Nothing but air,Bashir thought, knowing that the positional transport would have attempted to beam everything within its target location. “This is Bashir,” he said. “I’ve still got nothing here.”

“The substance is still here,”Dax said. “Ensign Gordimer, would y—” She stopped speaking in mid-sentence, in mid- word,with a suddenness that told Bashir that something had happened. He heard a sound like one somebody would make when punched in the stomach, the air rushing from their lungs.

“Lieutenant Dax?” he said. He waited just long enough for a response, and when none came, he said, louder, “Ezri?” He took a step toward the door, but stopped when Nog spoke.

“Doctor, the object moved, and Lieutenant Dax accidentally came into contact with it,”he said, urgency sounding in his hurried words and raised voice. “She’s lost consciousness.”

“Ensign Gordimer,” Bashir said at once. “Lock on to Lieutenant Dax’s combadge and transport her directly to biobed one in the medical bay.” For emergency situations, Bashir knew, the coordinates of various locations in the medical bay had been preprogrammed into the ship’s transporter.

“Yes, sir,”Gordimer said.

Bashir turned and sped over to the bed. “Bashir to Richter,” he said, contacting his primary medical assistant.

There was a pause, and then the sleepy voice of the nurse sounded over the comm system. “This is Richter,”she said. It was still early in the day, and Bashir had apparently just woken her.

“Krissten, we have an emergency,” he told her. “I need you in the medical bay.”

“I’m on my way,”she said without hesitation, any drowsiness she felt now gone from her voice. “Richter out.”

An instant later, the effervescent white light of the transporter filled the space above the bed, accompanied by the telltale whine. Even before Ezri had fully materialized, Bashir reached up and switched on the medical sensors. When the transport had completed, he peered down at her only long enough to see that she lay facedown, with her eyes closed and her complexion grown terribly pallid. Then he looked back up at the diagnostic display above the head of the bed. Her respiration was shallow, her heart rate down and fluttering, her neural activity nearly nonexistent—almost all of her vital signs had plummeted.

Bashir raced across the medical bay, heading for a storage cabinet. As he passed the portable stand at the center of the room, he reached out and tried to push it away. He had set the brake on it, though, and instead of rolling away, it toppled over. The stand crashed onto the deck with a clang, the sound uncomfortably loud in the quiet medical bay.

Bashir opened the cabinet and quickly pulled out a hypospray and a vial of cordrazine. As he dashed back over to Ezri, he affixed the powerful stimulant to the hypo. At the bed, he reached his empty hand to Ezri’s neck, pulling down the collar of her uniform with two fingers, her pale flesh clammy beneath his touch. He administered the hypo just below her ear, the small device hissing briefly as it worked.

On the medical display above the bed, the heart-rate monitor slowly changed, the number of beats per minute increasing, the rhythm of her heart smoothing out. Bashir waited, but few other readings improved. In particular, her neural activity remained dramatically low, a consequence almost unheard of with the use of cordrazine. Strangely, though, the neural energy of the Dax symbiont, though skewed, measured at a level not much different from normal.

Behind him, one of the doors to the medical bay opened. Footsteps approached, and he looked up from the tricorder to see Ensign Richter appear on the other side of the bed. She wore her reddish blond hair loosely about her head, he saw, with a curl to it that was not evident when she pulled it back in braids. Bashir felt a moment of surreal displacement, and of confused curiosity about himself, wondering why he even noticed such insignificant details right now.

“Oh no,” Richter said as she peered down at Ezri. “How is she?” she asked, even as her gaze rose to check the readouts for herself.

“She’s in a coma,” Bashir said flatly. “She’s dying.”

35

Treir reached across the dabo table for the gaming rondure. As she did, the bare flesh of her shoulder brushed against Hetik’s brawny triceps—equally bare—and she felt an instant of heat. In the morning quiet at Quark’s—only a handful of customers sat scattered about, having their breakfasts—the fleeting touch seemed intense enough to be heard. The strength of her reaction surprised her. In the past few years, she had only pretended at such feelings—for which she had been kept warm in other ways. But not like this. She found the unexpected jolt more than a little liberating.

Treir had hesitated in that sultry moment, and now she began moving again. She swiped the rondure from its cup in the dabo wheel and held it up before Hetik. “So,” she said, peering past the transparent orb with the starburst pattern at its center, “that would pay off on…?”

“Pass five and half under,” Hetik finished, and then he explained the structure of the payouts.

Beautyand brains,Treir thought, and then laughed at herself for such schoolgirlish notions. Still, a woman could look. And with Hetik, there was plenty at which to look. Right now, she satisfied herself with a gaze just a fraction too long into eyes she thought of as the color of night. “Right again, my cheltol,”she said, the appellative slipping out before she could stop it.

“Cheltol?”he asked.

“Uh, it’s an Orion term for a…uh… capable…male student,” she stammered, choosing discretion over description. It occurred to her that this must be how some of her own admirers felt. And she also considered what else she might be able to teach this sweet young man beside dabo.

Treir reached out and took Hetik’s hand in hers, placed the rondure in his palm, and closed his fingers around it. His dark, delicious flesh complemented her green coloring, she noticed. “Now you give it a whirl,” she said, nodding her head toward the wheel, and then scolding herself for the unintended double entendre. As interesting and even delightful as she found her unanticipated responses to Hetik this morning, that was not why she had brought him here. This was business.

Hetik grasped the side of the dabo wheel and spun it around. The twitter of the wheel filled the room, easily overtaking the intermittent ring of flatware on dishes. He dexterously rolled the rondure from his palm to the tips of his thumb and forefinger, then reached down and sent it swirling around the upper, outer rim of the wheel.

“Treir.” The voice cut through the ambient sounds of the bar like a diamond through glass, sharply and without much effort. Both Treir and Hetik looked up from the dabo table to the entrance of the bar, where Quark had just arrived.

Treir muttered an Orion oath. What’s he doing here?she thought in frustration. For the past few weeks, Quark had delegated the management of the bar during the morning hours to her. At first, he had still come to the bar himself at that time, keeping obviously watchful eyes— and attentive ears,she added—on her. Lately, though, he had stopped showing up in the morning. And despite her certainty that he still somehow managed to monitor her activities, through the use of surveillance devices or confederates or some other devious means, she had begun to feel some sense of autonomy during the times she was at least nominally in charge of the bar. Perhaps, she thought now, that had been naïve. As she decided what she should do, she absently clutched at her necklace, a collection of emerald green jewels set in a pattern of interlacing triangles.