Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

61

Ro stepped out of the turbolift and started down the Promenade. She weaved through the people, paying them little attention other than to be sure she did not run into anybody. She had just come from Kira’s office, where she had briefed the colonel on the station’s security status. Now Ro headed back to her own office, where she would continue to coordinate her teams. To this point, all of the procedures and precautions they had put in place for the summit had worked well and without incident.

As she passed the bar, she withstood her inclination to peer inside. She was still angry with Quark for the way he had acted yesterday. They had been having such nice times together recently, and their late-night stroll through the station two nights ago had been tremendously enjoyable—and even, maybe, just a little bit romantic. She and Quark had really taken a liking to each other—or at least, so she had thought.

Ro had not minded Quark’s flirtation with Treir when she had first entered the bar. Ro could be something of a flirt herself sometimes. What had made her angry, though, was that he had continued flirting with Treir at the same time that he had ignored her.

Except that you weren’t really angry, were you?she asked herself as she approached her office. She had actually been hurt by what had happened. Of course, what difference does it make anyway?she thought. The summit had started this morning, and if Bajor ended up entering the Federation, she likely would not be here much longer.

The doors to her office separated and slid open, and as soon as she walked inside, she saw Quark. He stood between the two chairs in front of her desk, apparently waiting for her. He turned, and began speaking as soon as he saw her. “Laren,” he said quickly, “I want to apologize for my behavior yesterday in the bar. I don’t really know what—”

“Quark,” she interrupted, striding across the room and moving behind her desk. She heard the office doors click closed. “I really don’t have time for this right now.” She sat down in her chair and studied a display. The harshness in her tone and manner carried with it not just her disappointment in Quark, she realized, but also her concerns about her future.

Quark did not move. “Laren,” he said quietly. “I’d just like to speak with you for a minute, and then I promise I’ll go. You don’t even have to say anything.” He sounded desperate for her attention, but she also thought that she perceived a seriousness and sincerity in his words.

“All right,” she relented, her own voice still severe. “One minute.” She sat back in her chair, folded her arms across her chest, and stared up at him.

“All right,” Quark said, looking suddenly flustered. She thought that he had probably not expected to be allowed to plead his case to her. He dropped his gaze from hers. “I just…uh…I wanted to apologize for my behavior yesterday in the bar.”

“You already said that,” she told him, thinking that he had probably rehearsed that line before coming in here, but perhaps nothing more than that.

“I guess I did say that.” He tapped nervously on her desk with his fingertips, then seemed to realize what he was doing and stopped. He stepped away from the desk and started moving nervously about the room. “It’s just that I didn’t mean to do what I did…I mean, I didn’t…I was…”

“Quark,” Ro said, exasperated at his hesitation.

He stopped pacing and looked over at her. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I just wanted to apologize to you.”

“Well, you’ve done that,” she said, let down that Quark could not muster more than the few simple words that he had. “So go on your way.” She made a shooing gesture with one hand, then looked down at the display on her desk, although she did not actually read any of the words there. The office doors hummed opened again, and then closed. She sighed heavily and slumped back in her chair, peering after Quark.

Except that Quark had not left. He stood on this side of the doors, looking back at her. “Laren,” he said, “I’m sorry.” The desperation had left his voice now, replaced, she thought, with forthrightness. He walked back over to her desk, navigating between the two chairs. “The way I behaved with Treir—whether you had been there or not—was wrong,” he told her. “But it was especially wrong because I hurt your feelings.”

A swirl of emotions surged through Ro, not least among them, confusion. “Why, Quark?” she wanted to know. “Why did you act that way?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think it was out of fear.”

“Fear?” That answer did nothing to allay her confusion.

“I’ve been enjoying the time we’ve spent together lately,” Quark repeated. “And obviously you have, too…” He paused, and she realized that he was giving her the opportunity to agree with him.

“Maybe,” she said, and then, unable to stop herself, she smiled. Quark smiled back.

“So I think I got scared,” he said. “Scared that you might get to know me better and then not enjoy spending time with me. Or scared that…I don’t know…that I might actually get something I want.”

To Ro, that answer sounded suspiciously absurd. She leaned forward in her chair and rested her forearms on the top of the desk. “Yeah,” she said, “I can see how getting what you want could be pretty frightening.”

“Laren, I’m a Ferengi,” Quark said. “That means that my entire life has been about trying to get what I want.” He stopped and took a deep breath, as though bracing himself for something. “And for most of my life, I haven’t gotten it. So finally getting something I want, particularly something as valuable as…well, as you…it really is frightening.”

Ro looked into his eyes and saw only frankness there. She was moved by that openness and honesty, and by his appraisal of her– which she chose to take in the romantic sense she thought he had intended. “I’m not sure that I completely understand,” she said, “but thank you, Quark.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. He waited, and they simply looked at each other for a moment more without saying anything. She realized she was glad he’d come in here, and even more so that he’d said the things he had, in the way that he had.

If only—

Ro stopped her thought, not wanting to think about her unsure future right now, and not wanting her apprehensions to show on her face. Finally, Quark headed for the doors, but again, he did not make it far. He turned back to her. “Are you all right?” he asked, concern evident in his voice. His ability to read her mood so well surprised her, and also impressed her. They had just spent the last few minutes with him basically begging for her forgiveness and her giving it to him, and then him baring his soul, and yet he somehow perceived that something else entirely was bothering her. Still, she did not feel prepared to talk about it right now.

“I’m fine,” she said. Seeing doubt in Quark’s eyes, she added, “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“I see,” Quark said, but instead of leaving, he walked back over to her desk. “So, how’s the…uh, conference…going?” he asked.

“The conference, huh?” Ro said, aware that Quark knew nothing about the summit, other than the confluence of officials here at the station. But since Kira had just told her that the first minister would be announcing the meeting and the reason for it to the people of Bajor later today, Ro thought that it would do no harm to tell Quark about it now. “Actually,” she said, “they’re calling it a summit.”

“A summit?” Quark asked.

“Yes,” Ro said. “They’re meeting about the issue of Bajoran membership in the Federation. They’re supposedly going to decide one way or the other—” She stopped talking when she noticed an expression on Quark’s face of shock and even pain. For a moment, she thought that there might even be something wrong with him physically. “Quark, are you all right?”

“No,” he said, looking off to the side, as though in a daze. He moved in front of one of the chairs at her desk and dropped heavily into it. “No, I’m not.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked. He continued to stare off to one side. “Quark,” she said, beginning to grow concerned. At last, he looked over at her.

“Is it going to happen?” he wanted to know. “Is Bajor going to join the Federation?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why? What difference does it make to you?” She thought that maybe he had surmised her own situation, that since the Bajoran Militia would be rolled up into Starfleet she would be facing the end of her career, and therefore the end of her time on Deep Space 9.

“If Bajor joins the Federation,” he said, “then I really am ruined.”

“What?” she said, thinking that Quark was once again exaggerating. “Why would you—” But then she saw it. “The Federation has essentially a moneyless economy.”

“A moneyless economy,” Quark echoed, saying the words as though they had been laced with poison. “I won’t be able to make a living running the bar, because this will be completely a Federation facility, and so nobody will be paying.”

“I never thought of that…I’m sorry,” she said, her concern for her own situation now coupled with a concern for Quark. “What will you do?” she asked, a question she had been posing to herself for the last couple of days. “What were you going to do three years ago when Bajor was on the verge of joining?”

“Three years ago, I was a younger man,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that three years ago, I actually celebrated the prospect of Bajor’s admittance into the Federation,” Quark said. “I was going to stay in the bar and work the angles. Because the one thing that will happen when this becomes a Federation space station is that more ships will come here, and that’ll translate to more customers in the bar. More customers means more information, and more information means more opportunity. And as the 9th Rule of Acquisition states, opportunity plus instinct equals profit.”

Ro was not quite following Quark. “And you don’t have the instinct anymore?” she asked.

“I don’t know if I ever had it,” he said disgustedly. But then he seemed to rethink that, and said, “I’ve still got the instinct. But what I don’t have anymore is the drive. Not to run the bar without being able to make a sure living at it, not to wait for a piece of information here and there that would allow me to possibly make some small profit somewhere.” Ro did not say anything; she was not sure what to say. “I don’t know,” Quark went on. “I guess maybe the war had an effect on me.”

“It had an effect on all of us,” Ro offered.

“Yeah,” Quark agreed. Again, he looked off to the side, his gaze seeming to see something beyond the office. “When my nephew’s leg got shot off…I think maybe I’ve just realized that I value stability. Chasing profit based on gathering speculative information…you can make a killing, but there’s just so much uncertainty in it.” Quark looked back over at Ro. “I’ll tell you something, Laren,” he said in a voice so quiet that it was almost a whisper. “The bar’s not the most profitable it’s ever been right now, but—and don’t ever tell anybody I said this—that’s all right.”

“Because you have stability,” Ro said.

“Yes,” Quark said. “I’m not making much of a profit, but I am making a living.” He stood up from his chair, apparently preparing to leave. “I think I’ve known for a while now that, whenever Bajor did join the Federation, it would finally be time for me to move on.”

She looked up at him, and said, “I know the feeling.”

“What do you mean?” Quark asked.

“Starfleet,” Ro said. Quark’s eyes widened in understanding. He sat back down in the chair, and Ro started to talk to him about her own uncertain future.

62

Vaughn leaned against a broken wall, the gloom of the gray mist about him, and listened three times to Lieutenant Dax’s account of her contact with the thoughtscape. Each time, he felt a greater sense of the nature of it, and of this world as well, although precise understanding still eluded him. It seemed as though a lot of disparate facts almost fit together to form a greater knowledge, but he could not quite move the facts around to their proper places.

The probe had arrived here as Vaughn had been searching the perimeter of the vortex—the interface with the thoughtscape—attempting to find anything that would help him understand or defeat the pulse. The probe had hovered overhead for a short time, before finally alighting on one of the few patches of ground between wrecked sections of the complex. It had landed about a third of the way around the vortex, and it had taken Vaughn twenty minutes to reach it, crawling through and around the debris of the fallen buildings.

Vaughn had hoped that the probe was more than simply a probe, that the Defiantcrew had developed information vital to his mission, possibly even a means of stopping the pulse. His heart had raced at the sight of the devices, which he had immediately assumed to be some sort of a solution. Each was metallic, with an ovoid body, and two panels set parallel to its surface, attached by rigid filaments. The devices had been completely unfamiliar to him.

He had listened first to Dax’s account, and then to Nog’s explanation and instructions about deploying the devices. Vaughn had paid particular attention to the engineer’s caution to use all of them. If too few of the interdimensional explosives were detonated, Nog had warned, the interface would not be closed, but only widened. Then Vaughn had listened to Dax’s account two more times.

Now, just two hours before the next pulse, he worked his way around the outside of the vortex, positioning the thirty-two devices at intervals of roughly ten meters. He set each one to detonate at the same time, one hour from now. The crew had included two satchels in which to carry the explosives, and he had slung them over his shoulders. He had already emptied and discarded one bag, and had now almost gone through the second one.

As Vaughn circled the vortex, waving away the gray mist suffusing the air, he felt strongly that he stood at the brink of understanding all that was happening—and all that had happened—here. He reviewed everything that he now knew about the thoughtscape and this world. According to Dax, the pulse resulted from the thoughtscape—the Inamuri, she called them—attempting to enter this universe. That did not necessarily imply hostility, he knew. The question he had to answer was, Why?Why did the Inamuri want to cross into this universe? The Prentara had violated their space—had violated them—via their virtual-reality technology, so perhaps they wanted to counterattack. But Dax had said that the Inamuri considered the Prentara both invaders andsaviors. How could that be? And whether invaders or saviors, or somehow both, the Prentara had died out long ago, something the Inamuri must know.

Vaughn stepped over a girder that had fallen in such a way that it now hung out over the vortex. He looked back and saw that he had come about ten meters, and so he pulled out another device. He armed it, bent down, and set it in place. Then he moved on.

His own experiences here must tie into all of this, Vaughn thought. As he recalled the various scenes he had encountered, he reflected on the fact that they shared a common thread beyond simply being past events from his life. All of the incidents—from Captain Harriman to Prynn to his mother—had engendered a profound sense of loss or abandonment in him. And the Inamuri, through the energy clouds, had caused that. They must obviously have sensed his mind, his memory, in some way.

Vaughn remembered thinking this morning that he had dreamed dreams not his own, and he wondered now if that might have been an indication of some mental or emotional connection—a communing—with the Inamuri. But he had also felt as though he had dreamed Prynn’s and ch’Thane’s dreams, so perhaps this entire planet was connected to the Inamuri, united by the energy that circled it. He recalled the high-pitched sound he had thought of as the voice of the clouds, and he realized now that he might have been more right than he had known.

Ten meters to the next location. Device, arm, set.

Vaughn continued around the vortex. He waved idly at the gray mist, and thought about the mechanism by which bits of his past had been re-created. The energy from the clouds had reorganized local matter into different forms, but again, the question was, Why?Had Vaughn’s experiences been intended as an attack on him? As communication? And if the—

Awareness surged in Vaughn’s mind. He dropped to his knees, his hands coming up to the sides of his head. His consciousness felt as though it had been split open.

The mist,he understood at once, and knew that the understanding was not entirely his own. The mist, like the cloud cover, was an extension of the interface with the thoughtscape. And he stood within it, and sensed a tenuous connection with—

The Inamuri.

And suddenly Vaughn grasped it all. The Inamuri had not been attempting to navigate through the interface into this universe, although they eventually would. They had been sending the energy clouds through the interface, and all of that energy squeezing through the relatively small interface had caused the pulse. And the sea of clouds, the energy within, had been sent here to reorganize the matter of this world into a form that the Inamuri could inhabit.

“Why?” Vaughn asked aloud. “Why?”

Still waiting for answers, he staggered to his feet. He knew that he had to keep going. You have a mission,he told himself. He moved on.

Tell me,Vaughn thought, exhorting the Inamuri to give him more. Why did you re-create events from my past? And why events of loss and abandonment?

Because the Inamuri knew loss, Vaughn realized, because it knew abandonment. The re-created events of his life had been either its attempts to communicate or manifestations of its thoughts and emotions.

It,Vaughn thought. Not they.The thoughtscape, the Inamuri, was not a race of beings; it was a singular entity. One being that had known only one reality, that of its own “pocket universe,” as Dax had called it. It had known only its own existence, and nothing beyond that.

Until the day that the Prentara had connected their technology to it. Connected their minds to it through their virtual-reality systems. They had invaded the living mind of the Inamuri.

Vaughn saw the first device he had set up sitting just ahead, and he turned to see the previous one. Standing an equal distance from each, he pulled out the last device. Armed it, bent, and set it down.

Still crouching, Vaughn gazed through the mist around the perimeter of the vortex, at the interdimensional explosive devices that now surrounded it. Then he looked out into the vortex itself, at the sweeping, twisting surface that so closely resembled the sea of clouds above. The private domain of the Inamuri had been invadedby the Prentara, but then the Inamuri had come to understand that theywere other beings, that there wereother beings, and therefore that there was more to existence than only itself. In some sense, Vaughn saw, the Prentara had savedthe Inamuri, adding unexpected knowledge and sensation to its solitary existence. It had tried to establish contact with the Prentara, had tried to enter this universe, not understanding the destruction it caused by doing so. After the first pulse, though, the Prentara had withdrawn from the vortex, from their connection with the Inamuri, leaving it alone again.

No,Vaughn thought. Notagain. The thoughtscape had been left alone for the first time in its life. Before then, it could not have understood the concept of being alone, because such a thing had been outside of its experience. But then the thoughtscape had learned what it meant to be alone, in the most profound way. And so it continued trying to enter this continuum, and to find other beings.

And now Vaughn was going to seal it back in its own universe. Alone. Forever.

Vaughn had agonized, but he had made his decision, and now he had committed to it. He stood at the edge of the vortex, peering down into its center. Nog’s interdimensional explosives would detonate in fifteen minutes. Even if Vaughn changed his mind now, he could not possibly make his way around the vortex again and undo what he had done.

Predictably, he thought about Prynn. She had always thought of herself as being so much like her mother, and he had always thought that too. Certainly she carried a great deal of Ruriko in her, but he saw now that there was also a lot of him within her as well. That might or might not have been a good thing, but it provided him a small sense of peace right now. He was very proud of his daughter, and he loved her. Just moments from his own death, he hoped that his last desperate act would somehow manage to save her. He should have thought of it as a long shot, but he found that he actually believed that he would be able to communicate directly with the Inamuri, and convince it to save Prynn and Shar if it could.

What bothered him most right now was that, if she lived, he would be leaving Prynn alone again. He felt more than foolish for not having seen how much she had needed him since Ruriko had died. He had selfishly allowed his guilt to override his paternal responsibilities—and that his guilt had been justifiable provided him no solace, and no pardon. He had failed his daughter, and his only regret about his attempt to save her now was that he would definitely fail her again; either she would die with him, or she would live, and be without him.

Vaughn checked the chronometer on his tricorder. Thirteen minutes left now. He turned toward the complex and headed for the corridor from which he had first seen the vortex. He climbed over the rubble, then squeezed past the beam, holding his burden out in front of him. Once past the beam, he found the beacon where he had left it. He picked it up with his free hand and switched it on, then strode the twenty meters down the corridor to the intersection there. He bent down and deposited the bag on the floor. Then, one by one, he examined the eight interdimensional explosives he had removed from around the vortex, and he verified that all of them had been disarmed. When the others detonated, he supposed that the force might set these off as well, but without being armed, they could not slip into other dimensions and have the effect Nog had intended. The vortex would not be closed.

Vaughn stood back up, leaving the explosives and the beacon there. Then he strode back toward the vortex, thinking once more about Michael Collins, the astronaut who had circled the moon alone. He also thought about the tendril from the clouds that had struck down Chaffee.Vaughn wondered if the Inamuri had been trying to communicate with them all along. He did not know for sure, but he understood that all of this was true, that in some rudimentary way, he and Dax, and maybe even Prynn and ch’Thane, had been in contact with the Inamuri through the energy that now covered this planet and permeated its atmosphere. Dax had touched the fragment on Defiant,and Vaughn had experienced the matter that been reorganized for him here, and he had also walked through the mist around the vortex.

After disarming the devices, he made his way back outside, past the beam and over the pile of debris. Outside once more, he strode directly over to the edge of the vortex. Vaughn checked the tricorder again, and saw that the interdimensional devices would detonate in two minutes. He looked up and watched as many of the devices faded out of sight, slipping into subspace or some other dimension.

If Vaughn had started away from here as soon as he had finished deploying all of the devices, he might have been able to escape the effects of the explosions. But after having come to understand the monstrous loneliness of the Inamuri, he had found himself unwilling to consign the creature to a lifetime of such an existence. As he had been reminded so vividly in the last day, Vaughn had known his own moments of loss and abandonment; he could not imagine a life in which such moments occurred unendingly, with not the slightest reprieve.

From his contact with the Inamuri, however tenuous, Vaughn had gained an understanding of what would happen once the interface was thrown wide: the planet would be transformed, and then the Inamuri would emerge into this universe. Once here, it could contact other beings, putting an end to its isolated reality.

Prynn and ch’Thane would be put at risk, he knew, but with the interface expanded, there would be no pulse, and Defiantand the Vahni would be safe. And with the Inamuri in this universe, there would never be another pulse. Vaughn’s own life, he thought, was a small cost for all of that.

He checked the chronometer again. Thirty seconds. He tossed the tricorder aside, then peered down into the churning gray depths of the vortex.

Vaughn spread his arms wide, breathed in deeply, and then dived into the twilight maelstrom.