THE BIG GAME

by Sandy Schofield

  How inefficient.

  But why should he have expected anything else?

  Lursa tossed in the chips to meet the Meepod’s bet. Then she raised the bet another fifty bars.

  Quark hadn’t moved. The Nagus leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He and Quark looked like matching short sentry dolls, with identical expressions on their craggy faces.

  The Meepod called and raised another fifty. Rasmussen and Etana stayed with the bet.

  Lursa tossed in an additional hundred bars.

  Odo’s throat was dry. For the first time, the game held his attention. He wanted to see what they were doing. He wanted to know what the cheating system was.

  All three remaining players called Lursa’s bet, but no one raised. The pot was huge. There were too many chips in the center to count. There had to be nearly two thousand bars worth there. All riding on one hand.

  One by one, Lursa put her cards on the table. Nine of hearts. Ten of hearts. The six, seven, and eight were already on the table. She had a royal flush, ten high.

  Rasmussen turned red and tossed his cards into the pot. Etana set hers down, and so did the Meepod. Lursa pulled the chips toward her with a big grin.

  Quark was not grinning. Neither was the Nagus. Garak hadn’t moved. He still had his elbows resting on the table, that wide-eyed look on his face.

  “I will finish dealing,” Quark said, shoving the dealer out of the way. He took a new deck out and opened it in front of the players. Lursa’s lips pursed. The Nagus nodded, and Garak leaned back, his body finally relaxed.

  At that moment, Odo knew what had happened.

  Somehow they had set up the cards. If he had played according to his usual method, he would have lost most of the chips in front of him.

  His frown grew deeper. He could not prove that the cheating system existed, and even if he could, he wasn’t sure how he would respond to it. Was it stealing? Could he arrest them? Did he even want to?

  He suppressed a small sigh. The rest of the tournament loomed ahead of him, like a death sentence.

  CHAPTER 33

  OPS WAS BEGINNING TO LOOK almost normal again. One of the ensigns had cleaned up the loose wires near Sisko’s office. Equipment that had fallen off-line was back on-line, and nothing had yet knocked it off. Of course that would change when Sisko took the runabout out of phase.

  He hoped O’Brien could keep the power core stabilized. O’Brien had spent much of his time near the core with four assistants, trying to find ways to prevent the fluctuations. He had said he was unwilling to boost the low reserves because when Sisko took the runabout out of phase, the boost might cause the core to blow.

  It was clear that stopping the Ghost Riders had become the only way to save the station. Both from the Cardassians and the power core.

  Sisko bent over the operations table. Systems were coming up again. One by one the warning lights had blinked off. He scratched the stubble on his face. Too bad he didn’t have time for a shave. A shower and change of uniform would be nice too. He was beginning to notice that he hadn’t bathed in days.

  Odo had just used the comm link to announce that he had shut down Quark’s cheating system, and the shutdown had been effective. Sisko had thanked him. They both had doubted that Quark’s strange equipment had contributed to the problems, but they didn’t want to take any chances.

  “We’re almost ready for you, sir,” O’Brien’s voice announced from the service bay.

  “On my way,” Sisko said. He headed toward the turbolift.

  “Benjamin.” Dax left Odo’s side and took Sisko’s arm. “I’ve been thinking about this and it worries me.”

  She nodded toward the main screen. The last Cardassian ship had returned to formation. Most still had nothing but their bridge lights on, but that was enough to start an attack.

  “I’ll disable them for you,” Sisko said.

  “I think you should stay to talk with them,” Dax said.

  Sisko looked at her wide blue eyes. In there, he saw the calmness of his old friend. “I’m sorry, old man. I need you here. Once I leave, there won’t be much talking anyway. We’ll worry about diplomacy if I’m successful.”

  Dax let go of his arm. She had made her final plea. He could tell from the expression on her face. She knew that he wouldn’t change his mind.

  Sisko got into the lift. “Just keep this place in one piece. I’m going to shake them up again. That offense seems to be our best defense.”

  He hoped. He didn’t know if he could live with it if his attempt to go out of phase was the last straw which destroyed the station.

  And Jake.

  “Good luck,” Dax said.

  Sisko smiled as the lift lurched and then started down. “Don’t you mean good hunting?”

  CHAPTER 34

  THE MEEPOD tossed her cards on the table, stood and stalked off, leaving a waft of stink behind her. Quark ran the back of his hand across his nose. Never again would he allow Meepod players in his games. At least not without a body suit to keep the smell in.

  Quark shook his head. He grabbed the deck of cards and walked over to the side of the room, activating the fan to clear the stench. It was wonderful to have everything up and running again. Just enough to keep the end of the tournament sane.

  “Thank all the religious deities in the pantheon,” said Berlinghoff Rasmussen. “I doubt my nose will ever be the same.”

  No one laughed at the remark. Doubtless they all felt that way.

  Quark looked at the chips. The largest stacks sat before the Odo and the Nagus. Clearly Odo did understand poker.

  The smell wasn’t clearing. Quark didn’t think he could stay around it much longer. “Let’s take a break,” he said.

  He opened the door and turned on the fan inside the bar. The fresh air was unfamiliar and quite pleasant.

  Quark stood in the door and watched the players move about. They stretched and took snacks off the back table. He didn’t know how they could eat with the smell still hanging over the room. But then the Nagus’s sense of smell must have faded with age and the others weren’t Ferengi. Humans tolerated all types of noxious odors without even noticing them.

  The last four players in the tournament were a bit of a surprise. He had expected Rasmussen to make it to the final table. The man was a con artist from way back. Literally. By staying, Garak confirmed his position as the in-station spy. His profession gave him a good poker face. After Quark had changed decks, the two of them had ganged up on Lursa and driven her away from the table in short order. Quark had never seen anyone lose so much money in such a small space of time. He would remember that in dealings with her in the future.

  No. The players Quark hadn’t expected to last were the Nagus and Odo. The Nagus should have dropped out shortly after Quark shut down the cheating system. In fact, Quark had circled the Nagus’s table several times, waiting for the changes. There were none. The Nagus continued to play the same consistent poker he had throughout the tournament.

  The real surprise, though, was Odo. All these years he had lied about not knowing how to gamble. He had to have. There was no other explanation for his stupendous luck.

  Unless he was a brilliant natural talent.

  He had said the game was simple.

  And Odo never lied.

  Quark ran a finger along the ridge of his left ear, calming himself. Odo hadn’t known how to play two days ago. No one could fake that kind of ignorance.

  Quark closed his eyes. Odo was the most natural poker player in the quadrant.

  And the perfect ringer.

  The odor was finally clearing out of the room. Quark closed the door and came back inside. Rasmussen was finishing off some ForeTee hard cider, his fifth glass in the last hour. The stress was getting to him.

  The Nagus and Odo were standing side by side. Quark picked up a glass of cider for himself and eavesdropped.

  “You play well,” the Nagus said in his tight, nasal voice.

  Odo nodde
d. “So do you.”

  “We shall see how good soon, won’t we?” The Nagus laughed. Odo shrugged.

  “That we will,” he said.

  Suddenly the lights went out. Quark dropped his glass. He heard it clang against the table in the darkness, then cider splashed on his pants. He started to curse when the station rocked so hard he fell into the table. Alarms went off in the Promenade, howling like a wild beast in the next room. Full glasses and chilled grub coated him. His fingers slid into a bowl filled with something hot and rubbery, then little pellets landed on his head. He grabbed one and waved it beneath his nose. Peanuts. He tossed it across the room. He had no idea how humans ate those things.

  The station stopped rumbling. Quark stood and grabbed the edge of the tablecloth so that he could wipe the food off his hands and face. The darkness couldn’t have come at a better time. He didn’t want the Nagus to see him covered in chilled grub worm.

  A peanut was caught in Quark’s ear. He stuck a finger in after it, and heard the peanut roll around the outer edges, the sound so loud he thought he was going to scream. At the last second, the peanut dropped down his lobe and out.

  Quark brushed himself off to make sure no more errant peanuts hid, and then said to Rom, “Lights!”

  “I can’t find them!” Rom said. His voice sounded far away.

  “Must I do everything myself?” Quark asked. He gripped the edge of the table and used it to guide him to the switch. He flicked it and the portable lights Rom had rigged over the table came on.

  Rom sat behind the table, a pot of beef stew upside down on his head. Bits of meat and carrot were running down his face like tears. “Get cleaned up,” Quark hissed. To look like that in front of the Nagus. Of all things.

  Rom pulled the bowl off his head and hurried out of the room, leaving little brown footprints behind him. The Nagus’s cackle rose above the alarms. Rasmussen joined him. Garak smiled. Only Odo looked unamused.

  Quark pulled a peanut off his sweater and flung it after Rom. This was his own fault for thinking things would get easier. At least this time they had the backup lights. He grabbed a fresh deck and headed toward the table. “Shall we begin again, gentlemen?”

  The Nagus grabbed a chilled grub worm off the tablecloth and tossed it in his mouth as he came over. Odo grimaced, and took his chair. The others took their places too, picking up errant chips and putting them back on the huge piles. Every chip from all seventy-seven players sat in front of those four. Quark noticed that a few chips were on the floor and no one had bothered to pick them up. They all knew that at this level of play, a few chips one way or the other would make no difference. The last survivor was going to take it all.

  The station trembled again, making the table bounce. Four pairs of hands gripped the tabletop and held it down.

  So much for the wonderful extravagant tournament. So much for impressing the quadrant’s best poker players. So much for a quiet, peaceful game. But just maybe it would be the biggest haul of his life.

  Quark braced himself against the table and began to shuffle.

  CHAPTER 35

  DAX’S VOICE CRACKLED over the runabout speaker. “Their weapon systems are coming back on-line.”

  Sisko strapped himself in and quickly checked the new equipment. Then he did a double-check of the phasers. O’Brien had said everything was ready when he ducked out of the ship and headed to Ops to watch over the power core.

  The runabout had a dry, mechanical smell, probably caused by all the tools O’Brien had been running. He had managed to finish the task in thirty-one minutes. He must have been working at warp speed.

  Sisko moved the runabout off the landing bay and turned it toward the Cardassian warships. They were back in formation and looking more formidable from the small ship than they had on the Ops screens. He raised his shields just as a message came through from the station.

  “Prepare yourself, Benjamin,” Dax said. “They’re arming their photon torpedo bays.”

  “Thanks, old man,” Sisko said.

  He dropped the runabout into full impulse while manipulating the phase shifter that O’Brien had installed. Sisko’s fingers were moving rapidly and he was breathing hard. The adrenaline in his system seemed to make him move twice as fast as normal.

  The runabout headed right toward Gul Danar’s Galor-class warship.

  “They are starting firing sequence!” Dax shouted.

  Then an instant later she shouted, “They fired!” just as he saw a flash as a photon torpedo released from the flagship’s bay.

  He hit the sequence to shift.

  Everything went black.

  The controls froze. Sisko pounded on them. Nothing.

  Emergency lights snapped on. Impulse was down for a moment, then it came back up without warning. Rippling, multicolored light filled the runabout, dancing across his skin like lights in a Risan dance hall.

  He squinted. Space itself looked flat—two dimensional. A white wormlike husk floated to starboard, and off his port bow was the Ganges. It too looked like a child’s drawing done without the shadow that would give the piece perspective.

  He couldn’t imagine regularly traveling through this space. It closed in on him, as if he were stuck in a small, tight room with no air.

  Kira’s runabout looked as listless as the Cardassian ships had after she left normal space. Had she gotten hurt as the ship went out of phase?

  He opened communications. “Runabout Rio Grande to the Ganges. It’s Sisko, Kira, are you all right?”

  Her image flashed on his screen. Her face was streaked with sweat and a smudge of dirt ran across her forehead. She had taken off her overcoat, and her T-shirt was also dirt covered and soaked. It looked as if half the controls had been taken apart. She held a laser driver in her left hand. “I’m fine, sir,” she said. “But the Ganges isn’t.”

  “What happened?” Any number of possible answers drifted through his head: the Ghost Riders attacked her, the runabout was nearly destroyed going in and out of phase; O’Brien’s jury-rigging had overloaded a system and knocked the controls off-line.

  Kira half laughed. The sound was not a pleasant one. In fact, her entire demeanor was too low-key for Kira. “I had an accident with the Espiritu,” she said. “I guess I made out better than it did. All that’s left of it is on your starboard bow.”

  Sisko nodded, just once. He understood now why she was so subdued. She had been angry at the Ghost Riders for killing the energy creatures. Then, when she arrived, she had done the same thing.

  “Most of my systems are off-line, sir. Including the control that will get me back.”

  Another message overrode Kira’s and a man’s face suddenly shared the screen beside Kira. He had a scar along one cheek and his hair was going gray. Human. “Well, well, well. How sweet. A Starfleet officer coming all this way to save a Bajoran.”

  Sisko glanced at the sensors showing that five small ships had lined up in a wedge formation behind the runabout.

  “She’s my first officer,” Sisko said as he eased the runabout toward Kira’s. “Let us be and we will return to our own space.”

  “After, of course, you’ve dealt with us.”

  The man seemed too relaxed. Sisko didn’t like it.

  He pulled to the port side of Kira’s runabout and turned so that he faced the Ghost Rider’s ships.

  They didn’t look powerful. They looked as if they had been cobbled together from Klingon, Romulan, and Federation parts.

  “The major asked you to leave this area,” Sisko said. He figured he could bluff them for a moment to buy a little time. “Why haven’t you?”

  The man laughed. “Really, you Federation warriors are too much. No one has ever been able to catch us. You know nothing about this type of space, Commander. Even if you did, your ship is not equipped to withstand long distances.”

  The ships hadn’t moved from their positions. Sisko could get no readings about their weaponry. In fact, he could get no readings about the sh
ips at all.

  “You’re destroying a Federation space station,” he said, “causing havoc on the planet Bajor and damaging Cardassian warships. Your aggression may lead to war. On behalf of the Federation, the Bajorans, and the Cardassians, I am asking you to leave.”

  “Commander,” Kira said, “we’ve been through this.”

  “That we have, little lady,” said the Ghost Rider. He was grinning. “And I’ll tell your boss what I told you. We can’t leave. We haven’t bagged our limit yet.”

  Faint laughter rose behind him, even though Sisko could see no other people. All five ships must have been hooked into the same link.

  “Neither have I,” Sisko said.

  Without waiting for a response, he fired the rigged phaser, hitting the lead ship. Anionic waves surrounded it, making it as white as the dead energy creature.

  For a heartbeat nothing happened, then it vanished.

  Without missing Sisko fired on the second and third ships before any of them had time to react. They turned white, just as the first ship, and vanished.

  The two-dimensional space rippled, like a heat wave Sisko had seen in the Howen desert, and then returned to normal.

  The fourth ship turned and began to accelerate. Sisko fired on it. The anionic wave froze it in place, and then it disappeared.

  The fifth ship tried to hail him. He ignored the communication and fired. The white light around the ship was nearly blinding. Sisko closed his eyes. When he opened them, that ship too was gone.

  The rippling light he had seen when he first arrived reappeared. Shifting from blue to red along the spectrum, then red to blue, wormlike creatures gathered in the empty area where the ships had been.

  “Espiritu”, Kira said.

  “They’re beautiful.” The lights popped against his eyes. His entire ship shifted colors along with the creatures. He forced himself to look away. “We can’t get too close, Kira. We have to go back too.”

  “I sure wish we could do something for them, sir.”

  “I think we just did, Kira.” Sisko turned his runabout toward hers. “Get ready. You’re next. And I warn you: those Riders went back into our space. And the Cardassian fleet was just gearing up when I left. Who knows what we’ll find when we return.” He didn’t mention to her the chance there would be nothing left when they got back.