CHAPTER 7

WEYOUN'S STORAGE TUBE was located at the far end of the main storage chamber on Rondac III. Since the nutrient-stasis fluid was colorless and the tube cover transparent, from his upright position he could stare out and see the entire facility. On one side, bank after bank of tubes just like his stretched out to the vanishing point. On the other side, the tube banks soared upward and plunged downward for kilometers.

There were so many storage tubes, he was unable to count them. But he did know what lay inside each one.

Another Weyoun.

Every few centuries, a team of Jem'Hadar would walk past his tube, usually escorting a Founder. Occasionally, Weyoun would see another Vorta in their company—an Eris or a Keevan or a Marklar. And always, he would see another Weyoun, freshly awakened, the nutrient fluid still dripping from his glistening body, his eyes bright with the prospects of the new life he was about to embrace.

But over the millennia that Weyoun had spent motionless, expectant, in his own tube, not one Founder, not one Jem'Hadar, not one other Vorta had come for him.

Slowly, in the sporadic bursts of thought that surfaced at random in a mind lacking stimulation, it occurred to Weyoun that though he had been brought to the brink of life in this cloning facility, it might not be his destiny ever to partake of it. Instead, he might spend eternity in his tube, neither dead nor alive, simply waiting . . . forever . . . without ever being—

Weyoun suddenly realized—a few decades later—that his view of the storage facility was blocked by a person standing in front of his tube.

No, not a person, Weyoun thought—eventually—a female. His eyes registered flowing dark hair and dangling ear jewelry. His artificial memory began piecing together disparate, disconnected images from half-remembered lives of all the decanted Weyoun clones who had preceded him.

Kilana. It was Kilana. Or, more precisely, a Kilana. A female Vorta whose third incarnation had once shared passion with Weyoun's sec—

The female Vorta placed her hand on his storage tube's cover.

Her hand passed through the cover.

The cover was gone!

The weight and thickness of the tube's nutrient-stasis fluid left Weyoun, spilling away from him, splashing noisily on the floor. The sound thundered in his ears. The overhead lights seared his eyes. He shivered as the slick coating of the fluid evaporated from skin that had never been exposed to a change in temperature.

Weyoun's lungs expanded and he drew in a huge gulp of air and he lived!

Driven by instinct, Weyoun stepped from his tube. But his legs were not ready and they buckled beneath him.

Kilana caught him, steadied him.

Weyoun heard his own voice as it moaned with delight. To be embraced by solid arms, to sense the delicious change of pressure and gravity bearing down on his limbs, to be in a position other than floating upright in his tube—it was so marvelous and so confusing and so overwhelming, all at the same time.

“Shhh,” Kilana whispered, and Weyoun thrilled to feel her fingers gently brush his sodden hair from his forehead. “You're free now.”

Weyoun stared into the face of the incarnated female who had meant so much to his own previous incarnation.

It was then that he noticed that something was wrong.

The female who held him was dressed like Kilana. Quite properly, she wore the standard deep-red gown of a Vorta negotiator—the color to imply the threat of violence. Quite properly, her shoulders were cloaked in the blue of authority—the color to imply the rewards of cooperation. And, quite properly, the gown itself was cut low and pulled tight to distract male eyes and attention.

But her ears—they were missing or mutilated. Weyoun saw no sign of Vorta amplifying nodes ascending from her jaw.

Instead, he saw what appeared to be some lesser form of senseamplifying structure covering the bridge of her nose.

“Who are you?” Weyoun gurgled. Voicing that question made him cough up thick clots of nutrient fluid that he realized he must have been breathing during the millennia he'd spent in his tube.

“Arla Rees,” the female said.

Weyoun gasped as the storage chamber melted away, replaced by the cold sterility of a Starfleet sickbay. In the same instant, his memory was restored, and he realized he was on the Defiant.

“How did you find me?” Weyoun asked. He tried to pull his hand from hers, but she wouldn't relinquish her grip.

“The True Prophets guided me to you,” Arla said, “so that I might give you your freedom, and you might grant me my release.”

Weyoun knew exactly what she meant, why she wouldn't let go of his hand.

“Of course,” Weyoun said. “I gladly share the gift of the Grigari.”

He squeezed the flesh of her hand then, pinching it between two nails until the skin broke and blood welled.

She gave a small moan, then did the same to him.

And when their wounds met, blood to blood, the gift of the Grigari was shared.

“But what if everything that's happened since we entered the wormhole has been an Orb experience?” Dr. Bashir asked. “Including this conversation? Right now?”

In his command chair, and finally wearing a newly replicated Starfleet uniform, circa 2375, Sisko stared at the main viewer of the Defiant's bridge. He couldn't take his eyes from the image of Deep Space 9 displayed there, now floating against a violent red background of rippling light, glowing verteron nodes, and shifting verteron strings.

No, that's wrong, Sisko thought. Despite Jadzia's discovery about why she couldn't receive any signals from the station and her subsequent adjustment of the Defiant's communications systems to account for two different temporal frames, he still could not make himself believe it. That is not Deep Space 9. Not yet.

Sisko roused himself from his thoughts of the past. Returned to the present. Or to the future. “Doctor, this is not an illusion,” he said firmly. He looked away from the screen and over at Bashir, who was seated at the ship's auxiliary life-support station. Worf was at tactical, Jadzia at science, Kira at flight. Appreciatively, Sisko noted that Jake was sitting at the back of the bridge by the situation table, trying to stay out of the way. Off the bridge, Commander Arla was watching over Weyoun in sickbay, and Ensign Simons and the remaining eight members of the crew were on duty in engineering. “That you can be sure of.”

“But how?” Bashir persisted. “The illusion I was trapped in was indistinguishable from reality.”

Sisko knew each one of his crew was waiting for the answer to Bashir's question. After what they each had experienced, how could any of them be certain what reality was anymore?

Sisko knew his answer wasn't good enough as he gave it, but it was the only thing he could think to say. “This moment we're in, Doctor, it doesn't feel like an Orb experience.” He held up a hand to stop Bashir's protest. “It doesn't feel anything at all like the individual illusion of hell I was trapped in. And if you think about it, I'm certain you can identify the differences between what you feel now and what you felt . . . before Dax came for you.”

In the silence that followed his challenge, Sisko knew everyone was daring to revisit his and her own experience of hell.

Jadzia spoke first. “He's right, Julian. I remember my first Orb experience. Right in my lab on Deep Space 9. I opened the Orb Ark and the next thing I knew, I was with Curzon, in the transference bay, as Dax passed from him to me.”

“That was an actual memory being replayed,” Bashir argued. “Of course you knew it wasn't real because it had happened before.”

Sisko intervened to take control of the discussion. They had decisions to make and, if Jadzia's estimates were correct, they would have to make them soon.

“Doctor, in your illusion, after the first time you . . . you fouled up the singularity containment field and the universe . . . ended, didn't you have some small question in the back of your mind when the experience began repeating?”

“Well, yes, but . . . it was more like an unsettling sense of déjà vu. It was nothing that made me think, ‘Oh, right, this is just an illusion. Everything's going to be all right after all.’ ”

“But the point is, you knew something was wrong. When I had my first Orb experience, I found myself suddenly walking on the beach where I had met Jennifer. And I met her again, then and there, fully aware that I was in the past, even though I gave no thought to how I had arrived at that moment.” Sisko spread his arms to encompass the bridge. “But this is different. Through the Orbs, or being in the presence of the Prophets, things feel altered. Time moves in fits and starts, back and forth. The . . . the light comes from outside and from within . . . the sound is something you feel as much as hear . . . the quality of existence is different.

“Having experienced the Orbs, having met the Prophets, and having

been trapped in a Pah-wraith hell, I say what we're experiencing now, on this ship, is the same reality we all remember from our past. And I believe Dax's sensor scans bear me out.”

Sisko looked to Jadzia, who nodded her agreement, then took up his argument.

“Julian,” she said, “at some point we have to draw the line. Sure, maybe we're all still stuck in the wormhole from back in our first trip through it. Maybe everything that's happened to us in the past six years is an illusion. But if that illusion is indistinguishable from reality—truly indistinguishable and not just a convincing reproduction—then we have no choice but to accept it as reality and deal with it as best we can. Otherwise, we might as well sit in a corner, doubt the existence of everything, and just . . . do nothing.”

“This is why I prefer medicine,” Bashir grumbled. “Physics always ends up colliding head-to-head with philosophy.”

Jadzia's smile was pointed. “Not quite. To test the postulates of physics, you can design experiments. Trust me: Domains of linear reality can exist within the nonlinear realm of the wormhole pocket.” She turned to Sisko. “And Benjamin? My experiments show we really are running out of time.”

“I'm convinced,” Sisko said. He looked around the bridge for any other questions, but all attention appeared to be focused on what Jadzia would say next. For however it was that the Defiant and the station could exist in here at all, the Trill had clearly determined that they would not be able to exist much longer.

Then the ship pitched again and everyone on the bridge grabbed the closest chair or console to steady themselves. Sisko kept his eyes fixed on the main viewer. And just as before, by the time all movement stopped, the image on the viewer had changed. Now DS9 appeared before a background of undulating blue energy, with no verteron phenomena observable. Sisko turned to Jadzia for her report. “Old Man?”

“Another equalization wave. And it came . . . one hundred seventyseven seconds faster than the last one.”

“So they are accelerating,” Sisko said.

“As predicted,” the Trill confirmed. “Along a perfect geometric curve.”

“Any change in the time required to equalize the pressure difference between the two wormhole fragments?”

Jadzia had discovered that when the wormhole pocket split in two, the resulting halves were not identical. The blue wormhole had extended from the Bajoran system through a hyperdimensional realm to emerge seventy thousand light-years away in the Gamma Quadrant. The red wormhole, though, had joined two regions of space more than one hundred thousand light-years apart, stretching from Bajor to the farthest reaches of the Delta Quadrant. To her, that implied that each wormhole contained a different energy density, so that when they were rejoined, that difference had to be evened out, just as when two spacecraft docked and their differing atmospheric pressures had to equalize when the airlocks were opened.

Sisko listened intently now as Jadzia read the displays at her station. “No change in my first calculation. Other than now I can be precise to five decimal places. The equalization waves will keep passing over us at an accelerating rate during the next . . . fifteen hours, twenty-seven minutes. Just like water sloshing through a pipe, trying to find its level. And after those nine hundred twenty-seven minutes, the delay between each pass will have shrunk to something on the order of the Planck interval so that the wormhole environment will effectively become homeostatic, and . . .”

Sisko completed her analysis. “The space-time bubbles containing

the station and this ship will follow the universe into nonexistence.”

“Exactly. The wormhole pocket will not only be nonlinear in time the way its two fragments were, it will also become dimensionless in space. And that, I'm afraid,” the Trill concluded, “is as close to nothingness as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle will permit.”

“Fifteen hours, twenty-seven minutes,” Bashir repeated glumly. “So much for philosophy. And physics. And everything else.”

Sisko stood up, alarmed by the doctor's sudden embrace of defeat, and also acutely aware of his crew watching him, looking to him for strength, and for leadership.

“That's enough, Doctor. It's not over yet.” Sisko made his decision. Their decision. “We're going to cross over.”

“What?” The startled response had come from Jake at the back of the bridge. His son had obviously reached his limit for remaining a silent observer. “Dad, are we really going back to Deep Space 9?”

Sisko shook his head. It wasn't as simple as that. If Jadzia was correct, then, technically, that wasn't Deep Space 9 out there. In its current temporal frame, it wouldn't become Deep Space 9 for at least two more weeks. Because, according to the navigational signals that Jadzia had received from it, the station before them existed at a specific time in the past.

Like everyone else on the bridge, Sisko could not look away from the main viewer and the achingly familiar shape that was slowly turning on it, waiting. The home they had lost. Before it had become their home.

A time in which it had been known as Terok Nor.

Stardate 46359.1.

The Day of Withdrawal.

The day to which Sisko now had to return, to save his life, his crew, and his universe.

Odo, like almost all the others on the Boreth who had been “rescued” by Garak, didn't want to talk about the hell in which he'd been trapped, and O'Brien wasn't inclined to force the issue. Mostly because he had finally determined the nature of the periodic waves that had struck the Boreth and caused the huge Klingon ship to buck as if hit by a phaser volley. It appeared that the quantum structure of the blended wormhole fragments was equalizing, and as best as the chief engineer could determine, once equilibrium had been achieved, the space-time bubble containing the Boreth would no longer have any dimensions in which to exist.

By entering the red wormhole, those aboard the Boreth had not escaped the end of their universe. They had only postponed it, and not by long, either.

“How much time?!” Quark bleated, incredulous. Except for Dukat, who still lay unconscious, bound, and gagged on the deck beside the unused communications station, only the Ferengi barkeep among the twelve others on the bridge of the Boreth seemed not to have heard what O'Brien had just announced.

“I said, to our frame of reference,” O'Brien repeated, “we have thirty hours and . . . some odd minutes. I can't work it out any closer than that.”

Quark whirled to confront Garak, who as usual, O'Brien noted, looked unperturbed in the face of the Ferengi's extravagantly expressed emotions. “You should have left me in Debtor's Dungeon!”

“Believe me, if I had known how disagreeable you were going to be about being saved, I would have preferred to have left you there myself,” Garak said.

“Then send me back!” Quark demanded.

O'Brien knew they didn't have the time for this. “That's enough, Quark. Settle down.”

Almost comic in his bulky Bajoran robes, Quark drew himself up to shout at O'Brien. “You're not in charge!”

But any further protest from the furious Ferengi was quickly quashed as Garak clamped a hand on Quark's shoulder. “Yes, Quark, he is in charge. Chief O'Brien is the only one among us who understands the unique nature of our predicament. And I, for one, am content to hear his conclusions and act accordingly.”

Indignant, the Ferengi shook off the Cardassian's hand. “Don't you understand?! You dragged us out of our afterlives! Eternal afterlives! To face absolute extinction in thirty hours!”

Odo, the only person on the bridge to be in proper garb—because he had formed his Bajoran uniform from his outer layers of mutable flesh—made a futile attempt to get Quark to listen to reason.

“Quark, we were not experiencing real afterlives,” the changeling said. “The Pah-wraiths created illusions for us. Presumably because they couldn't get at us any other way.”

“Uh, that does make sense, brother,” Rom added.

“SENSE!” Quark all but screamed at Rom. “Have you grown points on your ears all of a sudden? What do you know about things making sense?”

O'Brien did not intervene in the exchange between the siblings. He was confident that Rom could handle himself.

“Well,” Rom said, as if his brother had asked him a reasonable question, “according to the Chief, as long as normal matter and space-time exists in the wormhole pocket, the pocket's domain is disrupted. So it seems to, uh, make sense that if the Pah-wraiths, or whatever, didn't want to be . . . disrupted, they would have destroyed us when we first entered. But since they didn't, I agree with Garak. It's because . . . they can't.”

“Well said, Rom,” Garak added in an approving tone of voice; just to provoke Quark, O'Brien was sure.

“So how does that explain them putting us to sleep with illusions of the afterlife?” Quark asked acidly.

Garak took over. “Quark, it might help if you would start thinking

less like a condemned prisoner and more like a Ferengi.” The Cardassian ignored Quark's shocked, insulted gasp. “Why don't you consider what we're involved in as a business deal? What would your response be if you were trying to get the better of a potential customer—one who didn't realize he had some method of gaining an advantage over you?”

To O'Brien, it seemed clear that the glowering and dark-faced Quark knew the answer Garak was going after, but he didn't want to give the Cardassian the satisfaction of saying it.

So Garak did. “I believe,” he said helpfully, “you would attempt to distract your client. Perhaps provide him with an expensive yet potent bottle of bloodwine. Introduce him to a fetching dabo girl or two. Keep him occupied until the window of opportunity for exploiting his advantage over you has fled. And then, for the cost of a small distraction, you would no longer be at risk. At least, as I believe.”

“So?” Quark said, surly.

“So,” O'Brien said, impatient with the both of them, “the afterlife illusions we experienced were distractions. To keep us from attempting to get out of here.”

His huge ears flushing perceptibly, the Ferengi lifted his hands up toward the ceiling in a dramatic gesture of frustration. “Am I surrounded by idiots?! There's nowhere else to go!”

O'Brien's displeasure with Quark's antics sharpened his voice. “Not where, Quark. When.” He pointed to the main viewer. “That's not just Deep Space 9 out there. That's Deep Space 9 on the day it was swallowed by the red wormhole. If we can somehow get onto the station on that day, we can stop the Orbs of Jalbador from being opened in your establishment.”

Quark's pale eyes bulged with shock. “That's—that's time travel!” he quavered. “And from the first frinxing day we popped up in this nightmare future, every one of you has said—” His voice now under more control, Quark adopted a high-pitched singsong voice, his impression of human, O'Brien guessed. “—‘The only way we can go back in time is if the Defiant slingshots us around the red wormhole.’ ”

“In normal space, Quark,” O'Brien said. “And we're not in normal space anymore. Normal space doesn't exist anymore. And under the circumstances, I don't think anyone here is terribly concerned about what the Department of Temporal Investigations has to say about avoiding the creation of alternate timelines.”

Quark slapped his hands to his face. “How in the name of all that's profitable can you have alternate timelines if time doesn't exist?”

O'Brien was suddenly aware of everyone, even Garak, looking at him, waiting for his answer. For all the Ferengi's panicky, selfobsessed bluster, something in Quark's last outburst had resonated with the others on the bridge. And O'Brien knew that if he was to somehow keep this group together, make them capable of at least attempting his admittedly desperate survival plan, he had to come up with something convincing, and fast.

But for a moment, he just stared blankly back at them, the only thought running through his mind, What would Captain Sisko do? Followed almost instantaneously by, What would Captain Picard do?

Garak broke the silence. “Though I am loath to admit it, Chief O'Brien, our Ferengi friend does raise an interesting question.”

And then, as if a phaser burst had struck him directly between the eyes to fill his mind with blinding light, O'Brien had it. Thanks to Captain Picard.

“Look, like I said, the multidimensional physics of what's going on here are completely beyond me. We'd be a lot better off if Dax were with us, that's for sure. But what I can tell you is that I know for an absolute fact that alternate timelines do exist.”

By the silence that greeted his pronouncement, O'Brien understood that what he had to say next would be made infinitely easier by the fact that everyone wanted to believe him. Even Quark, it seemed, for all his negativity, was not yet ready to abandon all hope.

“Twice,” the chief engineer began, deliberately making eye contact with everyone on the bridge of the Boreth, “when I was on the Enterprise, we had encounters with beings or technology from a time period beyond the year 2400. Once we picked up a time-transport pod from the twenty-sixth century. Another time, Captain Picard himself had a run-in with two unsavory types from the twenty-seventh century. And Vash was with him. So, somehow, in De Sitter space or the multiverse or some undefinable phase space in which time has more than two dimensions—and which Dax would be able to talk about for days—timelines exist in which the universe did not end in 2400.

“Now, I'm not Dax, so I can't tell you how. Or why. But I do know that it's possible the way one of those timelines came into existence is because some of us managed to get back to Deep Space 9 in 2375—and stopped the red Orbs from opening the red wormhole.”

O'Brien stopped, having made his point as best he could, satisfied that he had done what every good leader was supposed to do: Show his followers a direction to go. And he was flattered to see that even if he had never delivered a speech like it before, this one seemed to have been effective. His audience was looking encouraged, even excited by his words.

Now only one last element remained to be put in place.

Captain Sisko and Captain Picard, O'Brien knew, would have taken care of it at once, out of instinct. The same instinct that likely had made them Starfleet captains in the first place.

But O'Brien wasn't working from instinct, but rather from his experience—first on the Enterprise and then on Deep Space 9, where he had observed great leaders in action, and those observed examples told him what he had to do now.

“I'm going to give it a try,” O'Brien said in a ringing voice that sounded more confident than he felt. “Who's with me?”

He felt his face grow warm, and he knew his cheeks were red, as one by one every member of his crew stepped forward and vowed his or her support.

Even Quark.

His proud moment was brief.

“So it would appear,” Garak said drily, “since we are all in agreement, that only one last detail remains to be worked out.” The Cardassian nodded pointedly in the direction of the viewer and the tantalizing destination it still displayed. “How do we get over there?”

Relief swept through O'Brien.

“Now you're talking engineering,” he said gratefully. “And that part I've got all worked out.”

On the viewer, Deep Space 9 turned slowly, waiting, just as it had on the day it was destroyed.

The day to which O'Brien now had to return, to save his life, his crew, and his universe.