Star Trek Deep Space Nine #14: The Long Night by Dean Wesley Smith

Author:Dean Wesley Smith [Smith, Dean Wesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Media Tie-In, General
ISBN: 9780671551650
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 1996-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Jake sat on the only chair in the room, his arms crossed over his chest. The little surveillance room had grown stiflingly hot, and he worried that air wasn't circulating through it. He didn't tell his worries to Nog, though.

Nog hadn't spoken to him since Jake kaboshed his uncle.

Nog and Rom hovered over Quark, who had only recently regained consciousness. He had been out over thirty minutes, during which time Nog had repeatedly berated Jake for his stupidity. Jake had let him; he had been around Ferengi long enough to know such verbal abuse was a way of blowing off steam and tension. Besides, it was safer for Nog to blame Jake than to take the blame himself. Quark's punishments could be bizarre and severe.

Jake's stomach growled. Their situation had grown desperate. The hunger wasn't that bad. The heat and the lack of water concerned him the most. The red alert showed no signs of abating. Jake had hoped that Kira would shut off the alert quickly and then the doors would open, but so far that hadn't happened. During Nog's beratement, Jake had watched the screen showing Ops and realized that the situation there was growing worse, not better.

Which meant that the red alert might continue indefinitely.

Quark moaned. Rom was murmuring soothing words, and Nog was hovering over both of them, occasionally throwing helpless glances over his shoulder at Jake. It felt as if Nog wanted Jake to make Quark better. Jake didn't have that skill. The only thing he could do was figure out a way out of here.

He had tried to talk to Rom about how they had opened the door from the outside, but Rom had said Quark had done that. And Quark wasn't answering any questions. Yet.

Jake stood and walked to the panel of screens. Watching Ops would get him nowhere, and he had already apologized to Nog. Jake had to go back to what he was doing before the other Ferengi arrived. Studying the panel.

The setup made no sense to him. It seemed to be some sort of surveillance system made to spy on the station, but who set it up and why? And where was the information going out? And for that matter, how? Jake didn't know that much about station security, but he couldn't imagine Chief O'Brien, Odo, and his father not discovering some sort of signal leaving the station from this panel.

Jake stood back from the panel and tried to really look at it. Chief O'Brien had taught him a lot about machinery. A general rule, he said, was to examine the pattern. Anything that didn't fit into the pattern bore investigating. So Jake stared at the panels and let what he was seeing form patterns.

It took a moment, but then he saw it. The screen in the lower corner really didn't show a strategic area of the station but showed instead a hallway just outside a docking bay. And the main focus of the picture wasn't the door to the docking bay, but a communications wall unit near it.

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