CHAPTER 9

FOR THE second time in two days, Jake Sisko opened the small egress panel and slid it to the side of the cramped Jefferies tube.

“It's open,” he said. Then he heard Nog's communicator badge chirp as his friend passed on the report to Chief O'Brien.

The chief's voice came back, echoing along the metal-walled tube. “According to your position on the station plans, you two lads should be facing another fifteen meters of unobstructed passageway.”

Jake sighed. He and Nog had finally done what they should have done years ago, and told DS9's chief engineer about the hidden section of the station. Then, with an agitated O'Brien at their side, they had told Jake's father. And then —Jake was sure it was just to compound the humiliation he and Nog felt—Sisko and the chief had insisted they repeat their story to the forbidding, and strongly disapproving, Lieutenant Commander Worf.

But even though it was plainly evident through all the reporting that his father was keenly disappointed in him for having kept something like this a secret for so long, Jake could also see that neither his father nor the chief nor Commander Worf actually believed the story when they first heard it. So why were they upset? Not that they shouldn't be, because the story was true. It was just . . . Jake didn't know. He only hoped that in a million years or so, when he was his father's age, he would have a better grasp of a teenager's way of thinking.

Jake lifted his head to look back down the narrow Jefferies tube at Nog. “I don't get it. Do they still think we're making this up?”

Apparently, Nog's comm channel was still open because O'Brien answered. “No, I don't think you're making it up. I'm just telling you what's on the screen.”

“Sorry, Chief,” Jake said with a grimace. “I'm going to climb through the opening now.”

Jake pushed himself up through the open access way just as he had before, then again swung his body around to free his legs so he could drop down into the dark section of corridor. Nog followed a moment later, much more quickly and smoothly than the last time. Once again, his palm torch was the only source of light.

“Tell them,” Jake said.

Nog tapped his communicator. “We are in the corridor.” Nog made it sound as if they were commandos who had just beamed in behind enemy lines.

A few seconds later, the short section of corridor lit up with the golden energy of the transporter effect, and three sparkling columns of quantum mist resolved into Jake's father, O'Brien, and Worf. Each of them carried their own palm torch. Jake wasn't quite sure why Worf had his hand on the phaser he wore. But then, Worf was like that.

Benjamin Sisko's expression was unreadable. “Chief?” was all he said. Jake had noticed that his father had a shorthand way of dealing with his command staff, almost as if they shared some low-level telepathic link.

Chief O'Brien's attention jumped back and forth between the corridor and the large engineering padd he carried. The padd was similar to the kind Jake had seen artists sometimes use for sketching. “This makes absolutely no sense,” the chief said. “Look at the deck plan for this section.”

As Sisko and Worf stood on one side of O'Brien to study the engineering display, Jake stood with Nog on the other.

On the padd, Jake could see four yellow dots representing the team's active communicators tightly grouped together, blinking in the middle of what a label identified as a storage room.

“This is clearly not a storage room,” Worf stated in his deep, somber voice.

O'Brien nodded, pointing to various bulkheads that surrounded the blinking lights on the padd display. “I think I can see what's happened here. The Cardassians' own official plans have been altered to show that these two storage rooms, here and here—” O'Brien's finger touched the surface of the padd, “—have back walls that extend an extra three meters or so. Notice this relay room extends two more meters. And this heat-exchange conduit is . . . maybe a half-meter wider than it has to be. And the two corridor sections running to either side are the same. So I'm betting the conduits that are supposed to be running right above us have been rerouted to either side, too, probably passing through the deck plates instead of running through that Jefferies tube that just isn't there.”

Jake was surprised by how seriously the three men were reacting to the unmarked corridor's existence. His father, especially, looked grim. “Why weren't these deviations noticed when the first retrofit team went through the station to confirm the Cardassian plans?”

O'Brien looked apologetic. “I'm betting they were noticed. But there are lots of discrepancies between the Cardassians' plans for the station and how they were executed. A project this big, there would have to be. I've noticed little things over the years myself—pipes in the wrong order, a junction box on the left wall instead of the right . . . it gets so you come to expect it. But they're usually not major enough to bother altering the plans to fit.”

“Yet this stretch of corridor is . . .” Sisko swung the beam of his palm torch from one end of the section to the other. “. . . at least ten meters long, Chief. That's a lot of station to go missing.”

“No argument from me, sir. All I can say is that this is a noncritical section of the station, so with the war changing our priorities, we just haven't had a full refit team down here yet. For what it's worth, we would have found this . . . missing space . . . eventually.”

Sisko levelled his gaze at Jake. “For what it's worth, we should have been informed about this missing space six years ago.”

Jake was about to remind his father how many times he had apologized already, when Nog nudged him in the side. Jake understood. Nog had gone to great lengths to explain to Jake that their best defense was to behave like Starfleet cadets—limiting their responses to Yes, sir; No, sir; and most importantly, No excuse, sir. “It's a good way to avoid arguments,” Nog had emphasized.

So Jake remained silent until his father said, “All right, then, where's this . . . hidden holosuite?”

Nog hurried ahead. “Right down here, Captain. It's the only door in that bulkhead.”

The team followed Nog until they were gathered together by the closed door. Worf and O'Brien immediately scanned the door and the area beyond it with their tricorders—one set for engineering readings, the other for security.

Jake shifted his weight from one leg to the other, impatient with the delay. He wanted this over with. “Dad, there's nothing dangerous in there. We've been inside a lot of—”

Sisko cut him off with an icy glare. “And maybe you've been lucky. Before they left, the Cardassians booby-trapped all sorts of equipment and facilities in this station, especially anything with a military function. And the only reason I can think of for putting a holosuite down here is for training purposes.”

“Yes, sir,” Jake said dispiritedly.

“I detect no explosives or triggering devices behind the door,” Worf announced as he lowered his tricorder.

“Captain,” O'Brien added, “I'm not even picking up any evidence of power flow. The tricorder's telling me there's a room beyond the door, about five meters by six. But I don't think anything inside is even connected to the station's power grid.” The chief made an adjustment on his tricorder. “In fact, I'm not even picking up any evidence of holo equipment. Either projectors or microforcefield emitters.”

Nervously, Jake looked up and down the corridor to see if there was any chance they could somehow be at the wrong door. But just as every time before, there was only the one.

“You're certain it was a holosuite?” his father asked him.

“Dad, it could run our fishing hole program perfectly. Water and everything.”

His father looked back to O'Brien. “Then it has to be a holosuite, and for it to run a program from my own data library it has to have some type of interface with the station's main computer network.”

O'Brien made more adjustments, then frowned. “If there is, sir, I'm going to have to make a more detailed scan. From inside.”

Sisko nodded at Worf. Worf tapped the door control and the door opened.

Jake almost smiled as he heard Nog take a deep breath. His best friend was preparing himself for the embarrassment of having everyone see his adolescent modification of the fishing-hole program, complete with Ferengi bathing beauties.

But as the light from the palm torches stabbed into the room, it revealed . . . only a room.

Jake and Nog both tried to push ahead, but were held back by Worf.

“I've never seen that before,” Jake said to his father.

“Sir, this holosuite has always been in operation,” Nog added.

Sisko looked at O'Brien. “Any chance the holosuite ran on batteries and yesterday's visit finally exhausted them?”

O'Brien was skeptical. “No battery powerful enough for a holosuite goes completely dead that fast. I'd still be able to pick up some residual charge somewhere. And even taking a direct reading from the far wall, there are no holoprojectors on it or in it.”

Sisko nodded at Worf again and he and the Klingon stepped into the room together. Jake watched as his father and Worf reached the middle, then turned slowly, playing their palm torches around in a circle like all-seeing scanners.

“It appears to be a lab of some sort,” Worf said slowly.

“Maybe,” Sisko said. “It does look as if they were building things in here. Maybe a machine shop? Chief O'Brien?”

O'Brien stepped in next and Jake watched him make the same careful examination of the room, this time giving a running inventory of everything he saw. “Circuit testbed, communications console, a Type-IV computer interface. . . .” He gave Sisko a significant look. “That's identical to Dax's science station in Ops.” He returned to his assessment of the room. “A few storage lockers, maybe for lab coats or tools or lunches . . . None of them locked.”

“What about that?” Sisko asked, aiming his torch to a corner of the room Jake couldn't see.

“Well, it's a console,” O'Brien said. “But I don't recognize the configuration.”

Sisko looked at both O'Brien and Worf. “Gentlemen, any energy readings?” he asked.

Worf and O'Brien replied at the same time. “No, sir.”

Sisko motioned to Jake and Nog. “You two. In here.”

Jake and Nog stepped over the lip of the door and into the room. In this nonoperational mode it was completely unfamiliar to Jake, and he could see the same lack of recognition in Nog.

“Really, sir. We never saw it this way,” Nog said.

“You two said you were able to change whatever program it was displaying,” Sisko prompted.

“That's right,” Jake said. “I'll give it a try.” He cleared his throat. “Room, this is Jake Sisko. Show me my fishing hole.”

Jake unconsciously braced himself for the sudden swirl of holopixels and the odd optical bounce that had always followed that command.

But nothing happened.

“Anything?” Sisko asked O'Brien.

“I've set this at full sensitivity, Captain. If there were a single acoustical pickup in this room, I would have detected the current flow created when Jake spoke.” He showed the tricorder's flashing face to Jake's father.

Sisko answered his own question. “Nothing.”

Jake winced at his father's tone of voice. “Dad, this was a holodeck. We played in my fishing hole. And Nog had a really great Ferenginar adventure playground.” The playground had been at the edge of a dismal, rain-misted swamp, Jake remembered, but the programmable swinging vines had been a lot of fun.

“What else?” Sisko asked sternly.

Jake shrugged, perplexed by what he had no way to explain, or prove. “A couple of other programs from our personal library. You know, the theme park at Tranquility Base, the Klingon Zoo . . .” He glanced at Nog.

“We could only ever run programs that were in your personal files or my father's,” Nog said. “I mean, we could customize elements of them with voice commands, but . . . we never really figured out the room's full operating interface.”

Sisko looked again at O'Brien and Worf as if silently soliciting their opinions.

In response, Worf asked the next question. “Are you certain you never saw a holoprogram that was Cardassian in nature? A military training scenario? Cardassian history reenactments?”

Both Jake and Nog shook their heads.

“Oh,” Nog suddenly added. “There was the moon. The Bajoran moon.”

“Which moon?” Sisko asked sharply.

Jake stared beseechingly at Nog, who shrugged. “Dad, I don't know. One of the inhabited ones. That was the program that was running yesterday when we came in. That's what made us think that someone else had been in here.”

Sisko rubbed his free hand over his clean-shaven scalp. It was a gesture Jake had seen his father make a thousand times, most often when Dax was forcing him into checkmate in three-dimensional chess.

“Chief,” Sisko said, “if we don't know what that console is, is there any chance it could be some radically different form of holoprojector?”

Jake took a look at the unidentified console as O'Brien walked over to it and the four palm torches in the room converged upon it.

The console was definitely Cardassian in design—a large, jagged boomerang shape, tilted slightly toward the operator, finished with the familiar dull-gray bonding metal. The flat-panel controls were unlit, though the light from the palm torches showed that the controls were arranged in standard Cardassian logic groupings. About the only detail that made the console unusual was that in the center of its slanting surface, a section had been inset in order to hold a flat shelf about a half-meter square.

Even to Jake's untrained eye, it seemed obvious that whatever had been connected to the console on that shelf had been ripped out. Two power leads dangled to either side, their interior component wires roughly torn apart. Jake could even see heat damage on the console just beneath the lead ends, as well as in the center of the shelf.

“Now, this is interesting,” O'Brien said as he held his tricorder only centimeters from the damaged console.

“Was it a holoprojector?” Sisko asked.

“I doubt it,” O'Brien answered. “But I don't think I've ever seen energy traces like this before.”

“What kind of energy?” Worf asked.

“Hard to say, Commander. I don't think it's from a weapon. But . . . whatever was on this section here—” O'Brien pointed his tricorder at the console's inset shelf, “—it was radiating . . . something I haven't seen before.”

Jake stepped back as his father moved in front of him and Nog as if to shield them from the console. “Dangerous?” his father asked.

“Not now, sir. And there's no way to know if what I'm picking up came about because it was a slow release of radiation over a long period of time—in which case, I don't think it ever would have been dangerous—or if it came in a sudden, explosive release, in a short time—in which case, it might have been.” O'Brien snapped his tricorder shut with a practiced flip of his hand. “Sorry, Captain. But that's the best I can do with this. I'm going to need a full team to take it apart. Couldn't hurt to have Dax take a look, too.”

“Maybe in a day or two,” Sisko said. “I've already got her helping out with the dead Cardassians.”

Jake was surprised to hear Commander Worf snort.

Sisko raised his eyebrows. “A problem, Mr. Worf?”

Worf looked up at the ceiling. “Sir, it is not any of my business.”

“But . . . ?”

“For Quark to say that he has lost his memory to provide an alibi for his actions at the time the Cardassians were killed is . . . ludicrous.”

“You're right,” Sisko agreed. Jake was as surprised to hear his father say that as it appeared Commander Worf was. But then his father finished his statement. “It is none of your business.”

“Yes, sir,” Worf growled grumpily.

Jake caught the lightning-quick wink and a smile that his father meant just for him. Then he watched as his father tugged down on his jacket and transformed himself from Jake's father into a Starfleet captain again.

“Anything else you feel we should know?” he asked Jake and Nog. “Any detail, however small, you think might help us out?”

Jake and Nog looked at each other, shook their heads.

Sisko accepted their answer. “All right. You two can—”

“I have a question,” Chief O'Brien suddenly said. “How did you two find this room in the first place?”

“We used to explore the Jefferies tubes,” Jake said.

“I can understand that,” O'Brien replied. “But what possessed you to go to all the trouble of opening up that access hatch? It couldn't have been easy.”

Jake looked down at the deck, trying to remember the first day he and Nog had found the room. “I think it was because we had never seen one so small. It's not exactly a standard size.”

Nog coughed. “We were . . . looking for hidden Cardassian treasure, Chief.”

“Ah,” O'Brien said. “For a couple of twelve-year-olds, that makes perfect sense. But then, when you came in here, to the room, for the first time, how did you know it was a holosuite? It couldn't have been running any of your own programs without your having given it a command, right?”

“Right,” Jake said with surprise. He looked down at Nog. “What was running when we came in?”

Jake felt his father's hand on his shoulder. “Jake, do you have any sense that you can't remember the first time you came into this room?”

“I don't think so,” Jake said, wondering why his father suddenly sounded so worried.

“Wait! I remember,” Nog said.

Everyone looked at him. He looked up at Jake. “You didn't want to go inside, remember?”

Jake laughed. “Oh yeah. I was . . . I was afraid. I remember now.”

Nog looked back to Sisko. “So Jake dared me to go in first.”

“And what program was running?” O'Brien asked.

“That's what was so great,” Nog said excitedly. “It was Ferenginar. The swamp outside the capital city. It was dark, and wet, and raining. I was so excited. I came out to tell Jake it was just like my adventure playground program, and when we both came back in, we found the playground just a few hundred meters away.”

O'Brien looked at Sisko. “The room recognized him. Called up his favorite program from his father's personal library. And all in the space of time it took to open the door.”

Jake looked at the serious expression that his father, O'Brien, and Worf all shared now. “Why's that bad?”

O'Brien answered. “Jake, there's no power coming into this room. There's no computer link through that Type-IV console or through any other piece of equipment in the room. Yet somehow this room had the data-processing capability to identify Nog and call up a program from his father's personal library in seconds. Not even the holodecks they use at Starfleet Academy have that kind of processing ability.” O'Brien turned to Sisko as if making a formal report. “Sir, with this new information, I think it's reasonable to assume that this was a top-secret Cardassian research facility, probably involving advanced computers and holo-replication technology far beyond anything we have.”

“I agree,” Sisko said. “So why did the Cardassians leave it behind?”

“Perhaps,” Worf said in a voice full of grave concern, “the equipment in here was too complex to be removed in time during the Withdrawal, and was considered too valuable to be destroyed.”

Jake could see that his father was definitely intrigued—and disturbed—by that possibility. “You know,” he said softly as if talking to himself, “Starfleet has never been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the Cardassians didn't activate DS9's selfdestruct system when they withdrew. I wonder if this room—this lab—is the reason. Did they achieve a breakthrough here that they hoped to keep hidden until they could return?”

“But they did return, Captain,” Worf said. “Last year. Why did they not reclaim their equipment then?”

Sisko looked up, and Jake could see he was enjoying the challenge this room was presenting. “Perhaps the work being done here was so secret that only a handful of people knew about it. Perhaps they died during the Withdrawal, or shortly after. There could be a dozen reasons, Worf.”

“But if the work was so secret and so valuable,” O'Brien said, “then why was it being carried out here? In a mining station? In an occupied sector subject to attack by Bajoran resistance fighters?”

“I don't know, Chief,” Sisko admitted, and didn't seem troubled by his lack of an answer. “But you can be sure there was a reason. We're dealing with Cardassians here, and they have a reason for everything they do.” He looked around the room, deep in thought. “If this was a Cardassian research facility, then you can be sure that the reason it is here is because this is the only place it could be.”

Jake saw that O'Brien didn't share his captain's sense of urgency for the problem at hand. “But, sir, why would that be?”

Jake could see his father was in his element now. His face was alive with new purpose. “Who knows, Chief. But one thing's for sure—even after six years, this old place still has a few surprises left in it.”