"Major Kira—" A voice prodded her, in synch with the jostling her shoulder received. "Sorry to disturb you—"
I just bet you are. She was awake enough to keep her thoughts from muttering aloud. The impulse to cock back her arm—her hand had already squeezed itself into a fist—and punch out whoever it was had been resisted. The dream had already faded into irretrievability, not even a memory left behind. That's because it wasn't real, Kira told herself as she took a deep breath of the shuttle's stifling air supply, readying herself for full consciousness. What had been shown to her wasn't even widespread on Bajor; the visit to this region had lasted nearly five days, and all she had seen had been the same scarred landscape, the crumbling pit mines and mountains of worthless extraction tailings left behind by the Cardassians, that had been there when she had first shipped off-planet to the Deep Space Nine station. The green processes of nature were taking a long time in softening the torn hillsides; the soil had been so depleted by its ravagers that even the toughest weeds had difficulty in taking root.
"We're going to be docking soon. . . ."
"All right." She nodded, swallowing the taste that sleep had left in her mouth, then glanced up at the crew member standing beside the cot. A kid, hardly worth displaying her anger toward, even if he had deserved it. "Thanks." She swung her feet onto the shuttle's deck and sat up. "I'll be coming forward in a minute or so."
The crew member exited, leaving her alone with the hold's other occupant, a wooden crate nearly as tall as herself. Automatically, as she had done several times already on the journey from Bajor, she reached out and tugged on the chains wrapped around the crate. The ancient, rust-specked padlocks were sealed with not only the insignia of the Bajoran provisional government, but a simpler cursive signature as well, drawn in candle wax by the fingertip of one of the senior Vedeks of the dominant Bajoran religious order. A formality, more than a security measure; any competent thief could have cut through the chains with a microtorch, rifled the crate's contents, and sealed it all back up with nothing more than a few hair-thin seams in the metal links. If the treasures inside had needed any protection—a debatable proposition; they had little other than historical value—then that had been the reason for Kira's presence: "riding shotgun," to use the old Earth phrase employed when she had been given the assignment. Though once the crate had been loaded aboard the freight shuttle, she had felt little guilt about catching up on her sleep, after the exertions of her other assignment, the confidential one, on the surface of Bajor.
Everything was in order with the crate, just as she had expected. The freight shuttle's crew members were all professionals, as much as she was; as long as their cargo wasn't leaking toxic radiation or some other hazard, they had little interest in anything other than making sure it reached its destination. Kira snapped together the collar fastening of her uniform and stood up, smoothing her hair back away from her brow.
"There's an estimated time to docking of a quarter hour." The shuttle's navigator looked over his shoulder at Kira standing behind him. "We could go ahead and beam you aboard if you're in a hurry." He shrugged. "If you want, we could have you notified as soon as your cargo is transferred onto the loading dock."
Looking past the navigator and the pilot in the next seat over, Kira could see the distant shape of Deep Space Nine through the port; the curved pylons hung against the starry black. She felt a slight, pseudogravitational tug at her bones, as though her body were already willing itself to be back inside the station's habitat ring, the world of metal that the instinctive parts of herself had already started to regard as home. That internal perception saddened her, as had the one at the beginning of her mission, when she had stepped onto Bajoran soil for the first time in almost a year and had realized that she had felt like an alien on her own birth planet.
She shook her head. "No, that's all right." She had carried out every detail of her mission this far; she could see through the rest. "Establish a comm link and notify Commander Sisko of my arrival. And arrange for intrastation transport of the cargo to his private office on Ops deck. I'll meet him there." She turned away and headed back to the hold.
Away from the shuttle's crew, Kira leaned her hands against the wooden crate, as though some subtle emanation from hat it held might enter her soul. Inside were pieces of Bajor, remnants of one who might have been the planet's essence, as though the oceans' tides had been a single being's heartbeat . . .
She felt nothing. Eyes closed, Kira's head hung below her shoulders for a moment longer, until she gathered enough strength to push herself away from the crate.
Getting sentimental wasn't part of your assignment. She brushed a few splinters from her palms. If the crate's contents were as dead as she sometimes felt, in her bleakest moments, her own connection to her native world to be, then that was just something she would have to deal with. For better or worse.
But for now, all of that could wait. Major Kira Nerys sat down on the edge of the cot and methodically began reviewing everything she needed to report to her commanding officer.
Suddenly, in what one of normal humanoid physiology might have termed the blink of an eye, he saw the one for whom he had been searching. Odo felt the electric rush of aroused suspicion inside himself, as though he had been capable of fine-tuning an olfactory system for himself, to catch some pheromone for incipient murder. Across the crowded Promenade, the currents of hustlers and marks mingling below the elevated walkway, he had spotted Ahrmant Wyoss.
Odo pulled himself back into the shadow of a structural pillar, to keep from being sighted in turn by his target. Total nonvisibility could have been achieved by changing his shape again, to anything from another section of bulkhead to one of the anaconda-like cables looping overhead. But with this many watching eyes in the vicinity, he was constrained; nothing would have sent an alarm through the Promenade's denizens faster than DS9's chief of security being caught so obviously spying on the sector's action.
There was another reason he wished to maintain his customary appearance. To shift in and out of a simulation of an inanimate object required precious seconds in which the atoms of his material form sought their new equilibrium with each other. Seconds that could seem long as hours, if in them he was unable to stop one of the crimes he had sworn himself to prevent. The humanoid form he had created for himself was the best combination of speed and strength he could devise, while still maintaining at least a rough resemblance to a majority of natives of the galaxy's scattered worlds. Keeping all of them unaware of how tensely coiled his muscles were, ready for sudden movement, was a deceptive skill closer to an actor's art than a policeman's.
"There you are, my dear Odo!" A familiar voice came from close beside him. "I've been looking all over for you."
He looked down from the corner of his eye; the Ferengi innkeeper's piranha grin loomed up at him. "Given the nature of your enterprises, Quark—" He craned his neck to keep the far reaches of the Promenade in view. "—you never have to wait very long for me to make an appearance. Now, do you?"
"Once again, I detect a sarcastic tone to your comments." Quark emitted a martyr's sigh. "I suppose that's the plight of the small businessman in today's universe. Always an object of suspicion, merely for cutting a few of the needless bureaucratic corners that so impede the free flow of commerce."