Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 36 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

58

“I’m an idiot,” Quark pronounced. The words filled the almost empty room. Quark looked around and saw the few other people here glancing in his direction. He ignored them, and turned back to the person across the table from him.

“Hey, you’d know about that better’n I would,” Vic said, shrugging. The holographic singer returned his attention to his holographic breakfast. Quark peered over at his plate, then quickly looked away; the notion of eating flaky, dried-up grain fragments immersed in cow’s milk, even when the concoction was made out of photons and force fields, turned his stomach.

Hew-mons,Quark thought, but even as he did so, he knew that his revulsion was misplaced. Nothing and nobody disgusted him right now more than himself. “Yeah, well, trust me,” he told Vic. “I’m even more of an idiot right now than my simpleton brother.”

Vic lifted a flute of a bright orange liquid that looked quite a bit like pooncheenee,though without the reddish tint. Quark knew that the drink could not have been the Bajoran beverage, since this holoprogram ran period-specific. “You mean your brother who’s now in charge of the whole shebang back home?” Vic sipped at his drink, then set it back down.

“Not to mention ruining the entire Ferengi economy,” Quark moaned. “Thanks for reminding me.”

Vic shook his head slowly as he chewed noisily on his breakfast. “So that’s why you’re upset?” Vic asked. “’Cause your brother’s wreckin’ the out-of-town books?”

“I’m upset,” Quark said, “because there’s something going on here on the station, and I don’t know anything about it.”

“Hey, you can’t know everything, right?” Vic said.

Quark leaned forward across the table. “If it happens on this station,” he intoned, “I make it my business to know about it.” He sat back in his chair. “And if there’s profit to be had, then I make it my business.”

Vic threw one hand in the air. “So you don’t know about this one,” he said. “You find out about the next one. No big thing. It’s just business.”

“‘Justbusiness’?” Quark repeated, appalled at the combination of the two words. “You don’t understand. I’m not just a businessman; I’m a Ferengibusinessman. Business is my life.”

“Yeah, I know that’s what you say,” Vic offered.

“I’m not just saying it,” Quark told him. “Business ismy life.”

Vic nodded and smiled in a way that made Quark uncomfortable. “Hey, pallie, whatever you wanna believe is fine with me.”

“I don’t just believe it,” Quark maintained. “It’s true.”

“Okay, okay, who’s arguin’?” Vic scooped up the last bit of his breakfast and shoveled it into his mouth.

“You are,” Quark said.

“Look,” Vic said. He set his spoon down in his empty bowl with a clink. “You say business is your life. I just see somethin’ different, is all. Since I’ve been back in business here at the hotel, how many times have you and Julian been in here cryin’ in your beer about one dame or another? First it was Jadzia, then it was Ezri, and then the green one. I’m tellin’ you, you can’t figure the players without a scorecard. I know the doc and Ezri have a thing now, but you…you’re still in here mopin’.”

Quark shrugged and offered a sly smile. “I like females,” he said, feeling somewhat sheepish. “I can’t help that.”

“Course not,” Vic said. “I have a fondness for ’em myself. But didn’t somebody once say that dames and dough don’t mix?” Vic’s words sounded remarkably similar to the 94th Rule of Acquisition.

“All right, so I have a weakness,” Quark allowed. “That doesn’t mean business isn’t my life.”

Vic raised his glass and downed the last of his drink. “That’s right,” he said. “Except, what about this?” He put his glass down on the table, then spread his hands out, gesturing at their surroundings.

Quark looked around. “What about what?”

“I don’t wanna bite the hand that feeds me,” Vic said, “but you’re lettin’this light show run twenty-six hours a day. I know we get our fair share of traffic in here from that floatin’ bicycle wheel of yours, but not that much.”

“I like this place,” Quark said meekly, recognizing the truth of what Vic had said.

“Hey, and that’s great,” Vic told him. He picked up his empty glass and held it up, gesturing toward the bar. “Believe me, I’m happy about that. It just doesn’t make the best business sense for a guy who claims business is the most important thing in his life. Plus…” He set his glass back down.

“Plus what?” Quark asked.

“Didn’t you risk your life to rescue your mother from a bunch of bad guys who snatched her?” Vic said. “I mean, that’s great. She’s your mom and you gotta do what you gotta do. But you said business is your life, and that ain’t exactly business.”

Quark nodded, wondering exactly how Vic had learned about Ishka’s kidnapping by the Dominion. “My mother…she had the Grand Nagus’s ear—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Vic interrupted, obviously not putting much stock in Quark’s purported justification for his actions. “Didn’t you also risk your life helping the Feds take this place back from the bad guys?”

“Better customers,” Quark said at once. “The Federation and the Bajorans make better customers than the Dominion and the Cardassians.” But even Quark did not believe that excuse for what he had done.

A young woman with long red hair and a short skirt appeared at the table, carrying a tray with two bottles on it. “Here ya are, boss,” she said, setting the tray down. She poured first from the champagne bottle, and then from the clear, squarish bottle of orange liquid. Vic sipped at the drink while she loaded his empty bowl onto the tray.

“Thanks, doll,” Vic said. After she had gone, he looked back over at Quark. “What about all those stories about you runnin’ food and medicine to the Bajorans back when the bad guys ran the show?”

Quark felt an unpleasant chill buzz through the ridges along the tops of his ears. “That was at cost,” he protested, perhaps a bit too loudly. Trying to settle himself back down, he said in a quieter tone, “That was also a business decision.” He repeated his contention that Bajorans made better customers than Cardassians.

Vic seemed to consider him for a moment, and then he leaned forward across the table. In a low voice, the singer said, “I know that’s what you say, pallie, but you probably don’t realize that there are still some facts and figures from way back when rootin’ around inside these walls.”

“What?” Quark said. The idea that the station’s computer system still retained records of his Occupation-era transactions made his lobes go completely cold. “That’s all speculation,” Quark insisted, understanding that Vic knew otherwise. “I don’t want to hear that outside of this room.”

Vic raised his hands up in front of him, palms toward Quark. “Hey, nobody’ll hear it from me.”

Quark looked away, uncomfortable with where this conversation had gone, but at the same time wanting to hear the rest of what this hologram had to say. “What’s your point, anyway?” he asked.

“My point is, you’re always in here claimin’ to have this ideal of the Ferengi businessman that you wanna live up to, and yet you’re always doin’ somethin’ to mess that up.”

“Exactly,” Quark said. “So I’m an idiot.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Vic said. “Or maybe this image they gave you as a kid and that you’re always tryin’ to fulfill, maybe that’s not really what you want out of life.”

Quark reached up with both hands and rubbed at the bottoms of his lobes. His ears had gone numb. Me, not wanting to be a businessman?he thought, incredulous at the suggestion. Not wanting to be aFerengi businessman?The idea seemed preposterous on its face.

“Or maybe you just don’t know how to deal with gettin’ what you want,” Vic went on. “I knew a guy once who wanted more than anything to be a Major League baseball player.”

Baseball,Quark thought. Sisko’s game.

“This guy didn’t have all that much natural ability,” Vic continued, “but he worked his tail off to get through the farm system and make it to the bigs.” Quark had no idea what farms had to do with baseball, but then he had always been mystified by the sport. “So what does he do when he gets there? Drinks like a fish, carouses till dawn, stuff he’d never done before in his life.”

“Why?” Quark asked.

“Who knows why,” Vic said. “But he makes it to the Majors, and he’s only there for a cup of coffee before they ship him back down. Never makes it back up. So he got what he said he really wanted, and he threw it away as soon as he got it. So maybe he didn’t really want it, or maybe he didn’t know what to do with it once he did get it.”

Quark sat quietly for a moment, taking in what Vic had said. The words bothered him, and not because they were untrue. But he also did not know if he had the strength to face them. Finally, he said, “So what’s all that got to do with me?”

Vic tilted his head to the side and smiled. “Mr. Quark,” he said, “you’re not an idiot.” He paused, and then said, “You want to know what I think? I think business isn’t the only thing you’re worried about messin’ up these days.”

“What do you mean?” Quark asked, although he supposed he already knew the answer.

“What do I mean,” Vic said. “Black hair, nice figure, wrinkled nose…”

“Laren,” Quark said, his heart changing its beat at just the thought of her.

“Laren,” Vic agreed.

“I messed that up.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.” Vic grabbed his drink and drained it in one quick pull.

Quark grunted. “She probably wasn’t interested anyway.”

“I got news for you, pallie,” Vic said. He put his empty glass back on the table, then stood up. “The dame digs you.”

“You spoke to her?” Quark asked.

“Didn’t need to,” Vic said. He dug into his pocket and came out with a handful of green bills. He selected several and dropped them onto the table. “I heard her voice when she called you in here a couple nights ago. She’s got it for you.”

Quark’s heart pounded wildly in his chest. He stared up at Vic, unable to say anything.

“Look, Mr. Quark,” Vic said. “I hate to eat ’n’ run, but I gotta interview some comics this morning. I still haven’t found that opening act I’ve been lookin’ for.”

“That’s all right,” Quark said.

Vic smiled again. “Catch you on the flip side, pallie.” He walked across the room and climbed the stairs to the stage, then disappeared behind the curtain.

“Catch you on the flip side,” Quark muttered, having no idea what the words meant. But he understood the rest of what Vic had tried to tell him.

59

Vaughn’s footsteps echoed loudly in the dark corridor. The air here tasted stale, as though it had lain dormant in these buildings for centuries. He did not smell death here, though, only abandonment.

He marched along, his boots kicking up the thick layer of dust that coated the floor. Little galaxies of particles spun through the beam of his beacon. He consulted his tricorder as he walked. This near the site of the pulse and its massive energy, the reach of the tricorder had dwindled to less than two hundred meters, but as Vaughn had hoped, the sensors did function well within that limited range. Now all he had to do was get close enough to the center of the complex to scan the area, then somehow use that information to determine a means of stopping the pulse.

Yeah,Vaughn thought, that’s all.He laughed, the sound briefly joining his footfalls as they reverberated through the corridor. A doorway stood open in the left wall, and he shined his beacon through it as he passed, interested only in confirming that it was a room, not another corridor.

Vaughn had moved through the complex for almost an hour now, steadily making his way toward its center. Doors had lined most of the corridors through which he had walked, some of them closed, some of them—like the last one—wide open. He had earlier searched some of the rooms, looking for information or tools or anything else that might ultimately aid him in completing his mission here. But all he had found had been more of what he had seen yesterday back in the city: computers, communications equipment, and circuitry junctions. Scans had revealed that the machinery populated many of the rooms here, but also traveled through the walls and beneath the floors. None of it remained active.

Vaughn reached an intersection. A corridor extended to both his left and right, and the one he was in continued ahead. He shined his beacon in all three directions and saw nothing. He performed another scan, making sure that the center of the complex still lay ahead, then strode forward.

Back in the city, Vaughn had speculated that technology had somehow played a part in the extinction of the civilization here. Whether that was true or not, though, he thought that he had begun to see the mechanism by which the inhabitants of this world might have come to their ends. Vaughn had spent yesterday being visited by specters of his past that had evoked brutal feelings of loss and abandonment in him, and his emotions had reeled. If that same sort of thing had happened to the people here, but continuously, if they had been faced each day of their lives with such horrible feelings, then perhaps that had driven them to their destruction. Vaughn did not doubt that living day after day with a freshsense of loss would have been unbearable.

A shape appeared up ahead in the light of his beacon: an empty chair. As Vaughn approached it, he found the sight of it eerie, an apt symbol for this empty world. This place is haunted,he thought in a melodramatic and uncharacteristic manner, and he realized just how fragile his emotional state had become. He passed the chair and walked on.

The suggestion of ghosts, though, brought him quickly back to the middle of last night…to seeing his mother, hearing again those terrible words, and feeling once more the desperate grief and loss he had first felt as a boy. He had awoken this morning at the first gray light of day, only marginally rested from the interrupted and uneasy sleep he had gotten. Recollections of his dreams lurked vaguely beyond the outskirts of his consciousness, and he had the strange impression that he had dreamed the dreams of others—including those of Prynn and ch’Thane. He also had the sense that he had dreamed of the people who had once lived on this planet, and also, oddly enough, of Ezri Dax. But his first thoughts upon waking had not been of his dreams, or of his encounter with his mother, but of his daughter, and his hope that he would not fail her—would not leave her—again.

Vaughn had padded back to where he had first lain down to sleep last night, and had found almost everything where he had left it. His bedroll and blanket had been there, his food and water, his coat, tricorder, and beacon; he had taken only the latter three objects with him for his foray into the complex. Even the circle of stones had been there, the ashes of a dead fire blackening the ground around which they sat. Only his mother had been missing, a fact for which he had been grateful. He had examined the dirt around the circle of stones, and seen footprints leading away from the camp and back along the direction he had taken to get here.

Maybe she went to join Captain Harriman,Vaughn thought now, bitterly. He had not been on this world long, but he had come to despise it. The intensity of his feelings shocked him, and he tried to push them aside.

Up ahead, the corridor dead-ended against another. Vaughn saw a patch of light on the wall facing him, light not thrown there by his beacon. He stopped—the echoes of his boots diminishing quickly—and switched the beacon off. The darkness within the complex had faded to a dull illumination he recognized too well: the outside light of this shrouded planet. And he perceived something else besides the light: the high-pitched wail at the bounds of his hearing. It sounded louder here, stronger, which did not surprise him.

Leaving his beacon off, Vaughn continued down the corridor. At the intersection, he consulted his tricorder, then proceeded to the left. The light grew brighter, and he walked on until he reached another intersection. He turned again, right this time, following the light. Twenty meters ahead of him, the corridor ended in a tangle of building materials. Past a heap of metal and stone, he could see patches of the dark gray mass that stood at the center of the complex: the source of the pulse.

As Vaughn walked forward, he noticed a heavy curtain of dust hanging in the air, dust that he had not stirred up from the floor. He scanned the air. The dust was primarily composed of traces of stone, sand, and lime, along with some metallic particulates; he concluded that it was the residue of the building collapse up ahead, which must not have happened too long ago. He guessed that this part of the complex had come down during or after the last pulse.

Vaughn stopped at the pile of debris and studied it. It stood close to two meters tall at most points, though lower on the left side and higher on the right. On the left, though, a metal beam hung from the fallen ceiling all the way down to the floor. If he could squeeze past it, he would probably be able to get over the rubble there.

Vaughn set the beacon down, then closed his tricorder and secured it in a coat pocket, fastening a flap across it. Reaching up, he tested the stability of the metal beam; it seemed wedged in place. He ducked down and slowly pushed his body through the space between the wall and the beam, actually making it through without much effort. Just as carefully, he stepped over the debris. He dislodged a few pieces of broken building materials, but quickly got past the heap.

The place where the pulse had been generated stretched before him, a great, dark circle that could have been a reflection of the sky above it. The surface of the circle, perhaps a hundred meters across, roiled and spun, a gray vortex that descended from its edges to a low point at its center. All around the perimeter, the complex had caved in—either blasted by the pulse, Vaughn supposed, or falling in as the zone of energy had expanded over time, loosing the foundations of the buildings. A fine, gray mist hung in the air here, like a thin fog over a lake at dawn.

Vaughn pulled out his tricorder and scanned the vortex. The readings of its surface corresponded to those of the cloud cover, although the vortex was much more powerful. At the center point, sensor readings broke down. Vaughn ran a diagnostic, verifying the accuracy of the aberrant scan. The readings resembled those of a singularity, he noted, with significant distortions in the space-time continuum there, although he saw no compression of matter and no extreme gravitational force. Vaughn adjusted the tricorder several times, attempting to circumvent the conditions, but he could take no better scans.

Finally, he checked the amount of energy that had built up in the vortex, and the rate at which it was now changing. Both measures reached slightly higher than had been predicted by the crew’s extrapolations of the probe’s data. If Vaughn had harbored any scant hopes that he would reach this place and find the threat to the Vahni Vahltupali gone, or even delayed, those hopes now vanished.

Based on the tricorder readings, another pulse would surge from the vortex in less than four hours.

60

Prynn’s emotions seemed heightened today, as though whatever dreams had visited her during the night had somehow made her miss her father more. As she and Shar had worked throughout the morning, she had continually had to force herself to concentrate on what she had been doing. Even now, as they set to complete their final test, her mind drifted to her father, and to the image of him walking away from the camp.

Prynn shook her head, as though the movement could shake the picture in her mind loose. She refocused her attention on the tricorder in her hand, reached forward, and pressed a control. In an instant, white motes appeared before her eyes, and her surroundings faded from view.

She materialized one hundred meters from Chaffee’s aft section. She peered back at that portion of the wreckage, and just to the left of it, where Shar lay. She reached to the outside of her forearm, where the controls of her environmental suit’s comm system were set. She switched it on, and said, “Tenmei to ch’Thane.”

“I read you.”Shar’s voice sounded tinny in her helmet, with a slight reverb.

“All right,” she said. “I’m going to check the equipment.”

Prynn turned to her left. On the ground there sat the mass of machinery she had patched together. Two circuitry modules, each about the size of her torso, sat beside each other. Bundles of fiberoptic lines emerged from each in several places, some routing back into the same module, some into the other one. Isolinear optical chips jutted out all across the upper surfaces, sitting amid numerous other components. The tangled collection of technology looked to Prynn like the wreckage of the shuttle itself—twisted, broken, beyond repair—but the modules actually composed the second rudimentary transporter that she had pieced together.

That, along with the environmental suits,she thought. When she and Shar had awoken this morning, she had used the first makeshift transporter to beam him to Chaffee’s aft section; with Shar’s leg so badly broken, neither one of them had wanted to risk moving him any other way. The two had then worked on the plan they had devised last night, with Shar attempting to repair another power cell and to finish rigging the environmental suits, and Prynn trying to improvise a second transporter. Both had been successful.

Now Prynn set her tricorder to sensor mode. She scanned the extemporized transporter machinery, then executed a diagnostic of it. When she had finished, she told Shar, “The equipment looks good. I’m going to beam you over now.”

“Acknowledged,”Shar said.

Prynn reset the tricorder to function as a control interface for the transporter, then energized the unit. She lifted her gaze from the display just in time to see the fading sparkle of dematerialization where Shar had been. Several meters in front of her, the white streaks of light reappeared, depositing both Shar and the other heap of transporter machinery on the ground. Shar lay on his back, also clad in an environmental suit.

“You did it,”he told her, the thin sound of his voice still echoing slightly inside her helmet.

“Wedid it,” she said, knowing that Shar’s part in their accomplishment could not be understated. Despite the painkillers and medication she had given him, his injuries still left him uncomfortable and weak. She found it remarkable that he had been able to concentrate long enough to do the detailed work he had done this morning. “How’s your leg?” she asked him now. The process of getting him into an environmental suit had been an arduous one, and even with the anesthetics, she knew, it had been painful for him.

“I’m all right,”Shar said.

Prynn nodded, a movement that felt awkward in the confines of her helmet. “Okay,” she said. Shar was far from all right, she knew, but she respected his desire to forge ahead in their mission. “I guess we should get started then.” They had decided to “skip-transport”—as they had begun referring to it—toward the site of the pulse. Failing that, they would do what Vaughn had ordered: they would use the transporters to get as far away as possible. Although the use of the environmental suits as pattern enhancers had doubled the ranges of the transporters in both directions, they suspected that the amount of interference from the energy at the site would prevent them from getting all that close to it. They could not really know that, though, until they attempted it. They also had no way of knowing whether her father had been able to reach the site by now, and so she and Shar might actually be the last hope for the Vahni. Of course, if they could even get to the location, there remained the matter of just what they could do to—

An electronic thrum interrupted Prynn’s thoughts, and she thought at first that it might be feedback in her suit’s comm system. She raised her forearm up so that she could see and work the controls there, but as she did, she saw Shar point upward. “Look,”he said. Prynn tilted her head back, the movement clumsy because of her helmet. She reached up and unlocked the seals, then twisted the helmet to release it. As she pulled it off, the foreign sound increased in volume. She peered skyward.

Above, an object descended toward them. With only the churning clouds as a backdrop, Prynn could not immediately tell its size. But as it drew closer, she recognized the shape. It looked like a quantum torpedo.

Prynn stood over the object, a sense of optimism growing within her for the first time since the crash. She had set to the tasks she had taken on with determination, but she understood now that, even with the successes she and Shar had managed with the transporters, she had never really believed that they or her father would be able to stop the pulse—or that they would be able to escape this place. Normally confident that she could accomplish anything, solve any problem, she was surprised to realize that she had lacked that confidence for the past few days.

The object had soft-landed five meters from where she and Shar had been with their improvised transporter equipment. It sat lengthwise on the ground, about a half-meter tall, a meter wide, and three meters long. White letters and numbers in Federation Standard marked the black casing in several locations, identifying it as one of Defiant’s probes. A gouge penetrated one end of the outer shell, the edges of the gash seared, as though made by an energy weapon.

Prynn bent and released the locks in the probe’s casing, then lifted the upper section of it open. Shar had removed his helmet, and she narrated for him what she saw. She could identify the guidance and propulsion systems—which seemed to have taken some damage from whatever had sliced through the outer casing—but where she would have expected sensor equipment, she saw only two small modules, surrounded by a pair of bags that held caches of unfamiliar objects twice as large as her fist. In the center of the probe sat a rectangular container with three words printed on it: VAUGHN CH’THANE TENMEI.

Prynn pulled out the container and opened it. Inside, she found a padd. She carried it back to where Shar still lay on the ground, and sat down beside him. Together, they listened to Lieutenant Dax and Lieutenant Nog describe what the crew of Defianthad learned about the pulse, and the solution they had devised to stop it. Prynn could not interpret the movements of Shar’s antennae, but if they expressed emotion, then she guessed that they displayed excitement right now; that was how she felt.

“We have to get the explosives to the site,” she said when the messages had finished. She wondered whether they should attempt to skip-transport them to the source of the pulse, but Shar answered the question before she even asked it.

“With these type of devices, designed to shift into subspace and other dimensions, I wouldn’t recommended transporting them,” he said. “The phase change could detonate them.”

“All right. Then we’ll have to get the probe back in the air,” she said. “We’ll just have to hope that Commander Vaughn has reached the site, or that we can beam there ourselves.”

Prynn walked back to the probe and found the control interface for the guidance system. Reviewing the settings, she saw that the Defiantcrew had programmed the remaining sensors to scan for human and Andorian life signs, and if unable to find any, then to scan for the energy interference at the source of the pulse. She added a command now to ignore the present location, then set the probe to lift off in one minute. She quickly loaded the container with the padd back inside, then closed and locked the upper casing.

She rejoined Shar, and the two of them waited for the probe to launch. A minute passed, but nothing happened. Prynn used her tricorder to scan the probe, and found that all of its systems had gone dead. Immediately, her optimism faded.

“What happened?” Shar asked.

“I don’t know,” Prynn said. “It’s completely lost power.” She returned to the probe and reopened the upper casing. She examined the guidance and propulsion systems. Whatever had penetrated the outer casing had damaged the probe’s power cell. She imagined a lance of energy spiking down from the clouds, like the one that had doomed the shuttle. The cell had obviously functioned until the probe had reached them, but the greater power requirements for a liftoff had apparently overloaded it. Prynn knew at once what they would have to do, and when she told Shar, he agreed.

Twenty minutes later, she had replaced the failed power cell in the probe with one of their own. She ran some quick diagnostics, then set the probe to launch. This time, it lifted off and headed away.

Sitting beside Shar on the ground, Prynn watched the probe fade out of sight. She searched within her for her optimism but found it difficult to find now. She knew that she and Shar were essentially back where they had been last night, although the environmental suits now doubled the distances they could transport. With only one power cell, though, they would be able to beam away from here just once, either fourteen kilometers toward the site of the pulse, or three hundred fifty kilometers in the opposite direction.

Either way,she thought, it won’t make much difference.Either her father would be able to stop the pulse, or he would not. All she and Shar could really do right now was wait…and hope.