CHAPTER 2

AFTER THE FIRST thousand years in the Dyson Sphere, O'Brien noticed that something was moving on the horizon. A dark shape, indistinct, shimmering, flickering in and out of existence in the turbulence of heat that rose from the level sand surrounding him.

Part of him wanted to cry out and run toward the illusion, to beg forgiveness for whatever he had done that had brought him here. But another part, the reasoning part, the engineering part bludgeoned into submission by the mere fact of this Dyson Sphere's existence, saw no reason for moving.

This part of him had remembered the old legends of Earth and that the point of this place, this hell, was that there was no point to anything. At first, O'Brien had been surprised that the old legends had turned out to be true. But after a century or two of simply standing in the sand, not even able to die, the surprise had left him, along with logic.

He had even given up his last hope that eventually he must go mad.

After another thousand years had passed, O'Brien noticed that the dark shape no longer shimmered as much as it had. It was more distinct. And larger.

Someone was walking toward him.

The engineering part of him tried to calculate the interior surface area of a sphere with a diameter approaching three hundred million kilometers. This part of him wanted to comprehend the incredible length of time it would take for someone walking on the interior of that sphere to randomly meet the only other being in the sphere. But his consciousness could no longer handle the numbers. Zeroes fell away from the pictures he built in his mind like infinite particles of sand.

He could no longer think or reason, except for whatever faculties were required to understand that he could no longer do so.

Within another century, at most, the person approaching was almost within earshot. O'Brien thought if he concentrated he might be able to hear the crunching of the sand under the person's feet. But after millennia of hearing only his own heartbeat, his own breathing, the sound of those footsteps proved almost painful. Even to focus on something other than an infinity of sand hurt his eyes.

A year went by. The person stood before him, dressed in robes that were . . . O'Brien couldn't even recall the names of their colors. The person, however, had gray skin and a wide neck, and O'Brien knew he was from another world, though he was unable to remember which one.

“Miles O'Brien,” the visitor said.

O'Brien understood that that was his name. He wanted to say something in greeting but only got as far as opening his mouth. Whatever he was supposed to do after that—and he knew there was something—he had forgotten.

The visitor looked around at the desert, at the overwhelming ghostly lattice work that stretched through the sky and arched behind the blazing sun, as if he hadn't spent centuries walking through this same unchanging landscape, as if he were seeing it for the first time.

“I understand,” he said. “And I can take it away. Would you like that?”

Only one thought formed in O'Brien's mind: Yes . . .

The gray-skinned figure smiled as if he had heard O'Brien's reply. “There is a price.”

Pain ripped through O'Brien's throat as he forced himself to gasp out, “. . . yes . . .” The first word he had spoken in thousands, perhaps millions of years.

“Do you know who I am?”

O'Brien thought he should know. There were many things he thought he should know. But he didn't. He shook his head.

“You've just forgotten. Just from the look of this place, I'd guess you think you've been here for a long time, isn't that right?”

O'Brien couldn't answer. He had forgotten all the names he had once known for the units of time.

“But it's only been a few minutes. Remarkable, isn't it?”

O'Brien squinted, frowned, stretched his facial muscles, licked his lips as if waking up after a late night drinking Romulan ale with . . . “Julian,” he said.

“I presume you mean Dr. Bashir.” The visitor sounded amused. “He's not with us, but I am heartened to see that your memory might still function. I have need of an engineer.”

O'Brien felt a shiver of recognition along his back, across his arms. “Chief Engineer,” he corrected.

The visitor grinned. “You'll be fine.” He held out a hand to O'Brien, a gray hand with black nails. “Now remember what I said. I will take you away from here, and in return, you will serve me.”

O'Brien reached out to take that gray hand. He heard the sinews of his arm creak in protest after so many centuries of absolute immobility.

“That's right,” the gray-skinned man said as he gave O'Brien's hand a hard squeeze. “Now, can you say that? Can you say, I will serve you . . . ?”

O'Brien's words were little more than escaping voiced breaths, but in his mind, he said what must be said. “I . . . will . . . serve . . . you . . .”

The gray hand squeezed O'Brien's harder. “Louder,” the visitor said. “I will serve you, Kosst Dukat.”

“Dukat,” O'Brien croaked, as if that word had been about to be spoken for millennia. “Kosst Dukat, I will serve you . . .”

Dukat's face took on an expression of bliss, even as his dark eyes momentarily seemed to flash with the color of the armband he wore on his robes. “Then you are free,” he said, and he pulled O'Brien forward, and with that single step—

—O'Brien was on the bridge of the Klingon battleship Boreth.

And he remembered.

Everything.

O'Brien took a step forward and swayed, dizzy, overcome by the instantaneous transition from millennia of damnation to reality. At least, some type of reality.

“Dukat?”

“No questions,” the Cardassian ordered. “Get to work!” He pointed to the engineering consoles to the side of the bridge. On the deck by most of them, O'Brien registered the unconscious forms of his friends and coworkers, six in all, including Quark, Odo, and Garak.

“Doing what?”

Dukat hissed, “It's not going the way it should! The way he promised.”

O'Brien stared at Dukat, completely baffled. He remembered being in a prison cell in a restored ancient building in B'hala, with Rom and Quark and Odo. In nearby cells were Garak and the ten others rescued from Deep Space 9's destruction by the Defiant, then transported twenty-five years into the future to become prisoners of the Bajoran Ascendancy. Only Captain Sisko, Commander Arla, and Major Kira were not among them, apparently held prisoner at another location on Bajor. O'Brien hadn't seen any of them since the terrible day they had all been forced to witness the public execution of Tom Riker.

Then O'Brien remembered working with Rom on what was supposed to have been the universe's last day of existence, to prove that when both Bajoran wormholes opened together, they would not be close enough to merge and unravel the hidden dimensions of spacetime, instantaneously destroying the universe.

But then the wall of their cell had somehow melted, and Dukat had walked through some kind of dimensional portal from the Mirror Universe to join them. This version of Dukat, twenty-five years older, white-haired, and completely mad, had then told them that Weyoun and the Ascendancy were planning to induce a nova reaction in the Bajoran sun. Their goal: To distort the space-time metric so that the two wormholes would move close enough together to merge when they opened.

And then Dukat had offered them a way out—what O'Brien and the others had mistakenly taken to mean a chance to stop the nova detonation and save the universe.

But Dukat had had no intention of saving anything. He had only needed a crew to operate the Boreth long enough to keep Weyoun from entering either wormhole in the Defiant, so that the Boreth could enter instead.

O'Brien's mind pictured the destruction of Bajor as it had been shown on the main viewer of the Boreth's bridge. Three Bajorans from DS9 had left their positions then, to charge Dukat in fury, only to be incinerated by the blasts of fiery red energy that sprang from the Cardassian's outstretched arms.

And now Dukat was holding out his hand to him just as he had to those three Bajorans. “Do not defy me, Chief.”

O'Brien forced himself to remain calm. The last thing he remembered before waking up in the Dyson Sphere from hell was hearing Weyoun and Dukat scream at each other as the undulating mouth of the red wormhole grew larger on the viewer. Now he needed to know what had happened after that, to him and his friends, and to the Boreth. Not to mention the universe.

“I have no intention of defying you,” O'Brien said. “But I'm not a mindreader. If you need me to do something, you have to tell me what it is.”

Dukat's eyes flared red for a heartbeat, the betraying flash of unearthly energy uncomfortably reminding O'Brien of the events on DS9 which the Bajorans had called the Reckoning. He cautioned himself to remember that Dukat was still somehow possessed by a Pah-wraith, perhaps even the same one that had taken control of the captain's son.

“I need full power restored to this vessel,” Dukat began calmly enough, though each subsequent word grew disturbingly louder and came faster. “I need weapons and sensors brought on line. I need to restore the Amojan for all eternity!”

O'Brien quickly looked around the bridge, taking what relief he could from the fact that Quark and the others sprawled by their stations still appeared to be breathing. Also, he noted, the Klingon displays and the retrofitted Bajoran control surfaces indicated that the ship was on standby reserve—the condition he would expect the ship to automatically establish in the event of the sudden incapacitation of its crew. That suggested that the Boreth was not heavily damaged. A positive sign.

But before he could act, there was still a major question he needed to have answered.

“Are we in the wormhole?”

“You just spent two thousand years in a sand-filled Dyson Sphere. What do you think?”

O'Brien hesitated, unsure. “Was that . . . an Orb experience?”

He flinched as Dukat reached out to him to put a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Chief O'Brien, what you experienced was your own personal hell. And now that I know what it is, I can put you back there any time I please. Do you understand?”

“I'll get to work at once.”

Dukat lifted his hand.

O'Brien hurried to the main flight console where he called up the sensor controls. Swiftly, he reset the primary sensor net and ordered the ship's computer to reestablish an optical environment on the main viewer.

“Tell me what you are doing,” Dukat warned.

“I'm making sure we're safe. No sense starting repairs if we're about to be attacked or—”

As if he were some primal beast, Dukat raised his voice in a bellow of rage as the viewer came to life.

“He's still there!”

O'Brien looked up to see the last thing he expected to see.

Deep Space 9.

Against a roiling red backdrop of twisting, glowing, pulsing verteron strings.

“We are in the wormhole,” O'Brien said wonderingly. But how did DS9 get here? he thought.

“Of course we are,” Dukat snarled. “The universe has ended. This is the only reality that exists now. But he's still here!”

“Who?” O'Brien asked. He took a deep breath as he waited for Dukat's reply and then wished he hadn't. He could almost taste the acrid odor of burned flesh that still filled his nostrils.

“Weyoun,” Dukat raged. “He's out there. I know it.”

“On the station?”

“No, you fool!” Dukat swept over to O'Brien and angrily stabbed a finger at the top-right corner of the viewer. “There!”

O'Brien peered into what appeared to be a shimmering verteron node. But as the hyperdimensional energy artifact wavered in and out of view, he saw that there was another shape occupying the same area.

“The Defiant,” he said.

“Weyoun isn't supposed to be here,” Dukat fumed, spittle flying from his mouth. “He was supposed to fade into nonexistence. Never to be. Never to have been.”

O'Brien tried running a structural scan on the station in the center

of the screen. “The ship must have entered the blue wormhole.” It was the only explanation. At least, to account for the Defiant. As for what appeared to be DS9, its twin, Empok Nor, had been in orbit of Bajor. Perhaps that station had somehow been swept into the wormhole as well.

“Destroy the Defiant!” Dukat commanded.

O'Brien looked at the weapons status display. “Sorry, all weapons are off-line.”

“Then we'll ram her!”

O'Brien pointed to the propulsion systems display. “Not like this, we won't. The warp engines are off-line, and the impulse engines need to be restarted.”

O'Brien was yanked into the air as easily as if he were wearing an antigrav. Dukat had him by the front of his robes. The engineer tried to turn away from Dukat's foul breath as the madman whispered very softly into his face, “Then restart them.”

Dukat abruptly released O'Brien, and he dropped awkwardly to the deck, almost falling backward over his chair.

“Look, Dukat, you need an engineer, and I'm willing to be that engineer—” O'Brien saw the telltale red flashes of light flicker in Dukat's narrowed eyes. He began speaking more rapidly. “—but for me to do my work, I have to know what I'm starting with. I don't know what the ship's been exposed to. I don't know how long we've been in here. I don't know how much longer we can last. So unless you want the Boreth to fall apart around your ears, let me do my job the way it's supposed to be done!” O'Brien stopped then, half expecting to be blasted by Pah-wraith lightning on the spot.

But Dukat stepped back. “Work swiftly,” was all he said.

O'Brien pushed his luck. “It'd go faster if I had some help.”

“Who?”

“Rom,” O'Brien said. He searched Dukat's face for any sign of hesitation or resistance. Didn't see it. Pressed on. “And Garak, he can handle the computers.” O'Brien saw Dukat's face darken. “That should do it,” he said quickly. “For now.”

“That's all there is in here,” Dukat reminded him sharply. “The endless, eternal now. We are completely outside linear time.”

O'Brien had never been able to accept that part of the story regarding the wormhole environment, and he still couldn't. As far as he was concerned, in a true realm of nonlinear time, even the simplest conversation would be impossible to conduct.

“If we're in nonlinear time,” he asked daringly, “then why haven't I already finished my work?”

“You can be sure that somewhere in this wormhole, you have,” Dukat warned. “And unless you begin your work now, you can be equally sure that somewhere in this wormhole, I am already standing over your lifeless body.”

O'Brien sensed he had gone right to the limit. He sat down at the main console and began queuing the diagnostic routines he wanted to run.

“Who do you need first?” Dukat asked harshly.

“Rom.”

“Keep working.”

O'Brien felt a sudden breeze disturb his robes, and when he realized he couldn't hear Dukat's ragged breathing any longer, he risked looking over his shoulder.

Dukat was gone. Rom must be somewhere else on the ship.

And though O'Brien wished nothing bad for the Ferengi, for the sake of the universe he found himself hoping Rom's torment was awful enough to keep Dukat busy for at least another thousand years.

Then O'Brien turned back to the viewer with renewed purpose: to restore the Boreth's communications systems. Because, before he could do anything to change the situation, he needed to find out if DS9 and the Defiant were really in the wormhole with the Boreth.

And if so, who was onboard them.