CHAPTER 4

THEY WERE CALLED tiyerta nok —literally, the life-flow of iron, or as the current usage had it, the arteries of the machine.

That was the term the Cardassians gave to the engineering access tunnels that riddled their mining station: a complex network of barely passable crawl spaces supporting a web of ODN cables, power conduits, waste-, water-, and replicator-mass plumbing, and air-circulation channels. But as soon as Starfleet had taken control and Terok Nor became Deep Space 9, the tiyerta nok inevitably became known as Jefferies tubes, a term some said had its origins as far back as the very beginnings of starship design. Others said even further.

But unlike DS9's other Jefferies tubes—most of which by now had been retrofitted with new, Starfleet-standard lighting sources and ODN upgrades—the Jefferies tube on this lower level was dark, cramped, and cut off from the station's main air-flow system. Not a whisper of a breeze passed through it, and Jake Sisko blinked as steady drips of sweat rolled into his eyes.

“You're crazy,” Nog said. “It'll never work.”

Jake was flat on his back at the end of this particular tiyerta nok, lifting his cramped arms directly overhead to work on the panel set into the uncomfortably low, sloping ceiling. The much shorter Nog was crouched at Jake's feet, where the tunnel height was a bit more generous, keeping a palm torch on the panel above Jake and passing along tools as Jake requested them.

“Nog, it's perfect,” Jake insisted. He wriggled a multispanner against the flathead mini-tagbolt he had finally loosened, and the second of three U-shaped clasps holding the egress panel in place dropped free, hitting him right between the eyes. “Oww!” It was more a cry of surprise than pain. “These things never used to be so tight.”

“Some of the old Cardassian subsystems are self-repairing.” Nog spoke with apparent disinterest, though he added with a chuckle, “Did that ever surprise the Chief when he finally figured out why some of his repairs kept reverting to Cardassian configurations. But anyway, the plan can't work, because there's no way you'll ever get past the ambassador's bodyguards.”

Jake carefully put the multispanner down beside him and groped for the intergrips. Three more minis to go. “That's what the diversion's for. When the bodyguards go to help the dabo girls, we slip into the ambassador's quarters, take the latinum—”

“What?! You never said anything about stealing latinum!”

Jake moaned and lowered his strained arms to rest them. “Technically, we're not stealing it, Nog, we're only taking it to confuse Odo about the motive. And even if we were really stealing it, so what? We're murderers, remember? Cold-blooded and remorseless.”

Jake squinted as Nog aimed the palm torch directly into his eyes. “Jake, my friend, you have to start getting out more. We're not murderers.”

“Okay, okay. You know what I mean. Quark and Morn are the murderers.”

Nog put down the palm torch, but even with the suddenly increased darkness Jake had no trouble sensing how annoyed his friend was. “I thought you said you couldn't use their names.”

“You're right. I mean ‘Higgs and Fermion.’ It's just that I've been thinking about this story for so long, and while you were on patrol Quark let me watch one of his smuggling transactions—”

“Jake!” Nog hissed. “I'm wearing a communicator!” The Ferengi teenager lowered his chin to his chest and spoke loudly and precisely for the benefit of any potential eavesdroppers. “And I'm certain my Uncle Quark would never be involved in smuggling, or any other type of illegal—or even questionable—activity. Perhaps he was just playing a joke on you by pretending that he was.”

“Oh, forget it,” Jake muttered. Then he went back to attacking the third mini-tagbolt. “No one ever told me writing was such hard work.”

“What's so hard about sitting in front of a computer and talking?”

“Shine the light here,” Jake said. “And that part's not hard. It's all the work you have to do ahead of time so you can know what to say to the computer. That's the hard—owwh!”

The third mini was much looser than the second, and left a dent in Jake's forehead when it fell.

“We could have used the transporter to get down here,” Nog said.

Jake didn't know why he bothered to keep explaining things to Nog, but he tried again. “That would leave a trace in the station security log.” He pried at the egress panel with just his fingers now; to his relief, it came out easily. “Huh. I thought that would have been stuck after all these years.”

Nog, uncharacteristically, said nothing, and Jake looked back at him with renewed suspicion. “You sure you haven't been back here since the last time?”

Nog looked offended. “Why would I come down here?”

Jake smiled insinuatingly. “The ‘Room,’ remember?” Then Jake used his feet to push himself backwards until his head and upper body poked out through the wall-panel opening. A moment later, he had turned his body and swung his legs out and down, hung on to the edge of the opening, and then dropped lightly to the floor of a small stretch of corridor. The corridor was lit only by the reflected light coming in through a panel opening set high near the ceiling in the bulkhead behind him.

“Whoa . . . it's still not hooked up to the main power grid,” Jake said.

Nog's voice echoed in the Jeffries tube before he stuck his head through the wall-panel opening and brought the palm torch up beside him, letting it play around the area. “With the war, the Chief's retrofit schedule lost its priority. Except, of course, when he needed to maintain critical functions.”

Jake's eyebrows lifted in surprise. Starfleet had made the retrofitting of Deep Space 9 a high-profile project, and accordingly Chief O'Brien had been given the authority to set up a renovation and repair program that would eventually move through the entire station, from Ops to the lowest level. War or no war, it was hard to believe that after almost six years, no one on any of the retrofitting teams had stumbled upon this ten-meter stretch of corridor that somehow had been sealed off from all the other corridors on the level.

Jake glanced up at Nog. “Aren't you coming down?”

“I thought you said you just wanted to time how long it would take for Quark and—I mean, for ‘Higgs and Fermion’ to escape through the Jefferies tube.”

That was the original reason why Jake had talked Nog into retracing their old routes through the Jefferies tubes. He had decided to put his semiautobiographical novel, Anslem, aside for the time being and try something more commercial. So the new crime novel he was working on, The Ferengi Connection, was going to be set on a fictional Cardassian mining station still in orbit of Bajor. For that reason, he wanted to be completely accurate about how long it would take his crime lords Higgs and Fermion to secretly move from one part of the station to another. When Quark had allowed him to observe the illegal sale of Denevan crystals last Saturday night, Jake had been most interested to learn that the Ferengi used a network of secret passageways different from the Jefferies tubes. That would allow him to move through the station without being observed by Odo. Unfortunately, Nog's uncle wasn't about to give Captain Sisko's son, of all people, any details about the network, so Jake had decided to base the tunnels in his novel on the engineering ones he and Nog used to play in.

“Well, we're here. You timed it. Let's go back,” Nog said impatiently. He held out his hand to haul Jake back up to the panel opening.

“No,” Jake said as he looked around. “I can use this in the story. A lost section of the station. . . . Maybe this is where Quark—Higgs—has his secret headquarters.”

“Jake, did you ever stop to think that maybe this section was sealed off for a reason?”

Jake didn't understand why Nog was being so cautious. “Nog, we used to come down here almost every day after school. If there was anything dangerous, we'd already know about it. Now get down here.”

Nog mumbled something in an obscure trading tongue that Jake couldn't make out. But the young Ferengi squirmed through the panel opening and dropped with a loud thump to the uncarpeted deck beside his friend. He got up awkwardly, brushed dust from his Starfleet uniform, then aimed his palm torch to one end of the short corridor. The beam of light found only a standard, DS9 bulkhead, a dull, burnished-copper color, ridged and scalloped like the skin of a gigantic reptile. Nog shone the light in the other direction, but his torchlight uncovered only more of the same. “You know, we really have to tell Chief O'Brien about this,” he said.

Jake patted Nog on the back. “And what are we going to say when he asks us when we discovered a lost section of corridor?”

“We were children,” Nog said. “If we told anyone what we had found back then . . . .” He laughed. “My father would have served me my lobes on a platter for playing in the tubes.”

“And for playing with a ‘hew-mon,’ ” Jake added.

Nog frowned, and Jake knew why. Despite the cannibalism rumors that still refused to die, human-Ferengi relations had come a long way in the past decade; but those relations still weren't so secure that many Ferengi would be comfortable joking about them.

“Would your father have been any more understanding?” Nog asked defiantly.

Jake snorted. “If I had told him about the tunnels back then, I'd still be confined to my room.”

“But . . . we are going to tell them now, correct?”

“Maybe not right this minute,” Jake said.

“Jake, we don't have any excuse for keeping this to ourselves. In fact, it might be my duty as a Starfleet officer to tell my commanding officer that—where are you going?!”

Jake ignored Nog and his unfathomable anxiety, and walked toward the only door in the corridor. “Let's just see if it's still here,” Jake said.

Nog darted past him and stood in front of the lone door. “It is. Now let's go to Ops and—”

Jake smiled at Nog and reached for the door control panel. “And now, let's see if it's still working.”

“It is working!” Nog bleated as he pushed Jake's hand away from the door control.

Jake regarded his friend with a slight frown. “Nog, is there something you'd like to tell me?”

“Let's go to Ops, find Chief O'Brien, and . . . and I'll tell you everything.”

Even in the pale illumination from the palm torch, Jake saw Nog's large ears flush. The explanation came to him suddenly.

“Nog . . . you have been coming down here, haven't you?”

“No. Well, yes. But, not often. A few times. Five . . . maybe eight, ten times.”

Jake stared at Nog, nonplussed. “By yourself?”

Nog's mouth opened and closed but nothing came out.

“Oh, I get it now.” Jake shook his head with a laugh, the sound oddly muffled in the enclosed space. “So . . . if I open this door, just what am I going to see?” He tried to remember the titles of the ‘special’ holosuite programs they used to ‘borrow’ from Quark's bar, the ones Quark kept locked in the little box under the stale pistachios no one ever asked for. “Lauriento Spa? Vulcan Love Slave?”

At that, Nog started to laugh, too. “Part One or Part Two?”

There was only one answer to that question. “Part Two,” Jake said with a snicker. Then both friends completed the title at the same time: “The Revenge!”

That was enough to make both double over in fits of uncontrolled giggling, both recalling how they would take the adult holosuite cylinders and try to run the graphic subroutines through their personal desk padds. At best, they were able to call up mildly suggestive silhouettes of some of the holographic performers from the programs, usually obscured by blurred color and jagged outlines. But the two young friends, certain they were close to learning the secrets of the universe—and equally certain they were going to be caught by their fathers at any minute—had stared at those flickering images for hours, trying desperately to see in them what it was that adults found so compelling.

Eventually, the laughter faded and Jake caught his breath. “So, you really don't want me to open the door?” he asked.

Nog chewed at his lip. “And if I say no, as soon as we leave you'll be right back here to open it anyway, right?”

“Right,” Jake agreed. That's exactly what he had decided to do.

Nog sighed in resignation. “Go ahead.” He stepped aside.

Jake made a production out of pressing the door control. When the door slipped open, he comically placed both hands over his eyes.

Until he heard Nog say, “Hey, that's not my program. . . .” Jake took his hands away, looked into what had been the most exciting discovery of their childhood on Deep Space 9, something not recorded on any deck plan or technical drawing. A lost Cardassian holosuite.

Nog was already inside the room, standing on a slightly inclined rocky landscape. Beyond him, about a holographic kilometer away, Jake spied a collection of small stone buildings reminiscent of a primitive village. It was night on the holosuite, but the buildings and the land were lit by a cool, blue-green illumination. Jake couldn't detect the source of that backlighting, though it appeared, improbably, to be coming from somewhere behind him.

He stepped inside to join Nog, then turned around to look past the improbable cutout of the doorway to the DS9 corridor, to an astounding holographic vista of a night sky.

At once he identified the source of the blue-green light.

A planet filled almost a tenth of the sky in the holographic scene, the bright light reflecting from the green oceans of its sunlit half enough to wash most of the stars from the heavens.

Then he recognized the planet. “Hey, that's Bajor. . . .”

“Really?” Nog said.

Jake pointed skyward. “By the terminator . . . see those mountains?” The distinctive pattern created where three tectonic plates had collided to form a perfect X of intersecting mountain ranges was so well known as to almost be the galactic symbol for Bajor.

“Dahkur Province,” Nog murmured. He looked around the holographic landscape again. “So this must be one of Bajor's moons. But I didn't program this.”

“Neither did I,” Jake said.

The two friends looked at each other, and Jake could see that Nog had just reached the same conclusion he had. “Someone else has been down here.”

“Pretty dull program,” Jake said softly. “I don't see a single Vulcan love slave.”

They stood in silence for a few moments, listening to the holographic wind. Jake looked back at the village and saw flickering lights in some of the windows of the small buildings.

“Does it feel as if something should be happening?” Nog asked.

Jake shook his head. “It's not on pause. We've got wind, moving lights in that village.”

“But why would anyone want a holosimulation of . . . of nothing happening on a Bajoran moon?”

Jake shrugged. “Maybe the program's caught in a loop. Or the holosuite's broken.” He cleared his throat. “Room, this is Jake Sisko. Show me my fishing hole. . . .”

Unlike any other type of holographic simulation Jake had ever seen, the distinctive program switchover of the Cardassian holosuite now began. At first, the colors and the shapes of the Bajoran moon's landscape seemed to liquefy and swim into each other, and then, as if the plug had been pulled on reality, all the colors spun swiftly—dizzyingly—into a spiral vortex that made Jake feel as if he were about to be drawn down an endless tunnel. But, just as quickly as the vertigo of that transformation made itself felt, the spiralling stopped and with a strange optical bounce that Jake could almost feel, the new program took shape.

Jake and Nog were standing on a covered wooden bridge that spanned Jake's favorite fishing hole. It was his father's favorite, too, and six years ago, Jake had been delighted to discover that this secret Cardassian holosuite could access his father's programs from DS9's main computers.

Except . . .

“This isn't my program, either,” Jake said to Nog. The perpetual summer sun wasn't shining. In fact, the day was overcast. In fact, it was actually raining.”

“I, uh, sort of made some, uh, minor modifications,” Nog confessed with a shrug. “The rain makes me feel more . . . at home. . . .”

Then Jake saw that he and Nog weren't alone. There were people swimming in the fishing hole. “Who are they?” He stepped closer to the bridge's railing, saw the impressive size and bulbous shape of the swimmers' bald heads. “Ferengi?”

“Uh-huh,” Nog said in a strangled croak, as if his throat was slowly closing in.

The Ferengi swimmers saw Jake and Nog on the bridge, and started waving enthusiastically.

Then Jake saw how small their ears were, and he began to really understand. “Ferengi females . . .”

“I've never really been much for . . . pointed ears,” Nog mumbled.

Two of the swimmers began climbing a wooden ladder at the side of the bridge. They were calling Nog's name, and as they stepped onto the bridge, leaving wet footprints behind, Jake was momentarily startled by the bulky, multilayered swimming costumes the Ferengi females wore. Other than their heads, their hands, and their feet, not a square centimeter of skin was exposed, not a curve of their bodies could be discerned.

Jake looked at Nog with a grin.

Nog's open-mouth smile was so broad, it almost made him look as if he'd just been stunned by a phaser. The Ferengi teenager stared at the two fully clad females without blinking.

“You're drooling,” Jake teased.

Nog looked up at his friend. “Vulcan love slaves don't . . . wear any clothes,” he said sheepishly. “Where's the fun in that?”

Jake took Nog by the arm, tugged him toward the door to the corridor. “Nog, you need to get out more. Let's go find Chief O'Brien.”

Allowing Nog to wave a sad farewell to the Ferengi females, Jake pushed his glum friend out the door.

The Ferengi females—representing everything Nog could ever want—returned that wave sadly as Jake and Nog left, reverting to their true forms only when the door had completely closed, and the waiting began again.