CHAPTER 10

IN THE BLACKENED dust of his homeworld, Odo felt his wings melt and his feathers retract as he reverted to his true form, oozing like liquid despite all his efforts to create a solid form of any kind.

Dukat stood over him, his wild-haired, leering image repeated a thousandfold among the individual optical-perception cells that covered the changeling's amorphous body.

“That's right, Odo,” Dukat said, and his harsh voice was multiplied by Odo's specialized acoustic cells, just as was his image. “We have returned to that place which you fear most.”

Helpless, Odo could only watch as Dukat leaned over and scooped up a handful of him. Odo's essence dripped down Dukat's arm like thick, golden tar.

“Or should I say,” the Cardassian sneered, “you have returned. Because I may leave any time I want.”

Odo fought to create tentacles to wrap around Dukat's wide neck and strangle the Cardassian into silence. But physical control had left him. All he could do was to flow uselessly in the grip of gravity, powerless, just as when he had first experienced this personal and private hell—when the two wormholes had merged and he had flowed across the lifeless surface of this planet for millennia.

“Unless, that is,” Dukat continued, “you make the right choice.”

Odo felt tiny flakes of carbonized ash and debris adhere to his outer surface, and he knew those flakes were all that remained of his people after the Great Link had been incinerated by whatever disaster had struck this world.

But when the end had come here, Odo had been selfishly absent. His people had perished while he lived among the solids, adopting their ways, deliberately suppressing and ignoring his heritage. So that now he was even more alone than when he had been a solitary freak of nature on Terok Nor. Then, he hadn't known about his past or his kind. But now he knew exactly what he had lost, and he would know that loss forever.

“Do you have something—anything—to say?” Dukat asked. He shook the last of Odo from his arm. “Perhaps I can help.” He gestured and a red glow of energy formed over the gray flesh of his hand. Suddenly, Odo felt reconnected to his form and to his abilities.

At once he pictured himself as a humanoid and within an instant his dispersed vision and sense of hearing coalesced into the localized regions of a humanoid head as he took shape and rose up from the ashes of his people.

“Is that better?” Dukat asked.

Odo controlled himself. He would not attack the madman. Not just yet. This experience was not real in any physical sense. But though Garak had not had any difficulty in extracting him from it, Odo wasn't certain how Dukat's manipulation of reality might have been affected by the process of their being beamed onto the changelings' homeworld. All Odo could remember of his transport from the Boreth was his shock when Dukat had leaped at him on the bridge.

“Do you have something to say?” Dukat asked again.

Odo cleared his throat, then spoke. “By adding your mass to the transport beam, it's most probable you've thrown off O'Brien's coordinate calculations. This time, we likely are dead.”

But the Cardassian madman shook his white-haired head and his eyes glowed red with the fire of the Pah-wraiths. “Odo, really, can't you feel the difference? On the Boreth, it seems Garak was right. The Amojan had departed from me to do battle against his betrayers, leaving me with only a pitiful reminder of the power I once had.” He held his hands before him, and weak scarlet sparks crackled from open palm to palm, sullying the dry air with the stench of burning flesh.

“But now,” Dukat went on, “I exist in a temporal frame in which the Amojan has not yet returned to his Temple.”

An almost dreamlike reverie come over Dukat, and Odo guessed the Cardassian was caught up in some memory of where he had been twenty-five years ago.

“At the time you and Sisko were tampering with the secrets of the Orbs of Jalbador, I was returning from my . . . sojourn in the Gamma Quadrant,” Dukat said. “I was eager to meet with Weyoun and Damar, to retrieve the ancient fetish doll that had contained blessed Amojan's spirit. But now that I am returned to this time, the Amojan walks within me once again, needing no release.” Dukat's eyes blazed with sudden red energy so searing in intensity that his features seemed to melt away and Odo was forced to shield his own eyes.

“He is a timeless being,” Dukat chanted, as if reciting some ancient catechism. “All barriers fall before him. Accept this gift as you have always accepted him, now and forever, Amojan.” The light faded and Dukat stared soulfully at Odo. “Can I hear an Amojan from you, Odo?”

“Why not?” Odo said.

Dukat blinked in happy surprise. “Truly?”

“Truly,” Odo said. Then he morphed his right hand into a tencentimeter cube of elemental iron and thrust it forward as fast as his nerve impulses could travel.

There was a satisfying crunch as the iron cube struck Dukat's face, and the Cardassian fell onto his back as if he were an android whose powerpack had been deactivated.

Odo knew this was an illusory realm and that nothing he could do would bring on Dukat's death. But even the illusion of pain might be enough to make the madman careless. And an enemy's carelessness usually brought with it opportunity. Odo changed his left hand into another cube of iron and swung it around like a hammer to crush Dukat's rib cage. The madman's arms and legs kicked out, twitched, then lay still.

Odo reduced the length of his arms, drawing the cubes away from Dukat's twisted body, savoring the illusion of dark blood that pooled around the illusion of a mangled face. He held his cubefists ready to strike again.

But the pooled blood faded as if evaporating and Dukat's face reformed from the battered ruins of his skull as if a melted statue had entered a pocket of reversed time. Then his chest reinflated, its ribs whole once again.

“Say hello to your eternity,” Dukat spat at Odo, once his teeth had reformed.

Odo shut out all else as he concentrated on a critical alteration of his body, then sent out both fists—

—which missed Dukat because he was no longer there.

The Cardassian had vanished from Odo's reality.

But he had not vanished quickly enough.

For even as Dukat escaped the dimension within which this illusion existed, something else went with him—tiny barbed tendrils no thicker than a single human hair, identical to those of the Trelbeth grabber tree that had once flourished in Keiko O'Brien's arboretum on Deep Space 9. Odo had projected then outward from each cubefist of iron to snare the robes covering the madman's still re-forming body.

And Odo, whose morphogenic molecules shifted mass through other dimensions as easily as they altered their appearance and alignment, was suddenly in contact with both Dukat's position and his own. In one simple action, he now pulsed the bulk of his mass along those linking tendrils.

In that other location to which Dukat had fled, the changeling opened his eyes in his solid, humanoid body, just as the Cardassian ran from the large, unfinished storage room on DS9, exactly where O'Brien had beamed them.

Instantly, Odo withdrew the tendrils that connected him to Dukat. There was a momentary burst of disorientation as he puzzled over what had happened to him and where he had been—someplace that had been a psychic dimension for himself yet a physical one for Dukat. But the sound of Dukat's footsteps receding down the corridor made Odo quickly put the paradox aside.

His mission was plain to him. If the transport had gone as planned, and if Dukat's extra mass had not proved too disruptive, both he and Dukat were on DS9 twenty-five years in the past, at the time Sisko had returned from Jeraddo with two of the three Red Orbs of Jalbador. In slightly less than four hours, the third Red Orb would be discovered in Quark's bar, and the red wormhole would open, destroying the station and propelling the Defiant into the future.

Odo knew Dukat would do all he could to see that history played out exactly as it had before.

It was now up to Odo to prevent that from happening.

Odo rushed for the corridor, determined to use all the resources at his disposal. And as chief of security for DS9, his resources were considerable.

It only took him a few seconds to find a communications node at the intersection of two corridors, and he hit the emergency access control. “Odo to Security. Gul Dukat is on the station in the lower levels. He must be found and captured at once. Use heavy stun on sight. Acknowledge.”

Odo paused, half expecting to hear his own voice in reply, demanding to know who was impersonating him.

But no response came.

He hit the control again. “Odo to Security, acknowledge.” Nothing. He entered his personal ID code. “Computer, this is Odo. Put me in contact with the Security office.” Again, nothing. “Odo to Ops, this is an emergency. Acknowledge!”

With a growl of frustration, Odo realized the node must be out of service. He was about to hurry to another intersection, when he took a closer look at the panel. Though he could not have articulated his suspicions—he was acting more on a feeling than any logical conclusion—he pressed the tab on the side of the terminal node and swung up the trapezoidal cover.

Inside, a tiny, isolinear status display screen glowed pale lavender; precisely, Odo knew, as a fully functioning node on this level should.

Recalling an action that seemed to be a habit with Chief O'Brien and Rom, Odo carefully held down the subsystem diagnostic key to the left of the display. Before anything else, the two engineers had always checked the status of the equipment they had been sent to repair, from the equipment's own perspective.

The self-check of the tiny terminal took less than three seconds. The Cardassian symbols that appeared in the display window indicated the device was operating at efficiency level 729—the Cardassian equivalent of 100 percent.

Yet the device had not transmitted his communications.

Odo tapped more controls, then stared at the new display line that appeared, this time in Federation alphanumerics.

O'Brien had miscalculated. Odo and Dukat had not been beamed to DS9 on the day the three Red Orbs had been found and brought together.

The stardate was 51884.2—almost five days earlier.

“How is that possible?” Odo said to himself. O'Brien had been certain that the bubble of space-time containing the station existed in the wormhole pocket because it had somehow been ‘swallowed’ by the red wormhole when it opened in Quark's bar. The fact that the time signal the Chief had measured on the Boreth seemed to originate from a few hours before that event was easily explained by the nonlinear temporal nature of the wormhole. But five days? Odo thought. What's connecting the station to the red wormhole in this time?

As quickly as he had asked himself that question, he knew the answer.

With no time to waste this second time around, Odo stretched into a pseudopod of golden liquid and surged through a ventilation grille.

Before he could save the universe in the future, he would have to stop a crime in the past.

Sisko and Kira followed, appalled, as Obanak and Lorem reverently ushered Weyoun from the holosuite as if they were his acolytes.

“Why can they see him but not us?” Kira demanded. “Why can we interact with the station and not people?”

“There's an answer,” Sisko said.

“For Dax, maybe,” Kira replied worriedly.

They came to the metal staircase that led down to the main floor of Quark's where Sisko was surprised to hear a hum of conversation, even the familiar clacking of the dabo wheel accompanied by its usual chorus of cheers and groans.

Sisko looked over the staircase, down toward the main floor. Quark's was packed. Almost every customer was a Cardassian.

“Quark said business was dead in the days before the Withdrawal,” Kira said.

For Sisko, there was only one explanation. “Then we're in the wrong time frame,” he said.

“But how?” Kira asked. “Dax picked up the time signal for the Day of Withdrawal.”

Sisko shook his head. “Maybe that's not the only day that connects the station to the red wormhole. Remember what Leej Terrell said. She studied the first Red Orb on the station. Hooked it up to some sort of device. Created what she called a ‘wormhole precursor field,’ and it allowed her to see into the red wormhole. It even allowed some of her researchers to step into it. That could be why we're here before the Day of Withdrawal—this might be one of the days Terrell conducted her experiments.”

Sisko and Kira took the staircase down to the main floor. Weyoun had pulled up his hood to hide his features, and before him, Obanak and Lorem were moving politely through the crowd of Cardassians, heads bowed like nervous trustees grateful for even the small amount of freedom their position offered them. The three were heading for the main entrance. The Promenade beyond was bathed in cold blue light, heavily misted.

“We have to keep following them,” Sisko said urgently. He started through the crowd, automatically trying to shift and twist to avoid colliding with the passersby who simply slipped through him without awareness of his presence.

Halfway to the entrance, Sisko looked over to the bar to see Quark serving drinks. The Ferengi, though younger in this time frame, paradoxically seemed older: his face haggard, his eyes deeply shadowed, his brightly colored jacket wrinkled and spoiled by a large stain. Sisko had forgotten how Quark had changed over the time the station had been home to a Starfleet presence. After six years, for all his complaints and occasional misadventures, the Ferengi barkeep Sisko knew had become a successful businessman, obviously getting more sleep than he had in this time.

Sisko and Kira reached the Promenade, and now the changes between Terok Nor and Deep Space 9 became even more pronounced.

Half the storefronts were shuttered, closed for more than just the evening. They were out of business. And there were none of the small sales kiosks set up by optimistic entrepreneurs. This was a dying place.

“That way,” Kira said, and she pointed to the right, where Obanak and Lorem remained to either side of Weyoun, walking toward the security fence that cut the Promenade in two—one side Cardassian, the other Bajoran.

Weyoun passed through the narrow gate without being troubled by the Cardassian guards, but Sisko saw a look pass between Obanak and a heavily armed glinn and guessed that bribes were paid on a regular basis.

“I suppose we just walk through,” Sisko said as he moved beside the lineup of Bajoran trustees returning to their quarters or carrying out assignments on the Bajoran side.

“Why not?” Kira said, and with a tight-lipped look of trepidation, stepped into the line and walked through the people ahead of her.

Sisko matched her movements, and the experience was definitely unsettling. He found it easier to only open his eyes every few seconds, to avoid the disorienting strobe-like flicker of darkness that accompanied each figure he passed through.

Penetrating the security gate required waiting for a Bajoran to approach it and then moving through the briefly open gate at the same time as the Bajoran. Kira went first, then Sisko.

“Did you see that?” Kira asked. She was pointing to a Cardassian in a security booth set back from the fence.

“See what?” Sisko asked.

“When we passed through, the guard monitoring the sensors couldn't see us but he acted as if he knew there was more than one person going through the gate.”

Hope flared in Sisko that he and Kira might be able to use a computer terminal to transmit written messages. “Which confirms we're able to interact with the station's equipment at different levels. At least some of it.” He peered around the darker and more crowded Bajoran side, trying to catch a glimpse of Weyoun's red robes. “Over there,” he said.

Obanak was leading Weyoun into the Bajoran Temple.

“Not a good sign,” Kira said flatly.

Sisko looked at her, waited for an explanation.

She gave one promptly. “The Resistance usually tried to avoid involving any temple in their activities, so the Cardassians wouldn't have an excuse to close them. So the one place on Terok Nor where you could almost guarantee there would be no Resistance members present is the Promenade Temple.”

“But would the prylars have allowed it to be used by a Pah-wraith cult?”

Kira shook her head. “Until I saw Obanak go inside, I would have said no.”

“Well, it won't do any good to try to signal Dax until time catches up with us and we're in the station on the same day the Defiant is observing it from the wormhole.”

Kira understood. “So, first we follow Weyoun.”

Together, they approached the Temple, and once they moved closer, Sisko noticed how threadbare the carpet was at the base of the steps leading inside. And how the elegant Bajoran carving which represented the gateway to the Celestial Temple appeared to be darker than he remembered, a result of the ore soot that the Cardassian filters couldn't totally eliminate from the station's air supply.

Kira paused at the entrance, also inspecting its tattered condition. “We really made a difference here these past six years,” she said softly. “We can't let it all have been for nothing.”

Sisko regarded her somberly. “We won't,” he promised.

They stepped through the doorway and entered the Temple.

And were instantly struck by a solid blast of blue light.

Sisko gasped as its impact crashed down upon him like a wave. But the force of it hit from all directions at once so that he remained on his feet.

He staggered as the light faded, leaned in toward Kira who had doubled over, trying to catch her breath. “What was that?” she said as she coughed.

“An explosion?” Sisko suggested. But there had been no sound to accompany the flash. He straightened up with some difficulty, to peer into the Temple's worship area, to see if Weyoun and his Bajoran followers had been similarly affected.

But the Vorta was gone, along with his acolytes.

The only occupant of the Temple now was a tall, distinguished prylar with a neatly trimmed white beard.

And his eyes were fixed on Sisko.

Sisko stared at the old prylar.

“Can you see me?” he asked.

The prylar bowed in acknowledgment. “I have been waiting to see you all my life, Emissary.”

The way the prylar said that word brought a sudden memory to Sisko. The man before him was the first prylar he had ever met.

The first Bajoran to call him Emissary.

On the first day he had set foot on the Promenade when he had arrived on Deep Space 9.

And now the paradoxes begin, Sisko thought, fighting bewilderment. In his original timeline, he had met this prylar days, perhaps months from now, two weeks after the Cardassians had left the station. But now, when Sisko's earlier self arrived on the station for the first time, this prylar would already have met him, in a way.

“Prylar Rulan,” Kira said in greeting.

The Prylar nodded again. “Nerys.”

“You know each other?” Sisko asked, realizing how foolish the question was as he said it. He forged on. “Prylar, there were three men just here. Two trustees and an alien in red robes.”

A small smile played across Rulan's placid features. “There has been no one here today but me, Emissary. And there are no more trustees, thank the Prophets.”

Sisko looked at Kira, about to ask if she knew of any hidden passages connected to the Temple. He knew of none.

But before he could ask his question, Kira had one of her own.

“Prylar, why are there no trustees anymore?”

“Not since the Cardassians left, my child. All of Bajor are free now.” The prylar fixed his calm eyes on Sisko. “And you, too, are of Bajor now.”

Sisko felt the skin of his arms rise up in gooseflesh. The light, he told himself. That's what the light was.

“Prylar,” he asked, “when did the Cardassians leave?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“We've shifted to a new temporal frame two weeks beyond the time we wanted,” Sisko said to Kira.

“How?” she asked. Then answered her own question, just as Sisko had. “That light?”

“It has to be. I asked Dax if we'd feel the pressure waves on the station. We must still carry with us some connection to the Defiant's frame of space-time so that each time an equalization pressure wave goes past, we get tugged along with it.

Kira took it to the next logical step. “So when the next one passes, we'll be tugged back into the past.”

Sisko nodded. “Just not as far. Then we'll come forward again.”

Kira looked at him. “What do you want to bet that the one place we'll finally settle is the Day of Withdrawal—the same time frame the Defiant's observing.”

Sisko rubbed his hand over his face. “And by then it'll be too late.” He saw Kira's puzzled expression. “Major, if we're still linked to the Defiant's temporal frame, when it ceases to exist, we probably will, too.”

“Or else . . . the link will cease, and we'll be left here.”

“Are you willing to risk that?”

Kira gave him a grim smile. “Do we have a choice?”

“The Emissary has many choices,” Prylar Rulan said quietly.

In the back of his mind, Sisko tried to work out the difference in the rate of time passage between the Defiant of the future and this station in the past. Knowing that might give him some idea of how much longer he and Kira had before the pendulum of time swept them back into the past. But he had another, more personal question burning in him as well.

“Prylar,” Sisko asked, “how do you know that I am the Emissary?”

The prylar smiled, as if to indicate he knew more than anyone could ever suspect. “You are the Sisko. You have just appeared before me from within the light of the Celestial Temple itself. There are those among us who have always known that just such a person will be the Emissary.”

Sisko didn't understand how that could be possible. In this past, when he had first seen Rulan, Rulan had also called him Emissary at once, even though Sisko had merely stepped out from an airlock on the Promenade and not from a flash of wormhole radiation. But when Sisko had first met the Prophets, only a few days after that, those beings had seemed to not recognize him as anything except a disturbance in their environment. Indeed, at first they had seemed to have a difficult time even recognizing him as a corporeal being and had said they wanted to destroy him.

“You've always known?” Sisko asked, truly baffled. “How is that possible?”

Prylar Rulan shook his head as if the question had no meaning. “I know because those who came before me knew, because those who came before them knew, all the way back to the first writings of the great mystics in the time before Lost B'hala.”

“The mystic Shabren?” Kira asked.

The prylar smiled. “And Eilin and Naradim.”

Kira frowned. “But those are the mystics of Jalbador.”

Sisko was fascinated to see the serene prylar bristle at Kira's use of that term.

“Some have called them that,” Rulan said sharply. “But they are mistaken. To those who know the Will of the Prophets, they are the mystics of Jalkaree.”

“But, Prylar, in all the lessons you've taught me,” Kira said, “in all the lessons I've learned in all the Temples I've worshipped in, not you, not one prylar or monk, has ever taught me of Jalkaree. Or said the name of the Emissary.”

The prylar's smile returned, this time like that of an indulgent parent. “Oh, my child, think what would have happened if those who knew the truth so many millennia ago had named the Emissary for all the world. Do you not think that every generation would then have hundreds, if not thousands of people coming forth to say that they were the Sisko? And do you not think that if the full prophecies of Jalbador and Jalkaree were known to all the world, if the history of the future were laid out for all with the mystics' precision, there would not be those who would attempt to change that future?”

The prylar stepped closer to Kira, placed a hand on her shoulder, looked directly and deeply into her eyes. “My child, I know your faith is pure and absolute, and as part of your faith, I ask you to accept that there is a reason the Will of the Prophets must sometimes be seen as difficult to interpret for the many, even while it is understood perfectly by the few.”

“But who chooses those few?” Kira asked.

The prylar's expression revealed nothing. “In the end, who chooses the Emissary?” He looked over at Sisko. “I sense that you are not entirely accustomed to your role.”

The prylar's understatement was overwhelming. Sisko held his true reaction in check, simply said, “That's true.”

“Naradim spoke of that, in the same text in which Eilin states the danger inherent in revealing too much of the prophecies, that the revelation of the one direction of time might contain within it the seeds of another outcome.”

“Another time,” Sisko said.

The prylar studied Sisko carefully, as if looking through him, into the melee of thoughts that filled his mind. He reached out to Sisko's ear. “May I?”

“As long as you realize that Eilin is correct and some of what you learn must never be revealed.”

Rulan nodded, then tightly, almost painfully, squeezed Sisko's left earlobe between his thumb and forefinger.

Rulan closed his eyes, turned his head up, opened his mouth—not in fear, Sisko thought—but in awe.

Sometime later, seconds or minutes, Sisko couldn't be sure, he felt the prylar's grip lessen, then his hand slipped away.

From outside the Temple, on the Promenade, Sisko heard a sudden clang of metal. He and Kira glanced back over their shoulders.

“The repair work,” Rulan said. “But then,” he added, “you know that.”

Sisko nodded. A subtle though familiar tremor vibrated through the deck.

“That's an airlock cycling,” he said.

Rulan nodded, as if hesitant to say much more. “Since the Enterprise arrived, there have been a great many comings and goings.”

Sisko held Rulan's gaze for a few moments, knowing that the prylar would know—knew—or at least sensed—all that he did.

And then Sisko couldn't resist and spun around and walked quickly to the Temple's entrance.

He peered cautiously around the edge of the doorway. The Promenade beyond was even darker than it had been under the Cardassians. It was littered with debris and ruined components that had been too bulky to loot and so had been destroyed in place.

Fusion torches sent sparks through the shadows. Metal rang under the impact of molecular saws. And spinward, past Quark's, an inner airlock door opened.

A younger Chief Miles O'Brien stood before the disk door as it rolled to the side.

And Commander Benjamin Sisko set foot on the station for the very first time.

Captain Sisko, in the doorway to the Temple, was suddenly aware of Kira and Prylar Rulan at his side.

“This probably isn't the best idea in the world,” Kira said.

“No, it's not,” Sisko agreed. He stepped back; Kira followed. Prylar Rulan stayed in place, gazing out at the second Sisko now approaching.

“Remember, Eilin was right,” Captain Sisko said.

Rulan looked back into the Temple. “Of that,” he said, “I have no doubt.”

Sisko understood the prylar's unspoken promise. Rulan would not tell Commander Sisko that he had just been visited by a future version of him. What would happen here on the Promenade in the next minute would be what had happened before.

“You must understand as well,” Rulan said. “There can be no other time, or all is lost.”

“I understand,” Sisko said as he moved farther back into the protection of the Temple. “But he does not.”

Rulan nodded as if to put Sisko's mind at ease. “Shabren is very clear about that in his text about the Emissary's first visit to the Gateway to the Temple. There were—there will be—many things the Sisko did not understand that day. This day.”

Sisko thought back to his beliefs and his attitudes of six years ago. Had he ever been that naive? “In time, he will,” he told the prylar.

“In this time,” Rulan said emphatically. “Not another time.” He looked back to the Promenade, then turned to bow his head to Sisko in the Temple. “If you will excuse me, I must go welcome the Emissary. For the first time.”

Then Rulan left the Temple to await Commander Sisko, just as he had awaited him before. Just as he will always await me, Sisko thought.

And with an unexpected flash of insight, the concept of nonlinear time became clearer to him. It wasn't that to the Prophets their realm of nonlinear time was without past, present, and future, it was that the past and present coexisted interchangeably within a third dimension of time, with only the future in flux.

“Are you all right?” Kira asked, and Sisko was surprised by the intense concern in her being. Then he realized that he could hear a conversation outside the Temple. A conversation that included his own voice.

“Fine,” Sisko said. “I was just thinking that if I ever get the chance to see the Prophets again, maybe I'll have something I can teach them.”

Kira's voice sharpened. “Be careful who you say that to. Some might think it heresy.”

“Believe me,” Sisko said, “if I ever do get a chance to spend that much time with the Prophets, I don't think I'll be too worried about what other people think.”

Kira looked around the Temple as if searching for another way out. “Well, we can't stay here while . . . we're both out there.”

Sisko didn't understand. “Why not?”

“You heard what Rulan said. The danger of changing time. We can't just walk out there and warn ourselves about the future. We have to let everything proceed just as it did the first time.”

“Major,” Sisko said, stunned by Kira's abrupt change of heart. “We will not allow the Pah-wraiths to win. I have no intention of allowing the universe to end, simply because that's what happened before.”

Kira stiffened in anger. “That's not what I meant at all. I just mean, we can't change what happened before the Red Orbs were brought together. But we can stop that from happening just before we were pushed into the future—if we get rid of the one Orb hidden in Quark's right now. Nothing else would change for the next six years.”

“But we'd still be changing the timeline.” The nuance of the major's argument still escaped Sisko.

“If we stop the red wormhole from opening on DS9 in the last few minutes before we left on the Defiant, maybe we won't be changing time, we'll be restoring it.”

At last Sisko saw what Kira meant. “Of course,” he said. “Leave the past alone, but affect our present in order to create a new future.”

“The same as we do every day,” Kira added.

“So . . . all we have to do is get to Quark's and take the Orb from its hiding place inside the stained-glass portrait of the Tholian general.”

The plan was just that simple. Its execution even simpler. At the back of the Temple, there was a wide selection of monks' attire, and in minutes, both Sisko and Kira were unrecognizable in large hoods and bulky robes.

Side by side, they crossed the cluttered Promenade, their passage met only by smiles from the Bajoran workers, clearly pleased to see religious figures using their newfound freedom to move about the entire station.

The noise and commotion all around him brought back to Sisko the heady sense of victory and celebration that had existed in the station's first days as Deep Space 9. At the same time, he remembered the tension that had equally been present, because no one had known how Bajor's provisional government would survive the next few weeks, let alone years.

But now, knowing that it had survived, Sisko continued with Kira to Quark's, easily resisting the opportunity to tell those around them that for the next few years, at least, their world would make great strides.

Once they were in Quark's, Kira brazenly stepped up to the bar and, with her head bowed and hood pulled forward, informed Quark in a low, muffled voice that they understood he was leaving the station and that the prylars were considering asking the station manager to have the Temple relocated to this larger area.

“We'd like to look around,” Kira said.

Quark, still as careworn in this timeframe as when the Cardassians had been in charge, waved his hand dismissively. He was in the middle of packing up what few items remained that weren't broken. “Be my guest,” he sighed. “You can even use the holosuites to guarantee mystic visions for the faithful. Ha.” Then he turned his back on his visitors.

Kira and Sisko made their way slowly around the ruined bar, only gradually moving toward the large, yellow and orange glass mural that was about the only source of light at the moment.

Then they both stepped behind it where they couldn't be observed.

Sisko pointed at the access panel in the back of the mural's thick housing, flush to the floor. “There,” he said.

Kira nodded, then knelt beside it, pulling out a small pulsedriver she had found in a maintenance toolbox at the back of the Temple.

Six years from now, Sisko knew that he had been led to this same spot by the glowing interior light from two Orbs of Jalbador, because hidden inside was the missing third Orb, protected from years of maintenance sensor sweeps by an unusual low-power Andorian sensor mask.

“Leave the sensor mask turned on,” Sisko whispered. “Just take the Orb.” What they'd do with it was something he work out later. The mostly likely possibility was to “borrow” a runabout and launch the Orb into the Bajoran sun.

The final fastener came out of the panel and Kira carefully pulled it free. From inside the service alcove, no larger than an Orb Ark, Sisko saw the pale blue glow of the sensor mask device.

He exhaled, abruptly aware that he hadn't taken a breath for the past half minute.

Kira smiled up at him, then bent forward and reached inside.

She kept her hand in for a long time, methodically moving it back and forth, then leaning down close to the floor to peer inside.

She pulled back and stared up at him.

Before she could utter a word, Sisko knew what she would say.

“It's not there!”

Sisko even knew why.

Weyoun.