by Неизвестный
Nog reacted with outraged shock. "An Orb is not an 'artifact.' It is... an Orb. And my uncle would not be stupid enough to risk buying or selling an Orb, no mat-ter how great the profit."
"But there would be incredible profit for someone not as... law-abiding as Quark? Like a real crimi-nal?"
Nog clearly did not want to be having this conversa-tion. "I suppose."
"All right. Then that's what it is. Thank you, Nog. You've solved an important story point. Quark- Higgs-is trying to sell an Orb. And since we haven't heard any news about an Orb being stolen, it's got to be one of the Orbs that went missing during the Occu-pation that the Cardassians haven't returned yet."
Nog looked disappointed. "So now you are suggest-ing that either a Cardassian is selling a stolen Orb or that someone with more lobes than brains stole an Orb from the Cardassians."
"Isn't there some Rule of Acquisition to cover this?"
Jake asked. "You know, Profit plus more profit equals temporary insanity for a desperate criminal?"
Nog screwed up his face in concentration. "Perhaps in one of the reform editions. But not in the..." He frowned. "You are not being serious. There is no such law."
"All I'm looking for is a possibility. A willing sus-pension of disbelief. What's it going to take to con-vince you?"
"Really?"
"Nog, if I can convince you, I can convince anyone. Now, let me have it. What do you need to believe the story?"
Nog looked around at the milling crowd. "More smugglers. If someone's trying to sell an Orb, there should be a great many more than four smugglers on board DS9. There should be dozens, if not hundreds."
"Okay, I can live with that. Quark put out the word a few days ago. The closest smugglers arrive in a day or two. With more continuing to arrive. So there will be more by now, we just don't know about them. What else?"
Nog shrugged. "Cardassians."
"Why Cardassians?"
"They're trying to recover their stolen property."
That was going too far for Jake. "Nog, there won't be any Cardassians coming to DS9. We're at war with them."
Nog shook his head. "The Federation is at war with Cardassia. Bajor is not a member of the Federation. Technically, it has been given neutral status by the Dominion. And technically, this station is Bajoran ter-ritory."
"But it's in Federation space."
Nog held his hands out as if he had nothing more to offer. "You asked what it would take. I answered. Now you really do have to buy me lunch."
Jake started walking again, with Nog hurrying to keep up. "I don't have to buy you anything. I asked for help. You set up impossible conditions."
The Replimat was full, every table taken. There was even a line outside. The Sagittarians did not have a reputation for palatable food. Too many of their flavor-ings were self-organizing slime molds, which often tried to reconstitute themselves and then escape from whatever dish they had been mixed into.
"Not impossible," Nog insisted. "Necessary. As in necessary for me to accept your premise. Should we try the Klingon Cafe?"
"Impossible, because there's no way anyone will believe that Cardassians will come to DS9. Why don't we try Quark's?"
Nog looked uncomfortable. "That little Base... he makes me nervous. Did you know he has hair? On his... scalp? Uh, no offense."
"We'll eat upstairs."
"All right." Nog suddenly brightened. "Maybe Leeta will be on duty. Then we can negotiate a family dis-count!"
The young men left the Replimat and started back toward Quark's. "You have to pay to eat at your uncle's?" Jake asked.
"Exploitation begins at home," Nog said, as if quot-ing another of the Ferengi Rules. "And if the Orb is really an Orb and you want your story to be believed, then you have to do something dramatic so the reader will understand the stakes have been raised."
"What are you talking about?"
"Cardassians on DS9."
"Forget it. I'm not writing a fantasy. I'm writing a heist novel and there are rules I have to follow. And one of them is...." Jake hesitated. Couldn't quite believe what he saw-who he saw-stepping through the airlock across from Quark's, beyond the Infirmary.
"Is what?" Nog prompted.
"Cardassians," Jake said.
Nog sounded as confused as Jake felt. "That's a rule?"
Jake reached out, took Nog's shoulder, and pointed him in the same direction he was looking. "No," Jake said. "That's your proof."
Cardassians.
Three of them. Just outside the circular door of the airlock. One was female, the other two male. And one of them was unlike any Cardassian Jake had ever seen before: He was bald.
Jake felt Nog tense, and instantly the Ferengi tapped his communicator badge.
"Nog to Commander Worf. Security breach on the Promenade. Airlock Alpha. Three enemy personnel."
Jake wheeled to Nog. "Nog, they're not enemy personnel. Look at them-they're civilians. No weap-ons. No-"
Jake stopped talking as the crowd reacted to five columns of shimmering light that formed around the airlock stairs.
Jake stared in fascination as four Starfleet security officers beamed in with Worf and scattered the crowd. Each of the five had a phaser. Each phaser was aimed at the Cardassians.
"Isn't that a bit of an overreaction?" Jake asked.
"We are at war," Nog said.
Jake had tried, but he still didn't understand the mil-itary mind-set that had become so much a part of Starfleet in the past year. But the one thing he felt he did know was motivation, both in the characters he wrote about and in real life. And he understood the motivation that had led to the scene being played out before him right now.
"Okay, Nog-this proves my point," Jake said as Worf and his team took the Cardassians into custody. "What possible reason could three Cardassians have for risking a trip into Federation space to set foot on a Starfleet-controlled space station?"
Nog looked up at Jake, and Jake could see that this time his friend knew exactly what he was talking about.
"You said it yourself," Jake continued. "They want their Orb back. It's the only possible reason they could have for coming here."
Nog looked grim. "We shall see." Then he went to offer his assistance to Worf.
Jake remained behind. But as he watched the Car-dassians being led away, he was filled with an over-powering sense of just being right.
He was the only person on Deep Space 9 who truly knew what was going on, and it was time to start let-ting people know it.
CHAPTER 16
"I am leej terrell," the leader of the Cardassian mis-sion said in the relative calm of the Wardroom. "And these are our credentials."
Sisko accepted the articulated Cardassian padd she gave him. The excitement of the unannounced arrival of three Cardassians on a neutral cruiser had finally lessened throughout the station. But the security con-cerns remained.
As he took his seat across from his visitors at the conference table, Sisko studied the padd, comparing the identity dossiers it displayed as the station's com-puter automatically tested the authentication codes in the padd's memory.
According to the padd, Leej Terrell was the widow of a minor trade diplomat from Cardassia Prime. Her technical specialist, Dr. Phraim Betan, was a physician retired from the Cardassian Home Battalions. And her
associate, Atrig, of no specified job function, was a businessman who ran an import-export company among the Cardassian colony worlds. The three Car-dassians were, each dossier proclaimed, volunteers working for the Amber Star, with no official connec-tion to the Cardassian government.
Sisko, however, didn't believe a word of the dossiers. For a diplomat's wife, Terrell was too clearly used to giving orders, not practicing diplomacy. Dr. Betan was too young to have retired from anything. And Atrig-perhaps the most striking Cardassian Sisko had ever seen-had not lost his hair nor been so badly scarred at the base of his neck and across one of his wide shoulder membranes ferrying goods from one world to another. Atr
ig had been in battle.
Decked out though they were with false identities, innocuous civilian outfits, and singularly hollow smiles, Sisko had no doubt he was seated across the table from three Cardassian soldiers. Three very active, and dangerous, Cardassian soldiers.
A Federation authorization window opened on the padd's display-the authentication codes had been confirmed. Terrell, Betan, and Atrig had been cleared for travel within the Bajoran sector.
But Sisko didn't really care. He placed the padd on the table as if it held nothing of interest or of value for him.
"So, you are traveling under the guise of a humani-tarian mission," Sisko began.
"Not under the guise," Terrell replied easily. "We are a humanitarian mission, accepted by both the Fed-eration and the Dominion during this terrible conflict."
Sisko folded his hands. "Then why didn't you make travel arrangements directly with this station? If you
are permitted to travel through Federation space, why arrive unannounced?"
Seated directly across the table from him, Terrell matched Sisko's gesture, folding her own hands in a mirror image of his. "In times such as these," she said, "I often find it is more expedient to beg forgiveness than ask permission. If I had requested your approval to travel here, would you have given it to me?"
"No," Sisko said, registering Terrell's surprise at his decision not to hide the truth through the more stan-dard practice of equivocation and diversion.
'Then I was right to do as I did," she said with a smile.
"Again, no," Sisko said, keeping his tone deliber-ately impassive and uninformative. "You have dis-rupted my station. You have raised many questions in the mind of my strategic operations officer. Whatever delay you might have expected if you had contacted me ahead of time you can be sure will now be even longer, as Commander Worf tries to uncover what you're hiding."
Sisko saw Terrell shoot a swift glance at Dr. Betan. And then as if the glance had been a signal for his action, the doctor spoke next.
"Captain Sisko, I assure you we have nothing to hide. We are volunteer workers of the Amber Star, pri-vate citizens aligned with no political group. We are merely here to repatriate the remains of the unfortu-nate Cardassians you discovered fused within the hull of this station. I'm sure you'll understand how this humanitarian act will at last bring closure to their fam-ilies, as their fates are now known and the two unfortu-nates can be laid to rest according to their own customs."
"Ah, but I understand completely, Doctor," Sisko said. "And I am very pleased that the genetic profiles of the soldiers have allowed you to identify them." Hastily suppressed reactions from all three Cardas-sians informed Sisko that his statement had startled them, a suspicion Terrell quickly confirmed.
"I believe you have reached an incorrect conclu-sion, Captain Sisko. The dead whose remains we are recovering are not-were not-soldiers. Their identi-fication files are in the padd, as well. You will see that they were civilian support staff for the Terok Nor mining operation. Low-level. Of course, they worked for the military in trying to restore order to Bajor-"
"Excuse me?" Sisko said, not sure he had heard Ter-rell correctly.
Undeterred by his interruption, Terrell proceeded silkily. "Captain, you know what a troubled world Bajor is today. Believe me when I say that in the past, it was even more so. Remember that the Bajorans endured centuries of petty political and religious squabbling. And almost sixty years ago, when we could see these poor people were about to allow those conflicts to erupt into the horrors of all-out world war, well, we had to act, didn't we? We're a compassionate people, Captain. If we had not brought order to these people-our closest neighbors in space, after all- when we did, Bajor would be a wasteland today."
Sisko clenched and unclenched his hands so vigor-ously during Terrell's vile tirade that the popping of his knuckles rang out in the Wardroom. "Parts of Bajor are a wasteland today, because of what you and your Occupation forces did to it."
"And we regret that," Terrell said. "If you could only
know how it pained us whenever we had to discipline these people."
Terrell paused as if to let him take part in the con-versation. But Sisko remained silent because he knew if he opened his mouth to say a single word, he'd end up screaming at these sanctimonious monsters.
"I understand what you're feeling," Terrell said with infuriating condescension. "I know how attached one can get to Bajorans. In a way, they're so much like children. In fact, our research has proven without doubt that the reason they remain so backward, and so dangerously unable to consider the consequences of their actions, is that their brains are not as developed is most other sentient creatures. Those parts of the neural structure responsible for higher-order thought are stunted, more like those found in less evolved ani-mals such as-"
'That is quite enough," Sisko said through clenched teeth.
Terrell waved her hand as if what she had to say was of no real importance. "I know, I know."
Sisko could hear his heart thundering in his ears. He wanted nothing more than to end this meeting and escape from Terrell's presence. He put his hands on the table, prepared to stand, to... he saw the padd.
He forced himself to relax back into his chair.
Terrell had almost succeeded in perfectly deflecting him off the topic they'd been discussing.
He looked at her with new respect-as an adversary.
He decided it was time to deflect her. "To return to the topic at hand, your identification of the bodies as those of 'civilians' does not match other details we've obtained from our investigation." Now Sisko stood to end the meeting. "I can only surmise that the Amber
Star has made some error, and so we will not be able to release the bodies until a more detailed analysis is completed."
Terrell was on her feet at once. "Captain Sisko, there is no error."
Sisko smiled. "I know an error would be unlikely coming from your military's Central Records. But as you said yourself, the Amber Star is a civilian organi-zation. I'd prefer my medical staff continuing with-"
"I would be happy to be of assistance," Dr. Betan interjected. "There are subtleties to Cardassian bio-chemistry and physiology with which an alien doctor might not be familiar."
"Thank you, but it won't be necessary," Sisko said. "Our Doctor Bashir is one of the finest in Starfleet. And he has the advantage of working in a Cardassian medical facility." He gestured to the door. "I'm sure we'll clear this up in oh... a week or two."
Terrell gave no sign of leaving. Her voice turned harsh and her manner seemed more threatening. "Cap-tain, do not turn this into a diplomatic incident. What-ever slim chance for peace exists now will be lost forever if the population of Cardassia believes the Fed-eration would play politics with the bodies of Cardas-sian citizens. That they will not forgive."
"I don't understand," Sisko said.
Terrell's eyes narrowed. "That we care for and respect our honored dead?"
"No," Sisko said. "That you think Cardassia has anything to do with the disposition of this war." Sisko made no effort to disguise his pleasure at his Terrell's displeasure. "Admit it, Terrell, your world is as con-trolled by the Dominion as Bajor was controlled by you during the Occupation. In fact, I wonder how far
down the evolutionary scale the Founders rank Car-dassian neural structures."
"You are making a mistake," Terrell hissed.
Sisko actually laughed. "I'm not the one who's stepped into the middle of enemy territory." He turned his back on the Cardassians and walked to the doors. "The Sagittarian cruiser is departing tomorrow at fif-teen hundred hours. You will be leaving with it. In the meantime, I'll have you escorted to guest quarters."
"Captain Sisko," Dr. Betan fluttered as he looked nervously at Terrell, "for the sake of galactic peace, please reconsider this deadly insult."
The doors slid open and Sisko looked up to see Major Kira approaching. He allowed himself a moment to contemplate what this meeting might have been like
with Kira involved. The Cardassians would be badly injured or dead by now. Neither of which states would have been desirable.
"Captain," Kira said urgently, "we have a problem." Sisko was relieved to see that her attention was solely focused on him and not on his visitors.
"It's take care of, Major. I've dealt with the Car-dassian delegation." It was safer not allowing the fiery Bajoran any contact with Terrell and her com-panions. If she did, a second front could open up right here on DS9.
But Kira was not interested in Sisko's visitors. She glanced back over her shoulder. "Not a Cardassian problem. A Bajoran one."