Warped (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  On the device's small readout panel, the numbers shifted, held for a moment, then changed to letters. One by one, they spelled out the name SISKO.

  That's odd, mused the security chief. Why would the station's commander come this far to use a holosuite, when there were the closer ones above Quark's bar.

  Another letter appeared on the readout. The initial J. The access code had been that for Benjamin Sisko's son, Jake.

  Odo gazed at the small mystery for a few seconds longer, then switched off the device and stowed it in his uniform pocket. A wordless concern still nagged at him, but there was no time to puzzle over it now. He turned and strode quickly toward the corridors' hub.

  Just for a moment, he had felt as if someone else was there with him, another presence more human than the one with which he shared this little world. Jake looked over his shoulder, expecting—or rather, hoping—to see a door open in the horizon. Maybe his father would step across the water-smoothed rocks turning back to gray metal, reach down and take his hand as the stream thinned and disappeared, and pull him back into the narrow spaces and skyless ceilings of the real world.

  He saw no one behind him; the feeling passed, replaced by the certainty of how alone he was, with no one but the other boy for company. The boy who existed nowhere else but here.

  Reluctantly, Jake brought his gaze back around to his companion. The other boy's dark, lank hair fell across his brow as he studied the turtle in his hand. He poked at the side of the shell with the knifepoint, as though trying to find a hidden latch. Jake felt a hollowness at the base of his gut, a souring wad of spit beneath his tongue.

  There had been a time before the other boy had shown up in this world. Now there were times when Jake wished he could go back to then, to be alone here again. And other times, when the sick, dizzy feeling inside himself grew so large that it threatened to swallow him up, when he was crazily glad that the other boy had come. That was when he knew that the things the other said were only echoes of things that had already been spoken in some dark sector of his own heart.

  "You want to?" As if he had read Jake's thoughts, the other boy held the knife out to him.

  Jake shook his head. "I'll just watch. This time."

  The other boy's unpleasant, knowing smile broke, then disappeared as he focused his attention back to the turtle. The stumpy, scaly legs kicked in futile struggle.

  He had already started remembering, and couldn't stop. To when he had first become aware of the other boy's presence here. Jake hadn't even seen him, but had found his handiwork. In the woods farther down the creek's length, the trees whose wild profusion of branches broke this world's sunlight into scattered coins. There, in the damp-smelling shadows, Jake had found a space of bare earth scraped out of the tangled roots and dead leaves. Empty except for something that lay beneath a swarm of flies, their avid buzzing like the sound of the electronic currents beneath the surfaces of this world. He'd prodded the object with his toe, the flies dispersing then settling back down upon it, and caught a glimpse of the small animal opened from beneath its small chin to between its hind legs. A cat, or what had been one, with enough of its gray tabby fur unmarked to show that it wasn't the orange prowler from the barn. Jake had stepped back from it in disgust, and had almost tripped over one of the cords, pieces of dirty frayed rope he hadn't noticed before, that looped around the trunks of the nearest trees and pulled the dead thing into a spread-eagled X on the ground.

  That had been the first sign, the emblem of the other boy's arrival here. Since then, Jake had seen more things. But never without feeling sick in his gut afterward, so that now he pushed away the little knife when it was offered to him, despite the other's sneer.

  He closed his eyes when he heard a tiny sound, the whisper the knife made when it cut through something soft and yielding. Not for the first time, he wished everything around him was a dream, a real dream, the kind from which he could wake when it got too scary.

  She turned in the cramped space, knowing that her chance for sleep was coming to an end. Major Kira Nerys knew she could have used a lot more of it, to ease the fatigue in her bones and the mental weariness that had seemed to gather like silt behind her eyes.

  There was another reason for keeping her eyes squinted shut against the flashing lights, for trying to ignore the metal-on-metal sounds that rattled down the freight shuttle's interior, and the voices of the crew members. With enough effort, she could hold on to the last fading edge of the dream that had visited her, the small comfort for which she had been grateful, as though it had been her long-dead father's kiss upon her brow. A vision of green fields rolling to a domed and spired city just in sight at the horizon; she had drifted above as though on a bed of soft winds, reaching a hand down to touch the surface of Bajor, as though her homeworld was the face of a lover whose sleep she watched in her own . . .

  "Major Kira—" A voice prodded her, in synch with the jostling her shoulder received. "Sorry to disturb you—"

  I just bet you are. She was awake enough to keep her thoughts from muttering aloud. The impulse to cock back her arm—her hand had already squeezed itself into a fist—and punch out whoever it was had been resisted. The dream had already faded into irretrievability, not even a memory left behind. That's because it wasn't real, Kira told herself as she took a deep breath of the shuttle's stifling air supply, readying herself for full consciousness. What had been shown to her wasn't even widespread on Bajor; the visit to this region had lasted nearly five days, and all she had seen had been the same scarred landscape, the crumbling pit mines and mountains of worthless extraction tailings left behind by the Cardassians, that had been there when she had first shipped off-planet to the Deep Space Nine station. The green processes of nature were taking a long time in softening the torn hillsides; the soil had been so depleted by its ravagers that even the toughest weeds had difficulty in taking root.

  "We're going to be docking soon. . . ."

  "All right." She nodded, swallowing the taste that sleep had left in her mouth, then glanced up at the crew member standing beside the cot. A kid, hardly worth displaying her anger toward, even if he had deserved it. "Thanks." She swung her feet onto the shuttle's deck and sat up. "I'll be coming forward in a minute or so."

  The crew member exited, leaving her alone with the hold's other occupant, a wooden crate nearly as tall as herself. Automatically, as she had done several times already on the journey from Bajor, she reached out and tugged on the chains wrapped around the crate. The ancient, rust-specked padlocks were sealed with not only the insignia of the Bajoran provisional government, but a simpler cursive signature as well, drawn in candle wax by the fingertip of one of the senior Vedeks of the dominant Bajoran religious order. A formality, more than a security measure; any competent thief could have cut through the chains with a microtorch, rifled the crate's contents, and sealed it all back up with nothing more than a few hair-thin seams in the metal links. If the treasures inside had needed any protection—a debatable proposition; they had little other than historical value—then that had been the reason for Kira's presence: "riding shotgun," to use the old Earth phrase employed when she had been given the assignment. Though once the crate had been loaded aboard the freight shuttle, she had felt little guilt about catching up on her sleep, after the exertions of her other assignment, the confidential one, on the surface of Bajor.

  Everything was in order with the crate, just as she had expected. The freight shuttle's crew members were all professionals, as much as she was; as long as their cargo wasn't leaking toxic radiation or some other hazard, they had little interest in anything other than making sure it reached its destination. Kira snapped together the collar fastening of her uniform and stood up, smoothing her hair back away from her brow.

  "There's an estimated time to docking of a quarter hour." The shuttle's navigator looked over his shoulder at Kira standing behind him. "We could go ahead and beam you aboard if you're in a hurry." He shrugged. "If you want, we could have yo
u notified as soon as your cargo is transferred onto the loading dock."

  Looking past the navigator and the pilot in the next seat over, Kira could see the distant shape of Deep Space Nine through the port; the curved pylons hung against the starry black. She felt a slight, pseudogravitational tug at her bones, as though her body were already willing itself to be back inside the station's habitat ring, the world of metal that the instinctive parts of herself had already started to regard as home. That internal perception saddened her, as had the one at the beginning of her mission, when she had stepped onto Bajoran soil for the first time in almost a year and had realized that she had felt like an alien on her own birth planet.

  She shook her head. "No, that's all right." She had carried out every detail of her mission this far; she could see through the rest. "Establish a comm link and notify Commander Sisko of my arrival. And arrange for intrastation transport of the cargo to his private office on Ops deck. I'll meet him there." She turned away and headed back to the hold.

  Away from the shuttle's crew, Kira leaned her hands against the wooden crate, as though some subtle emanation from hat it held might enter her soul. Inside were pieces of Bajor, remnants of one who might have been the planet's essence, as though the oceans' tides had been a single being's heartbeat . . .

  She felt nothing. Eyes closed, Kira's head hung below her shoulders for a moment longer, until she gathered enough strength to push herself away from the crate.

  Getting sentimental wasn't part of your assignment. She brushed a few splinters from her palms. If the crate's contents were as dead as she sometimes felt, in her bleakest moments, her own connection to her native world to be, then that was just something she would have to deal with. For better or worse.

  But for now, all of that could wait. Major Kira Nerys sat down on the edge of the cot and methodically began reviewing everything she needed to report to her commanding officer.

  Suddenly, in what one of normal humanoid physiology might have termed the blink of an eye, he saw the one for whom he had been searching. Odo felt the electric rush of aroused suspicion inside himself, as though he had been capable of fine-tuning an olfactory system for himself, to catch some pheromone for incipient murder. Across the crowded Promenade, the currents of hustlers and marks mingling below the elevated walkway, he had spotted Ahrmant Wyoss.

  Odo pulled himself back into the shadow of a structural pillar, to keep from being sighted in turn by his target. Total nonvisibility could have been achieved by changing his shape again, to anything from another section of bulkhead to one of the anaconda-like cables looping overhead. But with this many watching eyes in the vicinity, he was constrained; nothing would have sent an alarm through the Promenade's denizens faster than DS9's chief of security being caught so obviously spying on the sector's action.

  There was another reason he wished to maintain his customary appearance. To shift in and out of a simulation of an inanimate object required precious seconds in which the atoms of his material form sought their new equilibrium with each other. Seconds that could seem long as hours, if in them he was unable to stop one of the crimes he had sworn himself to prevent. The humanoid form he had created for himself was the best combination of speed and strength he could devise, while still maintaining at least a rough resemblance to a majority of natives of the galaxy's scattered worlds. Keeping all of them unaware of how tensely coiled his muscles were, ready for sudden movement, was a deceptive skill closer to an actor's art than a policeman's.

  "There you are, my dear Odo!" A familiar voice came from close beside him. "I've been looking all over for you."

  He looked down from the corner of his eye; the Ferengi innkeeper's piranha grin loomed up at him. "Given the nature of your enterprises, Quark—" He craned his neck to keep the far reaches of the Promenade in view. "—you never have to wait very long for me to make an appearance. Now, do you?"

  "Once again, I detect a sarcastic tone to your comments." Quark emitted a martyr's sigh. "I suppose that's the plight of the small businessman in today's universe. Always an object of suspicion, merely for cutting a few of the needless bureaucratic corners that so impede the free flow of commerce."

  "Indeed." Odo gave the Ferengi just enough attention to keep the conversation alive. A constant visual scan of the Promenade while talking was so much a part of his habitual behavior—and deliberately so—that it shouldn't arouse any due notice on the other's part. "And exactly what corners have you been cutting lately? Not watering down your synthale again, are you?"

  "Cutting corners? Me? Never." Quark drew himself to his height, bringing himself almost to Odo's shoulder. "I was speaking in general terms about these matters. And that synthale wasn't watered—it was an experiment, to create a lighter, less filling beverage for my customers."

  "And at full price, of course."

  Quark shrugged. "I was charging for the creativity involved." His expression soured with a deep brooding. "Your accusations are really unjust, you know—especially when you consider the unsavory nature of certain other individuals doing business around here."

  That remark drew a fraction more of Odo's attention. "And who might that be?"

  "Never mind. Perhaps at a later date we'll discuss these matters. Right now, I don't think you're even listening to me." Quark's puzzled gaze swung parallel to that of the security chief. "Just what is it that you find so fascinating over there?"

  "It's nothing to do with you." Across the Promenade, the sweating, heavy-jawed face of Ahrmant Wyoss was still visible, his small eyes glaring beneath a brow furrowed in concentration. Odo could see, as others passed in front of the suspect, how his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, the cords of his wrists tautening with each squeeze. Even from this far away, Odo could pick up the murderous radiation given off by the man. He glanced over at Quark. "Now might be a good time for you to go back behind your bar."

  "Oh?" Quark had had similar discreet warnings before, and had learned to heed them. He took an apprehensive step back from Odo's side. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't do anything to scare the customers away. That'd be only right, considering your plans to use my premises for your little conference with Commander Sisko."

  "I don't know what you're talking about." To Odo, the Ferengi's voice had started to seem like an insect buzzing around his head, one that he wished he could brush away with a stroke of a hand. "I'm not having any conference with the commander. In your establishment or anywhere else."

  "But . . . I just received a communication from one of Sisko's adjutants, asking me to reserve a private booth for two. With all the usual mandatory security screening, of course. So I just naturally assumed, what with the rather . . . unusual developments we've had on the station lately, that you were the other party involved."

  Odo felt a familiar anger ticking upward inside him. The Ferengi's mannerism of constant hinting, of never coming right out and speaking what was on his mind, probing every word in a conversation for some possibility of gain, had driven him to the boiling point on several previous occasions. Right now, he didn't have the time to waste.

  "Listen to me, Quark." He managed to keep his voice under control, his sight still trained upon his quarry across the Promenade. "I promise you that we are going to have a detailed discussion—soon. And if there's something you should have already told me about, I'll pick you up by the heels and shake you until you do so. Is that clear? In the meantime, perhaps you should go back and wipe off the table in one of your booths. Commander Sisko has, I'm sure, a great many other things on his mind beside some outbreak of prehensile-fingered sneak thieves, or whatever else it is that's troubling you so much."

  The sarcasm had no effect on Quark. "I wish that's all it were." His face had clouded once more, eyes narrowing and voice filled with an uncharacteristic bitterness. "Very well. I can see that the scope of your duties doesn't include defending the principle of free enterprise against unfair competition." He turned on his heel and started toward the ramp leading dow
n to the Promenade's main area.

  With the Ferengi gone, all of Odo's attention focused again on its original target. With careful timing, each step taken when Ahrmant Wyoss's simmering gaze swung away, the security chief moved in closer.

  * * *

  She watched as Commander Sisko ran a hand along the edge of the wooden crate. He nodded slowly, his expression one of deep, even melancholy contemplation.

  "Here are the keys, sir." Major Kira extended the small primitive bits of metal on her palm. "For the locks."

  "What's that?" Sisko turned toward her. "Oh . . . of course." He took the keys and closed his fist around them. "Do you know if there's any special procedure we should follow about breaking the seals? I did a search through all the onboard databases concerning Bajoran religious practices, but I couldn't really find anything regarding this situation."

  "I don't think there's anything special you have to do, Commander." It wasn't the first time that she had to admit to gaps in knowledge of her home planet's faith, gaps that seemed to grow larger the longer she was away. "The seals are more of a formality than anything else; the elders wanted to assure us that the contents are genuine."

  "There's little doubt of that, I'm afraid." Sisko pressed his fist against the wood. "I wish it were otherwise—I'd give a great deal for everything inside here to be fake." He shook his head. "You've done a good job with this assignment, Major. Just a shame that it was necessary."

  Kira held her silence. The commander had spoken her feelings as well.

  Inside the crate were mute bits and pieces, fragments of the past and tokens of remembrance. Of the Kai Opaka, the one who had served as the very soul of Bajor. A soul that had fled from that world, to an eternal life . . . and death.

  It didn't matter now, what the Kai's choice had been. Her absence from Bajor had left an equal emptiness inside Kira. And in Commander Sisko—she could sense that, in the sad hush of his words.