"STOP THE LIFT."
Sisko waited until Dax grasped the controls and caused the turbolift cab to stop between decks. They'd gotten off the bridge only minutes after Kirk himself, Spock, and McCoy had also left. Staying on the bridge was too touchy.
He pulled out his communicator, which luckily was rigged with twenty-fourth-century scramblers and directionals. "Sisko to Odo."
"Odo here."
"Are you on the station?"
"Yes … unfortunately."
"Explain that."
"Sir, there is barely any visible floor left. The tribbles are covering everything. Including the bartender. Is Captain Kirk all right so far, sir?"
"He was a few minutes ago, but of course that doesn't mean anything. He might have headed over to the station. If you see him there, contact me. The bomb's not on board the Enterprise, so it must be over there."
"We've only been able to get through two decks. We're running out of time."
Hearing the frustration and hopelessness in Odo's voice, Sisko glanced at Dax. "I can send more teams from the Defiant."
"It's not a question of manpower, Captain," Odo told him. "It's a question of multiplication. The tribbles are breeding so quickly, we can't keep up with them."
"Benjamin," Dax interrupted, "maybe we can narrow things down a little. Presumably, Darvin put the bomb somewhere he knows Kirk is going to be in the next half hour. If we stick close to Kirk—"
"He might lead us right to it."
"It's worth a try," Odo agreed, "but there's no reason for us to stop searching over here."
"Keep at it for now, Constable." Sisko closed the communicator and clasped the lift control. "Deck Five."
"It should be easy," Dax said. "All we have to do is follow Kirk and try to anticipate a little."
"Easy," Sisko said, "except that we don't know exactly where he is right now."
"He went to Mr. Lurry's office, didn't he?"
"That's what he said, but by the time we have Kira beam us over there, he could be back here."
"Or he could be right next to the bomb right now, and if we beam over, we could be killed, too."
"Old man," Sisko said, sighing roughly, "have I ever told you that your logic is a pain in the backside?"
"Daily, in one way or another."
"Yes, well … I'll contact Odo and have them check Lurry's office. If the captain's still there, they can track him. You and I will stay here in case he comes back."
He snapped his communicator open again, and realized that his hand was shaking.
"Captain Kirk, I'm mystified at your tone of voice! I've done nothing to warrant such severe treatment!"
"Oh, really?"
Jim Kirk wheeled around, noting a ring of desperation and a crack of fear in the voice of merchant Cyrano Jones.
Jones was a charming con man, an everybody's uncle, a licensed prospector, and a general haberdasher, and Kirk had an easy time rattling him by merely pacing in front of him.
In contrast to Kirk's tense pacing, Spock stood apocalyptically still with his hands behind his back. "Surely you must've realized what would've happened if you removed the tribbles from their predator-filled environment to an environment where their natural multiplicative proclivities would have no restraining factors."
Frantic, Jones gave Spock a pathetic, whole-body chuckle. "Well, of cour—what did you say?"
Spock blinked, glanced at Kirk, and tried again. "By removing the tribbles from their natural habitat, you have, so to speak, removed the cork from the bottle and allowed the genie to escape."
"If by that you mean do they breed quickly, well, of course, that's how I maintain my stock. But breeding animals isn't against regulations—only breeding dangerous ones. And tribbles aren't dangerous …" The big gentle man held up a tribble and cooed like a carnival caller appealing to children, desperate to make himself innocent in what had developed into a colossal pain in the neck.
"Just incredibly prolific," Kirk complained, having to grudgingly accept that there was some sense in what Jones said. He hadn't broken any regulations.
"Precisely!" Jones chimed. "And at six credits a head—that is, a body—it mounts up. Now, if you'll excuse me …" He got up and rounded for the door. "You should sell an instruction and maintenance manual with this thing," Kirk muttered, as Jones handed him the tribble.
Realizing he was off the hook, Cyrano Jones's voice changed tenor. "If I did, what would happen to man's search for knowledge?" He punctuated the moment with a clap against one of his pockets, and said, "Well, I must be tending my ship. Au revoir."
He swashed out of the room, crossing paths at the door with Nils Barris and Arne Darvin, who cast the prospector a cutting glare, then hurried into the room. Darvin gave Barris an encouraging shove. "Go ahead, sir, tell him!"
"Captain Kirk," Barris began, shored up, "I consider your security measures a disgrace. In my opinion, you have taken this entire very important project far too lightly!"
Kirk bobbed his eyebrows and actually started to enjoy himself. "On the contrary, sir, I … I think of this project as very important. It is you I take lightly." Fuming now, Barris leveled a finger at him. "I am going to report fully to the proper authorities that you have given free access to this station to a man who is quite probably a Klingon spy!"
His attitude shifted as Kirk said, "Now, that's a very serious charge. To whom are you referring?"
"To that man who just walked out of here."
"Cyrano Jones? A Klingon agent?"
"Did you hear me?"
"I heard you."
In the spirit of the moment, Spock supplied, "He simply could not believe his ears."
Kirk looked at him quizzically, and they exchanged a moment of mutual entertainment before he turned back to Barris. "What evidence do you have against Mr. Jones?"
Barris motioned toward Darvin. "My assistant here has kept Mr. Jones under close surveillance for quite some time and his actions have been most suspicious. I believe he was involved in that little altercation between your men and the—"
"Yes, yes, go on. What else do you have?"
"Well, Captain," Darvin began, "I checked his ship's log and it seems he was in the Klingon sphere of influence less than four months ago."
"The man is an independent scout, Captain," Barris persisted. "It's quite possible that he is also a Klingon spy."
Kirk handed the subject to Spock with a glance, and the first officer took over.
"We have already checked on the background of Mr. Cyrano Jones," Spock said with studious efficiency. "He is a licensed asteroid locator and prospector. He's never broken the law, at least not severely, and for the past seven years with his one-man spaceship he has obtained a marginal living by engaging in the buying and selling of rare merchandise, including, unfortunately, tribbles."
Barris would've pounded a table if he'd been standing near one. "But he is after my grain!"
"Do you have any proof of that?" Kirk shot back.
Darvin insisted, "You can't deny he's disrupted this station!"
"People have disrupted stations before without being Klingon agents. Sometimes all they need is a title, Mr. Barris. Unfortunately, disrupting a station is not an offense. Now if you'll excuse me …" Kirk handed the tribble to Spock, and gave a clap on an imaginary waistcoat. "I have a ship to tend to. Au revoir."
"Are you sure he was headed in this direction?"
Sisko sat nervously at the rec room table and looked around at the other Enterprise crew enjoying their off-watch hours by plucking, stroking, and cuddling tribbles.
Tribbles, tribbles, everywhere … on the deck, on the tables, on the processors, and even dotting the walls. He had no idea how they were crawling up the walls. He hadn't yet been able to find anything resembling a foot or tentacle or suction cup.
Dax sat across from him, tensely watching the door. "Odo tracked them to the station's transporter room. I tracked them out of the ship's. They came out of the transporter room and came down this corridor. I deduced they were coming right here. They could've stopped off at the sickbay, I suppose …"
"The man's life is in our hands," Sisko said, worried. "The life of one of the most famous men in Starfleet history. He has things yet to do that had better get done, or our universe is going to turn upside down the hard way. We've got to do better than this. If Darvin's estimation of an hour was right, we have less than ten minutes. And we can't even scan any of these tribbles without giving ourselves away."
"What do you intend to do, then? If we find Captain Kirk, and trail him to the tribble with the bomb, what can we do without attracting attention?"
"I'll attract it if I have to," Sisko told her, "to save his life."
She narrowed her eyes. "How are you going to explain that?"
Miserably, he sighed. "Feign insanity, I suppose."
What feign? Here they were, one hundred years in the past, trying to find an adorable fuzzy bomb before it killed one of the greatest adventurers in history and put an end to the universe as they knew it. Reality couldn't be this weird. Obviously, Sisko was strapped to a bed in some asylum, having paranoid delusions.
Feeling each second tick by a pulse at a time, his whole body tightened as the door panel opened and Kirk and Spock strode in together.
Suddenly lightheaded with relief, Sisko glanced at Dax, then watched the captain go to the wall replicators. "I'm so glad to see him," he murmured. "He's all right, so far."
"And Darvin's on the station, the young Darvin I mean, so how would he have known where the captain would be at this moment?" Dax murmured back. "It's got to be somewhere else."
"Shh …"
"My chicken sandwich and coffee …"
Kirk was holding a food plate loaded not with food, but with tribbles. He raised his coffee cup, with a little brown tribble stuffed into it.
He swung around to Spock. "This is my chicken sandwich and coffee!"
The Vulcan gazed down at his own plateful of tribbles. "Fascinating …"
"I want these things off the ship—I don't care if it takes every man we've got, I want them off the ship!"
Before Spock could respond, the door opened again and Engineer Scott shuffled in, with an armload of tribbles from his hips to his neck. "Aye, they're into the machinery, all right," he said. "And they're probably in all the other food processors, too."
"How?" Kirk asked.
"Probably through one of the air vents."
"Captain," Spock said urgently, "there are vents of that type on the space station."
A light came on in Kirk's face. "And in the storage compartments!"
At the table, Sisko hissed, "Storage compartments!"
He pushed to his feet, skirting the wall and leading Dax to the door as Captain Kirk ditched his tribbles and went immediately to a comm unit on a table.
As Sisko hurried out, he heard the captain's urgent orders filter away behind him.
"This is Kirk. Contact Manager Lurry and Nils Barris. Have them meet us near the storage compartments. We're beaming down. Come on, Spock!"