by Peter David
"Yes," he agreed, "but I had to take some additional risks in order to get it here." Gnome stroked his chin. "It added costs. Interest, you might say, upon your original investment." He paused, then put a hand roughly on her shoulder.
Varis's eyes narrowed, still clutching the lid to her chest.
Suddenly a hole appeared in the lid she was clutching. The hole had been made by a phaser blast from the weapon she held in her small but steady hand.
Gnome rocked back on his heels, stumbled, and then crashed heavily against a container, knocking it over. If the phaser had been on one of its higher settings, he would not have survived the experience. As it was, he was simply stunned. When he woke up, it was going to be with one hell of a headache.
And without his ship.
It took all of Varis's strength to lift the black marketeer halfway to a sitting position and drag him across the ground. She had not planned on this turn of events, but neither had she been completely unprepared for it. Hauling him over to the open hatchway, she pitched him out. Gnome thudded to the floor of the hangar bay and rolled a couple of feet before stopping.
"I'll be borrowing your ship," she called to his unconscious form. "Consider it a penalty for your behavior." Then she closed the hatch and sat down at the controls.
Varis was feeling a great deal older than her nineteen years.
She studied the runabout controls. Thanks to her friendship with Jake Sisko, they weren't completely alien to her. During her time at Deep Space Nine, Jake had decided to show off for her a bit by taking her aboard a runabout and explaining how it all worked.
They hadn't left the station, of course. But Jake—the picture of confidence—had shown her how to maneuver through a combination of ion storms and meteor showers without sustaining damage.
When she had first arrived on Deep Space Nine, Varis had been nothing more than a scared fifteen-year-old, thrust into the leadership of her Paqu village after her parents had been killed by Cardassians. As tetrarch, it had fallen upon her to negotiate land boundaries with representatives of the rival Navot village. It was her friendship with Jake and the little Ferengi known as Nog that had enabled her to solve her problems with the Navot.
Varis sighed. She had hoped to prevail upon the black marketeer to transport her back to her village. To perform, in essence, a favor on top of the financial arrangement into which they had entered.
Upon reflection, she now saw how naive she had been. A creature like Gnome had no "better nature" to which she could have appealed.
Her hands fluttered over the ship's controls for a moment. Jake called such things "idiot-proof." They had been designed, through years of careful craftsmanship, to be simple to use.
With a confidence born of self-assurance and ignorance, Varis quickly activated the thrusters. The runabout lifted off the ground with only the slightest of herky-jerky movements, and then the engines roared as the ship hurtled forward.
At which point, Varis suddenly realized that she had neglected to open the door to the hangar bay.
As the runabout smashed through the door, she had a quick glimpse of passersby ducking to shield themselves from flying pieces of debris, and then Varis realized that she was on a direct collision course with a building directly across the way. Residents of the building saw her coming and leaped out of their windows to avoid the imminent collision.
Varis pulled on the controls as fast and as hard as she could. The nose of the runabout abruptly angled upward—at nearly a ninety-degree angle, the Bajoran sun glinting off the vessel's windshield. And the vessel soared toward the heavens like a great wingless angel.
Yes, an angel, most definitely that. An angel of mercy, on her way to help her people.
By casting herself in that role, she realized that she was able to forgive herself for circumventing the laws of Bajor that she had sworn to uphold as a tetrarch. She could forgive herself for dealing with black marketeers, and she could forgive herself for stealing a runabout as well.
She could forgive herself all that because Varis Sul, tetrarch of the Paqu, believed in the rightness of her course. She had seen her people needy, starving. They had looked to her in silent supplication; silent because they were a resolute, uncomplaining people, who saw no need to heap guilt and frustration upon their leader.
Responding to their quiet desperation, she had gone to the government. It had been no use. She had approached Jake Sisko and his father, the commander of Deep Space Nine. No use again.
In fact, no one had been of any use, least of all her. She finally had decided that she was not going to tolerate it any longer. And as a result, she found herself flying a stolen runabout filled with contraband replicators and the raw material they needed. Only the Prophets knew where Gnome had gotten them. From a shipment intended for a space station? Scavenged, perhaps, from a space vessel that had been seized, its crew slaughtered, but its equipment left intact?
Once upon a time, Varis would have dwelt heavily on such things. But now it would be a luxury to do so—a philosophical and moral nicety she could no longer afford.
She felt the weaker for her calm attitude. She felt unclean, in fact. But that didn't matter. Nothing mattered except helping her people.
Perhaps her actions were sinful. But she didn't care. As the ground sped past beneath her, she mused that if morals and a clear conscience were in short supply, well, at least help was to be had in abundance. And ultimately, that was all that mattered.
* * *
When Varis Sul arrived at her village, the rejoicing that followed was incredible. The feast her people put on was dazzling beyond anything within Paqu memory. The replicators, hooked up quickly, churned out food with breathtaking speed, and even that was insufficiently rapid for the starving populace.
Originally, tables had been set up for people to sit at in a civilized way. But that idea quickly went by the wayside as people plopped down to gorge themselves anywhere they could. Streets, sidewalks, under trees and bushes.
Even the animals were fed. The crops that were the animals' sustenance had been particularly bad in the past year—just another aspect of a situation that had seemed completely hopeless.
There was laughter and rejoicing, music and dancing and food, always more food. And the songs …
Songs of celebration, of thanks. And all of them were dedicated to, and sung about, Varis Sul. New songs were fabricated on the spot, and old songs were intoned about great old heroes, with Varis Sul's name substituted in the appropriate places.
Thanks to the Bajoran troubadours, Varis Sul was credited with everything from defeating the Cardassians to the creation of the planet itself.
But Varis heard none of these. Despite the urging of her neighbors, she did not participate. She ate, of course, although nowhere near as much as everyone else. Instead, she ate a small portion, with the intent of visiting the temple afterward.
And there she would pray for forgiveness.
Which, unfortunately for her, and all the people in her town … wouldn't come. Something else was coming instead.
A considerable smell would soon fill the Paqu village, just as it had the Place. It would be the stink of fear.
CHAPTER
1
KNEELING ON THE floor in a corner of the station's operations center, Miles O'Brien checked his tricorder, hoping to see a steady line on its sensor readout.
Unfortunately, the line he saw had a power spike at three-second intervals. He used the back of his hand to wipe a thin film of sweat from his forehead and spoke to the engineering assistant halfway inside the bulkhead.
"We've got the spike again, Tony," the chief said with resignation. "Try switching the power relays for the OHD."
Tony Kwiatkowski, a thin wiry man with a large nose and dark hair, pulled himself out of the bulkhead. "Don't you mean the ODN, sir?"
O'Brien's face flushed with embarrassment. There was a big difference between an optical data network and an omnidirectional holographic diode.
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"Yeah," he admitted, "I guess I do."
His assistant chuckled, then crawled back into the bulkhead to see it done. The chief shook his head at the mistake. He didn't make them very often, after all. But then, he wasn't often as distracted as he was now.
Keiko and Molly, his wife and little daughter, had returned only the day before from Bajor, where Keiko had been involved in a long and demanding botanical expedition. Back on the Enterprise, it had been possible for O'Brien and his bride to pursue their respective careers and still see each other every night. That wasn't the case on Deep Space Nine.
As chief of operations, O'Brien was always mired knee-deep in repairs, slowly and laboriously correcting the mindless damage the Cardassians had inflicted before they left the station. To make matters worse, it was his job to meld existing Cardassian systems with newly introduced Federation technology.
All in all, a demanding job. And one that didn't allow him to take much time off.
Keiko, on the other hand, couldn't be much of a botanist on Deep Space Nine. Her job entailed a great deal offield work. Hence, the long periods of time spent in the Bajoran wilderness.
With Molly. Without O'Brien.
But now they were home, and life was good again. Full. Complete.
"Chief?" came Kwiatkowski's voice, muffled by his confinement.
O'Brien leaned over to peer inside. "What is it?" he asked.
His assistant smiled as he pointed to the ODN juncture, a bulky box in which raw power was converted for use by a half-dozen tertiary systems.
"I've replaced the relays. How does it look?"
The chief used his tricorder to monitor the power flow. "Damn," he said.
"The spikes are still there?" Kwiatkowski asked.
"Still there," O'Brien confirmed.
He had hoped to have settled the problem an hour ago. Now, instead of spending some time with his family before dinner, he'd be lucky to get to his quarters before the food got cold.
Abruptly, he made an executive decision. "That's it," he said. "We'll pick up on this tomorrow."
His assistant looked at him as if he'd grown a second head. "But sir …" he began.
"I know," O'Brien said, "I know." It wasn't like him to give up on a problem until he'd gotten it licked. "But tonight is special—my first dinner with my wife and daughter in months. I'm not going to miss it for anything short of a station-wide emergency."
Which this definitely wasn't. Thanks to the chief's dedication over the last few years, there were plenty of backup systems that could carry the load until the next morning.
Kwiatkowski shrugged. "You're the boss," he said.
O'Brien smiled. He was, wasn't he? And for once the boss was going home right on time.
As soon as his assistant wriggled out of the bulkhead again, the two men wrestled the corresponding junction plate back into place. And when Kwiatkowski volunteered to put their tools away, the chief was only too happy to accept the offer.
Crossing Ops, he headed for the nearest turbolift.
All the while Keiko and Molly had been off-station, O'Brien had dreaded going back to his quarters at night. Usually, he shared a meal at Quark's place with Julian Bashir, then found a reason to remain in the bar the rest of the evening.
Sure, he had regained his old form at darts against Bashir and polished up on his kayaking skills in the holosuites. But in the end, he'd always had to go home to an empty echoing set of walls.
Not now, he told himself. Not for a while, at least. As far as he was concerned, the longer the better.
As he entered the turbolift, O'Brien allowed his mind to drift, thinking of things he could do with Molly in the days to come. There would be a zoo trip, thanks to the reservations he'd made in Quark's holosuite. Also a sailing excursion, and then a circus as well.
He kept arranging and rearranging the order of events in his mind, oblivious to his whereabouts. So when he realized he was standing in front of the door to his quarters, it was with a bit of surprise.
Home, he thought. He had never fully appreciated the meaning of the word until now.
As the doors slid open, the chief heard a clattering of dishes. "Looks like someone's home from work," Keiko called.
O'Brien heard a squeal. Then, as the aroma of dinner came to him, there was a sound of small quick feet and a tiny figure with long dark hair burst out of the other room.
With another squeal, this one louder than the first, Molly threw herself at her father. He snatched her out of midair.
"Daddy! Daddy!" she exclaimed. "Come quickly! I want to show you the picture I made after lunch and then you can see the clay figure I made and the dinner I helped make and then I want a story …"
"Hold on, little one," O'Brien said with a laugh. It was one thing to follow a string of technical babble during the heat of battle, but it was quite another to interpret the breathless rush of an excited child.
Hugging Molly to him, he returned his attention to the smell. It was something familiar. And wonderful.
He called out to his wife. "Yankee pot roast! Right, Keiko?"
"Yes, Daddy," said his daughter, before his wife could reply. "With broccoli and ice cream."
Keiko stuck her head around the corner of a bulkhead. "Actually," she told him, "only the broccoli will be served with the pot roast. The ice cream is scheduled for dessert."
O'Brien grinned. "I sort of figured that."
He reveled in the sight of his wife, who somehow always looked more appealing to him every time he saw her. She was wearing something soft and green that hugged her in all the right places. And her eyes were filled with a spark, with the kind of life he had not seen in them since before he took his family off the Enterprise.
The chief was delighted with the menu, too, knowing full well Keiko only made a red-meat dish when she wanted to do something special for him. Clearly, she was trying to make up for lost time.
Putting Molly down, he patted her on the rump. "Go get your picture and your clay figure," he told her. "I want to take a look."
As his daughter complied, O'Brien wandered over to the dining area, where his wife was leaning over the replicator. His intention was to hug her for all he was worth.
But with a fluid graceful motion, Keiko whirled around and snuck under his outstretched arms, carrying a hot serving dish. A cloud of steam trailed behind her.
O'Brien shook his head. There would be time for romance later, he supposed. Shrugging, he ordered up a cup of coffee, his fifth of the day.
"Come and sit down, Miles," Keiko told him.
A moment later, Molly arrived with her creations in tow. "Here they are," she said.
The chief oohed and aahed over them, though he hadn't the slightest idea what they were supposed to be. Then he settled Molly into her seat, adjusting a cloth napkin in front of her blue overalls.
Smiling, Keiko arranged the various dishes on the table, then slid into her chair and reached for the serving utensils. O'Brien grinned and took his own seat, savoring the aroma from the meat.
"Smells delicious," he said.
"It should," his wife replied, a serious tone in her voice. "I spent twenty minutes sifting through roast offerings on the menu and then had to edit one to match that meal we had back on the Enterprise." Keiko began to serve Molly her child's portion.
The chief grunted. "Meal? On the Enterprise?"
Keiko sighed, her smooth skin furrowing between her eyes. "You're hopeless, you know that? Think about it."
She busied herself fastening Molly's napkin and pouring her a drink. In the meantime, O'Brien searched his memory for the occasion in question. Keiko's exasperation signaled it was a special moment: dear to her, though obviously forgotten by O'Brien.
Then it hit him.
"It's your birthday," he blurted out.
Keiko stared at him wide-eyed. Sighing, she cut up Molly's food for her.
No, thought the chief, that wasn't it. He racked his brain again, scrunching his face in t
hought. In the meantime, his food sat untouched.
Finally he put it together. "We celebrated my posting to Deep Space Nine with Yankee pot roast," he announced triumphantly, then smiled. "What's going on? I'm not being transferred, am I?"
It was a joke, but Keiko didn't laugh. What's more, her playfulness melted away. O'Brien swallowed. He recognized that look. His wife used it when a subject important to her was about to be broached.
"Well?" he prodded gently.
Keiko sat down as Molly began to eat and directed her full attention toward her husband. "No," he said, "you're staying put. You're happy here."
"And I'm happy to be back here, with you. But … an opportunity has come up. The Bajorans I work with contacted me today—"
"No," repeated O'Brien. The word was sharp, direct, intended to preclude any further discussion.
He should have known it wouldn't work. Not on Keiko.
She forged ahead as if he hadn't even spoken. "They've discovered some new kind of flora on a remote island. It's got them stumped as to whether it's a naturally occurring anomaly or something the Cardassians brought with them. Anyway, I—"
"You're not going back," O'Brien insisted. To keep from saying anything further, anything he might regret, he raised his mug to his lips and swallowed some coffee. The heat from the mug made his face flush, but not half as much as the heat of his anger.
His wife leaned forward over the table, as determined as he was. "They need me, Miles. I can't just close off a part of my life, not after living it again for six months. You, you're needed every day and that makes you feel good. I'm proud of you and your accomplishments. But I want to feel good, too—to take pride in some accomplishments of my own."
He had seen that look before, just prior to her last departure. She wasn't going to give in, not for anything.
"I need you," he said softly. "And who'll watch Molly?"
"She'll come back to the planet with me," Keiko said quickly, trying to get the words out. "She made some friends down there, and they'll be at the site, too. Miles, it's only for three weeks at most …"
O'Brien shook his head. "I've missed enough of her growing up. We were just about to regain some balance, her and me. Why now?"