CHAPTER 28

SISKO JUMPED DOWN from the Defiant's transporter pad and ran into the corridor and to the bridge. He could already hear the ship's impulse engines coming on line as she prepared to undock from the station.

Worf was in the command chair and he stepped out as soon as Sisko appeared. On the main viewer, Deep Space 9 stretched out to the stars. But it was only a dark silhouette against the Denorios Belt. All station lights were out.

“How did you get the order to evacuate?” Sisko asked, slipping into his chair.

“It came into Ops through Jadzia,” Worf said. He was already at tactical. “More than one thousand people are already away.”

Sisko knew just how fortunate the inhabitants and crew of the station were. With the two Akira-class starships Admiral Ross had dispatched to help with the evacuation, more than twelve banks of transporters were operating at once. And the main personnel banks on the Garneau and the Bondar could retrieve more than one hundred evacuees every minute between them.

Jadzia and O'Brien were next on the bridge, followed by Bashir and Kira.

Bashir held a medical tricorder to Sisko and Sisko winced, suddenly realizing his jaw hurt.

“How's that feel?” the doctor asked.

“You should see the other guy,” Sisko quipped. He didn't know with whom he had collided during the evacuation, but this wasn't the time to worry about it.

“Oh, Prophets!”

Sisko leaned forward with a smile. The exclamation had come from Commander Arla at flight operations, the least religious Bajoran he had yet to meet.

But before he could say anything to her about her apparent change in faith, he saw what she saw on the viewer and all sense of amusement fled.

A large glowing sphere of red energy blossomed over a section of the Promenade, just below Ops.

“What is that?” Sisko asked.

“The wormhole precursor,” Jadzia replied. “It must have found a new source of power, because it's continuing to accelerate.”

“Worf! What's the status of the evacuation?”

“Fifteen hundred people away,” Worf reported. “But there is growing gravimetric distortion interfering with—”

Worf fell silent as a chorus of gasps filled the bridge.

The section of the habitat ring closest to the growing red sphere of energy was beginning to buckle, bending like a broken wheel.

Sisko stared at the screen in sickened fascination. “How many people are still on board . . . ?”

“Communications are down, sir. We must withdraw.”

“Release the docking clamps,” he ordered.

Arla fumbled with her console until Kira touched the young Bajoran commander on her shoulder and swiftly took over the position.

On the viewer, three escape modules launched from the habitat ring, but instead of flying free of the station they were drawn on perfect arcs into the red sphere.

“This can't be happening,” Bashir said in shock.

The impact of the three modules set off a series of explosions that ringed the Promenade, and in a chain reaction they traveled up the central core to Ops.

“Jake . . .” Sisko whispered, as if an icy hand clutched his heart, then spoke more strongly, “Did anyone see Jake?”

“He's on board,” Bashir said at once.

“What about Kasidy?”

Sisko's heart sank. No one had seen her on the Defiant. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair. Surely with the combined might of all the vessels using transporters now, Kasidy had been among the lucky ones.

A new wave of horrified gasps escaped those observing the viewer as a section of the habitat ring broke off and fell up into the red sphere.

“We are beginning to experience tidal distortions from an intense gravitational source,” Worf announced.

Then Jadzia made her report. “It's a wormhole, Benjamin. For some reason it's opening about a hundred times more slowly than the one we're used to, but it is opening.”

“Get us out of here, Major.”

“Aye, sir.”

On the viewer, the image of Deep Space 9—what was left of it—angled abruptly as the Defiant banked away.

And then the starship shook violently as the viewer flared with blue energy.

“We are under attack!” Worf shouted.

“Full power to shields!” Sisko ordered. He knew it had to be the Jem'Hadar. The Dominion had finally reacted to—

“You're not going anywhere,” Leej Terrell said from the viewer.

Sisko leapt to his feet to face her. He recognized the bridge of her Sagittarian cruiser. “Mr. Worf, lock on all weapons,” he said.

“I cannot acquire a target.”

On the viewer, Terrell was a study in triumphant rage. She pounded a fist on the arm of her looming command chair. “Go back to your station, Captain. You found the third Orb. Now you must join it.”

“I thought you wanted the Orbs for yourself,” Sisko said, trying to goad her, as he had so recently, so long ago.

“If Cardassia can't have them, then no one can. Fire!”

Instantly the Defiant shook under another fusillade of phaser fire.

“Worf! Where is she!”

“Her ship is cloaked, sir! I can pick up a slight modulation when she fires, but not enough to extrapolate a course.”

“Where did a Cardassian ship get a cloaking device?” Sisko demanded to know.

The Defiant trembled as another round of phaser fire found her.

Then Sisko heard the ship's own capacitors discharge with return fire.

“I believe I hit her,” Worf called out. “I will continue to—”

The biggest blast yet hit the Defiant, and the ship spun on her axis.

Each time DS9 slipped past the viewer, the red sphere was larger. Now Sisko could see the rotating vortex was composed of red spiraling tendrils of energy. In form, it looked just like the wormhole he had seen open so many times. Only its color was different.

“Major Kira,” Sisko said. “We need to be stabilized so Worf can return fire.”

“She's picked her targets,” Kira warned. “Our thrusters are offline. Impulse is out. All we've got is warp and that's not powered up yet.”

“Working on it, sir!” O'Brien volunteered before he had been asked.

“Can we get support from another ship?” Sisko asked.

“All channels are down,” Jadzia said. “The other ships are withdrawing.”

“How can that be? Surely they can see we're in difficulty!”

Jadzia turned from her science station to Sisko. “Benjamin, we're so close to that wormhole we could be within some kind of event horizon. Those other ships might not even know we're still here.”

O'Brien chimed in. “That could explain why the wormhole seems to be opening so slowly. Those other ships might have seen it move as quickly as the blue wormhole does. And we might have been sucked in.”

Sisko tried to follow the reasoning of his two experts. “So we're in some kind of temporal bubble?”

“Not necessarily,” Jadzia said. “It could be straightforward relativistic time displacement. We should be able to warp out when the engines are ready, just like jumping out of a black hole.”

“Thirty seconds to warp,” O'Brien reported.

The Defiant shuddered as another volley hit her, then rang with her own phasers as Worf once more returned fire. “I think I may have hit her again,” Worf said.

“Twenty seconds to warp,” O'Brien counted down.

On the viewer, the red wormhole now obscured more than half of DS9. Sisko watched as the station's upper docking pylons begin to twist down to the red distortion, hull plates popping loose like autumn leaves in a storm. Then one of the pylons broke free entirely as an explosion engulfed its base. It tumbled into the wormhole, visibly breaking up into still smaller pieces. Then it disappeared.

Another explosion shook the Defiant. Transtator sparks erupted from Worf's tactical station and the Klingon had to jump back as the automatic fire-suppression system engulfed his console with anaerobic vapor.

“Ten seconds,” O'Brien said.

“Major,” Sisko ordered, “prepare to get us out of here.”

Another hit.

“Shields at thirty-seven percent,” Kira announced. “We can't take much more.”

And then on the viewer, as if it were no more than a crumpled piece of tissue being pulled down a drain, Deep Space 9 fell in on itself, shattering like brittle ice, each shard drawn spinning into the endless, infinite tunnel of the red wormhole at its heart.

Sisko felt a part of himself vanishing into that ravenous maw, to be lost forever along with his station.

“They all got off in time,” he chanted softly to himself, willing his words to be true. “They had to get off in time.”

“We have warp!” O'Brien announced. On screen, the red wormhole continued to expand, continued to open, its unwinding coils of negative energy now reaching out for the Defiant.

Sisko fell back in his chair, gripped the arms. “Now, Major!”

“Never!” Terrell's voice echoed from all the bridge speakers at once.

And then a final blast of phaser fire hit the starship just as she went to warp. And the first tendrils of the wormhole brushed across her hull to claim her.

No one on board the Defiant had a chance.

They were all engulfed in a red flash of overwhelming intensity, the sheer magnitude of which exceeded anything in their entire experience of existence.

And then each moment dissolved into the next.

Until there was only the silence and the darkness of endless infinite space . . .