SISKO LOOKED through the monitor at the bomb in the containment chamber. "It's live?"
"It surely is, Commander," O'Brien told him. "The switch we disarmed is only what the ordnance people call an antihandling device. It would have set off the bomb if we'd tried to move or tamper with it. But the remote-control detonator is still intact. Whenever the Cardies send the signal …" He mimed an explosion.
Sisko nodded decisively. "What I want to do, Chief, is use the Cardassians' own weapon against them. Until they've undocked, they can't send that signal without blowing themselves up along with the station. We have that much time. Now—" He looked from O'Brien to Odo with a strange light in his eyes. "Do you think you can manage to plant that bomb on Gul Marak's ship?"
"Without being detected, you mean?" Odo said slowly.
O'Brien broke into a grin. "Just how much damage do you want it to do, sir?"
"As much as possible. I can't take chances here."
The simple thing would have been to have Odo change himself into the form of a Cardassian and enter the Swift Striker through the airlock, as one of the crew. But, aside from the question of passes and ID, the flaw in this plan was clearly demonstrated when Odo showed them how well he could mimic Cardassian features. His face was a raw, unfinished, lumpy thing, no more like a real Cardassian's than his normal appearance was Bajoran.
"Inanimate objects are easy, living things harder. And persons …"
"Well," O'Brien had said, "so much for that idea."
But there was always more than one way to attack a starship. The idea came as they scanned the image of the Cardassian ship at dock. "Look at all that debris!"
It was drifting all around the station, a hazard to docking and undocking operations, discarded out of the airlocks in defiance of all station regulations as overloaded ships lightened their loads and jettisoned the personal effects the desperate station refugees had smuggled on board.
"One more inanimate object …" O'Brien had whispered, inspired.
Now he floated in the silence of space, with the mass of DS-Nine below him, the wide circular sweep of the docking ring, the pylons arching up from it. He could still remember his first sight of this place, how alien it had seemed, even sinister in its Cardassian design. And now it was home. Things changed, didn't they?
His attention shifted to the Swift Striker, the Cardassian ship docked at the nearest pylon, looking very much like it belonged there. More so than the Enterprise had ever done, or any other Starfleet ship, he thought reflectively.
They were almost drifting. It had to look that way. O'Brien in his EVA suit clung to Odo, who had taken the shape of an ordinary packing crate, one of many of them out here. Their progress was so slow that O'Brien had time to wonder what was in all these crates, and barrels, and bags. Would any of the people ever be back to retrieve these jettisoned possessions? Would they survive to be able to do so?
A quick jet from his hand thruster corrected their course toward the Cardassian ship and slightly altered the direction of the Odo-crate's spin. O'Brien only hoped the Cardies wouldn't notice. The whole point was to be inconspicuous. Any scan would reveal the fact that the crate was not really a crate. What would happen then was not encouraging to contemplate.
Instead of worrying, he concentrated on the slowly growing shape of the Cardassian ship. The Swift Striker was a Galor-class, the most advanced of the Cardassian warships, packed with destructive weaponry. And, like all starships, vulnerable, in part on account of its own mass and capacity for acceleration. It depended on the power of its shields and integrity fields to defend it and keep it intact, but these systems could fail. Having spent a career keeping them functioning, O'Brien knew quite well how they could fail.
Absently, he stroked the case of the bomb he was carrying. Nasty little thing. He shuddered. There was something about an antimatter explosion, the malice of planting the bomb where they had. Above him, the ship's belly started to fill the sky. There were antimatter storage pods on the Swift Striker, necessary for the functioning of the warp drive, much larger than the ones that supplied the station's reactors.
But too hard to access. On the other hand, the power linkage to the structural integrity field generators …
The crate suddenly extruded an arm, which reached out and snagged a handhold on the hull. Odo pulled them in closer. From this point on, disguise was irrelevant. All that mattered was luck. They ought to be safe, unless the Cardies suddenly decided to run a sweeping scan of their own hull exterior.
Moving cautiously across the ship's surface, O'Brien recalled that argument:
"What if their hull scan picks you up?"
"Commander," Dax had pointed out after a check of her instruments, "the Cardassians aren't scanning their own hull."
Which, in retrospect, was the proof they should have noticed all along. Docked at a station supposedly full of Bajoran terrorists, with bombs going off almost every day, the Swift Striker, of all the ships berthed there, was not constantly scanning its hull to guard against sabotage. Because the Cardassians alone knew that the bombings weren't the work of Bajorans at all.
Well, that was hindsight for you—always too late to do any good.
Now O'Brien hoped that Dax had her instruments trained on them at the moment. Their only hope, if discovered, was that Dax could beam them back in time. As to the other consequences, that still didn't bear thinking of.
He followed Odo, more awkwardly because he was burdened with the bomb and his tools, as well as restricted in shape. Odo seemed somehow more natural out here in space, more free. He wondered if it was frustrating to the shape-changer to maintain a single form for so much of the time.
He finally signaled that they had come to the right spot. Handing the bomb to Odo, he took out his tools and started to remove the hull access plate. The bomb still had the connecting wires that had held it to the containment pod in the station's reactor. O'Brien used them to fasten it to the main power linkage node, then replaced the access plate. That was it. It seemed almost too simple.
Oh, there was still the risk of discovery. The antihandling switch on the bomb had been disarmed, and the Cardassians, if they found it out here, wouldn't have any trouble removing it. But there was only one way it could go off now, and that was if Gul Marak sent the signal to detonate, thinking it was still planted on the station.
Would they do it, he wondered? Or was it only a threat? Hard to believe they'd really do such a thing—even Cardassians.
Odo resumed his crate shape, and they pushed off from the ship, to all appearances just another piece of debris, drifting again, but this time in the direction of pylon five, an empty arch standing out from the station. O'Brien just hoped they got there in time, before the Swift Striker took off.
There were only a couple of hours left.