Star Trek - DS9 011 - Devil In The Sky

by Неизвестный

  "I have another chair," Nog whispered. Beneath his protruding brow, Nog's eyes darted furtively about the storeroom as he wrestled the chair past stacks of (mostly contraband) supplies. Crouching on the floor, his knees resting on the scorched metal grillework, Jake watched his friend approach.

  "I don't think chairs are going to cut it much longer," he said glumly. Quark's broken freezer had been absorbed by the Horta in a matter of minutes.

  "We're going to need tables next." In fact, all that was left of the first chair was one shining blue leg that was even now dissolving beneath the Horta's tendrils. The stolen alien was growing at an alarming rate, and so was its appetite. Twice as large as before, it no longer looked so raw and newborn. A layer of dark, stony armor had formed over its crimson hide, spreading outward from the mineral flecks it had been born with. Only veins and fissures in the armor revealed the redness underneath, like rivers of molten lava breaking up through faults in a planet's surface.

  "Tables!" Nog exclaimed. "How am I supposed to sneak tables out of the bar? My uncle is already looking suspicious. If he wasn't so busy with all those moon watchers, he'd be onto us for sure!" He handed the new chair over to Jake, who shoved it toward the voracious Horta. He was careful not to get his hands too close; so far, the little monster seemed more interested in metal than flesh, but Jake didn't feel like taking chances. His palm still stung where the egg had burned him.

  "Nog, I think maybe it's time to tell my dad about this." "No!" Nog said. "My uncle will kill me. Besides, it's ours. We borrowed it fair and square." Feigning confidence, and failing miserably, he tried to reassure Jake. "Look, as long as we keep feeding it, it's not going anywhere. You stay here and I'll... I'll go find a buyer right away." "Hey, wait a sec!" Jake complained, as Nog backed away, then turned and ran out of sight. No way is he sticking me with this, Jake thought, leaping to his feet and chasing after his friend. The Horta had another chair to eat. That would keep it busy for a while, he told himself. Or so he hoped.

  Suddenly, the food stopped coming. The Horta finished off another sumptuous scrap of chair and waited for something new to eat. But nothing ap- peared, and even the carbon-smelling creatures who had been caring for her disappeared abruptly.

  She let out a grinding cry, but received no response.

  She was alone and hungry. The chairs and cups and other morsels, while delicious, had not satisfied her hunger. She felt, on the very fringes of her senses, something else, a promise of food and fulfillment that was exactly what she craved. And it was nearby.

  Snuffiing along the storeroom floor, she came at last to a solid rhodinium wall and proceeded to burn a path straight through it. The lights in the storeroom winked on and off as severed circuits were replaced by backup systems.

  The Horta left a steaming tunnel behind her as she left the storeroom for unknown territory. The food she wanted called to her. If only she could find it.

  Maybe this way...

  Clad only in a diaphanous white gown that barely veiled the tantalizing feminine body underneath, the Vulcan priestess slipped quietly into the young crewman's quarters. Ensign Marc Tomson sat upright in his bunk, his heart pounding, as the beautiful Vulcan drew nearer. Only the small reading light over his head illuminated the room, penetrating the filmy gauze stretched tautly over the woman's breasts. Marc shifted uncomfortably upon his bunk, naked beneath a single thin sheet.

  "T'Leena?" he asked breathlessly. "Why are you doing here... I mean, what are you coming..." Damn, he thought. I sound like an idiot. "Comput- er, freeze program." Her arms outstretched toward him, her lips glisten- ing moistly, the figure of T'Leena suddenly became as motionless as a marble statue. Not breathing, not blinking, she froze in place as though trapped in a single instant of time. Marc took a deep breath and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  Oh well, he consoled himself. The great thing about holosuites was you could keep rerunning a fantasy until you got it right. And he had been fine-tuning this particular scenario ever since his last term of duty on Vulcan, several months back. All those irresistible, unapproachable Vulcan women... ! Still, DS9 had its attractions as well, including Quark's holosuites.

  Anxious to begin again, he leaned back on the bunk and rested his head on the pillow. "Computer, resume program from beginning." T'Leena disappeared, then rematerialized at the entrance of his quarters. The door slid silently shut behind her, leaving them alone together. She crept through the shadows toward him, into the revealing glare of the reading light.

  Marc swallowed and cleared his throat. "T'Leena," he tried again. "What are you doing here?" (That's better, he decided. His voice sounded deeper, more confident.) "! do not know. I do not understand." She knelt beside the bunk and placed a warm palm upon Marc's cheek. Her hair, blacker than space and more lustrous, fell about her bare shoulders. "It is not logical. It is not Vulcan." "But..." Marc prompted her.

  "You make my cool green blood burn like a stream of fiery emeralds, Marc Tomson. My time is years away, but when I look on you I feel the passion of the pon farr." With total Vulcan honesty, she stared at him, puzzled but unashamed by her strange desires.

  God, she was gorgeous, Marc thought. Even though he had carefully scripted all her dialogue, he was still overwhelmed by the experience of hearing it from her own lips.

  "Wha... what do you want from me?" (Take it easy, he thought. Don't rush things. We're almost there.) T'Leena rose to her feet and reached behind her neck to untie the straps of her robe. The sheer, translucent fabric fell away from her body, drifting with agonizing slowness to the floor. "I want to meM with you, Marc Tomson. I want to explore infinite pleasures in infinite combinations. I want to teach you the ancient secrets of Vulcan love.... " "Yes!" Marc blurted. He couldn't stand it anymore.

  Sweat streamed down his back. The bunk itself seemed to be growing hotter by the second. He grabbed the hem of his blanket and tossed it aside, exposing.

  A steaming, wriggling mass of brown-and-red rock burning its way up through the mattress and between his legs.

  Marc screamed in panic. He half-jumped, half- tumbled out of the bunk, colliding with T'Leena.

  They fell in a jumble of naked limbs onto the hard tile floor. Forced to improvise, the holographic Vulcan tried to embrace Marc while continuing her prepro- grammed declaration of love.

  "... Every seven years is not enough, not for you.

  Marc barely heard her. All fantasies and fervor had been driven out of his head by the sudden, shocking appearance of the thing in the bed, replaced by an instinctive urge to escape. Ohmigod, he thought. I'm completely defenseless. His uniform and communica- tor lay in a heap on the other side of the floor. His phaser was back in his real quarters; Constable Odo didn't allow weapons on the Promenade.

  Frantically, he tried to disengage himself from the amorous Vulcan priestess. Acidic fumes seared his nostrils, and he struggled to look over his shoulder to see what the alien creature was doing, but T'Leena's teeth held on to his ear. An awkward thunk behind him suggested that the thing had dropped off the bunk onto the floor. Maybe it was oozing toward him this very minute.

  "Computer," he shouted, "end program!" He bare- ly got the words out before T'Leena thrust her tongue into his mouth.

  Tongue, T'Leena, and darkened room vanished instantly, and Marc found himself sprawled on the floor of the holosuite. Blinking against the sudden, brighter lighting, he heard a heavy, thrashing sound nearby. He sprang to his feet and scrambled away from the sound. Only when he was at least a yard away did he turn around and look toward the empty space where the simulated bunk had existed heartbeats ago.

  His fantasy might have dematerialized, but the monster remained. Tentatively, like a puppy learning to walk, it zigzagged across the floor, leaving a trail of charred and sizzling tile behind it. A high-pitched screeching, like plates of rusty metal being scraped against each other, emerged from the creature, hurt- ing Marc's ears. The creature's hunger, and corrosive nature, were all too obvious.


  He glanced quickly in the direction of his clothing, wondering if maybe he could make a run for them.

  Then the alien, perhaps agitated by the sudden change in the holosuite's appearance, lurched toward the only remaining object in the room: Marc.

  The young ensign raced out of the suite as fast as his feet would carry him. Oh god, he thought, how am I ever going to explain this to the Commander?

  Shrieks and laughter broke out in the lounge. Be- hind the bar, Quark looked up in time to see a human male, quite naked, stumble down the stairs from Quark's upper floors. Blushing redder than an Dumesite man-lobster, the human navigated through the bar and ran out into the Promenade. Despite the young male's haste, Quark recognized him as the ensign who had rented Holosuite #5.

  Humans! Quark shook his head. Sometimes he thought he'd never figure out the sexual customs of Homo sapiens. No Ferengi would ever flee from a holosuite unless in pursuit of something more profit- able. Still, this incident only confirmed his faith in one of the oldest and most sacred of the Rules of Acquisi- tion: Always get payment in advance.

  The baby Horta was quite confused. This chamber had appeared very interesting at first. There had been more of the carbon beings, like the two smaller ones who had first fed her, as well as solid structures that looked and smelled as if they were real. But then the snacks disappeared and so did the creature who smelled like copper. And the other carbon person, the one that secreted sodium chloride in an aqueous solution, had run away, just like her feeders.

  The Horta howled in frustration and hunger. Where was Mother? Where was the food she craved?

  Despite her cries, she felt no trace of her mother's presence. She could sense the food, however, sorne- where in this strange, unsettling world she had awak- ened into. Below, she realized; it was still farther below.

  Sinking into the floor, she left the empty holosuite behind.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jadzia Dax made a point of being awake and at the conn when the Amazon entered the Davon system. If they came across any other vessels, she would be at the controls. She could still hear Benjamin warning her to keep things from getting any more complicated than they had to be--and she had no intention of letting him down.

  She felt the thrum of the engines change as she brought the ship out of warp at the very edge of the system. Hopefully they were beyond the range of any sensors the Cardassians had set up. She put a receiver to her ear to scan privately for subspace radio trans- missions, but instead of the usual whir and crackle of static and the mumble of distant voices, she heard a loud hiss... a hiss that grew louder by the second.

  When it became painful, she yanked the receiver from her ear, wincing. It had to be a Van Luden radiation belt. Nothing else made that sort of sound.

  "You should have awakened me," Kira asked, drop- ping into the seat beside her. "What's our status?" "There's a Van Luden radiation belt nearby," she said. An uncomfortable ringing tone sounded in the back of her head.

  "Where? I don't see..." Kira began, bending over the sensors. "Got it! Fifty thousand klicks ahead and closing." "That's precisely the cover we need," Dax said. "If we can't hear them, they can't hear us... including the noise from our warp coils." Against her better judgment, she had to let Kira take control of the ship. The ringing sound had begun to throw off her sense of balance. There was no sense in jeopardizing everyone if her ability to pilot the runabout was impaired. She shook her head slowly, trying to clear the sound away. If it didn't stop soon, she'd have to call Julian.

  "That's fine as long as we're out here," Kira said.

  "But it doesn't help us find that Horta. See if you can spot any Cardassian ships." "I told you," Dax said, "there's too much white noise from the radiation belt." Wasn't Kira listening to her? "We're going to have to get farther away from it if we're going to pick anything up." She shook her head again. Finally the ringing sound began to fade.

  "I didn't mean for you to take a sensor scan, I meant for you to physically go look using your eyes." "What?" The idea sounded crazy, but Kira didn't look like she was kidding. For a second Dax wondered if the static had affected her hearing. "You want me to go and look out the ports?" "That's right," Kira said. "Eyeball space around us.

  You Federation types are too used to technology.

  What would you do if the sensors were down? So you don't see more than a few thousand kticks in any direction. Sometimes that's all you need." Dax found herself nodding. It could work. "A very insightful, if primitive, answer. I'll see what I can spot." Rising, she headed astern. At each viewport on the starboard side she paused and gazed out for a few seconds, studying the darkness of the void around them. Slowly her hearing returned to normal, and she relaxed a bit. That was one less thing for her to worry about.

  The Van Luden radiation belt hung tantalizingly near, a shimmering yellow veil of light across the horizon that she found curiously appealing. There wasn't anything quite so beautiful as the wonders of deep space, she thought. Perhaps that's what had drawn her to the sciences--and ultimately to the fringe of the known universe.

  As she continued around the runabout, she passed the spot where the card table had been folded into the wall for the night. Julian and the others had sacked out on the floor, on sleeping pads taken from ship's stores. Gingerly, she stepped around them. Julian, she thought, looked positively charming in his sleep, with his perpetually furrowed brow now smooth and re- laxed. She smiled almost maternally at him. He was such an endearing child in so many ways.

  She hadn't spotted anything when she reached the rearmost viewport, so she started back along the port side, repeating the process. Once more the Van Luden radiation belt stretched seemingly to infinity ahead of her, drawing her eye like a moth to its flame. She found a curious hollow feeling in her chest looking at it, and she knew when she got back to DS9 that she'd have to look up whatever studies Starfleet had done on it during the time this system had been in Federation space.

  Two viewports from the front of the ship, a subtle movement caught her eye. She squinted, straining to see. Yes, there it was... a small black circle moving across the glow of the radiation belt.

  "Kira," she said. "There's something coming slowly at us from port side." "Where?" Kira demanded.

  Putting the radiation belt from her thoughts, Dax hurried back to her seat. She leaned forward, located the speck on her monitor, and pointed. "There. See it?" "I'm bringing us closer," Kira said. "Moving to an intercept course." Dax felt a faint tremor run through the runabout's deck plates as the Amazon came about. She leaned forward, watching closely as the black shape grew from the size of a pinhead to the size of a dinner plate to the size of a small ship-- No, not a ship, she decided with relief. "It's an asteroid," she said. "The radiation belt isn't as clean as you thought, Kira." "Hang on!" Kira said.

  "What are you doing?" Dax demanded. They were still on a collision course with the asteroid, she realized.

  "One second more..." Kira whispered.

  "Decelerate! Kira!" Dax cried, her alarm growing.

  "Pull up--you're going to hit it!" The crater-scarred surface of the asteroid now loomed like an immense pockmarked wall ahead of her, filling the wide view- screen.

  "Relax, I know what I'm doing," Kira said. She fired docking thrusters at the last possible moment.

  "I've done this a thousand times." Dax braced herself for collision. Kira was certifi- ably insane. Dax knew it now. Nobody flew on manual this close to an asteroid.

  Kira fired the thrusters once more, easing them to a crawl. Finally, with a jarring bump, the runabout's nose touched the asteroid's surface. Slowly Kira ap- plied the thrusters again.

  "You're going to push it," Dax said in awe. She'd never seen such a move before, and the sheer daring of it amazed her more than she would admit.

  "Very good," Kira said. "Hold on!" A heavy thrumming noise filled the cabin as the runabout's engines strained against the asteroid's mass, but Dax had the distinct impression they were making progress. She g
lanced down at the ship's relative-velocity gauge. It showed an almost exponen- tial increase in speed. When Kira switched from thrusters to impulse engines, they were positively racing.

  They rapidly cleared the Van Luden radiation belt.

  When Kira cut the engines and used the thrusters to move back fifteen meters from the asteroid's surface, Dax breathed easily for the first time. Now at least they had a little room to maneuver. She didn't like cutting it so close.

  Kira began flicking switches. The interior lights went out, along with most of the instruments. "We don't want them to pick up our energy bleed," she said. She leaned back and looked at Dax. "We should be clear of the radiation belt's interference. Try the sensors again." Dax blinked. "You continue to amaze me, Kira," she said.

  "Like I said, it's an old trick. There are a lot of asteroids around Bajor. We used to sneak whole strike forces into orbit this way. Are you picking anything up?" "Not yet." Dax finished the readouts from the first two planets and moved on to the third. For a gas giant, it had a suspiciously high energy reading. She took a more detailed scan, but found nothing unusual. If not the planet, she thought, perhaps the moons.