Acknowledging Quark’s entrance with a knowing nod and a worldly smile, Vic turned toward the stage, where a trio of tuxedoed humans struck up an expert piano-bass-and-drums accompaniment as Vic began warbling a bouncy musical travelogue whose recurring refrain was “Let’s Get Away From It All.” Just before beginning his performance, Vic mentioned that an Earth singer named Sin-Ah-Trah had made the tune famous.
Quark took a seat across the small table from Ro, realizing that he’d already missed the opportunity to pull her chair out for her. But that was all right. If she could learn to feel as comfortable in this alien milieu as he had become over the past few months, then perhaps she would lower her shields voluntarily. Quark recalled how he had once regarded Vic’s holographic establishment as unwelcome competition, until the upheavals of the Dominion War had taught him that ancient Las Vegas was really a refuge from troubles of every sort. A refuge that could be overused, as Nog had demonstrated during the months following the loss of his leg, but one that stood ready to offer solace at all times. Twenty-six/seven, as some of the hew-mons around here like to say.
As Vic concluded his number and took a bow before the applauding dinner crowd, Quark glanced at Ro, who seemed engrossed in the environment. Good, he thought.
Quark leaned forward and assayed his most nonthreatening smile. “You got here a little early.”
She nodded, a wry expression on her face. “I didn’t think you’d mind. I’m less accessible here than I am in the security office. Besides, after the dress shop finished sewing me into this costume, I realized I wasn’t exactly dressed for work.”
“There’s more to life than work,” Quark said, grinning.
She favored him with a silent that’s-easy-for-you-to-say glower.
Sensing that something else besides the demands of her job was bothering her, he decided to change the subject. “How do you like Las Vegas so far?”
“It’s…interesting.” Her tone was noncommittal and her brow remained furrowed as she gazed around the room. The earring dangling from her left ear gleamed enticingly in the room’s subdued lighting.
Quark hadn’t noticed that Vic had taken up a position alongside their table. “Interesting, doll-face?” the crooner said with an urbane smile.
Ro cast a quick glance over her shoulder as though convinced Vic had to be addressing someone else.
“No need for the double take, sweetheart,” Vic said. “I was just wondering when your beau here was going to get around to introducing us.”
“I think maybe I need to have my universal translator checked,” Ro said.
“This is 1962,” Vic said, his smile disarming. “Here you’ll have to pick up the lingo the old-fashioned way. By experience.” He turned toward Quark while making a courtly gesture in Ro’s direction. “So are you going to keep this vision you’ve found all to yourself?”
Quark realized he had been staring at Ro the entire time, drinking in her image. He shook himself as though from a dream. “Vic, meet Lieutenant Ro Laren, the station’s chief of security. Ro, Vic Fontaine.”
With the deftness of an expert stage magician, Vic somehow managed to take Ro’s hand and raise it to his lips—without prompting her to throw him bodily across the neighboring table. Charmed, I’m sure, Quark thought, feeling all the satisfaction of a man entering the finalstage negotiations of a killer deal.
Until he noticed that Ro’s forehead was still as wrinkled as her Bajoran nose.
Vic had obviously noticed as well. “If you don’t mind my mentioning it, you seem a little distracted for someone who’s here for a night on the town.”
“So are you a touch telepath as well as a singer?” Ro asked, her frown persisting.
Vic laughed and shook his head. “I never work Harry Blackstone’s side of the street. But I’d have to be a real Clyde to miss the fact that something’s really eating you. A farmer could scrub his overalls on your corrugated but otherwise charming forehead. I think I’d better expedite the drinks. First round’s on me.”
“Quark, I thought you might try to seduce me,” Ro said with a wry smile. “But I never expected you to subject me to some sort of…covert counseling program.”
Vic motioned to an improbably short-skirted waitress, who brought a small tray to the table, replete with a bottle on ice and a trio of champagne glasses. “It’s flattering that you think of me as some sort of professional head-shrinker,” he said. “But I’m just a humble holographic student of the human—I mean the humanoid—heart.”
Ro’s eyebrows shot straight up, momentarily smoothing away the striations of worry. “You know you’re a hologram?” she asked Vic.
Vic made an exaggerated bow. “Like a great man once said: ‘Know thyself.’”
“Of all the holograms in all the hospitality venues in all the quadrant,” Quark said, “Vic is unique.”
Ro examined the bottle the waitress had set down before her. “Spring wine?”
Vic shook his head as he began filling the three glasses. “No can do. It’s 1962, remember? I might be a self-aware hologram, but I’m also period specific. But Dom Pérignon isn’t too shabby as a consolation prize.”
Taking his lead from Vic, Quark raised his glass. Ro followed a moment later. “To the future,” Vic said, then took a drink. Quark and Ro did likewise.
But Ro’s dark expression returned almost immediately.
“Something wrong with the bubbly?” Vic asked.
Ro shook her head and regarded the contents of her glass, evidently transfixed by the continuous upward motion of its stream of perfectly uniform, nearly microscopic bubbles.
“Well, since the problem clearly can’t be the company,” Vic said in a bantering tone, “it has to be my toast.”
Ro’s contemplative scowl only deepened.
And Quark realized in a flash that Vic had, as usual, cut directly to the heart of the matter.
Vic seemed to realize it as well, and took that revelation as his cue to move on. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to your evening. Enjoy the show.” Handing his barely touched champagne to a passing waitress, he was gone, moving cordially among the other tables as he made his way back to the stage.
Quark let the silence stretch for as long as he could stand it. Then he said, “It’s still bothering you, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What we talked about before Shakaar made his big announcement. The future.”
She nodded, looking bleak. “It’d help if you could convince me that there’s even going to be a future.”
Quark didn’t like the sound of that. “What, did you just get wind of some new classified Starfleet crisis that’s about to end the universe as we know it?”
She took another large swallow of champagne, her expression softening somewhat. She must have been warming up either to him or to the drink. “Things like that come and go. But the future is something else entirely. You’re stuck with facing it every day the universe doesn’t end.”
Quark had to agree. He had already told her of his misgivings about trying to make a living in Bajoran territory after the Federation came in and introduced its cashless, abundance-based, replicator-driven economy. He felt all but certain that he was about to lose everything he’d built here over the past sixteen years.
He wondered if the incoming regime would deprive him of Ro as well. A determination rose within him to prevent that from happening, though he hadn’t the faintest idea of how he might go about it.
It seemed hopeless on the face of it.
“So have you decided what you’re going to do after the Federation comes in?” he asked, taking the liberty of refilling both their glasses.
“As a matter of fact,” Ro said, throwing back a hefty quantity of the Dom Pérignon, “I think I’ve finally come to a decision.”
On the stage, Vic and his ensemble launched into a rendition of a centuries-old Earth standard that repeatedly asked the question “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”—and continually pr
esented “I don’t” as the only acceptable answer. According to Vic, someone named Porter had written the song for a show called High Society, which apparently had starred this Sin-Ah-Trah person whom Vic seemed to regard so highly. But how a disdain for the acquisition of money equated with any so-called high society made absolutely no sense. Quark struggled to ignore the song’s patently offensive lyrics, while Ro didn’t seem to mind them. Or perhaps she hadn’t even noticed, having lived among impecunious Starfleet hew-mons for as long as she had.
Quark watched her throughout Vic’s performance, wondering if she intended to tell him what decision she’d made. He suspected it lay along lines similar to his own. “I suppose neither of us is considered a pillar of the community around here,” he said. “And under the Federation, it’s only going to get worse for us both. The new regime is never going to feel right for either one of us. Not as long as we’re outsiders.”
“It’s been made pretty clear to me today that I can never wear a Starfleet uniform again,” Ro said, as though talking to herself. “Not that I’d want to.”
“But the Bajoran Militia is going to be part of Starfleet soon,” Quark said. Your choices look pretty much the same as mine. But where will yours take you?
Ro took another drink and nodded. “Once the ministers sign those entry documents, home won’t be a refuge from the Federation anymore. At least, not for me.”
“And the Bajorans will become just like the hew-mons,” Quark said. “Flat broke, but too well fed to realize it.”
“To outsiders,” Ro said, raising her glass in an ironic toast. “So the next big question is, What do we do next?”
We?
Even as his despair about his personal financial prospects deepened, Quark allowed himself to nurture the hope that he was finally connecting with Ro on some level deeper than mere infatuation. But if she, too, was planning to leave the station, would he ever get the chance to capitalize on that?
Quark was suddenly terrified that the wrong word from him right now might drive her away from him forever. “Don’t go,” was all he could think of to say.
He realized a moment later that Vic had returned, his entrance evidently obscured by the gathering Dom Pérignon haze. “Let me guess,” Quark said. “You heard everything we just said.”
Vic grinned. “I heard enough, pallie, to make one thing as clear as where Goldwater stands on JFK: You two gloomy Guses are made for each other.”
Ro’s nearly empty drink slipped from her fingers and tipped over. She ignored the stain that was slowly spreading across the tablecloth. “Come again?”
“Listen, those ancient Chinese cats might have really been onto something when they decided to make ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ into the same word.”
“I don’t follow you,” Quark said, wondering if his holosuite was beginning to malfunction. That would be damned inconvenient, with Nog over ninety thousand light-years away at the moment.
“Neither of you can see a way of making a go of it under the Federation flag,” Vic said, looking first at Ro, then at Quark. “Which means that you’re both going to have to get out of Dodge. Away from Starfleet. And away from a cashless Promenade.”
“Right,” Quark said. So far, Vic was only stating the obvious. Where was this leading?
“Dodge?” Ro said, obviously perplexed.
Vic sighed and shook his head in an exaggerated display of patience. “Okay, let me spell it out for you in great big letters, like the Sands’ marquee: You two need to gallop off to the frontier and go into business together.”
After a parting wink at a nonplussed Ro, Vic returned to the stage and began to sing “Fly Me to the Moon.”
A moment later Quark realized that Vic was, yet again, uncannily right. He looked at Ro and saw the same realization beginning to dawn in her eyes as well.
“I think we need to talk,” he said as he righted her glass and filled it again, emptying the bottle in the process.
Ro smiled. “Later,” she said, and held out her hand to him. “Dance with me.”
Quark felt a grin spreading across his face and took Laren’s hand. They stepped onto the dance floor together.
Seated behind the large desk in the station commander’s office, Kira didn’t bother to look up from the security report she had been reading until after the door had hissed open and admitted her latest visitor.
She was surprised to see Colonel Lenaris Holem—no, she corrected herself, General Lenaris Holem—striding toward her desk.
The general’s broad smile belied his mock-chiding tone. “Working this late is a bad habit, Colonel.”
“Occupational hazard,” she said, returning the smile. “I’m going to have a very busy day tomorrow.” Tossing the padd aside, she rose from her chair in deference to Lenaris’s superior rank.
His lips curled in a good-natured scowl. “Please. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing colonels leaping to attention in my presence. Especially not you.”
Kira felt her own smile increase in wattage. She had always genuinely liked the large, blunt-featured Militia officer. “Well, if you won’t take a salute, then I hope you’ll accept my congratulations on your promotion.”
He touched the month-old general’s pin on the collar of his gray uniform tunic, as though he thought a Vayan hornfly had just lit there. Kira knew that Lenaris had been promoted from colonel to general in recognition of his accomplishments as commander of the Lamnak fleet during the evacuation of Europa Nova, a non-Federation Earth colony whose population had been threatened by theta radiation a few months earlier. It also hadn’t escaped her notice that she, the overall commander of that extremely complex mission, had received no promotions or commendations whatsoever.
So goes Militia politics, she thought. For the Attainted.
But she knew that Lenaris wasn’t responsible for her shabby treatment, either at the hands of Yevir Linjarin’s plurality in the Vedek Assembly, or from his sympathizers within the Bajoran Militia. She knew that both groups bore little love for her after her official excommunication from the mainstream of Bajor’s religious life. Yet, on the eve of the planet’s entry into the Federation, neither group seemed able to muster sufficient courage to fire her on purely religious grounds.
Still, Lenaris’s promotion served as a depressing reminder to her of how far she had fallen in the eyes of so many influential Bajorans.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, gesturing toward the sofa in the meeting area of her office. She moved over to the replicator, from which she extracted two cups of alva nut tea, the general’s favorite beverage. “And why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”
“I didn’t call ahead,” said the general as he sat, “in case you already knew the answer to your first question. You might have found some convenient excuse not to see me.”
She handed one of the two steaming mugs to Lenaris. “My door is always open to you, Holem. You know that.”
“I do. And I’m grateful for it.” He took a careful sip of the hot, fragrant liquid. Settling back into the sofa, he said, “You know, I nearly turned down this promotion. After Europa Nova, it felt like the High Command was deliberately snubbing you by offering these general’s bars to me.”
“Turning down a promotion wouldn’t have made the Militia any nicer to me, Holem. Besides, you’ve earned it many times over.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know about that. But before I said anything foolish, I realized that I’d have a better chance of changing the attitudes of the old-guard brass as a general than I would have had as a colonel.”
“Maybe,” she said, eager to see where he was headed.
“And that brings me to the reason for my visit,” he continued, gazing directly into her eyes over the top of his mug. “Ten days ago I decided to follow the path of Ohalu. I have committed my life to the tenets of Ohalu’s Truthseekers, and to the Ohalavaru Way.”
Kira nodded. She had heard the rumors of grumblings from certain highly plac
ed Bajorans about Yevir’s heavy-handedness. And that the authors of some of these complaints had, perhaps out of sheer frustration, thrown their support behind the Ohalavaru, the group whose formation Kira had apparently inspired by disseminating Ohalu’s prophecies a few months back—an action that had led directly to her Attainder.
“It’s not exactly a secret,” Kira said. Beginning to wonder when the general intended to make his point, she sipped slowly at the contents of her mug.
“You should join us,” Lenaris said.
Kira nearly spit her tea across the room. “What?!”
He appeared unmoved by her reaction. “It was your actions that catalyzed the Ohalavaru movement. And your Attainder that gave it drive and purpose.”
Lenaris’s reasoning sounded insane to Kira’s ears. “My actions drove a wedge into the Bajoran faith.”
He scowled. “That’s Yevir and his cronies talking. I think Kira Nerys knows better. Besides, are you really prepared to spend years on your knees begging the forgiveness of Yevir and his toadies?”
She felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “I never asked for any forgiveness. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Exactly. I’m glad you’re prepared to admit that you don’t have to play their game. You have nothing to lose by joining us and throwing your public support behind Vedek Solis, our nominee for the kaiship.”
Kira knew Solis well and liked him quite a lot. A week ago, she had been somewhat surprised by the news that Solis had become the nominal Ohalavaru leader. His sincerity and goodwill could never be called into question; he had always worked hard for the benefit of the Bajoran people, during and after the Cardassian Occupation. Kira would never forget the quarrel she had had with Odo more than a year earlier, after the constable had briefly detained Solis for conducting charitable fund-raising activities aboard the station without a permit. The vedek’s actions had brought some quick, desperately needed relief to Bajoran flood victims. Like Odo, the man she had fallen in love with, Solis usually wasn’t one to place the niceties of paperwork ahead of the urgent needs of people.
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