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spacedogfromspaceWarship Mine
Quodo Mini-Fest V
Art
Odo is transporting Quark to a nearby star base for a trial before Federation judges for a crime he committed. But before they can get there, they are kidnapped by a group of rogue Jem'Hadar, who want to use Odo as a weapon to destroy the Founders. It's up to Quark to rescue Odo and orchestrate their escape back to Deep Space Nine.
Fandom(s): Star Trek DS9
Character(s): Quark, Odo
Tags: Quodo, Die Hard I Guess?
Rating: Teen+ Audiences
Content Warnings: N/A
Word Count: 4490
Type: Oneshot, Standalone
Notes:
Written for Quodo Mini-Fest V for Cakedoom
This fic wasn't supposed to be the Quark Die Hard Episode, but it became one anyways. The title is in reference to TNG's Starship Mine, which is the classic Picard Die Hard Episode.
"Are these handcuffs really necessary?" Quark asked, jangling the chains that tied his wrist together.
"I can't have you escaping two days before your trial," Odo said, not bothering to look up from the detective novel he was reading.
"Escape?" Quark asked. "Escape to where? We're on a runabout. What am I gonna do, jump out an airlock?"
Odo hummed ponderously. "Now there's an idea. Maybe I should let you go."
"Oh, ha ha." Quark rolled his eyes. "You know, if you want a career in comedy, you're going to have to do better than 'hey Quark, go kill yourself!'"
Odo harrumphed and flipped a digital page, proceeding to ignore him.
"Odo!"
Odo rolled his eyes. "What do you want, Quark?"
"Handcuffs!" Quark said, jangling his restraints irritably. "Get them off! This is a cruel and unusual punishment!"
"Quark, you think everything is a cruel and unusual punishment," Odo said. "And I assure you, this does not qualify. If you didn't want to wear restraints, you shouldn't have engaged in criminal activity."
Quark scoffed. "It would have been a very lucrative business opportunity."
"You were—" Odo's head snapped around to the sensors as an alert bleeped at him. Odo's brow furrowed at what he saw.
"What?" Quark asked. "What is it?"
Odo shook his head. "It looks like... Computer, visuals on screen."
An image of another ship appeared on the Orinoco's view screen.
Quark stared at the other ship for a moment, then looked at Odo, then back to the ship on the view screen. "That looks like— Odo, please tell me that's not what it looks like."
"Unfortunately, it's exactly what it looks like," Odo said. "What's a Dominion warship doing this far into the Alpha quadrant?"
"Who cares!" Quark protested. "Do evasive maneuvers or something! Get us out of here!"
Before Odo could respond, four Jem'Hadar soldiers beamed aboard the runabout. Three of them were armed with rifles, and the fourth held a strange looking instrument, which he pointed at Odo. A greenish beam shot out from the instrument, and Odo exploded into liquid goop the moment the beam hit him.
"Odo!" Quark shouted. His fear was momentarily replaced by anger and indignation, and he leapt to his feet, turning to face the intruders. "You idiots! You just killed Odo! Don't you know that he's a Founder? You just killed one of your gods!"
The Jem'Hadar did not seem alarmed by this in the least. One of the three holding rifles took aim and shot Quark before he could scream.
"Quaaaarrrrrk..."
"Quaaaaaaaaarrrk..."
"QUARK!"
"AH!" Quark sat bolt upright, glancing around rapidly, unsure where he was. He worked to calm his breathing and take in his surroundings. His earlier flailing had revealed that his wrists were still bound. He was in a small room— no, it was a holding cell. Quark had spent enough time in holding cells to know one when he saw one. This one even had the force field like in the cells in the security office back home. Beyond the force field, he couldn't see anything. There was just a blank wall on the other side of a hallway. The rest of the cell was empty. There were no furnishings of any kind. It was just three oppressively grey walls, an oppressively hard floor, awful fluorescent lighting, and a force field that hummed in a way that was eventually going to drive Quark mad.
Oh. And there was a bucket.
Quark stared at the bucket, wondering why it was in his cell. It was just a simple, steel pail. Curiosity getting the best of him, he crawled over to the bucket to see if there was anything inside. If it was empty, then his best guess was that his captors had been kind enough to provide a toilet. A dignity-sucking toilet, but a toilet nonetheless.
But the bucket wasn't empty. It had some sort of shiny liquid in it. Before Quark had time to think about what it might be, a face appeared in the bucket.
"Quark!" The face shouted.
Quark screamed and fell back on his butt, and he shoved himself back with his feet until his back hit the wall. He stared at the bucket, heart pounding.
Slowly, an awful puppet of a face rose from the bucket. It looked like a beige-ish balaclava, with dead empty eyes. It looked vaguely like...
"Odo?" Quark asked, squinting.
"Of course it's me! How many other changelings do you know?" Odo snapped irritably.
"Uh, well I met the Voice of the Link once," Quark said. "Creepy lady. Oh, and there was that one that replaced Doctor Bashir. So... at least three?"
The droopy mask-face had no eyes, but the sockets rippled in a way that suggested that Odo was rolling his eyes at him.
"Odo, why are you..." Quark waved a hand nebulously, looking for an appropriate word. He couldn't find one. "Why are you like that?"
"The Jem'Hadar did something to me," the Odo mask said, then wavered, slinking back down into the bucket.
Quark waited for a moment, but Odo neither elaborated, nor re-emerged from the bucket. "Odo?" Quark called, crawling back over to kneel by the bucket. He poked the goop with a hesitant finger.
The goop grew two dot eyes and a frowning mouth, looking as if a child had drawn a face in the goop. The mouth moved with a strange, animated quality.
"Whatever they used to shoot me," Odo continued, "is making it extremely hard to hold a form of any kind. Even this takes an excruciating amount of concentration and energy." The face faded again.
"Oh," Quark said. "So you're useless, as usual. I've got to do everything around here, don't I?"
The crude face appeared in the goo again just to scowl at him.
Quark held up his bound wrists so the goo could see— if it could see, it didn't have eyes at the moment —and gave it an I told you so look. "Bet you're wishing you took these off when I asked, hm? Now how are we gonna get out of here?"
"Quark, you wouldn't be able to get us out of here with free hands, a phaser, and an escort," Odo retorted.
"Have a little faith in me, Odo," Quark grumbled. "It's not like you're going to be getting us out of this mess."
Footsteps sounded from the hall, and a pair of Jem'Hadar soldiers appeared on the other side of the force field, one with a gun, and one with the same instrument that exploded Odo on the Orinoco.
"What is the meaning of this?" Quark snapped, apparently having no sense of self preservation. "You've kidnapped a Founder and turned him into soup! And more importantly, you kidnapped me! Don't you know who I am? Where is your Vorta supervisor, I demand to speak with them."
"Our supervisor is dead," one of the Jem'Hadar said in a flat tone. "We killed him."
Odo dragged some of himself up out of the bucket and made something resembling a face. "What do you want with me?"
"How do you know it's not me they want?" Quark asked.
"Shut up, Quark," Odo warned.
The Jem'Hadar ignored the exchange. "We're taking you to the Founder's home-world."
"For what purpose?" Odo asked.
"To destroy them," the solider answered. One of the Jem'Hadar used the control panel on then wall to disable the force field. The other Jem'Hadar— the one with the device —took aim at the fleshy mass that rose from the bucket and fired, sending Odo collapsing into a liquid once again.
"We will return for you shortly," one of the soldiers said, addressing the bucket, and re-engaging the force field. Then, the two of them marched out of sight.
"Hey!" Quark shouted after them. "What about me?" He got no answer.
"Well, Odo, what do you make of that?" He asked.
Odo didn't answer.
"Odo?" Quark asked, peering into the bucket.
The goop rippled, so at least Odo was alive. Probably. But it took several minutes for the total paralysis to subside, and Odo was able to form a mouth to speak with again.
"Quark..." He groaned.
"Oh, good," Quark said. "Do you have any idea what's going on here? I thought the Jem'Hadar were engineered to be undyingly loyal to the Founders and the Vorta. Why would these ones kill their Vorta and try to destroy all the Founders?"
"Clearly," Odo said impatiently, "these particular Jem'Hadar are defective."
"I mean, that's good, right? They're technically on our side," Quark said. "They might be able to take out the entire Dominion for us!"
"We can't let them destroy all the Founders," Odo said.
"Why not?" Quark asked. "Take out the Founders, disable the entire Dominion. War over! Bad guys lose!"
"Because killing the Founders would be genocide, and that would make us the bad guys."
"Oh, you're just being sentimental about your people. Besides, we're not the ones doing it," Quark pointed out. "They'd be doing it to themselves."
"Standing by and letting something like that happen leaves us just as responsible as if we had done it ourselves," Odo argued. "Besides, you realize that when they say they want to kill all the Founders, that that includes me, right?*"
"I was counting on it," Quark muttered. "So what do we do?"
"You have to find a way to stop them."
"Me? What about you?"
Odo formed enough of a face to display irritation. "As you can see, I am not of much use."
"Great," Quark said. "Just great. You know, I'm only here because of you. You should be the one fixing this."
Footsteps approached again, and two Jem'Hadar appeared. Quark couldn't tell if they were the same ones as previous or not, but this time, one trained a rifle on Quark while the other disengaged the force field and entered the cell.
"What are you doing?" Quark asked.
The Jem'Hadar didn't answer, he just walked up to the bucket and picked it up. Odo said nothing, but formed a pair of floating eyes to glare up at him.
Bucket retrieved, the Jem'Hadar left the cell, and re-engaged the force field. Only then the rifle that was trained on Quark lowered.
Quark ran up to the force field and watched the Jem'Hadar retreat down the hall with Odo. "Hey! What about me? What are you going to do with me? I demand to speak with a representative!"
Of course, he got no answer.
Quark wasn't sure what he was supposed to do now, but he knew that the Jem'Hadar probably weren't going to pay him any mind while he was locked up in this holding cell. He decided that his best course of action was to escape the cell, and hopefully find a shuttle bay that hopefully housed the Orinoco. There was a good chance of him getting caught, so he decided that in that case he would act like the Ferengi he was and negotiate for his release. Most of the plan's details would need to be worked out later. After all, he wouldn't get to any of them if he couldn't bust out of the holding cell first.
Luckily, no Jem'Hadar soldiers had been left behind to keep an eye on him. And luckily, this wasn't the highest security holding cell he'd ever broken out of. Quark stepped up to the wall beside the force field. He knew that the control panel for the force field was just on the other side. If he could find a way to pry the panel off the wall, he could access the inner workings. He didn't have his brother Rom's expertise with all things wires and machinery, but with enough trial and error, you could bypass any security system. Usually. Sometimes.
The wall panel was surprisingly easy to rip off the wall. That seemed odd to Quark, but the important thing was that now the wiring of the control panel was exposed. Time for some trial and error.
In the end, pulling a couple wires loose caused the force field to shut down. That was good. He had been concerned that he would accidentally lock himself in instead. But now that he was free from the cell, he felt a sense of dread. He was up against at least four Jem'Hadar soldiers, and he had no idea where they, Odo, or the Orinoco was.
With no choice but to move on, Quark crept quietly through the corridors of the unfamiliar ship, tucking his wrists to his clothing to keep his restraints from jangling, and using his keen hearing to alert him to any approaching Jem'Hadar— or to keep him from stumbling right into them. Luckily, the designers of the Dominion warship weren't fans of open concepts, so there was plenty of cover unless he walked into a room with one of them.
Doors were labelled with signage, but it wasn't in any language that he could read. But when he came to a wide set of double doors, he decided they looked important enough to investigate. Pressing his ear to the doors, he determined that nobody was inside, and tapped at the control to open the door, which luckily wasn't locked.
What he saw made his heart leap. It was a shuttle bay, and inside was the Orinoco. All he had to do was figure out how to open the big bay doors, and fly back to Deep Space Nine as fast as the Orinoco would take him.
He took three steps towards the runabout before he stopped, something in his gut making him feel like he had forgotten something. Oh, right. He supposed he was forgetting Odo. But the guilt about forgetting Odo confused him. After all, why should he feel bad about leaving Odo behind to the mercy of these rogue Jem'Hadar? Odo had been nothing but a pain in the ass in all the years Quark knew him. He was always getting in the way of Quark's most lucrative business deals, arresting Quark for every little thing, not to mention dragging him to a star base for a trial before Federation judges, which, by the way, was how they got into this mess in the first place. Quark should be glad to leave Odo behind. He should leave Odo behind. He forced himself to walk to the runabout, boarded it, and sat in the pilot's seat.
He was about to engage the engine, but found that he couldn't. Something just didn't feel right to him.
"Come on, Quark," he said under his breath. "Worry about yourself first. Once we get back to Deep Space Nine, we can send out the Defiant to come find Odo."
That compromise made him feel a little bit better, but deep down he knew that if he managed to leave the warship and get back to Deep Space Nine unscathed, there was no way that the Defiant would be able to catch up to or find this particular warship.
Quark sighed, got up, and broke into the Orinoco's weapons locker.
Quark really wished that Odo had removed those stupid handcuffs while he had the chance. It was difficult to keep the chain silent when he was holding a phaser in each hand. Phasers were all the weapons locker had. There was nothing as large and intimidating as the rifles that the Jem'Hadar packed. So Quark compensated by double fisting the small hand phasers. It wasn't practical, but it made him feel a little more confident.
He crept through the dark corridors of the Dominion warship, breathing as shallowly and as quietly as possible so that his ears had the greatest chance of picking up any sign of Jem'Hadar soldiers. He knew that if he wanted to survive this, he had to get the jump on them.
He came to a door that was open. His ears picked up a sound from within, so he stopped, pressing himself against the wall. He held his breath and listened, trying to determine how many were in the room. From the breaths he heard, he determined that there was only one. His heart pounded, and he knew that he could die in this next moment.
Double phasers raised, he stepped into the doorway, and started firing before he even spotted his target. He swept the room with phaser fire, handcuff chains jingling with the recoil. After a few moments, when he realized that he hadn't been shot, he released the triggers, and surveyed the room. A dead Jem'Hadar lay on the floor.
Quark laughed nervously at the unexpected victory. He really hadn't thought that he could best a Jem'Hadar soldier, and yet, here he was. Unfortunately, he wouldn't be getting much of a sneak attack on the others, since his excessive phaser fire had created enough noise to attract the attention of every other soul on the ship.
Hearing footsteps running towards his position, Quark hid in a corner, along the wall that the door was on. He raised his phasers, ready to fire on the approaching Jem'Hadar the moment they stepped into the room. Maybe he could ambush another after all.
One rounded the corner into the room, and Quark fired. The Jem'Hadar collapsed to the floor, dead. His companion— who was just stepping into the room —leapt back out into the corridor before he got shot himself. Quark waited.
The Jem'Hadar leaned around the corner and fired towards Quark's position. The beam hit the wall above Quark's head, making him glad that he was crouched low. Quark fired back a split second after, but since the Jem'Hadar had used the doorway as cover, he missed, and the Jem'Hadar ducked back out into the corridor.
Quark cursed under his breath. This one was going to kill him, he was sure. His luck only ran so deep. But if he was going to go down, he would go down fighting. Steeling himself, he ran towards the door. When the Jem'Hadar poked his head into the room again, Quark was right on top of him, surprising the Jem'Hadar enough that he missed his shot, and Quark got him point blank.
It took a long time for the blood pounding in his ears to die down enough that he could listen for any other footsteps. He was sure that in that time, someone would come along and kill him. But they didn't. When his heart stopped pounding, he realized that he heard nothing. However, he felt a burning sensation on his left arm. Looking over, he saw that there was a scorch mark in the shoulder of his jacket. The Jem'Hadar's rifle burst hadn't missed after all— it had grazed him.
"Great," Quark said, kicking the corpse of the Jem'Hadar. "And you're dead, so I can't even make you pay for this jacket."
When he was certain that nobody else was coming, Quark stepped back into the corridor, peering out cautiously just in case someone was waiting in ambush. There was nobody. Interesting. For a second he hoped that there weren't any Jem'Hadar left— but he knew from their capture that there were at least four. And on a warship of this size, there were probably plenty more beyond that. So he was cautious as he continued his search for Odo.
It was eerily silent as he walked through the ship, listening for voices, or footsteps, or breaths. When he finally caught a sound that wasn't just engine drone, he stopped. Someone was behind a closed door, the sign of which Quark couldn't read. He just hoped the door wasn't locked.
Taking a deep breath, he punched the door control with his phaser, and went in guns blazing, and screaming, at first firing randomly, then taking aim at the Jem'Hadar inside once he caught him in his sights. The Jem'Hadar's rifle was strapped to his back, and he died reaching for it.
It was only after the Jem'Hadar soldier fell that Quark saw that he was in a lab, and that a familiar bucket was sitting on the counter. Fearing that he may have shot Odo, Quark rushed over to the bucket and looked inside.
Luckily, the liquid was moving. Not dead. A face bubbled to the surface. "I honestly did not expect to have to see your face ever again, Quark," Odo said. "It's a shame, really."
"I almost left you behind," Quark hissed. "So don't make me change my mind. Come on, I know where the Orinoco is." He awkwardly looked around for a place to put his phasers, not wanting to leave them behind in case they encountered more Jem'Hadar. He settled for placing them in the bucket with Odo, who grumbled irritably. Then, he picked up the bucket and started for the door.
"Wait, Quark, they've done something to me," Odo said.
"I know, they made you a useless bucket-dwelling liquid."
"Not that," Odo said. "They've poisoned me."
"What? Why?"
"It's how they were going to take out the Founders," Odo explained. "They poisoned me, so that when I joined the Great Link, the poison would spread throughout the Link, killing every changeling on that planet."
Quark stopped in his tracks. "Great," he muttered. "I don't suppose there's an antidote around here somewhere?"
"Not one that we could identify," Odo said. "But I know what they gave me." He raised a goopy approximate of a hand out of the bucket and pointed. "There, that red vial over there. Bring that with us. Perhaps Doctor Bashir or Commander Dax can synthesize an antidote."
"Alright," Quark said, grabbing the sealed vial and tossing it in the bucket, much to Odo's protest. "Time to go."
Quark carried the bucket of Odo back through the corridors towards the Orinoco.
"I'm surprised you didn't just take off when you found the Orinoco before me," Odo said.
"Like I said, I almost did," Quark said.
"Why didn't you?"
Quark paused, thinking for a moment. "I don't know," he admitted.
When the got to the Orinoco Quark sat in the pilot's seat and set the bucket in the navigator's. He fired up the engine.
Odo lifted a ghoulish face out of the bucket and looked out the view screen at the closed shuttle bay doors in front of them. "I don't suppose you know how to open those," he said.
"Nope," Quark admitted. "But everything comes down to negotiation." Without thinking too hard about how badly it could go, he fired a photon torpedo at the door.
The explosion rocked the Orinoco and almost tipped Odo's bucket off its chair. But when the dust settled, the doors were open.
"That could have killed us," Odo grumbled.
"But it didn't," Quark bragged. He flew the Orinoco out the gap and into open space.
"Interesting," Odo said. He had a pair of eyes peering over the rim of his bucket at the scanners.
"What?"
"There's nothing living on that warship anymore," Odo said. "You must have killed them all."
"Wait, there were only four on that whole warship?" Quark asked.
"Apparently. Perhaps only four of them were defective, and they took out all the others when they killed their supervisor."
"Huh," Quark said. Then, "let's tow it back to Deep Space Nine."
"Good idea."
"Imagine how much the Federation will pay for this."
"Quark!"
"Okay, okay, we'll give it to the Federation out of the goodness of our hearts to support the war effort," Quark grumbled reluctantly.
A week later, Quark walked into sick bay, and flagged down Doctor Bashir.
"How's Odo doing?"
"Much better," Doctor Bashir said. "The antidote will take some time to fully take effect, but I suspect he will make a full recovery within the week."
"Good, that's good," Quark said.
Doctor Bashir left to go to his office, and Quark stepped into the room Odo had been confined to for the past week.
Luckily, he wasn't in liquid form for too long after they returned to the station. The strange device that the Jem'Hadar had used to prevent him from holding shape had only a temporary effect, and Odo was able to turn back into his usual self. However, the poison they had given him had made him more and more sick with each passing day, and would have eventually killed him had an antidote not been synthesized.
Quark had been worried the whole week that the poison was some impenetrable Dominion technology that couldn't be replicated, like Ketracel White. Now that the code was cracked, and Odo was on the mend, Quark thought he'd finally be able to sleep at night again.
"Quark," Odo said as Quark walked into the room.
"Odo," Quark said. Odo was in his humanoid form, lying on a bio-bed, looking just as sick as he had the day before. "You don't look any better. Is Doctor Bashir sure he found the antidote?"
Odo harrumphed. "He only just gave me the antidote. These things take time," he said.
"Do you... feel any different?" Quark asked, sitting down in a chair at Odo's bedside.
Odo nodded. "I can tell that I am not getting worse any longer," he said. "Or perhaps that's a placebo."
They sat in silence for a while, unsure what to say. Then, Odo spoke up.
"Thank you," he said simply. It seemed to take a great effort.
Quark looked at him, confused. Odo had never thanked him for anything before.
"For coming back for me," Odo clarified. "I know you could have left without me. If you had, you wouldn't have had to fight those Jem'Hadar. You risked your life to save me."
"Yeah, well," Quark said. "If I hadn't taken out the Jem'Hadar, they would have just blown up the Orinoco with torpedoes before I could get away. I really didn't have a choice."
"Hmm," Odo hummed. "There is also the matter of your trial."
Quark scoffed. "Really, Odo? After all I did for you?"
"I thought you said you didn't have a choice," Odo sneered. "Anyways, I've looked over the evidence again. It appears that you actually had nothing to do with the crime that was committed, and you are no longer required to stand trial. You're free to go."
Quark's brow furrowed. "That can't be right, I—" Odo glared at him, and Quark stopped. Then, he nodded as he picked up what Odo was putting down. "I mean, of course I had nothing to do with it. That's what I've been saying this whole time! You've really got to get better at this police business."
Odo made a strange rumbling sound. Quark recognized it as a laugh. He grinned.
"Quark?" Odo asked after a while.
"Yeah, Odo?"
"Are we... friends?"
Quark let out a chuckle. "No," he said. "But you know what they say: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
"And, we're enemies."
"Yes."
"Which makes us closer than friends," Odo pointed out.
"Huh," Quark said, grinning. "I guess it does."