CHAPTER 25
“FIFTEEN MINUTES,” Garak said as he looked at his tricorder. “Ah, well. Perhaps there are some things we are not meant to know.”
“Five more minutes,” Sisko said. He had peeled off his ripped jacket in the close confines of the conduit. It was enervatingly hot in here. The air circulators were off-line, along with most of the other equipment on the station.
“It will take five minutes for us to reach the transporter in Ops,” Garak reminded him. “And then there will be two of us to beam out. Even for you, that is leaving precious little time.”
“Do you want to go ahead?” Sisko asked.
But Garak declined the offer. “What I might do, however, is move back to the Jefferies tube. I find the conduit is a bit . . . closed in for my liking.”
Sisko shifted out of the way and Garak crawled back to the Jefferies tube to which the conduit connected.
Quark, Odo, the past Garak, and the two Cardassian soldiers had been gone from the corridor outside Terrell's lab for almost ten minutes. If time in the red wormhole was nonlinear, anything could have happened by now, Sisko knew.
Then Garak called out in an urgent whisper, “Captain! Quickly!”
Sisko slid along the conduit to join Garak in the Jefferies tube.
“Quark!” the Cardassian whispered. He pointed ahead. “He just crawled through that intersection. And he was carrying the Orb!”
Sisko immediately began crawling down the tube with Garak following behind.
At the intersection, Sisko carefully looked around the corner, saw no trace of Quark, and pushed on.
After two more turns, it was clear where Quark was headed—his bar.
“This is it!” Sisko said to Garak. “Somehow, Quark got the Orb, and he's taking it up to hide in his bar, exactly where we'll find it six years from now!”
“Except,” Garak pointed out, “didn't you say someone else will steal it?”
“Not if we steal it first!” Sisko said decisively.
He was positive there was a chance his last desperate plan could work. If he could get the Orb from Quark. If he could take it into the future. And if he could then hide it again in Quark's bar just before he himself went to search for it after returning from Jeraddo. If he could make that chain of events work out, everything else would, too.
Sisko, with Garak still following, proceeded as quickly as he could through the tubes for one more deck, until he saw an open hatchway. He leaned forward to peer through it, just in time to see Quark hurrying along a corridor, Orb in hand.
Sisko jumped down after his quarry. Garak dropped in pursuit an instant later.
And then, two levels below the Promenade and what Sisko knew was Quark's final intended destination, everything changed.
Sisko charged around a corner to find Quark rolled up against a bulkhead, blood trickling from his mouth, completely unconscious.
And the Red Orb of Jalbador was gone.
“No,” Sisko gasped, leaning forward, hands on knees, breathless from the long pursuit. “How could it have been stolen already?”
“Unless it was stolen to begin with,” Garak said, wheezing slightly as he arrived at Sisko's side a moment later.
“But how?”
“This might not be the time to explore that question, Captain. We have barely enough time to reach the transporter, let alone—”
“GET THE FERENGI!”
At the far end of the corridor, a group of Cardassian soldiers had appeared and now began running forward, eager to complete the lynching that had almost occurred on the Promenade.
“We can't leave him!” Sisko said.
“Captain! We know he survived this day!”
“No one could survive this!” Sisko cried as he swept up Quark's limp body and began to run back the way he had come.
“You're going the wrong way!” Garak called after him.
But Sisko didn't stop.
He had finally accepted that there was only one thing left that he could do.
What Kira had told him to do from the start.
Trust in the Prophets.