“I’ll call you immediately if anyone’s condition changes, Doctor,” Krissten said, making an effort to appear casual while clinging to the side of one of the biobeds as though her very life depended on it.

“All right,” Bashir said. Smiling, he turned to Ezri. “After you, fearless leader. Let’s regale everyone with our tales of derring-do from the far frontier.”

  *  *  *

Because of the alien ship’s low gravity and dim, amber-colored illumination, Nog moved about with extreme care. Junior engineers Permenter and Senkowski seemed completely involved in their attempt to mime basic engineering concepts to the tall, thin pentaped who seemed to be in charge of the engine room.

Nog was glad that Shar had come along as well. Although the Andorian science officer was still more tight-lipped than usual, Nog hoped that getting engaged in the repairs to the alien ship would help draw him out, encourage him to discuss whatever had been bothering him.

Nog noticed that Shar, who was absently holding a hyperspanner, was looking in his direction. Shar’s antennae twitched in evident curiosity.

“Are you unwell, Nog?” Shar said.

“I’m fine,” Nog lied. In fact, he felt anything butfine. The itch he’d first begun to notice while parking the Saganhad continued unabated and seemed to be intensifying. Until maybe forty minutes ago, Nog had been willing to consider Ezri’s suggestion that the itching might have been psychosomatic, something related to his acknowledged aversion to being forced against his better judgment to share space aboard DS9 with Taran’atar. But now it felt as though hundreds of carnivorous Hupyrian beetle larvae were building a hive in his biosynthetic leg. How could the cause of this be something in his head?

He promised himself that he’d run, not walk, to the Defiant’s medical bay just as soon as he was certain that this wreck of a warp core wasn’t going to blow up in everyone’s face. Until then, he’d cope with the discomfort. Concentrate past it. Suck it up.

Deal with it, Cadet! Deal with it!

He recalled his earliest Academy days. New plebe cadets couldn’t afford to display any sign of weakness. Especially notFerengi cadets.For some reason he couldn’t fathom, reminding himself that his lowly cadet days now lay more than two years behind him was doing precious little to bolster his confidence.

Nog came out of his reverie when he noticed that Shar was still looking at him expectantly. He was thankful that Permenter and Senkowski were still preoccupied with their instrument calibrations. Nog tried to put on his best tongoface for Shar, though he didn’t want to appear as evasive as his friend always did whenever he was asked a direct question about his family. Concentrating on that helped distract him from the mounting agony in his leg.

Until he saw the alien ship’s chief engineer extend two of its impossibly slender lower limbs toward one of the countless handholds that covered every bulkhead, loft itself spiderlike toward the ceiling, and fetch several of its tools and instruments with its remaining three appendages.

Watching a creature whose movements so resembled those of a Talarian hook spider made it very difficult not to think about legs, itching or otherwise.

Shar still stared at Nog, his antennae fairly vibrating with unasked questions.

Nog knelt long enough to fetch an EPS pattern tracer from his open toolkit. He focused past the pain in his left leg as he rose.

“I’m fine, Shar. Really. Now let’s finish getting this engine room shipshape so we can get back to the Defiant.”

The alien structure turned slowly end over end, hovering in midair about a meter above the longest table in the mess hall. Commander Vaughn sat at the head of the table, his fingers steepled before him as he watched the object’s ever-changing profile.

How long has it been drifting all alone out there?Vaughn thought, his soul filled to bursting with an almost religious ecstasy at the sight of this marvelous, inscrutable thing. How many aeons have come and gone since its builders turned to dust?

Seated across the table from Vaughn, Ezri Dax absently scratched at her abdomen. Then she gestured toward the hologram that dominated the Defiant’s ad hoc briefing room as she finished relating the tale of the Sagan’s near collision with the ancient object. Dr. Bashir sat beside her, listening attentively. The four remaining chairs were occupied by Lieutenant Sam Bowers, Ensign Prynn Tenmei, and science specialists Cassini and T’rb.

Vaughn looked around the room. Bashir, T’rb, and Cassini began reading the sensor reports that now scrolled across everyone’s padds. But Bowers—whose specialty was tactical and security rather than science—seemed completely entranced by the image of the artifact. Tenmei appeared utterly absorbed by it as well.

Vaughn smiled to himself. Maybe the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.

Vaughn watched as the artifact turned, shrank almost to invisibility, then grew a series of outsize flanges and sprouted structures resembling the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral. Then, as ephemeral as a ring of smoke, the thing’s shape changed utterly yet again, adopting an austere, Platonic solid aspect.

“I don’t suppose anybody will mind if the tactical officer asks a really obvious and dumb question at this point,” Bowers said. “But how does this thing change its form? I’ve never heard of any type of architecture capable of doing that.”

“Strictly speaking, Lieutenant,” Bashir said, “it isn’t really changing its form at all.”

“Come again?” Bowers said, looking perplexed.

“Imagine you’re on a boat floating on an ocean,” Bashir said in a professorial tone. “Floating nearby is an iceberg. All you can see of the iceberg is the little bit that’s peeking out of the water. The bulk of it is hidden by the water.”

“All right,” Bowers said, clearly expecting more.

Bashir obliged him. “Now imagine that the iceberg is slowly rotating on an axis that’s deep under the water. You’ll continue to see just a fraction of the ice at any one time—but always a different portion of the whole.”

“And,” Cassini added, “if you row your boat too close to the spinning berg, you’ll be caught in its undertow and get dragged under the water with it. That’s what appears to have nearly happened to the Sagan.”

“Metaphorically speaking,” T’rb added, rubbing at the vertical line that bisected his sky-blue forehead.

“So what isthe thing?” said Ensign Tenmei.

“It could be anything,” Bashir said with a shrug. “A space colony. An observatory. A retail establishment.”

“A police station,” Bowers said.

“An interdimensional ski lodge,” Tenmei said with a tiny smirk.

“A hospital,” Dax said quietly. “Or a church.”

“Whatever it is,” Bowers said, “could it be related to the fight between our alien guests and the folks who attacked them?”

“Until we crack the language barrier,” T’rb said, “the reasons for that conflict will pretty much be anybody’s guess.”

Bowers scowled. “Maybe not. It would help if some of our engineering detachment could snoop around a bit aboard the damaged ship. See if they can find what they’re doing way out on the fringes of this system.”

“Unfortunately,” Vaughn said, “the aliens seem to be supervising every move our people make over there. It looks like interviewing our patients may be our only hope for figuring out the aliens—and the artifact.”

Vaughn noticed the wry smile that had appeared on the doctor’s face at Ezri’s suggestion that the artifact might be a church of some sort. “Regarding the alien object,” Bashir continued, looking in Ezri’s direction as he spoke, “all we really know is that an intelligent and perhaps extinct species built it more than five hundred million years ago for some purpose which remains obscure. We also know that this structure possesses certain higher-dimensional characteristics that we don’t fully understand. We really don’t have any other information—except for the alien text file we downloaded from one of the thing’s internal computers.”