Star Trek Deep Space 9 Warped

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 548.21KB 180 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Warped

By K.W. Jeter

Inside Cover

After its blockbuster debut in January 1993, STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE immediately joined

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION® at the top of the ratings. Now thatThe Next Generation

TM has moved on to feature films,Deep Space NineTM is heralding a new era of critical and public

acclaim for STAR TREK® on television.

WARPED is the firstDeep Space Nine hardcover and the eleventh in an unprecedented series of epic

STAR TREK hardcovers—a series of national bestsellers that has included recent smash-hits likeThe

Original Series novel SAREK by A.C. Crispin andThe Next Generation book DARK MIRROR by

Diane Duane.

Highly respected science fiction novelist K.W. Jeter concocts a gripping tale that pits Commander Sisko

against the most dangerous foe he has ever faced. As the story opens, political tensions on Bajor are

once again on the rise, and the various factions may soon come to open conflict. In addition, a series of

murders on the station have shaken everyone on board. While Security Chief Odo investigates the

murders, Commander Sisko finds himself butting up against a new religious faction who plan to take over

Bajor and force the Federation to leaveDeep Space NineTM .

Odo soon traces the murders to a bizarre and dangerous new form of holosuite technology—a

technology that turns its users into insane killers and that now has Commander Sisko's son Jake in its

grip. As the situation deteriorates on Bajor, Sisko learns that the political conflict and the new holosuites

are connected. They are both the work of a single dangerous man with a plan that threatens the very

fabric of reality.

The plot is darker than anything Sisko has faced before, and to defeat it, he must enter the heart of a

twisted, evil world that threatens to overtake the station. It's a world where danger lurks in every corner

and death can come at any moment—from the evil within Sisko himself, from his closest friends, or even

at the hands of his own son.

K.W. Jeter is the author of over twenty science fiction, fantasy and thriller novels, including the notorious

DR. ADDER , the disorientingFAREWELL HORIZONTAL , and the somewhat bafflingMADLANDS ,

as well as theSTAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE ® novelBLOODLETTER . TheNew York Times

Book Review called him an "...exhilarating writer who always seems to have another rabbit to pull out of

his hat."

Mr. Jeter will next be writingBLADE RUNNER TWO: EDGE OF HUMAN , a sequel to Philip K.

Dick's classicDO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? By the time you read this, he and his

wife will also have returned to God's country, specifically Portland, Oregon.

Blurb

Empty, lifeless space spread Sisko as he stepped onto the Ops deck.

Slowly, he turned from where he stood, his gaze searching. . . .

And finding. A chair before one of the consoles slowly turned, revealing the figure that had been sitting

there. An image with his face.

His voice: "I've been waiting for you." A smile formed on the face of Sisko's mirror image, his echo. "For

a long time."

Sisko nodded slowly, acknowledging its existence. He knew he should have expected it.

The echo's face—Sisko's face, transformed but still the same—was an emotionless mask, cold an

inhuman, divorced from all feeling.

"There can't be two of us here. That's not possible." The echo's voice came from deep inside, as though

the words were the result of long brooding. "You'll have to go."

The image's hand lifted and reached for Sisko's throat. . . .

Main Text

To Sam Ward, Joyce Reynolds-Ward and Lew Ward

HISTORIAN'S NOTE

This adventure takes place shortly after Kai Opaka answered the call of the Prophets, and before the

events depicted in the episodes "The Homecoming," "The Circle," and "Siege."

WYOSS

CHAPTER 1

"Look—"

A hand darted into the water, through the ribbons of green weeds streaming in the current, into the

darkness between the stones smooth as black pearls. A fist came back up, with flashes of silver wriggling

from either side, a clear rivulet dripping from the elbow.

Jake Sisko regarded the fish in the other boy's grasp. As before—since the first time—he was filled with

both admira-tion and a stomach-knotting unease at the other's lightning quickness.Too fast, he thought.

Like a knife piercing the water without even a splash.That's not right.

The two boys hunkered knees-to-chest on the largest rock in the middle of the creek, the yellow sun

above drying the wet marks their bare feet had left behind them. The water churned white a few inches

away. Jake squinted against the glare, turning his gaze toward the tall-grass fields that rolled up to the

stand of trees that served as a windbreak at the crest of the hill.Eucalyptus, his father had called them,

crushing the sickle leaves in his big hand to release their sharp, penetrating scent. Jake's father had

reached up and pulled away a strip of bark—it didn't hurt the trees, this type shed the long, twisting

pieces like snakeskins—and given it to him as a kind of souvenir, one that he still had dangling on the wall

of his bedroom.

"Look," insisted the other boy, thrusting the captured fish in front of Jake's face. The creature's round

eyes were emblems of unreasoning panic, the pink-rimmed gills fluttering wide in the strangling air. Its

mouth made an idiot O, as the boy's thumb traced the seam of its belly.

Jake wanted to tell the other boy to let the fish go, to throw it back into the water, where it could

disappear into the shadowed refuge downstream. But he was afraid to. Notafraid —Jake's spine

stiffened at the edge of the traitorous thought—but held by a dark fascination, as though standing at a cliff

whose rim crumbled beneath one's toes.

He didn't even know the other boy's name. But then he didn't need to.

"Aw, we've done a fish before. They're nothing special." The other boy weighed the creature's fate and

found it unworthy of further consideration. He tossed it away, not even watching where it broke the

water's surface and flicked out of sight. He leaned over the side of the rock, shading his eyes to hunt for

something better.

Jake felt the squeezing around his heart relax. In the distance, on the creek's other side, the grasses'

feathery tops parted and settled together again as a hidden shape moved below them. He knew it was

the big orange tabby with battered ears that lived on the mice from the barn beyond the hill. Or the barn

that had used to be over there; the sway-backed shingled roof and gaping boards, with the mounds of

dusty-smelling hay and withered, ancient horse turds inside, had gradually faded away, as though pushed

from existence by this little world's new commanding presence. That was probably why the cat had to

roam farther afield, to find something to eat. Everything here had changed, or was about to, Jake knew.

His companion leaned closer to the shadow on the water. Jake watched, keeping his own breath still.

He didn't want to do or say anything that would draw attention to the cat on its solitary, preoccupied

hunt. There were things that could happen to it—things that the other boy might do—that made Jake's

stomach knot up again.

"I saw something down here. . . ." The other boy muttered as his hand brushed through the green weeds.

A lock of hair dark as his eyes dangled across his brow. Oddly—another thing that Jake knew wasn't

right—the other boy's shoulders were dusted with freckles, like the ones on his forearms beneath sandy

red hair. It seemed as if those parts were all that was left of the boy who had lived in this world before, a

redhead with a snub nose and a broad, open smile. The newcomer's smile was a twisting of one corner

of a thin-lipped mouth, an expression filled with amusement at what its owner had glimpsed inside Jake's

heart.

"What?" Curious despite his misgivings, Jake leaned over to see. His shadow mingled with the other's,

casting the water even darker. "What is it?"

The other boy stretched out, chest against the rock, so he could reach all the way down, the water

swirling to the pit of his arm. Jake could see when he had caught whatever it was, from the sudden

tensing of his muscles and the black spark of delight in his eyes.

Sitting back on his haunches, the other boy held up the prize. For a moment, Jake thought the wetly

shining thing was just a rock, a flattish one wide as his companion's out-stretched fingertips. Then he saw

the stubby clawed legs poking out from the corners. A face like a crabby old man's, annoyed at his bald

head being exposed to the sun, protruded from under the shell, then drew back in deep suspicion. When

the scaly eyelids came partway down, it looked kind of like his friend Nog's uncle, the Ferengi innkeeper

back aboard the station.

"Cool. . . ." The other boy examined the turtle as if he had never seen one before. Jake was surprised at

that—the creek was full of them, either scooting about on the bottom or basking on the lower rocks in

the shallows. "This could be . . .interesting. . . . "

Jake felt the sick feeling in his gut again, as though he were helpless to keep himself from falling into the

dark eyes that looked over the turtle shell at him. Whatever happened next—like the things that had

happened already—he knew he would be part of it. That his hands would be right next to the other

boy's. That he would even hold, if the other let him, the little knife with the blade that jumped out when a

button was pushed.

In the field beyond the creek, the barn cat had caught some small, blind thing that it had greedily torn

open with its teeth and claws. The sweat on Jake's shoulders chilled, as though the sun had disappeared

behind a cloud. At the horizon of his vision, he'd always before been able to see, if he stared hard

enough, where this world became nothing but a wall inside another world. Now this" bright earth's

shadows gathered there.

He brought his gaze back to the two smaller pieces of darkness before him. The eyes regarded him; then

the other boy smiled in wicked conspiracy.

"This'll be fun." The other boy reached into the pocket of his jeans and fetched out the little folding knife.

"You know it will."

Jake squeezed his eyes shut, against the reflection of his own face that bounced off the sudden snap of

metal in the other's hand. It didn't do any good to keep whispering to himself that nothing here was real.

But he went on saying it, anyway.

* * *

A section of bulkhead, the curved wall between the gridded floor and the overhead light panels,

considered its position.There's really no need for this— if the bulkhead had possessed any vocal

apparatus, it might have spoken the words aloud, just to hear them echo down the station's empty

corridor. The bulkhead would have been able to hear that, as part of its surface, indistinguishable from

the rest, served as a crude tympanic membrane, carrying the sounds of voices and footsteps—if there

had been any—to the intelligence con-cealed within.He must be already gone, thought the bulkhead; it

rippled like flowing water for a moment, then peeled away from the insensate metal beneath and

recoalesced into the formof Deep Space Nine's chief of security.

Odo looked around the angle of the nearest corner, to where the passageway split into the farther

reaches of the station. Now that he had resumed the humanoid appearance by which most of DS9's

personnel recognized him, he could visually scan the area. Before, any transformation of his matter into an

optic sensor might have given away his carefully maintained disguise.

There was no sign of the individual he had been tracking. In Odo's memory was a complete dossier on

one Ahrmant Wyoss, an itinerant freight handler who had been catching occasional pickup work in the

station's main docking pylon. Despite the range of computerized equipment on the dock, from

overhead-tracking forklifts that could shift multi-ton reactor cores to tweezerlike micromanipulators

capable of extracting the black specks of monocloned seed stock from radiation-resistant transport gel,

there was still a need for the kind of sheer muscle mass that could break open a wooden packing crate

from one of the low-tech trading worlds. Wyoss possessed that much, along with a heavily brooding face

that to Odo indicated a chronic overindulgence in central-nervous-system depressants. That Wyoss also

had enough rudimentary intelligence left to elude a tracker tinged Odo's thoughts with unease; it didn't fit

with the profile he had mentally constructed of the suspect.

From behind him came the sound of a small object hitting the floor. Not startled, but in his customary

state of hyperalertness, Odo turned quickly and spotted the source, a small plastoid box with a pair of

dangling probe wires and a digital readout on one side. It was a sign of how thoroughly Ahrmant Wyoss

had filled his thoughts, that he had forgotten the device he had brought along. He had hidden it, tucking it

into a ceiling crevice, before flowing into his own molecule-thick concealment over the bulkhead segment.

He turned the device over in his hand; the numbers on the readout still corresponded to Wyoss's

credit/access code. Chief of Operations O'Brien had cobbled together the device as a favor for Odo,

part of the relationship of mutual back-scratching the two of them had worked out. Odo had exceeded

his authority, by perhaps only a small bit, in leaning on a band of petty thieves who had been pilfering

from some of the chief's outlying storage lockers, and O'Brien had in turn designed and put together this

handy little gizmo. And kept quiet about it.

Odo meditatively ran his thumb across the points of the probe wires. By a strict interpretation of DS9's

regulations, the device was illegal; without a written order from the station's commander, the equivalent of

a planetside court order, accessing any record of an individual's financial deal-ings, no matter how small,

was forbidden. The moral qualms Odo felt—it was his job to enforce the laws, not break them—were

small, in proportion to the device's limited function: all it could do was extract the access codes and

corresponding names from the data banks of the station's holosuites, giving him a record of who had used

each one, and when. That had been useful in establishing a pattern of behavior for Wyoss; the suspect

had spent an inordinate amount of time immersed in the artificial worlds created by one or another of the

holosuites that had been installed along this passageway.

That habit alone served as an identifying quirk for Wyoss; this bank of holosuites was several levels

away from the main action of the Promenade. Whenever the suspect had emerged from the detailed

sensory experience for which he had programmed the suite, he'd had to trudge a long way to knock back

a few synthales at Quark's emporium. That datum was still being turned over at the back of Odo's

thoughts, an analogue to his slow fidgeting with the device in his hand.

An obsessive need for privacy? Odo considered that possi-bility, and discarded it as before. A thug like

Ahrmant Wyoss wouldn't care what other people thought of his recreational activities. And besides, the

interior of a holosuite, no matter what busily teeming sector its door might exit onto, was already as

private as technology could devise. The only place more private would be the inside of one's own skull.

Which was, of course, part of the holosuites' attraction. For himself, Odo couldn't see much of a point in

that; there was rarely a moment of his life when he didn't feel essentially alone, a creature of unknown

origin, separated from all others.

He pushed those thoughts aside, with no more effort than closing the lid on a box of old-fashioned still

photographs and family data recordings. He had trained himself to do as much, to attend to the job at

hand, whatever it might be. Everybody, he supposed, did the same; the fact that the box he carried

around, tucked away in a dark corner of remembrance, held nothing but empty brooding made no

difference.

Ahrmant Wyoss was somewhere else aboard the station; the sooner the suspect was located, the better.

There were three corpses lying in the morgue connected to the station's central infirmary; each of them

had been ripped open, from throat to bipedal lower extremities, by a honed pryblade, the folding tool

that the loading docks' freight-handlers used to slice through heavy cables and lever apart stuck container

seals. Odo had seen one of the pylon crew draw the razor-edged tool out of his overalls' back pocket

and flick it to full extension in his hand faster than eye could follow or thought anticipate. Two of the

corpses in the morgue had been the frenzied product of one of Wyoss's coworkers, who had slit his own

throat before Odo could apprehend him. The third and latest murder had been committed more

discreetly, with no clue left behind, other than the rousing of the security chief's even sharper instincts,

every time he had seen Wyoss skulking through the station's corridors. Something in the eyes, or rather

behind them, like a worm uncoiling around the pit of a small fruit . . . That, plus the rather more concrete

datum of Wyoss's pryblade being missing from the locker where he kept his other tools when he wasn't

working.

Stop wasting time,Odo scolded himself. Something had kept him loitering here, long after he had

ascertained that Wyoss was not in this sector. Another suspicion, as though a sense beyond sight or

hearing had caught the trace of some other crime being committed.

The holosuite closest to him was one of the new ones that had been shipped on board the station and

powered up. It provided him a measure of grim satisfaction to think of someone cutting into Quark's

territory of salacious entertain-ment; the Ferengi was no doubt already fuming about this competition and

how unfair it was to him. The notion of Quark's discomfiture was almost satisfying enough to out-weigh

the tiresome necessity of investigating and keeping an eye on the owners of the new holosuites.

At the moment, this one was occupied; he had already used O'Brien's clever device to determine that

someone other than Wyoss had entered the suite, before he'd taken up his dis-guised surveillance. Odo

reinserted the probe wires beneath the edge of the door's control panel, to obtain the exact credit/access

code.

On the device's small readout panel, the numbers shifted, held for a moment, then changed to letters.

One by one, they spelled out the namesisko.

That's odd,mused the security chief. Why would the station's commander come this far to use a

holosuite, when there were the closer ones above Quark's bar.

Another letter appeared on the readout. The initial J. The access code had been that for Benjamin

Sisko's son, Jake.

Odo gazed at the small mystery for a few seconds longer, then switched off the device and stowed it in

his uniform pocket. A wordless concern still nagged at him, but there was no time to puzzle over it now.

He turned and strode quickly toward the corridors' hub.

Just for a moment, he had felt as if someone else was there with him, another presence more human than

the one with which he shared this little world. Jake looked over his shoulder, expecting—or rather,

hoping—to see a door open in the horizon. Maybe his father would step across the water-smoothed

rocks turning back to gray metal, reach down and take his hand as the stream thinned and disappeared,

and pull him back into the narrow spaces and skyless ceilings of the real world.

He saw no one behind him; the feeling passed, replaced by the certainty of how alone he was, with no

one but the other boy for company. The boy who existed nowhere else but here.

Reluctantly, Jake brought his gaze back around to his companion. The other boy's dark, lank hair fell

across his brow as he studied the turtle in his hand. He poked at the side of the shell with the knifepoint,

as though trying to find a hidden latch. Jake felt a hollowness at the base of his gut, a souring wad of spit

beneath his tongue.

There had been a time before the other boy had shown up in this world. Now there were times when

Jake wished he could go back to then, to be alone here again. And other times, when the sick, dizzy

feeling inside himself grew so large that it threatened to swallow him up, when he was crazily glad that the

other boy had come. That was when he knew that the things the other said were only echoes of things

that had already been spoken in some dark sector of his own heart.

"You want to?" As if he had read Jake's thoughts, the other boy held the knife out to him.

Jake shook his head. "I'll just watch. This time."

The other boy's unpleasant, knowing smile broke, then disappeared as he focused his attention back to

the turtle. The stumpy, scaly legs kicked in futile struggle.

He had already started remembering, and couldn't stop. To when he had first become aware of the other

boy's presence here. Jake hadn't even seen him, but had found his handi-work. In the woods farther

down the creek's length, the trees whose wild profusion of branches broke this world's sunlight into

scattered coins. There, in the damp-smelling shadows, Jake had found a space of bare earth scraped out

of the tangled roots and dead leaves. Empty except for something that lay beneath a swarm of flies, their

avid buzzing like the sound of the electronic currents beneath the surfaces of this world. He'd prodded

the object with his toe, the flies dispers-ing then settling back down upon it, and caught a glimpse of the

small animal opened from beneath its small chin to between its hind legs. A cat, or what had been one,

with enough of its gray tabby fur unmarked to show that it wasn't the orange prowler from the barn. Jake

had stepped back from it in disgust, and had almost tripped over one of the cords, pieces of dirty frayed

rope he hadn't noticed before, that looped around the trunks of the nearest trees and pulled the dead

thing into a spread-eagled X on the ground.

That had been the first sign, the emblem of the other boy's arrival here. Since then, Jake had seen more

things. But never without feeling sick in his gut afterward, so that now he pushed away the little knife

when it was offered to him, despite the other's sneer.

He closed his eyes when he heard a tiny sound, the whisper the knife made when it cut through

something soft and yielding. Not for the first time, he wished everything around him was a dream, a real

dream, the kind from which he could wake when it got too scary.

She turned in the cramped space, knowing that her chance for sleep was coming to an end. Major Kira

Nerys knew she could have used a lot more of it, to ease the fatigue in her bones and the mental

weariness that had seemed to gather like silt behind her eyes.

There was another reason for keeping her eyes squinted shut against the flashing lights, for trying to

ignore the metal-on-metal sounds that rattled down the freight shuttle's interior, and the voices of the

crew members. With enough effort, she could hold on to the last fading edge of the dream that had

visited her, the small comfort for which she had been grateful, as though it had been her long-dead

father's kiss upon her brow. A vision of green fields rolling to a domed and spired city just in sight at the

horizon; she had drifted above as though on a bed of soft winds, reaching a hand down to touch the

surface of Bajor, as though her homeworld was the face of a lover whose sleep she watched in her own .

. .

"Major Kira—" A voice prodded her, in synch with the jostling her shoulder received. "Sorry to disturb

you—"

I just bet you are.She was awake enough to keep her thoughts from muttering aloud. The impulse to

cock back her arm—her hand had already squeezed itself into a fist—and punch out whoever it was had

been resisted. The dream had already faded into irretrievability, not even a memory left behind.That's

because it wasn't real, Kira told herself as she took a deep breath of the shuttle's stifling air supply,

readying herself for full consciousness. What had been shown to her wasn't even widespread on Bajor;

the visit to this region had lasted nearly five days, and all she had seen had been the same scarred

landscape, the crumbling pit mines and mountains of worthless extraction tailings left behind by the

Cardassians, that had been there when she had first shipped off-planet to theDeep Space Nine station.

The green processes of nature were taking a long time in softening the torn hillsides; the soil had been so

depleted by its ravagers that even the toughest weeds had difficulty in taking root.

"We're going to be docking soon. . . ."

"All right." She nodded, swallowing the taste that sleep had left in her mouth, then glanced up at the crew

member standing beside the cot. A kid, hardly worth displaying her anger toward, even if he had

deserved it. "Thanks." She swung her feet onto the shuttle's deck and sat up. "I'll be coming forward in a

minute or so."

The crew member exited, leaving her alone with the hold's other occupant, a wooden crate nearly as tall

as herself. Automatically, as she had done several times already on the journey from Bajor, she reached

out and tugged on the chains wrapped around the crate. The ancient, rust-specked padlocks were sealed

with not only the insignia of the Bajoran provi-sional government, but a simpler cursive signature as well,

drawn in candle wax by the fingertip of one of the senior Vedeks of the dominant Bajoran religious order.

A formality, more than a security measure; any competent thief could have cut through the chains with a

microtorch, rifled the crate's contents, and sealed it all back up with nothing more than a few hair-thin

seams in the metal links. If the treasures inside had needed any protection—a debatable proposition; they

had little other than historical value—then that had been the reason for Kira's presence: "riding shotgun,"

to use the old Earth phrase employed when she had been given the assign-ment. Though once the crate

had been loaded aboard the freight shuttle, she had felt little guilt about catching up on her sleep, after the

exertions of her other assignment, the confi-dential one, on the surface of Bajor.

Everything was in order with the crate, just as she had expected. The freight shuttle's crew members

were all profes-sionals, as much as she was; as long as their cargo wasn't leaking toxic radiation or some

other hazard, they had little interest in anything other than making sure it reached its destination. Kira

snapped together the collar fastening of her uniform and stood up, smoothing her hair back away from

her brow.

"There's an estimated time to docking of a quarter hour." The shuttle's navigator looked over his

shoulder at Kira standing behind him. "We could go ahead and beam you aboard if you're in a hurry." He

shrugged. "If you want, we could have you notified as soon as your cargo is transferred onto the loading

dock."

Looking past the navigator and the pilot in the next seat over, Kira could see the distant shape ofDeep

Space Nine through the port; the curved pylons hung against the starry black. She felt a slight,

pseudogravitational tug at her bones, as though her body were already willing itself to be back inside the

station's habitat ring, the world of metal that the instinctive parts of herself had already started to regard

as home. That internal perception saddened her, as had the one at the beginning of her mission, when she

had stepped onto Bajoran soil for the first time in almost a year and had realized that she had felt like an

alien on her own birth planet.

She shook her head. "No, that's all right." She had carried out every detail of her mission this far; she

could see through the rest. "Establish a comm link and notify Commander Sisko of my arrival. And

arrange for intrastation transport of the cargo to his private office on Ops deck. I'll meet him there." She

turned away and headed back to the hold.

Away from the shuttle's crew, Kira leaned her hands against the wooden crate, as though some subtle

emanation from hat it held might enter her soul. Inside were pieces of Bajor, remnants of one who might

have been the planet's essence, asthough the oceans' tides had been a single being's heartbeat . . .

She felt nothing. Eyes closed, Kira's head hung below her shoulders for a moment longer, until she

gathered enough strength to push herself away from the crate.

Getting sentimental wasn't part of your assignment.She brushed a few splinters from her palms. If the

crate's contents were as dead as she sometimes felt, in her bleakest moments, her own connection to her

native world to be, then that was just something she would have to deal with. For better or worse.

But for now, all of that could wait. Major Kira Nerys sat down on the edge of the cot and methodically

began reviewing everything she needed to report to her commanding officer.

Suddenly, in what one of normal humanoid physiology might have termed the blink of an eye, he saw the

one for whom he had been searching. Odo felt the electric rush of aroused suspicion inside himself, as

though he had been capable of fine-tuning an olfactory system for himself, to catch some pheromone for

incipient murder. Across the crowded Promenade, the currents of hustlers and marks mingling below the

elevated walkway, he had spotted Ahrmant Wyoss.

Odo pulled himself back into the shadow of a structural pillar, to keep from being sighted in turn by his

target. Total nonvisibility could have been achieved by changing his shape again, to anything from another

section of bulkhead to one of the anaconda-like cables looping overhead. But with this many watching

eyes in the vicinity, he was constrained; nothing would have sent an alarm through the Promenade's

denizens faster than DS9's chief of security being caught so obviously spying on the sector's action.

There was another reason he wished to maintain his customary appearance. To shift in and out of a

simulation of an inanimate object required precious seconds in which the atoms of his material form

sought their new equilibrium with each other. Seconds that could seem long as hours, if in them he was

unable to stop one of the crimes he had sworn himself to prevent. The humanoid form he had created for

himself was the best combination of speed and strength he could devise, while still maintaining at least a

rough resemblance to a majority of natives of the galaxy's scattered worlds. Keeping all of them unaware

of how tensely coiled his muscles were, ready for sudden movement, was a deceptive skill closer to an

actor's art than a policeman's.

"Thereyou are, my dear Odo!" A familiar voice came from close beside him. "I've been looking all over

for you."

He looked down from the corner of his eye; the Ferengi innkeeper's piranha grin loomed up at him.

"Given the nature of your enterprises, Quark—" He craned his neck to keep the far reaches of the

Promenade in view. "—you never have to wait very long for me to make an appearance. Now, do you?"

"Once again, I detect a sarcastic tone to your comments." Quark emitted a martyr's sigh. "I suppose

that's the plight of the small businessman in today's universe. Always an object of suspicion, merely for

cutting a few of the needless bureau-cratic corners that so impede the free flow of commerce."

"Indeed." Odo gave the Ferengi just enough attention to keep the conversation alive. A constant visual

scan of the Promenade while talking was so much a part of his habitualbehavior—and deliberately

so—that it shouldn't arouse any due notice on the other's part. "And exactly what corners haveyou been

cutting lately? Not watering down your synthale again, are you?"

"Cutting corners? Me? Never." Quark drew himself to his height, bringing himself almost to Odo's

shoulder. "I was speaking ingeneral terms about these matters. And that synthale wasn't watered—it

was an experiment, to create alighter, less filling beverage for my customers."

"And at full price, of course."

Quark shrugged. "I was charging for the creativity involved." His expression soured with a deep

brooding. "Your accusations are really unjust, you know—especially when you consider the unsavory

nature of certain other individuals doing business around here."

That remark drew a fraction more of Odo's attention. "And who might that be?"

"Never mind. Perhaps at a later date we'll discuss these matters. Right now, I don't think you're even

listening to me." Quark's puzzled gaze swung parallel to that of the security chief. "Just what is it that you

find so fascinating over there?"

"It's nothing to do with you." Across the Promenade, the sweating, heavy-jawed face of Ahrmant Wyoss

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

StarTrek:DeepSpaceNine–Warped ByK.W.Jeter InsideCover AfteritsblockbusterdebutinJanuary1993,STARTREK:DEEPSPACENINEimmediatelyjoinedSTARTREK:THENEXTGENERATION®atthetopoftheratings.NowthatTheNextGenerationTMhasmovedontofeaturefilms,DeepSpaceNineTMisheraldinganeweraofcriticalandpublicacclaimforSTARTREK...

展开>> 收起<<

Star Trek Deep Space 9 Warped.pdf

共180页,预览36页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Star Trek Deep Space 9 Warped

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: