Rom giggled as his brother stomped off with a curse, then recovered himself.
"Uh, maybe Weyoun will claim that he interceded with the Prophets on behalf of
the people of the universe," he said. "That way, he can take credit for...
saving us all."
O'Brien nodded. "That makes sense, Rom. The easiest disaster to prevent is the
one that could never happen. High priests and shamans have been doing it
forever—driving off the dragon that eats the moon, bringing summer back after
the solstice."
Odo was feeling buoyed by this revelation. Perhaps he would hold Kira's hand
again, mold his lips to hers once more. But still, he thought, surely there were
easier ways for Weyoun to gain the respect of the galaxy than to manufacture a
doomsday scenario that could be disproved by a few lines of mathematics.
"Are you certain there's no way to move 'negative' matter?" he asked O'Brien.
The chief engineer was adamant. "The wormholes are fixed in the space-time
metric, Odo, like rocks in cement. Nothing's going to move them. It just won't
work."
"Well, then," Odo said with new enthusiasm, "we'd better start thinking what
we'd like for dinner tonight."
"There's nothing like an idiot's death," Quark muttered from his corner. "Happy
to the end."
Odo walked over to the barred window, felt the warning tingle of the inhibitor
field. He looked out at the blazing sun. He wondered if Kira was looking at it,
too. He wished he could reassure her that there was nothing to worry about,
after all. But Weyoun had been keeping both Kira and Arla with Sisko.
Odo turned away from the window. "I wonder when our jailers will come back," he
said to O'Brien. The Bajoran guards that had been posted for them had not
arrived this morning. Even the loathsome Grigari were gone.
"I wonder when you'll face the inevitable," Quark snapped.
Odo had just about had it with the Ferengi. 'Trust in physics, Quark."
"Ha!" Quark exclaimed. "If I trusted in physics I'd be paying out twice as many
dabos and—" He shut his mouth with an audible smack. "Forget I said that." He
turned away, face as red as his brother's.
In fact, Odo noticed even O'Brien was more flushed than usual. "Are you all
right, Chief?"
"I could use a nice cold beer," O'Brien said with a weary grin. He moved to the
window and held up a hand next to it. "That's odd. The breeze doesn't feel all
that hot."
3f> "Because it's the wall," Rom said.
Odo and O'Brien shared the same puzzled reaction, and stared at the wall Rom
pointed to. It was made of typical B'hala building stones, half a meter square,
badly eroded, set without mortar. The only thing beyond it was the outside.
But as Odo watched, the stone wall seemed to waver, as if seen through a raging
fire.
"Stand back," Odo cautioned.
O'Brien, Rom, and Odo began retreating from the rippling wall, not taking their
eyes off it.
"Here it comes," Quark sniped from his corner position where the rippling wall
met the far wall. "Reality's dissolving. I'd say I told you so but what would be
the point?"
ii Odo motioned to the Ferengi. "I'd get over here if I were you, Quark."
But Quark didn't budge. "If I were you," he said, mimicking Odo's way of
speaking. "You know what I've always wanted to say to you, Odo?" he announced.
"No," Odo told him.
The rippling wall resembled liquid now, and an oval shape was forming in its
center as the heat in the cell air increased.
Quark cleared his throat. "I've always wanted to say, Why don't you turn
yourself into a two-pronged Man-dorian gutter snail and go—"
A high-pitched squeal rang out as the liquid-like wall exploded inward with a
flash of near-bunding red light Odo and Rom and O'Brien stumbled forward as a
rash of cool air blasted into the wall opening, kicking up a cloud of sand from
the floor and sucking the bunk, the buckets, and Quark all in the same
direction.
And then, without warning, the wind ended. The bunks and the buckets and Quark
stopped moving.
The sand on the floor lay as still and undisturbed as if in a vacuum.
"That was the end of the universe?" he crowed, hopping on one foot to shake the
sand from his ears. "After all that buildup?"
This time not even Odo bothered to tell Quark to shut up.
Because Odo saw through the opening in the wall that someone else was about to
join them.
A humanoid shape was walking toward them from a dark room that Odo knew was not
beyond the shattered wall.
The stench of putrefaction swept into the small cell and infected every molecule
of air. O'Brien gagged, Rom whimpered, and Quark protested in disgust.
Then Odo saw a pair of glowing red eyes just like Weyoun's.
"Oh,frinx," Quark said. "Not another one."
"No," a deep voice answered. "Not another one. The first one."
Odo stepped back as Dukat entered the cell. But the Cardassian's eyes were
normal and he was normal, except for the soiled robes he wore and his halo of
wild dead-white hair.
"My dear, dear friends," he said. "How good to see you once again."
"How did you get here?" Odo asked Dukat. He had seen enough strange things in
this future to not waste time questioning them.
I
Dukat held up a silver cylinder a bit larger than Weyoun's inhibitor, and
looked at it lovingly. "A multidimensional transporter device. A toy, really."
O'Brien stared at Dukat. "The Mirror Universe?"
Dukat lowered the cylinder. "And like all mirrors, what it contains is only a
reflection. So when this universe ends, so shall it."
"But this universe isn't ending," O'Brien argued. "The wormholes won't open
close enough to each other. And there's no way they can be moved."
Dukat looked at O'Brien as if the Chief were no more than a babbling child.
"Miles, that's not very imaginative of you. Of course the wormhole entrances
can't be moved through space. But what if space were moved. What you might even
call a warp." ? "Dear God," O'Brien said. "Rom, they're going to change the
space-time metric."
"Great River," Rom squeaked. "There's only one way to do that."
"I knew it," Quark added. "Um, whatever it is."
"But you have a way out, don't you, Dukat?" Odo said. He for one was not willing
to give up just yet.
Dukat beamed. "Odo... I always knew there was a reason why I liked you." He held
out his hand. "And there is exactly that. A way out. A way to escape the
destruction of everything. And all I ask is for one small favor in return..."
Odo stared at Dukat's hand as if it were a gray-scaled snake poised to strike.
He looked up at Dukat's eyes—at Weyoun's eyes—saw the red sparks ignite.
The universe had thirty minutes left.
It was not as if they had a choice.
CHAPTER 27
they were all on the battle bridge now: Captain Nog, Admiral Picard, Vash, Jake,
and the thirteen other temporal refugees.
"Computer," Nog said. "Go to long-range transfactor sensors. Image
Bajor
-B'hava'el.
Bashir observed the computer navigation graphic vanish from the main viewer, to
be replaced by a realtime representation of Bajor's sun. He noted a small solar
flare frozen in a graceful arc from its northwestern hemisphere, and a string
of small sunspots scattered at its equator. As far as he could tell, it was to
all appearances a typical type-O star, securely hi the middle of the mam
sequence.
"What's the time lag with this system?" Jadzia asked.
"With transfactor imaging at this distance? We're seeing the sun as it existed
less than half a second ago." Nog's hand moved through a holographic control
panel
and a spectrographic display of the sun appeared at the bottom of the viewer.
Even Bashir was able to see that there were no anomalies present.
"You're sure about this?" Jadzia asked. "Stars don't get much more stable than
that."
Bashir could tell the Trill was worried, and about more than Nog's planned
maneuver. Jadzia's spotting stood out in high contrast to her pale, drawn face,
and the reason for her concern was standing beside her: Worf, his shoulders
rounded, restricted by the pressure bandages the holographic medical team had
applied to his disruptor wounds. The problem was that this ship had no medical
equipment set for Klingon physiology, and what would have required a simple
fifteen-minute treatment in Bashir's infirmary on DS9 had become a week-long
ordeal of daily bandage-changings and the constant threat of infection. Jadzia
was clearly worried that in his weakened condition Worf might not survive what
Nog had in mind. And Bashir had been unable to say much to reassure her. As
Vash had earlier pointed out, there were just too many things that could go
wrong.
But Nog was a study in confidence. "I'm positive," the Ferengi answered. Then he
adjusted more holographic controls, until the image of Bajor's sun shrank to
the upper-right-hand corner of the viewer and a new image window opened. Now
they were looking at a closeup of the Phoenix's twenty-five-thousand-year-old
dedication plate recovered by the Romulans. "Look at the atomic tracings," he
said.
Thin lines of artificial color appeared over the plaque. Most of the lines were
dead straight. A very few, Bashir noticed, curved and looped like the trail of
subatomic particles in a child's cloud chamber.
"Read the isotope numbers, too," Nog urged Jadzia. "And the energy matrix."
This was a more difficult piece of evidence for Bashir to understand. But from
what Nog had already told them, it apparently showed incontrovertible evidence
that the plaque had been in close proximity to a supernova. In addition, Nog
said, to having been subjected to an intense burst of chronometric particles,
which suggested it had traveled along a temporal slingshot trajectory.
Furthermore, the Ferengi maintained, the distinctive mix of elements and
isotopes that had left their trails through the plaque's metal structure were an
exact match for Bajor-B'hava'el—a sun that should not be at risk for even a
simple nova reaction for more than a billion years.
Which apparently left room for only one conclusion.
The Ascendancy was going to deliberately trigger the sun's explosion.
And the reason was, again according to Nog, perfectly logical: When the two
wormholes opened at their closest approach to each other—something which would
happen in just over fifteen minutes, relative time—the portals would be too
far away from each other to interact.
The supernova detonation of Bajor's sun, however, provided it was properly
timed, would create a high-density, faster-than-light subspace pressure wave.
And that pressure wave would be followed minutes later by a near-light-speed
physical wall of superheated gas thrown off from the surface of the collapsing
sun.
As far as Bashir had been able to understand from Nog's explanation, the
combined effect of the two near-simultaneous concussions in real space and
subspace— when added to the gravity waves generated by the sudden disappearance
of the Bajoran gravity well
around which the wormholes orbited—would actually cause the underlying structure
of space-time to warp.
Nog told them that the effect would be a natural version of what a Cochrane
engine did on an ongoing and far more focused basis in every Starship that had
ever flown. And then the Ferengi had shown the math to Jadzia that described an
incredible event. For approximately four seconds, the space between the two
wormhole openings would relativistically decrease from almost five hundred
kilometers to less than five hundred meters.
And, Nog insisted, there was nothing in the universe that could keep the two
wormholes apart at that distance.
Thus would the Ascendancy end the universe.
"Commander Dax," the Ferengi captain said with finality. "Like it or not, we're
running out of time. We'll be at our first insertion point in ... seven
minutes."
"Are you certain you don't want to attempt to place the deep-time charges?"
Jadzia asked.
"If we had planted them, they would have detonated by now," Nog said. "There's
only one more thing we can do."
Bashir could see that Jadzia's concern was now shared by everyone else who would
be beaming from the Phoenix at... at transfactor twelve, whatever that meant in
recalibrated warp factors.
And with Nog claiming that modern transporters could handle the task by using
something called "mi-cropacket-burst-transmission," who among the temporal
refugees from the past could argue with something so incomprehensible? Certainly
he himself couldn't, Bashir thought.
Nog turned from the viewer to address his apprehensive passengers. 'Trust in
the River," he said. "It might
not take you where you want to go, but have faith that it will always take you
where you need to go. Good profits to you all. Now please report to your
assigned transporter pads."
Having faced death many times on this strange journey, Bashir himself felt
rather unconcerned about soon facing it again. Besides, if anything went wrong
with Nog's plan in the past, he and all the others simply wouldn't exist. So
they wouldn't even be dead.
As the others left the battle bridge he approached Nog, who was in the middle of
saying his farewell to Jake, at least that's what it seemed to Bashir that the
Ferengi was doing. What he overheard of their exchange did not make much sense
to him.
"Remember," Nog warned his friend, "don't tell 'me.'"
Jake's answering smile was rather mournful, Bashir thought "But I'll make sure
you get all the girls," Jake said. "Fully clothed."
As Jake stepped back, he bumped into Bashir, awkwardly pinning Vash between the
two of them.
"Don't look so glum, boys," she said, separating them with a playful push. "This
is going to work. I know it" The archaeologist manifested none of the
nervousness possessing everyone else.
"How can you be so sure?" Bashir asked her, curious, and rather envious of her
upbeat, invigor
ated mood.
She winked at him. "Let's just say I've seen how the River flowed."
Bashir frowned at her. What did she mean? Had Vash learned something—about the
past? Frustratingly, there was however no time left for questions—no time even
to express his regret that he and she had not had the opportunity to follow up
on the promise of that kiss they had shared on the Augustus. More than anything
else— if only to bring completion to his time with her— Bashir wished he could
kiss Vash again.
The woman was a mind reader. But it seemed she had read the wrong mind. She
pushed past Bashir to grab Jake's face between her hands and kissed Jake with a
passion that could have melted duranium.
When she released him, Jake looked dizzy, and shocked, and pleased—incredibly
pleased—all at the same time. And incapable of coherent speech. Horridly
jealous, Bashir felt a hundred years old. He remembered feeling that way
himself. And hoped he would again.
"You know," Bashir heard Vash say to Jake, "people are going to tell you that
you always remember your first love."
Jake nodded silently, still dazed.
"But you know what the truth is?' Vash didn't wait for an answer. "The truth is,
the one you really never forget is your best love."
Then she looked past Jake at Bashir, who felt his heart skip a beat. But then he
too was dismissed by her gaze, which now settled on another: Admiral Picard,
sheltered in his command chair.
Vash flicked her finger under Jake's nose. "And what I want you to remember is
your twenty-fifth birthday. I'm buying."
"Okay," Jake mumbled hoarsely, "I'll be there."
Then Jake left, and Bashir felt uncomfortable staying in Vash's presence without
him. He crossed quickly to Picard's side, unwilling to leave without one last
chance to speak to the living legend.
"Dr. Bashir!" Picard said as Bashir approached his chair.
Bashir was startled at Picard's recognition of him. Through most of his time on
the Phoenix, the admiral had thought he was someone called Wesley.
"You remember me," Bashir said, pleased, as he shook the admiral's hand.
"How could I forget? Between you and Admiral McCoy, I lived hi constant fear
that my wife was going to leave me for either one of her heroes. She was a
doctor, too, you know."
"I didn't know you had married," Bashir said.