Alden finished the trumpet solo with a flourish. The crowd at Vic's applauded for a long minute as he went back to his table. Vic and Ezri welcomed him.

"Great, as always, pally," the holographic host enthused, clapping with the rest. "Ya know, you gotta jam with Davey boy sometime. You'll both learn something."

Endar stared. "Davey boy?" he repeated.

"Kuhlman. Kid really knows how to tickle the ivories."

"Ivories?" Ezri repeated.

"Piano," Endar supplied. He glanced at the now-empty stage. "I didn't think any of Kuhlman's type of instruments would work with your orchestra, Vic! He plays piano too?"

"Virtuoso. Kid should be headlining!" Vic shot back. "So, Ezri, what's the schedule for this soiree of yours?"

"Julian's back in three days, with the Nightingale."

"And ya wanna welcome him back with a party. Good plan. I like it. Of course ya can have it here."

"Actually, we want to have it both here and in Quark's."

Everyone's eyes strayed automatically to what looked like the entrance to the lounge, but was actually the holosuite door to the real world.

"Ahh." Vic nodded in understanding. "Ya wanna give everybody a chance to be there, without offending me or Quark."

"Well...."

"You got it," Endar interjected.

Vic grinned fondly at the Trill. "And you were afraid I'd be offended at sharing the premises? Awh, Ezri, I'm flattered -- but I'm not that easy to offend. Besides, Quark and I, we reached a bit of an understanding. Sure, I'll be half the party space. Not a problem."

The K'Voln shuddered again, throwing all aboard, both crew and raiders, to their knees -- and then, into the air.

"Gravity system offline," the engineering tech reported unnecessarily.

"Repair it!" Telok ordered, equally unnecessarily.

On deck four, aft section -- a cargo bay -- the two forces converged. Lintak led his security team against the invaders, but there was no sense of order. Berserker fury flooded the hearts and souls of the warriors, and they threw themselves at the enemy, howling challenges, bat'leths raised.

But as the gravity went out, they found themselves hurtling toward the ceiling by the force of their own footsteps.

"Disrupters!" roared their leader.

The enemy -- masked, faceless, familiar from the war -- raised their own weapons. One of them spoke, the voice an electronic, grating sound.

They fired.

A man was hit, his war cry turning into a choked screech for only a second as his clothing and body armor smoldered, and his flesh burned. The energy of the shot sent his body spinning sideways toward a girder.

Other shots went wild, both crew and invaders. The walls glowed. Three separate fires started, drifting fireballs.

"Breen dung!" Lintak shouted, bracing a hand on the deck and kicking one of the burning crates toward the enemy. "Take them!"

An eerie battle joined. Shots went wild as people found themselves moving in unexpected directions with every exertion of energy. Hand-to-hand combat turned into wild swings and clutches to keep an enemy close enough to injure. Thrusts of bat'leths and other blades caused minimal damage to their targets.

In every compartment of the ship, crew scrabbled and grabbed for any handhold that would give them purchase in the hand-to-hand fighting, or let them make their way through corridors, or keep them at their stations. Personal items, supplies, and gear clogged corridors and followed the slow drift of circulating air and smoke trails. Crewmen kicked boxes out of their way, sending them off in other vectors.

Among the items, forgotten, was a brown teddy bear, somersaulting lazily head over heels.

On the bridge, more red lights blinked, and a warning klaxon roared.

"Hull breach," one of the officers growled. "We're losing atmosphere!"

"Emergency procedures," Telok ordered, gripping both sides of his command chair to prevent any indignity.

Throughout the ship, hatches sealed and force fields glowed.

Endar and Ezri left Vic's, walking out into the upper level of Quark's establishment.

"Well, that was easier than I thought," Endar remarked, pausing at the railing to look down at the early afternoon crowd.

"Not everybody's as touchy as you are," Ezri observed.

"Hmm, I wonder if holograms can hold grudges...."

"Not the way you can," she replied idly.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Hmmm? Um, well, like toward Kira ... and you were pretty vehement about your feelings about Klingons, earlier."

"I don't like Klingons. I'm entitled to that."

"Even Klingons like Worf and Martok?"

"How can I forget what happened at places like Ajilon Prime?" he countered

Ezri studied him for a moment. "I knew a Vulcan historian, a long time ago. One of the things he told me always fascinated him about humans was their capacity to ... hold grudges, and then to forget them, to set aside old prejudices. He felt it was one of the reasons your people advanced so quickly into the stars, that humans could do in two hundred years what took Vulcan over two thousand years. It's one of the amazing things about your species, frankly. Sets you apart from so many other sentient beings in this universe."

"Not me," he said flatly.

"Endar, individuals are capable of holding grudges, but they're also capable of looking at situations, at people, and choosing not to let old hatreds run their lives. They can choose to leave the past behind and move on. It's a choice people make."

"It's not a choice I'll make."

"Endar, you--"

His eyes suddenly seemed a million light-years away, bleak dark violet pools. "I guess that means I don't qualify as human, then, doesn't it?"

The stark comment shook Ezri up. "I'm not saying that you're less human for still being angry! That's part of your condition. And every individual reacts--"

He just looked back at her, his expression closed down, empty, almost a stranger.

For a second Ezri felt the uneasiness that Kira described when Alden displayed his dark moods -- torn between a desire to hide behind the nearest piece of furniture, and the urge to lash out in self-defense, anything to stop that stare that seemed to come from the heart of a black hole to shred a person's self-confidence and peace of mind. A voice inside seemed to be saying I-told-you-so.

They kept walking, a distant silent chill between them.

Turbolifts had gone down as well as gravity. The two repair crewmen, both armed and carrying small tool kits fastened at their waists, made their way down the empty lift tube, controlling the speed and vector of their drift with grips and nudges against the ladder rungs that lined every lift in case of just such emergencies. They reached their destination level.

The door refused to slide open. The first tech braced his bat'leth against a rung to prevent it floating away, and pulled a coil spanner from his kit. Several deft applications, and the door slowly heeded a command to open. However:

"Internal force fields! We are cut off!" snarled Kord'al, snatching his hand back. He glared at the shimmery haze that blocked their path through the opening.

"Then we can not return to level seven the way we came. We must reach a security junction," responded Motbur from his position above Kord'al, clinging to the rungs at the side of the tube.

Kord'al pulled a scanner from his kit. "It will not matter if we reach a junction. These force fields aren't intended to contain the enemy. Atmospheric pressure is falling. It must be a hull breach."

"So we must either find and seal the breach, or reach a sealed area," the other concluded reasonably. "It must be a microscopic crack or hole -- it cannot be large or we would be in vacuum or spaced by now. Which way?"

The lead technician scowled at his scanner. "Our equipment is not sensitive enough to track it."

"Then we must--" Motbur's voice ended abruptly and he gazed at what had caught his eye.

Caught in a waft of air, Kukalaka slowly spiraled up the empty turbolift shaft. At that moment, the bear had come within sight of the two engineering technicians.

Kord'al stared in disbelief. "What is that?"

Motbur watched as the teddy bear slowly drifted up past them in the lift tube. "That is the Kukalaka! I saw it on the bridge. It belongs to the Trill, Dax!"

"What is it doing here?"

"I think--" The higher Klingon grinned, baring teeth in a frightful grimace. "I think it is following the atmosphere escaping through the breach. And so we will follow it." One-handed, Motbur began to climb the rungs, keeping the bear in sight.

"Follow a ... Kukalaka? Why?"

"To find and seal the breach," he called back.

"We must get to a security junction and report the situation!"

"When we have found the breach, we will have something to report."

"I will not follow a Trill's soft pet," Kord'al muttered. He quickly replaced his tools, grabbed his bat'leth, and continued to descend the shaft.

Motbur followed Kukalaka, to a section of the mess hall. Once or twice, he was almost convinced he should turn aside, that whatever drift of air was carrying the bear had nothing to do with a hull leak. But he persevered.

The mess hall had been the site of some minor skirmish in the intervening hours; tables and chairs were upended in a loose heap along the far wall, obviously kicked aside. Several blaster burns scarred the walls and floor. There was a still-smoldering area along the ceiling; small tendrils of dark smoke shimmied at an angle through one corner of the room.

The bear somersaulted slowly between the scattered furnishings -- then was inexorably drawn toward a replicator on the same wall as the furnishings.

Motbur scowled and made a face. "This is no time for replicated food," he sneered at the bear. "Perhaps for the ones who created you, but for a true Klingon meal, gagh must be...."

His voice faded as he realized the smoke was making its way toward the same replicator, as everything else in the chamber, including the bear. Listening carefully, he though he detected a whine.