CHAPTER 18

“THERE,” O'BRIEN SAID. “That's the hidden stretch of corridor with the holosuite. The one Jake and Nog found.”

On the Defiant's main viewer, a small red dot flashed in the lower section of a three-dimensional wire-frame schematic of Deep Space 9. Only a third of the station's outline was filled with detailed depictions of bulkheads and decks, conduits and waveguides, turbolift shafts and structural support beams. The other two-thirds of the station remained featureless. But that was to be expected. O'Brien had been conducting his tactical sweep for only a little more than three hours, and it was still under way.

Sisko watched as another pulsing light joined the first on the screen, a few decks higher and closer to the station's core. “What about that?” he asked, pointing to a second red dot. “Over there, two levels up.”

“Ah,” the chief said as he rotated the schematic on the viewer. “That's a deficiency we already knew about. The original plans called for that section to hold about ten additional living units. But the Cardassians never got around to finishing them, so they left it as one large room. The dock management people use it as a storeroom for unclaimed goods. Odo checks it for contraband every week or so.”

A third red dot began flashing. Sisko leaned forward to get a closer look. “What about that one, Chief?” He tried to place the third location's features from memory. “Is that the water-recycling plant?”

“Yes, sir. That's the one I called Major Kira about. That's the part that just shouldn't be there.”

Finally, Sisko thought. “I need an explanation, Chief.”

Sisko watched as O'Brien expanded the schematic of the station until the viewer displayed a section only three decks tall, the third red dot now an irregular rectangle pulsing precisely where a network of pipes seemed to come to an end.

“Well, first off, sir, it is the water plant. I'm in there at least once a month for inspection. I know the specifications of all the pipes, the filters, the evaporators. And after six years of me crawling all over this station, well, if there were a single deviation or deficiency from the schematics, I'd know about it. And I can vouch for that whole section being spot on to the Cardassians' original plans.” O'Brien paused to qualify his statement. “Of course, it does have documented upgrades from when the Starfleet Corps of Engineers rebuilt it three years ago. But I can vouch for those, too.”

“So,” Sisko said, “if you know that the physical layout of the water plant is in perfect agreement with the Cardassian schematics, then why is that flashing light saying the two patterns don't match?”

“Because they don't, sir.”

Sisko turned to regard his chief engineer with growing impatience. He was vaguely aware of Commander Arla standing nearby, but the young Bajoran officer was wisely choosing to observe, not take part.

“You're confusing me, Chief,” Sisko said. “And I don't like to be confused.” But from the look he now saw on O'Brien's flushed, red face, it was clear that the engineer was as mystified as he.

“Sir, according to the tactical sensor sweep I've conducted, DS9's water treatment facility no longer even exists. Somehow, and don't ask me how, it's turned into a large, empty room. And that's why the red light's flashing.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, Chief, but if the water plant had truly disappeared, shouldn't we know about it?”

“Oh, we'd know about it,” O'Brien said, perplexed. “We'd have a thousand calls in from the habitat ring about no running water. We'd have transporter venting of all the water being spilled into the plant from the severed pipes. The whole station would look to be floating in a cloud of ice crystals.”

“And since it's not . . . ?”

“Someone's got to be running a sensor mask in the treatment facility,” O'Brien concluded with a frustrated frown. “Something small, tightly focused, no appreciable power signature. Intended, I'd say, to defeat any tricorders being used to conduct a search. A tricorder that encountered that mask wouldn't register that anything was trying to jam its sensors. All it would show is that there was nothing in the room.”

“In other words, that's where Quark is.”

“Frankly, Captain,” O'Brien said, “there could be a hundred Jem'Hadar hiding behind that thing and we'd be the last to know about it.”

That was all Sisko needed to hear. He activated his communicator. “Mr. Worf, we have a probable target. Prepare transporter suppression fields and arm the anesthezine dispensers for the following coordinates.”

Sisko recited four groups of digits, each corresponding to a specific location's deck, ring, corridor, and door number in DS9. But each number was offset by a different, predetermined amount, so that anyone listening in to his transmission would not be able to determine Sisko's real target. Only Worf had the key to the code, and his reply, as usual, was to the point.

“Understood. Implementing security measures. I will beam you to the perimeter of the location.”

“No,” Sisko said. He wasn't looking forward to any type of violent encounter around the equipment that supplied water to the station. “The Chief and I will beam to Ops. We'll leave from there with a full security team.”

“Excuse me,” Arla said. “You're leaving me here?”

Sisko didn't even glance at the Bajoran commander as he replied. “Regulations don't permit me to completely abandon a ship.”

“But . . . I'm not rated for this class of ship. Not on my own.”

Arla's qualifications or lack thereof were not one of Sisko's priorities right now. “Commander, trust me, all you have to do is sit. As soon as we're finished on the station, I'll have a crew beamed out.” Sisko didn't understand why the young Bajoran officer was so troubled by the prospect of being alone on the Defiant. Most people in Starfleet dreamed of a chance to be the only person on a starship. It was a powerful experience, Sisko knew, to be the sole person in the presence of so much power and potential. But perhaps Arla Rees was better suited to flying a desk.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and made her way quickly toward the lone flight operations chair as if she expected the artificial gravity to cut out at any second.

Arla's disappointing reaction to opportunity slipped from Sisko's thoughts almost immediately. He was anxious to get moving. “Status, Mr. Worf?”

“Anesthezine systems are on-line. I am now reconfiguring the interior security fields to—”

A high-pitched squeal blared from Sisko's communicator.

Sisko hit his communicator twice to reset it, tried opening a frequency again, and got nothing. In an instant he was on his way to the Defiant's communications console, even as O'Brien scrambled to the tactical station.

It took only seconds for Sisko to see that all of DS9's communications arrays were dead: No carrier waves. No navigation beacons. No subspace repeater signals.

Sisko turned to face O'Brien. “Report!”

The chief didn't take his eyes off the madly flashing tactical displays he studied. “I have no idea what's going on. Massive power fluctuations. All external and internal communications are down. They're on emergency lighting, life-support, gravity . . . unless a quantum torpedo hit Ops dead center, I'd say we're looking at a total computer failure.” The screens stopped flashing. O'Brien looked stunned. “Sir, there's not a single automated system operating on the station. It's as if the computer's disappeared.”

“This is not a coincidence,” Sisko said angrily. “Worf was adjusting the security fields. They were waiting for us to make our move.”

“Who was?” O'Brien asked.

“Whoever's got Quark. Whoever put up that sensor mask so we can't see what's behind it. But they couldn't know we'd be on the Defiant.” Sisko rushed back to the auxiliary engineering console. “Chief! We need to shut down the Defiant's computers.”

“What?!” O'Brien and Arla said it together.

“If the station's computer has been infected by a programming virus, or some type of disruptive radiation, the Defiant's computers might be vulnerable, too. Let's move it!”

With O'Brien at his side, Sisko transformed the Defiant into little more than an inert chunk of dead mass within two minutes.

“Now what?” O'Brien asked.

“Now we're beaming directly to the water plant. Or, at least to the edge of that sensor mask.”

Sisko saw O'Brien glance over at Arla, who was staring at the screen in front of her. Her olive-gold face was pale, her mouth hung slightly open. “Captain,” the chief said, “I think I should stay here and keep the ship under manual control.”

“I need you on DS9,” Sisko said. That was the end of the argument. “Commander Arla, you are going to drift. But as long as you're moving away from the station, there's nothing you have to do.”

Arla's words were rasping as if her throat were bone dry. “What . . . what if I do start drifting toward the station?”

“Use the docking thrusters to alter your trajectory,” Sisko said sharply. He wondered how he had thought just a short time earlier that Arla was exactly the kind of officer material that Starfleet needed more of. The young Bajoran was not behaving as if she were even worthy of the command rank she now possessed.

“Just don't try to reverse course,” O'Brien added. “With the impulse engines powered down, you don't have enough thruster propellant to manage it.”

Arla's nod was hesitant. Incredibly, it seemed to Sisko she could not even control her appearance of nervousness. “And . . . if I'm heading for the wormhole?”

“It's going to take you a couple of hours to drift that far,” Sisko said, trying to sound reassuring, when all he wanted to do was shout at her to pull herself together. “This'll be over by then.”

“Captain,” O'Brien suddenly suggested, “what if I just set a course for her now? Steer her away from the station and the wormhole. Only take a minute.”

But Sisko shook his head. O'Brien was a good man, but he was needed elsewhere. “If there's anyone on that station keeping track of this ship, I don't want them to see Commander Arla changing course, because that will make her a target. I want them to think she's either disabled or abandoned. Commander—you have the conn. I suggest you sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Then Sisko headed at double speed for the main doors and O'Brien followed just as quickly.

The Defiant was a compact ship, designed for the efficient movement of information and personnel in battle. It took only seconds to run down the corridor and reach the closer of the ship's two transporter rooms.

Sisko pushed through the doors before they had finished opening and headed directly for the equipment locker. “Set the coordinates, Chief. I'll get the phasers.”

“Not rifles!” O'Brien warned as he entered beaming coordinates on the console. “None of the pipes in the water plant is shielded. Take hand phasers and don't set them for anything higher than force three. Otherwise, one miss and we'll all be swimming.”

Sisko knew better than to question O'Brien's technical expertise. But he took four hand phasers along with two tricorders. One phaser he attached to the holster strips on his uniform along with a tricorder. One he held in his hand. And the other two phasers he handed to O'Brien, along with the second tricorder, the moment his chief engineer joined him on the transporter pad.

O'Brien attached one of the phasers to his own holster strips. “We'll materialize just to the side of the equipment transfer doors leading into the main treatment room,” he told Sisko. “And brace yourself, sir. I don't know what the gravity's going to be like.”

Then Sisko felt a momentary tingle like that of a cool breeze, as the Defiant's transporter room turned into a spray of sparkling light. Almost immediately, the light faded to reveal a dark corridor ribbed and ringed by Cardassian struts. He and O'Brien had returned to Deep Space 9.

It took a few disorienting moments, and slippage of more than a few centimeters, before Sisko's inner ear caught up to the fact that the deck was slanted by four or five degrees. For his part, O'Brien made a series of small jumps, rising up from the deck only a centimeter or two each time. Trust the chief to come up with his own way to measure an artificial gravity field, Sisko thought.

“Okay, not that bad,” the chief engineer said, confirming Sisko's guess about the reason for his impromptu athletic performance. “The station's gone to emergency gravity, and I'm guessing the old units in section 3 are barely holding on at fifty percent efficiency.”

“What can we expect if they fail?” Sisko asked, phaser held ready as he made sure the short stretch of corridor was deserted.

“If the old units shut down all at once, it'll feel like the station's suddenly lurched a few more degrees.”

Sisko didn't like the image. “Like an old sinking ship.”

“At least we won't drown,” O'Brien said. He looked at the closed doors to the water treatment facility. “I hope.”

Sisko frowned, tapped his communicator. “Sisko to Worf.” No response. “Sisko to Ops.” Still nothing.

There was no time to waste. Sisko moved cautiously along the slanted corridor to the edge of the oversize water-plant doors. They had been designed to allow large pieces of equipment to be moved in and out, so they and the corridor ceiling were twice the height of most other similar structures in the station.

Sisko flipped open his tricorder and scanned through the doors for life-signs. But the readings indicated there were no life-forms in the facility.

He flipped the device shut and put it back on its holster strip. “I don't know what to expect in there,” Sisko said in a low voice, “but since we're only using heavy stun, feel free to shoot first and ask questions later.”

O'Brien gave a quiet chuckle. “Careful, sir, you're starting to sound like Worf.”

Sisko tapped the door control.

The doors to the water plant remained closed.

Sisko tapped in his command override code.

This time the doors opened.

Then Sisko and O'Brien both moaned at the same time as the overwhelming stench of raw sewage enveloped them.

Sisko blocked his nostrils with one hand, but his action did nothing-to diminish the awful smell.

“Must have been quite a spill when the gravity generators switched over to the backups,” O'Brien coughed. “We should get used to it in a few minutes.”

Sisko had to force himself to open his mouth to speak. “You have such a way of looking on the bright side of things.”

Sisko led the way into the huge facility—one of the largest open spaces in DS9. It was three decks high, forty meters deep, fifty wide, filled with a maze of pipes, metal vats, and overhead walkways.

It also reverberated with the deafening roar of rushing water.

Sisko hadn't been down here for years, but he didn't remember it being so loud. He stepped closer to O'Brien so the chief could hear him. “Is it supposed to sound like this?” he shouted.

O'Brien nodded, then shouted back. “The sound bafflers must be off-line, or—” Abruptly, the chief engineer pointed up to the left. “Captain, over there!”

Sisko saw what he meant at once.

What appeared to be a silver flower had sprouted on the top of a five-meter-tall vat of dull, copper-colored metal emblazoned with a Cardassian warning glyph. The ‘flower’ was perhaps a meter across, with three pulsing blue lights on the tip of each of its five gleaming petals.

It was not Cardassian technology. Neither was it Starfleet.

“The sensor mask?” Sisko asked.

“That's my guess,” O'Brien confirmed, then he took aim with his phaser.

Sisko could only hope that a force-three setting would be enough to overload whatever the alien device used for circuitry. Any phaser blast more powerful would risk puncturing the vat.

“Here goes,” O'Brien said.

Then an object flashed through the air. O'Brien grunted as something hit his arm and his phaser went flying. Spun around by the impact, he collided full force with Sisko.

Sisko staggered back. Without stopping to think, he pulled O'Brien into the shelter of an immense pipe that emerged from the deck and curved away overhead. Pushing the chief down to a sitting position against the pipe, Sisko immediately reached out to examine O'Brien's arm.

“Careful,” the chief gasped. The sleeve of his black jumpsuit was wet with blood where a slender gold dagger, a kind Sisko had never seen before, impaled the chief's forearm. A rivulet of blood was dripping from his cuff.

The golden blade was edged with a series of angled barbs, making for easy penetration but near-impossible extraction. Sisko kneeled down and leaned closer. He yelled directly into the chief's ear to be heard over the thunderous roar of the water. “I'm not going to be able to pull that out.”

O'Brien nodded, sweat mingling with tears of pain on his cheeks. “It's going numb,” he murmured weakly, and Sisko was only able to understand him by reading his lips. He knew at once the blade had to have been coated with some type of poison.

“Chief—I'm going to take out the sensor mask,” Sisko shouted. “Keep trying to get through to Worf on your communicator.”

He didn't like the way O'Brien looked blearily at him then, as if the engineer didn't believe that Worf was ever going to appear, or that he'd still be alive when Worf did.

“I'll—come—back—for—you,” Sisko shouted, emphasizing each word as if that made his promise more valid.

Silently, O'Brien mouthed his response, “I know you will. . . .” And then the engineer's head slumped forward, eyes closed.

Filled with furious purpose, Sisko leapt to his feet, edged around the pipe until he could just see the silver blossom of the sensor mask emitter against the dark edge of the vat.

With the tracking precision of the Defiant's sensors, he checked each catwalk, each potential hiding place for the enemy. But there were too many shadows, too many dark corners. He realized there was no way he could know where a potential enemy was hiding until a knife struck him just as it had the chief.

Sisko frowned. That particular choice of weapon troubled him. Why a knife? One phaser burst and the chief would have been killed. One wide burst, and we'd both have been stunned.

Again he used the tricorder to scan for life-signs, but it was useless. This close to the emitter its displays flashed erratically.

Sisko made his decision. He set his phaser to force six, medium dispersal. There was no time to take careful aim at the emitter as the chief had done.

He swung out and fired at once, ducking back behind the pipe even as a dagger clanged against it. The sensor mask emitter exploded in a shower of transtator sparks. The sensor mask was down.

Breathing hard, but feeling victorious, Sisko leaned back against the pipe, tried his communicator again. No response. But it didn't matter. Sisko knew that as soon as Worf was able to restore emergency communications in Ops, he'd be able to get through.

Suddenly, the thick odor of sewage intensified. Involuntarily gagging, Sisko stuck his head out to take a quick glance around the pipe and saw a gout of dark water spraying from the top edge of the vat where the sensor mask emitter had been. His phaser blast had obviously punctured the vat wall. And the vat had to be a waste separator, designed to send liquids to the recycling evaporators and solids to the replicator mass reclaimers.

Only now, both liquids and solids were splattering down on the metal deck of the facility, and because of the imbalance in the artificial gravity fields, the odiferous sludge from the vat was oozing toward the back of the cavernous water-plant room.

In a vain attempt to shield himself from the terrible smell, Sisko pulled the neck of his duty shirt up over his mouth and his nose. He had to keep going. At least now he knew where to go.

And with the emitter gone, his tricorder should be functional again. Sisko checked its display. It was. There were two life-signs twenty meters ahead.

Still keeping to the cover of the pipes, Sisko headed in the direction of the indicated life-signs, not certain what he was looking for.

But what he found wasn't surprising.

Quark.

In chains.

Hanging head down.

Over an open collection tank filled to the brim with dark, bubbling sludge.

Quark's hands were tied behind his back and thick black wires were cruelly clipped to the edges of his prodigious ears.

And the only way Sisko was able to tell that the Ferengi was even alive was because the tricorder said he was.

Sisko checked the reading again. “Damn,” he whispered. One of the two life-signs had disappeared. Now there was only one—Quark. The other had moved out of range, or else had—

Pain seared Sisko's back as he was thrown forward to the slippery deck, his phaser and tricorder both tumbling away.

Throwing off the shock of the attack, Sisko rolled to his feet, leaping up to face whatever, whoever, had felled him.

An Andorian female. Three meters away. Crouched in fight-ready position, the stark-blue tendrils of her antennae jutting from her distinctive blue-white, Vulcan-short hair. In one blue hand, she held a golden dagger like the one that injured O'Brien.

His attacker was one of the two sisters Odo had been watching. But which sister, Sisko didn't know.

The Andorian moved closer, hypnotically waving her dagger in circles, her dark, blue-rimmed eyes absolutely fixed on his own. Sisko could see muscles ripple in her bare blue arms and midriff. She was dressed more for a workout in a zero-G gym than she was for any trade mission, wearing only a snug black leather vest, black leggings, and low-cut gripshoes.

A spasm twisted Sisko's back where the Andorian had kicked him. The fact she hadn't stabbed him as she had O'Brien meant she didn't consider him a worthy opponent. She intended to toy with him.

But Sisko was in no mood to be toyed with.

He slapped his hand down to his second phaser, ripped it from its holster strips, and—even as the Andorian launched herself at him with an ear-splitting shriek—fired point-blank.

She collapsed at his feet, her eyes rolled back, her body unmoving.

Sisko kicked the dagger from her limp hand, then twisted her over on her back to keep her nose and mouth clear of the sewage whose level was still rising. The movement of her chest attested to the fact that she was still breathing.

Sisko checked to be sure she had no other weapons, then started for Quark, who was still trussed and helpless, suspended from the ceiling.

Quark's mouth was moving at warp ten, but saying nothing Sisko could hear above the increasing din in the vast chamber. Sisko muttered to himself as he studied the chains from which the Ferengi dangled over the sludge tank. “Quark, I don't know what you did to those people, but—” Sisko stopped suddenly, remembering. People. And he whirled around just in time to be thrown against the sludge tank, as the second Andorian sister's hand stabbed at his neck.

This Andorian female was even more threatening than her sibling. While only slightly taller, she was much, much stronger. She wore almost the same outfit as her sister, but her long blue-white hair was pulled back tightly and braided, and the smooth blue skin of her left arm was intricately tattooed in black from wrist to shoulder.

With a shriek even louder than her sister's, she launched herself at Sisko before he had a chance to regain his balance.

Sisko tried to feint sideways, but stumbled.

The Andorian changed her angle of approach in midair, transferring her momentum into a spinning high kick that struck Sisko's shoulder, knocking him back against the edge of the sludge tank, so that his arm fell back into it.

Then the Andorian dropped to one knee beside Sisko, raised her hand to deliver a lethal punch-down blow to his chest.

But Sisko summoned all of his strength to fling his arm up, splashing raw sewage in her eyes.

The Andorian screamed as she shrank back from him, her hands clawing at her face.

Sisko twisted away, swinging one of his legs under hers, tripping her, so that she fell to the deck.

Ignoring his still-twinging back, he staggered to his feet.

In a heartbeat, the Andorian's body flexed powerfully, and she was once again standing upright before him, her blazing, dark eyes intent on revenge.

Sisko reached for his phaser, but it was gone.

The Andorian threw herself at him.

Instinctively, Sisko tucked and rolled toward her, forcing contact before she had anticipated.

He lost his breath in one explosive moment as her foot slammed into his ribs, but then the pressure was gone and he looked up, gasping, in time to see her flailing form flip over him and land in the sewage tank ejecting a fountain of disgusting liquid that struck and soaked Quark as precisely as if the Ferengi had been its chosen target.

Slowly, clutching his side, Sisko struggled to his feet, trying not to laugh because it hurt too much as Quark maniacally spun and sputtered and sprayed droplets of a dark substance whose origin was too terrible for Sisko even to contemplate.

“Calm down, Quark,” Sisko finally managed to shout. “I'll get you down.”

Quark screamed something indecipherable—two words? Sisko couldn't be sure. But the Ferengi was shaking and swinging back and forth on his chains, clearly panicked by something. Probably the fear of falling into the sludge tank, Sisko decided.

“What?” Sisko called up to Quark. The Ferengi's neck veins were now bulging as Quark screeched again. But it was impossible to hear him over the incessant rush and roar of the liquids in the pipes all around.

The second Andorian sister was trying to pull herself toward the edge of the tank, to drag herself out. She was moving so slowly, Sisko doubted she'd cause him any more trouble. He decided to leave Quark to Worf's security staff, and instead to go back to get O'Brien and deliver him to the Infirmary. Quark might be uncomfortable but he wasn't in any danger now.

He looked up to wave at Quark to somehow signal him that someone would come back for him, when he finally realized that the Ferengi wasn't looking at him, but at something beyond him.

With a sudden flash of alarm, Sisko turned about.

A moment too late.

A black shape enveloped him like a tidal wave sinking a ship, and the roar of the room fell away into silence as he drowned in a sea of darkness.