The Long Night by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

looked flustered, and O'Brien frowned. The ensigns huddled over the stations, trying not to be noticed.
    Sisko was standing, too, although he didn't remember getting out of his chair. His stomach felt like it had tied itself into a knot. He'd been on other destroyed ships before. This was just another.
    But he couldn't convince himself of that. The ship on that asteroid held the body of the religious leader for an entire culture. Not to mention the priceless artwork from generations of Jibetian culture.
    Or the future relationship between the Jibetian Confederacy and the Federation.
    The Nibix was a myth. People didn't just beam into a myth. Yet he was about to.

CHAPTER
5
    THE AIR WAS STICKY and filled with dust. Jake's hands were filthy, and he didn't want to look at his clothes. But he couldn't contain his excitement. He felt like one of those explorers in the stories his father used to read to him. Even though Jake was still in the station, he felt as if he were touching a forbidden world, one forgotten a long, long time ago. He felt as if he were conquering new territory.
    He felt like he was on the verge of something big.
    "I wonder if my father finished cleaning up the bar yet," Nog said, his voice echoing.
    Jake whirled, raising dust. "That's all you can think about? Cleaning the bar?"
    "There isn't much more to think about," Nog said. "This place is as exciting as a Vulcan wrestling match."
    "I don't know," Jake said. "I think it's kinda cool."
    And he did. They'd moved through twenty small linked rooms in the last ten minutes. The floors were covered with a fine gray dust, and the dust had caked in ventilation patterns on the walls. Jake had no idea where they were at the moment, but he had no worry about finding their way out. The rooms just lead one into another. All he and Nog had to do was follow their own footprints in the dust.
    Nog sneezed. It sounded like an explosion in the enclosed area. "Sure was a good idea," he said. "Crawling around in the dust to find nothing."
    They stopped in the middle of a room the size of a holosuite. Jake flashed his light around the walls and ceilings. Only gray metal. No sign of old furniture or equipment. Nothing had disturbed the dust in here in years.
    The entrance to the next room was about a meter above the floor and looked more like a maintenance tunnel. They'd have to crawl on their hands and knees to get through it if it lead anywhere.
    "We really should be mapping this out," Jake said.
    "You should be mapping this out," Nog said, pointing his flashlight at his clothes and trying to pat off some of the dust. All he managed to do was fill the air around them, making the lights look like they were being shown through a thick fog. "I only came along because you asked."
    Jake frowned at him. "Why are you being so difficult about this?"
    Nog stopped patting. "I'm tired of people making me do things I don't want to do."
    "You didn't have to come."
    "You wanted me to."
    "But I told you that you could leave if you wanted."
    "You said that, but you meant I should stay."
    Jake looked away. He had made it clear that he wanted Nog to stay. "You don't always have to do everything everyone else wants you to do."
    "I'm not like you!" Nog had raised his voice. The room shook with the force of his words. "I'm not the commander's son. No one on the station gives me special permission to map stupid maintenance tunnels. No one tells me that I can spend all day watching the chief engineer. No one gets me three days away from the station so I can fly in some special ship with my father. I have to stay here and work for my uncle. And when I get back tonight, I'll get yelled at for not helping clean up and for being so dirty."
    "Is that what's bugging you?" Jake asked.
    "Isn't that enough?"
    "I thought you didn't care that I was the commander's son."
    Nog sighed in his impatient way. "It's just things are easy for you, and they're never easy for me. It's like these tunnels. You think it's cool