But that was a reality best dealt with after he’d finished the task he’d come here to perform.
Nog approached the blindvault, and O’Brien’s team members made room for him. He ran his long fingers across its smooth, light-devouring surface.
O’Brien chose that moment to enter the aft section and address the members of his team. “All right, now let’s have a good close look at this blind—”
The chief stopped in mid-word, his mouth forming a silent ellipse of incredulity as his eyes fell upon Nog.
“Um, mission specialist Nog, Chief. Sir. Reporting for duty.” Nog assayed a sloppy, left-handed salute.
O’Brien ignored him, glaring instead at the kai, who was now standing beside Nog. The runabout was beginning to feel distinctly crowded.
“What the hell is going on here?” the chief demanded. “What exactly is a teenage kid doing tagging along with you on a dangerous mission in the DMZ?”
Winn seemed as imperturbable as one of the stone gargoyles that guarded the Tower of Commerce back on Ferenginar. “You said you thought a Ferengi would be useful on this mission, Chief, did you not?”
“Of course I did. I tried to persuade Rom to come with us, remember? You were there.”
“Indeed I was, Chief. Rom declined, so I found another Ferengi who possesses similar aptitudes. I would think, under the circumstances, that you’d be grateful for the help.”
“It’s your Orb,” O’Brien snapped. “And your conscience. Eminence.”
Winn’s rejoinder was interrupted by the wailing and flashing of a cockpit alarm. O’Brien and a dark-haired hew-mon engineer named Muniz—Nog recognized him from back on the station—immediately returned to their stations. The other two crew members—a hew-mon male and female who, respectively, had to be Wright and Adabwe—began running scans from other consoles adjacent to the main cockpit. The blindvault and the Orb inside it were now all but forgotten.
“Sensor contact with a ship,” Muniz said. “No, make that two ships.”
O’Brien nodded. “I see them, Enrique. O’Brien to Lenaris. Are you picking up what we’re picking up?”
“They’ve appeared on our sensors, too, Chief. One is the same Maquis ship that attacked us earlier. It’s been stopped and boarded by a Galor-class Cardassian warship”
“I want to approach and hail them, Colonel. I think we ought to find out what they’re up to,” O’Brien said.
“Agreed.”
A few minutes later, Nog watched O’Brien drop the runabout out of warp and hail the Cardassian ship, which was already visible through the front window as a distant point of light. A glance at Adabwe’s tactical readout told Nog that he was actually looking at two vessels—one Cardassian and one Maquis—flying in extremely close proximity to each other.
O’Brien repeated his hail. “Cardassian vessel, this is Chief Miles Edward O’Brien of the Starfleet runabout Orinoco. Please respond.”
“Strange,” Wright muttered, shaking his head at something on his console that Nog couldn’t see. “You’d think the Maquis ship would show human life-signs. But all I’m detecting on either ship is Cardassians.”
Adabwe’s head moved up and down. “I get the same readings. The Akorem Laan’s science officer confirms our scans as well.”
The chief raised an eyebrow at that, but said nothing. Instead, he repeated his hail yet again. He did so twice again before a brusque male voice responded on an audio channel. “Orinoco, this is the Cardassian warship Tavracet. Please state your business here.”
“We’ve just concluded a ... salvage operation,” O’Brien said in the ingratiatingly familiar voice Nog sometimes heard him use at the bar when in the company of Dr. Bashir, a tankard of beer, and a handful of metal-tipped projectiles. “I was wondering if you required our assistance before we returned to Federation space.”
A long beat elapsed before the Cardassian responded. “Thank you for your kind offer, Chief. However, I believe we already have the matter well in hand. The terrorists have been apprehended. Tavracet out.”
“My. That wasn’t very neighborly,” Adabwe said, still studying her sensor console.
Wright shrugged. “Cardassians aren’t the cuddliest people in the quadrant. Even when they’re not shooting at you.”
Nog looked toward Winn, who stood behind the cockpit. Her eyes were focused on the forward window.
“The people on that Maquis ship might have been the ones who stole the Orb from Turrel in the first place,” she said.
“Maybe,” O’Brien said, turning his seat toward her. “Or the dead Maquis we found on the planet might be the guilty parties. We may never know.”
Winn nodded. “I suppose the important thing is that we’ve recovered the Orb.”
“I’m forced to agree,” said O’Brien, who then opened a channel to Colonel Lenaris back on the Bajoran ship. After a quick and parsimonious exchange, the chief fed a series of commands into his flight console.
The distantly visible Tavracet and its Maquis companion fell away as the runabout went back to warp and resumed its heading for DS9.
Nog was startled by a hand on his shoulder, but calmed when he realized it was Winn. Smiling, she gestured toward the black cube behind the transporter. “Mr. Nog, if you’d be so kind?”
Nog moved deliberately toward the antigrav sled. His fingers felt slippery with sweat as he slowly felt along the blindvault’s edges. He closed his eyes to shut out the expectant gazes of Winn and Chief O’Brien’s team. He had to marshal all of his concentration to tune out the myriad tiny sounds they made even as they tried to be still. Angrily shushing the fidgety Muniz had done absolutely no good at all.
There. A gentle ringing overtone, perceptible only to Ferengi auditory nerves, sounded as his fingers came into feather-light contact with the first hasp. The second, third, and fourth, each one making its signature chime, followed in sequence. He opened his eyes to see a half-meter-wide flatscreen interface extrude itself onto the blindvault’s nearest face, as though conjured by magic.
An icon appeared, rendered in the angular, reassuringly familiar script of written Ferengi. He touched it, and a tone sounded. He calculated a tone an octave higher, then bisected it to generate a pitch a tritone above the original sound.
The process repeated and gradually accelerated, as he heard the pitches and anticipated the response each time. Sweat ran down his bulbous forehead and into his eyes. He ignored it and soldiered on. Though he nearly lost the sequence when someone’s badly timed decision to sit caused a cacophonous squeak, he continued listening to the ever-changing tones and keying in the responses that would have made no sense to anyone with smaller, less sensitive lobes.
Throughout the procedure, which seemed to go on for an hour but probably actually occupied a span of perhaps four or maybe five minutes, a single thought recurred continuously within Nog’s head, like a persistent leitmotif that got stuck in the brain during a concert of Sinnravian drad music: This is way, way too easy.
Then, just when Nog began to worry that he might have made a critical misstep capable of making the blindvault’s computer shut down permanently, the interface panel shimmered and began to vanish, along with the front and top faces of the black cube.
He turned toward Winn, flashing her a triumphant grin.
Then he saw that her expression was anything but happy.
A moment later, he saw a similar, surprised look on the faces of O’Brien, Adabwe, Wright, and Muniz. Only then did he look back into the open blindvault.
It was empty.
What the hell would Marauder Mo do now?
“No,” Winn whispered. “By the Prophets, it can’t be.” Having lived through the horrors of the Occupation, she had known despair on many occasions. But never quite like this. Victory had never been snatched from her grasp quite so ignominiously before.
Nog stood before the empty vault, his mouth silently opening and closing. “Do not blame yourself, child,” she told him. “You did everything I
asked of you.”
Winn became conscious of O’Brien standing beside her. “Obviously somebody got to the vault before we did. And it’s the same somebody who killed all those Maquis, unless I miss my guess.”
Winn nodded, numb. It didn’t matter. The Orb was gone. Just like all the other Orbs that the damned Cardassians had expropriated and then lost.
Nog found his voice at last. “This has got to have something to do with that Cardassian ship.”
“Why do you say that?” O’Brien asked.
“Because nobody mentioned finding any sign of Ferengi either down on the planet or aboard the Cardassian ship. And without a Ferengi, whoever beat us to the vault probably couldn’t have gotten it open as quickly as they did.”
O’Brien nodded, apparently understanding. “Unless they already had the entry code. And nobody had that except for Legate Turrel and maybe a very small handful of other Cardassian officers.”
Nog’s eyes widened as he carried this logic another step further. “That’s why I think the Orb might be aboard the Cardassian vessel. Chief, were there any strange energy signatures on that ship?”
“I don’t think so. At least, none that any of us recognized.”
Winn watched as Adabwe and Muniz called up the records of the scans the Orinoco had made of the Tavracet and the Maquis ship it had impounded. O’Brien, Wright, and Nog were also watching intently as arcane charts, graphs, and columns of numeric data scrolled across the readouts.
Winn realized she couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.
“There’s an unusual-looking energy spike here,” Adabwe said, pointing to a sharply rising curve on a graph she’d frozen in place on one of the monitors. “But it could mean anything from a leaky coolant manifold to an inefficient warp core.”
“Doesn’t exactly scream, ‘I’m the missing Orb, come look for me here,’ does it?” Muniz said.
Nog spoke up. “No. But it could.”
“Excuse me?” Muniz said.
Nog pointed at the cryptic squiggles on the console before them. “Can you run this through the computer or something and convert it into sound?”
Adabwe scowled thoughtfully. “That’s a lot of cycles per second. It wouldn’t be in the audible range.”
Grinning, Nog tapped his lobe. “Let’s give it a try anyway.”
A moment later, Adabwe keyed in the last of a short sequence of commands. “There it is.”
“I don’t hear anything,” O’Brien said.
“Me, neither,” said Muniz.
“Shhhh,” Nog said, closing his eyes. A moment later he opened them and a look of recognition passed across his pinched face. “I’ve heard that sound before.”
“Where?” Winn asked.
“In the Bajoran shrine back on the station. Two days ago.”
Winn recalled that Nog had been standing with her before the Orb of Prophecy and Change that day.
Hope reignited within Winn’s soul. She turned to O’Brien. “Chief, we must double back and find the Tavracet immediately.”
Another sensor alarm sounded, prompting O’Brien to return to the cockpit to check it. Winn followed him forward. “Looks like we won’t have to.
“The Tavracet seems to be following us.”
Winn immediately beamed back to the Akorem Laan, and headed straight for her private cabin there. Activating her personal sub-space transceiver, she instructed the device’s control computer to contact Legate Turrel on his secure diplomatic channel.
Whatever deception you’re attempting, Turrel, I’m going to put a stop to it, here and now.
Turrel’s face appeared on her desktop viewer moments later, and Winn thought she saw a look of surprise flash across the legate’s hard, almost reptilian face. The picture on the screen was so sharp he might have been standing right beside her.
“Kai Winn. To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure of this call?”
Winn wished to waste no time on diplomatic pleasantries. Instead, she sought to rattle him with a direct assault. “How long have you been aboard the Tavracet, following us?”
He blinked several times, signaling to Winn that she had scored a direct hit. Then he recovered his composure and smiled his negotiator’s smile. “Very good, Eminence. What gave me away?”
“For one thing, the Tavracet appears to be carrying the Orb of Contemplation. I didn’t think you’d want to stray very far from it, after all the trouble you evidently took to persuade the Central Command to release it to your custody. And especially after the Maquis allegedly stole it.”
Turrel frowned. “You doubt that the Maquis were responsible for the theft of the Orb?”
“Let’s just say that I now find it hard to believe that they acted alone.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The blindvault you used to carry the Orb is transporter-proof. That means the thieves would have had to board the vessel you took to Deep Space 9 in order to seize the vault. So if Maquis fighters had been the only attackers, they would have done far more than simply steal from you—they would have slaughtered you and every other Cardassian on board. But there were no Maquis on the Maquis ship you’ve just impounded.”
“Interesting speculation.”
“Not speculation. We’ve already opened the blindvault you left behind in the Maquis hideout. The Orb was missing.”
The look of discomfiture on Turrel’s face spoke volumes. He hadn’t been expecting this. Winn thought he had the look of a man whose entire world was now in danger of spiraling out of control.
She pressed on. “Turrel, it’s very unlikely that the Maquis could have removed the Orb from the blindvault. But you could have done it. Or perhaps the deed was carried out by some of your subordinates. Perhaps by officers who weren’t happy with your efforts to repatriate the Orb.”
“Ordering the Orb returned was an unprecedented act of Cardassian largesse,” Turrel said, somehow managing to sound both cautious and self-aggrandizing at the same time. “Bold strokes such as these can sometimes inspire fear.”
“Change is often frightening,” Winn said, nodding. Having lived under the brutal heel of Cardassian oppressors for decades, she felt she knew what she was talking about. “But perhaps now is the time to challenge that fear. After all, we’ve both worked very hard on our recent diplomatic agreement. I’m certain that neither of us wishes to place in jeopardy what we’ve accomplished together thus far.”
Turrel’s stolid visage changed subtly, moving by degrees from calculating to contemplative. At length, he said, “All right. Perhaps the whole truth will best serve that end.”
“I am listening, Legate.”
“I’m sure you are aware that Maquis raids have been a persistent problem for the Cardassian Union over the past year, ever since a treaty redrew our boundaries with the Federation.”
“Leaving a number of former Federation worlds and their populations technically in Cardassian territory.”
“Not technically, Eminence. Those worlds are ours now, and their Federation populations have been relocated. Save, of course, for the Maquis—those who opted to use terror tactics in an effort to retain the territory the Federation legally ceded to us.”
Of course, Winn was bitterly aware that one person’s terrorist might be another’s freedom fighter. But this was a subject she didn’t wish to debate at the moment. “I am familiar with the origins of the Maquis,” she said. “Please go on.”
“Very well. I needed some help in drawing a particularly troublesome Maquis cell out into the open. I also discovered, as you suggested, evidence that certain individuals in my officer corps were not only actively working against our efforts to repatriate the Orb of Contemplation, but had also covertly thrown in with the Maquis to that end.”
Winn nodded, beginning to see clearly the picture that Turrel was painting for her. “You needed to draw your own traitors into the open as well.”
“Exactly so. And the Orb served as an irresistible enticement for both. The turn
coats, you see, wanted to keep the Orb for themselves, and they contrived to use the Maquis to acquire the vault that carried it. Blaming the Maquis seemed an elegant method for covering up their conspiracy. By discreetly monitoring the progress of your search of the Demilitarized Zone, I was able to apprehend the traitors immediately after they had wiped out the Maquis cell and relieved them of their prize. A prize that will soon be back on Cardassia Prime.”
“So your offer to repatriate the Orb was merely a ploy. You planned to keep it all along, while making it appear that the Maquis made off with it.” Winn suddenly feared that the treaty on which she and Vedek Bareil had labored for so long—the agreement that Bareil had died pursuing—was unraveling right before her eyes.
Then another infuriating realization came to Winn: Had Turrel’s plan worked only a little better, she never would have known that he had manipulated her, the Bajoran Militia, and Starfleet into unwittingly abetting the wanton slaughter of people whose only real crime was standing up against Cardassian tyranny.
And some of those people were Bajorans, she thought, her gorge rising.
“So we seem to have a truly thorny problem now, Kai Winn,” the legate said. “It would be terribly costly to me, and to my government, if the accusations you’ve just made were to become generally known. Obviously, I can’t permit that to happen.”
By the Prophets, Winn thought, horrified. He means to destroy this ship and the runabout, merely to cover up his scheme. No doubt he’ll blame the Maquis for that as well. I was a fool to think I could ever negotiate in good faith with this man.
Her mind raced. There had to be an alternative to a pitched battle, and the abandonment of the treaty that Bareil had given his life to negotiate. If she were to call the bridge now, what were the odds that even Lenaris could act in time to save the ship? Absurdly, she found herself thinking of the games of chance that had seemed so popular in the drinking establishment run by Nog’s unpleasant uncle.
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