There is linear in the nonlinear, so that neither exists one without the other. So it was with anslem, and all the multitudes that he held within himself, myself among them, in that place that was no place, obtained only by knowing the absence of hours in the hourglass. An hourglass as the entry­way? Was there ever such a joke to make even a Vulcan laugh at those immensities and contradic­tions of meaning? Yet caught in that sea of sand, drawn toward the neck of that hourglass where both the Temples at last were aligned—well, what else could we do in those vast temporal currents but race time....

—jake sisko, Anslem

PROLOGUE

In the Hands of the Prophets

"THIS does not happen," Captain Jean-Luc Picard says.

The Sisko walks with him by the cool waters of Bajor. "It does not, but it did," the Sisko says. "Look around and see it for yourself."

They stand together on the Promenade, the Sisko and O'Brien and twelve-year-old Jake with his bare feet and his fishing pole, and with Kai Winn and Vic and Arla Rees and all of them, and they watch the Prome­nade die exactly as it dies the first time, deck plates buckling, power currents sparking, debris and trailing strips of dislodged carpet spiraling into the singularity that is Quark's bar—where the Red Wormhole opens the doors to the second Temple.

"There is no second Temple," Admiral Ross says.

He sits across from the Sisko in the Wardroom of Deep Space 9. Behind him, the casualty lists scroll end-

lessly as the war with the Dominion begins, ends, be­gins again.

The Sisko stands at the center of B'hala, in the shade of the bantaca tower.

"But there was," the Sisko says.

"There is no was," Kira protests.

"Then explain this," the Sisko replies.

He is with them on the bridge of the Defiant as Deep Space 9 is consumed by the Red Wormhole and the ship is trapped in a net of energies that pull it from that time to another yet to be.

In his restaurant in New Orleans, the Sisko's father says, "That time is meaningless."

On the sands of Tyree, the Sisko's true mother says, "And another time yet to be is more meaningless still."

In the serene confines of the Bajoran Temple on the Promenade the Sisko's laughter echoes. "You still don't understand!" It is a marvel to him, this continuation of a state of being that should not exist without flesh to bind it. "I am here to teach you, am I not?"

"You are the Sisko, pallie," Vic agrees.

The Sisko makes it clear for them. "Then... pay at­tention!"

The Prophets take their places in the outfield as the Sisko steps up to the plate.

"Not this again," Nog says.

The Sisko is delighted. "Again! That's right! You're finally getting the idea!" He tosses his baseball into the air. It hangs like a planet in space, wheeling about Bajor-B'hava'el, until there appears a baseball bat like a comet sparkling through the stars to—

Interruption.

The Sisko is in the light space.

Jennifer stands before him, her legs crushed by the debris on the dying Saratoga, her clothes sodden with her blood. "You keep bringing us back to the baseball game."

The Sisko takes her hand in his. "Yes! Because now it is you—" He looks around the nothingness, knowing they are all within it. "—all of you who will not go for­ward!"

Jennifer is in her robes of Kente cloth, as she wears them on the day they are wed. "There is no forward."

The Sisko discovers he is learning about this place, as if when he falls with Dukat and his flesh is con­sumed by the flames of the Fire Caves, all resistance to the speed of thought is lost.

"If there is no forward," he argues, "then why are we not already there? Why do you not know everything that I tell you?"

"You are linear," General Martok reminds him, as if he could forget.

"So are you," the Sisko says.

And for the very first time, the Sisko now forces them from the light space to a place he makes real, where from the mists of the moon of AR-558 Jem'Hadar soldiers ad­vance and Houdini mines explode all around them.

"What is this?" they plaintively chorus.

"This is death," the Sisko tells them. "This is change. This is the forward progression of time to an end in which there is no more forward. This is the fate of all beings—even your fate."

"Impossible," Kai Opaka says by the reflecting pool.

The Sisko leans against the bar on Space Station

K-7, smiling as he looks down at the old gold shirt he wears with the arrowhead emblem that is only that, not a single molecule of communicator circuitry within it. "This is what has gone before," he informs the smooth-foreheaded Klingons at the bar.

The Sisko stands on the sands of Mars, before the vast automated factories where nanoassemblers fabri­cate the parts for Admiral Picard's mad dream—the U.S.S. Phoenix. "This is what is yet to be," he informs the Tellarite engineers at his side.

And now it is he who returns them to the light space. "And you are all part of that continuum from past to future, with an end before you as surely as you had a beginning."

"What is this?" Arla asks in despair.

"It is why I am here."

"You are the Emissary," Nog agrees.

The Sisko shakes his head. "I am not the Emissary. I am your Emissary."

"How is there a difference?" Grand Nagus Zek asks.

"Think to an earlier time. The first time I came be­fore you."

"You are always before us," O'Brien says.

"I am before you now," the Sisko agrees. "As your Emissary. As one who has come to teach you what you do not know. But before that first time—you must re­member!"

The Sisko brings them all back to the baseball game.

"Here—this first time—you did not know who I was!"

Solok looks at Martok. "Adversarial."

Martok looks at Eddington. "Confrontational."

Eddington looks at Picard. "He must be destroyed."

The Sisko throws a ball high in the air, swings, hits

one out of the park, and all the Prophets turn to watch the orb vanish in the brilliant blue sky.

"Do you see?" the Sisko asks. "How things have changed? The way you were then. The way you are now."

The Prophets are silent.

Nineteen-year-old Jake steps forward from them all.

"This... does not happen," the young man says.

"Maybe you're right," the Sisko sighs. He sits at his desk in his 1953 Harlem apartment, pushes his glasses back along the bridge of his nose, flexes his fingers, then Bennie types on the Remington: Maybe all of this did happen ...

The Sisko stands on Bajor, gazing up as that world's sun reacts to the proto-matter pulse set off by the Gri-gari task force eight minutes earlier and goes super­nova, claiming all the world and all its inhabitants on the last night of the Universe.

... or maybe none of it happened, Bennie types.

"But still," the Sisko says as he tosses another base­ball into the air, "you want to find out what happens next because, for now, you just don't know."

"We know everything," Admiral Ross says.

"Then answer me this," the Sisko says as another fly ball clears the home-run fence. "When I first came to you, when you did not know me, why did you want to destroy me?"

The Prophets are silent.

"Then see this, and answer an even greater mys­tery," the Sisko says, as he returns them all to the bridge of the Defiant just as Captain Thomas Riker de­livers his ultimatum.

"What mystery?" Weyoun asks, clad in his Vedek's robes.

"I will show you the fate of the people who pray to the Prophets as gods. But then you must tell me: To whom do the Prophets pray?"

The Prophets still do not answer.

But they watch as the Sisko continues his story....

CHAPTER 1

like the thirty-three fragile beings within her battered hull, in less than a minute the Starship Defiant would die.

Wounded. Space-tossed. Twenty-five years from home. Her decks littered with the bodies of those who had not survived her journey. And for those who still lived, her smoke-filled corridors reverberated with sen­sor alarms warning that enemy weapons were locked onto her, ready to fire.

Beyond her forward hull, the U.S.S. Opaka acceler­ated toward an attacking wing of three Starfleet vessels. But adding to the confusion of all aboard the Defiant, that warship, which was defending them—inexplicably named for a woman of peace—appeared to be a Starfleet vessel as well.

The Opaka was almost a kilometer long, and though her basic design of twin nacelles and two main hulls was little changed from the earliest days of humanity's

first voyages to the stars, each element of the warship was stretched to an aggressive extreme, most notably the two forward-facing projections thrusting out from her command hull like battering rams. Now, as she closed in on her prey, needle-thin lances of golden en­ergy pulsed from her emitter rings. Existing partially in the other dimensions of Cochrane space, those destruc­tive energy bursts reached their targets at faster-than-light velocities, only to be dispersed into rippling patterns of flashing squares of luminescence as they were broken apart by whatever incomprehensible shields protected the three attacking Starfleet vessels.

In response, the Opaka launched a second warp-speed volley—miniature stars flaring from her launch­ing tubes. The sudden light they carried sprayed across the Defiant's blue-gray hull—the only radiance to illu­minate her so deep in the space between the stars, for there was no glow from her warp engines.

Wisps of venting coolant began escaping from the Defiant's cracked hull plates, wreathing her in vapor. Within the ruin of her engine room, at the source of the leaking coolant, the hyperdimensional stability of her warp core seethed from instability to uselessness a thousand times each second.

The ship had no weapons. Diminished shields. No propulsion. The most limited of life-support, and even that was rapidly failing.

But seconds from destruction, caught in a battle of a war that belonged only to her future, the Defiant, like her crew, was not finished yet.

"Choose   your   side!"   Captain   Thomas    Riker screamed from the Defiant's bridge viewer.

And within this exact same moment, Captain Ben­jamin Sisko was frozen—twenty years of Starfleet training preventing him from making any decision under these circumstances.

Somehow, when Deep Space 9 had been destroyed by the opening of a second wormhole in Bajoran space, the Defiant had become enmeshed in the outer edges of the phenomenon's boundary layer and, like an ancient sailing ship swept 'round an ocean maelstrom, she had been propelled into a new heading—almost twenty-five years in her future.

The year 2400, Jadzia Dax had said.

Which meant—according to Starfleet general orders and to the strict regulations of the Federation Depart­ment of Temporal Investigations—that it was now the responsibility of all aboard the Defiant to refrain from any interaction with the inhabitants of this future. Oth­erwise, when Sisko's ship returned to her proper time, his crew's knowledge of this future could prevent this timeline from ever coming to pass—setting in place a major temporal anomaly. Thus the source of Sisko's paralysis was simple: How could his ship and crew re­turn from a future that would never exist?

With the weight of future history in the balance, Sisko could not choose sides as Riker demanded. Whatever this War of the Prophets was—and Sisko wished he had never even heard Riker say that name— he and the crew of the Defiant had to remain neutral. Starfleet and the FDTI allowed them no other option.

Sisko straightened in his command chair. "Mr. O'Brien. All power to shields—even life-support!"

Almost immediately, the lights in the bridge dimmed and the almost imperceptible hum of the air circulators

began to slow. At the same time, Sisko felt the artificial gravity field lessen to its minimum level, and under­stood that his chief engineer had chosen to reply to his order through instant action in place of time-wasting speech.

Then the Defiant was rocked by a staccato series of explosive impacts unlike any Sisko had ever experi­enced.

"What was that?" Dr. Bashir protested to no one in particular. He was holding his tricorder near Jadzia, checking her head wound once again.

"Shields from sixty-eight to twelve percent!" O'Brien reported with awe. "From one hit!"

Sisko had already ordered the main viewer set to a fifty-percent reduction in resolution so that no one on the bridge—especially O'Brien and Jadzia—might in­advertently pick up clues about future technology sim­ply by seeing what the ships of this time looked like. But the display still held enough detail to show the at­tacking Starfleet vessels flash by. The three craft, each twice the Defiant's length and half its width, were shaped like daggers, the tips of their prows glowing as if they were nothing more than flying phaser cannons.

"Worf!" Sisko said urgently. "What are they firing at us?"

"Energy signature unknown!" Worf's deep voice tri­umphed over even the raucous, incessant alarms. "Propulsion systems unknown!"

Now the Opaka streaked by in pursuit. The viewer flickered with flashes of disruptive energy as once again the hull of the Defiant echoed with the thumps of multiple physical impacts.

"Worf?" Sisko asked. Under the circumstances, it

was a detailed enough question for the Defiant's first officer.

"Sixteen objects have materialized on our hull," Worf answered without hesitation. "They are attached with molecular adhesion. Sensors show antimatter pods in each."

"Contact mines," Sisko said, pushing himself to his feet. "Beamed through what's left of our shields."

Jadzia called out to Sisko from her science station. Her hair was still in uncharacteristic disarray. The med­ical patch on the side of her forehead obscured her deli­cate Trill spotting. But nothing could disguise the apprehension in her tone. "We're out of our league here, Benjamin. I think the mines were beamed in from those three ships, but I can't make any sense of their transporter traces. For what it's worth, they probably could've punched through our shields even at one hun­dred percent."

Major Kira didn't look up from her position at the helm. "The three attackers are on their way back. The Opaka's still in pursuit."

Worf spoke again. "Sir, I am detecting a countdown signal from the mines on our hull. They are pro­grammed to detonate in seventy-three seconds."

Sisko grimaced, trying to understand the logic of that. "Why a countdown? If they can beam antimatter bombs through our shields, why not set them to go off at once?'

Commander Arla Rees had the answer. "It's what die other captain said." The tall Bajoran spun around from her auxiliary sensor station. " 'Every ship is needed for the war.' He said he wasn't going to let the Defiant get away."

Sisko struck the arm of his chair with one fist. "Of

course! The other side wants us too, and they'll only detonate the mines if—"

He and everyone on the bridge involuntarily flinched, shielding their eyes from the sudden flare of blinding light that shot forth from the viewscreen faster than the ship's overtaxed computers could compensate for. At precisely the same instant, the deafening rumble of an explosion erupted from the bridge speakers as the Defiant's sensors automatically converted the impact of energy particles hi the soundless vacuum of space into synthetic noise, giving the crew an audible indication of the size and the direction of the far-off explosion.

"One of the attackers ..." Kira said in disbelief. "It dropped from warp and rammed the Opaka." She looked back over her shoulder. "Captain, that ship had a crew of fifty-eight."

Now at Sisko's side, Bashir murmured under his breath, "Fanatics."

Sisko tried and failed to comprehend what such des­perate action said about the Starfleet of this day.

"Forty seconds until detonation," Worf warned.

"Captain," O'Brien added, "our transporters are off­line. I can't get rid of the mines without an EVA team, and there's just no time."

lime, Sisko thought. And that was the end of his in­decision. As a Starfleet officer, he couldn't risk pollut­ing the timeline. But as a Starship captain... his crew had to come first

"This is the Defiant to Captain Riker, I am—"

The stars on the viewer suddenly spiraled, and the Defiant's deck lurched to starboard, felling everyone not braced in a duty chair, including Sisko.

"Another ship decloaking!" Worf shouted as three

bridge stations blew out in cascades of translator sparks. "We are caught in its gravimetric wake!"

"Dax!" Sisko struggled to his feet. "Stabilize the screen!"

The spiraling stars slowed, then held steady, even though all attitude screens showed that the Defiant was still spinning wildly on her central axis.

Then, with the same dissolving checkerboard pattern of wavering squares of light that Sisko had seen en­velop the Opaka, the new ship decloaked.

Again, Sisko had no doubt he was looking at a ship based on advanced technology. But in this case the vessel was not of Starfleet design; it was unmistakably Klingon—a battlecruiser at least the size of the Opaka. Yet this warship's deep purple exterior hull was studded with thick plates and conduits, with a long central spine extending from the sharp-edged half-diamond of the cruiser's combined engineering and propulsion hull to end in a wedge-shaped bridge module.

"Whose side is it on?" Sisko asked sharply, even as Worf reported that he could pick up no transmissions of any kind from the vessel. But Jadzia caught sight of something on the Klingon's hull and instructed the De­fiant's computer to jump the viewer to magnification fifty and restore full resolution.

At once, Sisko and his crew were looking at a de­tailed segment of the warship's purple hull. Angular Klingon script ran beneath the same modified Starfleet emblem Tom Riker had worn on his uniform—the clas­sic Starfleet delta in gold backed by an upside-down triangle in blue.

"It has to be with the Opaka," Kira said.

12

Worf's next words unnerved Sisko. "And her desig­nation is Boreth."

The Opaka was named for a Bajoran spiritual leader—the first kai Sisko had met on Bajor. And Boreth was the world to which the Klingon messiah, Kahless the Unforgettable, had promised to return after his death. The Starfleet of Sisko's day did not make a habit of naming its ships after religious figures or places. Something had changed in this time. But what?

"Thirty seconds," Worf said tersely.

Sisko faced the viewscreen. "This is Captain Sisko to Captain Riker and to the commander of the Boreth. My crew stands ready to join you. We require immediate evacuation."

"Course change on the two remaining attackers!" Kira announced. "Coming in on a ramming course!"

Sisko clenched his hands at his sides. He didn't un­derstand the tactics. What about the antimatter mines? Their adversaries could destroy the Defiant without sacrificing themselves in a suicidal collision.

Sisko turned abruptly to O'Brien. "Mine status?"

"Only nine left! Seven ... five... Captain, they're being beamed away!"

"The Boreth," Sisko said. That had to be the answer. But why?

He looked at Jadzia. "Any transporter trace?"

"Still nothing detectable, Benjamin."

'Ten seconds to impact with attackers!" Kira shouted. "The Opaka is firing more of those... torpe­does or whatever they are ... five seconds...."

Sisko reached for his command chair. "Brace for col­lision!"

And then, as if a series of fusion sparklers had ig-

nited one after the other across the bridge, Dax, Bashir, and Worf—

—vanished.

One instant Sisko's senior command staff were at their stations. Then, in the center of each of their torsos a single pinpoint of light flared, and as if suddenly twisted away at a ninety-degree angle from every direc­tion at once, the body of each crew member spun and shrank into that small dot of light, which faded as sud­denly as it had blossomed.

"Chief! What happened!"

O'Brien's voice faltered, betraying his utter bewilder­ment. "I... some kind of... transporter, I think. It—it hit all through the ship, sir. We've lost fifteen crew...."

Sisko strode toward Jadzia's science station, but Arla reached the Trill's empty chair before he did.

"The attackers have gone to warp, sir. The Opaka is pursuing. The Boreth is holding its position."

With an arm as heavy as his hopes, Sisko finally al­lowed himself to touch his communicator. "Sisko to Jake."

No answer. Sisko's stomach twisted with fear for his boy.

Arla looked up at Sisko.

"My son—he was in sickbay," Sisko said in answer to Arla's questioning glance.

"Communications are down across the ship," Arla offered.

And then a far-too-familiar voice whispered from the bridge speakers, with pious—and patently false—sur­prise.

"Captain Sisko, I cannot tell you what a privilege it is to see you once again."

Sisko forced himself to raise Ms head to look up at the viewer, to see the odious, smiling speaker who sat in a Klingon command chair, a figure clad in the un­mistakable robes of a Bajoran vedek.

"Weyoun... ?"

"Oh Captain, I feel so honored that you remember me after all this time," the Vorta simpered. "Though I suppose for you it is only a matter of minutes since you were plucked from the timeline and redeposited here."

Sisko stared at the viewscreen as if he were trapped in a dream and the slightest movement on his part would send him into an endless fall.

No, not a dream, Sisko thought. A nightmare....

Because Weyoun's presence as a Bajoran religious leader on a Klingon vessel with Starfleet markings meant only one thing.

Sometime in the past twenty-five years, the war had ended.

And the Dominion had won.

CHAPTER 2

the instant the sirens began to wail, Captain Nog was out of his bunk and running for the door of his quarters, his Model-I personal phaser in hand. Then, barefoot, wearing only Starfleet-issue sleep shorts and no Fer­engi headskirt, Nog slammed into that door. It hadn't opened in response to his full-speed approach.

Coming fully awake with the sudden shock of pain, he slapped his hand against the door's control panel, to punch in his override code and activate manual func­tion. But before he could begin, the lights in his clut­tered quarters dimmed, alarm sirens screamed to life and, with a stomach-turning lurch, Nog felt the gravity net abruptly shut down, leaving him bouncing in nat­ural Martian gravity, still with all his mass but only one-third his weight.

Reflexively Nog slapped at his bare chest, as if his communicator badge were permanently welded to his

17

flesh, then swore an instant later in an obscure Ferengi trading dialect. He darted back to his closet to get his jacket, only to pitch forward as the first shockwave hit Personnel Dome 1.

His cursing reduced to a moan of frustration, Nog jumped to his feet—and banged his head on the ceiling because he'd forgotten to compensate for the suddenly diminished gravity. Dropping to the floor once more, he yanked open his closet door, then ripped his com­municator from the red shoulder of the frayed uniform jacket hanging inside.

He knew exactly what had just happened. The four-second delay between the loss of gravity and the arrival of the ground tremor made it obvious. The main power generators for the entire Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards had been sabotaged. Again.

Nog squeezed his communicator badge—a scarlet Starfleet arrowhead against an oval of Klingon teal and gold—between thumb and forefinger as he turned back toward the door. But all the device did was squeal with subspace interference—jamming, pure and simple.

Nog tossed the useless badge aside, then punched in his override code for the door. When the door still didn't open, he abandoned caution and protocol and blasted through it with his phaser.

A moment later his bare feet were propelling him with long, loping strides along the dark corridors of the shipyard's largest personnel dome. Multiple sirens wailed, all out of phase and echoing from every direc­tion, a sonic affront to bis sensitive ears. Flashing yel­low lights spun at each corridor intersection. More shockwaves and muffled explosions rumbled through the floor and walls. But Nog ignored them all. There

was only one thought in his mind, one goal as impor­tant as any profit he could imagine.

The Old Man.

As he reached the main hub of the dome—a large, open atrium—he could see thin columns of smoke twist­ing up from the lower levels, as if a fire had broken out at the base of the free-standing transparent elevator shafts.

Nog rushed to the railing, leaned over, and peered down to the bottom level. Glowing lances of light from rapidly moving palm torches blazed within the heavy smoke that filled the central concourse five floors down. Though he could see nothing else within the murk, his sensitive ears identified the rush of fire-fight­ing chemicals being sprayed by the dome's emergency crews. He could also hear the thunder of running foot­steps, as other personnel bounded up the stairways that spiraled around the atrium, fleeing the fire below.

To the side Nog saw a disaster locker that had auto­matically opened as soon as the alarms had sounded. He ran to it and took out two emergency pressure suits, each vacuum-compressed to rectangular blocks no larger than a sandwich. As swiftly as he could, he tugged the carry loops of the compressed suits over his wrist, then charged up the closest stairway himself, pushing coughing ensigns and other Fleet workers out of his way while automatically counting each one, even as he also kept track of each set of twenty stair risers that ran from level to level. He was a Ferengi, thank the Great River, and numbers were as integral to his soul as breathing—fourteen times each minute, or approxi­mately 20,000 times each Martian day.

Torrents of statistics flooded his mind as he ran, trig­gered by the people he passed. In this dome, he knew, most of the personnel were either Andorian (42 percent precisely) or Tellarite (23.6 percent), supplemented by a few dozen Vulcans (48) and Betazoids (42) who had been unable to find rooms in the respective domes set to their environmental preferences.

Of the six main personnel domes in this installa­tion—hurriedly constructed after the attack of '88— none were set to Earth-normal conditions. After '88 it just hadn't made sense.

The Old Man's quarters, however, as befitted a VIP suite, had individual gravity modifiers and atmospheric controls, enabling flag officers and distinguished guests to select any preferred environmental condition, from the Breen Asteroidal Swarm frigid wasteland to Vulcan high desert. Those quarters were on the ninth level, just one below the topmost ground-level floor, with its com­mon-area gymnasium, arboretum, and mess hall.

By the time he reached that level, Nog's feet were stinging from a dozen small cuts inflicted by the rough non-skid surface of the stairs. But mere discomfort had no power to slow him. He looked up once just long enough to see that all the clear panes of the dome's faceted roof were still intact, then headed away from the stairs to charge down the corridor leading to the VIP units.

Nog swore again as he saw the bodies of two guards sprawled on the floor by the shattered security door. Absolute evidence, he feared, that the sabotage of the generators was just a diversion, that the real target was alone and defenseless at the end of this final corridor.

Nog launched himself like an old-fashioned Martian astronaut over the knife-sharp shards of the shattered door. At the same time, like a twenty-fourth-century

commando, he thumbed his phaser to full power. The pen-size silver tube bore little resemblance to the weapons he had trained with when he entered the Academy more than twenty-five years ago. But at its maximum setting this new model had all the stopping power of an old compression phaser rifle. For ten dis­charges, at least.

Nog finally slowed as he rounded the last corner be­fore the Old Man's quarters. The sirens were quieter here, and only one warning light spun, presumably be­cause security staff were always on duty here. But none of those alarms was necessary, because there was no mistaking the distinctive ozone scent of Romulan poly-wave disruptors—and that was warning enough mat a security breach was under way.

He had been right about the true target of this attack, but the knowledge brought him no satisfaction. The Old Man was ninety-five years old—in no condition to re­sist an attack by Romulan assassins. The best Nog could hope to do now was to keep the killers from escaping.

Two more long strides brought him to the entrance of the Old Man's quarters. As he had expected, both doors had been blown out of their tracks, sagging top and bottom, half disintegrated, their ragged edges sparkling with the blue crystals of solidified quantum polywaves.

Phaser held ready, Nog advanced through the twisted panels, into a spacious sitting room striped with gauzy tendrils of smoke. The only source of light came from a large aquarium set into a smooth gray wall. The aquar­ium obviously had its own backup power supply, and undulating ripples of blue light now swept the room, set in motion by the graceful movement of the fins of the Old Man's prized lionfish.

Nog paused for a moment, intent on hearing the slight­est noise, certain the assassins could not have left so soon. The shields that protected the shipyard's ground in­stallations were separately powered by underground and orbital generating stations, and not even the new Grigari subspace pulse-transporters could penetrate the con­stantly modulating deflector screens. However the Romu­lans planned to escape, their first step had to be on foot.

Nog had no intention of letting them take that step— or any others.

As methodically as a sensor sweep, he turned his head so his ears could fix on any sounds that might be coming from the short hall leading to the bedroom, or from the door to the small kitchen, or from the door to the study.

He concentrated on the hallway. Nothing. Though that didn't rule out the possibility that someone might be hiding in the bedroom.

Next, the kitchen. Nothing.

Then the study. And there Nog heard slow, shallow breathing.

He began to move sideways, still holding his phaser before him, aiming it at the study door. There was just enough light from the aquarium to avoid bumping the bland Starfleet furniture. He flattened himself against the wall beside the study door, silently counting down for his own—

—attack!

His absolutely perfect textbook move propelled him through the study doorway in a fluid low-gravity roll, smoothly bringing him to his feet in a crouch, thumb already pushing down on the activation button of his phaser as he targeted the first Romulan he saw—the one on the floor by the desk.

But when the silver phaser beam punched its way through the Romulan, the Romulan gave no reaction.

For an instant, Nog stared at his adversary in puzzle­ment. Then reality caught up to him. His shot had been unnecessary.

The first Romulan was already dead.

So was the second Romulan, slumped on the couch. The gold shoulder of his counterfeit Starfleet uniform was darkened by green blood seeping from the deep, wide gash that scored his neck.

Then a tremulous, raspy voice came from the direc­tion of the room's bookcases. The ones filled with real books. "There's a third one in the bedroom."

Nog slowly straightened up from his crouch. "Admi­ral?"

The Old Man stepped from the shadows, into the light spilling through the doorway behind Nog. He was a hew-mon, slightly stooped. His bald scalp was flushed a deep red, and his long fringe of white hair, usually tied back in a Klingon-style queue, sprayed across his bare shoulders. Only then did Nog realize that the Old Man was naked, his sharp skeleton painfully evident through nearly translucent, thin skin. The only object he carried was a bat'leth. It dripped with dark and glistening green blood.

But the Old Man's eyes were sparkling, and the creases around them crinkled in amusement as he also took a closer look at his would-be rescuer. "It appears you're out of uniform, Nog."

Nog laughed with affection. "Look who's talking, Jean-Luc."

Fleet Admiral Jean-Luc Picard—the beloved Old Man to Ms staff—joined in the laughter. "I was in the sonic shower when—" He doubled over, coughing.

Immediately, Nog pulled from the couch a blanket untouched by Romulan blood, and draped it carefully around the Old Man's sharp-boned shoulders. Fittingly, Nog saw, the blanket was woven with the old Starfleet emblem and the name and registration of Picard's last ship command: the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-F.

Nog reached for the bat'leth. "Maybe I should take that."

The Old Man stared at the weapon for a few mo­ments, as if wondering how it came to be in his hands.

"That's the one Worf gave you, isn't it?" Nog asked gently.

The Old Man seemed relieved. "That's right." He handed the bat'leth to Nog. "How is Worf? Have you heard from him on Deep Space 9?"

Nog kept his smile steady. He had already conferred with Starfleet Medical on this: The Old Man was in the secondary stages of Irumodic Syndrome, a degenera­tive disorder linked to a progressive and incurable dete­rioration of the synaptic pathways. The doctors had told Nog that the Old Man's short-term memory would be first to show signs of disruption, and that's just what had happened. It had become common this past year for the admiral to forget the names of the newer re­searchers who had joined Project Phoenix. But now, as the project drew nearer its absolute deadline and the unrelenting pressure mounted, it was distressing to see that the Old Man also seemed to be having more and more difficulty recalling events that had occurred years, even decades, before.

"Worf is dead, Jean-Luc," Nog said quietly. "When Deep Space 9—"

The Old Man's eyes widened. "—was destroyed.

That's right" He licked his dry Ups, pulled the blanket of his last command more tightly around his shoulders. "That's when it all started, you know."

Nog understood what the Old Man meant. Everyone in what was left of the Federation did. With the destruc­tion of Deep Space 9 and the discovery of the second wormhole in Bajoran space, all the conditions that had led to this terrible state of siege had been set in place.

"I was there when it happened," Nog reminded him.

Late at night, the memories of that last day, that last hour on DS9, that last minute before he had been beamed out to the [7.5.5. Garneau, were as vivid to Nog as if they had happened only hours earlier, as if he were still in his youth, still only an ensign.

Back then, back there, he had been working in Ops with Garak and Jadzia, painstakingly restoring the sta­tion's computers. Then something had happened in his uncle's bar. Captain Sisko had asked for Jadzia's help, for Chief O'Brien's help, even for Nog's father's help. But he had not asked for Nog's.

Less than an hour later, the gravimetric structure of space had suddenly distorted, and every warning light and siren in Ops had gone off at once as the order came to abandon the station. Even now, Nog was still unable to make sense of the readings he had seen at the time. Only after the fact had he learned that a wormhole had opened unnaturally slowly in his uncle's bar on the Promenade. After the fact, he had learned that a few survivors from the Promenade had been beamed aboard the rescue flotilla, with stories describing how the three Red Orbs of Jalbador had moved into alignment by themselves, somehow triggering the wormhole's ap­pearance.

But in the confusion of those final moments, Nog had been left with the mystery of the sensors, watching uncomprehendingly as transport indicators showed the start of mass beam-outs, and—inexplicably—a handful of beam-ins.

Then, only seconds from the end, when the station's power had failed, plunging all of Ops into momentary darkness before the emergency batteries came on-line, Nog had heard Jake Sisko's voice as if he were calling out from far away. He remembered spinning around, al­ready so close to panic that only Garak's eerily calm example had kept him focused on his work of dropping shields according to emergency evacuation procedures in order to permit as many transports as possible.

But when he had turned in answer to Jake's call— that was when Nog had screamed as only a Ferengi could. Because Jake was only centimeters behind him.

Jake had reached out to him then, silently mouthing Nog's name as if he were shouting as loudly as he could. To his perpetual regret, Nog had drawn back from his friend in fear. His abrupt move caused him to stumble back over his stool, begin to fall, and when he landed, he was on a cargo-transporter on the Garneau.

Two muscle-bound lieutenants had dragged him off the array so quickly, one of his arms had been dislo­cated, the other deeply bruised. And by the time a har­ried-looking medical technician had finally gotten to him, everything was over.

Deep Space 9.

The Defiant.

His father, his uncle, and his best friend, Jake.

Gone. Snuffed out. The void within him the equal of the one that had swallowed everyone he had loved.

"I was there when it happened," Nog said again. "When everyone died."

That sudden flash of a smile came to the Old Man again. "Oh, no. They didn't die, Nog."

But Nog knew that theory, too. And he didn't accept it If there was any hope for the Federation, for the galaxy, for the universe itself, that hope rested instead with Project Phoenix and the brilliance of Jean-Luc Pi­card, however much that brilliance was compromised. What needed to be done now—the only thing that could be done—was something that only the Old Man had accomplished before; at least, he was the only star-ship captain alive today who had accomplished it. And Nog, and everyone else who had sacrificed and strug­gled to make Jean-Luc Picard's Phoenix a reality, con­tinued to believe he could do it again. They had to believe.

Fifteen more standard days, Nog thought. All he had to do was keep the Old Man calm and stress-free for 360 more hours. Keep the Old Man's peridaxon levels up. Make sure he slept and ate as his medical team de­termined was necessary, and the Phoenix would fly and the nightmare would end. Failure was unacceptable— and unthinkable.

"Jean-Luc, Captain Sisko was lost with the Defiant. They were all lost. And now the Federation is counting on you, and science. Not some ancient prophecy."

The Old Man stood in the middle of his sitting room, shaking his head like a patient teacher addressing a confused student. "You know ... you know people used to fight over whether or not a photon was a wave or a particle. Centuries ago they used to think it had the characteristics of both, and depending which character-

istic an experiment was set up to find, that's the charac­teristic that was revealed."

It might have been a long time ago, but Nog still re­membered the science history classes he had taken at the Academy. He was familiar with the muddled early be­ginnings of multiphysics, when scientists had first en­countered quantum effects and had lacked the basic theory to understand them as anything more than appar­ently contradictory phenomena. He knew that the old physicists' mistake had not been in trying to determine the nature of light as particle or wave, but in thinking it had to be only one or the other. Fortunately, the blinding simplicity of the Hawking Recursive-Dimension Inter­pretation had taken care of that fallacy, and all apparent quantum contradictions had disappeared from the equa­tions overnight, opening the door to applied quantum engineering for everything from faster-than-light com­munication to the Heisenberg compensators used in every transporter and replicator system to this day.

"The debate over the nature of light is ancient history," Nog said kindly. "Not science. Certainly not prophecy."

Another tremor shook the floor beneath them. Longer and more sustained man the others that had pre­ceded it Nog looked away from the Old Man as his ears picked up a distant, high-pitched whistle, some­thing he doubted any hew-mon would be able to hear. To him, it could mean only one thing: The atmospheric forcefields were down.

"But the way the question was resolved," the Old Man insisted. "That's what's applicable today."

Nog quickly slipped one of the vacuum-compressed emergency suits off his wrist, tugged on the loop to break the seal, and in less than a second shook out a

crinkly, semitransparent blue jumpsuit. "Here, Jean-Luc. We'd better put these on."

"Y'see," the Old Man said, as he stepped agonizingly slowly into one leg of the suit, then the other, "the con­flict between particle and wave was resolved when it was discovered that the real answer united both aspects. Different sides of the same coin."

Nog slipped the blanket from Picard's shoulders and helped pull both the Old Man's sleeves on, making sure the admiral's hands reached to the mitt-like ends.

"Same thing with ancient prophecy and science," the Old Man explained.

Nog smoothed out the flaps of Picard's suit opening, then pressed them together so the molecular adhesors created an airtight seal. All that remained now was to pull up the hood hanging down the Old Man's back, seal that to the suit, then twist the small metal cylinder at the suit's neck, which would inflate the face mask to provide the admiral with ten minutes of emergency air while at the same time transmitting a transporter distress beacon.

Though he estimated the atmospheric pressure in the personnel dome would hold for the next minute or two, Nog didn't want to take any chances with the Old Man. Swiftly, he positioned Picard's hood, sealed it, then twisted the cylinder so that a clear bubble of micro-thin polymer formed around the Old Man's face.

"Science and ancient prophecy," the admiral shouted through the mask, undeterred by all of Nog's minister-ings. "Look deeply enough, and who's to say both aren't different aspects of the same thing? Just like par­ticle and wave!"

Even as Nog shook out his own suit, quickly don­ning and sealing it, the admiral's words had a chilling

effect on Mm. The Ascendancy's propaganda had won it dozens of worlds already—fifty-two to be exact, ac­cording to the latest intelligence estimates. If those falsehoods were to reach the workers of Project Phoenix, perhaps the project would survive. But if they infected Admiral Picard... Nog didn't even want to think of the consequences.

Nog hesitated before pulling his own hood over his head. Fortunately, the pressure suits were designed to fit up to a 200-kilogram Tellarite, so there would be ample room even for a Ferengi head and ears. "Jean-Luc, you can't allow yourself to be distracted by Ascendancy lies. You have to concentrate on finishing die Phoenix." "But they're not lies," Picard replied indignantly. Nog put his hands on the Old Man's shoulders, and their suits crackled like a blazing campfire. "Jean-Luc, please. Remember what you've been telling us since the project began. The Ascendancy will do anything, say anything, to divert us from our course."

Picard patted Nog's hand on his left shoulder. "But that was before, Will."

"Before what?" Nog didn't bother to correct the Old Man. When he was tired or confused, the admiral often thought Nog was his old first officer from the Enter­prise-D and E, Will Riker. Another casualty of '88.

"Before this attack!" The Old Man spread his arms grandly, and Nog noticed that both his suit and Picard's had begun to expand slightly, obviously in response to reduced air pressure in the dome.

Nog checked the ready light on the small metal cylinder on his own suit. The emergency beacon was transmitting. The automatic search-and-rescue equip­ment installed throughout the Utopia Planitia Fleet

Yards was designed to be activated by the first sign of falling air pressure. By now, Nog knew, sensors throughout the domes should be locking onto emer­gency beacons and activating automatic short-range transporters to beam personnel to underground shelters.

"What's so special about this attack?"

"It's fifteen days!" the Old Man said. "Don't you see? It's no coincidence they're attacking now! It's a di­version. To keep us from the truth."

"What truth?" Nog shouted. The air outside his suit was thinning rapidly, and the Old Man's voice was fading.

"They've come back!" the Old Man said. "It's the only explanation."

Then, before Nog could offer an alternate explana­tion of his own, he was relieved to see the Old Man begin to dissolve in a transporter beam, followed a mo­ment later by the transformation into light of the admi­ral's quarters. They were both being beamed away.

But as their new location took shape around them, Nog realized with a start that they hadn't been beamed to safety in the underground shelters.

Martian gravity had been replaced by Class-M normal.

He and the Old Man were no longer in the shipyards, and the people surrounding them were not Starfleet emergency-evacuation personnel.

They were Romulans.

And this close to the end of the universe, Nog knew that Romulans could only want one thing.

The death of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard.

CHAPTER 3

sometimes, Julian Bashir remembered what it was like to be normal.

But such bittersweet memories were suspect, be­cause they were invariably mixed in with disjointed recollections of his early childhood, from his first faint glimmerings of self-awareness to age six. For the rest of his childhood—that is, everything beyond age 6 years plus 142 days—there were, of course, no dis­jointed recollections, only perfect recall. Because on the one hundred forty-third day of his seventh year of existence he had awakened in the suffocating gel of an amino-diffusion bam, with an illegally altered genetic structure. On that day everything had changed—not just within the boy he had been, but within the universe that had previously surrounded him.

In fact, sometimes it seemed to Bashir that the inno­cent male child who had been born to his parents thirty-

four years ago had perished in that back-alley gene mill on Adigeon Prime, and that he—the altered creature who now called himself Julian Bashir—was in fact a changeling of old Earth legends.

Little Julian—the terrified boy who had been im­mersed in the diffusion bath with no idea what he had done wrong to make his parents punish him in such a way—had been undeniably slow to learn throughout his entire, brief life. His environment had been a constant marvel to him, because so much of it was simply be­yond his natural capacity to comprehend. His beloved stuffed bear, Kukalaka, had been no less alive to him than his mother's cruelly nipping and yipping Martian terriers. To little Julian, it had been obvious that the var­ious computer interfaces in his home contained little people who could speak to him. And he had only been able to watch in wonder as the other children at his school somehow answered questions or accomplished tasks with abilities indistinguishable to him from magic.

One recollection that most often resurfaced when least wanted from those blurry, half-remembered days of dull normalcy, was of standing in his school's play­room listening to Naomi Pedersen chant the times table. To little Julian there had been absolutely no connection between the numerals that floated above the holoboard and the words that his classmate sang out. The discon­nect had been so profound that Bashir clearly remem­bered his early, untransformed self not even attempting to understand what was going on: Naomi was simply uttering random noises, and the squiggles above the holoboard were only unrelated doodles.

From his present vantage point, Bashir regarded those days of simple incomprehension as the peace of

innocence. They marked a time when he was unaware that life was a continuing straggle, a never-ending se­ries of problems to be overcome by those equipped to recognize and solve them.

Now he recognized that same peace of incomprehen­sion in most of the fourteen others with whom he had just been transported from the Defiant, and he envied them their unknowing normalcy.

But, incapable of giving in to what he suspected was their hopeless situation, Bashir still studied his surround­ings. He and the others were standing together in what appeared to be a familiar setting: the hangar deck of a Starfleet vessel, complete with the usual bold yellow sign warning about variable gravity fields, and the stacks of modular shipping crates marked with the Starfleet delta and standard identification labels. Other than the fact that the lighting was about half intensity, and the air unusually cool, Bashir could almost believe he was on a standard Starfleet cargo ship in his own time. Only the Starfleet emblem on the crates confirmed that he and the others from the Defiant were still in the future.

Interestingly enough, that emblem, though under­standably different from the one used in his time, was also different from the emblem Captain Riker had worn on his uniform, and that had been emblazoned on the Klingon cruiser. That identifying mark, Bashir recalled, had placed a gold Starfleet arrowhead against an up­side-down triangle of blue. But here on this ship, the arrowhead was set within a vertically elongated oval, its width matching the oval's. The arrowhead itself was colored the red of human blood, the lower half of the oval teal and the upper half gold—as if the colors of the k'Roth ch'Kor, the ancient Klingon trident that was

the symbol of the Empire, had been merged with the more recent symbol of Starfleet.

But rather than give himself a headache trying to fathom the political permutations that might have led to the two different versions of the Starfleet emblem in this future, Bashir set that particular problem aside. In­stead, he directed his attention to the conversations going on around him—five now—and his mind was such that he could effortlessly keep up with each at the same time. In all except one of those conversations, Bashir heard relief expressed, primarily because of the familiar surroundings.

The single conversation that was more guarded was that between Jadzia and Worf. Klingon pessimism and the Trill's seven lifetimes of experience were obviously enabling the two officers to come to the same conclu­sion Bashir's enhanced intellect had reached: They were in more danger now than when the Defiant had come under attack.

Bashir wasted little time contemplating what might happen in the next few minutes. His primary responsi­bility was to his crewmates, and to the few civilians who had been evacuated from Deep Space 9 to the De­fiant and then beamed here.

He rapidly assessed the fourteen others for obvious signs of injury or distress. Nine of them were either Defiant or DS9 crew members, six in Starfleet uni­forms, three in the uniforms of the Bajoran militia. The other five, including—Bashir was surprised to see—the unorthodox archaeologist Vash, were civilians; three of these human, the other two Bajorans.

He also noted, without undue concern, that the med­ical patch on the side of Jadzia's forehead was stained

with blood and needed to be replaced. Without a proto­plaser he had been unable to close the small wound; the dense capillary network beneath a Trill's spots made them prone to copious and unsightly—though not life-threatening—bleeding as a result of any minor cut or scrape in the general area.

Close by Jadzia's side, Worf was uninjured and un­bowed. His uniform was soiled by smoke, and one side of his broad face was streaked with soot. His scowl was evidence not of any wound to his body, but rather to his sense of pride and honor—outrage being his people's traditional response to captivity.

Bashir also observed that Jake Sisko, who was cur­rently engaged in listening carefully to Worf and Jadzia's conversation without taking part, also seemed unharmed. The tall, lanky young man had been helping out in the Defiant's sickbay when the group transport to this ship had taken place. It was a blessing, Bashir thought, that at least none of the Defiant's surviving crew or passengers had required critical medical atten­tion before their doctor had been kidnapped.

Then again, the last he himself could recall from his own final moments on the Defiant's bridge was that there were still some antimatter contact mines attached to her hull, so there was no way of knowing if the ship or any of the crew and passengers not transported here still survived.

Then a hoarse female voice interrupted his thoughts. 'This isn't good, is it?"

It was Vash, and automatically Bashir reviewed her condition. The last place he had seen her had been in Quark's bar, when the three Red Orbs of Jalbador had moved themselves into alignment and somehow trig-

gered the opening of a second wormhole in Bajoran space.

Vash, an admittedly alluring adventurer and archae­ologist of questionable ethics, was still in the same out­fit she had worn in the bar—no more than an hour ago in relative time—as if she were prepared to trek across the Bajoran deserts in search of lost cities. She no longer toted her well-worn oversized shoulder bag, though. Bashir guessed it must be either back on the Defiant or left behind in the mad rush from Quark's and the subsequent mass beam-out to the evacuation flotilla.

Vash waved an imperious hand in front of his face. "You keep staring at me like that, I'm going to think one of us has a problem. And it's not me."

"Sorry," Bashir said, flushing. "I didn't see you on the Defiant. There were some injuries from the evacua­tion, and ..." He shrugged. It was pointless to say any­thing more. It was quite likely Vash was used to people staring at her, for all the obvious reasons.

"I was hustled into the Defiant's mess hall right after I was beamed aboard." Vash frowned. "What the hell happened?"

Bashir told her as succinctly as he could. The old, apocryphal legends of the Red Orbs of Jalbador had turned out to be correct, at least in part. A second Tem­ple—or wormhole—had opened, though since they were now twenty-five years or so into the future the part of the legend about the opening of the second Temple causing the end of the universe was clearly and thank­fully not correct. Bashir was about to describe the at­tacking ships and what Captain Thomas Riker had said about the War of the Prophets, but Vash interrupted.

"Twenty-five years? Into the future?"

Bashir nodded. "It happens."

"Not to me."

"Think of it as archaeology in reverse."

Vash's eyes flashed. "This isn't fanny, Doc. The longer we stay here the more likely it is we'll learn about the future, and the less likely we are to have someone let us go back." She looked over at the crates. "Especially if some bureaucrat at Starfleet has anything to say about it."

"That's true," Bashir agreed. He glanced at the main personnel doors leading into the interior of whatever vessel they were aboard—one of the two surviving at­tack ships, he had concluded. "But on the plus side, no one from this ship has attempted to communicate with us. That could suggest they're also following Starfleet regulations, and want to keep us isolated for our return."

"You don't really believe that."

"And why not?"

"If they wanted to keep us isolated, why beam us off the Defiant?"

"We were under attack. The Defiant might have been destroyed."

"Attacked by who?" Vash asked, and Bashir told her the other half of the story, about Thomas Riker in the Opaka and the three attacking Starfleet vessels.

"That makes no sense," Vash said when Bashir had finished.

'Things change. Twenty-five years is a long time."

"How things have changed has nothing to do with our current situation," Vash told him. "If this is a Starfleet vessel, how long do you think it would take some technician to run a search of the service record of the Defiant?"

"Your point?"

"C'mon, Doc. Did that strange transporter scramble your synapses? If the historical record shows the Defi­ant disappeared with all hands when DS9 was de­stroyed, then we're not going back. It's that simple."

Bashir bit his lip. Vash had reached the same conclu­sion he had. There were a few unresolved issues, how­ever. "This ship we're on was probably one of the ones involved in the attack. If it's been damaged, the Defi­ant's service record may not be available. The delay in any attempted communication could be a result of hav­ing to wait to hear back from Starfleet Command."

Vash looked skeptical. "I never took you for much of a dreamer."

Before Bashir could reply, Jadzia, Worf, and Jake had joined them.

"Julian," Jadzia said teasingly, "a dreamer? Like no other, complete with stars in his eyes."

Bashir did not respond to Jadzia's banter. She had been trying to act as if nothing had changed between them since she had married Worf. But it had. Though until these last few weeks, when Jadzia and Worf had sought his counsel on the likelihood of a Klingon and a Trill procreating, Bashir had almost convinced himself that Worf was only a temporary inconvenience, not an insurmountable barrier. In time, he had reasoned, Jadzia would tire of her plainspoken Klingon mate and begin to seek more sophisticated company. But know­ing her as he did, even he could not fantasize a time when Jadzia would tire of her child-to-be, or deny that child a chance to know its father.

So there it was. His heart was broken, and his suc­cess at hiding his misery from Jadzia was one of the few advantages of having an enhanced intellect: Only

his ability to master advanced Vulcan meditation tech­niques was sparing him public and personal humilia­tion.

"Vash is concerned that the longer we wait here," Bashir explained, "the less likely it is we'll be allowed to go back to our own time."

"Allowed?" Jake asked in alarm.

Jadzia put her hand on the young man's shoulder. 'To go back, Jake, we're going to need access to ad­vanced technology."

Jake looked confused. "What about temporal sling­shot?"

Jadzia shook her head. "We didn't get here by sling­shot, so we don't have a Feynman curve to follow back to our starting point. Any attempt we make to move into the past will result in a complete temporal decoupling."

Jake stared at her, not a gram of understanding in nun.

Worf took over. "It would be like entering a planet's atmosphere at too shallow an angle. Our craft would skip out, away from the planet, never to return."

"Though in our case," Jadzia continued, "we would skip out of our normal space-time and ... well, then it becomes a question of philosophy, not physics. But if you think about it, if anyone with a warp drive could go back in time wherever and whenever she wanted, half the stars in the galaxy wouldn't exist. I mean, a century ago Klingons would have gone back in time a million years and dropped asteroids on Earth and Vulcan to eliminate the Empire's competitors before they had ever evolved."

Jake glanced at Worf. "Really?"

Worf shifted uncomfortably. "It was a different time. But yes, I have heard rumors of the Empire dispatching

temporal assault teams to destroy ... enemy worlds be­fore the enemy could arise."

"What happened to them?" Jake asked.

"We do not know."

But as Bashir anticipated, Jadzia found so simple an answer unacceptable. "As far as we can tell," she said, "the physics of it is pretty straightforward. Any given time traveler moving from one time to another at a rate greater than the local entropic norm, or on a reverse en-tropic vector, has to move outside normal space-time along a pathway called a Feynman curve. Now, if the past the traveler goes to is not disrupted, the Feynman curve retains its integrity and, provided the traveler can find it again, the way is clear to return to the starting point. However, if the timeline is significantly dis­rupted, the Feynman curve collapses, because its end point—that is, the traveler's starting point—no longer exists. It's like cutting the end of a rope bridge."

Bashir was curious to see how Jake's imaginative mind would tackle Jadzia's elegantly defined problems of temporal mechanics. Though strict causality did not exist at the most fundamental levels of the universe, it was the defining characteristic of macroscopic exis­tence. Indeed, that was one of the chief reasons why the warp drive and time travel took so long to be discov­ered by emerging cultures. Even though both concepts were rather simple, requiring little more than a basic atomic-age engineering capability to demonstrate, the ideas of faster-than-light travel and time-like curves in­dependent of space could not easily be grasped by minds narrowly conditioned by primitive Einsteinian physics—any more than Newton could have conceived of relativistic time dilation.

Jake's young face wrinkled in concentration. "Hold it... it sounds as if you're saying that the Klingons could have traveled back in time and destroyed the Earth."

"There's no reason why they couldn't," Jadzia agreed. "In fact, several of the temporal assault missions Worf mentioned could have succeeded. It's just that if they did destroy the Earth in the past, the present they came from—in which the Earth had not been destroyed—no longer existed, so they could never return to it."

"But..." Jake said uncertainly, "... the Earth does exist."

"In this timeline," Jadzia agreed. She smiled indul­gently at Jake. "What you're struggling with is what they used to call on Earth the grandfather paradox. It was a long time ago, before anyone thought time travel possi­ble. Yet early theorists imagined a situation in which a time traveler could go back in time and kill his grandfa­ther before his father was conceived. No father meant no son. No son meant no time traveler. But no time traveler meant that the grandfather hadn't been killed, so the fa­ther was born, the son became the time traveler, and..." Jadzia smiled as Jake finished the paradox.

"... and the grandfather was killed." Jake's expres­sion was thoughtful. "But... you're saying that can happen?"

"There's nothing to prevent it The difference be­tween what the Einsteinian-era physicists thought and what we know today, from actual experimental demon­strations, is that no paradox results."

"How's that possible?"

"Two solutions are suggested, but neither is testable—so both have equal validity. One solution is that if you, say, went back in time and killed your

grandfather, a temporal feedback loop would be estab­lished that would collapse into a hyperdimensional black hole, cutting the loop off from any interaction with the rest of the universe. The end result would be as if the events leading to the feedback loop never hap­pened. The second solution states that the instant you killed your grandfather, you'd create a branching time­line. That is, two universes would now exist—one in which your grandfather lived, and one in which he died."

"But if he died, then how could I go back and kill him?"

"You can't, Jake. Not from the new timeline. But since you came from the old one, there's no paradox. How­ever, because the Feynman curve you followed no longer exists, you are trapped in the new timeline you created, with no way to get back. In effect, you're a large virtual particle that has tunneled out of the quantum foam."

Jadzia put her hand on Worf's shoulder, a gesture of familiarity that caused an unexpected tightness in Bashir's throat. "A few years ago," she said, "when Worf was on the Enterprise, he encountered a series of parallel universes that were extremely similar to our own. Some researchers suggest that those parallel di­mensions have actually been created by the manipula­tion of past events by time travelers."

Vash put her hands on her hips and sighed noisily. "Do the rest of us have to know this for the test? Or does any of this hypothetical moonshine have anything to do with our situation, right here and now?"

Bashir sensed Jadzia's dislike of Vash in the Trill's quick reply, though her words were polite. "It has everything to do with our situation, Vash. From our

perspective, we've traveled into our future. But from the perspective of the people who live here, we're in­truders from the past who—if we return—could pre­vent this future from ever existing."

"It wouldn't just be a split-off, parallel dimension?" Jake asked.

"It might be," Jadzia allowed. "But then again, this present might just wink out of existence, along with everyone in it. Remember what happened on Gaia, to the people who were our descendants? If this was your present, would you be willing to risk nonexistence for the sake of a handful of refugees from the past?"

As Jake thought that over, Worf added, "Several years ago, the Enterprise encountered the Bozeman—a Starfleet vessel that had been caught in a temporal causality loop for almost a century. Once we broke the loop, the crew of the ship was in the same situation we face now."

"What happened to them?' Jake asked.

Worf frowned. "Historical records stated that the Bozeman had disappeared without a trace. Since it had never returned home in our timeline, Starfleet could not risk sending it back. Under Starfleet regulations, her captain and her crew were ... resettled in their new time."

"And that's what's going to happen to us?" Jake said, dismayed.

"That appears to be the most likely outcome," Bashir said, when no one else offered an answer to Jake's question.

"Not for me," Vash said. "I'm not Starfleet. I'm going home."

"Really? How?" Jadzia asked. Bashir could tell she

44

intended her challenge to reduce Vash to inarticulate si­lence.

But Vash merely issued her own challenge. "I thought you were the big expert on the Bajoran Orbs. You've never heard of the Orb of Time?"

"She's right!" Jake said.

Vash smiled dazzlingly at Jake. "Okay. I've got one partner. Anyone else?"

Bashir shook his head, refusing to play Vash's game.

"Too dangerous," Jadzia said. "We didn't get here through the Orb of Time, so there's no Orb-related Feynman curve connecting back to our own time."

Vash rolled her eyes. "C'mon! You're a scientist— think outside the warp bubble. Let's say you hadn't reached this time period on the Defiant. You could have lived through the past twenty-five years, easy. Are you telling me that under those conditions you couldn't use the Orb of Time to slip back twenty-five years?"

"Of course I could," Jadzia said, and Bashir could hear the growing annoyance in her tone. "Because the subatomic chronometric particles bound within my molecular structure would be in perfect synch with the current universe's background chronitronic radiation environment. I would belong in this time. But all of us are out of phase, Vash. We can't establish a second Feynman curve in this time because we're already con­nected to the first curve, stretching from our own time. Either we go back the way we came—by traveling through the boundary region of the wormhole that brought us here—or we don't go home at all."

Vash groaned in frustration, her expression becom­ing almost that of a wild creature held against its will.

Bashir leaned forward, lightly touching Vash's arm.

45

"We're still simply speculating," he said in his most re­assuring tone. "Starfleet might send us back at any mo­ment."

"And if they don't?" Vash retorted.

Bashir took a deep breath and said what he knew someone had to say. "Then considering all the possible timelike curves we might have followed, perhaps twenty-five years isn't all that bad."

"What?!" Vash exclaimed.

"You said it yourself. This time period is within our natural lifetimes. People we know will still be alive. The places we know won't have changed all that much. It will be easier for us to adapt than it was for the crew of the Bozeman."

This time Vash grabbed his arm, and her tone was not at all reassuring. "Is it that easy to make a quitter out of you?"

Bashir peeled her hand off his arm. There were larger issues at stake. "Are you that willing to risk the lives of the billions of beings alive in this time who might be wiped from existence by a single act of self­ishness on your part?"

Vash's cheeks reddened as her voice rose in anger. "I didn't ask to be beamed to the Defiant. 1 didn't ask to... oh, I hate you Starfleet types. The good of the many ... it makes me sick!" Then she whirled around and marched off toward the main personnel door lead­ing from the hangar deck.

Bashir resisted following, but he called out to her, "Vash! If you go out that door, you only increase the odds they won't send you back!"

Vash's pace did not lessen.

"Don't worry," Jadzia said. "The door will be sealed."

Just then the status of the door ceased to be impor­tant, because Vash suddenly collided with—nothing.

Bashir saw her come to a sudden stop, as if she had run into a slab of transparent aluminum, undetectable in the dim light of the hangar deck. Vash stepped back and rubbed at her face, then reached out and slapped her hand against something that was solid, yet ab­solutely invisible.

"She's hit a forcefield," Jadzia said.

"Unusual," Worf commented. "Most forcefields emit Pauli exclusion sparks when anything physical makes contact."

"Whatever it is, I don't think it's anything to worry about," Bashir said. He watched Vash turn and begin to walk across the deck, sliding her hand as she moved along the forcefield's invisible boundary. "I mean, even if it's a forcefield, it's not delivering a warning shock. I think it's further evidence that they want to keep us from interacting with ..."

He stopped as a throbbing vibration began to sound through the deck, and he heard the rest of the Defiant's crew begin talking excitedly as—

—the main hangar door slid open to reveal stars streaming past to a vanishing point.

Bashir reflexively held his breath. The ship was trav­eling at warp, and only the hangar deck's atmospheric forcefield was preventing the fifteen of them from being explosively decompressed into the ship's warp field.

"I think someone's trying to get our attention ...," Jadzia said lightly.

Bashir turned as he heard the quick hiss of an open­ing door.

Three Vulcans stood in the corridor beyond, two fe-

males and a male, their impassive faces offering no clue as to their intentions.

One after the other, the three Vulcans stepped onto the hangar deck, and Bashir took some solace from the fact that the uniforms they were wearing reflected Starfleet traditions. Their trousers and jackets were made of a vertically-ribbed black material, with the en­tire left shoulder of each jacket constructed of a block of contrasting fabric in a traditional Fleet specialty color, in this case red on two of them and blue on the third. In the center of each colorful shoulder was what could only be a communicator badge, identical to the modi­fied emblem on the crates and complete with the colors of the Klingon k'Roth ch'Kor. Only one element was completely new to Bashir: Two of the Vulcans—those with the red shoulders—were wearing large clear visors over their eyes, like some kind of protective shield.

As the three figures halted at the boundary of the forcefield, Bashir took the chance to study their uni­forms more closely for rank markings. He found them on small vertical panels, a centimeter wide by perhaps four centimeters long, centered on their jackets just below their collars. Instead of the round pips that Bashir wore, these uniforms used square tabs, though he felt it was likely the number of tabs would carry the same meaning.

"The woman on the right, with the blue shoulder," Bashir said quietly to Jadzia and Worf. "The captain?"

The Vulcan in question had four square tabs in her rank badge, and seemed older than her two compan­ions. Her skin was a warm brown, almost the same shade as Jake's, and a few strands of gray ran as high­lights through her severely-cut black hair. Since the

specialty color on her shoulder was blue, Bashir guessed that either blue was the current color signify­ing command or this was a science vessel with a scien­tist for a captain. She was also the only one of the three not wearing a visor.

Bashir looked at Worf. "Commander, we should probably follow the temporal displacement policy to the letter, and you are the ranking command officer."

Worf gave Bashir a curt nod, then stepped toward the silent Vulcans.

"I am Lieutenant Commander Worf of the Starship Defiant. I have reason to believe these people and I have been inadvertently transferred approximately twenty-five years into our future. Under the terms of Starfleet's temporal displacement policy, I request im­mediate assistance for our return to our own time."

The Vulcan captain put her hands behind her back as she began to speak. "Commander Worf, I am Captain T'len, commander of this destroyer, the Augustus. You and your people have been positively identified by your DNA signatures, obtained from transporter records. As you have surmised, you have traveled in time almost twenty-five years from what was your present. The cur­rent Stardate is 76958.2."

She paused, and Bashir concluded it was to let her confirmation of their fate sink in. "As I suspect you have also already surmised," she then continued, "the historical record shows that the ship on which you made this temporal transfer was lost with all hands on Stardate 51889.4, concurrent with the destruction of the space station Deep Space 9. Under these circum­stances, Starfleet regulations are clear. Do you agree?"

Worf's voice deepened. "I would like to examine the historical record myself."

Captain T'len raised an eyebrow. "That would be a waste of time and resources. If you do not believe me, logic suggests you will not be able to believe any his­torical transcript I provide."

Bashir was slightly surprised that T'len wasn't aware that Klingons preferred physical proof to logical infer­ence. "Then I wish to be put in contact with officials from the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations."

T'len's deep sigh—a most atypical expression of emotion, unless Vulcans in this future were somehow different—strongly suggested to Bashir that the Vulcan was under some undisclosed yet incredible strain.

"Commander," she said almost wearily, "your per­sonnel records indicate you are a reasonable being. In­deed, the records available for most of the other non-Bajorans with you indicate a high degree of proba­bility you can still be of use to Starfleet in this time pe­riod. All you need to know now is that the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations no longer ex­ists. Twelve years ago its responsibilities were assumed by Starfleet's Temporal Warfare Division. I assure you that under current conditions the personnel of the TWD are most unlikely to expend any effort in trying to con­vince you that this present is everything I say it is. You must either accept my word, or not."

Worf's grim expression betrayed his struggle to maintain composure in the face of what he obviously considered a threat, though it was as yet of an unspeci­fied nature.

"What are the current conditions?" Worf asked, im­mensely pleasing Bashir. That was exactly the question

he would have asked first, to be quickly followed by in­quiries about the exact nature of the ominously named Temporal Warfare Division and what the Vulcan cap­tain meant by her cryptic reference to the Bajorans among them not being useful.

"The Federation is at war with the Bajoran Ascen­dancy. And my crew and I have no more time to waste with you than does the TWD. Therefore, I put it to you and your people as straightforwardly as I can. The non-Bajorans among you may now take this opportunity to reaffirm your loyalty to the Federation and to Starfleet, and to join us in our war. Those who comply will be al­lowed to leave the hangar deck and will be assigned to suitable positions within the fleet. Those who do not comply will remain on the hangar deck with the Ba­jorans until the atmospheric forcefield is dropped, in..." T'len tapped her communicator badge twice. "... three minutes."

Immediately, yellow warning lights spun across the deck and bulkheads as the familiar Starfleet computer voice announced, "Warning. The hangar deck will de­compress in three minutes. Please vacate the area."

All around Bashir, the other captives began to talk in groups again, their mutterings and exclamations full of anger and shock. But Worf, interestingly, seemed only to become calmer, as if now that he understood the challenge he faced, he could focus all his energy on overcoming it

"Am I to believe," the Klingon growled, "that in only twenty-five years Starfleet has degenerated into a gang of murderers?"

"Believe what you will," T'len replied crisply. "We are fighting for more than you can imagine. Logic de-

mands that we waste no time or resources on any­thing—or anyone—that does not help us in our strug­gle. Commander Worf, your choice is simple: Join us in our war against the Ascendancy, or die with the Ba­jorans among you."

"Warning, the hanger deck will decompress in two minutes, thirty seconds. Please vacate the area."

Worf turned to face the fourteen others who looked to him for leadership. He was about to speak when it suddenly came to Bashir what the Vulcan was actually doing. He held up his hand to stop Worf from saying anything more.

"She's bluffing, Worf."

Worf's heavy brow wrinkled as he considered Bashir's emphatic statement, but T'len spoke before he could.

"Dr. Bashir, Vulcans do not bluff."

Bashir's response was immediate and to the point. "And Starfleet doesn't kill its prisoners—war or no war."

The captain held his gaze for long moments, then without a sign, suddenly wheeled and walked back to­ward the personnel door. "You know what you have to do to survive," she said without looking back. "The prisoner containment field is now deactivated. This door will remain open until five seconds before decom­pression." Then she and her two companions stepped through that door and were gone.

"Warning, the hanger deck will decompress in two minutes. Please vacate the area."

Vash started for the unseen edge of the forcefield. "Hey! You didn't ask me! I'll join up!"

But Bashir moved forward and pulled her back. "Get back here!"

Vash twisted out of his grip, slapped his hand away. "Look, all due respect to your Bajoran friends, but I don't plan on getting sucked out into hard vacuum!"

"We are in no danger," Bashir said forcefully. He looked around at the others. "Captain T'len will not de­compress the hangar deck!"

"How can you be sure?" Worf asked.

"Because she is a Vulcan, and there is no logic to... to killing Bajorans, even if somehow they are en­emies of Starfleet in this time. And there is absolutely no logic in killing us. We're completely contained on this hangar deck. We're no threat to anyone. And you heard what she said about confirming our identities through DNA scans—she knows that none of us is in­volved in... current conditions."

"Then why is she threatening us?" Jake asked.

"Warning, the hanger deck will decompress in one minute, thirty seconds."

Bashir registered Jadzia's and Worf's matching ex­pressions of less-than-full confidence in his argument, as well as the outright look of fear on the five Bajorans, now standing apart from the others. "She's testing us."

"Where's the logic in that?" Jadzia asked.

Bashir knew he lacked a definitive answer. "Maybe what she said about DNA scans wasn't the truth. If they really don't have a way of confirming our identities, they don't really know who we are."

"And why would that be important?" Vash snapped.

But then Jake snapped his fingers. "Founders can fool a DNA scan, right?"

Bashir nodded, equally impressed by and grateful for the young man's quickness. "That could be it. If this ... Bajoran Ascendancy is a result of the Domin-

ion establishing a foothold in the Alpha Quadrant, Starfleet could still be at war with the Founders. For all Captain T'len knows, we might all be shapeshifters who've impersonated the lost crewmembers of the De­fiant."

Jadzia narrowed her eyes. "Then why didn't they just strap us down and cut us to see what happened to our blood?"

Bashir winced. She was right. Though the Founders could mimic almost any living being down to the level of its DNA, once a single drop of blood escaped from that duplicated form, it immediately reverted to the Founders' normal gelatinous state. As his Trill col­league had just pointed out, there were easier, more di­rect methods of being certain Worf and the others weren't changelings.

"Warning, the hanger deck will decompress in sixty seconds. Please vacate the area."

'T'len!" Vash shouted. "I'm on your side! Beam me out!"

"If this is a test," Bashir said sharply, "you are most certainly failing."

"Me?" Vash hissed. "I'm the only one acting like a human being. I want to live!"

"Forty-five seconds to explosive decompression," the computer warned.

"Commander Worf!" Everyone turned to the Bajoran who had called out. He was an ensign no older than twenty, face pale with fear, the looped chain of his sil­ver earring trembling. "You can't all die because of us." Bashir saw the other four Bajorans beside the young ensign nod nervously. Apparently they had discussed this act of sacrifice and he spoke for them all. "Do what

the captain wants. Save yourselves. We ... we'll trust in the Prophets."

"Thirty seconds to explosive decompression."

"Y'see?" Vash urged. "Even they don't want any false heroics!"

"It is not false!" Worf barked at her. Then he faced the Bajorans and stood at attention. His words were calm and deliberate. "Ensign, your courage brings honor to us all. But as a Starfleet officer and a Klingon warrior, I cannot abandon you to an unjust fate." Worf placed his arm through the ensign's, taking his stand beside the Bajorans. Jadzia promptly followed his ex­ample. Then Bashir, Jake, and all the others, except for one, stood together on the hangar deck, their fates as inextricably linked as their arms.

Only Vash stood alone.

"Fifteen seconds...."

"Captain T'len!" Worf's voice rang out across the cold, dark hangar deck. "If Starfleet has forgotten the ideals for which it once stood, then let our deaths re­mind you of what you have lost."

Bashir watched Vash rub a hand over her face, al­most as if she was more embarrassed than afraid to be so obviously on her own.

"Oh, for...," she muttered, then hastily crossed the few meters to link her arm through Bashir's.

"Ten seconds...," the computer announced.

"Happy now?" Vash asked Bashir.

"We're in no danger," Bashir answered. "I don't know why, but I'm still convinced this is a test."

"I'm convinced you're insane.."

With a loud bang, the personnel door guillotined shut

"Five seconds."

Bashir detected an instant increase in his heart's pumping action at the same time as beside him he heard Vash say, "Oh, what the hell," and he felt her hands on his face as she pulled him around and kissed him as deeply as he had ever been kissed, just as the computer announced, "The hangar deck will now—"

Then the rest of the warning was swept away in the sudden roar of rushing wind and the hammering of his heartbeat—and for all his enhanced intellect, Bashir couldn't tell if he was reacting to the threat of sudden death, or to Vash's thrillingly expert kiss.

CHAPTER 4

nog jumped in front of the Old Man to block whatever weapons the Romulans might have, but before he could do anything else, the ribbon-like discharge from a poly-wave disruptor smeared across his chest.

Instantly Nog felt his entire body numb, then he col­lapsed to the floor, slightly puzzled by the fact that he was still alive. At maximum power, polywaves could set off a subatomic disintegration cascade that was far more efficient than disassociation by phased energy. He had seen Starfleet's sensor logs of the aftermath of polywave combat—the ghastly scattering of limbs and partial torsos left behind by the tightly-bound poly-spheres of total matter annihilation.

Yet at the moment, whether he himself lived through such an assault or not was of no importance to him. Be­cause if the Old Man had been hit with even the same type of low-intensity paralysis beam, it was extremely

doubtful that the elderly hew-mon's fragile body would survive the shock.

Nog lay absolutely still on the floor—he could do nothing else, no matter what had happened to the admi­ral. Unlike a phaser stun, the polywave version left its victims completely alert but completely immobilized.

His vision began to blur. He was incapable of blink­ing, and the flow of air through his emergency breath­ing mask was drawing moisture from the surface of his eyes. His hearing was also becoming less acute, as if the small muscles connecting to both his primary and secondary eardrums were losing their ability to func­tion. The only sound he could hear clearly was the slow thud of his own heart.

But... there. Somewhere in the increasingly indis­tinct background noise, Nog thought he heard the Old Man speaking. Though how could the hew-mon do that if he'd been paralyzed as Nog had?

Suddenly, Nog's field of vision shifted and shook as someone raised him up, ripped open his emergency hood, and peeled back the air mask. At once his vision cleared, and die first thing he saw was a young Romu­lan woman in the bronze chainmail of the Imperial Le­gion waving a small device in front of his face. The device, Nog realized, was a dispenser that sprayed a moisturizing mist, to keep his eyes clear.

"Ferengi," the Romulan said, her voice distorted and muffled as if she spoke from behind a door. "I am Cen­turion Karon. You are on board the Imperial cruiser Al-tanex. Though you cannot respond, I know that you can hear me. Your paralysis will begin to lessen within an hour. There is usually no permanent damage."

Usually?! Nog thought with alarm.

The Centurion shot a second cloud of mist into his eyes. 'To answer what I suspect are your most pressing questions, the crew of this ship are no longer allied with the Ascendancy. We need to talk to Admiral Pi­card. We presume you are his bodyguard or attendant. When we have concluded our discussions, if either or both of you desire, we shall return you to a secure Starfleet base."

If either or both desire? To Nog, it almost sounded as if Karon expected that he and the Old Man might be per­suaded never to return to Utopia Planitia. What could she ever say that would make that even a possibility?

Karon misted his eyes again. Though Nog could still only look straight ahead, he now saw the Old Man, hood removed, being led away by two other Romulans without sign of force or struggle.

The Centurion recaptured his attention with her next words. "No matter what decision you ultimately make, neither you nor the Admiral will be harmed. Two bions will now take you to our sickbay. When your paralysis has ended, we will speak again."

Nog tried his utmost, but failed to make a single sound of protest. He wasn't the one who needed sick­bay—the Old Man was.

Her statement delivered, Centurion Karon slipped from his view, as once again Nog realized he was being moved. And only full polywave paralysis pre­vented his drawing back in disgust from the ... things that moved him.

Bions.

Starfleet Intelligence had examined captured bions, and Nog had read the classified situation assessments with horror. Bions were supposedly artificial life-

forms, created by Romulan science and now used as workers and soldiers throughout the Star Empire. Though the creatures were disturbingly humanoid, the Romulans insisted bions had no capacity to become self-aware. They were simply genetically-engineered organic machines, no different from the myriad forms of mechanical devices that served the Federation, from self-piloted shuttlecraft to nanite assemblers. The only difference, the Romulans maintained, was that instead of being built from duraplast and optical circuitry, bions were self-assembled—that is, grown—from pro­teins swirling in nutrient baths. Or so, Starfleet warned, the Romulans would have the galaxy believe.

As far as Starfleet was concerned, there was a reason why bions had begun to appear shortly after the Romu­lans had allied themselves with the Ascendancy, and the first battles had been fought in the undeclared War of the Prophets. Bions, Starfleet's biologists had con­cluded, were not genetically-engineered artificial life­forms; they were genetically-altered prisoners of war.

Nog shuddered inwardly, if not outwardly. The Rom­ulans were now doing to their captives what the Borg used to do with theirs. Except in the case of the bions, the Borg's biomechanical mechanisms of assimilation had been replaced by strictly biological processes.

The underlying technology was, without question, Grigari. And if only for that reason—the unconscionable alliance with the Grigari Meld—Nog fervently believed the Ascendancy deserved to be wiped out

Nog was grateful he could not see the dreadful mu­tants that carried him now. Without constant misting his vision had blurred again, and he was able to form only the vaguest impression of green metal doors sliding

open before Mm, a surprisingly narrow corridor mov­ing past him, and, finally, an oppressively small med­ical facility, where an angular treatment bed emerged from a dull-green bulkhead, the display screen above it glowing with unreadable yellow Romulan glyphs and multicolored status lights.

He was maneuvered onto the treatment bed, and al­most immediately his vision cleared again. This time the ocular mist came from an overhead pallet of med­ical equipment. Just in time to give Nog a brief, shock­ing glimpse of a bion.

Its face—for the bions were neither male nor fe­male—was unnaturally blank, its severe features nearly obliterated by the camouflage effect of its bizarrely mottled skin, a dizzying patchwork of Andorian blue and Miradorn white, Orion green, Tiburonian pink, and Klingon brown.

Even more disconcerting, its mouth was a tiny, lip-less gash intended to do little more than ingest nutri­ent paste. The creature had no real nose, only two vertical slits that pulsed open and closed like the gills of a fish.

Yet the real problem for Nog was what had happened to the bion's ears. Despite years of working with hew-mons and Vulcans and other cartilaginously-challenged species, Nog knew he still had difficulty abandoning the old Ferengi presumption equating intelligence with ear size. And the same ruthless efficiency displayed in the bion's other minimal features had reduced its ears to mere vestigial curls of flesh that protruded from the jaw hinge like the wilted petals of a flower. On a purely visceral level, it was as if he was looking at creatures whose skulls had been flayed open and were empty—

that they could even stand upright with such minuscule ears, let alone carry out useful tasks, was unnerving.

Hostage within his own still body, Nog could only watch now as one bion reached above him. Its two fin­gers and thumb identified it as a common worker unit Other versions, Nog had read, had up to seven fingers for delicate mechanical repairs or complex weapons operation. No doubt other details of the bion's specific capabilities were indicated by the markings on the front of its tight gray jumpsuit and by the pattern of green stripes ringing each of its sleeves. Perhaps even the identity of the captive species from which it had been created was encoded there.

Another spray of mist clouded the air for a moment, and at the same time the gray-suited bion moved to po­sition its face directly in front of Nog's unblinking eyes.

The bion's eyes were humanoid in size and place­ment, but the portion of the eyeball mat was typically white in most species was a lustrous black. Nog didn't know if that color provided a specific, engineered ad­vantage; he suspected it was a cosmetic detail designed to remove any sense of personality from the bions. Even a Vulcan's placid eyes could convey emotion. But bions had eyes that revealed nothing. Whatever secrets the pitiful creature's brain held, its flat gaze betrayed no trace of any individuality or past life.

The bion mercifully stepped back out of Nog's sight

Nog waited for whatever would happen next, thinking of the Old Man, worried about where he had been taken and what their captors had done with him.

Long minutes passed without sign of anything else moving in the medical facility, and Nog concluded he had been left alone. He willed peace upon his racing

mind. There was nothing he could do until his paralysis ended except meditate on the Great Material River, and hope that somehow it would take from him his mental clarity—of which he had no great need right now— and, just for a few hours at least, transfer it to Jean-Luc Picard, who most certainly did.

After all the effort these Romulans had expended in order to contact the the admiral, Nog didn't want to think what would happen when they realized that their prize captive was not the great man of years past, only a man.

Nog's thoughts paused. Hadn't someone once said something about that condition? But whether it was ex­haustion or the effect of the polywaves, he no longer recalled who.

Another lost memory, he thought, troubled, as his consciousness finally sank into the Great River. In time, he supposed, that would be the fate of them all.

CHAPTER 5

he was only nineteen, but Jake Sisko already under­stood the inevitability of death. And on the hangar deck of this Starfleet vessel of the future he was, in his way, prepared to die.

Or so he told himself.

But even as the computer's warning was drowned out by the explosive burst of air that rushed over him, tugging him back against the linked arms of his fellow prisoners, Jake still didn't believe that the time of his death was near.

Part of the reason for his confidence in his survival came from his half-felt suspicion that the Bajoran Prophets might intercede, or that, at the very least, their existence implied that death might not be the end of his own awareness.

But as to whether it was faith in the Prophets or faith hi Dr. Bashir's logical assessment of their situation—

that they were merely being tested by the Vulcan cap­tain of mis ship—or simply the fire of his youth that at this moment made him unwilling to accept the final ex­tinction of his intellect, Jake wasn't certain.

All he knew was that when a second blast of air rushed over him, and he realized that the ship's atmos­pheric pressure had been maintained and that he could still breathe—he wasn't really surprised.

Smiling broadly like most of the others at their close call, Jake glanced over hi Bashir's direction. What he saw men did surprise him. The doctor was engulfed in an embarrassingly passionate embrace with Vash. Jake couldn't help gawking as a handful of excited conver­sations began around him and he saw Vash draw back from the doctor, look around, and he heard her say, "Guess you were right, Doc." Bashir was looking de­cidedly flustered, and Jake felt himself experiencing an unexpected pang of jealousy. Vash was extremely at­tractive, in a dangerous, older sort of way.

Then his and everyone's attention was diverted to the personnel door as it opened once again and Captain T'len reappeared, accompanied by her two visored offi­cers in the black Starfleet uniforms with red shoulders.

"Is the test over?" Bashir asked. Jake appreciated and mentally applauded the defiance in his tone.

"It is," T'len replied.

But the doctor wasn't finished. "May I ask what the purpose of it was?"

"It was necessary to see if you had been altered by the Grigari. No Grigari construct yet encountered is ca­pable of facing a life-or-death .situation without at­tempting to bargain for its life."

Jake vaguely recalled Kasidy Yates telling him sto-

ries of the Grigari, though she'd seemed to imply that few experts believed that the fabled lost species was real—merely a name given to an amalgam of legends that had accumulated over time.

Bashir was nodding at Vash, who was still standing beside him. "Not a very convincing test. Vash here was ready to bargain with you from the beginning."

Jake regarded Bashir anxiously, wondering if it was a good idea to say anything that might provoke the cap­tain, but the Vulcan seemed unperturbed by the doctor's identification of a logical flaw in her test.

"Vash is not a Starfleet officer. Her reaction was in compliance with historical records of her personality."

At that the archaeologist broke away from the group of captives, heading straight for T'len. "Yeah, well what about this reaction?" she said threateningly, lead­ing Jake to half-expect she'd try to deck the Vulcan captain when she reached her.

But before Vash could cross more than half the four meters that stood between her and T'len, what looked to be a phaser beam shot out from the visor worn by the officer on the captain's right. The silver beam hit Vash dead center, and she immediately crumpled to the deck as if stunned.

"Whoa...," Jake whispered. Then, as Bashir, Worf, and Jadzia rushed to Vash's aid, he took a closer look at those special clear visors of T'Len's officers, what he had at first thought were a type of safety eyewear. After a moment, he realized that if he looked slightly away from the two officers, he could just make out a pattern of glowing lights on their visors' surfaces, as if the vi­sors were generating some sort of holographic display for their wearer. On the officer nearest him Jake also

noticed a narrow black wire that ran from the arm of the visor and hooked over the Vulcan's pointed ear. The wire disappeared into the collar of the officer's uni­form.

Not bad, Jake thought. A phaser that doesn't require anyone having to waste time to draw and aim it. He had no idea how the odd silver phaser beam could have been generated in such a thin device, but he decided it was reasonable to assume that twenty-five years could have led to at least a few technological breakthroughs. He reminded himself to be on the alert for other hidden marvels of the day. They'd make for interesting details in the novel he planned to write after he returned to his own time. Because, just as he had not been ready to be­lieve he was going to die, he was somehow sure that eventually he would return. All he needed to do was work out the details—or be sure that Dr. Bashir, Jadzia, and Worf worked them out.

For now, the doctor and the Trill were helping Vash to her feet. From what Jake could see of her, the ar­chaeologist was unharmed, though the way she stag­gered made it clear she was still suffering from the effects of the stun.

Captain T'len continued coolly as if nothing unusual had just happened. "As I explained, your identities have been confirmed by DNA analysis. But do not think mat changes your status on this ship."

"Just what is our status?" Bashir asked. He had his arm firmly around Vash's shoulders to support her.

"Refugees," T'len answered. "But that can change."

"How?"

"The decision is not up to me." The Vulcan captain then went on to explain mat they would be taken from

the hangar deck and given quarters, to which they'd be confined until their arrival at Starbase 53. During their confinement they would be provided with limited com­puter access in order to familiarize themselves with their new time period. "Make no mistake," T'len con­cluded. "This time period will be your new home."

As the refugees fell silent in the face of that blunt statement, Jake took advantage of the moment to shout out, "What happened to the Defiant? "

Captain T'len's dark eyes immediately sought him out, and Jake surprised himself as he held her intense gaze. "Your ship was captured by the Ascendancy. To answer the rest of your questions which must logically follow: So far as we know, the Defiant was captured in­tact. Though we do not have definitive knowledge, it is logical to assume that the crew has been captured. Whether or not they are subsequently harmed will de­pend on the degree of resistance they offer."

"Then we should attempt to rescue them," Worf said bluntly. "It is unacceptable to retreat."

T'len's gaze shifted from Jake to Worf, but her next words had the teenager's full attention. "I can assure you that a rescue attempt will be made. Starfleet has no intention of letting the Ascendancy keep Benjamin Sisko in custody."

Jake experienced a huge upswell of relief upon hear­ing the captain state Starfleet's objective so authorita­tively, though he couldn't help also wondering why his father would have such importance in this time. But be­fore he could get up his nerve to ask for clarification, one of the Bajorans changed the subject.

"Who are the Grigari?"

The  captain's  enigmatic  response  was  ominous.

"You'll find out." She gestured to the open door, and Jake followed the rest of T'len's prisoners as they began their long march.

To Jake, T'len's ship, the Augustus, seemed half-fin­ished. The dull-gray floors of the cramped corridors had no carpet—the decks were simply bare composite plates. And no attempt had been made to bide the ship's mechanical components. The cluttered ceilings were lined with so many differently colored pipes and con­duits that Jake doubted there was a single Jefferies tube on the vessel. ODN conduits were everywhere, running along bulkheads and punching through decks and ceil­ings almost at random. At least, Jake assumed they were ODN conduits. Who knew if optical data net­works were still being used hi this future?

The ship appeared to have no turbolifts either. He and the other fourteen prisoners from the Defiant had to change decks by using steep and narrow metal staircases mat tattled alarmingly as so many pairs of feet pounded down them. For a ship of the future, the Augustus was re­minding Jake more of the old walk-through exhibit of the U.S.S. Discovery, a Daedalus-class ship more than 200 years old, at the Starfleet Museum in San Francisco. But even that old veteran, one of the first ships commissioned by the newly formed Starfleet, had had more room.

The environmental controls also seemed to be less precise than the ones Jake was used to. The hangar deck had been cool, but the first corridors the refugees had been led through were uncomfortably hot. On their enforced march they had already encountered a few more of T'len's crew, and they had all, without excep­tion, been Vulcan. That made the heat make sense to

Jake: It reflected the crew's normal and preferred ambi­ent temperature.

But then, trudging along in the line of captives, Jake stepped off a stairway into a corridor that was so cold its gray metal walls were rimed with frost. With a shiver, he abandoned his earlier theory of acclimation for a Vulcan crew, and decided that the unsettling changes in temperature merely meant that the ship's en­vironmental controls were faulty.

Finally they reached the end of their march, and their destination turned out to be a series of personnel cab­ins—they certainly didn't deserve to be called quarters. Jake was assigned to one that was little bigger than his bedroom on DS9 but which was crowded with two bunks, a fold-down desktop, what seemed to be a lim­ited-capacity food replicator, and—crammed into one corner with no privacy screen—a small toilet-and-sink unit that appeared to be able to double as a sonic shower enclosure. Everything was in the same depress­ing shade of muddy gray.

Jake's roommate was Ensign Ryle Simons, a young human from Alpha Centauri with an almost pure white complexion topped by a startlingly bright-red crewcut. Simons was fresh from the Academy and had been on Deep Space 9 for only two days, waiting to join the crew of his first ship, the Destiny. After taking less than a second to assess the cramped nature of their room, both Jake and Simons peppered the Vulcan lieutenant who stood in their doorway with questions.

"How long will it take to get to the Starbase?' Si­mons asked.

"And where's the computer terminal?" Jake added.

The Vulcan stepped past the two young men and

folded down the desktop so that it blocked the doors of the storage lockers that took up one bulkhead. "Our transit time is classified," she said, then busied herself with the desktop.

The surface of it was a large control surface, and the Vulcan swiftly tapped in a series of commands that quickly created what Jake recognized as a Starfleet computer input tablet not too different from the ones he was familiar with. What was different, though, was that the computer had no physical display. Instead, a holo­graphic screen appeared a few centimeters above the desktop. For now, the modified Starfleet emblem ap­peared in the center of it.

No time like the present, Jake thought. "Lieutenant, why did the ship from the Bajoran Ascendancy also have a Starfleet emblem?"

The Vulcan frowned as she assessed him, shaking her head once. "The explanation is in the history briefings that will be made available to you."

"Then the explanation isn't classified?"

"No."

Jake refrained from showing amusement at the Vul­can's poorly disguised impatience. "So there's no rea­son why you can't tell us, is there? It would be more efficient."

"Then the efficient answer is: propaganda." The Vul­can abruptly stood up and moved toward the open door.

"I don't know what you mean by that," Jake said truthfully.

The Vulcan hesitated on the threshold, men looked back at Jake and Simons. Apparently she made some sort of decision, for she then delivered her explanation rapidly, without pause. "At the time the Ascendancy

was formed, it initially sought new members from those worlds waiting to accept admission to the Federa­tion, just as Bajor had been. One of the chief advan­tages to Federation membership is the opportunity to take part in Starfleet operations and to benefit from its defensive forces. Thus, in its attempt to sway the gov­ernments of the nonaligned worlds, the Ascendancy claimed to be the new political master of Starfleet. Since many Ascendancy vessels had been pirated from our fleet over the years, in a limited sense the claim was correct."

"Now I really don't understand," Jake said seriously. "How could any group simply say they're the ones re­sponsible for Starfleet?"

"Following the destruction of Earth," the Vulcan said, her expression remaining completely neutral, "Starfleet's lines of command and control took several weeks to be reestablished. In some regions where polit­ical turmoil further complicated communications, some task forces and battle groups were cut off from com­mand for months."

Jake couldn't speak, let alone think of any new ques­tion. Which was just as well, because the Vulcan had no intention of answering further inquiries.

"Use your computer," she said. "All your questions will be answered." Then she stepped back into the cor­ridor, and the narrow door slipped shut and locked.

Jake looked at his roommate. The Centaurian en­sign's white cheeks were splotched with red, while the rest of his face was almost luminescent in its paleness. "That... that can't be true," Simons said faintly.

But Jake knew better. The Vulcan had had no prob­lem refusing to answer a question when the answer

was classified. Thus, she had no motive for lying to them. "Let's check the computer," he said. He went to the desktop and placed his hand on the flashing yellow panel labelled user identification. At once the panel turned green, and the holographic display switched from a static image of the Starfleet emblem to that of a Bolian in the new version of the Starfleet uniform. Jake checked the square tabs on the Bolian's rank badge and saw that the blue-skinned alien was an ad­miral.

'This briefing," the Bolian admiral began, "has been prepared for the refugees rescued from the Starship De­fiant. It consists of a twenty-two-minute presentation of the key events that have occurred since the destruction of Deep Space 9 and the loss of your ship until the pres­ent day, focusing on those events which have led to what is commonly known as the War of the Prophets. At the end of this briefing, you will be given an oppor­tunity to examine files detailing the current status of any relatives you may have in this time period. The briefing will commence on your verbal request."

Jake stared at the image. "I don't get it," he said, turning to Simons. "We only showed up here less than two hours ago. How did they have enough time to make a briefing tape for us?"

Simons shook his head, puzzled. "Their computers are faster?"

Jake wasn't convinced. But he folded his arms across his chest and prepared himself for the worst. "Com­puter: Start the briefing."

The image of the Bolian admiral disappeared, re­placed by that of a Starfleet sensor-log identification screen announcing that whatever images were about to

be shown had been recorded by the U.S.S. Garneau on Stardate 51889.4, in the Bajoran sector.

Jake felt his chest tighten even before the sensor log began.

He recognized the date.

He was about to see the events that, according to his­tory, had led to his death.

CHAPTER 6

"what's wrong with him?" Centurion Karon de­manded.

Nog awoke with a start. He instantly moved his hand to the side of his head in response to a dull pain in his temple. Then he reacted to the shock of realization that the little finger of his right hand was broken. And then to the fact that he could move at all. Until he remem­bered where he was and how he had come here.

The Romulan centurion's voice was insistent. "Ad­miral Picard. Has he been injured?"

Nog pushed himself up on the medical bed. He rubbed at his head again, this time careful to keep all pressure off his broken finger. "Irumodic Syndrome," he said. His throat was painfully dry. He started to cough.

But Karon wasn't interested in his discomfort. "Tosh!" she snarled.

Nog didn't know what that word meant, but from the

way the sharp-featured Romulan had said it, he could guess. And he could also guess that it meant she knew very well what Irumodic Syndrome was.

"Does that mean Starfleet's not serious about Project Phoenix?' Karon asked.

"I am not answering any questions until I see Admi­ral Picard."

Karen's dark eyes considered him. Their highlights seemed to shine out at him from the shadows of her deep brow and precisely-cut black bangs. "Who are you?" she asked.

Nog hesitated. Considering his present circum­stances, he could be a prisoner of war, which meant he should say nothing, even though he knew his eventual fate would be to become a bion. Then again, it was pos­sible that Karon had been truthful when she said the crew of this ship no longer supported the Ascendancy. Romulans had been the Federation's allies in the war against the Dominion. Was it possible they could be al­lies again? More to the point, Nog wondered, this close to the end, was there really anything to lose?

"I'm the Integrated Systems Manager for Project Phoenix," he said. "Captain Nog."

Karon looked gratifyingly impressed. "So you're in charge," she said with a slight incline of her head.

"I manage the project," Nog replied. "The Admiral is in charge."

Karon pursed her lips and nodded. "I understand per­sonal loyalty. Odd to see it in a Ferengi, though. Per­haps our mission hasn't been wasted after all."

"What mission?" Nog said, deliberately ignoring her insult It was the fate of the Ferengi to be misunder­stood by all but their own kind.

Karon's cool gaze swept over him. "Perhaps you'd prefer getting dressed."

Nog looked down and felt his ears flush. He was still in his sleep shorts. His pressure suit had apparently been removed as he slept. "Yes, I would," he said stiffly. "But more than that, I would appreciate having someone look at this." He held up his little ringer, trying not to gri­mace as he saw the strange angle it took from his hand.

It required an agonizing twenty minutes to get his finger straightened and set in a magnetic splint, and Karon apologized for the Altanex carrying no tissue stimulators suitable for Ferengi biology. Her explana­tion for his injuries seemed quite reasonable—that he'd broken his finger and bruised his temple when he fell to the deck after being paralyzed.

Once he'd been treated, Karon offered him a change of clothing, and Nog quickly pulled on a Romulan util­ity uniform—gray trousers, a tunic unfortunately in­tended for a taller person, and black boots that were, surprisingly, the perfect size. Then the Romulan centu­rion escorted him to Admiral Picard's guest quarters.

To Nog's relief, the Old Man was asleep, not in a coma or dead. And in response to his pointed question­ing, Karon assured him that Picard's interrogators had not used any force or psychological pressure, espe­cially—here Karon paused and fixed Nog with a mea­suring look—when it had become so quickly apparent that the admiral was not in full command of his leg­endary faculties.

With the Old Man's condition confirmed, Nog al­lowed Karon to lead him to a situation room three decks up. As he followed the Romulan, Nog studied what few details the short passage revealed about the

vessel he was in. He wasn't certain what class of ship the Altanex was, but it was obviously cramped and con­fined, and the paltry number of crew members they passed suggested that it was also extremely small.

Lacking any other ready source of information, Nog had no reservations about directly asking his escort about her ship.

"We're a listening post," she explained, as she ad­justed the replicator in the small situation room to dis­play its menu hi Ferengi tallyscript. "Our current position is within this system's main asteroid belt."

"Ah, a spy vessel." Nog glanced around the spartan room, trying to identify any obvious recording sensors. But all he saw was a blank tactical screen, a conference table with nine chairs, and on the table a small packing crate with reinforced locking clamps.

Karon didn't confirm or deny his definition of her term. "High-speed multiple transmorphic cloaks. But limited shields and weapons."

Nog was impressed. "With transmorphic cloaks you don't need shields. I had not realized you had perfected them."

A grim expression flashed across Karen's stern fea­tures. "Our engineers found they could solve their im­passe with certain... biogenic components."

Nog understood and shared her distaste. The Romu­lans had again employed Grigari technology. Which meant the ship's state-of-the-art cloaking device was con­trolled in part by engineered tissues taken from captives.

Then, without preamble Karon said, "The Star Em­pire is collapsing."

Startled, Nog attempted to hide his shock the only way he could. He looked away from her, to the replicator.

"Are you surprised?" Karon asked.

"By the news? Or by the fact that you are telling me?" Nog concentrated on the replicator's talleyscript. There were no Ferengi selections available. The only non-Romulan food and drink he recognized were Vul­can, and he wasn't enamored of Vulcan cuisine. There were never enough beetles.

"You don't believe me." Karon folded her arms and drew herself up, making her posture even more erect than it had been. She was a few centimeters taller than Nog but very slight, even in chainmail. Nog had grown to his maximum height as a teenager on DS9, but he knew a decade of desk work had added more than a few kilograms of bulk to his small frame, giving him a much more substantial presence than Karon.

Nog saw little risk in answering her truthfully. "I haven't decided," he said. "For a collapsing power, you did not seem to have much trouble overwhelming Utopia's defenses."

"It was a Tal Shiar operation. They are the last to feel the deprivations of the Empire's eroding capabilities."

Nog allowed his face to reveal a slight degree of in­terest at her mention of the feared Romulan intelligence service. But the revelation was a calculated one, to make her think that he appreciated her candor. The cen­turion might believe she was engaged in a frank con­versation with a fellow warrior, but to Nog, he and she were engaged in negotiations—everything was always a negotiation. And sometimes—most times—it was best not to let the other party know it.

"Why did the Tal Shiar want to kidnap Admiral Pi­card?"

"They didn't," Karon said. "The Utopia Yards are

your last major shipbuilding center. The Tal Shiar wanted to cripple them. My... group saw a chance to make contact with Admiral Picard during the confu­sion."

Nog made a note of her hesitation at mentioning whom she was working with. That could mean she hadn't yet determined if she could trust him. It could also mean that there was no group, and that she and the handful of crew on this ship made up the whole of the Romulan resistance.

'Two questions," he said. "First, if the Tal Shiar ac­cepts the Ascendancy's teachings, why bother attacking the yards this late?"

Just for a moment, it seemed to Nog that Karon sensed he was hiding something from her, but if so, it did not stop her from answering him. 'This was one of fifteen at­tacks scheduled to... to keep the Federation off-balance. We know about Project Phoenix and Project Guardian. Even Project Looking Glass. But we can't be sure you don't have other last-moment operations planned."

Now Nog really was impressed. For obvious reasons, Project Phoenix had been impossible to completely hide. But Guardian was one of the most highly classi­fied operations in Starfleet's history. Even he had been told only a few details about it, and those only because of how they might relate to the timing of the Phoenix's mission. As for Looking Glass, that was a code name even he had never heard before.

Karon seemed to understand that Nog wasn't going to order anything from the replicator, so she reached past him to punch in some selections of her own. "As to what the Tal Shiar does or does not believe, I don't know anymore. I think at first our politicians consid-

ered the Bajoran Ascendants to be fanatics. The reason the Star Empire supported them was because the As­cendants' goal was to destabilize the Federation—al­ways a worthy endeavor in Romulan eyes."

"But now?" Nog asked, trying not to let his voice sound too eager for details.

A tray with two tall glasses of brown liquid appeared in the replicator slot. Each glass was topped by a froth of foam.

"I don't know how much access Starfleet Intelli­gence has to events on Romulus, but as the Federation and the Klingon Empire suffered outright acts of terror­ism and overt military strikes, we ourselves suffered from key politicians succumbing to mysterious diseases and accidents."

The centurion handed him a glass. "You were being attacked from without. We, from within."

Nog sniffed at the drink in surprise. Root beer. It smelled delicious. "By the Ascendants?"

"You said you had a second question." Karon held up her glass in an age-old gesture of salute, drank deeply from it, then wiped the foam from her upper lip.

Nog took a tentative sip from his glass. The subtle interplay of sarsaparilla and vanilla was missing, of course. In years of study, he had yet to find a replicator version of the drink that could match that made on Ces-tus III. In fact, he had been surprised to learn that root beer had not been invented there, considering that the versions from everywhere else were but a pale imita­tion.

But he wasn't here to discuss brewing methods. He set his glass down on the tray. "Why did you want to speak to the admiral?"

Karon sighed. "We know about the Phoenix."

Nog made his shrug noncommittal. Such knowledge was not surprising. Almost everyone knew something about the ship. "You said that."

"We know its mission."

Perhaps in general, Nog thought, still unconcerned. It was unlikely even the Tal Shiar had managed to un­cover all the details of the audacious plan the Old Man had put in motion almost five years ago.

"And we know that mission will fail."

Nog picked up his glass again to cover his shock and took another quick sip of its aromatic liquid. Swiftly, he considered all the possible reasons Karon might have for telling him this. His first thought was that she was also part of the Tal Shiar and it was an attempt to sow disinformation. But then, he reasoned, why hadn't she just killed him and Picard? Surely their deaths would have a greater chance of disrupting Project Phoenix than would their being swayed by her influence.

"For whatever it might be worth to you," he said care­fully, "there are those in Starfleet who believe the same."

Karon shook her head. "You misunderstand. I did not say we believe your mission will fail. I said, we know your mission will fail."

Nog drank the last of his root beer and regretfully placed the empty glass on the tray. "How is it possible to know the fate of something which has yet to hap­pen?"

He meant his question to be a challenge, and expected the Romulan centurion to respond in kind. But instead— surprisingly—Karon pulled out one of the chairs and sat down at the conference table. Her whole being seemed to Nog to be enveloped in an air of inexpressible sadness.

"Captain Nog, twenty-five thousand years ago, three Bajoran mystics set down their visions: Shabren, Eilin, and Naradim. All except the tenth of Shabren's prophe­cies have proved true, and that one can be read as a warning and not a firm prediction. The Books of Eilin unequivocally describe the rediscovery of the Orbs of Jalbador, just as it occurred twenty-five years ago. And Naradim's Eight Visions—"

"Are ancient poetry," Nog interrupted, as he took a chair facing her. "All the writings of the mystics are. Written with allusions and veiled references that every generation has reinterpreted and applied to their own unique circumstances."

Karon's gaze settled on Nog so intently he had the unsettling feeling that she had some alien power to read his mind. "You really don't believe that any of what's happened this past quarter-century has been foretold?"

Nog emphatically shook his head. "Of course not," he said firmly. "What has happened is the result of sec­ular fanatics who have appropriated obscure religious writings in an attempt to justify brutal oppression and bloody conquest The so-called War of the Prophets is a war of politics—not religion."

Karon's hands betrayed her inner tension as she twisted them together tightly, and she leaned forward, urgent "But you work for Admiral Picard. He under­stands what's happening."

Nog spoke with pride. "Admiral Picard is a scientist An explorer. A historian. Of course he understands."

"Perhaps not it seems, in the same way you do. Cap­tain Nog, are you aware that Naradim's Third Vision has been fulfilled?"

Nog groaned with impatience. He'd thought his pres­ence here might give him a chance to launch a new at­tack against the Ascendancy. But instead, it appeared even the Romulan resistance was as caught up in reli­gious nonsense as the fanatics who had enslaved Bajor and now threatened the universe.

'To be honest," he said, "I can't keep that drivel straight. What is Naradim's Third Vision?"

"It's the reason why the Tal Shiar launched fifteen attacks against the Federation and Starfleet in the last five hours."

Nog frowned. 'To keep us off-balance, you said."

Karon drew back, studying him, puzzled, as if amazed that he still didn't understand her. "Captain, Admiral Picard understands even if you don't. He told us that he told you what had happened."

"What?" Nog rubbed at his aching temple. The cen­turion wasn't making any sense at all.

"The Defiant, Captain. It reappeared in deep space near the border of—"

"What!" Nog suddenly had trouble breathing.

"—the Bajoran Central Protectorates."

It was as if she'd shot him with a polywave all over again. "Is ... is anyone on board?"

Karon's hands were still now. They lay flat on the table between them. "You know there's only one per­son who counts. And yes, he is on board. Benjamin Lafayette Sisko. Emissary to the False Prophets."

Nog felt the sharp heat of anger in his cheeks and ears, compounding the shock he felt. "Captain Sisko was one of the greatest beings I have ever known."

"For the False Prophets to have chosen him—indeed, if the new findings from B'hala are true, for them to

have arranged his birth—how could he be anything else?"

Nog gripped his splinted finger in an effort to use the distraction of pain to regain his focus. "Who else?" he asked. "Who else is on the Defiant?"

"We haven't been able to intercept a complete list Apparently, there's at least one Cardassian—"

"Garak?"

"I wasn't given names. Also a changeling—"

"Odo!"

"Eighteen in all."

"Eighteen ... ?" Nog took a deep breath. The num­ber was appallingly small. More than two hundred peo­ple had been reported missing when Deep Space 9 was destroyed. "Are there... are there any Ferengi on the ship?'

"I don't have that information."

"What about Captain Sisko's son?"

"Captain Nog, how do you know these people?"

Nog told her.

"That explains a great deal," Karon said when he had finished. "You served under Sisko. You traveled many times through the false wormhole. You even have expe­rienced a temporal exchange on your trip to Earth's past."

Her tone made Nog uncomfortable. "What does that explain?"

"I apologize in advance, Captain. But by your own admission, you have had several encounters with the forces of the False Prophets. I believe that could ex­plain why you remain so resistant to the truth."

Nog clenched his fists, despite his splinted finger. "My mind is open!"

"Captain Nog, given the power of the Prophets, true or false, how would you know if it were not?"

Nog jumped to his feet, knocking his chair back. 'This discussion is over. I want you to return Admiral Picard and me to the closest Starfleet facility."

"You haven't heard my proposition," Karon said, looking up at him.

"I am not interested."

"Are you interested in stopping the Ascendancy? Saving the universe? Preserving the memory of the great Jean-Luc Picard?"

That last question stopped Nog. Twenty-four years ago, just after the destruction of Cardassia Prime, he had been assigned to the U.S.S. Enterprise under then-Captain Picard. That was when the Old Man had be­come his mentor, and had given him the new direction he had so badly needed after the loss of so many people who had been close to him. In truth, Nog admitted to himself, his career today was as much dedicated to Pi­card as it was to Starfleet.

"How can you do all that?" he asked the centurion.

"By myself," Karon said, as she pushed back her chair and got to her feet, "I cannot. But together, we can accomplish all that and more."

Nog held her gaze. "My question stands. How?"

The centurion spoke slowly and deliberately, as if the words she were about to say were the most important she had ever spoken. "Give us the Phoenix."

Nog stepped back in shock. "Never."

He saw Karon's lips tremble, as if she were restrain­ing some great emotion. Then she turned sharply away from him and tapped her finger on the keypad of the small packing crate. With a hiss of mechanical move-

ment, the thick locking clamps released and the crate opened to reveal a battered, discolored sheet of cop­pery-colored metal, a hand's breadth high and slightly wider.

Nog leaned closer. The metal sheet was supported in a nest of semi-transparent packing gel. Two of its edges were smooth, and a jagged break showed where it had been shattered, so that it seemed that at least half of it was missing.

Karon reached into the crate, lifted out the metal, and gave it to Nog. Even as she did so, he realized he was looking at a Starship's dedication plaque.

"Read it," she said quietly.

Nog turned the metal over, and felt as if the gravity web had failed again.

He had seen mis plaque a thousand times before. The last time—three days ago—was when it had been pristinely mounted on the bulkhead beside the primary turbolift on the bridge of Jean-Luc Picard's greatest achievement u.s.s. PHOEN...the remaining letters read.

Beneath that, hi smaller type: first of its class.

Beneath that, a list of the engineers and designers Nog had worked with every day.

And then, at the bottom, the ship's simple motto, chosen by the Old Man himself: "... Sokath, fas eyes uncovered... "

Nog spoke without thinking. "It's... a bad forgery."

But Karon's next words seemed to come to nun from a terrible distance. "Captain Nog, that plaque is twenty-five thousand years old."

The plaque shook in Nog's hands. How could anyone know the target date? "Where... where did you...."

The Romulan centurion completed his question. "Find it? At the bottom of a methane sea on Syladdo."

Nog shook his head. The name was unfamiliar.

"Fourth moon of Ba'Syladon."

Nog's pulse quickened. "The Class-J gas giant...."

"The largest planet in the Bajoran system. Correct." Karon's eyes remained fixed on him. She was making no attempt to take back the plaque. "And twenty-five thousand years ago, the Phoenix died there, before her mission could be completed."

"You can't know that. Not... absolutely."

"We can know that. We do know that. We can show you sensor records of all the wreckage recovered to date. Wreckage that includes enough of the deep-time components to know they were never deployed as planned."

Nog looked down at the evidence in his hands. The metal plaque burned his fingers, froze them, the confu­sion of sensations occurring all at once.

"Don't let the Phoenix die uselessly, Captain. Don't throw away Jean-Luc Picard's greatest dream on a mis­sion that cannot succeed."

And then he finally understood. "You want the ship for another mission."

"When the ship is completed. Yes. We do."

Nog looked up to meet her gaze. Realizing that what he held in his hands was the proof that everything he had struggled for in these past five years on Mars, everything he had sacrificed, had been for nothing. Nothing.

He could barely speak the words. "You are asking me to betray Starfleet, the Federation—everything I be­lieve in."

"No, Captain, I am offering you a chance to save those very things. The only chance you have. We came here to put this question to Admiral Picard, but his time has passed. So I put it to you, Captain Nog. In all the universe, you are the only one who can save it now. Will you join us?"

It took Nog a long time to make his decision.

And time was the one thing he no longer had.

CHAPTER 7

if sisko closed his eyes, he could almost believe he was on Bajor, in the kai's Temple, in his own time. The gentle splash of water on stone in the meditation pool. The sharp peppermint-cinnamon smell of the b'nai candles. Even the cool breeze that brought with it the rich, loamy scent of the contemplation gardens. All these sensations brought back to him the world he had hoped someday would become his adopted home.

But even these sense memories faded when he opened his eyes and looked out through the curving viewports of the Boreth's observation deck to see the Defiant being pulled through the stars at warp speed, ensnared in the purple web of a tractor beam and trail­ing half a kilometer behind the angular engineering hull of the advanced-technology Klingon battlecruiser.

At his right, he saw in Kira a reflection of his own distress at the sight of their ship—so distant, so power-

less. At his left the tall, lean form of Arla Rees stood rigid, tense, though Sisko knew the defeat of the Defi­ant could not inflict the same emotional toll on her. The Bajoran commander had only served on Deep Space 9 for a few weeks, and she had not served on the Defiant before the events of the station's last day—or of the last twenty-five years.

"How do you think it happened?"

Sisko knew what Kira was really asking him. His conclusion—that the Dominion had won its war with the Federation—had been shared by all the others on the Defiant once they saw or heard of Weyoun's appearance in Vedek's robes. And now, the fact that they had been been transported to Weyoun's Klingon ship and had dis­covered a Bajoran meditation chamber reconstructed to the last detail in its observation lounge was more proof. There could be no doubt that in this future the Domin­ion had won the war, and had assimilated the cultures of the Alpha Quadrant as omnivorously as had the Borg.

"Maybe it was Deep Space 9," Sisko ventured. "Once the station was gone, Starfleet had no forward base to guard the wormhole."

Kira sighed. "So we really were accomplishing some­thing. This isn't the way I'd like to find out, though."

Arla turned away from the Defiant. "I thought the wormhole was no longer an issue in the war, because the aliens kept Dominion forces from using it."

Sisko saw Kira stiffen at the Bajoran commander's casual use of the term "aliens" to describe the beings in the wormhole.

"The Prophets," Kira said emphatically, "chose to stop one fleet of Jem'Hadar ships from traveling through their Temple. But if the Bajoran people failed

in their duty to protect the Temple's doorway, then it is entirely possible that the Prophets withdrew their bless­ing—just as they did when the Cardassians invaded."

Arla persisted. "Major, if the wormhole aliens are gods, how could they let the Cardassians inflict such evil on our world?"

Kira's smile was brittle. "I won't pretend to under­stand the Prophets, but I know everything they do is for a reason."

Before Arla could further escalate what was for now merely a discussion, Sisko intervened to keep it at that level. This argument could have no end between the two Bajorans of such dissimilar background and belief.

Kira had been bom on occupied Bajor. She had grown up in relocation camps, and had fought for the Resistance since she was a child. The only thing mat had enabled her—and millions of other Bajorans—to survive the horrors of the Cardassian Occupation of their world was a deep and unquestioning faith in their gods—the Prophets of the Celestial Temple.

But Arla Rees, only a few years younger than Kira, had been born to prosperous Bajoran traders on the neutral world of New Sydney. She had enjoyed a Me of privilege in which the Cardassian Occupation, though an evil to rally against, had never been experienced firsthand. For Arla, now a Starfleet officer, as for many Bajorans of her upbringing, the Prophets were little more than an outmoded superstition perversely clung to by her less sophisticated cousins on the old world.

Sisko knew mat as fervently as Kira believed in the Prophets and their Celestial Temple, Arla held an equally strong belief that the Bajoran wormhole was in­habited by aliens from a different dimensional realm,

and that their involvement in the history of Bajor had been more disruptive than benevolent.

He himself had been wondering of late if reconciling these two opposing beliefs was one of the tasks that he, hi his ill-defined and unsought role as the Emissary to Bajor's Prophets, was supposed to be able to accom­plish. If so, then he was still unable to see how one could ever be reconciled with the other.

"That's enough," Sisko said to both Kira and Arla. 'This debate is nothing we're going to resolve here and now."

"Oh, but we are," Weyoun proclaimed from behind them.

Sisko and the two Bajorans turned as quickly as if shot by disruptors, to see that the Vorta had apparently beamed into the observation deck behind them, just be­side the meditation pool. Across the deck, the doors to the corridor were still closed, and there was no other obvious way in.

"Captain Sisko," Weyoun purred, "Major Kira, you have no idea how delighted I am to meet you again after so many years. And Commander Arla, it is such a pleasure to make your acquaintance." The Vorta smiled ingratiatingly at his guests and clasped his hands ea­gerly before him. "I trust you've found your quarters to your liking."

Sisko forced himself to control his initial impulse to angrily demand an explanation for everything that had happened to them. Weyoun's irritatingly obsequious manner had simply—like everything else about him and his species—been genetically programmed by the Founders in order to better serve the Dominion as ne­gotiators, strategists, scientists, and diplomats.

In this sense, this latest version of Weyoun had changed not at all over the past twenty-five years. The clone's thick black hair, brushed high above his fore­head, showed no trace of gray. His smooth, open face, framed by dramatically ribbed ears that ran from his chin halfway up the sides of his head, showed no sign of age-related lines or wrinkles. Indeed, the only aspect of the cloned Vorta that had changed from the time Sisko had last crossed his path was that this Weyoun now wore a Bajoran earring, complete with a gleaming silver chain.

But at the moment none of these details was impor­tant to Sisko. There was only one thought that claimed his mind. "What happened to my people who were beamed off the Defiant?" He did not add mat his son Jake had been among them.

"Sadly," Weyoun began mournfully, "we must con­sider them dead. The attackers are not known for taking prisoners. And those they do take do not live for long."

Kira's outraged question filled the terrible silence that followed the Vorta's pronouncement. "What are you doing hi those robes?"

Weyoun glanced down at his saffron-and-white Vedek's robes, as if to be sure his clothing hadn't changed in the last few seconds. "Why, they were a gift. From the congregation of the Dahkur Temple. I believe that's in your home province, Major."

Kira's face tightened in disbelief. "None of the monks I know would ever accept a Dominion lackey as a vedek."

Weyoun gazed at Kira in hurt sadness, as if her words had wounded him cruelly. "The Dominion," he said, almost wistfully. "A name I have not heard in many years."

Kira's quick glance at Sisko revealed her lack of

understanding, but he was unable to offer her any of his own.

"Why not?" Sisko asked Weyoun. "Did the Founders change its name?"

"Founders," Weyoun repeated, as if that word hadn't crossed his lips for a long time either. 'To be honest, I don't know how the Founders reacted to their loss."

"What loss?" Sisko asked. Now he needed enlighten­ment.

"Of the war, of course," Weyoun answered. "With the Federation."

Kira shook her head. "Wait a minute. The Dominion lost the war?"

Weyoun looked troubled. "In ... a manner of speak­ing."

"And what manner would that be?" Sisko demanded.

Weyoun nodded thoughtfully. "I understand your confusion, Captain. Twenty-five years is a long time. And I will see to it that you have access to briefing tapes that recount the thrilling historic events you've missed. But for now, simply to put your minds at rest, I will try to... get you up to speed. Isn't that what you say?"

"Just start at the beginning," Sisko said. "Who won the war?"

The Vorta's smile was vague. "In a technical sense, no one—but the war is over," he hastened to add, as Sisko took a step toward him. "In fact, it ended almost one year to the day after the loss of Deep Space 9 and the beginning of your... miraculous voyage."

Sisko was no longer interested in even pretending to be patient. "How did it end?"

The Vorta pursed his lips. "With the destruction of Cardassia Prime, I'm sorry to say. A terrible battle. A

terrible price to pay for peace. But the Cardassians were a proud people. And Damar and the Founder he served refused to surrender. Then, when—"

Arla interrupted suddenly. "What do you mean, the Cardassians 'were' a proud people?"

Weyoun fixed his remarkably clear gray eyes on hers. "I don't play games with my words, Commander. At all times, you can be sure I mean exactly what I say. Today, the Cardassians as a species are virtually ex­tinct. Cardassia Prime. The Hub Colonies. The Union Territories. All destroyed."

"Destroyed?" Sisko repeated. "We are talking about planets?"

Weyoun nodded. "Entire worlds, Captain. Laid waste. Uninhabitable. A death toll in the tens of bil­lions. ... A mere handful of Cardassians left now. Traders. Pirates." He paused, then added with unex­pected anger, "Madmen."

Kira sounded as shocked as Sisko felt. "But you— you somehow escaped all that destruction?"

Weyoun's facial expressions disconcertingly flick­ered back and forth between an overweening smile of pride and an exaggerated frown of sorrow. "No, Major. In a sense, / brought about that destruction."

Now Sisko, Kira, and Arla all began to speak at the same time. But Weyoun ignored their questions and protests alike.

"No, no, no," he said, tucking his hands within the folds of his robes. "Whatever you think of me, you're wrong." He stood with his back to the observation win­dows and their backdrop of warp-smeared stars. "Cap­tain Sisko, you must believe me. I begged Damar to accept the inevitable. I implored the Founder to accept

that it was time she and her kind accepted their fate to be partners in a new cause, not the leaders of a dying one. Yet—"

Sisko regarded him with disbelief. "Are you saying you turned against the Founders?! "

"But... they were your gods," Kira said.

Weyoun shook his head. "The only reason the Vorta believed the Founders to be gods was because that was programmed into the basic structure of our brains. Our belief in the Founders was achieved through the same genetic engineering that raised us from the forests of our homeworld."

"But you've always known about your program­ming," Sisko said.

'True. And our belief, engineered or not, did sustain the Vorta—sustained me—through the most difficult times. But then..." Weyoun withdrew his arms from his robes and spread them wide, as if to embrace Sisko and the others. "... The day came when those difficult times" ended and... and / met the true Gods of all creation—­the Prophets." His transformed face shone with bliss.

Sisko stared at the triumphant Vorta. "You.... met the Bajoran Prophets?"

Weyoun nodded, his beatific smile never wavering.

"Through an Orb experience?" Kira asked doubt­fully. "Or—"

"Face to face," the Vorta said in a humble voice. "In the True Celestial Temple. I traveled through it. A des­perate expedition to see if it led to the Gamma Quad­rant." He laughed quietly to himself in remembrance. "The Founder herself ordered me to go. Two Cardas­sian warships. A wing of Jem'Hadar attack cruisers. Yet... I was the only one to return."

And then, an icy hand gripping his heart, Sisko made sense of Weyoun's astounding story. "You traveled through the second wormhole."

The Vorta held a finger to his lips. "Oh, Captain, I must caution you. I have a very devoted, very religious crew. We don't call them... 'wormholes' anymore."

"Two Temples, then," Sisko said. "Just like the leg­end of the Red Orbs of Jalbador."

Weyoun stared at Sisko, abandoning all traces of the false veneer of a genetically engineered negotiator he had always maintained in their previous encounters. "In your time," he said seriously, "the legend of Jalbador ex­isted in many different forms, distorted by the inevitable accumulation of error over the millennia of its retelling. But in essence, Captain, each variation of that legend possessed a fraction of the truth. A truth which you helped bring back to a universe that had lost its way."

"And that truth would be?" Kira asked grimly.

Weyoun's response was uncharacteristically to the point. "The Prophets are the Gods of all creation, and the True Celestial Temple is their home."

Then, pausing as if to compose himself, the Vorta studied his audience of three before focusing his atten­tion on Arla. "Now I know this is not what you believe, Commander. I overheard what you were saying before I joined you. If the Prophets are Gods, then how can they let evil exist? That is a valid question. And it has a valid answer."

Weyoun stepped closer to Arla, addressing her as if Sisko and Kira were no longer present in this recon­struction of a meditation chamber. "You see, Com­mander, the Prophets do not wish their children to be afflicted by evil. But uncounted eons ago, when the

universe was a perfect ideal contained within the Tem­ple, some Prophets rebelled. Oh, they believed they had a just cause. They thought that a universe within the Temple could only ever be a reflection of perfection, not perfection itself. And so they fought to free crea­tion from its timeless realm. And in that great and terri­ble battle—beyond the comprehension of any linear being—the One Celestial Temple was—" Weyoun clapped his hands together unexpectedly, startling his three listeners,"—split asunder!"

The Vorta smiled apologetically at Arla. "The battle between the two groups of Prophets ended men. But the damage had already been done. The stars, the galaxies, the planets... everything the Prophets had created in their image of timeless perfection spilled out into the void created by the Temple's destruction. And in mat void, perfection was unattainable. Evil was loosed upon the face of creation. And all because of the pride of one group of Prophets, who thought they knew better."

"The Pah-wraiths," Arla whispered.

Weyoun brightened at Arla's response. "Ah, so you have had some religious instruction, Commander. Yes, of course. But the Pah-wraiths you know from your time are those poor beings who spilled from the Temple at the time it was torn in two. They could not cany on the fight in the False Temple, neither could they join their fellows in the True Temple. Instead, they sought shelter near the entrance to both shards of the One Temple, deep in the Fire Caves at die core of Bajor, lost and abandoned by both sides."

"This is all blasphemy!" Kira protested. "There was no battle in the Temple! There are no fallen Prophets! There is no second Temple!"

Undisturbed, Weyoun pointed an accusing finger at the livid major. "Then how do you explain your pres­ence here and now, exactly as foretold by Naradim's Third Vision as recorded on the tablets of Jalbador?"

"What do you mean 'our presence' was foretold?" Sisko asked quickly, before Kira could interrupt Wey­oun again.

"Behold," the Vorta intoned as if reciting from some ancient text, "you shall know the final prophecy of Jal­bador is fulfilled when the False Emissary shall rise from among those that did die in the destruction of the gate­way, to face the final battle with the True Emissary of the Prophets, and to bow before his righteousness at the time the doors shall be opened and the One Temple restored."

Weyoun's voice trembled with ecstasy as he con­cluded, "And by his return, and by his defeat, this shall you know as the True Reckoning, which shall come at the end of all days, and the beginning of that which has no beginning."

Sisko was unable to restrain Kira from another out­burst. "More Pah-wraith heresy!" she exclaimed. "The Reckoning took place less than a month ago! And Kai Winn stopped it!"

Weyoun regarded her with pity. "Major, do you re­ally believe any corporeal being could defy the will of the Prophets? Especially a nonbeliever such as Winn?"

Sisko could see the conflict in Kira. Winn was not the religious leader she had preferred, but neither did Kira doubt that the Kai had faith. "Kai Winn is not a nonbe­liever. She is ... sometimes misguided in her attempts to reconcile her spiritual duties with her political ones."

"Was," Weyoun corrected her. "Winn was misguided."

"She's dead?" Kira asked in a disbelieving voice.

"One of the first to be hung."

"Hung?!"

Weyoun sighed and bowed bis head. "You missed so much. The end of the war. The Ascendancy of Bajor. The collapse of the Federation—"

Sisko, Kira, and Arla all said, "What?" at the same moment

"Near-collapse," Weyoun amended. "Oh, there's still a council that meets... somewhere. Ships here and there that claim to be part of Starfleet. But all of it is little more than the twitching of a corpse, I'm afraid."

"What about those ships that attacked us?" Sisko asked.

"Oh, they weren't attacking you, Captain. They were attacking Captain Riker's ship in order to capture yours. Or, more to the point, to capture you."

"Why me?"

"Isn't that obvious? Without you the True Reckoning can't take place."

Sisko stared at Weyoun, afraid to draw the only con­clusion that seemed logical.

Weyoun nodded as if reading his mind. "That's right, Captain. You are the False Emissary. Risen from among those who died at the destruction of the gateway to (he Celestial Temple, that is, your late lamented Deep Space 9."

"But if I'm the False Emissary ..."

"Exactly." Weyoun bowed. "I am the True Emissary to the True Prophets of the One Temple, now Kai to all the believers of the Bajoran Ascendancy."

"Kai?!" To Sisko, Kira sounded as if she were about to choke. "You're a pawn of the Pah-wraiths!"

Weyoun's smile faded. 'True, I am their servant. But

consider this, Major. Even in the fringe beliefs you cling to, when was evil visited upon the universe?"

Whatever uncertainty Kira felt, it didn't prevent her from standing up to Weyoun. "Bajorans don't presume to speak for the universe. But evil came to Bajor when the people first turned away from the Prophets."

"And when was that? In your beliefs?" Weyoun added condescendingly.

"I don't think anyone knows the actual time period."

"Then approximately ... how long ago?"

Kira shrugged. "At the... the very beginning of our time on our world."

Weyoun leaned forward, his manner suggesting to Sisko nothing so much as a spider about to complete its web. "Exactly. At the very beginning of time. And what will eliminate evil from the universe—or, at the very least, in your beliefs, from the people of Bajor?"

Sisko couldn't help feeling that the Vorta was about to spring his trap, and it seemed by the slowness of Kira's reply that she sensed the same possibility. "When... when all the people of Bajor return to the Prophets and ... accept them as our Gods."

The Vorta nodded as if Kira had just answered her own question. "Then I ask you, Major, what better way to bring the people of the universe—or of Bajor—back to the Prophets than by bringing them back to the One Celestial Temple? And in all the 'blasphemous' and 'heretical' text that you refuse to accept, what is the one thing the Pah-wraiths always want to do?"

"Return to the Temple," Kira said reluctantly.

"Because by doing so the One Temple will be re­stored, and all the people will be returned to the Prophets."

"But the texts clearly state that the Pah-wraiths want to destroy the Temple!" Kira insisted.

Weyoun's reply was unexpected. "I agree. That's what your texts—inspired by the False Prophets—say. Because the False Prophets don't want the Temple to be restored. The False Prophets want to delude the peo­ple of Bajor into thinking that the Pah-wraiths are demons." The Vorta's voice began to rise accusingly. "But answer this, Major Why is it that the Prophets you worship hide themselves in their Temple, refusing to come out, refusing to do anything except sow confu­sion with the Orbs they inflicted upon your world, while the Pah-wraiths—even in your own texts—are known to walk amongst the people of Bajor and to con­stantly struggle to open the Temple doors?"

"Lies!" Kira said. "I refuse to listen to more of your lies!"

"Listen to yourself, Major. Where are your argu­ments, your reasons? You are simply denying the truth out of habit" Weyoun was almost taunting her. "I ex­pected so much more of you."

"Heretic!" Kira shouted as she rushed forward to strike Weyoun.

Sisko lunged after her but before he could reach her—

—a brilliant flash of red light flared from around Weyoun, and Kira was thrown back onto the flat stones that covered the deck.

Sisko dropped to his knees, supporting Kira as she gasped for breath, her dark eyes wide and unfocused. Arla moved to Sisko's side to add whatever aid she could give.

Weyoun's voice floated over them. "Forgive me. Major Kira's attack was quite unexpected, and in the

years since we last met I have perfected my control of... telekinesis, I suppose you would call it. A little too well, it seems."

Sisko turned to Weyoun, who still stood in front of the observation windows. "Do you have a medkit or a tricorder—anything?" Kira shuddered in his arms, each hard-won breath shallower, as if her throat were closing.

"I'm afraid we have no medical equipment of any kind on board this vessel," Weyoun said apologetically.

Sisko was appalled. Klingon ships were not known for their medical facilities, but still they carried some supplies, if only for the command staff. "Then beam us back to the Defiant!" He felt Kira's body arch, then go rigid as she opened her mouth and made no sound, as if her airways were now totally obstructed. "She's dying!" Sisko shouted at Weyoun.

Weyoun moved away from the windows and leaned down to observe Kira. "No, she's not." He waved one arm free of his robes, then placed his thumb and fore­finger on the lobe of Kira's left ear. "Her pagh is strong. She did not journey all this way to die so close to the end...."

And then Sisko watched, uncomprehending, as shimmering red light sprang forth from the Vorta's pale hand and spread across Kira's distorted features, until suddenly her entire body trembled, she inhaled deeply, and—

—went limp, breathing easily as if she had merely fallen asleep in his arms.

Sisko looked up at Weyoun, and for just an instant saw the Vorta's eyes flash red as well.

"Yes, Captain?" Weyoun said, as his eyes returned to their crystal-gray clarity.

Sisko looked down at Kira, whose eyes remained closed. Her chest rose and fell with normal regularity.

"What did you mean... 'so close to the end'? The end of what?"

The Vorta smiled like a child with a secret. "Why, not the end, Captain. The beginning. Didn't you hear what I said? The reason you've been returned from the dead is so the final prophecy of Jalbador can be fulfilled."

Sisko struggled to recall the exact words Weyoun had used when he seemed to be reciting sacred text to Kira. "The end of all days, and the beginning of that which has no beginning?"

"Exactly," Weyoun said, beaming as if at his favorite pupil. "When we shall all be returned to the Temple, and this imperfect creation shall at last come to an end."

Had he heard anyone else speak in that way, Sisko would have assumed the speaker was insane. But he had seen the red glow in Weyoun's eyes. The same glow that had been in Jake's eyes when a Pah-wraith had possessed his son's body and controlled his son's mind.

Arla got to her feet, her voice uncertain, colored by fear. "You're both talking about the end of the universe, aren't you?"

Sisko felt the chill of madness fill the room, as Wey­oun bestowed a smile of blessing upon the Bajoran Starfleet officer. "Oh, Commander, nothing as drastic as that. Merely the end of material existence. But at that time, you—" the Vorta smiled at Sisko. "—and the captain—" He brushed his fingers along the side of Kira's face. "—and even the nonbelievers will ascend to a new level of existence, wrapped for all time in the love and the wisdom of the Prophets."

Glow or no glow, Pah-wraith or no Pah-wraith, for Sisko, Weyoun had gone too far. He eased Kira onto the floor and stood up to face the Vorta. "You're in­sane," he said.

Weyoun merely shrugged. "Of course that's what you must think. It is demanded of your role as the False Emissary. But rest assured that even you will ascend to the Temple when you fulfill the final prophecy and ac­knowledge the True Prophets."

"Never," Sisko said. But even as he spoke, Sisko was aware that not even he, the Emissary of Kira's Prophets, knew what he must do next to stop Weyoun and the Pah-Wraiths from whatever terrible action they were planning. He still needed to learn more about this future before he could help anyone change it

"Ah, but never doesn't mean what it used to," Wey­oun replied. "Not when all you have left is fifteen days."

"Fifteen days... till what?" Arla asked.

Weyoun closed his eyes, as if at total peace with himself and the universe. "Fifteen days until the doors of the two Temples shall open together, and the final battle of good and evil shall be fought..." He opened his eyes, sought out Sisko as he continued, "... and won, and this cruel, imperfect universe shall at last pass, and we shall all ascend to the Temple for eter­nity."

Apprehension swept over Sisko. It was obvious mat despite the complete insanity of Weyoun's proclama­tion, the Vorta believed every word he spoke.

And when the universe did not end in fifteen days, Sisko did not doubt there would be, quite literally, hell to pay.

CHAPTER 8

in the small, low-ceilinged briefing room on the Boreth's main cargo deck, Elim Garak read the sensor-log identification screen on the main wall-viewer, and felt nothing.

He didn't have to be paranoid to know that he and the seventeen other crew and passengers removed from the Defiant were under close observation. But from what he had already deduced about the state of this time period in general, and of the Bajoran Ascendancy in particular, being paranoid would stand him in good stead.

The large irregularly-shaped Klingon viewscreen on the far bulkhead flickered once, then displayed an image of Deep Space 9 as it had existed on Stardate 51889.4, as seen from the vantage point of the U.S.S. Garneau. The Garneau was—or had been—one of two Akira-class Starfleet vessels dispatched when the sta­tion's computers had fallen victim to some rather

clever, if disruptive, Bynar codes inserted by two vi­cious Andorian sisters intent on obtaining the Red Orbs of Jalbador.

At the time, as he had helped Jadzia Dax eliminate the codes from Deep Space 9's Cardassian computer components, he had been impressed by the meddlesome Andorians' audacity—though given the results of their endeavors and how they had affected him personally, he would happily eviscerate them now, very slowly.

On the viewscreen, the image of Deep Space 9 grew as the Garneau closed in. This moment of calm before the inevitable temporal storm to come gave Garak the chance to admire once again the stately sweep of the Cardassian docking towers and the profound balance in the proportions of its rings to its central core. To his trained eye, the station was an exquisitely compelling sculpture, majestically framed against the subtly shift­ing energy cascades of the Denorios Belt, and it spoke to him of his long-lost home.

None of this would he reveal to others, of course. In­stead, keeping his expression deliberately blank, he checked the timecode running at the bottom of the image. In terms of his own relative perceptions—and what other perceptions could there be that were as im­portant?—the time it indicated was barely a day ago. He had been in Ops at that moment, still working on the computer though curious about what was going on in Quark's, where so many others of the station's per­sonnel had congregated.

Not that he would admit to being curious, either. Far better to be aloof, he knew. Far better to be uncon­cerned. Far better to be so unremarkable and innocuous that the passing crowd could do nothing but ignore him.

At last, something happened in the recording. A faint red glow pulsed through three or four of the observa­tion portals ringing the Promenade level. Garak de­cided that must have been the moment when the three Red Orbs of Jalbador were brought into alignment in the Ferengi's bar, beginning the process of opening the second wormhole in Bajoran space—and in the middle of Deep Space 9.

The alignment had been quite a sight—or so he had been told by one of his fellow passengers, Rom to be precise. The lumpish but loquacious Ferengi repair tech­nician had described how the three hourglass-shaped orbs, indistinguishable from the better-known Orbs of the Prophets—except for their crimson color—had levi­tated, as if under their own control, until they had de­scribed the vertices of an equilateral triangle. Suspended in midair less than two meters above the floor of the bar, they had proved impossible to budge.

Garak sighed as if stifling a yawn. But inwardly he was anything but bored. No wonder dear, sweet Leej Terrell had been so eager to obtain the Orbs for her­self—and for Cardassia. The Cardassian scientist had been his lover once, his nemesis many times, and was one of a scattered and secretive handful of highly skilled and exceedingly ruthless operatives who had survived the Dominion's obliteration of the Obsidian Order.

With the three Red Orbs in hand, Garak had no doubt that Terrell had believed she would have the se­cret to creating a translocatable wormhole. If anything could break Cardassia free of its devil's bargain with the Dominion, the ability to open a wormhole connect­ing any two points in space would be the ultimate deal-breaker. No planetary defense force would be able to

stop a Cardassian fleet that could launch from the homeworld and within seconds appear in the atmos­phere of the enemy's home. Terrell's trio of orbs and that second wormhole would be the key to a Pax Car­dassia, bringing order to a troubled galaxy.

But at the same time as Garak fully supported Ter­rell's passion for freedom and admired her patriotism for Cardassia's sake, he also secretly hoped for his own sake that this sensor log would show her vessel's de­struction. In detail.

On the viewscreen, the red emanations in the Prome­nade's observation portals had become a constant glow, slowly increasing in brightness. Garak noted a handful of escape pods already breaking free of the habitat rings. Then, almost obscured by a docking tower, the Defiant released her docking clamps and began to slip back from the station, moving out of the optical sen­sor's field of vision.

It was just about now, Garak realized, that he had been unexpectedly beamed from Ops into the confu­sion of the Defiant, men roughly pushed out the door and toward the mess hall. And he could see that the timing of his rescue had been perfect.

Because now on the viewscreen, the red glow had in­fected a full quadrant of the Promenade module. Silent explosions ran along a docking pylon. And then, the habitat ring began to bend like a wheel warping out of true, as if an immense gravitational well had formed in Quark's.

As it had.

Garak continued to watch events unfold without dis­playing the slightest interest in or outrage at what tran­spired next. More escape pods shot free of the station, only to be drawn back to disappear into the opening maw of the red-tinged wormhole.

Like the mouth of the human hell, Garak thought. How fitting. How poetic.

And then, faster than the sensor log had been able to record, the image of Deep Space 9 shrank and was gone, replaced by what could almost pass for the open­ing to the Bajoran wormhole. Except that that swirling mass of forces always seemed to have a blue cast to the energies it released, and this second wormhole was most definitely color-shifted to the red half of the visi­ble-light spectrum.

Captain Sisko's voice disrupted the silence in the briefing room. "That wasn't how we experienced the station's collapse."

Sisko, Major Kira, and Commander Arla were seated up front in the first row of hard Klingon chairs, to which they had been escorted by Romulan security guards only moments before the briefing began. Garak could understand why the captain of the Defiant had been sep­arated from the other passengers and crew when they had been beamed to the Boreth. But he didn't know why the major and the commander had been taken with him, unless it was because they were the only two Ba­jorans among the eighteen. He would, however, en­deavor to find out. Though Garak knew he would never admit to curiosity—at least, not in a public sense—he was fully aware mat he lived his life in a perpetual haze of it.

Sisko continued his correction of the sensor log's ac­count. "We saw the collapse of the station proceed more slowly while we were under attack by Terrell's ship."

How very interesting, Garak thought, only his long

years of training allowing him to keep Ms face com­pletely composed.

A young Romulan who stood at the side of the brief­ing room, improbably outfitted in a poorly fitted variation of a Bajoran militia uniform, switched on a padd so that his angular face was illuminated from below. Then he looked over to Sisko and said, "That tends to confirm the hypothesis that the Defiant was caught within the bound­ary layer of the opening wormhole. Your ship would men have been subjected to relativistic time-dilation effects."

"Then shouldn't the same have happened to Terrell's ship?" Sisko asked.

Garak waited eagerly for the answer. But the Romu­lan was not forthcoming.

"There are no records of that ship as you described it—" The Romulan looked down at his padd again. "—A Chimera-class vessel disguised as a Sagittarian passenger liner. In any event, the Defiant was the only vessel to emerge into this time period."

Pity, Garak thought. He would have enjoyed one final meeting with Terrell. He would have liked to have seen her face when she learned that their precious Cardassia no longer existed. Its history, its culture, and all except a handful of its people erased from the universe, as if they had been nothing but a half-remembered dream.

He himself had learned the fate of his world just a few hours earlier from two young Klingon soldiers, also in badly tailored Bajoran uniforms. He had noted their intense interest in observing him, and upon ques­tioning them had learned that they had never encoun­tered a Cardassian before. Then they had told him why.

At that precise instant, Garak had to admit—if only to himself—he had felt a true pang of regret. But only

for an instant. Immense relief—not sorrow—had im­mediately followed. In this time period, there was now nothing left for him to fight for. His struggles were over.

It was, he had decided, a quite liberating experience.

A Bajoran colonel now appeared on the main viewscreen, obviously reading from a script, droning on without much clarity of detail about the events of the few weeks that had followed the opening of the second wormhole. Apparently, the space-time matrix of the Ba­joran sector had been altered in some obscure technical way by the second wormhole's gravimetric profile. Garak couldn't follow what the implications of that were, nor was he particularly interested. But supposedly the behavior of the first wormhole had become more er­ratic because of those changes. It had rarely opened after that, and travel through it had proved impossible.

Then, the Bajoran colonel recounted at tedious length, with the Cardassian-Dominion alliance mount­ing a major offensive throughout the region, a small battle group had broken through Starfleet's crumbling lines and reached the Bajoran system.

Garak covered his mouth with his hand and yawned outright. This time it wasn't an affectation. The briefing room was getting uncomfortably hot. He glanced at the unfinished metal walls, willing himself to see them move away from him and not close in. His claustropho­bia—again a personal idiosyncrasy he avoided reveal­ing to any other being—was becoming more noticeable of late. He redoubled bis efforts to suppress it.

Another new sensor-log screen appeared on the viewer, and Garak welcomed it as a distraction from the heat and closeness of the room. This next recording had apparently been made by the {7.5.5. Enterprise, also in the Bajoran system, on Stardate 52145.7.

The new sensor recording began, and for a few sec­onds all Garak could see was streaking stars and lances of phaser fire. Then the image stabilized, and he was able to make out a tightly grouped formation of three Galor-class Cardassian warships surrounded by a cloud of Jem'Hadar attack cruisers, purple drive fields aglow. In the background, Garak could once again see the shifting energy curtain of the Denorios Belt, so he had a reasonably good notion of what he was watching: the departure of Kai Weyoun's expedition.

Kai Weyoun, Garak mused. He almost felt sorry for poor Major Kira, having to deal with that corruption of her deeply felt religion. Almost felt sorry. The major was a Bajoran, after all, and they were a far too sensi­tive people, regrettably quick to find fault or take of­fense. And judging from how they had created an entire religion around a few sparkling artifacts discarded by a more advanced species, rather easy to deceive as well.

The new sensor log continued, and Garak's conclu­sion was confirmed. Just as the Enterprise swooped in on what seemed to him to be a rather remarkably risky attack—which nonetheless resulted in the loss of a Car­dassian warship—the red wormhole popped open, just as the blue wormhole so often had. At mat, the two re­maining Galor-class ships and their Jem'Hadar escorts vanished into the red wormhole, which then collapsed. Though the Enterprise continued on a matching course, unlike the blue wormhole the red wormhole did not open again.

Very selective, Garak noted. Which meant it was quite likely that the red wormhole was also home to an

advanced species, or was otherwise under intelligent control.

The current sensor log ended, and the boring Bajoran colonel returned to the viewscreen to explain that the Weyoun expedition had been intended to traverse the new phenomenon and attempt to discover if it had a second opening in normal space, as did the existing phenomenon.

Garak's eyes began to close. Really, the colonel was almost soporific. Even he could guess that the unstated goal of the expedition had been to determine if the new wormhole led to the Gamma Quadrant.

But then Garak's eyes opened abruptly. The colonel had not referred to the wormholes as wormholes. He had pointedly called them phenomena. Why?

Listening more closely now, Garak heard the colonel go on to say that although it usually took less than two minutes to travel through the existing phenomenon, the Weyoun expedition remained in the new phenomenon for more than three weeks. At which time, of the 1,137 valiant soldiers who had made up the expeditionary force, only Weyoun managed to return. Though he brought with him new allies.

Now another new sensor log began running, this one from a Bajoran vessel, the Naquo, beginning with a rapid sweep across the Denorios Belt to catch the red wormhole in the process of opening. And then, from that cauldron of hyperdimensional energies, Garak saw seven ships appear.

Despite himself Garak leaned forward in his chair, as if those tew extra centimeters might help him better un­derstand the nature of the seven ships.

Are they transparent? he wondered, for certainly he

could see the glow of the wormhole and the Belt through their elongated, ovoid shapes.

But as the sensor log displayed a progression of in­creasingly magnified views, Garak realized that the seven ships were little more than skeletons—collec­tions of struts and beams, each vessel slightly different from the rest but with no obviously contained areas that might correspond to crew quarters.

A sudden flash of light from one of the ships ended the sensor recording. Sitting back once again, Garak de­cided the flash of light had been weapons fire. Wher­ever the second wormhole had reemerged into normal space, it was clear that Weyoun had returned with allies.

Once again, the Bajoran colonel returned to the screen. This time Garak did not feel at all sleepy.

The colonel now stated that the new phenomenon had connected the Bajoran Sector to a region in the far­thest reaches of the Delta Quadrant. There, Weyoun had made contact with the Grigari, who returned the Vorta when the rest of his expedition had been lost.

Garak waited for more details, but the colonel of­fered none. An omission Garak found distinctly amus­ing in its circumspection. He himself had heard rumors of the Grigari most of his Me. Though he could recall no convincing report of direct contact with the species, their medical technology was often traded at the fron­tier, having been obtained from other, intermediary species. Furthermore, that particular type of medical technology was banned on virtually every civilized world in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

He recalled once reading a report outlining the re­sults of the Obsidian Order's analysis of a Grigari flesh regenerator, which some had hoped would enable cer-

tain torture techniques to be used for longer periods of interrogation. The Order's conclusion: too dangerous.

If but one contraband Grigari device had been deemed by the Obsidian Order to be too dangerous, then it was daunting to consider the damage a Grigari fleet might be capable of inflicting. Clearly, what the Bajoran colonel was not saying in this sanitized brief­ing was that Weyoun's expedition—Jem'Hadar and Cardassian alike—had been utterly decimated by the Grigari. Which begged the only questions worth ask­ing: How had Weyoun survived, and why had the Gri­gari come through the wormhole under his command?

Garak repressed the hope that threatened to surface as a smile on his face. A universe of mystery to explore, he thought It could actually be that there would be no one here he could bribe, threaten, or seduce into taking him back to his own time. And if so, he might grow to like it here.

He settled back to see what else would unfold from this selective presentation of the past twenty-five years, and what answers, if any, might be forthcoming. So far, it seemed, for each mystery described and explained two new ones were being revealed and left enigmatic.

As the briefing continued, the ever-curious Garak was not disappointed.

CHAPTER 9

with seven lifetimes of experience to draw on, Jadzia Dax recognized a dying Starship when she saw one, and the Augustus was dying.

It obviously had been launched before completion— its environmental controls were malfunctioning. The nature of the vessel's exposed wires, pipes, and con­duits also told her that redundancy and self-repair capa­bilities were nonexistent. And there were appallingly few signs of any attempt to make the ship a secure home for her crew. Even the earliest starships had used paint and colored lights to vary the visual environment and prevent boredom from setting in on long voyages or tours of duty. Yet even those simple grace notes were missing from mis ship.

And just as the yellowing of a single leaf can indi­cate the failing health of a tree, Jadzia was further con­vinced that the decline of the Augustus was not an

isolated event. It was a symptom of a greater disease, one that must infect all of Starfleet.

None of these conclusions had she shared with Worf, however. Even as she had walked with him through the narrow, unfinished corridors of the ship escorted by Vulcan security guards, each wearing phaser-visors, Jadzia had remained silent, as had he. Now, with little more than a look exchanged since she and her husband had been escorted to the cramped cabin that was to be their prison cell, Jadzia knew that Worf had reached the same conclusion she had.

They were under surveillance.

The fact mat the Vulcan captain of this vessel could subject them to the barbaric test of their humanity on the hangar deck was proof enough that this Starfleet had de­viated from the ideals that had drawn Jadzia to serve in it The computer briefing she and Worf had watched on the holographic screen had been further evidence of what­ever disease was responsible for the decay around them.

Whether the briefing had been a complete lie or not Jadzia couldn't be certain. But she was convinced that it had not been the complete truth.

She had seen that same realization hi Worf's eyes as well.

Because no matter how limited Starfleet's ship con­struction and maintenance capacities had become, no matter how brutal and arbitrary its commanders, Jadzia could not for an instant believe that in a mere twenty-five years Starfleet and the Federation had degenerated to the point that they would take part in a religious war. It was unthinkable.

Yet according to the computer briefing, mat's exactly what was under way—the War of the Prophets.

Somehow, since the destruction of Deep Space 9 a new religious movement on Bajor, centered on the be­ings discovered to live in the second wormhole, had be­come a rallying point for a new interstellar political entity—the Bajoran Ascendancy. If the briefing was to be believed, the Ascendancy had early on launched a series of unprovoked attacks against Federation terri­tory that had resulted in years of tense negotiations and border skirmishes, each side accusing the other of on­going acts of terrorism.

Had that been the end of the story, Jadzia might have understood how a state of war could come to exist, with the Ascendancy attempting to take over new systems and the Federation attempting to maintain its borders.

But according to the briefing that was not the point of the undeclared war.

The goal of the Ascendancy was not to acquire new territory. It was simply to prohibit the passage of non-Ascendancy ships through the Bajoran Sector, includ­ing the homeworld system and the four closest colony worlds. In Jadzia's time—in fact, throughout the exis­tence of the Federation—Starfleet had always respected the sovereignty of independent systems. The Prime Di­rective permitted it to do nothing less.

But according to that same briefing, which Jadzia had found to be a particularly deplorable piece of prop­aganda, long on emotion and short on facts, the goal of Starfleet in this war was not to defend Federation terri­tory, not to contain Ascendancy forces within their own boundaries, but actually to invade the Bajoran home system and destroy the second wormhole, ending the new Bajoran religion.

Even seven lifetimes had not prepared her for the

utter revulsion she felt for the Starfleet of this time. What had happened to the Prime Directive? What had happened to the Fundamental Declarations? For a mo­ment the Trill had even found herself wondering if, in addition to traveling through time, the Defiant had somehow crossed over into a parallel universe, one closer to the horrors of the Mirror Universe than to the one she had lived in.

Their Vulcan captors had told them that the briefing would answer all their questions. But so many new ones had been raised in Jadzia that she had come to feel liberated. When she had entered the Academy, she had pledged herself to uphold the ideals of Starfleet and the Federation. When she had graduated, she had taken her oath as an officer to do the same. As a result, she felt no conflict in her present resolve to behave according to that pledge and that oath—both made to the Starfleet of the past and not to this hollow, dying version that did not deserve its name.

All she needed now was an opportunity to take ac­tion, and that opportunity came the moment she and Worf set foot on their third metal staircase. The ship's decks, doors, and intersections were labeled only by al­phanumeric code, but Jadzia knew they were now on a deck higher than the hangar deck, which suggested they were moving closer to the bridge.

Worf and she—the tactical officer and the science of­ficer—had been "invited" to a meeting there. And that strongly suggested that Captain T'len and her own sci­ence officer were now on the bridge, waiting for their "guests" to arrive.

Which means, Jadzia thought, they won't be ex­pecting—

121

Two steps from the top of the staircase and the wait-tag Vulcan escort, she drove her fist upward into the man's stomach, and as he doubled over she smashed her other hand up against the visor he wore, seeking to damage it as much as its wearer.

Reflexively, the Vulcan guard reached out for her shoulder, seeking the nerves that would bring instant unconsciousness. But he was still off-balance, and Jadzia swept bis outstretched hand aside and slammed his head against the metal handrail.

That was the telling blow, and with a groan the guard fell to the metal deck.

Only then did Jadzia turn back to see how Worf had fared, confident that he would have been looking for the same opportunity she had, and that he would have made his move hi the same instant.

Sure enough, Worf was crouched at the bottom of the stairway, removing the phaser-visor from the guard who lay sprawled there. A thin thread of green blood trickled from the Vulcan's nose, which looked consid­erably flatter than it had a few moments earlier.

Jadzia leaped up the last few steps and pulled the phaser-visor from the guard she had felled. A thin black wire ran from the device into the collar of the guard's uniform. She pushed him onto his side and traced the wire down his back until it reached his waist. She pulled up on his jacket and discovered that the wire dis­appeared into a belt that was studded with various com­ponents, and which she concluded was the power supply and control mechanism for the weapon.

The belt had a twist lock that opened easily, and by the time Jadzia had donned it over her own uniform and was adjusting the visor to her head, Worf had run

up the stairs with surprisingly little noise and had stopped beside her, his own phaser-visor already in place.

"Looks good," Jadzia told him. But looking through her own visor was like looking through transparent alu­minum. She saw no holographic displays or any other indication of how the visor should be operated.

"Mine does not work, either," Worf said.

Jadzia tried pulling her loose belt tighter. "Maybe they're keyed to each individual user."

"Or they could require low-level Vulcan telepathy."

Jadzia realized there could be a dozen safeguards built into the visors, and even if she and Worf could get past them, they'd still not know how to aim and fire. "Okay, for now they're just fashion accessories."

Worf frowned. "This is not a time to joke."

Jadzia couldn't resist smiling at her mate. She knew that as far as Worf was concerned there never was a good time for a joke. "Good work taking out your guard. I knew you'd be thinking the same thing I was."

Something flashed through Worf's eyes that sud­denly made Jadzia doubt he had been thinking the same as she had.

"Weren't you?" she asked.

"There were two earlier opportunities to attack. When you missed them both, I decided that you had not reached the same conclusion / had."

"So I took my time," she said. She most definitely intended to learn what the missed opportunities had been, but this wasn't the time for a debriefing. "But we're thinking the same thing now, right?"

"I hope so," Worf said seriously. "You are planning on locating the second hangar deck where they un-

723

doubtedly keep the shuttlecraft that were missing from the hangar deck we were beamed to."

"You want to hijack a shuttlecraft?" Jadzia asked in­credulously.

"It is the best way to escape and find a source of in­formation about this time mat we can trust."

"I agree with the second part, but there's a much bet­ter way to escape than by taking over a shuttle."

Worf gave Jadzia a look she knew all too well—the one that said he was the warrior in the family and she was the scientist. "What better way?" he asked, and his tone suggested that he knew whatever she was about to say was wrong.

"We take over the ship."

"The two of us?"

Jadzia grinned. "If you'd like to go back to our quar­ters and rest, I can take care of it."

Worf grunted. "How?"

"First, we don't linger near the scene of the crime." She looked up and down the corridor, then started to run forward. Unlike all other Starfleet vessels she had been on, the Augustus had no maps or display boards in the corridors. And since the identification labels did not progress in any logical sequence, she decided to as­sume that the ship had been deliberately designed to make it difficult for any hostile boarding party to know where they were and where they should go.

But from what she recalled of the elongated shape of the vessel as she had seen it on the Defiant's viewscreen, the odds were good that the bridge was ahead and no more than one or two decks higher.

Within two or three running strides, Worf had caught up to her, and together they ran to the next intersection.

Jadzia stopped in the middle of it, glancing port and starboard.

"How can you be sure we will not run into other guards?" Worf asked.

"Look at the ship's condition. It's filthy, poorly maintained. I bet they're running with less than half the crew they're supposed to have. That means double shifts, so everyone's either at their station or sleeping."

Worf adjusted the visor he wore—his prominent brow kept it from fitting securely across his face. "It is still dangerous to run without—"

Jadzia cut him off by pointing to a nearby door. "That one!" She ran to it, and as she looked for a con­trol panel the door obligingly slid open before her.

"An unlocked compartment is not likely to contain critical components," Worf complained. But he duti­fully followed her inside.

As the door slipped shut behind them, three small lighting fixtures flickered to life. Another sign that the Augustus wasn't operating at peak efficiency. The energy used to light the interior of a Starship was usually negli­gible compared to what was required to run the warp en­gines or the replicators. But this ship was obviously set up to conserve even that insignificant amount of power.

"Why are we here?" Worf asked as he surveyed the room. It was almost the same size as the cabin they'd been given, but there was no furniture, and its walls were lined with conduits and cables.

"There!" Jadzia pointed to her quarry—a computer screen and control surface. "That won't have restricted access."

She went to the screen, and in only seconds she had called up a schematic of the ship. It was Tiberius-class,

and seemed to have evolved from the Defiant. Almost three-quarters of its volume was devoted to warp en­gines and weapons systems. Only the central core of the ship contained significant life-support areas.

"This is good," Jadzia said as she made calculations based on the size of the habitable volume of the ship. "I'd say the regular crew complement wouldn't be more than fifty. So we're probably facing no more than thirty. That's just about two to one, and you're good for at least ten, so..." She looked back at Worf, but he wasn't paying attention to her. He was looking down at the deck. "Am I boring you?"

Worf was looking at the far bulkhead, and a sudden shaft of silver energy lanced from his visor to crackle against a bare spot between two conduits. "I have found the 'on' switch," Worf announced as he reached over to show her where her visor's activation controls were located, on the upper edge of her belt. Suddenly a rainbow collection of virtual squares appeared before her eyes, each about a centimeter across, and appearing to hover in mid-air a meter in front of her.

Then Worf touched another control on her belt and the squares seemed to float closer, until she could read then* labels. Some corresponded to phaser controls. Others to tricorder functions.

"A combination phaser and tricorder?" she asked.

"Extremely efficient," Worf confirmed with ap­proval. "It leaves both hands free to use a bat'leth."

Jadzia looked past the holographic controls to give Worf a wry smile. "Exactly what I was thinking." She refocused on the controls, noticing that whichever one she looked at brightened. "How do you actually get it to fire?" she asked.

Worf quickly briefed her on the visor operating sys­tem, explaining that it appeared to be similar to the hel­mets worn by Starfleet warp-fighter pilots hi their own time. After enabling the phaser functions, firing, it seemed, was as simple as looking at a target and blink­ing the right eye.

"This is better than I had hoped," Jadzia said.

Worf sighed. "Do you really think we have a chance at taking over their bridge? Even armed with these?"

Jadzia patted Worf's expansive chest. "We're not going to take over the bridge. Chances are it has defenses we can't even imagine. I had something different in mind."

This time Worf's sigh was even louder. "It is obvious we do not think alike, because I have no idea what you mean."

Jadzia was about to wink at Worf, then thought better of it, considering her visor's capabilities. Instead, she pointed to a spot on the ship's schematic that indicated a large cabin just down the corridor from the bridge. "What's more important than the bridge of a Starship? Or should I say, who is more important?"

At last Worf smiled. Trill and Klingon, bound by love and duty, they were finally both sharing the same thought

They waited in darkness—and they did not have to wait long. The door to the captain's stateroom slid open only minutes after Jadzia and Worf had easily bypassed the lock. For all the advanced firepower the Augustus carried, her designers had left out a considerable num­ber of security amenities, including a weapons-suppres­sion system, computer control of all interior locks, and a personnel-locator network. The only reason for the omissions Jadzia could imagine was that their absence

made the ship simpler and faster to build. But what did the concepts of simpler and faster have to do with a construction project undertaken by robotic assemblers? All the mysteries in this time period were making her uncomfortable.

With the door opening and the lights coming on, Jadzia trusted that several of those mysteries might soon end.

As planned, the instant the door had slid shut again, Worf leaned out from his position sprawled behind the bunk and stunned Captain T'len with a blast from his triphaser.

The stun intensity was at the lowest setting, and T'len's hand fluttered toward her communicator as she slumped on the deck, semiconscious. But before the cap­tain could report, Jadzia was at her side and removed her communicator badge. Then Worf tied the captain's hands and feet with lengths of fabric he ripped from the sheets on the bunk and carried her to the room's lone chair.

As T'len slowly regained awareness of what had happened to her, Jadzia studied the stateroom to see if she could build up a picture of what sort of person the captain was. But almost everything in it was Starfleet issue, not a hint of individuality anywhere. No paint­ings or framed holos. No books. Not even a Vulcan IDIC placed as a meditation aid.

Jadzia's examination ended with T'len's blunt state­ment "You will not survive this attempt to take control of my ship."

"We've survived this long," Jadzia said easily. "We'll make it through a few more minutes."

Worf stood so that he was midway between the closed door and the captain, and he kept his gaze firmly

on the door to challenge anyone who might come through it. "Captain T'len, what is our estimated arrival time at Starbase 53?"

"Eighteen hours, fourteen minutes."

"What will happen to us when we arrive?"

"To you? Nothing. Because you will be dead. To your fellow refugees, I cannot say. It was anticipated that they would be given a chance to demonstrate their suitability for continuing their service with Starfleet. However, if your actions are typical of what we can ex­pect from them, they will be imprisoned."

"You knew we were coming, didn't you?" Jadzia said. It was the only explanation for how quickly the briefing program had been made available. It had been created for the crew of the Defiant, the Bolian admiral had said.

T'len nodded. "Several years after your disappear­ance, Starfleet researchers went back to the sensor logs recorded at the time of your disappearance and discov­ered clues suggesting the Defiant might have been pulled along the equivalent of a temporal-slingshot tra­jectory around the mouth of the second wormhole. The trajectory was calculated and the time of your reemer-gence into the timeline plotted."

"Why did we reemerge hi interstellar space?" Worf asked.

Jadzia expanded the question. "Shouldn't we have reappeared around the wormhole?"

"You did not travel into the wormhole. You traveled through a region of space-time that was significantly distorted by the wormhole. The Bajoran system has moved on hi the past twenty-five years, through a com­bination of its own relative motion and the rotation of

the galaxy. Since the space-time distortion caused by the wormhole is not constant—as would be the case with the gravity well of a star—the absolute region of space you passed through was unbound, and moved at a different rate."

Jadzia felt vindicated. "Given your knowledge of the second wormhole, I'd say Starfleet has done consider­able research into it."

"These are desperate times," T'len said, looking down at the torn sheets that bound her hands and feet together.

"A Vulcan admitting to desperation?" Jadzia asked.

"You saw the briefing that was prepared for you," the captain replied. "Logic is in short supply at this time."

"Exactly what I was thinking," Jadzia agreed. "Now tell me—what wasn't on the briefing?"

"That question is too broad."

"I don't believe the Federation would enter into a war against any system just to wipe out a religion."

"Perhaps not in your time."

"Are you serious?" Jadzia asked, hating the implica­tions of T'len's answer. "This War of the Prophets is what the briefing described?"

T'len looked up at the ceiling, an odd gesture for a Vulcan to make. "Starfleet's objective in this war, unde­clared or not, is to gain entry into the Bajoran system and destroy the red wormhole and any and all artifacts of importance to the subset of Bajoran faith known as Ascendant."

Jadzia could see that even Worf looked shocked by T'len's words. "What about the Prime Directive?"

"It is no longer operative."

Jadzia stared at T'len. "I can't believe I heard a Starfleet officer say that."

"Commander Dax, this is a war of survival. Either we destroy the Ascendants, or they will destroy us."

"Because of their religious beliefs?"

"Precisely."

Worf shared Jadzia's incomprehension. "You will have to explain to us how a belief based in personal faith can pose a danger to the Federation."

"Not just the Federation," T'len said grimly.

"Captain," Jadzia asked in sudden apprehension, "what exactly do the Ascendants believe?"

The captain's explanation did nothing to make Jadzia more comfortable.

CHAPTER 10

on six swift legs, the Cardassian vole scurried along the overhead power conduit mounted near the top of the bulkhead just outside the Boreth's main engineering sta­tion. Visually indistinguishable in color from the stained Klingon structural panels that lined the ship's corridor, the diminutive orange creature froze hi the shadows near the ceiling, almost as if to avoid being heard by the sensitive ears of the two Romulans passing by below.

But when the two stopped, and each reached out in turn for the engineering security panel, the vole's tiny head jutted forward, its spine nobs pulsing in time with its rapid breathing, the hairless flaps of its bat-like ears flattening close to its skull, its glittering, bulbous eyes focusing on each move the Romulans made as they tapped out their individual security codes.

The engineering doors slid open.

In the same instant, the vole released the opposable

claws of its two front pairs of legs and dropped from the conduit, straight for the Romulans—

—who didn't even bother to look up as the annoying buzz of a Klingon glob fly swerved around them, then vanished into the cavernous upper levels of the largest open area on the Boreth.

Seconds later, before the Engineering doors could close, the Cardassian vole gripped the edge of a second-level safety rail with its claws, then vaulted to engineer­ing's upper deck and slipped through the narrow gap between two heavily shielded quantum-wave decou­plers, both aglow with flickering status lights. Just then, an exhausted Romulan technician who had been work­ing all shift to trace the source of an intermittent photon leak near the decouplers glanced away from her padd toward the gap. And saw a dim orange blur streak by.

A momentary frown creased the technician's face. The Boreth, however, was a vast ship and contained a verita­ble secondary ecosystem of parasites and vermin, so the sighting of the occasional pest was not worth reporting. Thus duty won out over curiosity. The photon leak was real. The technician dismissed the fleeting sighting.

And far back in the twisted labyrinth of barely pass­able access paths that ran behind the wall of power relays that supplied the ship's Romulan-designed singularity in­hibitor, the vole stopped, and after looking all around took a deep, squeaky breath and began to expand....

In the shadows of engineering, Odo watched care­fully as his humanoid hands sprouted from the sleeves of his Bajoran constable's uniform. Unlike the other, more common shapeshifting creatures in the galaxy, changelings such as he had the ability to alter their

mass as well as their form. Though it was a completely instinctive process, Odo's first mentor in the world of solids, Dr. Mora Pol, had theorized that Odo's ability to alter the shape of his molecular structure actually en­abled him to form four-dimensional lattices in the shape of hyperspheres and tesseracts—geometric shapes that could not exist in only three dimensions.

In effect, this allowed Odo to shunt some of his mass into another dimension, depending on the requirements of the form he assumed. Odo acknowledged that as a scientific problem his innate ability was interesting, and that Pol's theory, if true, made some sort of sense. Yet because of Dr. Pol's belief that changelings faced the risk of inadvertently pushing too much of themselves into that other dimension and disappearing altogether, Odo still experienced unease when attempting to reduce his mass to a matter of micrograms. As a result he had seldom dared push his shape-changing ability to the ex­tremes of becoming anything as small as a Klingon glob fly, a creature only hah7 the size of a Terran mosquito.

Since learning more about his true nature from his fellow changelings hi the Great Link, Odo had learned that Dr. Pol's fear resulted from his misunderstanding the shapeshifting process; still, old habits died hard, and Odo still felt uncomfortable transforming himself into anything smaller than voles or creatures of similar size.

Relieved at his uneventful reversion to normal hu-manoid mass and size, Odo now turned to the one or two details still requiring his attention.

On his reconnaissance mission he had observed that almost all crew members of the Boreth wore uniforms apparently modified from something similar to the one he had customarily worn on Deep Space 9. Except that

the Boreth crew uniforms featured slightly different shades of brown-and-tan fabric and had a single swath of a contrasting color running across the chest from shoulder to shoulder, instead of the two seemingly sep­arate shoulder pieces his own uniform displayed. Also for some reason, Odo recalled, the Boreth crew uni­forms were an invariably sloppy fit, as if the ship's clothing replicators no longer had accurate measuring capabilities.

Still the changes were simple, and as he now formed a mental picture of himself wearing a new uniform, Odo sensed the familiar rippling and shifting of his outer self as his external uniform updated itself to the new standard appearance, its surface even sagging and bunching to suggest a bad fit. Then, just to further the illusion should he be seen in engineering, Odo gave his head a shake, and his sleek, brushed-back hair—a near duplicate of Dr. Pol's own style and color—slithered forward to become black Romulan bangs. At the same time his simply shaped ears elongated slightly to form Vulcanoid points, and his brow became more pronounced. Odo knew that under normal lighting conditions there would still be an unfinished look to his features (despite his ability to du­plicate every vane of every feather on an avian species, the far less demanding details of a humanoid face had al­ways remained such a difficult challenge for him he sometimes wondered if his people had engineered a sort of facial inhibition into nun when they'd adjusted his ge­netic code, to make him long to return to his home-world). At least, he reasoned, his new Romulan form would offer some protection during his passage through engineering, while he committed the acts of sabotage so painstakingly planned by O'Brien and Rom.

Captain Sisko, of course, had given his express ap­proval for the operation. From the briefing the survivors from the Defiant had received only a few hours ago, it had become obvious to all that despite the Starfleet em­blems that adorned this vessel, the institution served by the crew of the Boreth bore no allegiance nor resem­blance to the Starfleet of twenty-five years past. The emblems, in the captain's judgment, were a lie. Odo and the other survivors suspected the briefing was also.

Odo directed his attention to an exposed bulkhead be­tween two large and unidentifiable cylindrical housings, where he found a power-relay switching box surrounded by a nest of conduits. The box itself was a meter tall, no more than a half-meter wide, and labeled with a Bajoran identification plate that had been haphazardly attached over a Klingon sign. From what Chief O'Brien had seen of the Boreth's power-distribution system as he was led through the corridors, he had told Odo he was confident that the switching mechanisms in the ship would not have changed significantly since their own time. Odo studied the Bajoran plate more closely, confirming for himself that it did use the same terminology with which he was familiar. Still, when he swung open the access panel, he was relieved to see that the layout of the box's interior was indeed very close to what Rom had described.

At any given time, Odo was aware from experience, a starship generated a constant amount of power for in­ternal use, though the demands on that power varied according to what subsystems—from replicators to sonic showers—were operating from second to second. Thus, a ship's power-distribution system was con­stantly adjusting the amount of power, available as ei­ther basic electricity or the more complex wave-forms

of translator current, that moved through specific sec­tions of the ship's power grid and prevented localized surges, brownouts, and overloads. Odo knew that inter­fering with that system would, as a matter of course, make such interruptions in the flow of power more likely. And a properly timed interruption that affected engineering could have the desired result of forcing the Boreth to drop from warp. That, in fact, was Odo's goal.

Sisko had admitted that it was a risky plan, but the captain had also thought it likely that, given the speed with which the vessels of the other Starfleet had at­tacked the Opaka, if the Boreth were to lose warp propulsion in deep space, it would also come under swift attack.

Odo concentrated on transforming his fingers into right-angled wiring grippers in order to disconnect an inline series of transpolar compensators. He trusted that Kira would be as successful with her half of the mis­sion: obtaining a Bajoran combadge from one of the guards watching over the Defiant's rescued crew and passengers. His Deep Space 9 colleague had taken the challenge because, whatever the truth of this future, as Bajorans Kira and Commander Aria were not subject to the same level of scrutiny as the other survivors. Con­sequently, Kira and Aria had each been given separate staterooms, while the remaining sixteen... prisoners, Odo decided was the best term for them... had been grouped into four main barracks-type rooms, each room featuring enough tiered bunks for twenty-one crew. O'Brien had identified the holding areas as en­listed men's communal quarters—a living area typical of some Klingon warships.

Whatever the barracks' original purpose, Odo had been pleased enough to have been placed in so large a confinement chamber. It had made it easier to move to the back of the room nearest the sanitary facilities and discreetly transform himself into the Klingon insect ca­pable of escaping through the door with the departing guards. While he had originally planned to reach engi­neering through the ventilation shafts, the Chief had been quick to point out to him that various environmen­tal systems on the ship employed charged grids specifi­cally designed to incinerate unwanted pests.

Odo gave a final twist to the secondary connector ring, and the status lights of the compensators winked out. One down, five to go. By O'Brien's calculations, if he could compromise at least six relay switches within engineering, and then short-circuit a seventh, he'd be able to cause a surge that would interrupt power to the ship's warp generators long enough to trigger an auto­matic safety shutdown. Although the chief engineer had doubted it would take the crew of the Boreth more than ten minutes to bring their ship back into warp, if Kira had her communicator and Rom was able to reconfig­ure it and there were real Starfleet vessels nearby, Odo reckoned that ten minutes might be just long enough to bring the Boreth under attack.

Whether that attack would result in the rescue of the Defiant's survivors now held prisoner on the Boreth was a risk everyone had accepted. Action, in Odo's ex­perience, was always preferable to imprisonment.

First changing the right-angled grippers at the end of his arm back into a hand, he carefully shut the access panel and glanced around his cramped work area. In the dim light, there appeared to be another power-relay

switching box four meters along the bulkhead, mounted between two large vertical pipes. Odo approached the switching box, located the release latch for its cover and, just as he was about to open it, heard a soft voice in his ear murmur, "Odo. You can stop now."

Startled, Odo stepped back, unsuccessfully scanning the shadows and darkness for the source of the voice. He couldn't be sure, but it had sounded like Weyoun. Either Weyoun himself was here, or his voice had been relayed through an overhead communications speaker. It was unclear which.

Odo quickly decided against staying long enough to find out. He took a breath, formed a mental image of a vole, and—

—nothing.

Odo tried again.

And again. But his shape appeared to be locked hi his half-formed Romulan disguise.

"Such a useful precaution," Weyoun's voice said breathily, from nowhere and from everywhere, "the in­hibitor."

Odo simultaneously blinked and stepped back, as a small cylindrical device suddenly appeared to be hover­ing a few meters in front of him. One end was seg­mented like a series of stacked golden rings, the other bore a black panel dotted with sequentially flashing lights.

"The original was developed by the Obsidian Order." To Odo, it was as if Weyoun were speaking from the unsupported device, and he wondered if antigravs had actually been miniaturized to such an extent. "A very long and arduous process, as I'm sure you know. Then Damar had it further refined. I believe he was planning

on betraying the Founder... once the Dominion-Cardassian alliance had proved victorious over the Fed­eration, of course."

And suddenly Weyoun's pale face appeared in midair, smiling with a distracted expression, near the floating inhibitor. Then, with a series of jerky move­ments, the rest of Weyoun's body came into view.

Odo stared in amazement, as a flurry of small energy discharges revealed the Vorta before him in his entirety, half-dressed in a vedek's robes, half in what could only be an isolation suit with its cloaking field switched off.

"Also a most useful device, wouldn't you agree?" Weyoun said as he stepped neatly out of the bulky red suit and let it fall to the deck. "I'm surprised you peo­ple forgot about it. It was a Starfleet invention, after all. Apparently, something called Section 31 reverse-engineered the Romulan cloaking device on the Defi­ant. Quite illegal. It's fascinating what the passage of time brings to the release of secret documents."

Odo had no idea what Weyoun was talking about, and didn't care to know. "Turn off the inhibitor," he said.

Weyoun looked at the device in his hand, shrugged. "I don't think so."

Odo regarded him sternly. "I gave you an order."

"So you did."

Odo was uncomfortable with what he had to say next, but in this one limited case, surely the end justi­fied the means. "Weyoun, I am your god. Do as I say."

Unexpectedly, Weyoun moved toward him, holding out the device as if making an offering of it. "Odo, do you realize you've never spoken to me like that before," the Vorta said as if concerned for his welfare. "I don't believe you know how much it has always troubled me

to see you so conflicted, refusing to admit what you are, what you have meant to me."

"Well, I don't refuse to admit it any longer. Turn off the—"

The cylinder struck Odo's face like a club, knocking him to the deck.

Odo held a hand to his all-too-solid face. The pain was intense, and he looked up at Weyoun in shock. The Vorta appeared to be trembling in the throes of nervous excitement

"I can't tell you how many times in the past twenty-five years I've wondered if I could do that. Did it hurt?"

Slowly, Odo got to his feet, only now recalling Sisko's warning that Weyoun had somehow overcome his ge­netic imperative to regard changelings as gods. "Yes."

"And that was just a simple blow. Imagine what it must feel like... to die."

Odo braced himself. Not only did Weyoun's attack confirm that the Vorta was capable of striking one of the beings he used to worship, it seemed he was prepar­ing himself to kill. Only one explanation was possible. Weyoun was a clone and this one was defective.

"I'm not defective," the Vorta said before Odo could state his conclusion. "I prefer to regard myself as re­stored. Cured. Freed?" The Vorta shrugged. "The im­portant thing is, I can finally think for myself."

"Perhaps," Odo growled, "you've just been more ef­fectively programmed."

Weyoun merely grinned. "I wondered that myself, Odo, after I returned from the True Temple. After all, if some minor realignment of my amino acids were re­sponsible for my former belief that you and your peo­ple were gods, I realized I really couldn't rule out the

possibility that some other agency might have made a further modification in my program."

"And what answer did you find?" As if I don't know, Odo thought sourly.

As if delighted to share a confidence with one who would truly understand, Weyoun favored him with an intimate smile. "First, I returned to my own home-world, as it were. To the Dominion cloning facilities on Rondac III. I awoke one of the other Weyouns. And you know, the most sophisticated medical scans showed that there was absolutely no difference between myself and him. Except in our thoughts and beliefs."

"Weyoun Eight believed the Founders were gods."

The Vorta sighed. 'To the end, sadly."

Odo snorted. "You mean, you killed him."

Weyoun pursed his mouth, pious. "He was defective, Odo. It was a mercy."

"And what happens when the next Weyoun tracks you down and decides you're defective?"

"There is, there will be, no next Weyoun," Weyoun said firmly. "I am the last. The cloning facility, you see, had... outlived its usefulness."

"You mean, you destroyed it."

"You know very well it was in Cardassian territory, so—technically—the Cardassians must take the blame for its loss, because they would not surrender. Believe me, Odo, I would have preferred to have kept at least some other Vorta around to help me through these diffi­cult years."

"You're sure you're the last of your kind?"

Weyoun nodded. "Just as you are the last of yours. At least in the Alpha Quadrant. Isn't that reason enough that we should be united in our purpose?"

"And what purpose would that be?" Odo steeled himself to continue the discussion with the odious crea­ture before him. The more Weyoun babbled on, the more information he would supply that might suggest a way out of this intolerable situation.

"Think of the suffering you've endured, Odo."

Odo loathed the false concern in Weyoun's oily voice, but gave no outward indication of his feelings, waiting to see what the Vorta really wanted from him.

Encouraged, Weyoun wanned to his argument that he and Odo were soulmates. "Cast out by your own people. Forced to become a plaything of Bajoran and Cardassian scientists. Never really belonging to any world, even your own when you returned to the Great Link. But you and I... we share so much pain. Isn't it right and proper that we should dedicate our lives to eliminating pain forever?"

"Pain is a necessary part of life," Odo said gruffly. "It enables us to appreciate pleasure."

Weyoun gazed at him thoughtfully. "I never knew you had such a philosophical streak hi you."

"Do you really want to end my pain?" Odo asked skeptically. "And the pain of all the others from the De­fiant?"

Weyoun bowed his head as he had done countless times in Odo's presence, but not this time to Odo. "The cessation of pain, the onset of joy ... that is the will and the one goal of the True Prophets," he intoned.

"Then free us," Odo said.

Weyoun sighed, lifting his head. "You're not being held prisoner here. You're being protected."

"It seems some words have changed their meanings in the past twenty-five years."

"Not words, Odo. The galaxy has changed. The Fed­eration has become an abomination. Starfleet an organi­zation of brutal murderers. If I gave you a shuttlecraft and sent you to ... to Vulcan... or Andor, do you know how long you'd last?" Weyoun didn't even pause before answering his own question. "They'd shoot you out of space before you finished opening nailing frequencies."

For no distinct reason he could articulate, Odo was beginning to feel that he really wasn't in immediate danger from Weyoun. It was obvious that the Vorta had been changed in some way. Whatever set of neurons in his brain had been programmed to revere changelings had somehow been reconfigured to revere the Pah-wraiths instead. Recalling that once even the Ferengi Grand Nagus Zek had been altered beyond recognition, having entered the first wormhole, only to reemerge as an altruist determined to give away his fortune. As a re­sult, Odo now had little doubt that alteration of funda­mental personality traits was well within the capability of wormhole beings.

But still it somehow also appeared to Odo that Wey­oun maintained a type of residual respect for him. The Vorta seemed anxious that he talk with him, listen to him, perhaps even come to understand him. And just as Weyoun's worship of him had been advantageous in the past, Odo decided that in this situation, it was still worth capitalizing on any remaining shadow of that be­havior, no matter how distasteful it was.

"Weyoun," he began, without a trace of his previous challenging attitude, choosing instead to play along al­together with whatever Weyoun was up to, "I acknowl­edge there is a great deal about this time I don't understand. But if there is just one question you can an-

swer for me now, then tell me: Why are the people from the Defiant so dangerous to the Starfleet of this time that they would kill us on sight?"

Odo was gratified by the effect of his changed tone on Weyoun, who responded by lowering the inhibitor and no longer making a point of threatening him with it "Rest assured it's not you, Odo. It's Captain Sisko."

Odo kept his surprise to himself. "Why him?"

The Vorta regarded Odo earnestly. "Because he's the False Emissary to the False Prophets. And according to prophecies of Jalbador, the One True Temple cannot be restored until the False Emissary accepts the True Emissary."

Weyoun's face became grave. "There are those in Starfleet who have determined that if they can prevent Captain Sisko from being present when the two halves of the Temple at last open in conjunction, the Day of Ascendancy will be postponed for millennia."

It was beginning to make sense to Odo. "So every­one knew that the Defiant hadn't been destroyed along with DS9. That the snip had been caught in a temporal rift."

Weyoun nodded. "Not at once, of course. But as the Ascendancy regained its rightful position of primacy on Bajor—oh, I tell you, Odo, no world has ever seen such a cultural flowering. You would not believe the treasures those Bajoran monks concealed over the centuries, be­cause they contradicted the teachings of the False Prophets. It is only now that ancient texts thought lost forever have been brought out into the light. Together with all of the writings and prophecies that... that the world had forgotten even existed, all of them hidden in caverns, walled-up in temples...."

Odo forgot himself for a moment. "And these texts, these writings, described the Defiant's return, did they?"

But Weyoun just smiled, and waggled a finger at him. "I hear that skeptical tone. And, no, the ancient texts didn't say that a twenty-fourth-century starship named the Defiant would be caught in a temporal rift only to reappear twenty-five years later."

"Didn't think so."

"Ah, but several texts did say that the False Emissary would arise from those who had perished at the fall of the gateway, just as I explained to Captain Sisko. The three great mystics of Jalbador—Shabren, Eilin, and Naradim—they had to describe their visions hi the con­text of their time, you know."

"Weyoun," Odo said, choosing his words with care, "I have no doubt that ancient mystical texts can be in­terpreted to support recent events. Humanoids have been doing that for millennia on hundreds of worlds. What I find troubling is that you say Starfleet has also accepted these interpretations."

"What's left of Starfleet. Yes."

"Then what I don't understand is why Starfleet would accept that the writings on which you base your faith are true, yet not then also accept your faith."

Weyoun's smile faded from his face, and for just an instant Odo thought he detected the flash of a red shift in the Vorta's clear gray eyes. "In the final battle to determine the fate of the universe," Weyoun said passionately, "Starfleet, for reasons which no sane mind can comprehend, has chosen to support the wrong side. Could we say they are afraid of that which they don't understand? That they're afraid of change? Or is it something simpler, Odo? Can we

simply say that in a universe in which all sentient be­ings have been given free choice, some, invariably, will choose evil?"

The Vorta paused as if in contact with something or someone of which Odo was unaware, and then discon­certingly began speaking again as if there had been no interruption in his speech. "These same questions have been asked since the True Prophets created sentient be­ings in their own image, and I doubt we will answer them here in engineering."

Even though he sensed Weyoun becoming threaten­ing again, Odo pushed on.

"Weyoun, all things being equal, how can I know that it's not you who've chosen... evil?"

The Vorta studied him for a moment before respond­ing. "You know, if my crew had heard that question come from you, Odo, not even I could have acted fast enough to save your life. If anyone else had asked that question, I would not even try to save him. But you and I... ?" Weyoun sighed deeply. "I will make al­lowances. But just this once. Do you understand?"

Odo nodded. "I understand I'm not to question you like that again."

An appreciative smile touched Weyoun's mouth. "Spo­ken like a Vorta." And then he was deadly serious again. "If you truly want to know who has allied themselves with the forces of evil, consider this, Odo: My forces res­cued you and your ship from a Starfleet attack wing."

"Only," Odo interjected, "because you need Captain Sisko to fulfill your prophecy."

"Exactly!" Weyoun said, apparently unoffended by the interruption. "I do need Captain Sisko alive. But the ancient texts say nothing about you, Odo. Or about the

others I saved with your captain. If I were serving some evil purpose, would it make sense for me to keep you all alive? Or would I simply have you killed? Just as those Starfleet ships tried to do?"

The Vorta held up his inhibitor device and checked its energy level. "It's time for you to go back to the oth­ers now, Odo. Tell them what we've talked about. Be especially sure to tell Captain Sisko that if this ill-conceived escape attempt by some unimaginable set of circumstances had worked, all he would have been es­caping from was my protection, while at the same time delivering himself up to those whose only goal is to kill him."

Weyoun twisted a control on the inhibitor and, shockingly, Odo felt his outer surface instantly begin to lose its integrity, shifting from his Romulan disguise to his usual humanoid form.

Weyoun waved the inhibitor at him. "I think you would agree, Odo, that my scientists have made a great many advances in the time you've been gone. Just re­member I can use this to turn you into a cube of dura-nium and have you thrown out an airlock if I have to."

Odo shivered in spite of himself. In a way, the expe­rience of forced transformation had been nice being in the Great Link. But in that surrender of individuality he himself had made the choice. Weyoun's machine had just chosen for him.

Weyoun's voice again filled his ears. "Tell Sisko what I've told you," the Vorta said with finality. "If you want to live, I am the only hope you have."

CHAPTER 11

it had been two years since he had had a new uniform. These days, replicator rations for nonessentials were nearly impossible to obtain. But while the words "nearly impossible" might be a roadblock for some Starfleet captains, to a Ferengi Starfleet captain they were a challenge. So two days ago, beginning with a priceless bottle of Picard champagne—vintage 2382, the last great year before the Earth's destruction—Nog had begun a complex series of trades that had not only resulted in his obtaining enough priority replicator ra­tions to requisition ten new uniforms, but he had also acquired use of one of the last remaining private yachts in Sector 001.

Technically, the Cerulean Star was the property of the Andorian trade representative in New Berlin. But since the trade mission didn't have access to adequate civilian antimatter supplies, the yacht had not been

used in ten months, and the New Berlin representative was certain that no one at her consulate would miss it—provided Nog returned it in three days and left enough Starfleet antimatter in the ship to reach Andor.

Given his transit time to Starbase 53, that left Nog thirty hours to pick up his passengers and warp back to Mars. There would then be ten days left until the end of the universe.

"But at least I'll face it wearing a new uniform," Nog said aloud.

He stood in the surprisingly large stateroom of the Andorian yacht, in standard orbit of a heavily-shielded Class-B asteroid in the lifeless Largo system, checking his virtual reflection in the holographic mirror that cir­cled him. Over the past year, he had noticed how his old uniforms had begun to fray, but not how the color at his shoulder had faded. This new uniform was an im­pressively rich black—it showed every speck of dust and lint—and its shoulder was a vivid, saturated crim­son. Not quite a dress uniform, but it would do. Be­cause for what he was about to attempt, he was determined to look his best.

Satisfied that the uniform was as perfect as he had time to make it, Nog donned a matching crimson head-skirt and tapped his combadge.

"Captain Nog," he said. "One to beam down."

There was no verbal acknowledgment of his request, but he was on schedule, and three seconds later the An­dorian stateroom dissolved into light, then reformed as the transporter room in Starbase 53's main ground in­stallation, deep within the asteroid's core.

As Nog had arranged, Captain T'len of the Augustus was waiting for him.

"Captain," Nog said as he stepped down from the pad, "it is good to see you again."

T'len kept her hands folded behind her back. "This is most irregular."

Nog hid a smile. He liked Vulcans. They never wasted time—an attribute he had come to appreciate during his Starfleet career. "I agree," he said.

T'len raised an eyebrow. "I refer to your request, not the overall situation."

Nog was ready for that. "If it were not for the overall situation, I wouldn't have made my request."

T'len angled her head slightly in the Vulcan equiva­lent of a shrug. "Point taken." She gestured to the door, and Nog hung back a step to let her lead the way. Though they shared the same rank, T'len was also a starship commander, and hi the subtle, unwritten tradi­tions of the Fleet, that gave her greater privilege.

Nog followed in T'len's wake as she turned left out­side the transporter room and walked toward the turbo-lift. Automatically, he noticed yet discounted the poor state of repair of the walls—sizable dents, repair patches of differing colors, irregular stains from cracked conduits mat had leaked in the past. Starfleet had been operating under extreme wartime conditions for more than ten years. Mere appearance, like frayed uniforms, was not at the top of anyone's list of problems to solve.

"How have they adjusted?" Nog asked T'len, as they neared the turbolift alcove.

"Impossible to characterize except on an individual basis."

"So, some of them have adjusted better than others?"

Nog caught T'len's swift sideways glance at him. "If their state of adjustment varies according to each indi-

vidual, then logic suggests that of course some have ad­justed better than others. You will find out for yourself in just a few minutes."

"I'd like to be prepared."

The Vulcan seemed to accept that explanation. "Then you should be prepared for the human civilian Vash. I have recommended that she remain in custody here, until... the end of hostilities."

What a euphemism, Nog thought, and he wondered who had first used it. Hostilities would end in less than two weeks, either with Starfleet's being successful in obliterating most of Bajor or with the end of the uni­verse. At the end of hostilities, either Vash would be re­leased, everyone would have new uniforms, walls would be painted, planet-wide celebrations would be held... or else nothing would ever matter again.

But the end of the universe was not a topic of con­versation in which Starfleet officers engaged. Quite properly, official directives stressed that all personnel were to focus on the mission, not the consequences.

"What's Vash likely to do?" Nog asked. "Escape?"

"In a manner of speaking. She is intent on returning to her own time."

Nog knew better, but couldn't resist. "Would that be so bad?"

T'len stopped and turned to him. "If Vash returned to her time and revealed what she had learned of our time, history would be changed."

"I ask the question again: Would that be so bad?"

Nog was not naive enough to interpret T'len's ex­pression of surprise as evidence of her abandonment of all pretense of Vulcan self-control. "Captain Nog, you are the Integrated Systems Manager for the Phoenix."

Though not quite sure why T'len was stating some­thing so obvious, Nog waited, gambling on her explain­ing herself without his having to interrupt.

"Thus you understand the logic of time travel," she said.

Nog frowned. "Some would say there is no logic to time travel."

T'len looked away for a moment as if gathering her thoughts—as if a Vulcan ever needed to do that. "If Vash—or indeed, if any of the crew of the Defiant—are allowed to return to their present, only two end results are possible. One, Vash changes the past, and we will no longer exist as we are, and the billions of beings born in the past twenty-five years will likely never exist at all. Two, Vash changes the past, and in so doing she creates a new timeline while we remain in ours—ex­actly as it is, unchanged."

Nog shook his head. "Think of the billions who have died in the past twenty-five years," he said. "Think of Earth. Of Cardassia Prime."

T'len eyed Nog with what Nog felt could only be disappointment. "Captain Nog, in each generation are born a mere handful of great beings. Your Admiral Pi-card is surely one of them. Perhaps one other starship captain in all of Starfleet's history has matched his ac­complishments. But if only one example of his bril­liance is required, then we need look no further than Project Phoenix. To change history without changing our timeline is a concept as revolutionary as Hawking's normalization of the Heisenberg exceptions."

Suddenly, T'len's attitude, however subtly, seemed to Nog to soften. "Even as a Vulcan," she said, "I do un­derstand what you are about to experience will be

fraught with emotion. You are about to open a door to your own past But do not allow yourself to be trapped by it. Jean-Luc Picard has given us a true phoenix. Trust in him, Captain. As a Starfleet officer, you can do no less."

'Trust me, Captain," Nog said emphatically. "I have no intention of doing anything else."

Nog's eyes deliberately met and held the Vulcan's as steadily as if he were negotiating difficult delivery dates with a recalcitrant supplier. And he was certain that Captain T'len in no way detected the lie he had just brazenly uttered.

It's good to be a Ferengi, Nog thought proudly, and not for the first time in his long Starfleet career. His peo­ple's four-lobed brains were resistant to most forms of telepathy, and negotiation skills continued to be taught to Ferengi youngsters at an age when most other humanoid babies were only learning to say their first words.

T'len nodded once as she led the way to the turbolift, and they rode the rest of the way to the conference room in silence. It was the Vulcan way. And Nog was glad of it

In the command conference room of Starbase 53, Jake Sisko knew he was the most nervous of all the temporal refugees from the Defiant. Which wasn't to say mat tension wasn't high for all the other survivors— officers and civilians, humans and Bajorans alike.

At first, this trip into the future had been just an ad­venture. High-risk and demanding, but when hadn't space exploration been that way?

But that had all changed only hours after he and the other survivors on the Augustus were shown the suspicious briefing tape. Right after viewing that

tape, he and the others had been called to another briefing, this time at the request of Worf and Jadzia. The revelations in that second gathering had con­cerned the past twenty-five years' worth of history in this timeline that they had missed. Suddenly, all that had been left unsaid in the first briefing came into focus for Jake.

In the bluntest of terms, what the people of this time faced was nothing less than the impending end of the universe.

Until the moment Jadzia and Worf and Captain T'len had related this incredible news, almost every pair of captives on board the Augustus had already been en­gaged in planning an escape or an attempt to seize con­trol of the surprisingly deficient ship. Because Worf and Jadzia had been first to take action, they had been the first to learn the truth.

Now no one was planning to escape. Except maybe Vash.

What appeared to be holding the others together at this moment, in Jake's view, was the shared opinion that if the end of the universe were approaching, it was because of what had been done and not done by all pres­ent during the last days of Deep Space 9. Although no one was talking about this upsetting conclusion, Jake felt certain that everyone believed in its truth.

Which meant in a way, he realized, that the fifteen temporal refugees from his time were now feeling re­sponsible for everything that had happened in this time during the past twenty-five years, and which was now leading to disaster. How could they not stay here, in this time, to do everything they could to try and reverse what they had set in motion?

"So, you know this big shot?" Vash suddenly asked him.

Jake knew his uncertain smile betrayed his nervous­ness. He had always known that Nog would do well in Starfleet, and he was gratified to learn that his child­hood Ferengi Mend was a captain now. But he was having some difficulty thinking of Nog as a "big shot." And it was odder still to think that in just a few mo­ments the doors were going to open and his old friend was going to step through them. Twenty-jive years older.

"He's—he was—my best friend," Jake told Vash.

"Really." Vash ran her hands along her newly sup­plied gray-and-black uniform. The gesture was clearly meant to be provocative.

"Nice uniforms, hmm?" she said with a smile, as his eyes involuntarily followed the seductive movement of her hands.

Jake snapped his eyes back to Vash's face with an ef­fort. All fifteen refugees had been given Starfleet uni­forms of the day to wear. The Starfleet officers among them had received their equivalent rank and specialty markings. The Bajorans and civilians had been given a variant of the uniform that reminded Jake of what cadets used to wear. Instead of being mostly black, the main uniform was a ribbed gray fabric, leaving only the shoulder section black. The supply officer had ex­plained that the uniform identified them as civilian spe­cialists within the Fleet, subject to Fleet regulations.

Jake had been surprised that the uniforms were is­sued from a storeroom and not a replicator station, and even more surprised that nothing fit as well as it should—though he supposed that was to be expected

when clothes weren't replicated with the benefit of a somatic topography scan.

But whoever had given Vash her specialist uniform must have expended some extra effort in determining her size, because to Jake it fit her to perfection. And she obviously knew it.

"Sorry," Jake stammered, having no idea what to say next "I... yeah, Nog's my best friend." What an idiot lam, bethought.

"How old are you?" Vash asked with a frank grin.

"I'll be twenty next month."

"Nineteen... what do you think your father would say if we..." Vash let her voice trail off suggestively.

Is there even a chance? Jake thought in amazement. He, like everyone else who knew them, had assumed that Vash and Dr. Bashir were ... He abruptly stopped that line of thought and shifted direction. "Um, I... uh, dated a dabo girl once. A couple of years back. That was okay with my dad... he even made us din­ner."

Vash studied him as if she were really listening to him. "A dabo girl. How educational for you."

Jake nodded, watching her carefully for any signs mat she was making fun of him. It actually had been, but not in the way Vash meant. Or did she—

"And after dinner," Vash continued, "was your date arrested, or did she just leave the station?"

Jake frowned. "Uh, Mardah left, yeah. She was ac­cepted at the Regulus Science Academy."

"Let me guess. Yam father wrote her a great letter of recommendation."

Jake sighed. "Look, I didn't mean to—"

"It's okay, Jake. We'll be friends. We'll go to... din-

ner a couple of years from now. We won't invite your father."

Jake nodded, half-disappointed, half-relieved, then suddenly added, "A couple of years from now.... So you think we're going to make it through this?"

Vash pointed to someone standing behind Jake. "Don't ask me. Ask him."

Jake turned to see whom Vash meant. A Ferengi standing in an open doorway beside Captain T'len. A Ferengi who looked like Nog, but wasn't

This man was about five kilos heavier, with even larger earlobes, and his face seemed drawn, the brown skin weathered and wrinkled around the careworn, sunken eyes and—

"Jake," Nog said in the voice Jake remembered from only four days ago on DS9, "it is me."

Jake suddenly felt even more uncomfortable than when Vash had teased him into staring at her. He just knew that a look of shock had swept over his face, with his realization that this grizzled veteran was his friend, and that his friend was now so... so old. In the waves of emotions that broke over him, the strongest was one of sorrow. For all the time passed and not shared.

"Nog...." Jake couldn't say anything else. His throat was suddenly swollen shut.

But Nog shook his head as if in understanding, and stepped forward and hugged him strongly, slapping his back, then looked up at him, beaming. "Just as I re­member you. Not a day older. Not a day..."

Jake saw Nog's old-young eyes begin to glisten as if filling with tears. But then his friend looked away, bared his artfully twisted fangs and called out, "Dr. Bashir! Commander Dax!"

Jake broke away from Nog as his friend greeted all the others, the Ferengi's salutations ending with an awkward pause as he came face-to-face with Worf.

"Commander," Nog said formally, "Starfleet has missed you. And so have I."

"You are a captain," Worf replied gravely. "You do honor to your family and to your father."

And then Starfleet formality between Klingon and Ferengi broke down as Nog spread his arms again and Worf embraced the diminutive officer in a bearhug that Jake knew could fell a sehlat.

Finally Worf released his grip, and Nog dropped a few centimeters to the floor, then tugged down on his jacket and turned to face everyone. He cleared his throat noisily. "My friends ... oh, my friends ... I al­most don't know where to begin."

But Jadzia did. "Captain T'len," the Trill officer said, "has been very efficient in bringing us up to date. We understand the danger threatening... everything. And we know that you're here to make a proposal to us about how we can help Starfleet destroy Bajor."

Jake grimaced. Intellectually, he knew he was in a different time, with a much different Starfleet. But emotionally, he was still having a very hard time under­standing how anyone from Starfleet could say some­thing like that. His thoughts flew back to when he was a small child in San Francisco and his mother and his father had first explained the Prime Directive to him. He remembered his favorite interactive holobooks, in which Plotter and Trevis had helped children discover the need for the Prime Directive in the Forest of For­ever. But in this future—Nog's future—it was as if the Prime Directive had never been issued.

"Still," Jake heard Nog say to Jadzia, "I can imagine how strange, even upsetting all of this must seem to you."

"We are Starfleet officers," Worf said simply. "What is your proposal?"

Nog immediately turned to Captain T'len, and now she stepped all the way into the conference room so that the doors to the corridor slid shut Then she entered a code into the wall panel, and Jake saw a security condition sta­tus light on the panel begin to glow. He had once thought that DS9 had become overly militarized during the course of the Dominion War. But what had happened to the station in no way compared with the battle conditions under which the Augustus and Starbase 53 operated.

Nog wasted no time in beginning. "The art of mak­ing fancy speeches has declined in the past few years," he said crisply, "so I will state my proposition plainly. You do not belong in this time. Starfleet will not at­tempt to send you back to your own time. However, given your situation, Starfleet is willing to allow who­ever among you wishes to volunteer, a chance to make another journey in time."

"That's not possible," Jake blurted out. He looked at Jadzia. "Didn't you say we couldn't establish a second Feynman curve from this time?"