by Неизвестный
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, slam-ming 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 imag-ined 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 cor-ner 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 poten-tial 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 protec-torate of the Bajoran Cooperative Government. Martial Jaw was declared under the provisions of the Cardas-sian Uniform Code of Military Justice."
Quark waited... and waited... but Odo said noth-ing 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 spend-ing. 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 Cardas-sians, 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 Car-dassians 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 displace
d 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 intelli-gent. 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 obvi-ous 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 Cardas-sian 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 impas-sively 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 cow-ard. 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 fol-lowed 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 Car-dassian 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 pro-grams."
"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 Car-dassian 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 Car-dassians 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 equip-ment, 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 uni-form for... ? Quark couldn't identify the tailor's mili-tary-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 w
as 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 conve-niently 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.