“So then what happened?” Ro asked, carrying on their conversation.
“Well, then I signed aboard a freighter—” he began.
“Wait a minute,” Ro said. “What about the apprenticeship with the district subnagus?”
“I decided to leave that,” Quark said.
“All right,” Ro said, stopping in the corridor and turning toward him. Quark stopped as well. As he faced her, he saw the arc of the docking ring through the windows, the stars shining brightly beyond the station. Ro playfully jabbed a finger in his direction, and said, “You’re not telling me everything.”
With a raffish tilt of his head and a lowering of his voice, Quark said, “What are you going to do, Security Chief? Interrogate me?”
Ro opened her mouth in a smile. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Quark smiled back at her. “I believe I would,” he said.
Ro shook her head and rolled her eyes, then started walking again. Quark followed along, catching up to her in a couple of steps. Just up ahead, he saw, stood the closed set of doors that separated the crossover bridge from the habitat ring. “So,” Ro said, “are you going to tell me why you left the apprenticeship?”
“Ah…the subnagus requested that I leave,” Quark told her.
“‘Requested’?” she asked skeptically.
“Well, he suggested…he told me to leave,” Quark offered. “Ordered me, really.”
“Ordered, huh?” Ro asked, pronouncing her words slowly and melodramatically. Quark got the sense that she suspected what he was going to say, or at least the type of thing that he was going to say, and that she now played up her end of the dialogue for effect. “And why would the subnagus order you out of your apprenticeship if he regarded you so highly?”
“I was…well, I was also highly regarded by his sister,” Quark admitted, pretending to be abashed.
They arrived at the doors to the habitat ring, which opened before them. They stepped through, and Ro stopped again. “Quark, you rake,”she said, a wide smile on her face. She reached out and pushed at the front of his shoulder with the tips of her fingers.
“Now, can I help it if females find me attractive?” he said.
“No, I guess you can’t.”
They stood there for a moment, and then Quark held his hands out, one in each direction. “Which way do we go now?” he asked.
Ro looked both ways down the corridor, then moved up to a companel set into the bulkhead opposite the doors. She touched the panel, and said, “Computer, what time is it?”
“The time is zero-three-fifty-three hours.”
Ro’s eyes widened. “Is that right?” she asked Quark.
“I think so,” he told her. “We’ve been walking for quite a while.”
“I really need to get some sleep,” she said. “It’s been a long couple of days, and the next few aren’t going to be any shorter or easier.”
“Aren’t you down this way?” Quark asked, pointing his thumb back over his shoulder.
“Yes,” she said, “and I won’t even ask how or why you know that.”
“Are you kidding?” Quark said as they headed in that direction. “A new chief of security is appointed to the station, and I’m not going to know where they live? Please.”
Ro chuckled. “What was I thinking?” she said.
When they reached her quarters a few minutes later, Ro opened the door and stepped inside. Quark discreetly remained in the corridor. “Thank you for the company,” Ro said.
“Thank you,” Quark said. “I enjoyed it.”
“I did too.”
There was a brief pause as they stood there, and the notion of moving forward and kissing Ro shot through Quark’s mind at warp speed. Instead, he simply said, “Good night, Laren.”
“Good night,” she said, and then, before he could turn away, “May I ask you a question, Quark?”
“The answer is yes,”he said at once. Her lips formed into a smile again, as lovely a sight as Quark thought he had ever seen.
“You haven’t even heard the question yet,” she said.
“I trust you,” he told her.
“Well, don’t,” she said. “You may not like this question.”
Quark did not like the sound of that statement. “Go ahead,” he said anyway.
“Do you think…do you think that women like the cologne you’re wearing?”
Quark felt immediately embarrassed. “Not anymore,” he said.
Ro must have sensed his humiliation, because she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I mean, you obviously like it, and I’m sure that Ferengi women must like it too.”
“It’s very popular on Ferenginar,” Quark confirmed.
“I’m sorry,” Ro went on. “It’s just…I thought you’d want to know.”
Quark was astounded. Why would he want to know that he smelled bad to a female he liked? Except that, if she had not told him, he realized, then he would have continued to smell bad to her. This way—
“It’s all right,” he told her, and meant it. By telling him that she did not like his cologne, she had actually shown him both respect and trust. “I appreciate you saying something to me. The last thing I want to do is repel you.”
“Oh, well, even without the cologne,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm, “you still repel me.”
Quark nodded. “You repel me too.”
“Good night, Quark.”
“Good night, Laren.”
On the way back to his own quarters, Quark twice jumped up and clicked his heels.
39
Vaughn had walked for hours. Night had fallen now, and it had fallen hard. With no moons to reflect sunlight through the clouds, and the remote light of the stars unable to penetrate the atmospheric cover, darkness reigned. Vaughn hiked now toward his destination holding the beacon out before him, illuminating the ground a few meters ahead. He imagined peering down on himself from a height, a solitary mote in the empty ebon setting. So completely had the day vanished around him that Vaughn felt utterly alone, adrift on a virtually invisible sea, with the shore nothing more than a distant, impossible memory.
Iam alone,he thought. As far as he knew, there were only two other people on this entire planet, and he had walked away from them. A modern-day Michael Collins,he romanticized. Four centuries ago, as humanity had first set foot on another world, Michael Collins had become the loneliest human being in history. He and two other astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had journeyed from the Earth to the moon in a two-vehicle tandem spacecraft, one of which had then descended to the lunar surface. Collins had remained in the orbiter, and when it had circled around the far side of the moon, he had been cut off from all communication. By himself aboard Columbia,he had been farther from Earth than any single human had ever been, and totally unable to contact anybody, anywhere. The sense of isolation, Vaughn had always thought, must have been profound.
“‘Here men from the planet Earth,’” he quoted aloud, “‘first set foot upon the moon.’” His words fled into the night, the sound of his voice small and insignificant in the vast, unseen emptiness about him. Vaughn recalled his first trip to the Sea of Tranquillity, and to the preserved remnants of man’s first steps out into the cosmos—the base of Eagle,the landing craft; the camera that had transmitted images of the event back to the people of Earth; the flag of the old nation-state that had sent the astronauts. Vaughn’s life had already changed by that time—he had been pulled away from his childhood dreams of exploration and into the world of special ops—but he had still been overcome by a sense of awe during that visit to the landing site.