If only—

Ro stopped her thought, not wanting to think about her unsure future right now, and not wanting her apprehensions to show on her face. Finally, Quark headed for the doors, but again, he did not make it far. He turned back to her. “Are you all right?” he asked, concern evident in his voice. His ability to read her mood so well surprised her, and also impressed her. They had just spent the last few minutes with him basically begging for her forgiveness and her giving it to him, and then him baring his soul, and yet he somehow perceived that something else entirely was bothering her. Still, she did not feel prepared to talk about it right now.

“I’m fine,” she said. Seeing doubt in Quark’s eyes, she added, “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“I see,” Quark said, but instead of leaving, he walked back over to her desk. “So, how’s the…uh, conference…going?” he asked.

“The conference, huh?” Ro said, aware that Quark knew nothing about the summit, other than the confluence of officials here at the station. But since Kira had just told her that the first minister would be announcing the meeting and the reason for it to the people of Bajor later today, Ro thought that it would do no harm to tell Quark about it now. “Actually,” she said, “they’re calling it a summit.”

“A summit?” Quark asked.

“Yes,” Ro said. “They’re meeting about the issue of Bajoran membership in the Federation. They’re supposedly going to decide one way or the other—” She stopped talking when she noticed an expression on Quark’s face of shock and even pain. For a moment, she thought that there might even be something wrong with him physically. “Quark, are you all right?”

“No,” he said, looking off to the side, as though in a daze. He moved in front of one of the chairs at her desk and dropped heavily into it. “No, I’m not.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked. He continued to stare off to one side. “Quark,” she said, beginning to grow concerned. At last, he looked over at her.

“Is it going to happen?” he wanted to know. “Is Bajor going to join the Federation?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why? What difference does it make to you?” She thought that maybe he had surmised her own situation, that since the Bajoran Militia would be rolled up into Starfleet she would be facing the end of her career, and therefore the end of her time on Deep Space 9.

“If Bajor joins the Federation,” he said, “then I really am ruined.”

“What?” she said, thinking that Quark was once again exaggerating. “Why would you—” But then she saw it. “The Federation has essentially a moneyless economy.”

“A moneyless economy,” Quark echoed, saying the words as though they had been laced with poison. “I won’t be able to make a living running the bar, because this will be completely a Federation facility, and so nobody will be paying.”

“I never thought of that…I’m sorry,” she said, her concern for her own situation now coupled with a concern for Quark. “What will you do?” she asked, a question she had been posing to herself for the last couple of days. “What were you going to do three years ago when Bajor was on the verge of joining?”

“Three years ago, I was a younger man,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that three years ago, I actually celebrated the prospect of Bajor’s admittance into the Federation,” Quark said. “I was going to stay in the bar and work the angles. Because the one thing that will happen when this becomes a Federation space station is that more ships will come here, and that’ll translate to more customers in the bar. More customers means more information, and more information means more opportunity. And as the 9th Rule of Acquisition states, opportunity plus instinct equals profit.”

Ro was not quite following Quark. “And you don’t have the instinct anymore?” she asked.

“I don’t know if I ever had it,” he said disgustedly. But then he seemed to rethink that, and said, “I’ve still got the instinct. But what I don’t have anymore is the drive. Not to run the bar without being able to make a sure living at it, not to wait for a piece of information here and there that would allow me to possibly make some small profit somewhere.” Ro did not say anything; she was not sure what to say. “I don’t know,” Quark went on. “I guess maybe the war had an effect on me.”

“It had an effect on all of us,” Ro offered.

“Yeah,” Quark agreed. Again, he looked off to the side, his gaze seeming to see something beyond the office. “When my nephew’s leg got shot off…I think maybe I’ve just realized that I value stability. Chasing profit based on gathering speculative information…you can make a killing, but there’s just so much uncertainty in it.” Quark looked back over at Ro. “I’ll tell you something, Laren,” he said in a voice so quiet that it was almost a whisper. “The bar’s not the most profitable it’s ever been right now, but—and don’t ever tell anybody I said this—that’s all right.”

“Because you have stability,” Ro said.

“Yes,” Quark said. “I’m not making much of a profit, but I am making a living.” He stood up from his chair, apparently preparing to leave. “I think I’ve known for a while now that, whenever Bajor did join the Federation, it would finally be time for me to move on.”

She looked up at him, and said, “I know the feeling.”

“What do you mean?” Quark asked.

“Starfleet,” Ro said. Quark’s eyes widened in understanding. He sat back down in the chair, and Ro started to talk to him about her own uncertain future.

62

Vaughn leaned against a broken wall, the gloom of the gray mist about him, and listened three times to Lieutenant Dax’s account of her contact with the thoughtscape. Each time, he felt a greater sense of the nature of it, and of this world as well, although precise understanding still eluded him. It seemed as though a lot of disparate facts almost fit together to form a greater knowledge, but he could not quite move the facts around to their proper places.

The probe had arrived here as Vaughn had been searching the perimeter of the vortex—the interface with the thoughtscape—attempting to find anything that would help him understand or defeat the pulse. The probe had hovered overhead for a short time, before finally alighting on one of the few patches of ground between wrecked sections of the complex. It had landed about a third of the way around the vortex, and it had taken Vaughn twenty minutes to reach it, crawling through and around the debris of the fallen buildings.

Vaughn had hoped that the probe was more than simply a probe, that the Defiantcrew had developed information vital to his mission, possibly even a means of stopping the pulse. His heart had raced at the sight of the devices, which he had immediately assumed to be some sort of a solution. Each was metallic, with an ovoid body, and two panels set parallel to its surface, attached by rigid filaments. The devices had been completely unfamiliar to him.

He had listened first to Dax’s account, and then to Nog’s explanation and instructions about deploying the devices. Vaughn had paid particular attention to the engineer’s caution to use all of them. If too few of the interdimensional explosives were detonated, Nog had warned, the interface would not be closed, but only widened. Then Vaughn had listened to Dax’s account two more times.

Now, just two hours before the next pulse, he worked his way around the outside of the vortex, positioning the thirty-two devices at intervals of roughly ten meters. He set each one to detonate at the same time, one hour from now. The crew had included two satchels in which to carry the explosives, and he had slung them over his shoulders. He had already emptied and discarded one bag, and had now almost gone through the second one.