CHAPTER
1

“NOW WATCH CAREFULLY.”

Miles O’Brien, square-jawed, curly-haired, and the most aggressively patient individual on Deep Space Nine, smiled broadly, which was the only way he was capable of smiling. He had a look in his eye that gleamed of mischief and deviltry. It was, in fact, the exact look that he had used several years previously on a certain young botanist aboard the USS Enterprise, when he had first spotted her lounging in Ten-Forward. And she had found that look refreshingly guileless, even playful. A pleasing mixture of a little boy’s soul in a grown man’s body.

That was over four years ago.

Now she just found it damned irritating.

Keiko, his wife—the irritated woman—did not look up from the lesson plans she was preparing for the next day.

At first glance, and even at second, Miles and Keiko O’Brien were mismatched. In contrast to the buoyant Irishman’s open expression and “Hi, pal, gladdaseeya” air, the Asian Keiko was far more low-key, far more reserved.

When O’Brien’s spirits were high, they couldn’t be anchored with a crate of gold-pressed latinum. When they were low, a team of horses could be hitched up and whipped into a frenzy, and still not drag him out of the doldrums until he was ready to go.

Keiko, on the other hand, was far more steady. She was not quick to anger, but instead would build gradually. O’Brien sometimes teasingly called her “the slow cooker.” But when she did get angry, volcanoes had nothing on her.

She was light-skinned where he was swarthy, delicate where he was coarse. Yin, as she put it, to his yang. He, on the other hand, would say that she was Abbott to his Costello—a reference that she did not begin to understand, along with most of his references to arcane and archaic Earth matters.

There was much about him that she did not understand, even after four years of marriage.

She did not understand his fondness for poker, a relatively dishonorable game where the object was to win through deceit and trickery rather than through an honest matching of skill against skill.

She did not understand why she was supposed to adjust to such a radical change in her life as coming to this godforsaken space station that was so isolated it wasn’t even in the middle of nowhere but rather in the distant, bleak outskirts of nowhere.

She did not understand why in the world he had been dead set on naming their offspring Elvis if it had been a boy. Fortunately the issue had been dodged when a girl arrived, during one of the more tempestuous days of Enterprise life that she had experienced.

And most of all, she did not understand why he did not understand.

“Miles, please,” she said, rubbing her temple—an early warning sign indicating that her beloved husband was really pushing matters. “I’ve really got a lot on my mind right now.”

O’Brien, who rarely, if ever, picked up on the aforementioned early warning sign, said, “It’ll just take a minute.”

“Miles . . . ”

I miss the Enterprise, and I miss my life, and it’s a struggle to get any children to come to my classes because they’d all much rather be out causing trouble or something, and anyway, I never intended to be a teacher—I’m a botanist. And I never intended for Molly to grow up in a snake pit like this station, and I hate that she has to, and I hate this station, and I hate feeling grungy all the time, and I hate this whole stupid situation, and I hate—

“Something on your mind, hon?” he asked.

She looked at that hurt puppy dog expression of his, and she couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve never been one for kicking helpless small animals,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She waved it off and put down her padd. “Go ahead.”

“All right.” He grinned, fully comfortable with her dismissal of anything being wrong. “Quark showed me some magic tricks, and I figured when we have Molly’s birthday party, I could entertain.”

“Miles . . . Molly isn’t interested in magic tricks. You know what she wants for her birthday: a pony, like she’s seen in her books. She wants to ride a pony around the habitat ring.”

“Well, it’s not bloody likely, okay? A magician will have to do. Now . . . watch carefully.”

He held his hand out, palm up. There was a coin in it.

Keiko, trying to muster enthusiasm, applauded.

“I didn’t do the trick yet,” said O’Brien.

“Oh . . . sorry. I just thought the coin was pretty. What is it, anyway?”

“A Ferengi tri-esta. Now . . . watch carefully.”

“You said that already.”

“Well, do it,” he told her, trying not to sound irritated.

Gamely he held the coin up in his left hand. Then with his right hand he reached over and scooped it up. He held his right hand up high over his head and then snapped it open.

The coin was gone.

“Taa-daaa!” he proclaimed.

She stared at him.

“Well?” he said. “What did you think of that? The coin’s gone.”

“It’s still in your left hand,” she said flatly.

His face fell. “No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.” She reached over and pried his clenched left fist open. O’Brien rolled his eyes as the tri-esta glinted in the dim lighting of their quarters. “See?” Then, when he didn’t say anything immediately, she added uncertainly, “Taa-daaa.”

He waved his empty right hand around in irritation. “You were supposed to be looking at this hand. It’s called misdirection.”

“But that wasn’t the hand the coin was in.”

“Yes, but that was the point!”

“I thought,” she said cautiously, “that the point was that I was supposed to watch carefully. That’s what you said. Twice. I remember. I counted. If I’d watched your right hand, I’d have been looking in the wrong place.”

“But that’s the bloody trick!” he said in exasperation.

She sighed and rubbed her forehead again. “I’m sorry, Miles. Would you like to do it again? I promise I’ll look in the right wrong place this time.”

“No, forget it,” he said. “Just forget it. Go back to . . . to whatever it was you were doing.”

“Fine,” she said. “I wouldn’t have stopped if you hadn’t disturbed me.”

He paused a moment. “Y’know . . . I think I know what I did wrong. I wasn’t fast enough. Look, let me try it again—”

At that moment his communicator beeped. He tapped it and said, “O’Brien here.”

“Chief, this is Dax,” came a calm female voice. “Could you come up to Ops for a moment? Something’s going on that I’d like you to double-check. I know it’s late, but—”

“On my way,” he said. He turned to Keiko. “Sorry about this,” he said apologetically. “You always complain that you hardly see me.”

“No, it’s all right,” she said quickly. “I’ll find something to do while you’re gone.”

“Thanks, Keiko.” He squeezed her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “You’re the best.”

He left their quarters, and she sat there in the blissful silence. She picked up her notepad to continue lesson plans . . . 

At which point Molly, from the next room, started to cry.

Keiko sighed deeply. She seemed to sigh a lot these days.

O’Brien’s quarters were in the habitat ring, as indeed were everyone else’s quarters. Deep Space Nine comprised a series of ringed structures connected by crossover bridges and vertical and horizontal turbolifts. The outermost ring was the docking ring, which contained the docking ports, cargo bays, facilities for the mining operations that had been Deep Space Nine’s original raison d’être, and six protruding docking pylons.

The next ring in was the habitat ring. In addition to the roughly three hundred individuals who were permanent residents of Deep Space Nine—including, as Keiko O’Brien would have said, some fairly reluctant residents—there were enough quarters to accommodate several times that number. This greatly facilitated Deep Space Nine’s ability to service and deal with the various travelers who stopped by to conduct business, get their ships serviced, get themselves serviced, or see to whatever other needs might arise.

The habitat ring was also the location of the defensive weapon sail towers, which had been outfitted with Starfleet phasers after the original armaments had been stripped away by the departing Cardassians. There were also six runabout landing pads—platforms that could transport the great space station’s runabout vehicles to and from the runabout service bay deep inside the habitat ring.

At the center of Deep Space Nine was the aptly named core section. The operations center, or Ops—Deep Space Nine’s equivalent of a starship bridge—was situated at the very top of the core. It served as the nerve center for the entire station, and lately it seemed to be O’Brien’s second home. Hell, the way things had been going at home, sometimes it was more his first home.

The core section was also the location for the station’s shields, its fusion reactors, its communications array, and—some people would have said most importantly—the Promenade. With its shops, cafés, and such, the Promenade was the center of commerce.

To say that it served a variety of needs was to put it mildly. In one section of the Promenade, for example, was Quark’s casino, run by an unscrupulous Ferengi—“Is there any other kind?” the security chief was once heard to mutter—named Quark, who provided anything, from exotic drinks in his bar to exotic sex in his holosuites.

But in another section of the three-deck Promenade, Keiko O’Brien labored daily to try to educate—or at least keep out of trouble—the young people who resided on Deep Space Nine. It was not easy, since a good education seemed to be the last thing on the minds of the kids who ran about unsupervised on the station. And while Keiko struggled to improve their academic health, Dr. Julian Bashir labored in his Cardassian-manufactured infirmary to keep their physical health up to snuff.

Deep Space Nine—a bizarre conglomeration of requirements, goals, and desires. Sometimes it seemed only a matter of time before the entire station blew apart. The only question was whether it would blow from the physical stress that the broken-down station put on its structures and operational systems or from the emotional stress of trying to keep the lid on a variety of disparate, and oftentimes contradictory, individuals.

Lieutenant Jadzia Dax stood a respectful distance away as O’Brien labored at the science station. “I appreciate you taking the time, Chief.”

O’Brien didn’t speak at first. To be precise, he wasn’t “at” the science station so much as under it. He had the bottom panel off and was lying on the floor, his body slightly contorted, running a series of tests on the sensor arrays.

This was not regarded as an unusual sight in the operations center. Some damned thing or other was always breaking down. Quark had once commented in a snickering tone that there were prostitutes who spent less time on their backs than O’Brien did. Although O’Brien was not exactly enthusiastic about the humor at his expense, he had to admit somewhat grudgingly that Quark had a point. At Ops—indeed, at points throughout the space station—something was always going wrong. O’Brien sometimes wished he were twins, but then he would dismiss the notion as inappropriate. After all, why wish a life like this on anyone else?

Dax was infinitely serene. “Is there anything I can do to help, Chief?”

“Just stand back and give me room, Lieutenant.”

Since she was already standing far enough back to accord him sufficient space, she presumed that he was speaking metaphorically. Her hair was pulled back tight, revealing the graceful arch of leopardlike spots that tapered gracefully down around her forehead. She looked, in every respect, like an attractive, confident, young woman.

Which was simply an example of the age-old lesson that one should not take what one sees as a given.

After a few more moments O’Brien sat up. “I understand your caution, Lieutenant,” he said, “but it’s not the instrumentation this time. I’ve double-checked all the arrays, and the readings you’re getting are perfectly accurate. For once, the equipment isn’t screwed up.”

“Indeed.”

Dax turned with raised eyebrows and regarded the image on screen.

At first glance, nothing appeared there except the emptiness of space.

That, too, was an example of looks being deceiving.

“Thank you, Chief,” she said. And with that she headed up to the office of the station’s commander, Ben Sisko, to report her findings. It was not a report that he was going to be overly pleased to hear.

O’Brien replaced the paneling and, as he watched Dax go, muttered, “The Trill is gone. And here I guess I’m just a Trill-seeker.”

“What was that?”

O’Brien looked up, embarrassed that his little jokes had been overheard.

Odo stood over him, his hands behind his back.

Looking Odo directly in the eye was always a bit disconcerting, since his face—with its smooth forehead, lack of eyebrows, and “unfinished” nose—wasn’t quite “right.” It was not, of course, unusual to encounter an alien species who happened to have developed differently from humans.

But O’Brien was well aware that this appearance was one that Odo had assumed in an endeavor to look human. It was the attempted approximation of humanity that O’Brien found just a touch unsettling. Nothing that he couldn’t get used to, of course. Just something that was going to take some time.

“Just a little joke, Constable,” he said.

O’Brien remembered how Data had always looked at someone with childlike curiosity when he didn’t immediately comprehend something.

Not Odo. Oh, he encountered things that he didn’t understand, but when he did, he simply looked annoyed. Even impatient, as if the person who did understand the situation had no business being better informed than he.

He had one of those looks now.

“I always understood that humans liked to tell jokes to an audience,” said Odo. “For mutual entertainment.”

“Well . . . sometimes we’ll make little jokes to ourselves as well, just to keep ourselves entertained, or to show ourselves how witty we are.”

“And substituting ‘Trill’ for ‘thrill’ is an example of that?”

O’Brien shook out his foot, which was starting to fall asleep. “Kind of. Yes.”

Odo didn’t smile, because he never did. He did, however, grimace, which he did a lot.

“Hilarious,” he said sarcastically.

“Thanks for the vote of support.” O’Brien pulled himself to his feet, then said as an afterthought, “Hey . . . I want to show you something.”

“What do you want to show me?” Odo sounded cautious.

O’Brien pulled out the coin and said in a low, conspiratorial voice, “Magic.”

Odo sighed and feigned interest, about as successfully as he feigned a human nose.

Which didn’t matter a whit to O’Brien. “Now . . . watch carefully. . . .”