CHAPTER 12

SISKO AND KIRA left Quark's, heads bowed, faces hidden by the robes they wore, to find a place to talk.

“The one good thing about the Orb being missing is that it tells us that the timeline can be changed,” Kira said. “That means we can do it, too.”

“But how?” Sisko asked her. “If we do get swept back to an earlier

time on the station, then it's obvious we don't succeed, because if we had, the Orb would have been back in its hiding place.” Hearing his own words, Sisko sighed. The grammar of Federation Standard was not equipped to deal with time travel.

He and Kira came to a tangle of fallen metal that was all that remained of the old security fence that once had bisected the Promenade into its Bajoran and Cardassian halves, and carefully stepped through it. The stores up ahead were dark, but at least the deck itself had been cleared of major obstructions. Sisko vaguely recalled that the initial clean-up crews wouldn't return to deal with the minor debris until the rest of the big pieces elsewhere had been cut up and carted away.

“Then maybe this is an alternate timeline,” Kira said. “I mean, with the Orb missing from the place we found it, or will find it, six years from now, it's sure not the timeline we started in.”

Sisko risked looking up to the viewports on the Promenade's second level. Bajor was bright in them, and close. Somewhere higher up, he knew, he himself, six years younger, was now in Ops, taking the stairs to his new office, listening to Kira give all the reasons why Starfleet's mission here wouldn't succeed, why Bajor would succumb to civil war in weeks, why . . .

He couldn't stop the ironic laugh that escaped his lips.

“We've had this conversation before,” he said to her. “Except the last time, you were the negative one.”

Sisko saw the major's confused expression, so he glanced up again, lifting a hand in the direction of Ops. “Remember what was going on about now?”

At that, startled, she gave a sharp laugh as well. But a tight one and only for a moment.

“So now I'll think positively,” Sisko said. “Given current conditions, how do we accomplish what we set out to do?”

Kira shrugged. “Find Weyoun. Take the Orb from him. Put it back into its hiding place in Quark's.”

“No, Major,” Sisko said. “That restores the timeline. Somehow, we have to change it.”

“All right. We put a message into the computer,” Kira said. “Encrypt it, bury it in some database with a time-release code, so it . . . it shows up on your padd the day before those Andorians arrived and all this started.”

But Sisko shook his head. “I thought about that, but remember all the work we've done on these computers in the past six years. More than half the components have been replaced. The programming has been lost and restored more times than . . . than I can remember. We can't count on anything we input today remaining accessible or executable when we need it to be.”

Kira ran a hand through her short auburn hair. “So how else can we leave a message to warn ourselves?”

“Maybe,” Sisko said, “. . . maybe we should just go up to ourselves now.”

But even before he had finished uttering his suggestion, Sisko saw the major's objection register on her open face.

“Captain, you heard Prylar Rulan. Eilin was clear about the dangers of altering history.”

“How could it be history, Major, if Eilin wrote his texts in the time before B'hala? That's more than twenty millennia ago.”

“Twenty-five millennia ago,” Kira corrected. “Eilin wrote his texts at the same time Shabren wrote the Prophecies. And the Fifth Prophecy came true, exactly as written.”

“Not exactly,” Sisko corrected her in turn. “The Prophecy said there would be a thousand years of peace if the Prophets defeated Kosst Amojan during the Reckoning.”

Kira nodded vigorously. “That's right—if. The Prophecy said the confrontation would take place. It said where and when and who or what would be involved. And all those details fell into place precisely as foretold. But the one thing Shabren didn't say was who would win that confrontation. Don't you see? When the Prophets gave Shabren the gift of the Orb of Prophecy, they held back just enough to ensure that free will would still be the deciding factor. We're not their puppets or their playthings—”

Bridling, Sisko interrupted her. “I have never suggested that we are, Major.”

“Maybe not said it. But you're feeling it now. I can tell by the way you're thinking about what we should do. As if . . . as if we should abandon the Prophets.”

Sisko hesitated. He knew that at any other time, his instant response—and the response Kira would expect of him—would be to state emphatically that he would never abandon the Prophets. But this time, something held back his words, and he didn't know what it was.

“You see, you don't even know what choice to make, do you?”

Feeling overwhelmed, experiencing it again the way he remembered he had when first seeing it, Sisko looked up and down the Promenade. “Why . . . why would the Prophets make that choice so difficult?”

“You made a more difficult choice, once,” Kira reminded him. “When you let the Reckoning proceed, even though your own son's life was at risk.”

Sisko nodded. That day, that decision, still woke him from his sleep. “But that was different,” he said slowly. “The conflict was clear-cut, well defined. I had no doubt what it was the Prophets wanted.” He spread his arms to the ruins of the Promenade. “But this . . . how can linear minds comprehend what we're facing now? Isn't it easier to be a Starfleet officer? Because my duty here is clearcut. To save Starfleet, the Federation, and the universe.”

Kira raised a skeptical eyebrow. “By breaking every temporal translocation regulation in the book?”

Now it was Sisko's turn to remind her. “The regulations of today,” he said. “Not of the future, Major. Even Starfleet recognized that drastic action must be taken. That's why they built Picard's Phoenix.”

But Kira was already shaking her head. “They didn't build it to change the past. They wanted to put in position a weapon that would let them save the present. There is a difference, Captain. I believe Starfleet was being true to its ideals, even then.”

“And if so, what did it get them?” Sisko asked angrily. “Nothing!”

Kira responded to his outburst with equal passion of her own. “Which tells me that if you think there's a conflict between following the Prophets and being a Starfleet officer, then you're wrong! In this case, we know what being a Starfleet officer means: failure.”

Now Sisko felt the touch of Kira's hands on both his arms, as if she worried that he might be getting ready to storm off, which he was. “I'm not saying that for you choosing the Prophets is always the right choice, or the only choice. Sometimes, I know you've had to choose Starfleet. And I'd argue that even those decisions ended up serving the Prophets eventually, in ways we couldn't foresee at the time. But here and at that moment. . . .” Sisko had never seen a look of such desperation or of such hope on Kira's face as she stared up at him at that moment. “. . . Emissary, if ever there was a time to trust the Prophets and their servants, this has got to be it.”

Having delivered her speech, the major dropped her hands from Sisko's arms and stepped back, awaiting his answer.

Sisko looked away, unthinkingly adjusted the strap of the heavy radio he carried under his robes, trying not to think that the fate of the universe itself might rest on what his decision would be. Eventually, he turned back to face Kira.

“Major,” he began, “my one hesitation, my one doubt that I just . . . can't overcome is that the Bajorans recognized me as the Emissary, but the Prophets did not.”

“I know,” Kira said. “Not at first. But it seems like the Prophets' acceptance of you . . . that changed, didn't it?”

Sisko nodded, not sure what her point was.

“Because, in time, the Prophets came to trust you.”

“In time,” Sisko agreed.

Kira stared at him fiercely. “The Prophets are never wrong.”

“But is that the same as always being right?”

It was clear to Sisko that even Kira had no answers left for him. Just as clear as his own knowledge that he would be asking no more questions.

It was time to take action. To exercise free will.

To save the universe, or destroy it.

Sisko made his decision.

Odo walked slowly to his office, still feeling disoriented by his latest transfer, shielding his eyes from the blinding blasts of red energy that lit up the Promenade's upper-level viewports. He had concluded that the flash of red light that had propelled him from the time of Dal Nortron's murder to this time in which the station existed within the red wormhole was related to the pressure equalization waves measured by Chief O'Brien.

Somehow, Odo thought, when those waves had washed over the Boreth's bubble of space-time, they had affected him, as well, like flotsam on an ocean swell being pushed toward shore and then pulled away.

If that were the case, then there was hope that soon another flash of light—blue, this time—might shift him back into the past, before the station's destruction, when he could access a computer node to send urgent messages to Sisko and the command staff, telling them how they could change their present so this nightmarish future could never come to pass.

But as he walked around the Promenade's curve to see Quark's bar open and empty, and even his own security office apparently left unattended, the changeling realized the significant flaw in his reasoning.

When the Red Orbs had opened the red wormhole, he himself had seen the gravimetric effects rip apart the Promenade. Onboard the Defiant, he had witnessed the station's docking pylons buckle and the station's hub begin to deform like a wagon wheel twisting.

Yet everything here was intact. Perfect.

There had to be some explanation. But since he was a constable, not a temporal mechanic, if he was ever to find out what was really happening, he would need to contact an expert. Jadzia or O'Brien or—

“Hey, Stretch! Are you a sight for sore eyes!”

Odo whirled around in shock.

Shock that was multiplied a thousandfold as he said, “Vic?”

Vic Fontaine, a holographic representation of a quintessential Las Vegas lounge singer, circa 1962 Earth, elegantly clad in a formal tuxedo of his era, lifted a hand to wave happily at Odo as the singer quickened his approach.

Vic was a character in one of Dr. Bashir's role-playing programs. A clever combination of synthetic intelligence algorithms, holographic imagery, and micro-forcefields that could exist only within a holographically generated environment. It was impossible for him to be on the Promenade, or anywhere else on Deep Space 9, except for the holosuites on the top level in Quark's.

“How . . . how can you be here?” Odo asked.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Vic said. The holographic singer tugged on his collar and looked up at the viewports that seethed with red wormhole energy. “And I gotta tell ya, in person, space sure looks different from those photos in Life magazine.”

“No, Vic, I'm serious. You're a hologram—”

“Thanks for noticin'.”

“You can't be here.”

“You don't have to tell me.”

“So . . . how can you be here?”

Vic shook his head. “Okay, here's the story so far. I was doing my thing at a matinee. The power goes out. I find you and your pals locked up in some twenty-fourth-century hoosegow and spring the lot of ya. Then I amble back to my half of the program and let you guys take care of business.”

“Yes, yes, I know all that,” Odo said. That's exactly what had happened the day before the station had been destroyed. When Terrell had taken Sisko to Jeraddo to search for the lost Orb, she had imprisoned Odo and the others in a holographic version of Odo's security holding cells. Vic, perhaps the only holographic character with the ability to cross between programs of his own volition, had entered Terrell's simulation and set them free. “But what happened then?”

“Near as I can figure, one of those A-bomb tests the military runs out in the desert took a left turn. Big flash of light, thought it was an earthquake, then the power's out again and . . .” Vic's face took on an uncharacteristic grim expression. “Everyone sort of disappeared, Stretch. Like one moment I'm in the middle of panic city, telling the audience to walk not run to the nearest exits, and the next . . . I'm like Belafonte in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, only there's no Inger Stevens, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” Odo said in bewilderment. “I don't.”

“Everyone else vanished, Stretch. Everyone. And the other thing that's not kosher is that all of a sudden there's this crazy door in the middle of the casino that's got all these flashing lights and . . . where it leads to ain't exactly there, you know?”

“A holosuite arch?” Odo asked.

“Maybe it was the penthouse suite. How'm I supposed to know? But I step through it anyway. Y'know, maybe the little green men have come for me or something. But I figure, what've I got to lose?

“So, I step through, find myself on the top floor of what has got to be Ming the Merciless's favorite bar and grill, and when I ditch that joint”—Vic looked around again and shrugged—“I'm here in this circular shopping mall, with no doors to the parking lot. But with what's outside those big picture windows up there, I'm going to take a wild guess and say there aren't any parking lots. Am I right or am I right?”

From his reading of twentieth-century detective novels, Odo knew that a parking lot wasn't really a park of any kind. The hologram was right, and Odo told him so.

“So,” Vic said, “my next guess is that this is that deep-space station you guys are always talkin' about.”

“That's right.”

“Whoa. Well, I can't stop now. I'll turn over all the cards and say, ‘Something's gone haywire.’ ”

Odo tried to remember if that was a reference from a cowboy novel.

“You know—screwy,” Vic said. “Messed up. SNAFU.”

“Not right,” Odo suggested.

“Now you're cooking.”

Odo took that as agreement.

“So,” Vic continued, “from what I remember, this station of yours is supposed to be crawling with crew members, visitors, a regular McCarran in space.”

Odo understood what Vic meant if not his exact words. “Everyone's vanished from here, too.”

“So . . . I'm no Einstein, but that makes me think that somehow what happened to your joint and what happened to mine are connected.”

Odo nodded, remembered a phrase Captain Sisko liked to use. “You're batting a thousand.”

Vic smiled and cocked a finger at Odo as if firing a phaser. “Good one, Stretch.” But the smile was short-lived. “So, any twenty-fourth-century ideas about what we can do about the whole megillah?”

Odo suddenly had an unnerving thought. “Vic, how long have you been walking around the Promenade?”

“The mall?” Vic asked. “I don't know. Twenty minutes or so. Is it important?”

Odo didn't know the answer to that question. But he felt confident that he hadn't been thrust into some Pah-wraith-generated hell concocted expressly for Vic Fontaine. Otherwise, the hologram would have thought he had been walking for centuries, if not millennia. Still, there had to be some explanation for how Vic managed to exist where there were no holo-emitters. Just as there had to be an explanation for how this once-ruined station was now intact and, judging from the lights and the breeze from the circulating air, fully operational.

Then Odo had it. “This is an illusion,” he said.

“Hey, hold on, Stretch. A guy could get a complex from talk like that.”

But Odo shook his head. He was beginning to make sense of his surroundings. “No, you're not an illusion, Vic. But everything around us . . . it's not what we'd normally call reality.”

“Speak for yourself, pallie,” Vic said. “My reality is Vegas. And this place is definitely not normal. Not that Vegas is all that normal to begin with.”

Odo suddenly held out his hand. “Shake,” he said.

Vic gave him a ‘Why not’ look, took his hand, and pumped it. “Was that supposed to prove something?”

“I think so,” Odo said. “Let's go to my office.”

“Lead on, MacDuff.”

Odo knew things would be simpler if he ceased asking Vic to explain himself. So he just nodded at the hologram and continued on to the security station.

“You see,” Odo said as they walked on together, speaking more to help himself understand his situation than from any expectation that Vic could follow his reasoning, “I was just in another version of this station. As it existed a week ago, more or less.”

“Whatever you say, Stretch.”

“And while I was there, I could touch the walls, I stood on the deck, I could even press controls on a communication node. But I couldn't touch anything that was alive or that was closely connected to anything that was alive. I couldn't even make anyone I saw or heard see or hear me.”

Vic stopped at the entrance to Security. “I can tell you right now, I don't like where this is going.”

Odo stopped as well. “I don't understand.”

“Hey, you made me shake hands with you. And I can hear every word you say . . . even if a lot of them don't make all that much sense.”

Odo stared blankly, waiting for some clue to what Vic meant.

“It's like you're saying because I can see you, hear you, and feel you, I'm not real—like I don't exist.”

“Ah,” Odo said, at last understanding Vic's concern. “You're seeing

things from a twentieth-century viewpoint.”

“Like I have a choice?”

“In this time, we recognize that life comes in many different forms. The majority of those forms are biological, and they're what I was referring to. You're a special case.”

Vic looked skeptical. “Don't humor me.”

“I'm not. You're what we call an isolinear-based life-form.” In fact, Odo admitted to himself alone, he really didn't know if Vic actually was a life-form or not. At the one extreme, he knew there were artificial entities such as Lieutenant Commander Data of the U.S.S. Enterprise, who was unquestionably a living being under Federation definitions. At the other extreme, there were the Starfleet Emergency Medical Holograms, some of whom, like Vic, were prone to exhibit characteristics and behaviors that had never been intended by their programming. Dr. Bashir had told Odo of the debate raging within Starfleet Medical over whether or not the EMHs were evolving into true self-awareness, or were simply uncannily accurate reconstructions of the irascible Lewis Zimmerman.

But given current conditions, the changeling saw no need to hurt Vic's feelings, real or simulated as they might be.

“I was only pointing out,” Odo said in conclusion, “that I seemed to have no connection to biological life-forms. But since your consciousness—” If that's what you have, Odo thought. “—arises from the station's computer system, it's as easy for me to interact with you as it is with this door.” At that, Odo tapped his code into the door of the security station and it slid open. Then he gestured for Vic to step in first.

Vic maintained his skeptical expression. “You're pretty smooth, Stretch. So I'll take what you said under advisement. But the big question still remains: How come you and I are the only two cats on the station?”

To Odo, the answer was simple. “Everyone else was either evacuated or . . . or died, I imagine, when the station entered the red wormhole. I escaped on the Defiant and, to make a long story short, came back. In your case, well, obviously, since the station still exists and all its equipment is functioning, entering the wormhole wasn't harmful to you, either.”

Vic blew out a deep breath, as if giving up. “You any relation to Rod Serling?”

To Odo, the name Rodserl had a Romulan sound to it, but he guessed he was safe simply shaking his head.

“Coulda fooled me,” Vic said, then walked into Odo's office. “So where does all this fancy gobbledygook leave us? Are things ever going to get back to normal or a reasonable facsimile thereof?”

Odo sat down behind his desk, saw that all his computer systems were on-line. “There's a chance.”

Vic sat on the edge of the desk. “Enlighten me.”

“All right,” Odo said as he began to access the station's main science logs, “we're in a wormhole.”

“Let me guess. That's the twenty-fourth-century way of saying we're up the creek without a paddle.”

“Exactly,” Odo said, not knowing if it was or not. But time was of the essence. “And the first time Sisko and Dax went through it, they ended up together but in two different realities.” Odo glanced up at Vic, wondering if he was making any more sense to the hologram than the hologram was making to him.

Vic had tilted his head to one side and was regarding him with narrowed eyes. “You keep going. I'm just trying to imagine how'd you look with a beret and goatee.” The hologram paused. “Ever think of playing the bongos?”

“Not . . . really.” Odo looked back at his security screen, accessed the station's last hour of sensor logs. “Anyway, what Sisko's and Dax's experience seems to suggest is that a great deal of what we experience within a wormhole environment is subjective. But the fact that . . .” Odo hesitated, thinking of how Dukat had appeared to him on the desolate surface of the world that had once held the Great Link. How could he convey that to Vic? “The fact that you and I are both sharing this subjective reality of the station tells me that somehow there is an underlying reality to everything that's happening in here.”

“Okay. Ya lost me back at that wormhole thing, pallie.”

Odo called up the sensor log's gravimetric profile of local space and watched it play back at ten times normal speed. Keeping the record was a standard function of the station's sensors, one of the several dozen methods used to track and measure the opening and closing of the Bajoran wormhole. “Think of Las Vegas,” Odo suggested as he watched the display.

“All the time,” Vic sighed. “All the time.”

“But where you live isn't really Las Vegas.”

“Ooo, you don't pull any punches, do ya, Stretch?”

“But it's still Las Vegas to you. Just as it's Las Vegas to me when I go into the holosuite. And to Dr. Bashir. And Kira . . . it's a shared illusion. And the fact that it's shared means that something independent of the people visiting it is responsible for creating that illusion.”

“Whatever you say, Stretch.”

Odo persevered. “So the same principle is at work here in the wormhole. It's full of illusions, but because you and I can share this one, it must have some kind of independent reality.”

“So basically you're telling me that we're just in some kinda big holosuite in the sky?”

“That's one way of putting it,” Odo agreed. Then he saw what he'd been waiting for: The first gravimetric fluctuations that corresponded to the alignment of the three Red Orbs of Jalbador in Quark's bar. “Got it,” he said.

Vic craned forward to peer at Odo's screen for himself. “Got what?”

Odo slipped a memory rod into an access port to copy the sensor log onto it. “This is how the . . . the doorway to this particular holosuite opened. It shows how the structure of local space-time was deformed when the station was swallowed by the wormhole.”

“And that's a good thing?”

The moment the screen went dark, Odo held up the memory rod. “This is the equivalent of a map. It shows the way in, so if we can somehow reverse the deformations . . .”

“. . . it'll show the way out,” Vic concluded.

Odo nodded, inexplicably pleased that a hologram could follow his logic.

“So?” Vic asked after a few moments of silence. “How do you reverse the deformations and get us outta here?”

“I . . . don't,” Odo said. “I have to get these data back to Chief O'Brien.”

“Is he evacuated or . . . you know?” Vic asked.

“Evacuated.” Odo stood up.

“So . . .” Vic pointed to the ceiling. “He's out there?”

But Odo shook his head. “Actually, he's in the past. Or in the future, I suppose. From this frame of reference.”

Vic held up both hands and shook them back and forth. “Okay, that's it. Now you're being just plain nuts.”

Odo smiled, then pressed the memory rod to his chest, concentrating on an entirely new modification to his humanoid body. The rod sank into him like a log disappearing into quicksand.

Vic's eyes opened wide. “Man oh man, if that's legit, you could give Blackstone a run for his money.”

Odo knew he was in a race, though not the kind Vic might mean. At any moment, he suspected a new equalization pressure wave would strike the Boreth and somehow fling him back to the station's past. And if he was correct about the special nature of biological lifeforms within the wormhole, then he was confident that the memory rod would survive the transition encased within the newly formed pocket inside his body as if it were a standard medical implant. He stood up.

“What happens now?” Vic asked, without moving from Odo's desk.

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For me to be sent back in time.”

Vic stared at Odo. “Okay for you, but . . . what about me?”

“If what I'm planning works, you'll be fine.”

“So what's ‘fine’ mean in the twenty-fourth century?”

“You'll remember rescuing us from the Security holding cells, just as you do now. Then you'll remember singing to the matinee audience. And then . . . we'll all come in, just like we usually do, and none of this will ever have happened.”

Vic's eyebrows arched. “You don't say?”

“You should be happy,” Odo said.

“Why? You think I don't know what happens to the regular-type light bulbs around here? Push a button, and pow! Lights out, pallie. No memory. No life. Just reappearing back at the start of the program and carrying on like it's the first time all over again. Odo, that sort of thing . . . scares me, okay?”

“I had no idea,” Odo said truthfully. “But you do remember what happens from one run of your program to another, don't you?”

“I do now. But if what you're saying is true and none of this will ever have happened . . . then I won't remember it, will I?”

Odo shook his head.

“Which is sort of like . . . being erased, wouldn't ya say?”

Odo nodded.

“I don't want that to happen to me.”

Odo understood. “No living being does.”

“Living.” Vic's wistful smile was full of irony. “What a way to find out you're alive—the day you find out you're going to die.”

“No, no. You won't die,” Odo said hurriedly, trying to reassure the hologram. “Your life will continue—”

“But from back then. Not from now.”

“That's right.”

“So thatVic Fontaine will live.” Vic tapped his chest. “But this one, me, the putz who stepped out onto your fancy space station, won't.”

“That's right,” Odo reluctantly agreed.

Vic took a deep breath, got to his feet. “You know, I probably shouldn't know this about myself, but, well, you know the guy who programmed me?”

“Felix.”

“Yeah. He sort of . . . set it up so I could get away with a few things here and there.”

“So I've noticed.”

“So I figured out what these memory cylinders are.” Vic nodded at Odo's chest. “Like the rod you just ‘disappeared’ into your chest.”

Odo was amazed by what he knew Vic was about to ask. But he also knew there was no answer he could give that would satisfy the hologram.

“Vic . . . I can't take you with me.”

“But you're taking that map.”

“Well, yes, but when I give the information on it to Chief O'Brien and if he's somehow able to use it to knock this station out of the red wormhole back in the past, then none of this will have happened. Not for you. And not for me.”

Vic stared at Odo. “What? You get erased, too?”

“That's right.”

“Well, ain't that a kick in the head.” Vic sat down again on the edge of the desk and fixed his unfocused gaze on the wall.

“Are you all right?” Odo asked.

“Well, yeah . . . it's just that . . . well, I never really thought that you guys could, you know, be erased, or die, or whatever ya call it when you're biological.”

Odo was thoroughly puzzled by Vic's sudden confusion. “Vic, exactly what do you think we are?”

Vic looked over at Odo with haunted eyes. “C'mon, Stretch. Ya come and go like ghosts. You're always talking about living in space, and in the future, and . . . well, between you and Spots and Worf and the little guys with the big ears, you sure don't look like any of the cats I grew up with back in Hoboken.”

“So what does that make us?” Odo asked. He was absolutely baffled by the idea that any hologram might have a belief system that was different from the worldview created by its internal programming.

“You tell me,” Vic said. “I mean, what do you and your friends think I am?”

Odo didn't even have to stop to think about the answer. “A friend,” he said.

“I like that,” Vic said. “Don't get me wrong—being erased really bugs the hell outta me. But being your friend, I can . . . I can live with that.”

“I'm glad,” Odo said. He checked the time readout on his desk. When he had beamed onto the station from the Boreth on the day Dal Nortron had died, he estimated he had spent approximately thirty minutes in that timeframe before jumping ahead to this one. Since O'Brien had noted that the waves would come closer and closer together, Odo had assumed he would have less than thirty minutes to spend in this timeframe, and he was almost at twenty-five minutes already.

“So, how do you go back?” Vic asked. Then he laughed as if it was the most ludicrous thing he could say. “In time, I mean?”

“I'll see a flash of light,” Odo answered.

“Any idea what I'll see?”

“No.”

“Will you be back?”

“Not to this timeframe.”

“So, it'll just be me and . . . nobody.”

Odo suddenly realized the paradox Vic had stumbled upon. Certainly, if everything worked out as Odo now hoped, and O'Brien was able to change the past, that version of Vic would have no knowledge of the events following the destruction of the station, because that destruction would never have occurred.

But in that case, this Vic would inhabit an alternate timeline, completely alone.

“Talk to me, Stretch. This just ends, right? I forget all about it? Go back to the ways things were?”

Odo didn't know what to say to comfort the worried-looking hologram.

Vic got back to his feet. “Hey, c'mon, pallie. This is Vic. Ya gotta talk to me. Ya gotta tell me this is going to work out.”

“I . . . I really don't know,” Odo said. “There're so many possibilities . . .”

“Are you telling me I might be stuck here by myself forever?”

“But there'll be other Vics . . .”

Odo winced inwardly as the hologram's voice rose with his concern. “I don't care about other Vics. Hell, Felix has probably sold copies of my program halfway to Timbuktu and back again. I care about this Vic.”

“So do I,” Odo said, struggling to think of a way to help the hologram. Could it be possible to copy him onto a memory cylinder? Was Vic's consciousness purely digital and totally transportable from computer to computer? Or was there an analog component to it that meant the hologram would not remain ‘Vic’ when copied from the computer system he inhabited at this moment?

“Stretch . . . ?” Vic said, plaintive. “Don't leave me here.”

Odo opened his mouth to say something, anything that might ease Vic's growing fear of loneliness. But the instant he did, a flash of blue light of unbearable clarity struck him with a physical impact that shot pain through his body, focusing like a laser on the center of his chest.

When the light faded, Odo was still in his security office, but Vic was gone.

Odo checked the time display.

Stardate 51885.9. A day and a half after Nortron's murder. Three and a half days before the station would be destroyed.

Odo placed a hand on his burning chest, focusing on flexing muscles not naturally found in most humanoid bodies.

The memory rod passed through his simulated Bajoran tunic and into his hand.

He went to his security desk and slipped the rod into the access port.

The data—detailing an event that would not happen for another eighty-seven hours—downloaded perfectly.

But Odo knew that if he provided these data to O'Brien today, or to Dax, then the chances were that they wouldn't have need of them.

Instead, Sisko and his staff would make certain that the three Red Orbs of Jalbador would never be brought aboard this station, let alone brought into alignment.

“But what happens then?” Odo asked himself.

He thought of Vic stranded on an empty station in an alternate reality.

He thought of O'Brien and Garak and, yes, even of Quark on the Boreth. And the seven others with them, including Rom, waiting in a tiny bubble of space-time for a communication from him—for a sign that they would soon all be saved.

And in this time, Odo knew, they would all be saved. They would never travel into the future. The universe would not end in twentyfive years when the two wormholes were aligned and the Bajoran sun destroyed.

But in an alternate timeline, there would always be those whom he had consigned to an endless existence in an endless nothingness.

He stared at the gravimetric sensor log on his desk's display screen. Sometime in the next twenty to thirty minutes—however long it would be until the next pressure wave struck in a flash of red light—he could save the universe simply by inputting a warning into the station's computer system.

But if he did, then who would save his friends?

Odo struggled to think of a third possibility.

Because, for now, taking one path at the cost of the other was a choice he could not—would not—make.