by Неизвестный
Nog mumbled something in an obscure trading tongue that Jake couldn't make out. But the young Ferengi squirmed through the panel opening and dropped with a loud thump to the uncarpeted deck beside his friend. He got up awkwardly, brushed dust from his Starfleet uniform, then aimed his palm torch to one end of the short corridor. The beam of light found only a standard, DS9 bulkhead, a dull, burnished-copper color, ridged and scalloped like the skin of a gigantic reptile. Nog shone the light in the other direction, but his torchlight uncovered only more of the same. "You know, we really have to tell Chief O'Brien about this," he said.
Jake patted Nog on the back. "And what are we going to say when he asks us when we discovered a lost section of corridor?"
"We were children," Nog said. "If we told anyone what we had found back then...." He laughed. "My
father would have served me my lobes on a platter for playing in the tubes."
"And for playing with a 'hew-mon,' " Jake added.
Nog frowned, and Jake knew why. Despite the can-nibalism rumors that still refused to die, human-Ferengi relations had come a long way in the past decade; but those relations still weren't so secure that many Ferengi would be comfortable joking about them.
"Would your father have been any more understand-ing?" Nog asked defiantly.
Jake snorted. "If I had told him about the tunnels back then, I'd still be confined to my room."
"But... we are going to tell them now, correct?"
"Maybe not right this minute," Jake said.
"Jake, we don't have any excuse for keeping this to ourselves. In fact, it might be my duty as a Starfleet officer to tell my commanding officer that-where are you going?!"
Jake ignored Nog and his unfathomable anxiety, and walked toward the only door in the corridor. "Let's just see if it's still here," Jake said.
Nog darted past him and stood in front of the lone door. "It is. Now let's go to Ops and-"
Jake smiled at Nog and reached for the door control panel. "And now, let's see if it's still working."
"It is working!" Nog bleated as he pushed Jake's hand away from the door control.
Jake regarded his friend with a slight frown. "Nog, is there something you'd like to tell me?"
"Let's go to Ops, find Chief O'Brien, and... and I'll tell you everything."
Even in the pale illumination from the palm torch, Jake saw Nog's large ears flush. The explanation came to him suddenly.
"Nog... you have been coming down here, haven't you?"
"No. Well, yes. But, not often. A few times. Five... maybe eight, ten times."
Jake stared at Nog, nonplussed. "By yourself?"
Nog's mouth opened and closed but nothing came out.
"Oh, I get it now." Jake shook his head with a laugh, the sound oddly muffled in the enclosed space. "So... if I open this door, just what am I going to see?" He tried to remember the titles of the 'special' holosuite programs they used to 'borrow' from Quark's bar, the ones Quark kept locked in the little box under the stale pistachios no one ever asked for. "Lauriento Spa? Vulcan Love Slave?"
At that, Nog started to laugh, too. "Part One or Part Two?"
There was only one answer to that question. "Part Two," Jake said with a snicker. Then both friends com-pleted the title at the same time: "The Revenge!"
That was enough to make both double over in fits of uncontrolled giggling, both recalling how they would take the adult holosuite cylinders and try to run the graphic subroutines through their personal desk padds. At best, they were able to call up mildly suggestive sil-houettes of some of the holographic performers from the programs, usually obscured by blurred color and jagged outlines. But the two young friends, certain they were close to learning the secrets of the uni-verse-and equally certain they were going to be caught by their fathers at any minute-had stared at those flickering images for hours, trying desperately to see in them what it was that adults found so com-pelling.
Eventually, the laughter faded and Jake caught his
breath. "So, you really don't want me to open the door?" he asked.
Nog chewed at his lip. "And if I say No, as soon as we leave you'll be right back here to open it anyway, right?"
"Right," Jake agreed. That's exactly what he had decided to do.
Nog sighed in resignation. "Go ahead." He stepped aside.
Jake made a production out of pressing the door control. When the door slipped open, he comically placed both hands over his eyes.
Until he heard Nog say, "Hey, that's not my pro-gram...." Jake took his hands away, looked into what had been the most exciting discovery of their child-hood on Deep Space 9, something not recorded on any deck plan or technical drawing. A lost Cardassian holosuite.
Nog was already inside the room, standing on a slightly inclined rocky landscape. Beyond him, about a holographic kilometer away, Jake spied a collection of small stone buildings reminiscent of a primitive vil-lage. It was night on the holosuite, but the buildings and the land were lit by a cool, blue-green illumina-tion. Jake couldn't detect the source of that backlight-ing, though it appeared, improbably, to be coming from somewhere behind him.
He stepped inside to join Nog, then turned around to look past the improbable cutout of the doorway to the DS9 corridor, to an astounding holographic vista of a night sky.
At once he identified the source of the blue-green light.
A planet filled almost a tenth of the sky in the holo-
graphic scene, the bright light reflecting from the green oceans of its sunlit half enough to wash most of the stars from the heavens.
Then he recognized the planet. "Hey, that's Bajor...."
"Really?" Nog said.
Jake pointed skyward. "By the terminator... see those mountains?" The distinctive pattern created where three tectonic plates had collided to form a per-fect X of intersecting mountain ranges was so well known as to almost be the galactic symbol for Bajor.
"Dahkur Province," Nog murmured. He looked around the holographic landscape again. "So this must be one of Bajor's moons. But I didn't program this."
"Neither did I," Jake said.
The two friends looked at each other, and Jake could see that Nog had just reached the same conclusion he had. "Someone else has been down here."
"Pretty dull program," Jake said softly. "I don't see a single Vulcan love slave."
They stood in silence for a few moments, listening to the holographic wind. Jake looked back at the vil-lage and saw flickering lights in some of the windows of the small buildings.
"Does it feel as if something should be happening?" Nog asked.
Jake shook his head. "It's not on pause. We've got wind, moving lights in that village."
"But why would anyone want a holosimulation of... of nothing happening on a Bajoran moon?"
Jake shrugged. "Maybe the program's caught in a loop. Or the holosuite's broken." He cleared his throat. "Room, this is Jake Sisko. Show me my fishing hole...."
Unlike any other type of holographic simulation Jake had ever seen, the distinctive program switchover of the Cardassian holosuite now began. At first, the colors and the shapes of the Bajoran moon's landscape seemed to liquefy and swim into each other, and then, as if the plug had been pulled on reality, all the colors spun swiftly-dizzyingly-into a spiral vortex that made Jake feel as if he were about to be drawn down an endless tunnel. But, just as quickly as the vertigo of that transformation made itself felt, the spiralling stopped and with a strange optical bounce that Jake could almost feel, the new program took shape.
Jake and Nog were standing on a covered wooden bridge that spanned Jake's favorite fishing hole. It was his father's favorite, too, and six years ago, Jake had been delighted to discover that this secret Cardassian holosuite could access his father's programs from DS9's main computers.
Except...
"This isn't my program, either," Jake said to Nog. The perpetual summer sun wasn't shining. In fact, the day was overcast. In fact, it was actually raining."
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br /> "I, uh, sort of made some, uh, minor modifications," Nog confessed with a shrug. "The rain makes me feel more... at home...."
Then Jake saw that he and Nog weren't alone. There were people swimming in the fishing hole. "Who are they?" He stepped closer to the bridge's railing, saw the impressive size and bulbous shape of the swim-mers' bald heads. "Ferengi?"
"Uh-huh," Nog said in a strangled croak, as if his throat was slowly closing in.
The Ferengi swimmers saw Jake and Nog on the bridge, and started waving enthusiastically.
Then Jake saw how small their ears were, and he began to really understand. "Ferengi females..."
"I've never really been much for... pointed ears," Nog mumbled.
Two of the swimmers began climbing a wooden lad-der at the side of the bridge. They were calling Nog's name, and as they stepped onto the bridge, leaving wet footprints behind, Jake was momentarily startled by the bulky, multilayered swimming costumes the Fer-engi females wore. Other than their heads, their hands, and their feet, not a square centimeter of skin was exposed, not a curve of their bodies could be dis-cerned.
Jake looked at Nog with a grin.
Nog's open-mouth smile was so broad, it almost made him look as if he'd just been stunned by a phaser. The Ferengi teenager stared at the two fully clad females without blinking.
"You're drooling," Jake teased.
Nog looked up at his friend. "Vulcan love slaves don't... wear any clothes," he said sheepishly. "Where's the fun in that?"
Jake took Nog by the arm, tugged him toward the door to the corridor. "Nog, you need to get out more. Let's go find Chief O'Brien."
Allowing Nog to wave a sad farewell to the Ferengi females, Jake pushed his glum friend out the door.
The Ferengi females-representing everything Nog could ever want-returned that wave sadly as Jake and Nog left, reverting to their true forms only when the door had completely closed, and the waiting began again.
CHAPTER 5
if miles O'BRIEN had his way, every Starship, every runabout, every shuttlecraft, and every space station in the galaxy would be as smooth and featureless as his little son's bottom.
Not that DS9's chief engineer minded a turn in space. Perhaps because he was a happily married par-ent of two young, active children, O'Brien greatly enjoyed putting on an environmental suit and slipping out of the artificial gravity fields for an hour or two, just as he was doing today to float above the Defiant, relatively speaking, of course. And stolen moments such as these, when he could just drift peacefully among the stars, hearing only the rhythms of his own heart, his own breathing, he found those moments truly restoring.
But to work in space? In the twenty-fourth century? What was Starfleet thinking?
To O'Brien, who had given the matter some thought, the perfect spacecraft would be without sur-face texture-not one exposed conduit, not a single inset panel, and absolutely no components that could only be serviced from the outside of the ship. Instead, in his opinion at least, everything should be accessible from within, so that engineers and repair technicians could work safely in a breathable atmosphere, under controlled temperatures, in conditions where an unex-pected sharp edge of metal would mean only a quick trip to the infirmary and not explosive decompression and a terrible, painful death.
Humans are far too fragile for space, O'Brien thought, not for the first time. Far too fragile for most things, actually. Which is why machines were so nec-essary. And why engineers in particular were human-ity's best hope for a better future.
O'Brien smiled to himself just thinking about his engineer's dream of that better tomorrow. Gleaming Starships, hulls like mirrors, blazing past the stars with their fragile cargo safely cocooned, and-
"You still breathing out there, Chief?"
The brisk voice in O'Brien's helmet communicator was as loud as it was unexpected.
"Who is this?" O'Brien demanded.
The short sharp burst of laughter that came in response to his startled request was enough to answer his question.
"Sorry, Major," O'Brien said. "I was... I was con-centrating on the transionic power coupling."
O'Brien regretted the words as soon as he said them. He could picture the wry smile on Kira's face as she replied, "I'll say. You were concentrating so hard we could hear you snoring."
Blushing in spite of himself, O'Brien maneuvered gingerly around from the open coupling bay until he could look along the length of the Defiant's upper hull, past the towering pylon and immense curve of DS9's docking ring and up to the Operations Module, as if there were viewports there through which he could see the major. "I'm running a level-six diagnostic," O'Brien explained. "There's not a lot I can do while the computer's working."
"Which is why I was wondering if you'd like to lend a hand to the PTC work crew," Kira said. The humor had gone from her voice. O'Brien thought he could detect the slightest undercurrent of concern.
"Have they run into trouble?"
"It's not trouble yet, Chief. They were almost ready to lift off a hull plate, but then they got an anomalous density reading."
Kira's news hit O'Brien like a shock of translator current. "Tell them not to touch it!"
"I'm confident they know enough not to do that. Rom's leading the team."
"Ah, well, all right, then," O'Brien said, his sudden concern subsiding to a more tolerable level of wari-ness. Rom was one of the best junior technicians he had ever trained. The hardworking Ferengi could be counted on to take a conservative approach to repairs-and to O'Brien, the conservative approach was always the best. "Let me seal this bay and I'll join them." O'Brien tapped his thruster controls to move closer to the Defiant's hull and the open coupling bay.
"Want me to beam you over?" Kira asked.
O'Brien gazed up through the top of his helmet, admiring the towering spires of the station's curved docking arms, picked out against the fathomless black
of space by brilliant running lights. That a machine- an artificial construct built by intelligent hands-could even exist in this universe, could even dare to shine as brightly as the timeless stars, frankly thrilled him at such a visceral level that he couldn't care less if those hands had been Cardassian or human. "That's all right, Major. Looks like a nice day for a walk...."
As DS9's chief engineer, O'Brien was well aware that, according to regulations, untethered spacewalks from one section of the station's exterior to another were strictly forbidden. The massive station's slow sta-bilization spin, almost imperceptible even at the outer edge of the docking ring, could induce in inexperi-enced personnel violent attacks of debilitating space-sickness. Poor Worf almost had to be prodded into his environmental suit for EVA drills.
But O'Brien had no such trouble with an exterior traverse of the station. In his mind, he saw the huge structure simply as a giant cog, moving within its per-fect circle, wholly predictable, reassuringly stable. Thus, after the transionic coupling bay was safely sealed and the diagnostic readers placed on standby, he oriented himself to the station's local coordinates, cor-rectly pointing his feet at the Defiant's hull, and tapped his thrusters. Then he smoothly slipped above the ship, effortlessly adjusting his vector so he would rise above the gentle slope of the docking ring beside the pylon, level out, then drop over the ring's inner edge as if tak-ing a ski jump into an infinite valley filled with stars.
O'Brien sighed with pleasure. He loved this view, the sensation of this movement. In an old-style system of measurement he had mastered in order to be able to read old engineering texts, the distance to the far side of the ring was almost a mile. Certainly, he now
reflected, he had seen larger artificial structures in his career in space. The planet-sized Dyson Sphere, for instance, which Captain Picard's Enterprise had encountered when they had rescued the legendary Montgomery Scott. Contemplating that engineering feat still kept O'Brien awake at night, as he struggled to comprehend the staggering mechanical stresses on its hull components. But a Dyson Sphere was so enor-mous, he
knew, that there was only one way to truly make sense of its size and scope, and that was through mathematical abstractions.
A mile-wide space station, though, that was some-thing concrete, something that could be seen and felt. In fact, Deep Space 9 was about as large as an artificial structure could be built and still be comprehensible to unenhanced human senses. It was part of the reason he had enjoyed this assignment so much. In some ways, DS9 was the ultimate machine. And its size and com-plexity were just below the level at which engineers were forced to rely on artificial intelligence and data reduction in order to grasp the structure of what they built. But DS9-well, by now, O'Brien felt he knew it well enough that he could almost have built a duplicate of it by himself.