“This is Quark.” He looked over at Vic, but the hologram was gazing off toward the bar.

“Quark, I’m sorry to bother you while you’re in the holosuite,”she said. “I stopped by the bar, but you’d already closed up.”She paused, and then said, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not at all,” Quark said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I just got off duty—”That surprised Quark; it was late. “—and I don’t really feel like going to sleep, so…I guess I was just looking for some company.”

Quark could not believe it. He felt his mouth drop open, and he quickly closed it, folding his lips around his teeth. “Uh, all right,” he said. “Where are you?”

“In my office.”

“All right,” he told her. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” That would give him enough time to stop in the bar and put on some cologne.

“Great,”she said. “Ro out.”The com channel closed.

Quark peered over at Vic again, who still pretended that his attention was elsewhere. “Well,” Quark said, standing up, “nice talking to you.”

Vic looked over at him. “Always a pleasure,” he said. Quark headed for the door. Behind him, he heard Vic say, “I guess romance isn’t dead on the ol’ wheel after all.” Quark did not bother to stop or look back. But he did smile.

Quark strolled with Ro in the dim, nighttime illumination of Deep Space 9. They walked through one of the crossover bridges and headed from the docking ring toward the habitat ring. It had been more than two hours since he had met Ro in her office, and they had been meandering about the station and talking ever since. They had both admitted to being tired and to having had a difficult couple of days—Quark had actually claimed more than merely a couple—but their time together had been comfortable and filled with laughter. Quark realized that their senses of humor—rooted in their similarly sarcastic sensibilities—meshed well.

“So then what happened?” Ro asked, carrying on their conversation.

“Well, then I signed aboard a freighter—” he began.

“Wait a minute,” Ro said. “What about the apprenticeship with the district subnagus?”

“I decided to leave that,” Quark said.

“All right,” Ro said, stopping in the corridor and turning toward him. Quark stopped as well. As he faced her, he saw the arc of the docking ring through the windows, the stars shining brightly beyond the station. Ro playfully jabbed a finger in his direction, and said, “You’re not telling me everything.”

With a raffish tilt of his head and a lowering of his voice, Quark said, “What are you going to do, Security Chief? Interrogate me?”

Ro opened her mouth in a smile. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Quark smiled back at her. “I believe I would,” he said.

Ro shook her head and rolled her eyes, then started walking again. Quark followed along, catching up to her in a couple of steps. Just up ahead, he saw, stood the closed set of doors that separated the crossover bridge from the habitat ring. “So,” Ro said, “are you going to tell me why you left the apprenticeship?”

“Ah…the subnagus requested that I leave,” Quark told her.

“‘Requested’?” she asked skeptically.

“Well, he suggested…he told me to leave,” Quark offered. “Ordered me, really.”

“Ordered, huh?” Ro asked, pronouncing her words slowly and melodramatically. Quark got the sense that she suspected what he was going to say, or at least the type of thing that he was going to say, and that she now played up her end of the dialogue for effect. “And why would the subnagus order you out of your apprenticeship if he regarded you so highly?”

“I was…well, I was also highly regarded by his sister,” Quark admitted, pretending to be abashed.

They arrived at the doors to the habitat ring, which opened before them. They stepped through, and Ro stopped again. “Quark, you rake,”she said, a wide smile on her face. She reached out and pushed at the front of his shoulder with the tips of her fingers.

“Now, can I help it if females find me attractive?” he said.

“No, I guess you can’t.”

They stood there for a moment, and then Quark held his hands out, one in each direction. “Which way do we go now?” he asked.

Ro looked both ways down the corridor, then moved up to a companel set into the bulkhead opposite the doors. She touched the panel, and said, “Computer, what time is it?”

“The time is zero-three-fifty-three hours.”

Ro’s eyes widened. “Is that right?” she asked Quark.

“I think so,” he told her. “We’ve been walking for quite a while.”

“I really need to get some sleep,” she said. “It’s been a long couple of days, and the next few aren’t going to be any shorter or easier.”

“Aren’t you down this way?” Quark asked, pointing his thumb back over his shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, “and I won’t even ask how or why you know that.”

“Are you kidding?” Quark said as they headed in that direction. “A new chief of security is appointed to the station, and I’m not going to know where they live? Please.”

Ro chuckled. “What was I thinking?” she said.

When they reached her quarters a few minutes later, Ro opened the door and stepped inside. Quark discreetly remained in the corridor. “Thank you for the company,” Ro said.

“Thank you,” Quark said. “I enjoyed it.”

“I did too.”

There was a brief pause as they stood there, and the notion of moving forward and kissing Ro shot through Quark’s mind at warp speed. Instead, he simply said, “Good night, Laren.”

“Good night,” she said, and then, before he could turn away, “May I ask you a question, Quark?”

“The answer is yes,”he said at once. Her lips formed into a smile again, as lovely a sight as Quark thought he had ever seen.

“You haven’t even heard the question yet,” she said.

“I trust you,” he told her.

“Well, don’t,” she said. “You may not like this question.”

Quark did not like the sound of that statement. “Go ahead,” he said anyway.

“Do you think…do you think that women like the cologne you’re wearing?”

Quark felt immediately embarrassed. “Not anymore,” he said.

Ro must have sensed his humiliation, because she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I mean, you obviously like it, and I’m sure that Ferengi women must like it too.”

“It’s very popular on Ferenginar,” Quark confirmed.

“I’m sorry,” Ro went on. “It’s just…I thought you’d want to know.”

Quark was astounded. Why would he want to know that he smelled bad to a female he liked? Except that, if she had not told him, he realized, then he would have continued to smell bad to her. This way—

“It’s all right,” he told her, and meant it. By telling him that she did not like his cologne, she had actually shown him both respect and trust. “I appreciate you saying something to me. The last thing I want to do is repel you.”

“Oh, well, even without the cologne,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm, “you still repel me.”

Quark nodded. “You repel me too.”

“Good night, Quark.”

“Good night, Laren.”

On the way back to his own quarters, Quark twice jumped up and clicked his heels.

39

Vaughn had walked for hours. Night had fallen now, and it had fallen hard. With no moons to reflect sunlight through the clouds, and the remote light of the stars unable to penetrate the atmospheric cover, darkness reigned. Vaughn hiked now toward his destination holding the beacon out before him, illuminating the ground a few meters ahead. He imagined peering down on himself from a height, a solitary mote in the empty ebon setting. So completely had the day vanished around him that Vaughn felt utterly alone, adrift on a virtually invisible sea, with the shore nothing more than a distant, impossible memory.