by Неизвестный
"Ttan," he said, "that was a mistake. I am your only friend here." "You are not a friend? she cried.
"I am," he said. "I am the only one who will talk with you as an equal. I am the only one who can release you from the tractor beam. And I am the only one who can let you see your children." "My eggsw" Ttan said.
"Yes, your eggs. They, too, are on board my ship, Ttan. We haven't counted them yet, but we have them all. All of the unbroken ones, anyway." "What?" Ttan shrieked, her insides suddenly twist- ing up with fear. "My eggsw" She began to struggle frantically against the tractor beam. "My eggs--" "There were plenty of eggs left," Gul Mavek said. "I don't believe we counted all the whole ones. I can find out how many are still intact, if you want. How many were there supposed to be?" "Twenty," Ttan sobbed. She went limp. "Twenty beautiful children. Oh, my poor, poor young ones--" "Wait," Gul Mavek said. "I will be back with the exact count." He turned and strolled down the ramp at a leisurely pace, as though he had all the time in the world.
Spinning, Ttan felt a confused jumble of anger, hurt, and despair. Her cilia quivered. She felt numb in all of her extremities. How many dead? she wondered.
How many still alive?
How could they have allowed harm to come to her eggs? How could they let her children perish so casually, so callously? When humans first came to Janus VI, thousands had been destroyed, but that had been an accident. The Federation hadn't realized the silicon nodules were eggs. As soon as they found out, they had moved to protect the young Hortas, to help the Prime Mother feed and care for them. And in return the Hortas had helped the Federation. It was unthinkable that a sentient being could let harm come to children... any children.
Ttan twitched when Gul Mavek appeared at the head of the ramp again. He folded his arms behind his back and watched her silently.
"Yes?" Ttan cried. "Yes?" "Your eggs..." "Tell mew "I had them removed from the ship for safekeeping.
It seems that nineteen of the twenty are still intact--" Ttan felt a keen pang of hurt at the one loss, but then relief flooded through her when she realized how many more were still alive and whole. It almost caused her to miss Gul Mavek's next words.
"~for the moment," he finished.
"What do you mean?" Ttan demanded. "If you harm my children--" "You are in no position to make threats," Gul Mavek said. "If you threaten me or any of my men again, I will have another egg destroyed." Ttan all but gasped in horror. "You can't~" "And," Gul Mavek continued, "after that I will have another destroyed, and another, and another, until they are all dead. Every last one of them, Ttan.
Unless..." "Unless?" Ttan said, a small hope rising within her.
"Unless you cooperate," he said. "If you perform one small task for me today--one small, almost insignificant task--I will let you see your eggs for a few moments this evening." Despairing, Ttan could only say, "Anything you ask, I will do."
Aboard the Amazon, Julian Bashir tried to concen- trate on the mess that his tricorder had become. It hates me, he thought, though he knew that was irrational. Machines didn't hate anybody. Only this one certainly seemed to have it in for him. He'd spent twenty minutes taking it apart and now, an hour and a half later, it wasn't any closer to being fixed.
His vision began to blur, and he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. What he wouldn't have given to have ChiefO'Brien's skills right now. He took a sip of replicated coffee and grimaced at the bitter taste.
Enough stalling. He forced himself to concentrate on the tiny computer screen set into the wall. A trickle of sweat ran down this back, and suddenly he began to get a neck ache. He knew it was from staring up at the monitor too much. The colorful schematic of the tricorder's inner mechanism the monitor displayed started to blur again.
"Blast," he said, and slammed down his electron probe. This wasn't the simple recalibration he had expected. "Blast it all!" He rubbed his eyes again. It didn't look like he'd ever get the tricorder working again.
He glanced a little wistfully over his shoulder at the other pull-out table, where the five ensigns were busily playing poker with cards and chips the onboard replicator had made. Not that he gambled much; he simply hadn't realized how little there was to actually do aboard the Amazon until now. With a little over warp four as the runabout's greatest speed and anoth- er sixteen hours of travel still ahead, he would have welcomed a decent science library, a holedeck, or even a visit to Quark's infamous holesuites to pass the time. Without them, poker would have to do.
He watched as Ensign Aponte dropped three blue chips into the pot. Everyone else folded, and Aponte raked in her win with a gleeful laugh.
Julian hated that sound. He'd lost steadily through the hour he'd played, and Aponte's laugh had started to get to him. On impulse, he'd decided to take a break from the game, have a snack, and try his hand at recalibrating his tricorder to pick up silicon life- forms. He'd thought it might change his luck.
Instead, things had rapidly gotten worse. He turned back to his pull-out table and stared helplessly down at the circuits in front of him.
Bad as they were, what remained of his snack--half of a replicated ham sandwich and a rapidly chilling cup of the worst replicated coffee he'd ever hadm looked more inviting than the tricorder, so he stalled by taking a couple of bites and sips. It shouM be easy, he told himself. You're a surgeon. You fix biological machines every day. How can one tricorder be so hard?
Finally he couldn't put it off any longer. He set his sandwich down, selected a probe, and tried to push a primary connector back in place. Instead, he touched a scanner trip circuit by mistake. Blue sparks hissed and spat into the air, and he jerked his hand back to avoid being burned. "Blast!" he said.
"Having a problem, Julian?" Dax asked. Julian jumped. He'd been so wrapped up in the tricorder problem, he hadn't seen her wander back into the passenger section. He had to get his act together, he thought, or she'd never respect him.
"A problem, urn, yes," he said, then winced inward- ly at how pathetic that sounded. "I was trying to recalibrate my tricorder to pick up silicon-based life- forms. The changes I need to make are all listed in the manual, but somehow I've got them all muddled." "So that's what you call it." Julian felt himself growing flustered. Somehow, that seemed to happen rather frequently when he was around Jadzia Dax.
"I can do yours next, if you want," he offered.
"I'm afraid mine is already done," Dax said. She unclipped it from her belt and set it on the table. "I cleaned and recalibrated it two hours ago; then I did Kira's." "Then do you think you might--" He gestured helplessly at the tangled mess of wires and data chips before him. He didn't have the nerve to meet her gaze.
Dax laughed lightly. "Of course I'll help put it back together." She slid into the seat opposite him, took the probe gently from his hand--her touch was cool as silk and sent a shiver down his spine--and began snapping pieces of the tricorder together. "It will give me something to do for the next few minutes." "Are you bored, too, then?" "A little." Julian felt some of his confidence return. "Would you care to join the poker game with me? I'd be glad to give you some pointers, if you've never played be- fore." "Actually, one of my previous hosts was a mathe- matician and an inveterate gambler. He enjoyed play- ing the odds so much, I'm afraid that--with very few exceptions--I've grown tired of all games of mathe- matical probability. Except for Ferengi, it's hard to find real competition. There's something not quite fair, I feel, about always being the winner. It puts a strain on relationships." "Ah," Julian said, biting his lip. He'd walked right into it again. "That's very thoughtful of you, Jadzia." He watched her smooth, feminine hands fit piece after piece of the tricorder together. Every now and then she made a small adjustment with the probe.
Almost before he could blink, the tricorder was back together.
"That's it?" he asked, amazed.
"That's it," Dax said. "You might want to try it out, of course, to make sure." He flipped it open and saw the display panel come to life. The readout now matched the ma
nual's--right down to the split screen for carbon-based and silicon- based life-forms. It worked perfectly. He met her gaze.
"Thank you," he said, sincerely meaning it.
Dax rose. "Any time, Julian." She paused. "I'm going to get some sleep. I strongly suggest you do the same." "Yes," he said. "Right away. I just want a few more hands of cards first." Only sixteen hours, he thought, and we're there. He wondered if he was going to make it.
As Ttan moved down the ramp from the Dagger, she felt strangely giddy, as though she weighed next to nothing. They were in some kind of underground chamber, with crude stone walls far to either side and a smooth stone floor beneath her. Light came from brilliant glowing panels set overhead, to either side of what looked like a glowing forcefield of some kind.
Through the forcefield she could see distant stars.
She gave an experimental hop, pushing off the floor with her cilia, and to her surprise soared several meters forward, almost striking Gul Mavek's back.
The guards bellowed warnings to their leader, snap- ping up their weapons. Ttan paused, hardly daring to move. She had noticed that they had increased the power settings on their weapons.
Gul Mavek, though, merely paused and regarded her with a strangely serene expression. "The gravity here is roughly a third of what you are used to," he told her. "You will adapt quickly, as have we all." He turned his back and led the way down the ramp to a stone floor.
As oddly light as Ttan felt, it was good to have a planet around her. Already she tasted traces of ferrous oxide, calcium, and other minerals through her cilia.
If not for her eggs, she would have burrowed deep into the rock underfoot in seconds. Not even the phasers could have stopped her.
As long as Gul Mavek held her eggs, though, she knew she would do whatever he asked. Nineteen children still alive, she thought. Nineteen chances for immortality. I must not fail them.
They crossed an underground docking bay to a large cargo lift--little more than a rhodinium box with antigrav units underneath it.
Gul Mavek boarded first, then Ttan, then the guards. After one guard rolled a gate across the front of the lift, they started down.
Through the gate Ttan watched as they descended past level after level. The first ten looked identical: square and white, with doors opening to either side. A few humanoids in uniforms that matched the guards' moved through them on errands. The eleventh through twentieth hadn't been finished, with walls and floors of a gray-green stone that glistened as though wet. Ttan knew that look: these tunnels had been carved out with heavy-duty phasers.
At the twentieth level the lift came to a halt and the gate opened. Gul Mavek stepped out. "This way," he said.
Ttan emerged more slowly. Here, this far under- ground, she felt at ease for the first time since she'd left Janus VI. The rock walls around her, the comfort- ing closeness, the cool touch of stone--she had come home.
Gul Mavek turned left without a second's hesita- tion. Ttan followed, and the guards brought up the rear. They traveled in silence for several minutes before Ttan began to feel vibrations in the stone under her. She wasn't certain, but it felt like it came from heavy machinery somewhere ahead.
At last they rounded a corner and entered another large cavern. Some kind of large mining and smelting operation was under way here. On the far side of the cavern, a seemingly endless line of dust-covered cargo bins easily ten meters long and five meters wide floated in on antigray lifts, dumped tons of gravel into a pile, then floated back out. Huge robot-driven bulldozers shoveled the gravel onto a conveyor belt, which carried it into an immense box that radiated heat in waves--probably a smelting furnace, Ttan thought. She'd never seen one quite like this before, but she knew the general principle. Inside, the gravel was reduced to its composite minerals, then put back together into ingots of pure latinurn or rhodinium or carbonire or whatever else it had been programmed for. She couldn't see where the ingots came out of this one, though.
"As you may have already guessed," Gul Mavek said, "Davonia is a working moon. We have found traces of latinum on this level. I want you to find the main deposit for us." Moon? Ttan wondered. Where in the Great Plan had they brought her?
"As you command," she said through the transla- tor.
"And Ttan--you have twenty minutes to find it and report back. Either that or you won't see your children again tonight." "But--" she began.
"Nineteen minutes and fifty seconds," Gul Mavek said.
Ttan whirled and hit the rock wall. It melted before her, surrounding her, filling her body with the deli- cious tastes of iron, nickel, and three billion years of water seepage and geologic stability. Latinum, latinurn, she thought, searching frantically for the right taste. She had to see her eggs, had to know her children were safe. Where is the latinurn--
CHAPTER 6
As USUAL, Quark was claiming to be the injured party.
Odo didn't believe it for a seconO.
The security chief sat in Quark's bar, his table conspicuously free of drinks or refreshments, while Quark himself paced and scurried around him, wav- ing his hands in the air and putting on a fine display of Ferengi indignation. "I don't believe this!" he barked, spraying saliva past his rodenttike teeth. Quark wore a lime-green jacket over a garish, multicolored blouse that looked like it had been decorated by a mob of hyperactive, crayon-wielding two-year-olds. "I come to you as a law-abiding citizen, a community leader, victimized by crime, and you won't even lift one gelatinous finger to do your duty! It's an outrage, a scandal. Just what do you think your job is anyway?" "To keep an eye on you," Odo answered, gazing impassively over the bar. He declined to look in Quark's direction. The more agitated Quark became, the less interested Odo seemed.
The bar grew more crowded as lunchtime ap- proached. Odo spotted an unusual number of strang- ers amid the regular customers. A large family of Tetlarites stuffed their porcine faces on Quark's over- priced buffet. The eldest Tellarite, typically near- sighted, squinted at a plate of Vegan truffles before snorting his approval and tipping the entire plate above his waiting mouth. At another table, a pair of hairless Deltan women glibly fended off the attentions of over a dozen Argelian men. A small party of Betazoids sat at the bar, carrying on a silent telepathic conversation, much to the annoyance of Morn, the hefty alien who usually occupied one or more of those seats. Scanning the room, Odo also spotted Klingons, Caitians, Tiburons, P'alblaakis, and many other new arrivals, all presumably drawn to DS9 by the immi- nent flyby of The Prodigal. Odo allowed himself a moment of nostalgia for the bad old days of the Occupation; the Cardassians might have been tyran- nical butchers, but at least they never turned the station into a tourist trap.
You'd think, he thought, Quark's greedy little heart would be filled with glee at this boom in business.
Instead, the Ferengi kept on ranting about some alleged inconvenience.
"Contrary to your deranged opinion," Quark de- clared, "I do not steal from myself." "You would if you could," Odo snorted in disgust.
Quark ignored the gibe. "In the last two hours, three plates, five mugs, and one entire chair have disap- peared from the premises. Do you think they simply evaporated?" "I believe the Ferengi still practice an archaic scam known as 'insurance.' Are you insured, Quark?" "Look," Quark said, lowering his voice. "You and I both know that if I were after insurance money, I'd lose more than a few plates. This is petty theft, and not worth my effort." True enough, Odo thought. Although he hated to admit it, Quark had a point. "I suppose," he said slowly, making eye contact with Quark for the first time this encounter, "there's no reason why a major criminal cannot be afflicted by a minor one." "Exactly!" Quark crowed. "Hypothetically speak- ing, of course. You'll find the thief, then?" "Actually," Odo said. "I'm wishing that this robber were more ambitious. It would appeal to my sense of justice." The Ferengi started to protest, but was interrupted by the beep of Odo's comm badge. Rising to answer the call, Odo immediately recognized the urgent tone in Sisko's voice and turned his ba
ck on Quark so he could listen to Sisko in privacy; then he realized that Quark's enormous, eavesdropping ears were still too close for comfort. Very well.
Odo's bottom half, from his waist to his feet, dissolved into a translucent orange goo that flowed upward, forming a soundproof cone over Odo's head and upper torso. Glancing over his shoulder, through the glassy sheen of the cone, he saw Quark chewing his bottom lip in frustration. Odo permitted himself a thin smile, but his expression turned grim as Sisko quickly informed him about Ttan's abduction. An unfortunate matter, he concluded, that could pose a threat to the station's security should the raiders return for the other Hortas.
"Understood," he signed off. Regaining humanoid form, he rose from his seat and strode out into the Promenade. He had to organize his security team, prepare them for the possibility of an imminent Cardassian assault. This would have to happen, he groused, when the population of the Promenade was already swollen beyond reason. Quark hollered at him from the doorway of his bar: "Wait! What about my plates?" "Look after them yourself," Odo said brusquely. "I have more important things to do."