by Неизвестный
By the time the archaeologist regained her feet, Leen had slid halfway down the stairway railing to the main level and flipped over to land on her feet, a golden dagger in each hand.
The spectacle of fully-clothed feminine physicality was too much for Quark, and he shivered with forbid-den pleasure. Rather than slide the Red Orb off the bar, he continued to watch the action in anticipation of the females' killing each other. Yet if even one of
them survived, Quark had little doubt that he'd be the next victim.
Satr held up a slender cylinder of amber crystal. "We have the map, Vash. Without it, your Orb is nothing more than a sparkly rock. Let us buy it from you."
Vash was breathing hard, weaponless, holding her side where Satr had kicked her, but Quark suspected the resourceful archaeologist wouldn't admit defeat yet. And he was right again.
"Without an Orb, your map might as well be a Fer-engi ear probe. Let me buy the map from you."
The one thing Quark never forgot was that he was Ferengi. He saw his opportunity and he acted upon it immediately. "Ladies, please... you each have some-thing the other wants. What better situation could there be for striking a deal? A deal, I might add, I'd be glad to broker for just a small commission-"
Leen's bare blue arm flexed and a golden dagger flashed through the air to pin Quark's too-large jacket-with him inside it-to die wall.
"Or not..." Quark whispered.
Satr and Leen moved to flank Vash, one heading to either side of her. The archaeologist was forced up against the bar counter, with no way to escape them.
Leen drew a third golden dagger from the set of scabbards at her back, and once again held a wickedly sharp blade in each hand.
Satr tossed her crystal cylinder tauntingly, back and forth, from one hand to the other.
"You want the Orb, I want the map," Vash said, her eyes moving quickly from one to the other. "The Fer-engi is right. We can work out a deal."
"Dal Nortron wanted to work out a deal," Satr
sneered. "He hired us, so of course we supported his decision. And then the Ferengi killed him."
"What?!" Quark protested. "I didn't kill anyone! I thought you were all lying! That the map was a forgery!"
"You were willing to be the broker at the auction," Leen said.
"I make no representations as to the suitability of the product for the use to which the purchaser intends-"
"Silence!"
Quark knew much better than to argue with a blue tattooed female. Each intricate black scroll on her arm represented a man she had killed-after having had her way with him. And though Quark suspected he would not necessarily object to the second interaction, he would definitely have issues with the first.
He nodded, not even risking a single word to say he agreed with her.
"If you didn't kill Nortron," Vash said, "and the Fer-engi didn't, then who did?"
"Do I look like the changeling?" Leen snarled viciously.
"We don't care who killed him," Satr said quickly, with a sharp glance at her sister. "The fact is, he's dead. We're not. So now we do things our way. And we want your Orb."
"It won't do any good without knowing where to use it," Vash countered.
Satr brandished her crystal wand. "This map tells us which world we must take the Orb to."
"And when we get close enough to the second Orb," Leen said triumphantly, "the first will glow to lead us along the final path."
"You actually believe that kragh?" Vash asked.
Quark caught his breath as Satr's head jerked men-acingly forward like a striking snake. "If you didn't believe it, you'd sell us your Orb."
"You wouldn't believe what I went through to get this," Vash said, undaunted. "I'm not selling anything."
The three of them faced each other, drenched in sweat, ready to fight to the death, taut muscles rippling beneath the Andorian sisters' glistening blue skin, Vash's long, lustrous hair a dark fountain against creamy-white shoulders... Quark trembled, took a canning breath. He was falling in love, and he didn't care with which one.
A moment before he had been on the verge of slip-ping to safety and obscurity behind the bar. But now he paused, unsure.
"We're not selling anything, either," Satr said.
"Which leaves us only one alternative," Leen added.
"Exactly," Base squeaked. "It means I'll take both!"
"Oh, for-" Quark snorted in disgust, as Base jumped up on the bar waving aloft his comically puny bat'leth. The little betrayer could only have been hid-ing among the crates of glasses across from the repli-cator, waiting for his moment to strike.
Moron, Quark thought. Base would probably last about fifteen seconds against the blue sisters. And Vash would-
"What are you?" Satr said.
"Your worst nightmare, bluecheeks," Base chirped.
Leen hooted at the thought, then suddenly threw both daggers at the minute Ferengi.
And then, to Quark's utter astonishment, Base twisted his bat'leth in an expert blur and deflected both daggers. He hadn't even tried to duck.
"I can throw this a skrell of a lot faster than you blues can run," Base crowed. "Now bring me the map crystal," he said to Satr. Then he glared at Quark. "And you, you lobeless hunk of greeworm castings, you bring me the Orb."
Quark tugged at his jacket where its shoulder was still fixed to the wall by Leen's dagger, trusting Base would see that he was otherwise detained.
But Vash provided distraction enough.
"You backstabbing little hardinak," she spat at him. "You're supposed to be working for me!"
"Ha!" Quark said, much that had been unclear at last becoming clear to him. "He was supposed to be working for me!"
"You're both fools!" Leen snarled.
"We paid him off so he'd work for us!" Satr added.
"Which begs the question," Vash said. "Who the hell are you working for now?"
Base shrugged his shoulders. "What can I tell you half-wits? With all the latinum you slugs gave me, I finally had enough to go into business for myself." Base jabbed his thumb against his small chest. "You'd better believe it. I'm pure Ferengi, in it for the profit and nothing else!"
That was too much for Quark. "Oh, will someone step on him and crush him flat."
Base squealed, enraged, as he whirled around to confront Quark, holding his miniature bat'leth high-relatively speaking-above his head with both hands.
Quark fought to wriggle out of his borrowed jacket, still pinned securely to the wall. The only way that pitiful excuse for a Ferengi would actually kill him was if he died first from embarrassment.
But Vash got to Base first, knocking him straight off the bar to the deck.
Squeaking in outrage, Base rolled to his feet, still waving his bat'leth, but in the wrong direction. Because Satr and Leen now attacked him from behind, Satr sweeping him up in the bare, muscled arms Quark thought had definite potential, Leen drawing her own well-exposed arm back to slap him, and then-
-Quark moaned as everything went wrong. Again.
Even though Base's bat'leth didn't have the finely honed cutting edges of the traditional Klingon weapon-and he certainly didn't have the skill to slice an artery or bisect a key muscle group-all he seemed to need to do to cause havoc was make contact between the blade and any part of his opponent's body, and Ferengi plasma-whip circuits did the rest. Which is just what he did.
Quark watched in disbelief as Base swung the bat'leth wildly at Leen until he provoked her suffi-ciently to reach out to swat it away. At that precise moment of contact with Base's weapon, the blue Andorian flew back in a shimmering nimbus of disrup-tive neural energy.
Startled, Leen's sister dropped her prey; he took the opportunity to tuck, roll, and come up swinging, bash-ing Satr across the knees with his bat'leth so that she, too, collapsed in the throes of neural disruption.
Vash still hadn't regained her feet, and being at Base's level didn't have a chance. Quark covered his eyes with both hands, but peered through
his fingers, appalled and fascinated at the same time.
After vanquishing his last female enemy with a glancing blow to the ankles, Base now threw back his head and cackled like a mad paultillian as he used his
bat'leth like a vaulter's pole and sprang back up onto the bar.
He swaggered toward Quark.
Quark pulled and struggled mightily, but the barbs on the dagger just wouldn't let go. He was a sitting Grumpackian tortoise.
"Base, can't we talk about this?" Quark pleaded.
The little Ferengi spun his bat'leth around his wrist just like Bus Betar in the old Marauder Mo holos. The classic ones, not the remakes. "I don't think so, frinx-for-brains. For the first time in my life, it's winner-take-all." He stopped the bat'leth in midspin, tapped one pudgy finger against the tip of his weapon. "It's the 242nd Rule, after all... More is good, all is better. Prepare to meet your Accountant." Then Base raised his weapon. "The Orb is mine. The map is mine. Everything is mine! Do you hear me?! For the first time in my life, Base wins!"
"I don't think so, you miserable scrap of a sentient being!"
For a moment, Base stopped in midstride, staring at Quark as if those combative words had dared come from his intended victim's mouth.
Quark shrank down into his oversize green jacket, wondering if he had be stupid enough to utter those words. True as they might be.
And then, as the truth finally dawned on both hunter and hunted, Quark and Base both slowly turned to look at the person who had uttered them.
Morn.
No longer deep in his cups on the bartop.
Instead, the hulking Lurian was on his feet, a gigan-tic dark silhouette looming against the light filtering through the doors to the Promenade.
"Drop the bat'leth," Morn growled.
"Make me!" Base squeaked back in defiance.
"I will."
Quark's mouth dropped open in awe and respect. Not only was Morn his best customer, he was about to senselessly sacrifice his life in a tragic and doomed attempt to save him.
What a noble gesture, Quark thought. A totally inef-fective, inadequate, useless gesture.
If he lived, Quark decided, he'd retire Morn's stool. Or-even better-charge people extra to sit in it.
"Prepare to die," Base yodeled.
Morn grunted. "Not today," he said.
And then, even as tiny Base raised his bat'leth for the attack, Morn swung up his huge arm and-
-it snaked out along the bar like golden lightning, until Morn's immense hand closed on the bat'leth, and crushed it, dropping the shards to the ground, and then snapped back like a tentacle around Base's scrawny neck, still eerily flowing like the pseudopod of a hew-mon-sized amoeba.
As Base gargled helplessly in Morn's unforgiving grip, Quark recovered his senses.
"Why didn't you wait until the little monster had killed me?" he snapped. "Wouldn't that have given you an even better reason to act, Mom?"
Morn shook his huge wrinkled head once, then soft-ened, melted, into a gelatinous amber statue before resolidifying as Odo, though one Morn-like arm retained its grip on Base.
"Ohhh, you enjoyed that, didn't you?" Quark accused the shape-shifting constable. "Seeing me almost killed."
"As a matter of fact, I did," Odo said. "By the way, Quark, nice suit."
"That's not funny."
"And you'll notice I'm not laughing. Whatever else is going on around here-and I assure you, I did hear everything-Dal Nortron's still dead. And if you didn't kill him, and the Andorians didn't kill him, then there's still a murderer walking free on DS9."
Quark threw up his hands. "Finding murderers is not my job," he said piously. With much relish, Odo gazed at Base's stumpy legs kicking frantically as he held the snarling little Ferengi above the deck just high enough to keep Base from connecting with anything solid.
"Fortunately," Odo said gravely, "it happens to be mine. And in this case, I think my job has just become much simpler."
Quark saw where Odo was looking-directly at the Red Orb of Jalbador, still sitting on the counter of Quark's bar. Shocked and appalled, Quark realized he'd forgotten what a Ferengi must never forget. Profit and the potential thereof.
"As a wise man once explained," the constable said, "all we have to do now to solve the crime is follow the Orb...."
CHAPTER 20
empty of its lifeblood of people, the station seemed a melancholy place to Sisko.
After five cold restarts, Dax's computer team still wasn't rid of whatever type of Bynar code Satr and Leen had input into DS9's computers, and all internal automated systems remained off-line. Even the main gravity generators hadn't been brought back into ser-vice. As a result, the banners decorating the Prome-nade all hung at the same skewed angle, and the deck itself was at a slant as if, impossible though it was, the entire station were listing in space.
The litter on the carpeted sections of the deck was a sad reminder of the hasty evacuation of all nonessen-tial station personnel into the habitat ring. And aside from the dim emergency lighting, some fixtures of which were finally beginning to flicker after having been on too long, the only signs of life that remained
were the faint sounds of chanting coming from the Bajoran Temple and the opening and closing of the doors to Odo's office.
Sisko now headed for the Security Office to join the others assembling there.
His ears still rang from the twenty minutes he had stood within the sonic shower, ridding himself of the malodorous sludge of the water-treatment facility, and every muscle in his body still felt the effects of the stun Vash had fired at him. But the physical disorienta-tion he still suffered was not his biggest problem; it was his continued mental confusion. With the uncover-ing of each new piece of the puzzle-the seemingly unconnected and unexplainable events on the station, the one key element that would make sense of them all, was still missing. And that was annoying the hell out of him.
Halfway between the turbolift and the Security Office Sisko turned to see Bashir striding quickly along the corridor toward him.
"How is he?" Sisko asked. Despite every other threat to the station, O'Brien was his first priority. Worf and his security team had been beamed into the water plant the moment the transporter systems had finally been manually tuned. They'd found Sisko, just coming to, and O'Brien unconscious. Sisko had given the order to evacuate the wounded chief to the Infir-mary first.
Bashir's report offered more mystery. "Interestingly enough, there was another Andorian toxin on the dag-ger that hit him. Not the same one Vash used on her-self, but one intended to incapacitate almost any species. But don't worry," the doctor said quickly, see- ing the anxious look that Sisko could not keep from
his face, "it's not fatal. At least, not to Miles. He's too stubborn."
The doctor glanced around at the unsettling state of the Promenade as they walked towards Odo's office. "I suppose you've already thought about this-but what happens if the Dominion hears about our condi-tion?"
Sisko had thought about that, right after Worf's team beamed the chief out to the Infirmary. "Admiral Ross has already dispatched the Bondar and the Gar-neau to provide us support." "Akira-class," Bashir said.
Sisko nodded. "They'll stand up to anything the Dominion can throw at us. At least for the time being."
They'd reached the doors of the Security Office. Sisko paused before entering, gathering his strength. "Something wrong, Captain?" Bashir asked. Sisko shrugged. "There's something going on here I don't understand. And, to be honest, it makes me uneasy."
"For what it's worth," the doctor offered, "when I heard Vash actually had one of the Red Orbs, I thought that explained everything. I mean, I had halfway fig-ured out for myself that the Orbs might be real. So maybe we should look at this as just another one of Quark's scams-albeit blown up to immense propor-tions because of the potential for... mind-boggling profit."
Sisko understood, but was unconvinced. "I hope you're right. A simple explanation is always the best." "Un
less it's the wrong one, of course," Bashir added with a charming, self-deprecating smile. Then the door to the Security Office slid open and he stepped through.
Instead of following the doctor, Sisko wheeled about suddenly, aware of eyes upon him. He looked down the corridor to the right, toward the entrance of the Temple where the large, solid, unmistakable form of Prylar Obanak stood in the doorway, arms folded within bright saffron robes, watching.
Both men nodded to each other in silent acknowl-edgment.