Warped (star trek)

by K. W. Jeter

  "Don't play coy with me, Quark." He leaned over the unordered drink, which had been deposited in front of him as a fruitless attempt at ingratiation. "Just last shift, you might have been welded to my elbow, the way that you were tugging at me and hinting that you had some huge secret to impart. And now it's business as usual around here? You're severely trying my patience."

  "Please . . . could you keep your voice down?" The Ferengi's manner became even more nervous and agitated. That was what Odo had expected; these types with an obsessive interest in other people's affairs always reacted in panic at the thought of their own being revealed. "I assure you—"

  "You'll assure me nothing." Odo brought his voice up another notch in volume. "But you will expand upon those rather broad hints you were so generous with before. You seemed quite concerned about what you termed 'unusual developments'; there's apparently some negative impact on your manifold business enterprises, from certain 'unsavory characters'—though I can't imagine anyone so far gone in depravity that you could justifiably call them that."

  "I so enjoy these witticisms of yours." Quark forced one of his sharp-pointed smiles. "Kindly and well-intentioned as I'm sure they're meant to be. But look—" He leaned closer, his words set in a conspiratorial whisper. "I've got . . . well, business arrangements with half the individuals in this bar. All strictly legitimate, of course."

  Odo emitted a snort of disbelief.

  "All right, sort of legitimate. Harmless, let's say. But these people tend to be a little on the paranoid side; they don't have the same long-standing relationship of trust with you that I do." Quark scanned the premises again, directing an even broader smile and a wave of a hand to a table ringed with scowling faces. "Be right with you." He turned back to the chief of security. "Give me a break," he pleaded. "If everyone sees the two of us having a long, intimate conversation, I could wind up going out one of the waste-disposal chutes little pieces."

  "Very well." Odo took the tray from Quark and set it down beside the untouched synthale; his next action was to grasp the Ferengi's lapels and slam Quark down into the chair next to him. "Then my advice to you would be to talk fast."

  Quark had barely enough breath for a panicky squeak. "It's the holosuites—"

  "What about them? Other than the fact they represent a good percentage of your profits."

  The Ferengi managed to regain some of his composure. "I run a few holosuites, true, but their value to me isn't the revenue they generate—believe me, I hardly cover my expenses on them. Rather, they're all part of my role here as host to legions of weary travelers. I've often suggested to Commander Sisko that Starfleet should consider subsidizing some of my activities here, for the sheer social value and goodwill they generate among visitors to DS9. Now, in a properly administered transit station—"

  "I thought you were in a hurry."

  "Yes, of course." The comment prompted another nervous survey by Quark. "You're fully aware that no matter what your own personal views might be about the morality involved in my operating the holosuites, they are inspected and fully licensed—by you, as a matter of fact."

  "My feelings don't enter into it," said Odo sourly. "If the DS9 regulations allow you to do business in such a manner, then I allow it. That's all."

  "But you have to admit that I run a clean operation. Some of the programming for my holosuites may be a little bit on the risqué side—all right, a lot that way—but it's all within the established guidelines for, shall we say, adult entertainment. There's certainly nothing in my holosuites' programing that could be considered harmful . . . nothing that anybody could get hurt by. . . ."

  Odo peered more closely at the Ferengi. "What are you talking about?"

  "The problem, my dear Odo, is that I no longer control all of the station's holosuites; there are these new ones that have been brought on board. Now, if you and the commander were to see the wisdom of granting me an exclusive franchise . . ." A hopeful tone crept into his voice. "All right, all right; never mind." Quark began sliding off the seat. "Look, I've already stayed too long here talking to you. I've got a bar to run." He picked up the empty tray and clutched it to his chest. "It's not my holosuites I was referring to. They're not the problem. And that's all I can tell you right now."

  Odo watched the Ferengi making his rounds among the other tables, attempting to mollify the thuggish patrons who had been casting narrow-eyed glances Quark's way.

  Outside Quark's establishment, Odo moved through the crowded Promenade. There was another sector of the station that he wished to investigate.

  "How's that little gadget working out? You know, the one I rigged up for you." As he crouched down with the old-fashioned manual screwdriver, DS9's chief of operations looked up at the figure standing beside him.

  "'Gadget'? Oh, yes." Odo nodded. "Quite satisfactorily, thank you. I didn't bring it with me—" He displayed his empty hands. "Otherwise, I would have been happy to demonstrate the device's efficiency."

  "No need." O'Brien had gotten down on his knees, the better to apply force to a particularly stubborn panel fastening. "I'm already immodest enough about the quality of my work." He signaled with a crooked finger. "Could you point that light a little more this way? There, that's fine." With both fists clenched around the screwdriver's handle, and teeth gritted together, he strained against the reluctant bit of metal.

  "Actually, I need to ask another favor of you along those lines." Odo peered around the flashlight's beam. "The device you made for me just reads out the access code of someone who's currently using a holosuite; what I require now would be something that could give me a cumulative history of a holosuite's past users. Would that be possible?"

  "Sure; no problem." The screw had finally broken free, and O'Brien began backing it out. "These babies all have a log-in chip wired into the basic circuitry, so every access occasion gets recorded—you could have the times and dates, too, if you wanted." With a tiny ping, the screw fell out on the metal flooring. Out of habit created by years of practical engineer work, O'Brien picked up the screw and tucked it into a belt pouch before it could get lost.

  "That would be most helpful."

  Rubbing the small of his back, O'Brien looked over the panel. There were another sixteen fasteners to go. It would have been less work to use a power tool, but both he and Odo had agreed they didn't want anyone to know they were back here in this narrow space, and the noise might have given them away.

  It had been less than half an hour ago that Odo had cornered him in his office on the engineering deck and dragooned him along on this expedition. Or "investigation," as Odo would have it. The sector in question, one of DS9's remoter and less-frequented corridors, held a row of the new holosuites. He hadn't been able to conjecture why anyone would travel all this way to use them, when there were better-maintained ones on the Promenade.

  "Exactly," Odo had replied to the chief of operations' musings. "And where one finds a mystery, one must then look for a motivation."

  Spoken like a real detective, O'Brien had thought. They had checked and found no one using any of the corridor's holosuites; he had then led Odo back to the normally closed-off space behind them, from which the holosuites' workings could be reached.

  "Actually," continued O'Brien, "there would be a wee bit of a problem." The second of the panel's screws fell into his palm; he started on the next one. "And that'd be the same as with the other device: what you're asking for is not quite within regulations." With a raised eyebrow, he glanced up at Odo.

  "Do you have a problem with that?"

  "Me?" O'Brien shook his head as he stood up. Half of the screws rattled in his pocket; they had started coming along faster, the panel shifting with its own weight enough to break the seal. "But you're the policeman, remember."

  Odo's expression didn't change—it never did—but his spine stiffened, as though the remark had stung him. "I'll take full responsibility for whatever consequences may ensue."

  "Fine, fine; whatever." The handle of
the screwdriver had grown warm and sweaty in his grip. "Tell you what. Say around the end of next shift, come around to the engineering deck when you know I'm not going to be there. If you see a package on my desk marked with the letters NT, then that's yours."

  "'NT'?"

  "New toy. You'll be able to figure out how it works on your own. Ah, here we go." The final screw came free, and O'Brien slid it and the hand tool into his pocket. With his fingers braced against the flat metal, he eased the panel out and away from the wall.

  "Very impressive." Odo shone the flashlight into the recess behind. "I had no idea there was quite so much inside one of these."

  "You must be joking." He brushed off his palms against his uniform. "A holosuite's one of the most complicated pieces of equipment aboard the station. You'd have to go up to Ops deck and root around the multiband comm gear, the real long-distance stuff, to find anything more elaborate. Look-" He took the flashlight from Odo and used it as a pointer. "Over there you've got your miniaturized tractor-beam units; all of those have to be coordinated exactly with each other in order to produce even the simplest tactile sensory illusions. Same with the optical functions, the olfactory, anything where specific molecules have to be produced by the built-in replicators—" The flashlight beam skipped from one interwired module to the next. "Plus there's temperature control, and various homeostatic processes that aren't even meant to be perceived consciously, but the user would notice something was wrong if they weren't right on the money. And all of that has to be monitored and microadjusted in real time to interface not just with the original programming, but every move, every flick of an eyelash, that the user makes inside the chamber. So for that you need a data channel that's about big enough to run a small cruiser, and a computer node that's completely separate from the station's central unit—otherwise, if enough holosuites came on-line simultaneously, the processor drain could shut DS9 down to basic survival operations." He shook his head in admiration. "When I was back in engineering school, I tore one of these apart—a Mark One model, not anything as sophisticated as this—and believe me, I was an old man before I got it put back together."

  Odo's head shake expressed a different, more rueful emotion. "It seems a pity that such ingenuity isn't put to better use. I fail to see the attraction of these devices."

  "Different strokes, as they say." O'Brien smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. "Not everybody has such a rich and stimulating reality as you do."

  "Hm." Odo peered into the holosuite's mazelike innards. "Right now, that reality seems somewhat discouraging. How are you going to be able to tell if this unit's been tampered with?"

  That question had been the whole point of their expedition to this sector of the ship. Odo had been his usual tight-mouthed self, but O'Brien had been able to glean enough from him to know that the security chief had been tipped off about some possible alterations to these holosuites' programming banks. He had guessed on his own that the tip had come from Quark—who else? Coming from that dubious source, might be no more than a typically sneaking maneuver to have the holosuites not under Quark's control shut down and taken off-line. Quark viewed competition as a vastly inferior state to monopoly.

  "Easy enough," replied O'Brien. "If you know what you're looking for." He ducked his head below the panel opening's edge and stepped into the tight space surrounded by the different modules; he had to hold his elbows close to his sides to keep from bumping into any of them. "Should be right over . . . here." He reached outside to Odo. "Hand me that equipment bag I left over on the floor there. Thanks." From the bag he drew a small probe; numbers scrolled across its screen as he inserted the needle-like points into a socket receptor. "Tampering on holosuites was always a big worry; the problem about guarding against it is that you've got a lot of sites along the data stream that can be dinked around with. So what you've got laid over the entire assembly is what's called a web seal—there's microfilaments running from this box through every other component and back again. Poke your head in here for a moment." With his other hand, O'Brien pointed to the numbers that had stopped upon the probe's display. "See that? That's the date of the last time someone so much as laid a finger on anything in here."

  "So this holosuite—and presumably the others in this sector—hasn't been tampered with."

  O'Brien shrugged. "Well . . . let's not be too hasty about that conclusion." He drew another device from the equipment bag, one with the rough but serviceable appearance of his own construction. "Give me a couple more minutes."

  Maneuvering through the narrow enclosure, he started tracing the almost microscopic strands of the web seal. He could feel Odo watching him as he stepped farther into the holosuite's innards.

  "Those clever bastards." He had found what he had suspected would be hidden there; an LED on the device in his hand glowed red. Whoever had been in here before him merited his admiration, if only on a technical basis.

  "What is it?" Odo's voice came from behind.

  O'Brien emerged with a rectangular black box in his hands. "I've got to give them credit, whoever they were—that was a good clean job they did. I wouldn't have located this little number if I hadn't been able to get a decay readout on the web filament. They managed to jump a section of line, then splice this in, all without tripping the seal unit's sensors. That takes some pretty high-level skills."

  Odo nodded slowly, as if already assembling a list of criteria for suspects. "How proficient would that person—or group of persons—have to be?"

  "Frankly, they'd have to be as good as I am. And that's very good." O'Brien turned the object around in his hands. "Wonder what the hell's inside this thing. Nice, tight unit; looks like it came off a regular assembly line, and not just some kludge somebody threw together. It'll take some work to bust it open."

  "How long will that take?"

  "Depends. If there's an autodestruct sequence wired in, I'll have to find some way of finessing around it. That might take a shift or two. If it's clean, though, I could have it ready for Dax to start running an analysis in, oh, a couple of hours. Can't be sure until I've got it on the bench."

  "Very well." Odo pointed to the black box in the chief of operations' hands. "Are there members of the engineering crew who can open up the other holosuites here and extract these things?"

  "Sure." O'Brien nodded. "Once I tell them what they're looking for."

  "They'll need temp security authorizations from me—I'm locking this whole sector down."

  "I'll send them your way first, then."

  As they turned away from the panel opening and headed for the passageway, Odo studied his companion. "Somehow . you knew, didn't you? That someone had tampered with that holosuite, despite the web-seal readout."

  O'Brien tried to be as gentle as possible with his smile. "Perhaps you're not the only great detective on board, Constable. Didn't you notice the dust?"

  Odo glanced behind himself, then back to O'Brien. "What dust?"

  "Exactly—there wasn't any." He pointed to an overhead grille. "These work areas don't get the same atmospheric filtration cycles that the other sectors do. Things get pretty mucky after a while; that's why those access panels are bolted down so airtight. Whoever was in here, they were real professionals." He let his smile widen. "They cleaned up after themselves. And that's how I knew."

  "Is this the article in question?" The object seemed surprisingly light in his hands. Sisko rubbed the ball of his thumb across the enameled surface. He could see the reflection of his face in it, as though it were an obsidian mirror.

  "That's the casing for it," said Dax. "O'Brien didn't have any trouble getting into it—though apparently he did make the first drill hole by remote, in a bombproof chamber, just to be on the safe side." She pointed to the workbench along the laboratory's other side. "The unit's interior components are over there."

  "You've completed your analysis on them?"

  "For the most part. I'm afraid, Benjamin, that we'll have a difficult time determining the sou
rce of these devices. Whoever built them didn't leave a lot of clues inside."

  He set the empty casing down, then looked over the carefully dismantled innards. Bright fragments of metal, the intricate tracery of microcircuits—for a moment, an irrational feeling moved at the base of his own gut, that he was looking at the disemboweled carcass of a once-living creature, one that had crept with malign rodentlike cunning into the core of the station. He pushed the disquieting thought away.

  "What about its function?" Sisko picked up one of the pieces, a mute crystalline cylinder, and studied it between his thumb and forefinger. "Its effect on these altered holosuites?"

  "I can give you more information on that." She stepped beside him and took the crystal away from him, replacing it in the exact ordered spot from which he had taken it. That small action held a silent reprimand, as though from an elder to a child. Which in essence it was, coming—as he knew it did—from the centuries-old symbiont inside Jadzia's torso. His ancient friend, across a gulf of so many years and aggregate lifetimes. He watched as Jadzia drew her hand away from the piece. "Unfortunately," she said, "a great deal more."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's not good news, Benjamin. There are some very serious consequences to what I've found here."

  "Related to the epidemic of murders?"

  She nodded.

  "I had a feeling that was going to be the case." Sisko leaned back against the edge of the bench. "Give me a rundown on it, then."

  "Basically, the situation with the holosuites in the indicated sector is as Odo suspected; they've all been tampered with. An operations crew is currently removing the other modules identical to this one. I'll check each one of them out, but I'm confident that I'll find that they're all identical in construction and operation. The technology that's employed in these modules is a very powerful—and illicit—sensory-input technology that's usually referred to by the initials 'CI.'"