THE TWO BOYS crouched low behind a barrier, back where the lights had been blown out by the bomb blast. Out on the main deck of the Promenade, security teams were herding the last lingering civilians away from the scene. The wounded had long since been taken to the infirmary, and the immediate area of Garak's shop was cordoned off.
"What a mess!" Jake Sisko whispered uneasily. Scenes like this always reminded him of that time on board the Saratoga, when it was hit by the Borg ship. When Mom died. His memories of the event weren't entirely clear, but certain sounds, certain smells always brought it back: women screaming, the acrid, choking scent of smoke.
Now that he was on DS-Nine, though, disaster was almost becoming an everyday affair. Assessing the current situation, he decided that he'd seen worse, though there was going to be one huge job cleaning all this up. "This station is always a wreck, anyway," he pronounced finally.
"You can say that again," Nog agreed. The Ferengi boy was much shorter than Jake, with the oversized, sensitive ears of his race. The primary thing the two of them had in common was their mutual wish to be anywhere else in the galaxy besides DS-Nine. And knowing that in both their cases there was nothing they could do about it. Jake's father was the station commander, Nog's uncle Quark owned a prospering casino on the Promenade.
Nog's avid little eyes kept flickering back and forth, from the smashed storefront to the figure of Constable Odo working with the security team to clear the area. "Why did he have to show up?" he muttered.
It was Odo's well-known belief that all the Ferengi were thieves or worse. He distrusted Quark most of all, but the feeling extended strongly to Quark's nephew Nog. And it was just as strongly reciprocated on Nog's part.
Jake wasn't quite sure why Nog was insisting on hanging around here, now that the excitement of the bombing was over. They were going to get in trouble, he knew it. Dad didn't like him spending too much time with Nog, anyway. But Dad wasn't around right now. Some kind of urgent message had called him back to his office, and it didn't seem likely that he'd be home again for a while, either.
But now Odo was talking with someone on his communicator. And now he was heading away toward the security office.
Nog inhaled with a sharp hiss of satisfaction. "All right! Let's go!"
"Go where?"
"I know a way we can get in from the back."
"But …" Jake stared in dismay at the security barriers set up in front of the store. "You can't do that!"
Nog sneered. "I told you, I can get in from the back. I know the way."
"No," Jake argued desperately. He knew that appeals to stupid human notions like right and wrong meant nothing to Nog. "I mean, well—what about Garak?"
"What about him? He's still in the infirmary."
"No, I mean—"
"If he's smart, he has inshoorance. Right? And if he's not—"
But just then, without warning, the lights overhead suddenly came on again, Jake yelped in startled surprise, and a voice yelled out, "You! Come out of there! This is a restricted area!"
While Jake hesitated in guilty indecision, Nog took the opportunity to bolt. The Ferengi boy was quick and experienced at the game of escape, but this time he wasn't lucky. A few minutes later, he was being dragged back by the constable, who had a painfully firm grip on an ear ridge. "You, too, Mr. Sisko," Odo ordered, and Jake slowly stood up from his hiding place, miserable and ashamed.
"We weren't doing anything! We just wanted to watch," he pleaded desperately.
"Empty your pockets," Odo ordered sternly, utterly without mercy or sympathy.
The prisoners complied, Nog sullenly and Jake in mounting dread that the constable would call his father, or take him to detention. He couldn't stand it if Dad had to come and bail him out of detention. If I get out of this, I'll never do anything again, I promise, please.
Odo inspected the contents of the pockets, making a more thorough search of Nog's, but apparently he found nothing he could classify as contraband or evidence of any crime. This seemed to disappoint him. "I'm going to let you go this time," he said finally, "but I don't want to find either of you around here again. This area is restricted until further notice. Unauthorized persons in a restricted area are subject to detention indefinitely during a state of emergency."
They were released and personally escorted by Odo from the Promenade.
"I knew we were going to get caught," Jake moaned.
"I could have gotten in, if you hadn't made so much noise," Nog snapped. "Next time, I go by myself!" The little Ferengi stomped away.
"All right, then! Go by yourself! Get thrown in the brig again!" Jake yelled back. "See if I care!" Nog was nothing but trouble, he seethed. Maybe Dad was right about him.
Jake stood alone, abandoned in the corridor. "I hate this place," he muttered to himself.
The sirens and alarms had stopped sounding a long time ago. Berat checked his chrono again. Hours ago.
They hadn't caught him yet. At first, when the alert went off and he knew they were after him, Berat almost gave in to panic. Crouched in his hiding place, a supply closet down in an abandoned-looking section of the lower core, he'd held on to his stolen phaser as his only salvation, not quite sure if, in the end, he was going to turn it on his pursuers or himself.
But they hadn't found him. He hadn't even heard the sounds of pursuit.
It was dead dark in the closet, except for the faint momentary glow of his chrono when he checked the time. Silent and dark. Berat couldn't keep his eyes open any longer, but he could hear himself breathing, his own heartbeat pulsing, accelerated by fright. And if he held his breath, he could hear the station, the creaky hiss of the ventilation system, the fitful suck and choke of the hydraulics.
They were familiar, soothing noises, although DS-Nine didn't have the sound of a healthy station. Berat had never seen a Cardassian facility in this kind of condition. Whole sections down in the docking pylon seemed deserted. Sections of the power plant, too. The signs of wreckage and wholesale destruction were everywhere, although attempts had obviously been made at some point to clean up the worst of the mess. But no one chasing after him, despite the alarms. That was the main thing. He was safe in this place, in part because it was half-wrecked.
Berat's head fell forward. Still keeping his grip on the phaser, he finally slept.
In his dream, Sub Halek was kicking on his bunk. "Berat! Wake up! On your feet! I've got a job for you, scrag! Today you're going to hang!"
Berat's eyes flew open in panic, he started up, and banged his head on a wall before he remembered where he was. And why: what he'd done.
For a moment, he was reliving the scene: Halek's angry face, the blow, the slashing pain. Reaching for the pry bar. The sensation of the impact with Halek's skull, the sound of bone cracking …
Berat gingerly touched his face, felt the bruises throb. But he ached everywhere, worse than ever, crammed into this closet.
Well, so he'd been an idiot, played right into the hands of his enemies. They had every excuse now to do what they wanted to him. Once they caught up with him.
But at least he had options now. Some room to breathe. And on DS-Nine there were ships coming in and out all the time. A way out. Off the station. Out of Cardassian space altogether. His experience was more on stations than ships, but certainly he could find a ship that could use another engineering technician. After what Halek had put him through on the Swift Striker, he wouldn't consider any job beneath him, ever again.
He was wondering whether it might be better to try to stow away or openly ask for a berth, when a pang hit his gut and he started to figure how long it had been since he'd been able to eat. He paused in the dark, listening. No one out in the corridor that he could hear.
All right. Here he was, somewhere in the lower core, maybe level thirty-one or -two. Near the reactors. In some section that seemed to be deserted. So where was the closest food replicator going to be? What was the best way to get there without being seen? Mentally, as if he were back on Farside Station, he traced a path of utility shafts, maintenance accesses, conduits, ducts—hard to squeeze through, some of those places. But working under Sub Halek hadn't let him put on a lot of extra weight. A good thing for him now.
He cracked open the door. The whole section was dark, either from neglect or because it was on power-save, only a few dim safety lights glowing. Even fewer of those than there should have been, in fact. More malfunctions. Thinking of malfunctions, and food replicators, he went back to the closet and strapped on his tool belt.
He opened a panel, crawled inside a maintenance tunnel, and shut the hatch behind him. Now he was safe from discovery, safe enough, anyway. Massive power conduits ran through the tunnel, but they were lifeless. Berat followed them, wondering how the station managed to function at all with so much capacity shut down. Was there something wrong with the reactors? How could this place defend itself against attack?
Whatever was wrong, though, it was lucky for him. If no one ever came into these sections, maybe he could hide out here indefinitely. As long as he could find food. Feeling slightly more hopeful about his prospects for survival, he headed through a shaft up to one of the cargo levels. After prowling around the corridors for a while, he found a deserted workers' lounge with a replicator against one wall. He approached it cautiously. Someone had kicked in the front panel. Probably the same someone who'd smashed the chairs and tables, broken the lights, and thrown something disgusting against the far wall. Malicious, systematic destruction.
Berat shuddered. This place was too empty, too long deserted. It was almost like being on a ghost station. Maybe none of the stories were actually true, but ghost stations, ghost ships were a staple of spacefaring myth:
Something got onto a station. Sometimes, no one even ever saw what it was, until it was too late, and everyone was dead, and the station drifted, drifted through space as its systems shut down, one by one. Other, more violent versions had pirates attacking, or unknown alien ships.
This place looked more like the work of pirates. Which maybe wasn't all too much different from what he knew to be the truth, that the damage had been done by Cardassian troops, enraged at having to retreat and abandon the station to the conquered race they despised, determined to leave them as little as possible to enjoy.
Such as a functioning food synthesizer. With weary resignation, Baret pulled off the broken panel and started to probe the replicator's interior. On all his previous assignments, up to thirty percent of station malfunctions had involved the replicator systems, and half of those had been the fault of the matrix grid. There was something not quite right about the basic design, although the procurement department would deny it to their graves.
But this time, it was a ruptured power-flux modulator, doubtless broken by someone's big, armored boot kicking through the front panel. On Farside, he'd have just plugged in a replacement, but he wasn't on Farside now, and he didn't have a replacement modulator in his tool kit.
But that didn't matter. There were tricks you learned when you'd served on stations and ships for a while, tricks that didn't come out of the book and you didn't want the inspectors to see—ever. And in a lounge like this, there was always a head for the workers to use to relieve themselves.
While everyone pretended to ignore the fact, food supply and waste disposal were just opposite sides of the same basic process. And so … here … in the disposal unit, you needed a flux modulator, just like you did in the replicator. And though it was true that this model operated at a different modulation rate, if you adjusted the resistors on the replicator to compensate … like that … as far down as they could go, then plugged the other module in … there, it would work, as the saying went, as long as it worked.
Holding his breath, Berat programmed the replicator for something simple: one of the hot meat rolls that were a favorite of the Cardassian troops on Farside Station. There was a pause, a humming sound as the power faltered; then the roll materialized on the replicator tray, steaming and redolent with familiar spices that made Berat's eyes water gratefully.
He took a bite. Oh, that was good! He almost laughed aloud in relief.
Maybe, just maybe, he was going to be all right here on this miserable wreck of a station. For a while. Until he found a ship and could get away.