Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

38

Quark strode out of the turbolift and onto the Promenade, his mood as dark as a Jem’Hadar’s hearts. He listened and could tell immediately, even before he reached the bar, that his fortunes had not improved much. If the proverbial wise man could hear profit in the wind, Quark wondered what sort of a man that made him. Besides poor,he thought. As he walked toward the bar, his ears told him the approximate number of customers there—too few—and the number of those playing at the dabo table—several more than at any time during the past couple of weeks, but still not enough.

I should have stayed in my quarters,he thought. Except that even an afternoon spent foraging through the quadrant’s financial and commodities exchanges had not held any fascination for him. It vexed Quark to see his idiot brother’s so-called reforms being implemented on Ferenginar, crippling so many of the markets. But even Quark’s anger at Rom could not keep his mind occupied for very long.

Quark only glanced at the floor as he slipped behind the bar; the last thing he needed to see right now was just how close his employees came to outnumbering his customers. He looked at the mess Frool and Grimp had managed to leave—remarkable, really, considering the dearth of business—and grabbed a rag. He began to swab the surface of the bar, wanting to occupy himself. But as he concentrated on the simple task, with his eyes cast down, his ears still remained open. And he did not hear her.

Again.

Quark had neither heard nor seen Ro Laren since she had chased the Jem’Hadar soldier from the bar two nights ago. She had talked about coming back later that night, but not only had she not returned since then, she had also been conspicuously absent from the Promenade. Quark had not even seen her in her office.

Females and finances don’t mix,he reminded himself. He never seemed to remember that when he needed to. And he had been fool enough to believe that she had actually begun returning his flirtations.

Quark grumbled, lifting a V-shaped glass half-filled with a lightgreen liquid. He wiped the condensation from its base and from the place it had rested, then set it back down. The Boslic woman sitting on the other side of the bar, whose drink this seemed to be, was not even paying attention. She sat turned away, peering in the direction of the dabo table. Quark thought about suggesting to her that she go play, but then a voice reached his ears.

“Pass five, pass five,” the voice said. “Sorry, no winners this time.” Quark had no problem with the outcome—it was about time that the dabo wheel began spinning again according to the advantages of the house—but the voice should have belonged to Treir. It did not; it belonged to a man.

Quark shifted to his left and looked past the Boslic woman. Around the dabo table sat a couple of men and a half-dozen women. Treir, who should have been operating the game, was nowhere in sight. Instead, the young, scantily dressed Bajoran man she had brought in earlier today stood in her place. As Quark watched, the man—Hetik, was it?—held the rondure up before the gamblers, his hand dancing dramatically through the air, and then, with a flourish, he placed it in the wheel and sent it spinning around.

The edges of Quark’s lobes warmed as anger rose within him. Not only had Treir—an employee—had the audacity to hire somebody, and not only had she concocted the position of dabo boy,but he had ordered her to get rid of Hetik by the time he returned to the bar. And yet there the man stood, with Quark’s latinum spread out on the table before him.

Quark flung the rag down behind the bar, furious. He would fire Hetik, and then, when he found Treir, he would dispatch her as well. Sensuous or not, green or not, Treir had overstepped her bounds more than once, and by more than just a bit. Quark had had enough. He turned—

–and almost ran into Treir. Quark pulled up quickly, surprised not only to see her there, but that she had approached without him hearing her. Am I that distracted,he asked himself, or is she that good?He thought his ears had been open, but now he realized that he had only been listening for the sound of Laren’s voice. As he looked up at Treir, though, he knew that none of that mattered at the moment; what mattered was him regaining control of his bar.

“I told you to get rid of him,” Quark said without preamble, pointing over at Hetik. He spoke loudly, not caring who heard him. This was his business, and he would—

“I have a proposition for you,” Treir said, interrupting his thoughts. She spoke in soft tones, but her eyes stared down hard at him. Her manner seemed to imply that there would be no subterfuge here, no use of wiles—feminine or otherwise—only business dealings.

“Why would you want to get rid of him?”somebody asked to Quark’s right. He looked in that direction and saw that the Boslic woman had turned in her seat toward the bar. The triangular slope of her forehead, and her dark hair and eyes, reminded him of Rionoj, a freighter captain with whom he occasionally dealt. This woman was shorter and heavier than Rionoj, though, and clearly did not have the sense to tend to her own business; she had evidently heard Quark and seen him gesture toward Hetik. “He’s beautiful,” she said. “In fact, I may go play a little dabo myself.”

Quark resisted the impulse to tell the woman to go. Instead, he simply smiled and nodded. Then he turned back to Treir, who had not moved a millimeter. “A proposition?” Quark said, sidling away from the bar and over toward the shelves behind it, putting a little distance between himself and the Boslic woman. Treir glided over with him.

“Yes, a proposition,” she said. “Let Hetik work here for a week before you make a decision about whether to keep him on or not. If you decide to let him go at that point, then I’ll pay his wages.”

Quark felt the ridge of his brow rise, surprised at Treir’s promise of actual latinum. She obviously wanted very much for Hetik to work here. Quark did not know why—although considering the amount of clothing these two wore in public, he thought he could guess easily enough—but he did see an opportunity for a small profit. “What sort of wages did you agree to pay him?” he asked. Treir told him, and actually, the amount was fairly low, only a fraction of what Quark currently paid her. “I’ll tell you what,” Quark said. “I’ll keep him on for a week, and then I’ll pay him. But if I decide to fire him, I won’t pay youfor the week.”

Treir said, “No, that’s not fair,” but her shoulders slumped, and Quark knew that he would get what he had demanded. He took a step past Treir, heading toward Hetik, but she stopped him. “All right,” she said.

Quark gazed up at her curiously. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“If I tell you,” Treir said, shaking her head, “you won’t believe me.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Because I think it’s good business,” she said. “I mean, look.” She nodded her head in the direction of the dabo table, and Quark looked over there. “I know it’s only eight people,” she went on, “but he’s only been here a few hours, and that’s the most people we’ve had playing dabo in weeks.”

Quark shrugged and looked back at her. “Coincidence,” he said. “And even if it’s not, him drawing one or two more dabo players a night is not going to justify keeping him on the payroll.”

Treir suddenly smiled broadly, which unnerved Quark. “Oh, he’ll do better than that,” she said. “And the two of us together will do muchbetter than that.” Quark wondered if Treir and Hetik might be planning something other than simply trying to draw more dabo players into the bar. He doubted it, but he also resolved to keep his ears open.

“Well, why don’t you two drum up some business right now,” he offered sarcastically. “We could use it.”

“Sure,” Treir said, nodding.

“Oh, and I’ll draw up a contract for our little agreement,” he told her.

“I’m sure you will,” Treir said, and she headed for the dabo table.

Quark watched her go, confident that he had just made himself some easy latinum, Still, it brought him little joy. He peered down at the floor, then bent and retrieved the rag he had thrown down. He tossed it on the recycle shelf, beside a couple of short glasses and a tall, slender blue bottle. Then he found an unused rag beneath the bar and resumed his cleaning.

“Hey, Mr. Quark, long time no see.” Vic Fontaine had finished singing for the night, and as the lights came up in the nightclub, he descended the steps at the right-hand side of the stage. Quark sat alone at a table in the space between there and the bar, one elbow up, the side of his face resting on his closed hand. “So what’s doin’?” Vic asked as he passed by, no doubt headed to get a drink. Quark might not have visited this holosuite program in a while, but he had spent enough time in it to know that the singer liked to imbibe after his last set.

“You don’t want to know,” Quark intoned, answering—and not answering—Vic’s question. He watched as the musicians on the stage packed up their instruments. One of the men seemed to be having some difficulties getting his curved, gold-colored horn into its black case.

“Oh no?” Vic said. Quark glanced over and saw him perched on the edge of a stool, a quick nod of his head getting the attention of an older, gray-haired man tending bar. “Vodka and tonic, rocks,” Vic ordered. Then, looking over at Quark, he asked, “Somethin’ to drink?”

Quark shrugged. He was about to say no, but then decided otherwise. “I’ll just have a snail juice,” he said.

“Snail juice, right,” Vic said, shaking his head as he motioned again to the bartender. Quark peered back at the stage and saw that the horn player had managed to wrestle his instrument into its case. All packed up, the musicians started to leave, most going backstage, but a couple descending onto the floor and heading out the front entrance. A moment later, Vic stepped up to the table and set a short, frosted glass down in front of Quark. “So, you mind?” he asked, gesturing to the chair on the other side of the table.

“Sure, why not?” Quark said. Vic put his own drink down with a thud softened by the white tablecloth. Then he sat himself down.

“So, I don’t wanna know what’s doin’ with you?” he asked. “Or you don’t wanna tell me?”

“Believe me,” Quark said, “it’s not very interesting, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.” He lifted his face from atop his hand, then dropped his arm onto the table and wrapped his fingers around his drink. The glass felt cooler than he usually liked his snail juice, but then, why should he ever expect to get what he wanted?

“Hey, you don’t wanna sing, that’s fine with me,” Vic said. “I been doin’ it all night.”

“I heard. Well, at least the last few songs,” Quark said. He had come up to the holosuite after he had closed the bar. He had been surprised to see so few holographic patrons in the club. My business is so bad,Quark had mused, it extends all the way to Las Vegas in 1962.Now, to Vic, he said, “You sounded good.” Quark actually enjoyed the hew-monmusic that Vic sang, though it really did not sound very hew-mon;the music seemed too…sophisticated to be of Earth origin. In fact, Quark would not have been surprised if he found out that hew-monshad appropriated the style from some other people on some other world that they had assimilated into the Federation. They were worse than the Borg.

“Thanks for sayin’ so,” Vic said. “With ears like those—” He pointed his chin in the direction of Quark’s lobes “—that means a lot.”

“Don’t mention it.” Quark picked up his drink and absently moved it around in a tight circle, swirling the snail juice around. He heard the shells ticking along the sides of the glass.

Vic lifted his own glass and took a healthy swallow. “So,” he said, lowering the drink back to the table, “how’s business?”

In an annoyed monotone, Quark said, “Don’t mention that either.” He plunked his glass down and slumped in his chair.

“Uh-oh. Trouble at the till?”

“Trouble everywhere,” Quark lamented, and he complained about Treir.

“Treir,” Vic mused. “She’s the green one?”

“Yes,” Quark said. “How did you know?” He was certain the Orion woman had never used this holoprogram.

“It’s amazin’ what you can learn cooped up in a memory buffer,” Vic explained. “I’ll tell you what, though. You twenty-fourth-century types are more colorful than the strip at night. It’s fabulous.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t care what color she is,” Quark moaned, “she’s been causing me grief.” He told Vic about what she had done today, and about how she continued to behave like his business partner rather than his employee.

“Hmmm. Seems to me that if a farmer puts a fox in charge of guardin’ the henhouse,” Vic said, “and then the fox eats the hens, well, it ain’t the fox’s fault.”

It took a moment for Quark to decipher Vic’s words. “You’re saying it’s my fault?” he asked.

“Hey, pallie, I don’t know, I’m not there,” Vic said. “I’m just sayin’.”

“Well, stop saying,” Quark told him. “Besides, I’ve got a lot more problems than just Treir. Things haven’t been the same since the war, I’ve got monsters chasing away the few customers I do have, and romance is dead.”

“Hey, I know somethin’ about the effects of war, and all you can do is ride it out,” Vic said. “Now, I don’t know from monsters, but I can tell you that not only isn’t romance dead, it ain’t even sick.”

“Maybe not in Las Vegas,” Quark muttered. He lifted his glass again.

“Not in Vegas, and not on that floatin’ bicycle wheel of yours. Not anywhere, at any time,” Vic maintained. “Look, if a lonely, little-lobed lightbulb like me can get the girls, what does that say about a big-eared, smartly dressed guy like you?”

“These lobes aren’t what they used to be,” Quark said. He raised his glass and took a swig—and gagged, and then spit the mouthful of whatever it was out in a spray, just missing Vic. Quark managed to get the glass back onto the table, half its contents spilling out. Around his coughs, he managed to say, “That’s…not…snail juice.”

“Mr. Quark,” Vic said, leaning one arm onto the table, “this is1962. If there’s somebody somewhere on Earth drinkin’ liquefied snails, I don’t know about it, and I don’t wanna know about it.”

“What is that?” Quark asked, wiping his mouth. The vile drink had combined an unbearable iciness with some harsh and unidentifiable taste.

Vic held up his glass. “Same as I’m drinkin’,” he said. “Vodka and tonic.”

“It’s awful,” Quark said, wiping his mouth with the flat of his hand. “The next time—”

The comm signal sounded, two short, low tones. “Incoming message for Quark,”the computer announced. Quark had set up the holosuite comm system tonight so that nobody could get directly through to him. He had thought that Treir might want to talk, might want to try to get him to change his mind about their agreement. But he had decided that he did not wish to be disturbed.

“Whoever it is, tell them I’m busy,” Quark said. But then it occurred to him that maybe Ro was trying to contact him, and as unlikely as that seemed, he could not help finding out. “Wait,” he told the computer. “Who is it?”

“The message is from Lieutenant Ro,”the computer responded.

Quark felt his heart begin thudding wildly in his chest. His lobes tingled. “Computer, put the message through,” he said, sitting up in his chair.

Laren’s voice rang through the comm system. “Lieutenant Ro to Quark,”she said simply.

“This is Quark.” He looked over at Vic, but the hologram was gazing off toward the bar.

“Quark, I’m sorry to bother you while you’re in the holosuite,”she said. “I stopped by the bar, but you’d already closed up.”She paused, and then said, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not at all,” Quark said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I just got off duty—”That surprised Quark; it was late. “—and I don’t really feel like going to sleep, so…I guess I was just looking for some company.”

Quark could not believe it. He felt his mouth drop open, and he quickly closed it, folding his lips around his teeth. “Uh, all right,” he said. “Where are you?”

“In my office.”

“All right,” he told her. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” That would give him enough time to stop in the bar and put on some cologne.

“Great,”she said. “Ro out.”The com channel closed.

Quark peered over at Vic again, who still pretended that his attention was elsewhere. “Well,” Quark said, standing up, “nice talking to you.”

Vic looked over at him. “Always a pleasure,” he said. Quark headed for the door. Behind him, he heard Vic say, “I guess romance isn’t dead on the ol’ wheel after all.” Quark did not bother to stop or look back. But he did smile.

Quark strolled with Ro in the dim, nighttime illumination of Deep Space 9. They walked through one of the crossover bridges and headed from the docking ring toward the habitat ring. It had been more than two hours since he had met Ro in her office, and they had been meandering about the station and talking ever since. They had both admitted to being tired and to having had a difficult couple of days—Quark had actually claimed more than merely a couple—but their time together had been comfortable and filled with laughter. Quark realized that their senses of humor—rooted in their similarly sarcastic sensibilities—meshed well.

“So then what happened?” Ro asked, carrying on their conversation.

“Well, then I signed aboard a freighter—” he began.

“Wait a minute,” Ro said. “What about the apprenticeship with the district subnagus?”

“I decided to leave that,” Quark said.

“All right,” Ro said, stopping in the corridor and turning toward him. Quark stopped as well. As he faced her, he saw the arc of the docking ring through the windows, the stars shining brightly beyond the station. Ro playfully jabbed a finger in his direction, and said, “You’re not telling me everything.”

With a raffish tilt of his head and a lowering of his voice, Quark said, “What are you going to do, Security Chief? Interrogate me?”

Ro opened her mouth in a smile. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Quark smiled back at her. “I believe I would,” he said.

Ro shook her head and rolled her eyes, then started walking again. Quark followed along, catching up to her in a couple of steps. Just up ahead, he saw, stood the closed set of doors that separated the crossover bridge from the habitat ring. “So,” Ro said, “are you going to tell me why you left the apprenticeship?”

“Ah…the subnagus requested that I leave,” Quark told her.

“‘Requested’?” she asked skeptically.

“Well, he suggested…he told me to leave,” Quark offered. “Ordered me, really.”

“Ordered, huh?” Ro asked, pronouncing her words slowly and melodramatically. Quark got the sense that she suspected what he was going to say, or at least the type of thing that he was going to say, and that she now played up her end of the dialogue for effect. “And why would the subnagus order you out of your apprenticeship if he regarded you so highly?”

“I was…well, I was also highly regarded by his sister,” Quark admitted, pretending to be abashed.

They arrived at the doors to the habitat ring, which opened before them. They stepped through, and Ro stopped again. “Quark, you rake,”she said, a wide smile on her face. She reached out and pushed at the front of his shoulder with the tips of her fingers.

“Now, can I help it if females find me attractive?” he said.

“No, I guess you can’t.”

They stood there for a moment, and then Quark held his hands out, one in each direction. “Which way do we go now?” he asked.

Ro looked both ways down the corridor, then moved up to a companel set into the bulkhead opposite the doors. She touched the panel, and said, “Computer, what time is it?”

“The time is zero-three-fifty-three hours.”

Ro’s eyes widened. “Is that right?” she asked Quark.

“I think so,” he told her. “We’ve been walking for quite a while.”

“I really need to get some sleep,” she said. “It’s been a long couple of days, and the next few aren’t going to be any shorter or easier.”

“Aren’t you down this way?” Quark asked, pointing his thumb back over his shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, “and I won’t even ask how or why you know that.”

“Are you kidding?” Quark said as they headed in that direction. “A new chief of security is appointed to the station, and I’m not going to know where they live? Please.”

Ro chuckled. “What was I thinking?” she said.

When they reached her quarters a few minutes later, Ro opened the door and stepped inside. Quark discreetly remained in the corridor. “Thank you for the company,” Ro said.

“Thank you,” Quark said. “I enjoyed it.”

“I did too.”

There was a brief pause as they stood there, and the notion of moving forward and kissing Ro shot through Quark’s mind at warp speed. Instead, he simply said, “Good night, Laren.”

“Good night,” she said, and then, before he could turn away, “May I ask you a question, Quark?”

“The answer is yes,”he said at once. Her lips formed into a smile again, as lovely a sight as Quark thought he had ever seen.

“You haven’t even heard the question yet,” she said.

“I trust you,” he told her.

“Well, don’t,” she said. “You may not like this question.”

Quark did not like the sound of that statement. “Go ahead,” he said anyway.

“Do you think…do you think that women like the cologne you’re wearing?”

Quark felt immediately embarrassed. “Not anymore,” he said.

Ro must have sensed his humiliation, because she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I mean, you obviously like it, and I’m sure that Ferengi women must like it too.”

“It’s very popular on Ferenginar,” Quark confirmed.

“I’m sorry,” Ro went on. “It’s just…I thought you’d want to know.”

Quark was astounded. Why would he want to know that he smelled bad to a female he liked? Except that, if she had not told him, he realized, then he would have continued to smell bad to her. This way—

“It’s all right,” he told her, and meant it. By telling him that she did not like his cologne, she had actually shown him both respect and trust. “I appreciate you saying something to me. The last thing I want to do is repel you.”

“Oh, well, even without the cologne,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm, “you still repel me.”

Quark nodded. “You repel me too.”

“Good night, Quark.”

“Good night, Laren.”

On the way back to his own quarters, Quark twice jumped up and clicked his heels.