THE BIG GAME

by Sandy Schofield

  “And they can’t see us because they’re out of phase?”

  “That’s right,” L’sthwan said. He stood. “The game will start up again soon. I would like to go back.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Sisko said. “Is that all you know about these Ghost Riders?”

  “I can tell you where to find them on Risa.”

  Odo stopped pacing He put his hand back on L’sthwan’s arm.

  “That doesn’t do me much good,” Sisko said, “since I’m here.”

  L’sthwan shrugged. “But the rest of the information will help you, Commander. Now, if you could get your flunky to take me back to the card room—”

  Odo grew two inches, obviously angry.

  “I don’t think so,” Sisko said. “Odo, be nice to our friend L’sthwan in the brig. Give him anything he wants. Cards, food, whatever he needs. And if he thinks of more about the Ghost Riders, contact me.”

  Odo nodded. His expression didn’t change, but Sisko could see the pleasure tugging at the covers of Odo’s features. He tapped his comm badge. “Primmon. Meet me in the brig. I have the guest you were looking for.”

  “We had a deal!” L’sthwan shouted, as Odo began dragging him away.

  Sisko shook his head. “I don’t make deals with murderers,” he said flatly.

  “You said I could keep playing.”

  Sisko smiled widely and leaned closer to L’sthwan as if telling him a secret of great importance. “I was bluffing.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE SERVICE AREA was hot and smelled of dust. Jake stifled a sneeze as he crawled in. Light filtered up from the rooms below, but the holosuites were wonderfully quiet. Jake’s big fear as he passed them had always been that he would hear something he didn’t want to hear.

  Nog was ahead of him, walking almost upright now that they had gone past the holosuites. Nog had brought a tiny Ferengi single beam flashlight and was using it to illuminate their way.

  “No sense in stepping on equipment,” he had told Jake with a grin.

  Jake’s heart was pounding. He should have said something to his father. He would as soon as they got out of this. Maybe he should have followed his father to their quarters and talked to him there.

  Nog had just turned on the service walkway in the opposite direction of the back room. He held the light in one hand and his father’s device in the other. Nog thought he knew where the secret room was, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Jake thought the whole trip was too much of a chance.

  “Almost there,” Nog hissed.

  Good. This was the second pair of pants Jake had stained with dust and dirt from these service ways. He didn’t like being up here, with the faint hum of running equipment, the thin planking that served as a floor, and the odd lights coming through from the rooms below.

  Nog’s flashlight barely cut through the darkness in front of them. Jake wanted to see more than four feet away. What if Chief O’Brien hadn’t finished working on this part of the station yet? What if this walkway just ended?

  Then, from below, all the lights went out. Jake froze. He thought it had been dark before. Now the only thing he could see was Nog, illuminated in the thin beam of the Ferengi flashlight.

  “Wow,” Nog said. “Power’s down again.”

  He kept moving forward. Jake didn’t move for a moment, but the light got fainter and fainter. He didn’t want to be caught in the complete dark.

  He followed, slowly. “Be careful,” he said more to himself than to Nog. If either one of them stepped off the walkway they would fall through the ceilings of the rooms below. At best, it would be embarrassing at worst, they could get hurt.

  “I know what I’m doing, hu-mon,” Nog said, turning to grin at Jake. Nog’s slight movement was enough to throw him off balance. He swung his arms, making the light circle the area like a strobe, illuminating walls, ceiling, walkway, floor.

  Jake reached for him and caught Nog’s arm. Nog took a step backwards to regain his balance. Something crunched, then Nog toppled even farther. His foot had gone through the floor. Or, more accurately, the ceiling of the room below.

  “What is that?” a panicked voice said from below.

  “Something fell on me!” someone else said.

  Nog leaned backwards and pulled Jake toward him. Jake braced himself on the walkway, feeling like they both hung over the edge of a cliff. Nog’s left arm was flung behind his head, the light illuminating a plastic coated far wall. With his right hand, he grabbed Jake’s shirt.

  Then Nog’s other leg slipped through the floor. Jake held on with all of his strength.

  “The ceiling is caving in!” someone yelled.

  “Let’s get out of here!”

  “It might be just as bad outside.”

  “We can’t leave the equipment!”

  “Hold on!” Jake hissed.

  “I am holding on,” Nog said.

  The lights came back on. The darkness no longer seemed dark. Nog’s chest glowed with the lights from below. His legs hung through the floor, and his hips were trapped in the flooring. Now that Jake could see the problem, he knew how to solve it. He braced himself and tugged. Nog popped out of the hole like a hot dog squeezed out of a bun. He scrambled onto the walkway, and both boys peered into the room below.

  Eight Ferengi faces looked up at them. Most of the Ferengi had pieces of ceiling and dust coating their bald heads. All the Ferengi were frowning.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Nog whispered.

  Jake didn’t have to be told twice. He pushed himself to his feet and ran along the service walkway. His footsteps clanged, and Nog’s clanged too in an off-rhythm. Jake’s breath caught in his throat. The Ferengi were yelling behind them and arguing about how to get into the ceiling.

  When he reached the narrow part of the passage, Jake flung himself onto his knees, wincing as a jolting pain ran through his body. Those scrapes would be terrible. He crawled as fast as he could to the access panel. Nog was right behind him, breathing hard.

  The panel loomed ahead. Jake pushed it with all his strength, and then dove out of it. Nog followed, tucking and rolling across the floor like a ball.

  Jake slammed the portal shut and ran, imagining that at any moment he would hear the pounding of an army behind him.

  CHAPTER 23

  KIRA HAD PUNCHED IN half a message to Starfleet before a squeal from the communications board let her know that long-range subspace still wasn’t working. O’Brien had managed to get the board up and running, so Kira felt better working at her old station. But still she found nothing more frustrating than running to fix equipment that was constantly breaking down.

  With no end in sight.

  She had barely eaten since the crisis started. She was surviving on water and an occasional sweet. She had gone beyond tired—she was focused, as she had been in those early days of fighting the Cardassians on Bajor. She would run on pure adrenaline until someone would stop her and force her to sleep.

  She had hated sleeping. Sleeping meant she would miss something. In those days, if she missed something, she might lose her life.

  This crisis felt the same way. They had been lucky. So far the power core had held and life support had only gone down for short periods of time. Having the environmental controls constantly fail was hard enough on them. Right now Ops was so cold that she shivered every time she moved.

  She did like being cold better than being warm. Being warm made her tired, and she didn’t need to be tired.

  “Reports in,” O’Brien said. “Engineering has fixed docking rings four and five. The ships docked there will be stable now.”

  “Also,” Carter said, “the airlock on docking ring sixteen will now open.”

  “I’m sure the Ferengi who was stuck in there is glad to be out,” Kira said. She fiddled with the communications board. Nothing had worked so far to reestablish long-range communications. She was actually repeating her actions. She wondered if anyone else was doing the same.

&
nbsp; The hum of the turbolift took her focus off the board. Sisko was back. He still hadn’t been to his quarters. His uniform was as rumpled as it was when he left, and from this distance his five o’clock shadow made his face look bruised. Oddly, though, he seemed to have more energy than he had when he left.

  “Didn’t expect you back so soon,” Kira said.

  “Sir,” O’Brien said with a bit of a grin. “You were supposed to shower.”

  “I will,” Sisko said. He strode across Ops to the science console. “Has anyone heard of the Ghost Riders?”

  “Solitrium waves!” O’Brien said, as if that connection made sense. “How could I have missed it?”

  “You mean you know what’s going on?” Kira leaned forward on her console.

  “Maybe,” O’Brien said. “Dax, let me at the science console.”

  “Certainly.” Dax stood. “What are Ghost Riders, Benjamin?”

  “Have you heard of them, Chief?” Sisko asked.

  “Just a reference back when I was on the Enterprise.” His fingers flew over the board. “Let me see if I can access any information about them.”

  “While he’s looking,” Kira said, her frustration making her bounce on the balls of her feet, “tell us what you know.”

  “I don’t know much,” Sisko said. “Odo arrested a man down at Quark’s who claimed that Ghost Riders were causing the station’s problems. The man was bargaining to stay out of the brig, and the story was strange enough that I thought perhaps he was making it up.”

  “I don’t think so, Commander,” O’Brien said. “Just give me a minute.”

  They didn’t have a minute. Not now, when they were close. The exhaustion that Kira had been holding at bay threatened behind her eyes. “What are these things?” she snapped, angry that she had had to ask twice.

  “My source says they are hunting what he called ‘energy creatures.’”

  “Energy creatures?” Dax asked.

  “Espiritu?” Kira leaned against the console. “They’re hunting Espiritu?”

  Sisko turned. “You know of them, Major?”

  “Of course,” Kira said. “Every Bajoran child has heard of them. They were discovered near here when I was about five.” She ran her fingers through her short hair. “They’re gentle, harmless creatures. I can’t believe that someone would hunt them.”

  “I have had no evidence of life-forms on my sensors,” Dax said, her hands flying across the science pad.

  “You wouldn’t,” Kira said. “They live out of phase from us. They can pass through most things, unseen and unfelt.”

  She sighed. She had learned as much about them as she could. As a child, she had wanted to pass through things unseen and unfelt. When she had joined the resistance against the Cardassians, she had longed to find a way to be like the creatures, so that all of Bajor would disappear from the Cardassians’ grasp.

  “I found it,” O’Brien said. “Ghost Riders use a loose group of runabout-sized, single-manned ships. They roam space together like a pack of wild animals. There is no record of them ever working in this area before, but they are wanted by the Federation on a long list of charges. They were tagged with the name Ghost Riders because their ships function just out of phase with normal space. The Romulans were using the same technology in an attempt to perfect an improved cloaking device. The Ghost Riders stole the technology from them.”

  The last brought Kira back from the past. “Why would they?” she asked. “I heard about that new cloaking device. It doesn’t work.”

  “It must work,” Sisko said. “The Ghost Riders are using it.”

  “It doesn’t work for the Romulans, sir,” O’Brien said. “There are too many problems. The worst one is that when a ship is out of phase—which is how it is cloaked—it can’t figure where it is in real space.”

  “So it’s flying blind,” Sisko said. “Are the Ghost Riders flying blind?”

  “Not really,” O’Brien answered. Kira had the picture now. The Ghost Riders had found a way to be in the same phase as the Espiritu. They actually got to see the beautiful pulsing glow that Kira had just heard about. And they were hunting it. She clenched her fists. Just like the Cardassians. They found something beautiful, so they wanted to destroy it. “The Ghost Riders aren’t concerned about our space. They want to follow the Espiritu. In that phase, they can see them just fine.”

  “How do the solitrium waves figure in?” Dax asked.

  O’Brien moved away from her board and went back to his, speaking as he went. “Holding the ships out of phase creates strange effects in the normal space around them. That was another problem of the Romulan cloaking device. The ships weren’t really cloaked because they could be tracked by the changes in space around them. One of those changes was solitrium waves.”

  Dax took her place at the science console, but did nothing except watch O’Brien. “So,” she said, “the side effects from the Ghost Riders are creating our problems.”

  “It would seem that way,” Sisko said.

  “I’m not sure, sir,” O’Brien said. “We don’t know what they’re doing to those energy creatures.”

  “I’m sure they’re killing them,” Kira said. Destroying all the freedom. Just because they were beautiful. She hated that kind of injustice.

  “Perhaps,” Dax said. “But for what?”

  “My source mentioned that when caught alive, the Espiritu were worth a lot of money.”

  “Alive?” O’Brien said. “Could they be bleeding off the energy, then?”

  Dax had again focused on her console. “Solitrium waves are increasing,” she said. “Would that mean—?”

  The station rocked. As the lights flickered, Kira moved to an engineering station. Warning lights flooded the board. The environmental controls shut off. The cold air against her back was gone. Sisko staggered, then caught himself on the edge of the science console.

  “Life support out in docking ring five,” Kira said.

  “All the doors in the living quarters on level six jammed,” Dax said.

  “Replicators out in the Promenade,” Carter said.

  “The power core has reached 150 percent of normal,” O’Brien said.

  “The system can’t sustain that!” Sisko whirled. He hit his comm badge. “Mr. Teppo, take that core off-line.”

  Kira turned her attention to the power core. Around its icon on the pad, a red warning light flashed.

  “Core breach in one minute,” the computer said.

  “I’m trying here, sir,” O’Brien said. “I can’t get to the core.”

  “Commander,” Teppo’s voice sounded tinny through the comm link, “we’re losing containment.”

  The trembling stopped.

  “Solitrium waves receding,” Dax said.

  The red light around the power core winked off.

  “Power core fluctuating,” O’Brien said. After a short pause he continued, “It’s now fifty percent of normal and holding.”

  “How’s that containment, Mr. Teppo?” Sisko asked.

  “I see no serious damage,” Teppo said, “but I’ll run a quick diagnostic.”

  Kira brushed her hair off her forehead. “Commander, Cardassian technology is very fussy. If we don’t figure out what to do about the power core, it could blow.”

  “It won’t blow until it holds 75 percent over normal for thirty seconds,” O’Brien snapped.

  “Which,” Sisko said, “it just might do the next time we get hit. Chief, I want you to double-check the containment fields and see what you can do about shutting the core down at a moment’s notice.”

  O’Brien nodded. Kira put her hands on the small of her back and stretched. They had better find a solution quickly. She had seen the devastation from a blown Cardassian power core once, many years before. It had taken out twenty square kilometers of ground along with the military research station which housed the core. It was not a pretty sight.

  She took a deep breath and turned her attention to her console. She br
ought the life-support systems back up in the docking ring, then turned her attention to the doors. The problem looked big enough that the solution might not be possible from Ops.

  “Benjamin,” Dax said, her voice tinged with a slight amount of panic. “The Cardassian ship is breaking up.”

  Kira moved back to communications. “The Cardassians are shouting about being attacked. Litna is ignoring them. I can’t hail either one of them.”

  “Is the tractor beam working?” Sisko asked O’Brien.

  “No, sir.” O’Brien frowned as he punched the pad. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “We need to help the Cardassians, Benjamin,” Dax said. “It’s a mess out there.”

  Kira’s fingers slowed on the console. She had an obligation to save lives, but it was harder to work for Cardassian lives.

  “How many on board?” Sisko asked Kira.

  “Too many to beam over, even if all the transporters were working correctly.”

  “Chief, get a lock on as many people as you can.”

  “I’m trying, sir, but the interference is getting in our way.”

  “We’re running out of time, Benjamin,” Dax said. “Their ship is falling apart.”

  “Two shuttles have just left the Cardassian ship,” Kira said. “They have about five more on a ship of that size.”

  “Let’s hope they make it,” Sisko said. “Since we can’t seem to help them.”

  “The five other shuttles are out too,” O’Brien said.

  “That’s it for the ship,” Dax said. “It’s breaking up.”

  A light blinked on the communications console. “A message coming in from Captain Litna,” Kira said. “She complains of Cardassian attack, then thanks us for destroying the Cardassian ship. She says she is returning to Bajor for repairs but she will return.”

  “On screen.” Sisko walked down the steps to the front of the operations table.

  Kira shook her head. “She has blocked any response, sir. She does not want to communicate, just to let us know what she thinks. We are being hailed by one of the Cardassian shuttles too, sir.”