Devil in the Sky Read online

  Sisko took a deep breath and tried again to reason with the secretary. “Perhaps the correct procedures have not been observed,” he conceded, “but the fact remains that I have twenty eggs, each containing a sentient being, that will surely hatch long before they can be taken back to Janus VI. They may be orphans, Pova, and, biologically, they’re not suited to life on a space station.” Again, Sisko visualized an entire brood of baby Hortas, burrowing out of control. Who would be worse off in such a situation, the Hortas or Deep Space Nine? “They belong on a planet, deep underground, not stuck out in space.”

  Clearly, Secretary Pova was not a sucker for orphans. “That is a problem for the Federation,” he declared. “My first priority must be the environmental sanctity of Bajor. The eggs stay where they are.”

  “If we send them by shuttle to Bajor now,” Sisko argued, “it doesn’t have to be a permanent solution.”

  “No.” Behind Pova, the deputy secretary’s office looked impeccably clean and perhaps newly painted. If only Bajor were within transporter range of DS9, Sisko mused grumpily; I’d beam the eggs directly onto Pova’s desk.

  “They may have lost their mother, Pova.” Just like Jake lost Jennifer, Sisko thought, feeling a pang of sympathy for the unborn Hortas. He wondered if Ttan had a mate or family back on Janus VI, and hoped he wouldn’t have to send them word of her death.

  “You are wasting my time, Commander,” Pova said. “Our decision is final. The Hortas will not be allowed on Bajor.”

  Until the coalition government changes its mind again, Sisko thought, but how long will that take? This isn’t over yet, Pova, he vowed, while calmly stating, “I suspect that we will discuss this matter again, Secretary. For now, I’ll let you get back to your work. Sisko out.”

  Pova’s image vanished from the screen, replaced by a view of the surrounding space. At Sisko’s orders, the main viewer was to be directed toward the Cardassian border until Kira’s return, except when needed for other purposes. The wormhole, unexplored at the moment, could not be seen. Sisko relaxed his shoulders and leaned forward, bracing himself on a guardrail upon the upper tier of Ops. He glanced around the operations center. A relief crew manned all important stations, including four officers at the operations table alone, but Ops still seemed empty without Dax or Kira. On Sisko’s left, Miles O’Brien fussed with a trapezoidal display grid at the engineering station; Deep Space Nine never seemed to run out of minor malfunctions for O’Brien to fix.

  O’Brien looked up from his repairs to give Sisko a sympathetic look. “Not being terribly cooperative, was he?” O’Brien said, with a nod toward the screen.

  “No. I think we’re on our own for the duration. Have the eggs been secured?”

  “Yes, sir. An unfurnished suite on level fifteen. About all that was available, what with the crowds coming in for that Illumination business.” O’Brien strolled over to where Sisko was standing. “If you don’t mind me asking, any word from Major Kira and the others?”

  Sisko shook his head. “While they’re in Cardassian space, they have to maintain strict communications silence.” His knuckles tightened around the guardrail. “It’s a sensible precaution. All we can do is wait—and take care of those eggs.”

  “Well, you know what they say anyway: Don’t count your Hortas until they’re hatched.” O’Brien’s broad grin faded as Sisko stared at him with a blank expression. “Er, that was meant as a joke, sir.”

  “I know, Chief. Carry on.” Sisko marched into his office and let the doors slide shut behind him. Damn Deputy Secretary Pova, he fumed, and his whole Council on Ecological Controls! Quark would have been easier to deal with; at least you can bribe a Ferengi. The thought of those twenty young Hortas being rejected by the very planet their mother might have sacrificed her life to salvage infuriated him, and raised uncomfortable associations with his own motherless son. Suppose, he couldn’t help speculating, Jennifer and I had both died in that battle at Wolf 359, and Jake’s fate had ended up in the hands of some self-important bureaucrat? Sisko promised himself that he would do everything in his power to protect Ttan’s children until Kira brought the mother Horta safely home.

  Thank goodness, he thought, that Jake at least was safe and far from trouble.

  * * *

  “You must be crazy!” Jake Sisko whispered emphatically. “Odo will catch us for sure!”

  Nog brushed away Jake’s objections with a wave of his hand. “You’re paranoid about Odo, you know that? He can’t be everywhere.”

  “Yes,” Jake replied, “but he could be anything.”

  The two teenagers crouched behind a gray rhodinium support beam outside Suite 959. It was early in the day and this section of the habitat ring was sparsely populated; only a few tired traders, staggering back to their ships after a long night of gambling and carousing at Quark’s, had passed by Jake and Nog in the last half hour. A Bajoran security officer swung by the suite periodically for a routine check. According to Nog’s calculations, she wouldn’t be due back for at least twenty minutes. Jake wasn’t sure he trusted Nog’s calculations. He’d seen some of Nog’s homework assignments….

  “Look,” Jake argued, “what’s the big deal with a bunch of eggs anyway?” Even with both of them kneeling, Jake was a head taller than the young Ferengi. To blend with the shadows, Jake had put on his darkest blue jumpsuit. Nog, shameless, wore a bright orange shirt with purple trousers. The wrap behind his ears glittered with metallic fibers.

  “Ah, but these are Horta eggs!” Nog’s eyes gleamed with the same excitement he usually displayed for gold-pressed latinum—or anything recognizably female.

  “So?” Jake asked.

  “Well, er, that is …” Nog seemed reluctant to abandon his dreams of profit merely for lack of any solid justification. “The Cardassians wanted them, right? So they must be worth something!”

  “But it’s stealing,” Jake objected. He hated having to be the wet blanket all the time, and certainly amusements on DS9 were few and far between, but it felt like he and Nog were crossing some sort of line with this particular caper. His conscience nagged at him, with a voice that suspiciously resembled his father’s.

  Of course, stealing was no big deal to a Ferengi. Even now Jake could see Nog blinking his eyes at his friend’s objection, and struggling to wrap his brain around the idea that “So what?” was not a workable response.

  “We’re only going to borrow it,” Nog said instead. “Besides, it’s only a bunch of eggs, no one is going to miss one.”

  “I thought these were the extra-special Horta eggs,” Jake said, mimicking Nog’s greedy fervor with pinpoint accuracy. Hah, he thought. Got you there.

  Nog was unimpressed by logic. “Consistency is a hu-man virtue,” he said, drawing out the first syllable in “human” so that it sounded vaguely obscene. “C’mon, are you with me or not?”

  Jake briefly considered rapping his head against the girder. How did he get sucked into these messes? But he knew why. A) he was bored. B) Nog was his only real friend. Despite the combined efforts of his conscience and common sense, he couldn’t convince himself that some weird alien egg was more important than either A or B. “Okay, I’m in. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Nog muttered gleefully. The boys rose quickly to their feet, bolted out from behind the girder, and nearly collided with a large Bajoran security officer.

  She was at least six feet tall, with firm muscles (and an impressive figure) visible beneath her brown uniform. A stern expression seemed to have frozen on her face. “Shouldn’t you boys be in school?” she said. It sounded more like a statement than a question.

  Nog’s jaw dropped. His mouth quivered soundlessly, making him look like a trout caught on a hook. Was he speechless with fear, Jake wondered, or simply overwhelmed by his close proximity to the woman’s imposing curves? Probably a bit of both. I’m going to kill him, Jake thought, assuming we get out of this alive.

  “School doesn’t start for another hour,” Jake explained hurriedly. “We were pacing out the circumference of the habitat ring … for geometry class. Extra credit.” Actually, Nog hadn’t attended Mrs. O’Brien’s school for days, but Jake saw no reason to go into that. “We were at five hundred and fifty steps so far, right, Nog?” He elbowed his friend, none too gently. “Right?”

  “Oh yes,” Nog sputtered. “Five hundred and sixty for sure!”

  The security officer eyed them skeptically. The wrinkles on her nose seemed to deepen. “You were rushing pretty fast to be doing such careful counting.”

  “We count better when we run!” Nog volunteered. Jake groaned inside.

  “Like you said, we don’t want to be late for class,” he added. Please, he thought, don’t call my dad. I still haven’t lived down that business with Odo’s bucket and the oatmeal.

  The officer stared at them in silence for what seemed the length of a transgalactic voyage—on impulse power. A thin layer of sweat glued Jake’s shirt to his back. Nog’s hands nervously protected the lobes of his enormous ears.

  “Very well,” she said finally. “Be on your way.”

  “Yes, sir, officer, ma’am!” Jake said, almost bursting with relief. He grabbed Nog roughly by the arm, and, taking long careful strides, tried to pace away from Suite 959 as rapidly as he could. “Five hundred and fifty-one, five hundred and fifty-two, five hundred and fifty-three …”

  “Five hundred and sixty-four,” Nog said beside him, “five hundred and sixty-five …”

  Oh, leaking radioactive wormholes, Jake cursed silently. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the officer watching them depart, her hands on her hips, a suspicious scowl on her face. “Human steps equal one-point-five Ferengi steps,” he called back by way of explanation. He hoped he didn’t sound ne
arly as stupid as he felt.

  Finally, they rounded a corner and left the security woman behind. Jake collapsed against the corridor wall. His heart was pounding. The sweat on his back cooled to a chilly film. If this was a bad holo, he thought, I’d be fainting now.

  Nog, on the other hand, seemed positively invigorated now that they were safe. “Eluding prosecution!” he crowed, bouncing off the floor in an impromptu victory dance. “There’s no greater thrill!” He grinned at his reluctant accomplice. “A school project! Extra credit! That was sheer brilliance … almost as good as what I was going to say. As you sure you aren’t part Ferengi?”

  “Positive,” Jake replied, forcing himself to remember that Nog meant that as a compliment. Slowly, his heartbeat returned to normal.

  Nog pointed his ears in the direction they had come. “Okay,” he said enthusiastically. “I can hear her bootsteps. She’s going the opposite way.” Without even asking Jake’s opinion, he dashed back toward the suite. Halfway there, he paused only long enough to look back at Jake. “What’s keeping you?” he asked, appearing genuinely puzzled. “Hurry!”

  I don’t believe this, Jake thought. I don’t believe me. Breaking into a jog, he caught up with Nog outside the suite door. The Ferengi was busy affixing a white crystalline patch to the lock beside the door. Jake didn’t need to ask where the patch came from; like most Ferengi, Nog wore his pockets on the inside of his clothes. “Something you ‘borrowed’ from your uncle?” Jake asked.

  “Actually, I got it from a cat burglar in exchange for some Eeiauoan pornography.” He shrugged dismissively. “I’m not into felines.”

  The crystal patch sparkled as it swiftly flashed through the entire spectrum from white to black, trying every intermediate shade in between. It operated completely silently, which made sense, Jake realized, given the sort of jobs it had probably been designed for; that this device had once belonged to a professional thief did not make Jake feel any more comfortable about this whole stunt. “Look, Nog,” he started to protest.

  Too late. On its third cycle through the spectrum, the patch halted on a hue somewhere between rose and pink. It blinked three times; then the two halves of the sturdy door slid back into the adjoining walls. Nog rubbed his palms together and scooted inside the bay. With a sigh of resignation, Jake followed him.

  Low-level illumination activated automatically upon their entrance, and Jake found himself in a vaultlike chamber about half the size of his and his father’s personal quarters. Alien graffiti defaced the walls, and the floor was scratched and in need of repair. No wonder, Jake thought, the suite was empty except for the eggs, which he spotted right away.

  They were lined up like bowling balls on top of a black, triangular platform about three feet tall. “Careful,” Nog said, “there’s some type of stasis field.” To demonstrate, he brought his hands near the eggs; a sudden burst of crackling blue energy repelled his grasping fingers. Nog seemed more amused than concerned by the shielding, Jake noted as he drew closer to their target. Keeping at least a foot away from the invisible field, he stared at the eggs while Nog, scurrying around on his knees, inspected the field generator. The eggs all looked identical: completely spherical, slightly smaller than an old-fashioned basketball, with a glossy metallic sheen. He had trouble placing the exact the color of the eggs in the dim light; they were somewhere between violet and copper, depending on what angle he looked at them from. Was there actually some sort of organism growing inside? It was hard to believe; the spheres looked more like geological curiosities than something alive.

  Then again, he’d bumped into some very unusual life-forms during his travels with his father. Humanoid races were most common, but Jake had no illusions that all beings fit the Terran mode. The universe—even just the Federation—was full of strange and exotic entities, like those “nonlinear” intelligences his dad had discovered in the wormhole. Or Q, who looked human, but sure wasn’t. Or whatever they were that had impersonated Buck Bokai, Lieutenant Dax, and that troll during their first year on the station. Or, for that matter, Constable Odo.

  Thinking about the station’s security chief reminded Jake of how much trouble they could get into if they were caught. He glanced nervously around the empty suite; thank goodness it was so barren, he thought. There were no stray objects that could be the shapeshifter in disguise—unless he was one of the eggs themselves!

  “C’mon,” he whispered to Nog. “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem,” Nog replied. He ran his stubby fingers over a control pad located under the rim of the platform. “There! Try it now.”

  Half expecting an energy shock, Jake reached hesitantly for an egg. Nothing happened. He met no resistance. His hand stroked the smooth, metallic shell; it was surprisingly cool. He grinned despite himself. This was too easy! Obviously, the field was intended to shield the eggs from shocks, not … borrowing.

  Nog sprang to his feet and scampered, his freckled face beaming, around the unprotected eggs. “Take that one!” he suggested. “No, no, that one! Wait a nano, maybe this one here …!”

  “Nog,” Jake said patiently. “They’re all the same.” He realized, with a jolt of recognition, that he sounded a lot like his father talking to Dr. Bashir. “Choose one and let’s go.”

  “But which one?” Nog whined, torn by greed and indecision. “Maybe we should take a couple more …?”

  “No way!” Jake said.

  “But …” Nog’s eyes darted back and forth between his friend and the eggs.

  “No,” Jake said firmly. He removed a piece of toweling that he’d tucked into his boot earlier. There was only so far he could be pushed, even by Nog. He had to draw the line somewhere. Picking one at random, he carefully lifted an egg from the platform and wrapped it in the soft white towel. For a second, he thought he felt something move within the egg, as though its center of gravity had suddenly shifted, but he chalked it up to nerves. That Bajoran woman could be back at any minute!

  The stolen egg left an empty, circular recess in the top of the platform, an incriminating gap that caught Jake’s eye like a silent accusation. He looked away from the depression. “We’re out of here,” he told Nog. “Now!”

  The Ferengi hesitated for a moment, staring at the remaining eggs as if he could absorb the entire haul into his eyes. He ran his tongue over his rough, uneven front teeth.

  “Nog!”

  With a pained expression on his face, Nog turned from the eggs and ran with Jake back into the corridor outside. Jake looked up and down the hall while Nog hastily removed the crystal patch from the locking mechanism. There was no one in sight, thankfully. By the time the suite doors slid shut again, the boys were already several meters away. Clutching the swaddled Horta egg close to his chest, Jake walked quickly toward the nearest turbolift, with Nog struggling to keep up with him.

  You know, Jake thought, maybe human steps do equal one-point-five Ferengi ones.

  * * *

  Nog was nearly out of breath by the time they reached the turbolift. He snarled under his breath. Why did humans have to have such long legs anyway? It seemed an unfair advantage, and unfair advantages by rights belonged to the Ferengi. Then again, he didn’t really mind that human females had those astoundingly endless legs. Too bad they felt obliged to cover them up. Take that Lieutenant Dax, for instance. Thinking about her, out of uniform (and not into anything in particular), made his lobes tingle. Suppose she and he were marooned on …

  “Say, Nog,” Jake said, knocking him out of a promising fantasy, “I thought of something. Did you reactivate the stasis field around the eggs?”

  Deficits, Nog cursed silently. He’d forgotten all about that field. “I thought you’d done that,” he said hastily, embarrassed. To err was Ferengi, he reminded himself; the trick was to shift blame fast enough.

  To his surprise, Jake didn’t argue the point. “I guess,” his friend said with shrug, “it was going to be pretty obvious that an egg was gone, even if we’d put the field back the way we found it. And it’s not like we’re expecting an earthquake or something anytime soon. The eggs will be perfectly safe, right?”