CHAPTER 26

WITH ONLY eight minutes remaining, Sisko finally stopped in front of the door to Terrell's lab. His chest heaved. His lungs burned with each breath. Quark's body was a dead weight in his arms.

But the door to Terrell's abandoned lab still glowed faintly with the power of the Orb.

The power of the Temple.

Garak stumbled to a stop beside him. “You . . . can't be . . . serious,” he gasped.

“They entice corporeal beings by offering them what they want most,” Sisko said. He shifted Quark's body once again. “I know what I want most. What about you, Garak?”

Garak's weary smile brightened with his understanding. “By all means, then. May I?” He held his hand over the doorplate.

Sisko nodded. Without the Orb, they would have to enter the lab just as Jake and Nog had, not by passing through the door but by opening it.

“If it is an illusion that we find,” Sisko said, “you can get us out, can't you?”

Garak cocked his head to one side, looking intrigued by the possibility. “Assuming there is someplace else to go, I believe I am well versed in the techniques Dukat used.”

“Good enough,” Sisko said.

The door opened.

Sisko stepped through it with Quark in his arms.

Thinking only of what he wanted most—

“Captain!” Odo shouted.

Sisko spun around to see that he was exactly where he had wanted to be.

Deep Space 9.

In Quark's bar.

Surrounded by all the rescued crew and passengers with whom he had traveled through time.

Almost all.

Odo stepped forward to take Quark's unconscious body from him.

Then Sisko saw Worf on a stretcher, badly injured.

He saw Jadzia seated at a table far off in the back, working intently at a communications terminal.

“What timeframe is this?” Sisko asked.

Then Garak appeared beside him.

Sisko looked but could detect no obvious portal or distortion that might indicate a wormhole or its precursor field. He and Garak had simply both materialized in the center of the bar's main room.

“We're about ten minutes after the station was destroyed,” Bashir explained quickly. “And in about two minutes, we'll be swept back to just about ten minutes before.”

“The evacuation is about to get under way back there,” Odo said. “We've got a chance.”

Sisko didn't know how that could be possible. He didn't understand how the timeline could continue unchanged. Not without the presence of the stolen Red Orb. But he had an even more important question to ask them all. “Where's Jake?”

Bashir's expression was not reassuring. “He's still on the Defiant,” the doctor said. “It's Arla . . . she's been infected by Grigari nanites, and she's a follower of Weyoun now. She won't drop the shields to let us beam Jake off.”

Bashir led Sisko to Jadzia, who looked up at him with surprise. “Jake!” she said excitedly. “Your father's here!”

“Dad!”

Sisko felt a heartrending surge of joy tinged with sorrow as he heard his son's voice crackle from the small device on Jadzia's table.

“Jake! It's going to be okay. We'll get you off the ship!”

Sisko saw Jadzia's silent shake of her head, but he couldn't—he refused to—believe there was no hope. Not when he could hear his son. And his son could hear him.

“We'll get you off the ship!” Sisko said again. There had to be a way, and he would find it.

Then Weyoun's voice obnoxiously intruded. “Oh, Benjamin, you shouldn't lie to your son.”

“You can stop this, Weyoun!” Sisko said. “Tell Arla to drop the shields!”

“Why?” Weyoun asked. “So the pain of life can continue forever?”

“No!” Sisko exploded. “So the joy of life can continue! You were alive once! You know what—”

“I assure you, I am alive now as well,” Weyoun coolly interrupted.

“Are you?” Sisko demanded. “Remember when I hit you, Weyoun? I broke your nose! And now it's perfectly restored, isn't it? Rebuilt by those damned nanites. They're in you, Weyoun. They're making you forget what it even means to be alive. They've programmed you just the way your Founders did! They've turned you into a soulless machine, and that's what wants this universe to end!”

“Coming up on ninety seconds!” someone in the bar called out. The earnest young voice sounded like Ensign Simons.

Jadzia lifted the communications device under one arm. Sisko held out his hand for it—it was his only contact with his son. But instead, the Trill held out her other hand to him. “We have to link hands, Benjamin,” she said. “It's the only way we can overcome the temporal inertia or whatever it is that kept Weyoun and Dukat and everyone they touched locked in a specific timeframe.”

Jadzia took his hand in hers when Sisko made no motion of his own. “We'll come back to this timeframe at least once more,” she said softly. “I promise you'll be able to talk to Jake again.”

Sisko heard the unspoken words at the end of her sentence. He'd be able to talk to his son one last time.

“All right, everyone,” Odo shouted. “It's going to be getting dark on the other side. Lots of confusion. Stay to the back wall and out of sight so we don't interfere with anything!”

In a daze, Sisko saw all the temporal refugees in the bar begin to move to the back wall of the bar's main room. Jadzia used her grip on his hand to move him in the same direction, to join the others.

“Why's Odo saying that?” Sisko asked in sudden alarm. “We have to be evacuated on the other side. Before the station's destroyed.”

“No, sir,” O'Brien answered as he hurried over to join Sisko and Jadzia. “Dax and I, we've worked out the equations. If we leave the station too soon, all bets are off. Our one chance to not create an alternate timeline is to reenter our own timeframe at the exact moment the wormhole fully opens.”

“Is that even possible?” Sisko asked. He saw the way Jadzia and O'Brien looked at each other. It meant they both had their doubts.

“I'm going to have to blow the station's reactors,” O'Brien gruffly admitted. “A full explosive overload.”

“What?”

“For what it's worth, Benjamin,” Jadzia pointed out, “the force of the explosion might have been what threw the Defiant into the future in the first place. I did the calculations, and between the wormhole opening and Terrell's ship firing at us, there wasn't enough energy hitting our ship to put us into a slingshot around the wormhole's mouth.”

“But what will blowing the reactors do to this part of the station?” Sisko asked.

“This part of the station's destroyed anyway,” O'Brien said. “We all saw it implode. But if the next time we come back to this timeframe after the station's destruction—if we can run up to Ops so when we switch back, it'll be completely evacuated—and if I can blow the reactors then, with any luck, all the airtight doors will seal, and the whole Ops module will pop free of the wormhole.”

“That's a lot of ifs, Chief,” Sisko said.

“It's all we've got, sir. Short of setting off a trilithium planetbuster outside the habitat ring.”

“Ten seconds!” Odo shouted. “Everyone link arms!”

Sisko stood, arm in arm with Jadzia and Kira against the back wall with the others, linked arms with them, and was suddenly blinded by a flash of blue light.

But when the flash faded, full visibility did not return as it had so many times before.

Instead, like everyone else, Sisko staggered to one side in the skewed gravity field. Staring in disbelief at the three floating Orbs of Jalbador, now in perfect alignment. They were suspended in midair, just a meter or so above the deck, spinning and glowing, each just like an Orb of the Prophets, except that the energy they shed was the hellish hue of blood and fire.

“But the third Orb was stolen!” Sisko said.

“I don't know how it got back,” Kira told him, almost yelling to be heard over the wail of the pressure alarms, “but the last time we were in this timeframe, we were watching from upstairs, and we saw you find it again. Right behind the mural.”

Now, just as Sisko had witnessed six years in the past outside the door to Terrell's secret lab, coiled tendrils of red energy began to unfurl. This time, they curled away from each Orb to link up with tendrils sent forth from the others, until they merged and defined an equilateral triangle of shimmering crimson light.

And in the middle of that formation, a distortion was growing.

The doorway to the Second Temple.

And to DS9's destruction.

To Sisko's profound amazement, everything was as it was before. It was as if all the actions he and the others had taken in the past had had no effect on the present. Unless, as Garak had said, what had happened in the past was what had always happened in the past. What was supposed to have happened.

On the other side of the room, Sisko observed the O'Brien of this timeframe try to touch an Orb, only to be thrown back in a flash of red lightning.

He observed the growing wind generated by whatever dimensional forces the Orbs were unleashing that blew at the other Jadzia's hair as she tried to take readings with her tricorder.

He heard that other Jadzia shout, “We've got intensive neutrino flux! A definite wormhole precursor!”

And then Sisko was electrified to hear his own voice shout back, “Here?!”

There was a flash of phaser fire as someone tried to disrupt an Orb but was disintegrated by his own beam's precise return.

Then Kai Winn and Kira appeared in the entrance to the bar, astonishment stretching their mouths open wide even as the howling wind attempted to drive the women back.

Sisko watched, mesmerized, as these earlier versions of himself and his crew began to withdraw.

And then he remembered . . .

“Chief!” Sisko shouted to the O'Brien of his own timeframe. “You wanted to shut down the reactors! To cut off the power you thought the Orbs were using!”

Sisko saw the sudden fear that struck his engineer. “But if I do that, I won't be able to set them to overload!”

Sisko knew there was no more time to waste.

He ran away from the others, away from the back wall, skirting the glowing triangle of light to race out onto the Promenade, just as the power grid failed and the station was plunged into darkness.

This is it! Sisko thought. This was when O'Brien made his suggestion to shut down the reactors.

And in the halflight, Sisko turned, remembering he himself was just about to give that order, until . . .

The Sisko who had survived his journey into the future ran up to the Sisko who had yet to depart, pushed the Quark of the past to the side, and with all his strength punched himself as hard as he could.

Even as his past self fell to the deck, Sisko took command.

“Abandon station!” he cried out, exactly as he remembered hearing

himself say so many days, so many years, so many millennia ago. “Chief! Jadzia! Pass the order on to abandon station!”

He checked on himself on the deck, saw himself rubbing his jaw, beginning to get up. He remembered how he felt momentarily confused at the time. As if he had missed out on something important.

He heard O'Brien of the past urgently call out a question. “What about the reactors?”

“Now, Chief!”

The Sisko of the future saw that his order had just the same effect on O'Brien now, as he remembered. A moment later, the station's siren wailed with two long bursts, two short. Over and over.

The order to abandon station.

Sisko watched, fascinated, as his past self got to his feet, looked around in confusion and then tapped at his combadge to issue more orders.

At the time, Sisko remembered, he hadn't known who had given the order to abandon the station, but he had assumed it was in response to something that had happened when he had been hit and half-conscious. So he had not countermanded it.

The Sisko of the future ran back into Quark's bar, felt the floor already beginning to buckle, evaded the debris that was flying everywhere.

He ducked bouncing chairs and rolling tables, went charging for the back wall, reaching out his hand to grab Kira's as—

A red light flashed over him, and he was back in a silent restored version of Quark's bar.

The sudden calm was jarring to Sisko, almost physical.

“We're eight minutes past the destruction of the station!” O'Brien shouted. “Everyone up to Ops!”

Sisko watched in confusion as the others began to run past him, out of the bar. He didn't understand. “Why is the station restored in here? Why aren't we floating in imploded debris?”

“I wondered the same thing,” Odo told him as he hurried past to join the others. “Even Vic is operational in this version of the station. I met him walking around the Promenade.”

Sisko decided to think about the implications of that later. It was time to run. Time to try Jadzia's and O'Brien's last-ditch plan to return them all to their timeline.

And then Jake's voice called out to him from Jadzia's communicator.

“Dad! I know what to do! I know what to do!”

Jadzia stopped so Sisko could speak to his son.

“Are the shields down?” Sisko asked him.

“No—Arla's not saying anything. But I can save the station!”

“What? How?”

“By blowing up the Defiant.”

Sisko's blood turned to ice. “No!”

“Dad, it'll work. All I have to do is cut the power to the magnetic bottles, release the matter and antimatter, and, according to the computer, the explosion will have enough force to create a subspace compression wave.”

“There is no subspace in the wormhole,” Sisko said.

“I know!” Jake answered. “But the explosion will create it, and that's what'll push the station free.”

“You will not blow up the Defiant!” Sisko raged. “That is an order!”

“Dad, the channel was open. I heard what you were talking about with O'Brien. The reactors. The planetbuster. I worked it out with the computer. Tell him, Dax.”

Sisko looked at his friend in sudden hope, but she had none to give him. “He's right, Benjamin. A subspace bubble generated by the Defiant would be enough to push us from the station, with far less risk than overloading the station's reactors.”

“Less risk?” Sisko cried. “What about my son?”

“Dad! I'm trapped here! In seven minutes, I won't exist!”

“I'll get you out!” Sisko promised, pleaded.

“Dad, please. Let me help!”

“Don't, Jake . . .”

“Dad, I have to. I know . . . I know you'd do it for me . . .”

Tears burned Sisko's eyes.

He had raised his son too well.

“I love you, Dad . . .”

“Jake . . . I love you . . .”

Sisko swayed on his feet. He couldn't go on. He just couldn't believe that after all he and everyone he loved and cared about had been through, after he had trusted in the Prophets to deliver him and his people and his universe, that this would be the price they would demand.

“Benjamin,” Jadzia urged as she tugged on his arm. “We have to go.”

Sisko let his friend guide him to safety.

But what did it matter that a universe was saved, if the cost was the life of his son?

In the engineering room of the Defiant, Jake finally felt at peace.

This was something he could do. Something that would matter.

He touched the command lines that would make the computer think the ship's matter-antimatter fuel had been vented—one of O'Brien's tricks for interfering with a starship's operational readiness.

Then he activated the commands that would permit him to order a powerdown of the magnetic coils—the ones that generated the containment fields in which the matter and antimatter were stored.

Three seconds after he entered that command, the ship would explode. But the timing had to be precisely right.

Jake watched the countdown on the console. Three timeframes gradually coming into phase, only a few seconds off right now.

He was surprised at how good he felt.

He thought of his father.

He was proud to be Ben Sisko's son.

Sisko lost track of timeframes and elapsed time and whether the light that flashed over him was blue or red.

Because nothing mattered anymore.

It was all confusion anyway.

And then he was in Ops with all the others.

A perfect Ops, with gravity level and restored.

“Thirty seconds,” Odo said.

Everyone joined hands.

Almost everyone. Three Bajorans had died on the Boreth. Two Denevan technicians on the Defiant. Vash had escaped to the past. Quark had simply vanished, leaving his past self alone.

And Jake—Jake was somewhere beyond time and space.

In the hands of the Prophets.

“Fifteen seconds,” Odo said.

Jadzia squeezed Sisko's hand.

“This will be the final transfer,” she told him. “We'll be switching

to a timeframe about five seconds before the station was destroyed. We'll actually be on the station as it falls into the red wormhole. And then, just before the wormhole closes, just as the Defiant of that time is attacked by Terrell's ship, the subspace bubble will push us out again.”

And Jake will die, Sisko thought, remembering the accusations he had hurled at Weyoun. Now he felt like a soulless machine himself, beyond all care, beyond emotion.

“Five seconds,” Odo intoned. “Four . . . three . . . two . . .”

The flash was blue, and when it faded, the others cried out in terror

as they toppled to the side, the gravity more off-balance than it had ever been before.

Every alarm in Ops was screaming. Distant explosions echoed through the deck. Consoles exploded in sparks and flame.

And then a red glow infused everything in Sisko's field of vision, as if the very air had combusted.

“We've entered the wormhole,” O'Brien shouted.

Jake, Sisko thought—one final time.

And then he was in—

—the light space.

“What happened?” the Sisko asks.

He is by the reflecting pool in the meditation garden.

“What happens,” Kai Opaka corrects him. She smiles at him as she reaches for his ear.

“No,” the Sisko says. “This isn't right. This isn't what was supposed to be.”

Captain Picard turns away from the table in the conference room of the Enterprise. Behind him, Bajor is resplendent in full sunlight, a world reborn. “Supposed?” Picard asks.

“I trusted in you!” the Sisko laments.

He falls to his knees in the ruins of B'hala. “I trusted in you.”

“You always trust in us,” Opaka says.

The Sisko looks up at her, and even on the Promenade as it is on the first day he sets foot on it, he feels the tears run down his face.

Not the tears of the Prophets.

His tears.

The tears of a father.

“I hate you,” the Sisko says.

His own father stands behind him in the kitchen of the restaurant in New Orleans, holding the Sisko's hand in his as he guides the whisk through the eggs that swirl like galaxies.

“Hate? What is this?” the Sisko's father asks.

The Sisko stands behind Jake in his own kitchen in his apartment in San Francisco, Jennifer looking on as the Sisko holds his son's hand in his as he guides the whisk through the eggs that swirl like galaxies.

“No . . . ,” the Sisko says. “This isn't fair . . .”

“Yes,” Opaka tells him. “It is.”

The Sisko walks the paths of the Academy as a student.

“Just as there is no time—” Boothby says.

The Sisko is under the stars of Earth, outside the tent in Yosemite, cradling Jennifer in his arms the night Jake is conceived.

“—there is no hate,” Jennifer says.

The Sisko stands on the deck of the Saratoga as it burns.

“But there is death!”

Prylar Rulan bows his head outside the Temple on the Promenade. “Another time.”

“Not another time,” the Sisko says. “This time! This time Jake died! Not because of time! Not because of anything at all except for you!”

The Sisko expects to be taken to the light space, where he is always taken when his emotions overwhelm the Prophets.

Instead, he is on the pitcher's mound in Ebbets Field.

The Sisko does not understand.

“You brought me here?”

“We always bring you here,” Jackie Robinson says.

The Sisko looks around the perfect field, inhales the rich scent of the grass, hears the growing tumult of the crowd.

They are on their feet, cheering. He hears a cowbell ringing in the outfield stand, a ragtag band plays Dixieland off-key.

The Sisko turns again, sees the scoreboard.

“Someone pitched a no-hitter,” the Sisko says.

He looks at the baseball in his hand. The Prophets, for once, do not correct his incorrect use of tense.

“I don't understand,” the Sisko says.

“You throw the ball,” Picard says.

“They hit the ball,” Opaka says.

Twelve-year-old Jake points to the scoreboard again. “This is what happens.”

Sisko turns back to the board, reads it carefully.

“The home team won?” he says.

The Sisko is in the Wardroom on Deep Space 9.

“The war ends,” Locutus says.

The Sisko is in Vic's.

“You threw the ball, pallie. Heckuva game.”

The Sisko stands on the bridge of the first Enterprise, a glimmer of understanding beginning to grow in him.

“The War of the Prophets,” he says. “You won.”

Captain Kirk turns in his command chair, holds out his hands. “We always win, Lieutenant.”

The Sisko hangs his head, in the ruins of B'hala, alone.

“But I have lost,” he says.

He grimaces as Opaka's thumb and finger squeeze his earlobe, feel his pagh.

“What is this?” she asks.

In the light space, the Sisko hears the answer to the question she has asked.

The voice is Jake's, but the boy cannot be seen.

“It is, quite simply, your journey, Dad, the one you've always been destined to take.”

“What is this?” the Sisko asks.

And the Prophets answer as they always do.