THE BIG GAME

by Sandy Schofield

  Kira grabbed her laser driver and shook it at him. “Pretty as the Espiritu are, I don’t want to stay with them forever. I’m ready when you are.”

  Sisko fired on the Ganges. The little runabout shuddered. The multicolored lights from the energy creatures bounced off the anionic waves, creating a hundred rainbows.

  The sight was so stunning that Sisko paused for a moment before recalibrating his own equipment.

  Then with a slight wave at the Espiritu, he pushed the phase driver and put his runabout back into real space.

  CHAPTER 36

  ODO STARED at the cards on the table. He had known it would come to this. Garak had lost this hand—and with it, all his chips. That left Odo alone with two Ferengi: the Nagus, who was playing, and Quark, who was the dealer.

  Odo would always be plagued by Ferengi. He had decided, sometime in the last five minutes, that it was his lot in life.

  He had better make the most of it.

  Garak tossed his cards on the table. Odo waited to pull in the chips. It had seemed obvious to him that he had the best hand in that last round. But Garak hadn’t thought so, or perhaps he had been bluffing. Someday, Odo would understand the concept of the bluff.

  But obviously it wouldn’t be this time.

  Garak pushed his chair away from the table and stood. He bowed to both the Nagus and to Odo. “It has been a pleasure,” Garak said, “and an honor to play with you both. You are both fine poker players.”

  Odo never trusted a polite Cardassian. He also never argued with one.

  “You are a gambler of the first degree,” the Nagus said.

  “It has been interesting,” Odo said “In a tedious sort of way.” He stared at the Nagus. Nothing would show up the Ferengi more than to have Odo beat the Nagus. And Odo could do exactly that if he put his mind to it.

  For the second time that day, he felt a small spark of interest in the game.

  Garak smiled at him. “Perhaps we can have a rematch someday.”

  “Oh, I doubt it,” the Nagus replied as if the comment had been directed at him. “I don’t come here as often as I should.”

  Odo shook his head. “Sorry. I doubt I’ll play after today.”

  “Yes.” Garak’s smile grew wider. “If you win today, why would you ever need to play again?”

  Under his breath, the Nagus said, “He won’t win.”

  Garak didn’t notice. He tipped an imaginary hat to Quark. “A fine and interesting game, sir.”

  Quark’s mouth opened, as if shocked that a loser would compliment him. Before he could answer, Garak turned. The door hissed open and Garak disappeared into Quark’s.

  When the door closed, Quark said, “Would you two like a break? I can get Rom to prepare more food.”

  Odo shot a glance at the ruined buffet table. Rom had partially cleaned up the food, but enough of it remained to add a perfume to the room. He wasn’t sure he could ever look at a roast beef sandwich in the same way again.

  The Nagus was evaluating the chips. Odo had maybe only a handful more. Each of them had to spread out their chips to nearby chairs because if they stacked their chips in the normal manner, they wouldn’t be able to see each other’s faces. Odo refused to think about how much money was before them. He had never really realized how much wealth gamers wasted on these get-rich-quick fantasies.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “If he stays, I stay,” said the Nagus, and cackled.

  Quark brought out a new deck. “Let the game begin,” he said.

  The Nagus toasted Odo with a glass filled with a greenish liquid. Odo had smelled it and didn’t want to taste it. “Now,” the Nagus said, “the real fun begins.”

  Quark sighed, and shuffled.

  CHAPTER 37

  O’BRIEN HAD BARELY made it back to Ops when Sisko’s ship went out of phase.

  The wave hit so hard that the station rattled as it shook. Consoles disconnected from the walls and for a moment O’Brien thought the entire station would rock apart. He clung to his panel, never taking his attention from the power core containment. Somehow, some way, it held. He made a few quick adjustments on the dimly lit board. The containment was in place. He really had no idea how, but they were still alive and for the moment that was all that mattered.

  The lights, life support, and environmental controls were down. “Dax!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”

  She didn’t respond. For a moment, he thought of crawling in the dark to where she had been.

  Then finally she answered. “I’m not sure, Chief. I think so. Just give me a minute.”

  The rocking stopped. O’Brien let go of his console and did another, more thorough check of the power core containment. It was going to need a lot of work, but power levels were holding at 17 percent.

  How many more jolts like that one it would hold through was anyone’s guess. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out. But if Sisko was successful at bringing back not only the Ghost Riders, but Kira and himself, the station might be rocked to pieces.

  In a few moments, the lights came back up and he quickly brought life support and the environmental controls back on-line. A thin haze of smoke filled Ops and the wires that had been down before and repaired were down again. Their hissing, exploding sparks made him uneasy.

  “Ensign,” he snapped at Ensign Howe who was pulling himself off the floor. “Take care of that mess.”

  “Yes, sir,” Howe said.

  Someone got the main viewscreen back on. O’Brien smiled at Dax. She smiled back. She seemed to be okay, considering everything.

  “Well,” O’Brien said, “I hope someone’s negotiating skills are primed and ready.”

  O’Brien pointed and Dax glanced at the screen. The Cardassian fleet had been blown out of line again. All of the ships were tumbling slowly through space, unable to stop themselves from rolling over and over like so much debris. One ship had broken apart. A large piece of hull glanced off one of the other ships.

  “Anyone survive that, Dax?”

  “Looks like almost everyone was beamed out of the destroyed ship at the last minute. Gul Danar’s ship still has some power and about twice the crew it should have.”

  “Good,” O’Brien said. “The last thing we need now would be a lot of dead Cardassians. It’s going to be tough enough to talk our way out of this.”

  “They haven’t hailed us yet,” Dax said.

  “If they do you get to do the talking,” O’Brien said.

  “I might slip and tell them that they deserved everything they got.”

  “Not exactly the best conciliatory tactic.”

  “That’s why I want you to do it.” O’Brien returned his attention to the engineering console. Behind him the wires had stopped spitting. All that remained of the smoke was an acrid electric tang. “Life support, environmental controls, sensors, and communications on-line.” He glanced around. “We’re getting good at this.”

  “That we are,” Dax said. “Now, Chief, we need our shields and weaponry back. If Benjamin’s plan works, we’ll be hit with a second wave at any moment. If it doesn’t, those Cardassians will come back fighting before there is any talking.”

  “I’m working on it, Lieutenant.” O’Brien’s hands flew across the console. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck without weapons or shields facing an angry Cardassian fleet. Of course, even with everything working the station wasn’t equipped for that kind of warfare.

  He glanced up at the screen. When they got hit again, the entire station’s systems would probably go down. He wished he had time to cross his fingers. It would sure help if Sisko reappeared smack in the middle of that Cardassian fleet.

  The idea that had been crawling at the back of his brain exploded. “Of course!” he shouted.

  “You all right?” Dax asked.

  O’Brien’s fingers flew over the board. “We’ll need some sort of protection when Kira and Sisko come back.”

  “I will agree to that,” Dax said. “But h
ow?”

  “I’m bleeding anionic energy into the deflector screens,” O’Brien said. “That should shield us from the solitrium waves.”

  “Shields working,” Carter said. “Feeding anionic energy. Now.”

  On the viewscreen a thin haze surrounded the station. O’Brien nodded and strengthened the flow. This wouldn’t stop the destruction, but it would certainly slow it down.

  “What’s that?” Ensign Carter asked.

  O’Brien looked up. A ghostly white ship appeared in the middle of the Cardassian debris. The white faded, leaving a gray hulk. Two other white ships appeared immediately after it, near the same spot.

  “Hold on!” Dax said.

  “Those are our friends, the Ghost Riders,” O’Brien said.

  The lights went dark and the station rocked violently as the waves from the ghost ships struck. Then the lights flickered on again with encouraging speed.

  “It’s working!” O’Brien shouted. “The anionic field is blocking the worst of it. Hang on! I’m diverting all power systems to the shields.”

  The lights dimmed as their energy flowed into the anionic field.

  “Power core containment maintaining,” O’Brien read out. “Power holding at 110 percent.”

  “Tractor beam still functioning,” Dax said. “I’ve locked onto them, pulling them in. They don’t seem to have enough power to fight it.”

  A fourth ship appeared, a bit too close to the station for comfort. O’Brien waited until the white glow faded from the ship, and the rocking stopped. He did a quick check of the power core to make sure it was stable and then locked a tractor beam on the ship. A fifth ship appeared to the starboard side of the Galor-class warship, sending it tumbling through space.

  The anionic energy screen seemed to be holding, keeping the destruction down for the moment.

  “How many of those things are there?” O’Brien asked, as he locked on another tractor beam.

  A sixth ship appeared at the edge of the Cardassian fleet. The ship glowed so white that it was almost blinding. As the white faded, O’Brien manipulated a tractor beam so that he would capture the sixth ship too.

  “Wait!” Odo said. “Isn’t that Kira’s?”

  “Yes. It’s the Ganges!” Dax said.

  O’Brien sighed with relief. He didn’t think he could stretch the tractor beams that far. He would have had to release one ship briefly before locking onto the new one.

  “The major is aboard,” Carter said.

  “Where’s the commander?” Dax asked.

  An alarm sounded. “Screens failing,” O’Brien said. “That last hit knocked them hard.”

  His fingers again flew over the board, but without luck. He couldn’t hold the screens or the anionic energy flow.

  Kira was hailing the station. O’Brien put her on screen. “You need to pull me in,” she said. “I have lost impulse.”

  O’Brien’s gaze met Dax’s over the consoles. No Sisko yet. If he lost power in his drives, he wouldn’t make it back.

  “We have you, Major,” O’Brien said. “Did you clean up those Riders?”

  “The commander did a brilliant job,” Kira said.

  “Where is he?” Dax asked.

  “I don’t know.” Kira frowned. “He said he would be right behind me.”

  There was enough of a pause to cause a frown to form on Dax’s normally calm face, then the second runabout appeared next to Gul Danar’s warship.

  The impact from Sisko’s appearance blew the Cardassian flagship end-over-end and scattered what was left of the remaining fleet even more.

  “Brace yourselves,” Dax said. “We’re not protected for this one.”

  O’Brien held the controls. This time, he would see if he could keep the lights on. The solitrium wave hit the station and made it vibrate. The lights flickered. Life support went out for a moment, and the environmental controls went off-line.

  “Power core containment holding.”

  O’Brien let out a deep sigh of relief.

  Kira cursed and disappeared from the screen.

  “Weapons off-line,” said Carter.

  The vibrating stopped. O’Brien brought life support back up, and environmental controls came back on. “What’s going on with the major?”

  Dax bent over her controls. “Nothing serious. Looks like she got shaken up a bit.”

  “Did we lose the tractor beams?” Howe asked. He sounded a bit rattled.

  “No,” O’Brien said. “This one wasn’t as bad as some of the others.”

  “I’m getting something odd on the sensors,” Dax said.

  “The commander is hailing us,” said Carter.

  “Open a channel.” O’Brien looked up at the screen. Sisko’s stubble-covered face filled the eye-shaped portal.

  “Quite a mess here,” he said.

  “You can take most of the credit for that, sir,” said O’Brien.

  Sisko grinned. “I think you can as well. Seems as if you rode it out just fine. And you have our Rider friends well in tow. You know we’ll need to bring in Kira.”

  “Yes, sir, as soon as we can.”

  “Give me a full damage report on the station.”

  “No casualties,” Dax said. “Thanks to O’Brien. He rigged up an anionic energy screen that saved us a lot of pounding. Main systems are all on-line. Power core holding. We’re doing fine, Benjamin. It’s the Cardassians who suffered this time.”

  “And the Bajorans,” O’Brien said. “I just got word from Litna. Her ships were banged around, but no loss of life.”

  Sisko nodded. “When the Cardassians get their systems back up, they’ll be ready to fight. We’ll have to be prepared for them. Dax, keep trying to get a message to Starfleet. Tell them we need help at once. And tell Litna to go home and stay there.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Dax said. “Just a moment ago, I got a reading from the sensors. I followed up and discovered that—”

  “The cavalry!” O’Brien shouted and the others in Ops cheered. The two Galaxy-class starships showed on his sensors now too.

  “The Federation?” Sisko said. “When did we get a message through?”

  “I don’t know,” Dax said. “Maybe some of the messages Kira sent made it. The Federation just wasn’t able to confirm.”

  O’Brien grinned. He worked out the starships’ trajectories. “They’ll be here, sir, well before the Cardassians get on their feet.”

  “Good thing,” Sisko said. “These negotiations will be difficult, to say the least.”

  “Maybe we should let Major Kira talk with the Cardassians,” O’Brien said with a grin.

  Sisko shook his head. “I was thinking instead that she could interrogate the Ghost Riders. I think both sides need to blow off a little steam.”

  “I hear that,” O’Brien said, laughing. Then he noticed just how good laughing felt.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE SHOWDOWN and final hand came quicker than Odo would have expected. Hours earlier he had watched Lursa bet chips worth hundreds of bars of goldpressed latinum and wondered how anyone could do that.

  Now he knew.

  The chips had become a scorecard. The room had blurred into nothing. All that mattered were the cards and the Nagus’s time-worn face. The money meant nothing at all. Winning did.

  He had to beat the Nagus.

  He had to prove to those small-minded Ferengi that their little brains were no match for his.

  Even though the game had remained the same, the odds had changed dramatically in the last few hours. As each player left, the chances of getting good cards diminished. The Nagus had taken a few hands because Odo had not bluffed.

  Odo hated the fact that the Nagus had figured him out. Odo wondered if he should try bluffing. But that would have him no better than the other liars, and it just wasn’t his style.

  Quark’s communications with the Nagus were curt and almost rude. That relieved Odo. With all the cheating that had gone on in this room since t
he tournament began, he found himself hard-pressed to trust a Ferengi dealer and a Ferengi player. But he knew that they were no longer cheating. He could tell.

  He would show them that their scheming Ferengi minds were no match for his.

  Even if he did have to bluff.

  The Nagus cut the cards and Quark picked up the deck. He dealt quickly. Odo waited until both his cards hit the table before he picked them up. A jack and eight of spades. A possible straight. A possible flush. A possible straight flush. Definitely a bettable hand. Odo opened the bet with fifty bars of goldpressed latinum in chips.

  The Nagus didn’t even blink. His aged face was rigid. Odo doubted if it had changed expression in the last two days.

  Except to laugh that awful laugh.

  The Nagus called and tossed his chips into the pot. Quark dealt the Flop: nine of spades, nine of diamonds, and ten of spades.

  Odo glanced at his cards again. The longer he played and the more exhausted he got, the more cautious he became about checking his cards. In an earlier hand against the Nagus, Odo had forgotten what his hole cards were and had confused them with a set he had had earlier. He had picked up the hole cards just in time to save himself hundreds of bars.

  The jack and eight were still there. Combined with the nine and ten, he had a straight flush going. He bet a hundred, feeling odd. He had not been aggressive in betting before. The Nagus looked at him strangely.

  “I see you and raise a hundred,” said the Nagus. Those were the first words he had spoken in two hands.

  Odo didn’t reply. He called by throwing in the extra chips.

  Quark dealt a six of hearts.

  Odo glanced at his cards, not to check this time, but to think. With the cards showing, the possible combinations for the Nagus were a full house or a low straight. If he had anything lower, he would fold. He had done so before.

  Odo grabbed a hundred bars worth of chips, a bet the size of his original entry. The Nagus upped him by two hundred. In one quick movement, Odo called the bet. The pile of chips in the center of the table was huge.