The Long Night (7 page)

"Sure. Because I don't want to do this by myself." Jake turned the flashlight toward the tunnel. "Come on. Let's see where this goes."

About three meters ahead, the tunnel ended in what appeared to be just another empty room. Jake pulled himself up and into the tunnel.

"Wait," Nog said.

Jake could see Nog's light from behind him as they crawled through the dust. The dust coated Jake's face. He was sweating. The air was close in here and smelled dry and ancient, as if it hadn't been used in a long time. But that couldn't be. All of the station's systems were hooked together, or at least, that was what the chief once told him.

Nog coughed at the dust Jake was kicking up into his face. "On the way back, I lead," Nog said. "Hurry up before I choke."

Jake crawled quicker, kicking up more dust. The tunnel opened up into the new room at floor level. Jake shined his light around the dust and gray walls until the beam stopped on a metal door. A moment later, Nog joined him.

Then he saw where Jake's flashlight beam was pointing and stopped. "Don't you wonder what all these rooms were used for?" Jake asked.

"Something secret," Nog said, "Or else they would be on the schematic."

That was what Jake had thought. Nog's voice finally held the same excitement that Jake had felt from the moment he discovered the panel.

"Yeah, real secret," Jake said. "But what?"

The two crossed the dust-covered floor and stopped in front of the metal door. It was the first door they had seen in nearly an hour of climbing and crawling through room after room of dust.

"I wonder where this goes to?" Jake said, noting that the door handle had the standard Cardassian latching and didn't seem to be locked, at least from this side.

"Let's find out," Nog said. He reached for the handle and pulled it down.

Suddenly Jake wanted to stop him. Maybe the door was a trap. Maybe it was wired to explode. Chief O'Brien had warned him about such things. But it was too late. Nog had already opened the door.

And nothing happened.

Except for the blinding light. After all that darkness any light seemed bright. Jake blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

There was no dust on this floor. The room was the size of his bedroom, yet seemed bigger because three more tunnels led off in different directions.

The light came from small ventilation grates spaced near the ceiling around the room. Only it was clear from this side of the grates they had never been designed for ventilation. Small steps lead up to each so that someone could stand on the top step and look out through the grate.

Three chairs, Cardassian design with metal backs, were spaced around the otherwise empty room.

"What is-"

"A spy hole," Nog whispered. "I've heard about rooms like this. Keep your voice down." He climbed the nearest stairs, but even standing on his tiptoes he couldn't see through the grate.

"Why is everything on this station built for tall people?" Nog whispered.

"Maybe because it was designed by Cardassians," Jake whispered back. He climbed the same set of steps and looked through the grate. And choked.

He could see into the back room of a shop on the Promenade. He couldn't tell which one, because he hadn't been in the backs of too many of them.

"What do you see?" Nog hissed.

Jake stepped down and moved to another grate. This one looked out into the main area of the Promenade. Laughter filtered through as two ensigns walked past arm in arm.

"Who's laughing?" Nog whispered.

"No one," Jake whispered back. He frowned. The cleanliness of this space bothered him.

"Well, someone was laughing," Nog whispered.

"No one important," Jake clarified. He glanced down at Nog. "We're on the Promenade. I can see the shops. How many of these spy holes do you think there are?"

"A bunch," Nog said. "I wonder if we can see into my uncle's bar."

Jake grinned. "That would be great if we could. Then we'd know if all the work was done."

"And I wouldn't ever have to go back in the middle of a riot." Nog turned around.

So did Jake. Three more tunnels. Even though he had been smiling, this whole thing left him disquieted. Of all the things he had expected, this was the last. Part of him wanted to go back, but turning around meant turning his back on adventure.

Nog was already down the stairs. "Let's figure out which passage leads to my uncle's bar."

"All right," Jake said. He was committed. For the first time since he had entered the panel, he wondered if this was the right thing to do.

AS HE GAVE the command to energize, Sisko closed his eyes. He didn't want the transition from the bright transporter room on the Defiant into the darkness of the crashed ship to be abrupt. He wanted a moment to feel the place before he saw it.

Dax's readings had shown that much of the ship was still intact. Only a few sections had been damaged by the crash. The news wasn't a complete surprise: for something as fragile as that statue to survive, the crash couldn't have been devastating. Sisko had Dax prepare the coordinates for beam down into the main section of the ship that still had rudimentary life-support systems. That alone had surprised Sisko, but O'Brien had assured him that ships from the beginning of space travel on were always designed so that the life-support systems had double and triple backups. On a ship the size of the Nibix, most of the outer shell would have to be destroyed before the life-support systems would quit entirely.

Still, Sisko thought it damned unusual on a ship this old. If, indeed, it was as old as he hoped.

As the beaming process ended, the first thing he noted was the cold. It went through the protective layers of his uniform. He had expected a chill-the asteroid had no atmosphere-but nothing as penetrating as this. He took a tentative breath-the air was cold but real-and sighed.

The life support did work.

He could also feel the antigravity units they were all wearing adjusting them to eight-tenths of Earth normal. The asteroid's gravity was actually less than half.

Then he opened his eyes, cringing slightly, expecting to be surrounded by bodies. Instead, he was in a dark, wide hallway. He tugged on his gloves, slipped the end of them beneath the wrists of his uniform so that the only skin he exposed was on his face. Dax already had her light on and was examining the wall panels. O'Brien switched his on after a moment and looked at the paneling as well.

"I thought we'd see more than this," O'Brien said.

"This ship is huge," Dax said. "This is just a corridor. A small one, judging from the readings I took on the Defiant."

Sisko switched on his light and glanced at the panels as well. The diagrams were clear, using an old spacer's code that had been outdated in this sector for centuries, but the words were in a language that looked only vaguely familiar. And he wasn't sure if the familiarity was because he hoped he would see something he recognized.

"Can you make out anything, Chief?"

"Nothing of use to us," O'Brien said. "We studied this type of system at the Academy. It could belong to any one of a hundred star systems that developed similar technology, long before humans had space flight."

"But it's familiar?" Sisko asked.

"Yes, of course. Familiar enough anyway." O'Brien's breath floated like a ghost in the darkness. Dax had her tricorder out, and its hum echoed in the silence.

"No life signs," she said. "But behind these walls are all sorts of storage areas."

"And there's equipment behind those," O'Brien said.

Sisko pulled out his tricorder as well but didn't use it. Not yet. He wanted to take this slow, not to come to any more conclusions than he already had. "Come on," he said. "Let's see what else we can find."

He led the way down the silent passage to a doorway that had jammed open. The door was tall-he could get through it without much effort-and it was wide enough for two people to pass. His light caught coffinlike shapes scattered throughout the room. He glanced at Dax. She was staring intently ahead, her own light playing on the surface of the coffins.

Coldsleep chambers. Ancient ones that looked like long narrow bullets. The kind that, when jettisoned into space, provided enough protection for the being inside to survive a short trip through a planet's atmosphere.

No one in the Federation had used this type of technology in a long, long time.

"I count fifteen of them," O'Brien said.

"I get no readings," Dax said. "If they were working, something would show on the tricorder."

The cold bit into Sisko's cheeks and nose. He climbed over a pile of rubble near the door and crouched near the closest coldsleep bed. Through the opaque lid and the slight fog of his own breath, Sisko could see the body of a man, somewhat well preserved, yet obviously dead. The skin on his face had sunken in and his eyelids seemed flat. He had been a middle-aged man. He wore robes that had no markings on them. Through the lid, Sisko couldn't even make out the robes' fabric.

"A few of them smashed open," O'Brien said. He had gone deeper into the room. His voice had a quiet power in the silence. "Nothing left except skulls, a bit of bone, and some metal jewelry. This ship has been here a long time."

The Caxtonian hadn't come into the aired section of the ship; he'd only been to the small outer area exposed to the vacuum of the asteroid. There the bodies hadn't decomposed at all.

Dax crouched beside an intact coldsleep bed. She ran her tricorder over it. "I can't tell how long this man's been dead," she said. "The cold, the lack of oxygen in the unit, and the drugs they used to ease into cold sleep have messed up any reading I can understand. Julian did some work on cold sleep. He might be able to get a better idea than I have."

"If this turns out to be the Nibix," Sisko said, "I'll bring him down."

So far they had seen nothing that indicated they were on the Nibix. Of course, nothing had shown that they weren't on the Nibix either. Sisko would hate for this mission to prove inconclusive.

O'Brien stood, following his tricorder as if it were a native guide. "Do you hear that?" he asked.

Sisko looked up. He heard the hum of the tricorders, the rasp of their own breath, and something else, very faint. A quiet thrum he wouldn't have noticed if O'Brien hadn't mentioned it.

"Equipment," Dax said. "Something's still working."

"It's probably the life-support systems," O'Brien said. "Or what's left of them. There's a chamber just beyond this one. I'm going to investigate."

Sisko stood. He'd learned all he could from the dead man. He pulled out his tricorder. It slid in his gloved hands. He adjusted a few settings and then found the same unusual reading that seemed to be leading O'Brien forward. A low level of power, running on its own system, separate from the systems behind the panels in the corridor.

"Would that be life support?" Dax asked. "It's an independent system."

"If I were designing a ship for deep space with this primitive technology," O'Brien said, "I'd make damn sure that life support, at least to the important areas, had its own system or at least its own backup."

"Was that usual, Chief?"

"It depends on the culture," O'Brien said. "Some early space travelers from this section had no life support going into the cargo bays. If a worker got trapped back there, he died. It wasn't practical, but it was cheap."

"A waste of life," Sisko said, and he was referring not just to the practice O'Brien mentioned, but to the bodies around him.

"In some cultures, life wasn't valued very much," O'Brien said.

Neither Dax nor Sisko responded. They had both seen places where life wasn't much valued. After those experiences, the Federation's rules about accepting advanced cultures made much more sense.

Sisko's hand was shaking, and he hoped it was from the cold. The readings on his tricorder remained constant. His heart was pounding hard. Dax had an intent look on her face. She maneuvered through the coffins toward the chamber.

O'Brien reached it first. "The readings are definitely coming from here," he said.

Dax reached it second and gasped. "Benjamin."

His mouth was dry. He crossed the distance in half the time it took the others. Dax was wiping the side of the door, as if to clean something off. O'Brien was running his tricorder over the wall.

"All the systems from this wall inward are active and working," he said. "Life support, environmental controls, power bays, everything."

His voice held a kind of awe. He punched the tricorder two and three times, obviously checking his readings, but they apparently remained the same.

Sisko was watching Dax. She continued to wipe, glancing over her shoulder at him, the excitement on her face so reminiscent of Curzon when he found a toy that Sisko saw not Jadzia, but an old Trill man, his white hair thinning over his markings.

"There are redundant systems like I've never seen before," he said. "They wanted to keep whatever is in there alive and running. There must be ten backup systems in this wall alone."

Sisko had to swallow before he could speak. "This ship's been here a long time. No system can run forever."

"The power needed here is low," O'Brien said. "And at least half these systems are linked. If one shuts down, another takes over. I'd say this part of the ship could live a good long time yet."

"That's not all," Dax said. "Benjamin, take a look at this." She moved away from the part of the door she was polishing. The paint on the door had long since faded to gray, but the outline of the design was still visible.

Sisko looked at the pattern for a moment before the shape sprang out at him. An oval with a green staff in the middle. Or at least the staff was supposed to be green. In some areas on Jibet, the staff even glowed. The design was all over anything that had to do with the House of Jibim Kiba Siber, including the Nibix.

To have the symbol on or near a door meant only one thing.

"The royal chamber," he said softly to himself.

Dax nodded. "We found it."

Sisko let the thought sink into his cold mind. Now, more than at any other time in his career, he had to be very careful. He glanced at Dax.