A DIMMER PLACE even than the vault in which they had slept, this hole provided the ideal seclusion sought by any saboteur, a grotto from which to extend affliction into the nearby community.
They had followed the web of Cardassian architecture, doggedly familiar once they let it work for them, left their gray mausoleum and now crouched within a low-ceilinged maintenance chamber whose walls were grouchy blue and marked with repair-coded panels of mustard yellow.
There was much less dust in here, but enough to inform them that the chamber had been undisturbed for years and probably would remain so, at least long enough to serve their purposes. The High Gul was pleased.
He congratulated his men twice when they found this place, this hole with open circuits whose connections could be fanned to life and made to scourge other systems in the complex. He told his men they were superior, because in their eyes he saw their need to hear it. They weren't feeling much more now than the blistering fear and fury and shock of what had happened to them, and none of those were helpful. The disfigurement of those feelings would impair them, torment and maim them, and he wanted the slates of their emotions to be blank for him. He did not yet know what the situation would demand of them, and he wanted to be able to play any card as he saw fit.
And what good would it do to let them fester in misery? Yes, they had been deceived, yes, their families had been told they were dead, yet their still bodies used in some hideous bargain, but he chose not to fan that flame yet, lest it burn itself out before he could make use of it.
These things required careful development, like excellent cuisine.
"Working quite well." The High Gul rearranged his stiff legs and watched the small auxiliary monitors before him, meant only for repair purposes. His eyes once served him better, but he could still see well enough for his ends.
"I don't know what I'm doing sometimes," Elto said as he picked at the exposed conduits.
"It doesn't matter. As long as there is chaos."
"Internal sensors are down, I know."
"We must keep those down."
"There are no Cardassians in the building," the younger officer said. "These people will probably not think to look for us with bioscans."
"Better they can't look at all. And remember, all of you, someone knows we are here and awakened. Someone wakened us, then left us there. Until we know who and why he remains silent, we make no assumptions." The High Gul leaned back and sighed. The cool dryness of the chamber was making him itch. "Besides, we still don't know what we're doing here, to whose purpose … even in ignorance I intend to find advantage."
Elto paused in the work that hunched his bulk into a tiny space, and looked around at him. "Your command is our will, High Gul."
Instantly he was echoed by the others huddled in the long, narrow space.
"Thank you," the High Gul said with a glow of appreciation, but in a tone that implied he fully and eternally expected their devotion and was entitled to expect it. "One step at a time. There is no hurry. Except …" He leaned forward again. "I am hungry. Has anyone seen food?"
"I saw a commissary," Ranan said. "But there was gambling."
"A public house. Gambling … that proves this is not, at least not entirely, a military base. Good … Ranan, Koto, you go there and see if you can bring food. If you find an easier place to get food, less populated, bring it from there."
"Yes, High Gul!"
"Yes, High Gul."
"And keep your heads covered, remember."
"Yes, High Gul."
"Elto …"
"Yes, High Gul?"
"Can you see any long-range sensor equipment tied in to these conduits?"
"Not here, High Gul. In these outlets I see only short-range sensors registering."
"Mmm … I wonder if there are any ships here. I would feel better to steal one and get back in space, have room to maneuver, to make attack … it is a long desire of mine. I do not believe it ever went to sleep in me."
His men were watching him as he spoke, though he met none of their eyes. They were mystified by him, and properly so. Part of his job, of the responsibility of being High Gul, was to maintain the sense of magic and awe he saw now in their eyes. He felt the curiosity of their youth, the respect of students for an elder.
His many victories flew before his mind, and the success these had brought him in the Cardassian culture. He was High Gul—there was no other alive of that stature. He alone bore such a title, created for him. His approval or disapproval of a maneuver, political or military, could sway so many that the maneuver wouldn't even have to be performed to have an effect as if it had been. So strong was the muscle of cooperation beneath him that it was as if he had become de facto dictator.
This, he knew, was because he had never forgotten that his many victories had been as much good fortune as skill and bravery, and his influence only extended as far as his latest exploit. Such was the way with any leader in the Cardassian force.
The thought, plaguing him since first he had thought it, of his being used against his people was not only personally abhorrent, but was a negation of his entire life, his entire service. After twenty years, if indeed that was the count, or if those years were even more, was he unimportant among the current powers? Perhaps even an oddity to be patronized like a senile old relative?
If so, he must find and destroy the forces that hid him in this place, and if they had forgotten the High Gul, he would make them remember. If they had used him, he would make them die.
Sharply he forgot his thoughts as they began to burn and pointed past Elto's noticeable arm. "What is that blue light flashing there?"
"A monitor of functioning inertial damping fields of some sort."
"Why would inertial fields be needed in a complex like this?"
"I don't know, High Gul. This equipment is highly sophisticated, elite extrapolations of what is familiar to me. It seems very advanced for twenty years, but … perhaps they are running experiments of some kind with inertial damping."
"Turn them off, then."
"Without tracing them first?"
"Chaos, Elto, chaos."
"Yes, High Gul … chaos."
The big second-in-command squinted to see better in the dimness, and punched the necessary button.
They didn't expect anything to happen. Expected in fact to have to risk their lives exploring out into this complex to discover what damage they had done and decide what to do next.
But the strangest occurrence descended upon them—they began to float.
Malicu shouted an unintelligible syllable as he tensed suddenly from his squatting position and propelled himself wildly from one end of the narrow chamber to the other, and smashed headlong into the High Gul's shoulder, which in turn sent both of them bouncing like balls into the others. If they had all managed to sit still, they would simply be hovering in place, but the activity caused equal reactions, and off they went, bumping and grasping in the dimness for a way to hold still.
Disorientation struck the High Gul along with a wave of nausea as his empty stomach reacted to the sudden weightlessness.
He flung out his arms, found a piece of structural metal, and held on, indifferent to the gulps and grunts of his Elite Guard as they also struggled for balance. He stared out into the narrow chamber at the bulky uniformed bodies that tumbled before him.
"Gravity!" he choked. "Artificial gravity! That was the purpose of inertial damping! We aren't on a planet at all! We're on a space vessel!"
His reaction caused him to flex his spine, which sent him convulsing forward to a place where he struck the side of his head. Reaching upward, he managed to catch the beam that had sent his brain ringing, and hold himself in place.
"Not a space vessel, High Gul," Malica said. "It must be a space station."
"How do you know?"
"I saw docking facilities."
"Yes … yes, a space station, then. Keep calm. Don't push around, hold yourselves in place … a space station, a space station … this changes everything!"
Elto, nearly turned upside down, with a flop of his black hair flopped from one side of his face to the other, one hand still clutching the housing of the bared circuits with which he was bedeviling this complex, blinked at him in the dimness. "How, High Gul?"
"Because a space outpost is here for a reason. No one goes to the trouble and energy to place an outpost all the way out in space without some valuable consideration. A planet, a nebula, an ore-rich asteroid belt, a strategic location … something valuable enough to require guard. Much more important than simply a ship. If we can control the outpost, we can also control the reason. And don't forget—this is a Cardassian-built complex, without Cardassians living in it. Has it been captured? If so, what has happened to the Empire? When we answer these, we'll find our next duty."
"Do you wish me to turn the inertial damping back on, sir?" Elto asked, looking truly ludicrous now, pressed in a great hulking arch from the ceiling around almost to the floor.
"Not yet," the High Gul said, fighting to think in this unfamiliar state. "Now our chaos must be more careful and specific. We must debilitate these people and incapacitate them from acting against us, but we must leave the station functional in order to keep ourselves alive, and so we will have it to use when we take control. Very interesting, invigorating, this new challenge … you, all of you, pay careful attention and think very hard about whatever you see from now on. Unless your life is at stake, take the second action rather than the first. Do you understand? If you allow for that extra second, that extra breath, you may discover something that we can use. You may be risking everything, but you must now take the dangerous pause. Think, my young brigade, will you, of the dangerous pause."
He gazed at them, hanging as they all were, including himself, in this preposterous design as if illustrating what he was saying to them. Whether they comprehended or not quite yet, it didn't matter. When the moment came, they would recognize it.
"Go out now," he added, "and capture someone wearing a uniform. The time has come for me to have answers, and understand this prize of mine."
"Everyone, stay calm! Hold on to something! No, no, don't push off the deck or the walls! Madam, will you please hold onto that child before he turns into a projectile? Quark! Close your doors! Keep the people inside the bar!"
"Big talk from a walking water balloon! Why don't you just spread yourself into a big fish net and catch everybody until the gravity comes back on? You think I can keep fifty free-roaming patrons inside a dark bar at a time like this? I'm a wizard, aren't I? Talent worth a fortune! I wish!"
Odo coiled one leg around the handrail of a spiral stairway and watched in frustration as panicked station dwellers spiraled into the air like seed pods in a breeze. Their own forward momentum as they walked Deep Space Nine's Promenade Deck now sent them soaring and bumping in midair, propelled by their own startlement that had prevented them from holding still and waiting out the mishap.
It struck him abruptly how many people were living on this station who in fact knew nothing about space travel or life in space or the eccentricities of either and who had never been trained to deal with such malfunctions as those of gravity control. They simply came here in a controlled-environment craft, and stepped out into the controlled-environment station without lending a thought to the effort and energy necessary to create and maintain this environment or what to do when it broke down.
"Quark, you have low ceilings in that bunco rat-trap!" he called across the open space of the corridor. "You can put people underneath them. When the gravity comes back on, these people out here in the corridor are going to—"
Plummet like rocks to the deck and smash every bone in their fragile nonfluid forms. No, better he didn't say that just to get a rise out of the station's number-one flimflam man.
From inside the open doorway of the bar, Quark offered a snaggletoothed grimace and communicated with his rodentlike eyes that somehow this must be Odo's fault, or at least that he would happily spread lies to that order.
"Keep as many people under the overhangs as possible," Odo finally told him, measuring his words and using his long cold stare to make an effect on the resident Ferengi woolpuller. "Tell them to get toward the floor and stay as close to it as possible, so they won't fall far when the gravity comes back on!"
"Sisko and O'Brien aren't stupid enough to turn the gravity back on too fast," Quark called. "Nobody's going to fall!"
"We don't know the extent of general damage," Odo called back, frustrated that he had to let so many people in on what was happening. "They may have no choice. We have to be ready for any circumstance."
He was saying as little as possible, but he saw in the eyes of the people around him that they were paying attention and reading in the complications.
A big fish net. Merited a thought or two … just how far could he extend his substance? How thin could he stretch? He'd never tried that.
Still, he might catch between five and fifty floating victims, but there was a whole station full of people here. He was more use in this humanoid form, yelling at those who recognized his voice as the supreme custodian of common sense, order, and police action on DS9.
He rather liked it that way.
"See what you can do about getting people to hold themselves close to the floors. I'll try to get to Ops."
"You'd better try to get to engineering instead," Quark called, wrapped like an envelope around the very end of the bar, his bulbous head canted to one side to keep his sensitive wide-brimmed ears from striking anything. "Communications are down stationwide. If this gravity glitch is localized to the Promenade, Chief O'Brien's going to have to know about it before it can get fixed, and you're the only one who can turn to grease and squish under a door panel!"
Not sure whether he'd been complimented or not, Odo barked a few more orders to the wide-eyed patrons who were turning heels-up all around him and took the time to think about the logic of where he should go. Report to the captain, yes. But Sisko was no fool and probably already knew about this and the other malfunctions rattling through the station. Certainly everyone knew about the comm shutdown and the faulty lifts. He had personally extricated five people from the frozen lifts and he was already in a bad mood about it.
Odo hooked a toe around the stairway railing and glowered.
He hated when Quark made sense. Even more when he was forced to admit to Quark that Quark was making sense.
Might better be worth letting the whole station go to pot.
Suddenly a blunt sensation of solidity struck him—and all around it began to rain people.
Citizens dropped from midair and struck the deck in a gaggle, heads-first, knees-first, in piles, yelping and howling with pain as they slammed to the deck, powered by their own weights.
For Odo, variable mass was something he took for granted. He slipped to the deck also, but not with the punishing hammer blows of the poor souls around him. Around him he heard bones crack and flesh strike metal with bruising unforgiveness.
And someone began to sob.
So it was true—his guess was right. There was more going wrong than just the gravity. The systems to fix the gravity, and everything else, were also botched. Even the automatic safeties that would have prevented what just happened must be off-line or somehow compromised.
The whole station … compromised.
"Is everyone all right?"
With a gushing groan, Kira Nerys pulled herself up off the deck and custodially counted heads around the Ops center as everyone else stiffly got to their feet around her.
"Well, that was fun," she grumbled. "I always like a little fly around the ceiling before lunch. Artificial gravity now—what next?"
"I don't know," Sisko said, glancing at the readouts. "O'Brien must've managed to get control over it and get the inertial dampers working again. I wonder why he didn't turn it back on gradually, lower everyone to the ground slowly—there must be more breakdowns than just the obvious. Even the automatic safeties failed."
"And now," Dax added, "we also have to worry about how many people are hurt from the fall and can't get to the infirmary because the lifts are out of order." She pulled herself back into her seat and checked her equipment. "Long-range sensors still operating, Benjamin, and now I'm picking up two … possibly three warp-nine drones in the sector, distant but functioning. I think it's safe to assume there are more, which we're not picking up yet."
"It would take more than three to cause a sector-wide blackout," Sisko said, as if discussing a point over a game of cards, and rubbed the shoulder on which he'd landed when the gravity popped back on.
Kira had been watching him and Dax in silence for several minutes before the gravity went wild, keeping quiet as they sifted through the problems and tried to pick out which were homebound and which were external. As for any second-in-command, once the commander came on deck she was shunted to observer status, until she came up with something to contribute. That was fine—this series of events was bizarre to her.
She found herself asking two questions for every answer they got, while Ben Sisko was working through the situation one element at a time without getting mad at it.
Kira knew she would've been mad by now. In fact, she was mad the moment her nose hit the lift door. Now they were all bruised too.
It was becoming a game, to see when Sisko would get mad. How much would he take before that stoic Vulcan-imitation exterior would crack? She's seen it crack before, but she'd never had a chance to actually watch the process.
"It's not precisely a blackout," Dax explained. "Blackout would mean hundreds of comm systems on planets, stations, and ships all shutting down simultaneously. It would be impossible to coordinate without the cooperation of every government and captain. What we're experiencing here is a whiteout—excess communications noise being flushed into the area, so much that it simply outshouts everything else, floods every frequency, and clogs the gains."
"In other words, no cooperative effort, no accident, but a deliberate act of sector-wide intrusion. Do you concur?"
"I concur, yes."
"Can you identify those drones?" Sisko asked. "What's the gain on their broadcast? Any propulsion mixture we can break down?"
"Very faint," Dax said. "Not enough for identification breakdown."
"No beams, semaphores, or signals of any kind?"
Dax looked up at him, and from the other side of Sisko Kira noticed a change. Dax's expression was layered with knowing. And Sisko's voice had gone indicatively mellow, his words specific.
"No beacons," Dax said, and continued to look at him.
Kira watched her, watched him—what did they realize that she was missing? Suddenly she understood why she had fallen so quiet and let events play out before her. Something was changing, and her instincts had told her to shut up and notice it, pay attention and learn.
"Then it's not Starfleet," Sisko muttered to himself. "Are there any alert signals or blips that might suggest a drill or test of any kind?"
"No blips." Still turned up to him, Dax didn't even bother with her controls anymore. She obviously already knew these answers and was taking each in lockstep. "No alert signals."
"What are you doing?" Kira finally overflowed. "What am I missing?"
Sisko straightened and paced away, then turned back to say, "Several years in Starfleet Academy and Command School, Major."
For the first time in minutes, Dax looked away from him to Kira. "He's asking a series of proper questions before regulations allow him to come to a certain conclusion."
"What conclusion?" Kira felt like a child pestering her parents for answers about grown-up things.
Sisko was now pacing the deck as if playing out his role as the dad, sifting his experience for a simple way to deal with a complicated reality.
"Sector whiteout can be taken as a prelude to invasion, Major," he said. "And that's how I'm taking it."
Invasion. Not just a word, but the very sound, the embodiment of the action, the painting of horror. The settled galaxy had few corners any longer that had been isolated from the horror, and everybody knew what that meant and how high modern space science could execute such a concept with glaring, burning physical reality. Certainly Kira had never been protected from it in her life. Rather, her whole life had been one long response to such infliction.
It wasn't supposed to happen anymore. The Federation was here, Starfleet was here now. She had almost convinced herself the dangers of the past were over.
"Who is it?" she blurted. "Is this a move by Cardassia to get control of the sector back? Or could it somehow be the Dominion trying to extend control through the wormhole from the Gamma Quadrant?"
"At this point, there's no way to know," Sisko said evenly, but with smoke behind his eyes. "But I know what the Dominion is. I've been willing to take extreme measures to keep them out of this quadrant, even to destroying the wormhole. I'll carry through with that if I have to."
Feeling her body temperature drop, Kira pressed her fingertips to the buffer of Dax's console. "Without orders from Starfleet?"
"Major, I am Starfleet. That's why I'm in command here. For times like this."
His words were so simple, so unatoning, that Kira almost lost them in the hypnotism of his solemn eyes. He wasn't making any proclamations.
With a little spasm of her hand Kira pushed off Dax's console and took over the pacing. "This is a fine time for things to be going haywire all over the station," she ground out.
Even as she said those words, she realized the foolish blindness of them and felt her facial expression change. It gave her away completely as she looked up and saw Sisko looked at her knowingly.
"It's no coincidence," Sisko said in a confirming way. "It's a good bet there are enemy operatives already on the station."
The headache just kept getting bigger.
And there hadn't been a single shot fired yet! Not a threat! Not a scratched line in the sand! Nobody had even spit on anybody else.
Somebody should at least spit.
"So," Kira shoved out, "what do we do? How do we fight an enemy we can't see, can't identify, and who may or may not already be here?"
"Tactics will be different," Sisko said as if ready with his answer, "depending on who's about to attack us. As far as actual punitive actions, we'll have to wait for them to make a move. Until that happens, we'll tighten security on the station and see if we can't flush out the birds who are sneaking around in the weeds."
Dax indulged in a quirkish grin. "So we start at Quark's, right?"
Sisko didn't respond. He was already involved in tactics. "Major, I want you to start evacuation of the station."
"Evacuation!" Kira interrupted. "Sir, the whole station?"
"All non-Starfleet personnel, and all the children first."
As she stared at him, he suddenly turned harsh and glared back. "I lost my wife in an enemy invasion, Major. There are lots of non-Starfleet people here and there could be lots of death coming."
"Commander," Kira began, slower this time, her brow tight, "don't you think …"
But she hadn't the conviction to say what she was thinking, to tell him he was being drastic, to explain to the man who knew what she would say how involved it was to evacuate a station the size of Deep Space Nine, or even that there wouldn't be any way to keep such an action confidential. He evidently didn't care whether it was kept confidential or not.
Sisko drilled her with a haunted and daring stare, brows down, the whites of his eyes showing like two reclining crescents beneath them, his mouth in a single straight line.
"I've been through an invasion before," he said. "I've seen it. I've paid for it. I know how much worse an attack is when the soldiers have their families with them. Heads aren't clear. Risks are entirely different. Innocent people die. Whoever will attack this station knows the station's defense—I have to assume that, because I wouldn't attack a place until I knew all I could know about it. There are saboteurs on board who are very likely equipped to overcome any resistance we initially offer. I don't have any intention of doing things in the order they expect, is that clear?"
Over the invigoration rising in her chest, Kira said, "Yes, sir!"
"Good. Get messages through to all docked vessels and tell them I'm issuing letters of marque that will allow them to act as de facto Starfleet ships and that their first mission is to take full loads of passengers down to Bajor."
"If this is an invasion," Dax said, "the planet'll be in danger, too."
"Taking a planet is a lot harder than taking a station. And they'll still have to get past me first."
He stared at nothing, fanning his inner flame, the flash of anger that would carry him through.
Kira recognized that anger, that flash—she had one, too. But she had rarely possessed control over it, to bring it to the fore as Sisko was doing right before her eyes.
His eyes grew hard and he drew a long breath. "A sector-wide communications shutdown and a series of debilitating malfunctions smells of a plan, exactly what I would to if I wanted to take an installation with minimum damage. If that's what's happening here, then we're going to be ready for it."
Kira glanced at Dax, and in that brief glance received the solidity she was looking for.
"Yes, sir," she said. "We'll be ready."
Sisko's dark cheek flinched, and somewhere under the conviction and the anticipation was a buried smile, of the kind that makes spines shiver.
"I'm betting Starfleet won't miss a sector-wide whiteout. All we have to do is hold our own until they get here. First we turn our attention to the internal sabotage, try to stay one step ahead of it and find out who's doing it. Major, as soon as the station has been evacuated of sixty percent of its non-Starfleet personnel, I want you to issue weapons to the staff. We're going hunting."