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 surpr