“Lieutenant,” he responded, acknowledging Ezri. He nodded at Nog and Gordimer, who both responded in kind. Nog, he noticed, also held a tricorder, one doubtless configured for engineering use. Bashir lowered himself to a half-sitting, half-lying position in the cramped space. He peered across the conduit at the exposed circuitry—the middle of the three open sections was dark—and saw what appeared to be a bypass of some sort. A bundle of optical fibers emerged from one section, snaked along the floor of the Jefferies tube past the middle section, and connected back into the third. “What’s going on?” he asked, the reason Ezri had called him here not immediately evident to him.

“Last night,” she explained, “we experienced a minor power disruption in engineering.” He recalled her mentioning that when she had returned to their quarters last night. “Ensign Leishman has circumvented the problem—” She swept her hand through the air above the obviously improvised bypass. “—but this appears to have been the source of the disruption.” Ezri indicated the middle section.

Bashir looked, but beyond the circuitry being dark—and therefore without power, he assumed—he observed nothing out of the ordinary. He searched for something he could recognize as foreign, but saw only the expected assemblage of isolinear optical chips, fiber-optic cables, and routing and junction nodes…except—“Is this what you’re referring to?” he asked, pointing to a gray substance pooled along the length of the middle section.

“Careful, Doctor; don’t get too close,” Ensign Gordimer said. “We’re not sure what we’re dealing with here.”

Bashir had not intended to touch the amorphous mass without scanning it first, but he understood that Gordimer’s position in security required him to practice caution. “Don’t worry,” Bashir said, withdrawing his hand, but continuing to try to get a good look at the substance in the poorly illuminated tube. The mass appeared inert and viscous, almost like a thick pool of grease, but dark gray rather than black. “I don’t think it’s going to leap out at me.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Doctor,” Nog said.

“What?” Bashir asked, turning his head to look over at the engineer.

“We haven’t seen it moving,” Ezri clarified, “but the ship had an unexplained hull breach at about the same time as the power disruption in engineering.” Bashir remembered her mentioning that last night as well.

“You think this entered the ship through the breach and traveled here?” Bashir asked, peering back down at the patch of gray. He opened his medical tricorder, and started scanning.

“Possibly,” Ezri said. “Nothing has transported onto or off the ship, so we don’t know how else this might have gotten here.”

Bashir studied the display on the tricorder. “I am getting energy readings,” he said.

“Which makes sense,” Nog said. “Somehow, this thing interrupted the flow of power, causing the outage in engineering, but it also carried enough energy to prevent the secondary system from engaging.”

“You say that as though it were planned,” Bashir told him. “But stars have energy, and they’re not alive. This substance may simply be holding an electrical charge.” He continued examining the tricorder scan. “These energy readings, though…”

“They’re nothing you’re familiar with,” Ezri finished for him.

“No,” Bashir agreed.

“They match the readings we took of the pulse,” Nog said. “And of the clouds surrounding the planet.”

“Really?” Bashir said, looking up again. He reached up and wiped a hand across his forehead, his hand coming away wet with perspiration; the air in the Jefferies tube was still and close.

“We think that when Defiantwas struck by the energy surge from the cloud cover, this may have been deposited on the ship,” Nog said.

“And eaten through the shields and the hull, and then crawled here?” Bashir asked, his tone conveying his skepticism.

“We’ve seen stranger things,” Ezri said.

“Yes, of course, but this—” He peered back down at the substance, and then consulted the tricorder once more. “I’m reading no organic compounds, nothing beyond a very rudimentary physical structure, no musculature…nothing to suggest a morphogenic matrix…I think it’s very unlikely that this object is alive.”

“Is that conclusive?” Ezri wanted to know.

Bashir touched a control on the tricorder and ended the scan. As he folded the device back into its compact carrying form, he looked over at her. “No,” he said. “I’ll need to run a series of more complex tests.”

“All right,” Ezri said. “I’d like you to do that.” She turned to Gordimer. “Ensign, I want you to go up to the transporter and beam the object directly to the medical bay.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Doctor,” she went on, “establish a containment field about the object while you study it.”

Bashir noted the seeming confidence with which Ezri practiced command; the set of her body, the certainty in her tone and words, the quick decisions, all painted her as a person completely in charge of both herself and the situation. And yet, knowing as he did the personal price she was still paying for the loss of Ensign Roness, he wondered just how well her professional calm and resolve, forced as they must be, actually served her. He hoped that the mask she wore while on duty would not blind her to…well, to anything. Commander Vaughn seemed to find such behavior constructive, but Bashir felt far less sanguine about it. He believed that Ezri should not be making decisions, either for the ship or for herself, either concentrating too much on the death of Roness, or completely ignoring it.

He mentioned none of this now. Nor did he know when he would be able to speak with her again about such matters; he hoped he would not have to. All he said now was “Aye, sir.” Then he turned and crawled back down the Jefferies tube the way he had come, headed for the medical bay as he had been ordered, with Ensign Gordimer thumping along behind him.

Bashir wheeled the portable stand to the center of the empty medical bay and set its brake. The white apparatus stood as tall as a diagnostic bed, with upper and lower shelves about half that size. He felt along the side of the upper shelf until he located the small control pad there, and then he activated the unit’s locator; the signal, like that of a combadge, would facilitate transport. He also set the parameters for a containment field, which he would establish about the substance once it had been beamed to the medical bay. He tapped his combadge. “Bashir to Gordimer.”

“This is Gordimer,”came the ensign’s immediate response. “I’m at the transporter, sir.”

“I’m ready here,” Bashir told him. “I’ve initiated a transport locator.”

After a momentary pause, Gordimer said, “I’ve got it. I’m all set.”

Bashir told the security officer to stand by, then tapped his combadge again. “Bashir to Dax.”

“Dax here,”she said.

“We’re ready to transport,” he informed her.

“All right,”she said. “Dax to Gordimer. Energize.”

Bashir took a step back from the stand and waited for the bright white streaks and the high-pitched drone of the transporter. He waited, but nothing happened.

“This is Gordimer,”the security officer said. “I can’t get a transporter lock on the object. The transport sensors can read its energy, but they can’t establish a lock for some reason.”

“Try using a positional transport,”Nog suggested, his voice coming over the channels opened to Dax. “Beam everything up to five centimeters above the bulkhead that the substance is sitting on.”

“Yes, sir,”Gordimer said. “Resetting the transporter… energizing.”

This time, the light of the transporter shimmered above the stand in the medical bay, accompanied by a familiar hum. But when the light faded and the hum quieted, nothing had materialized there.