Bloodletter (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  Bloodletter

  ( Star Trek , Deep Space Nine - 3 )

  K. W. Jeter

  K. W. Jeter

  Bloodletter

  (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine − 3)

  To Chris and Lynn Hoth, with thanks

  Historian’s Note

  This adventure takes place before the STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE episode “Battle Lines.”

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  A CRY RANG through the engineering bay.

  “Lousy piece of Cardassian crap!”

  More words followed, in a vocabulary colorful enough to draw expressions of distaste from a Bajoran work crew nearby. Dressed in the drab gray of one of their planet’s more puritanical sects, they hadn’t yet become used to the rougher edges of station life.

  Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien, still cursing, emerged from a thrust-device compartment’s access port. Blood threaded from the corner of his brow, gashed on one of the gantry chains running taut to the vessel’s exposed innards. It was only slightly redder than his sweating face.

  “Is there some difficulty you have encountered?” O’Brien’s Cardassian counterpart inquired with mock solicitude. Behind him, curved panels of ship’s armor hung in the bay’s depths like brutalist stage scenery. “If you will recall, I warned you that working on our equipment was a matter best left to experts—”

  “No difficulty; nothing that I can’t handle, that is.” He looked at the blood smeared on the rag he’d taken from his pocket. The wound was minor enough; a typical machine-shop accident that he could safely ignore for the time being. It was much harder to ignore the thin smile on the Cardassian engineer’s face. If lizards could grin—a major effort of self-control was required to keep from decking this one. “I just need the right tools.” He turned and headed toward the bay’s heavy equipment locker, ducking beneath the power cables looping overhead.

  A satisfying expression of alarm showed in the Cardassian engineer’s eyes when O’Brien came back. “What . . . what do you think you’re doing . . . ”

  It was his turn to smile. He pressed the joystick on the control box in his hands; behind him, the ponderous articulated device that had followed him out of the locker clumped forward, the steel deck clanging at each step. “I’ve been here long enough to be plenty familiar with the quality of Cardassian construction.” He deliberately steered the jacksledge so that the uplifted striking weight clipped one of the bay’s structural girders; the resulting shock wave came close to knocking the Cardassian off his feet. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that your stuff responds to an old Earthly engineering principle—If it doesn’t fit, use a bigger hammer.”

  “You’ve gone mad—” The Cardassian scrambled out of the way as the device swung toward the drydocked vessel. “This . . . this is impossible. . . .”

  Hammers didn’t come any bigger than the jacksledge. O’Brien and the rest of the DS9 tech crew had cobbled it together for smashing through whatever interior sections of the station had collapsed so badly that only brute force could clear a path. The striking weight was loaded with enough depleted fission material to punch a humanoid-sized hole between one deck and the next. Now, it followed O’Brien like a puppy on a leash as he clambered inside the open thrust-device compartment. The jacksledge’s servo-mechs allowed it to delicately pick its way into the space, the massive legs settling between the thrust chamber and the surrounding bulkhead.

  The Cardassian engineer’s face appeared at the rim of the access port. He had recovered enough to begin blustering. “The use of this device is totally uncalled-for—” His voice echoed off the chamber’s wall towering above O’Brien’s head. “This is a complete violation of the operational protocols agreed to by the administration of this station . . . it cannot be done—”

  “Bet me.” O’Brien thumbed the trigger button on the control box, and the striking weight swung through an arc close enough that he heard the rush through the air. The last he heard was the jacksledge hitting the bulkhead like the clapper of a monstrous bell. When the diaphragms inside his protective ear inserts opened up again, he could hear the ringing of the dented metal, and cutting through that, the ululating wail of the vessel’s security alarms going off.

  He eyeballed the effect the hammer blow had made upon the bulkhead. If anything, the freight hauler wasn’t crap, but rather, overengineered for the research purposes to which it had been converted. It would take another dozen blows, at least, to bend the metal for enough clearance; then the buffer shields could finally be lowered into place.

  The alarms didn’t shut off, but grew louder instead, shrieking from the violated core of the vessel. Before readying the jacksledge for another swing, O’Brien glanced out the access port and saw the Cardassian engineer running for the loading doors—whether from terror or to summon help, he couldn’t tell. The Bajorans looked up from the eyepieces of the assembly bench. They weren’t so puritanical, he noted, as to be able to resist smiling at the Cardassian’s discomfiture.

  “Let’s get a few more in.” He patted the closest of the jacksledge’s legs. “Before anybody comes to stop us.”

  After the DS9 security team had taken away the chief engineer—the head of security himself had snapped the hand restraints on—the Bajorans glanced around at each other. Events did not usually get so dramatic in the engineering bay.

  “He seems a decent enough man.” One laid down the delicate tools and flexed his cramped fingers. “This O’Brien—he has not been ungracious toward us.”

  A few of the others nodded in agreement. They had all expected the chief engineer to have greeted them with hostility, to have impeded their being made part of the station’s construction and retrofitting operations; O’Brien had been forced to take them on as part of an agreement hammered out between the station’s commander and the government authorities down on the surface of Bajor. But if O’Brien had not been exactly overjoyed by their arrival, he had at least been fair to them since.

  Another of the crew pushed aside his magnifying optic. “I will admit that, when the great time comes, I may even miss him. A bit . . . ”

  The sympathetic comments were more than the group’s leader could take. None but the other Bajorans knew that he was in charge of their spiritual and moral welfare, charged with shielding them from the temptations to be found among the heathens. He bore no mark that would have indicated his hidden rank to the Starfleet officers. It was just one more thing of which they were unenlightened.

  “Perhaps,” he said coldly, “in your devotions you could strive to remember why we’re here; the purpose behind our coming to this place.” The leader cast a stern gaze around the assembly bench.

  The others, suitably chastened, looked down at the glittering components of their labors.

  “I only meant—” The first who had spoken, the youngest of the group, now made an attempt to defend himself. “Just that there’s surely no harm in being on good terms with the man. That’s all.”

  “Ah . . . harm.” The leader nodded, making a show of mulling over the word. “As if our people hadn’t suffered enough of that, already. From just such creatures as this chief engineer of whom you seem so fond.” His own words lashed out, before the other could protest. “It doesn’t matter that he’s not a Cardassian. He, as well as all the rest of them, is still an outsider. They are not Bajoran.”

  Silence wrapped itself around the group. None of them could raise his eyes to meet the harsh gaze of the leader.

  “From now on—” He spoke softly, having vanquished all opposition. “Keep company only with your brethren, and you will be shielded from falling into error.”

  No one spoke. One by one, they picked up their delicate tools and resumed
their work.

  He could hear them coming up the corridor outside his office—even with the door closed. For Benjamin Sisko, that was one of the unforeseen advantages of the Deep Space Nine station’s ramshackle state of construction. Aboard the Enterprise, or any of the other Starfleet vessels, acoustic isolation between one sector and another, between the public spaces and the private compartments, was total; you didn’t know who might be at your door until they announced their presence. Here, however, the ringing of footsteps on bare metal, the echoing of raised voices against the walls—all came clearly to him. Which gave him time, if only a few seconds, to put on his game face, the mask of calm authority that everyone expected from the station’s commander.

  “ . . . sabotage . . . blatant sabotage. On my world, that is a capital offense. . . .” One voice had the grating tones of a Cardassian officer, the combination of overweening arrogance and innate hostility, without which all of them seemed unable to even order a drink in one of the station’s lounges. From the sound of it, this one seemed to have been pushed from mere annoyance to vibrating rage. “We shall see what kind of justice can be expected from your Federation superiors. . . .”

  Another voice muttered something in reply, too low for Sisko to make out the words, though he recognized his chief engineer’s accent. He had a vague idea of what this was all about; the station’s head of security had been able to give him a rushed comm call, with an indication of the mess that was about to land on his desk.

  The desk . . . that was the other advantage of a bit of warning. These days, any interruption seemed to come while he was chin-deep in the intricacies of Bajoran diplomacy. Spread before him were things not meant for the prying, advantage-seeking eyes of a Cardassian officer. As the voices and footsteps approached, Sisko blanked the computer screen.

  “Enter.” He settled back in his chair, expression composed so as not to show that he’d just painfully nicked his shin on the drawer’s corner. Every damned thing the Cardassians had built seemed to have sharp edges sticking out of it, waiting to draw blood; that seemed the way they liked things to be.

  Worse luck—there were two Cardassian officers. One he recognized as the chief engineer for the vessel currently being retrofitted in the drydock bay; the other—he suppressed a sigh of aggrieved annoyance—was Gul Tahgla, the vessel’s captain. Tahgla, in his brief time aboard DS9, had already proved himself to be an apt pupil in the arts of obstruction and connivance practiced by his crony and superior, Gul Dukat. Sisko sometimes wondered if Dukat had sharpened the metal edges before vacating the desk at which he now sat; he wouldn’t put it past him.

  “For the love of—” Behind the Cardassians, Chief Engineer O’Brien whispered to Odo, loud enough for Sisko to hear, then grimaced as he held up the restraints binding his wrists. “Did you have to put ‘em on so tight? If you’re just trying to show these jokers you’re serious—”

  The security chief glared back at him. “I do nothing for show.”

  The Cardassian captain nodded stiffly toward Sisko. “I believe we have a small . . . problem, Commander.” A relishing smile lurked on his face as he spoke the word. “Or perhaps not so small. A certain matter of deliberate and unprovoked sabotage on the part of one of your senior crew members—”

  “Bull.” O’Brien snorted in disgust. “I’ve been plenty provoked, thank you.”

  Sisko listened to the Cardassian engineer’s account of what had happened in drydock. Now, he had to work to suppress his own smile; he would have liked to have been there when O’Brien had fired off the jacksledge, just to have seen the Cardassian scurry for the bay’s exit.

  “I’m sure the commander will appreciate the ramifications of this incident.” Gul Tahgla’s voice grew more icily formal. “The agreement with the Federation, by which your technicians are given access to some of the most crucial areas of our ships, was accepted by our council under duress. In your guise of protectors of the hapless Bajorans, you have obtained control of the stable wormhole, access to which is permitted only to those who meet your conditions.” The formal tone was displaced by a sneer. “Odd, isn’t it, how such deep altruism just happens to give the Federation the keys to the entire Gamma Quadrant.”

  “Please. There’s no call to—”

  “Hear me out, Commander.” The Cardassian leaned threateningly over the desk. “It has been long suspected by our council that the Federation’s requirements for travel through the wormhole are a pretext by which spies could be given free run of our vessels, in the guise of workmen installing these ridiculous, nonfunctioning devices—”

  “Believe me, if they were nonfunctioning, they wouldn’t be so expensive.” The Cardassian had hit a sore point with Sisko. A major portion of the station’s budget, the Federation resources devoted to keeping DS9 up and running, had gone into the on-site construction of the impulse energy buffers. Although no vessel, Federation or Cardassian or any other, would be allowed into the wormhole without the buffers in place, the reimbursement schedule that Starfleet had mandated covered only a fraction of their actual cost—at least until the next appropriations review.

  In the meantime, DS9’s operations were being squeezed tight by the need to get craft such as the Cardassian research vessel ready for intrawormhole travel. It had been less than twenty-four hours ago that Major Kira had stormed into this office with the figures of the expected shortfall, rows of numbers on the screen of her data padd, as much as demanding that he immediately order a halt to any further retrofit work. Why should we go in the hole for the sake of Cardassians?—those had been her words. Kira had little experience with the subtleties of the Federation bureaucracy; he’d had a difficult time convincing her that running a deficit was the best way of persuading Starfleet to increase their budget.

  As for doing things for the sake of Cardassians . . . he had his reasons for that, as well. And, for the time being, he was telling no one. “—and you’d better get it straight, nothing leaves that drydock till I say so! You can be a friggin’ admiral for all I care—”

  The sound of his chief engineer’s shouting brought Sisko up from the deep workings of his thoughts. “Please, gentlemen.” He held up a hand for quiet, then gestured to Odo. “You can go ahead and take the restraints off. I hardly think they’re necessary.”

  Tahgla’s expression soured even further. “Sabotage is treated so lightly by you?”

  “I very much doubt that there was any criminal intent here; perhaps just a simple misunderstanding, that’s all. Mister O’Brien, if you could give us your interpretation?”

  The engineer left off glaring at Odo and rubbing his chafed wrists. “It’s simple enough, Commander. We’ve gone back and forth with this bunch. We must’ve had twenty communiques, at least—I could call up the archive from the data bank and show you—concerning the dimensions of the impulse energy buffers that were going to be installed on their vessel.” Teeth-gritting frustration showed in O’Brien’s face. “It’s just a matter of how much clearance they’d have to leave us so we could fit the damn things in around their engines. We finally get it worked out—or so I thought—and then they show up in our drydock, and their engine compartments are almost a meter too narrow.” He shrugged. “So I fired up the jacksledge and went to make myself a little working room.”

  “The dimensions of those chambers are exactly as you stipulated.” Tahgla jabbed a finger at O’Brien. “Our technicians are not given to the sort of errors you seem to expect from your own—”

  Sisko angled the computer panel toward his chief engineer. “Let’s just take a look, shall we?”

  An interlocking display of construction diagrams appeared, with the words SECURITY—ACCESS RESTRICTED blinking in red at the top of the screen. O’Brien lifted his hands from the keyboard and pointed to the specifications. “There—that’s what they’re supposed to be.”

  His counterpart leaned past him, the sharp ridge of his finger tapping the Cardassian numerals. “And that’s what they are.” He glared as fier
cely as Gul Tahgla, like an attack dog straining against its leash. “Just as you specified!”

  Before Sisko could say anything, his security chief interrupted. “Excuse me; I don’t wish to parade my own expertise here—” Standing behind the quarreling engineers, Odo had craned his neck to see what was on the computer panel. “But I think I may be able to clear this up for everyone.” He glanced toward Sisko. “You see, Commander, I’ve lived among the Cardassians; so I’m a little more conscious of the stratifications in their society. The various sectors have different systems of mathematical notation—the numbers are the same, but the bases used for dividing and multiplying into units of measurement are not.” His fingertip drew a line across the numerals as he turned his level gaze toward the Cardassian engineer. “I believe that if you recalculate and use damur, the mercantile base, the results will come closer to what our chief engineer wanted.”

  Sisko leaned back in his chair, watching the others assembled around his desk. He could see a smile tugging at the comers of O’Brien’s mouth as the Cardassian engineer squinted at the panel, a furious computation almost visible behind his scaly brow.

  Though less emotion showed on the other Cardassian’s face, Sisko kept a closer eye on him. Gul Tahgla had watched Odo the whole time the security chief had been giving his short lecture, as though waiting for some particular word or phrase to come out of Odo’s mouth. Evidently, it hadn’t; Tahgla had kept his own silence, the suspicion that had narrowed his gaze finally dissipating.

  “Well, yes . . . ” The Cardassian engineer straightened up, his voice stiff with sullen anger and embarrassment. He managed a nod toward Odo. “Your point is well taken. Perhaps . . . perhaps the confusion arose during your chief engineer’s initial communications with us. . . .”