by K. W. Jeter
“What the—” On the other side of the bay, the chief engineer looked in perplexity at the diagnostic cabinet. A bundled set of cables ran from it to a hatch in the machinery mounted on the cargo shuttle’s foresection. “We’re getting some flaky control feedback here.” The rest of the engineering crew looked over his shoulders at the cabinet’s gauge panels.
Their voices faded as Hören and the other Redemptorists used the distraction to slip around the substation’s distant side.
“Quick—” At Deyreth’s order, the largest of the men bent down, cupping his hands to give Hören a boost. Another switch on the box opened one of the substation’s curved exterior panels, enough for Hören to pry the gap wide enough for his shoulders to squeeze through. In a few seconds, he had scrambled inside, turning around to grab an improvised handle and pull the panel shut behind himself. The metal grew warm as a low-level fission charge around the panel’s edge welded it tight, sealing him in darkness.
He reached up to his ear to activate the tiny comm link there. This close, it was easy to pick up the transmission from Kira Nerys and the doctor in the shuttle connected to the substation.
“Anything wrong?”
That was Kira’s voice; he could imagine her up in the pilot area, impatient with the break in the departure procedure.
The chief engineer’s reply crackled with static. “ . . . looked for a moment like we were having some problem with the mounting arms . . . seems to have cleared up . . . ”
Within seconds, a fine vibration moved through the structural beams close around him. There wasn’t time to waste—he crawled quickly ahead, shoving aside a panel of lighter weight, then dropping from the ceiling to the substation’s interior.
Hören scrambled to his feet and reached up to the ceiling; the dislodged panel was just out of reach of his fingertips. He’d have to take care of it later; he nearly fell as the substation shifted position.
“What are you doing over there . . . ” In his ear, he could hear the exit crew’s voices. “Come on, clear the area . . . ” That must’ve been addressed to Deyreth and the rest of his group; it didn’t sound as if they had aroused any suspicions.
He hurried toward one of the substation’s farther sections, with a familiarity born of memorizing the plans Deyreth had provided him. He’d be able to brace himself inside a sickbed unit, secure against the cargo shuttle’s acceleration as it left the docking pylon.
Then it would just be a matter of waiting . . .
CHAPTER 8
“WE’RE DEAD.”
He spoke aloud, aware of the figure standing behind him in the doorway of the pilot area. Bashir leaned back from the shuttle’s instrument panel and looked over his shoulder. “Completely.”
“What are you talking about?” Kira had gone aft to do a visual scan of the connectors for the locking arms; the momentary glitch before they had left DS9 had continued to be a source of worry. If it had been up to Bashir, he would have delayed until it had been thoroughly checked out—but that had been Kira’s decision to make. Now, she slipped into the other seat. She quickly looked across the display. “What’s going on—”
“As I indicated, we’re dead. In the water, so to speak.” He pointed. “We’ve come to a complete halt.”
She muttered a few Bajoran swear words, as her hands moved across the controls. None of the instruments registered any change. She turned and glared at him. “If this is something you’ve pulled, just so we’d wind up spending more time here in the wormhole, I’ll—”
“Major Kira.” He tried to control his own temper. “If I’d known beforehand that you were susceptible to paranoid fantasies, I would’ve prescribed psychiatric treatment for you. I’m getting all the data I need, thank you.”
The latter was true; since the cargo shuttle, with the substation mounted before it, had entered the wormhole, the sensors had been operating at full capacity. The various pieces of equipment he and Dax had installed were running perfectly; he had checked the portable data banks and had found the information flow to be running at 110 percent of predicted levels. Commander Sisko himself had instructed Bashir to allow for the additional storage.
“They’re smart,” Sisko had told him. The commander had been giving him an additional briefing about the wormhole’s inhabitants. “They can figure out the purpose of anything that comes into their domain.” Sisko had, since his encounter with the creatures, developed a propensity for speaking of them as if they were material, even human. “They can figure out what you’re doing there. If they decide to, they can pour out information like a naiadene rainstorm.”
Perhaps that had already started happening. The wormhole’s interior had turned out to be a treasure chest of electromagnetic radiation, dense to either extreme of the sensors’ bandwidth, frequencies overlapping and intermingled. A full analysis would have to wait until he got the data banks back to DS9 and could begin going over them with Dax, but his first glance at some of the monitor screens showed indications of order, not just chaotic, random bursts and background noise. If that held up on further investigation, the hypothesis of the wormhole being an artifact produced by its inhabitants, and not just a naturally occurring phenomenon, would be substantiated. And if the underlying structure could be induced from the data . . . then the possibilities were wide open—for accomplishments far beyond the fields of multispecies medicine. Bashir almost had to control his hands from twitching, as though they might otherwise tear right into the secrets filling the banks.
Now, if only the wormhole’s inhabitants were to touch his mind, as they had the commander’s . . . then he was sure all the doors would open . . .
“I suppose it’s just a convenient accident, then?”
In the meantime, he looked at Kira beside him. “Major, perhaps you should lighten up a bit.” He’d had enough of her suspicions. “You’re well aware of the quality of materials with which O’Brien has had to make do. Probably nothing more than a loose connection somewhere. Here, watch—” He balled up his fist and, as he’d seen the chief engineer do often enough, slammed it into the least fragile-seeming panel in front of him.
Nothing happened, except for a throb of pain that traveled from his knuckles to his elbow. He wasn’t about to reveal that to Kira.
“Very impressive,” she said dryly. “Now, maybe we’d better try to fix things, and get on our way. If we were able to communicate with DS Nine from this far inside the wormhole, we could’ve asked O’Brien for some engineering advice. But since we can’t—” She stood up. “Come on. Let’s check out the engine compartment.”
“What do you need me for?” Bashir had already shifted his attention back to the sensor readouts.
“Not much, except to hold the flashlight. Now come on.” She strode past him.
As soon as they unsealed the access hatch, the burnt smell struck their nostrils. Not from a fire—the alarm systems would have kicked in if there had been one—but from overloaded circuitry and charred wire.
Bashir leaned over, peering into the opening. “This doesn’t look good.”
“Thanks for the diagnosis.” Kira had already started clambering down the metal rungs into the compartment. “It looks even worse down here.”
He breathed through a hand clamped over his mouth and nose as he stood beside her in the narrow space. “What do you think happened?” He watched as she opened a panel on the side of one of the massive cylinders and started the engines’ self-test mode.
“Well, it’s not the impulse units—they check out fine.” More numbers skittered across the readout. “Something to do with the bypass . . . no, it’s the buffers.” She ran her hand across the surface of the meter-thick shielding that had been placed around the engines, then looked at the sooty ash coating her palm. “They overloaded—something went wrong with the absorb-and-release algorithms.”
“What does that mean?”
Kira closed the diagnostic panel. “These buffers are built up from a programmable crystalline matrix.
Like an intelligent capacitor—they take in the engines’ thrust impulses and modulate them to a sine wave. The propulsive effect is virtually the same, and it doesn’t disrupt the wormhole’s ionic field. So our little friends out there don’t suffer the effects, basically. But something went wrong here; it looks like the buffers were taking in 100 percent of the impulse power but passing on only 90 percent of it. With the additional mass of the substation we’re carrying, it’s not likely we would’ve noticed the drop in effective power. At least not until the whole system burned out.”
“So, we’re stuck here without engines?” Bashir looked across the compartment’s silent forms.
“No—” She shook her head. “We can pull out the buffer circuitry easily enough. That would just be putting things back in their original design. The problem is, what happens if we fire these things up—while we’re still inside the wormhole—and the buffers aren’t working?”
He had to admit it was a good question. Passage through the wormhole was predicated on the understanding that Commander Sisko had reached with the mysterious creatures that were its inhabitants. Creatures for whom the effects of an unbuffered impulse engine were potentially deadly . . .
“Let’s get back to the pilot area.” Kira started up the rungs to the access hatch above. “We’re really going to have to think about this one.”
While he waited, he was careful to touch none of the items in the sparsely furnished living quarters. It would have been easy enough for Odo to examine everything the Redemptorist possessed—there wasn’t much, clothes and a few sets of microassembly tools—and to do it undetected. He could have hidden himself as a thin, transparent membrane on the ceiling, and watched whatever the man did when he thought he was alone. But this was a time, Odo had calculated, when a more direct approach was called for.
The door slid open, and the Redemptorist named Deyreth Elt entered. Lost in thought, or just tired—he had let the door close behind him before he saw Odo sitting on the chair pulled over from the desk.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Deyreth’s reaction was immediately hostile. “What are you doing in here?”
“You needn’t be alarmed.” Odo kept his own voice level. “I apologize for this intrusion on your privacy. But I thought perhaps you would prefer that any discussions between us were done as discreetly as possible. You know who I am, don’t you?”
Deyreth nodded slowly. “The chief of security . . . ” He kept his back close to the door, as though he might attempt to flee at any moment.
“It’s been my observation,” said Odo, “that, for a group whose religious devotions are paramount in their lives, you and your fellow Redemptorists are remarkably well informed about the reality of DS Nine’s operations; the personnel in charge, and so forth. Almost as if you’d made it a point of study. At least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten whenever I’ve talked to the others.”
“Why have you been talking to them?” Deyreth’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Odo observed the change with satisfaction. It always helped to plant a seed that could grow large enough to split conspiracies apart. “It’s my job, isn’t it? To investigate . . . to talk to people. I would have hoped that you would welcome my attentions, in that it’s the murder of one of your own that’s being looked into.”
Deyreth’s expression grew even harder. “Arten was a fool.”
“Oh? Do fools deserve to die, then?”
“That . . . that’s not a concern of mine.” His face showed that he’d spoken too rashly. “But Arten fell among bad companions—nonbelievers—when he came to this place. It was a mistake to bring him with us; he was too young; he didn’t have the shield of a confirmed faith to protect him from his errors.”
“I see. And those errors were . . . ?”
“That is of no concern to you. Investigate his death, if you choose; I have no say about it. But these doctrinal matters are beyond your sphere of authority.”
“Very well.” Odo leaned forward. “Let’s talk of your compatriot’s death. I find it . . . interesting to hear you tell of these ‘bad companions’ Arten found here. Especially when my investigations among those who would fit that description—and I know all who are aboard the station—show that none of them had the slightest contact with him. He seemed to lead the same type of reclusive existence here as do you and the rest of the Redemptorists.”
A shrug. “I can’t answer for all of his comings and goings.”
Odo let his gaze wander around the quarters. “Do you like music? Of any kind?” He looked back to Deyreth.
The question seemed to puzzle him. “Such things are frivolities . . . ”
“I expected that reaction from you. That’s why I’m not surprised to see that there’s no chip-player in your quarters. There wasn’t one in Arten’s, either. Which, of course, made it intriguing that I found a couple of blank chips on his corpse. But then . . . there are other uses for them besides recording music.”
Deyreth remained silent, his spine visibly stiffening.
“What use would you have for them?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. . . .”
“That statement might have been believable at one time.” Odo carefully watched the shift of expressions across the other’s face. “But not now—thanks to the services of a certain Ferengi barkeeper. Quark is probably the worst possible ‘companion’ on the station, but he doesn’t mind doing a few little services for me, now and then—it keeps him in my good graces for whatever malfeasances he may commit later on.”
A corner of Deyreth’s mouth curled in distaste. “What does that sort of creature have to do with me?”
“Quark is in the habit of surreptitiously video recording everything that happens inside his establishment, and most of what happens just outside on the Promenade; the entryway is studded with some cleverly concealed lenses. He is, as one might expect, alert to chances for blackmail.”
“I’ve never patronized such a place.”
“No. But quite a few shifts ago, not long after you and the rest of your microassembly team came up here from Bajor, you went into the booth of a Rhaessian gadget merchant just across the Promenade from Quark’s place—you show up quite identifiably on the video that he let me have. There you purchased two cartons of recording chips, paying for them with cash scrip issued by the Bajoran provisional government—the Rhaessian cheated you on the exchange rate. At high magnification, the details of the transaction are evident. The manufacturer’s batch number of the recording chips you bought is the same as of those that were found on the murdered Arten. Of course, that’s not really too significant—you might have given them to him for some obscure purpose that’s not really any of my business.”
Deyreth had stepped back, right against the door.
“What is significant,” continued Odo, “is that the same batch number is on the chips that were found during a raid on an illicit transmitting station on the surface of Bajor—”
In a split second, Deyreth had palmed the door’s control and darted out to the corridor beyond.
Odo had been readying himself, altering the muscle mass of his legs into a peak glycogen conversion rate. He was up from the chair like a coiled spring, and pinning Deyreth to the floor within a couple of strides.
“Go about your business,” he told the few startled faces in the corridor. With a knee against Deyreth’s spine, he jerked the other’s wrists back and snapped on a set of hand restraints. “Nothing to see here.” He pulled Deyreth upright and pushed him toward the nearest turbolift.
“Any luck?” She knelt down to see how the work was coming along.
Bashir lay on his back, his head and upper torso wedged into a narrow opening beneath the pilot area’s controls. “Wait a minute—” He wriggled out, his tools and light in his hands. “Not bad,” he said, leaning his shoulders against the panel. “But it’s going to take a while.”
He had surprised her by devising a plan for modifying the comm
link—Kira had thought that medicine was his only practical field of knowledge. In this case, his leisure activity of restoring ancient audio equipment had proved to be of value: he had done a rough analysis of the electromagnetic spectra surrounding them in the wormhole, and had found a narrow band that seemed to reflect along the limits of the wormhole’s curved space. If he shorted out the transmitter’s signal on everything but those frequencies, they might be able to hail the Ops deck back on DS9. The drop-off in the signal’s strength would occur at a steep exponential rate, but it was still worth a shot.
“Take a break.” She almost regretted jumping down his throat the way she had before. “We’ve got to figure out some strategy here.”
Bashir followed her to the pilot seats. While he bandaged the knuckles he had scraped underneath the communicator panel, she ran through her analysis of their situation.
“It’s pretty obvious we were sabotaged.” Kira squeezed the seat’s arm in her fist. “O’Brien put in those impulse buffers himself, and when he checked them out they were functioning perfectly. If they hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have cleared this shuttle for the mission. So, somebody must’ve gotten to the buffers afterward.” She had her own suspicions about who it might have been, but she didn’t want to voice them now. The changes in the buffers’ circuitry could have been accomplished only by someone with advanced microassembly skills.
“Maybe that somebody doesn’t want us to get out to the Gamma Quadrant.” Bashir closed the lid on the first aid kit. “If Odo were here, he’d probably remind us of that old Earth maxim, Qui bono? Who benefits? The only ones I can think of would be the Cardassians.” He rubbed his thumb across the bandage on his index finger. “But Gul Tahgla and his crew had already left when the buffers were being installed around our engines . . . so, they must have someone else working for them, someone still aboard the station.”
His line of thought had diverged light-years away from hers; that was fine, as far as she was concerned. “Right now, it doesn’t matter who did it, or why. What we need to figure out is what to do about it. And fast—we’ve got to get the substation in place before the Cardassians can reach the wormhole’s exit sector and claim it for themselves.”