"Do you have a problem with that?"
"Me?" O'Brien shook his head as he stood up. Half of the screws rattled in his pocket; they had started coming along faster, the panel shifting with its own weight enough to break the seal. "But you're the policeman, remember."
Odo's expression didn't change—it never did—but his spine stiffened, as though the remark had stung him. "I'll take full responsibility for whatever consequences may ensue."
"Fine, fine; whatever." The handle of the screwdriver had grown warm and sweaty in his grip. "Tell you what. Say around the end of next shift, come around to the engineering deck when you know I'm not going to be there. If you see a package on my desk marked with the letters NT, then that's yours."
"'NT'?"
"New toy. You'll be able to figure out how it works on your own. Ah, here we go." The final screw came free, and O'Brien slid it and the hand tool into his pocket. With his fingers braced against the flat metal, he eased the panel out and away from the wall.
"Very impressive." Odo shone the flashlight into the recess behind. "I had no idea there was quite so much inside one of these."
"You must be joking." He brushed off his palms against his uniform. "A holosuite's one of the most complicated pieces of equipment aboard the station. You'd have to go up to Ops deck and root around the multiband comm gear, the real long-distance stuff, to find anything more elaborate. Look-" He took the flashlight from Odo and used it as a pointer. "Over there you've got your miniaturized tractor-beam units; all of those have to be coordinated exactly with each other in order to produce even the simplest tactile sensory illusions. Same with the optical functions, the olfactory, anything where specific molecules have to be produced by the built-in replicators—" The flashlight beam skipped from one interwired module to the next. "Plus there's temperature control, and various homeostatic processes that aren't even meant to be perceived consciously, but the user would notice something was wrong if they weren't right on the money. And all of that has to be monitored and microadjusted in real time to interface not just with the original programming, but every move, every flick of an eyelash, that the user makes inside the chamber. So for that you need a data channel that's about big enough to run a small cruiser, and a computer node that's completely separate from the station's central unit—otherwise, if enough holosuites came on-line simultaneously, the processor drain could shut DS9 down to basic survival operations." He shook his head in admiration. "When I was back in engineering school, I tore one of these apart—a Mark One model, not anything as sophisticated as this—and believe me, I was an old man before I got it put back together."
Odo's head shake expressed a different, more rueful emotion. "It seems a pity that such ingenuity isn't put to better use. I fail to see the attraction of these devices."
"Different strokes, as they say." O'Brien smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. "Not everybody has such a rich and stimulating reality as you do."
"Hm." Odo peered into the holosuite's mazelike innards. "Right now, that reality seems somewhat discouraging. How are you going to be able to tell if this unit's been tampered with?"
That question had been the whole point of their expedition to this sector of the ship. Odo had been his usual tight-mouthed self, but O'Brien had been able to glean enough from him to know that the security chief had been tipped off about some possible alterations to these holosuites' programming banks. He had guessed on his own that the tip had come from Quark—who else? Coming from that dubious source, might be no more than a typically sneaking maneuver to have the holosuites not under Quark's control shut down and taken off-line. Quark viewed competition as a vastly inferior state to monopoly.
"Easy enough," replied O'Brien. "If you know what you're looking for." He ducked his head below the panel opening's edge and stepped into the tight space surrounded by the different modules; he had to hold his elbows close to his sides to keep from bumping into any of them. "Should be right over . . . here." He reached outside to Odo. "Hand me that equipment bag I left over on the floor there. Thanks." From the bag he drew a small probe; numbers scrolled across its screen as he inserted the needle-like points into a socket receptor. "Tampering on holosuites was always a big worry; the problem about guarding against it is that you've got a lot of sites along the data stream that can be dinked around with. So what you've got laid over the entire assembly is what's called a web seal—there's microfilaments running from this box through every other component and back again. Poke your head in here for a moment." With his other hand, O'Brien pointed to the numbers that had stopped upon the probe's display. "See that? That's the date of the last time someone so much as laid a finger on anything in here."
"So this holosuite—and presumably the others in this sector—hasn't been tampered with."
O'Brien shrugged. "Well . . . let's not be too hasty about that conclusion." He drew another device from the equipment bag, one with the rough but serviceable appearance of his own construction. "Give me a couple more minutes."
Maneuvering through the narrow enclosure, he started tracing the almost microscopic strands of the web seal. He could feel Odo watching him as he stepped farther into the holosuite's innards.
"Those clever bastards." He had found what he had suspected would be hidden there; an LED on the device in his hand glowed red. Whoever had been in here before him merited his admiration, if only on a technical basis.
"What is it?" Odo's voice came from behind.
O'Brien emerged with a rectangular black box in his hands. "I've got to give them credit, whoever they were—that was a good clean job they did. I wouldn't have located this little number if I hadn't been able to get a decay readout on the web filament. They managed to jump a section of line, then splice this in, all without tripping the seal unit's sensors. That takes some pretty high-level skills."
Odo nodded slowly, as if already assembling a list of criteria for suspects. "How proficient would that person—or group of persons—have to be?"
"Frankly, they'd have to be as good as I am. And that's very good." O'Brien turned the object around in his hands. "Wonder what the hell's inside this thing. Nice, tight unit; looks like it came off a regular assembly line, and not just some kludge somebody threw together. It'll take some work to bust it open."
"How long will that take?"
"Depends. If there's an autodestruct sequence wired in, I'll have to find some way of finessing around it. That might take a shift or two. If it's clean, though, I could have it ready for Dax to start running an analysis in, oh, a couple of hours. Can't be sure until I've got it on the bench."
"Very well." Odo pointed to the black box in the chief of operations' hands. "Are there members of the engineering crew who can open up the other holosuites here and extract these things?"
"Sure." O'Brien nodded. "Once I tell them what they're looking for."
"They'll need temp security authorizations from me—I'm locking this whole sector down."
"I'll send them your way first, then."
As they turned away from the panel opening and headed for the passageway, Odo studied his companion. "Somehow . you knew, didn't you? That someone had tampered with that holosuite, despite the web-seal readout."
O'Brien tried to be as gentle as possible with his smile. "Perhaps you're not the only great detective on board, Constable. Didn't you notice the dust?"
Odo glanced behind himself, then back to O'Brien. "What dust?"