by Неизвестный
Jadzia had to admire Vash's technique. The touch had clinched it. Bashir was definitely on the hook, though she knew him well enough that he would do nothing to pursue this new opportunity until after Vash was no longer in his care.
Bashir eased away from her hand. "Uh, you're quite welcome. I'll... check in on you later, then."
"I'll be here."
/ don't believe it, Jadzia thought as she started for the door. The silly creature actually batted her eye-lashes at him.
Then Jadzia hooked her arm around Julian's and guided him to the door at her side. "Come along, Doc-tor. You have other patients."
"I do?"
The surgery door slid shut behind them, and they were in the main work area. Without Vash.
Immediately, Jadzia said, "Julian, I'm surprised at you."
"Why me? On the contrary, I'm surprised at you and at Odo."
"That woman was... wait a minute. Why are you surprised at me ?"
Bashir headed over to the workstation where he had left the neural dart. "Because you-and Odo-were falling for everything Vash said."
Now Jadzia was doubly surprised. "I wasn't falling for everything she said. You were." She batted her eye-lashes at Bashir. "Oh, Doctor, I'm open to anything. Really, Julian."
Bashir gave her a look of amusement. "Could it be you're jealous?"
"I am a happily married woman, thank you. I just happen to be concerned for my friend."
Bashir rolled the dart in his fingers, as if looking for something he and the most sophisticated collection of medical scanners and analyzers this side of Starbase 375 had missed the first time. "Well, your friend is
equally concerned about you." He brought up his other hand and adjusted the position of the dart. "So you should know that everything Vash was saying in there was a lie." He began rolling the dart again, as if trying to feel for some slight imperfection.
Jadzia sighed with relief. There was hope for Julian yet. "Thank goodness you were able to sense it, too. I really was getting worried about you."
Bashir looked as if he hadn't quite understood what Jadzia had said. He continued to roll the dart in his fin-gers. Jadzia eyed him with renewed concern. She didn't like the way he was handling the dart, and she trusted he wasn't going to do something stupid, like accidentally prick himself with the dart's small needle. "I didn't have to sense anything, Jadzia. I knew what was going on the instant she made her mistake."
"What mistake?"
"Dax! You musn't have been paying attention. Now I'm even more surprised."
Jadzia put her hands on her hips. "Julian, unlike Miss Batty-Eyes in there, I am not fond of this kind of game. What mistake did she make?"
"Bicuprodyanide," Bashir said happily, entirely too happily in Jadzia's estimation. "She said she had it bubbling in her brain, if you recall."
Jadzia thought back. Yes, she could remember Vash saying exactly that. "But what about it? She did have bicuprodyanide in her system, didn't she?"
"Absolutely. Except... I never told her that's what it was. All I said was she had been exposed to an Andorian neural toxin."
Jadzia tapped her forehead with her fingers. It had slipped right by her. But then she thought she detected a flaw. "Just a minute, Julian. Maybe it was a lucky
guess. I mean, how many Andorian neural toxins can there be?"
Bashir held up the medical padd he had been work-ing with earlier. "In common use or easily replicated with nonspecialized equipment, one hundred ninety seven. I have no doubt that Vash knew exactly what was in this dart, and because of that, there was no pos-sible way she thought she was dying when she told Captain Sisko about the Red Orbs."
Jadzia was struggling now to deal not only with what Bashir was suggesting, but with the fact that he had jumped so far ahead of her own assumptions. "But Julian, how could she take the chance that her accom-plice would be able to shoot her at the right time, with the right toxin, without being seen?"
Then Jadzia felt Dax lurch within her abdominal pocket as Bashir suddenly slapped his hand to the side of his neck, driving the neural dart needle into his flesh. "Julian!"
But Bashir's only response was to seem to pluck the dart from his neck and then roll it forward in his fin-gers so that Jadzia could see the needle had been removed. It was in his other hand.
"What better way to make us believe she's telling us the truth, than by making us think that someone would rather kill her than have us hear what she had to say?"
To Jadzia, that moment of revelation was as power-ful as if an Altonian sphere had just turned monochro-matic. She had become so caught up in the idea that Vash was manipulating the truth in the surgery that she hadn't stopped to consider that that manipulation might have started much earlier.
"She's been lying from the beginning," Jadzia said wonderingly.
"I think that's likely," Bashir agreed.
"Which could mean... she does know where Quark is-"
"-and she knows who claims to have the Red Orbs-"
Then Jadzia and Bashir hesitated as they drew the ultimate conclusion from what they had discovered.
"And the Red Orbs themselves..." Jadzia said slowly.
Bashir nodded. "... could very well be real." He smiled at Jadzia's look of concentration. "As I said, we could be a great team."
Even his persistence struck her as endearing. But she deflected him by saying, "Julian, we already are a great team."
He stepped closer to her. "So what does the team do now?"
"Now... we go see Benjamin."
She could see it in his eyes: It wasn't what he had wanted to hear her say, but he knew it was the right thing for her to have said.
What a sweet hopeless romantic Julian is, Jadzia thought with real affection as they left the Infirmary together. Someday, the woman who gets Julian is going to be the luckiest woman in the quadrant.
She wondered who that lucky woman would be.
CHAPTER 15
"You'RE crazy," Nog said.
Jake shrugged. "My granddad says that's not so bad in a writer."
"Then may I say your grandfather is crazy, too."
Jake straightened up from the safety railing on the second level of the Promenade. Years ago, when he and Nog had first met and made the first tentative steps in forging a friendship that would transcend the tradi-tional boundaries of their respective species, they would sit on the deck here, letting their legs swing over the side until Odo or one of his officers told them they should have something better to do and it was time to move along.
But now, Jake realized there had been nothing better for the two of them to be doing than watching the parade of life that had passed by beneath them. Because those long hours of observation, speculation,
and just plain talking had helped them become the young men they were today-the writer and the Starfleet officer.
It was from this vantage point by the safety railing that Jake first began noticing the intricate details of people's behavior: how some couples walked close together, some apart; how some people smiled secretly to themselves, while others fought back hidden tears. He'd seen the confidence of the newly arrived visitor, fresh from the shuttle, striding in to face the challenge of Quark's dabo table. Hours later, he'd watched the defeated shuffle of that same person as he crept away with only the clothes he wore.
Nog had learned no less than Jake. He had explained the Great Material River to his hew-mon friend, and how the Promenade was a perfect tributary of that mighty cascade that shaped the universe. On the shores of the Promenade-that is, its shops and kiosks-were pockets of accumulation, areas that had too much of one thing or another. Flowing between those shores were the rushing waters of customers- that is, those who had too little of what the shops had too much of.
On the other side of the equation, the shopkeepers had far too little latinum, and so an endless rebalanc-ing of accounts ensued as the waters lapped at the shores, eroding a little here, building up a little there, always working to achieve a b
alance that forever remained out of reach.
Jake had been brought up in a Starfleet home and was fascinated by the Ferengi outlook on the universe. Nog, who had been brought up to accept the Great Material River as the only reasonable way to see the universe, had been equally fascinated to learn about
Jake's alien perspective. The idea that it was accept-able-even desirable-to accumulate knowledge for no other purpose than to increase understanding, and the entire concept of helping others without any prospect of profit, were staggering to the young Fer-engi.
But once both boys got over their initial dismissal of each others' viewpoints and began to truly try to see what the other meant, whole new vistas opened before them.
In Jake was born the need to see how other minds- not just human and Ferengi-viewed the universe, and then to illuminate those views for others through the written word. In Nog, a mad dream was born in which the precision of Ferengi thought could be applied to the romantic altruism of the Federation in order to cre-ate a new paradigm of galactic organization, one in which the most extreme imbalances in the Great Mate-rial River-meaning those that invariably led to con-flict-would be forever eliminated, while still leaving ample opportunity for individuals to profit.
Thus Jake and Nog had set their lives' goals and directions, all in the idle pastimes of children, and all from this one corner of the Promenade.
Not that any of that made it easier for them to rec-oncile their differences today.
"You know what your problem is?" Nog asked.
"I don't get out enough?" Jake answered.
The Ferengi frowned. "No. It is that you are always trying to understand life in terms of a made-up novel."
"Nog, that's my job."
"How can it be a job if you make no money from it? Writing news articles is your job. Writing novels for no money, that is... an affliction."
Jake put an elbow on the safety railing and rested his head on his hand. "Nog, when you were at the Academy, did you make any profit?"
Nog reacted suspiciously to Jake's abrupt change of topic. "No...."
"But someday you expect to profit from your Starfleet experience, don't you?"
Nog appeared to be selecting his words with extreme care. "I would hope that... many individuals, commercial concerns, and government agencies will profit from... what I will learn during my career in Starfleet."
Jake pounced as soon as Nog had cornered himself. "So you admit that-"
Nog realized the trap he'd been caught in and wouldn't let Jake finish. He did it himself. "Yes, yes, that I performed certain activities with no chance of immediate profit, but with the expectation of earning profit at a later time."
Jake's smirk let Nog know who had won this partic-ular argument. "So, as I was saying, from the perspec-tive of a made-up novel, there's something going on here on Deep Space 9. Something that your uncle's involved with. And something that's brought smug-glers in from across the quadrant. And it's not what Vash told Dax and Odo."
"And as / was saying, you're crazy. You're drawing connections where none exist. You're trying to make my uncle into that Fermion character-"
"Higgs. Higgs is based on Quark. Fermion is based on Morn."
"-that unbelievable character in your novel. And he's not."
Jake stretched and straightened up again. A wave of
new visitors was arriving on the Promenade from the turbolifts and airlocks. Not too many were Bajoran, so Jake decided the commercial cruiser from Sagittarius HI had finally arrived. The Sagittarians were neutral in the Dominion War, and as a result their cruisers carried cargo and passengers from most of the nonaligned worlds. Whenever a Sagittarian ship docked at the sta-tion, there was always a good chance a rarely seen alien might be on board, and Jake found himself watching the crowd closely, hoping he might catch his first glimpse of a Nanth.
But he hadn't forgotten his friend, and even as his gaze remained on the lower Promenade level he said, "Nog, if I gave you ten crates of stem bolts, self-sealing or not, your imagination would run wild think-ing up new schemes for selling them, or trading them, or... somehow turning them into latinum. When it comes to business, you won't accept any limits."
"Of course not."
"Then why is it you have no imagination when it comes to how people behave?"
After a few moments of silence, Jake glanced side-ways to see that Nog was just staring at him, as if he could think of nothing more to say.
Jake sighed. "Let's try it again." He held up a finger. "First of all, Quark called in a group of smugglers to take part in the sale of a counterfeit Bajoran artifact." He held up a second finger. "Then, one of the Ando-rian smugglers was murdered." He held up a third fin-ger. "And then, someone tried to murder Vash." He held up a fourth finger. "And despite Vash explaining the whole thing to Dax and Odo, mere are still at least four smugglers on the station-Vash, the Andorian sis-ters, and that guy, Base." Jake waved his hand back
and forth, trying to emphasize the importance of those facts. "So put all that together, and what do you have?"
"Four fingers."
Jake closed his eyes. "Nog, use your imagination."
"All right. I will now imagine the impossible." Nog put his hand over his eyes, a thumb on one temple, a forefinger on the other. "I am imagining that you are giving up this stupid line of reasoning. I am imagining that... that you are buying me lunch at the Replimat. I am imagining that-"
But by then, Jake's laughter had become contagious and Nog began laughing, too.
"I am not buying you lunch," Jake laughed. "It's your turn."
"That is why I was using my imagination," Nog said.
They both began walking toward the closest spiral stairway.
"Anyway," Jake said, undeterred by his friend's resistance. "I still think I'm right."
"That the counterfeit Bajoran artifact isn't counter-feit?"
They came to the staircase, and Jake waited for Nog to go first. "If it were all a scam like Vash said, the smugglers would have left by now, right? After all, Odo knows all about it, so what's the point of sticking around?"
"To obtain the counterfeit artifact and take it some-place where potential customers don't know it's coun-terfeit," Nog said.
They arrived on the Promenade's main level, and Jake was surprised by the noise and bustle of the new arrivals. Many of them were looking around as if they had never seen a space station before.
"That still doesn't answer the big mystery," Jake said as he and Nog started for the Replimat. "Why would professional smugglers get involved with mur-der for a counterfeit artifact? I mean, I understand the idea of trying to make a profit for low risk-"
"I would certainly hope so."
"-but to commit murder?" Jake said. 'That's a high-risk crime. Which means the potential profits have to be equally high. Isn't that one of your rules? The riskier the road, the greater the profit?"
This time when Jake looked at Nog, he could see the Ferengi looking thoughtful.
"All right," Nog said. "You have a point. A small one. And it probably has nothing at all to do with what's really going on here. But...."
Jake grinned. "But what?"
"It is probably good enough for The Ferengi Cor-rection."
"Connection. The title is, The Ferengi Connection."
"Whatever."
Jake stopped Nog by the directory monolith. "Okay. I'm being serious now."
"When aren't you serious?"
"I mean it, Nog. How am I ever going to be able to convince a reader that a story I write might be true, if I can't even convince you that what we're really seeing go on all around us is a story?"
Now Nog looked worried. "I do not have the slight-est idea what you're talking about."
Jake took a breath, oblivious to the crowds of peo-ple passing by. "Given everything that's happened here over the past three days, what do you think is going on?"
"Anything other than what you think is going on."
"You're doing this on
purpose."
"Jake, be reasonable. Let us say you are right. Let us say that Uncle Fermion-"
"Quark."
"-Quark is selling a real Bajoran artifact with a value worth killing for. First of all, what kind of an artifact is that valuable? I mean, the rarest Bajoran artifact that I have ever heard of was that icon of the city of B'hala. And nobody was trying to kill to get that. The Cardassians just... gave it back to Bajor."
Jake glanced up at the Promenade's high ceiling. Nog had a point. Even Jake had never heard of an artifact so valuable that-he had it! "Nog! It's an Orb!"