by Неизвестный
"Maybe," Sisko said. "It does look as if they were building things in here. Maybe a machine shop? Chief O'Brien?"
O'Brien stepped in next and Jake watched him make the same careful examination of the room, this time giving a running inventory of everything he saw. "Circuit testbed, communications console, a Type-IV computer interface...." He gave Sisko a significant look. "That's identical to Dax's science station in Ops." He returned to his assessment of the room. "A few storage lockers, maybe for lab coats or tools or lunches... None of them locked."
"What about that?" Sisko asked, aiming his torch to a corner of the room Jake couldn't see.
"Well, it's a console," O'Brien said. "But I don't recognize the configuration."
Sisko looked at both O'Brien and Worf. "Gentle-men, any energy readings?" he asked.
Worf and O'Brien replied at the same time. "No, sir."
Sisko motioned to Jake and Nog. "You two. In here."
Jake and Nog stepped over the lip of the door and into the room. In this nonoperational mode it was com-pletely unfamiliar to Jake, and he could see the same lack of recognition in Nog.
"Really, sir. We never saw it this way," Nog said.
"You two said you were able to change whatever program it was displaying," Sisko prompted.
"That's right," Jake said. "I'll give it a try." He cleared his throat. "Room, this is Jake Sisko. Show me my fishing hole."
Jake unconsciously braced himself for the sudden swirl of holopixels and the odd optical bounce that had always followed that command.
But nothing happened.
"Anything?" Sisko asked O'Brien.
"I've set this at full sensitivity, Captain. If there were a single acoustical pickup in this room, I would have detected the current flow created when Jake spoke." He showed the tricorder's flashing face to Jake's father.
Sisko answered his own question. "Nothing."
Jake winced at his father's tone of voice. "Dad, this was a holodeck. We played in my fishing hole. And Nog had a really great Ferenginar adventure play-ground." The playground had been at the edge of a dis-mal, rain-misted swamp, Jake remembered, but the programmable swinging vines had been a lot of fun.
"What else?" Sisko asked sternly.
Jake shrugged, perplexed by what he had no way to explain, or prove. "A couple of other programs from our personal library. You know, the theme park at Tran-quility Base, the Klingon Zoo..." He glanced at Nog.
"We could only ever ran programs that were in your personal files or my father's," Nog said. "I mean, we could customize elements of them with voice com-mands, but... we never really figured out the room's full operating interface."
Sisko looked again at O'Brien and Worf as if silently soliciting their opinions.
In response, Worf asked the next question. "Are you certain you never saw a holoprogram that was Cardas-sian in nature? A military training scenario? Cardas-sian history reenactments?"
Both Jake and Nog shook their heads.
"Oh," Nog suddenly added. "There was the moon. The Bajoran moon."
"Which moon?" Sisko asked sharply.
Jake stared beseechingly at Nog, who shrugged. "Dad, I don't know. One of the inhabited ones. That was the program that was running yesterday when we came in. That's what made us think that someone else had been in here."
Sisko rubbed his free hand over his clean-shaven scalp. It was a gesture Jake had seen his father make a thousand times, most often when Dax was forcing him into checkmate in three-dimensional chess.
"Chief," Sisko said, "if we don't know what that console is, is there any chance it could be some radi-cally different form of holoprojector?"
Jake took a look at the unidentified console as O'Brien walked over to it and the four palm torches in the room converged upon it.
The console was definitely Cardassian in design-a large, jagged boomerang shape, tilted slightly toward the operator, finished with the familiar dull-gray bond-ing metal. The flat-panel controls were unlit, though
the light from the palm torches showed that the con-trols were arranged in standard Cardassian logic groupings. About the only detail that made the console unusual was that in the center of its slanting surface, a section had been inset in order to hold a flat shelf about a half-meter square.
Even to Jake's untrained eye, it seemed obvious that whatever had been connected to the console on that shelf had been ripped out. Two power leads dangled to either side, their interior component wires roughly torn apart. Jake could even see heat damage on the console just beneath the lead ends, as well as in the center of the shelf.
"Now this is interesting," O'Brien said as he held his tricorder only centimeters from the damaged con-sole.
"Was it a holoprojector?" Sisko asked.
"I doubt it," O'Brien answered. "But I don't think I've ever seen energy traces like this before."
"What kind of energy?" Worf asked.
"Hard to say, Commander. I don't think it's from a weapon. But... whatever was on this section here-" O'Brien pointed his tricorder at the console's inset shelf, "-it was radiating... something I haven't seen before."
Jake stepped back as his father moved in front of him and Nog as if to shield them from the console. "Dangerous?" his father asked.
"Not now, sir. And there's no way to know if what I'm picking up came about because it was a slow release of radiation over a long period of time-in which case, I don't think it ever would have been dan-gerous-or if it came in a sudden, explosive release, in a short time-in which case, it might have been."
O'Brien snapped his tricorder shut with a practiced flip of his hand. "Sorry, Captain. But that's the best I can do with this. I'm going to need a full team to take it apart. Couldn't hurt to have Dax take a look, too."
"Maybe in a day or two," Sisko said. "I've already got her helping out with the dead Cardassians."
Jake was surprised to hear Commander Worf snort.
Sisko raised his eyebrows. "A problem, Mr. Worf?"
Worf looked up at the ceiling. "Sir, it is not any of my business."
"But... ?"
"For Quark to say that he has lost his memory to provide an alibi for his actions at the time the Cardas-sians were killed is... ludicrous."
"You're right," Sisko agreed. Jake was as surprised to hear his father say that as it appeared Commander Worf was. But then his father finished his statement. "It is none of your business."
"Yes, sir," Worf growled grumpily.
Jake caught the lightning-quick wink and a smile that his father meant just for him. Then he watched as his father tugged down on his jacket and transformed himself from Jake's father into a Starfleet captain again.
"Anything else you feel we should know?" he asked Jake and Nog. "Any detail, however small, you think might help us out?"
Jake and Nog looked at each other, shook their heads.
Sisko accepted their answer. "All right. You two can-"
"I have a question," Chief O'Brien suddenly said. "How did you two find this room in the first place?"
"We used to explore the Jefferies tubes," Jake said.
"I can understand that," O'Brien replied. "But what possessed you to go to all the trouble of opening up that access hatch? It couldn't have been easy."
Jake looked down at the deck, trying to remember the first day he and Nog had found the room. "I think it was because we had never seen one so small. It's not exactly a standard size."
Nog coughed. "We were... looking for hidden Car-dassian treasure, Chief."
"Ah," O'Brien said. "For a couple of twelve-year-olds, that makes perfect sense. But then, when you came in here, to the room, for the first time, how did you know it was a holosuite? It couldn't have been running any of your own programs without your hav-ing given it a command, right?"
"Right," Jake said with surprise. He looked down at Nog. "What was running when we came in?"
Jake felt his father's hand on his shoulder. "Jake, do you have any sense that you can't remember th
e first time you came into this room?"
"I don't think so," Jake said, wondering why his father suddenly sounded so worried.
"Wait! I remember," Nog said.
Everyone looked at him. He looked up at Jake. "You didn't want to go inside, remember?"
Jake laughed. "Oh yeah. I was... I was afraid. I remember now."
Nog looked back to Sisko. "So Jake dared me to go in first."
"And what program was running?" O'Brien asked.
"That's what was so great," Nog said excitedly. "It was Ferenginar. The swamp outside the capital city. It was dark, and wet, and raining. I was so excited. I came out to tell Jake it was just like my adventure
playground program, and when we both came back in, we found the playground just a few hundred meters away."
O'Brien looked at Sisko. "The room recognized him. Called up his favorite program from his father's personal library. And all in the space of time it took to open the door."
Jake looked at the serious expression that his father, O'Brien, and Worf all shared now. "Why's that bad?"
O'Brien answered. "Jake, there's no power coming into this room. There's no computer link through that Type-IV console or through any other piece of equip-ment in the room. Yet somehow this room had the data-processing capability to identify Nog and call up a program from his father's personal library in sec-onds. Not even the holodecks they use at Starfleet Academy have that kind of processing ability." O'Brien turned to Sisko as if making a formal report. "Sir, with this new information, I think it's reasonable to assume that this was a top-secret Cardassian research facility, probably involving advanced comput-ers and holo-replication technology far beyond any-thing we have."
"I agree," Sisko said. "So why did the Cardassians leave it behind?"
"Perhaps," Worf said in a voice full of grave con-cern, "the equipment in here was too complex to be removed in time during the Withdrawal, and was con-sidered too valuable to be destroyed."
Jake could see that his father was definitely intrigued-and disturbed-by that possibility. "You know," he said softly as if talking to himself, "Starfleet has never been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the Cardassians didn't activate
DS9's self-destruct system when they withdrew. I wonder if this room-this lab-is the reason. Did they achieve a breakthrough here that they hoped to keep hidden until they could return?"
"But they did return, Captain," Worf said. "Last year. Why did they not reclaim their equipment then?"
Sisko looked up, and Jake could see he was enjoy-ing the challenge this room was presenting. "Perhaps the work being done here was so secret that only a handful of people knew about it. Perhaps they died during the Withdrawal, or shortly after. There could be a dozen reasons, Worf."
"But if the work was so secret and so valuable," O'Brien said, "then why was it being carried out here? In a mining station? In an occupied sector subject to attack by Bajoran resistance fighters?"
"I don't know, Chief," Sisko admitted, and didn't seem troubled by his lack of an answer. "But you can be sure there was a reason. We're dealing with Cardas-sians here, and they have a reason for everything they do." He looked around the room, deep in thought. "If this was a Cardassian research facility, then you can be sure that the reason it is here, is because this is the only place it could be."
Jake saw that O'Brien didn't share his captain's sense of urgency for the problem at hand. "But, sir, why would that be?"
Jake could see his father was in his element now. His face was alive with new purpose. "Who knows, Chief. But one thing's for sure-even after six years, this old place still has a few surprises left in it."
CHAPTER 10
the only thing worse than a Ferengi with a headache was a Ferengi with an earache. And at this moment, in his darkened bar in the middle of DS9's night, Quark suffered from both-unquestionably the aftermath of the past eight hours he had spent with Odo.
And now his woes intensified as he saw the after-hours condition of his establishment. The chairs had not been placed on top of the tables. There were still glasses on the dabo table. And behind the bar, the replicator had been left on.
"Why do I even bother?" Quark said to the empty room. He gazed up at the vivid orange, red, and yellow stained-glass mural that dominated the first floor of his bar. All its backglow panels had been left on, too. "What about you, Admiral? Do you have an answer?"
The mural kept its silence, which was no great sur-
prise. Quark shuffled over to the bar to pour himself a very large drink.
Exactly what the mural was, Quark really wasn't sure. For years, that same wall had been dominated by a large Cardassian galor, courtesy of Gul Dukat.
Quark seldom cared about politics, and if the com-mandant of Terok Nor had wanted his grandmother hung on the wall, it would have been fine with the Fer-engi. So the lurid green, pink, and yellow symbol of the Cardassian Union, which looked to Quark like some improbable combination of the hooded Smiling Partner of Ferengi legend and a short-handled screw-driver, had remained proudly in place-until Gul Dukat had swaggered in one day to announce he had just won a spectacular work of rare and valuable art in a late-night game of tongo. And since Quark's was the only public facility on the station with a ceiling high enough to properly display this great treasure, Dukat proclaimed Quark's would be its new home.
At the time, Quark had cared as much about his establishment's decor as he did about politics. His was the only bar on the Cardassian half of the station- indeed, it was the only bar on the entire station, the closest thing to competition being the Cardassian Cafe. And if a tired Cardassian soldier or Bajoran trustee would rather eat replicated Cardassian neemuk without benefit of kanar to wash it down or the com-pany of luscious dabo girls, then Quark was just as happy not to have those lackluster, boring slugs taking up valuable space in his bar.
So, Cardassian galor or Dukat's esteemed art trea-sure, it mattered little to Quark at the time what was on the back wall of his bar. True, he had had to shut down for two days while a team of Bajoran artisans were
brought up to install the mural, and Subcommandant Akris had not granted Quark's request for a matching percentage decrease in the weekly kickback-that is, licensing fee-that Quark had to pay the station man-agement office. But Dukat had more than made up for Quark's initial lost profits by pretentiously buying end-less rounds for his staff on the night the mural was grandly unveiled-to mostly diffident though polite applause.
As Quark had worked the tables that night, he had overheard the Bajoran comfort women saying that at least the orange light helped bring a more Bajoran flush to the cold gray faces of the Cardassian officers they were forced to entertain. Quark himself liked the orange light, because it made it easier to use short measures in amber-colored drinks. And Dukat got to proudly trumpet on about the addition he had made to culture on Terok Nor-making the station an uplifting beacon of Cardassian light amidst the primitive dark-ness of the Bajoran sector.
It was just that no one seemed to be sure what the mural was supposed to represent-until finally, that first night, when much kanar had been consumed and two glinns had already been dragged off to the Infir-mary after a particularly brutish fight (which fortu-nately had lasted long enough for Quark to take bets and clear five slips of latinum), Dukat toasted the mural in such a way that it was clear what he thought it was.
"To a mighty enemy," Dukat had proclaimed, "defeated at last, now sentenced to look on the works of the Cardassian Union and despair! Ladies and gen-tlemen, I give you the portrait of Admiral Alkene, late of the Tholian Assembly!"
After Dukat and his guests had left that evening, Quark and Rom and two Cardassian mining engineers had closed the place, leaning on the bar, staring thoughtfully up at what was now called the Tholian mural.
One mining engineer drunkenly offered up the observation that Tholians had faceted heads.
The other, in an equal state of disequilibrium, dis-agreed, maintaining it was the T
holian helmets that were faceted, and that the shape of Tholian heads was closer to the long and pointed sections included in the mural. Except that he was positive the mural had been installed upside down.
Rom had volunteered that he was fairly certain the mural was actually a version of the traditional good-luck banners that were always hung over the drinking troughs in what he delicately referred to as Tellarite mud-pits of ill repute. "Yep, they... make them by the hundreds on Tellarus," Rom had sniggered. "And you see that same crazy design on Tellarite scarves and pill boxes and... lingerie."
Quark remembered glaring at his idiot brother, demanding to know why the Tellarites would put a portrait of a Tholian admiral on lingerie!