Devil in the Sky Page 5

  “Right!” Nog said automatically. Jake was obviously indulging in that odd human habit of “rationalizing” his actions in order to “appease his conscience.” Nog didn’t really understand this, but he recognized it when he saw it. Sometimes humans just had to be talked into pursuing their own best interests. Good thing, he thought, that Jake has a partner like me to set him straight.

  The turbolift deposited them on the Promenade. As Nog had planned, there wasn’t much traffic among the shops and stalls at this hour. Although night and day were, naturally, abstract concepts on DS9, most people stuck to Starfleet time for convenience’s sake. It was handy, especially on the Promenade, to have regular hours for business—and pleasure. This early in the morning, most establishments were, depending on their bill of fare, closed, shutting down, or just setting up shop.

  Technically, Quark’s was open twenty-four hours a day, but the bar was nearly deserted when they arrived. Only a handful of diehards and new arrivals occupied the tables, consuming replicated meals or trying unsuccessfully to get drunk on heavily diluted synthehol. (The strong stuff, Nog knew, wasn’t served until serious gambling got under way.) A skinny, lime-green Asominian, whose species required sleep only once every twenty years, was flirting shamelessly with a Dabo girl.

  Quark himself was nowhere to be seen. Nog wasn’t surprised. His uncle seldom woke before noon, and then spent an hour or two in a holosuite. A distant cousin, Chram, manned the bar during the morning shift. Tufts of gray hair sprouted from the bartender’s large ears. When I’m that age, Nog promised himself, I’m not going to be working for my richer relations. He gave Chram a wave as he led Jake back into the storerooms. Chram glowered at him in return; the older Ferengi was not a morning person.

  In contrast to the glitz and glamour of the public Quark’s, the rear of the bar was a maze of boxes, compartments, and closets, generously equipped with odd nooks and crannies. After all, as Nog had been taught several times, you never knew when you might need a private meeting place for … whatever. He guided Jake to a broken-down refrigeration unit stuck between a crate of bootleg Cardassian wine and a stack of anti-Bajoran propaganda disks. Several gallon bottles of kamoy syrup, all covered in dust, rested on top of the crates.

  “Since the Cardassians left,” he explained, “there hasn’t been much call for any of this stuff. My uncle’s waiting for a good time to dump it—at a decent profit.” He tapped the controls on the freezer, then gave it a slap on the side. The lid sprang open with a noisy pop. “The egg will be safe in here. Hand it over.” Inwardly, he congratulated himself on maneuvering Jake into carrying the stolen egg on his person this whole time. Puzzling as it could sometimes be, this human tendency to trust came in very handy.

  “Here,” Jake said, slowly unwrapping the egg. “Boy, am I glad to get rid of this.”

  And am I ever glad to take it, Nog thought.

  Layers of toweling came away, revealing the gleam of the Horta egg underneath. For the first time, Nog started to wonder what exactly a Horta was, and what he was supposed to do with the egg. He stroked his right ear thoughtfully. No matter. There was profit here somehow; he knew it.

  His fingers itched for the egg. What was taking Jake so long? He wanted that egg now!

  Instead of handing it over right away, his human friend gazed quizzically at the semiexposed sphere. “Funny,” Jake said. “It seems warmer than before.” He peeled away the last layer of cloth and his palm came into direct contact with the shiny metal shell. “Oww! Damn! Oww!” Jake blurted suddenly, yanking his hands away from the egg. With horror, Nog watched his prize drop onto the hard molybdenite floor.

  “You … you hu-man!” he cried out angrily. The egg crashed down with a ringing clang that made Nog’s lobes shrivel. It rolled away toward the back of the storeroom. Jake waved his fingers wildly about, then started blowing on his palm.

  “It burned me!” Jake said, showing him the reddened flesh on his hand. Nog gave the burn, which didn’t seem that serious, only a second’s look before chasing after the egg. Please, he thought, don’t let it be broken. The egg came to a stop against a cask of Klingon war games. Nog reached out for it anxiously. “Wait!” Jake yelled from behind him. “Be careful!”

  At the last minute, Nog yanked his hands away. He disliked pain almost as much as he craved profit. Bending over the egg, he searched its surface with his beady blue eyes for any crack or disfigurement.

  At first, the sphere seemed unharmed. Praise the bottom line, Nog thought gratefully. Then the egg began to shake. Nog’s eyes widened. “Jake, get over here. Something’s happening!” A high-pitched grinding noise emerged from inside the egg. As the two boys looked on in amazement, one side of the sphere began to glow with a faint red radiance. Thin trails of vapor rose from the glowing portion of the shell. “It’s going to explode!” Nog exclaimed, backing away frantically on all fours. “Run!”

  Jake grabbed onto Nog’s foot, halting his escape. “No, Nog, no! Don’t you see? It’s hatching!”

  What? Of course! “I knew that,” Nog said defensively. “Can’t you hu-mans recognize a joke when you hear one?”

  “Sssh!” Jake said. “Here he comes!”

  The egg did not crack. Instead, something burned its way out of the sphere, leaving a steaming hole in the shell. The creature looked like a huge, scarlet worm, about half a meter long. Its hide was red and pulpy, like raw meat, except for tiny flecks of mineral matter embedded here and there over its surface. A fringe of tiny tendrils or cilia ran along the bottom of the creature on all sides; it seemed to use the fringe to pull itself slowly across the floor, leaving a trail of scorched grillework behind it. So this was a Horta, Nog mused. He wondered what it was worth. And how much more he could charge for it.

  Before he could calculate a price, however, the newborn Horta crawled (oozed?) back toward the now-empty egg. Jake and he watched as it burned a new hole through the shell and disappeared inside the egg. “What …?” he started to ask, but then the entire egg glowed with the red light as before, and proceeded to dissolve before their eyes. White fumes rose and evaporated as the hard metal shell melted into the baby Horta itself, which seemed to absorb every bit of matter that wasn’t boiled away. In a second or two, there was no shell left, only a wriggling red thing that emitted a teeth-jarring vibration from no orifice Nog could detect.

  “What’s the matter with it?” he asked Jake desperately. “What do we do now?” And how, he agonized silently, was he supposed to hide this burning little monster from his uncle?

  Jake didn’t look as confident as Nog would have liked. “I think it’s hungry,” he said.

  CHAPTER 5

  “WHEN CAN WE EXPECT some excitement, ladies?”

  Feeling bored, Julian Bashir leaned both arms on the back of Major Kira’s chair and peered over her head at the console. As near as he could tell, Kira and Dax appeared to be running a series of sensor sweeps of the space around the ship, but he couldn’t swear to it. Kira’s hands danced across the controls almost more quickly than he could follow, and she wasn’t taking time to explain each step as she went along the way Chief O’Brien usually did. It didn’t surprise him, considering the time-critical nature of their mission.

  Kira said, “You’re crowding me, Doctor.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She’s on edge, he told himself, straightening quickly. The Bajoran equivalent of adrenaline must be surging through her veins, priming her body for battle-readiness … and making her a little irritable. Doubtless he could find plenty of information on the effects of Bajoran adrenaline back on DS9. He’d have to look the subject up when they got back. There might be a paper in it—especially if the Bajorans made it into the Federation and began serving on Starfleet ships. He grinned a little. There was a certain fame to be had by being the first to file a new medical paper—just look at the way Leonard McCoy’s name was plastered all over the Horta reports as the “pioneering surgeon” who first operated on a Horta.

  “No problem,” Kira said curtly. “Bajorans just have a very definite sense of personal space.”

  “You can look over my shoulder, Julian,” Dax said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Why, thank you, Jadzia!” She must have forgotten my slug remark, he thought, or at least put it from her mind in the tumult following Ttan’s kidnapping. He felt his heart skip a beat. Something about her excited him more than any other female he’d ever been around. He’d heard Chief O’Brien muttering about “crushes” and “puppy love” under his breath more than once, but Julian knew it was more than that. This was the real thing. If only he could get her to notice him … and if only he could manage to not say something stupid.

  Leaning on the back of Dax’s chair, he moved his head down until he caught a faint whiff of scent from her hair, a subtle perfume mingling what smelled like Andorian wildflowers and flowering plankton from Cilas XII. Beautiful, like she was, he thought. He breathed more deeply.

  Kira brought the runabout around and accelerated again. Julian toppled forward and barely caught himself in time to keep from hitting the back of Dax’s head. Accidentally insulting her was bad enough, he thought. He didn’t need to fall on her when she wasn’t looking.

  He shot a quick glance at Kira, but she seemed completely occupied at the controls. Julian frowned. She appeared a little too occupied, he decided. She should have at least taken a quick glance when he almost fell; she must have caught his sudden wild movement from the corner of her eye.

  Julian felt the engines’ vibrations deepen through the deck underfoot. Glancing at the monitor, he watched the runabout speeding forward. He couldn’t tell if the course change had been necessary. If he didn’t know better, though, he would have said Kira made the ship lurch forward on purpose … or was he being too paranoid?

  Then the truth hit him and he had a hard time keeping from laughing. Kira was jealous of Dax! Why hadn’t he seen it before? Clearly she didn’t want him leaning on the back of her seat because she couldn’t concentrate with him so near. Women had told him he was handsome before—indeed, he’d been something of a ladies’ man at the Academy—but he’d had no idea he could so thoroughly penetrate even Kira’s mask of icy professionalism. After the mission was over, he’d have to find a way to let her down gently. Much as he admired her command talents, Kira wasn’t exactly his idea of a perfect date.

  “Where are we now?” he asked. It would be best to try to keep Kira’s mind on the work at hand.

  “On the last known course the Cardassian raider took,” Dax replied instead. “We’re at half impulse power. I’m running a sensor sweep for subspace distortion.”

  A small light began to flash across Kira’s monitor. Julian found himself leaning forward to see, and when Kira shot him a glance, he gave her what he considered his most reassuring bedside smile. Don’t break her heart now, he thought. Let it wait till the end of the mission. That’s the professional thing to do.

  “I have it,” Dax said, pointing at what looked to Julian like a smear of pale gray on her monitor. “This pattern has to be bled from a warp coil generator. Major?”

  “It’s very diffuse,” Kira said slowly.

  “The wormhole might account for it,” Julian ventured, though he didn’t feel at all sure of himself. This stuff was way out of his league.

  “No,” Dax said, “there’s definitely something there. Let me try a few computer enhancements….”

  Julian watched as the three-dimensional representation of space around the runabout blanked on Dax’s monitor, then redrew several times in what he found a dizzyingly quick succession. Each enhancement showed more detail in the diffused ion cloud.

  “Allowing for normal drift and distortion from the wormhole,” Dax said, “let’s run a backward simulation….”

  After another dizzying sequence of images, the diffuse spray of ions suddenly drew together into what Julian recognized as a distinct trail of ionized particles. Dax had been right, he saw now. There couldn’t be any mistaking it. A starship had been through here, and not that long ago.

  “Bingo,” Dax said.

  “What?” Kira demanded.

  “An old Earth expression,” Julian said, a little proud that he had recognized such an archaic word. Forsooth, his classic Earth poetry classes were paying off at last. “It means we’ve found it.”

  “I can see that!” Kira snapped. “Strap yourself in, Doctor. We’re going to warp speed in ten seconds.”

  Ten seconds? Julian thought. Turning, he darted into the rear of the runabout. The five members of the security team hadn’t yet ventured from their seats. He scanned their faces and noticed looks ranging from amusement to fascination. They must have been listening to every word they said up front, he realized … and watching his every move. He swallowed. I hope they didn’t see me smelling Dax’s hair. Then he gave a mental shrug. Well, he thought, this was my day for putting my foot in it. Hopefully there wouldn’t be too many hot rumors surrounding Dax and him when they got back home.

  He dropped into his seat and buckled himself in. He knew they were in a hurry, but ten seconds was cutting it awfully close for comfort.

  He watched as the stars on the forward monitor over Dax’s head turned to streaks; then suddenly they were moving faster than light. He started to unbuckle himself, but Kira called, “Better stay seated back there, guys. We may have a few more sudden course shifts coming up.”

  “Right,” Julian muttered unhappily. He looked back and found the five members of the security team all watching him. Ensigns Aponte and Wilkens definitely seemed to be smirking. He had to find something to occupy them or they’d all end up grinning behind his back through the entire mission.

  “Well,” he said slowly, his thoughts racing to find something to do. “I looks like we’re stuck back here for a while. Anybody bring a deck of cards?”

  * * *

  Kira risked a quick glance over her shoulder, found Bashir talking animatedly to the five ensigns, and chuckled softly to herself. They were undoubtedly the largest audience the doctor had had for quite a while. They should keep him busy for the time being, she thought. At least until he ran out of those boring Starfleet Academy stories of his.

  “Don’t you think that was a little cruel?” Dax said in a low voice. “He could have come back up here.”

  “Cruel, but entirely justifiable,” Kira replied. “The way he was smelling your hair made my skin crawl.”

  “He smelled yours first.”

  Kira found herself speechless. The thought of that—that—that pedantic fovian worm smelling her hair—it made her sick to her stomach. She’d have to find a way to tell him, in no uncertain terms, to stay well away from her when they got back after this mission.

  “The ship made a turn,” Dax announced. “Coming up. Log course change in five seconds.”

  “I see it,” Kira said.

  “They must have thought the wormhole would hide their new course,” Dax went on. “Our new destination is … the Davon system? Computer confirms. The Davon system. Estimated time of arrival: twenty-two hours.”

  “The Davon system,” Kira mused. There weren’t any Cardassian mining camps there. Or none that she knew about, anyway.

  “I don’t think I’m familiar with it,” Dax said.

  “I am,” Kira said. “It has a total of six planets, four gas giants and two sun-scorched rocks in tight orbits around the sun. It was disputed territory until twenty-two years ago, when Starfleet ceded it to the Cardassians in a border treaty.”

  “I think I did hear something about that,” Dax said. “There weren’t any desirable planets, so it was easier to give it up than make a fuss over it.”

  “Just like Bajor,” Kira said. She tried to keep the bitterness from her voice and knew she didn’t quite succeed. “Just like Bajor.”

  * * *

  Ttan heard it as much as felt it when a series of jolts shook the Dagger. She began to struggle again, trying to get free, but the tractor beam seemed to work against her every movement, pinning her in midair. She would have given anything to be free just about then. She had to find her eggs.

  The jolts stopped as suddenly as they’d begun. Ttan strained to hear, but no new sounds reached her. The hold remained as eerily silent as a mined-out pocket of duranium ore. Will I never be free? she mentally cried out. Will I never see my children hatch? She began to despair.

  What seemed hours later—she had lost all sense of time and had no idea how long it had actually been—a new series of jolts ran through the Dagger. This time the far wall began to fold down into a ramp, admitting a flood of brilliant white light.

  Ttan was still spinning very slowly. As she came around to face the ramp, she peered into the brightness. Several dozen figures moved out there. As she watched, half a dozen humanoids sprinted into the hold and took equidistant positions around her. They all held massive energy weapons of some kind, which they pointed at her body.

  “What do you want?” she demanded. “Where are my children?” The Universal Translator repeated her message. None of the humanoids replied.

  As she continued to spin, Ttan studied their faces. She wasn’t certain, but though they dressed in black like Gul Mavek and had the same corded necks, she didn’t think any of them were him. If she’d been free, she would have gladly melted him alive for what he’d done to her.

  “What do you want?” she demanded again. “Tell me! Tell me!”

  “Ttan,” she heard Gul Mavek say, “I am the only one who can help you.” He climbed the ramp and stood looking at her, his hands on his hips. “You are my guest. You will follow all instructions with precision and care. Do you understand?”

  She shot a stream of acid at him. He leaped backward in time to avoid it, and the acid began to smoke and hiss as it ate away the metal plating.

  A whining noise filled the air, and a dull, unpleasant itch hit Ttan from all sides at once. The humanoids were shooting their weapons at her, Ttan realized.