CHAPTER 18

EACH TIME SISKO was swept into the relative future, past the Day of Withdrawal, he took the opportunity to rest, and he had found the perfect site to do so.

Cannibalized over the years by Cardassian engineers, an antiquated fifty-year-old Cardassian ore hauler had remained undisturbed beside an unused ore-processing bay in Deep Space 9's outer ring for six months after Sisko had originally arrived to take command of the station. In a timeframe several days prior to the Withdrawal, Sisko had located the hulk again and saw that its condition then was no different from what it would be six months later, when Chief O'Brien would finally arrange to have it carted away as scrap.

Since nothing had disturbed the hauler in all that time, Sisko felt secure hiding in its cargo hold, in no danger from departing Cardassians searching for plunder or—depending on which timeframe he was in—zealous Bajoran militia searching for saboteurs.

Now, on this latest transfer into the future, Sisko carefully set down the two cases he had brought with him that held his work. He had learned from experience that he could carry through time anything he could hold that was not in direct contact with the station. Next, he recovered the Cardassian tricorder he had concealed behind a loose baffle plate in the past and checked the local time and date. Once again, he had been swept past the actual events of the Day of Withdrawal, though not as far as on his previous jumps.

According to the tricorder's readout, he was now approximately fifty hours past the departure of the last Cardassian from DS9. From the reports he had read when he had taken command, he knew that confusion would still reign on the station. In the next few hours, a minor general from the Bajoran Resistance, whose name Sisko could no longer remember, would declare the station the Star of Bajor and begin to organize the transport of orbital weapons to its cargo bays, in order to enforce what he termed a just peace on the planet below. That general's term of office would last a little more than one day before he was taken into custody by an assault team sent from the hastily formed Provisional Government, whose hurriedly elected members even now were struggling to make their way across their ruined world to hold their first assembly.

As for himself, Sisko recalled that he had been on Earth at this time, his visit to Rutgers University cut short by an urgent recall order from Starfleet Command. He had been considering a teaching position, and when the recall had arrived, he was standing in the backyard of a quaint mid-twenty-second-century cottage on Moravian Lane, smiling as he watched his son Jake eye the towering maple trees, already imagining himself climbing them.

With that, Sisko's thoughts inevitably turned to Jake in this present, a young man now, off somewhere in time with the Defiant. Though Sisko knew he couldn't be sure that the action he had decided on would result in his own individual survival or Jake's, the certainty at least would exist that a Ben Sisko and his son would live on in another timeline without the threat of the Bajoran Ascendancy and the end of the universe it would bring.

The decision itself had not been an easy one for Sisko to make, but he felt that somehow Jake would understand. If their positions were reversed, he even thought there was a possibility that his son might make the same choice.

In Sisko's last face-to-face exchange with Kira, after the two of them had left Quark's knowing that the Red Orb had already been removed, the Bajoran major had not supported his decision. Kira was convinced that they had to follow the admonitions of Eilin, the ancient mystic of Jalbador, and of Prylar Rulan, who had first welcomed Sisko to the station: No change in the timeline was to be permitted; everything was to be left in the hands of the Prophets.

Sisko had told the major he thought her choice was the better one, and the one he would prefer to see prevail, but that even if he put his duties as Emissary first, he could not stop thinking like a Starfleet officer, and that every aspect of his training was demanding that he consider what might happen if the Prophets remained silent to their plight.

“If faith fails us,” Sisko had argued, “then science must not.”

He and Kira had agreed to separate. Kira told him she would do all she could to establish further communication with the Defiant, to track down Weyoun, and to obtain the Red Orb of Jalbador from Leej Terrell before whoever stole it from Quark's hiding place was able to take it from the station.

“You know,” Kira told him in that last conversation, “maybe the people who stole the Orb were us. I mean, if we took it two days after Quark hid it, that would explain why it wasn't there when we tried to find it two weeks later. Right?”

Sisko allowed the possibility of that scenario but pointed out that if he and Kira were responsible for the Orb's disappearance, then surely they would have left some sort of sign to themselves, so they would know what actually happened.

“Maybe not,” Kira said. “That would be like telling ourselves the future, and that might mean we'd be careless and miss the opportunity to steal it. Or maybe we intended to leave a sign or message for our future selves to find, but we were being chased and didn't have the time.”

“The truth is,” Sisko said, “this is like every other life-or-death situation we've been in. We have no idea what will happen next.”

“I believe the Prophets do,” Kira said.

“I hope you're right.”

Then a flash of light had swept the two of them into the past, more than a week before the Withdrawal.

Fortunately, they materialized in the Bajoran half of the Promenade, and their sudden appearance in a shadowed alcove was barely noticed by the exhausted slave workers who huddled together during the station's night, the fabled Cardassian efficiency having failed to provide them with berths.

Sisko and Kira had gone their separate ways then, Kira steadfastly determined to do what she had to do, telling Sisko that if—when—she succeeded, she would seek him out where she knew she could find him, no matter the timeframe, in the abandoned ore hauler. On his own, Sisko managed to steal a Cardassian tricorder and reach the hulk within a half hour, after which he was swept ahead into another post-Withdrawal timeframe.

By now, Sisko was spending less than ten minutes in each timeframe, and it had taken him multiple timeshifts to nearly complete building the device that, if necessary, could take the place of Kira's faith: a chroniton pulse-emitter which he now carried with him through each new timeshift, along with his assorted borrowed tools. To assemble the simple emitter, he'd made use of various components left behind in the Cardassian ore hauler, as well as key isolinear circuits and a spare sensor-resonance chamber which he liberated from the Starfleet materiel that had arrived from the Enterprise.

He knew the emitter would be a crude device, unlikely to operate for more than a few minutes once the power supply was attached. But Sisko was betting that at the appropriate time, even the brief cascade of chronometric particles the emitter produced would destroy the worm hole-precursor field that Leej Terrell had created with the Red Orb in her secret lab deep within DS9. That destructive cascade would have the added benefit of driving whatever entity possessed Weyoun from his body—presuming, of course, that Weyoun was still on the station. As yet, Sisko had seen no sign of the Vorta, other than when Weyoun had been greeted by Prylar Obanak as the one true Emissary, the first time Sisko had arrived with Kira.

Weyoun, however, was not all that important now. The actions Sisko planned to take would still change all of the history that unfolded from the Day of Withdrawal, with or without the Vorta's presence on the station.

Sisko knew the chroniton cascade would be easily detected on Cardassia, only five and a quarter light-years distant. Undoubtedly, the Science Directorate of the Obsidian Order would ask pointed questions, and Terrell, in particular, couldn't help but suspect a connection to wormhole phenomena. That could lead her to return to the station more quickly than she had in Sisko's original timeline. If she did so, Sisko thought, at worst, the Red Orb would be discovered years earlier, perhaps when the Cardassians were destined to retake control of the station at the beginning of the Dominion War. At best, the Orb would remain hidden, and there would be no secret ‘Cardassian holosuite’ for young Jake and Nog to discover. The consequence of that would be that it would take more time for the Sisko and Odo of that day to realize what Quark and Vash and Dal Nortron, among others, were planning almost six years later.

In the end, Sisko knew, the new future he would bring into being was unpredictable. After all, from the moment he and Kira discovered for themselves that the Red Orb had been moved from Quark's, the timeline had already changed. At least, Sisko reassured himself, the strategy he had decided upon would introduce a different set of changes and would thus create a greater chance that the three Red Orbs would not be brought together.

Beyond that, Kira was right. All their fates would be in the hands of the Prophets.

Sisko carefully replaced the Cardassian tricorder behind the baffle

plate, picked up his cases with his tools and his almost-completed emitter, then stood expectantly to one side in an area of the cargo hold he knew he had left clear in the past.

When the next equalization wave struck, Sisko estimated he'd be arriving in the past about the time the first troop transports had left Bajor. At first, he knew, those departures would seem to be no different from a normal troop rotation. But as soon as word began to spread that fresh troops had not arrived to replace those who had left, the first uprisings would begin among the Bajorans, and battles for the Cardassian-controlled spaceports would rage across the planet. Since the first uprising had occurred about two days before the Cardassians evacuated the station, Sisko guessed it would take him another three or four more time oscillations to reach that specific timeframe. When he did, he would activate his emitter. Then, one way or another, the nightmare would end.

Sisko was prepared when a flash of blue light blinded him. He had learned that closing his eyes did nothing to lessen the light's intensity. At least, he thought, wincing, repetition served to blunt the physical shock of timeshifting.

But this time, the moment his vision cleared, Sisko was struck by a shock of a different kind.

Kira was in the cargo hold, and so was Dr. Bashir, and both were bound and gagged and kneeling before their captor.

Weyoun.

In the Defiant's sickbay, Jake nodded to the two crew members watching over Arla. Each was a civilian, garbed in the same style of gray and black advisor uniform he wore. Briefly over the past few weeks, Jake had talked to both of them. They were agricultural technicians, human, from Deneva, who had been returning from a Federation exchange program to Ferenginar. When the red wormhole had opened both had been on DS9 waiting for transportation because they had lost all their personal belongings and equipment in an all-too-common misunderstanding of Ferengi hotel laws. Neither had been aware that those laws equated the offer of shelter with imputed ownership of whatever was then placed in that shelter unless money changed hands first—a minor detail Ferengi hoteliers regularly neglected to share with off-worlders. Since the technicians were the only personnel onboard the Defiant with anything close to training in biology, Bashir had deputized both of them as his nurses.

“How is she?” Jake asked, looking down at Arla's still form on the sickbay treatment table.

But Arla herself replied before the technicians could. “Jake?” The Bajoran commander lifted her head and looked over at him.

Jake went to her side as she slowly sat up on the treatment table. “I wouldn't move too much. Dr. Bashir said you might be dizzy for a few days.” At the time, Jake had considered the diagnosis optimistic, considering they might only have a few hours of existence left.

But Arla merely stretched her neck from side to side, arched her back, and a moment later slipped off the table to stand unaided, without any unsteadiness. “Actually, I feel fine.” She looked around sickbay. “Where is the doctor?”

“A lot's happened,” Jake said. He enjoyed the novelty of talking with someone who was almost his height. Arla was definitely one of the tallest Bajorans he had ever met.

“Um, excuse us,” one of the technicians interrupted. “But Commander Worf . . . he wanted to be informed the moment Commander Arla woke up.”

“Why?” Arla asked.

“You should let him know,” Jake told the technicians. To Arla, he said, “Do you remember who hit you?”

“Hit me?”

“Your head,” Jake said, repeating what Bashir had told him. At the same time, the technician who had just spoken with Jake fumbled with his combadge, achieving contact with Worf only after several false starts.

As the technician informed Worf of her condition, Arla gingerly touched the top of her head. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?” Jake observed her action, puzzled. Bashir had said Arla had been struck on the back of her head, not the top. Couldn't she feel the injury? Or was the doctor's treatment that good?

Arla wrinkled her face in concentration. “I . . . I went on a break. Ensign Simons sent someone up from engineering to watch Weyoun.” She snapped her fingers. “I saw Major Kira beam out to the station. Are she and your father all right?”

“So far,” Jake said. “What else?”

“Well . . . let's see . . . did I come back in here?”

“The engineer who spelled you said you did.”

Arla nodded. “That's right . . . that's right . . . I did come back. I was carrying a coffee . . . Weyoun was on the table . . . and . . .” She shook her head in frustration. “All I remember after that is a red flash.” She smiled apologetically at Jake. “Do you think there's any coffee left?”

“Sure,” Jake said with a shrug, deciding she wasn't used to starship food replicators. The coffee was always on.

Then, after asking the technicians to tell Worf that he and Arla would be in the mess hall, he left sickbay with her.

On the short walk to the mess, Jake filled in Arla on what she had missed. But the best news of all was that Jadzia had managed to contact O'Brien and that the crew of the Defiant were already being beamed to the Boreth.

But as they entered the mess hall and went straight to a replicator, Arla didn't seem particularly interested in their pending rescue.

“So all the times are converging?” she asked, then instructed the replicator to give her coffee, black, New Berlin blend.

Jake nodded, watching as a gray mug of steaming dark liquid appeared in the replicator bay. “Dax said it's inevitable. These pockets of space-time we're in, they're the last remnants of linear time, and basically they're going to dissolve into the nonlinear environment of the wormhole.”

Arla picked up the mug. “How much more time is left?” she asked.

“It's different for each pocket,” Jake said. He gestured to the closest table and accompanied her to it, taking a seat directly across from her. “As if we were all traveling at relativistic speeds, back before inertial dampeners. Dax set up a time display at her station. We've got about three hours. The Boreth has about two and half. On the station, they have just over two.”

Arla stared down into her coffee, warming her hands around the mug.

Jake didn't know if there would ever be an easy time, so he decided to be blunt. “How do you feel about the Prophets?” he asked, mortified by the sudden betraying catch in his voice.

He thought he saw a brief smile lift Arla's mouth at the corners. “You mean, do I believe in them?”

“Yeah. I guess that's it.”

“I didn't used to.”

“I . . . I know. That's what Dax said.”

“You were talking about me?”

Jake flushed. “Well, I heard what you said about, you know, hoping

for the best and trusting in the Prophets.”

Arla again raised her coffee mug, but it seemed only to touch her lips. She set it down again without drinking from it, as if just going through the motions.

“I heard what the Pah-wraiths did to you,” she said. “The hell they put you in.”

Jake shivered, recalling the whole all-too-real experience of inputting as if his life had depended on it.

“Do you know what my Pah-wraith hell was?” she asked, stroking the side of the coffee mug.

Jake shook his head, said, “No,” almost too softly to be heard.

“I didn't have one.”

Jake stared at her, not understanding. “But . . . everyone else did . . .”

“I didn't believe in Pah-wraiths, either.” She looked up at him then, so suddenly Jake was startled. Her large eyes were bright, gleaming. She gave him a half-smile. “My parents didn't even tell me stories about them to scare me when I was a child. They were very practical people. No Prophets. No Pah-wraiths. No absolute good. But no absolute evil, either. Funny how that works.”

“So . . . so what happened to you?” Jake asked. “Did you experience anything?”

Arla nodded. “Oh, yes. I was punished.”

Jake was startled by the intense pain in Arla's voice. “But . . . not by the Pah-wraiths?”

“By the Prophets.” The Bajoran spat out the last word as if it were the foulest substance in the universe. “They put me in a camp. With Cardassian soldiers. I was their . . .” She shook her head, unable to continue.

Jake waited. He thought again of what the doctor had told him, about how people were the product of their experiences, and he knew how much of life was still before him. At least, he hoped it was.

Arla spoke again. “There was only one way out left to me. One way. The Prophets. And I begged for them to help me. I prayed to them. And the soldiers . . . when I was no more use to them, they'd throw me in a pit and bury me alive with all the others, and then I'd wake up and I'd be crawling through the battlefield again, and the Prophets . . .” Arla bent over her mug of coffee, and her voice became little more than a whisper that Jake could barely hear. “The Prophets would come to me then. And they'd say, ‘Sorry, Arla. You had your chance. Now this is what you get.’ And then the soldiers would come again, and . . .” Arla's hands tightened around the mug until Jake could see the bones in her knuckles. “We all had our chance.”

Jake sat silent, unsure what reassurances a nineteen-year-old could offer a Starfleet commander. If Arla had been his age, maybe he would have put his hand on hers, to try to tell her that things would be all right, that she had had a Pah-wraith experience after all, that the Prophets wouldn't abandon Bajorans. But he didn't know if any of that were true. All he did know was that he was as confused as she was.

“But . . . you said, ‘Trust in the Prophets,’ didn't you?” Jake finally asked.

Arla let go of her coffee mug, pushed back on her chair, stood up. “I should go talk to Worf.”

Jake quickly got up to follow her. “Uh, Worf says we should all go around in pairs.”

Arla stared at him, frowning.

“Until . . . until we know who beamed Weyoun out.”

“Don't worry,” Arla said with a brief laugh that made the hair on the back of Jake's neck bristle. “I'm sure we'll see him again.”

Then the ship seemed to drop out from beneath Jake's feet as the lights brightened and dimmed and everything about him shifted abruptly to port. Another pressure wave. The violent movement slammed Jake's head—which was level with Arla's—directly into hers, his forehead smashing into her upper lip, the recoil of the collision tossing them both to the deck.

A moment later, Jake was sitting up, a hand to his head, looking over at the Bajoran. “Are you all right?” he asked over the ringing in his ears.

Arla was sitting up as well. She had lifted one hand and was touching two fingers to her already-swelling split lip. A bright red smear stained her teeth; a trickle of blood ran down her chin.

“Commander—I'm sorry,” Jake said. He got unsteadily to his feet. “I can get a medikit and . . . and . . .”

“No need,” Arla said, her speech slurring as she licked the blood from her fingers.

Then her split lip knit itself back together and deflated until it was its normal size. Unbelieving, Jake watched as the trickle of blood on Arla's chin broke into small, distinct beads which then disappeared as if they were being reabsorbed into her skin.

“Now you know why I don't have to believe in the Prophets,” Arla said as she came for him. “I have something even better . . .”

Jake didn't even have time to scream.

On the bridge of the Boreth, Rom delivered his confirmation: All transporter settings had been realigned according to Jadzia's specifications.

The transporter was ready to energize.

But energize what? O'Brien thought. He knew he was dealing with a more sophisticated transporter technology than he was used to. He knew that Jadzia understood the theory of temporal mechanics much more thoroughly than he did. But as far as the chief engineer could see, the coordinates to which he had set the transporter contained imaginary numbers. Frankly, he was surprised the computers—even Klingon ones—had even allowed him to do so.

“Uh, Chief?” Rom prompted. “We're ready to . . . go.”

“All right,” O'Brien said, feeling a touch apprehensive and not too proud to show it. “You might want to stand aside, because I have no idea what we're about to bring in here.”

Rom and the two other crew members—Starfleet personnel who had just happened to be on DS9 between assignments when the red wormhole had opened—immediately moved to the back of the bridge.

Though the main transporter rooms were on other decks, it still remained easier for O'Brien to keep transporter controls switched to the bridge because wormhole conditions continued to limit targeting to one person at a time. With the Boreth's warp engines unusable in an environment without subspace dimensions, the massive Klingon vessel had power to spare for such energy-intensive, point-to-point beamings.

“Energizing,” O'Brien said.

Because the coordinates didn't seem to correspond to any physical

location in local space, on his display O'Brien saw no gravitational deviation in the transport beam's propagation. Instead, as the Chief expected, it remained as coherent as a laser, until it snapped back as quickly as if he had initiated an intraship transport.

Then, to O'Brien's complete surprise, the resulting cylinder of sparkling light in the center of the bridge resolved into a form, and that form became solid—a living, breathing, redheaded Starfleet ensign whom O'Brien hadn't seen since the battle with Tom Riker's ship, when the ensign had been transported from the Defiant in the midst of the action.

“I see it, but I don't believe it,” O'Brien marveled.

Ensign Simons looked down at his hands as if to count his fingers, then said excitedly, “It worked! It really worked!”

“Rom—set the controls for another go.”

“Aye, aye . . . Chief.”

It took O'Brien only ten minutes more to beam over all but five of the Defiant's remaining crew, with the chief adjusting the coordinates of each transport in precise accordance to the detailed instructions that Jadzia had transmitted from the station, along with her remarkably simple dimensional map.

Ensign Simons had made the process even more efficient by providing the up-to-date figures Jadzia needed to compensate precisely for changes to the Defiant's navigational deflector shields—changes that had been brought on by the ship's fall into the wormhole.

“Uh, that only leaves Commander Worf,” Rom said happily as he checked off Jadzia's manifest, “Commander Arla, the two agricultural technicians, and . . . Jake.”

O'Brien frowned. He was having a hard time believing that beaming through time and space—as he had once done in Earth orbit—could be this simple. Not to mention accepting that in only about two and a half hours, if his calculations were correct, even a truly amazing accomplishment like this might amount to nothing. What good would it do to rescue people from the Defiant if the end result was merely that everyone then died together instead of alone? The chief engineer shook off his dark thoughts. There was nothing to be gained by dwelling on what might go wrong. Beam everyone to the Boreth, then beam everyone to the station. Those were his orders, so that was what he would do.

“The transporter has recycled,” Rom announced.

“Here comes the next one,” O'Brien said crisply. “Energizing . . .”

On O'Brien's transporter display, the beam shot out once more to the new, impossible coordinates, but this time it didn't snap back.

O'Brien watched, unconcerned at first. The beam was showing no feedback ripple to indicate it had dematerialized anyone, so no immediate danger existed. To compensate for target drift, the chief engineer did what usually worked. He increased the power by eight percent and widened the focus by two.

Nothing happened.

“The coils will time out in ten seconds,” Rom called out in warning.

After first making sure the beam was still clear, O'Brien forced it back to rematerialize anything it might have found but that might not be showing up on the display.

But nothing appeared. O'Brien didn't understand. He had Rom reset the system.

The hum and pop of the Heisenberg compensators echoed through the deck as O'Brien rapidly worked out the new degree of Jadzia's coordinate drift, basing his calculations on this minor delay alone, then energized the beam again.

Still nothing.

Beads of sweat began dotting the Chief's brow as he tried five more times until the coils timed out for quantum-phase realignment.

O'Brien swore under his breath. He had no choice but to shut down.

“What happened?” Rom asked, worried.

O'Brien had no answer other than the most troubling one—the one now shown on the Boreth's main viewer.

“The Defiant,” O'Brien said. “It just . . . isn't there anymore.”