IN THE SMALL, low-ceilinged briefing room on the Boreth’s main cargo deck, Elim Garak read the sensor-log identification screen on the main wall-viewer, and felt nothing.
He didn’t have to be paranoid to know that he and the seventeen other crew and passengers removed from the Defiant were under close observation. But from what he had already deduced about the state of this time period in general, and of the Bajoran Ascendancy in particular, being paranoid would stand him in good stead.
The large irregularly shaped Klingon viewscreen on the far bulkhead flickered once, then displayed an image of Deep Space 9 as it had existed on stardate 51889.4, as seen from the vantage point of the U.S.S. Garneau. The Garneau was—or had been—one of two Akira-class Starfleet vessels dispatched when the station’s computers had fallen victim to some rather clever, if disruptive, Bynar codes inserted by two vicious Andorian sisters intent on obtaining the Red Orbs of Jalbador.
At the time, as he had helped Jadzia Dax eliminate the codes from Deep Space 9’s Cardassian computer components, he had been impressed by the meddlesome Andorians’ audacity—though given the results of their endeavors and how they had affected him personally, he would happily eviscerate them now, very slowly.
On the viewscreen, the image of Deep Space 9 grew as the Garneau closed in. This moment of calm before the inevitable temporal storm to come gave Garak the chance to admire once again the stately sweep of the Cardassian docking towers and the profound balance in the proportions of its rings to its central core. To his trained eye, the station was an exquisitely compelling sculpture, majestically framed against the subtly shifting energy cascades of the Denorios Belt, and it spoke to him of his long-lost home.
None of this would he reveal to others, of course. Instead, keeping his expression deliberately blank, he checked the timecode running at the bottom of the image. In terms of his own relative perceptions—and what other perceptions could there be that were as important?—the time it indicated was barely a day ago. He had been in Ops at that moment, still working on the computer though curious about what was going on in Quark’s, where so many others of the station’s personnel had congregated.
Not that he would admit to being curious, either. Far better to be aloof, he knew. Far better to be unconcerned. Far better to be so unremarkable and innocuous that the passing crowd could do nothing but ignore him.
At last, something happened in the recording. A faint red glow pulsed through three or four of the observation portals ringing the Promenade level. Garak decided that must have been the moment when the three Red Orbs of Jalbador were brought into alignment in the Ferengi’s bar, beginning the process of opening the second wormhole in Bajoran space—and in the middle of Deep Space 9.
The alignment had been quite a sight—or so he had been told by one of his fellow passengers, Rom to be precise. The lumpish but loquacious Ferengi repair technician had described how the three hourglass-shaped orbs, indistinguishable from the better-known Orbs of the Prophets—except for their crimson color—had levitated, as if under their own control, until they had described the vertices of an equilateral triangle. Suspended in midair less than two meters above the floor of the bar, they had proved impossible to budge.
Garak sighed as if stifling a yawn. But inwardly he was anything but bored. No wonder dear, sweet Leej Terrell had been so eager to obtain the Orbs for herself—and for Cardassia. The Cardassian scientist had been his lover once, his nemesis many times, and was one of a scattered and secretive handful of highly skilled and exceedingly ruthless operatives who had survived the Dominion’s obliteration of the Obsidian Order.
With the three Red Orbs in hand, Garak had no doubt that Terrell had believed she would have the secret to creating a translocatable wormhole. If anything could break Cardassia free of its devil’s bargain with the Dominion, the ability to open a wormhole connecting any two points in space would be the ultimate deal-breaker. No planetary defense force would be able to stop a Cardassian fleet that could launch from the homeworld and within seconds appear in the atmosphere of the enemy’s home. Terrell’s trio of orbs and that second wormhole would be the key to a Pax Cardassia, bringing order to a troubled galaxy.
But at the same time as Garak fully supported Terrell’s passion for freedom and admired her patriotism for Cardassia’s sake, he also secretly hoped for his own sake that this sensor log would show her vessel’s destruction. In detail.
On the viewscreen, the red emanations in the Promenade’s observation portals had become a constant glow, slowly increasing in brightness. Garak noted a handful of escape pods already breaking free of the habitat rings. Then, almost obscured by a docking tower, the Defiant released her docking clamps and began to slip back from the station, moving out of the optical sensor’s field of vision.
It was just about now, Garak realized, that he had been unexpectedly beamed from Ops into the confusion of the Defiant, then roughly pushed out the door and toward the mess hall. And he could see that the timing of his rescue had been perfect.
Because now on the viewscreen, the red glow had infected a full quadrant of the Promenade module. Silent explosions ran along a docking pylon. And then, the habitat ring began to bend like a wheel warping out of true, as if an immense gravitational well had formed in Quark’s.
As it had.
Garak continued to watch events unfold without displaying the slightest interest in or outrage at what transpired next. More escape pods shot free of the station, only to be drawn back to disappear into the opening maw of the red-tinged wormhole.
Like the mouth of the human hell, Garak thought. How fitting. How poetic.
And then, faster than the sensor log had been able to record, the image of Deep Space 9 shrank and was gone, replaced by what could almost pass for the opening to the Bajoran wormhole. Except that that swirling mass of forces always seemed to have a blue cast to the energies it released, and this second wormhole was most definitely color-shifted to the red half of the visible-light spectrum.
Captain Sisko’s voice disrupted the silence in the briefing room. “That wasn’t how we experienced the station’s collapse.”
Sisko, Major Kira, and Commander Arla were seated up front in the first row of hard Klingon chairs, to which they had been escorted by Romulan security guards only moments before the briefing began. Garak could understand why the captain of the Defiant had been separated from the other passengers and crew when they had been beamed to the Boreth. But he didn’t know why the major and the commander had been taken with him, unless it was because they were the only two Bajorans among the eighteen. He would, however, endeavor to find out. Though Garak knew he would never admit to curiosity—at least, not in a public sense—he was fully aware that he lived his life in a perpetual haze of it.
Sisko continued his correction of the sensor log’s account. “We saw the collapse of the station proceed more slowly while we were under attack by Terrell’s ship.”
How very interesting, Garak thought, only his long years of training allowing him to keep his face completely composed.
A young Romulan who stood at the side of the briefing room, improbably outfitted in a poorly fitted variation of a Bajoran militia uniform, switched on a padd so that his angular face was illuminated from below. Then he looked over to Sisko and said, “That tends to confirm the hypothesis that the Defiant was caught within the boundary layer of the opening wormhole. Your ship would then have been subjected to relativistic time-dilation effects.”
“Then shouldn’t the same have happened to Terrell’s ship?” Sisko asked.
Garak waited eagerly for the answer. But the Romulan was not forthcoming.
“There are no records of that ship as you described it—” The Romulan looked down at his padd again. “—A Chimera-class vessel disguised as a Sagittarian passenger liner. In any event, the Defiant was the only vessel to emerge into this time period.”
Pity, Garak thought. He would have enjoyed one final meeting with Terrell. He would have liked to have seen her face when she learned that their precious Cardassia no longer existed. Its history, its culture, and all except a handful of its people erased from the universe, as if they had been nothing but a half-remembered dream.
He himself had learned the fate of his world just a few hours earlier-from two young Klingon soldiers, also in badly tailored Bajoran uniforms. He had noted their intense interest in observing him, and upon questioning them had learned that they had never encountered a Cardassian before. Then they had told him why.
At that precise instant, Garak had to admit—if only to himself—he had felt a true pang of regret. But only for an instant. Immense relief—not sorrow—had immediately followed. In this time period, there was now nothing left for him to fight for. His struggles were over.
It was, he had decided, a quite liberating experience.
A Bajoran colonel now appeared on the main viewscreen, obviously reading from a script, droning on without much clarity of detail about the events of the few weeks that had followed the opening of the second wormhole. Apparently, the space-time matrix of the Bajoran sector had been altered in some obscure technical way by the second wormhole’s gravimetric profile. Garak couldn’t follow what the implications of that were, nor was he particularly interested. But supposedly the behavior of the first wormhole had become more erratic because of those changes. It had rarely opened after that, and travel through it had proved impossible.
Then, the Bajoran colonel recounted at tedious length, with the Cardassian-Dominion alliance mounting a major offensive throughout the region, a small battle group had broken through Starfleet’s crumbling lines and reached the Bajoran system.
Garak covered his mouth with his hand and yawned outright. This time it wasn’t an affectation. The briefing room was getting uncomfortably hot. He glanced at the unfinished metal walls, willing himself to see them move away from him and not close in. His claustrophobia—again a personal idiosyncrasy he avoided revealing to any other being—was becoming more noticeable of late. He redoubled his efforts to suppress it.
Another new sensor-log screen appeared on the viewer, and Garak welcomed it as a distraction from the heat and closeness of the room. This next recording had apparently been made by the U.S.S. Enterprise, also in the Bajoran system, on stardate 52145.7.
The new sensor recording began, and for a few seconds all Garak could see was streaking stars and lances of phaser fire. Then the image stabilized, and he was able to make out a tightly grouped formation of three Galor-class Cardassian warships surrounded by a cloud of Jem’Hadar attack cruisers, purple drive fields aglow. In the background, Garak could once again see the shifting energy curtain of the Denorios Belt, so he had a reasonably good notion of what he was watching: the departure of Kai Weyoun’s expedition.
Kai Weyoun, Garak mused. He almost felt sorry for poor Major Kira, having to deal with that corruption of her deeply felt religion. Almost felt sorry. The major was a Bajoran, after all, and they were a far too sensitive people, regrettably quick to find fault or take offense. And judging from how they had created an entire religion around a few sparkling artifacts discarded by a more advanced species, rather easy to deceive as well.
The new sensor log continued, and Garak’s conclusion was confirmed. Just as the Enterprise swooped in on what seemed to him to be a rather remarkably risky attack—which nonetheless resulted in the loss of a Cardassian warship—the red wormhole popped open, just as the blue wormhole so often had. At that, the two remaining Galor-class ships and their Jem’Hadar escorts vanished into the red wormhole, which then collapsed. Though the Enterprise continued on a matching course, unlike the blue wormhole the red wormhole did not open again.
Very selective, Garak noted. Which meant it was quite likely that the red wormhole was also home to an advanced species, or was otherwise under intelligent control.
The current sensor log ended, and the boring Bajoran colonel returned to the viewscreen to explain that the Weyoun expedition had been intended to traverse the new phenomenon and attempt to discover if it had a second opening in normal space, as did the existing phenomenon.
Garak’s eyes began to close. Really, the colonel was almost soporific. Even he could guess that the unstated goal of the expedition had been to determine if the new wormhole led to the Gamma Quadrant.
But then Garak’s eyes opened abruptly. The colonel had not referred to the wormholes as wormholes. He had pointedly called them phenomena. Why?
Listening more closely now, Garak heard the colonel go on to say that although it usually took less than two minutes to travel through the existing phenomenon, the Weyoun expedition remained in the new phenomenon for more than three weeks. At which time, of the 1,137 valiant soldiers who had made up the expeditionary force, only Weyoun managed to return. Though he brought with him new allies.
Now another new sensor log began running, this one from a Bajoran vessel, the Naquo, beginning with a rapid sweep across the Denorios Belt to catch the red wormhole in the process of opening. And then, from that cauldron of hyperdimensional energies, Garak saw seven ships appear.
Despite himself Garak leaned forward in his chair, as if those few extra centimeters might help him better understand the nature of the seven ships.
Are they transparent? he wondered, for certainly he could see the glow of the wormhole and the Belt through their elongated, ovoid shapes.
But as the sensor log displayed a progression of increasingly magnified views, Garak realized that the seven ships were little more than skeletons—collections of struts and beams, each vessel slightly different from the rest but with no obviously contained areas that might correspond to crew quarters.
A sudden flash of light from one of the ships ended the sensor recording. Sitting back once again, Garak decided the flash of light had been weapons fire. Wherever the second wormhole had reemerged into normal space, it was clear that Weyoun had returned with allies.
Once again, the Bajoran colonel returned to the screen. This time Garak did not feel at all sleepy.
The colonel now stated that the new phenomenon had connected the Bajoran Sector to a region in the farthest reaches of the Delta Quadrant. There, Weyoun had made contact with the Grigari, who returned the Vorta when the rest of his expedition had been lost.
Garak waited for more details, but the colonel offered none. An omission Garak found distinctly amusing in its circumspection. He himself had heard rumors of the Grigari most of his life. Though he could recall no convincing report of direct contact with the species, their medical technology was often traded at the frontier, having been obtained from other, intermediary species. Furthermore, that particular type of medical technology was banned on virtually every civilized world in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.
He recalled once reading a report outlining the results of the Obsidian Order’s analysis of a Grigari flesh regenerator, which some had hoped would enable certain torture techniques to be used for longer periods of interrogation. The Order’s conclusion: too dangerous.
If but one contraband Grigari device had been deemed by the Obsidian Order to be too dangerous, then it was daunting to consider the damage a Grigari fleet might be capable of inflicting. Clearly, what the Bajoran colonel was not saying in this sanitized briefing was that Weyoun’s expedition—Jem’Hadar and Cardassian alike—had been utterly decimated by the Grigari. Which begged the only questions worth asking: How had Weyoun survived, and why had the Grigari come through the wormhole under his command?
Garak repressed the hope that threatened to surface as a smile on his face. A universe of mystery to explore, he thought. It could actually be that there would be no one here he could bribe, threaten, or seduce into taking him back to his own time. And if so, he might grow to like it here.
He settled back to see what else would unfold from this selective presentation of the past twenty-five years, and what answers, if any, might be forthcoming. So far, it seemed, for each mystery described and explained two new ones were being revealed and left enigmatic.
As the briefing continued, the ever-curious Garak was not disappointed.