“I got news for you, pallie,” Vic said. He put his empty glass back on the table, then stood up. “The dame digs you.”
“You spoke to her?” Quark asked.
“Didn’t need to,” Vic said. He dug into his pocket and came out with a handful of green bills. He selected several and dropped them onto the table. “I heard her voice when she called you in here a couple nights ago. She’s got it for you.”
Quark’s heart pounded wildly in his chest. He stared up at Vic, unable to say anything.
“Look, Mr. Quark,” Vic said. “I hate to eat ’n’ run, but I gotta interview some comics this morning. I still haven’t found that opening act I’ve been lookin’ for.”
“That’s all right,” Quark said.
Vic smiled again. “Catch you on the flip side, pallie.” He walked across the room and climbed the stairs to the stage, then disappeared behind the curtain.
“Catch you on the flip side,” Quark muttered, having no idea what the words meant. But he understood the rest of what Vic had tried to tell him.
59
Vaughn’s footsteps echoed loudly in the dark corridor. The air here tasted stale, as though it had lain dormant in these buildings for centuries. He did not smell death here, though, only abandonment.
He marched along, his boots kicking up the thick layer of dust that coated the floor. Little galaxies of particles spun through the beam of his beacon. He consulted his tricorder as he walked. This near the site of the pulse and its massive energy, the reach of the tricorder had dwindled to less than two hundred meters, but as Vaughn had hoped, the sensors did function well within that limited range. Now all he had to do was get close enough to the center of the complex to scan the area, then somehow use that information to determine a means of stopping the pulse.
Yeah,Vaughn thought, that’s all.He laughed, the sound briefly joining his footfalls as they reverberated through the corridor. A doorway stood open in the left wall, and he shined his beacon through it as he passed, interested only in confirming that it was a room, not another corridor.
Vaughn had moved through the complex for almost an hour now, steadily making his way toward its center. Doors had lined most of the corridors through which he had walked, some of them closed, some of them—like the last one—wide open. He had earlier searched some of the rooms, looking for information or tools or anything else that might ultimately aid him in completing his mission here. But all he had found had been more of what he had seen yesterday back in the city: computers, communications equipment, and circuitry junctions. Scans had revealed that the machinery populated many of the rooms here, but also traveled through the walls and beneath the floors. None of it remained active.
Vaughn reached an intersection. A corridor extended to both his left and right, and the one he was in continued ahead. He shined his beacon in all three directions and saw nothing. He performed another scan, making sure that the center of the complex still lay ahead, then strode forward.
Back in the city, Vaughn had speculated that technology had somehow played a part in the extinction of the civilization here. Whether that was true or not, though, he thought that he had begun to see the mechanism by which the inhabitants of this world might have come to their ends. Vaughn had spent yesterday being visited by specters of his past that had evoked brutal feelings of loss and abandonment in him, and his emotions had reeled. If that same sort of thing had happened to the people here, but continuously, if they had been faced each day of their lives with such horrible feelings, then perhaps that had driven them to their destruction. Vaughn did not doubt that living day after day with a freshsense of loss would have been unbearable.
A shape appeared up ahead in the light of his beacon: an empty chair. As Vaughn approached it, he found the sight of it eerie, an apt symbol for this empty world. This place is haunted,he thought in a melodramatic and uncharacteristic manner, and he realized just how fragile his emotional state had become. He passed the chair and walked on.
The suggestion of ghosts, though, brought him quickly back to the middle of last night…to seeing his mother, hearing again those terrible words, and feeling once more the desperate grief and loss he had first felt as a boy. He had awoken this morning at the first gray light of day, only marginally rested from the interrupted and uneasy sleep he had gotten. Recollections of his dreams lurked vaguely beyond the outskirts of his consciousness, and he had the strange impression that he had dreamed the dreams of others—including those of Prynn and ch’Thane. He also had the sense that he had dreamed of the people who had once lived on this planet, and also, oddly enough, of Ezri Dax. But his first thoughts upon waking had not been of his dreams, or of his encounter with his mother, but of his daughter, and his hope that he would not fail her—would not leave her—again.
Vaughn had padded back to where he had first lain down to sleep last night, and had found almost everything where he had left it. His bedroll and blanket had been there, his food and water, his coat, tricorder, and beacon; he had taken only the latter three objects with him for his foray into the complex. Even the circle of stones had been there, the ashes of a dead fire blackening the ground around which they sat. Only his mother had been missing, a fact for which he had been grateful. He had examined the dirt around the circle of stones, and seen footprints leading away from the camp and back along the direction he had taken to get here.
Maybe she went to join Captain Harriman,Vaughn thought now, bitterly. He had not been on this world long, but he had come to despise it. The intensity of his feelings shocked him, and he tried to push them aside.
Up ahead, the corridor dead-ended against another. Vaughn saw a patch of light on the wall facing him, light not thrown there by his beacon. He stopped—the echoes of his boots diminishing quickly—and switched the beacon off. The darkness within the complex had faded to a dull illumination he recognized too welclass="underline" the outside light of this shrouded planet. And he perceived something else besides the light: the high-pitched wail at the bounds of his hearing. It sounded louder here, stronger, which did not surprise him.
Leaving his beacon off, Vaughn continued down the corridor. At the intersection, he consulted his tricorder, then proceeded to the left. The light grew brighter, and he walked on until he reached another intersection. He turned again, right this time, following the light. Twenty meters ahead of him, the corridor ended in a tangle of building materials. Past a heap of metal and stone, he could see patches of the dark gray mass that stood at the center of the complex: the source of the pulse.
As Vaughn walked forward, he noticed a heavy curtain of dust hanging in the air, dust that he had not stirred up from the floor. He scanned the air. The dust was primarily composed of traces of stone, sand, and lime, along with some metallic particulates; he concluded that it was the residue of the building collapse up ahead, which must not have happened too long ago. He guessed that this part of the complex had come down during or after the last pulse.
Vaughn stopped at the pile of debris and studied it. It stood close to two meters tall at most points, though lower on the left side and higher on the right. On the left, though, a metal beam hung from the fallen ceiling all the way down to the floor. If he could squeeze past it, he would probably be able to get over the rubble there.
Vaughn set the beacon down, then closed his tricorder and secured it in a coat pocket, fastening a flap across it. Reaching up, he tested the stability of the metal beam; it seemed wedged in place. He ducked down and slowly pushed his body through the space between the wall and the beam, actually making it through without much effort. Just as carefully, he stepped over the debris. He dislodged a few pieces of broken building materials, but quickly got past the heap.