THE BIG GAME

by Sandy Schofield

  Quark dealt the last card. Queen of spades.

  A straight flush. An honest straight flush. Odo had actually drawn into a straight flush, queen high. The odds were so high against getting a hand of that caliber that he nearly choked.

  Then he realized that it had to happen. Enough hands had been played since the tournament started that the odds—farfetched as they were—had been achieved. It was a matter of simple logic.

  He studied his chips until he could control the gleam that he knew was in his eyes. He was going to beat the Ferengi at their own simple-minded game.

  Then he opened the betting with five hundred. If the Nagus had nothing, that sum would buy Odo the pot. But if the Nagus was holding some decent cards, the money would only excite him and get him to bet more.

  Provided that the Nagus didn’t understand Odo’s betting strategy. The Nagus probably knew that Odo had something. But he had no way of knowing how good that something was.

  The Nagus called the five hundred and bumped the pot another five hundred. He was holding.

  Odo nodded and then just for show glanced at his cards a final time. He pretended to think for the moment, even though he knew exactly what he was going to do.

  He pushed the extra five hundred forward. He paused, as if he were considering, and finally, reluctantly, added another thousand.

  The Nagus looked up at him and grinned. “This may be,” the Nagus said, “the end to a fine game.”

  He put his tiny hands around his entire stack of remaining chips and pushed them forward.

  Quark choked.

  The sound pleased Odo. Reactions like that were all that interested him now.

  The Nagus couldn’t have anything that would beat a straight flush, queen high. Could he?

  No, he couldn’t.

  The odds didn’t favor that in any reality and nothing in the last few hours had even implied that the Nagus was cheating.

  Odo pushed all his remaining chips forward, even though his stack was higher than the Nagus’s. “I call your bet.”

  Every chip from every player in the tournament now rested between them.

  Slowly the Nagus laid down his two hole cards faceup on the table. Full house. Three nines, two queens. A great hand.

  But not good enough.

  Quark chuckled.

  Odo couldn’t wait to wipe the smile off Quark’s face.

  Odo laid his cards faceup on the table. “Straight flush. Queen high.”

  Quark let out a small hiss of air. Odo watched him out of the corner of his eye. Quark was struggling for control. He doesn’t want to lose his temper in front of the Nagus, Odo thought.

  Odo felt a small tingle of pleasure. All the hours of boredom had been worth it for the look of horror on Quark’s face.

  The Nagus stared at the cards for a moment, then nodded and smiled. He pointed at Quark. “You need to hire this man,” the Nagus said. “He’s the best gambler in the place. And he’s local. Think of all the money he could earn for you.”

  Over the Nagus’s head, Quark rolled his eyes at Odo.

  The Nagus leaned forward and extended his hand.

  Odo took it. The Nagus’s hand was warm and moist. “Nicely done,” the Nagus said. “Well played. If I’m ever in this area again, I’ll make sure I set you up for a rematch—with someone else.”

  He cackled and stood, grabbed his staff, and moved slowly to the door.

  Quark was ecstatic. Things had worked out far better than he could have dreamed. Every last bar of latinum in the tournament now belonged to him.

  “It seems you owe me some money,” Odo said.

  Quark smiled a wide and toothsome grin. Odo didn’t understand, and Quark was going to love to explain it to him. “Actually,” he said, every word dripping with triumph, “you were playing for me. The money is mine.”

  “No, Quark,” Odo said. “We never agreed that I would give you the money if I won.”

  Quark’s heart skipped a beat, then another. “But—but—but—that’s what a ringer does!” Quark said desperately.

  Odo shrugged. “Funny,” he said, “how important the things you leave out of an explanation can sometimes be. We have no agreement. The money is mine.”

  “You—you cheating, shape-shifting con artist!” Quark said. “I’ll—I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Odo asked. “Report me to security?”

  Quark put his head in his hands. He was jinxed. He was under a curse. A curse in the form of a shapeshifting do-gooder. “Why me?” he whispered to the Ferengi gods. “Why me?”

  CHAPTER 39

  THE DOOR to the back room was locked. Not even Rom could get in. Quark pushed the last bars of goldpressed latinum forward. Odo counted them and packed them into the last of the white containers he had brought from his office. Then he stacked the container on the cart.

  Quark paced the room trying to figure out a way to keep the money. Odo was right. Quark had no recourse. He couldn’t even tell Commander Sisko because Sisko knew of the cheating systems.

  Odo stood. “We’ll need to unlock the door. Ensign Johnson will be here any moment to help me store these in a safe place.”

  Idiot constable thought of everything. Quark made himself smile as he unlocked the door. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

  Ten cases stacked five high. What would a man like Odo do with that kind of money? Perhaps he hadn’t thought it through yet.

  “As the Nagus said,” Quark began, “it is fortunate someone local won the pot. We need investment in the station itself. Why, just this morning I was talking with—”

  “Really, Quark,” Odo said. “You know me better than to involve me in your schemes.”

  “Well, you seemed to enjoy gambling.”

  Odo shook his head. “The only thing I enjoy is tormenting you.” His unfinished face almost eased into a smile. “I think I succeeded this time.”

  “No,” Quark said. “I mean, I’m happy you won. I just wish you would act like a proper ringer and give your earnings to me.”

  “I never was a proper ringer,” Odo said. “Besides, I have other plans for all this.”

  “You do?” Quark asked.

  Odo nodded. A strange expression was pasted on his face. It was almost as if his muscles were struggling for control. “You see, I have no use for money. So I’m going to give it to”—Odo leaned over until his partially completed nose almost rubbed against Quark’s—“give it to the Bajoran Children’s Fund.”

  “To charity! No!” Quark screamed. It was the last straw. The very last straw.

  Finally the expression on Odo’s face resolved itself.

  Into a smile.

  Quark had never seen anything so hideous in his life.

  Charity? Charity?

  He had been wrong all along. Odo did not understand poker. And never would. A true poker player would never give his winnings to charity.

  Odo opened the door and pushed the cart through it. He stopped and peered back in. “Cheer up, Quark,” he said. “It’s only a game.”

  Quark looked up and watched Odo wheel the gold-pressed latinum through the bar. “Constable,” he said, when he knew Odo could no longer hear him. “Money is never a game.”

  CHAPTER 40

  SISKO RUBBED his stubble beard. It itched. He couldn’t wait to shave it off.

  He and Kira looked like refugees from the Zileanian wars. They got on the turbolift together, dirty, tired, and high-spirited, even though they had just left the brig. L’sthwan had threatened to kill Sisko for cheating him, and the Ghost Riders—all five of them—were denouncing him and Kira.

  “Well,” Sisko said, “L’sthwan said he wanted to join the Ghost Riders someday. But I doubt this was how he planned to do it.”

  Kira laughed. “I hope they’ll all be very happy together.”

  The lift stopped at Ops. Sisko stepped forward, Kira at his side. It felt good to walk through here, without worrying about breakdowns. After he checked all the systems
and talked to the Starfleet captain, he would return to his quarters.

  Seems he and Jake needed a little time to work out a few things—and to have that lunch they had missed. But that could wait until after a long, long sleep.

  “The Cardassians are limping for home,” O’Brien said. “The Bajorans as well.”

  “That seems to please you, Chief,” Sisko said.

  “Well, it certainly pleases me!” Kira said before she saw the grin on Sisko’s face.

  Dax turned from her board. “Captain Higginbotham of the Federation starship Madison and Captain Kiser of the starship Idaho would like the pleasure of your company for dinner. They said they want to know how you did what you did to the Cardassians.”

  “Tell them I accept, but only if my Ops crew is invited. You all look like you could use a good meal.”

  “That we could,” O’Brien said.

  “Will we have time for a bit of rest first?” Dax asked.

  “Rest?” Sisko asked. “Rest? I thought Trills never rested, Dax.”

  Dax grinned. “Then we constantly surprise you, Benjamin. This Trill needs a nap.”

  “When you contact the captains about dinner, make certain that it will be at least eight hours from now.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Dax said.

  “Yes.” Kira wiped a hand over her face. She only succeeded in smearing the dirt. Her energy levels were still down and Sisko doubted it was from exhaustion.

  “Come into my office for a moment, Major,” Sisko said. He led the way up the stairs. The diamond-shaped doors to his office slid back. The room was a mess. He hadn’t been in here since the troubles began. Shelves everywhere, papers littering the floor. He hadn’t realized he kept so many papers.

  He shoved debris off his chair and sat. Kira did the same on the chair on the other side of Sisko’s desk.

  “Killing the energy creature bothers you,” he said, not asking a question.

  She looked down at her hands. “All my life I’ve wanted to see one. So I do and I killed it.”

  “I suspect the death was accidental. Could you have stopped yourself, Major?”

  Kira shook her head. “I play it over and over in my mind. I couldn’t have changed anything. The creature moved in front of me.”

  “Well,” Sisko said. “Let me tell you something you did change. Before I took the Rio Grande to find you, I did some more research on our friends in the brig. It seems that they tried to capture energy creatures alive, but for each creature captured about five died. You were right, Major. Much of the problem we had in the station was not caused by Riders going in and out of phase, but by dead space creatures floating into our space. We had no choice. We had to stop those Riders.”

  “But you were going to let them go!” Kira said, some of her old fire returning.

  Sisko shook his head. “Seems I’ve been playing poker for the last few days too. No. I wasn’t going to let them go. Once the crisis was past, I would have sent you out to hunt them down.”

  “No offense, Commander, but your bluff didn’t work.”

  “That’s the risk in bluffing,” Sisko said. “Sometimes you have to show your cards. Sometimes you lose.”

  Kira smiled. “This time we won.”

  Sisko nodded. “This time.”

  EPILOGUE

  OUT IN A now-quiet area of space, an out-of-phase world that the human eye cannot see, a white wormlike creature drifts silently. It twists round and round as if responding to an unseen force, but its body is limp, without signs of life.

  The Ghost Riders disappeared and the runabouts vanished, the Espiritu float toward their dead companion. They surround it, their iridescent skins brilliant against its whiteness. They nudge it, like children trying to awaken a sleeping companion. When it does not move, they drift into a circle around it and wait. Slowly a hard white shell forms around their now motionless companion.

  Hours, maybe days later (the Espiritu do not think in units of time), the white creature’s shell falls away, revealing a thousand small nodes of brilliant color—sparkling red next to deep blue, pale pink against sea-foam turquoise. The nodes pulsate and grow until they cover the dead creature’s body.

  Two Espiritu from opposite sides of the circle swim toward the middle. They nudge the nodes loose, pushing them like tiny floating balls in a deep, calm ocean. Each Espiritu touches a hundred, two hundred, of the brightly shining spheres, then floats away—each in its own direction, trailing the sparkling multicolored lights behind them.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SANDY SCHOFIELD is the pen name for husband and wife writing team Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. They chose the pseudonym when they realized that their six names would not fit on a book cover. The Big Game is their first joint novel, but certainly not their first publishing credential.

  Dean has sold over fifty short stories and a novel, Laying the Music to Rest, a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel of the Year (the only SF novel to achieve that distinction). Kristine has also sold a number of short stories and eight novels. Four have seen print so far: The White Mists of Power, Afterimage (written with Kevin J. Anderson), Facade, and Heart Readers.

  Dean and Kristine collaborated on a publishing company, Pulphouse Publishing, Inc. That joint venture has brought them one World Fantasy award, another nomination, a Hugo nomination, and a house full of books (including numerous copies of The Best of Pulphouse from St. Martin’s Press). Kristine has stopped editing for Pulphouse and now edits The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work there has thrice nominated her for science fiction’s prestigious Hugo award for Best Professional Editor. Dean edits most Pulphouse projects. His editing skills have placed Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine on the Hugo ballot three times.

  In 1991 they started to collaborate on fiction. In addition to The Big Game, they have sold short stories to Ghosttide and Journeys to the Twilight Zone. Another Sandy Schofield novel will appear in the Aliens series in 1994.

  Look for STAR TREK fiction from Pocket Books

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  Enterprise: The First Adventure · Vonda N. McIntyre

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