CHAPTER 14

“YOU KNOW HOW stardates work,” Commander Arla Rees said.

“Of course.” Sisko nodded, distracted, wondering about what was beyond the windowless hull of the small travelpod they were riding in. It reminded him of a two-person escape module, though he could see no indication that it carried emergency supplies or even flight controls. According to Weyoun, transporters were not permitted to operate anywhere within the Bajoran system—though he had provided no explanation why—and all travel here was carried out by pod, runabout, or shuttle. Thus, the survivors from the Defiant had been sent off from the Boreth's hangar deck two by two, in these tiny pods with no means by which to observe the somehow restored Deep Space 9 as they neared it.

“Seriously?” Arla persisted. “You've actually looked into how the stardate system was devised?”

Sisko looked across the cramped pod—or down the pod, or up it. There was no artificial gravity field, and no inertial dampeners, either. Essentially, he and the commander were the only passengers in a gray metal can with two acceleration seats with restraint straps, a pressure door, and four blue-white lights, two at their feet and two at their heads. Sisko even doubted if the simple vessel had its own engines or reaction-control system. He guessed they were being guided from the Boreth to DS9 by tractor beam.

“I've studied timekeeping.”

Arla frowned. “When? They don't tell you a lot in the Academy.”

“Actually, I had reason to take an extension course a few years ago. I even built a few different types of mechanical clocks on my own.” Sisko tried to lean back in his acceleration seat, but of course there was no gravity field to aid his maneuver—only the two chestcrossing straps that kept him from floating out of the seat.

“Did your course deal with how the system got started?”

“Some of it. As I understand it, Commander, the impetus behind devising a universal—or, at least, a galactic —standard time-and-date-keeping system was primarily religious.”

From her seat beside him, Arla nodded her head in agreement, though Sisko didn't understand the reason for the odd smile that accompanied that nod.

He continued, not knowing what she was looking for in his answer. “There's certainly precedent for it. Many of the religious festivals and holy days celebrated on Earth are tied to the calendar.”

“More often than not the lunar calendar, I believe,” Arla said.

“That's right,” Sisko said. Though he still didn't know why they were having this conversation, it seemed harmless enough. He decided to run with it. The commander would give him her reasons when she was ready, and that was fine with him. “Now if my memory serves me right, when the first outposts were set up on Earth's moon, since everyone lived underground and the moon is less than a light-second from Earth, timekeeping wasn't a problem. But when the outposts on Mars were established, and it was common for people to spend years there with their families, I recall learning that it became awkward trying to reconcile Martian sols at twenty-four-and-a-half hours with Earth days at just under twenty-four. So a council of religious scholars on Mars came up with the first stardate system—Local Planetary Time—based, I believe, on the look-up tables and charts the Vulcans had been using to reconcile their starships' calendars with their homeworld's.”

“The Vulcan system was based in philosophy,” Arla said, as if making some important point, “not religion.”

“I . . . suppose you could say that,” Sisko said amiably. “Now, for most people, once you have a few thousand starships and outposts and a few hundred colonies, it gets too cumbersome to keep using look-up tables and charts. But,” Sisko smiled, “not for Vulcans. It's no secret they have no problem keeping forty or fifty different calendar systems in their heads at the same time. But humans, we freely admit, tend to place more cultural and religious importance on specific days.”

“Just like Bajorans,” Arla said as she turned to him, her eyes filled with a passion Sisko didn't recall having noticed before. She then paused expectantly, as if she had still not heard what she needed to hear.

“Is there some point to this conversation?” Sisko finally asked.

But Arla's answer merely took the form of another question. “What happened next? According to the extension course you took.”

Sisko sighed, tiring of their exercise. He wondered how long it would take for the pod to drift over to the station. He was surprising himself with his need to touch the metal walls and feel the decks of DS9 beneath his boots again. And with his desire to have someone tell him how it was that he could have seen DS9 destroyed, and yet see it now restored. Weyoun had been of little help. All he would answer in reply to Sisko's questions was, “In time, Benjamin. All will be explained in time.”

Only because there was absolutely nothing else to do at the moment, Sisko continued to humor Arla. This time his answer came straight out of the Academy's first-semester text file. “The underlying principle of the universal stardate system is that of hyperdimensional distance averaging.”

“Which is?”

Sisko grimaced. The last time he had had this basic a conversation with anyone about stardates, Jake had been five and sitting on his knee, struggling to get his Flotter Forest Diary program to work on the new padd Sisko had given him for his birthday.

“If you insist.” Sisko then rattled off the requisite information. “Any two points in space can be joined by a straight line. The length of that line, divided by two, will yield the midpoint. If the inhabitants of both points convert their local time to the hypothetical time at the midpoint, then they both have an arbitrary yet universally applicable constant time to which they can refer, in order to reconcile their local calendars.” He paused before continuing. “You know, of course, it's the exact same principle developed on Earth when an international convention chose to run the zero meridian through Greenwich, establishing Greenwich Mean Time. It was a completely artificial standard, but a standard everyone could use.”

“And . . .,” Arla prompted.

“And,” Sisko sighed. The Bajoran commander's persistence was fully up to Vulcan standards. “Any two points can be joined by a straight line. Go up a dimension, and any three points can be located on a twodimensional plane. Go up another dimension, and any four points in space can be located on the curved surface of a three-dimensional sphere. Any five points can be found on the surface of a four-dimensional hypersphere, and so on. The standard relationship is that any number of points, n, can be mapped onto the surface of a sphere which exists in n minus one dimensions. And that means that all of those points are exactly the same distance from the center of the sphere. So, just after the Romulan War, the Starfleet Bureau of Standards and the Vulcan Science Academy arbitrarily chose the center of our galaxy as the center point of a hypersphere with . . . oh, I forget the exact figure . . . something like five hundred million dimensions, okay? So theoretically, every star in our galaxy—along with four hundred million and some starships and outposts—can be located on the surface of the hypersphere and can directly relate their local calendars and clocks to a common standard time that's an equal distance from everywhere. Just as everyone on Earth used to look to Greenwich.” Sisko gripped his restraints and pushed himself back into his acceleration couch, trying to compress his spine. The microgravity, not to mention his traveling companion, was giving him a pain in the small of his back, as his spine elongated in the absence of a strong gravity field. “Is that sufficient?” he asked sharply.

“What do you think?” Arla replied.

A sudden shock of pain pulsed through Sisko just above his left kidney. He remembered the sensation from his microgravity training decades ago in the Academy's zero-G gym. He forced his next words out through gritted teeth. “I think it's a damn simple system. One that works independent of position and relativistic velocity. And since it's based on the galactic center it's blessedly free of political overtones.” Sisko smiled in relief as his back spasm ended, as suddenly as it had begun, and as he at the same time relived a sudden memory of the one sticking point Jake—like most five-year-olds—had had when it came to learning stardates. “And once a person gets used to the idea that stardates can seem to run backward from place to place, depending on your direction and speed of travel, it becomes an exceedingly simple calculation to convert from local time to stardate anywhere in the galaxy.

“So—if you're asking me if I'm in favor of stardates, Commander, yes, I am. Now what does this have to do with anything?”

Arla's expression was maddeningly enigmatic, and Sisko could read no clues in it. “So you consider the system to be completely arbitrary?”

“Any timekeeping system has to be. Because the universe has no absolute time or absolute position. Now would you please answer my question.”

“Then how is it—” Arla said, and Sisko's attention was caught by her tone. The commander was finally ready to make her point. “—nine days from now, when the two wormholes are going to open in the Bajoran system only kilometers apart from each other and . . . and supposedly end the universe, or transform it somehow, that that completely arbitrary stardate system is going to roll over to 7700.0 at the same moment that Earth's calendar starts a new century with the first day of 2401 C.E.?”

Her question was so incredibly naive, Sisko couldn't believe the Bajoran had even asked it. “Coincidence, Commander.” Now it was he who was expectant, waiting for her to say something more, to somehow explain herself.

“Coincidence,” she repeated thoughtfully, obviously not accepting

his answer. Sisko regarded her with puzzlement.

“Did you know,” Arla said, “that an old Klingon calendar system reverts to the Fourth Age of Kahless on that same date? That the Orthodox Andorian Vengeance Cycle begins its 330th iteration then also? That that very same date is the one given in Ferengi tradition when some groups celebrate the day the Great Material River first overflowed its banks among the stars and, in the flood that followed, created Ferenginar and the first Ferengi?”

As Arla recited her list, Sisko observed her gesticulate with one hand to emphasize her words, and was fascinated to see the sudden action in microgravity billow the commander's robes around her like seaweed caught in a tidal current, pulsing back and forth in time with the slow, floating motion of her earring chain.

“Seventeen different spacefaring cultures, Captain Sisko. That's how many worlds have calendar systems that either reset or roll over to significant dates or new counting cycles on the exact same day the two wormholes come into alignment. Two systems coinciding is a coincidence. I'll give you that. Maybe even three or four. But seventeen? There must be some better explanation for that. Wouldn't you agree?”

Sisko took his time replying. He wished he knew the reasons behind the Bajoran commander's sudden obsession with the timing of events and timekeeping systems derived from religious traditions. When he had first met her on DS9, he remembered being impressed by her intensity and by her drive to do the best possible job. True, there had been an awkward moment when he had realized that she was discreetly communicating her interest in getting to know him on a more personal level, but she had responded properly and professionally the moment he had made her aware of his relationship with Kasidy.

He had had no doubt that Arla would make her own mark in Starfleet. Though she had little interest in taking command of a ship and had opted instead for a career track in administration, some of Starfleet's best and most forward-thinking strategic leaders had come from that same background.

But most of all, Sisko knew that Arla had been one of the rare few Bajorans who were completely secular. By her own account, she had no faith in the Prophets. To her, she had maintained to him, they were merely a race of advanced beings who lived in a different dimensional environment, one which rendered communication between themselves and the life-forms of Arla's own dimension very difficult. And she had told him emphatically on more than one occasion that the Celestial Temple was simply a wormhole to her, worthy of study, not for religious reasons, but because it was stable and apparently artificial.

So how did someone like that, he now thought, suddenly become so interested in comparative religion? And even more intriguingly, why?

Sisko decided to change tactics. “Do you have an explanation?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Arla answered simply.

“A theory then? Something that we could put to the test?”

A frown creased Arla's smooth forehead. “A week ago, if you had asked me about the stardate standard, I would have given the same answer you did. That it was an arbitrary timekeeping system. That absolute time didn't exist any more than absolute location.” A fleeting smile erased her frown. The smile seemed slightly nervous to Sisko. “What's that old saying, Captain? Everything's relative?”

“That's true, you know,” Sisko said.

The Bajoran commander shook her head vehemently in disagreement. “No . . . those other timekeeping systems . . . Terran, Bajoran, Klingon, Andorian . . . they're not really arbitrary. They all share a common underpinning—not relative but related.”

“Commander.” Sisko spoke in his best authoritative tone. “The calendar systems you refer to date back thousands if not tens of thousands of years, to a time before star travel. There is nothing to connect them.”

“But there is.” Arla's voice was rising with an urgency that was beginning to concern Sisko. The source of whatever had upset her was still not clear to him. “Don't you see? They all came out of religion. They're all based on some form of creation story. And maybe . . . maybe life arose independently on all those worlds, but maybe it also all arose at the same time—from the same cause.”

Sisko's concern changed to indignation. It appeared the Bajoran commander was simply guilty of sloppy thinking. “Commander, for what you're proposing—something for which there is no conclusive empirical proof, by the way—you might as well credit the Preservers with having seeded life throughout the quadrant, as much as invoke a supernatural force. There's about the same amount of evidence for both theories.”

Sisko couldn't help noticing Arla's hurt expression, as she came to the correct realization that he considered her idea to be totally without merit. “Captain, I was just trying to explain why I disagreed with the commonly accepted belief that all the timekeeping systems were arbitrary. If they all stem from the same act of creation by the Prophets, then it makes sense that they all come to an end at the same time.”

“Then what about stardates?” Sisko asked. “Without question, that's a completely artificial system based in the necessities of interstellar travel.”

But Arla was not giving up so easily. “No, sir. You said it yourself. The need for stardates arose in part from the religious need to chart Earth's festivals and holy days on other worlds. How do we know the religious scholars of the time didn't build into their timekeeping system the same hidden knowledge that underlies all the other systems in the quadrant?”

Sisko shifted in his accelerator seat, feeling the restraints securing

him in place. He felt trapped in both the conversation and the pod. It was all too obvious that he wasn't going to prevail in this argument. As soon as anyone brought up anything like “hidden knowledge,” all possibility of a debate based on available facts flew out the airlock. “I take it your religious views have changed in the past few days,” Sisko said in massive understatement.

“I don't know,” Arla said, her voice declining in intensity. At last, even she was sounding weary now. Sisko knew how she felt. “What I do know is that there has to be some sort of explanation,” she said. “And as someone trained in the scientific method, I have to keep my mind open to all possible explanations, even the ones I might think are unlikely.”

Sisko was aware that the Bajoran commander was chiding him for apparently closing his own mind to the possibility of supernatural intervention in the affairs of the galaxy. But he felt secure in his approach. After all, he had dealt with the Prophets firsthand. And though explanations from them were often difficult to come by, subtlety was not their style. If there had been some sort of connection between the Prophets and worlds other than Bajor, Sisko felt certain that strong evidence for it would have turned up much earlier than now.

“An admirable position,” he said in deliberate tones of finality, hoping that Arla would understand and accept that he wanted no more part in this conversation.

Just then the hull of the travelpod creaked, and a slight tremor moved through the small craft.

“Tractor beam?” Arla asked.

“Or docking clamp. Do we seem to be slowing down?”

Immediately, Arla held out both her arms, and watched them as if trying to see if they might respond to a change in delta vee. But except for the undulations of the sleeves of her robe, her arms remained motionless. “Some tractor beams have their own inertial dampening effect,” she said. “We could be spinning like a plasma coil right now and not know it.”

Sisko knew that was a possibility, though he didn't see the point. From what he'd learned so far, the Ascendancy, for all its apparent capabilities, seemed to be in favor of not expending any effort or supplies unless absolutely necessary.

The lights suddenly flashed with almost blinding intensity, and there was another scrape and a stronger metallic bang, followed by the sound of rushing air. Sisko looked to the pressure door.

“That'll probably be an airlock sealing against the hull,” Arla said.

“Not on DS9,” Sisko said. “If we were at a docking port on a pylon or the main ring, we'd be within the artificial gravity field.”

Arla was looking at him with concern. “Then where did we go? To another ship?”

“I don't know,” Sisko said. He braced himself against his restraints and half twisted in his chair to face the door. He debated the wisdom of releasing the restraints, but if a gravity field did switch on suddenly, he couldn't be sure in which direction he might fall.

A new vibration shook the hull—something fast, almost an electrical hum.

“We're changing velocity,” Arla said.

Sisko saw the chain of her earring slowly begin to flutter down until it hung beside her neck. But whether it was the effect of acceleration or the beginning of a gravity field there was no way to tell. Einstein had determined that almost five hundred years ago and that, too, was still true.

And then both he and Arla were abruptly shaken as a loud bang erupted in the pod. The sound seemed to come from the direction of the door.

The next bang was even louder but not as startling.

The third deformed the door, and Sisko tensed as he heard a hiss of air indicating that atmospheric integrity had been lost around the door's seal.

But when the pressure within the pod didn't seem to change appreciably, Sisko revised his deduction. They had docked with or somehow been taken aboard another vessel whose atmosphere was slightly different from the pod's.

A fourth bang rocked the pod. The door creaked and swung open.

Beyond the pod's simple portal Sisko glimpsed a pale-yellow light fixture shining within a dark airlock. He could just make out the curve of a Cardassian door wheel in the gloom.

“This is the station,” he exclaimed. He touched the release tabs on his restraints and pushed himself from the chair. His feet gently made contact with the floor of the pod. Automatically, Sisko estimated gravity at about one-tenth Earth normal.

He nodded at Arla, who then released herself to stand on the floor, still holding the loose restraints to keep herself from bouncing into the pod's low ceiling.

With extreme caution, Sisko began moving toward the open portal.

The glare from the single dim light fixture in the airlock prevented him from seeing through the viewport in the far door. All he could be sure of was that whatever was beyond, it was in the dark as well.

He stepped from the pod into the airlock, almost falling as normal gravity suddenly took over.

The moment he regained his footing he took hold of Arla's arm. “Careful. They must be able to focus gravity fields better than we could.”

“Who?” Arla asked, as she cautiously entered the more powerful field.

“Knowing Weyoun, this is probably some game he's devised.”

“Or a trap.”

“He already had us,” Sisko reminded her. He pushed his face against the viewport, cupping his hands around his eyes to shield his vision and squinting to see some sort of detail in whatever lay beyond. But the darkness there was absolute.

A sudden mechanical grinding noise caused him to spin around. He saw the other wheel door roll shut, cutting off any chance of their returning to the pod. In any event, with the pressure door damaged—by what? Sisko suddenly wondered—the pod would not be the safest place to be.

Another rush of air popped his ears. Oddly enough, the effect made Sisko feel better, because he knew it meant that when the second wheel door opened there would be an atmosphere on the other side.

He turned to check on Arla. “Are you all right?”

Silent, she nodded, slowly raising her hand to point toward the second wheel door, her eyes wide with alarm.

And then just as the second door began to roll Sisko caught sight of what had disturbed her. For just an instant, through the moving viewport, against the darkness of what lay beyond, two eyes glowed red.

“It's Weyoun,” Sisko said in disgust. Though what the Vorta was attempting to accomplish with this bit of theater was beyond him.

Then a sudden wind of hot, damp air from beyond the airlock swept over him in a rush, and he gagged at the sweet, fetid stench that accompanied it. Behind him, Arla did the same.

Sisko looked up, eyes watering, the sharp taste of bile in his mouth, knowing that whatever else lay in the darkness, there were organic bodies, rotting.

Then, from out of the darkness, the two red eyes approached him.

Sisko's vision was still blurry in the assault of that terrible smell, but with a sudden tensing of his stomach he realized that the shadowy outlines of the figure who was entering the airlock indicated someone taller than Weyoun. And those shoulders—

It was a Cardassian!

Arla cried out in fear behind him.

A powerful hand closed around Sisko's throat, its cold grip unnaturally strong. Red eyes of fire blazed down at him.

And Sisko recognized the creature who held his life in one gray hand.

It was Dukat!