Vectors Read Online Free Page A

asked.
    They stared at each other for a moment. Then Kellec said, "You want our services and our planet."
    "You cannot survive without us," Dukat said. "Not anymore." "We could survive just fine," Kellec said.
    There was a crash behind them. Dukat turned. The woman had collapsed. The man who had brought her was clutching the wall as if it gave him strength.
    "I need some help over here," Narat said.
    Dukat remained where he was.
    "Open the force field," Kellec said.
    Dukat looked at him. "Open it, and I will help them," Kellec said.
    Dukat brought the force field down. Kellec hurried to the others, demanding that Narat drop the quarantine field on that end as well. Both doctors picked up the female patient, helping her to a bed. Then they helped the male patient. They bent over the patients, lost in their work.
    Dukat watched them for a moment, feeling itchy and cold. He glanced at his hand. The skin was its normal grayish color. Healthy. He was healthy.
    For the moment.
    Kellec wasn't looking at him, and Dukat didn't want to go any closer to taunt him. But Dukat knew Kellec, knew his kind. The man was a doctor first. He would heal a patient and then look to see the patient's race. That was why Dukat had Kellec brought to Terok Nor. For all his Bajoran patriotism, Kellec would save Cardassians if he had to.
    In fact, he had just demanded to be allowed to. They would work together to solve this, Cardassian and Bajoran, because they had no other choice.
    Chapter Four Doctor KATHERINE PULASKI stood in the sickbay of the Enterprise. She was alone. The four medical staff members who were supposed to be in the area had honored her request and granted her the last few moments here alone.
    She sighed. The instruments were on their trays, just as she liked them. The monitors were in their off positions. The desk was neat, but all of her personal experiments were gone. Sickbay was tidied up and ready for the new doctor.
    Or the old doctor, as it were. Pulaski was being replaced by the doctor she'd replaced, Beverly Crusher. Which was as it should be. Dr. Crusher's presence had never entirely left this sickbay. No matter what Pulaski did, she had a sense of Beverly Crusher's presence. Part of it was the very layout of the bay. Of course, much was standard on each starship and Pulaski had served on a number. But there were items left to each doctor's discretion-where to put the experiments, for example, or the way the desk was situated in the office. Pulaski had always meant to move the pieces around, to make the sickbay more efficient for her type of medicine. But the demands of being the chief medical officer on a starship-particularly an active starship like the Enterprise, a ship with a demanding captain-had never allowed her enough free time to reorganize.
    That wasn't entirely true. There had been down periods where she had had some free time-once she had even helped Data in his Sherlock Holmes holodeck program-but she had generally used those times for resting. Making big changes like rearranging sickbay would have required a lot of effort, not just in moving of furniture but in retraining the staff. Effort she was now relieved she hadn't expended.
    She tugged at her blue shirt and glanced at her travel bags. She had already removed personal items from her quarters, and all of her experiments and notes were already on the shuttle that would take her to Deep Space Five. She wasn't sure what her new assignment would be-Starfleet was being cagey about it, as always, which usually meant they were considering her for several missions and that she would get the one that rose to the top.
    Still, she would miss the Enterprise. She loved starships and the challenges they presented. On starships she saw diseases no one else had seen; injuries whose treatment required a knowledge of the most current techniques or the most primitive, depending on whether she was aboard ship or on a hostile planet; aliens whose physiology was so strange that