Cathedral by Michael Mangels (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

Vic seemed to realize it as well, and took that revelation as his cue to move on. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to your evening. Enjoy the show.” Handing his barely touched champagne to a passing waitress, he was gone, moving cordially among the other tables as he made his way back to the stage.

Quark let the silence stretch for as long as he could stand it. Then he said, “It’s still bothering you, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What we talked about before Shakaar made his big announcement. The future.”

She nodded, looking bleak. “It’d help if you could convince me that there’s even going to be a future.”

Quark didn’t like the sound of that. “What, did you just get wind of some new classified Starfleet crisis that’s about to end the universe as we know it?”

She took another large swallow of champagne, her expression softening somewhat. She must have been warming up either to him or to the drink. “Things like that come and go. But the future is something else entirely. You’re stuck with facing it every day the universe doesn’t end.”

Quark had to agree. He had already told her of his misgivings about trying to make a living in Bajoran territory after the Federation came in and introduced its cashless, abundance-based, replicator-driven economy. He felt all but certain that he was about to lose everything he’d built here over the past sixteen years.

He wondered if the incoming regime would deprive him of Ro as well. A determination rose within him to prevent that from happening, though he hadn’t the faintest idea of how he might go about it.

It seemed hopeless on the face of it.

“So have you decided what you’re going to do after the Federation comes in?” he asked, taking the liberty of refilling both their glasses.

“As a matter of fact,” Ro said, throwing back a hefty quantity of the Dom Pérignon, “I think I’ve finally come to a decision.”

On the stage, Vic and his ensemble launched into a rendition of a centuries-old Earth standard that repeatedly asked the question “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”—and continually presented “I don’t” as the only acceptable answer. According to Vic, someone named Porter had written the song for a show called High Society, which apparently had starred this Sin-Ah-Trah person whom Vic seemed to regard so highly. But how a disdain for the acquisition of money equated with any so-called high society made absolutely no sense. Quark struggled to ignore the song’s patently offensive lyrics, while Ro didn’t seem to mind them. Or perhaps she hadn’t even noticed, having lived among impecunious Starfleet hew-mons for as long as she had.

Quark watched her throughout Vic’s performance, wondering if she intended to tell him what decision she’d made. He suspected it lay along lines similar to his own. “I suppose neither of us is considered a pillar of the community around here,” he said. “And under the Federation, it’s only going to get worse for us both. The new regime is never going to feel right for either one of us. Not as long as we’re outsiders.”

“It’s been made pretty clear to me today that I can never wear a Starfleet uniform again,” Ro said, as though talking to herself. “Not that I’d want to.”

“But the Bajoran Militia is going to be part of Starfleet soon,” Quark said. Your choices look pretty much the same as mine. But where will yours take you?

Ro took another drink and nodded. “Once the ministers sign those entry documents, home won’t be a refuge from the Federation anymore. At least, not for me.”

“And the Bajorans will become just like the hew-mons,” Quark said. “Flat broke, but too well fed to realize it.”

“To outsiders,” Ro said, raising her glass in an ironic toast. “So the next big question is, What do we do next?”

We?

Even as his despair about his personal financial prospects deepened, Quark allowed himself to nurture the hope that he was finally connecting with Ro on some level deeper than mere infatuation. But if she, too, was planning to leave the station, would he ever get the chance to capitalize on that?

Quark was suddenly terrified that the wrong word from him right now might drive her away from him forever. “Don’t go,” was all he could think of to say.

He realized a moment later that Vic had returned, his entrance evidently obscured by the gathering Dom Pérignon haze. “Let me guess,” Quark said. “You heard everything we just said.”

Vic grinned. “I heard enough, pallie, to make one thing as clear as where Goldwater stands on JFK: You two gloomy Guses are made for each other.”

Ro’s nearly empty drink slipped from her fingers and tipped over. She ignored the stain that was slowly spreading across the tablecloth. “Come again?”

“Listen, those ancient Chinese cats might have really been onto something when they decided to make ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ into the same word.”

“I don’t follow you,” Quark said, wondering if his holosuite was beginning to malfunction. That would be damned inconvenient, with Nog over ninety thousand light-years away at the moment.

“Neither of you can see a way of making a go of it under the Federation flag,” Vic said, looking first at Ro, then at Quark. “Which means that you’re both going to have to get out of Dodge. Away from Starfleet. And away from a cashless Promenade.”

“Right,” Quark said. So far, Vic was only stating the obvious. Where was this leading?

“Dodge?” Ro said, obviously perplexed.

Vic sighed and shook his head in an exaggerated display of patience. “Okay, let me spell it out for you in great big letters, like the Sands’ marquee: You two need to gallop off to the frontier and go into business together.”

After a parting wink at a nonplussed Ro, Vic returned to the stage and began to sing “Fly Me to the Moon.”

A moment later Quark realized that Vic was, yet again, uncannily right. He looked at Ro and saw the same realization beginning to