“Colonel Kira?” Quark said, and all at once, his focus changed. He took his hand from Treir’s waist and moved away from her. He took a few steps down the bar until he stood directly across from Ro. “What does she want?”

“You’ll have to ask her,” Ro said sternly.

“But I didn’t do anything,” Quark protested.

“No,” Ro said. “Of course you didn’t.” She looked and sounded angry, but as she turned and marched out of the bar, something in the way Ro carried herself made Treir think that she was also hurt.

Treir peered down at Quark, who now looked worried after the news that the colonel wanted to see him. She smiled, realizing that she had not quite understood the situation between Quark and Ro after all. Quark’s interest in the lieutenant might or might not have been genuine, might or might not have been motivated only by expediency, but Ro…wonder of wonders, Ro actually liked Quark.

Treir shook her head, thinking that the universe really was an amazing place.

43

Vaughn walked through the dead city. The heels of his boots pounded along the empty street, reverberating in the metal canyons formed by the tall buildings on either side of him. He moved quickly, steadily, the hard surface putting more strain on his back, legs, and feet than had the softer, undeveloped ground, but it also allowed him a faster pace. His hip still ached, but he ignored it.

Sleep had come easily to him last night, the result of a lifetime of “battlefield” service. Through the years, Vaughn had come to understand the value of rest in the fulfillment of missions, and he had trained himself to sleep under difficult circumstances. Last night had been different only in the dreams that had come. The nightmares.

Vaughn could not recall the images that had haunted his slumber, but he had woken with a start before dawn. Disoriented in the pitch blackness of this world’s night, it had taken him a moment to recall his circumstances. He had consulted his tricorder and seen that he had slept for little more than four hours. He had considered attempting to get more rest, but quickly abandoned that idea, finding himself wide awake and anxious to continue on his way.

It had taken him only a couple of hours to reach flat land and, shortly after that, the city. The collection of structures had risen before him like a small range of hills, low in the foreground, climbing higher in the distance. He had entered the city and made his way through it for three hours, choosing not to rest until he had left it behind him. Other than the sizes of the buildings, he had found little variation marking one area from another.

Now, Vaughn walked on through the city, surrounded by neglect. The buildings, whether one story tall or ten, showed that they had long been deserted. Dirt adorned their sides like spatters and streaks of brown paint—but not just their sides. Every building in the city stood open to the outside, every window shattered, masses of glass shards lying alongside walls like crystalline moats. Land vehicles likewise sat exposed, their own windows reduced to fragments. A patina of dust lay over everything like an immovable veil. Nobody had lived here for a very long time.

But the former inhabitants of the city had not abandoned their homes for some other place; they had left it for death. Bones littered the urban landscape, some scattered about as though strewn by some inimical force, others together in intact or nearly intact skeletons. The remains appeared to be those of humanoids, with two arms and two legs. The skulls were larger than that of a human, and the thoracic cavities were bound by ribs oriented not horizontally, but vertically.

Curiosity drove Vaughn to stop and explore the macabre scene, but he could not take the time away from his journey. Still, as he passed the skeletal remnants of the people who had obviously once lived here, the tricorder and his own eyes told him many things. Beside one fractured set of bones after another sat a handheld weapon. He saw affixed to buildings and lampposts numerous nooses, below which the skeletons of the hanged had fallen in heaps. Other collections of bones lay smashed in the street, the clear result of people plummeting from tall buildings to their deaths.

Vaughn wondered what had driven these people to kill each other, but even as he did so, he understood that no civil war had occurred here. For whatever reason, the hundreds of thousands who had lived in this city had chosen to abandon their homes in the fastest way possible. The fatal wounds caused by the handheld weapons had all been self-inflicted, the nooses had been strung up by those intending to sling them around their own necks, and nobody had been thrown from atop a building—they had all jumped. The population here, Vaughn was suddenly convinced, had committed mass suicide.

As he walked past the dead, he used his tricorder to study the city they had left behind. Readings put its age on the order of centuries, with indications that it had last been inhabited two hundred years ago. Machinery, also long dead, permeated the buildings. Computers and communications equipment spread throughout the city, through every structure and down into subterranean conduits. Circuitry junctions sat on street corners every few blocks, encased in large cubes that stood twice as tall as Vaughn, and that had been dusted brown through the decades.

Vaughn speculated that perhaps technology, or its misuse, had somehow brought these people to their demise, although he could not see how. The other lifeless cities that Chaffeehad flown over had been brought to their ends in different ways—by fire, by panic, by abandonment, by siege—and Vaughn could find no common element among them beyond the deaths of their citizenry. What little information he possessed failed to add up to any obvious conclusion.

At the next intersection sat one of the large circuitry junctions. Vaughn raised his tricorder and took sensor readings of the cube. Like the others he had scanned, this one housed a union of several citywide technologies. He recognized computer and communications relays, set in a sophisticated configuration, but he detected nothing that might send the entire population of the planet to its death, particularly in so many disparate ways.

Vaughn lowered the tricorder and glanced down the street. He was nearing the far border of the city, he knew, beyond which lay more open, undeveloped land. And somewhere close,he hoped, the site of the pulse.If he could put—

Something moved up ahead. Vaughn stopped immediately. He turned his head slowly, peering from one side of the street to the other. He saw nothing. His first inclination was to attribute it to the wind, but the air had been calm, not even disturbing the layer of dust coating everything here. Perhaps just a shadow then,Vaughn thought as he lifted his tricorder, intending to scan the street ahead of him. The result of a random swirl of the unceasing cloud cover—

Movement came again, and this time Vaughn saw its source. A half-block down, on the right-hand side, a figure peered out from around the side of a building. The face looked human. Vaughn watched the figure for a few seconds, and then it moved again, reaching a hand out and gesturing toward him.

No,Vaughn realized. Gesturing him forward.

Vaughn took a step toward the figure—toward the man—and stopped, waiting to see its— his—reaction. The man continued motioning Vaughn forward, and something about the way he did so seemed oddly familiar. Vaughn started ahead again, and as he did, he moved his thumb up onto the tricorder controls and activated a scan.