CHAPTER 13

JAKE KNEW BETTER than to get in Worf's way, so he stayed in position at his auxiliary console while the Klingon thundered from the bridge.

But even though he had seen his father transport safely from the Defiant with Major Kira, Jake couldn't help imagining the worst.

“Dax?” he called out over the harsh staccato of the transporter alarms.

The Trill scientist had also remained at her station, and her eyes were fixed firmly on her displays. “It'll be all right, Jake. Worf can handle it.”

“But handle what?”

“Someone probably got tired of waiting,” Jadzia said reassuringly, “so they had themselves transported over on the same settings I used for your father and Kira.”

“But what if whoever it is gets caught by the Cardassians or . . .” Since arriving in the future, Jake had learned more than he'd ever known about the potential consequences of creating new timelines. And what he'd learned was worrying him. What if his father and Kira set up one alternate past, and whoever had transported after them inadvertently set up another? That particular scenario could lead to the Defiant's being unable to maintain contact with any version of DS9.

But Jadzia didn't seem interested in leading him through another discussion of temporal physics. “Jake, right now, our job is communication. Just watch your board. Let Worf deal with security.” As if to underscore her instructions, the alarms stopped just as she finished speaking, their cessation suggesting the situation had come under control.

Jake sighed, and for a moment his concentration diverted to his hand which he saw trembling above the controls at his station. It was time he got himself under control.

“Are you cycling for different time signatures?” Jadzia asked him.

Jake sprang back into action and input the sequencing code that would start the process. “Yes, sir,” he said. Focus, he thought. Jadzia was searching for a radio signal from DS9, timeshifted by the same degree as the navigational timecodes the station was transmitting from the Day of Withdrawal. His job was to look for any other unexpected temporal perturbations generated by the wormhole environment that might obscure his father's attempt to communicate.

The overhead speakers hissed into life. It was Dr. Bashir from elsewhere in the ship. “Dax, I'm going to need your help in sickbay.”

Jake looked over at the Trill, caught her eye. Someone was obviously injured. “Who is it, Julian?” Jadzia asked.

“Commander Arla. Weyoun came out of his trance or whatever it was. Beat her up badly. Then transported off the ship.”

“Sorry, Julian. I can't leave my station.”

“She has internal bleeding in her skull. I need an assistant.”

“Then you've got at least nine other people to pick from.” Jadzia did not look at Jake as the comm circuit went dead.

“Dax—Weyoun could change everything, couldn't he?” Jake asked nervously.

“I'm sure Worf is taking that under consideration.” Jadzia's terse tone turned suddenly angry as Jake saw her hit her combadge sharply. “Dax to Bashir.”

Bashir answered promptly, considerably calmer than before. “It's all right, Dax. I've got one of Simons's engineers to assist me.”

But the Trill brushed his assurance aside. “I need to talk to you in private—immediately. Can you come to the bridge?”

Bashir's reply was indignant. “I'm not leaving my patient any more than you'll leave your station.”

“Oh, for . . . Julian, step into the corridor.”

Wondering what was going on but hesitant to interrupt Jadzia in her present mood, Jake studied his display, watching the spray of individual datapoints as they undulated up and down across the center screen. Out of the corner of his eye, however, Jake actually saw Jadzia's spots darken—he'd never seen her so upset before. But still, Jadzia kept her eyes on the console before her, and her hand moved rhythmically over the controls, continuing to carry out her duty.

“All right,” Bashir replied a few moments later, exasperated. “I'm in the corridor. Now, what's this about?”

Jake's fingers continued to work at his own assignment, but his ears strained to catch Jadzia and Bashir's exchange for any clues to the Trill's concerns about Commander Arla.

“Arla came into the transporter room and watched me beam out Kira.”

“So?” Bashir asked.

“So . . . she seemed too interested in the process,” Jadzia said.

Jake immediately thought back to Arla's demeanor when she was in the transporter room, recalled the way the Bajoran commander had looked over Jadzia's shoulder with such close attention.

“As I recall,” Bashir replied, “Arla's a Starfleet officer with limited starship experience. I would hope she would show some interest in procedures outside her field of—”

“Julian! Weyoun couldn't have beamed himself off the ship without

help! There are no automated subroutines to handle transport in the absence of a subspace carrier wave.”

Jake sat up straighter, not sure if he had heard Jadzia correctly.

“You're saying Arla beamed Weyoun off the ship?” Bashir asked.

“Well, someone had to have helped him.”

Bashir didn't sound convinced. “So then who came up behind Arla and fractured her skull from behind after she operated the transporter?”

“I don't know,” Jadzia admitted to Bashir. “I'm just suggesting you be careful with her.”

“Suggestion noted,” Bashir replied drily, then the circuit went dead again.

Jake heard Jadzia mutter something under her breath, knew it wasn't intended for him, but asked anyway to see if he could get her talking to him again. He had to find out if she had said what he thought she had.

“I'm sorry?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Jadzia answered shortly. “I'm just surprised that given the situation, people aren't more concerned than they are.”

Gathering courage for his next question, Jake visually tracked the sensor-scan advance to the limit of receptivity, then tapped in the sequence that told the sensor subroutines to begin again.

“Dax?”

“I'm here.”

“The transporter . . . you said you couldn't set it on automatic?”

Jadzia's reply seemed unnaturally even-toned to him. “It's all right, Jake. I'm the most qualified transporter operator. I'll stay behind.”

Jake stared at the Trill, unbelieving. “Does . . . does Worf know?” He couldn't imagine Worf allowing his wife to stay behind, to be lost with the ship.

Jadzia half-turned to meet his gaze. “What are you suggesting, Jake? That Worf would order someone else to stay behind and die so I could live?”

Put that bluntly, Jake knew she was right. There was another option. But Jadzia dealt with that one before he could even voice it. “And he won't stay behind, either. Worf knows he's not proficient enough to handle the beam manually under these conditions. If he even tried, he'd probably end up killing the last person to beam off. Besides,” she said, “Worf has Alexander to think of. All my children—Dax's children, at least—have already had full lives of their own. And I have lived seven lifetimes, while Worf hasn't even lived one. I know what I'm doing, Jake. So we don't have to talk about it anymore.” She turned back to her console.

Jake looked back at his own display. A yellow spike flared out of the random noise.

“Dax! A signal on timeshift forty-seven!”

“What?”

Jake froze the sensor scan's progression before allowing himself to glance over at Jadzia, who was rapidly inputting a long string of commands.

“That's way out of bounds,” she said. “Almost like it's a reflected signal instead of . . .”

The bridge speakers crackled with interference so intense that the computer couldn't remove it. But a new voice could still be heard within the cacophony.

“. . . shifting with each . . . lization wave . . . days before Withdrawal . . . weeks after . . . Weyoun in phase but . . .”

A long hiss of static blanked out the rest of whatever was being said. But Jake had heard enough.

“Dax! That's my dad!” he said just as Worf entered the bridge.

“Have you made contact with the captain?” the Klingon asked.

“We're definitely getting something,” Jadzia said. “But according to the timeshift on the signal, it's not coming from the time we sent him to.”

Jake heard his father speak again through the harsh static. “Repeating . . . Major . . . and I arrived safely . . . on target day. At first, we . . . phase . . . on living . . . to the day I arrived on . . . first time. We're . . . equalization wave through time. . . . First arrival, several days before With . . . then . . . when Starfleet . . . but doesn't get caught in the waves like we . . . other time signals . . . over at once . . .” Then interference swallowed the transmission again.

Worf stood beside Jadzia. “The captain said he was repeating his message. Have the computer overlay each transmission we receive to build a complete version.”

“Already on it,” Jadzia confirmed.

Elation and anxiety in equal parts filled Jake. He turned toward Worf and Jadzia, unsure if he could—or should—leave his own station now. “That means he made it, doesn't it?”

“And Kira and Weyoun,” Jadzia said. “But it sounds as if each time the Defiant gets hit by an equalization wave, they get moved through time by a few weeks or days.”

“What does that mean?” Jake asked.

“I don't know,” Jadzia confessed. “Clearly, we can beam off the Defiant to the station, but if we're somehow still connected to this pocket of space-time when the wormhole environment finally stabilizes, I can't be sure we'll stay in the past. We might get snapped back here and . . . disappear.”

“What will it take to make you sure?” Worf asked.

Jadzia looked up at her husband. “I'll need to have readings taken during a temporal shift on the station, then compare them to the readings I already have from this side.”

“Then you will beam over now,” Worf said. The short statement sounded a great deal like an order to Jake, despite what the Trill had said earlier about what her mate would do in these circumstances.

Jadzia stood up. “Sorry, Worf. I'm the best transport operator on the ship. Julian can take the readings I need and radio back the results.”

From his own station, Jake tried to observe the two without being obvious. He understood they were dealing with something other than a Starfleet command decision. They were also a wife and husband. And perhaps the last hope the universe had of surviving in some form, in some timeline or another.

But for all the complexities of their conflict, Jake decided there must be advantages to their multilevel relationship as well. Because their argument ended before it had even begun.

“I will inform the doctor,” Worf said gruffly. “Assemble whatever instruments you require him to take, then report to the transporter room.”

Before Jadzia could respond, the main viewer flashed blue, and the Defiant pitched violently. Jake held on to his console to maintain his balance. Worf and Jadzia steadied each other.

The lights on the bridge flickered briefly before the ship's artificial gravity field returned to trim. And when Jake next looked up at the viewer, Deep Space 9 now hung against a shifting field of red energy, not blue.

“The waves are speeding up,” Jadzia reported. “Just as predicted.”

“How much longer?” Worf asked.

“For the Defiant,” Jadzia said as she glanced down at her console, “seven hours, three minutes. But the last twenty minutes are going to be rough, with waves hitting us every few minutes, then every few seconds.”

“Then we will abandon ship before that happens,” Worf said.

Sharing a brief, intense look at her mate, Jadzia nodded. “I'll . . . go get what Julian will need.”

“And,” the Klingon added, “when you have beamed him to the station, you will then work with the computer to automate the transport sequence so that—” Worf harshly cleared his throat before continuing. “So that . . . when the time comes, the last crew member will be able to beam off as well.”

Jake could see that Jadzia wanted to argue about that, but again it was as if a burst of micropacket communications was exchanged between the couple, relieving them of the necessity of arguing with spoken words.

“I'll get on it,” Jadzia agreed. She leaned down to tap some controls at her station. “Jake,” she glanced over to his station. “The computer will continue to record anything your father transmits. But you stay here and listen for any changes we should know about right away.”

Jake nodded.

Then Jadzia left the bridge, followed by her Klingon mate. Just at the door, Worf stopped and turned to Jake. “I must talk with Dr. Bashir.” The Klingon looked around the otherwise empty bridge. “It would seem that you have the—”

“Oh, no, I don't,” Jake said, though he knew his reaction differed from the one everyone else onboard the ship would give in his position. He pointed to the twenty-fifth-century uniform he wore. “Civilian advisor, remember? I'll watch the viewer and monitor communications, but . . .”

Worf nodded. “Carry on.”

Then Jake was left alone on the bridge of the Defiant.

With its empty center chair.

Where his father belonged.

Where Jake knew he would see his father again.

As far as Jake was concerned, no other choice was possible.

Julian Bashir dropped easily from midair, rolled once, and was instantly on his feet in total darkness, knowing exactly where he was. The smell of Quark's was quite unmistakable.

“Computer, lights please.”

At once, he found himself standing within a flickering pool of light coming from a series of wall-mounted torches, looking out through a dramatic marble arch at a set of wide stairs descending to a small garden.

Bashir's stomach tightened. The holosuite was in use. He wondered how close he had come to being beamed directly into one of the suite's occupants or replicated props.

A deep snorting sounded behind him, and he spun around to see who else was with him.

Bashir's mouth dropped open. “Morn?”

The big Lurian was sound asleep, huge mouth agape, in the midst of a mound of red pillows on which sprawled the softly breathing forms of four or five, perhaps even six, web-fingered Laurienton spa girls wearing . . . not much, as far as Bashir could tell.

“Computer,” Bashir whispered urgently, “lights down, please. Intensity one.”

Half the torches were suddenly extinguished and the others reduced to the glowing radiance of coals.

Undisturbed and unaware, Morn snored on in the arms of his holographic companions.

Bashir looked around the suite as he shifted his radio under the ragged Bajoran trustee clothes he wore and tried to guess where the holosuite's arch might be. It wasn't self-evident.

“Computer,” Bashir said in a low voice, “please indicate the exit.”

A green square of light flashed on the far side of the mound of red pillows. But at the same time, a computer voice warned, loudly, “Credit will not be given for any unused time.”

Bashir cringed and began running for the flashing green light, but it was already too late.

Morn stirred, sat up, rubbed at his eyes. His movements woke the spa girls as well.

Bashir was almost at the hidden arch when the Lurian caught sight of him.

Morn's blank look of alarm betrayed no personal recognition, and the doctor realized that meant he had arrived in a timeframe before his first arrival on the station.

Bashir put his finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he said quietly to Morn. “Don't say a word.”

Morn's tiny eyes narrowed in brief suspicion, but then a mighty yawn struck him and the Lurian shrugged as if to say he had no argument with his unexpected guest's suggestion. Morn's eyes began to close as he sank back into his soft pillows and the giggling spa girls, who once more curled up against him, their holographic contentment a mirror of his own.

Bashir nodded with a relieved smile, hoping that the bandage he wore over the bridge of his nose had been enough to disguise him in the low light, so that the Lurian wouldn't recognize the younger Dr. Bashir when he arrived on the station.

Then, casting off any worry about what could not be changed now, Bashir approached the flashing green light and asked the computer to show him the arch.

Seconds later, he was standing in the corridor outside the holosuites, releasing a deep breath as the door closed behind him.

From what Jadzia had been able to piece together of Sisko's garbled message, the doctor understood that he had most likely arrived on Deep Space 9 in a timeframe different from the one seen by the Defiant, though still connected to it. However, from his current position, it was impossible for him to know precisely which timeframe he was in. Morn, for instance, had been a customer of Quark's before the Day of Withdrawal, as well as after it. About all he could be certain of, Bashir thought, was that this day was not one of those on which the station had been plunged into chaos.

Now he moved cautiously along the corridor, heading for the balcony overlooking Quark's main floor. Creeping up to the railing, he looked down and saw—

Cardassians.

“Wonderful.” Bashir sighed.

He had arrived before the Day of Withdrawal. And judging from the raucous laughter down below, the station's Cardassians were in no hurry to leave.

He backed away from the railing, trying to remember if there were any nearby Jefferies tubes he could escape into.

But his thoughts of escape ended when he felt the emitter node of a phaser dig into his back.

Without being told to, Bashir slowly lifted up his hands to show he was unarmed. Rough hands efficiently patted him down, located his Starfleet radio and modified tricorder, relieved him of both.

Then a deep voice said, “Turn around. Say nothing.”

Bashir did as he was told but couldn't hide a flicker of recognition as he saw Prylar Obanak.

“You know me, don't you?” the prylar said.

Though Bashir knew that each interaction he had in this time could cut him off from his own time, he also knew he had to reply. “You . . . look familiar.”

Obanak regarded him doubtfully. Then he reached behind himself to a bulkhead panel, pressing something the doctor could not see, until the panel popped open a few centimeters, revealing an access port.

Obanak waved his phaser—a segmented Cardassian model, Bashir noted—to make it clear that the doctor was to go first.

Bashir complied and found himself looking into a narrow serviceaccess tunnel. The node of the phaser again prodded him in the back. Obviously, Obanak wanted him to proceed.

Squeezing through the opening, Bashir could see the tunnel ran for about four meters to a poorly lit Jefferies tube. Quickly guessing it would take the broad-shouldered prylar more time to squeeze through the tunnel behind him, Bashir began formulating a plan to escape. But the instant he poked his head into the Jefferies tube, another phaser node found his temple.

“Slowly,” was all the second voice said. But that was enough for the doctor to put his plan on hold.

The Jefferies tube was unlike any other Bashir had encountered in his time on DS9. More than half its lights weren't working. Of the few that were, most were flickering on and off erratically. The customary, pristine ODN conduits installed by the Starfleet Corps of Engineers were nowhere to be seen. And somewhere off in the shadows, a liquid badly in need of recycling dripped noisily.

The Bajoran who held the phaser node to Bashir's temple pushed the doctor to one side as Obanak twisted out of the narrow access tunnel with surprising agility for someone of his bulk. Crouching down beside Bashir, the prylar handed his phaser back to his partner. Then, with shocking, almost unnatural, speed, he leaned forward and ripped the bandage from Bashir's face.

“Human,” Obanak said. He made the statement sound like an accusation.

“I'm not here to make trouble,” Bashir said quickly. If Jadzia's reconstruction of Sisko's message was correct, sometime in the next hour—adjusting that timespan for differing rates of temporal flow—an equalization wave would pass over the Defiant. All he had to do, the doctor reminded himself, was stay alive for that time, and the wave would snap him into a timeframe on the other side of the Day of Withdrawal. If Jadzia's reconstruction was correct.

“Does that mean you support the Cardassians?” Obanak asked sharply.

“Of course not!”

“Then what are you doing here?”

Bashir's genetically enhanced intellect whirled through and considered all his options at an accelerated rate. Most of all, he knew, he had to be sure not to introduce any changes into the past. But he also had to find Sisko and Kira. And, Bashir knew, since Kira had said that Obanak was part of the Bajoran Resistance, his best strategy was to trust the man. The only question was how little information could he reveal and still earn Obanak's trust in return.

“Can you tell me the date?” Bashir began.

Obanak and his partner exchanged a look.

“The Third Feast Day of Tral,” Obanak said.

“I mean . . . the stardate.”

Obanak squinted at him, judging him. “Who is the Emissary?”

Bashir froze. How could he reveal that information in the past, before Captain Sisko had been identified by the Bajoran people? “I . . . I can't tell you.”

Obanak nodded as if he had expected that answer. “But you know him?”

“Prylar Obanak,” Bashir said, “you have to trust me. For the good of your people, you—”

He fell back as Obanak lunged at him. The prylar's massive forearm shoved against his throat, under his jaw, pressing with shocking strength, cutting off his flow of air.

“What does a human know about what's good for Bajorans?” the prylar growled.

“. . . I'm on . . . your . . . side . . .” Bashir wheezed.

Obanak did not reduce the pressure. “Then tell me—Who is the Emissary?”

The light in the Jefferies tube became even dimmer to Bashir as his field of vision shrank and darkened. Bashir's hammering pulse filled his awareness. If he died here, then nothing would change. He had to take a chance. It was the only choice.

“. . . Sisko . . .” he gasped.

The constriction on his throat was gone. Bashir gulped in a burning

rush of air and his hands flew to his bruised throat.

Obanak rocked back on his knees. “You see?” the prylar said. “That's all we needed to know. To give us a common ground.”

“For what?” Bashir coughed as he took another deep breath and flexed his leg muscles as best he could in the cramped space.

“This is what you need to know,” Obanak said firmly. “In five days, the enemy will leave the Gateway abandoned. The Temple will be in disarray. The Prophets will weep no more. Fourteen days later, the Sisko will arrive from the stars. Three times he will deny that he is the Emissary. Then even the Prophets will deny him. But that will be a test. For the Emissary will come to the Gateway not once on that day but twice. And the Temple at last will open its doors for all to see.”

Bashir staring intently at Obanak, saw only resolve in his eyes, heard only conviction in his voice. “How do you know that?” he risked asking.

Obanak stared back. “I know how I know. The question is, how do you?”

But Bashir had done with taking chances. “Truly, all I can say is that I will be gone in less than an hour. If you give me back my radio and tricorder, I'll stay right here, won't cause any trouble, and events will unfold just as they . . . just as they should.”

Obanak's partner's glance went to the radio and tricorder on the floor of the Jefferies tube.

Obanak frowned. “I'm disappointed in you,” he told the doctor. Then he shoved Bashir to the side, forcing him to start to crawl forward down the tube. “Turn left at the fourth intersection,” the prylar instructed Bashir. “And remember, the moment you make noise is the moment you die.”

The crawl through the Jefferies tubes took ten minutes at least, and by its end, Bashir couldn't be certain which level he was on. But Obanak knew. Shoving past Bashir, the prylar unlatched an access panel, then dropped through into a large room beyond. Bashir, then the prylar's partner, followed immediately after.

To Bashir, the room seemed to be a storeroom of some kind, smaller than a cargo bay, perhaps one of the supply lockers on the level directly under the Promenade where storekeepers kept their stock.

Two small emergency wall-mounted fusion lamps provided light. Bashir also noted a cot against the bulkhead between two stacks of shipping containers. Almost everything appeared to be labeled in Cardassian radians. Bashir guessed the most likely explanation was that this was a hiding place for resistance members on the station.

“I'd really like my tricorder and radio back,” he said.

Obanak took them from his partner, held them out of Bashir's reach. “And I'd really like some answers.”

“Look,” Bashir said, “you've told me that you know about events in the future. How the . . . the enemy will leave the Gateway, how the Emissary will arrive from the stars. Is it really so difficult for you to accept that maybe I know something about what's going to happen, too? Can't you just accept that . . . that we both obtained our knowledge from the same source?”

“That is not possible,” Obanak said, handing Bashir's tricorder and radio back to his Bajoran partner. “I know what my source is. The source of my people and of my order since time began. But you are not of my people. You are not of my order.”

“Yet I know what you know,” Bashir insisted, looking at Obanak's partner, wondering whether or not, when the pressure wave came, he would have enough of a warning at least to retrieve his tricorder.

“Only two types of beings know what I know,” Obanak said. And now Bashir heard the conviction in the prylar's voice begin to turn into threat. “Bajorans and Prophets. Are you a Prophet, human?”

“No.”

“And you're not Bajoran. So . . . I'm at a loss.”

For all his superior reasoning powers and abilities, Bashir couldn't see how he was going to get out of this. “Prylar Obanak, I promise you, someday I will be able to explain everything to you. But . . . I just can't explain today.”

“Because you don't know, or because you won't?”

Bashir struggled to project conviction equal to that the prylar had shown him. “For those of us who have . . . knowledge of what is to come, we know the danger of revealing too much. And that's what I face now. If I reveal too much, I might change what I know must come.”

For once, Obanak did not have a ready reply. Instead, he simply contemplated Bashir with a thoughtful expression on his broad, weathered face.

“Will you,” he asked at last, “at least reveal the source of your knowledge?”

Bashir shook his head. Even that information might be enough to change the history he knew. “I'm sorry.”

Obanak looked over to a corner of the storeroom, and Bashir suddenly had the shock of realization that there was a fourth person with them in the storeroom.

A person who now stepped from the shadows into the cool blue light of the fusion lamps, his bright red robes the color of freshly spilled blood.

“I've heard enough,” Weyoun said.

Obanak bowed reverently. “Yes, Emissary.”

Bashir almost choked. “He's not the Emissary!”

“He is the Sisko,” Obanak warned. “Even you knew his name.”

“He's Weyoun! He's . . . he's possessed by the Pah-wraiths!”

Obanak took a step toward Bashir but stopped obediently at a gesture from Weyoun. “The Prophets are known by many names,” the prylar said. “And dwell in many places. Reconciliation of all Bajor and her Prophets is—”

“Obanak!” Bashir said forcefully. “I'm from the future! Do you understand? That's how I know what will happen. And I'm telling you that this creature is not your Emissary. He is—” Bashir's tirade ended in a cry of pain as a bolt of red energy slammed into his chest, driving him back against the storeroom bulkhead.

“That, good doctor,” Weyoun said softly, “is quite enough of that.” The Vorta moved forward until he stood over Bashir, looking down at him with a pious expression of dismay. “Tell your friends, whatever they try to do, I will undo. There are no alternate timelines. There is only the one True Temple and those who dwell within it. And unfortunately for you, Dr. Bashir, you are not in their number.”

At that, Weyoun raised his hand, and a nimbus of red energy crackled across his fingers.

“Damn you,” Bashir whispered, still almost completely paralyzed by the first blow Weyoun had struck, knowing what the second blow was likely to do.

Weyoun smiled with real amusement at the doctor's choice of words.

Then a blast of light obliterated Bashir's consciousness.

And his last thought was to wonder why the light was blue, not red.