Chapter 8

She’ll never get out of dock!was Sisko’s first thought. As he brought the shuttlepod around to view the ship in all her ugly entirety, he tried not to let his despair show on his face.

She was a merchanter, of a class that he thought had been decommissioned nearly a century before, mainly because its designers, desperate to maximize interior space for cargo, had routed far too much of her workings to the exterior, making her vulnerable not only to weapons fire, but even to casual space debris.

She looked like a gigantic horseshoe crab, her engine nacelles tapering aft from the curve of the forward hull into ridiculously narrow finials which, Sisko recalled from a tech manual subheading on how not to design a ship, also doubled as weapons ports. Now there was a brilliant idea! Run your plasma weapons off the same outtake conduits as your matter/antimatter flux and hope every time you fire you don’t blow yourself up in the process. But Sisko assumed the weapons had been deactivated, possibly even removed, for the sake of cover. They were supposed to be peaceful merchants dealing in dry goods and machine parts, not the contraband runners these ships were clearly designed for. Somehow the distinction didn’t cheer him.

Sisko maneuvered the pod under the hulk’s keel, shaking his head in dismay at the number of conduits, holding tanks, and jury-rigged components he could identify, right out there in the open. Talk about a soft underbelly! A kid with a slingshot could damage this ship. It was a flying bomb. Couldn’t Starfleet have done better? Or was that the point—to make this ship seem so hopeless she wasn’t worth investigating?

“Permission to speak candidly, Mr. Sisko,” Uhura said quietly beside him. She’d been watching the play of emotions on his expressive face, and could sense the steam rising under his collar.

“Those stabilizers have seen better days, Admiral,” Sisko remarked tightly, containing himself, his expert eye noticing hairline fractures that would have to be sealed before this thing went anywhere. “And if I had the time and the resources, I’d customize the retro bafflers and do something about streamlining her prow.”

“But since you have neither, you’ll make do,” Uhura said dryly. “You also don’t want to defeat the purpose of this mission by making this thing look like anything other than a hunk of junk. Which, as you’ve obviously surmised, is what it’s meant to be. We want any Romulan who picks her up on long-range and comes alongside for a look to dismiss her as not worth getting his hands dirty. Shall we go aboard?”

It took Sisko a moment to find the docking port amid all the shadows and odd angles and, once he did, he eased the pod up to it as gently as he could, as if afraid a sudden jolt would cause the entire ship to cave in and disintegrate into flakes of rust. Not surprisingly, the airlock groaned when he activated it.

Uhura led the way, and Sisko followed her into the cargo bay, glancing wistfully forward toward the conn, which he’d wanted to check out first. Alternatively, he’d have liked to head straight for the engines, which would be where he’d want to spend most of his time before departure. But for whatever reason Uhura wanted him to see the cargo bay first. Well, all right; it was her show.

At least the cargo bay, unlike the gangway, was big enough for him to stand upright without ducking his head. But when Uhura stopped in the middle of one of the narrow aisles formed by several rows of monolithic gray containers as if awaiting his approval, Sisko didn’t know what to say.

“Look around you, Lieutenant,” she said off his puzzled expression. “What do you see?”

“Containers, ma’am,” Sisko answered, hoping he didn’t sound sarcastic. Obviously he was being tested. He glanced at the padd readouts on the nearer ones. “Containers whose manifests tell me in Standard and what I assume is Romulan that they’re carrying grain and bolts of fabric and machine parts.”

“And, being a pragmatist,” a voice issued from the direction of a narrow, rusting catwalk Sisko just now noticed running around the upper perimeter of the cavernous space, “you believe exactly what you’re told. No one would ever accuse you of uncertainty.”

The voice belonged to a lanky older man with snow-white hair, dressed in civilian clothes but with a vaguely Starfleet air about him. He took the treacherously narrow steps down from the catwalk lightly and with extraordinary speed for a man of his apparent age and strode jauntily down the narrow aisle to join them. He had an infectious smile, and that smile was directed at Uhura, though he was sizing up Sisko as he approached.

“He’s young,” he remarked as if Sisko weren’t there.

“So were you once, Heisenberg,” Uhura replied warmly. It was obvious these two had known each other for a long time. “Care to show him what you’ve got here?”

Activating a device about half the size of a communicator concealed in the palm of his hand, Heisenberg pointed it toward the manifest padd built into the side of a container near the end of the aisle, and the container began to move. Actually, it unfolded. The top slid sideways and down, fitting snugly against the rear wall of the container. Then all four sides lowered gracefully to the deck like the petals of some huge metallic flower, revealing not the machine parts the manifest declared, but what looked like a section of a modular medical laboratory.

Countertops slid into place, lights lit up, instrument panels continued a conversation with each other that they’d obviously been conducting in the dark, rows of beakers and retorts evidenced bubbling activities Sisko could only guess at. Transfixed, he barely noticed that Heisenberg, with a spryness that belied his age, was moving among all the containers in the bay, though effecting the same magic on only some of them.

“Some of them are empty,” the old man was explaining, his voice echoing as he periodically disappeared from view, “designed to telescope into themselves to make room for the lab modules, which have been randomly distributed among containers that actually do contain what they say they do…”

As he explained, the containers, as if on cue, did exactly what he said they would do. The choreography was so complicated that even to Sisko’s engineer’s eye it looked like magic.

“I’ll provide you with a schematic, Mr. Sisko, which you will commit to memory before departure,” Heisenberg was saying, his voice nearing and fading as he hopped out of the way of each opening container like an antic spider. “You’ll also guard this little gizmo—” Indicating the tiny control unit. “—with your life. From my hand to yours, and no one—repeat, no one—else’s.”

“Yessir…” Sisko said vaguely, unable to keep himself from gawking as the transformation was completed. An ordinary cargo bay inside the ugliest ship in Federation space had become a compact medical laboratory, its components fitted into a single module, as complete as that of any starship’s sickbay. The whole thing was an engineering and logistical marvel.

“Dr. Selar will be continuing her research on the virus while you’re in transit,” Uhura was explaining. “You and Lieutenant Tuvok will be collecting air and soil samples on the planets you visit, looking for contaminants in the water, the food supply, anywhere, while Selar attempts to get tissue samples from anyone reporting an unexplained illness. All of that comes back here at the end of the day for analysis. There are facilities to set up a small field hospital, including a reversed air-flow room and a full-spectrum decon beam to screen incoming personnel for anything contagious that might be clinging to their skin or clothes.”