“It was me,” Odo said, wishing she hadn’t asked. While he hadn’t made any effort to explain or demonstrate his nature to the people he’d met, he had no plans to hide it, either; he’d simply hoped to avoid the conversation. But she had asked.
“I knew it!” Jaxa said, excited. “How did you do that?”
“My unique nature allows for it.” It was his standard reply, the one he and Mora had given to the various Cardassians who had come to view him at the institute.
“Oh,” Jaxa said, seeming puzzled by the answer. “Well…what kind of animal was it?”
“A riding hound, native to Cardassia Prime.” He replied as promptly as he would have to any question from Doctor Mora. “I learned it from studying three-dimensional motion images in the database at the Bajoran Institute of Science.”
Jaxa frowned. “Could you be other animals, too?” she wondered.
“Yes,” Odo said, again wishing she hadn’t asked. He did not like the idea of changing his form on demand for her, or anyone else. It made him feel uncomfortable, especially since he wasn’t sure how to go about refusing. It had only just begun to occur to him that he couldrefuse, if he wanted to, but he had never done so before, and he didn’t know what kind of reaction a refusal would produce. He preferred an atmosphere of agreeable serenity, if it was possible to maintain it.
Jaxa tripped on a piece of root jutting above the surface of the dirt path, and Odo quickly caught her by the elbow before she stumbled. As she regained her footing, her face tilted to the sky. “Look!” she exclaimed, and Odo raised his head to see a crooked line, soaring through the clouds. “It’s a sinoraptor,” she said.
“A sinoraptor,” Odo repeated, watching the thing in the sky.
“A bird,” Jaxa said.
Odo knew what birds were; egg-laying animals that could fly—or at least, some of them could. He recognized that he had seen birds go by as he was coming through the forest to the Ikreimi village from the institute, but he hadn’t paid them much attention.
“Could you be a bird?” Jaxa asked him.
“I don’t know,” Odo said. “I’ve never tried it before.”
“If you can be anything you want,” Jaxa asked, “how come you’re a person all the time? I only saw you be a person at the village.”
Odo grunted before he replied. “I suppose it’s because I have the most practice being a humanoid,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s what Doctor Mora wanted me to be more than anything else.”
“Oh,” Jaxa said. “But…what do youwant to be more than anything else?”
He looked up at the sky, watching the sinoraptor as it came closer, considering her question. “I don’t know yet,” he finally answered. “What do you want to be more than anything else?”
Jaxa already knew the answer. “A soldier,” she said. “To fight the Cardassians and make them go away.”
Odo was curious and surprised, but not terribly. He knew there was conflict between the Bajorans and the Cardassians, though he did not fully understand how it had come about. It did interest him, however, to recognize that a child would already know to be angry at the Cardassians. He supposed the conflict might have run deeper than he originally suspected, and acknowledged to himself that Doctor Mora may have been right—he still had a great deal to learn before he could ever truly “fit in.”
It’s not that I don’t trust her,Quark reassured himself as he struggled with the locking mechanism behind the door panel. It’s just that if Thrax has been listening to her transmissions, and if she already knew that I was selling black-market goods…Everyone made mistakes, it was a fact. An innocent slip of the tongue, and he could lose all that he’d worked for.
The door slid open, allowing him to ignore the meandering, unpleasant train of thought that had been plaguing him since his affair with Natima had begun, that had induced him to visit her empty quarters. She was on Bajor for the day, on business, visiting some grand high muckity-muck, so there was no reason for him to be ashamed of his minor break-and-sweep; she’d never even know that he’d been in her rooms.
Her quarters were quiet and spare, generic, lifeless without her. Quark produced a device from the pocket of his waistcoat and began to sweep for listening devices, but the readout quickly confirmed that her rooms were clean. He went through her desk, found hard copies of statistics and a box of isolinear rods labeled with boring, work-related titles. Nothing with his name on it, anywhere.
She said it had nothing to do with me, he told himself, and felt that flicker of unpleasantness once more, which he’d positively identified as guilt. But then, when he’d asked her about it, the night after Thrax had interrogated her, it seemed to Quark that perhaps she had protested just a little too much. She was hiding something. Quark had decided he’d better hack into her computer, just to be sure.
He settled in front of her console, bringing up the datastrings of her last several transmissions, looking for any visible markers to suggest that they had been monitored. He was shocked to discover that Thrax had been listening to all of them, and he played back the recordings, carefully reading the transcripts as he went.
There was nothing there to implicate Quark, he was certain, but he was disturbed that Thrax had been listening in. What did the security officer want with her? Something to do with her job, maybe? Quark hoped that whatever it was, she would be safe. On the other hand, he considered, maybe Thrax just listened to everyone’s transmissions. Quark was sure that the security chief had tried, numerous times, to eavesdrop on his own communications, but Quark didn’t skimp on tech; he had the very best—well, close to the best—modules and wire blocks, to keep his private business private. He decided that when Natima got back, he’d talk with her about upgrading her hardware.
He was ready to leave, but there was a padd next to Natima’s console, open to a page with a particular line of characters, and he couldn’t help but take a peek. It was in plain sight, after all. It was an acquisition code; Quark knew it immediately—he received similar sequences constantly from the military personnel who came through the bar and put their orders on their government-issued accounts. This one was probably from Natima’s place of employment, the…Information people, whatever-it-was. She must have been ordering something just before she left. But this sequence included something extra to make it stand out from those that Quark dealt with every other day of his life. This one was complete with a passcode.
Quark drummed his fingers on her desk, frowning, thinking. With the passcode that was now in front of him, he had the means to access Natima’s company acquisition accounts. If Quark was careful with it, he might be able to manipulate the sequence so that any purchases he made with it would not be attributed to Natima. Cardassians were notoriously sloppy with matters of finance. Quark knew that well enough; there were several customers that he regularly skimmed from, and they had never even suspected it.
No.He couldn’t betray her. Although…he could certainly help a lot of Bajorans with this information. She hadn’t said as much outright, but he knew how she felt about the occupation, knew that she sympathized with the Bajorans. If she had the know-how, she would certainly be using her account to help them. He could use the code to order goods under an assumed Cardassian persona, or maybe…just skim enoughthat nobody would even notice. She would never even have to know—and if she did, would she necessarily disapprove, considering all the good the code could do for the Bajoran people?
He let out a breath, chiding himself for his weak rationalizations. He was a Ferengi, and Ferengi lived to make profit. If he didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, why, it would almost be immoral. He’d answer to the Blessed Exchequer if he ignored this code—and for what? The sake of some Cardassian female? He wasn’t about to let a woman wreck his chance at success again, not after what had happened with Gera on Ferenginar.