The Long Night

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Dax's readings had shown that much of the ship was still intact. Only a few sections had been damaged by the crash. The news wasn't a complete surprise: for something as fragile as that statue to survive, the crash couldn't have been devastating. Sisko had Dax prepare the coordinates for beam down into the main section of the ship that still had rudimentary life-support systems. That alone had surprised Sisko, but O'Brien had assured him that ships from the beginning of space travel on were always designed so that the life-support systems had double and triple backups. On a ship the size of the Nibix, most of the outer shell would have to be destroyed before the life-support systems would quit entirely.

  Still, Sisko thought it damned unusual on a ship this old. If, indeed, it was as old as he hoped.

  As the beaming process ended, the first thing he noted was the cold. It went through the protective layers of his uniform. He had expected a chill—the asteroid had no atmosphere—but nothing as penetrating as this. He took a tentative breath—the air was cold but real—and sighed.

  The life support did work.

  He could also feel the antigravity units they were all wearing adjusting them to eight-tenths of Earth normal. The asteroid's gravity was actually less than half.

  Then he opened his eyes, cringing slightly, expecting to be surrounded by bodies. Instead, he was in a dark, wide hallway. He tugged on his gloves, slipped the end of them beneath the wrists of his uniform so that the only skin he exposed was on his face. Dax already had her light on and was examining the wall panels. O'Brien switched his on after a moment and looked at the paneling as well.

  "I thought we'd see more than this," O'Brien said.

  "This ship is huge," Dax said. "This is just a corridor. A small one, judging from the readings I took on the Defiant."

  Sisko switched on his light and glanced at the panels as well. The diagrams were clear, using an old spacer's code that had been outdated in this sector for centuries, but the words were in a language that looked only vaguely familiar. And he wasn't sure if the familiarity was because he hoped he would see something he recognized.

  "Can you make out anything, Chief?"

  "Nothing of use to us," O'Brien said. "We studied this type of system at the Academy. It could belong to any one of a hundred star systems that developed similar technology, long before humans had space flight."

  "But it's familiar?" Sisko asked.

  "Yes, of course. Familiar enough anyway." O'Brien's breath floated like a ghost in the darkness. Dax had her tricorder out, and its hum echoed in the silence.

  "No life signs," she said. "But behind these walls are all sorts of storage areas."

  "And there's equipment behind those," O'Brien said.

  Sisko pulled out his tricorder as well but didn't use it. Not yet. He wanted to take this slow, not to come to any more conclusions than he already had. "Come on," he said. "Let's see what else we can find."

  He led the way down the silent passage to a doorway that had jammed open. The door was tall—he could get through it without much effort—and it was wide enough for two people to pass. His light caught coffinlike shapes scattered throughout the room. He glanced at Dax. She was staring intently ahead, her own light playing on the surface of the coffins.

  Cold-sleep chambers. Ancient ones that looked like long narrow bullets. The kind that, when jettisoned into space, provided enough protection for the being inside to survive a short trip through a planet's atmosphere.

  No one in the Federation had used this type of technology in a long, long time.

  "I count fifteen of them," O'Brien said.

  "I get no readings," Dax said. "If they were working, something would show on the tricorder."

  The cold bit into Sisko's cheeks and nose. He climbed over a pile of rubble near the door and crouched near the closest cold-sleep bed. Through the opaque lid and the slight fog of his own breath, Sisko could see the body of a man, somewhat well preserved, yet obviously dead. The skin on his face had sunken in and his eyelids seemed flat. He had been a middle-aged man. He wore robes that had no markings on them. Through the lid, Sisko couldn't even make out the robes' fabric.

  "A few of them smashed open," O'Brien said. He had gone deeper into the room. His voice had a quiet power in the silence. "Nothing left except skulls, a bit of bone, and some metal jewelry. This ship has been here a long time."

  The Caxtonian hadn't come into the aired section of the ship; he'd only been to the small outer area exposed to the vacuum of the asteroid. There the bodies hadn't decomposed at all.

  Dax crouched beside an intact cold-sleep bed. She ran her tricorder over it. "I can't tell how long this man's been dead," she said. "The cold, the lack of oxygen in the unit, and the drugs they used to ease into cold sleep have messed up any reading I can understand. Julian did some work on cold sleep. He might be able to get a better idea than I have."

  "If this turns out to be the Nibix," Sisko said, "I'll bring him down."

  So far they had seen nothing that indicated they were on the Nibix. Of course, nothing had shown that they weren't on the Nibix either. Sisko would hate for this mission to prove inconclusive.

  O'Brien stood, following his tricorder as if it were a native guide. "Do you hear that?" he asked.

  Sisko looked up. He heard the hum of the tricorders, the rasp of their own breath, and something else, very faint. A quiet thrum he wouldn't have noticed if O'Brien hadn't mentioned it.

  "Equipment," Dax said. "Something's still working."

  "It's probably the life-support systems," O'Brien said. "Or what's left of them. There's a chamber just beyond this one. I'm going to investigate."

  Sisko stood. He'd learned all he could from the dead man. He pulled out his tricorder. It slid in his gloved hands. He adjusted a few settings and then found the same unusual reading that seemed to be leading O'Brien forward. A low level of power, running on its own system, separate from the systems behind the panels in the corridor.

  "Would that be life support?" Dax asked. "It's an independent system."

  "If I were designing a ship for deep space with this primitive technology," O'Brien said, "I'd make damn sure that life support, at least to the important areas, had its own system or at least its own backup."

  "Was that usual, Chief?"

  "It depends on the culture," O'Brien said. "Some early space travelers from this section had no life support going into the cargo bays. If a worker got trapped back there, he died. It wasn't practical, but it was cheap."

  "A waste of life," Sisko said, and he was referring not just to the practice O'Brien mentioned, but to the bodies around him.

  "In some cultures, life wasn't valued very much," O'Brien said.

  Neither Dax nor Sisko responded. They had both seen places where life wasn't much valued. After those experiences, the Federation's rules about accepting advanced cultures made much more sense.

  Sisko's hand was shaking, and he hoped it was from the cold. The readings on his tricorder remained constant. His heart was pounding hard. Dax had an intent look on her face. She maneuvered through the coffins toward the chamber.

  O'Brien reached it first. "The readings are definitely coming from here," he said.

  Dax reached it second and gasped. "Benjamin."

  His mouth was dry. He crossed the distance in half the time it took the others. Dax was wiping the side of the door, as if to clean something off. O'Brien was running his tricorder over the wall.

  "All the systems from this wall inward are active and working," he said. "Life support, environmental controls, power bays, everything."

  His voice held a kind of awe. He punched the tricorder two and three times, obviously checking his readings, but they apparently remained the same.

  Sisko was watching Dax. She continued to wipe, glancing over her shoulder at him, the excitement on her face so reminiscent of Curzon when he found a toy that Sisko saw not Jadzia, but an old Trill man, his white hair thinning over his markings.

  "There are r
edundant systems like I've never seen before," he said. "They wanted to keep whatever is in there alive and running. There must be ten backup systems in this wall alone."

  Sisko had to swallow before he could speak. "This ship's been here a long time. No system can run forever."

  "The power needed here is low," O'Brien said. "And at least half these systems are linked. If one shuts down, another takes over. I'd say this part of the ship could live a good long time yet."

  "That's not all," Dax said. "Benjamin, take a look at this." She moved away from the part of the door she was polishing. The paint on the door had long since faded to gray, but the outline of the design was still visible.

  Sisko looked at the pattern for a moment before the shape sprang out at him. An oval with a green staff in the middle. Or at least the staff was supposed to be green. In some areas on Jibet, the staff even glowed. The design was all over anything that had to do with the House of Jibim Kiba Siber, including the Nibix.

  To have the symbol on or near a door meant only one thing.

  "The royal chamber," he said softly to himself.

  Dax nodded. "We found it."

  Sisko let the thought sink into his cold mind. Now, more than at any other time in his career, he had to be very careful. He glanced at Dax.

  "We should confirm," she said.

  He knew it. And he also knew that he wanted to be the first to look on the Supreme Ruler's face. If the man still had a face. What a disaster it would be if the Supreme Ruler's cold-sleep bed had broken open.

  Sisko switched his tricorder onto record. He would need a record for the Federation and for the Jibetians. "Dax, O'Brien, I'm using my tricorder to record all of this. State your name and rank and the time we've already spent on this mission."

  They did, and he followed suit. O'Brien shot him a concerned glance. Even though they had briefed him, no one apparently had told him all the things of import that he needed to know.

  "Chief, can you open this door without harming anything?"

  O'Brien frowned at Sisko's tricorder. "Judging from the way this equipment works, I can."

  "Nothing appears to be blocking the door from either side," Dax said, using her own tricorder. Her hands were shaking, too. Her breath left a small bit of condensation on the wall.

  "All right then," Sisko said. He watched as O'Brien reached forward and touched a small square area beside the door. With a scraping of metal that sent shivers down Sisko's back, the door slid back.

  A light went on inside, startling all of them. Dax put a hand on Sisko's arm. "If this is the chamber of the Supreme Ruler," she said, "there might be protections."

  "I don't read anything," O'Brien said.

  "But that doesn't mean they aren't there," Dax said.

  Sisko nodded. He didn't care if a green glow from the Jibetian god struck him dead. He was going to be the first person in that room in over eight hundred years.

  He slipped inside the door and found himself in a chamber filled with art and more designs. The equipment on the wall glowed. The light was a single spot over a cold-sleep bed on top of a raised platform.

  Sisko let his tricorder scan the room so that he could show it undisturbed. Then he walked carefully toward the platform. The light was eerie, a recognition of life where there was none.

  Dax followed as did O'Brien.

  "I don't like this," O'Brien said.

  But Sisko would wait to get O'Brien's opinion after they had looked at that cold-sleep bed. Sisko climbed the stairs. Beside the bed, a long staff still glowed green. It was the symbol of the Supreme Ruler. It never left his side.

  "Benjamin," Dax said softly.

  "I see it, old man," he said.

  He ran his gloved hand over the top of the staff, careful not to touch it. Then he peered down into the opaque lid.

  The soft light made the Supreme Ruler's skin look faintly gray. The ruler was a young man, maybe in his late twenties, his features still perfectly formed. His face hadn't sunken in like the other dead man's had. The Supreme Ruler had the ridged cheekbones that marked a Jibetian, and Sisko knew that his eyes, if open, would have flecks of green in the whites.

  The man's age surprised Sisko, even though he knew the history of Jibet. He figured that the Supreme Ruler would be a broken old man with a long white beard and features filled with age and wisdom. Not a man who, in real time, hadn't lived as long as Sisko had.

  "We found it," Dax said, her voice barely containing the excitement. "We found him." She, too, reached down and reverently touched the green symbol.

  "That we did, old man," Sisko said. "That we did."

  "You may have found a little more than you were expecting." O'Brien's voice held none of the reverence that Dax's did. Sisko recognized the tone. It was O'Brien at his most cautious. He didn't know how Sisko would react to his find.

  Sisko turned to him. O'Brien was kneeling beside the cold-sleep chamber, his tricorder in his hand. After a moment he looked up at Dax and Sisko. "This is still working."

  Sisko, for what seemed like an eternity, couldn't get his mind to wrap around O'Brien's words. He couldn't let the thought in. And then when it did Sisko broke into a cold sweat, and his stomach clamped down hard.

  He hit his comm badge with so much force that it felt like he slapped himself in the chest. "Doctor Bashir! We need you on the surface immediately."

  The doctor shot back a quick response that Sisko ignored. He crouched over the opaque glass and looked into the young face of Jibim Kiba Siber. The young and very much alive face of the Supreme Ruler of a peaceful empire that might soon be peaceful no longer.

  And Sisko shuddered.

  CHAPTER

  7

  IT TOOK KIRA an hour after the Defiant's departure to settle the issues of docking clamps, cargo logs, and incoming freighters. Then she retreated to the commander's office to examine the files he left for her.

  She sat in his chair and read as quickly as she could. The chair always felt awkward to her—Gul Dukat had sat in it so much that it had molded to his shape. Try as she might, she could never get comfortable in it. Nor, if she were completely honest, could she ever be comfortable in an officer's room of Cardassian design. It had gotten so that she could ignore most of the Cardassian designs in her normal haunts around the station, but places like this—and Odo's brig—made her extremely uncomfortable. Try as she might, she could never leave the past completely behind.

  Nor, it seemed, could the Jibetians. When their Supreme Ruler left, eight hundred years before, Jibetian culture continued to follow him as spiritual leader of their world. In search of their leader they spread out over outlying planets, eighty in all, forming the Jibetian Confederacy. The same confederacy was now in the middle stations of applying for membership to the Federation.

  Centuries of research and speculation discussed the whereabouts of the ship and the consequences of finding the Supreme Ruler or his descendants on some distant outpost. Even more documents dealt with the wealth of the ship itself, which had to be Quark's interest in all of this.

  She had just finished reading the first three files on the Nibix and now couldn't shake the fear of impending doom. She was starting to understand why Dax and Sisko had acted so harshly. If they actually did find the lost ship, the station would be overwhelmed with curiosity seekers, treasure hunters, and a thousand Federation and Jibetian officials. At the moment the calm around the station felt like the calm before the storm.

  A very powerful storm if her guess was right.

  At least she could use the time to become more informed. She pulled Commander Sisko's chair up closer to his desk and punched in the request for information on the current status of Jibetian and Federation treaties and the Jibetian's request to join the Federation. After a moment the screen brought up the file, and she settled in for a long afternoon of technical reading when her comm badge chirped.

  "Kira here."

  "Major," said Ensign Stafa, whom she had left in charge of communications
in Ops, "there's an incoming message for you from the Jibetian High Council."

  Kira couldn't have heard that right. She had been reading about Jibet, so she must have inserted that word in for something else. "From whom?"

  "The Jibetian High Council. Do you want me to pass this along to someone else? They're saying it's rather urgent."

  And odd. She squared her shoulders and put on her best military poker face. There was no way the Jibetians would know about the discovery of the Nibix, or what could be the Nibix. She and Odo had been monitoring all outgoing communication and nothing had been leaked. Nothing. This had to be about some other matter unrelated to the Nibix and the timing was just bad.

  She forced herself to take a deep breath. "I'll take it here."

  The screen on Commander Sisko's desk cleared to show a middle-aged man with an almost albino complexion and thinning blond hair. His cheekbones were ridged, and his deep blue eyes had green dots in the whites.

  Kira smiled as if greeting any dignitary. "I am Major Kira Nerys, first officer of Federation Station Deep Space Nine. How may I be of service?"

  "Forgive the intrusion, Major. I am Jiber Kidath of the Jibetian High Council." She could see the man from the waist up. He bowed slightly as he addressed her. "I am inquiring about a mission we believe your commander has undertaken. A mission looking for our ship the Nibix."

  "The lost ship?" Kira asked. She hated diplomacy. It went against every blunt bone in her body. Yet she knew that each word she said now was important. It was equally important to satisfy the official without lying to him. If possible.

  "Yes," Kidath said, nodding. "The lost ship. We understand your commander has led an expedition to find it."

  "I am not at liberty to discuss Commander Sisko's activities, Councilman. Perhaps if you went through regular Federation channels …" She let her voice drop off.

  "I intend to, Major," Kidath said. "I had hoped that you might cut through the official red tape. I understand your people have a deep religious faith and know what it means to have other cultures interfere with your beliefs."