"Nog! Watch out—"
His shouted warning was too late. Nog hit the guardrail with the small of his back, just as the ball grazed past his outstretched fingertips. He was too far off balance to stop himself from toppling over.
Jake ran to the spot where his friend had disappeared. Panting for breath, he looked over and saw the Ferengi youth, eyes immense in panic, clutching the bottom edge of the walkway with one straining set of fingertips. Below him, the Promenade's visitors continued about their business and pleasures; none of them had looked up and noticed.
"Grab my hand!" Jake braced himself and reached over. As soon as he had circled his own fingers around Nog's wrist, he tugged and let himself fall backward. That was enough to bring Nog landing heavily on top of him.
"What happened to the ball?" Nog raised his head and looked around. "Does that count as an out?"
Standing at the rail, the two boys saw what had happened. The ball's velocity had wedged it into a narrow crevice between two of the structural beams above the Promenade—only for a moment; as they watched, the ball dropped free. It struck an angled girder below with enough force to send it caroming toward the side of the Promenade, and into the doorway of Quark's drinking establishment.
They both held their breaths. The sound of glass breaking was appropriately spectacular, as the ball skittered crazily along the bar, toppling some of the patrons backward on the stools.
"No," said Nog in admiration. "That's definitely a home run."
A moment later, Quark appeared in the doorway, teeth clenched in fury, gaze darting around the Promenade for the perpetrators of the outrage. The ball was clutched in one white-knuckled, trembling hand.
"We better split." Jake scooped up the bat and ran, with Nog at his heels.
They slowed to a walk when they were well away from their impromptu playing field. "You know, I don't think my uncle's going to let us have that ball back."
"That's all right. We can get another." Jake hoisted the bat back onto his shoulder. He nodded thoughtfully. "This was a good idea . . . but it's definitely going to take some more work."
"Access granted."
She stepped through the spot where the energy beam had crackled and sparked. It snapped back into place behind her, with a surge that lit up the distant corners of the passageway.
Dr. Bashir was waiting for her on the other side; the security system had dictated that they had to separately identify themselves and gain entry to the restricted area. "Are you ready for this?" He held up a small datacard between his thumb and forefinger.
Dax nodded. "I think we can go ahead with this stage of the investigation, Julian." As always, she was aware of the fine line she had to tread with him, to maintain a cordial working atmosphere while not encouraging his persistent romantic fantasies about her.
The lights on the altered holosuite's control panel blinked into life as Bashir restored the unit's power. The entrances the other holosuites lining the corridor remained dark rectangles, cut off from both the station's energizing grid and any humanoid contact. Until everything about the epidemic of murder had been explained—and rectified—caution dictated a complete shutdown of all the holosuites that had been tampered with, even after the suspect CI modules had been removed; Chief of Operations O'Brien would have to determine whether a lingering toxic effect had been created in the holosuites' original circuits.
She watched as Bashir opened a small access slot on the control panel. A part of her—a part that was not quite as coldly rational as the rest—felt the slightest chill touch of apprehension. The doctor's quick, precise labors with the small tools he had brought reminded her of ancient video recordings she had once seen, of the timers to high-explosive bombs being dismantled. One wrong move and it goes off in your face—that's not likely to happen, chided a familiar voice inside her. The voice, one that had become as much hers as the one with which she spoke aloud, didn't use words to make its meaning clear. It didn't have to; the thoughts of the centuries-old symbiont inside her abdomen ran in virtual parallel to those of the cerebral matter, less than three decades old, inside her skull. She had been one with the symbiont for so much of her body's life that it had become impossible to make any distinction between where its existence left off and hers began. But there were infrequent moments such as this, when a minute twitch upon the nervous system, a release of hormones into the bloodstream, reminded her that the physical form had a life, even a mind, of its own.
Her attention was brought back by Julian's voice.
"What I'm doing," he said, bending low to peer into the access slot, "is wiring in the programming that we were able to download out of the other holosuites that Ahrmant Wyoss used." He poked a logic probe into the maze of circuits, drew it out, and read the LEDs on the handle. "He started out with one of the standard programs, a generic urban simulation, but it seems to have been extensively modified by the influence of the CI modules. We'll know better what's in the program when we get it up and running."
"Wouldn't it have been easier to run a model simulation through the computer?" And safer, that same part of her thought without speaking aloud.
Bashir shook his head. "There's some kind of interlock routine that's been interlaced with the program—O'Brien tried to break it out but he had to give up eventually. Apparently, the only way to get into it is by activating it with one of the CI modules." He made a few final adjustments. "There, that should do it." He glanced round at her. "All set?"
"Of course."
"Here goes, then." The holosuite's door slid open.
They stepped through and into darkness. As the door shut behind them, sealing away the corridor and completing the illusory world surrounding them, Dax quelled the twinge of physiological panic that accelerated her pulse for a few beats. She had spent so many hours poring over the transcripts of Wyoss's drug-induced ravings that she had a reasonable idea of what to expect. But the impact of the reality—or artificiality, she corrected herself—was still oppressive.
In the perceived distance around her and Bashir, a sulfur-tinged night fog clung to damp, crudely surfaced streets. The mists threaded between looming buildings of dirt-stained brick; empty windows gaped down upon them like the hollow eyes of idiot spectators. Ragged curtains fluttered listlessly across the glass teeth left in the broken frames. The blue radiance from the overhead streetlights barely penetrated the gloom, serving more to make the hallucinated night a tangible sensation upon the skin.
"Well. This is cheerful," said Bashir. He turned, studying the claustrophobic vista. "Sort of an exercise in negative mood induction, don't you think? It's got that—what did they use to call it?—that film-noir look to it."
She caught the reference to the ancient art form, the cinema of the late twentieth century having been a limited sensory-input predecessor to the holosuites themselves. "If by that you mean overtly depressing, I'd have to agree."
"It has a certain bleak charm, I guess. Though if I had known this was what was going on inside Ahrmant Wyoss's head, I would have argued for pharmaceutical intervention." Dax took a step forward; a sudden wave of dizziness swept across her, nearly toppling her from her feet. She felt Bashir catch her by one arm and around the shoulder.