by Mel Gilden
Again the voice boomed in their ears. “I am Oryx. Admiral of the High Command. Defender of the Truth. Protector of the Faith. Guardian of the Line.”
There was another long moment, then Jake saw his father take a deliberate step forward so that attention would be focused on him.
“I am Benjamin Sisko. Commander of Deep Space Nine. How can we help you?”
“By returning that whom you have abducted.”
“I do not understand. Who is it you think we have abducted?”
“The Next in Line.”
“What is the ‘Next in Line’?”
“It is he. The one who would be the next to rule our world.”
“I don’t know if whoever you’re looking for is here on our station. But you are welcome to search.”
A gloved hand reached up and lifted the energy bubble to reveal a face that was almost human, though it was purple, and lizardlike, and framed by ragged flaps of thick pebbled skin. The glove and uniform seemed spun from some metallic material.
“You try my patience, Commander Sisko.” The voice that spoke was no longer booming, but the threat was still present. Very much present.
“I don’t mean to, Admiral. But you arrive here without warning and accuse us of stealing something—or someone—whom you seem unable or unwilling to describe.”
“We know the prince is among you.”
“Exactly how do you know that?”
“One of the ships to which you have given protection carried the prince to your station.”
“Which ship?”
“That we do not know. But we know the ship passed through the hole in space ahead of us.”
“Dozens of ships came through the wormhole in the past two days for the celebration. It could be any of them. Or it could be none of them.”
“One of those ships stole our prince,” the Admiral maintained.
“But you don’t know which one?”
“We do not have that information.”
Sisko’s frustration was echoed in his words. “If you can’t tell us which ship you suspect, then I would ask you to display a picture of your missing prince.”
The admiral seemed to take that suggestion as an insult. “Do you know what you ask?”
“Only for a picture. How can we find your prince if we don’t know what he looks like?”
“It is impossible. In his present state it is forbidden for any to look upon His Royal Highness. He was nearing the end of his Solitary when he was abducted.”
“What is Solitary?”
“That is our business and does not concern you.”
“It does if you want our help.”
“You continue to try my patience, Commander.” The gloved hand reached for a switch. “I allow you one day of your time in which to return that which is ours.”
“And if we fail to find your prince?”
“Then we have no other choice under our law.” The admiral replaced his helmet. “We will destroy your station.”
“And risk destroying your prince along with it?”
“If it must be done, it will be done. If the prince cannot be returned to us, he must perish with those who have taken him. It is our law.”
“What kind of law is it that would punish hundreds of innocent people because someone you seek might be on this station?”
“It is not for you to understand our laws. It is sufficient that you know it is our law—and it will be carried out if you do not find and deliver our prince.”
The screen went blank.
Jake squirmed. His father was smart. He might even be the smartest man on Deep Space Nine. But how could anyone find someone when they didn’t know what he looked like?
Twenty minutes later the increased activity in Operations reminded Jake of a Ntok ant colony under siege. The off-duty crew members had been summoned back and now busily studied the logs of all ships that had come through the wormhole in the past three weeks. Jake watched them search through the databases for any clue that might point to the missing prince. The task seemed hopeless since no one had any idea what they were looking for.
In another part of the room, Deep Space Nine’s senior staff gathered around the Operations Table. Besides Commander Sisko and Major Kira, they included Engineering Chief Miles O’Brien; Science Officer Jadzia Dax; Medical Officer Julian Bashir; and the station’s security chief, Odo.
“That’s what we’re up against.” Sisko concluded his summary of the events of the past hour. “Any thoughts?”
“Have you tried to reestablish contact with the alien ship?” Dax asked.
Kira nodded. “They won’t respond.”
Sisko looked at O’Brien. “Chief, if it comes down to hostilities, can this station defend itself against their attack?”
O’Brien considered this for a long moment. The chief was not a man to rush to conclusions. Finally he replied. “Unknown, Commander. That’s a Borg-size warship hanging over our heads. I have to believe their weapons are pretty powerful.”
Jake saw the momentary grimace on his father’s face at the mention of the Borg. He felt the same flash of anger and sorrow as he remembered the battle at Wolf 359 and the death of his mother at the hands of the Borg.
“That’s bad,” Julian Bashir said, voicing his concern.
“Very bad,” O’Brien continued. “To put it in simple terms, we’d be like a duck in a shooting gallery if it comes to a fight.”
“Then we must ensure that it does not come to that,” Sisko said.
“All they seem to want,” said Kira, “is the return of their prince.”
“Unfortunately,” Odo spoke up, “there is no record of anyone matching the description of the alien on the ship arriving on the station. We don’t even know if that is what their prince looks like.”
“He must be here,” Bashir said.
“Not necessarily, Doctor,” Odo explained patiently.
“Just because these aliens think he came through the wormhole does not make it a fact.”
“But they believe it, Constable.” Sisko stood up from the table. He instinctively paced whenever faced with a difficult dilemma. “And as long they think we have their prince, that’s all that matters.”
Sisko stopped and faced his staff. “I’m open to suggestions.”
No one spoke. Then there was a cough from the background.
Jake and Nog had been sitting quietly in a corner during all this. Now Jake cautiously took a step forward.
“Jake.” Sisko looked at his son. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Ah, Dad—you asked for suggestions.”
“That’s right, Benjamin,” Dax reminded him. “You did ask.”
“Right. So what do you suggest, Jake?”
Jake hesitated a moment. He hadn’t quite thought it all through. “If you know where the alien ship came from, then you could check the logs of the ships docked here to see which of them was in their star system.”
“But we don’t know where the aliens came from.”
“Couldn’t you ask them?”
Commander Sisko took his son’s advice and ordered Major Kira to send a message to the alien ship.
There was no verbal reply, but almost instantly a data transmission was received by Deep Space Nine’s computer system.
Dax stepped to her console and studied the input. “I think they’ve given us what we asked for.”
“You think?”
“Their star charts are quite different from ours. And since we have no extensive maps of the Gamma Quadrant, it is going to take some time to translate their data into something we can understand.”
“Time is something we don’t have a lot of, Dax.”
“I realize that, Benjamin.”
“Do the best you can—as fast as you can.” Sisko turned to Odo. “Constable, I want you to start an immediate full-scale search of the station. You have to assume that if the prince is here, he is either avoiding us or being held captive.”
Odo rose
from the Operations Table. “If their missing prince is anywhere on Deep Space Nine, I’ll find him.”
Sisko turned to Chief O’Brien. “Go with him, Chief. You know the ins and outs of this station better than anyone.”
O’Brien quickly rose and followed Odo to the turbolift, while the others quickly went to their control stations.
Jake nudged Nog. “We’re not going to be much help in finding the prince. My dad can take care of that. We need to find our missing pet.”
Odo did not expect that finding a missing prince or a lost pet on Deep Space Nine would be difficult. There were not many places on the station where someone could hide or be hidden. At least, that was what Odo had thought when he and O’Brien started searching for the prince. But by the following morning he had not found a single clue that pointed to the possible whereabouts of the prince.
“I don’t think he’s here,” Odo confided to O’Brien as they walked through one of the connecting tunnels that linked the habitat ring to the docking ring. “We’ve searched all the guest quarters.”
“We’ve tried the obvious. Maybe it’s time to try the unobvious.” O’Brien was busy looking at the station blueprints on his palm computer.
“If you have an idea, Chief, don’t keep it to yourself.”
“Well,” O’Brien mumbled as he punched keys, “these are the original Cardassian diagrams.” He hit another key, and the display changed to include another set of diagrams that overlaid the first. They were in different colors, so any differences were apparent. “And this is the way it looks today.”
Odo studied the display, then pointed a finger and asked a question. “What goes on in these places where only the old structures exist?”
“These areas were sealed off. We don’t use them.”
“But is there access to them?”
“To some of them, I’m sure there is. Others are probably blocked by solid bermite plates. Stronger than steel or tritanium. No one could get into them.”
“We’ll have a look, just in case someone did find a way in.”
“But how—”
How required O’Brien to slice through the solid metal of the old plates.
It was cramped inside the abandoned power conduit, and O’Brien was sweating from the heat generated by the laser drill. The air was stale, and the lack of environmental controls in this section made the task all the more miserable. Fortunately it was the last of the sealed-off areas they had to search. But it was also proving to be the most difficult to penetrate.
“It’s going to take another twenty minutes to cut an opening big enough to get through,” he told Odo.
Odo agreed with O’Brien that this was most likely a fool’s errand; nevertheless he had to follow up any possibility. The constable stepped past O’Brien and stood in front of the narrow slot that the Operations chief had just pierced through the bermite.
“It’s big enough now,” Odo said.
While O’Brien watched with fascination, Odo poured himself into a thin snakelike form, not unlike the modeling plastic that his daughter, Molly, played with. Quickly the form that Odo had become vanished through the slot in the wall.
For a minute or two that seemed to last much longer, O’Brien waited. Then the snake flowed back out of the slot onto the floor of the conduit and reformed back into the more familiar form of the station constable.
“Nothing is inside there,” Odo pronounced when he was back to his old shape.
“I’d love to be able to do what you can do,” O’Brien said eagerly. “Then I’d really be able to get into my work.”
“As you humans say, ‘The grass is always greener in the other posture.’”
“It’s ‘pasture,’” corrected O’Brien. “But you’re right. Most of us want to be what we aren’t.”
“And what we aren’t at the moment is finding the lost prince. Where do you suggest we look next?”
O’Brien looked at the display on his palm computer. “Beats me. We’ve looked everywhere the blueprints suggest. But there may be other hidden nooks and crannies on the station that the Cardassians didn’t bother to put into their blueprints. Finding them could take a long time.”
“Time is the one commodity we are rapidly running out of,” Odo warned.
Jake and Nog, who were engaged in their own search elsewhere on the station, were also aware that time was running out.
It was the middle of the morning, and they had found no trace of their missing pet.
“I’m running out of places to look,” Nog said wearily as they sat on the balcony, their feet dangling above the crowded Promenade. No one except the Operations team and Odo’s security guards were aware of the threat from the enormous ship.
Jake was not even thinking about the aliens aboard the ship. He was lost in thought, remembering an old story, a mystery in which the object that everyone was looking for was never found because it was “hidden” in plain sight.
“There’s one place we forgot to look,” Jake said suddenly as he leaped to his feet.
“Where’s that?”
“The obvious place. The one place on this station where Babe might feel safe.”
“Our clubhouse!” Nog shouted as he followed Jake at a fast run.
CHAPTER 7
Meanwhile, in Operations, Benjamin Sisko saw that his people were running out of options.
“Okay, everyone,” he said. “Let’s stop and put together what we have.”
“What we have is less than four hours,” Major Kira reminded him, though it was apparent from their actions that no one in the room needed to be reminded of that fact.
“We’ve had no luck finding their prince,” O’Brien said. “Odo’s still searching, but it’s pretty clear that he isn’t here.”
“Try to contact the alien ship,” Sisko told Dax.
The Trill science officer swiveled her chair and keyed in a command at her terminal.
“They don’t want to talk to us,” Dax said after trying for a few minutes with no results.
“They must,” Sisko said. He pounded his fist on the Operations Table with a show of emotion that was unlike his normal tightly controlled composure.
“We are listening.” The voice echoed throughout the room.
Everyone turned to the main screen. The image was of the huge alien ship that hung near Deep Space Nine. It was, Sisko thought, dangling there like a bomb. He hoped that the bomb was not primed.
“We have searched for your prince,” Sisko said, “but he is not on this station.”
Now the ship in the viewer was replaced by the energy helmet of the alien admiral.
“We know that he is there,” came the voice.
“Then, unless you want a war, help us.”
“What help do you seek?”
“Beam down a boarding party from your ship to help us in the search.”
“That is not possible.”
“Then what is possible?” Sisko snapped, the anger apparent in his voice. “Without some cooperation on your part, you make it impossible to find your prince.”
“We have sent our star maps to your computer. That is enough. Find the ship that trespassed against us, and make those responsible return our prince.”
“We have not yet been able to coordinate your view of the Gamma Quadrant with our own charts. We need time.”
“You have three of the time units that you call hours.”
“But—”
“That is all the time you have. This contact is terminated. Now.”
The energy helmet on the viewer vanished, to be replaced once more by the alien ship.
Sisko turned to his science officer. “Dax, how much do we know?”
Dax studied her terminal. “Their world is named Pyx. That’s about it.”
“But which of the starships in our docking bays was in their system?”
“That I don’t know, Benjamin.”
“How long before you will know?”
Dax punched in a code, read
the results. “Ninety minutes and I should have an answer.”
“That’s cuttin’ it awful close, Commander,” O’Brien observed.
“Too close, Chief,” Sisko replied. “But it will have to be good enough.”
At the same time, in the upper pylon, Jake and Nog found Babe precisely where Jake had predicted. The little alien creature was asleep on a shelf in their clubhouse.
“Babe!” Jake yelled as he ran over and hugged his furry friend.
Babe stirred sleepily and nuzzled Jake with his soft horn.
“He seems tired,” Nog declared.
Jake had noticed it, too. “Maybe he’s hungry,” he said, while continuing to stroke the thick fur.
Nog stepped over to the old replicator he had borrowed from storage. They hadn’t used it in more than a month, not since the disaster when Nog had tried to prepare his grandmother’s acclaimed Ferengi swamp salad, apparently overtaxing the machine’s faltering microcircuits. Since then the results of any request were unpredictable.
“This isn’t going to work,” Nog announced after a few abortive attempts to produce something simple and edible.
Their only choice was to go down to Quark’s and select a range of potential foods that might fit Babe’s diet. Since they had no idea what the little creature thrived on, they would have to bring up a little bit of everything.
“We really should see Dr. Bashir first,” Jake said as they prepared to leave. Babe was still resting on the shelf, and Jake was concerned.
“He’s too busy with the search for the missing prince,” Nog replied. “Besides, Babe is smart enough that he’ll only pick those foods that are good for him.”
“I guess we really don’t have much choice,” Jake rationalized as he followed Nog out the door.
Left alone again in the clubhouse, Babe slept fitfully.
Suddenly he bolted awake. There was the sound of footsteps approaching heavily.
Darm appeared in the doorway, wearing an angry grin that was even more menacing than his scar. “Well, now, what have we here?” He blocked the exit with his body.
“I thought following those brats might lead me to you.”
Babe leaped from his shelf to the center of the room to face his enemy.