"But... we are going to tell them now, correct?"

"Maybe not right this minute," Jake said.

"Jake, we don't have any excuse for keeping this to ourselves. In fact, it might be my duty as a Starfleet officer to tell my commanding officer that—where are you going?!"

Jake ignored Nog and his unfathomable anxiety, and walked toward the only door in the corridor. "Let's just see if it's still here," Jake said.

Nog darted past him and stood in front of the lone door. "It is. Now let's go to Ops and—"

Jake smiled at Nog and reached for the door control panel. "And now, let's see if it's still working."

"It is working!" Nog bleated as he pushed Jake's hand away from the door control.

Jake regarded his friend with a slight frown. "Nog, is there something you'd like to tell me?"

"Let's go to Ops, find Chief O'Brien, and... and I'll tell you everything."

Even in the pale illumination from the palm torch, Jake saw Nog's large ears flush. The explanation came to him suddenly.

"Nog ... you have been coming down here, haven't you?"

"No. Well, yes. But, not often. A few times. Five ... maybe eight, ten times."

Jake stared at Nog, nonplussed. "By yourself?"

Nog's mouth opened and closed but nothing came out.

"Oh, I get it now." Jake shook his head with a laugh, the sound oddly muffled in the enclosed space. "So... if I open this door, just what am I going to see?" He tried to remember the titles of the 'special' holosuite programs they used to 'borrow' from Quark's bar, the ones Quark kept locked in the little box under the stale pistachios no one ever asked for. "Lauriento Spa? Vulcan Love Slave?"

At that, Nog started to laugh, too. "Part One or Part Two?"

There was only one answer to that question. "Part Two," Jake said with a snicker. Then both friends completed the title at the same time: "The Revenge!"

That was enough to make both double over in fits of uncontrolled giggling, both recalling how they would take the adult holosuite cylinders and try to run the graphic subroutines through their personal desk padds. At best, they were able to call up mildly suggestive silhouettes of some of the holographic performers from the programs, usually obscured by blurred color and jagged outlines. But the two young friends, certain they were close to learning the secrets of the universe—and equally certain they were going to be caught by their fathers at any minute—had stared at those flickering images for hours, trying desperately to see in them what it was that adults found so compelling.

Eventually, the laughter faded and Jake caught his

breath. "So, you really don't want me to open the door?" he asked.

Nog chewed at his lip. "And if I say No, as soon as we leave you'll be right back here to open it anyway, right?"

"Right," Jake agreed. That's exactly what he had decided to do.

Nog sighed in resignation. "Go ahead." He stepped aside.

Jake made a production out of pressing the door control. When the door slipped open, he comically placed both hands over his eyes.

Until he heard Nog say, "Hey, that's not my program. ..." Jake took his hands away, looked into what had been the most exciting discovery of their childhood on Deep Space 9, something not recorded on any deck plan or technical drawing. A lost Cardassian holosuite.

Nog was already inside the room, standing on a slightly inclined rocky landscape. Beyond him, about a holographic kilometer away, Jake spied a collection of small stone buildings reminiscent of a primitive village. It was night on the holosuite, but the buildings and the land were lit by a cool, blue-green illumination. Jake couldn't detect the source of that backlighting, though it appeared, improbably, to be coming from somewhere behind him.

He stepped inside to join Nog, then turned around to look past the improbable cutout of the doorway to the DS9 corridor, to an astounding holographic vista of a night sky.

At once he identified the source of the blue-green light.

A planet filled almost a tenth of the sky in the holo-

graphic scene, the bright light reflecting from the green oceans of its sunlit half enough to wash most of the stars from the heavens.

Then he recognized the planet. "Hey, that's Bajor...."

"Really?" Nog said.

Jake pointed skyward. "By the terminator... see those mountains?" The distinctive pattern created where three tectonic plates had collided to form a perfect X of intersecting mountain ranges was so well known as to almost be the galactic symbol for Bajor.

"Dahkur Province," Nog murmured. He looked around the holographic landscape again. "So this must be one of Bajor's moons. But I didn't program this."

"Neither did I," Jake said.

The two friends looked at each other, and Jake could see that Nog had just reached the same conclusion he had. "Someone else has been down here."

"Pretty dull program," Jake said softly. "I don't see a single Vulcan love slave."

They stood in silence for a few moments, listening to the holographic wind. Jake looked back at the village and saw flickering lights in some of the windows of the small buildings.

"Does it feel as if something should be happening?" Nog asked.

Jake shook his head. "It's not on pause. We've got wind, moving lights in that village."

"But why would anyone want a holosimulation of... of nothing happening on a Bajoran moon?"

Jake shrugged. "Maybe the program's caught in a loop. Or the holosuite's broken." He cleared his throat. "Room, this is Jake Sisko. Show me my fishing hole...."

Unlike any other type of holographic simulation Jake had ever seen, the distinctive program switchover of the Cardassian holosuite now began. At first, the colors and the shapes of the Bajoran moon's landscape seemed to liquefy and swim into each other, and then, as if the plug had been pulled on reality, all the colors spun swiftly—dizzyingly—into a spiral vortex that made Jake feel as if he were about to be drawn down an endless tunnel. But, just as quickly as the vertigo of that transformation made itself felt, the spiralling stopped and with a strange optical bounce that Jake could almost feel, the new program took shape.

Jake and Nog were standing on a covered wooden bridge that spanned Jake's favorite fishing hole. It was his father's favorite, too, and six years ago, Jake had been delighted to discover that this secret Cardassian holosuite could access his father's programs from DS9's main computers.

Except...

"This isn't my program, either," Jake said to Nog. The perpetual summer sun wasn't shining. In fact, the day was overcast. In fact, it was actually raining."

"I, uh, sort of made some, uh, minor modifications," Nog confessed with a shrug. "The rain makes me feel more ... at home...."

Then Jake saw that he and Nog weren't alone. There were people swimming in the fishing hole. "Who are they?" He stepped closer to the bridge's railing, saw the impressive size and bulbous shape of the swimmers' bald heads. "Ferengi?"

"Uh-huh," Nog said in a strangled croak, as if his throat was slowly closing in.

The Ferengi swimmers saw Jake and Nog on the bridge, and started waving enthusiastically.

Then Jake saw how small their ears were, and he began to really understand. "Ferengi females..."

"I've never really been much for... pointed ears," Nog mumbled.

Two of the swimmers began climbing a wooden ladder at the side of the bridge. They were calling Nog's name, and as they stepped onto the bridge, leaving wet footprints behind, Jake was momentarily startled by the bulky, multilayered swimming costumes the Ferengi females wore. Other than their heads, their hands, and their feet, not a square centimeter of skin was exposed, not a curve of their bodies could be discerned.

Jake looked at Nog with a grin.

Nog's open-mouth smile was so broad, it almost made him look as if he'd just been stunned by a phaser. The Ferengi teenager stared at the two fully clad females without blinking.

"You're drooling," Jake teased.

Nog looked up at his friend. "Vulcan love slaves don't... wear any clothes," he said sheepishly. "Where's the fun in that?"

Jake took Nog by the arm, tugged him toward the door to the corridor. "Nog, you need to get out more. Let's go find Chief O'Brien."

Allowing Nog to wave a sad farewell to the Ferengi females, Jake pushed his glum friend out the door.

The Ferengi females—representing everything Nog could ever want—returned that wave sadly as Jake and Nog left, reverting to their true forms only when the door had completely closed, and the waiting began again.

CHAPTER 5

if miles O'BRIEN had his way, every Starship, every runabout, every shuttlecraft, and every space station in the galaxy would be as smooth and featureless as his little son's bottom.

Not that DS9's chief engineer minded a turn in space. Perhaps because he was a happily married parent of two young, active children, O'Brien greatly enjoyed putting on an environmental suit and slipping out of the artificial gravity fields for an hour or two, just as he was doing today to float above the Defiant, relatively speaking, of course. And stolen moments such as these, when he could just drift peacefully among the stars, hearing only the rhythms of his own heart, his own breathing, he found those moments truly restoring.

But to work in space? In the twenty-fourth century? What was Starfleet thinking?

To O'Brien, who had given the matter some thought, the perfect spacecraft would be without surface texture—not one exposed conduit, not a single inset panel, and absolutely no components that could only be serviced from the outside of the ship. Instead, in his opinion at least, everything should be accessible from within, so that engineers and repair technicians could work safely in a breathable atmosphere, under controlled temperatures, in conditions where an unexpected sharp edge of metal would mean only a quick trip to the infirmary and not explosive decompression and a terrible, painful death.

Humans are far too fragile for space, O'Brien thought, not for the first time. Far too fragile for most things, actually. Which is why machines were so necessary. And why engineers in particular were humanity's best hope for a better future.

O'Brien smiled to himself just thinking about his engineer's dream of that better tomorrow. Gleaming Starships, hulls like mirrors, blazing past the stars with their fragile cargo safely cocooned, and—

"You still breathing out there, Chief?"

The brisk voice in O'Brien's helmet communicator was as loud as it was unexpected.

"Who is this?" O'Brien demanded.

The short sharp burst of laughter that came in response to his startled request was enough to answer his question.

"Sorry, Major," O'Brien said. "I was ... I was concentrating on the transionic power coupling."

O'Brien regretted the words as soon as he said them. He could picture the wry smile on Kira's face as she replied, "I'll say. You were concentrating so hard we could hear you snoring."

Blushing in spite of himself, O'Brien maneuvered gingerly around from the open coupling bay until he could look along the length of the Defiant's upper hull, past the towering pylon and immense curve of DS9's docking ring and up to the Operations Module, as if there were viewports there through which he could see the major. "I'm running a level-six diagnostic," O'Brien explained. "There's not a lot I can do while the computer's working."

"Which is why I was wondering if you'd like to lend a hand to the PTC work crew," Kira said. The humor had gone from her voice. O'Brien thought he could detect the slightest undercurrent of concern.

"Have they run into trouble?"

"It's not trouble yet, Chief. They were almost ready to lift off a hull plate, but then they got an anomalous density reading."

Kira's news hit O'Brien like a shock of translator current. "Tell them not to touch it!"

"I'm confident they know enough not to do that. Rom's leading the team."

"Ah, well, all right, then," O'Brien said, his sudden concern subsiding to a more tolerable level of wariness. Rom was one of the best junior technicians he had ever trained. The hardworking Ferengi could be counted on to take a conservative approach to repairs—and to O'Brien, the conservative approach was always the best. "Let me seal this bay and I'll join them." O'Brien tapped his thruster controls to move closer to the Defiant's hull and the open coupling bay.

"Want me to beam you over?" Kira asked.

O'Brien gazed up through the top of his helmet, admiring the towering spires of the station's curved docking arms, picked out against the fathomless black

of space by brilliant running lights. That a machine— an artificial construct built by intelligent hands—could even exist in this universe, could even dare to shine as brightly as the timeless stars, frankly thrilled him at such a visceral level that he couldn't care less if those hands had been Cardassian or human. "That's all right, Major. Looks like a nice day for a walk...."

As DS9's chief engineer, O'Brien was well aware that, according to regulations, untethered spacewalks from one section of the station's exterior to another were strictly forbidden. The massive station's slow stabilization spin, almost imperceptible even at the outer edge of the docking ring, could induce in inexperienced personnel violent attacks of debilitating space-sickness. Poor Worf almost had to be prodded into his environmental suit for EVA drills.

But O'Brien had no such trouble with an exterior traverse of the station. In his mind, he saw the huge structure simply as a giant cog, moving within its perfect circle, wholly predictable, reassuringly stable. Thus, after the transionic coupling bay was safely sealed and the diagnostic readers placed on standby, he oriented himself to the station's local coordinates, correctly pointing his feet at the Defiant's hull, and tapped his thrusters. Then he smoothly slipped above the ship, effortlessly adjusting his vector so he would rise above the gentle slope of the docking ring beside the pylon, level out, then drop over the ring's inner edge as if taking a ski jump into an infinite valley filled with stars.

O'Brien sighed with pleasure. He loved this view, the sensation of this movement. In an old-style system of measurement he had mastered in order to be able to read old engineering texts, the distance to the far side of the ring was almost a mile. Certainly, he now

reflected, he had seen larger artificial structures in his career in space. The planet-sized Dyson Sphere, for instance, which Captain Picard's Enterprise had encountered when they had rescued the legendary Montgomery Scott. Contemplating that engineering feat still kept O'Brien awake at night, as he struggled to comprehend the staggering mechanical stresses on its hull components. But a Dyson Sphere was so enormous, he knew, that there was only one way to truly make sense of its size and scope, and that was through mathematical abstractions.

A mile-wide space station, though, that was something concrete, something that could be seen and felt. In fact, Deep Space 9 was about as large as an artificial structure could be built and still be comprehensible to unenhanced human senses. It was part of the reason he had enjoyed this assignment so much. In some ways, DS9 was the ultimate machine. And its size and complexity were just below the level at which engineers were forced to rely on artificial intelligence and data reduction in order to grasp the structure of what they built. But DS9—well, by now, O'Brien felt he knew it well enough that he could almost have built a duplicate of it by himself.

As he dropped, O'Brien's line of sight cleared the interior habitat ring. Now he could see the red glow of the fusion reactors' exhaust cone at the relative bottom of the station. There, the saucer-shaped module containing the station's main fusion reactors—of which only four had been certified safe enough to remain operational—was attached to the main core by a constricted airlock linkage. That airlock connector was what allowed the quick jettisoning of the module in an emergency with minimal loss of interior atmosphere.

The airlock connector, though, was strictly designed to allow only the passage of turbolift cars and life-support services. The end-product of the fusion reactor— power—was delivered to the rest of the station through six exterior power transfer conduits that extended from the top hull of the fusion module to the bottom hull of the lower habitat. Again, in an emergency they were designed to be quickly separated from the station. A single conduit could supply the station's minimal power needs for weeks.

But yesterday, when Odo's murder-investigation team had detected an inexplicable modulation in the output of power-transfer conduit B almost exactly where it entered the main station, jettisoning the conduit had fortunately not been required.

No Dominion warships were reported within tens of parsecs of the Bajoran system, so emergency conditions did not apply. O'Brien had called for a by-the-book shutdown of conduit B, using the remaining five to supply the station without requiring any power rationing. And once the conduit was cold, he had assigned an engineering team to open it up and remove all the exterior hull plates, so that they could conduct a visual inspection in addition to the molecular scanning. It was a time-consuming procedure to be sure, but also a conservative one. A chance to make repairs without danger of attack or risk of catastrophic disaster was something that came to O'Brien less and less these days. He found he was actually looking forward to helping Rom and his team.

There were three other engineers with Rom, floating by the top of the power conduit where it entered the lower hull of the main station. O'Brien could see they were each attached to the station by a memory

tether— without them, DS9's rotation would move the conduit away from anyone in an environmental suit within sixty seconds.

O'Brien expertly maneuvered himself into position beside Rom. Rom was easy to identify among the engineering team because he was the shortest of the four, and he wore a modified helmet that provided more room for his Ferengi skull.

"Chief O'Brien," Rom said in greeting as he took O'Brien's arm, "I didn't mean for Major Kira to call you away from your important work."

"That's all right, Rom." From any other Ferengi, O'Brien knew that those words would be a reflexive and meaningless expression of the 33rd Rule of Acquisition. But in Rom's case, O'Brien believed that the Ferengi technician, gratifyingly enough, did consider anything the chief engineer of DS9 did to be of crucial importance to the station. Of course, it also was true that Rom always believed anything a chief of engineering did to be more important than what a mere assistant did. Unsure whether the Ferengi technician's belief stemmed from something in the Ferengi tradition of apprenticeship or from Rom's admiration for his chief's skills, O'Brien rather hoped it was the latter.

Grateful for Rom's steadying grip, O'Brien fired a memory tether from the mobility module around his right forearm. At once, the tether's tip sought out the nearest spinward positioning cleat on the hull and magnetically attached itself to the metallic surface. Now, O'Brien knew, the tether would automatically adjust its length and tension to keep him in position over the very same point—power-transfer conduit B, hull plate B-OF-186-9776-3. The Cardassians were nothing if not impressive record keepers.

"So what do we have?" he asked Rom.

Rom tapped some controls on his forearm padd, and they watched as a holographic display of a tricorder screen sprang up and took shape a half-meter in front of O'Brien's helmet.

O'Brien whistled as he interpreted the shifting, false-color display of a hull-plate scan. On a typical plate, the scan would show thirteen distinct color bars representing the thirteen composite layers used to form the station's skin. But on this display, O'Brien noted with a frown, several segments of the hull plate's interior layers were mixed together as if sections of them had melted into each other.

He checked the coordinates of the display. "You're sure this isn't reversed?"

"Yes, sir," Rom said earnestly. "See the outermost layer? Pure plasma-sprayed pyroceramic trianium."

Rom was right. The PSPT layer was for micromete-oroid protection, a final fail-safe for the station in case the station-keeping deflectors went off-line. Even more importantly, it was always and only applied to the exterior of the hull plates. Which meant the mixing of layers was definitely on the inside.

"Good attention to detail," O'Brien said. Even through his helmet he could see Rom's broad smile in response to his compliment. "A lot of engineers would have automatically concluded that the sensor was in error."

The smile left the Ferengi technician's face as quickly as it had appeared. "Oh, no, Chief—the whole team agreed that this was an anomalous reading."

O'Brien nodded. He didn't know if that were true or not, but he appreciated the fact that Rom took responsibility for his team—two Bajorans and a new Vulcan

ensign who had just been assigned to DS9 from the Academy. "Well done, people," he said, with a glance that encompassed Rom's three assistants.

This time, all except the Vulcan smiled back in acknowledgment of the praise.

"All right, Rom," O'Brien said. "What do we do next?"

Though obviously startled that O'Brien wasn't taking over the operation, Rom rose to the challenge. "Well, the final decision will have to be based on an understanding of what has caused the mixing of the hull layers."

"Very good. What possibilities should we investigate?" O'Brien effortlessly reassumed his role as instructor for the station's engineering staff. It gave him real pleasure to see someone grasp and apply engineering concepts for the first time. Somedays, he even thought he might enjoy teaching at the Academy himself. Once the war was over, of course.

"Um, um..." Rom said as he gathered his thoughts. "Well... if we had found this kind of mixing on the exterior layers of the hull, we could conclude that... it was the result of an energy discharge. Maybe a stray ... phaser hit from an old battle."

"That's one," O'Brien confirmed.

"And... if we open up the plate and find that the innermost layer is not disturbed—that is, it appears to be undamaged, then ... we might conclude the mixing of layers is a manufacturing flaw."

O'Brien decided to challenge Rom once again. He frowned. "The Cardassians? Miss a manufacturing flaw as prominent as this?"

A look of momentary panic contorted Rom's face. From long experience, O'Brien knew that many stu-

dents folded at this point, unwilling to appear to contradict their teacher's pronouncement.

But Rom swallowed hard and blurted out. "I really don't mean to argue but...."

"But what?" O'Brien prompted, trying to keep a smile from his face.

"Well... Cardassian manufacturing standards fell drastically during ... the last few years of the Occupation and if this hull plate was manufactured during that period and Bajoran slave workers were part of the quality assurance program then ... then there's a chance— a little tiny barely-worth-mentioning chance—that a manufacturing flaw like this could slip through." Rom audibly gulped at his own temerity and the remainder of his words tumbled out in a rush. "But... you're probably right. Don't pay any attention to me."

O'Brien shook his head. "Rom, never be afraid to question the chief engineer."

Rom blinked in surprise. "Never? Really?"

O'Brien reconsidered. "Well, maybe not when you're under enemy fire. But this is a stable situation, so we might as well enjoy the luxury of exploring all the possibilities. In this case, you're right. It is possible we're seeing a manufacturing flaw."

Rom brightened like a puppy who'd been given a brand-new chew toy. O'Brien couldn't help himself. He had to smile.

"Thank you, Chief."

"But let's not get carried away." O'Brien was the teacher again. "I think there's one more possibility we should consider. What about you?"

Rom nodded quickly in his helmet, making his entire weightless body rock slowly back and forth around his center of gravity.

"And that possibility would be ... ?" O'Brien said.

"Oh, uh, a power conduit rupture!"

"Exactly," O'Brien agreed. "Though because the hull plate surrounding the conduit isn't deformed. ..."

Rom got it at once. "It would be a very small rupture."

"So given those three possibilities, what procedures do we follow to identify which one is the actual cause of the layer distortion?"

Rom looked off into space and recited the steps to be taken next, beginning with shutting down the power conduit—which had already been accomplished—to the final step of setting up a portable forcefield in order to keep any possible debris contained once the damaged hull plate had been removed.

Timing his actions to coincide with the completion of Rom's list, O'Brien activated the memory tether override and used his thrusters to slip to the side. "Well, what are you waiting for, Rom?"

O'Brien chuckled at the expressions first of surprise and then delight that washed across Rom's face as the Ferengi technician realized he was being permitted to continue with the examination.

With renewed confidence, Rom efficiently directed the others in setting up the forcefield generator that Kira now beamed to the engineering team. Then he positioned his team at the connection points of the hull plate they were about to remove.

Elapsed time for these preparations was approximately twenty minutes, and O'Brien took full advantage of his position as an observer to use the time to watch the incomparable parade of the wonders of space: the steady shine of the untwinkling stars, the

subtly shifting colorful filaments of the Denorios Belt, and the distant pure light of Bajor's sun, Bajor-B'hava'el—the brightest star in space for DS9, though distant enough from the station that it was simply a brilliant point of light, not a blazing disk.

"We're ready, Chief," Rom announced.

Even from his position, floating five meters away, O'Brien could see that Rom's team had properly installed the forcefield emitters and that the four engineers were correctly in position. "You're in charge, Rom."

Rom nodded and turned his attention to steadying himself on the multitorque defastener he had attached to the plate bolt, then gave a quick glance to reassure himself that each of his team members was also poised to use their own. "All right, everybody, on the... count of ten. One—"

"Uh, Rom?"

"Yes, Chief?"

"Why not make it the count of three?"

"Good idea. Everybody, forget what I said about going on the count of ten. That would take too much time and slow down the—"

"One!" O'Brien prompted.

Rom got the hint. "Uh ... two ... and three!"

O'Brien carefully monitored the spinning bits of each defastener as they counterrotated, detaching the hull-plate fasteners.

"Slowly ..." Rom cautioned nervously. "Standing by to activate the forcefield... as soon as the hull plate is free...."

Then a few puffs of gas vented, as the hull-plate seal was broken and the plate itself began to drift away from the curved pillar of the conduit structure, pro-

pelled by the centripetal force imparted by DS9's rotation.

O'Brien's attention focused on what would happen next—in the next minute or two. When the plate had drifted about a meter away from the surface of the conduit, Rom would activate the forcefield so that any debris behind the plate would remain in place. Then, when the plate was about ten meters from the conduit, Jadzia was standing by in Ops to grab the plate with a construction tractor beam and hold it safely out of the way.

As far as O'Brien was concerned, his credits were on the cause of the distorted layers being a tiny rupture in the power-transfer conduit that had allowed plasma current to leak out and melt the inside of the hull plate. And a ruptured energy conduit would certainly explain the anomalous readings Odo's people got from the lower levels when they were investigating the death of that Andorian businessman.

Then the loudest, highest-pitched Ferengi scream O'Brien had ever heard shoved every other thought from his mind as he slammed his gloved hands to the sides of his helmet in a useless attempt to block out the din.

"Computer!" O'Brien shouted. "Lower helmet volume!"

Instantly, Rom's squeal dropped to a more tolerable level, and O'Brien swiftly detached his memory tether and thrusted in to see whatever it was that had so upset Rom.

Dead bodies.

Two of them.

Cardassians.

Crammed into the insulating buffer zone between the power-transfer conduit's inner and outer hulls.

The arms of the two corpses were stretched out as if desperately reaching to freedom. Their black, shrivelled lips were drawn back exposing startlingly white teeth, their jaws agape in terror.

O'Brien shivered. The dessicated gray flesh still coating what could be seen of the two skeletons was fractured by deep-cut purple fissures, the result of prolonged exposure to the absolute vacuum of space.

"It's all right, Rom. Calm down. Breathe normally." O'Brien stayed out of Rom's reach in case the Ferengi panicked and started flailing. "O'Brien to Ops, lock on to Rom and prepare to beam him in on my order."

"What is it, Chief?" Kira asked.

"I'm locked," Jadzia's voice added.

O'Brien kept his voice deliberately neutral, setting a proper example for his staff. "There are two bodies in the insulating space between the hulls. Cardassians."

"Construction workers?" Kira asked.

O'Brien thrusted in closer. One of the skeletons was missing its hand—it had been severed cleanly at the wrist. "Don't think so, Major. They're not in environment suits. In fact, they look to be civilians. Been here quite a while, though. All the moisture in them's sublimated long ago."

O'Brien puzzled over the missing hand. He looked around to see if it had floated free.

It had. He could see it attached to the inside of the detached hull plate, as if it had been welded in position, exactly where scans had detected that strange mixing of the plate's interior layers.

"Chief," Kira asked carefully, "any chance they might have been put in there when the conduit was manufactured?"

O'Brien understood what the major was suggesting.

The two Cardassians might have been victims of the Bajoran resistance—walled up in the conduit to die when it was carried into space. They certainly looked as if they had been in vacuum long enough to have been killed during the Occupation.

But the theory didn't hold because of one critical detail. "Probably not," O'Brien said. "These conduits were all assembled in space when the station was constructed. I don't know how the blazes they got in there."

Jadzia's voice came over the comm link next. "Chief, we should transport the bodies to the Infirmary for Julian. But I can't get a good lock on them. Is that conduit still live?"

"Dead cold, Commander. If you can lock onto Rom, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to lock onto the Cardassians."

"Well, I can't," Jadzia replied, and O'Brien could hear her annoyance.

"How about I pull them out into the open?" O'Brien suggested.

"What a good idea," Jadzia said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.

O'Brien looked back at Rom. The Ferengi engineer seemed calmer now. "Okay, Rom. Best thing to do is to climb back on the horse."

Rom's grimace of distaste was clear behind his faceplate. "There's a horse in there, too?!"

O'Brien didn't have the strength to explain. "Just give me a hand pulling them out so Jadzia can transport them."

O'Brien could see that the Ferengi engineer would rather start a fight with Worf than handle dead Cardassians, but he gamely tapped his thruster controls and moved into position beside his teacher.

"You get the one on the right," O'Brien said as he moved in to grab the arm stump of the Cardassian on the left. "And be gentle. They're apt to be a bit... brittle."

"Shouldn't a medical team come out to do this?" Rom asked as he tentatively reached for the Cardassian on the right.

Exercising caution, O'Brien took hold of the other corpse's arm. For a moment, he was disconcerted because the insulating gap was only about a meter and half deep, and he couldn't see where the dead Cardassian's legs were. But before he could stop to analyze the significance of what he saw, his hand reflexively gave his thruster controls a tap for reverse, and he abruptly tumbled away from the conduit, pulling the upper half of the dead Cardassian with him.

At the very same moment, Rom's renewed screaming in O'Brien's helmet informed him that Rom had discovered where the missing legs were.

He could see it for himself.

The corpse he'd been reaching for was only half there.

Severed at the waist, the truncated body spun around in empty space, slipping away from the conduit with the momentum O'Brien had transferred to it.

And the fate of the lower half was now apparent.

All that remained of it was a shiny discolored patch of merged flesh and metal on the inner hull of the conduit.

The lower half of the Cardassian's body had been fused within the metal hull plate of the station.

No wonder Dax couldn't get a clear lock on them, O'Brien thought. The poor devil must have been

caught in the worst kind of transporter malfunction imaginable.

So bad that fifteen separate fail-safe systems made certain that such a tragedy could never happen by accident.

Which meant only one thing to O'Brien, as the gigantic station wheeled around his tumbling form.

Odo had two more murders to investigate.

CHAPTER 6

.an entire world lay before Captain Benjamin Sisko.

Its visage was smooth and pristine, like the all-enshrouding ice caps of a frozen planet. And its unmarked surface held no hidden secrets, nothing lost or obscured in deep caves or folded valleys.

Only smooth, featureless mountains broke the Pla-lonic ideal of that perfect sphere. One long, unending line of regular red stitches, interlocking the two halves of the skin of the world to make a single whole.

Yet from that unblemished perfection, from that balanced mass and absolute symmetry, unending diversity was born in unending combination. Like an omega particle exploding to become an entire universe of possibilities in which—

"Captain Sisko ... ?"

Sisko looked up from the baseball he held in his hand to glance across his desk. He saw the questioning

expression in Commander Aria Rees's eyes and instantly knew this was no time for excuses. This very serious young Bajoran Starfleet officer deserved the absolute truth.

"I apologize, Commander. I must have tuned you out and—"

"That's quite all right, sir. I read the report of your mission to save Captain Cusak. I understand it might take time to recover from such an encounter."

Sisko regarded the attractive young commander with new interest. He had returned from the Defiant's latest patrol—and the mission to save Cusak—to find that Starfleet had unexpectedly assigned him a new second-in-command to coordinate with Major Kira.

Kira's reaction had been explosive. She believed Starfleet was passing judgment on her performance, or the perceived lack of it. Fortunately, Sisko had been able to quickly confirm that Commander Aria was here only on temporary assignment. After more than a decade of intricate negotiation and elaborate construction, the Farpoint Starbase on Deneb IV was finally about to be activated and Aria was slated for the number-two position on the base's command staff. Given the complexities of Starfleet's relationship with the Bandi of Deneb IV, the staffing wizards at headquarters had decided that Aria could benefit from experiencing life on DS9, a living laboratory of cross-cultural complexity.

She 'II need the benefit of a few other experiences, too, if she's to survive out here, Sisko thought as he contemplated the Bajoran newcomer before him, whose sharp edges had yet to be blunted by the realities of routine. But he remembered what he had been like when he was a freshly minted commander. He was

willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Jean-Luc Picard had done the same for him when Sisko had taken this assignment, though the captain of the Enterprise might not have realized it at the time.

"Thank you, Commander," Sisko said. "But that's no excuse for not listening to your report."

Aria offered him a padd. "You could read it later."

Sisko was tempted. The last thing he needed to hear right now was yet another report on Starfleet-Bajoran cultural referents in the workplace. But why was Commander Aria suggesting that she would be willing to forgo the official schedule? The scuttlebutt had it that Aria wasn't allowing anyone on the station to bypass standing Starfleet orders. Why was she willing to bend the rules for him?

"I appreciate the offer," Sisko said. He put his baseball back in its display stand on his desk and pushed it away so he wouldn't be tempted to reach for it again. "But you've worked hard on that report. I would like to hear it."

Aria nodded, and looked back to the padd, as if trying to find her place. Sisko was momentarily caught by the particularly elegant line of the epinasal folds on the bridge of her nose. There was a slight downward curve to them, which gave her an intriguing expression, as if she had just thought of a sly joke and was keeping it to herself.

Careful, Sisko cautioned himself. She had looked up without warning and caught him staring. Second time in this meeting alone.

"Captain? Is there something you wanted to say?"

Sisko shook his head, making a deliberate attempt to ignore her expression of shy amusement. "Please— continue." Then he leaned back in his broad-backed

chair, tugged down on Ms jacket, and forced himself to listen to every word Aria Rees had to say about the time-and-motion modification studies that had arisen from observations of Bajoran and Starfleet personnel working together.

Regrettably, but inevitably, the thirty-minute presentation was followed by Aria's suggestions for overcoming the perceived difficulties of human-Bajoran interactions. Sisko struggled to give his full attention to each of her recommendations before responding.

"Very clearly thought out," he announced when she had finished. And he meant it. The new commander's report revealed exceptional intelligence. For just the briefest of instants, Sisko felt a rush of pride in knowing that someone with the potential of Aria Rees— who could have chosen virtually any career in the galaxy—had been inspired to join Starfleet.

"Thank you, sir."

"A most thorough analysis of the existing literature as well."

Aria's smile was tremulous, expectant.

Sisko wondered how far he'd have to go with this. "I'll definitely circulate it among the command staff." That should do it, he thought.

"And ..." Aria prompted.

"And ... I'll ask them to read it." Sisko didn't know what else she wanted of him.

Well, obviously that wasn't it, he thought as he saw Aria's crestfallen expression.

"Shouldn't we have a general meeting of all command staff to discuss implementing my changes? Sir."

Sisko leaned forward, trying to find the best possible way to put what he knew he had to say.

"Commander, truthfully, those are all very insightful

observations about working conditions on DS9. And your suggestions for improving things are just... fine. But they're not necessary." Before Aria could respond, Sisko quickly added. "And more than that, they won't work. Can't work."

The dismayed young commander shook her head as if to be sure she had heard him properly, making the chain of her single silver earring sway against her olive-gold cheek.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but how can you know without trying?"

Sisko firmly reclaimed his usual air of detachment, settled back in his chair with a patient smile. "I have tried them, Commander. Everything you've suggested and more. And really, when it comes down to a choice between forcing everyone to do their work according to Starfleet's textbook definition of perfection, or having everyone do their work in their own way, with respect for other people's traditions and work habits, I have found it's better for people to find their own way than to have it forced upon them by an unseen bureaucracy."

Aria's chin lifted, in a way that reminded Sisko of Major Kira when she was not at all convinced of someone else's argument. "But sir, the literature clearly suggests ways that humans and Bajorans could be more efficient as team workers."

With a sigh, Sisko rose to his feet and waved a hand past the closed doors of his office, down the stairs to the lower level of Ops. "I have no doubt that's true, Commander—for humans and Bajorans. But look out there. What about Commander Worf? Commander Dax? And I have a half-dozen other races staffing this station. Should we make Bolians adhere to some form

of Bajoran-human work ethic? Should we force Martians to celebrate the Bajoran Days of Atonement instead of Colonial Independence Day?"

Aria's almond-brown eyes met his. "Well actually, sir, one of my suggestions is that all group religious celebrations be banned from the station. Not personal expressions of faith," she hastily amended, as his look of consternation and lack of comprehension registered on her. "I'm not suggesting that. But for the good of the group, religious events really have no place in what is, after all, a military environment—which is what DS9 will be for the duration of the Dominion War."

Sisko concentrated on keeping his voice calm in the face of Aria's surprisingly insensitive conclusion. "Commander, war or no war, this station is first and foremost a civilian installation run by the Bajoran government. Starfleet's presence as an administrative authority is temporary, and strictly limited to security operations. In no way would we ever infringe on the religious rights of any culture—which makes your suggestion totally out of line."

Aria's face reddened. "Sir, I'm not suggesting Starfleet outlaw religion, just relegate it to private expression, off-duty. I... I don't think there's anything out of line with my suggestion."

"No," Sisko said slowly. "Not as a suggestion. But what surprises me, frankly, is that you—a Bajoran— are making it."

"We're not all religious fan—" and Aria hesitated, apparently rethinking her choice of words. "We're not all religious to the same degree, sir."

"So it would seem."

"I don't mean to offend you, sir. I mean, I know that

many Bajorans believe that the wormhole aliens you've encountered are their Prophets."

"And you don't," Sisko said, not bothering to make it a question.

"Sir, with all due respect, I'd be much more inclined to believe that the Bajoran wormhole was a celestial temple if it didn't form with verteron nodes. I mean, if it's truly a home for gods, shouldn't it operate outside the normal laws of physics, instead of appearing as a natural phenomenon?"

Sisko sat down again and reached out for his baseball. He decided he was going to have to take a closer look at Commander Aria Rees's personnel file. He had met many Bajorans, with many different degrees of belief and many different traditions of worship. But he had never met one who so obviously rejected the idea that the beings in the wormhole were the Prophets.

"I have heard that argument," Sisko said, noncom-mittally, tossing the baseball from one hand to another while he waited to see what else the surprising young Bajoran would come up with.

Aria didn't keep him waiting, apparently most reluctant to accept such a neutral stance from him.

"Sir, do you believe the wormhole aliens are the Prophets? I mean, I know some people call you the Emissary, and I don't mean to offend you, but... you're an educated man."

"And as such," Sisko said lightly, "My eyes are open to the full range of wonder the universe contains."

Aria's spontaneous smile was full of quick, responsive humor. "You're not answering my question, sir."

Sisko stopped playing games. He placed his hands together as he thought for a moment. "Very well. What do I personally believe? I am sure there are entities

who live in the wormhole. I have no doubt that these entities are the source of the Orbs which have had such a profound effect on your people's history and culture. I have no doubt that these entities are, indeed, what the Bajoran people call their Prophets. And I have no doubt that the Prophets are inextricably involved in the fate of your people."

"That's still not an answer." Now Aria, too, spoke in earnest. "And the question is so simple. Are... they ... gods?"

"A wise man once said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Why should it be indistinguishable from the works of gods, Commander?"

"Sir, don't you think there's a difference—a profound difference—between having the attributes of a god, and being a god?"

If you only knew how many times I've asked myself that same question, Sisko thought wearily. "Yes," he said. "I do."

At that, Aria shot him a quick, almost triumphant look from beneath her improbably thick fringe of eyelashes. "So—what is the answer to my question?"

Sisko suddenly felt the need to bring an end to their conversation. "In all honesty, I don't know."

Sisko could see this disconcerting young woman didn't want their meeting to end with that pronouncement. But he could also see that she understood he did not wish to continue on this topic.

So, instead, she turned abruptly to look out the viewports in the main doors. Beyond her, in Ops, Starfleet uniforms mingled chaotically with Bajoran.

She glanced back at him. "So, ten races?"

Sisko reminded himself of his earlier resolve to give

the young commander the benefit of the doubt. In her way she was, perhaps, trying to change the subject, to bring their discussion back to the work at hand. "And that doesn't count the civilian staff," he said.

Aria turned away from the viewports, glanced down at her padd, then hugged it close to her, as if she no longer had any intention of turning it over to him.

"I'm sorry, Captain Sisko," she said quietly. "It's all new to me but I was just... trying to help."

"Believe me, Commander, I understand."

Aria took an impulsive step closer to his desk, and Sisko couldn't help noticing that the young commander's stiff military bearing, formerly so reminiscent of Kira's, had suddenly relaxed. "You do understand, don't you," she said with an open, frank look of approval that reminded Sisko of earlier days, of his youth, when he too had been capable of uncomplicated emotion. "I... I felt you would from the moment I met you."

Sisko might have been distracted before, but he was on full alert right now. There was only one way of dealing with what was happening, what might happen. "We should have dinner," he announced, rising to his feet to meet her gaze directly, though he had to look up to do so. The young Bajoran was a half head taller than he.

Aria's smile of pleasure was instantaneous. "I'd like that."

"So would I. I'd like you to meet two very important people in my life. My son, Jake, and Captain Kasidy Yates."

Aria regarded him quizzically. "I don't remember a captain of that name from the Starfleet personnel lists."

"Ah," Sisko said, as he stepped around his desk and toward the main doors, moving close enough to trigger their sensors. "That's because Kasidy is a civilian. A merchant captain." The doors slid open and the noise of Ops filled Sisko's office like a current of power. "She is also the woman I love," Sisko added deliberately, knowing no better way to set the record straight than by a blunt statement of the facts.

He was greatly relieved to see Aria's shoulders come back into square and her posture return to that of an officer. "I look forward to meeting them both," she said politely.

"I'll check with Kasidy, but I believe tomorrow night is open."

Aria stood beside Sisko at the top of the stairs to his office. She handed him her padd after all, and as he took it, her long, slender fingers for the briefest of instants grazed his, generating a current of another kind. 'Tomorrow night," she said.

Startled by his own response, Sisko took the padd, promptly removing his hand from contact with Aria's. He was about to dismiss her when his communicator chirped, followed by a familiar voice.

"Bashir to Sisko."

Sisko tapped his communicator. "Go ahead, Doctor."

"I've completed my preliminary scan of the two bodies Chief O'Brien found."

Sisko could sense Bashir's unspoken conviction that his captain wasn't going to like what he heard next.

"What's the bad news?" Sisko asked.

"The Chief was right," Bashir answered. "I'd say we're looking at two more murders. And at least from

a preliminary analysis, it appears both were killed by the same type of weapon that killed the Andorian."

Sisko's jaw tightened, and he felt his back stiffen as he reached a conclusion he suspected Bashir was about to share with him. "I see. Does Quark have a connection to the Cardassians?"

"I've asked Odo to bring him over to the Infirmary. I think you should be here."

"On my way, Doctor." Sisko paused for a moment, and then made a sudden decision. "Speaking of inter-species relations, Commander Aria, have you ever seen a changeling and a Ferengi interact?"

"Oil and water?" she asked.

Sisko shook his head. "Matter and antimatter. And you're about to experience it first-hand."

CHAPTER 7

"quark, quark, quark ..." The expression in Sisko's eyes revealed such an unsettling combination of exasperation and pity that Quark couldn't hold the captain's gaze. Instead, he glanced furtively around the infirmary to avoid it—but everyone else present was looking at him too.

Everyone except the two very dead Cardassians on the examination table.

What was left of them.

"Can't you ... cover them up or something?" Quark finally asked. "It's disgusting."

"Hmm," Odo said.

"What 'hmm'?" Quark demanded. "And don't say it's another sign of a guilty conscience. I've never seen them before. My conscience isn't guilty."

"I wasn't aware you had one," Odo said.

"Besides, Quark," Dr. Julian Bashir added, looking

up from his continuing inspection of the corpses, "after being blasted with microwaves, transporter-fused to hull metal, and exposed to vacuum for a few years, these two are so mummified that one of them could be Garak and you wouldn't be able to recognize him."

"However," Garak added with a polite cough from his position overlooking Bashir's shoulder, "one hastens to add that a simple process of elimination should serve to confirm that I am not one of the dear departed."

With open-mouthed disbelief, Quark watched the decidedly striking new Bajoran Starfleet officer who had entered the Infirmary with Captain Sisko turn to address DS9's sole Cardassian inhabitant. "Oh, are you Garak?" She held out her hand. "I'm Commander Aria. I've heard so much about you."

After a moment's hesitation, Garak shook the Bajoran officer's hand as if it were coated with a Brigellian nerve toxin. "I'm sure you have."

"Excuse me," Quark interrupted, "but can we get back to me for a minute?"

"That depends," Odo said gruffly. "Are you ready to make a confession?"

"That's it! That is absolutely it!" Quark bared his artfully stained fangs, which had cost his parents a small fortune in orthodontic bills to twist into such Ferengi perfection. "You people—oh, you take the spore pie, all of you. Two nights ago, an unexplained death, and what do you do? You play Let's Blame the Ferengi! And now, two more unexplained deaths— from ten years ago—and what do you do? The same thing! Well, I'm sick of it." He jabbed an accusatory finger at Odo. "I'm sick of being your one-size-fits-all

answer to crime on DS9!" Then he pointed at Sisko. "And I'm fed up with Starfleet not standing up to Odo's lax standards and sloppy investigations!"

Odo bristled with predictable indignation. "Let's talk about 'sloppy' after we've discussed those Denevan crystals you sold to the Nausicaan last Saturday night. You thought I didn't know, didn't you?"

"Arrrghh! You're doing it again! Changing the subject! Every time I make a point in my own defense, it's as if you people don't even want to pretend you've heard me."

Quark turned to Captain Sisko. "When the Cardassians withdrew, you were the one who wanted me to stay on this station as an example to others. To keep the community together."

"As I recall," Sisko said calmly, "first I had to threaten to put Nog in jail."

Quark waved his hand dismissively. "Negotiations. That's all that was. The point is, I stayed, didn't I? Even in the middle of this war, the Promenade is thriving. Do you have any problem hiring workers to live on board these days? No. Because I've done exactly what you wanted me to do."

"Let's not forget you made considerable profit at the same time," Major Kira said pointedly.

Quark felt as if he were in a shuttle spiraling out of control. "Of course I'm in it for profit! I'm a businessman! But there are rules to business!"

"Two hundred and eighty-five. Isn't that right, Quark? Some of which have never been revealed to a non-Ferengi." Odo's condescendingly snide tone was utterly maddening to Quark.

Quark was so overcome by frustration, his voice almost rose to shouting level. "When the Dominion

took over this station, I could have made immense profit by turning in the major and... and your son, Captain ... and everyone else working in the Resistance. I could have become an honorary Vorta and ended up with a ship made of latinum. But I stayed here and I risked my life—and my business—for you people! And this—this is how you repay me. You should all be ashamed of yourselves."

This time, there was only silence in the Infirmary. Quark straightened his jacket, wondering if it just might be possible that he had finally managed to get through to these small-lobed, microencephalic aliens.

And then Sisko ruined it all by saying, "Why ten years?"

Quark sighed. "Didn't you hear a word I said?"

"Every one of them," Sisko confirmed. "And the two that concern me are 'ten years.' How do you know when these two Cardassians were killed?"

Quark's ridged brow crinkled in puzzlement. "Isn't... isn't that what Dr. Bashir said? That they were killed during the Occupation? That was ten years ago."

'Technically," Kira said, "the Occupation spans anywhere from six to sixty-six years ago. Though the station wasn't built until twenty-four years ago."

"All right!" Quark sputtered. "I confess! I took a number out of thin air! I was confused! I suppose the almighty Federation has laws against Ferengi businessmen being confused and I deserve everything I've got coming to me!"

"Calm down, Quark," Bashir said. "You're jumping to far too many conclusions."

"Me?!"

Bashir nodded. "The only reason I've called every-

one in here is to see if we can't get some answers." He turned to Garak, who was still hovering behind the examination table on which the Cardassian corpses were displayed. "Garak, may I call upon your expertise?"

Garak regarded the doctor warily, the reptilian gray nobs of his forehead bunching together in deep furrows. "Oh, Doctor, I'm afraid that in matters of mysterious deaths, I am entirely bereft of experience."

Quark took some comfort in noting that no one in the Infirmary appeared to believe Garak any more than they appeared to believe him.

"I was speaking of your expertise as a tailor," Bashir clarified.

Now smiling expansively, Garak nodded graciously. "But of course. You'd like me to examine the clothes these two are wearing."

"Please," Bashir said. "They're carrying no artifacts, no currency, weapons, I.D. rods ... all they have is their clothes."

Without further hesitation, Garak bent over the table as if he saw such grotesquely mutilated bodies every day of his life. The only reason Quark watched what happened next was because the thought had occurred to him that his freedom might be dependent on the outcome of Garak's examination.

Garak's sharp gaze traveled from one wizened corpse to the next. One body—the one truncated at the waist—was clothed in an undistinguished tunic of brown fabric. The other body, which had been severed approximately at the knees, wore a similar garment, this time of blue.

Quark held his position as Garak picked up a pair of medical tongs from the side of the examination table

and pushed them through the slightly elastic resistance of the medical containment field that surrounded the bodies. No doubt Bashir had set up the field more to protect the sensibilities of his visitors than out of concern for medical contamination. That simple act, however, released a sudden and most unpleasant odor of charred flesh mixed with the sickly-sweet-smelling antiseptic spray the doctor had used to coat the bodies. Quark turned away, coughing and gagging, noticing that even the doctor held a hand against his mouth.

Garak, however, appeared impervious to the stench. Concentrating on his task, he delicately nudged the head of the body in the brown suit. Quark's eyes narrowed. The Cardassian tailor's handling of the tongs made it seem as if he was quite experienced with autopsy procedures. "Ah, here's your first clue, Doctor, and one doesn't have to be a tailor to see it."

Quark stopped breathing so he could take a closer glance at the gruesome mess on the table. He stepped back quickly, having seen nothing that told him what Garak was talking about. From his expression, neither had Bashir.

"His hair," Garak said. "See how long it is? The way it's tied? Very characteristic. This man was a soldier in the Invidian Battalion. They managed the southern provinces."

"Managed?" Kira repeated angrily. "They were a death squad."

Sisko put a hand on Kira's shoulder as if passing her an unspoken signal. "Then why is he in civilian clothes?" he asked.

Hew-mons, Quark thought, with a shake of his head. Always changing the subject.

"Perhaps he died on his day off," Garak said lightly,

directing his answer to Kira. "Whatever his reason for choosing this attire, I'm sure his DNA profile will be on file at Central Records. Determining his identity should make it easier to discover his date of death."

"What about the other one?" Bashir asked.

Garak glanced over at the slightly more complete body in the blue tunic. He used the tongs to lift up a tattered flap of cloth from the corpse's chest. "This one ... I believe he might have been in a struggle. See how the fabric is torn on the shoulder?"

Now everyone crowded around the table to verify the tear in the body's tunic, then just as quickly reeled back. With all of Garak's movement through the surface of the medical containment field, the distressingly sweet, cloying odors of death and disinfectant had become even stronger.

"Any way of dating the clothes?" Bashir asked, with a hand shielding his nose. "The width of the lapels? Length of the sleeves?"

Garak cocked his head, as if puzzled. "Fashion is more a function of geography than time, Doctor. What is stylish on one world is hopelessly garish on the next. There are colony worlds in the Union right now where this brown tunic would be the latest word in male furnishings. And other worlds where a man wearing anything blue would be arrested for disrupting public morals."

"Can you at least make a guess as to where the clothes were made?"

Still holding the torn shoulder fabric in the tongs, Garak frowned in disapproval. "I'm afraid this tunic was replicated. It could come from thousands—tens of thousands of different suppliers across the quadrant." He released the fabric remnant, then turned his atten-

tion to the second corpse's brown tunic with an approving smile. "Ahh, but this is—or at least was—a hand-tailored garment of the finest quality." With his customary, fastidious touch, he manipulated the tongs to open up the tunic to examine its lining. "It should be possible to trace the fabric, and from there...." Garak froze.

"Do you see something?" Bashir asked, though everyone, including Quark was aware that something had shocked the Cardassian tailor into utter stillness.

"The lining." The tone of Garak's voice seemed oddly flat to Quark.

The doctor looked over Garak's shoulder. "What about it?"

"I often used this fabric myself. It's from a very small mill on Argellius II. I... look at the exquisite workmanship of that cross-stitching ... oh my." Garak looked up at the curious faces of the people who surrounded him. "This is one of mine."

"That's an enormous help," Bashir said to Garak. 'Isn't it?"

"I'm... not absolutely certain that's true," Garak replied, almost haltingly.

Quark couldn't remain silent any longer. Did he have to do everything himself? "Are you kidding? The kind of records the Cardassians keep put Ferengi records to shame. And I guarantee you, if I had sold someone a hand-tailored suit twenty years ago, I'd still know the name of his mate, his offspring, and his pet vole."

Whatever honest reflection of mood that had been revealed in Garak's face disappeared as quickly as if an Ark had been closed on an Orb of the Prophets. From across the examination table, Garak delivered a

withering cold glare in Quark's direction. "Ordinarily, I might say that the random sand scratchings of an unhatched krimanganee would put Ferengi records to shame, but alas, this is not the time for banter." Resentfully, Quark noted how the Cardassian tailor softened his expression as he turned to Bashir. "And again, ordinarily, I would have to agree with you, Doctor. It should be a simple matter to discover to whom I sold this tunic, because I, too, never forget a customer." Garak's face showed he was as in the dark as they were. "Unfortunately, though, it appears I have forgotten this one."

Kira voiced the next logical question before Quark could shout it out. "Is it possible someone else bought the tunic and gave it to this man as a gift? Or that he stole it?"

"No, no, Major, you misunderstand," Garak said with an exaggerated display of patience. "Obviously, I could not remember this customer by his features, given the condition he's in. What I meant to say is, I have no recollection of selling this tunic to anyone. In fact, I have no recollection of even making it. Yet it is unquestionably my handiwork."

While everyone else looked mystified, Quark suddenly saw the pattern that was emerging from the void of confusion. But before he could act to confirm his suspicions, he saw Odo looking thoughtfully at Garak.

Aha, Quark thought, Odo sees it, too.

The changeling's next question was proof enough.

"Garak, is it possible that you made or sold this tunic about the time of the Withdrawal?"

'The lining fabric is old enough. It's ... possible," the tailor admitted.

But Quark had no intention of standing idly by

while Odo proceeded with his typically, time-consuming, step-by-step approach to an investigation. It was as if the changeling had never heard of the 9th Rule and the value of acting on raw instinct.

"Garak," Quark quickly said, "tell me—can you remember anything that happened on the Day of Withdrawal?"

"Of course," Garak said forcefully. "Every detail. Why are you smiling at me like that?"

Quark shot a sideways glance at Odo. The changeling was frowning, but Quark knew it was for the same reason that he himself smiled.

Garak was lying.

And Quark and Odo knew it.

"Would you like to try answering that again?" Odo asked Garak.

Garak looked at Quark, looked back to Odo, drew himself up rigidly. "I would not. And now, since I appear to have answered everything I can about these garments, I have a business to attend to."

Then Garak turned and left the Infirmary without another word.

Quark grinned at Odo, daring him to tell the others about what they both knew to be true. "See? The same thing happened to him."

"Am I the only one who's missing the point of this conversation?" Sisko asked.

Odo said nothing so Quark moved immediately to exploit the changeling's reluctance. "Captain," he announced, "allow me. Because unlike Odo, / have nothing to hide. You see, neither Odo nor I can recall anything about what happened to us on the Day of Withdrawal. And I think it's obvious that Garak doesn't remember anything, either."

"It was a long time ago," Sisko said.

"Not to me," Kira interrupted.

"Not to any Bajoran," Commander Aria added.

"And certainly not to any Cardassian," Quark said, "or Ferengi, or changeling who was on the station at the time. I'd say we've got a real mystery brewing here."

Sisko rubbed at his goatee. Quark suppressed a shudder of distaste. Even though the captain had worn the look for several years now, Quark still thought it made him look half-Klingon. "Quark, why am I feeling that you're changing the subject now?"

"It's the same subject, Captain. Two Cardassians dead from ten—I mean six years ago. An Andorian dead today. Dr. Bashir says everyone was killed by the same type of microwave energy discharge. Now what you have to do is find someone with a link to all three victims."

"We have," Odo said firmly. "You."

Quark turned in a full circle, appealing to the rest of them. "Does anyone else find it suspicious that Odo is going out of his way to blame these murders on me?"

Odo leaned forward and put his hands on the edge of the examination table. "You're heading into dangerous territory, Quark."

"See?" Quark said to Sisko. "See how defensive he is?"

Odo's voice actually shook with anger. "Quark, I'm warning you...."

But, undaunted, Quark pressed the attack. "So, where were you on the Day of Withdrawal, Odo? In fact, where were you when Dal Nortron was killed? By a weapon that couldn't be detected by your own security scanners, I might add."

"That's it! You're going back to your cell." The changeling made a move as if to vault over the examination table and its grisly contents.

To Quark's relief, Sisko intervened again. He held up a hand. "That's enough, Constable. This is an open investigation."

"Not with Odo in charge," Quark complained through clenched teeth. He turned to Sisko. "Captain, I formally request you take him off this case because of conflict of interest. He should be a suspect, too."

"I will do no such thing. As far as I'm concerned, I agree with Dr. Bashir. Too many people are jumping to too many conclusions on too little information." Sisko looked at the doctor. "I want you to prepare complete DNA profiles for these two bodies so we can identify them."

"Through Cardassian Central Records?" Bashir asked.

"That's right."

"I'll prepare the records," Bashir said, "but aren't we at war with the Cardassians?"

"For humanitarian purposes, Starfleet and the Cardassian Union have established unofficial lines of communication to facilitate the identification of war dead and the repatriation of remains. You give me the profiles, I'll handle the rest."

Then Sisko faced Odo. "As for you, Constable, I want a complete report on Dal Nortron's death on my desk within the hour. And I don't want to read any conclusions not supported by incontrovertible evidence. Is that understood?"

Odo's initial reply was terse. "Yes." But then he continued. "Unfortunately, I will not be able to provide

a complete report because Quark has refused to cooperate with my investigation."

"Is that right, Quark?

Quark squirmed under Sisko's intent gaze, but he remained defiant. "Why should I cooperate?" Quark said. "Odo's not interested in the truth."

The captain's reply was so loud, it echoed off the hard surfaces of the Infirmary walls and ceiling, and Quark reflexively covered his sensitive ear channels to protect them from the assault. "I am tired of this game you two are playing. Even if you don't think Odo's interested in the truth, you can be certain I am. Cooperate."

Quark knew a bluff when he heard one. "You can't order me to do anything," he countered.

"You're absolutely right," Sisko agreed. "But what I can do is decide that neither Bajor nor Starfleet has jurisdiction over the death of two Cardassian nationals. Which means, I could turn over these bodies to the Cardassians, along with our prime suspect, and let them settle this matter."

Quark swallowed. Hard.

"The choice is yours, Quark," the captain concluded. "You can either cooperate with Odo, or you can 'cooperate' with the Cardassians."

Quark frantically sought to extract some benefit from a deal he knew he would be forced to accept. "All right, but I want Odo to release me from custody, and to provide me with a bodyguard."

The look on Sisko's face told Quark that was the last thing he had expected the Ferengi to say. "What do you need a bodyguard for?"

"Dal Nortron's partners," Quark said. "The Andorian sisters."

Sisko looked at Odo for clarification.

"Their names are Satr and Leen. They claim to be representatives of a trade mission from Andor so they have limited diplomatic immunity. They both believe Quark murdered Nortron and have filed for the Andorian Rite of Kanlee."

"And just what is the Andorian Rite of Kanlee?" Sisko asked.

"Roughly translated," Quark said darkly, "it means kill the Ferengi."

Odo ignored the interruption. "It's an old Andorian tradition," the changeling told Sisko. "They believe Quark killed Nortron. To maintain the balance of good and evil in the universe, they want to kill him. They are ... a passionate people."

For a very long moment, Sisko stared at Quark, and Quark could tell the captain was making his decision. Quark felt almost sure he could predict what it was going to be.

"Here's my offer, Quark. You cooperate with Odo in the investigation of Dal Nortron's death, answer all the questions he asks, and instead of being confined to your cell, you'll be under station arrest, with a bodyguard."

Sisko's terms were exactly what Quark had expected. He took it as a minor victory. "Thank you, Captain."

But also as he expected, Odo didn't approve. "What about the murder of these two Cardassians?"

"For now," Sisko said, "I'll handle that investigation." He glanced around the Infirmary once, as if to make sure no one else had anything to say, then concluded, "I think we're finished here."

"But—but—" Quark protested, "what about the Day of Withdrawal?"

"One investigation at a time," Sisko told him. The captain looked back at the incomplete bodies of the unknown Cardassians. "This is one mystery where time is no longer of the essence." Sisko then nodded at Kira and the new Bajoran officer. "Major Kira, Commander Aria, you're with me." Then the captain and the two Bajoran officers left the infirmary.

Odo gestured sarcastically toward the door. "Come along, Quark. You're with me."

But it appeared Dr. Bashir wasn't quite finished with either of them. "Just a minute, you two. Is it true what you both said about not being able to remember what happened on the Day of Withdrawal?"

"A complete blank," Quark said emphatically. "I remember starting to pack up the breakables in the bar when the first reports of the troop transport launches started coming through ... and then ... next thing I knew, Rom and Nog found me asleep in the storage room and it was the next day."

Bashir looked at Odo. "How about you, Constable?"

"Nothing so mysterious," the changeling growled. "I've been thinking more about it, and I do remember breaking up a fight outside the chemist's shop. I was obviously hit by phaser fire, and woke up a day later when the Bajoran provisionals arrived."

"You're sure that's what happened?" Bashir asked. "I mean, someone saw you get shot, or you confirmed there was a fight at the chemists?"

Odo nodded. "Now that you mention it, yes. I do recall looking into it over the next few days. When the fighting broke out, I went to the Promenade, and the next thing I knew I was waking up and the whole thing was over—the withdrawal, Gul Dukat's departure, I missed it all."

Quark hid a smile of victory. Odo had just told his biggest lie of the day—one that would be easy to disprove. At a time when it would be most profitable to do so, that is.

"Well," Bashir said, "a phaser stun would certainly explain a loss of short-term memory."

But Quark wasn't willing to let Odo escape so easily. "Tell me, Doctor, would Odo's getting hit by phaser fire explain why / don't remember what happened that day? Or why Garak doesn't remember?"

Bashir looked confused. "Garak said he remembered everything perfectly."

Quark rolled his eyes at the doctor's incredible gullibility. "Dr. Bashir, Garak says he's a tailor. You don't believe that, do you?"

Bashir hesitated, then apparently decided to sidestep Quark's question. "There are techniques available, completely harmless, that I can use to see if either of you—or Garak—might be suffering from some type of post-traumatic stress syndrome, perhaps causing you to block out some kind of unpleasant memory of the Day of Withdrawal. I'd be happy to ... see if I could help."

"Thank you, Doctor," Odo said. "But I doubt if I have anything to remember other than being in a phaser coma."

"I'll get back to you," Quark said drily. He would need many more details about how Bashir's techniques worked before he allowed himself to be in a position where someone might have access to his safe combinations and account passwords.

Bashir seemed disappointed by Quark's and Odo's lack of enthusiasm for his suggestion. "Well, you know where I am."

With that, Odo escorted Quark from the Infirmary, and they both made their way along the Promenade to the Security Office. Quark was only too glad to leave the unsettling smell of death and disinfectant and return to the bustling life of commerce the Promenade represented. Appreciatively, he sniffed the sweet tang of frozen jutnja mixed with the incense from the Bajoran Temple, all overlaid with the exotic perfumes of twice a dozen worlds. It all was pure magic to Quark. Because to him, the combination of all these scents from all these potential customers gathered together to shop in one place invariably coalesced into the sweetest scent of all—latinum.

His snug jacket expanded to the breaking point as he breathed in deeply, happily. Then he saw the crowds in his bar to the left and instantly his sense of well-being evaporated. His eyes widened in alarm. There was no way his idiot brother Rom could handle that kind of crowd. He started toward the entrance. "I'm just going to check in with—"

But Odo grabbed him by the ear. "After you've 'cooperated,' " he hissed, and pulled Quark after him.

It was only with immense effort that Quark kept himself from squealing in public. Odo knew how much that hurt. But Quark continued without protest, because in just those few seconds he had had to look in through the main entrance to his bar he had seen three people who he did not want to notice him in his current state of custody.

Two of the people were those Andorian sisters, together at a small table and leaning so close together in intent and sibilant conversation that their blue antennae almost touched.

But the third person, sitting at the bar, trying and

failing to look interested as Morn prattled on and on and on to her, was far more important to avoid than either of the Andorians.

She was Vash, a human female who had traveled the galaxy not only with Jean-Luc Picard of the Enterprise but with the unfathomable entity known only as Q. She was also Quark's favorite archaeologist—the one potential business partner he constantly thought of with real regret, as the one who got away.

And if Vash had returned to Deep Space 9 ahead of schedule, then Quark had no doubt that the news of Dal Nortron's untimely end had already spread across the quadrant—and all of Quark's other 'special' customers were already on their way.

Unfortunately, for that exact same reason—Dal Nortron's death—Quark had been left with nothing to sell.

Which meant that over the next few days, the Andorian sisters were not the only ones on Deep Space 9 who'd be looking to kill a certain Ferengi barkeep.

CHAPTER 8

"ALL right," Sisko said to Kira and Aria as the turbolift began its short trip from the Promenade to the Operations Center, "who wants to start? The Day of Withdrawal."

Kira looked at Aria, who shook her head. "It only took a day on DS9," Kira said. "But it was more like a week of withdrawal on Bajor. The Cardassians pulled back to their garrisons and the spaceports in stages." She paused for a moment, clearly remembering scenes of devastating destruction, then doggedly continued. "Burning the villages, poisoning the land and the rivers. For the first few days, the Resistance didn't know it was happening everywhere. Each cell thought it was seeing the leadup to a concentrated regional bombing attack. The Cardassians had done that sort of thing before."

The lift rose up through the final deck and, as

always, Sisko felt a familiar sense of coming home. Ops was the heart of Deep Space 9, as much so as the bridge of a Starship. Even the harsh angles and bare metal of its towering Cardassian components had become an oddly welcoming sight to him.

He exited the lift car with Kira and Aria close behind him and headed off in the direction of the science station, where Jadzia was on duty. She was running a metallurgical analysis on her screens.

"Dax," Sisko said, "join us." He nodded at the short flight of stairs leading to his office. Jadzia rose from her station to follow him at once.

As Sisko started up those stairs, he asked Kira if she could remember exactly where she had been on the Day of Withdrawal.

She shook her head with a rueful smile. "I missed it. Twenty years in the Resistance, and the week the Cardassians left I was in a triage center in Dahkur, burning with fever and pretty much delirious. Lake flu. It swept through the whole province that year."

"No lasting effects, I hope."

Kira shrugged. "So do I."

Behind them, Jadzia stepped through the entrance-way, and the doors to Sisko's office slid shut.

"What about you, Commander?" Sisko asked Aria. He was pleased to see that whatever air of over-familiarity she had exhibited an hour ago, she was keeping it in check now.

"Oh, I was on the Solok."

Sisko hadn't recalled that posting from his quick glance at the Bajoran newcomer's file. "The Vulcan science vessel?"

Aria nodded. "We were at Qo'noS. A very dull assignment to remap the Praxis Ring."

"So, you weren't involved in any of the events of Withdrawal either?"

Kira broke in. "She wasn't involved in the Occupation. Period."

As if a ship had just decloaked before him, Sisko was suddenly aware of the tension between the two Bajoran officers, and realized with a start that it had been there since he had first seen them meet.

He exchanged a quick glance with Jadzia and her subtle nod confirmed that she saw the same animosity. Sisko wondered how he had missed it. But he could guess what was behind it.

"Is that right?" he asked in as neutral a fashion as he could.

Aria kept her eyes on him, ignoring Kira. "My grandparents lived on B'hal Ta. A Bajoran colony world. When the Cardassians annexed Bajor, my family was able to relocate to New Sydney. That's where I was born."

"You were fortunate," Sisko said. He decided that that accident of fate was more than enough reason to account for the major's feelings toward Aria Rees. He knew that there were those on Bajor—especially those who had served in the Resistance like Kira—who believed that expatriate Bajorans who had not suffered through the Occupation, and who had not voluntarily returned to their homeworld or taken up arms against Cardassia, were only one step removed from being collaborators.

"Yes, sir, very fortunate."

Sisko decided to bring the conversation back to the less-controversial present. "So, from your experience, Major, and from any research you might have done, Commander, can you think of any reason why person-

nel on board DS9 on the Day of Withdrawal might have suffered from memory loss, selective or otherwise?"

"Benjamin?" Jadzia asked. "Who's suffering from memory loss?"

Sisko quickly summarized for his old friend Quark's claim to be missing memories of the day in question, and the Ferengi's suspicions that Odo and Garak were similarly affected.

"Fascinating," Jadzia said. "The old name for it is 'Missing Time Syndrome.' On Earth, it goes back centuries, before first contact, when the Reticulii were conducting their genetic profiling of humans and didn't want anyone in the sample group to know they had been transported to the orbiting medical ships. Today, the Federation's own First Contact Office uses the same techniques if a duck blind's exposed or a pre-contact investigator is detected."

"In this case," Sisko said, "I think we can rale out any involvement by the Reticulii or the First Contact Office. What other possibilities should we consider? Medical experimentation?"

Kira shook her head. "The Cardassians conducted a horrendous amount of so-called medical research on Bajoran prisoners. Some of it involved mind control. But that was mostly in the camps. Up here, they kept the slave workers in line with force and random executions. So I think it's unlikely anyone experimented on Quark—especially since, if the Cardassians had experimented on him, their protocols usually called for the experimental subjects to be killed when the experiment was finished."

Aria looked hesitant, but now offered her own theory. "I don't know how relevant this is, but Starships

use anesthezine gas to disable intruders, and memory lapses are sometimes reported as a side effect."

Sisko looked at Kira. "We have a Starfleet anesthezine system installed on DS9. But there're also the remnants of a Cardassian neurozine gas dispersal network which, as I recall, was kept on hand in case of worker revolt."

Kira's voice was bitter. "Crowd-control inhalants like anesthezine are nonlethal. And nonlethality was never a concern of the Cardassians. They used neurozine at fatal concentrations, and if they had used it up here on the Day of Withdrawal, there would have been a lot more than just four Bajorans dead."

Sisko turned to Dax, who had so many times in the past been able to share the wisdom and experience of her past hosts. "Old Man?"

But she didn't look hopeful. "Benjamin, there're so many methods of blocking memories that I wouldn't know where to begin without more information."

"What kind of information?"

Jadzia pressed her lips together in thought. "Well, I'd like to know how much time Quark believes he's missing. Is it the same length of time that Odo and Garak can't account for? Is it the exact same period of time? Were they together on the Day of Withdrawal? Were they exposed to ... a radiation leak? An unusual subspace discharge?" Her face brightened as if she had just had a sudden insight.

"Something just occurred to you," Sisko said.

"I talked with Odo yesterday about his investigation into the Andorian's death. He thinks a microwave weapon was used, but I think it's possible some sort of accidental energy pulse could have caused similar injuries."

Sisko smiled at Jadzia. "Old Man, you've been

spending too much time in the holosuites with Worf. You were the reason we even found the Cardassians' bodies. Right after your talk with him, Odo sent a team down to the lower levels to look for energy anomalies. They found one where a power conduit entered the lower module. And Rom's team found that the cause of the anomaly was that the Cardassians had been transporter-fused into the inner hull plates, weakening the shielding."

Jadzia made a face at Sisko. After so many years of friendship, she was allowed more freedom with Starfleet protocol. "I knew that, Benjamin. I was standing by with the tractor beam when Rom found the bodies. I was just wondering if an anomalous energy event that resulted in microwave radiation could also be tied to an anomalous temporal event."

"An anomalous temporal event?" Aria said. "Those are incredibly rare."

"Not on DS9," Sisko said. "Unexpected time shifts are quite common in this region of space."

Jadzia confirmed it. "Actually, the odd temporal events we've experienced in the past almost all arise in some way out of our proximity to the wormhole. The structure of subspace is extremely twisted in this region. What's really surprising is that we don't experience even more jumps in time than we do. But on the Day of Withdrawal, the station was still in orbit of Bajor. And the planet's gravity well would have provided a great deal of shielding against almost any wormhole-related phenomena."

Sisko sat down on the corner of his desk, reached back, and picked up his baseball. "Okay, so we can rule that possibility out, too. But I still want this looked into.

"Major Kira," he said, rolling the ball back and forth in his fingers, feeling its comforting contours relax him as they always did, freeing him to think more clearly. "The constable seemed reluctant to discuss the Day of Withdrawal in the Infirmary. Perhaps he won't be as reluctant speaking with you. See if you can get him to talk about what he remembers from that day."

Kira seemed surprised by the request. "Captain, I'm not sure I feel comfortable doing that."

Sisko understood her reluctance. Everyone on the station knew about the love affair that had blossomed between Kira and Odo in the last month. And as their friend and colleague, Sisko was happy for both of them. "I'm not asking you to betray a trust, Major. Let Odo know that you're asking on my behalf. Let him know that I understand his reluctance to discuss what he remembers in front of Garak, but that I would appreciate a more forthright account that will remain confidential."

Kira nodded, accepting his argument.

Sisko tossed his baseball up a few centimeters, then caught it again. "Commander Aria, since I'm assuming you've had few if any dealings with Cardassians, I'm assigning you to question Garak."

Aria's eyes widened. "Question him about what, sir?"

"What Dax wants to know. I want a timeline of everything that happened to Odo and Garak and Quark on the Day of Withdrawal." Then he smiled winningly at Jadzia.

"Don't tell me," she said, pouting. "I get to talk to Quark."

Sisko's grin grew. "I can't imagine anyone else he'd rather open up to."

"Captain," Kira broke in briskly, "can I ask why something that happened six years ago is important enough for us to drop our other duties and—"

"No one's dropping their other duties," Sisko said. "There's a war on."

"Exactly," Kira agreed. "And I don't see the point of expending extra effort just to solve the deaths of two Cardassians, especially one who was in a death squad."

Sisko replaced his ball on his desk, then stood up to address Kira and the others, not as their coworker and friend but as their commanding officer and captain of Deep Space 9. "Major, those two dead Cardassians represent a mystery. And I will not have mysteries on my station. Because until we find out how those Cardassians died, and why Quark and perhaps two other people on this station had their memories interfered with, I can't be certain if any of it might happen again. And believe me, if an attack wing of Jem'Hadar fighters is bearing down at us, I want to know that my officers are not suddenly going to develop a case of amnesia and end up fused into the hull plates. Is that clear?"

Kira, Aria, and even Jadzia stood at attention. "Yes, sir." Kira said.

"Right away, sir," Aria added.

"Ben, I'll speak to Quark as soon as Odo's finished with him," Jadzia confirmed.

Sisko could see that there was more that Jadzia wanted to say. "Something else?" he asked.

"What about the Andorian?"

"Quark's many things," Sisko said reluctantly, "but he's no murderer. Though I do think Odo's enjoying this chance to make him sweat. And at the same time, I

think that by appearing to be convinced that Quark is guilty, Odo's making the real murderer feel overconfident."

Aria seemed shocked by Sisko's statement. "Sir, do you honestly believe that the constable has the wrong man, and that the real killer is still free on the station?"

"That's exactly what I think, Commander."

"But. .." Aria said, obviously disturbed by the thought, "isn't knowingly permitting the continued custody of an innocent man a violation of Starfleet directives concerning the application of local laws? And aren't you risking the real murderer escaping? Not to mention putting the other personnel on this station at risk of being killed?"

"Commander. Starfleet regulations are written by bureaucrats in comfortable offices back on Earth. As captain of this station, I do have the authority to ... be flexible in how I choose to follow those regulations, whenever I feel a given situation is outside the parameters Starfleet considered when the regulations were written. Believe me, Commander, this entire station falls outside those parameters."

Jadzia smiled at Sisko, and then took the confused commander's arm. "Odo won't be through questioning Quark for a while. Why don't we get some raktajino and... we'll talk."

Sisko could see that Aria was flattered by Jadzia's request; she left the office with her, Major Kira following a moment later.

As Sisko stood in the doorway to his office watching the three officers head for the turbolift, he was pleased to unexpectedly see his son, Jake, just emerging from the lift on the main deck below. The love he felt for his boy, this anchor for him in the storm of

events that regularly engulfed this station, filled Sisko with a transcendent joy.

But his sudden smile was undercut as he saw who stepped out of the lift behind Jake: Jake's best friend, Nog, and Chief O'Brien.

Jake looked up to wave at him, and Sisko returned the gesture, growing even more concerned as he noted Jake's half-hearted smile, Nog's nervous expression, and O'Brien's flushed cheeks.

"Hi, Dad," Jake called out as he took the stairs to the upper level, two at a time.

"Sir," Nog added crisply, just behind Jake.

Sisko frowned, and the three visitors froze where they stood. "You know, if this were six years ago and I saw you three coming up here like this, I'd think Chief O'Brien had caught you boys playing in the Jefferies rubes again. But you two young men are too old for that now, aren't you?"

O'Brien was wheezing slightly as he resumed climbing the stairs. "Funny you should say that, sir."

Sisko sighed. "Should we step inside?"

"Yes, sir," Jake said glumly.

Sisko followed the three into his office, suspecting hie wasn't going to like what they had to tell him.

He was right.

CHAPTER 9

for the second time in two days, Jake Sisko opened the small egress panel and slid it to the side of the cramped Jefferies tube.

"It's open," he said. Then he heard Nog's communicator badge chirp as his friend passed on the report to Chief O'Brien.

The chief's voice came back, echoing along the metal-walled tube. "According to your position on the station plans, you two lads should be facing another fifteen meters of unobstructed passageway."

Jake sighed. He and Nog had finally done what they should have done years ago, and told DS9's chief engineer about the hidden section of the station. Then, with an agitated O'Brien at their side, they had told Jake's father. And then—Jake was sure it was just to compound the humiliation he and Nog felt—Sisko and the chief had insisted they repeat their story to the forbid-

ding, and strongly disapproving, Lieutenant Commander Worf.

But even though it was plainly evident through all the reporting that his father was keenly disappointed in him for having kept something like this a secret for so long, Jake could also see that neither his father nor the chief nor Commander Worf actually believed the story when they first heard it. So why were they upset? Not that they shouldn't be, because the story was true. It was just... Jake didn't know. He only hoped that in a million years or so, when he was his father's age, he would have a better grasp of a teenager's way of thinking.

Jake lifted his head to look back down the narrow Jefferies tube at Nog. "I don't get it. Do they still think we're making this up?"

Apparently, Nog's comm channel was still open because O'Brien answered. "No, I don't think you're making it up. I'm just telling you what's on the screen."

"Sorry, Chief," Jake said with a grimace. "I'm going to climb through the opening now."

Jake pushed himself up through the open access way just as he had before, then again swung his body around to free his legs so he could drop down into the dark section of corridor. Nog followed a moment later, much more quickly and smoothly than the last time. Once again, his palm torch was the only source of light.

-Tell them," Jake said.

Nog tapped his communicator. "We are in the corridor." Nog made it sound as if they were commandos who had just beamed in behind enemy lines.

A few seconds later, the short section of corridor lit

up with the golden energy of the transporter effect, and three sparkling columns of quantum mist resolved into Jake's father, O'Brien, and Worf. Each of them carried their own palm torch. Jake wasn't quite sure why Worf had his hand on the phaser he wore. But then, Worf was like that.

Benjamin Sisko's expression was unreadable. "Chief?" was all he said. Jake had noticed that his father had a shorthand way of dealing with his command staff, almost as if they shared some low-level telepathic link.

Chief O'Brien's attention jumped back and forth between the corridor and the large engineering padd he carried. The padd was similar to the kind Jake had seen artists sometimes use for sketching. "This makes absolutely no sense," the chief said. "Look at the deck plan for this section."

As Sisko and Worf stood on one side of O'Brien to study the engineering display, Jake stood with Nog on the other.

On the padd, Jake could see four yellow dots representing the team's active communicators tightly grouped together, blinking in the middle of what a label identified as a storage room.

"This is clearly not a storage room," Worf stated in his deep, somber voice.

O'Brien nodded, pointing to various bulkheads that surrounded the blinking lights on the padd display. "I think I can see what's happened here. The Cardassians' own official plans have been altered to show that these two storage rooms, here and here—" O'Brien's finger touched the surface of the padd, "—have back walls that extend an extra three meters or so. Notice this relay room extends two more meters. And this

heat-exchange conduit is ... maybe a half-meter wider than it has to be. And the two corridor sections running to either side are the same. So I'm betting the conduits that are supposed to be running right above us have been rerouted to either side, too, probably passing through the deck plates instead of running through that Jefferies tube that just isn't there."

Jake was surprised by how seriously the three men were reacting to the unmarked corridor's existence. His father, especially, looked grim. "Why weren't these deviations noticed when the first retrofit team went through the station to confirm the Cardassian plans?"

O'Brien looked apologetic. "I'm betting they were noticed. But there are lots of discrepancies between me Cardassians' plans for the station and how they were executed. A project this big, there would have to be. I've noticed little things over the years myself— pipes in the wrong order, a junction box on the left wall instead of the right... it gets so you come to expect it. But they're usually not major enough to bother altering the plans to fit."

"Yet this stretch of corridor is ..." Sisko swung the beam of his palm torch from one end of the section to the other. "... at least ten meters long, Chief. That's a lot of station to go missing."

"No argument from me, sir. All I can say is that this is a noncritical section of the station, so with the war changing our priorities, we just haven't had a full refit team down here yet. For what it's worth, we would •save found this ... missing space ... eventually."

Sisko levelled his gaze at Jake. "For what it's worth, we should have been informed about this missing space six years ago."

Jake was about to remind his father how many times he had apologized already, when Nog nudged him in the side. Jake understood. Nog had gone to great lengths to explain to Jake that their best defense was to behave like Starfleet cadets—limiting their responses to Yes, sir; No, sir; and most importantly, No excuse, sir. "It's a good way to avoid arguments," Nog had emphasized.

So Jake remained silent until his father said, "All right then, where's this .. . hidden holosuite?"

Nog hurried ahead. "Right down here, Captain. It's the only door in that bulkhead."

The team followed Nog until they were gathered together by the closed door. Worf and O'Brien immediately scanned the door and the area beyond it with their tricorders—one set for engineering readings, the other for security.

Jake shifted his weight from one leg to the other, impatient with the delay. He wanted this over with. "Dad, there's nothing dangerous in there. We've been inside a lot of—"

Sisko cut him off with an icy glare. "And maybe you've been lucky. Before they left, the Cardassians booby-trapped all sorts of equipment and facilities in this station, especially anything with a military function. And the only reason I can think of for putting a holosuite down here is for training purposes."

"Yes, sir," Jake said dispiritedly.

"I detect no explosives or triggering devices behind the door," Worf announced as he lowered his tricorder.

"Captain," O'Brien added, "I'm not even picking up any evidence of power flow. The tricorder's telling me there's a room beyond the door, about five meters by six. But I don't think anything inside is even connected

to the station's power grid." The chief made an adjustment on his tricorder. "In fact, I'm not even picking up any evidence of holo equipment. Either projectors or microforcefield emitters."

Nervously, Jake looked up and down the corridor to see if there was any chance they could somehow be at the wrong door. But just as every time before, there was only the one.

"You're certain it was a holosuite?" his father asked him.

"Dad, it could run our fishing hole program perfectly. Water and everything."

His father looked back to O'Brien. 'Then it has to be a holosuite, and for it to run a program from my own data library it has to have some type of interface with the station's main computer network."

O'Brien made more adjustments, then frowned. "If there is, sir, I'm going to have to make a more detailed -can. From inside."

Sisko nodded at Worf. Worf tapped the door control and the door opened.

Jake almost smiled as he heard Nog take a deep breath. His best friend was preparing himself for the embarrassment of having everyone see his adolescent modification of the fishing-hole program, complete with Ferengi bathing beauties.

But as the light from the palm torches stabbed into the room, it revealed ... only a room.

Jake and Nog both tried to push ahead, but were held back by Worf.

"I've never seen that before," Jake said to his father.

"Sir, this holosuite has always been in operation," Nog added.

Sisko looked at O'Brien. "Any chance the holosuite

ran on batteries and yesterday's visit finally exhausted them?"

O'Brien was skeptical. "No battery powerful enough for a holosuite goes completely dead that fast. I'd still be able to pick up some residual charge somewhere. And even taking a direct reading from the far wall, there are no holoprojector on it or in it."

Sisko nodded at Worf again and he and the Klingon stepped into the room together. Jake watched as his father and Worf reached the middle, then turned slowly, playing their palm torches around in a circle like all-seeing scanners.

"It appears to be a lab of some sort," Worf said slowly.

"Maybe," Sisko said. "It does look as if they were building things in here. Maybe a machine shop? Chief O'Brien?"

O'Brien stepped in next and Jake watched him make the same careful examination of the room, this time giving a running inventory of everything he saw. "Circuit testbed, communications console, a Type-IV computer interface...." He gave Sisko a significant look. "That's identical to Dax's science station in Ops." He returned to his assessment of the room. "A few storage lockers, maybe for lab coats or tools or lunches ... None of them locked."

"What about that?" Sisko asked, aiming his torch to a corner of the room Jake couldn't see.

"Well, it's a console," O'Brien said. "But I don't recognize the configuration."

Sisko looked at both O'Brien and Worf. "Gentlemen, any energy readings?" he asked.

Worf and O'Brien replied at the same time. "No, sir."

Sisko motioned to Jake and Nog. "You two. In here."

Jake and Nog stepped over the lip of the door and into the room. In this nonoperational mode it was completely unfamiliar to Jake, and he could see the same lack of recognition in Nog.

"Really, sir. We never saw it this way," Nog said.

"You two said you were able to change whatever program it was displaying," Sisko prompted.

"That's right," Jake said. "I'll give it a try." He cleared his throat. "Room, this is Jake Sisko. Show me my fishing hole."

Jake unconsciously braced himself for the sudden swirl of holopixels and the odd optical bounce that had always followed that command.

But nothing happened.

"Anything?" Sisko asked O'Brien.

"I've set this at full sensitivity, Captain. If there were a single acoustical pickup in this room, I would have detected the current flow created when Jake spoke." He showed the tricorder's flashing face to Jake's father.

Sisko answered his own question. "Nothing."

Jake winced at his father's tone of voice. "Dad, this was a holodeck. We played in my fishing hole. And Nog had a really great Ferenginar adventure playground." The playground had been at the edge of a dismal, rain-misted swamp, Jake remembered, but the programmable swinging vines had been a lot of fun.

"What else?" Sisko asked sternly.

Jake shrugged, perplexed by what he had no way to explain, or prove. "A couple of other programs from our personal library. You know, the theme park at Tran-quility Base, the Klingon Zoo ..." He glanced at Nog.

"We could only ever ran programs that were in your personal files or my father's," Nog said. "I mean, we could customize elements of them with voice commands, but... we never really figured out the room's full operating interface."

Sisko looked again at O'Brien and Worf as if silently soliciting their opinions.

In response, Worf asked the next question. "Are you certain you never saw a holoprogram that was Cardassian in nature? A military training scenario? Cardassian history reenactments?"

Both Jake and Nog shook their heads.

"Oh," Nog suddenly added. "There was the moon. The Bajoran moon."

"Which moon?" Sisko asked sharply.

Jake stared beseechingly at Nog, who shrugged. "Dad, I don't know. One of the inhabited ones. That was the program that was running yesterday when we came in. That's what made us think that someone else had been in here."

Sisko rubbed his free hand over his clean-shaven scalp. It was a gesture Jake had seen his father make a thousand times, most often when Dax was forcing him into checkmate in three-dimensional chess.

"Chief," Sisko said, "if we don't know what that console is, is there any chance it could be some radically different form of holoprojector?"

Jake took a look at the unidentified console as O'Brien walked over to it and the four palm torches in the room converged upon it.

The console was definitely Cardassian in design—a large, jagged boomerang shape, tilted slightly toward the operator, finished with the familiar dull-gray bonding metal. The flat-panel controls were unlit, though

the light from the palm torches showed that the controls were arranged in standard Cardassian logic groupings. About the only detail that made the console unusual was that in the center of its slanting surface, a section had been inset in order to hold a flat shelf about a half-meter square.

Even to Jake's untrained eye, it seemed obvious that whatever had been connected to the console on that shelf had been ripped out. Two power leads dangled to either side, their interior component wires roughly torn apart. Jake could even see heat damage on the console just beneath the lead ends, as well as in the center of the shelf.

"Now this is interesting," O'Brien said as he held his tricorder only centimeters from the damaged console.

"Was it a holoprojector?" Sisko asked.

"I doubt it," O'Brien answered. "But I don't think I've ever seen energy traces like this before."

"What kind of energy?" Worf asked.

"Hard to say, Commander. I don't think it's from a weapon. But... whatever was on this section here—" O'Brien pointed his tricorder at the console's inset shelf, "—it was radiating ... something I haven't seen before."

Jake stepped back as his father moved in front of him and Nog as if to shield them from the console. "Dangerous?" his father asked.

"Not now, sir. And there's no way to know if what I'm picking up came about because it was a slow release of radiation over a long period of time—in which case, I don't think it ever would have been dangerous—or if it came in a sudden, explosive release, in a short time—in which case, it might have been."

O'Brien snapped his tricorder shut with a practiced flip of his hand. "Sorry, Captain. But that's the best I can do with this. I'm going to need a full team to take it apart. Couldn't hurt to have Dax take a look, too."

"Maybe in a day or two," Sisko said. "I've already got her helping out with the dead Cardassians."

Jake was surprised to hear Commander Worf snort.

Sisko raised his eyebrows. "A problem, Mr. Worf?"

Worf looked up at the ceiling. "Sir, it is not any of my business."

"But... ?"

"For Quark to say that he has lost his memory to provide an alibi for his actions at the time the Cardassians were killed is ... ludicrous."

"You're right," Sisko agreed. Jake was as surprised to hear his father say that as it appeared Commander Worf was. But then his father finished his statement. "It is none of your business."

"Yes, sir," Worf growled grumpily.

Jake caught the lightning-quick wink and a smile that his father meant just for him. Then he watched as his father tugged down on his jacket and transformed himself from Jake's father into a Starfleet captain again.

"Anything else you feel we should know?" he asked Jake and Nog. "Any detail, however small, you think might help us out?"

Jake and Nog looked at each other, shook their heads.

Sisko accepted their answer. "All right. You two can—"

"I have a question," Chief O'Brien suddenly said. "How did you two find this room in the first place?"

"We used to explore the Jefferies tubes," Jake said.

"I can understand that," O'Brien replied. "But what possessed you to go to all the trouble of opening up that access hatch? It couldn't have been easy."

Jake looked down at the deck, trying to remember the first day he and Nog had found the room. "I think it was because we had never seen one so small. It's not exactly a standard size."

Nog coughed. "We were . . . looking for hidden Cardassian treasure, Chief."

"Ah," O'Brien said. "For a couple of twelve-year-olds, that makes perfect sense. But then, when you came in here, to the room, for the first time, how did you know it was a holosuite? It couldn't have been running any of your own programs without your having given it a command, right?"

"Right," Jake said with surprise. He looked down at Nog. "What was running when we came in?"

Jake felt his father's hand on his shoulder. "Jake, do you have any sense that you can't remember the first time you came into this room?"

"I don't think so," Jake said, wondering why his father suddenly sounded so worried.

"Wait! I remember," Nog said.

Everyone looked at him. He looked up at Jake. "You didn't want to go inside, remember?"

Jake laughed. "Oh yeah. I was ... I was afraid. I remember now."

Nog looked back to Sisko. "So Jake dared me to go in first."

"And what program was running?" O'Brien asked.

"That's what was so great," Nog said excitedly. "It was Ferenginar. The swamp outside the capital city. It was dark, and wet, and raining. I was so excited. I came out to tell Jake it was just like my adventure

playground program, and when we both came back in, we found the playground just a few hundred meters away."

O'Brien looked at Sisko. "The room recognized him. Called up his favorite program from his father's personal library. And all in the space of time it took to open the door."

Jake looked at the serious expression that his father, O'Brien, and Worf all shared now. "Why's that bad?"

O'Brien answered. "Jake, there's no power coming into this room. There's no computer link through that Type-IV console or through any other piece of equipment in the room. Yet somehow this room had the data-processing capability to identify Nog and call up a program from his father's personal library in seconds. Not even the holodecks they use at Starfleet Academy have that kind of processing ability." O'Brien turned to Sisko as if making a formal report. "Sir, with this new information, I think it's reasonable to assume that this was a top-secret Cardassian research facility, probably involving advanced computers and holo-replication technology far beyond anything we have."

"I agree," Sisko said. "So why did the Cardassians leave it behind?"

"Perhaps," Worf said in a voice full of grave concern, "the equipment in here was too complex to be removed in time during the Withdrawal, and was considered too valuable to be destroyed."

Jake could see that his father was definitely intrigued—and disturbed—by that possibility. "You know," he said softly as if talking to himself, "Starfleet has never been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the Cardassians didn't activate

DS9's self-destruct system when they withdrew. I wonder if this room—this lab—is the reason. Did they achieve a breakthrough here that they hoped to keep hidden until they could return?"

"But they did return, Captain," Worf said. "Last year. Why did they not reclaim their equipment then?"

Sisko looked up, and Jake could see he was enjoying the challenge this room was presenting. "Perhaps the work being done here was so secret that only a handful of people knew about it. Perhaps they died during the Withdrawal, or shortly after. There could be a dozen reasons, Worf."

"But if the work was so secret and so valuable," O'Brien said, "then why was it being carried out here? In a mining station? In an occupied sector subject to attack by Bajoran resistance fighters?"

"I don't know, Chief," Sisko admitted, and didn't seem troubled by his lack of an answer. "But you can be sure there was a reason. We're dealing with Cardassians here, and they have a reason for everything they do." He looked around the room, deep in thought. "If this was a Cardassian research facility, then you can be sure that the reason it is here, is because this is the only place it could be."

Jake saw that O'Brien didn't share his captain's sense of urgency for the problem at hand. "But, sir, why would that be?"

Jake could see his father was in his element now. His face was alive with new purpose. "Who knows, Chief. But one thing's for sure—even after six years, this old place still has a few surprises left in it."

CHAPTER 10

the only thing worse than a Ferengi with a headache was a Ferengi with an earache. And at this moment, in his darkened bar in the middle of DS9's night, Quark suffered from both—unquestionably the aftermath of the past eight hours he had spent with Odo.

And now his woes intensified as he saw the after-hours condition of his establishment. The chairs had not been placed on top of the tables. There were still glasses on the dabo table. And behind the bar, the replicator had been left on.

"Why do I even bother?" Quark said to the empty room. He gazed up at the vivid orange, red, and yellow stained-glass mural that dominated the first floor of his bar. All its backglow panels had been left on, too. "What about you, Admiral? Do you have an answer?"

The mural kept its silence, which was no great sur-

prise. Quark shuffled over to the bar to pour himself a very large drink.

Exactly what the mural was, Quark really wasn't sure. For years, that same wall had been dominated by a large Cardassian galor, courtesy of Gul Dukat.

Quark seldom cared about politics, and if the commandant of Terok Nor had wanted his grandmother hung on the wall, it would have been fine with the Ferengi. So the lurid green, pink, and yellow symbol of the Cardassian Union, which looked to Quark like some improbable combination of the hooded Smiling Partner of Ferengi legend and a short-handled screwdriver, had remained proudly in place—until Gul Dukat had swaggered in one day to announce he had just won a spectacular work of rare and valuable art in a late-night game of tongo. And since Quark's was the only public facility on the station with a ceiling high enough to properly display this great treasure, Dukat proclaimed Quark's would be its new home.

At the time, Quark had cared as much about his establishment's decor as he did about politics. His was the only bar on the Cardassian half of the station— indeed, it was the only bar on the entire station, the closest thing to competition being the Cardassian Cafe. And if a tired Cardassian soldier or Bajoran trustee would rather eat replicated Cardassian neemuk without benefit of kanar to wash it down or the company of luscious dabo girls, then Quark was just as happy not to have those lackluster, boring slugs taking up valuable space in his bar.

So, Cardassian galor or Dukat's esteemed art treasure, it mattered little to Quark at the time what was on the back wall of his bar. True, he had had to shut down for two days while a team of Bajoran artisans were

brought up to install the mural, and Subcommandant Akris had not granted Quark's request for a matching percentage decrease in the weekly kickback—that is, licensing fee—that Quark had to pay the station management office. But Dukat had more than made up for Quark's initial lost profits by pretentiously buying endless rounds for his staff on the night the mural was grandly unveiled—to mostly diffident though polite applause.

As Quark had worked the tables that night, he had overheard the Bajoran comfort women saying that at least the orange light helped bring a more Bajoran flush to the cold gray faces of the Cardassian officers they were forced to entertain. Quark himself liked the orange light, because it made it easier to use short measures in amber-colored drinks. And Dukat got to proudly trumpet on about the addition he had made to culture on Terok Nor—making the station an uplifting beacon of Cardassian light amidst the primitive darkness of the Bajoran sector.

It was just that no one seemed to be sure what the mural was supposed to represent—until finally, that first night, when much kanar had been consumed and two glinns had already been dragged off to the Infirmary after a particularly brutish fight (which fortunately had lasted long enough for Quark to take bets and clear five slips of latinum), Dukat toasted the mural in such a way that it was clear what he thought it was.

"To a mighty enemy," Dukat had proclaimed, "defeated at last, now sentenced to look on the works of the Cardassian Union and despair! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the portrait of Admiral Alkene, late of the Tholian Assembly!"

After Dukat and his guests had left that evening, Quark and Rom and two Cardassian mining engineers had closed the place, leaning on the bar, staring thoughtfully up at what was now called the Tholian mural.

One mining engineer drunkenly offered up the observation that Tholians had faceted heads.

The other, in an equal state of disequilibrium, disagreed, maintaining it was the Tholian helmets that were faceted, and that the shape of Tholian heads was closer to the long and pointed sections included in the mural. Except that he was positive the mural had been installed upside down.

Rom had volunteered that he was fairly certain the mural was actually a version of the traditional good-luck banners that were always hung over the drinking troughs in what he delicately referred to as Tellarite mud-pits of ill repute. "Yep, they ... make them by the hundreds on Tellarus," Rom had sniggered. "And you see that same crazy design on Tellarite scarves and pill boxes and ... lingerie."

Quark remembered glaring at his idiot brother, demanding to know why the Tellarites would put a portrait of a Tholian admiral on lingerie!

Rom had simply shrugged and gone on to explain in excruciatingly precise and clinical detail that the shape in the mural was not that of a Tholian head at all, but of an entirely different, but equally remarkable part of Tellarite male anatomy.

Even as he began to laugh at Rom's hilariously ribald description, Quark had felt his heart actually stop beating as he suddenly remembered the presence of the two Cardassian engineers. Fortunately, both were so drunk that they didn't hear Rom dismiss the Gul's

great work of art as nothing more than a big Tellarite ... well, even in private, Quark had not been able to say the word, though he relished the aptness of the image.

For at least a year after that, he and Rom had shared a rare moment of rapport in their guilty, private pleasure every time Dukat came to the bar with whoever his latest comfort woman was and regaled her with the story of Admiral Alkene, ending with a grandiloquent toast and salute to the mural.

Only Quark and his brother knew to what the gul was really raising his glass, and they kept that knowledge to themselves. And if any other visitors to Quark's during those last years of the Occupation recognized what was hanging on the wall for what it was, they also wisely kept their expert knowledge—and their laughter—to themselves.

Though Quark had never been able to confirm Rom's saucy identification of the mural's subject matter, and for that matter had never been able to determine how his idiot brother had come to have such deep knowledge of Tellarite mud-pits of ill repute, it was always in Quark's mind that if the day ever came that the Cardassians left Terok Nor, he would celebrate that glorious occasion by shattering Gul Dukat's mural into ten thousand shards.

But that day had come and gone, six long years ago, and the mural remained, with both he and Rom still referring to it, in private, as the Admiral.

But the Tholian mural was of no importance this night, and Quark tried not to think of the disarray the bar had been left in—or the overtime it would cost him to get it back in shape for Morn's arrival in the morning. Instead, he poured himself a snoggin of Romulan ale.

And since old traditions are hard to ignore, he did hold up the glass to the mural. "To you, Admiral—or whatever you are. Because you're still here, and I'm still here, and I have absolutely no idea why that should be." He gulped down a mouthful of the ale, shivering as the blue fluid sliced through him like a protoplaser. "Except, that is," he coughed to finish his toast, "as some twisted reminder of the 117th Rule: You can't free a fish from water."

"Actually ..." a distant, muffled voice interjected, "that's the 217th Rule. A lot of people make that mistake."

The empty glass slipped from Quark's hand and shattered on the counter of the bar as he stared at the mural. For just a split second, visions of latinum came to his mind as he calculated the increased business he could attract with a talking wall decoration that knew the Rules of Acquisition. But only for a split second.

"Rommm..." Quark sighed. "What are you doing back there?"

"Uh, up here, Brother." Quark looked up. Rom was standing on the second floor, holding a large tray stacked with dirty dishes. He carried a server's billing padd in his mouth, accounting for the muffled nature of his voice.

"My mistake," Quark said in exasperation, "what are you doing up there?"

"Uh, cleaning up." Rom started down the stairs, eyes fixed on the precariously balanced dishes before him. "We had three different parties in the holosuites tonight, sooo ... things are still a bit messy."

Rom made it to the bar and put down his tray just as Quark lunged to catch the first falling glass. "Where

are the servers?" Quark demanded. "Did they all quit? Or did you talk them into going on strike again?"

Rom took the padd from his mouth and wiped the edge of it on his sleeve. "Well, no. I... sent them home."

Quark shook his head, having a hard time believing he was actually having this conversation. "How could you send them home when the place looks like this?!"

"Because ... it takes longer to clean up when we've been this busy—and then we have to pay them overtime."

Quark blinked. Had his brother actually said something sensible? "Wait a minute. You sent them home— to save money?"

Rom nodded excitedly. "Well... yes. You see, tomorrow's my day off from station duty, so I can stay up all night to clean the bar, and that saves us the overtime charges for the serving staff."

Quark snorted cynically. "Sure. So you can pocket that money for yourself."

"Uh, no, Brother. If we can keep overtime to a minimum for the next two weeks, then when we get our next beverage shipment, we'll be able to pay on delivery, and that will net us a one-point-six-seven percent discount for cash. Which, when you multiply by our standard adjusted gross markup, works out to an additional profit of—"

"I know what it works out to," Quark said. "Who gave you that idea?"

Rom looked around the empty bar and shrugged. "Uh,. . . you've been saying we need to cut overhead, and that made me think of how Chief O'Brien tries to ... optimize the station's engineering resources, so

I used his Starfleet scheduling programs to examine the bar's operations. And ... it worked! Didn't it?"

Whether it was the headache/earache assault, the exhaustion he felt after Odo's interrogation, or—more probably—the Romulan ale, Quark ran out of things to complain about. "You surprise me, Rom."

Rom grinned. "Uh, you surprise me, too. I... heard you talking to ..." He started to snicker. "... the Admiral."

Quark poured another snoggin of ale. "I didn't know you were eavesdropping." Quark went to swallow the drink, but stopped when he saw Rom staring at him. "What?"

"I heard what you said, Brother. Why is the mural still here? I mean, you always said you wanted to... get rid of it as soon as the Cardassians were gone."

Quark took a deep breath, realized he had no answer, so he made one up. "I got used to it. It's the same reason you're still here."

Rom's gap-toothed grin was knowing. "Oh, I know that's not true. You're just tired after being in that cell for so long. I sent a message to the Nagus!"

Quark felt as if he had just been slapped awake. 'About what?!"

"Well... Odo told Leeta to tell me that you said that you needed a lawyer."

"Doesn't anyone on this station know about negotiations?" Quark exclaimed in disgust. "You know, when you make an outrageous demand that you know won't be met, in order to counter the outrageous demand made by the other party?"

Now it was Rom's turn to look confused. "You mean ... you don't need a lawyer?"

"No."

"But—"

"But what?"

Rom shrugged. "You killed that Andorian."

"Rom! I did not kill anyone! "

Rom blinked innocently. "You killed that Klingon."

"An accident! What are you? Working for Odo now?"

"But, Brother, if... you didn't kill the Andorian, why have you been under arrest for the past two days?"

"Because Odo is one of those rare individuals on this station who is actually more of an idiot than you are!" Even as the words were leaving his mouth, Quark could see he had hurt his brother's feelings. "I'm sorry, Rom. Really. I didn't mean it. It's Odo who's put me in such a bad mood." Quark set up a second glass. "C'mon, have a drink to celebrate my release."

Rom watched carefully as Quark poured more ale. "But... wasn't it supposed to be a good idea that you were in protective custody?"

Quark handed the glass to his brother. "It was, until Odo decided I really was guilty and made it a real arrest. He still thinks I'm guilty."

The two Ferengi clinked glasses and toasted the Admiral. Then Rom gaped like a drowning fish as the Romulan ale scorched his insides. "I... I don't... understand ..." he gasped.

"You drank it too fast," Quark explained.

"N-no," Rom wheezed. "If Odo still thinks you're guilty, then why did he let you go?"

"Captain Sisko listened to reason. Hew-mons do that occasionally, you know, Rom. He made Odo release me and give me a bodyguard."

"What bodyguard?"

Quark pointed out to the Promenade. "That body— oh, for—"

The Bajoran security officer he had left standing watch at the main door to the bar was gone.

Quark crouched down and waved his hand at Rom. "Check the other door. Hurry!"

Rom jumped back to look spinward at the smaller entrance to the left of the bar. "Uh, there's no one there either."

Quark's desperately racing mind tried to make sense of the situation. The bodyguard had been Bajoran, so he probably hadn't been bribed to abandon his post. And if Vash was making a move on him, she wouldn't kill an uninvolved party, so she had either stunned the guard and—

"The Andorian sisters," Quark hissed.

Rom nodded with a happy smile. "They're very pretty."

"They want to kill me!" Quark yelped from behind the bar.

Rom leaned over to peer down at his hiding brother. "But.. . that was only because they thought you killed Dal Nortron. And since you didn't..."

"But they still think I did!"

Rom nodded with understanding. "Oh .. . then you are in big trouble. Huge trouble. Gigantic trouble."

The only thing that stopped Quark from slapping his brother silly was his desire to stay down, out of the line of fire. "Thank you for figuring that out for me, idiot! Now listen carefully...."

"Brother, I don't like it when you call me names. Chief O'Brien—"

"Shut up! Shut up and go to security. Get Odo. I don't care if you have to pour him out of his pail—"

"Uh, I don't think he lives in a pail anymore—"

"I don't care! It's not important! Just tell him his guard is gone and he needs to—"

A sudden series of swift knocks froze Quark in mid-command.

He mouthed the words, "Who ... is ... it?"

Rom mouthed back the words, "I... don't... know."

Quark made fists with both hands, and sputtered out loud, "Of course you don't know—you ..." He caught himself, dropped his voice to a whisper. "You didn't look."

"Oh," Rom said, as if the concept of seeing who was at a door was startlingly new. "I can do that." He left the bar.

Quark sank deeper behind it, knowing there was nowhere to run. The closest entrance to his network of smugglers' tunnels was in a wall halfway across the bar. Then he brightened. The lights were out. Maybe ... just maybe whoever was at the door who had come to kill him would think Rom was Quark, kill Rom, then leave. Quark chewed his bottom lip, trying not to jinx the possibility of good fortune by thinking too much about it. But it was possible. There could still be a happy ending to this tawdry mess after all.

"Hello?" Quark heard Rom speaking softly in the distance. "Is ... someone there?"

Quark braced for the sound of a phaser. My poor brother, he thought. How brave he is to risk his life for me. He began to plan Rom's memorial party. He was sure he could get Chief O'Brien to pay for it.

"Hello?" Rom said again.

Quark heard the hum of the door inductors as they began to slide open.

"Is someone—ah!"

Quark grimaced as he heard his brother's death cry swallowed by the crackle of an energy discharge. At least it was fast, he thought. He'd be sure that his nephew Nog took comfort in that knowledge.

But then he heard footsteps—a sound so faint only Ferengi ears could perceive it.

Vash, Quark thought, outraged. She knew what he looked like. That hew-mon female had killed Rom out of spite. You 'd think spite would be enough for her.

Then Quark heard a second set of footsteps. He stifled a groan. Two sets could only mean he was wrong about Vash. It was the Andorian sisters. They knew what he looked like too.

Who am I fooling? Quark suddenly thought. It was one thing to sit back and hope for disaster to strike others in order to save him. But the 236th Rule said it best: You can't buy fate.

/ have to be brave, he told himself. / have to avenge Rom's brave sacrifice. I have to stand up for what I believe in.

Slowly, Quark craned his head around and reached for the bottle of Romulan ale, grabbing it by its neck. In his mind, he painstakingly choreographed the moves he would have to make to go on the offensive— a sudden leap to his feet, smash the bottle to create a jagged makeshift weapon, then prepare for victory. If there were any other result, he wouldn't know it until he was on the steps of the Divine Treasury bribing the Nagul Doorman.

So be it, Quark thought with utter finality.

And then in a brilliant burst of speed and grace, Quark thrust himself to his feet, spun around like a dancer, swung the bottle of Romulan ale against the edge of the bar and—

—screamed in high-pitched mortal agony as the entire bottle shattered, slicing his palm with shards from the fragile neck.

"Frinx!" Quark squealed, as he clasped his bloody hand to his chest and looked out across the bar to see the last person he expected to see—

"Rom?!"

"Uh ... sorry brother... but there was nothing I could do."

Quark blinked through a haze of pain. Now his hand throbbed as badly as did his head and ears. "Nothing you could do about what?!"

"Well... he made me open the door."

Quark wrapped a bar rag around his bleeding hand, but that only drove the bottle shards in more deeply. And despite Rom's babbling, there was no one else present.

"Who made you open the door?!"

Rom looked down at something on his side of the bar. "He did. He ... said you wanted to see him."

"Rom," Quark said as he rocked from foot to foot, "I can't see anyone!"

"Uh ... because you're not looking?"

Quark sighed and trembled and wanted to cry, all at the same time. He leaned forward, looked over the edge of the bar, and saw—

—multicolored stars explode in his vision like the prettiest globular cluster he had ever seen.

As Quark fell into those stars, he heard what could

only be the laughter of the much-maligned Tholian Admiral echoing in his poor wounded ears. And he suspected that the basic underpinning of his personal philosophy had been proven true once again.

No matter how bad things look, they can always get worse.

CHAPTER 11

sometimes Sisko felt that he had never left the wormhole after his first meeting with the aliens. That after his first encounter with the Prophets in their Celestial Temple, everything that had happened since—or that appeared to have happened—was somehow already a memory. A memory he was merely reliving.

Standing before the sink in the tiny kitchen alcove of his quarters on Deep Space 9, Sisko whisked at the eggs in their copper bowl, smearing out the streaks of dark pepper sauce, frothing the egg mixture into a whirlpool just as the wormhole frothed the quantum foam of normal space-time.

How many times had he done this—made an omelette? How many times had he made this omelette? Or could it be they were all part of the exact same moment in time and—

—he was a child standing on a low wooden step-stool in the kitchen of his father's New Orleans restaurant. His father—Joseph—stood behind him, his large, comforting hand guiding his son's small hand on the whisk as it swept through the eggs, teaching him as his father had taught him, and—

—he was a father looking over his own son's shoulder. Little Jake-O was standing on a low wooden step-stool in the cooking corner of that cramped apartment he and Jennifer had rented in San Francisco as they waited for the Saratoga to return to port so they could finally share their careers, and their dreams, as a family. He held Jake's small hand in his, guiding it as his father had guided him, as Jake might someday guide his own child's hand—

—all the same moment, these memories of things long ago and of things still to be, yet all bound up together in the soothing traditions of those kitchens.

He laughed, softly, caught up in his discovery.

"That sounds nice," Kasidy Yates said.

Drawn suddenly from all moments to this moment, Sisko turned to Kasidy Yates where she sat on a chair at the dining table set for breakfast. Her lithe form was draped in one of his caftans, a textured cotton with a bold brown and white blockprint pattern from Old Zimbabwe. Her long brown fingers gracefully cradled a cup of morning coffee, her soft dark hair still mussed from bed, her clear brown eyes not quite yet open. Her infectious smile transfixed him, as it had from the first day they'd met.

"I've missed that," he heard her say. "You laughing."

Sisko held the copper bowl against his hip as without conscious thought he continued to fluff the eggs. "I was thinking that the reason the Prophets made me

their Emissary is because I already knew about nonlinear time."

Kasidy frowned, didn't understand.

Sisko's smile widened. "The kitchen!"

Kasidy nodded with sudden understanding. "Cooking does seem to carry you away," she said with an answering smile.

Sisko leaned over to give her a kiss on the forehead. "But it always brings me back to you." The light moment transformed when he did not move away.

Kasidy put down her coffee, Sisko his bowl, as Kasidy reached up to his face and kissed him as they had not kissed in weeks, in months, perhaps ever.

"I... thought I had lost you," she whispered, her breath soft against his cheek.

Sisko felt her body tremble, as if she were fighting back tears.

He knew why.

A week ago, they had been on the Defiant. Kasidy had volunteered to be a convoy liaison officer for Starfleet escort duty to Vega. So they could be together.

It had been a terrible mistake. And the mistake had been his.

In loving Kasidy, he had made her a part of his life that was separate from Starfleet and the Dominion War. In tearing down the barriers between his life and his duty, he had only succeeded in putting her in harm's way—at his side.

Once before, he had done that to the woman he loved, and it had cost her her life. Surviving the consequences of that mistake had taken him twelve years and the intervention of beings beyond human comprehension.

And he had.

Yet even now he could still see Jennifer, motionless on the deck of the Saratoga, her soul forever lost to him except in memory.

As protection from the cruel uncaring universe that might still end the existence of Kasidy Yates, Sisko now took refuge behind a different shield around his heart, a shield he had begun constructing the moment he and Kasidy had found themselves in active service together on the Defiant.

If Kasidy died under his command, the only way he could be certain he could still function to save his ship and his crew was to see her already among the dead, to mourn her before the fact, to be prepared for the awful day he might lose her. But even as he tried to reduce his vulnerability, Sisko knew it was impossible. He was in love and he was loved.

He stroked her hair, knowing how wrong it all was. First to put her at risk, and then to try to remove her from his heart.

"You can't lose me. Nothing will keep me from you," he murmured. For whether it was a memory of a past dream or a memory of something still to come, at the very end of whatever pain and whatever tragedy this universe and this war held for him, Sisko knew— knew with a conviction of faith and hope and love that would outlast the stars—he would always come back to the arms of Kasidy Yates.

And somehow, through some living bond still to be formed between them, he knew that Kasidy accepted his vow.

"Does this mean you're going to make me breakfast?" she teased even as her eyes told him she knew what he felt.

"Eventually." Sisko leaned down to kiss her again.

And as their lips met, their eyes closed, and time became nonlinear once again. Until—

A discreet throat-clearing cough.

Sisko opened his eyes at the same moment as Kasidy, brought back to this moment by—.

"Hey, guys."

Sisko couldn't resist reaching out a hand to tousle his son's hair as Jake, smiling sheepishly, skirted past them to the replicator. He remembered when he had had to bend down to touch the top of his son's head. Now it seemed he had to touch the stars to do the same.

"Hey, Jake-O," Sisko said as his son ordered and retrieved and drank in one gulp a tall glass of orange juice.

"I heard you went on a treasure hunt," Kasidy said.

Sisko saw Jake's swift glance at him, but he had no recriminations for his son. He and Jake had talked at length about Jake's actions—and his lack of action— last night. And Sisko had been deeply gratified to learn that almost everything he had to say to his son had already been in Jake's mind. Jake's and Nog's omission, not telling anyone about the mysterious Cardassian holosuite, was simply a leftover piece of business from when the two young men were little more than children.

Jake knew he had been wrong, and Sisko knew that doing the wrong thing and learning from it was what the process of maturing and growing was all about. All life was about such learning. What was important to Sisko, and what made him feel so proud of his son, was that for all the missteps the boy did make—and some days their number was truly astounding—he seldom made the same misstep twice.

As long as Jake kept that same spirit, Sisko could never really be angry with him—or disappointed.

"Buried treasure," Sisko said, picking up the copper bowl to give the eggs a final flourish. "Buried and forgotten." He set the bowl on the counter, cut a square of Imolian butter, and turned away to heat the empty omelette pan.

He could see that Jake heard and understood his tone of voice. The past was the past. They had moved on. They must always move on.

Jake pulled up a chair to sit down beside Kasidy at the table. "I was really surprised no one else had found that room by now."

Kasidy looked over at Sisko. "Do you think there could be other sealed-off sections in the station?"

Sisko dropped the butter into the hot omelette pan, then swirled it around to melt it evenly. "If there are, Chief O'Brien will know about them in a week. He's going to use the Defiant's tactical sensors to conduct a full survey scan of DS9, then correlate that scan with the Cardassian's blueprints to look for deviations. He says he should have done it years ago."

"Any reason why the holosuite was sealed off?" Kasidy asked.

Sisko poured the beaten eggs from the copper bowl into the pan, tilting the pan expertly to lightly coat the top of the egg mixture with the melted butter. "We don't even know that it is a holosuite," he said.

"What else could it be?" Jake asked.

Sisko reached for a handful of grated jack cheese and trailed it perfectly along one side of the gently bubbling mass of eggs. "Just because we don't know the answer doesn't mean we have to settle for a guess." Biting his bottom lip in concentration, he sprinkled in

chopped scallions, and then added a dusting of the secret ingredient in all the great recipes of Sisko's Creole Kitchen—the Cajun spices his father sent him on a more or less regular basis. "That would be too easy."

The door announcer chimed.

Sisko prodded the edge of the cooking eggs and glanced at his son. "I can't leave the pan now...."

He heard the door to his quarters slide open just as he judged that the texture of his creation was perfect. With a rapid twist and a flip of the pan, he held his breath as he slid the golden disk toward the forward edge of the pan, then folded it expertly over on itself, achieving a half moon of Creole perfection.

"Uh, Dad ..." Jake said.

Sisko looked up, saw Jadzia, was delighted. "Old Man! You're just in time for breakfast."

But Jadzia didn't share Sisko's enthusiasm—not today. She frowned. "Sorry, Benjamin, but... Quark's gone."

Sisko's sense of disbelief changed quickly to dismay, betrayal. "He's left the station?"

"I can't be sure. If he did, he did it in disguise. There's a chance he's simply hiding out here. But... well, maybe you should come down to the bar and... see for yourself. I think the situation's more complicated than we first thought."

Sisko's wrist jerked as he sharply snapped the pan again and the omelette flipped over with Starfleet precision. The bottom was an elegant combination of rich yellow and crispy brown. Sisko sighed. "Jake, it's up to you to uphold the family honor. You know what your grandfather always said." He slipped the omelette onto a plate already warmed by the inductor oven.

His son stepped into the alcove as Sisko stepped out. "No one leaves the table unsatisfied," Jake said.

"Do I have time to put on my uniform?" Sisko asked Jadzia.

She nodded. "This is going to be a Starfleet matter."

Sisko had been afraid of that. Somehow, when Quark was involved, situations always became more complicated.

Quark's bar looked normal for this early in the morning. The dabo table was silent. A rambunctious group of young Starfleet fighter pilots from the Thun-derchild who hadn't yet switched over to station local time were ending their duty day around a large collection of bar tables they'd pulled together. A handful of the station's Bajoran morning-shift personnel were eating replicator breakfasts, a handful of night-shift personnel were eating replicator suppers. And faithful Morn was on his stool—so much a part of the place that he was sometimes easy to overlook, except for the nonstop droning of his voice.

"So far so good," Sisko said to Jadzia.

She gestured to the bar. "Let me buy you a raktajino."

They chose stools as far away from the loquacious Morn as possible. "When did you find out Quark was gone?" Sisko asked.

"Odo told me he finished questioning Quark early this morning, around four. So I went to Quark's quarters at nine—I thought I'd let him get some sleep."

"And?"

"He wasn't there. Isn't anywhere."

"Anything missing? Signs of a struggle?"

"Nothing I could see. Odo's people are going through it now."

"That's not like Quark."

Jadzia almost laughed. "Not like Quark to run away from trouble? Benjamin, that's exactly like him."

Sisko shook his head. That wasn't what he had meant. "He and I had a deal. And... Quark usually keeps his deals. At least with me." He saw Jadzia's look of amazement. "Oh, he'll look for and exploit every loophole he can find. And just making the deal can be ... an adventure in frustration. But when all is said and done, Quark, in his own Ferengi way, is one of the most honorable people on this station. Not," Sisko added quickly, "that I would ever tell him that to his face. It could undercut me in future negotiations."

"Let's hope there are future negotiations," Jadzia muttered.

A sudden worrisome thought struck Sisko. "He didn't run into trouble with the Andorian sisters, did he?"

Jadzia shook her head. "Odo has them under twenty-six-hour surveillance. They've been keeping to themselves."

"Then what is it you suspect, Old Man?"

His old friend merely answered his question with another. "Do you have your raktajino, yet?"

Sisko looked around. Though the establishment was open for business—he recognized the usual servers managing the tables—no one was behind the bar. Yet he had heard the rattle of glasses in the recycler trays, and the hum of the replicator. That was why he hadn't noticed the absence of anyone—because it still sounded as if someone was present.

"All right," Sisko said, "I'll admit it. I'm confused. Care to enlighten me?"

Jadzia nodded. Tapped on the bartop. "Barkeep! We want to order!"

Sisko blinked with surprise as a Ferengi jumped up into view from behind the bar.

A very small Ferengi.

His skull and features were the size of any other adult of his species, complete with an unusual black headskirt, but the rest of his body was dramatically foreshortened. A meter tall at most.

"What do you want?" he snarled.

"Benjamin," Jadzia said, "meet Base. Base, meet Captain Benjamin Sisko, commander of Deep Space 9."

"Yeah, yeah, right, whatever," Base snapped. "You want to order? Or you want to stop bothering me?"

'Two raktajinos, please," Jadzia said.

"You actually drink that crap?" Base gargled in disgust, then whirled around and dropped below the level of the bar again.

Sisko couldn't suppress his curiosity. He stood up and leaned over the bar to see that a series of stools had been arranged behind it, presumably so the small barkeep could jump up to serve—if that's what such an unwelcoming manner could be called—the customers.

Sisko sat back down. "Base?" he asked Jadzia.

"Rom says he's an old friend of the family, helping look after the family's interests during ... Quark's troubles."

"Does Rom know where Quark is?"

Jadzia rolled her eyes. "Here's where it gets interesting. Rom claims that he didn't know Quark had been released. Odo, on the other hand, says that Quark told him he was going directly here after he was released. And all the servers say that Rom sent them home early last night."

"Ah," Sisko said, rubbing the fingers of one hand against his temple to forestall the headache that Quark could so easily provoke. "So Quark could have come here, and the only witness would have been Rom."

"Exactly."

Sisko sat up straighter with a sigh. "All right. I see how this might complicate matters.