CHAPTER 24

“OH, LOOK,” Garak said with satisfaction. “Now I'm here, too.”

Sisko looked in the direction Garak indicated and saw—

Garak.

This timeframe's version of him, dressed in civilian clothes, huddled behind the twisted wreckage of a collapsed air channel on the second level of the Promenade.

“It would appear all the players are now in the game,” Sisko's Garak said.

“Do you know what you were doing here?” Sisko asked. He looked down through the railing to the main level, to see Terrell's three agents marching Quark and Odo out of Quark's bar. They were heading for a turbolift.

“No doubt the same thing I'm doing now,” Garak said. “Trying to make sense of a very confusing day for the Cardassian people. Oh, look again—Quark's seen me!”

Sisko saw the Ferengi below look up in their direction, his attention caught by something he saw on the second level—Sisko's Garak, in his hiding place.

But atypically silent, the Quark below walked on without giving any other reaction.

“We should go down,” Garak said behind Sisko.

Having already made up his mind to accept the Cardassian's lead, Sisko now followed him, quickly reaching the first level via a winding metal stairway.

With Sisko close behind him, Garak edged out onto the Promenade, then ducked a moment later into a half-opened airlock. Once again, Sisko stayed with him.

Garak stayed a step back within the shelter of the airlock's entrance. He held up a cautioning hand. “Well, that should confuse the poor fellow,” he said. “I believe Quark just saw me again.”

Sisko peered past Garak. But if the Quark of this time had seen the Cardassian, again he was not giving any reaction to confirm the sighting. All Sisko could confirm for himself was that Quark and Odo had stepped into a turbolift car with the three Cardassians, then descended.

“Now where?” Sisko asked his guide.

Garak gave him a look of reproach, and Sisko realized how obvious

the answer to that question was.

Over the next few minutes, Sisko and Garak's task of following Quark and Odo and their captors was made immeasurably easier by knowing where they were going—to Terrell's hidden lab.

The most delicate aspect of the operation for Sisko and Garak was ensuring they wouldn't be spotted by Garak's past self, as he also followed the other Cardassians for reasons of his own.

“This is all so new to me,” Sisko's Garak said as they ended up crawling through a Jefferies tube on the same lower deck as Terrell's lab. “I must have already been suffering from some sort of memory lapse—because of the inhibitor I had asked myself to take. Afterward, since I undoubtedly suspected that I had been subjected to a memory-altering drug developed by the Obsidian Order, I, of course, must have suspected Terrell.”

Sisko attempted to make that causal loop make sense. “So . . . you followed Terrell's agents in the past,” he reasoned, “because you came from the future to give yourself a memory inhibitor, because you couldn't remember why you followed Terrell's agents.”

Garak paused for a moment and looked back at Sisko with a good-natured smile. “Isn't time travel remarkable? Such an invigorating challenge!”

A minute later, Sisko and Garak hit the end of the same dead-end conduit that Sisko recognized as the one Jake and Nog would discover a year or so from now, when they first located Terrell's lab and believed it was a Cardassian holosuite.

Through the air mesh of the conduit's cover, Sisko had a direct view of the door to that lab. The door itself was pulsing in and out in what Sisko recognized was a manifestation of Pah-wraith energy—something that Terrell had not yet learned to identify, quantify, or fear.

But because of the rumble of other sounds that now echoed deep within the conduit—explosions, alarms, the thrum of departing shuttles—Sisko couldn't hear what Terrell was saying about Odo and Quark, who were right beside her. He could see her face, though, and its expression revealed to him that she wasn't happy. Sisko's assessment was confirmed as in the next moment Terrell shot Odo.

Sisko tensed as the changeling collapsed, but Garak only whispered, “Easy. Remember—Odo survived this day, too. Though I'm afraid the same can't be said for those two young men in the brown suit and the blue.”

All three Cardassians with Terrell were civilians—at least, their clothes were.

And the tailor was right. Sisko had seen those two suits before.

They'd been on the two soldiers whose bodies would be found fused into the hull plates of the station—at the same time as Odo investigated Dal Nortron's murder.

And Terrell's three agents weren't the only Cardassian civilians in the corridor below. Because now, the blue-suited Cardassian held onto a third captive—Garak.

“I must say, it's beginning to make some sense to me now,” Sisko's Garak said.

Sisko watched and tried to listen through the conduit cover's airmesh as Terrell said something to the Garak held captive before her, then turned and had a separate word with Quark.

“She's telling him she wants him to go into the lab and get the Orb,” Sisko said.

Quark's reluctance was apparent.

Tendrils of red energy had begun to snake out all along the doorframe, as if outlining a miniature wormhole that was already beginning to form inside.

“That must be what's linking us to this day,” Sisko said in a low voice. “And what's linking the station's timeframe to the wormhole six years from now. Terrell almost succeeded in opening a wormhole just with one Orb and her equipment.”

“A sobering thought,” Garak said quietly beside him.

Suddenly, in the scene beyond the conduit air-mesh, Sisko saw Odo come back to consciousness and then begin to shout out something. Almost immediately, the changeling was drawn to the distorted, pulsing door to Terrell's lab, moving toward it as if compelled.

“A telepathic summons,” Sisko whispered to Garak. “That's what Terrell said happened to some of her scientists.”

Now the third Cardassian—perhaps Atrig, Sisko thought, younger and unscarred—jumped between Odo and the lab door. He pointed a weapon at the changeling, then stunned him again, preventing Odo from entering the lab.

Meanwhile, Terrell pushed Quark closer to the door.

Sisko instinctively recoiled as a huge strand of red energy unfurled from the opening upon the door and then lashed out at Terrell, who was saved at the last moment when Atrig leaped in front of her. This time, the Cardassian was struck by a tendril on his back and was hurled forward across the corridor, falling facedown on the deck, red energy snapping over the length of his body.

Then two more coils of energy darted out and Sisko saw Quark duck as they shot over him to strike the two Cardassians—the same two who would be found six years later, merged halfway into the DS9 hull.

Sisko and Garak watched as red light crept over the Cardassians' flailing forms as if it were alive and ingesting them. Then, like a whip being cracked, the coils snapped back to the door, and the bodies of the two Cardassians were pulled through solid metal.

Terrell's small phaser was now pressed against Quark's temple.

Sisko saw waves of indecision sweep over the Ferengi's face and could almost guess at his thoughts: Accept a clean death here? Or face whatever lay beyond that door that might be worse?

But as Sisko knew Quark must, the feisty Ferengi gathered up his courage, wrapped his head in his arms, ran straight at the door, and—

—disappeared.

“A remarkable display of character,” Garak commented. “I wonder

what convinced someone like Quark to make the attempt?”

Sisko didn't know. He accepted that he never might. Whatever had driven the Ferengi forward, though, Sisko knew it hadn't been cowardice.

“And now we wait?” Sisko asked Garak.

The Cardassian nodded. “There can't be much time remaining, but if we wish to know how Quark obtained the Orb, then wait we must.”

A moment later, though, the waiting was over for the versions of Odo and Garak who stood below in the corridor. Two more red coils whipped out from behind the door and pulled them both back into the realm of the red wormhole, even as Terrell finally gave up her vigil and shouted for her people to withdraw.

Sisko's eyes tracked the Cardassian scientist's retreat, not to return for six long years, abandoning her research and her lab. Without ever learning what now transpired behind its pulsing, glowing door.

Sisko's eyes remained fixed on the door.

He wondered if he would ever learn its secret.

And if so, who would tell him.

In a timeframe six years later, Quark awoke. And wished he hadn't. His head throbbed as if Morn was performing his favorite toe-tapping, crowd-pleasing Lurian fertility dance directly on Quark's skull.

He tried to get up, but something—someone—held him back. Someone behind him.

Quark groaned as he twisted his neck to look back over his shoulder.

Then he squeaked to see Dukat's unconscious form slumped behind him.

He and the mad Cardassian were tied together, back to back.

Quark lurched forward in his desire to get away, but his legs were tied together, too. He struggled to do more than squeak, but he was gagged.

He took a deep breath to quell his panic, forced his racing heart to settle down, exactly as Odo would undoubtedly instruct him. He looked around.

Wherever he was, the dim light was coming from a single fixture overhead. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the insubstantial light and then, with a start, he realized he knew where he was: tied up in his own storage locker under his own bar.

And from the sounds of the footsteps overhead, his bar was opening

up for business.

Quark's eyes widened. If whoever had hit him had placed the Red Orb in the hiding place where it belonged . . . He began to struggle against his bindings again. In only an hour, maybe two, he knew the red wormhole would open and the station would be destroyed, exactly as it had been before.

Except this time, he'd be trapped on it, bound and gagged and facing certain death with his only company a madman.

There was only one way out.

Even as Quark sent a silent entreaty to the Divine Nagus, he knew how utterly ridiculous he was being.

Yet what else could he do?

So he said the words he would never in a millennium have believed he would ever utter.

Squeaking full volume through his foul-tasting gag, Quark cried out: “Dukat! Dukat! You have to wake up!”

On the Defiant, Jake leaned with his back against the master console, arms folded, thinking about Mardah. Thinking about all the things he had left undone, the books unwritten, the secrets never shared.

“Still there?” Jadzia asked over the comm link.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Any word from my dad?”

“Not yet.” Jake could almost picture the Trill's smile as she spoke. “But you know your father, Jake. He likes to push his deadlines to the very last second.”

“Yeah. Maybe he'll surprise us.” Jake shook his head at his own words. A surprise was about the only thing that could save him now.

He twisted around to look at the time readout.

Nineteen minutes.

Jake turned back.

Just about time for the universe to end.

Again.