Trials and Tribble-ations Page 5

  Sisko frowned at the idea of such carnage, but understood in a cold-hearted way that to Darvin most of these people were pretty much already dead anyway. He was only still around because he was Klingon and had a longer life span. But the Klingons hadn't wanted him around. That meant everybody he'd associated with for the past one hundred years was gone anyway. What did Darvin care if they went a little earlier?

  "The bottom line," he finally said, "is we have to find Darvin and stop him before he changes history."

  "Assuming we do that," O'Brien asked, "how do we get home?"

  Dax offered one of her droll shrugs. "The Orb brought us here. Hopefully it can take us back."

  Kira tucked her chin. "Problem is, we don't know how it works."

  "How did Darvin figure it out?" Bashir asked.

  Odo handed over the twenty-fourth-century equivalent of a telltale matchbook—a padd with information scrolled upon it. Bajoran etchings. Old ones.

  Looking as aggravated as a teenager being told she wouldn't yet be allowed to graduate, Kira took the padd without waiting for Sisko to assign her the task. "I guess I'd better start brushing up on my ancient Bajoran."

  She moved off, studying the padd's screen.

  Sympathizing with the nitpicky task she was taking on, Sisko turned to the others. "Do we know where Darvin beamed to?"

  "No," Worf said. Clearly he hadn't wanted to admit this. "He wiped the transporter log when he beamed out. He also wiped all the logs regarding this incident, so we won't know what is coming from hour to hour."

  "He could be on the Enterprise or on the station," O'Brien considered.

  Knowing perfectly well that the risk had suddenly doubled, Sisko said, "We'll have to search both without arousing suspicion or altering the timeline ourselves. The last thing I want is a visit from Temporal Investigations when we get home."

  A devilish smile tugged at Dax's lovely lips, and Sisko could tell she was enjoying some aspect of this.

  "I guess we'll have to find a way to blend in," she said.

  CHAPTER 4

  A HAND EMERGING from a gold sleeve. Old-style slashes in proclamation sparkle.

  Trouser cuffs bloused over the tops of black boots. Communicator grid … flip up … flip down. A stroll back through the history of Starfleet. A visitation to a rougher time. Halloween.

  Feeling as incognito as he had ever felt, Ben Sisko stepped out of his quarters and into commitment. He almost stepped back inside.

  Too late—across the corridor, Julian Bashir emerged uneasily from his own quarters, and Sisko got his first full-length view of the twenty-third-century Starfleet uniform. Bashir's black-collared tunic was medical-blue, the trousers black and boots black. Simple. On the left side of his chest was the delta shield insignia, soft gold lined with black, with the circular symbol of the old Sciences Division.

  Bashir was staring at Sisko in the same way, scanning Sisko's gold shirt and delta shield, with the command star in the shield instead of the eye.

  Sisko could tell they both felt warm and charming about the way they looked, and a little embarrassed.

  "Captain," Bashir said, approaching slowly.

  Fingering his sleeve slash, Sisko corrected, "Lieutenant, actually. Didn't want to push my luck."

  From down the corridor, O'Brien's voice struck up, "Looks good on you, sir."

  The two men turned to meet him, and here he came, dressed in a cardinal-red tunic emblazoned with the delta shield and its little mechanical hook signifying Engineering Services, slashed with the rank of ensign on the cuffs, and damned if it didn't look good on him, too. There was a cheerful, proclamatory brightness in these uniforms, which broadcast at a glance who these people were, what they did for a living, and what they stood for. The thought occurred that they had to stand for more, and more fiercely, in those tumultuous years.

  He gazed at O'Brien as the engineer approached. "Thank you, Ensign."

  O'Brien nodded. "Finally got that promotion."

  "Wait a minute," Bashir said then. "Aren't you two wearing the wrong colors?"

  O'Brien scolded him with a glower. "Don't you know anything about this period?"

  Bashir swaggered back a step. "I'm a doctor, not a historian."

  Sisko smiled. "In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold, and—"

  "And women wore less."

  They turned at the sound of her voice, and there she was.

  A vision of classical womanhood, imperially feminine, and it was at the moment impossible to remember that Jadzia Dax carried within her the lifetimes of several old men.

  She wore the red tunic of a female services officer, a thigh-high number—no, higher than that—showing a pair of legs that started in midair and went all the way to the deck. And it was a long, long trip.

  Unlike uniforms of their own age, this one had no problems showing off the female figure, and in fact seemed designed to do so. Nothing homogeneous here, no insecurities, no problem with being utterly female.

  Dax's dark hair was piled up on her head in some kind of twist, making her seem even taller, and she seemed to be enjoying herself immensely. For a being who had spent much of her existence as various men, she seemed to particularly enjoy being a woman.

  Of course with that … and those …

  "What do you think?" she asked, basking in the men's stunned attention and dousing them with a smile.

  Sisko parted his lips, but found no voice in there. In his periphery, O'Brien blinked, then blinked again, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

  At Sisko's side, Bashir cleared his throat and croaked, "I think I'm beginning to like history …"

  The transporter room of Defiant was the last stop before vaulting off into the final frontier. And this was a day for grins and stares now that the entire landing party had gathered here.

  Worf wore a gaudy turban to conceal his Klingon skull ridge and wore the clothing of a wandering merchant. Odo, whose face merely mocked the humanoid without really being human, was also dressed as a civilian trader. The rest of them looked like a cluster of shore-leavers from a century ago.

  Specifically, eighty years ago.

  "The original Enterprise uses an old-style duotronic sensor array," Miles O'Brien was explaining, finally interested in something other than Dax's uniform. "If we wait for just the right point in the scan cycle, we can decloak the Defiant for almost two seconds without being detected."

  "Is that enough time to transport us aboard?" Sisko asked.

  "Barely."

  Dax swept toward them with a padd. "Here are the coordinates. The captain and I will beam to Deck Four and work our way aft. Chief, you and Julian will start your search on Deck Twenty-one."

  O'Brien nodded. "And work our way forward."

  Sisko turned to Odo and Worf. "What about the station?"

  "Little of it is habitable," Worf told him. "Most of K-Seven consists of storage area and industrial replication facilities."

  Odo added, "It shouldn't take long to search. Security isn't as tight as it is on a starship."

  "Remember," Sisko said to them all, "keep contact with people from this time period to a minimum."

  He met each of them eye-to-eye, as if to drill home the critical nature of that last instruction.

  O'Brien watched his monitor. "We're coming up on a bandshift in the scan cycle."

  "Dax," Sisko said, and led the way to the transporter pad.

  As he positioned himself properly and turned to face O'Brien and the transport console, he saw on a small monitor behind the engineer the dreamlike image of the beautiful first Starship Enterprise angling passively around Space Station K-Seven. Its wide main saucer section flickered in the light of the nearest sun, tipped slightly upward as it approached the cloaked Defiant, engineering hull swinging below, antimatter pods flickering in foreshortened grace.

  What a sight. And he was going there.

  He was going there …

  "Energizing," O'Br
ien said tightly. "Good luck, sir."

  Sisko couldn't muster a response. His tension was souping together with feverish anticipation—was he enjoying himself? Did he dare?

  Tampering with time … the whole concept was one giant nerve constantly tingling.

  He saw Odo, Worf, O'Brien, and Bashir watching as the transporter began humming. They had the same anticipatory tension in their eyes. They were looking forward to this, too, as if muscles were twitching that none could settle. Going back into the past—the real past, not just a holodeck reenactment. Even Odo and Worf shifted uneasily, waiting for their turn. They would be next, transporting to the old space station. O'Brien would key the computer to operate the transporter, and he and Bashir would go to another section of the classic starship.

  Strangely, Sisko was suddenly jealous. He wanted to do all three of these searches himself, see all parts of the starship and the station for himself. He wanted to roll back the years and bask awhile in this interesting time.

  His crew blurred before his eyes—the transporter effect. The Defiant fizzled around him, and he closed his eyes at the last second and drew a breath. The Enterprise! A forgotten brightness in the design of starships—bright hull, bright halls, bright uniforms. Nothing muted, all colors declaratively primary. He couldn't wait to see it for real.

  When the sizzling sensation on his skin finally breathed away, he opened his eyes, anxious to see the bright corridor he had anticipated.

  Nothing. Darkness. He blinked. Still nothing.

  Then his eyes began to adjust and he could see only the nightlight glow of a translucent panel in the wall beside him, and the shadowy silhouette of Dax on the other side.

  "I thought so," she said.

  "What?"

  "That the lights in a turbolift go off when no one's inside."

  Sisko blinked at her. "You really think about things like that, don't you?"

  "All the time." She didn't bother mentioning her elongated life experiences.

  Sisko realized that if you live long enough, you think about almost everything eventually. Dax, in another form, had been alive during this time period.

  "If I remember," she began, and took hold of one of three angled handles on the lift wall. She twisted it, and a light instantly came on. "Deck Four."

  The lift came to life and started moving. Panel lights moved sideways, indicating that the lift was running on a horizontal track. In a moment, it would slow, then shift to a vertical and take them up to Deck Four.

  Once there, the lift accommodatingly opened. Ben Sisko and Jadzia Dax stepped out into another age.

  The corridor was indeed bright, but not as wide as Sisko had expected. He'd toured a museum ship as a boy, and then thought the corridors were bigger. Of course, he was bigger now.

  There were lights and sound, and lots of people bustling back and forth. Shipwide communications droned on the shipboard comm system, and crewmen spoke into old-style wall panels. Some wore the same kinds of uniforms as Sisko and Dax, while others wore utility suits or protective overalls, There was even a passing alien dignitary being toured through by an ensign and a yeoman.

  Sisko held his breath for a moment, but no one showed any interest in him or Dax. They all had their jobs to do, and this wasn't Toyland. No hobnobbing on duty. Other than a congenial nod from a passing engineer, everybody was too busy to notice a couple of crewmen they didn't know.

  Not so unusual. Fraternization between officers and crew wasn't generally encouraged on the battleships of the past centuries. While such policy seemed heartless, there was a crystal-clear reasoning behind it. Emotional attachment could be distracting in times of stress and danger, while loyalty to crewmates in general was preferred. Loyalty was an entirely different commodity than friendship, and could in many ways be more powerful.

  "This is so exciting," Dax murmured. "It makes me want to go back to the Titanic and make sure they load the boats to capacity this time."

  "Mmm," Sisko uttered. "Let's not talk about disasters right now. Don't want to skunk our luck."

  She smiled. "Superstition? I didn't think you were the type, Benjamin."

  "I'm not. But any sailor who doesn't see a Jonah in the shadows now and then isn't paying attention. Let's start moving."

  They moved along the corridor, exchanging stilted nods with other crewmen who all seemed much more purposeful in their strides. Twice Sisko had to jockey sideways to avoid collision, then finally got the hang of bearing to the right with the flow of activity.

  "So many people," he muttered.

  Dax glanced around as if remembering. "They really packed them in on these old ships."

  "And compared to the old ocean-going military ships, starships are practically empty. Do you know that aircraft carriers of the old Earth Navy carried upwards of five thousand men?"

  "Including the air wing, yes," she tossed in, just to prove that he couldn't quite get anything on her today. "That's twice the size of the town where I was born."

  "You? Jadzia or Dax?"

  "Jadzia. Dax was born in a city of two million."

  Sisko pointed to a small alcove cut into a corridor wall. "What about over there?"

  They ducked into the recession, where panels and drawers allowed access to circuitry and tools with which to work on it, and a ladder into both deck and ceiling provided transport to other decks.

  "Perfect," Dax congratulated. "An auxiliary communications juncture."

  By "perfect" she meant they couldn't screw things up too badly here.

  Sisko opened the drawer she pointed to. "I'll be the repairman. You scan for Darvin."

  While he plucked at the circuitry, deliberately not doing anything that would affect any changes, Dax flipped open the top of her old-style tricorder. "You know, I used to have one of these," she murmured nostalgically.

  "Mmm-hmm," Sisko responded. "Any sign of Darvin?"

  "Not yet," she answered as the tricorder gave off a distinctive sound effect.

  "I love these classic mid-twenty-third-century designs," Dax went on softly. "The matte finish, the silver highlights … and it goes with the uniform."

  Dax let the tricorder hang from her shoulder as if modeling a fashion designer's latest evening bag. Sisko stared at her disapprovingly and Dax hastily retrieved the tricorder. "Sorry," she murmured, and resumed scanning.

  "I said Deck Twenty-one."

  Miles O'Brien heard the edge in his voice and agreed wholeheartedly with it. This was the fourth time he'd asked. They'd been standing here for what seemed like hours.

  In the dark.

  Julian Bashir sighed. Again. "Maybe if you said 'please.'"

  "What's wrong with this thing?"

  "Don't look at me," Bashir warned. "I don't know anything about this time period."

  "Maybe it's jammed." Taking the moment for what it was, O'Brien felt around for the circuitry access. "Help me get this wall panel off."

  Bashir stepped toward him, but suddenly the turbolift lights popped on. For an instant O'Brien prided himself that the thing was afraid of him and was now deciding to do his bidding, but then the door panels slid open and an Enterprise crewman stepped between the two of them.

  O'Brien and Bashir made room, trying to look natural, and returned the crewman's nod of greeting. Okay, so this lift was somebody else's trained dog.

  The crewman took hold of a stubbed handle angling out of the wall below the light panel. "Deck Fifteen."

  Dutifully the lift started moving. O'Brien glanced sheepishly at Bashir, and each reached for one of the other two handles.

  O'Brien leaned toward the doctor and mumbled, "I won't tell if you don't."

  "Deal."

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DIAMOND-SHAPED entranceway opened before Odo, admitting him to the K-Seven bar. He found the atmosphere most familiar, not terribly unlike Quark's bar on Deep Space Nine. Perhaps brighter.

  There were people here, lots of them. A bar, a bartender haggling with a persistent salesman, offic
ers, enlisted men, civilians, other merchants and visitors.

  Half expecting the people here to notice him and particularly his non-human, non-Klingon, non-anything face, he paused briefly. A few people looked, but none showed interest. Evidently strangers came and went here every day.

  He angled toward a group of empty tables in a corner of the room near the door. Without letting anyone see, he took his tricorder from his pocket and activated it. It had been programmed with Arne Darvin's biodata from the transporter. That, at least, the disguised Klingon had not been able to scramble or crash.

  Two senior officers stood at the bar. One was a Vulcan science officer of particularly elegant but relaxed bearing, more relaxed than any Vulcans Odo had ever known. The other officer—the captain!

  Odo looked twice to be sure he was seeing correctly. The physical description, the slashes on the sleeves—Captain James Kirk. A man whose name he had heard uttered with both contempt and respect steadily since first becoming involved with Starfleet. A thousand stories were in that man, Odo knew. His interest cranked up a notch.

  Sedate in a tapestry-green shirt rather than the expected tan command tunic, James Kirk was a muscular, compact man with quick hazel eyes and a much calmer manner than Odo would've expected, given the legends. Apparently, legend had chosen to reflect only sensational aspects. The crowd neither parted for him nor did he seem to expect such a thing.

  Here, today, he was a young James Kirk, in his early thirties and heading toward a starlit career, doing a job for which he was supremely talented. Few people in history had been so right for their jobs as Captain Kirk for his.

  The legend cast a long shadow upon Odo and his own time, for he in particular, outcast from another race, would not enjoy the freedoms of the Federation were it not for Starfleet and men like James Kirk. But he managed to keep things in perspective. Many of that young man's great days were yet to come. Restraint must be the order of the day.

  Kirk took his drink and turned to lean back on the bar. "Summoning a starship on a Priority-One Channel to guard some storage compartments. Storage compartments of wheat."