Bloodletter

Начало книги

A CRY RANG through the engineering bay.

“Lousy piece of Cardassian crap!”

More words followed, in a vocabulary colorful enough to draw expressions of distaste from a Bajoran work crew nearby. Dressed in the drab gray of one of their planet’s more puritanical sects, they hadn’t yet become used to the rougher edges of station life.

Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien, still cursing, emerged from a thrust-device compartment’s access port. Blood threaded from the corner of his brow, gashed on one of the gantry chains running taut to the vessel’s exposed innards. It was only slightly redder than his sweating face.

“Is there some difficulty you have encountered?” O’Brien’s Cardassian counterpart inquired with mock solicitude. Behind him, curved panels of ship’s armor hung in the bay’s depths like brutalist stage scenery. “If you will recall, I warned you that working on our equipment was a matter best left to experts—”

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