The Long Night by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch Read Free Book Online Page A

stirring a bowl of punch in his uncle's bar. "See? Nothing."
    He reached for the panel, but Jake grabbed his arm. "Not yet. I promised the chief we'd measure this."
    "Great. All I need is more work."
    Jake bit back his irritation. Clearly Nog wasn't as excited about this adventure as Jake was. "All right," Jake said. "I'll measure it."
    He bent over and went inside the small opening. About a half meter of the ceiling was missing. Jake had to duck to reach the inside wall, but when he got there, he could stand, his head and shoulders up inside the opening in the ceiling.
    "Hurry up," Nog said, but his words sounded hollow and seemed to echo off into a distance.
    "Hand me a light," Jake said. He could hardly contain his excitement. So far they had found nothing, but he had a feeling there was more. Much more.
    "The tricorder can measure in the dark," Nog said.
    "I don't want to measure. There's a passage in here." Jake's voice echoed upward, reverberating around him, throwing his words back at him until they faded.
    "A passage?" Nog finally sounded interested. Jake could hear the rustle of fabric against metal as Nog climbed inside. Then a flashlight appeared beside Jake, the beam pointing upward. A shaft about a meter high led into a much larger area that disappeared deeper into the wall. Jake could barely reach the edge above with his outstretched arm.
    Nog was under him, looking up. "Is there treasure?"
    "There's just dirt," Jake said. On a starship the lack of dust would be normal, even in a closed-off tunnel like this. But here, Jake always expected things to be dirty. His first image of DS9 always stuck in his mind: the mess of fallen ceiling beams and debris left in the Cardassian evacuation. Cleanliness on DS9, while the norm, still felt odd to him two and a half years later.
    "Do you think there's treasure?" Nog asked.
    "Look, Nog," Jake said, finally letting his irritation show. "If you don't want to come, just say so. I'm going to go exploring whether you come or not."
    "I didn't say I wouldn't come," Nog said in his I'm about-to-pick-a-fight voice. He often got into this mood after he'd had a bad day.
    "Good," Jake said. He handed Nog the flashlight. "If you change your mind, just tell me."
    Then Jake used both hands to reach up, grab onto the edge, and pull himself up the metal chute into the dark area above. Once there, he turned around and looked back down into the beam of the light Nog was shining upward into his face.
    "Hand me the light before you blind me," Jake said, and Nog did as he was told.
    "You're not going to leave me here in the dark, are you?" Nog asked. He wouldn't be able to lever himself up as easily as Jake did.
    But Jake didn't want to dwell on that problem at the moment. He shined the light at the area around him. It felt like a hall of some sort. By stretching out his arms in both directions he could almost touch the walls. The ceiling was an arm's length above his head. The passage went off into the distance before it turned.
    "It's huge!" Jake said, and his voice played back to him.
    Huge... huge... huge... huge...
    "Is there any treasure?" Nog asked, but this time his voice had a smile in it, as if he knew that the question was dumb.
    "Piles of it. Gold press latinum as far as the eye can see!"
    "Really?" Nog asked.
    Jake got down on his hands and knees, set the flashlight to one side, and peered over the edge. Nog was looking up at him with a mixture of greed and disbelief on his face.
    "Really," Jake said. "And a big fat dragon to guard it all."
    "You're making fun of me," Nog said.
    Jake nodded. "There isn't any treasure, but there's a lot more passage than the station schematics have room for. Want to go on an adventure?"
    "Sure beats working in my uncle's bar," Nog said and raised his hands like a child wanting to be picked up.

    It took less than two hours at warp five for the Defiant to reach the red-star system in which the Caxtonian said he had found the wreck. Sisko spent most of