CHAPTER 26

“IT WON'T WORK,” Miles O'Brien said.

“Uh . . . I agree,” Rom added.

Quark leaned forward and banged his broad forehead against the stone wall of the cell in B'hala. “Perfect, just perfect. Half the galaxy's convinced the universe is going to end in less than an hour, and my idiot brother just happens to figure out that this whole War of the Prophets is a big mistake.” He banged his head again. “Why not call up Weyoun? See if he'll let us go home now?” Bang.

“Uh, maybe you shouldn't be doing that, Brother. You might hurt yourself.”

At that, Quark opened his mouth and screamed and flung himself at Rom with arms outstretched, and for a second it seemed nothing could stop one Ferengi from crashing the other into solid rock.

Except me, Odo sighed to himself, as he reluctantly changed his humanoid arms into tentacles that snaked out across the length of the room to snag Quark.

“Will you settle down!” he said, as he deposited a squirming Quark on the side of the cell opposite Rom. “Maybe the Chief is onto something. What are they going to do? Lock me up? Kill me?”

“We can only hope,” Quark said darkly.

Odo grunted, more concerned about the grasping tentacles he'd formed so quickly, which were now becoming tangled in the robes he'd been forced to wear. He swiftly solved the situation by puddling faster than his robes could fall, then surging to the side and reforming in his humanoid shape again, his outer layer now a perfect reproduction of a Bajoran militia uniform, circa 2374. “That's better,” he said emphatically.

“Good for you,” Quark groused. “Now, why don't you change into a balloon and float us all out of here? Wouldn't want to be late for the end of the universe!”

Quark, however annoying a cellmate for the past seven days they had been incarcerated together, was not the real problem, Odo thought. What was truly unfortunate was that their cell in this partially restored B'hala structure was ringed by the same type of polymorphic inhibitor Weyoun had used against him on the Boreth. Behind these walls and barred windows, Odo was as caged as any solid.

But he refused to give in to self-centered neuroticism as Quark had done, though. Instead, he walked over to the wall where O'Brien and Rom had been scratching equations and diagrams into the soft stone for the past two days.

“Why won't it work?” the changeling asked O'Brien. He had to. Somehow, he had to believe there was still hope in this universe, that somehow he would be rejoined with Kira. Because to find love and lose it in so short a time . . . Odo refused to believe that Kira's Prophets would allow such agony.

“In the simplest terms,” O'Brien said, “it's inertia.” Odo watched as the Chief used a long stick he had peeled off one of the timbers of a bunk to point to a diagram of the Bajoran solar system and explain the orbits marked upon it.

Apparently, the entrance region of the blue wormhole of the Prophets maintained a nearly circular orbit around Bajor's sun, just at the edges of the Denorios Belt. And sometimes the wormhole actually crossed into it.

The Chief indicated the entrance region of the red wormhole which, in contrast to that of the blue wormhole, had a more eccentric orbit. Reminiscent, he said, of a comet's, travelling from the system's outer reaches and plunging past Bajor's own orbit before it returned to the realm of the gas giants.

On the Chief's diagram Odo noticed that the red wormhole actually crossed the orbit of the Denorios Belt and the blue wormhole four times each orbit. And in less than an hour, O'Brien said, for the first time since the red wormhole had been reestablished by the three Red Orbs of Jalbador twenty-five years ago in Quark's bar, the orbital harmonics of the Bajoran system were finally going to bring the two wormhole entrance regions to their closest possible approach.

“But that closest approach,” the Chief emphasized, “is still going to leave the entrance regions approximately five hundred kilometers apart.”

“Uh, four hundred and sixty-three kilometers,” Rom corrected him. “More or less.”

From the other side of the cell, Quark moaned loudly. He was again leaning his head against the cell wall.

“What's the difficulty presented by that distance?” Odo asked, deliberately shutting out the sound of Quark's complaining. “It doesn't seem very far, cosmically speaking.”

“The entrance effect of a wormhole is very constrained, Odo,” O'Brien said. “I mean, that's one of the reasons it took so long for the blue wormhole to be discovered. If you're not within a kilometer or so of it when it opens, there's no force acting on you to pull you in. If this thing had been swallowing hunks of the Denorios Belt for the past few thousand years, someone would have noticed pretty early on. But its effect on normal space is very limited. That's why we have to pilot a ship toward it with great precision to actually travel through it.”

“In other words,” Rom added hesitantly but eagerly, “even if both wormholes open at the precise moment of their closest approach, they're both too far away from each other to have any attractive effect.”

From his corner, Quark called out to them. “Before you pay too much attention to that lobeless wonder, did I ever tell you how Rom once stuck a toy whip from my Marauder Mo playset into his ear? He was eight years old, and he was always playing with his ears. I was so embarrassed. But here he took this little—”

“Shut up, Quark!” Odo, O'Brien, and Rom said it all together.

“I'm just saying he's not right,” Quark said loudly. “Always with the ears. Stop it or you'll go deaf, Moogie kept telling him. But did he listen? Ha? How could he? He had half my toys shoved up his ear canal!”

“No one's listening, Quark,” Odo growled. “Please, Rom, Chief O'Brien—go on.”

Rom's cheeks were flushed red. “There's, uh, not much more to tell. The wormholes won't move through space. So they won't join. So . . . the universe won't come to an end. That's about it.”

“Why didn't Starfleet scientists discover this?” Odo asked.

“Well, it's difficult to chart wormhole orbits accurately,” O'Brien said. “They respond to interior verteron forces, as well as to the number of times they open and close in a given orbit. I'm guessing that Starfleet's first reaction was that the wormholes would never come close enough to represent a threat. What do you think, Rom?”

Obviously pleased to have the Chief consult him, especially after such abuse from his brother, Rom quickly nodded his support for this theory.

“Further observations,” O'Brien continued, “suggested that the two wormholes would open close enough to merge today. But from what the Ascendants told us during those interminable briefings they kept giving us, the orbits are fairly well known for the next few months. And according to their own figures, they just won't be close enough.”

“Are you certain there's no way to move them?” Odo asked. “Tow them somehow? Use a tractor beam? Connect them by a charged particle web?”

O'Brien and Rom glanced at each other and both shook their heads. Odo saw little beads of sweat fall from their foreheads.

“You see, Odo, most wormhole entrances are created by verteron particles impinging on weakened areas of space-time,” O'Brien explained as Odo listened intently, doing his best to follow the technical language. “The opening they form is bound by negative matter, and it's kept open by negative energy, just as they suspected back in the twenty-first century. But not even the Iconians had the ability to manipulate negative matter. It would be like . . .” The Chief frowned as he tried to come up with the most helpful comparison “. . . like trying to outrun your shadow.”

Odo stared at the scratchings on the wall. “Then why do you suppose Weyoun's people are so convinced that today's the day the wormholes merge? They're going to look awfully foolish tomorrow.”

Quark's indignant voice sounded from just behind him. Odo turned to see the Ferengi pulling out on his robes like a small child about to curtsey. “They're going to look foolish?”

They all said it again. Only this time more emphatically. “SHUT UP, QUARK!”

Rom giggled as his brother stomped off with a curse, then recovered himself. “Uh, maybe Weyoun will claim that he interceded with the Prophets on behalf of the people of the universe,” he said. “That way, he can take credit for . . . saving us all.”

O'Brien nodded. “That makes sense, Rom. The easiest disaster to prevent is the one that could never happen. High priests and shamans have been doing it forever—driving off the dragon that eats the moon, bringing summer back after the solstice.”

Odo was feeling buoyed by this revelation. Perhaps he would hold Kira's hand again, mold his lips to hers once more. But still, he thought, surely there were easier ways for Weyoun to gain the respect of the galaxy than to manufacture a doomsday scenario that could be disproved by a few lines of mathematics.

“Are you certain there's no way to move ‘negative’ matter?” he asked O'Brien.

The chief engineer was adamant. “The wormholes are fixed in the space-time metric, Odo, like rocks in cement. Nothing's going to move them. It just won't work.”

“Well, then,” Odo said with new enthusiasm, “we'd better start thinking what we'd like for dinner tonight.”

“There's nothing like an idiot's death,” Quark muttered from his corner. “Happy to the end.”

Odo walked over to the barred window, felt the warning tingle of the inhibitor field. He looked out at the blazing sun. He wondered if Kira was looking at it, too. He wished he could reassure her that there was nothing to worry about, after all. But Weyoun had been keeping both Kira and Arla with Sisko.

Odo turned away from the window. “I wonder when our jailers will come back,” he said to O'Brien. The Bajoran guards that had been posted for them had not arrived this morning. Even the loathsome Grigari were gone.

“I wonder when you'll face the inevitable,” Quark snapped.

Odo had just about had it with the Ferengi. “Trust in physics, Quark.”

“Ha!” Quark exclaimed. “If I trusted in physics I'd be paying out twice as many dabos and—” He shut his mouth with an audible smack. “Forget I said that.” He turned away, face as red as his brother's.

In fact, Odo noticed even O'Brien was more flushed than usual. “Are you all right, Chief?”

“I could use a nice cold beer,” O'Brien said with a weary grin. He moved to the window and held up a hand next to it. “That's odd. The breeze doesn't feel all that hot.”

“Because it's the wall,” Rom said.

Odo and O'Brien shared the same puzzled reaction, and stared at the wall Rom pointed to. It was made of typical B'hala building stones, half a meter square, badly eroded, set without mortar. The only thing beyond it was the outside.

But as Odo watched, the stone wall seemed to waver, as if seen through a raging fire.

“Stand back,” Odo cautioned.

O'Brien, Rom, and Odo began retreating from the rippling wall, not taking their eyes off it.

“Here it comes,” Quark sniped from his corner position where the rippling wall met the far wall. “Reality's dissolving. I'd say I told you so but what would be the point?”

Odo motioned to the Ferengi. “I'd get over here if I were you, Quark.”

But Quark didn't budge. “If I were you,” he said, mimicking Odo's way of speaking. “You know what I've always wanted to say to you, Odo?” he announced.

“No,” Odo told him.

The rippling wall resembled liquid now, and an oval shape was forming in its center as the heat in the cell air increased.

Quark cleared his throat. “I've always wanted to say, Why don't you turn yourself into a two-pronged Mandorian gutter snail and go—”

A high-pitched squeal rang out as the liquid-like wall exploded inward with a flash of near-blinding red light. Odo and Rom and O'Brien stumbled forward as a rush of cool air blasted into the wall opening, kicking up a cloud of sand from the floor and sucking the bunk, the buckets, and Quark all in the same direction.

And then, without warning, the wind ended. The bunks and the buckets and Quark stopped moving.

The sand on the floor lay as still and undisturbed as if in a vacuum.

But Quark wasn't abhorring a vacuum as much as anything else in nature.

“That was the end of the universe?” he crowed, hopping on one foot to shake the sand from his ears. “After all that buildup?”

This time not even Odo bothered to tell Quark to shut up.

Because Odo saw through the opening in the wall that someone else was about to join them.

A humanoid shape was walking toward them from a dark room that Odo knew was not beyond the shattered wall.

The stench of putrefaction swept into the small cell and infected every molecule of air. O'Brien gagged, Rom whimpered, and Quark protested in disgust.

Then Odo saw a pair of glowing red eyes just like Weyoun's.

“Oh, frinx,” Quark said. “Not another one.”

“No,” a deep voice answered. “Not another one. The first one.”

Odo stepped back as Dukat entered the cell. But the Cardassian's eyes were normal and he was normal, except for the soiled robes he wore and his halo of wild dead-white hair.

“My dear, dear friends,” he said. “How good to see you once again.”

“How did you get here?” Odo asked Dukat. He had seen enough strange things in this future to not waste time questioning them.

Dukat held up a silver cylinder a bit larger than Weyoun's inhibitor, and looked at it lovingly. “A multidimensional transporter device. A toy, really.”

O'Brien stared at Dukat. “The Mirror Universe?”

Dukat lowered the cylinder. “And like all mirrors, what it contains is only a reflection. So when this universe ends, so shall it.”

“But this universe isn't ending,” O'Brien argued. “The wormholes won't open close enough to each other. And there's no way they can be moved.”

Dukat looked at O'Brien as if the Chief were no more than a babbling child. “Miles, that's not very imaginative of you. Of course the wormhole entrances can't be moved through space. But what if space were moved. What you might even call a warp.”

“Dear God,” O'Brien said. “Rom, they're going to change the space-time metric.”

“Great River,” Rom squeaked. “There's only one way to do that.”

“I knew it,” Quark added. “Um, whatever it is.”

“But you have a way out, don't you, Dukat?” Odo said. He for one was not willing to give up just yet.

Dukat beamed. “Odo . . . I always knew there was a reason why I liked you.” He held out his hand. “And there is exactly that. A way out. A way to escape the destruction of everything. And all I ask is for one small favor in return . . .”

Odo stared at Dukat's hand as if it were a gray-scaled snake poised to strike. He looked up at Dukat's eyes—at Weyoun's eyes—saw the red sparks ignite.

The universe had thirty minutes left.

It was not as if they had a choice.