JULIAN BASHIR felt as if he were caught in a dream. The sense of unreality that had begun to envelop him as he had watched the briefing tape on the Augustus had become more than a minor sense of unease at the back of his mind. Now that he was on Mars, his apprehension was like a cloak that covered him completely, weighting each breath he took, obscuring his vision, masking his powers of analysis.
Even worse, at times he only felt human.
Of the fifteen temporal refugees who had heard Captain Nog’s proposal at Starbase 53, nine had volunteered to join Project Phoenix and lose themselves even more thoroughly in time.
Of the six who had declined, five had been the Bajorans among them—three members of the militia and two civilians. In all good conscience, they had honestly explained that they could not take action against B’hala and their own people, though they understood why Starfleet felt it must. They requested instead that they be allowed to spend the next few weeks in prayer, so that they might put all their trust in the Prophets.
To Bashir’s relief, the Bajorans’ request had caused no consternation among Nog and his staff. Arrangements would be made, the Bajorans were told. Despite the War of the Prophets, their refusal had been accepted as simply as that. Some sense of Starfleet’s original decency, it seemed, still existed in this time.
The last holdout to refuse the mission was—to no one’s surprise—Vash. And also to no one’s surprise, the volatile archaeologist was not allowed to go anywhere or do anything except accompany the others to Utopia Planitia. Nog informed her that she would not be forced to join the crew of the Phoenix, but neither would she be released from custody until the end of “hostilities.”
Bashir recalled cringing at that euphemism, though he realized that the Ferengi captain had also felt uncomfortable using it. Under current conditions, such a term could refer to the approaching end of the universe as much as to the end of the great undeclared war against the Ascendancy.
Nog had subsequently left Starbase 53 on the same day he had first met with the temporal refugees, after an oddly tense dinner he shared with them. The spirited, private conversation Jake Sisko had with his aged childhood friend before they were all seated in the officer’s mess did not go unobserved by Bashir. Clearly there was some conflict between those two.
By itself, Bashir did not find such discord remarkable. No doubt there would be abandonment issues on both sides of the friendship: Why was it that Nog was left behind on the day that DS9 was destroyed? Why was it that Jake had apparently died, yet now lived again, full of the energy of youth, which Nog as a middle-aged Ferengi no doubt missed?
Yet something more had passed between the two friends and Bashir, for all his intellectual powers, had to admit his frustration that he had no way of determining just what that something more was.
Three days later, everyone had arrived at the Utopia Planitia shipyards aboard Captain T’len’s Augustus. Like all cadets, Bashir himself had toured the facility in his second year; from Mars orbit, both the constellation of orbital spacedocks and the vast construction fields on the planet’s surface were larger than he remembered them being. In the support domes, though, it seemed to Bashir that the corridors and rooms at least were almost identical to his memories of them. Except, of course, for the pervasive and somewhat depressing lack of maintenance and repair.
Upon their arrival at Starbase 53, he and the others were told that fifteen different Starfleet outposts throughout what was left of the Federation had been subjected to terrorist attack on the same day the Defiant had reappeared. Reportedly, Utopia Planitia had been one of the hardest hit, with more than 200 personnel injured and 35 dead. When the pressure shield of his habitat dome had been breached, Nog apparently had managed to save both himself and Admiral Picard by taking shelter in a waste-reclamation pumping room that had its own atmospheric forcefield.
Recalling the account they had been given, Bashir couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride at how Nog had turned out. Everyone on DS9 had taken a hand in helping mold the youth from the petty juvenile thief he had been at the beginning to the fine officer he had so clearly become.
But to Bashir, a terrorist attack still didn’t explain Utopia’s torn wall coverings, out-of-service lifts, cracked and damaged furniture, and a thousand other deviations from the ordered, precise Starfleet way of doing things in which he, like all those in Starfleet, had been trained. Though the operational areas of the shipyards still seemed outwardly as functional and as fully maintained as before, he couldn’t help but see how attention to detail was sliding. And that unspoken sense of desperation in this beleaguered version of Starfleet was contributing mightily to the overwhelming unreality of this experience for him.
Which is why, he supposed, on this his second day in the shipyards he wasn’t at all shocked when, while going from his quarters to the mess hall, he recognized a familiar figure, unchanged by time, walking toward him.
“Doctor Zimmerman?”
The bald man, whose quick, intelligent eyes were defined by distinct, dark eyebrows, halted a few meters from him. At once, Bashir felt himself subjected to an intense visual inspection. It was as if he were being compared to the contents of some sort of computer library file that only the bald man could see. Suddenly he snapped his fingers and exclaimed, “Julian Bashir! Of the Defiant!”
Bashir was puzzled by the way in which Zimmerman chose to identify him. He and the doctor had met on DS9 after all, when the doctor had been developing a long-term medical hologram. Zimmerman, however, didn’t appear to have aged at all in the past twenty-five years.
“That’s right,” Bashir said, and he closed the distance between them to shake Dr. Zimmerman’s hand. He checked the Starfleet rank insignia in the middle of the man’s chest and smiled politely. “Admiral Zimmerman. Very good, sir. And very deserved, I’m sure.”
The man before him returned his smile, but it was a rueful one. “Actually, Doctor Bashir, Lewis Zimmerman passed away several years ago.”
In his shock, Bashir kept both his hands locked around the bald man’s hand. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your confusion is understandable.” Still smiling but without real conviction, the admiral who wasn’t Dr. Zimmerman pulled his hand free from Bashir’s grip. “In appearance, I was modeled after him.”
Bashir still felt the heat of the man’s hand in his. But if he had heard correctly, there was only one possible explanation for what he was seeing. He looked up to the left and the right of the corridor, where the stained walls met the ceiling.
“There are no holoemitters,” the admiral said.
“But … are you …”
“I was,” the admiral said in a tone of resignation. “An EMH. Emergency Medical Hologram.”
Bashir took a step back. He had known there would be technological advances in the past twenty-five years, but this?
“You are a … a …”
“Hologram,” the admiral said perfunctorily. “Yes. Though obviously a type with which you are not familiar.”
“I … I am astounded that such an incredible breakthrough has been made in only two and a half decades.”
The hologram sighed. “It actually took more like four hundred years, but what’s a few centuries among friends? Now, a pleasure to meet you, but I really must be—”
Bashir interrupted him, suddenly intrigued by a construct that was even more than an apparently self-aware, self-generating hologram. The artificial being’s comment about “four hundred years” instantly raised a subject of great medical interest. “Excuse me,” he said, “but if you meant it took four centuries to develop the technology that’s freed you from holoemitters, are you referring to alien technology, or rather to something obtained through time travel?”
The hologram’s eyes crinkled not unpleasantly. “My specifications are on-line and, if I might say, make for fascinating bedtime reading. But right now, I am—”
Another voice broke in, completing the hologram’s statement. “Doctor, you are late.”
“That’s what I was just telling this young man.”
Bashir turned, looking for whoever it was the hologram was addressing, and his eyes widened as he saw a tall and striking woman, no older than forty, striding purposefully toward him. She had an intense, almost belligerent expression; her pale blonde hair was drawn back severely, and she wore a Starfleet uniform with a blue shoulder and—like the holographic doctor—the rank of admiral.
She also had an unusual biomechanical implant around her left eye, an implant that Bashir was startled to think he recognized.
“They are waiting for us in briefing room 5,” the woman said to the hologram.
Bashir couldn’t keep his eyes off the ocular implant. He offered his hand. “I’m Julian Bashir of the Defiant. Admiral …?”
The woman looked at Bashir’s extended hand as if she were Klingon and he was offering her a bowl of dead gagh. She made no attempt to offer her own hand in return.
“Seven,” she said flatly. “You are one of the temporal refugees.”
“That’s right,” Bashir said. Could it be possible? he wondered.
“And you cannot stop staring at my implant,” the admiral said.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” Bashir stammered. “But … well, I know I’m twenty-five years out of date, but … it looks like Borg technology.”
“It does because it is,” Admiral Seven said.
Bashir felt as if he were falling down a rabbit hole. “You are …”
The admiral placed her hands behind her back and stared at Bashir with impatience. “I am Borg. My designation is Seven of Nine. My function is Speaker to the Collective. You must now allow us to continue with our duties. Admiral Janeway does not like to be kept waiting.”
Bashir started at the mention of that name. “Admiral Jane—do you mean, Kathryn Janeway?”
“Yes,” the hologram said as he stood beside the Borg, “and believe me, it doesn’t pay to make her angry. So—”
“Voyager made it back?” Bashir said.
The Borg frowned at him. “Obviously.”
“But … how?”
The hologram and the Borg exchanged a look of shared commiseration. Then the hologram said to Bashir, “It’s a long story. We really do have to go.”
Before Bashir could utter another word, the hologram and the Borg marched off together. And just before they turned the corner into the corridor leading to the briefing rooms, Bashir was stunned to see the Borg reach out to hold the hologram’s hand as she leaned over to whisper in his ear as both of them broke out laughing like any young couple in love.
“Oh, brave new world that has such things in it,” Bashir said to no one in particular.
Twenty minutes later in the mess hall, Bashir was still mulling over the significance of the beings he had met, and using a padd to review the stunning ten-year-old alliance between the Federation and the Borg Collective as engineered by Admiral Seven of Nine and a Borg whose designation was given only as “Hugh.”
Though a great many details of the Treaty of Wolf 359 appeared to be classified, it was becoming apparent to him that technology exchanges were at its core. The Federation had and was providing expertise in nanite-mediated molecular surgery techniques to the Borg, while the Borg were providing transwarp technology which, Bashir concluded from reading between the lines, was the basis of Admiral Picard’s Phoenix.
“Incredible,” Bashir muttered to himself.
“What is?”
Startled, Bashir looked up to see Jake Sisko. How had he missed his approach? Even his enhanced senses seemed to be subject to his bewildering state of confusion these days. “The Borg,” he said. “The Borg appear to be our allies now.”
Bashir nodded as Jake gestured with the tray of food he held, to ask permission to sit down with him.
“I heard that, too,” Jake told him, taking the seat opposite Bashir. The tall youngster leaned forward across the small mess table and dropped his voice. “But I can’t get anyone to tell me what happened to the Klingon Empire. Are they part of the Federation now? On the side of the Ascendancy? People either ignore the question or they tell me the information’s classified.”
Bashir looked around the mess hall. At full capacity, it might hold three hundred personnel. But right now, perhaps because it was between shifts, there were only twenty-three others eating meals or nursing mugs of something hot. Twenty of these other diners were Andorians, the other three Tellarite.
“Have you seen another human here?” Bashir asked Jake.
Now Jake looked around the mess hall. “Well … wasn’t the lieutenant who showed us our quarters human?”
Bashir shook his head. “Vulcan.”
Jake frowned. “At Starbase 53 there were humans. The medical staff.”
Bashir held up two fingers. “Two technicians. On a staff of fifteen.”
Jake tapped his hands on the sides of his food tray. “So humans and Klingons are missing?”
Bashir shrugged and turned off his padd. “There’s a lot they aren’t telling us about what’s going on.”
Intriguing to Bashir, Jake immediately dropped his eyes to his collection of reconstituted rations and busily began peeling off their clear tops. When he had first visited the mess hall, Bashir had been interested to notice that what he thought were replicator slots lining one wall were actually small transporter bays with a direct connection to a food-processing facility a few kilometers away. Replicator circuitry and power converters were considered a critical resource and used for only the most important manufacturing needs.
“So, how’s Nog?” Bashir asked, trying to keep his tone innocuous, but wondering why Jake had chosen not to react to his statement. He took a sip of the tea he had requisitioned. It was too cold, too sweet, and tasted nothing at all like tea.
“Different,” Jake said, frowning at the contents of the containers he had uncovered. Again, it was not clear to Bashir if the frown was directed at the food or at his question.
“To be expected, don’t you think?”
Jake gingerly dabbed a finger into the red sauce that covered a brownish square of … something, then tentatively licked his finger. He grimaced. “I actually miss the combat rations on the Augustus.”
Bashir smiled in commiseration. Vulcan combat rations were logicaland not much else. They consisted of tasteless extruded slabs which were mostly vegetable pulp compressed to the consistency of soft wax. Accompanied by packets of distilled water and three uncomfortably large supplement pills to compensate for the differences between Vulcan and human nutrient requirements, 500 grams of pulp were sufficient to maintain a normal adult body for thirty hours. Vulcans were proud of the fact that their rations only had to be ingested once a day, and that the process could be completed in less than two minutes. How much more efficient could eating become? All of the temporal refugees had lost body mass during their voyage on the Augustus.
It was also possible, though, that Jake’s joke might have another purpose—to change the subject. Bashir didn’t intend to let such a ploy go unchallenged.
“Were you having an argument with Nog?” he asked. “Before we all had dinner at the starbase?”
He saw the answer in Jake’s guilty expression. “Jake, it’s bad enough that Starfleet is keeping secrets from us. We can’t keep them from each other, too.” Bashir dropped his own voice to a near whisper. “What did he tell you?”
Jake’s shoulders sagged. “It’s more what he didn’t tell me … tell us.”
“About what?”
Jake dropped his napkin over his untouched food. “He was lying to us.”
Bashir felt the unwelcome touch of alarm. He had considered that possibility himself. “About the Phoenix?”
“No … I don’t think about all that. Like, the Phoenix and going back twenty-five thousand years and the deep-time charges in B’hala … I really think that’s what Starfleet’s planning. Or was planning. But … when he told us he had no doubt that the mission would succeed … that was a lie.”
Bashir put down his padd. “Considering the rather audacious nature of the mission, I’m not really surprised. It’s perfectly understandable that Nog might harbor some doubts about the possibilities for success.”
But Jake shook his head emphatically. “I’m not talking about doubts. Or being nervous. I mean … look, it’s as if Nog already knows the mission can’t succeed.”
“Did he say that to you? Is that what you were arguing about?”
Jake looked right and left, obviously concerned about anyone overhearing their discussion. “That was part of it. But he didn’t have to tell me. Not flat out.”
“I don’t understand.”
Jake shifted uncomfortably. “He’s been my best friend for … well, we were best friends for a long time. And I can tell when he’s lying. He does this thing with his eyes and … his mouth sort of freezes in position.”
Jake was obviously developing some skill in observation. “They call it a ‘tell.’ Or they used to,” Bashir corrected himself, “a few centuries ago. In gambling and confidence games, some people develop a nervous habit which gives away the fact that they’re bluffing. You’re very observant.”
Jake shrugged. “Not really. Uh, Nog sort of told me himself. His father and uncle kept giving him a hard time about it. They, uh, they claimed he had picked it up from me … a filthy human habit that would hold him back in business.” Jake smiled weakly. “He tried to run away from the station a couple of times.”
“I didn’t know,” Bashir said truthfully.
“I … talked him out of it. But anyway, he’s still doing it. And he was definitely lying to us.”
Bashir sat back in the flimsy mess-hall chair and mentally called up a Vulcan behavioral algorithm to try to calculate the odds that Jake was correct in his conclusion of Nog’s truthfulness. Once the Vulcans had realized the failure of their early predictions that any species intelligent enough to develop warp drive would of course have embraced logic and peaceful exploration as the guiding principles of their culture, they had developed complex systems for modeling and predicting alien behavior as a form of self-survival. It was a difficult set of equations to master, but one could always count on a Vulcan to figure the odds for just about any eventuality.
Bashir completed his calculations. In the limited way he had trained himself in the Vulcan technique, he was forced to conclude that given the relationship between Jake and Nog, Jake was more likely than not correct in his assessment of his friend. Since there was nothing to be gained from questioning Jake’s conclusion, the only logical course was now to determine the underlying reasons for Nog’s behavior.
Bashir began the requisite series of questions. “Did you tell him that you knew he was lying?”
Jake nodded. “That’s when he got mad at me.”
“But did he deny lying?”
“How could he?”
“Did he say why?”
Jake appeared to be more profoundly unhappy than Bashir ever recalled seeing him before.
“All he told me was that I should keep my … my ridiculous hewmon opinions to myself. And then, well, he sort of let me know that it was really important that I not tell anyone what I thought.”
“With what you know of him, Jake, is there any reason you can think of why Nog would lie to us about the success of the mission?”
Now Jake looked positively haunted. “I … I think so.”
Bashir leaned forward to hear Jake’s theory about how Captain Nog was really going to save the lives of the temporal refugees—and the universe.
And what he heard was utterly fascinating, and at the same time utterly horrifying.